Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - Chart Music #73: March 4th 1993 – Frank Bald

Episode Date: January 7, 2024

The latest episode of the podcast which asks; do we really have to hug? And rub-a-dub?The Chart Music time sofa descends upon March of 1993, Pop-Crazed Youngsters – the Forgotten Nineties, if you will. A time where the only options available to The Kids were having their heads filled with rubbish by trampy Americans, or being exploited by Ian Beales in Hypercolor t-shirts who can’t play real music and want you to take loads of drugs. Your panel – ligging their way around London, ensconced in an Isleworth love nest and dealing with the misery of Gym Knickers, respectively – look back upon this strange perineum between Rave and Britpop, and have a tentative sniff at itAs for Our Favourite Thursday Evening Pop Treat, it’s currently weathering it’s 27th crisis under the stewardship of Stanley Appell, two years removed from its Year Zero clearout. The good news is he’s been given carte blanche to put on whoever he likes. The bad news is, he’s only a few months away from his 60th birthday, and there’s soon to be a new BBC1 controller in town who – according to rumour – is thinking about letting Janet Street Porter have a go. Musicwise, it’s a reminder that everything is still up for grabs in the post-Neightnies musicsphere: Right Said Fred get the wind of BBC Star Power at their backs, which can be a bit uncomfortable when you’ve cut the arse out of your trousers. Lenny Kravitz is SuperMuso. After Some Rap, Brett Anderson gets dragged to the front of assembly to explain why he’s let the school down by singing too violently. Then it’s over to Hawaii to drop in on the Lower-Case Canadian, before she gets a shave off Cindy Crawford. Runrig make their TOTP debut, then Rage Against The Machine, fresh from getting Bruno Brookes suspended for a week, kick off the run of blipverts that passes for the Breakers section these days, which also takes in Bryan Ferry, The Jesus Lizard and Dead Madonna. Diana Ross and a Sexy Saxman appear on the set of a school play of Escape From New York, and we end with some sexy Belgian pinball action, all hosted by Mark Franklin, who was probably younger than you at the time, and still is.  Sarah Bee and Simon Price join Al Needham for a rummage under the sewn-on cushion on the Mastermind chair of 1993, veering off on such tangents as being mithered by members of Suede and Elastica at a student disco, why all snack wafers of the Eighties sound like Bryan Ferry LP titles, the Lesbian Elephant, Jonny Sex-Cat and the Accessible Gamesdog, Paintballing with Ride, and Al’s Secret Terror. SWEAR SWEAR, SWEAR-SWEAR SWEAR SWEAR, SWEAR-SWEAR SWEAR SWEAR, SWEAR-SWEAR THERE’S SOME SWEARING.Video Playlist| Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter| The Chart Music Wiki | PatreonGet your tickets for Chart Music at Birmingham Town Hall on Jan 13th HERE 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 listening to? Um... Chart music. Chart music. Hey up, you pop craze youngsters, and welcome to the latest episode of Chart Music, the podcast that gets its hands right down the back of the settee on a random episode of top of the pops i'm your host al needham and with me today are simon price hello and sarah b

panel like a tramp in the night i am begging for you to tell me all the pop and interesting things like you want to do. I went to see our good friends and incredible psychedelic electronic rock troupe Teeth of the Sea. At our lovely local venue, Walthamstow Trades Hall. And I should say Sam, who plays trumpet for the Teeth, as nobody calls them, is a fully paid up, long-term, devoted, pop-crazed youngster. Oh, bless that man. Shout out to you, Sam. Thank you, sir. And I successfully did not get COVID for a fourth time.

Yes. But I did get the consolation prize of a cold for about six weeks. Oh, shit, you know, six-week cold. Yeah, that's what you get now. You know, this is like, you know, all of our immune systems are sort of, things are different now, you know, six weeks cold. Yeah, that's what you get now. You know, this is like, you know, all of our immune systems are sort of... Things are different now, you know. Oh, man, you want to be like John Travolta in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, Sarah. Yeah, yeah, I do.

Have you ever seen that film? I was so fucking disappointed by it. It came on the telly after Saturday Night Fever in Greece, and I expected John Travolta to be bouncing around in a big fucking Zorb thing to some disco music with a quiff on and having a right old time. But no, he was in hospital for fucking ages. And it was boring. That's tedious, isn't it?

For everyone concerned. But yeah, I think we should normalise actually now that, you know, people will look askance at you if you have a mask on. Masks now are like flares in 1981, aren't they? About as useful and about as stylish. Yeah, it's true. Oh, I don't know, though, because I remember the tail end of COVID and people were starting to go out on buses again. I remember sitting on a bus and these two blokes got on and one of them had a mask on and printed on it in big white letters on a black mask was, will open for cock.

Wow. And I'm sitting there thinking, oh, I know this bus route and I know what time it is. It's when all the old folks clubs start kicking out. So I'm sat there kind of like on those seats that go along the side of the bus, just waiting for all these old women to come on to get their reactions. And they just looked and just ignored him

or just laughed or just nudged each other and it was like god that's interesting yeah these women didn't give a fuck well you know they were young ones too nobody got the cock out to test him at his word well old grannies now would have been teenagers in the 60s they've seen it all do you know what i mean yeah exactly i feel like everyone has missed a trick with the whole kind of slogans on masks thing. It's a very easy way to say a thing, but you have to be prepared to be saying it after you've forgotten that on your face it says, you know, fuck the Tories or whatever. And, you know, then you go to the Tory party conference and it's really embarrassing. Meanwhile, though, exciting news for the perverse few who want to hear more of me saying things. Our film and television podcast, Teledrome, rides again imminently.

Oh, yeah. This time, John Tatlock and I will be examining a classic of 80s horror cinema and its recent remake. And John will be annoyingly messing about with some sort of puzzle box that he's got. I mean, I have told him that he's going to have to take it out in the edit because it's just this like, you know, he's really he's got i mean i have told him that he's gonna have to take it out in the edit because it's just this like you know he's really he's really preoccupied with it you know what like a rubik's cube what is it i don't know what it is he's like he's really preoccupied he hasn't slept in days he's just kind of sitting cross-legged in an empty room just like i'm a bit worried anyway uh teledrome wherever you get podcasts. I saw John Tatlock the other night.

Oh, really? Yeah, I was up in Manchester to have a drink with him and he didn't have a puzzle box on him then unless he had it stashed somewhere that, you know,

frankly, the sun don't shine. I don't know. Maybe he solved it. Oh, no. I think maybe we'd know about it if he'd solved it. Fair enough. Simon!

If you're happy with a nappy, then you're in for fun. George Michael once taunted Andrew Ridgely and I'm about to find out because we've got a baby Then you're in for fun. George Michael once taunted Andrew Ridgely. Yes. And I'm about to find out because we've got a baby on the way. Good Lord. Yeah.

The first child music baby. Janie has a baby on the way. You know, I had only a small amount to do with it, about 10cc's worth, you know. So you're not going to be going around saying, of course, we're pregnant. Boy or girl? Girl. Oh, Toya. Peepoo would work for either sex.

Yeah, this is true. Yeah, the clans of Price and Burns are about to gain a new generation. I'd assumed I was the end of the family line, you know, and I'd made my peace with that and I thought I would be seeing out my days in the company of my record collection just getting pissed on Havana Club all the time so this is a big life change especially in my age but I'm excited for it so you know there's that yeah it's a girl she's due in February as for the, we're probably going with a Welsh name and we do have a front runner which we're keeping under our hat. The only proviso really is that it has to be pronounceable by English people because she's going to be growing up in Brighton. Dave then.

But we don't want to use the front runner name until she's actually born. I don't know if it's superstition or what so in the meantime we've gone through this list of welsh girls names and picked the ugliest ones we can find in the knowledge that that we're definitely not using them when it's for real so names like greek which is spelt grug or bivig which is spelt budug or cranogwen who sounds like a really angry hatchet-faced old woman i think or bloddeoith which is a name for which even i a welshman need to take a bit of a run up so so we we alternate between those when when referring to her in in the certainty that that she'll not be called that so yeah um, big changes about to happen around here.

Amazing. The other thing, of course, is that my book is finally out there in the world. Indeed. Your other baby, yes. My other baby, yeah. Curepedia, an A to Z of The Cure. Yes.

The reviews have been really positive. I've been travelling around on a sort of promo circuit, met loads of lovely people at spoken word events book signings the cures fan community have been incredibly supportive and i was kind of quite nervous about that you know yeah and i wouldn't blame them if they took against it but and it seems to be selling well it's reached number one in some very niche charts and you'll know all about this sort of niche charting from chart music but so for example um biographies of punk musicians uh music encyclopedias because it's an encyclopedia

um it fleetingly reached number four in the proper music book charts it was never going to get any higher with britney spears and barbara streisand to contend with uh my favorite is when it reached number 11 in amazon's religious history of christianity charts fucking hell i mean i suppose there's a chapter on religion and there's a chapter on faith and the cure are a cult act so i'll i'll take it maybe they thought it was about the curate oh yeah of course um apparently there's a boring uh um answer this, and it's that there is another author called Simon Price who does write about religious history, and Amazon's algorithms got it mangled. So, yeah, you know, two births, a book and a baby. Good Lord.

And ask me in a year's time which one was the hardest, or ask Janie, anyway. There are a lot more sharp corners on your book. Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna say that yeah I've actually got a copy of it something it's fucking gorgeous I've done a nice job I'm scared to turn the pages of it I don't feel worthy yeah I'm hoping that because it is really nice it's got this sort of matte texture it's sort of red with this shiny black silhouette of Robert Smith laid over it and sort of silver writing and um I do think it's inevitably going to degrade if people carry it around with them. And I'm hoping it'll be like Public Image Limited's metal box,

that each copy will become sort of individual in the way that it deteriorates. Would you mind if I gave my copy away to one of the Polk Race patrons? Not at all. Why's that? You hate the cure, basically. I just think they deserve it more than I. So at some point after this episode has gone out, Not at all. Why is that's Place for the London Podcast Festival. Fucking hell, it was a proper day, wasn't it, Sarah? Yes, it was. Yes, it really was. Massive tar to them, King's Place and especially the pop craze youngsters who turned up and said hello to us afterwards and bought us drinks and all sorts. There was actually

a couple there who were in their mid-twenties. I couldn't believe it. Actual Gen Z. Yes, I got down on my knees in the pub afterwards and genuflected towards them, man. We're reaching that audience, man. We're doing it. We're getting down with the kids. Yeah, literally. We are gen

uflection. Yeah, literally. Yeah. We are gen-uflection. Yeah. And a special thanks to all the Pop Craze youngsters who booked our live stream, which I managed to have a look at afterwards. It was fucking mint. And it gave me the ideal opportunity to see how much I'm turning into Mr. Rumbold as the years roll on. Oh, fucking hell, man.

I've got a face for podcasts and a voice for newsprint. You're being harsh on yourself there. No, it's all true. I got away with it this time because I was just in the audience and I got to politely heckle and do a little royal wave. And that was my contribution. A splendid day.

And yeah, I'm starting to get a feel for these live shows now. I'm not so stressed about them. Your turn next, Simon. That'd be nice. And it might be sooner than you think. Hit the fucking music. Calling all pop crazed youngsters. You asked for it.

We were offered it. So we said, all right, then fuck it. Why not? Saturday, January the 13th, 2024, Birmingham Town Hall, Chalk Music live all day. Yes, pop crazed youngsters, Ch Chop music is getting on down to Benetton. With the power trio of Simon Price, Neil Kulkarni and Al Needham. For a fourth day of Chop Music Ramble. We commence with a return of Here Comes Quism. The Chop Music Pub Quiz.

A three hour live episode of chart music. And then, we round off the evening with a chart music disco, where we dance the night away to the white-hot sounds of Joyce Arnie and Two Man Sound. It do be the complete chart music experience, Miss Diane, and can be yours for a mere £15. So, see that

internet. Mashup bit.ly slash cm24. That's bit.ly slash cm24. Lay your money down and be prepared to be pop crazed all day long in beautiful downtown Birmingham. Hey, piss troll, we're coming for you.

Yes, you heard right, pop crazed youngsters. Yes, you heard right, Pop Craze Youngsters. Jesus and Buzz are making themselves available to their public in a few weeks' time. And as you listen to this, I can tell you that I have done precisely fuck all in the way of notes. So I need to get my thumb out of my arse and get on with it, because the Pop Craze Youngsters techno-ming us when it comes to the live shows. If you can't be arsed to listen back for that bitly link, just go to bmusic.co.uk, that's bmusic.co.uk, and put in a search for chart music.

The other bit of news is that we've started a new bonus strand exclusively for the Pop Craze Patreons called Hit the Fucking Play Button. Very simple premise, Pop Craze youngsters. We take one music video that was never shown on Top of the Pops, which means that we're never going to be able to talk about it properly on Chart Music music and we pull it to absolute bits there's two episodes up already and the third one's already in the bag and i'll be out in a few weeks time and chaps you've already had a dig at these and it's been a proper good dos aren't it yeah definitely like if people think that we sort of deep dive top of the pops episodes a bit too kind of nerdishly then just wait till you hear this shit oh voyage to the fucking earth's core mate yeah yeah it's good to be able to cover songs

that we're never going to do on a regular episode of chart music so yeah it's fucking mint mate the goal is to get one out once a month so you know that's going to be an extra hour or so uh to mix into your pop craze diet so if if you want all of that, plus the audio of our live show, and all the other benefits of being a pop craze Patreon, it is time to get some money down this g-string right here, and let us sh-sh-shake

that arse just for you. And speaking of the pop craze Patreons, here is the latest roll call of the lovely people who have put a jingle in our G-string of late. Thank you, lovelies. I suspect some of those aren't their real names, you know. And in the $5 section, we have Neve Conroy, Adam Pearce, Stuart, Tim Ward, Petrus Gyra, Michael Avery, Jim Parker, Mayor of Fishguard, Kenny Twat, Russell, James Glover, Kieran Gaynor, Dermot Fitzsimmons, Dr. Craig, James Jimbo Bradley, Chris Kyle, Brian Cairns, Carlos the Jackal,

Claire Oudy, Aidan DW, Briefly P, Nozza the Knob, Anna Dominoes, Laurie Powell, Andrew Whiters, Andy Hall, Mark Smith and Carl. Fucking hell, we love you. Come here, give me a fucking hug, you lovely bastards. Oh, Stuart Metcalf and Doug Grant jacked it right up. And so they get a very special arse rub on their trousers this Christmas time. Well done. Oh, by the way, happy birthday, Akashamira. And I'm sorry I missed it.

Fuck's sake, man. I'm turning into cunting stew pot nowadays, man. I can't have this. Anyway. But you've got better breath, Al. Yes. I can't have this. Anyway.

But you've got better breath, Al. Yes. Anyway, as well as all that lovely new bonus content and getting episodes in full without any advert ramble, the Pop Craze Patreons get to tinker and a tanker with the brand new Chop Music Top Ten. Shall we? Yeah. Shall we?

Go on then. Hit the fucking music! We've said goodbye to Bjorn Bingerbonger, Toto Coelho Ultras and Ian Interesting, which means four up, two down, one non-mover and three new entries. New entry at number 10, the Quincy Punks. Straight entry at number 10, the Quincy Punks.

Straight in at number 9, benefits cheap Paul D'Anno. Up one place from number 9 to number 8, the Birmingham Piss Trolls. Yes, yes. Another one place jump from number

8 to number 7 for here comes Chisholm. But down one place from number five to number six is Eric Smallshore of Eccles. Into the top five and it's a one place jump from six to five for Bomberdog. Down two places from number two to number four, the provisional Ooroo-R-A. Up four places from number seven to number three, the bent cunts who aren't fucking real.

Yes. This week's highest new entry crashes into the chart at number two, Festival of Sperm, which means... Britain's number one. It's still there at the very summit of Mount Pop. Ghost Face Scylla. Scylla. Oh, what a chart, me days.

Fucking hell. All the classics. Oh, what a chart we did. Fucking hell. All the classics. Festival of Sperm is going to be really baffling to anybody who isn't listening to hit the fucking play button, isn't it? Yeah. Shall we tell them, Simon?

Go on. Explain, Simon, Festival of Sperm. Well, as I understand it, from my good showbiz friend, Martin Degville, it was, yes, it was a working name for Zig Zig Sputnik before they were Zig Zig Sputnik. So, this week's new entries then. The Quincy Punks. I think pretty obvious what they're all about.

You know, they've got them skinny ties and shirts tucked into jeans and wacky sunglasses, you know, and capering about in a manner that David disapproves of. Yeah, it's good Charlotte, basically. Benefits cheap Paul D'Anno. Fairly self-explanatory. manner that david disapproves of yeah it's good charlotte basically benefits cheap paul diano and fairly self-explanatory but yeah festival of sperm i hear that name and what immediately comes to my mind is erotic morris dancing well i mean it is all about fertility rights isn't it

exactly exactly just bringing it into our century so So I think Festival of Spoon, they're like Enigma, but with a bit less monk chain and a lot more accordion. Yeah. And they come out on stage and they clack double-ended dildos together and stuff like that. Yeah. It's here really comes jism. Yeah.

So anyway, Pop Craze Youngsters, if you want in on all the excitement that being a Pop Craze Patreon brings into your world, remember, keyboard, patreon.com slash chart music, money, G-string. So this episode, Pop Craze Youngsters, takes us all the way back to March the 4th, 1993, way back to March the 4th, 1993, which is very much to my mind the 90s that nobody really cares about, isn't it? You know, we're post-rave, pre-Britpop, post-optimism, pre-Cokie arrogance. The 90s are done. We've got as far away from the 80s as humanly possible, but we don't yet know what the 90s are going to be so me dears if i were to say to you the music of 1993 what's immediately coming out of those lovely mouths of yours um some unholy soup of uh grunge euro dance and take that i think i was gonna say peruvian knitwear hat basically spin doctors if you wanna call me baby just go ahead now uh

just you know i've completely fucked all the pop crazy youngsters heads now with a mother of all earworms what that symbolizes yeah yeah stop now what what that uh what that symbolises is that grunge and American alternative music in the broadest sense had sort of curdled and the dregs were now being scraped from the barrel. But yeah, like you say, Britain hadn't yet stepped up with enough to replace it. You had Suede and the Mannix and Saint Etienne and Pulp, but nobody was using the B word yet, of course. But yeah, there were.

Well, there were. I mean, like punk and disco, Britpop was being used in the music papers years before the event. Sort of with a small B, I guess. No, because it's British, so it'd be a capital B. I know what you mean, Sarah. I'm just fucking with you. I don't know.

You had all these sort of tangents that the very best bits of which were enjoyable. So you had funk metal or rap metal that hadn't yet become horrible new metal. So, you know, you had things like Rage Against the Machine. You had kind of, I guess, the aftermath of rave. So bands like The Shaman were massive. And they were kind of irritating but the aftermath of rave so bands like the shaman were massive and they were kind of irritating but fun at the same time and g-funk hadn't quite happened yet but cypress hill were there and then you know they were pretty good and yes you could sort of take a bit of a pick and mix while not thinking that there's any one thing that's completely defining

the era yet yeah yeah it is it is a bit of a liminal year isn't it um i think there's also there's already a certain weariness about it like everyone's already knackered you know even though it's only it's it's sort of an early mid year in that way but uh yeah in terms of the charts it's like shat on by shaggy shoveled up by blobby people are tired the you know recessions dragging on and you know and it is like careful what you wish for really, because Britpop is coming down the tracks like a runaway train with a single eyebrow. In the full awareness that trains don't actually have eyebrows in general. Thomas the Tank Engine probably.

Oh yeah, oh God. Oh yeah, the eldritch horror of... Liam the Tank Engine, fuck no. Yeah, so rave obviously on its way out very much. The Prodigy's first album only came out last year. They're not considered Britpop, but they're sort of almost on the edge of it because The Fat of the Land a few years later was immense. There's quite a neat delineation really when it comes to dance music. The Castle Morton Common week-long rave happened last year,

which some people consider precipitated, almost single-handedly precipitated the Criminal Justice Bill. And that starts to mark the beginning of the end of the rave culture that started in 1988. In fact, so the Criminal Justice Bill this year was making its way through Parliament with its new rave clause. And the Ministry of Sound... Repetitive beats and all that. parliament with its new rave clause and um the ministry of sound repetitive beats yeah yeah the ministry of sound projected their logo onto parliament not to protest the bill but to promote their very first compilation so that really establishes the corporate evolution of the bootleg rave tape that had been massive up until now it was the end of the free party era and the

start of the super club era so the succession of the super club era. So the succession of repetitive beats. And you could still go mental in a huge crowd of people, but it would cost you at this point. One word that constantly sprung to mind when I was researching this era, malaise. The country's in recession, record sales have dipped for the first time in 12 years, and the music scene is in a state of absolute flux.

Bag is collapsed in on itself even though the enemy is still waiting for the stone roses to come back and make everything right again factory records has gone bust and the youth of britain are either pretending to be american tramps who have been loaded into a cannon and fired through a branch of millets or following the clarion call of assorted ian beals in hyper color t-shirts who hunch over computers in their bedrooms and make the youngsters take drugs and surrender to machine loops that isn't real music at all here's an article i found in the guardian from the year before chaps which kind of lays out the state of music at this time from a certain point of view.

Yeah. With the soulless machine beat of techno music and its leap from the underground rave scene to mainstream chart success, the science fiction nightmare is in sight. Computers are taking over from creativity and musicianship is slowly being replaced by the dismal donkey work of the computer programmer.

Although not quite the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, music technology may yet undermine a music industry that has traditionally made money out of good playing and songwriting. Techno dispenses with both and is currently the hottest force in the record shops.

Bands like Alternate, SL2 and 2 Unlimited sell singles in quantities real musicians dream of by making music so lacking in human qualities that it is difficult to imagine soft flesh ever having anything to do with its creation. In fact, it is all done with drum machines, sequencers and samplers, scavenging among other people's ideas and reveling in banality and repetition. Faceless and personality-free, techno embodies few of the traditional rock inspirations like sex, egomania and sedition.

Instead, it is all about money. No musical rebellion has ever started out so mercenary or been so instantly profitable given the technology and ability to play a three-fingered chord on a synth you can bash out a top 10 single ready for pressing in a day yeah you just push a button and on a ragged tip comes out. It's AI all over again, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. And it's this kind of conflation and elision that's going on of things that are not the same. So basically, it's written from that point of view

that good music has to be music that is handcrafted. Whereas I believe strongly that pop is an entirely user end art form, but it's all about how you experience it. And if it causes exhilaration or any other emotion in the listener, that's what matters. I couldn't give a fuck if somebody presses a button and out it pops, or if they've ripped their fingertips to pieces learning how to play the guitar. Good for them if they have, you know, i'm not slagging that off either but i spent a lot of a lot of time in this era arguing with people like

this and constant battle particularly on the melody maker letters page this could be a bad letter to backlash quite honestly yeah it's a bit like lab grown diamonds that you get now that are exactly the same as the ones that are mined out of the ground by small children. But, you know, there are people who will still insist that suffering has to happen before you can have beauty. It's like, I don't think that's true. I mean, when I read this article, it just reminded me so much of the mither and the wickling that's being punted out over AI. Yeah, but AI is bad, though. Yeah, well, depends how you use it, isn't it? I mean,

there's been interviews with people like Chuck D saying, yeah, there is going to be a lot of shit that's going to come out of it, but there's going to be other people like us back in the 80s and sampling that's going to find a way to make it work and make it sound brilliant and do stuff that you couldn't do before. You think we're skint now? Sorry. Yeah, I heard that Chuck D interview and it sort of gave me a bit of optimism he was saying that in the early days of sampling a lot of what came out was really unimaginative it was just one track or one loop over and over and over but you know he said that people like I guess the Bomb Squad and Terminator X and you'd also have to credit Eric B managed to kind of, well, he used the

term to freak it. Chuck D said, we figured out how to freak it. And I think that's basically what's going to happen with AI. To begin with, it's going to be endless people saying, you know, let's make a Beatles song, not least the Beatles themselves. But, you know, I think and hope we're going to get past that phase and people will figure out a way of making genuinely freaky, amazing music. I hope so too. I'm slightly more pessimistic. It's like I thought it was going to make everything else easier for us so that we could be free to make art. And I think it's going to be the other way around.

As writers, we were the ones they came for first. But, you know, the thing is, I've spent years of my life researching stuff off the internet and ended up reading other people's shitty writing were the ones they came for first but you know the thing is i've spent years of my life researching stuff off the internet and ended up reading other people's shitty writing that was so fucking awful it might as well have been done by ai yeah at least i wouldn't write without any further ado there is a certain kind of uncanny valley effect that you get even when just reading ai generated prose and i think and maybe I'm flattering myself but I think I can tell the difference you know that there is something

just unsettling and slightly queasy and sickening when you're reading something that wasn't done by a human brain I think it's possibly already at the stage that it can generate just sort of copy that could sort of describe a washing machine or something like that. But in terms of actual writing about ideas and thoughts, I don't think it's quite there yet. I actually think it's become the lowest form of wit as well, when people just have some idea, what would it look like if Evan Dando went water skiing? And, you know, they'll just, and then you'll get a picture of it and it's like oh look at this it's like okay i've got to admit sometimes it's it's fooled me i think i i got pranked oh yes the other day there was this thing doing the rounds that was meant to be rick

james's house in 1979 and it looks fucking amazing kind of sci-fi meet superfly this place that that he supposedly lived in i now think it's too good to be true and it's probably ai the jury's still out on that i think but um it's just you know there's this crestfallen feeling you get of oh for fuck's sake is that all it was i want to see these amazing luxurious rock star palaces from the 70s but i want to see them for real i don't want to see yeah you want the truth yeah yeah that surprises me about myself i never thought of myself as someone who craves authenticity but maybe my limit has been found and maybe i fucking do i don't know but anyway going back to the article you read this kind of stuff which was not uncommon in the media around

about this time and you start to realize why the corporate whores of the music biz were on their backs with their legs wide open paying for shed seven to show them just how dangerous music can be and smelly this is absolute craving for a band or some bands to come along and just take this decade by the scruff of the neck people want a a Beatles, man. Well, if only a band was going to take the decade by the scruff of the neck in this very episode of Top of the Box. If only. Foreshadow, foreshadow. Onwards!

Radio 1 News. In the news, a car bomb has been detonated in the underground car park of the World Trade Centre with the intention of crashing the North Tower into the South one and bringing both down. And although both buildings remain intact, six people are killed and over a thousand are injured. The Serbian Liberation Front immediately claim responsibility, but it turns out to be the work of Ramzi Youssef and his mates in the Liberation Army, a spin-off of Al-Qaeda. Six people are arrested in a Liverpool court for bricking in a police van containing Robert Thompson and John Venables,

while the BBC announced plans to broadcast the funeral of James Bulger live on the BBC One show Good Morning with Anne and Nick. Christ. I don't think that happened in the end, thank fuck. Fucking hell. An estimated 15 people are shot dead in a standoff between the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and it's revealed that 25 of the people still inside are British, some from Nottingham.

Have I mentioned this, that David Koresh used to live in St Anne's, near where me granny used to live? No way. Yeah, yeah, just about five minutes walk from where I'm sitting now. David Koresh lived there in the mid to late 80s. I know someone, used to be a landlord of a pub I did a pub quiz at, and he was living in St Anne's at the time. And every now and again again he'd get a fucking knock on his door. He opened it up. There's fucking David Koresh banging on about

Jesus again. It's insane isn't it? It's just like when Osama Bin Laden was standing on the clock end at Highbury. It's one of those things that doesn't seem to... Yes, I know. It's like it's been generated by AI or something. Tony Bland becomes the 96th victim of the Hillsborough disaster.

Justice for them. The US Air Force have started to airlift relief supplies into Bosnia for the benefit of Muslim refugees, including ration packs which contain pork. No special consideration has been made for that, said a USAF spokesperson, but it is easy to recognise and they can always throw it away. Cast members of Coronation Street are threatening to quit the soap for good if Granada TV end up selling the broadcast rights to BSkyB. Sky B. Granada, who claims that the programme generates over £100 million a year in advertising revenue for the ITV network, wants to double their price from £40,000 to £80,000 per episode,

and if they can't get that from ITV, they're threatening to take it to Murdoch. Members of the cast are famous for their charity work and caring attitude to the less fortunate said a granada insider most of them are desperately concerned about the effect a possible sale could have on pensioners and other lonely people they regard street characters as their friends and can't afford a satellite dish fucking hell that would be the end of the world if coronation street moved to satellite tory rent-a-gob jeffrey dickens has blasted itv for screening an hiv positive vicar kissing his dying boyfriend on a documentary this very evening what are children to make of all this he said it will encourage some of them to dabble in homosexual activities he said of the documentary series 3d vicars should act responsibly in public

if you can't trust your vicar who can you trust gotta say if i was 14 and i saw a vicar snogging another man i'd think very seriously about having a dabble. John Hendry of E17, currently at number 10 in the charts with Deep, and his mate have been attacked by five thugs with iron bars in Walthamstow after the latter chatted up one of their girlfriends. After going to hospital to have 12 stitches in his head, he said,

I can't understand why people do things like that. If they think they're being real men, they're very much mistaken. Bruce Dickinson has announced that he's leaving Iron Maiden, but will stay on until August to do a farewell tour and ring a live LP out of it. But the big news this week is that the IRA have targeted Mr Blobber. After

leaving a bomb in a bin outside Athena in Camden which injured 14 people, a threat of another bomb at Television Centre was issued, forcing the BBC to cancel its live episode of Noel's House Party and replace it with a repeat of the 1992 version of noel's christmas presents and a repeat of the greatest episode of tom and jerry ever zoot cat where tom falls for a bobby sockser and makes his own zoot suit out of a deck chair and a lampshade only to be comprehensively cock blocked by jerry who ends up dancing with her and presumably having a relationship. Fucking hell, what a cunt of a mouse Jerry was. Yeah, what a little fucker.

And the IRA there, not just there for the nasty things in life. Getting rid of Noel Edmonds for an evening, sort of. To be fair, the IRA only threatened to kill somebody on Noel Edmonds' primetime TV show. Noel succeeded. What a fucking grim time 1993 is. Jesus. There was just this sense of what's the fucking

point? I mean, the Tories had won the election the previous year. There was this flurry of optimism that Kinnock was going to get in. A flurry to which, sadly, Kinnock himself was only too prone. Well, alright! Alright! Alright. But yeah, when that failed, it was like oh god, we've got another five years Kinnock himself was only too prone. Well, all right! All right! All right. You know.

But yeah, when that failed, it was like, oh God, we've got another five years of the fucking Tories. It's not surprising that a lot of people just sort of turned inwards and just couldn't face politics anymore for a while. On the cover of Melody Maker this week, Pearl Jam. On the cover of Smash It, E17.

The number one LP in the country at the moment is diva by annie lennox and over in america the number one single is a whole new world by pebo bryson and regina bell and the number one lp is the soundtrack to the bodyguard by whitney hou So, me dears, what were we doing in April of 1993? I was just about to turn 15. Things were not going to improve significantly from being 14. It sucked. I survived, like you do. It was a hideous roiling cauldron of being bad at netball and hockey.

Oh, Sarah. That's the Char Music netball team gone for an absolute toss it was the knickers though there's the gym knickers the navy gym knickers the ultimate humiliation although not as uncomfortable as the socks really yeah like the navy kind of like knee socks that you had to wear and they were so scratchy like i don't really understand why it had to be this way. There's loads of ways to exercise. Why did it have to all be about, you know, the kind of social death of competitive sport? It sucked.

While wearing knickers. Was Sepp Blatter in charge of this? Do you remember he said that women's football would be more popular if they all just played wearing knickers or something? I mean, Jesus Christ. Tied to shorts that were practically knickers. Yeah, yeah. Let's be honest well we did have little you know sort of uh sort of little tiny skirts uh we were allowed to you know to uh preserve what remained of our dignity but uh you know yeah and it always rained

this is the thing it was like it it was always especially when it was hockey so you were just like up to your neck in filth and uh humiliation but other than that everything was great i played hockey at one school that i went to it was fucking terrifying oh yeah probably the scariest sport i've ever played jesus we played at our school every now and again let's give all the fucking head cases in the school a big wooden stick to wave about that's a great idea and when you see what the goalkeepers have to wear these massive fucking samurai outfits with all the padding they're absolutely fucking funked yeah and you realize that's there for a reason there's a reason why you have to like have all that crap

yeah yeah man never again music wise sarah what you into well here's the thing um so i had a little bit of a personal revelation at the recent Triumphant Chart Music live show. Having been on this podcast for seven years now, as we all have. Seven years! I know. And having, you know, done the so hey, what were you listening to at this time thing?

I'm racking my brains and just going, oh yeah, I am actually the chart music girl of the intro. Because you don't get the full effect from the audio. You need to see her face and Chris Needham's face face when we do a live show we open it up with a clip of the opening bit of audio where chris needham says so what what kind of music are you into yeah and the girl says chart music yeah and you always get this gasp of recognition when that comes on yeah yeah yeah which is which is wonderful and i don't want to um you know she clearly a person in her own right and i hope she's doing great but uh you know she isn't the one there is a giggle which is actually her friend who is who

is a little bit embarrassed like oh you've been put on the spot and she doesn't actually she looks like she's taking the question seriously and then kind of finds it tiresome that she's even been asked and says, chart music. Like, why are you even asking? What do you think I'm into? And she's the most attractive girl sat on that bench as well. Chris has obviously gone for her first. Yes. He asks this other girl what they think of heavy metal music.

This girl goes, say it's brilliant, Nicole. And she goes, it's brilliant. Really taking the piss. It's such a teenage thing. Like, you know, as soon as you're asked anything by someone, you know, who's older than you, it's like, oh, you've got to make sure you say the right thing. And the chart music girl doesn't actually care to say the right thing.

So I take inspiration from her. Hang on a minute. If you're the chart music girl, that means all the rest of us are chris needham i'm afraid it does can we deny it yeah strutting up to you with our musical knowledge hoisted over our shoulder and banging against our head that's a bit scary um yeah so i was um grudgingly appreciative of taking that as my best friend was was a huge fan who was her favorite uh jason oh yeah yeah jason orange i think she chose well. I think that

has but history has proven her right on that one. Wasn't he the nearest one that was in Take That to a bad boy before Robbie started acting the cunt? I don't know does Howard count as the bad boy now? Or just the wrong boy? Jason was just ever so nice and she

met him and he was just absolutely lovely but you know but you know that um as i'm sure i have related probably more than once they played at my school yes i always have to mention that that was quite surreal and brilliant um and i thought prey was a banger so you know and i stand by that um i was very into uh predictably enough janet jackson's latest self-titled album the one with the man bra on the cover i like to think that she just went around that entire year with her undone jeans topless with the man walking around behind her just covering her boobs and just giving them a little uplift that's a job you don't see advertised

down the job center isn't it no well you know ai is gonna just take care of that in the future yeah for everyone i hope i'm like a robot cupping my breasts as i was going about my business Well, you know, AI is going to just take care of that in the future. Yeah. For everyone, I hope. I'm like a robot cupping my breasts as I was going about my business. Yeah, that's the way love goes, which was the massive single of that. It's still the smoothest substance to ever enter the human ear and sort of into all of its cockles, you know. And Duran Duran put out their self-titled album, Ordinary World is the one Duran Duran song that even people who

hate joan joan understand to be great yeah but this is definitely this is one of those years for me where 90 of the music will give me just an overpowering pang because it's all steeped in the kind of histrionic moonshine of the adolescent experience you know any spark of anything from D-Ream on down will just make my memory go... Simon! I was 25 and I was writing for Melody Maker. I was a bit of a rising star by this point, I suppose. I was quite well established. I was doing a lot of reviews and features. And also, I was running the arts and media section, which was called Preview,

where I would write about films, comics, TV, games, anything that wasn't music, basically, which was quite good for freebies. I'll say. I remember getting a suede waistcoat to promote Clint Eastwood's The Unforgiven. Right. And a coffin-shaped box set of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula. So that then became Simon Price's Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula when I owned it.

This Clint Eastwood waistcoat, what did it have on it? Because, you know, you do get freebies, but more often than not, they're plastered with a logo of something that's going to go massively out of date in a month or two. Yeah, I mean, it did have the words The unforgiven embroidered uh on the breast pocket so uh i could only i could wear underneath the jacket but yeah it's basically completely useless and that's what pins are for yeah this is what badges are for patches or something i should have thought about that but yeah i was in a bed sit on the top floor of a side street in Tufnel Park slash Holloway,

which was so tiny I could reach everything I owned from my bed, you know. Like Mr. Tickle. No, it didn't even need to be Mr. Tickle. I could be a Tyrannosaurus Rex with tiny little arms. This included the rickety Leaning Tower of Pisa-like wooden habitat shelves with my records on, the Allen screws always threatening to give way and cause a vinyl avalanche i'm sure you remember that before ikea was on the scene you

know this is what you have to make do with you have to go to mfi yeah oh jesus the plaster of paris skulls and magical incense burners which i bought from mysteries of covent garden when i was going through an embarrassingly late in life occultist phase no um i cringe when i think back on that did you have tarot cards all that yes i did al i had all that shit i i'm really about i was 25 man it's too late in life to to be doing that shameful i pride myself on being very rational you know yeah there were loads of people i knew around about this time we went through a tarot phase because they're all fucking hippies but i had one mate who i'm not going to name here and he claimed to be able to read futures with

just a pack of playing cards what he had to do first of all though was take a reading of your aura before he touched the pack and did a reading and luckily for someone like me it was dead easy all he had to do was put his palm like millimeters away from mine but for some reason and you're not going to believe this that never worked with women's palms so he had to do a full body aura reading for that and yeah i've seen him do that and yeah it was the most shameful thing I've seen in my life and it never worked. Shame on you. You know who you are. I once played a game of poker

with tarot cards. I got a full house. Everyone died. That's a Stephen Wright joke. Oh hang on. I can do a pretty good Stephen Wright. Hang on. I once played a game of poker with tarot cards. I got a full house. Everyone died.

Yes! So anyway, there you were, Simon, dancing, laughing, drinking and loving in Bed, Sit, Lunch. There was all that occultist stuff. I had the Macintosh computer that I spoke about in another episode, which used to belong to Michael Grade, and on which I got so obsessed with playing lemmings that i'd often stay in and finish a game rather than go out and have a life and go to gigs

and parties and stuff that i've been invited to so i'm just sitting there like you know late at night oh no yeah yeah yeah that's good when you when you take your eye off the ball and then you realise that somewhere... They're all falling off the edge, yeah. There's a cliff that you're like, oh no! It's a very stressful game. Oh, God, you've been there too. And the building in which I was living was mildly infested with what I can only describe as brown fish.

What? They looked like silverfish, but they were actually brown. I think they were cockroaches. No, they had that sort of tapered shape. They were small and they were basically silverfish, but they were actually brown. I think they were cockroaches. No, they had that sort of tapered shape. They were small, and they were basically silverfish, but brown ones. Maybe they were really old silverfish that got tarnished. Well, it should be the other way around, that they start off brown and then go silver with age, as we do.

I don't know, yeah. But it was pretty horrible, and it was all I could afford at the time. I remember inviting Luke Haynes from the auteurs there so I could interview him. And I was embarrassed that a pop star, even a fairly minor one, was getting to see exactly how poorly paid we music journalists were. I had a small number of extravagances that I could treat myself to that I could afford, right? I had a small number of extravagances that I could treat myself to that I could afford, right? When I wanted a taxi, I had the number of this chauffeur or chauffeurs, I suppose I should say, because she was a lady limousine driver, wearing a uniform and a cap.

No. Yes. And she would pick me up and ferry me around town for only slightly more than a cab fare. Because I think most of her chauffeuring work was done in the daytime and from her point of view she might as well make a few extra quid in the evenings I suppose and from my point of view I think she only lived around the corner so I knew that if I couldn't get a taxi it was you know that there it was and I would turn up in style in a fancy car yeah like an inverted lady Penelope and Parkerer yeah and i didn't even do that thing that the pink panther did of you know give her a coin but it's on a piece of string and sort of

i'd also bought myself a proper leather biker jacket and i'd painted the sheep on drugs logo on the back right because sheep on drugs were fucking awesome and i didn't want to have one of the three most common goth insignia on my jacket which were sisters of mercy bauhaus or einsterzende neubauten okay so sheep on drugs it was even though doing the the detail if you can imagine this doing the detail on the syringe with a fine brush with acrylic paint really wasn't easy but just just about got away with it. You did it yourself? Oh, yeah. Oh, I'd be terrified to do that, man.

Yeah, yeah, on a fucking quite expensive jacket. Even if it was just a fucking jam logo. Yeah, yeah, I did it. I got away with it, got away with it. The other extravagance was my hair. All men can identify with this. Something happens around the age of 23 where men start nervously glancing up

at each other's hairlines like yeah is he going or is it just me well is he or isn't it yeah yeah yeah well i was going um which seemed exceptionally cruel but not unexpected when i looked at the male members of my family but i managed to long it out for a bit longer by throwing money at it. Right. Not by wearing a wig, but getting extensions, right? I went to this quite famous alternative hair salon in Kensington called Antenna. And they gave me this massive mane of synthetic dreadlocks, which I wore with an Axl Rose style bandana. And Hulk Hogan. Yeah, right, yeah.

A white man in dreads might be accused of cultural appropriation, but that wasn't what I was aiming for. My vibe was more this kind of hybrid glam rock, industrial cyberpunk kind of vibe I was going for. He was losing his hair. Yeah, well, yeah, but I've got to say he looked cool as fuck. So basically, yeah, living in a shitty bed sit, but leather jacket, limousine, nice hair.

That was it. That must have left amazing marks on your face. You slept on your side. Yeah, well, also... You just have amazing cheek tattoos in the morning. I put these little metal beads in the dreads as well. So if I was at a nightclub swishing them about, they would whip me in the face with quite some force.

Like Bob Marley. Yeah, and I sort of rattle when I'm walking down the streets. It's like sort of abacus. If I didn't place the bees in just the right place, yeah, it would be quite noisy. No, you were right to do all that kind of shit. One of the biggest regrets of my life was I didn't do more mad shit with my hair. Well, that's it, you know.

And, you know, if there are any youngsters listening to this, any actual youngsters i know it's a long shot but if you are in your 20s just do all the maddest shit with your hair that you can absolutely i just took one look at my dad when i was about 16 and i thought fuck this if that's my future i'm gonna have every mad hairstyle i can have so i did i continued that extends to a lot of a lot of other things about your appearances, like the Nora Ephron quote about, like, if I'd known, if I had known,

I look back at the pictures of me in my 20s, and if I'd only known, I would just have worn a bikini the entire time. Well, I'm living in a tiny flat on the top floor in Isle Witham with my girlfriend, just across the road from the gym that Lady Di used to go to first thing in the morning right yeah you know the one where the owner ended up taking secret gusset shots of her

a few months later it was all over the papers yeah i never saw her she could have always come in for a cup of tea or something well not tea i didn't drink it she could have a black coffee i'm in the final months of university and by this time absolutely gagging to get the fuck out of it and plunge into the real world. I've already decided what I'm going to do. I'm going to be a magazine writer and I don't give a fuck what magazine it's going to be. So in order to see your future, you peered in through a drinking straw into a cup of coke and it's got porn in it hey communicating through porn a drinking straw in the shape of a cock yes

music wise well i'm in a proper relationship for the first time ever so you can't really nestle with your paramour to back the fuck up Bionics or Gangsta Bitch by Apache. So I've stepped away from hip-hop a little bit. Right. And I'm also really skint. I'm working a side job at Richmond Odeon, selling popcorn and fucking fizzy drinks to cunts. And I'm spending less money on records, more on my girlfriend.

And I'm digging back into my collection of Isaacaac hayes curtis mayfield marvin gate i played this archie bell and the drolls album a lot round about this time going back to my roots if you will i'm still keeping abreast of the new stuff you know i'm listening to the local pirate station don fm and getting into jungle and i'm religiously taping Westwood on Capital Radio every Friday. That was a lifeline to me. Yeah. I know we all find Westwood more than just a ridiculous figure nowadays, but a toxic figure. But did you find him hilarious at the time?

Oh, God, yeah. X amount of hilariousness, as the man himself would say. Yeah, baby boy! I'm not a play hater. I'm not a play hater. That all the time, yeah. In this country, he was the gatekeeper because where else in 1993

could you turn on a radio at a certain time and be guaranteed a chance to hear, I don't know, the latest LP by Brand Nubian months before you could get it in the shops or, you know, like later on in the year, the Wu-Tang Clan. First time I heard them was on Westwood. Wasn't going to hear them anywhere else. So, you know like later on in the year the wu-tang clan first time i heard them was on westwood wasn't gonna hear them anywhere else so you know that's how it is you know as a pop craze youngster i was used to the idea that in order to listen to some

fucking amazing music i had to sit through a twat talking about it beforehand so you know dave lee travis then tim westwood now yeah anywayaps, I do believe it is time to retire to the chart music crap room, riffle through a box or two, and pull out an example of the music press from this very week. And this time, I'm going for the NME. Boo. March the 6th, 1993. Shall we leave?

Boo, here's... Let it go, Simon. On the cover, Mark Gardner of Ride and Tim Burgess of the Charlatans, the chip-hand-headed cherubs of student india, holding sticks of rock in their mouths as if they were cigars. In the news, well, the main story this week is the post-mortem on the death of the Happy Mondays. According to the NME, Sean Ryder has begged the rest of the group to reconsider their decision to split up following the collapse of their 1.7 million deal with EMI. We had a meeting and there was only one man who wanted the band to stay together, Sean, claims an unnamed Monday. He apologised

for his behaviour, but certain band members said, no, we've had enough. Further details of the band's disintegration has emerged, which began three weeks ago when Ryder walked out of a band meeting with EMI A&R director Clive Black before the deal was signed, claiming he was going out for a Kentucky Fried Chicken, banned code for custard ganache and never returning. When Ryder failed to convince Black in a subsequent phone conversation that he was a reliable investment, the deal was pulled, resulting in band manager Nathan McGough issuing P45-sworn band members and quitting the next day. According to local rumours, Ryder has already smashed up the

Monday's office and is currently scouring the city for McGough, brandishing a hunting knife. Meanwhile, the rest of the band remained unmoved by appeals from Sean to reconsider. Meanwhile, the rest of the band remained unmoved by appeals from Sean to reconsider. Most of the band have wives, girlfriends, families and mortgages, said the source. The EMI deal offered financial stability and Sean has just taken all of that away. It's quite sweet imagining the Happy Mondays being bothered about mortgages and stuff like that. You know, they're obviously 12-hour party people really meanwhile ryan has found time to attend court where he's fined 650 quid and banned from driving for 18 months over drink drive charges relating to a car crash with a vicar in a larder

last july yeah i wonder if he was snogging his boyfriend at the time with a vicar in a larder last July. A vicar in a larder. Yeah. I wonder if he was snogging his boyfriend at the time. He claimed that he has absolutely no disposable income and asked to pay the fine in instalments before leaving with Oriol Leach, the daughter of former Mondays collaborator Donovan, after the court revealed that he has left his wife Trish and their baby.

Oh man, grim times to be Sean Ryder. He says absolutely no disposable income but is that just because he has disposed his income very regularly into the hands of the local drug lord? He's liquidised his assets. He's powderised his assets probably, yeah. Meanwhile Apache Indian has had a fun evening at the kudos nightclub in watford which culminated with him taking to the stage with several minders in order to explain to the 2 000 strong audience that he had not been booked to appear at the venue that night contrary to posters slapped up all around hartfordshire. Following the inevitable altercation with venue security, a female steward was allegedly struck in the stomach

and a photographer claims that he was biffed by Apache's henchmen and required 10 stitches to a head wound. Apache completely denies the allegations, which are considered to be malicious distortions of the truth, claimed a spokesperson for the arranged marriage hitmaker. Fucking hell. Great news for all yous who like to jiggle that joypad. You too are working with computer game giant Sega

to produce an interactive Zoo TV CD, Reveal the Enemy. You're going to be able to mix your own videos to our songs. There will be a colour box, if you like, of images, and you're going to be able to remix our music for yourself, said Bono the Hedgehog. Sadly, the deal falls through, but when the Mega CD add-on for the Mega Drive hits the UK next month, you'll be able to spend upwards of 40

quid on the Make My Video series, where you can remake the videos of In Excess, Criss Cross, C&C Music Factory, and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. Now what really happened was you buy a Mega Drive and it had the U2 game pre-loaded onto it, whether you liked it or not. Jim Rose, the hippie punk circus leader, is well dischuffed that his current UK tour is in disarray after RSPCA protests and concerned local councils have cancelled his shows in Bristol, Portsmouth and Edinburgh. The whole thing is insane. No-one here seems to be getting the feel

and message of the show. Everything is done with real humour, he says. The RSPCA's complaints about slug eating are ironic, given that snails and oysters are a delicacy. And his mate, Matt the Tube Crowley, defended

his bile bear act, where he swallows a seven-foot tube, pumps a sort of fluids into it, pumps them out again, and invites members of the audience to have a sip, claiming that he's constantly tested for HIV, syphilis and hepatitis, and he always cancels his act when he has a cold or flu.

Fucking hell, did you go and see them? No. I did. Right. It was Clapham Grand. They were always turned up at festivals, though, but they had their own show at Clapham Grand. I mean, I saw that stuff you just described going on,

the guy regurgitating his stomach flu. I did not drink any of it myself. No. But the highlight of the show was Mr Lifto. Do you know about Mr Lifto? Yes. So for those who don't know what this guy would do, he would put a fucking hook, like a butcher's hook,

through his foreskin, and then he would lift fucking breeze blocks from, you know, with his cock. It was quite remarkable. They turned up in The X-Files as well. Yes, they did, yeah. I guess it was based on Todd Browning's Freaks, that kind of travelling free show.

And it was then, it was the Jim Rose Circus. Yeah, by the way, in case anyone is thinking about eating slugs or maybe, you know, as a sort of a food hack to have a nice sort of French cuisine, just don't. Just absolutely don't. It's amazing that we got away with, you know, oh, the shock. Oh, no, it's a global pandemic. Yeah, it's incredible we got away with it for so long. Shenanigans like this happening for entertainment.

Vince Power of the Mean Fiddler group, who used to book acts for the Reading Festival until it wound down last year, has announced the inaugural Phoenix Festival, which will be held at the Long Marsden Airfield near Stratford-upon-Avon in mid-July. Sonic Youth, Faith No More and the Black Crows have already been confirmed as headliners

and the bill would end up taking in the likes of Julian Cope, House of Pain, Pop Will Eat Itself, the disposable heroes of hip-hopress air, the Young Gods, Living Colour, the Manic Street Preachers, Hole, Pulp, Gil Scott Heron, Gangstar with Roy Ayers and Donald Bird and Sheep on Drugs all spread across

four stages and all for £49 plus 50p booking per person did you partake Simon? Yeah I did, it was a weird one Phoenix it's a sort of festival that didn't know what it was it was very eclectic to

a fault almost you know there were just so many different stages of you know there'd be a jazz stage and hip-hop stage a techno stage and all this kind of stuff i guess it was a bit like glastonbury in that sense but without any kind of counter-cultural or any kind of cultural vibe to it it was just here's all the music that's around sort of divvied up into little pockets and you can sort of wander around it but they've got some massive headliners yeah but it didn't really know what it was and i can see why it didn't last but i liked it because you know it was on an air field so it was a flat surface plenty of concrete and there were hotels nearby because i hate camping but they managed i guess you know basically the mean fiddler group had that kind of clout but they managed to get some massive headliners they had david bowie bob dylan on

headlining but but also you know they also had people like suede and bjork who are more of that era so i think it was a really underrated festival yeah i miss it what were the toilets like they were all right you know some of the things that happened that um i i mean i was mostly backstage so i probably would have had the luxury toilets but um some things i remember happening there were i had a pint of what i hope was water poured over my head by one of pop will eat itself right uh i i went in goal for probably wasn't water then. Exactly, yeah. Oh dear, did it rust your dread beads? Yeah, probably. I went in goal in a penalty shootout against the Cardigans, or between the Cardigans.

Right. And Nina Persson scored a goal past me. Possibly I was a little bit distracted by the fact that it was Nina Persson. And my friend, Emmy-Kate Montrose from Kinnicky, did the most amazing thing. She wasn't looking where she was going and she bumped into Coolio and knocked

him flat on his arse. No, man. If nothing else, Phoenix Festival gave me that memory. Over in stateside USA, the NME reveals that Prince's much publicised meeting with Morrisair

planned to coincide with last week's Grammys has been postponed after the latter decided not to attend the ceremony. The NME reports that a spokesman says Moser is recovering from a bout of flu but plans to reschedule

the chinwag. Eight years earlier that would have blown my mind. You know, eight years earlier, the idea of Prince meeting Morrissey. But what are they going to talk about? Oh, God. What the fuck? You know, I like singing about sex. Oh, well, I don't.

All right, bye then. It'd be like that Guardian thing dining across the divide, wouldn't it? Oh, God, yeah. And finally, Salt-N-Pepa have warned the public that a fake pepper is currently at large in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and is currently trying to obtain a record deal using the rapper's real name, Sandy Denton. So if you encounter a woman with massive gold trunk earrings on your doorstep and she attempts to encourage you to push it real good, contact the police immediately.

In the interview section, well, Northern Irish Noisenix TheraPair sit down with Keith Cameron in Brussels and immediately start banging on about how thick their fan base are. Fans listen to the likes of Teeth Grinder and say, ooh, if only they'd made it a little bit heavier, it would be the same sort of thing as Nine Inch Nails.

It's not meant to be that in the first place, moans frontman Andy Cairns. One thing that always disappoints me is that I tend to grant our fans with enough intelligence to realise what we're trying to do. Certain people we used to work

with always get digs in now. There's a lot of people with the mentality that your music's got shite because you're on a major. If people think our music has got shite and they genuinely think that, fair enough, but it's nothing to do with being on a major. Punk's got into the hands of the middle classes now. When I saw Huggy Bear for the first time, I thought they were great. But when you start ramming your manifestos down people's throats, it's lost any of the vibrancy that the original punk had. There's a fine line between Huggy Bear, Corner Shop and Bono. Whether you're preaching to the Camden Falcon

or to Madison Square Garden, there's not much difference. I feel like Pete Townsend when punk came along. Sarah, you were the sort of right age to be supposedly the target audience for Riot Grrrl. Did it actually reach you at the time? No, it didn't actually, no. In the wilds of West Yorkshire on the windswept hockey field. No, no, it didn't actually. Not at all. And that's exactly the problem with it for

me. The very people that it should have been targeting, it didn't because it was a closed elitist world of people on college campuses, university campuses, who could afford to print up, you know, limited run vinyl singles or fanzines and stuff. I agreed with a lot of the sentiments of what they were doing, but it just, yeah, it used to drive me insane that people thought, oh, well, that's feminism sorted then. That's fine, you know. Yeah, because, you know, that's done now.

No, it fucking isn't. Oh, by the way, therapy with a question mark at the end. Do you say their name like you were Australian? With UpTalk therapy? The question mark at the end was because of Letraset. They were sending out demo tapes, and they kind of got the spacing wrong between the letters, and there was a big gap at the end.

So they just thought, fuck it, put a question mark on the end to make it look better. They were all right therapy i went away with them to las vegas around this time for melody maker and i i remember um going back to the kind of image i had at the time with the massive dreadlocks and the leather jacket you can imagine that the uh climate in nevada wasn't necessarily ideal for i was wearing shit loads of makeup as well so tom sheehan the photographer and took us all out to the sierra nevada desert to do a photo shoot you know it's proper american desert you can

hear snakes rattling and all that kind of stuff um and everyone else is wearing sensibly sort of shorts short sleeve shirts stuff like that i'm there big army boots black leggings black knitted sort of crocheted long jumper underneath my black leather jacket with all the makeup and a black headband, big black dreadlocks. And I refused to compromise my look for the weather. I thought, fuck you, weather. Oh, Simon. You were the original goth in hot weather, weren't you, Simon?

I was. I fucking was. My favourite memory of that trip, though, was that evening, we all went to some kind of cocktail bar on the strip in vegas and there was an elvis impersonator right and of course for those who don't know um tom sheehan is a cockney gentleman who speaks in cockney rhyming yes a lot of it it's it's not the standard rhyming slang he often makes makes up his own it's bespoke yeah yeah so there was this elvis impersonator with the full kind of jumpsuit and massive flares. And Tom turns to us and says, look at that Callard's on that cunt.

And we're like, what? Callard's? And he goes, oh, yeah, I've got it. I've got it. Callard and Bowser's trousers. Yeah, I remember the classic Tom Sheehan-ism was, fucking hell, someone spilt beer. They spilt beer on, they spilt it on my hinge.

Right. Hinge and bracket. Packet. Jacket. Oh, jacket. Oh, okay. I thought it was packet. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't think I would have pronounced the question mark. I think the question mark is silent in therapy. They were really good fun. I saw them like some years later when I think they got back together at the electric Ballroom. Right. It was really great and very loud. And Andy Cairns led the crowd in a chant of You Fat Bastard,

which was... Have you ever shagged on acid? Your cunt feels this big, says Leslie Rankin of Silverfish to Sian Pattenden before she can even get the top off her biro. Not brownfish. Not brownfish. Brownfish sounds like a name that the spin doctors rejected.

You know, it was in like the... Before they adopted that, you know, it was in the shortlist. Or the name of their road there. Bibbidi-bib. It's so good. And now I'm remembering the League of Gentlemen film where Tubbs has a shit and says, I've made a little fish, a little brown fish.

After letting that hang in the air, she proceeds to coat down the big thing du jour. Riot girlies all alone are bollocks. I'm sick to death of hearing about it. It's not interesting. I feel no affinity with it at all i don't need a movement to express my opinions there are plenty of women around who don't have to be part of something and i don't give a fuck how people see me i'm not people hating but i'm not keen on them

why they're thick as a shithouse door most most of them. Silverfish were great, yeah. But, yeah, I can see why they wouldn't be having any of that Riot Grrrl stuff. Awkwardly, the enemy have devoted four pages to a Riot Grrrl special. Is it Riot Grrrl or Riot Grrrl? Go for it, Al. Stretch it out. OK. Awkwardly, the enemy have devoted four pages to a Riot Grrrl special. Liz Evans spends the first two pages breaking down the history of the movement and interviews Lush and Kim Gordon,

while Huggy Bear knock out a two-page manifesto with help from Stephen Wells. Because, hey, you can't entrust this sort of thing to just women. Who do we want to reach? asked Joe Johnson. We want to reach those brilliant punk rock women who've been worrying about what men think about them and are now cool and sassy fucking punk rock women. But if they're alone and isolated, then they're going to end up like my mother. We've got to make contact. This generation seems to have been convinced that it can't do anything for itself, that it's all been done before. Huggy bears see all around them, the indie whores, right swells, tedious transit band bands who don't want to change their t-shirts, never mind the world,

all of them gagging to be interviewed by white, male, middle-class, boring rock hacks for a white, male, middle-class, boring readership. This, in case you were wondering, is not an interview. It's an article written with the band's cooperation. My fee for the article will be donated to the King's Cross Women's Refuge. Bless him. In the centre spread, there's a most unsavory image of tim burgess of the charlatans and rides mark gardner who are about to embark on a joint headliner tour sucking on opposite ends of a stick of rock like the dogs in lady and the tramp can i stop you

there i was really fucked off about this right because this was my idea what yeah because the whole um thing of the charlatans and rides going on tour the news of that reached us at melody maker with plenty of notice and when we were having an editorial meeting i said well it's obvious you've got to get tim burgess and mark gardner together on the front of melody maker sucking on opposite ends of a stick of rock because they were both beautiful boys with luscious lips and you know it would have looked perfect it couldn't just be a pink stick of rock it would have to be one with sort of spiral swirling patterns around it so that you can see what it is that they're sucking on and people just

looked at me and says uh no no and I said well if you don't do it nme will basically like alan partridge where he's on you know partridge is going on about uh monkey tennis and inner city sumo you know presented by chas and dave or whatever if you don't do it sky will and tony hayes goes well i'll live with that so that that was the kind of action i got it's like this is obviously a brilliant front cover and it was a front cover that never happened and then nme do it and they don't even have the balls to put it on the front they just have them sucking separate sticks of rock on the front although they do have the double suck on the center pages but yeah still bitter yeah anyway did you ram a big cheese on a fork into your editor's face yeah yeah smell my rock

you mother we were brought together by drunken meeting at Reading Festival, and it was just, ah, great idea. Let's tour together. I'll see you there, says Burgess. Both groups have got really strong followings, and both groups are just totally into music, man. When asked about whether the rumours about Ride's impending split are true, Gardner is diplomatic to the point of tedium. Now I know how Michael Jackson feels, he says. It was just a bit of a stressed out year for us all, really. Andy Bell didn't have a nervous

breakdown or two, as rumoured. He just had a bad joint. Meanwhile, Burgess is on legal instructions not to talk about Rob Collins, his keyboard player who was arrested before Christmas after his mate attempted an armed holmdup at a supermarket in Staffordshire while he was sat in the car like Father Ted and Dougal when Tom nipped into the post office. So the rest of the interview isn't worth talking about, really.

I went away on a trip with ride as well oh did you know yeah um not long after this um this was to um to la and their tour manager in the states was the third copeland brother so you've got um stewart copeland you've got miles copeland and you've got this other guy who was a vietnam vet and he went around his house to do a photo shoot i think it was and he got out first of all the biggest bag of weeds i've seen in my life it's like a fucking pillow but then he said i know why don't we all do a bit of paintballing in the gardens and he's up in the hollywood hills and he's always fucking undergrowth and i'm like a bit wary of

this but okay okay so you know we all get our guns and our pellets and off we go and hide in the bushes and he comes fucking hunting us down and he's obviously got some kind of proper ptsd rage stored up inside him he's just he's not fucking showing any mercy he's just because those those pellets have you've been hit by a paintball pellet at close range it fucking hurts man we weren't wearing any padded gear like oh my god yeah so that's my main memory of hanging around with riders being shot at by this deranged rambo figure that's when you need your um customized cheap on drugs motorbike jacket exactly and your clint eastwood westcote oh yeah yeah all of it and terry staunton drops in on the would-I-lie-to-you hitmakers Charles and Ed air

and reveals that even they are falling foul of BBC censorship. The traffic lights blink on and off as Charles and Eddie strut along the sidewalk, recalling their early days in the Big Apple, writes Staunton. They remember the cool sounds their DJ friend Smash would spin down at the Soul Kitchen. They give each other a knowing smile and agree, yeah, that shit was funky. Suddenly a middle-aged man with an Oxbridge accent, wearing a set of headphones, yells above the melting pot hustle and bustle of the mean streets, cut. This is not America. This is Elstree. This is an afternoon run-through

on a BBC soundstage, and the man with the headphones has deemed that shit is not a particularly top-of-the-pops friendly word. The walking about on the streets of Elstree, was that Walford? Oh, good question. Yeah. Single reviews. Sam Steele is in the

chair this week and her single of the week is 15 Minutes of Fame by Sheep on Drugs. The trademark SOD barrage of techno rock and acid-edged mayhem is still as spiky and wicked

as Beelzebub's tale and just as sexily alluring. Zig Zig Sputnik were never as devilishly clever or absurdly anti-stylish as sheep on drugs, which is why 15 minutes of fame might just be a conservative estimate. These wolves, and for the last time the name refers to you, not them, are going to worry the moral majority into a frenzy of fear. Yeah, sadly that wasn't the case, but I fucking loved them. I remember the first time I saw them was supporting Daisy Chainsaw at Yulu.

Right. And Duncan, the singer, had painted on hair with a sort of painted on centre parting, a bit like, I don't know, Frank Sidebottom meets Adolf Hitler, really. And after about two songs, he was sweating so much under the lights, and this must have been intentional, that it all just streaked down his face and looked really horrific. Oh, like Rudy Giuliani. Yeah.

It was amazing. They were such a good band. But yeah, in hindsight, they were never going to trouble the charts or the moral majority, I don't think. Dodgy have put out their fourth single, Water Under The Bridge, and still reckons it's going to finally put them over the top and into the charts. Dodgy have seemingly got it all.

Sex, God, Good Looks, their own groovy Carnaby Street Club, and they've finally stirred themselves from their ultra-cool existence to bring us water under the bridge. Armed with swirling post-psychedelic guitars and instantly forgettable melodies, Dodgy stride effortlessly into the abyss of baguette, so cruelly abandoned by the stone roses at the beginning of the last century, by the Stone Roses at the beginning of the last century. While A&M's men in suits pop the corks in celebration of the fact that Dodgy have finally come up with a pleasant poppet of a song after nearly a year,

those poor sods at Geffen, home of the Stone Cold Roses, must be pulling their ponytails out in despair. I can't really see a Stone Roses comparison. It's a bit of a weird way to review them, but OK. Jamiroquai have pitched up with their second single, Too Young To Die, and still really, really reckons it. And him and them. Jamiroquai.

Got it? Good. Remember it. Because the big voice and even bigger hats are unlikely to go away. Jay, the wearer of the woolly tea coser, has one of the most powerful and impressive soul voices to slide across the dance spectrum in a long while. Jumping full force onto the jazz funk bandwagon, pioneered by the brand new Heavies and Galliano,

Too Young is a singing up-tempo follow-up to last year's club hit When You're Gonna Learn. And with Jay's tendency to break into a scat at the first opportunity, it's as catchy as a cold on the underground. See, it all started so positively, but it ended with going to prison for storming the Capitol because Donald Trump told him to. Yes.

But it's a coat down for looking through patient eyes by PM Dawn, a bland rehash that is only going to excite adventurous Michael Jackson fans and Radio 4 listeners. Hysteria unknown by Strangelove reveals that singer Patrick screwed up childhood, his history of alcohol abuse and his deep depressions of the bedrock from which his intensely personal songs are hewn. It is also this same depth of feeling that elevates Strangelove from simple shoegazing to spiritual soul-searching. Elsewhere, Sidney Boo Saeed are called a girl group, not you understand that gender is a yardstick by which to measure anything,

during Steel's review of Twilight Eyes. Dai Cheerleaders' Saturation EP is proof positive that girls can be as bold and big on guitars as any boy rockers, and the dramatic flutes and somber strings of baron to belong said specter morse theme will allow morse's memory to live on dig it kids i had a mate who's obsessed with die cheerleader and used to go to all their gigs but he thought they were german and they were called d cheerleader seriously In the album review section this week, Pride of Place is actually a twofer,

featuring Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah by Bikini Kill on one side and Our Troubled Youth by Huggy Bear on the other. This is the first fruit from the so-called Riot Grrrl movement, ripe for plucking by some adventurous major-label subsidiary, says Edwin Pouncey. The Riot Grrrl tag has been lazily looped around Bikini Kill's neck in a vague attempt to explain what they do, but it's confusing and deceptive.

Bikini Killer like some hot-rod engine that's been stripped down to the basics and filled with sonic true punk The only really shocking thing about Huggy Bear Is how fast they've learned to make records that sound both crudely troubled and flash at the same time Huggy Bear's side is the most immediate, the one you keep coming back for But the real way to play this record is with your eyes closed. Just slam it on the turntable, drop that needle,

and jump back at the surprise that leaps out of the speakers. But it's a coat down for practically everything else this week. Frank Black has finally crawled out from under the wreckage of the Pixies to put out his debut solo LP, Frank Black has finally crawled out from under the wreckage of the Pixies to put out his debut solo LP, Frank Black, but Deli for Deli dismisses it as an insubstantial corporate take on indie rock. Deacon Blue have failed to achieve the stadium-filling status for which they were once tipped, and they must have cost Columbia a small fortune.

So perhaps they were frog-marched into a record company office and told by an AR man to get trendy. Why else have they paid credit to cost producers Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne to make them sound like the happy Mondays, asked John Harris in his review of Whatever You Say, Say Nothing. It's empty opportunism. Why has terminally irritating frontman Ricky Ross decided to start wearing stupid shades and ill-fitting rockstar togs that make him look like someone in a Bono lookalike parade? Bollocks on all counts, really. This is lucky to scrape a three out of ten. Oh, it's a bad time for the 80s bands, isn't it?

Are you going to go my way? Asked Lenny Kravitz on the title track of his third album. Fuck off, am I? Replies Stephen Dalton, who calls it the sound of Kravitz shagging an elegantly dressed corpse. He's constructed an entire career from second-hand Leninism, third-hand Hedrick'sism, and stinking tenth-hand

hippieism. Cutting his cloth from the emperor's old clothes, he's stitched together this theme park boutique of trouser rock. Oh, sorry, callard rock, if you will. Fashion will fashionably crumpled worn in the right places but utterly empty true kravitz devotees earhead style vultures notting hill hippies and music biz twats will keep the faith because he still provides them with a solid get-out clause for their reactionary tastes,

reducing the era they blindly idolise to a safe, retro fashion spread, draped in hollow peace and love poses. It was easy to hate Wendy James, champion of Barbie feminism, when she fronted corporate terrorist Transvision Vamp. It was easy to dismiss her as the gherkin in the great hamburger of art. She didn't like clothes, but she liked screaming about the revolution. She was a complete prat. But Wendy wrote to Santa, aka Elvis Costello, in the summer of 1991, and he wrote her an LP. Simple, eh? And now everyone will say that there's far more to her than meets the eye.

That she has things to say. Right, Sean Patton of Wendy James' debut solo LP, Now Ain't The Time For Your Tears. Ultimately, James has made an LP which is fairly proficient, but more importantly, an LP which is dull. It's all about Wendy and her world, which is not enough for ten songs. Now Ain't The Time proves one thing beyond doubt. Elvis Costello has a sense of humour,

for that is the only excuse one can make for this sniffle of an album. In the gig guide, well, David could have seen Soho at the Brixton Fridge, cheered on his fellow MM hat Chris Roberts fronting Catwalk at the Borderline. I was there. Terminal Cheesecake at the Islington Powerhouse, Radiohead at the Underworld,

Eric Clapton at the Albert Hall, Daisy Chainsaw at Camden Palace I was there too and Dumpy's Rusty Nuts at the Woolwich Tram Shed but probably didn't Taylor could have seen the Hollies at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre the Steve Gibbons Band again at Birmingham Breed and Bar Panic Beach at Dudley JB's

or the uncontrollable noise explosion at the Mitre in Stalbridge, all dependent on him recovering from Nigel Kennedy's two-night stint at Birmingham Ronnie Scott's. Sarah could have seen Radiohead at Leeds Duchess of York, Rudimentary Peni also at the Duchess of York, Radical Dance Faction at Sheffield Hallamshire Hotel, Senseless Things at Sheffield Uni, or join the Proto Weller Dads for the Mod Fathers show at the Leeds Town and Country Club. Al could have knocked back the Bile Bear at the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow at Nottingham Trempe Polle, Alice in Chains at Rock Rock City and wound up the week checking out spare parts

at Loughborough's The Swan in the Rushes. Neil could have seen Sultans of Ping at Covune, Wall of Sleep at Coventry General Wharf, although probably didn't because the lead singer threatened to glass him once, and absolutely fuck all else. While Simon could have seen the Indigo Girls at Bristol Fleece and Firkin, Climax Blues Band at Newport King's Hotel,

Senseless Things at Bristol Unair, or Tamsin Archer at Cardiff St David's Hall. I like how you've expanded the radius of my local patch to include Bristol, because that's what it was fucking like. Nothing happens in Wales. In the letters page well sean patterning has been entrusted with angst this week and the main topic of conversation is a response to a letter of fortnight ago from terence t simmons from birmingham who trotted out the line about the white working class being edged out by ethnic minorities and the gays.

I'm working class, left school at 16, went into manual work. I am now unemployed but in no way do I blame people of different ethnic origins or have a different sexuality than me for my hard life in the real world, writes

working class and proud from Farnborough. The people who are to blame for the shit we live in are the politicians and ruling class who promote racism and homophobia to divide and rule us. These dickheads need bigoted people like Simmons to keep them in power, so Simmons, just fuck off! Middle-class anti-fascists from Stockport, however,

has a somewhat different point of view. Get real, Terrence Simmons, you working-class dickhead. Why does the enemy continue to follow the sad old oi, Gary Bush, old pro-working-class line? Fact! The working class is the most reactionary socio-economic group in Europe. Real radical social change

has always been inspired by the radical intelligentsia. And if you're talking music, most of the decent radical songwriters of the last 15 years went to public school. Shane McGowan, Joe Strummer,

Brett Anderson,ris out of the redskins to name but a few simon brett didn't go to public school that's a really weird thing to say he looks like he did though that's the main thing christ if you go around slapping your own ass mate people are gonna assume that you went there when we fight nazis on the streets. We're fighting the working class. Yes, you Terrence, you thick homophobe. When we argue against stool brains in pubs, we're arguing with the working class. Let's have an intelligence qualification for the vote. Say, three A-levels and at least one suede single.

Then the mass of sun-reading, bigoted, brain-dead sheep who have kept the Tories in power for the last 13 years wouldn't be able to fester drunkenly over the destruction of everything decent and worthwhile in this country. Terence, I went to public school on a scholarship, no fees, and I'm fucking proud of it most of my friends and their parents are professionals it's called intelligence you sad reactionary oik and i live in the real world as much as you do matey a big black pair of gay doc martins are going pro-bashing in Birmingham soon. Fucking hell. Everybody in this debate seems just lovely, don't they? I know.

What about the music, man? I do want to know where I can buy a big black pair of gay Dr Martens, though. Yeah. Music-wise, as with the rest of this issue, Huggy Bear feature heavily. Let me set the scene, writes Neil from Leeds. Here I am, sitting all on my lonesome on Friday night. Until tonight, I was a fairly average, normal, everyday kind of guy. Tonight, things changed. I watched the word. I saw the huggy revolution. Before now, I'd heard

of Huggy Bear, not knowing what they sounded like. But tonight, they definitely meant something and started something special. And when they started shouting about the really shitty sexist piece about the two American bimbos, the Barbie twins, it really hit me. For once, I agreed with the words crowd. Be they members of Huggy Bear or whatever. Be with us or against us it's up to you god you remember that bit no they'd just done a piece about the Barbie twins and then Huggy Bear started shouting at Terry Christian and he tried to calm it down and uh Henry Rollins

just sat there not knowing what the fuck was going on really my main memory of Huggy Bear on the word is that it was reported on by members of Melody Maker who'd gone along as sort of cheerleaders for the whole Riot Grrrl thing. Riot Grrrl? Yeah, Riot Grrrl. Oh, no, that's a bit too Dex-ish. It's a bit too Roy Orbison.

Grrrl. Yeah. The Riot G contingent at Melody Maker were furious that the Channel 4 staff had made them take their coats off, that they couldn't go in the studio audience with their coats on. This was their big rallying cry. They made us take off our coat, you know, as if that was the worst thing that ever happened. But they felt the benefit afterwards.

They felt the benefit, exactly. Channel 4 were just looking out for them, really. Yeah. Gavin from Haywood's Heath, however, believes that Huggy Bear's ticket pricing structure is just another form of sexism. Whilst visiting a record emporium in Brighton, I noticed a flyer for the Huggy Bear gig at the Brighton Richmond. I quickly looked to see how much the tickets were, and much to my surprise, I noted that for unemployed and students, this much-hyped ban could be seen for a mere £3. Then I noticed that this reduction included girls! Two exclamation marks. In other words, if you're not a student, unemployed or female, you have to pay 50p more to get in.

Just what in the hell are Huggy Bear trying to achieve with this action? in just what in the hell are huggy bear trying to achieve with this action before you dismiss me as a chauvinist pig i am very much in favor of equal rights but to openly distinguish between the sexes in this way amounts to blatant sexism in the extreme if huggy bear want to change people's attitudes to women's rights in society then they are not going to do it by suppressing men's it's interesting isn't it that there is some kind of horseshoe effect at play in terms of the interaction between sexism and pricing at music events because on the one hand you've got those sleazy nightclubs that uh you know, let women in for free. Yes. And then right the other side of the horseshoe, you've got Huggy Bear, who are the opposite of that, but are also letting women in really cheap. Maybe Huggy Bear should have offered free entry to all men who turned up to the venue in really tight shorts and give them a complimentary glass of fizz.

entry glass of fizz. Gavin of Leicester was very excited to see his hometown featuring in the pages of the NME for the first time since the days of show Wadi Wadi Air, thanks to a recent interview with Cornershop. The whole Cornershop explosion is so important to not only Leicester, but Britain. The challenging of society's stereotypes and music's traditionalism

is what this shithole of a country needs. The very fact that they can't play their instruments only adds to the excitement. Cornershop will, over a period of time, develop into an awesomely powerful band and disbelievers will repent. disbelievers will repent. Bands like them and fucking hell, Huggy Bear again, will in years to come be cited as a major influence upon the music and attitudes of their time. The media attention is very much justified as the threat of right-wing activism is more rife than ever before and those who make a formal stand against fascists and general ignorance deserve praise. Ignorance is Britain's downfall. 14 years of conservative rule.

Why can't people wake up? Oh, different times, everyone. I agree with one sentiment in that letter, which is the very fact that they can't play their instruments only adds to the excitement. Because I remember at Melody Maker, some of the people who really disparaged Riot Grrrl saying, well, the problem with these bands like Huggy Bear is they can't play their instruments.

As if, you know, that was it, that was just the end, you know, nothing further need be said. And, you know, the same with Corner Shop. The fact is, those bands could play their instruments enough to make that record. And if you find that record exciting then it doesn't need any more technique than that it doesn't need somebody that's able to play some kind of stupid fucking twiddly guitar solo do you know what i mean yeah what do you want them to do

use samplers and that right yeah the other news story that has agitated the readership is suede appearing at the brit awards even though they weren't nominated for anything. It is somewhat refreshing to witness a band who refused to put principles before selling their souls for fame and fortune. This is no doubt why the enemy have so readily embraced Suede to its heaving bosom, says Craig from Ulverston. But it was rather worrying to watch the said foursome

perform Animal Night Rate. Yes, that's what he wrote. Animal Night Rate at the Brit Awards. I can't help believing that if Mr Anderson and colleagues told the Brits organisers that if they wanted the band on the show so badly,

they should have voted for them originally. Better is it not to be loved truly by one person than handicapped by a couple of dozen you hate no respect for their vacuous nominations indeed carl essendorff from london who appears to be a regular contributor to angst of late is less florid. Dear WEA, withering establishment artists, think about it kids, and Brits chairman Rob Dickens, why are you inciting your own murder? I would like to nail your testicles to your bedroom ceiling and test kitchen knives on your stupid faces. Perhaps when a few pints of blood have congealed on the carpet, you'll stop spewing smug bullshit. Out of 48 nominations, how dare you not include suede? How dare you kick us in the teeth with your sterile average nominations. Enjoy your nightmares.

Spit out your artist's arse hairs and change your underwears. Somebody's been listening to the first Wu-Tang Clan album, haven't they? Ah, fucking, ah, fucking. Sew your asshole clothes and keep feeding you and feeding you. And Cole Rushbridge and Nichols of Hailsham

write to inform us that the letters Brett Anderson of Suede can be rearranged to spell sad nose of utter bender. I just thought you might like to know that. 55 pages, 70p. I never knew there was so much fucking Huggy Bear in it. So what else was on telly this day well bbc one kicks off at 6 a.m with business breakfast followed by two and a bit hours of bbc breakfast news after kilroy starts an argument it's a quarter of an hour of ross king doing some sort of quiz. Then it's Play Days and Good Morning with Anne and Nick. Pebble Mill, no longer at 1 but at a quarter past noon, is next,

followed by regional news in your area, the news, a repeat of yesterday's Neighbours, and the quiz show First Letter First, the short-lived wordy game show hosted by Don McLean. No, not that one. After the 1981 TV movie Isabel's Choice, about a secretary who has to choose between marrying a retiring boss or continuing her career with the new one,

it's Rupert, Melvin and Maureen's musicograms, Jack and Auraire, the new Yogi Bear show, the Hotel for Puppets series Dizzy Heights, Newsround and Blue Peter. Then it's Neighbours, The Six O'Clock News and Regional News in Your Area. BBC Two commences at 6.45am with a triple bill of Open University, then dips into BBC One's feed of breakfast news for a quarter of an hour, and then it's 45 minutes of yesterday's red-hot thrill ride at the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. At 9am, Daytime on 2 kicks in with schools programmes,

Thunderbirds, more schools programmes, The Adventures of Spot, Brum, Dilly the Dinosaur, and more schools programs. Then it's You and Me. Then the welfare rights magazine show Advice Shop. The News. The small business show I Could Do That. The documentary Some of Our Airmen Are No Longer Missing

about the work of the Air Force Recovery Unit. Now they recover bodies of pilots lost during World War II. Then it's From the Edge, the magazine show for the disabled. the Air Force Recovery Unit. Now they recover bodies of pilots lost during World War II. Then it's From the Edge, the magazine show for the disabled. Food and Drink makes Rabbit with prunes. And they're an hour into Kenny Rogers as the Gambler, the 1980 TV film which stars Kenny Rogers as the Gambler. ITV is a 24-hour concern now, so we'll begin at 6am with three and a half hours of GMTV,

followed by the British version of Jeopardy. Then it's regional news in your area, the time, the place, this morning, and Riddler's on the road. After the news and regional news in your area, it's home and away, a country practice, the third quarterfinal of the Wix British Snooker Open in Derby, more news and regional news in your area, blockbusters, Where's Wally, Mike and Angelo, Tiny Toons Adventures, a repeat of this afternoon's

Home and Away, the news at 5.40, regional news in your area, and they've just started Emmerdale. Channel 4 drops in on Sesame Street at 10 to 6, then it's Dennis, America's piss-poor attempt to rip off Dennis the Menace that can fuck right off. After two hours of The Big Breakfast, it's the game show You Bet Your Life, then it's two and a half hours of The Big Breakfast, it's the game show You Bet Your Life.

Then it's two and a half hours of schools programmes that Simon already knew about due to his computer. After the Parliament programme, Sesame Street and the Australian kids' show Liftoff, it's the 1938 British comedy film Sailing Along. Then some artists saw as a gauze at Heinz Memlin's St. John Altarpiece in Masterworks, followed by Food File and Countdown. Spike Lee and Malcolm X's wife and daughter

are the guests on the Oprah Winfrey show because the film debuts tomorrow in the UK. Then it's the magic roundabout, followed by the word access or areas. And then Tony Daly of Aston Villa batters a child 5-0 at striker on the

SNES in Gamesmaster and they've just started Channel 4 News. Me dears what is jumping out from you from that schedule? Malcolm X getting followed by the magic roundabout. That is a beautiful juxtaposition. Yes. Also Kenny Rogers the The Gambler.

They should have made a follow-up film about islands in the stream in which an island just sort of sits there. Yeah. That's it, nothing happens. Or Kenny Rogers bombing about in a car and jumping the lights called Kenny Rogers as the Amber Gambler. All right. All right then, pop craze youngsters.

It is time to go way back to March of 1993. Always remember, we may coat down your favourite band or artist, but we never forget, they've been on top of the pops more than we have. It's 7pm on Thursday, March 4th, 1993, and top of the pops, like the mainstream music industry, is in a slump. It's been years since the show was a regular fixture in the bar BBC One top 20 ratings. The

year zero revamp which took place in 1991 is being seen as a dead cat bounce and rumours are swirling that the incoming controller of BBC One, Alan Yentob has already put the show on his kill list. It's not all bad news, though. Repeats of Top of the Pops are holding down the top five places

in the ratings for the new satellite channel UK Gold, but despite all that, to use the parlance of the time, the knives are out for Top of the Pops. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Chaps, I think now's as good a time as any to examine the career of the sixth executive producer of Top of the Pops and the changes he wrought, don't you? Sure. Born in Stepney in 1933,

Stanley Appel became a cameraman for Top of the Pops in 1966, when the show was relocated from Manchester to London, and spent the rest of the decade upskirting Dolly Birds and crushing youths under the wheels of his EMI 2001. After working as senior cameraman on the music show Something Special and International Cabaret in the late 60s, he was earmarked for promotion and became the production assistant for Top of the Pops in 1971, a position he held throughout the first half of the 70s. In 1974, he made the next step up when

he became the director of the TV special Singer song of seacombe and the music show they sold a million hosted by vince hill and featuring the young generation and a year later while he was directing the new series lulu the valdunica music show and six episodes of Parkinson, he was being billed as assistant producer of Top of the Pops under Robin Nash, but had his title changed to director soon afterwards. By August of 1978, he's directed the series Max Bygrave Says I Want to Tell You a Story, the final series of The Black and White Minstrel Show, and the second series of Jim'll Fix It

and have been promoted up again to producer of Top of the Pops and he almost closed out the decade in that role while directing the third series of Rolf on Saturday OK, Mike Yorwood in Persons, Kelly Monteith, the third series of Blankety Blank and the Marty Cain Show. He had a break from Top of the Pops in late 79, early 80. When Robin Nash stepped down in the summer of 1980, Appel was poised to ascend to the throne of Top of the Pops but the BBC went for Michael Hurl instead and Appel resumed his role as the second-in-command,

dividing his time between Top of the Pops and working as the director of the late, late breakfast show, Wogan, the main attraction, the Keith Harris show and the old sailors' Saturday tea time variety show, The Old. In 1986, he became joint producer- producer director of Top of the Pops sharing the role with Paul Ciani and Brian Whitehouse and when Ciani took over from Hurl in

1988 Appel stepped away to work on Blankety Blank Every Second Counts and I've Got a Secret but when Ciani's health started to decline in late 1989 Appel was drafted back in to mind the shop for a while. And in the autumn of 1991, he officially took over from Chiané

and was given carte blanche to pull the programme out of the shit and improve on its rating of just under 8 million viewers a week. And chaps, fucking hell, who knew that there was still a meritocracy at the bbc in the 90s eh because if there's anyone in 1993 who knows the workings and the heritage at top of the pops it's this man right here and the good news is is that this man of experience has been given the opportunity to do what he likes the bad news is that in march of 1993 he's three months away from his 60th birthday that's the thing fucking hell top the pops is not real kids issues anymore when we talk about new incoming producers of top the pops as we often do

they usually seem to be kind of a new broom you know sweeping away all the crap and radicalizing everything but this guy's very much a company man isn't he he's uh yeah he's come up through the ranks he's very much the kind of roy evans through the boot room rather than a sort of gerard houllier figure yes but it is analogous to matthew bannister uh coming in at radio when it's around the same era bannister is getting rid of, you know, the likes of DLT and so on, and ruffling a lot of feathers doing that. And, well, without spoiling what we're about to see, Stanley Apple Appel has done that here,

by basically changing the rules about who gets to present the programme. And let's talk about those changes, because it might not be a new broom. It's probably a bit more of a Triggers broom, but it's a broom nonetheless isn't it yeah so the changes then well top of the pops is moved from television center to the bbc's l street center which it bought off central television in 1984 to accommodate the set of east enders and has been given a budget of a quarter of a million pound to build a new set and theoretically chaps that studio and walford was built by the cast of alveda's ain't pet because that's where they

filmed the on the job scenes in the first series amazing after intensive audience research it is revealed that a british public doesn't give a wank about the Radio 1 DJs who've been presenting the show. So for the first time in 24 years, the bond between Top of the Pops and Radio 1 is severed and a squad of new presenters are drafted in. Appel finally bans miming from Top of the Pops as he's never liked the idea of it and puts it about that at the very least he will allow the playing of musical instruments to be mimed but the singer has to be live. Do you reckon he was just seething all those years

behind his big, unwieldy BBC tank-like camera? He was thinking, fucking hell. Yeah, this is a cod. They're not fucking real. Yeah, he thought it was cheating didn't he yes I'd never have it it's still performance

you know there's a whole fucking show now based on lip syncing and dance battles you know so I think really having thought about this a lot too much really it would have been nice to give everyone the choice you know it's like well if you want to puss out that's fine just have some extra dancers and then if you want to sing then go for it it

would be nice to have a mixture but i suppose i understand what he was getting at but i don't agree in keeping with top of the pops of the late 80s videos are to be used as sparingly as possible but a chunk of the production budget is to be earmarked for live satellite broadcasts, mainly from America, of acts performing live. More importantly, the rules of the scheduling of Top of the Pops, which have stood pretty much unchanged since 1964, have been ripped up in an attempt to get the old ones interested again. Article in the stage, dated September 12th, 1991 Top of the Pops abandons young music fans

Fewer songs could reach the UK's top ten singles chart As a result of changes about to be made to Top of the Pops A chart expert warned this week The corporation aims to revive the show Which has experienced a dropping viewing figures of late by encouraging more live performances and opening the show up to feature acts from the album charts and US charts. According to the new rules, the number one single will still be played,

but any record in the top ten can be played regardless of its position and even if it was featured in the previous week's show. Singles climbing between positions 11 and 40 will be eligible for inclusion, but will be played only once unless they reach the top 10. Chart analyst Alan Jones predicted that the new guidelines may mean that the top 10 may remain static with a more rapid turnover of songs in the lower part of the top 40. Many singles need to be shown twice on Top of the Pops for them to make the top 10, he said. The corporation maintains the programme's new look has been prompted by the public's growing preference for long-playing records, while sales of singles, which are bought mainly by young teenagers, have slumped.

Producer Stanley Appel, who will choose the acts for the new look, Top of the Pops, said the inclusion of the American charts and tracks from the album charts will not only interest the older teenager who is developing more sophisticated musical tastes but also young people with specific musical preferences yes chaps you heard that right stanley appell on the verge of turning six there has complete control of the book at top of the pops. I don't like the sound of that. The thing that really jumps out at me is bands being able to appear the following week when, you know, regardless of whether they've gone up or not, that's heresy.

We've already seen that in short music, haven't we? When they put on Don't Look Back In Anger, even though it slipped down to number two. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that is cheating. Sacrilege! For a while, the Appel reformations worked.

The first episode under his stewardship put on an extra million viewers, and by early 1992 was pulling down a regular audience of nine and a half million. But at the end of the year, ratings went back into decline, with rumours circulating that Appel was about to be sacked and replaced by Janet Street Porter. Fucking hell, can you imagine that? That's a sort of Damocles, isn't it? So do you think that the changes that Top of the Pops wrought in the early 90s had an effect on the charts? Because we're not yet at the stage where singles will just rocket straight into the top three and then drop the next week yeah i don't think the industry have really got their

shit together in that kind of multi-format two cds kind of nonsense not quite yet but you've you've said it yourself that the the viewing figures were down to eight million so it's as if the the the centrality of top of the pops just wasn't as strong anymore maybe i was sort of complacent and naive at the time i didn't realize that and uh i'd stop watching the show uh religiously but if one of our bands in inverted commas was going to be on if we you know somebody tipped the wink to us that well actually there's there's a band on this episode um without naming any names i I would tune in to watch that, and I'd be thinking, oh, great, my favourite band is on Top of the Pops.

That means they are a big deal, and the whole of the UK is seeing it. Well, no, actually, the whole of the UK wasn't necessarily seeing it. No. So it wasn't a force it was, maybe. So it's hard to prove what forces something up and down the charts. There have been so many examples of what we might think is a brilliant Top of the pops performance followed by you know a song sinking with lead diving boots but you know you used to think that there was some kind of correlation maybe by this point not

yeah sarah you were the target viewership i suppose so were your choices informed to any extent by what you'd seen on top of the pops like i'm going to go out and buy that um not really it was probably um radio did it more because i suppose you know when you get playlists and you hear it all the time it just gets hammered into your brain so i don't think it did really right we're treated to the annoying rave wasp sound of now get out of that by tony jibber the eighth and possibly worst Top of the Pops theme, which was introduced in October of 1991. Any argument on that? No, I really don't like the sequence either. It's kind of industrial and industrious, you know. It looks like hard work. It makes pop music look like you've got to sort of be physically fit. Yeah, you've got to put the graft in.

Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, the words Top of the Pops are made out of these kind of proto-steampunk cogs and wheels. Yes. They're shot from these, well, they're not shot, it's probably computer generated, but from these vertiginous angles. And the dancers are doing stuff that looks like hard work rather than the expression of freedom with the human body that the dance is meant to be it's like outtakes from flash dance but you know the rehearsals and i didn't like it at all to and tp music factory if you will yeah there's these kind of shadowy faceless figures it's all quite humorless isn't it much as i am happy for top of the pops to have

some seriousness because when it's too wacky it's extremely annoying there is a slightly sort of transatlantic whiff about it as well it's definitely moving away from being british in that way the the shadowy mysterious figures of the dancers you know if this were today there'd be a whole subreddit devoted to decoding the hidden messages in their movements. You know, and talk about does it point to a conspiracy within the BBC? It is nice. I have to say it's nice to see them kick it off with a little running man. Yes. A little classic move.

I can, in fact, running man. Not at the moment, but someday that is the plan. I tell you what, relief, said Fred, pop pickers. Stick it out, right, not off. Coming from the streets of the UK, and Bright Said Fred take this year's 1993 anthem to number 13. When you're on the doctor's couch, you've got to stick it out. You want to be a world champ, you've got to stick it out You want to be a world champ

You've got to stick it right out As the film of youths working that body in a warehouse is overlaid by the mechanical spinning of the top of the Pops logo, which then transmogrifies into a tomato, we're greeted by tonight's host, Alan fucking Freeman. There he is, isn't it? In front of a Marshall stack and behind some decks, looking like Cypress Hill's dad,

wearing a T-shirt with a logo of a letter G on a Union Jack underneath an oversized denim jacket and a woolly hat. And, yeah, he's making his first top of the pops performance since he pitched up on the 25 years of top of the pop special on new year's eve 1988 and first question chaps what the fuck is that t-shirt because he's doing my eddie it's like a g a lowercase g like the guardian logo but on a round union jack and it looks so familiar and i i just cannot fucking remember what it is do my head in yeah if any of the pc wise can figure that out oh god yeah it's not a band logo no it can't be a logo of a product because it's bbc what is it

it's doing my head in yeah. You need to check out the BBC conspiracy subreddit. Yes. They'll know. Anyway, good old Fluff having a bit of a moment after his appearance on the last ever episode of Harry Enfield's television programme in April of 1992 when Mike Smash and Dave Nice visit him in a care

room and he's clearly the only one radio DJ of his era to take the criticism of old school Radio 1 on the chin. DLT was absolutely fucking well dischuffed by Smashy and Nice. Yeah, I think Freeman was seen as this kind of lovable, harmless relic of the swinging 60s who was willing to send himself up a bit. And yeah, you're absolutely right. Some of the other presenters of his generation did not want to even accept for one moment that they were not completely relevant.

But they needed to do that, really. Just let it go, because people love it. People love someone who has a bit of a sense of humour about themselves in that way. And it feels so good once, it's like admitting that you're wrong. I mean, that's not actually admitting it wrong, but you know, if you admit you're wrong,

it feels so good, I'm telling you. Like, people resist it with their life. But it's like, it's okay, just admit you're wrong. You feel great. And, you know, if you can take the piss out of yourself a little bit. It's like, at first, you're like, oh no, this will be the ruin of me. And it's like, no, it'll be fine. You'll be a national treasure. Don't worry about it. It's like

taking off a tight pair of shoes. Well, that's what Tony Blackburn eventually ended up doing. Yeah, I don't know. I think Blackburn basically stayed in the same place and the world came back round to him. And it turns out that he was always really sound, you know? I mean, maybe Alan Freeman's quite happy to have the piss taken out of him because he's still in work.

At this point, he's the host of the Friday Rock show, so, yeah, he's all right. But what he's actually doing is appearing in the video of the first single of the night, Stick It Out, by Right Said Fred and Friends. Born in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1953 and 1956 respectively, Richard and Christopher Fairbrass began their musical careers with a gig at East Grinstead Women's Institute in 1974

before going on to join the actors who told with suicide and supported Joy Division in 1978. After spending the 80s as session musicians, Richard as a bassist for David Bowie and appearing in the video for Blue Jean, and Christopher, who became known as Fred, playing guitar for Mick Jagger and appearing as a band member in the Bob Dylan film Hearts of Fire, they ended up running a gym at the end of the decade, recruited a guitarist on the side and formed Right Said Fred. By the way, chaps, you're not going to believe this,

but do you know the name of that guitarist no go on frank bold fuck off no it's rob manzola who played in the funk band the strutters in the 70s after writing an album's worth of songs and inspired by the outright preening twattery they observed on a daily basis at their gym they wrote a song called I'm Too Sexy which they demoed at night in a studio with the lights off because the studio had gone into receivership and they were paying off an engineer who still had the keys. After shopping the demo around they were not only turned down by every label in London, but also dropped by their booking agent. However, the song was passed on to the record plugger Guy Holmes,

who listened to it in his car, turned it off after a minute because he thought it was cat shit, but after the people in his passenger seats were still singing along to it, he offered to take them on. After he recommended that they knock off the rocky edges of the demo and go for a full-on dance version, and eventually compromise him for a pop feel, he got the new version onto Capital Radio, and, more importantly,

into the meaty hands of the kingmaker of pop himself, Simon Bates, who played it to death. And in August of 1991, I'm Too Sexy began a seven-week run at number two, held off number one by Everything I Do by Bryan Adams. They began 1992 with a follow-up, Don't Talk, Just Kiss, which got to number three in the first week of January and finally made it to the summit of Mount Pop when Deeply Dippy spent three weeks at number one in April of that year

while at the same time their debut LP Up thudded into the album charts at number three and would spend one week at number one This is the follow-up to the double A side, These Simple Things slash Daydream, which only got to number 29 for two weeks in April of last year, but more importantly, they're builders, Wright said, Fred and friends, all to give them their full title. Wright said Fred and Hugh and Peter peter and alan and jules and steve and clive and pauline and linda and richard and rob and basil and bernard the reason for this is because they've linked up with comic relief which was formed in 1985 by richard curtis and lenny henry

as a response to the ethiopian famine and launched from a refugee camp in Sudan by Noel Edmonds on the Christmas Day episode of the Late Late Breakfast Show. It's been put out in advance of the fourth Red Nose Day which takes place a week tomorrow so therefore this is also the follow-up to I Want To Be Elected the cover of the Alice Cooper song by Mr Bean and the Smear Campaign, which got to number nine in April of 1992. It entered the charts last week at number 15, and this week it's only nudged up two places to number 13. But they're working for the BBC now,

and the BBC looks after its own. So here they are in the studio with the turbine of BBC star power firmly at their back. And fucking hell, chaps, here is a hefty fatberg of pop culture that needs breaking up. Don't you think?

Let's begin by talking for once about Right Said Fred the band as opposed to Right Said Fred the disinformation farm because it is very easy to forget that in the early 90s they were a very big deal indeed, weren't they? I mean, the newspapers were calling them the saviours of pop for being recognisable characters in a sea of ravey anonymity. They were grown men in a musical climate that's currently skewed towards the youth

and a band with multi-generational appeal, I feel. I mean, I did not pick up on that at the time. They did seem like they were everywhere. Yeah. Well, kids liked them. Yeah. Even the oldens. And mums.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you know who they remind me of round about this time go on michael barrymore yeah so use the term being banded about by television people in the 90s they were mainstream weird you know what i mean kind of like a little bit end of the pier family friendly a quirky edge a bit saucer bit camp yeah they had the common touch didn't they i suppose um a bit like that kind of acceptable level of queerness that you're allowed to exhibit.

Yes. People like Paul O'Grady, I suppose. Although, you know, Paul O'Grady would definitely push the envelope and push the boundaries of what was acceptable. But yeah, the Freds were very harmless. They're more in the kind of Dick Emery mould. I think I did mind a bit of Fred at the time. remember i i went to see him live at brixton fridge oh and i wrote a mostly positive review for melody maker i think right yeah i liked i'm too sexy i like don't talk just kiss

although i was very childish and i used to sing don't talk just shit all the time because that's really witty if you just change one word of a song to shit. Oh, God, yeah. And deeply dippy, even though it was obviously a total rip-off of Daydream by Loving Spoonful, which is why, of course, they then, you just mentioned it yourself,

they recorded Daydream on the double A side of one of their singles. Yeah, I didn't have any high hopes for them becoming a great force in in popular music but i thought they were a sort of quite enjoyable diversion and thought you know they were basically on the side of the angels how little we knew yeah i i liked i'm too sexy it's funny because it's such a one-hit wonder isn't it it's it's like a nailed on one hit wonder which i think it was i think it made it to america didn't it? And there they really are a One Hit Wonder. Then they kept on... Yeah, number

one in America. Yeah, yeah, fucking hell. But it is, it's very jolly and naughty and clever and, you know, yeah, it's brilliant. Yeah, and Deeply Dippy, when that came out, I was like, oh no, this is a tune. It's number one, is it? Oh, good. Good for them. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I'm Too Sexy does

feel like a classic One Hit Wonder. They're breaking the rules by having a string of hits. What the fuck are they playing at? They're absolutely right. I'm Too Sexy does feel like a classic one-hit wonder. They're breaking the rules by having a string of hits. What the fuck are they playing at? They're not allowed. Their star is clearly on the wane, but here they come doing the bit for charity. Yeah, well, the heart just sinks, doesn't it? As it's borne out by this performance,

I mean, it's a melange of a studio performance with clips from the video flown in and out. It's essentially a display of BBC star power circa 1993. But we'll get to that later because right at the beginning, did you notice this? The band are on a slightly raised platform and right at the beginning of the song, a young madam reaches up and just pinches Fred Fairbrass

right on his arse. Did you see that? No, I missed that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he turns round and has a conversation with her. And you can clearly see her immediately going all serious and shaking her head and raising her arms up as if to say, that's not me.

And I just thought, ooh, that's interesting because of who the band are and what they're representing. I fully expected that to be the commencement of a bit, which would end up with that girl getting up on the stage and they start snogging and maybe she'll even take his clothes off or her clothes off, but alas, no. Genuine audience

fiddling with the band. I can't believe a sexual assault took place on Top of the Pops premises. Richard of the Freds has his arse partly out he's got they're not chaps are they i think they're they're actually yeah the leather trousers with the arse cut out yeah yeah um which is not to suggest that you know even if you're on a stage parading around with your arse out this is not an invitation to um to pinch um but yes um and it says what does it say on his ass fat bum it says fat on one cheek

and bum on the other and it's gauze it's on a bit of gauze so it's not bare ass but you know it's ass nonetheless yeah and it's a bit disingenuous isn't it to say fat bum when he is a man who uh is clearly in extremely good shape um and you know it's not a fat bum is when he is a man who is clearly in extremely good shape. And, you know, it's not a fat bum, is it, Richard? Certainly not. Sir Mix-a-Lot wouldn't be the slightest bit interested. No, absolutely not. His anaconda would not want none. Anyway, so we're going to talk about what a mess this is. So anyway, by the time your attention has gone back to Richard Fairbrass,

the celebs start piling in and fucking hell, what a melange this is. We start off with Lennox Lewis, who's the current WBC heavyweight champion, who was given the title in December of 1992 when Riddick Bowe refused to fight him and ended up lobbing the title belt in the bin at the end of a press conference. He's been a regular fixture on Sports Night, so he is pretty much a BBC person and we get to see him taking

time out from his preparation for his first title defence against Tony Tucker in Las Vegas by punching Richard Fairbrass in the head and then helping him up. While in the foreground, laughing his tits off in a country squire outfit, is Hugh Laurie, who is currently filming the final series of Jeeves and Wooster on ITV,

but has been a constant presence on the BBC since the early 80s and is in between series of A Bit of Fry and Laurie. And as is his want in the pre-American days, is doing his gormless toff bit. Next, we see Fred Fairbrass having a red nose pulled out of his ear by Geoffrey Durham, better known as... The Great Soprendo.

The Great Soprendo, who, after a regular stint on Cracker Jack, popped up on all manner of game shows like a new-age Willie Rushton. Surprisingly, his wife at the time, Victoria Wood, hasn't got involved this year. So The Stonk was the Comic Relief single in 1991 and it was a double A side with The Smile Song by Victoria Wood,

which I didn't know until I disappeared down this fucking rabbit hole, which I think is really how you should do it if you're going to do comic relief. You just get Victoria Wood to do a parody song, and she parodies all of the big people of the time. And, you know, it's mildly amusing, and the wordplay is extremely sharp. And that's what you should do, really.

You just have everyone else do a little cameo, a little interjection, if you want know but i honestly never knew about that and then popping up to say who says white people don't have rhythm is right yeah peter cook peter fucking cook mate i've just read david stubbs book at different times the history of british comedy and he makes a very convincing case for peter cook being this kind of towering genius of brit com i've got to say i never really got it partly because when i worked at melody maker uh there was somebody who worked on the news desk who used to bring in the tape of derrick and clive and play it uh in the office right and he'd sit there cackling and so

would other members of staff as far as i could tell the whole point of it was a man saying cunt on tape god who wants to listen to some man saying cunt all the time i like to think that we do it artistically on here you know there's something more than just the mere fact of a man in a deadpan voice saying cunt we only use it when absolutely necessary no i never really got it with peter cook and i just think that this video in fact you know it shouldn't be me here it should be david here david should be having this video rubbed in his face because all of his fucking heroes being shown up for the craven whores that they are well he's spent the 90s so far with very little telework but he's about to commence filming for the One Foot in the Grave Christmas special

as well as doing an elongated interview with Chris Morris for the Radio 3 show Why Bother and by this point has pretty much replaced Kenneth Williams as that bloke you book for your chat show and let him get on with it you know what I mean, national treasure

I believe is the word that's being used about him at this time. Christ. We then see him dressed like Hugh Laurie doing some comedy dancing with... Clive Anderson. Clive Anderson, who's still very much a Channel 4 man,

as the host of Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Clive Anderson talks back, but he's been a comic relief participant since it started and will be defecting to the BBC in a few years. Then we get about two seconds of Ronnie Corbett in his leather chair, except it isn't. It's Steve fucking Coogan, mate,

who at this point has been a regular of the Radio 4 show On The Hour and has just finished the first series of the radio version of Knowing Me, Knowing You, but was best known on television at the moment as an impressionist. And here he is doing Ronnie Corbett. Why couldn't they get real Ronnie Corbett in? It's too expensive.

During the studio performance, by the way, the kids have all been given red noses and car radiator grill adornments to wear on their head. And there's someone with a handheld camera getting stuck in, as was Top of the Pops' want round about this time. But at one point, they've angled Vase to the side, and we see something I've never seen before, which was an older bloke in a jumper off to the side of the kids

and crouching down and going from side to side, making this frantic grabbing gesture like an enormous crab. What the fuck? It's like EA's herding them from the knees. Yeah, he's cackling the kids in, is it? I guess he's sort of trying to duck under the line of the cameras, but they're... Yeah, failed. Dismal-y man. Looks like he's raving to The Crab by Michael Barrymore,

the single he put out in the late 80s and played relentlessly on his television show in a doomed attempt to get it into the charts. But then we see the fucking true hero of this video, Basil fucking Brush, and an enormous red nose, who hasn't been on the BBC since being the co-host of Crackerjack in 1984, but has made himself available to his public earlier this year

when he appeared on Fantasy Football League with Roy Hattersley. I fucking love Basil Brush. Who doesn't, man? Every time he appears on a screen, I just can't help but cheer with glee. You've seen the DVD Charlie Says, haven't you? I got that the week it came out in 2001, as I was already aware that this century

stank of unwiped arse and I wanted the old one back. And instead of the warm bath of nostalgia I was expecting, it was so fucking traumatic. The spirit of dark and lonely water. Sensible children. Babies being pitched into shopping

bags filled with glass. Kids trapped under frozen ponds. Joe and Petunia dying in a car crash, which I'd never seen before. That absolutely traumatised me. And then, about an hour in, we get a double barrel of protect and survive, which I hadn't seen before. Meow. Yes.

You're all going to die. But we'll pretend that you won't because we don't want any panic the air attack warning sounds like this is the sound yeah it was the one where they tell us that if you've got a dead body in your shelter right next to you you've got to live with the fucking thing for five days and you know you just want to slash your wrists and i've done with it but immediately after that you're hit with basil brush and roy north telling you not to go out into the sea on a dinghy you just go yes we all lived and so did basil the next one after that is royal ferris in a swimming pool with some kids but never mind never mind no he's quite brave sticking his head above

the parapet on this occasion because we're still four years out from new labour's election victory and the fox hunting ban you know yeah so going out and playing like that yeah good to have him back possibly the first and only time he's ever been on top of the pops which is wrong he could have hosted it man that would be brilliant oh that would actually have been brilliant yeah yeah i never liked basil brush at the time because uh i'd well i i thought foxes were great but i thought he was kind of letting the side down by not being you know elegant and sleek were you upset that he didn't savage chickens by the throat on saturday tea time sarah um or have very noisy sex no basil brush presenting Top of the Pops would have been fucking mint.

Because he always used to dress up as whatever special guest was on his show. I mean, the classic example of that, of course, is when Demis Roussos pitched up and Basil's there with a caftan and they're both singing along. Fucking Demis Roussos loves it. I've not seen that.

Apparently in the 70s, when he had his Saturday Tea Time show in the Generation Game slot, fucking foreign singers would be fighting to get on the Basil Brush show. And their agents would say, look, I've got you booked in on Saturday Tea Time on BBC One. You've got to sing with a fox who's dressed up as you and taking the piss. And they'd be like, no, book it, mate. So by rights, on this video, he should be there in a pair of leather trousers with his arse hanging out. Yes, exactly.

But you never get to see his arse, do you? No. They hadn't developed the technology yet, you know. I'll go to my grave having never seen Basil Brush's arse, man. What a waste of a life I've had. He's got a tail, though, hasn't he? Sort of sticks up behind him. Yeah, a brush brush if you will

yeah oh well indeed yeah and then we get Linda Robson and Pauline Quirk who are the stars of the BBC One sitcom

Birds of a Feather which is by now four series in we don't get Leslie Joseph who played proto-Milf Dorian Green

and there's no clip of them on top of the pops of them two mauling richard fairbrass's arse i think we've seen enough arse mauling for one episode of top of the pops don't you yeah you know what though right i just remembered that my girlfriend at the time fancied fred fairbrass oh really yeah and he was a bald man and i was starting to lose my hair a little bit around this time and I just I just

you know as I mentioned previously and I just remember thinking oh you know maybe it's okay maybe there's some hope for me what I didn't think was I've also got to go to the gym every fucking day and then finally at last the partnership the country's been waiting for because here comes Bernard fucking Cribbins yes Yes. He's currently resting, but he's popping up from time to time as a vicar in Noel's House Party, and there we go, a barrage of celebrity, circa 1993.

Yeah, Cribbins, mainly sort of known to me as the aggy bloke from Fawlty Towers. Yes. We all know the reason why he's particularly connected to this record, don't we? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because he had a hit single called Right Said Fred in the 60s. Yeah, the 60s yeah that's a little visual joke what we don't see

on top of the pops that's in the video is the clip of the african toddler being made to dance or any reference to the people and places that the event's raising money for which brings us quite neatly on to red Nose Day 1993. I have to ask, Simon, did Melody Maker do anything for the day? Did we fuck? Didn't David sit in a tin bath full of beans and review the singles? I mean, I can't speak for the politics of the other members of the Melody Maker staff, but in any civilised and properly functioning society, this would not be allowed to happen, and not just because the record is shit.

I tended to take the view informed by Paul Heaton in his House Martins days on the song Flag Day of charity basically being a fig leaf over the obscenity of capitalism. You know, you thought you'd like to change the world, got Blue Peter to stage an appeal. And it's a waste of time if you know what they mean. Try shaking a box in front of the Queen.

Try it now, mate. Even harder. But, you know, if you really want to improve things, it's pretty easy. Don't beg the public to reach in their fucking pockets and throw a few quid at it. You've got to act at governmental level. Cancel third world debt. Pay reparations for slavery. Don't fuck about with telethons and

fucking plastic tomatoes on your face jesus christ it's no it disgusts me it disgusts me and and the thing is people think that that means you're a miser that you're mean-spirited if you say that absolutely not i think that we as a society as a whole need to sort shit out and it should be embarrassing and shameful to all of us every day of our lives that there are things, whether in this country or abroad, which are so fucked that we have to stage charity appeals to sort them out. That's what tax is for. That's what taxation is for. Yeah, I have come to understand that charities are essentially a failure of government, isn't it? And the trouble is that you grow up, it takes you a long time to go,

hang on about this, because you grow up believing that it's the most purely good thing. How could it possibly be bad? And sadly, then you go, oh, yeah, fuck, actually, it kind of is. You get carte blanche when you are doing good in this way. You get carte blanche to be as manipulative as you like. And I understand why people would want to jump on this to do their bit shore it up and stick it out yeah i mean sarah's right that

intention has to count for something and also just the practical realities of things is that if the government is clearly not going to be minded to sort shit out then it's on us that you know you just got to sort shit out somehow in the immediate short term. But the trouble is that the short term then becomes the long term, and then it just becomes a way of life. And what should really have happened with this is, okay, the BBC has Red Nose Day and sorts out whatever shit that year's Red Nose Day is sorting out. Then, the very next Sunday on whichever political programme it is on the BBC, Paxman should sit down with John Major or whoever his representative is that day and say,

aren't you embarrassed? Aren't you ashamed that we, the BBC, have had to go grovelling to the public, your voters, to sort this out? It's the same now. We have a government where the Home Secretary until, well, the person who was home secretary until she was recently deposed, said that being homeless is a lifestyle choice, right? So this is why, more than ever, charities like Shelter are so important. Because charities like that act as pressure groups as much as just sort of fundraisers to, you know, to throw people a few quid. My dad was a founder member of Shelter Cymru. So it's always, you know, if I ever raise any money for anything, it's usually that. And that's precisely because for decades now, we've had governments whose housing policy

is almost sort of willfully directed to allow a certain amount of homelessness. Because if you allow people to become too comfortable and to think, oh, well, I'll never end up on the streets, they cease to become obedient little participants in work, in capitalism. So unfortunately, you know, we have to have things like shelter to kick the government's arse and to say, what, you know, what are you doing? Why aren't you sorting this out? There are also things like shelter to kick the government's arse and to say what you know what are you doing why why aren't you sorting this out there are also things like greenpeace which by its very nature is anti-governmental because it's trying to fight against government policies not just this government but governments all around the world so there are certain causes where where you think well we absolutely have to give them our money just to keep governments honest but something

like this if it's just to feed people who are starving come on that's what government's for that's what tax is for sorry end of rant sermon over at last yeah i've done a bit of volunteering with homeless charities and one christmas i helped with the shelter at the union chapel they kind of open up the basement of the Union Chapel in Islington and make it into a shelter for a couple of weeks and me and this other girl kind of did the beds

it was just like camp beds however many, 20 or 30 or something in this basement room and then we stood back and kind of admired our handiwork when we were done and it was warm in there it was a basement but we had lots of heaters and it was just like, oh, isn't that nice?

Oh God, isn't that awful? Both of us just had such mixed feelings. It's like the warm glow that you get from doing a charitable thing, doing a nice thing and then realising how disgusting it is that you had to do it at all. That's the charity experience really. But like I said, for a lot of people, you just get the first part, you know, you get the warm glow.

There's that cognitive dissonance, isn't there, of the Christmas one, you know, these charities that raise money to make sure that nobody is out on the streets on Christmas Day. And then what, on Boxing Day, they just turf them all out again? You know, as if there's something particularly special about Christmas. Oh, we don't mind there being homelessness but god not on christmas day fucking hell yeah these are all very nice words you're coming out with but i'm afraid to say that they're not

buttering the parsnips of advertising and product placement so allow me to talk about the sponsors of red nose day 1993 yeah walworths are the official vendors for the red noses which this to talk about the sponsors of Red Nose Day 1993. Woolworths are the official vendors for the red noses, which this year look like a tomato that's been thrown against the wall. 70p. C&A are selling the official T-shirt in association with global hypercolour. So the tomato changes colour when you get a bit of a sweat on.

They're available from £6 to £8. You can get a tomato nose for your car or lorry from Shell, £1.50 or £5. And M&M's are doing a bag of red-only shaking minstrels and are donating 3p for each bag sold. So there you go. Capitalism working there. No one could ever accuse you, you al of skimping on your

research fucking nora man it's what the pop craze youngsters expect i am in awe yay yeah same same as for the tv show well mr bean teamed up with seller Black for a special episode of Blind Date. There was a mash-up of A Question of Sport and Have I Got News For You. There was an interactive episode of Casualty where plot twists were voted on by the audience. Ben Elton exhumed the corpse of Friday Night Live. There was a horrific, not even a cover, but more of a singing over of Bohemian Rhapsody, featuring the casts of, get ready for this, the casts of Tomorrow's World, That's Life, Birds of a Feather, Red Dwarf, Blue Peter, Brookside, El Dorado,

Drop the Dead Donkey and London's Burning, Ian McCaskill, Gloria Hunniford and Karen Keating, Trev and Simon, smashy and nice air ed the duck gordon the gopher patrick moore edmunds jill dando seth armstrong chris fucking cunting evans nick owen and add diamond terry christian and nicholas Nicholas Witchell miming the piano on the news desk. Have you seen that? Fuck me, no. Right, so Fred made an appearance.

Of course they did. They played Stick It Out live in a random street. And they put on Spinal Tap afterwards because, you know, they needed to put something funny on after all that. because, you know, they needed to put something funny on after all that. 480 minutes of cheap peak-time television, which raised £18 million. The second lowest total on any comic relief event, don't you know? Yeah, I can't think why.

But really, chaps, the song and the video and the performance and the comic relief event, it kind of encapsulates the attitude taken towards charity at this point, which kind of remains to this day. It's not really about solving a problem or alleviating any suffering, but far more about feeling a bit good about yourself and getting your company logo on a massively oversized check on the telly, don't you think? Yeah, it's this complete get-out-of-jail-free card, because if you say anything negative about it people say

oh well you're misery guts aren't you yeah they'll say it's just a bit of fun yeah you know as if sticking a red nose or in this case a fucking plastic tomato on it makes anything immediately funny just the intention of it being funny is enough and suddenly all quality control goes out the window because it's for charity. I really hate that. What it tells us about the British psyche is so depressing that they will take this. We think now that we're sort of scraping the barrel with things like Mrs Brown's Boys,

but that kind of basicness was always with us and particularly with us in the late 80s, early 90s. Fuck me. I mean, charity records are inherently cynical operations, aren't they? Because they only exist to be bought. And they're totally blatant about that. I mean, fucking hell, the motherlode of charity singles, Do They Know It's Christmas,

they're saying, look, just buy five copies, even if you hate the song. Buy five copies and give them all to people who can't afford them. We don't give a fuck what you do with it, just buy it. They are kind of saying, well, it doesn't have to be good. It's not an actual song. It's not really music. It's a guilt trip in musical form, basically.

I mean, it's calculated to make you feel feelings of one sort or another. The primary one being, buy this or there'll be no milk for the babies again tomorrow. And, you know, whether or not it's good is irrelevant. Is this the way to Amarillo? Who gives a shit? Give us the money.

And from a television point of view, it's a brilliant way of getting loads of famous people. Of course. Some of whom don't even work for you to produce hours of unpaid content. Yeah, that's very true. You know, everyone wins apart from the world. A lot of those people are just doing work

that I'm sure that they tend to sort of sweep under the carpet these days. Hugh Laurie, you know, a man whose career includes Blackadder Goes Forth and A Bit of Fry and Laurie and House. It's fair to say that his finest work doesn't include waddling about with two red balloons between his knees. No. As he does here. Which later turns out to be two painted bald heads, let's recall. I mean, it's a bit fruity, this song, isn't it? They go on about an erection and Hugh Laurie nips in and says,

oh, a building, a building. Yeah, stick it out. The it means a willy. It means a cock. Fucking hell. Yeah, it's of a piece with the stonk isn't it there's a level of humor of it or stick it out there'll be a decent song on later this is the idea isn't it it's a kind of half successful double entendre isn't it because they're doing the whole stiff

upper lip emphasis on the stiff right uh you know chin up cock out keep calm and insert homily here it's really weird this song again fully in the knowledge that in some ways it's not meant to be good but they must have they sort of tried something a bit and then just kind of gave it up and went this will do i don't think anyone needs to be too embarrassed about this because that's the other thing about charity records. Because they're not really records in the true sense. They just lift right out of the culture, I think. And they lift out of anybody's CV

quite readily, I think. And you could say one of the most deserving charities of Comic Relief 1993 right said Fred. Their child positions are fucking sliding right down, aren't they? Yeah. This is a blip, isn't it? So this record, right, they've had the idea to kind of do a blues,

which is fine. The blues is very forgiving, and indeed Hugh Laurie went on to make some blues albums. Ah, yeah, yeah. Man loves the blues. It's a little bit always look on the bright side of life. That's kind of how it starts out and then there's a sort of slightly cleaner riff on the chicken song briefly and then they

kind of drop that as well but that's how it starts off if they'd kind of stuck to that a bit you know the idea of yeah everything's terrible but let's make the best of it. And that's kind of the idea, but it's not really followed through. Like I said, it feels like the work of about 20 different people who've just put in ideas and, you know, like you said, stick a red nose on it and it'll be funny. And even if it isn't, give us the money anyway. There's almost like a really sort of crass suicide prevention idea in there as well. It's like somebody at some point goes,

it's either laugh or die, isn't it? What? Is that a threat? Are you the Joker? What are you talking about? It's either laugh or die. That's what I've always said. I think the BBC are very good at this sort of thing, depending on the meaning of the word good.

Comic relief, sport relief, children in need. You know, up until recently, they had three of these go in every year. And let us recall that round about this time, ITV had a go in the late 80s with their biannual telethon, but they scrapped it in 1992, when their studio was invaded by a disabled pressure group during a live broadcast who protested against ITV's cloyingly patronising treatment

of the subject matter. They just strolled up and interrupted Michael Aspel and Claire Raynham. Yeah, ITV just stopped doing it. I think Comic Relief realised not that long after this that they should probably retire this flavour of novelty record um because they used to come in two flavours sincere and wackadoo and this was very much the latter and sensibly retired and just go you know and then it was just stuff like a couple years later um Cher, Chrissie Hynde and Nenna Cherry were doing Love Can Build a Bridge. But previous to this, we had The Stonk in 1991,

which I think is a toss-up between this and that for worst... It's tough to rank the comic relief singles, really. But, you know, it gets quite boring and safe after a bit, which is fine by me. Yeah, it moved on very quickly to let's get the biggest band in the country to do a cover version. Yeah, which makes much more sense. But I do wonder, like, who bought this?

Because people, you could donate in lots of different ways. You could donate on the night and you could buy a T-shirt and whatever. So, you know, buy like a T-shirt to sleep in, you know, because you're not going to wear it, are you? But, you know, where do the seven inch singles of Stick It Out end up? You know, and I thought, oh, I know there's right now there's an aging millennial somewhere going through the loft of their recently deceased boomer mum and pulling a seven inch of Stick It Out from the bottom of a dusty caved in box that used to hold supermarket own brand ketchup and mirthlessly looking at it and going, huh. And then wanging it down through the hole in the floor to join the sort of drift of crap at the bottom of the ladder. And then

soon they're going to gather it up into another bin bag and take another carload to the tip while musing ruefully on the needless smallness of their parents' lives and how that inevitably shaped their own life and how it technically isn't too late to find something more, something bigger, something more meaningful for themselves. But really they know in their bones it's too late to find something more, something bigger, something more meaningful for themselves,

but really, they know in their bones, it's too late. Stick it out! Ha, ha, ha! So the following week, Stick It Out jumped four places to number nine, but when Red Nose Day kicked into full gear, it got to number four, its highest position. The follow-up bumped, entered the chart at number 32 in October and immediately slid downwards. Diminishing returns set right in through the early 90s

and they never bothered the top 40 for the rest of the decade. Resurfacing in 2001 when You're my mate got to number 18 in october that year and then disappearing again and we never heard from right said fred ever again yeah right oh come on we've got to address this Anti-vax said Fred. Yeah, for all my misgivings, and that's putting it mildly, about this song and about the concept of charity telethons in general, I probably would have looked back upon

Right Said Fred with a certain amount of fondness after all this time, were it not for the fact that they have mutated into a toxic fucking bin fire of covid denial and dog whistle racism pitching up in provincial shopping centers and bothering pedestrians right said don istel exactly you know they say oh well you should separate the art from the artist yeah maybe not in this case hey no no Before we go on, it has to be said that Rob Manzole, Frank Bold, he's kept right out of it because he left the band in an amicable split in 1999.

You know who he's playing with now? Screwdriver? George fucking Clinton. Right, okay, fair play. He's in the P-Fun Call Stars. He's played with Sly Stone and fucking Outkast. Oh, that's nice. Good for him. Yeah, that's nice.

Good for him. Yeah. And he's still got his hair. But yeah, why do people give a fuck about whatever Wright said Fred or anyone like that thinks about anything?

It's the Twitter brain parasite is what it is, which affects millions of people. It makes people think that, you know, well, I've got a platform and I've got influence

and so therefore, you know, I need to use it. But it also gives you, well i've got a platform and i've got influence and so therefore you know i need to use it but it also gives you looking at that a false impression of how much weight that carries you know so everybody it's a massive distortion field um and you know i i want no part of it because in 1993 if someone had come up to you in the pub and said you know that hank marvin out of the shadows he's so against the fucking maastricht agreement you just shrug and get on with your fucking life wouldn't you yeah you wouldn't care

but i think it is quite enjoyable on some level when you look at the rogues gallery of washed up celebrities who are part of this whole grift you know these fucking grifters who are into the covid denial and the dog whistle racism and the anti-trans thing you look at the caliber of people that are being held up as the figureheads of that and it is basically matt letizia lawrence fox and the singer out of right said fred it's fucking comical it's funnier than anything on this fucking record let me tell you and uh ian brown let's oh let's not forget oh ian fucking brown actually let's do and stick it out became the fourth least selling comic relief single ever above absolutely fabulous by pet shop boys and absolutely fabulous

i want to be elected by mr bean and the Smear Campaign and Bruce Dickinson. And I know him so well by Susan Boyle and Geraldine McQueen. It's such a great song from Right So Cold. It deserves to be number one because it's just such a great pop record. I hope you go to your red noses ready for next Friday. OK, then let's have a look at this week's UK Top 40, then along with the current song at number four from Lenny Kravitz, Are You Gonna Go My Way?

The camera doll is back and to the right to reveal tonight's host in a dark grey suit over that Hypercolour Comic Relief T-shirt, which has already turned blue, so he must have had the right sweat on. Born in Swindon in 1974, Mark Franklin began his career by applying for a job at his local hospital radio station, but was turned down for only being seven years old. He eventually bagged a slot there while still at school and in April of 1989 he landed a gig on the brand new local radio station BBC Wiltshire Sound presenting a weekly youth programme. Then on August August 22nd 1991, while he was studying English and Communications at New College in Swindon, he chanced upon an advert in the stage sandwiched between Jacqueline's discotheque-required glamorous dancers and topless female dancers required for Istanbul nightclub, which read as follows.

Istanbul nightclub, which read as follows. BBC TV, top of the pops. How would you like to be a presenter of the number one pop music show? Auditions are being held shortly. If you are young, charismatic and rearing to go, exclamation mark, then please ring Stanley Appel 081-576-1613. He made the call, sailed through the audition, and on October 3rd, 1991, he launched the revamped TOTP with Tony Daughter, becoming the youngest Top of the Pops presenter ever at the age of 17, and, unless of course you know better, the first to be born after the first episode of Top of the Pops. This is his 35th appearance on

Top of the Pops as part of a talent pool which currently consists of him, Daughter and no one else. They alternate each week right through 1993. And chaps, he's the only DJ who's presenting Top of the Pops at the moment because he's doing the breakfast show on Chilton FM, a commercial station. Fucking hell, that must have pissed off Radio 1 DJs, eh? I mean, we'll recall that in 1989, Ashlyn and Linda Reynolds said,

can't they see that every generation has music for its own identity? But why the DJ on the radio station is always more than twice the age of me. And it's like the BBC have held up Mark Franklin and said, happy now? How does he get on, chaps? Have they made a boy do a man's job a baits his job if you will the first thing to say is i'd never heard of this guy no um again another one yeah because it was paul jordan recently yes that we hadn't heard of and we had to do a lot of research into oh god yeah so yeah mark franklin no idea. So I did a little bit of research and I, you know, where is he now?

And found him on Twitter. And I want to say right at the top, he seems like an absolutely brilliant bloke. Yeah. He hates the Tories. Yes. He's very sound on matters of gender and sexuality and so on. I mean, I share so many of his beliefs just scrolling down through his sort of feed. I followed him, in fact, I thought, you know, seems like a good guy to follow. I say all

that as a kind of preface for the coating down that I'm about to give his younger self. Because, yeah, right now, he may be essentially the anti Richard Fairbrass. And I salute him for that. But I just think that at the time and I'm sort of channeling my slightly younger self here I would have hated this guy because you know there's the saying of somebody being a stuffed shirt or a stuffed suit that they're just this this sort of like non-entity but they look the part is the idea yeah he's like a kind of broomstick or a coat hanger wearing a suit he's not even filling the suit he's a human coat hanger what he's like a kind of broomstick or a coat hanger wearing a suit. He's not even filling the suit. He's a human coat hanger.

What he looks like to me is a plausible, eager, young estate agent. Yes. He's a very young person's railcard advert, isn't he? Yeah. It's almost as if he gives nothing of himself away because he clearly has, I would say, a very likeable personality from what I've seen of him now on social media, but he gives nothing away of himself on Top of the Pops. It's almost as if the response

from Stanley Apple, I'm going to say Apple, to having previously had so many excessive and outlandish personalities presenting Top of the Pops was to hire presenters with no personality at all mark franklin makes paul jordan look like kenny everett essentially in terms of extroversion but in his defense simon i feel that he's been given as little opportunity as possible to put himself over on this episode don't know what the other episodes are like but we don't see that much of him and when we do he doesn't get that much air time this is more what you expect from a presenter role we're so used to the presenters of top of the pops being an outsized imposing themselves and being an outsized part of the show and kind of you know elbowing their way into the view of the camera every opportunity and it's like um you know with mixeding their way into the view of the camera at every opportunity. And it's like, you know, with mixed results, but with an awful lot of, you know, extremely tiresome pratting about.

This is much more of a sort of conventional presenter gig as it is at this time. In this kind of unsatisfying, quite slick era of Top of the Pops. And he's just perfect. He's perfect for that. He fits the role. He doesn't fit the jacket he's got the sort of day it's the halfway to David Byrne um jacket suit jacket there you know he's kind of you may find yourself presenting Top of the Pops well how did I get here yeah I I rang Stanley Apple and he said all right then yeah he's kind of a category c presenter you know if you think of's kind of a Category C presenter, you know,

if you think of Category A as creeps and Category B as other sundry narcissists, I suppose. He's like kind of trainee Mark Goodyear. Yeah, yeah. Mark good, Mark down. Mark three, see me. To be fair, he presented more episodes in the end than Mark Goodyear. And as I discovered from a Q&A in Wales on Sunday that he did, his biggest ambition was to become a household name like Noel Edmonds. He's a real pro, isn't he?

I mean, you've got to hand it to him. He's just right for this era. He's friendly and enthusiastic. He's incredibly self-possessed, considering he's barely allowed into the BBC bar, the Elstree bar at this point and and he's got lovely hair which is now as i've seen from his social media a lovely platinum shade he looks like his first career choice was boy in a boy band but he is totally

happy with this one yeah well you know he's happy to be there um which i like to see over most people who are like no i'm too good for this you know he absolutely doesn't have that attitude yeah and the thing is in order to become a household name like edmunds you'd you have to be a dick essentially yes in order to become a household name like saville you've got to be something far worse he's managed to not become a household name but also not be any of those horrible things. So fair play to him. That's how you do it.

That's how you do it. And you know how people go on about, oh, isn't it terrible when you see policemen that are younger than you? Fuck that. Having a fucking top of the pops presenter that's younger than you, that would have been a dagger of ice down the spine in 1993, wouldn't it? Especially for me being, you know, on the fringes of the media, working at Melty Maker.

It's not as if I wanted to be a Top of the Pops presenter. Do you know what I mean? But I at least wanted to think, well, yeah, I am a hip, young gunslinger, and those old farts at Top of the Pops aren't good enough for me yet. But if I'm not presenting Top of the Pops, that's because I'm too cool for it. I'm too young and hip and relevant.

And then some 19-year-old comes along, he's doing it already it's like oh no if only deska down was still going simon you'd have been a lock for that yeah i mean yeah he's pretty much become the face of the new top of the pops and has been going around saying that at this point he's already presented more episodes of noel edmonds Jimmy Savile, which I'm afraid to say is absolute bollocks because Edmonds ended up doing 74 and Savile did 272. But at this point, it looks very feasible that he could take this show right through the 90s and beyond. Because, you know, by the year 2000, he'd only be 26,

which is nothing in Top of the Pops terms. Do you remember him, Sarah, from the time? I had forgotten he existed, to be honest. So, no, I don't. But that is kind of a backhanded compliment because he was so out of the way of the act. He was so out of the way of Fred Fairbrass and his arse and, you know, everyone else.

It's like that Morrissey song, Little Man, What Now? I remember you, except I don't remember you. But really, it just goes to show that the new regime at Top of the Pops, it's not about the presenters anymore, which I suppose is a good thing.

Just the music, man. Yeah, I suppose. But there were more phases after this of kind of having you know celebrities oh yes yeah that would all change yeah true which you know was not necessarily an improvement because presenting is um very much like podcasting in fact it's a skill on its own you can't just assume i know i'm on very thin ice here but you can't just assume that because you're good at one thing you can immediately i'll just do this thing. It's fine. Any dickhead can do that.

That's such a great song. It deserves to be a number one because it's such a great pop record, says Franklin, as he holds up a red nose and shills Comic Relief one more time. He then immediately throws us into 75% of the top 40 over the video of Are You Gonna Go My Way by Lenny Kravitz. Born in New York in 1964, Leonard Kravitz was the son of a TV news producer and the actor Roxy Rocha, who became part of America's first interracial sitcom couple in The Jeffersons. He began his musical career at the age of 10 when his family relocated to Los Angeles,

where he joined the California Boys Choir and eventually attended Beverly Hills High School at the same time as Maria McKee, Nicolas Cage and Slash. He began his career properly in 1985 when he started calling himself Romeo Blue and spent the next three years demoing a debut LP and in 1989 after a bidding war between four different labels and being encouraged to bin off his shit stage name he was signed by Virgin. His first LP Let Love Rule was a minor hit in America and it and the three singles from it

stalked the lower end of the UK charts but the next LP 1991's Mama Said put him over the top here with the single It Ain't Over Till It's Over getting to number one for two weeks in June of that year this single the lead-off cut from his third LP of the same name which came out this week, is the follow-up to Stand By My Woman which only got to number 55 in September of 1991. It entered the chart at number 11 a fortnight ago and it was immediately flown over to Elstree for an in-studio performance, which helped it jump six places to number five. This week, it's crept up one place to number four,

so here's the video, which was directed by Mark Romanek, which did the videos for Sweet Bird of Truth for The The, Ring Ring Ring for De La Soul, and Free Your Mind for En Vogue, and was filmed in Las Vegas. So, chaps, let's get the charts out of the way first, because, hey, that's what Top of the Pops is doing nowadays, isn't it? Yeah, we don't get the pictures.

No, no. Can I just point out, by the way, that Mark Franklin leads into this brilliantly by saying, are you going to go my way? Yes. Such good emphasis. as far as the charts go out of the 30 singles that are run down i knew only seven of them fucking hell shame on me for not being down with the youth them yeah but that just reinforces the point that the charts and top the pops were not central anymore no and that we were finding our music in different ways and stuff was almost sort of

meaninglessly becoming a hit like almost randomly stuff would sort of fall into the top 30 top 20 then fall out again without really having any traction with with the public yeah but going through that chart now fucking out neil young rod stewart duran duran brian ferre madonna Rod Stewart, Duran Duran, Brian Ferrer, Madonna, Roll Farris. Fucking hell, welcome to the new decade, everyone. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The 90s haven't started yet, really, have they? No, no, no. Despite all this 1987, 88, Second Summer of Love, Acid House Rave.

It's a whole new era, all that kind of stuff. No, it's not really. It's Curtis Stigersville, isn't it? Yes, very much so. Well, it's because a lot of's Curtis Stigersville, isn't it? Yes, very much so. Well, it's because all of that stuff, a lot of that stuff really kind of flamed out. So, yeah, you're not going to see that at this point. But, yeah, it's a bunch of olds, isn't it?

So, anyway, Lenny. I mean, if you came up to me and said, look, I've got a spare ticket for this gig. The bloke's influenced by all these different elements of black music. He's worked with people like curtis mayfield he's sampled public enemy and all this i'd have took your fucking hand off and then i'd look at the ticket and go lenny fucking kravitz fuck off mate i'm not friends with you anymore yeah i mean what is there to say about are you going to go my way by lenny Kravitz, except... This is such a hilarious record.

There's something meditative about it. Like, you can't... It's the answer to itself. It's like a perfect, dumb, shiny sphere. It's so flawlessly kind of planet-shaped and filled with, you know, pseudo-deep knowledge, and it's so unslessly kind of planet shaped and filled with you know pseudo deep knowledge and it's so unsmilingly cheerful it's cool it's dorkish it's flimsy it's rock solid it's not shameless because it would have had to address the notion of shamefulness in order to reject it

which it hasn't done i love it i don't love. It's just one of the undeniable facts of life. It just is. I love that it doesn't have a question mark, either in the title or in the delivery, because that would undermine its power. It's a rhetorical question through and through. And the answer is... Something surprised me about myself when this kicked in.

And maybe it's just the context coming straight after Right Said Fred and Mark Franklin. But I found myself going, yes! Like Beavis and or Butthead. This is cool. I really did. And I thought, what the fuck has happened to me? Because obviously, yeah, he is shaking Hendrix. And obviously this song is shaking Crosstown Traffic or Crosstown Traffic Jam, maybe.

And we all kind of disdained and disparaged him at the time. And it can't just be that he was so retro because so were very many things that we and when i say we i mean critics that we loved you know um everybody was falling over themselves to praise delight for example and stuff like that or i don't know um world of twist or some some of those kind of bands that were in the music press all the time but yeah kravitz was the wrong type of retro maybe it was too on the nose massively on the nose I remember when yeah in fact he was more on the nose than the red noses that were on the noses of the people who'd just been on celebrating red nose day yeah it was almost as if he was

deliberately calibrated in some kind of laboratory to appeal to the Q magazine reading demographic basically dad rock because my dad was really impressed by lenny kravitz when he first came out because my dad was a massive john lennon fan and his early stuff kravitz let love rule was very much lennon-esque you know yeah that song in particular the title lennon kravitz if you were yeah and he had the little round glasses and everything, you know. So there was that angle before he went full on Hendrix. But in between those phases, you mentioned the song, It Ain't Over Till It's Over, or to pronounce it the way he sings it,

It Ain't Over Till It's Over. Baby, it ain't over. Yeah. I fucking love that song. I've got to admit. Yes. Because I am a sucker for um philly soul pastiche you know there was that uh that act quite recently silk sonic which is is anderson pack and bruno

mars made a whole album of that kind of stuff and i'm i'm just like yeah take my money i i fucking love that stuff so yeah when kravitz did it ain't over till it's over i was like oh fair enough you know he's made a fucking brilliant record here this record yeah it's like okay we can see exactly what you're doing we can see it's Hendrix by numbers and at the time I thought well like like Sarah says it's this kind of unstoppable undeniable fact it's this fucking thing that was made to be a huge hit and it's going to be a huge hit we know that but somehow just listening to it now out of context like i say i surprised myself by responding to it well on a on a visceral level yeah yeah i mean you're saying about pastiche like i i love a lot of pastiche

a lot of stuff that i love is pastiche which is a very widely misunderstood thing um you know because it isn't parody it's something more refined than that. It's not ripping off. It's, you know, you need to know what you're doing to pastiche. Yes. It's a highly, it's quite a high grade practice. You know, when it's good, it can be highly intelligent and sincere and deeply respectful of its source materials.

You can't really do it any other way. And it can be like a refinement of what it's working on you know once a genre exists once a type of sound exists you can just do that thing however you want because it's all it's open source anyone can do that and it can become part of a lineage you know it's not just like a kind of lay by where you've just kind of pulled over and just like well we'll stop here you know um it's like a sort of farmed pearl, you know. It requires a really high level of literacy and attention to detail and boldness, you know, bordering on obliviousness, which I think is what you get here.

I think Lenny Kravitz is, the impression that I get of him is that he's quite a simple man, you know, not overburdened with brains, but obviously has a really really good ear and is has has a great deal of musical talent and just has that now so you know it's that kind of savant thing that he has i mean he's kind of like he's like a hayman in human form isn't he but um yeah this is you can't you can't resist this i mean you you can but like i said it doesn't matter not trying to win you over.

It's not doing, you know, because like I said, it would have to address the idea that you need to be won over and that it needs to win anyone over. It's just this unstoppable juggernaut of garbled but brilliant nonsense. And the other thing is, Al, you know, at the start of every episode, you say, never forget they've been on top of the pops more than we have and all that. A lot of the sort of criticism of critics that one hears is, oh, well, you're just jealous.

Yes. You're just jealous because, you know, they're living this amazing life. I think there actually was a bit of that with Lenny Kravitz because, you know, he's fucking beautiful, right? Yes. And he's somehow getting away with being an old style type of rock star a 70s or even 60s type of rock star yes in an era where we thought we dispensed with all that he's getting away with living that life you know shagging supermodels and all of that and just just having

an amazing time and obviously um we're gonna grumble about that oh yeah yeah funny you should say that something because by this point 1993 it did appear to be the about that, aren't we? Yeah, funny you should say that, Simon, because by this point, 1993, it did appear to be the time that early 70s rock was finally allowed to display itself again. I believe this is a time that you could actually play a Led Zeppelin record and you wouldn't be called a hippie. Yeah, because you had new bands like Soundgarden and also Black Crowes playing kind of southern rock

and that kind of stuff yeah yeah I mean yeah but my relationship with Lenny Kravitz it's weird because when his first album came out I had a mate whose girlfriend worked at Oasis the clothes shop and that album would be on all the fucking time but even then I thought oh he's trying to be someone else and I do remember when his first album came out, it was like the comparison, the main comparison that was made was Elvis Costello. And by this time, you know, I'm at university and there was a music course there, which was quite big.

And as I've mentioned before, produced Reef and Chesney Hawks' backing band, as you may recall from Chart Music's Passive. And every bloke I knew on it wanted so badly to be lenny kravitz or at least have his life because in 1993 lenny kravitz is super muso he's also the rock version of jamiroquai you know what i mean he's taking on these old styles and and trying to mold them to himself but to me and my peers this was dismissed as girls music really yeah the implication being that you the female lenny kravitz fan oh you think

you're a cut above the take that and he's 17 fans but you only like him because you fancy him which is massively disrespectful to the women folk their musical tastes are only going to be respected if they're restricted to other women or lumpy but talented men like, I don't know, the Wurzels. Yeah, I think that it's safe to dismiss that in terms of the cultural commentary of the time. You're accepting Al's belated implied apology for being a sexist pig at the time.

I'll think about it. Anyway, the video, we get Lenny doing his Jimmy Marley thing in front of a load of models with an all-female band. And the overall effect is one of them Christmas perfume adverts or a more expensive remake of the studio line advert where they all burst through the wall and pretend to play saxophones with mad hair but to my mind the real star is the lighting rig which was put together by someone called Michael Keeling and is a chandelier of 983 bulbs being run through a series of chase sequences and looks fucking skill yeah I feel like I should point out, in case it isn't clear from what you said,

that the band in the videos is mostly women and they are an actual band. Yes. Yeah, it's not doing a Robert Palmer. It's not Addicted to Love. No, although, you know, not that I would disapprove of that necessarily, but yeah, Cindy Blackman is the extremely cool drummer.

She's not on the record, but she was his touring drummer for 18 years and yes, it's a great video and it's exactly right for the song Yeah, it's in this sort of this drum, isn't it? It's almost like one of those things that they had at travelling fairs

with a motorbike in it but it's full of people all stood on various levels and some of them jumping off those levels in a kind of stage divey way, implying a sort of level of mayhem that you probably never actually got at Lenny Kravitz concerts. No. But yeah, it all seems quite exciting, doesn't it? Yeah. It's kind of an amphitheatre, but it's just shot in such a way that it looks slightly otherworldly.

Like this is not a gig you could go to in real life. Obviously, Lenny looks great because he always did and still does. He's 59 now. Just don't look at recent pictures of him because it's just too depressing. He's wearing a sort of long red button through skirty thing. It's like a Pope's vestment. It's like he's the Pope of rock. I don't think what you're saying about, oh, he's trying to do this and he's trying to do that.

I think he just did what he did. He just, it's just, that's his authentic musical self. And I don't think of him as a sort of pretentious guy. This is another thing about pastiche. It doesn't imply that you think you're great, you know, that you think you're as good as these people. It's just like, well, that was his thing. And he just did it.

Yeah. He did it without fear or inhibition, which is a lot easier to do, as I've often said, if you're American, because, you know, you are. Yeah. I'm far less militant about him and this nowadays. Because you look back and you go, well, hang on a minute. He's wearing his influencers firmly on his sleeve. And he got slagged off for that.

But, you know, you look back at people like bobby omni shake and they were allowed to get away with it wonder why that is and the thing is i like this song now you do yes well welcome welcome let's party i am going your way now sarah because like eye of the tiger it was only when I started playing the bass on it in Guitar Hero on expert level, ladies, that I thought, fucking hell, yeah, this is all right, actually. It's such an incredible riff. And it goes, it knows it's an incredible riff. Yes, it is. Because it goes all the way through the song. It's like a redwood tree.

Yes. And all the rings, if you cut it, all the rings are just riff all the way through. And it's so satisfying. It does a little bit of a change and then it falls into the drums and picks itself back up again. And then the chorus has a completely different riff, which is also really good. Tell you what, though, Lightning Doesn't Strike Twice. And when he came back a little while later with, was it Fly Away? Yes.

Was it a British Airways advert? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it was a car advert. Was it a car advert? Yeah. And that was a huge hit. Number one. And it was basically the same kind of thing and it was like it just didn't have the same energy to it i'm like nah now don't do it again mate no and we've not even spoken about the lyrics yet which

are um interesting oh my god so i didn't realize i i had never had cause until now to to actually look up what the lyrics are and And yeah, it is kind of, I am the prophet who has come to tell you to stop killing each other and stuff, which is a laudable message, you know, which is, you know, we can all get behind and he's not asking us for any money. If he said it in the street though,

you'd be fucking sectioned. Yeah, I think maybe he's doing a bit. I don't think he actually wanted to say that he was born long ago when he was you know he's only in his 30s um but yeah so so it's like why tell me why we we got to die and kill each other one by one sorry i can't help myself um anyway and then it goes we got to hug and rubber dub we got to dance and be in love i I was like, oh, that's suggestive. It's like, is it?

Are you talking about doing it? And it's like, you're not not talking about doing it. Yeah, he wants to stick it out. It's not that different, really. I mean, you know, I don't want to conform to the stereotype of girls music here. I don't want to conform to the stereotype of girls' music here, but if Lenny Kravitz suggested that it would be a good thing if we were to hug and rub a dub, I would consider this. I would consider it carefully.

So the following week, Are You Gonna Go My Way stayed at number four and would get no higher. All the power of Top of the Pops. But the LP entered the UK album chart at number one. The follow-up, Believe, was immediately rushed out, but only got to number 30 in May of this year. But as we mentioned, he'd eventually get to number one with Fly Away. And Michael Keeling outdid himself ten years later

when he used just under 10,000 lightbulbs for the set of the video of Rock Your Body by Justin Timberlake. That's you. Coming soon live by satellite from Hawaii, That's what I'm talking about This is a tale without a moral kind of twist And about a girl's hell broke about resisting The events of a man's book she was living You can call it a take on all that you were given Now public...

We cut straight from the video back to Elstree as four youths skulk about on stage and the voice of Franklin spoilers an upcoming performance and tells us that there's been 10 new entries this week one of which is all about eve by marksman formed in london in 1989 marksman were a collaboration between two dubliners o'sheen lunette and hollis burn whose dads were in the 70s rock band the Emmett Spiceland, a rapper from Bristol named MC Fraze and a local DJ called K1. In 1992, they signed a deal with Talking Loud Records and put out their debut single Sad Affair,

an adaptation of the John Gibbs folk ballad Irish Ways and Irish Laws, of the John Gibbs folk ballad Irish Ways and Irish Laws, which was immediately banned by the BBC for using the phrase Chucky R. Lahr, the rallying cry of the IRA. And before I go on, I'd like to immediately apologise to the pop craze Irish, the Protestant community, and fuck it, while I'm here, the IRA as well. This single, the follow-up to Ship Ahoy,

which failed to chart despite having Sinead O'Connor on it, is the third cut from their debut LP, 33 Revolutions Per Minute, which came out on Monday. And fucking hell, it's only gone and entered the charts at number 28

this week, so here they are in the studio, making their Top of the P debut and oh chaps absolutely typical i wait ages for some hip-hop to talk about on chart music and when it does it's something i've never even heard because i'm afraid to say this lot totally passed me by in 1993 shocking me too me too the thing is music history is littered with the kind of scraps that no one remembers that was just big enough to get on telly at the time like that's the bulk of it

but it feels really odd doesn't it? It's like I have never heard hide nor hair of these people before now. It's like if you suddenly recovered a memory from when you were blackout drunk which isn't actually possible because when you are blackout drunk your brain is not on record.

Thank God. So there's no memories to find. I mean, hip-hop in 1993, it's all about the West Coast, isn't it? Yes, it is. Price Cube. But there was quite a bit of this sort of very politicised hip-hop around. They weren't the only ones. Yeah, Arrested Development and all that. Well, I mean, they were kind of a soft option, really.

I was thinking more of things like Consolidated, who was a sort of Marxist American outfit. You had things like Paris, you had the disposable heroes of hypocrisy, stuff like that. Yeah, marksmen were very much being hyped up or even self-hyped as the Irish public enemy. And yeah, some of the tracks you've named there, so Sad Affair, the one with Chucky Arlar in it, it does say violence is wrong in the lyrics. It stops short of supporting the IRA, but it is fiercely Republican and it calls the Union Jack the butcher's apron, which is a phrase I do like.

It says the six-county state is a bastard state, and it compares the situation of Irish Catholics to that of African Americans in regard of the slave trade. Obviously, a lot of people would say that is over the top, but it was a common comparison. I've got a really good book about the Troubles called Ulster's White Negroes, and it's about the racism doled out towards the Catholic community over there. So, you know, marksmen weren't alone in making that comparison. was the epithet that was thrown at them by the occupying forces and by Protestant militants and so on. So marksmen have very much sort of taken that idea and run with it, which was, you know, really not going to get them much airplay. Yeah, Simon Bates isn't going to play that, is there? Ship Ahoy, the one with Sinead, also made that comparison with wage slavery to the slave trade, which, you know, it's that's controversial. I've

certainly heard people from the point of view of African Americans, saying that you cannot make a comparison. You just you know, it's, it's obscene to even do that. Just don't honestly make any comparison you want. Just not that. But yeah, marksmen have just gone for it there. I'm kind of dancing around the fact that this isn't a very good track. This song that we're singing, it's got good intentions. It's about domestic violence. It tells a story of someone who has to wear long sleeves in the summer to hide the bruises. But it doesn't really pop, does it?

It doesn't leap out of the screen at you. Yeah, I agree with Simon. I mean, there's not very much to it, is there? Yeah, I mean with Simon. I mean, there's not very much to it, is there? Yeah, I mean, it sounds nice. There's a very subtle sample of the beginning of I'd Be a Fool Right Now by Stevie Wonder from one of his late 60s LPs. But that's the thing nowadays with hip-hop,

the element of surprise that you used to get when a tune would just storm in out of nowhere and fuck with your head. That's kind of gone now. Songs like this, they kind of like fade in and swirl around for a bit and then go and you forget about them straight away. There's some good elements, but it's quite a mush, isn't it?

It's quite sonically quite mushy, which is what they did with Ship Ahoy as well, with Sinead O'Connor doing the chorus really unforgivably low in the mix, just so that it could be anybody, which is not the best use of your Sinead O'Connor. It's mellow to the point of meaninglessness, really. And, you know, also the lyrics, the first guy,

sorry, I don't know which of them is which, the first guy's diction is just not very good. It's like all the lyrics are getting stuck in his cheeks on the way out. Once I realised what this was about, I was like, OK. But I couldn't find the lyrics anywhere, and I listened to it a few times, just going, eh, and kind of squinting in that way you do there was a line that i picked out somewhere in the middle as for all the marks and the bruises i guess that's the choice that she chooses it seems like the protagonist of the of the song is trying to

help her and she's rejecting it or that she is feigning interest in him i don't know i found that slightly alarmingly sort of peevish or petulant. I don't know. It's a weird tone to have in the middle. But like I said, I couldn't pick out most of it. So I mean, fair play to them for tackling a subject like this.

But the problem is, is they're doing it in hip hop. And, you know, 99% of hip hop is about the rapper as the focal point. You know, it's about who they are and what they're going to do or what they've already done the idea of rapper as bystander i can't really think of many examples probably i don't know millie pulled a pistol on santa by dayless salt where something

wrong's going on behind the scenes with someone they know right but they don't know what the fuck's going on until right at the end where Santa gets shot for being a wrong-in. But it's got to be said that Irish rappers are not shy about piling into this sort of stuff. As anyone who's seen the 1990 performance on The Late Late Show of What Did I Do Wrong by a collective of rappers called Rap Against Rape with Hazel O' fucking Connor.

Have you seen that? No. Fucking hell, man. Not only do they all sound like DJ Sven, against rape right uh with hazel o fucking connor have you seen that no no fucking hell man not only do they all sound like dj sven they all look like dj sven and it's up there with boyzone's debut appearance on the late late show oh yes now i have seen that and yes simon you're right you know there will be interesting irish or at least part part Irish hip-hop in the very near future. But sadly, it's going to be generated by House of Pain who are decidedly paddywhack.

House of Pain with a very different attitude towards violence against women. I got this bit from... I'm sure you also looked at Marksman's Wikipedia page. And you know when you see someone's wiki and it's very obviously been written by them yeah i really got that it's very very citation needed right this uh here's how it goes we're a great band from basically right yeah it goes their politics were at the

fore and breaking down musical boundaries was paramount. And, you know, nowhere along here are those little numbers to give you a link. The band was very well respected live and it was on stage that the power of their music really came across. Despite working with a number of high profile musicians, collaborating with James McNally of the Pogues and having Sinead O'Connor as a guest vocalist on the single Ship Ahoy. So, yeah, all of that, you know, just saying very much a rap group, that's not how you phrase things on Wikipedia. So yeah, somebody's been tinkering with that, obviously. But let's talk about the performance, because hip-hop on top of the pops, it's always been a melange of awkwardness.

Ever since the real Roxanne and Hitman Howie T did Bang Zoom Let's Go Go in the summer of 1986, it's because, chaps, by its very nature, the rapping obviously has to be live. You can't mime it. But hip-hop gigs have always been more about setting a mood and getting the crowd worked up and involved, which is impossible to do in three minutes

with an audience who are still getting over rights, said Fred. But, you know, fair play to them. They do a decent job of it. Do they, though? I don't think it is impossible. Public Enemy could have done it. Yeah. Give Public Enemy five minutes

or three minutes and they will excite your arse off. True. It sounds like the mics aren't turned up high enough for one thing. But also, hilariously, one of them has on

a comedy nightcap. Yes. Which really evokes the sleepiness of this, of the performance in general. Rip Van Winkle. Rap Van Winkle, if you will. Rap Van Winkle.

Whee! It actually looks really comfy. I would wear that. And then I'd overheat and get a migraine, whereupon I would wet the nightcap in cold water and put it back on and feel slightly better. I actually met the Rap Van Winkle guy relatively recently in the last sort of five, six years.

He is Oshin Lunny. That's who it is. That's the one who it is. It was on a train journey from London back to Brighton. We had mutual friends and I kind of came and joined them on their table. He didn't have the hat on at the time. And do you ever meet someone who has got such charisma about them right that you just think you must get so much fanning honestly he was so charming i mean the accent

helps that oh yeah you know what i mean yeah i just thought i bet women just fucking melt because honestly he had he had that twinkle in the eye and he had that almost stereotypical kind of Irish banter that, you know, he was... Oh, I almost fancied him myself, you know. He's done really well since Marksman. I don't know if you looked into any of those. No. Educate me, Simon. He basically became a bit of an entrepreneur and apparently made millions from fibre optic cables. Ooh.

Yeah, yeah. When that was the hot thing. And then went into online radio there's a radio station in brighton called slack city that he contributes a little bit to but i i think he's made his pile and just lives a really nice life now great so uh yeah good for him he sees the means of production then exactly yeah oh so he didn't he didn't invent the uh the the thing that comes up when you start to uh research marksman which is a sort of bright green pen that you use in DIY. So the following week, All About Eve dropped seven places to number 35 and exited the top 40 a week later.

Meanwhile, the LP entered the album chart at number 69, but dropped right out a week later, with a percentage of the take going to victim support charities. The follow-up, a re-release of Ship Ahoy, entered the chart at number 64 in June, but similarly dropped straight out. They spent the end of 93 supporting U2 for a couple of dates on the European leg of the Zoo TV Tour and Depeche Mode on the Euro leg of the Devotional Tour. They never troubled the charts again. All About Eve, that's Mark Twain on top of the pops. What's it all about? Tell me the Road Fest. Here's the video though. New entry number seven, Animal Nitrate. We cut to a tight shot of Franklin on an empty stage. Who tells

us that the next act was supposed to be here in the studio tonight, but are not. And as the camera pulls back, we see a very pouty young man with his arms tightly folded, looking out upon the kids with barely concealed contempt. Brett Anderson. Franklin asks him why his band aren't playing,

and he says, I think my voice has deserted me. I've been singing too violently. Fucking hell. This has got serious come to the front of assembly and explain how you've let the school down vibes, hasn't it? Who's made him do this and why? I can only assume that the decision was made quite late in the day because those curtains that we see on the stage, those sort of ruched, dark red silk drapes, are from the Animal Nitrate video. Oh! Yeah, yeah.

And so clearly they were planning to recreate their little world, their sort of video world, on the Top of the Pops stage. They were going to make it their domain and it was all set up, ready to go. Yeah, I mean, in terms of why it might have happened, well, I did look at their tour dates and it turned out that they had just finished touring their debut album about three days earlier in Cambridge.

And far be it from me to speculate as to what kind of celebrating they might have done at the end of that tour. But that might possibly have something to do with the fact that Brett's voice is apparently fucked. Hey, listen, get well soon, says

Franklin, and gently shoves him out of shot and introduces the video to Animal Nitrate by Suede. Formed in London in 1989 by Justine Frischman, her boyfriend Brett Anderson and Matt Osman, Suede started playing covers until they realised that neither of them were much cop on guitar. And in October of 1989, they placed an advert in the NME, which read, Young guitar player needed for London-based band. Smiths, commotions, Bo-Air, Pet Shop Boys, no musos. Some things are more important than a billiard hair.

Call Brett, which led to them being joined by Bernard Butler. After a series of gigs with the drum machine in late 1989, they sent off a demo to Gary Crowley, who was presenting a show called Demo Clash on Greater London Radio, and their song Wonderful sometimes won five weeks in a row, leading them to sign a deal with the Brighton-based independent label RML and the song appearing on a compilation cassette. But a debut double-A side single was scrapped

when the band didn't like it, and almost all of the 500 copies were destroyed. After being let down by the drum machine 1Gig2Mene, they finally put an advert in the NME for a drummer and were astonished to get a reply from Mike Joyce, who'd been looking to get back into the game after the Smiths split up, but both parties realised it'd be a bad idea and they went for Simon Gilbert

on the recommendation of their manager at the time, Ricky Gervais. After Frischmann and Anderson split up and the former was thrown out of the band after she started going out with Damon Alban and turned up late for a rehearsal because she'd been at a Blur video shoot, they began 1992 being touted about as the best unsigned band in the country.

Nude Records, a London independent, got in first with a two-single deal, and a week before the first one came out, The Drowners, they were on the cover of Melody Maker, billed as the best new band in Britain, which helped get the single up to number 49 in May of that year. This single, their third, is the follow-up to Mekel Mikke, which got to number 17 in September of 1992. It's also the third cut

from their debut LP, Suede, which comes out at the end of the month. And this week, it's smashed into the charts at number seven, this week's highest new entry. Oh, fucking hell. Where do we begin, chaps?

I just think this is where the episode begins. This is when it gets exciting. My heart skipped, I'll be honest, when I saw Brett standing there in this episode. Immediately, I thought, that is a pop star. I mean, fucking hell. It looks like he's going to go into a full Rigsbear of the kids, which would have been fucking mint.

My God. He's totally in character, isn't he? It's like just for that very brief moment and he's contorting himself like an angle poised lamp in leather. Yes. It's really funny as well because he has like a poker straight posture in real life. He's just cocked everything to make his body into an S shape for Suede. Yes. And it's like, fucking

hell, Brett, whatever's happened to your throat is nothing compared to what's happening to your vertebra. Suede are one of our bands. And when you see one of our bands on a Top of the Pop stage, their expression and the look on their face is usually, what the fuck am I doing here? But with Brett

Anderson, it's, what the fuck am i doing here but with brett anderson it's what the fuck are you doing here you the presenter you the kids you the camera crew what are you doing here looking at me he's giving uh mark franklin serious side eye oh yes yeah basically almost rolling his eyes like you know yeah this is the kind of shit you've got to do when you're a fucking massive band like we are. I mean, amazingly, Suede meant nothing to me at the time, bar a few clips of their videos on the chart show on a Saturday morning. And, you know, they'd come on for 10 seconds and I'd go, oh, this is interesting.

But, you know, obviously being a, you know, a hip hop boy, not interested enough to make me investigate them more and shamefully this lot are a complete black hole to me oh well i was interested to see what your take was going to be al because i kind of predicted 60 40 that you were going to fucking hate them no not at all it was just like all right is this what that lot are getting up to now okay it's an advance on fucking ned's atomic dustbin and the wonder stuff right that lot are getting up to now okay it's it's an advance on fucking ned's atomic dustbin and the wonder stuff right that lot meaning kind of indie rock fan yes whatever yeah right okay yeah it's like oh okay so we're uh we're being inspired again being inspired by

the early 70s but the good early 70s you know bowie and all that kind of stuff yeah i mean we said didn't we that um 1993 was kind of a fallow year and i think suede could only have manifested in one of those a kind of liminal space between scenes and they've they've said that they are a band about the liminal spaces liminal space rock brett is pretty much from one of those like growing up in a council house between a woodland and a tip it's like that's perfect brett of the dump exactly if they were a time of day they'd be gloaming if they were a body part they'd be a dip in a clavicle but that doesn't mean that they're in any way undefined like it's

startling from this video and also just from that couple of seconds of brett looking like a vampire bat that's kind of accidentally hung himself on a washing line and he's just trying to style it out. It's startling how clearly swayed they are right away and the strength and the confidence of the aesthetic that they are presenting is so striking. It's a bit messy and it's slightly rough around the edges, but fucking hell.

You just see it, don't you? You go, fucking hell. Yes. So, Simon, you were at Melody Maker at the at the time melody maker putting them on the cover saying here's the best new band in britain did you have a hand in that um yeah i was there um quite a long time before that in fact my backstory with suede goes way beyond them being suede even right there's so many weird coincidences okay first of all Brett was born four days after me right he grew up in Haywards Heath um I went for two years to a school that was just outside

Haywards Heath um we then both ended up at UCL University College London at the same time and I remember him knocking about right and I only realised it was him in hindsight. I did a lot of work at the student union, UCL union, because we had a mobile disco set up and we used to make a bit of money for ourselves and for the union by allowing the mobile disco to be hired out to sometimes a sort of private outsiders, hotels and so on.

And sometimes to the departments of the university and various society. We had it all on a massive trolley stolen from Euston Station. The whole set up. And one time we were hired and I was hired to do it by the architecture department. And I think either Justine or Brett, I think it might have been Justine, was a student at the architecture department. And I went along department and I went along there and I set up in the sort of common room there and I remember this couple and the guy had this bright yellow duffel coat coming up to me and just hassling me for David Bowie all night

I really vividly remember that and they were pissing me off a little bit actually you know what I mean but it was only afterwards i read an interview where brett was talking about hanging around ucl in this bright yellow duffel coat i thought fucking hell it was him all along at least he didn't ask you for any oasis you know probably because they didn't exist yet yeah exactly no so by the time i got to melody maker when suede sort of changed from being shitty Bull and Gay also rants to being Suede I was editing a section in the paper called Preview which was stuff about film and TV and comics and all that which I think I mentioned earlier a colleague of mine Ian Watson was

running the section called Advance confusingly similar kind of names and Advance was where we wrote about brand new bands right and he handed me a cassette tape one day and said to me simon i think you're gonna like this and it was a suede demo tape four tracks on it which included the drowners and metal mickey and a couple of the b-sides so basically their first two singles and i played it and the recording wasn't great quality but the fucking songs man they were so good it was one of those things you get a demo tape and I was just playing that over and over more than I was playing my actual record collection yeah um it was very Bowie very Smiths but I was in

the market for a bit of that so this this was good editing by the way by Ian Watson he could have taken it himself he could have thought well this band's obviously going to be huge I'm going to do it but he he knew that it was right up my street and and he gave it to me bless him yeah i went to a rehearsal studio in hackney and and i met them and uh i interviewed them i gave them their first bit of coverage in the mainstream weekly music press under the headline pigskin heads um and the thing with it is steve sutherland the assistant editor of melty maker then jumped on board really quickly and he re-interviewed them soon afterwards oh and yeah and he slapped them on the front cover of melty maker with the infamous headline the

best new band in britain and i feel like i'm being fucking written out of history and also gaslit by the fact that everybody thinks that was their first coverage. No, let's set the record straight right here. Yeah. On an old laptop, I've got the JPEG of that original pigskin heads piece in which I talk about the fact that they all dress in charity shop clothes and they've got kind of Brian Ferry hairstyles and just this really distinct aesthetic. This sort of very 1970s aesthetic that nobody had at the time. and they've got kind of Brian Ferry hairstyles and just this really distinct aesthetic, this sort of very 1970s aesthetic that nobody had at the time. But even the official Suede biography, Love and Poison by David Barnett, which I had a hand in,

I was actually slated to co-write that and I actually did a bit of preliminary work on it and I sort of backed out in the end. But even that book just skims over the fact that I wrote the first interview oh Jesus Christ the thing with the best new band in Britain which is a really bold thing to say and I love the fact that Melody Maker did that but we kind of bottled it I don't know if you've seen that front cover but it's a right fucking patchwork suede at the top of the cover and it says the best new band in Britain.

But we hedged our bets by also having, and this is from memory because I haven't seen it in a while, but Thousand Yard Stare and EMF also on the cover. And it's like, if you're going to say an unknown band is the best new band in Britain, fucking say it. Fucking just put a picture of them and that headline and dare the world to deal with that.

Don't say, oh, but never mind, you might like EMF or, you know, that kind of fucked me off. Yeah, that was the fundamental difference between Melody Maker and the NME. The NME would put up one massive image for their cover with a little bit of something on the side, whereas Melody Maker would just seemingly throw everything at the cover. And sorry, mate, but the NME's covers always look better. No, you're right.

Our front cover design wasn't great. And I apologise if any of my colleagues in the art department are listening, but they weren't that great. The thing that NME had in its favour, though, was that they never really had to break new bands. That was our job. So by the time NME put somebody on the cover, they are already big enough to carry a front cover.

Yeah. So NME would never have really had that dilemma. Sometimes they would go out on a limb and put fucking things like Terrace. Do you remember them? On the front cover. Kingmaker. Yeah. But mostly our job was to be the sort of talent scouts,

the sort of A&R department of IPC. And our strapline became Tomorrow's Music Today after a while, because basically, you've got two magazines that are very similar in the same building under the same publishing house, one floor above or below each other, sharing the same fucking ad department and everything. So we had to differentiate ourselves somehow. Just from a publishing point of view, it made no sense for IPC to have those two papers. So we had to kind of try and put some clear water between us and NME. So we became the paper that discovered bands.

And so it was with Suede. We put ourselves out on a limb, not far enough out on a limb as far as I'm concerned, but we did it. And then by the time NME did, it's like, well, you know,

Brett is really famous by now. But anyway, the video, because that's what we get and uh yeah it's absolutely sodden with 90s video cliches that aren't actually cliches yet in 1993 we get an interior of ruched velvet curtains with a carpet very similar to the one in the shining with clips of the rest of the band so their glossy hair tosses about just so and that's punctuated with shots of a very skinny lead singer slouching around the Lisson Green estate in Westminster and we get a

bit of artiness as well with someone wearing a pig's head because hey it's 1993 everyone yeah and that that ties in with the record sleeve as well there's a sort of illustration of somebody in a suit wearing a pig head. Yeah, I love that they did that. There was that kind of continuation. These things always matched. Well, that's the thing. Swayze had their worlds.

They created a world. And this is something that when I wrote that very first piece, that's what I was trying to get across, that they had a very, very distinct aesthetic. And they even had their own lexicon. The lyrics were all about council homes about council homes nuclear skies acid rain loveless bum sex and that kind of stuff you know and they're inviting you into this world that only they are writing about really in pop and yeah they obviously put so much thought into it they actually owe it all to top the pops um i found out from the aforementioned book which is actually a good book,

despite the fact that it tried to write me out of history, Love and Poison, that they were sitting around pre-record deal, watching an episode of Top of the Pops in October 1989, actually. And it made them get serious about Suede because they just thought, this is fucking awful. We've got to do something. Because I think they were kind of a bit of a baggy adjacent band yeah to begin with you see the way they dressed brett wearing these sort of like loose tops and beads around his neck and that

kind of stuff they did look a bit like a sort of i don't know almost um a candy flip kind of act you know what i mean if you look at photos I didn't see them in that time so I can't say if that uh actually crossed over into their music at all but they obviously just had a complete rethink I thought no fuck it we're gonna have our own world our own aesthetic we're gonna look like the dodgy uncles out of a 70s sitcom and we are gonna do our hair like Brian Ferry and we are gonna sing like Bowie and if anybody says oh you're ripping off bowie fuck it we're just gonna do it just like the 80s then well yeah exactly fucking love them for that i really do it's impossible to imagine suede as baggy when they are so tight yeah they just went off the polar opposite of baggy in so so many ways um i mean

brett really puts in a shift in this video doesn't he this is a man who has considered how this is going to look at every level and how he is going to look it's such a performance and I'm sure it's been refined in the edit which is extremely good but he's really giving everything there is a python at some point

and Brett does in fact several times like a snake unhinge his entire lower jaw like a python sw unhinge his entire lower jaw. Like a python swallowing an egg. I mean, that might be something to do with the things that they have said they took that got them through the day. But also it's not, you know, it's easy to say that. It's not that he's gurning, he's performing, you know. And he's so coquettish and girlish and weird and kind of awkward and sexy.

And it's very moody. And he's like a moody teenage girl kind of slouching around the council estate and then kind of talking to a pig's head and caressing it and then punching it. And kind of there's a bit where he just turns to look at the camera with this sort of quizzical look on his face and turns the pig's head at the same time. It's great. It's just the video. It's just kind of strobing at you.

All these signifiers of what they want to be and what they want to be about. And we've said, you know, that it's more it's beyond an aesthetic into iconography, isn't it? Really? Also, there's a lovely dog. It's a Doberman. And they throw in the pig effigy at the end because there's kind of there's the pig's head and then there's like a guy like a bonfire night guy with the pig's head on it and they throw that to the dog and the dog goes yeah

possibly unintentionally hilarious but yeah yeah sarah's absolutely right um about the possible reasons why brett is putting in such a shift as it were because yeah this this is mentioned in the biography that the director Pedro Romagni just gave him loads of cocaine because the first two takes they did of the video were a bit subdued and a bit boring and he just thought no sorry fuck this you know get this up your nostrils and off they go yeah now I've got worked up to performance pitch yeah definitely I they? Yeah, definitely. I think that Brett appearing on Top of the Pops momentarily, and that was obviously, you know, a fuck-up that they didn't want. But it's not just that he styles it out.

I think he's confident that the video is no less. It's not like, oh, sorry, we can't perform for you live. I'll have the video as consolation. Like, the video is as good, you know. Yeah. You're not losing anything. It's actually their second Top of the Pops appearance, have the video as consolation. Like the video is as good, you know. Yeah. You're not losing anything. It's actually their second Top of the Pops appearance,

if you can call it an appearance, because the first one was for Metal Mickey and they were mortally drunk on that occasion. Brett repeatedly slapping his arse with a microphone. Of course, that was his trademark. And they were the first unsigned band to appear on Top of the Pops, despite what Biss might tell you, because they'd actually fulfilled the two single deal they had with Nude Records. But they decided to stick with Nude in the end. So basically, when they were on Top of the Pops, they didn't have a record deal.

Oh, by the way, the guy in the pig mask who's sitting in a kind of mastermind type black leather swivel chair i've sat in that chair oh did you put the pig's head on as well god this really goes deep doesn't it fucking did you sniff it simon did i sniff the pig no the chair well well here's the thing um the chair uh had it previously belonged to brett and brett moved house and didn't have room for it anymore so he gave it to david barnett the author of the biography who was also running the suede fan club at the time right david was living with um errol alcan the well-known dj right who was also a mate of mine um in a in a flat above a shop on Fortis Road in Tuffle Park. And I live just around the corner. So, you know, occasionally I'd end up there and sitting on that chair.

And it was one of those chairs where, you know, you can imagine these mastermind chairs. You're sitting on a black leather cushion, but the cushion is stitched down. You can't pick the cushion up as such. But you can kind of get your hands around the outside of it. And in the crease around the outside of it right and in the crease around the outside of it um they would often find just ecstasy pills from when it was

brett's chair and they just you know brett and his mates had just casually sort of scattered or lost a load of you know ease down the side of it good lord yeah so so i've sat on that chair did it give you a sense of enormous well-being around the arse yeah but even the video and top of the box air in it has caused problems as a news article in this week's enemy bears out headline chart show kissed off with suede right suede's video for animal nitrate was pulled from last saturday's chart show had missed allegations that producers objected to a scene depicting two men kissing oh my god the video was shown on friday's late night show which is only screened in the london area but was mysteriously absent from the version which appeared the following lunchtime.

A spokesperson for the Chocho denied that any kind of censorship was imposed. He told the NME, we just didn't like the video. When asked why, in that case, the promo featured on the previous night's programme, he retorted, we make a children's TV programme. A spokesperson for the band declined to comment on the story. I mean, obviously that scene's been removed, but fucking hell, Suede have just made Top of the Pops come off as more daring than the chart show. Yeah. Anything else to say?

Oh yeah, quite a lot. Oh fucking hell, we've not even spoke about the song yet. Jesus. The thing with Animal Nitrate is, it is a song about domestic abuse, just like the Marksman song was. It's about loveless chemsex and bumming, basically, because the refrain, kind of the chorus, Now You're Over 21, seems to be a reference

to what was then the gay age of consent, of course. It actually dates it perfectly to this year because the age of homosexual consent was lowered to 18 the following year, in 1904. It was in the Criminal Justice Act, which I should point out, having slagged it off earlier for good reason. It's not all bad. And also, it would have been lowered to 16 at that time if Edwina Curry's amendment had succeeded

so there you go do you reckon the government were thinking well we could keep the age of consent as it is but that guy from Suede seems really angry about it better listen to the kids you know the thing with Suede and queerness is a controversial issue because they got a lot of stick at the time. There was the interview where Brett said that he considered himself a bisexual man who'd never had a homosexual experience. And people ripped the fucking shit out of him for that, saying that he was co-opting gay culture when he had no right to. And that suede were just straight boys faking it.

The thing is, the least gay-looking member of the band was the gay member of the band, and that suede were just straight boys faking it the thing is the least gay looking member of the band was the gay member of the band and that's simon gilbert the drummer right and um i knew him kind of before he was in suede as well because um you were having gay sex with him al oh come on jesus that's beneath you And don't make a joke about beneath you either. Yeah, in addition to doing stuff at UCL Union, I was doing quite a lot of work at ULU, the University of London Union, for the whole uni, which is down the road.

And that's the place that Ricky Gervais was the boss of. And it's where Ricky and I used to put gigs on and stuff like that. And yeah, Ricky was basically running suede out of that office. But downstairs in the lobby, there were two things. There was STA, Student Travel Association, so cheap holidays, inter-rail tickets and all that. And there was this tiny little booth where you could buy gig tickets, mostly gigs at Yulu itself.

Because do you remember the days when to get a ticket you actually had to go somewhere and fucking you know pay with money or a credit card or whatever there was one down by Oxford Circus Station yeah but Simon Gilbert was just sat there all fucking day so I was on kind of nodding terms you know speaking terms with him

already and yeah he was the gay man but no one thought it was him because he had sort of like short spiky ginger hair you know a bit like johnny rotten they thought well he's obviously not gay um so yeah it was kind of kind of hiding in place i didn't have a handbag or anything yeah yeah exactly but all these people sort of just really really attacking suede for being i suppose tourists sexual tourists were bang wrong they They just completely missed the point. Simon, weren't you in the building when Brett Anderson said that? Was I?

Well, I believe you were. That quote came from a massive interview. Oh, was it the sex debate at Melody Maker? The sex debate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When Melody Maker did the sex issue. Yeah, fuck's sake. Which was quite the thing to do in the 90s.

Yeah, it's had Brett Anderson on the cover, seemingly having his head eaten by Leslie out of Silverfish. Leslie out of Silverfish, yeah. Boy George was there as well. Yeah. And I, you know, I mentioned during the course of the debate that I actually wasn't gay or bisexual myself. And afterwards, Boy George came up to me just like,

no way, he was like he was convinced i was gay he couldn't believe it i was really proud of that i thought fucking hell boy george the king or the queen of gays um thinks that i'm a gay i thought yes that's kind of cool you know i think there's a lot to suggest that you know queerness is it's a very there are people who think that you this is not a word you should use still but um there are other people who think that the umbrella is quite big you know and it refers more to a sort of general way of life than just sexuality um also i think brett's comment i mean he has kind of rode back on it since and i think it was slightly um uh the wording may have

been slightly clumsy but it's not actually a controversial statement because the the stereotype is is that you know in order to be uh certified bisexual one must uh have at least one other person of another gender hanging off you as you go about your business you know yeah like you have to collect them like tokens. But actually, you don't. You know, people know what their sexuality is before they have any sexual experience at all. Exactly. A lot of the time. Or they discover it later, or they change them,

or, you know, whatever. Yes. I think if somebody said that today, it wouldn't make a ripple, would it? I mean, fair play to a band for blurring the lines and all that. It does come off like them youths in the first term of uni who put about this lie that they're all, I just don't know, am I gay, am I not?

You know, in an attempt to make them more interesting and convertible to girls, which is what my mate with the playing cards also did. Shame on him. There's quite a bit about them at this point that is affected and sort of arch you know a little bit but i think all that very quickly yeah yeah yeah yeah but i think but it's a little possibly slightly too far in the same way that brett's voice is this kind of spiky bark at this point because he hasn't quite you know worked it like by the time the

dog man star it's kind of he's worked it down a bit more uh into his chest and there's a song you know so it's got a little bit more room there it's kind of moved it down from the kind of bed sit esophagus to the sort of studio apartment of the the ribs i think the sort of that edge that was a little bit too sharp. They didn't lose the sharpness, but it kind of burned off a bit like alcohol in a sauce, you know, but it kept them from ever being jarringly earnest. This song, it sounds like a really obvious single. It's got that chorus.

You know, it's a real sort of sing along thing. Incredibly, it nearly wasn't a single. They wanted to put Sleeping Pills from the album out instead. Right. But then they wrote this song quite late on in the process of making the album and Saul Galpin from Nude Records said, oh, come on, that's the single. And it just seems mad now that it was ever not going to be the single.

Yeah, you can't imagine it, can you? It's a phenomenal record. I really think it's just a gobsmacking piece of work. It really is. Yeah. Animal Nitrate felt important. Jane Savage, who was their PR person at the time, sent a cassette of it, sellotape to a velvet cushion,

to the NME on a motorbike. Right. I don't recall Melody Maker receiving one, which is, you know, I'm a bit pissed off about that. And Select Magazine gave a whole page to the single separate from the usual singles page um about a month before it even came out it was like this is too important to be on the singles page this song has to have a feature about it right now so yeah and and they they started um select magazine listed it among their singles of the year uh before it was even a single before it

was even out so yeah it felt like an event it felt very important and of course this wasn't even the only time that a mainstream prime time television audience had seen Animal Nitrate that year because three weeks earlier they're on the Brit Awards yeah 16th ofary 1993 and to me suede doing animal nitrate on the brits is right up there with klf uh with their machine guns and sheep's heads or jarvis versus jacko or any of that it felt like a real fucking moment sadly the entire episode isn't out there anywhere i don't think on on the internet but the suede clip is and Richard O'Brien who was hosting introduces them as the already legendary suede and you can just see all the industry suits sat there in their fucking tuxedos it's like a black tie event completely bemused while Brett

goes on there and slaps his arse with a microphone, trashes the microphone stand. The band drop their instruments and walk off at the end. Brilliantly, right, Bernard Butler went on stage with his coat. He takes off his coat to play the song. Then he put his guitar down and put his coat back on before leaving the stage. I love that. The movement that did feel the benefit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Bernard Butler, we haven't really talked about him, but obviously he's the guy who answered the ad in NME. And he is a fucking musical genius. And he turns up, and apparently what he said to them, because they were about 25, the rest of them, and he was 22, he went along to audition and he said to them because they were about 25 the rest of them and he was 22 um you know he went along to sort of audition and he said to them how old are you then and they go well we're 25 and he said well you better hurry up then aren't you in love now you old you old bastards of 25 this performance at the brits suede were the only alternative bands on the bill. I mean, Al, you spoke about our bands, as it were,

from a Melody Maker perspective. It felt very punk. To give you some context, I've got the rest of the line-up here from that year. So performing were Andy Bell and KD Lang doing No More Tears, Enough Is Enough. Right. Madness doing Nightboat to Cairo.

Ooh. Peter Gabriel doing Steam steam the e17 song rod stewart doing a cover version of ruby tuesday and then sway doing animal nitrate and tasman archer doing sleeping saturday right the winners that year right annie lennox obviously because them's the rules yes right um take that shakespeare's sister peter gabriel mick hucknall annie lennox again simply read again um rod stewart prince okay prince um rem yeah okay rem nirvana yeah right um nigel fucking kennedy and wayne's world is broadly very establishment very very mainstream.

So honestly, I can just vividly remember to see Suede breaking out of their usual context, which was still kind of the 100 Club or the Africa Centre, like little venues, and storming the Brits felt like a real invasion. Yeah, I mean, it's of a piece with everything else about them, with the video and with brett standing there next to mark franklin it's very arresting and striking and whoa you know and it really sort of knocks you back in your seat in a really good way although possibly not for the people who were there on the night it's you can feel there's kind of no air in

the room at all and they it doesn't affect them whatsoever there's no self-consciousness there's just they're there to do what they do they're there to be swayed and it is quite mind-boggling what about you al well you know me simon this sort of thing it wasn't going to be my cup of tea but to see that lot doing what they're doing amongst fucking annie lennox and rod stewart and i just thought well you know there's a lot worse of this sort of thing knocking about. And if this is going to be the coming thing, then good, bring it on. You know, to paraphrase the parlance of the day, I might not like it, but I'm going to have to go along with it. Ich nichten lichten. Yeah, yeah.

So I looked in Love and Poison, the biography, to see what was going on behind the scenes at the Brit Awards, which took place at Alexandra Palace. And John Aidman, who was their manager at the time, says, Everyone was really nervous and we got given a big old Winnebago thing, which we sat in all day. I think they de-stressed themselves by changing their clothes a lot and Brett recurringly asking me for a hairdryer. I went to the production office and they were having share problems because she would only take her water in small bottles and they bought big ones.

Amateurs. So the bloke from Suede's hairdryer was not the major concern. I love that. First of all, share being really kind of spinal tap about about the format in which her water has to be served um and then apparently when when they go on stage charlie charlton who was of the management team and then later became their manager apparently knocked bernard's guitar when he handed it to him so the guitar was all out of tune no they go on he's got to play so he plays and so it sounds a bit ragged and that's why um and there was a guy doing the sound for them who'd never done their sound before

so it's all a bit shambolic it was all fucked and the theory that charlie has is that brett just sensed this and just really fucking went for it because he's like we're gonna sound terrible i've got to leave them with something to remember so he goes into full ass slapping mode yes um the party afterwards was was in a specially made fun fair because that's what the brit awards is like and uh they took load of ecstasy because that was their their thing as well as coke at the time they're all on a high after what they thought was just this mind-blowing television moment right and um saul galpin's mum saul being the boss of nude records saul's mum phoned him up to commiserate.

She said, oh, Saul, I'm so sorry. I've just seen Suede on The Brits. Are you OK? She thought his career was finished and Suede was finished. And he had to tell her, that was the greatest moment of my life. I suppose we've got to talk about the lyrics because, yeah, fucking hell, you wouldn't want to explain them to your non-art, would you?

So I don't know if I've said this before about using the second person. So it's written in the second person, which gives a certain immediacy, but it also gives you a certain distance. It's like often when, yeah, you're taking I out of it and you're putting a sort of little grass verge there that could protect you or give you a few steps away to make sense of things or reaching for something universal. news after some traumatic incident immediately or later they very often use you when speaking about what happened and they'll switch mid-sentence from first to second person like the lightning struck me and it was like you were being burned all along your veins you know it's like stepping

out of your own harrowing experience to help yourself and it's also stepping towards the person who's asking you about it sort of invite them to understand imagine if you were struck by lightning imagine yourself as me you know so there's that but there's also it's probably it's probably just that he was writing in a kind of omniscient storytelling position i mean i just think it's a great use the second person it sort of adds this layer of discomfort and accusation but i think it can also be interpreted as stealth first person because i kind of you know i know the song really well and it's like it's such a bop you know and it's got such dark subject matter that it's like okay i haven't really thought about this um i thought the tone is really vile and vicious

and it's like where does that come from who who would say this like i don't know a bad parent or a scorned lover or oh it's it's like somebody's nasty inner voice like that's the only way that you get that horrible it's like talking to them as they're squirming in self-loathing which is so clever and disquieting like people who have been um abused will often blame themselves and this is in a brilliant bouncy sing-along bit of glam pop so that the dissonance is is incredible and it's so marbled with ambiguities as well i'm people take the piss out of brett sometimes correctly for his lyrics but this is such a deceptively clever bit of songwriting you know it could be moralizing or finger wagging or it could be envious or belittling or admiring you know everything is you know if you call someone

an animal it could be a great compliment in a sexual sense or completely damning like what's wrong with you you've lost all your humanity it could be a pet really sort of dehumanizing taking away their agency or elevating them to the status of an ancient god it's very sophisticated and daring like now you're over 21 okay so now you're legally free to fuck who you want or you're already over the hill for the kind of sketchy guys you know and the self-loathing deepens like is this about freedom and pleasing yourself or now your animal's gone or is it about the inexorable trap of formative experience when the cage is opened you just stay in it you know this unhealthy unpleasant violent exploitative drug-fueled pain-wracked

illegal relationship was your first and you hated it and it fulfilled you and you loved it and it destroyed you and now it's over nothing is ever going to feel so good and so wrong again nothing's ever going to make you good and so wrong again nothing's ever going to make you feel anything again what does that say about you what sort of creature are you what does it take to turn you you know it's so kind of crawling creeping with with all this

extremely uncomfortable stuff and i i love it yeah yeah i i think you're completely right about that dissonance because we're looking at Suede. They're this young, sexy band singing about sex. You expect them to write in a kind of randy way. Do you know what I mean? But instead, it's really fucking bleak. And yeah, like Sarah, I can't even say the lyrics without almost bursting into song.

But the idea of, you know, what does it take to turn you on? You know, the idea of being unable to get it up, essentially. It runs so counter to this strutting, sexy band that they were. And that is what's so brilliant about it. And yeah, at the end, this supposedly brutal lover that the subject of the song had is described as an animal. You know, he's just an animal. There's a real venom to when he does it live because in the live version, he always sings, he's just a fucking animal. You know, he really goes for it at that moment.

I just completely endorse everything that Sarah just said. It's a brilliant brilliant lyric I love the fact that even the fact that it isn't clear exactly what position he's I mean it's kind of suspended judgment in some ways but also it's not clear who the character is or where the voice is coming from and I think that's another thing that kind of destabilizes you as you're listening to it. But it's all held together with this brilliant, brilliant pop tune. I wonder if it's the same animal as in the song Animal Lover on the album where Brett sings, I heard you being inside, but what were you in for? Yeah, so just a bit of speculation. What's happened to him?

Where has he gone? Did he leave? Is he in prison? Is he dead? What has happened? Yeah, yeah. And they put this on a Thursday evening when kids are watching. Fucking hell. Where has he gone? Did he leave? Is he in prison? Is he dead? What has happened? Yeah, yeah. And they put this on a Thursday evening when kids are watching.

Fucking hell. It's so obviously dirty. It's like, that's sex, isn't it? That's some sex. Don't know what's going on, but it's sex. But yeah, I mean, the way we're going on, we ought to round this up by saying that they became the biggest band of the 90s and became so influential and everything and uh what happened yeah i mean they were sort of the trailblazers for britpop but they

got steamrolled by other bands including i mean it must have been gutting for them that blur in particular became bigger than suede how must that have felt but oasis as well and then um obviously suede was scuppered um for a little while by the fact that bernard left and they had to bring in a new guitarist who was this untried 17 year old kid richard oakes who's actually brilliant but it sort of dented their credibility in the eyes of some people so that even when they were bringing out their absolute masterpiece of a second album dog man star it felt a little bit like they were holed below the waterline. You know, it really did.

And then when they actually made it big again and again, the third time round with Coming Up, it felt like they were riding on the coattails of Oasis, which is so wrong. But it just felt like, well, the world is now ready for guitar-based bands. And Suede had toned it down by this point. He was wearing sensible shirts rather than blouses and pearls. And his onstage persona was a bit more geezerish, I remember.

So it was a bit sad that in order to get the success that was really overdue, they had to sort of play by Brit rock or dad rocks rules but we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves but yeah basically as you hint there al they they never did become the sort of all-conquering dominant force that they should have done but but it felt like they were gonna yeah them and the manics suede and the manic street preachers were the two bands in the early 90s that i personally i thought fucking sign me up this is my army I'm joining the army I will fight to the death for you guys it was it was a cause to get behind Suede and the Manics and I remember once um because I was always writing about both those bands in Melody Maker I remember once being at

some kind of music biz after party and Matt Osman approaching me and saying come on Simon you've got to tell me who do you prefer us or the Manics and i paused and i said i'm sorry but it's the manics and he said i knew it i knew it do you think your lot over egged it with suede because um apparently they were on 18 magazine covers before their album even came out it creates a lot of resentment if you hype up a band that much and say they're the best new band in Britain, even if they are, plainly, the best new band in Britain. And, yeah, maybe it was too much too soon, and some of the front covers didn't do them any favours.

There was the infamous Select magazine cover, which superimposed Brett on the Union Jack. I think we might even have mentioned that in a previous episode. And Brett didn't want anything to do with that sort of flag-waving bullshit, even though, culturally, Suede were part of the fightback. They were very much the fightback of British references and a British kind of indie glam sensibility against that kind of chest-beating, hairy, macho American rock

that Grunge represented. But they didn't want to be involved in this stupid fucking almost keep calm and carry on business that Britpop became. Do you know what I mean? What would an American reader think of that cover? Some bloke slapping his arse and saying, Yanks go home. Which he never said, of course.

I mean, I don't really know what Brett's opinion was of grunge bands. It doesn't really matter. But it can't have done them any favours. I don't even know if that magazine reached the United States. But if it did, it cannot have done them any favours. But then Suede are a classic example of one of those British bands who are only going to appeal to Anglophiles on the coasts in the States.

I love that they were the London Suede. Yes, it's a better name. The London Suede is a better name. I've got a copy of Stay Together that's credited as the London Suede and it's one of my most prized suede possessions. It's a good name. I always call them the London Suede. I'm surprised I haven't been doing it all the way through this chat, actually.

It's weird to me, the Union Jack thing, because obviously it would have been way worse if it had just been an English flag. Oh, God. Because you just know just none of that. But I do think of Suede as a very English band, specifically. They show a route to not taking pride in Englishness, but pleasure and a release of shame.

It's like an inversion or a subversion of that kind of English shame about, you know, empire and sex and everything in between, you know. And they kind of mine, that's a seam that they mine, you know. And it's got nothing to do with jingoism or exceptionalism. And there's so many things about Englishness that they kind of correct. They don't really satirise it and they don't really dismiss it. They just kind of offer some sort of alternative to it. And there's so much about them that you don't instinctively associate with the English, like, you know, lusciousness and, you know, lasciviousness. Yeah. But just, yeah, I don't

know. There's a kind of upgrade to Englishness that they have. Like, we are a dirty, grubby people. And they know that and they haven't cleaned that up. They've just kind of excavated under it to find the really good stuff, to find the sort of depths. Man, Suede is such a fascinating band and it's way beyond the wit of me to make full sense of them. But I completely get it. I completely get it.

It's really weird and counterintuitive now in 2023 to be talking about any kind of positive Britishness because it's just been so soiled by Brexit and everything that came with it but at the time I think Swade as Sarah says and also I would say Saint Etienne did a really good job of it. And Saint Etienne were doing it slightly before Suede. They were kind of curating an alternate Britishness of cool 70s junk shop glam records that everyone's forgotten. Or, you know, footballers that everyone's forgotten and neighbourhoods in London that don't normally get mentioned and stuff like that. This is Saint Etienne I'm talking about now.

I think Bob and Pete and Sarah presented a kind of positive Britishness and Suede came along and did a similar thing in a slightly different way because Suede were not ones to sort of name drop anything. Their lyrics were quite universal. But they did come from that hinterland outside London. It's neither London nor the coast. It's sort of between London and Brighton. And I've written about The Cure in a similar way.

But I first picked up on this when I was reviewing the Suede B-side compilation, Sci-Fi Lullabies. Suede, by the way, wrote fucking brilliant B-sides. Their B-side album, it's a double album and it's better than most people's fucking studio album. But in writing a review of that, I was saying that there are all these places, these sort of dormitory towns that are just within reach of London

where you can see the lights of London almost down the railway track, but you're not quite there. Colchester with Blur um Croydon uh Saint Etienne Haywards Heath Suede and so on um and I I really think and Crawley for the cure but um Woking yeah Woking yeah absolutely jam yeah but Suede um are a bit more similar to the cure in in that they don't name check british stuff their sensibility is uniquely english but they are at least allowing a door open for anyone in the world to kind of get it yeah i think if they share share that sensibility deep within it there's something about otherness and you know not belonging anywhere yes which is the experience

of a lot of people who just desperately want to go to london then they go to london it's like yes i've made it oh fuck because london will never let you in either i mean it will tolerate your presence but it is as brutal as nature you can never really be a part of it you go oh no and so there's a whole country of people who don't feel they belong and suede they are of that thing as well very very much. And the other thing about Suede is you can't really lump him in with anyone else. I mean, every time I see on Facebook some flyer

for another fucking Britpop night, they've always got this collage of Noel and Liam and Damon and Jarvis and, you know, Mr Motivator and the Spice Girls. And then you see Brett Anderson there and you just think, what are you doing there? You might as well take him out and replace him with a cutout of Hulk Hogan because he doesn't belong there either. This is the thing about not fitting in anywhere.

It is a hard road to tread, but it has its compensations. I think they transcend Britpop now and they did then. You know, like the context that they have now is still their own and it always was and I think yeah obviously they suffered for it but they've kind of come through it and outlasted it in the largest way obviously there was the kind of manufactured blur versus oasis thing at the center of supposedly at the center of Britpop but it's really kind of Suede and Pulp or Blur and Oasis, isn't it?

You know, that's kind of how it's separated out. Whatever backlash there was against Suede in a year or so's time was down to them not selling enough records. That was the big slag off about them. It's like, ha-ha, I got you. You think you're so big and clever. Well, why aren't you number one? You know, Oasis number one.

Why aren't you number one? Yeah, yeah, there's all that yeah by the way sarah mentions suede outlasting all the bullshit i've got to add here that of all the bands who have split up and then got back together and maybe playing sort of nostalgic heritage gigs suede are the one who have made fucking brilliant new albums since getting back together it's extraordinary the first one okay the first one blood sports was kind of finding their feet it sounds like a suede album it's just them basically saying yep we can still make a suede kind of record but the three they've done since then are grand artistic statements they are incredible really ballsy of them to do that and actually way better than the final album of their first incarnation,

which is A New Morning, which, shamefully, I gave a five out of five review to, just out of loyalty, really, because it was not a very good album. Yeah, I think Brett has disowned that one now, hasn't he? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, seriously, of all the comeback bands, you know, normally, like when Pixies came back, the first couple of tours

fucking incredible just to see them sounding better than ever before but then it's like the dreaded thing of like well here's our new album it's like no no no no we don't but Swayze are the exception they really are I mean technically you could say they're a heritage band at this point but they don't feel like that at all. Like, I mean, for one thing, Brett's voice hasn't changed at all and their hearts are still in it. They found a new way to be the band that they are. And I think there's still, they've maintained a kind of sincerity and an innocence somehow and a beauty that is quite magical, really. They're such a special band.

I love what has become of them. It's really wonderful. Yeah, they could totally just be phoning it in at this point. But no, Gaz, we're recording this. I'm going to see Suede in a couple of days' time. And I've seen them earlier this year, and they are terrifying as a live act right now. I mentioned before that Brett is only four days younger than me and you see the

fucker right he comes he looks incredible he comes swaggering out on stage i love how cocky he is by the way like like even now he's still like ridiculous he's an elegant sir he is an elegant sir in a tevilline shirt yeah um yeah yeah so he sort of struts out on stage he's got this little wooden box with white gaffer tape around the edge so he doesn't fall off that he jumps up on and he uses it to sort of propel himself just so that his onstage jumps are that bit higher. And, you know, he goes into the crowd, people sort of tearing at him and it's so physical. He's just got so much incredible energy about him it's it's feral is what it is i remember a couple years ago when he first started pulling this shit out of the box and and performing like that my wife and i saw them at hammersmith apollo and my wife turned to me and said is he all right is he dying because she thought it was the performance of a dying man who just wanted to fucking put it all out there one last time but he's doing that he's doing that every fucking night at the moment at the age of 56

i just can't get my head around it he is a phenomenon the best thing that happened in the afterlife of this song and i don't know if you've seen this do the words or the word gay penis bum mean anything to you? Separately, yes. Together, not so much. Oh, my God. Have you got a treat in store? Right, OK.

So there's this guy. On Twitter, he was called Collincidence, but he somehow had his account suspended. I don't know what he's done wrong. And on YouTube, he's Collin Surname. And his YouTube account is still there. What he did, he's a fucking genius this guy, he made a mockumentary, if you will,

about Suede called The Insatiables and it starts off with a voiceover that goes, in 1989, Brett Wood Anderson and Matt Well Osman advertised in the NME wanting to form a band for people who pretend they're gay to listen to. I should say for a start, I'm pretty certain that Colin is gay himself. So, you know, anyway, and it continues. Brett combines the homoerotic charisma of 70s front men with the homoerotic charisma of 80s front men. of 70s front men with a homoerotic charisma of 80s front men and then um there are these little snippets of suede songs that he's kind of adapted uh so animal nitrate is changed to gay penis bum

and uh it goes oh what turns me on oh gay penis bum because i'm homosexual and this this went kind of viral right and the next gig that actual suede played in dublin brett actually sang it like that at the gig i mean who says suede don't have a sense of humor see comic relief right that is actually funny okay yeah yeah i think it's uh uh i i do think it's okay to write in character even if it's not directly from your experience i think brett anderson was not the first person to do this and will not be the last. You know, it's fine. You know, Kate Bush was not actually a foetus during the war, but it's fine. So the following week, Animal Nitrate stayed at number seven and would get no further. But Suede became the fastest selling debut LP since Welcome to the Pleasure Dome by Frank Care

and entered the album chart at number one. The follow-up, So Young, only got to number 22, but they'd go on to have seven more top ten hits throughout the 90s and two more number one LPs. Katie Lang made the top 40 last year, dueting with Roy Orbison for Crying, now solo and on its second release, Constant Craving is at 21,

and Live By Satellite from Hawaii. CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Even through the dark space Being thick or thin We're transported straight from Lisson Green to a shot of some apartments on the coast of Honolulu as Franklin brags on about the BBC satellite capabilities as we drop in on a live performance of Constant Craving by KD Lang. Born in Edmonton, Canada in 1961, Catherine Dawn Lang was relocated to the village of Consort in Alberta at the age of nine months, where she would grow up. While attending Red Deer

College and becoming obsessed with Patsy Cline, Lang decided to have a go at a singing career, moving back to Edmonton after graduating in 1982 and forming a tribute band called the reclines which played a sort of country venues in the city whilst finding time to do a seven-hour performance piece reenactment of barney clark's artificial heart transplant it says here in Wikipedia, citation needed. In 1984, The Reclines, now called KD Lang and The Reclines, put out the LP A Truly Western Experience and she'd release another with them before she went solo in 1986 and worked with Dave Edmonds on the LP Angel With A Lariat. A year later, Lang was approached by Roy Orbison to duet with him

on a re-recording of his 1961 single Crying for the soundtrack to the film Hiding Out, which got to number two in Canada and won a Grammy, but did nothing over here. And it would take a performance during the closing ceremony of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary to get Lang on British television when she sang the Alberta Rose. In 1992, Lang put out the LP On Genou,

and this, the follow-up to Barefoot, which failed to chart, was the lead-off single, which got to number 52 over here in May of that year. But then two things happened. The first one was an interview with the American LGBT magazine Advocate in June, where Lange proclaimed she was playing gold tender for the other ice hockey team, or whatever term they use in Canada. And then a re-release of Crying caught on in the UK, and went all the way to number 13 in August.

In the wake of increased interest in her, Constant Craving was re-released and last week it entered the chart at number 37. This week it soared 16 places to number 21 which has inspired stanley appell to fire up the satellite and send it over hawaii for a live performance of the song presumably before a gig or summit and you know i feel top of the pops of mr trick here chaps because you know people of that era would have seen those white apartments after being told that they were in hawaii and immediately put two and two together so so what you should have done was a sped-up camera zoom towards the balcony and have KD Lang standing there dressed up in a suit like Jack Lord

for that Hawaii Five-0 opening credits vibe. That would have been nice. And panel, we've already experienced this sort of thing with Etta James 3T and Moncho Jordan, haven't we? You know, it's that pop star you've heard about, but singing live in that America where they make all the films. But it's got to be said that the thrill of live transatlantic broadcasting is it's worn right off by the early 90s, hasn't it?

I mean, madness introducing House of Fun live from Japan a mere nine years previous. That was an absolute fucking mind blast, wasn't it? But things like this by 1993 see the thrill's gone hasn't it yeah there's a kind of weird flatness and a fuzziness about the satellite top of the box yeah that just kind of i don't know what it is it always feels very remote i think they fucked it i think they fucked it up because yeah it's live in hawaii but what we get is this establishing shot of Hawaii from the air.

It's almost like proto-drone footage of beaches and hotels. But then we cut and it's just KD sat on her own in the dark. She could have been anywhere. And it comes back, there's a guitar break later on where we see some more irrelevant footage of the flora and mountains of Hawaii. But there's no connection between that and the actual performance. Yeah, get her out on the beach. Because I remember, Simon, previously you were talking about going to see your first gigs and being disappointed

that they didn't sound as good as the records. You almost always get the same feeling when a satellite performance was trotted out. It just feels like the talent shows they have today, which are about seeing if someone could reach a standard. Yeah. You know, like Torval and Dean doing their compulsories. And here we're being told to just sit back

and see if this artist can actually do it without all that studio trickery and computers and whatnot. Well, the thing is, I don't know if you've noticed this, but it doesn't have the backing vocals. No. Where she harmonises with herself. And it made me realise that her harmonising with herself is I don't know if you've noticed this but it doesn't have the backing vocals no where she harmonizes with herself and it made me realize that her harmonizing with herself on the record totally makes it you know and when when you don't have that yeah I mean it's it's a very sparse

backing here as well sometimes it's barely more than drums I mean I've got opinions on the song which come to but I just think that choice to make her do it very solo like that loses something yeah i don't disagree but it is also a very very good performance like she makes it so easy like this is obviously what this person is supposed to be doing and she's also she's sitting down which is not the best position for singing um but yeah she's in total command of her instrument you know she ad-libs just a little bit, just to give a few moments of kind of a little curl or a little tickle. So you know it's live.

And she doesn't overextend herself for the high notes. I mean, it does lose something in the chorus. You're right, because there's usually that. I will not attempt it myself. But it is missing that high note a bit. But she's not overextending herself. She probably has to save her voice for more important stuff. She's quite happening, to be honest. There's a a very sound checky vibe about it isn't there yeah but you know if

that was a sound check while you were in the place you'd sit and listen to the whole thing wouldn't you yeah it's got to be said the lowercase canadian can piss this sort of thing out of her ass all day can't she so it's no burden to sit through this she's there sat on the edge of a platform in a Harley Davidson T-shirt underneath a denim shirt. And she's much better served by the video, which appears to be set in a Jim Rose circus-like performance during the Depression.

It's meant to be Waiting for Godot, isn't it? Yes. Mark Romanek is a really good director. Yeah, it's supposed to be a theatrical premiere of Waiting for Godot is the premise of it. But as far as satellite broadcasts from top of the pops go, we've seen far, far worse, haven't we? Oh, absolutely. And it does show she has a fantastic voice.

Not that I ever particularly doubted that. No. It really does. Even though it's a shame that there aren't two of her, one harmonising with the other. Yeah, it's still really impressive from that point of view. And I really surprised myself with my reaction to this because I think I was a bit anti-KD Lang back in the day. Not for any massive reason,

but part of it was the lowercase lettering. It was like E.E. Cummings, which was such a fucking annoying affectation. Dream Hampton. Yeah, or a late 80s sandwich bar in Islington that thinks it's something special and it's called something like refuel you know that's what it reminded me of the whole conceit of lowercase lettering was a very sort of trendy middle class thing in that

period and it kind of rubbed me up the wrong way is it i didn't realize that a case had a class. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Trust me. Trust me. It was kind of styled after E.E. Cummings. And I think for the same reason, which was to separate the kind of performance self from the person. It is a bit annoying, but it's not like the audience grade annoying where it's like, oh, it's all one word. Oh, no. It's like wearing sunglasses, isn't it? Sunglasses at night. Yeah. But I don't want people staring, it's all one word. Oh no, what am I going to do? It's like wearing sunglasses, isn't it? Sunglasses at night, yeah, but I don't want people staring in my eyes all the time. So I get it.

The enemy of Microsoft Word spell check, isn't it? Yes. She might as well have had a red wobbly line underneath her name as well. Yeah, because it is quite attention-seeking in a way. We have to tackle the lesbian elephant in the room. Yes, lesbian elephants, come on. Well, this is another reason

why I was maybe slightly set against her, not because I'm a massive homophobe. No, what it is, right, it was obviously very important at the time that she was a visible lesbian woman in pop and she was a pioneer of that. And also, not a fun lesbian like you get in porn or in Katy Perry videos.

Fun lesbian. A serious and real lesbian woman like you get in life, OK? And there weren't many about in the pop landscape of the late 80s, early 90s. Who was there? Who was there in 1993? Who was out? All right. Well, there was Frank with a PH.

Right. There was the Indigo Girls. And that was about it. I mean, some would have mentioned or guessed Michelle Shocked, but she doesn't identify as lesbian. Tracy Chapman has never confirmed her sexuality. So Katie Lang was way out in front on that score. And because of that, because she was that important figure,

you felt at the time there was a moral imperative coercing you to like her. I'm very resistant to that sort of thing so yeah i i think i probably just rolled my eyes at the fucking first of all the lowercase lettering and secondly that this kind of there was an edge to if people said do you like katie lang there's a certain edge to the question of like if you don't like it then you're a bigot do you know what i mean yeah are you or are you not a friend of katherine exactly so i suppose i hadn't given her any thought for decades until we chose to look at this episode of top the pops and what i would never ever think over all those years was what i need now is to hear constant craving by katie lang but i heard it and it just made me stop in my tracks for a moment it it feels like a song with significant emotional heft it feels important in the same way that the suede song feels important even lines like maybe a great magnet pulls all souls towards truth,

has a profundity to it, you know? And yeah, this was probably the big shock of the episode for me, was, oh wow, I really like Constant Craving by KD Lang. And it was definitely played upon, if not necessarily by her, because in 1993, nobody gave the slightest bit of a fuck about a country singer in Britain. But a country music singer from Canada who didn't eat meat and was a lesbian as well, that's a lot of hooks you can hang things on, isn't it? Well, that takes balls, being a gay woman or a gay man in the world of country music.

Yeah. I mean, seriously, man. And also, yeah, the whole thing about opposing the meat trade, that she's vegetarian and she actually launched that Meat Stinks campaign. Yes. Given that she grew up in Alberta, which is a cattle ranching state, as we know, and she ended up getting banned from more than 30 radio stations in Alberta and more than a dozen in the US.

I don't know if you saw this bit, but there was a sign in her hometown of Consort which said, Home of KD Lang. That was burned to the ground. And she was actually denounced by Alberta's agriculture minister for her supposed betrayal. I mean, fucking hell. It's like the Wurzels doing Meats' murder, isn't it? Right, exactly. And being gay.

But talking about the whole sexuality thing and her kind of androgyny and her status as as an icon of that a few months after this song there's that famous um august 93 issue of vanity fair oh yes that photo of her um on the cover in a barber's chair being shaved with a razor by cindy crawford that that's yeah stuff like that in a pre-internet age. That was big. I really think so. Yeah, because by 1993, it was kind of accepted, even if it was grudgingly by most people,

that gay men weren't going to go away and just wanted to get on with it. And obviously, being at university at the time, I was massively aware about same-sex palaver going on there'd be people at college that you knew who were gay or had suspicions that they were gay but they mainly kept it on the down low but at uni lads would be coming out left right and center yeah and the ones who were already out some of them practically went into orbit you know especially when you were living in london yeah yeah but that option didn't seem to be available to the women folk who were that way inclined you know after i graduated there were at

least three women i knew and linked up with afterwards and you know they sat me down and told me that they were lesbians and i always had to say yeah everybody knew doc so for someone like kd lang to come out back then even if it was before she was really known over here it must have been a massive deal yeah i mean it doesn't hurt that she looks like a really cute member of the undertones you know one of my mates was telling me that he went to a kd lang gig and it was absolutely full of women who were just screaming at her yeah as if she was donny osmond right the way through wow i can imagine yeah yeah these things are important in the culture, aren't they? And, you know, I think she can be proud of the part she played.

But also, she was just living her life. There was another culture shoot with her as actually as Elvis, wasn't there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't remember what that was for, but that was brilliant. And I suppose we got used to the idea of gay male pop stars in the 80s, haven't we? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think everybody was on board with that.

It's like, even if it was grudgingly, it's like, OK like okay well some men are gay and some of those gay men are going to be pop stars and they're going to be very successful ones yeah more birds for the rest of us eh but yeah not not with women the other thing is as well that she is clearly uh dressing down for this performance you know and and didn't feel any need to kind of conform to any stereotypical beauty standards in that way. But also, her voice is very feminine. She's got this very pure, clear tone to her voice. She almost sounds like Liza Minnelli, like as a Broadway singer, slipping between musical contexts as you listen.

I mean, she did. She kind of meandered between genres. I mean, partly because country would not really accept her. I mean, she lived in Nashville. It's like, that was tough. You know what, though? For everything I said about country being a difficult place for a gay woman, Roy Orbison choosing, when KD was still very early on in her career,

to duet with her. Fucking respect to Roy Orbison for that, you know? Yeah, yeah. That was before she was out, though. Oh, come on. You know what I mean? Like, the same as your friends at uni. Come on.

Of course, when you're an LGBT songwriter, everything has an extra layer of meaning, or at the very least, other people try to lump on an extra layer of meaning, you know, even when it's not there. You know, like when George Michael was forced out, you'd go over the Wham singles and go, ah, so maybe Club Tropicana was a gay club,

or, oh, that's why he didn't want his mate to get married in Young Guns Go For It. Could be true, but it could also be ridiculous because it kind of implies that everything gay people do is entirely determined by their sexuality. It's like seeing George Michael in the papers eating a packet of frazzles and going, oh, they must be the gay crisps then.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Depends which pocket you put the packet in. Well, I do think you're right that everything does get given this extra layer. And I wonder if, I don't want to sort of speak for you, but did you mean by that, that constant craving is hinting at the kind

of longing and yearning for forbidden fruit yeah and that being the situation under which gay people had to basically live for centuries you could say it elevates the context of the song from boohoo you don't fancy me because i'm not attractive enough for you with someone else to oh fucking hell you don't fancy me because nature and biology. Yeah, it's got a sort of echo of, you know, Radcliffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, or something like that. I think, you know, good or great songwriters will generally draw from their own experience, but they will strive to reach others. You know, that's kind of what they do. So a lot of, you know, a lot of great know a lot of great songs are it's not that it's ambiguous it's just that it's expansive and and large and um people can relate to it you know they'll find something in it to relate to and if you're a gay person it's going

to be about your own your own experience as a gay person but you're also a person and you want to connect with all kinds of audiences and we can sit all day pulling apart the semiotics and inner meanings and all that cobblers while millions of other people are coming across it on radio too and thinking oh this is lovely it is lovely it is lovely and that's it you know next time it's on the radio i will listen because i wouldn't say it's blown my mind but it's certainly given me a slight slap upside the head that i like this song. So the following week, Constant Craving jumped two places to number 19 and a week later would get to number 15, its highest position. The follow-up, The Mind of Love,

open brackets, Where Is Your Head, Catherine, close brackets, would only get to number 72 in May and she never got near the top 40 again, but she closed out the year with that cover of Vanity Fair where she got a shave off Cindy Crawford and appeared at the Concert of Hope for the National AIDS Trust with George Michael, David Bowie and Mick Hucknall. I would just like to ask why wasn't there a happy hardcore track sampling this called constant raving constant craving it's always great to introduce the band on the show when it's their first time, especially knowing they've worked so hard to get here.

From Scotland at number 29, Rum Rick with the excellent Wonderful. It's always great to introduce a band on the show when it's their first time, says Franklin off camera again, as we look at a whammy bar being interfered with, especially when they've worked so hard to get here. He's talking about Run Rig and Wonderful. Formed in the Isle of Skye and Glasgow in 1973, when the accordionist Blair Douglas' mam needed a band at short notice for a North Oost and Burneray Association dance in Glasgow and linked her son up with the Macdonald brothers, Callum and Rory,

the run-rig dance band spent the first five years of their career tearing up the dance halls of the west coast of Scotland with their rocky take on the traditional music of the Highlands and Islands. In 1978, they put out their first LP, Play Gaelic, an entirely Gaelic album, apart from the title, which caused no end of Mither with the record label, but caught the mood of much of the country at the peak of the Scottish devolution wave, and the band suddenly became a very big deal north of Hadrian's

Wall. It wouldn't be until 1982 that they put out their first single, a cover of the 18th century folk standard Loch Lomond, and it got to number 86 in the UK chart in the first week of 1983. Although they failed to crack the charts on two separate occasions in 1984, they spent the rest of the decade consolidating their position as a hugely popular independent band in Scotland. And when they signed a deal with Chrysalis in 1988, they started to gain a following on the continent

and they closed out the decade with their six-LP Searchlight, entering the album chart at number 11 in October of 1989. In 1991, their next LP, The Big Wheel, smashed into the charts at number four. They played a gig to 50,000 people, reasonably close to the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond and they eventually breached the top 40 when the Hot Hammer EP got to number 25 in September of that year. This single, the follow-up to Flower of the West, which got to number 43 in November of 1991, is the lead-off cut from their eighth LP Amazing Things, which comes out a week tomorrow.

And it's a new entry this week at number 29. And here they are in the Elstree studio, making their studio debut on top of the pops. And yes, chaps, the music industry may be in crisis at the moment with a drop in record sales but here's the upside bands with a dedicated fan base suddenly having the clout to get their faves into the charts what is there to say about wonderful by run rig seriously help help me well here's the thing right i found mark franklin's introduction incredibly patronizing when he says right so he says it's always great to introduce a band on the show

when it's their first time, especially knowing they've worked so hard to get here. Hang on a minute, right? Runrig, by this point, had had two gold albums and two silver albums and were a massive live act in Scotland. I guarantee you, I don't know if any members of Runrig have ever written their memoirs, but if they have,

you will not find any member of Runrig saying that appearing on Top of the Pops in 1993 was a highlight of their career. No fucking way. Right? But yeah, they are having their Clannad moment. You know, Clannad were massive in Ireland and then they finally had a hit in the UK with the theme from Harry's Game. Not quite on the

same level. But yeah, they're a band whose appeal is very regional or national, I should say. And that's fine. Top of the Pops is in their context. It's weird seeing them on there at all. But for Franklin to imply, oh, this plucky little band uh isn't it great you know we're doing them a favor no no no it is his context though to be fair isn't it mark franklin was found in his cradle underneath one of the stages and uh just you know raised by the tea lady and it's uh it's all he knows it's all he knows yeah a couple of years before this they had played to 50 000 people people in Balloch Country Park. So, yeah, they didn't need this and they don't need me to be snarky about them either.

It's a different sphere, isn't it? It's a different plane of existence that a lot of bands occupy. There are bands who have really good careers that don't interact very much with, occasionally they'll kind of merge with the mainstream and then you don't hear from them again. But that doesn't mean that they cease to exist. Yeah. I mean, even people in the actual music biz didn't know anything about them. There was an oral history about Red Wedge in Mojo, the Red Wedge tour of 1986. And they were added on the bill during the Scottish leg. And Tom Robinson said, Runrig turned up at Edinburgh Playhouse

and most of us didn't have a clue who they were. Then they went out on stage and the whole place went apeshit. Amazing. We were all standing at the side saying, who are these guys? And Donny Munro, the lead singer, said it was unusual for us back then to be suddenly thrust amongst all these top chart acts, but we were really delighted to be able to do the show. We did a song called Dance Called America because it was about forced emigration from Scotland and feudalism, and it related to the sense of loss of community that we were experiencing under Thatcherism.

So, yeah, they deserve their spot there. I mean, Simon, as a proud, woe-smeared Kelch, you've spoken of your love for big country back in the day. And Runrig's always been depicted as the Laphroaig to big country's bells and teachers. So did you ever dabble? No, and I don't really see the comparison apart from the fucking tartan shirt.

They shared one member, didn't they? They did share a member with, yeah, there's been 12 members of run rig i think across 45 years but we're not talking about sort of um imperial phase big country no i i i couldn't tell you actually i just know that there's somebody somebody was in both of them fair enough but no i i can't really just from from this song yeah sure they're wearing tartan or czech shirts but that's about they they look terrible don't i mean we've got to get into this okay so what it is so they've got leather jackets and work trousers on they've got work trousers and work shoes it's like they've just they've

just come from the office and they've had to throw on leather jackets to go on top of the pop and they're not even the right kind of pleated trousers are they they're not the david stubbs ones they're not semiotic trousers are they are they die, though? And they've got those really bad early 90s shirts under leather jackets. So they all look like a biker gang who only shop at C&A. Well, one of them's got the biker jacket, but the other, it's a blues on, which is just never good. It's like Jimmy Nail in Spender or something.

Oh, fuck me. Mullets as well, some serious mulletage going on. And they look so old. I mean, the main guy, Donny Munro, I looked it up and he's 39 when this is recorded. He looks every day of that and you can probably add another 15 on top. I mean, fucking hell.

He's the kind of 39 that people used to be in the 50s. Yes, yes. I didn't watch this episode when it originally came out. So when I realised that Run Rig were on it, I was like, ooh, I'm going to find out what this band are all about you know like crass because you know you'd see crass in the late 70s on the walls everywhere and you never heard them you just thought oh god what what must they be like and

it wasn't until like the turn of the century that i started listening to crass i thought oh fucking hell this is all right but i can't say the same for run rig i don't know what i was expecting probably a musical version of mcglashan out of absolutely but you know what we get here is a melange of mid-80s windy celticness and incidental music from an episode of tiger don't we yeah like the adventures or the silencers or something like that. The thing with it is, I don't believe, and this is for my own superficial skim through what Runrig are about, that this is representative of them as a band. No.

It happens without anything happening. There's all one chord for ages at the start and not even a melody to speak of. No. And they play their instruments like like their display models and they're trying to play really softly trying them out and they'll be handing them back to the shop assistant any second now do you know what i mean at least they're not doing smoke on the water though give them that or stairway to heaven um yeah there's kind of the vague atmosphere of rock

about it but there's no emphasis on anything in particular and there isn't really a riff and it's not in any particular key and there isn't really a hook but other than that it's it's great yeah it sounds vaguely christian doesn't it it's very yeah sorry but it does i think their earlier material would be more spirited and maybe more roots basedbased than this. But this, yeah, it doesn't even have a chorus. It's just got a title that's repeated. So Wonderful, Too Wonderful, So Wonderful, Too Wonderful. Oh, come on, guys. So it's kind of surprising that of their entire catalogue,

this is the one that gets into the charts. But, you know, what can you do? Yeah, I don't know what that says about people who buy records, really. I mean, it's honestly because Onerig were often name-dropped as, oh, well, you think you know about Scottish rock. Well, wait till you hear Runrig. So here we are hearing Runrig. And all I can say is it's just as well that the Jesus and Mary chain

and Mogwai and the Associates and Franz Ferdinand and Orange Juice and Belle and Sebastian and all those other bands exist so that we don't have to judge the rock of Scotland on this one song and this one performance. Yeah, it's very much the sound of middle-aged Scotland, isn't it, this? But we get a proper look at the main stage for the first time and oh, we can see where the BBC's chucked the money. Yeah, it's a properly wide stage flanked by metallic stairs and balconies to the side with a huge bank of scaffolding at the back and the band have decorated that with a massive banner which depicts the cover of their new lp which is a photo of the hugh mcdarmid memorial

created by the artist jake harvey so there is that yeah hugh mcdormand was a poet and one of the founders of the national party of scotland i discovered great so yeah a learning experience yeah no disrespect to them who they've had an incredible career and made a lot of people very happy but they're not a top of the pops band and this is not a top of the pops song and it's not barely even a song yeah so the following week wonderful dropped 14 places to number 43. The downside to having a hardcore fan base that buy shit on week one with no one else there to pick up the slack and a very chilling portent of the very near future.

But by the end of the month, the LP entered the chart at number two, held off the summit of Ben Chartis by their greatest hits by Hot Chocolate. The follow-up, The Greatest Flame, got to number 35 in May, but they'd go on to score six more top 40 hits throughout the 90s and even got to number nine in November of 2007 when they linked up with the Tartan Armour

for a revamp of loch lomond in 1997 their lead singer donny monroe who had already served as the rector of the university of edinburgh at this very moment left the band in order to run at the general election as the labour candidate for ross sky and inverness west but lost to charles kennedy and the band would put out six more studio LPs and five live LPs before splitting up in 2018. Oh, and Run Rig was a system of arable land tenure from late medieval times where strips of farmland were rotated amongst villagers on a yearly basis so no one could permanently bagsy the most fertile land.

Dig it, kids! So wonderful So wonderful Here we go with this week's top 40 breakers. Climbing at number 25, Rage Against The Machine, Killing In The Name. We go straight from Run Rig to the sting for the breakers section without even bothering to go back to Frank. He's getting fuck all airtime in this episode, isn't he?

Yeah, basically a glorified voiceover artist. First up, it's Killing In The Name by Rage Against The Machine. Formed in Los Angeles in 1991, Rage Against The Machine got their name from a song that front person Zack De La Roca wrote for his old band, Inside Out. In December of 1991, after garnering a following on the LA gig circuit, they recorded a 12-track demo tape, which they started selling at gigs, with a cover consisting of newspaper stock exchange figures with an actual match affixed to it.

And after they sold over 5,000 copies of it, they started shopping it around to record labels. One label, Atlantic, was so taken by it that one of the staff bootlegged it and sold hundreds of copies of it under a different cover, which led the band to reject their overtures and signed to Epic instead. This single, their debut, is the lead-off track from their first LP,

Rage Against The Machine, which came out last November, which already caused heads to snap back in the record shop due to its cover, which featured the Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc, who set himself on fire in protest at the persecution of Buddhists in South Vietnam in the early 60s. It crashed into the chart last week at number 27, and this week, after an incident that we may discuss later on, it's nudged up two places to number 25.

And here's a very selective clip of the video, which was directed by Petereter gideon one of tom morello's guitar students who filmed the band having fun on stage at the whiskey a go-go and the club with no name and panel this is why i was so down on lenny kravitz earlier because i knew this was coming fucking hell i love this song fuck yeah i knew it was coming. Fucking hell, I love this song. Fuck, yeah, I knew it was coming. And still when it came on, when I was watching the episode, I went, fuck, my diaphragm just twanged a little bit. It's like there's a set of muscles.

This is actually scientifically proven. There's a set of muscles in the neck and jaw that can only be activated by this record. It's like a natural reflex. You know, like when the doctor hits your knee with his toffee hammer. I mean, we only get 23 seconds of it, possibly because the BBC have had their fingers burned, chopped off, put in a microwave for three hours

and then lobbed down an active volcano over this single. Let's get to it now. Article in the news section of this week's NME. Rage against The Machine, who were forced to cancel the last three dates of their UK tour due to illness last week, are at the centre of two censorship rows. The rows started after Radio 1 received 138 phone complaints

after broadcasting the band's current single, Killing In The Name, unedited during last Sunday's Top 40 chart show. DJ Bruno Brooks played the original version of the single, culminating in the line, fuck you, I won't do what you tell me, repeated 16 times. A spokeswoman for Radio 1 said a studio mix-up meant the obscene version was played

instead of the edited clean version. We apologise to everyone who phoned up to complain, she said. It was an unfortunate mistake. These things happen. Two days after the Fiore, BBC Two's The Late Show censored

the band's live version of Bullet in the Head on Tuesday's No Nirvana Grunge special, which repeated the word motherfucker. Disgusting! And it's also worth noting that not only have the supposedly down-with-the-kids NME have censored all the swear words themselves but they've also written motherfucker you know like newsreaders of the 80s used to say skinheads yeah yeah the story goes that Brooks had put the record on without checking and slipped off to record a promo or something came back absolutely unaware that he'd laid 16 fucks upon the nation and apparently was suspended for a week so there we go rage against the machine have done nothing else have got rid of bruno brooks for a week but amazing you know this is one thing that always does my head in about djs you know you'd see them on things

like nationwide presenting the shows and the minute they put a record on and it starts playing they take the fucking headphones and start blathering on or pissing about not checking what they're actually playing yeah that's insane man i mean i could never do that i'd be listening all the time in case i put the wrong record on or or worse because i don't know if i even want to mention this i've had this massive phobia since the mid-80s about getting a load of mates around to watch a video and as i put it in and it started up i'd immediately think to myself you know what what what if this isn't spinal tap or driller killer and it's actually a video of me sat in my armchair having a massive wank with a big gormless smile on my face just to clarify paul craig jameson i have never ever made

or owned a tape of myself having a massive wank and not holding my mouth right. Yeah, but AI will take care of that. God, yeah. Deep fakes. I didn't think about that. And that fear is lingering. You know, even nowadays, you know,

what usually happens is we pick out what Top of the Pops are going to do, and I send you the video. The minute I press the send button, I think, you know, what if this isn't Top of the Pops were going to do and I send you the video the minute I press the send button I think you know what if this isn't Top of the Pops but me unattractively availing myself of my own facilities all I'm saying is if Bruno Brooks has been as paranoid as me he wouldn't have got himself into this shit yeah I actually DJ'd um on the BBC about 15 times a few years ago yeah i was on bbc radio sussex and i was a guest presenter on bbc introducing um quite a few times and there was a track i was

playing that i knew had a fuck on it and i sat there hovering over the mute button because i knew when it was coming i didn't have the skills to actually do my own edit of the song so i had to do it live like fucking just hit that button for a split second to bleep out the fuck and i did it so that's professionalism bruno brooks that is professionalism yeah but anyway again with the early 70s riffage fucking hell yeah rage against the machine are the other band on this episode where i got there first and I can't claim any special credit for that because it's not like they were some obscure indie band playing in pubs. They were already signed to Sony. Well, you know, Epic, but they had the Sony machine behind them.

But what happened was the previous year in 92, promos of this song had started circulating a long, long time before even the album had come out. And one of them reached me and one of them reached two DJs called Jonathan and Iko, who ran a night called Feet First at the Camden Palace, which was a legendary Tuesday night indie night for students. It was either a quid to get in or sometimes it was free if you had the right kind of flyer. And, you know, it's a bit of a legendary place.

I saw all kinds of... I saw Jane's Addiction there. I saw Swayze. I saw Ride. Daisy Chainsaw. All kinds of bands that became, you know, a big deal just for free at that club. But Jonathan and Iko started playing Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine

months before anybody knew who Rage Against the Machine were. And the crowd used to go absolutely fucking mental for it. And people would come up to me and go, what's that song, what's that song? That's actually quite impressive because indie nightclub crowds can be very conservative. They basically wanted to hear Size of a Cow by the Wonderstuff or The Only Living Boy in New Cross

by Carter the Un unstoppable sex machine over and over and over or if they're being really daring they would leap about out of space by the prodigy so for this kind of funk metal this angry funk metal political epic to get dropped in the middle of a prime time dj set week after week and for people to go fucking nuts to it tells you something about what kind of song it is and what it was. And it had the same effect on me, you know. Even though it was on a major label,

I did have to pull a few strings and do a bit of digging to find out, well, you know, how do I get hold of these fuckers? When are they coming over? And I ended up interviewing them in the dressing room of the Camden Underworld. Right. Which is, you know,

that's the level they were at at the time to write what turned out to be their first UK interview i've got them i've got yeah i've got rage games machine i've got suede i've got the darkness and and wu-tan clan who in various ways i can claim as my my personal firsts but yeah i i thought this record was just fucking superb. And it's been done to death now. And it's become the stuff of mockery for various reasons, which I'm sure we'll come to. But if you just try and wipe all that away, and just imagine the visceral feeling of hearing this for the first time. And as Sarah says, just what it does to your body involuntarily, it's extraordinary. It's just a very very very exciting piece of music and yet

there was kind of a lot of this sort of thing about i already mentioned jane's addiction but in terms of funk rock or funk metal we'd had red hot chili peppers we'd had faith no more there was sort of crossover things collaboration things so you had public enemy with anthrax and you had ice t with his band body count yes and things like the beat nigs and stuff like that um so there's a lot of that stuff going around but rage against machine really fucking carried it off they actually yes probably more than anyone other than public enemy in their collaboration with anthrax managed to to harness the excitement of rap and metal at the same time in a way that it became horribly

influential of course um yeah and and it does mean that the refrain fuck you i won't do what you tell me has gone from being a kind of critique of the american military industrial complex to basically adolescent petulance yeah and essentially it gave birth to all those papa roach type bands oh yes whose main message was really fuck you mom i won't tidy my bedroom yes that's what it gave us but it's not that's not race against machines fault they can't help that and this single and also bullet in the head and bomb track were just astonishing and the things that tom morello does with his guitar it's it doesn't sound like a guitar it sounds like some kind of industrial vinyl scratching or god knows what he's doing there because there's been so many attempts to make walk this way by run dmc happen again and

most of them being absolute catshit but this lot here they've cracked it by simply having a lead singer who shouts and someone who can kind of make his guitar scratch and he sounds fucking brilliant well he's a nerd tom morello he's a fucking guitar nerd and sometimes in fact i would say nine times out of ten that leads nowhere good yeah but every now and then you get someone like him who has this incredible grasp of technique and does something kind of awesome with it you know and again from a british perspective here's another example of a trend that started to kick in in the early 90s because you know if we as british kids were worked up into a froth about the idea of america in the 70s and then were crushed under the weight of american cultural juggernauts in the 80s the 90s or or at least the early part of it

was all about being told by americans that america was just as shit as our country yeah this was the decade when the curtain was pulled back to reveal people from trailer parks fighting with each other on jerry springer and it's like oh america's actually not all that after all yeah well yeah grunge told us that hip-hop told us that and here's another example yeah you've got Zach De La Rocha basically saying that there is significant crossover between the US military and the KKK. And the police.

Some of those who burn crosses are the same that join forces. Yeah, exactly. And also, you know, the idea of an American rock band who were properly left-wing, that was a fucking mind- in 1993 yeah it was you know you either had american rock bands who were kind of bozos politically or just didn't really care they weren't engaged politically but they could rock or you had hip-hop acts who did know where it's at politically but weren't really interested in rock so to have the two together was unexpected

yeah definitely yeah they were really smart as well, Rage Against the Machine. They were prone to sloganeering and fuck you, I won't do what you tell me is nothing if not a very basic and direct slogan. But they knew what they were doing. They knew that's how rock works. That's how you reach people. You're not really going to reach people with impenetrable Marxist dialectic. You have to boil it down to a slogan. Tom Morello was really fucking smart. He had an honours degree in political science from Harvard, which nobody expects that from a fucking guitarist in an American rock band. Did you see that thing that happened on Twitter in 2018 about this? No.

This was so funny. This is the best own I've seen on the internet. about this. No. This was so funny. This is the best own I've seen on the internet. So he posted a photo of his guitar with fuck Trump painted on it. Yeah. And some book wrote, another successful musician instantly becomes a political expert. Right. So Morello's reply was amazing, right? He said, one does not have to be an honours grad in political science from Harvard University to recognise the unethical and inhumane nature of this administration. But, well, I happen to be an honours grad in political science from Harvard University, so I can confirm that for you. It's fucking brilliant. See, I think that this is actually piss-take proof.

I think it is bulletproof because it's so serious. Zach Del Roscio is a serious man, a serious activist who really cares and really, you know, that's what he is first almost before a musician, you know. And I don't think any amount of recontextualising or overexposure can really tarnish it. It's also another track that is very interesting in terms of what perspective it's written from it kind of zooms in and out there's a kind of philosophical abstract perspective

and then there's a kind of crash zoom to an accusation now you do what they told you now you're under control so it's very urgent but it's almost mocking poking at you and you know and so there's these kind of dizzying shifts in perspective. I think at the end as well with the coda, it's like it's not just Zach speaking, it's a sort of radical ventriloquism where it's like, I'm speaking for you now. And it's irresistible. It's like his voice just becomes this kind of disembodied chant.

And you know who it belongs to, but it's taken on a life of its own. And he starts quietly and gets louder and louder like he's awakening to how things really are also it's, I don't know about you how long do you think the final motherfucker is

just off the top of your head in your head eight seconds I'd say about eight seconds right, it isn't at all, it's really short because the final fuck you are, do what you tell me is very emphatic eight seconds i'd say about eight seconds right it isn't at all it's really short because like the final fuck you i won't do what you tell me is very emphatic and you can hear the full stop and the kind of mic drop and the motherfucker after it is just like an extra shoe in the ribs

but it's very short you just remember it as a long scream in your head because that's what everyone does everyone just goes motherfucker yeah but what it actually is is motherfucker right it's short it's really short it's so funny like how it actually is is motherfucker it's short, it's really short it's so funny like how it actually becomes something else because it hey man it belongs to the people I mean it truly is the alt-rock come on Eileen

drop it at the wedding see that dance floor go off and Chop Suey by System of a Down those are the two yeah right i did start to think i was trying to compose a list of you know songs that speed up and slow down which is a risky gambit but you know if you can pull it off it will get people fucking going oh right yeah yeah yeah it does that yeah yeah i mean um yeah because uh little louie did the opposite

oh yeah slowed it down and and that was that was audacious as well as salacious. But there's not very many. There's also my favourite piece of classical music and also the only one that I can name is In the Hall of the Mountain King by Green Green. And that's, you know the one? Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And that speeds up a little bit towards the end.

Some versions of it, they really go all out. And da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Which kind of misses the point. You only need to do it a little bit towards the end some versions of it they they really go all out and kind of misses the point you only need to do it a little bit and another extremely overexposed uh decontextualized piece of music that is used it's editors love it just that slap it over a montage of just some chaos happening in a reality show it's just like oral shorthand for chaos hedonism or general semi-scripted skull fuckery. But it doesn't matter to me. Every time I hear that, I go, oh, and I get this tingle of like, I don't know what it is.

It's just like, oh my God. It's like being captured by trolls and born aloft down the mountain by such. And I realise that it hasn't, in real terms, it has not been preserved with its original meaning and it lost that long time ago and it's grim to think about the state of america now which is terrifying and depressing and you know there's 30 years later and and i i think the some of the right wing did try to claim this for themselves didn't they before they realized what it was actually about is that kind of knee-jerk oppositional defiant yeah which is just kind of

running rampant among public life in in america now yeah when this record first came out you could be confident if you suffered a miscarriage you could get medical help and not have to stagger bleeding from one hospital to the next to find a doctor who wasn't afraid of being accused of baby murder so it's it's there's something really bleak about it. It's like, I just imagine Wall-E doing his rounds after humanity has left the trash planet and finding a little tape deck with this in it, you know. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

But this song, man, it's the soundtrack to one of my most cherished memories. You sure you want to tell us this, Al? Six months after this episode, I suddenly find myself in Ludlow in Shropshire. Good start, okay. As the staff writer of a new Mega Drive magazine, got the job straight from graduating. Nice.

From an advert in The Guardian. And I'm fucking loving it, man. I'm practically running to work. I'm hammering out page after page of copy in a converted mill with a mixture of media professionals poached from other mags and farm lads who could write. And those farm lads, fucking hell, their idea of a good night out was getting into a field,

getting some weed or some pig tranquilizers or sniff some silage, a bottle of Mad Dog 2020, and listen on a tape deck to Rage Against the Machine, Black Sunday by Cypress Hill and the Judgment Night soundtrack. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, oh, they were fucking banging to that. Yeah, Judgment Night, that was the whole gimmick, wasn't it? It was like hip-hop act juxtaposed with rock act all the way through.

Sorry, carry on, yeah. So, anyway, it's the Christmas do in the local theatre, and I end up sitting at a table with the owners of the company called Roger and Ollie Frey, and their history was fascinating. They were practically run out of London by the Met in the late 70s because they'd published a game magazine called Zipper. Wow.

They ended up in Shropshire, and they started doing catalogues in the early 80s for ZX81 games realised no one was doing any actual games mags and they started up Crash and Zap which, you know, if you were that way inclined monuments of the 80s and both of them fucking love me so we end up at this table chatting about my future plans and everything

and I'm sitting there realising, fucking hell, they're talking about fast-tracking me right up the ladder and I'm looking at being an editor by the end of next year. So I'm leaning in hard to hear what they're saying. And then some of the farm lads who've been pestering the DJ to stop playing all this Christmas party shit and put some proper music on. One of them's just run back from his house with Black Sunday

and Rage Against the Machine and told him to put that on. And they played Killing in the Name. While all this serious discussion about my career is going on, I noticed out the corner of the island, like five of my mates, Miles, who was a greb lad with hair down to his arse and about 50 bangles up his arm, my mate, the accessible games dog who ended up living with a chap called pricey who was essentially kurt cobain but with more links nevada

a welsh goth called will who was pretty much the world's first emo may he rest and johnny sex cat and all climbed up on the stage and we're going absolutely fucking psych abilities at a meteor's gig on each other to killing in the name and i'm watching this out the corner of my life i fight so hard not to howl with laughter at it i end up blowing an actual snot bubble in front of my paymasters it didn't really matter in the end because the night ended with everyone getting pissed up and ollie absolutely off his box with his shirt completely undone, grabbing the mic off the DJ and screaming, everyone dance, dance for your magazines. And in six weeks time, the entire company would fall. Oh, shit.

Because the financial director had embezzled half a million pounds out of the company. So, yeah. Well, the snot bubble didn't matter that much then. That's right no it didn't i've dj'd to that demographic myself i went to baskerville hall which is uh in hay on y which is just inside wales but basically he's next to herefordshire which is not far from shropshire obviously and baskerville hall had this massive kind of barn it's like a disco attached to it and yeah it is that baskerville hall had this massive kind of barn it's like a disco attached to it and yeah it is that baskerville hall by the way as in you know conan doyle i was djing for a mate's wedding down there and i was just playing stuff like like darth punk or whatever because it was

that sort of era and it and it went fine but that crowd they are fucking hardcore that's for sure right and hearing what you're telling me now i should have played rage against the machine just to see the reaction they would have fucking gone off mate the name of course rage against the machine lent itself to all kinds of fun so david stubbs um when writing the comedy pages of melody maker ttt used to have a section every week for quite a long time of every week, rage against the machine, rage against a machine. Zach Della Rocha, just really swearing about a fucking fax machine or a washing machine or whatever it may be. And of course, I'm pretty sure that we had Glastonbury

coverage at one point with a headline, rage against the latrine. It did gladden my heart slightly last year or the year before to see how how deeply embedded this track is in the culture in america and in a good way al you know the uh herman cain awards subreddit um uh it's slightly distastefully oh gosh yes people were very defiant about covid and wouldn't wear masks and all this kind of thing and made a big deal of it on their social media it's uh assembling their life and death in their memes and posts and inevitably the last ones being uh yeah i think i'm feeling better and then uh here's a go fund me for the funeral yes but um one of these posted a meme that was george carlin quote

never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups referring to you know all the sheep following the rules about covid and some brilliant wag underneath said, some of those that quote Carlin are the same that win Darwin. Oh! Yeah, nice. Very good. Nice. So the following week, Killing in the Name dropped 12 places to number 35.

The follow-up, Bullet in the Head, did even better, getting to number 16 in May, and they'd round off the year with Bomb Track getting to number 37 in September. They went on to notch up three more top 40 hits over the rest of the decade, including getting to number 8 with Bulls on Parade in April of 1996, and Split Up in 2000. A year later, in the wake of 9-11, Clear Channel Communications, the biggest radio station conglomerate in America,

circulated a list of lyrically questionable songs that were not to be played on radio because they vaguely remind people of planes flying into buildings with all 43 recordings made by Rage Against the Machine on the blacklist. There's a fucking achievement. Would you care, chaps, to hear a selection of the other tunes on that list? Yes, please. Okay, so, Another One Bites the Dust and Kill a Queen by Queen.

Right. It's the End of the World as We Know It by R.E.M. Jump by Van Halen. Oh, fucking hell. I know. Great Balls of Fire by Jerry Lee Lewis. Right. Break Stuff by Limp Bizkit.

Ruby Tuesday by the Rolling Stones. What? Yeah, 9-11 happened on a Tuesday, you see. What? I know. So I'm guessing Everything's tuesday by chairman of the board was on that list as well benny and the jets rocket man and daniel by elton john why daniel he's flying away isn't it i suppose fly away by lenny cravis sorry lenny imagine by john lennon

yes about fucking time yeah imagine which is actually against religious indoctrination. So, yeah, anyway. Dancing in the Street by Martha and the Vandellas. What, because people in certain parts of the world were literally dancing in the street at the sight of the towers coming down? But not Dancing in the Street by Bowie and Jagger. Fucking hell, as if people had suffered enough. Yeah, but why was the Vandellas one?

But I just don't get it. Racism. Yeah. 99 Red was the Van Delis one? But I just don't get it. Racism. 99 Red Balloons by Naina. Right. St Elmo's Fire by John Parr. What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong. Fair enough.

The Night Chicago Died by Paper Lace. Okay. And Bits and Pieces by the Dave Clark Five. Yeah. But then, in early December of 2008, the DJ John Mortar was so appalled at the Christmas number one race being ruined by the X Factor that he launched a social media campaign to run a designated spoiler. Unfortunately, his choice of single that year,

Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley, designated spoiler unfortunately his choice of single that year never gonna give you up by rick assler only became that year's christmas number 73 but a year later possibly inspired by a new story about an asda in preston getting into trouble by playing killing in the name the previous year he tried again and killing in the name entered the chart at number eight there the week before Christmas. After being invited to perform the song live on the Radio 5 breakfast show on the condition that they cut the swearing out and then not doing what the BBC told them, leading to Nicky Campbell and Sheila Fogarty having to apologise, the single soared 79 places to number one.

Whoa, that's the biggest soar you've ever done. Fucking hell. Did you hear that live? No, I didn't know about it. It was so beautiful. I mean, what do they think's going to happen? Well, yeah. BBC Radio 5 Live go up to them and say,

yeah, you know that song where you say you won't do what we tell you uh can you do it but in this case can you do what we tell you there's a live clip of it on youtube and at the beginning he refrains from the fuck you but he just builds up and then he just goes into it and your fists both your fists and your feet go up in the air and i've got to say man that night when he got to number one he did feel like a moment yeah i think that was brilliant it was a perfect deployment of american sincerity in the service of british absurdism it was great yes i don't think it diminished it at all it was it was fantastic i think at the time i didn't i it because I got the hatred of Simon Cowell

and X Factor and all of that sure but I just thought the way to beat bad pop is with good pop not to beat it with proper real rock music you know by real musicians and I felt that's what was going on

I felt like yeah but I've kind of mellowed about it now and I felt that's what was going on. I felt like, yeah, but I've kind of mellowed about it now and I'm glad that RATM, R-A-T-M, however you say it. Do we say RATM? No, no one ever says that. I'm glad Rage Against the Machine have a number one to their name. Yeah, it seems only right and righteous. They're always going to be there, man. That's it now.

Christmas number ones, which now mean less and less yeah you know at a time when it still meant something there they are forever yeah yeah like that it is brilliant and since then the song has been used in 2012 at ukip rallies fuck and buy a load i know and buy a load of Trumpalumpas at a Republican Party rally in 2020. Both times, the band told them quite rightly

to fuck off. He was live here last week. Great new song from Brian Ferry, New York 22, I Put A Spell On You. Born in Washington, County Durham in 1945, Brian Ferry spent the late 60s studying fine art at Newcastle University and dabbling with local bands until he relocated to London in 1968 to teach art and pottery at Holland Park School.

In 1970, he auditioned for the role of lead singer of King Crimson, and although he wasn't deemed a suitable replacement for Gordon Haskell, he so impressed Pete Sinfield that the band he went on to form, Roxy Music, was signed to Sinfield's EG record label. They put out their debut single, Virginia Plain, in August of 1972 and scampered up the charts to number four, kicking off a career that would spawn ten top ten singles and a number one with Jealous Guy in March of 1981.

However, Ferry also began a solo career almost right from the off, starting in 1973 when he put out the covers LP These Foolish Things, with the lead-off cut A Cover of Dylan's A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, getting to number 10 in October of that year, and went on to put out five more solo LPs throughout the 70s. After splitting up Roxy in 1983, he resumed his solo career, racking up his first and only number one LP with Boys and Girls in 1985, knocking out five top 40 hits over the latter half of the decade. In 1987, he reunited with Brian Eno, however, and commenced work on his next LP, and by the time 1993 came round, it was still being worked on. However, he's taken the time to knock out Taxi, another almost all-covers LP which comes out next week, and this is the

lead-off single from it. It's a bash at the 1956 Screaming Jay Hawkins single, which the Alan Price set took to number nine for two weeks in April of 1966, but by this point was best known for Nina Simone's cover, which got to number 28 in February of 1969. It came out last week and he was immediately hustled over to Elstree for a live performance with an all-female band, loads of candles and fishing nets and that French dance where women get thrown about and this week it's entered the charts at number 22 so here's a clip of the video, all 24 seconds of it. I mean they're obviously trying to lump in as many tunes as possible and they're clearly fretting about the attention span of the Sonic and Mario craze youth of today but I think you get more of a feel of the song and the artist on an al price advert don't

you i'm amazed it was as much as 24 seconds i didn't time it but it felt more like five you know yeah i mean five years ago a slot in the breaker section that's going to bag to you anything from 45 seconds to a minute and a bit of airtime. Right. Which would be more than enough to make you either want to hear it in full or sit tight and see what's on next. But I feel this is doing no one any favours, really. Yeah, I'm surprised it was 24 seconds, but I think it's enough in this instance.

So anyway, Brian Ferry in 1993. What's the point of him? I used to travel by Virgin Atlantic quite a lot in the 90s, back and forth to Los Angeles or Las Vegas to interview bands for Melody Maker. And before takeoff, they would always show you this film and it was clearly aimed at the passengers who turned left at the door instead of right,

which I never did because I'm not brian fucking ferry you know and on that film there was a little promotional clip for necker island richard branson's private island resort in the british virgin islands no relation right and of course private island resorts have got a bad rep these days due to the Jeffrey Epstein and the King of England's younger brother affair. But in those days, they were still seen as aspirational. And the soundtrack for that advert, obviously, was Roxy Music. The implication being that if you were one of the passengers who turned right at the door and you wondered how wealthy you'd need to be in order to visit Necker Island the answer was more than this so by the early 90s right Brian Ferry was just this byword this living walking byword for affluence and luxury that that was his public image and I guess it had been since the NME

started calling him Byron Ferrari almost two decades earlier. In fact, there's an album that he released a year after this in 1994, which takes Ferry's international ruling class shtick to the absolute extreme. It's called Mamuna, and it's currently being reissued in a deluxe format, as if Brian Ferry Records could be anything other than deluxe. And it's overseen by friend of the show, Mark Wood. Hello, Mark. Oh, hey, Mark.

And the list of personnel alone is absurdly lavish, right? So it includes Brian Eno, Richard Norris out of The Grid, Phil Manzanera out of Roxy Music, Niall Rogers, Pino Palladino, Guy Pratt, the rock auteur, who's another friend of mine, hello Guy, Maceo Parker, Andy Mackay out of Roxy Music, Carleen Anderson, and here's my favourite credit,

Nan Kidwell, Astrologer. The album was originally going to be called Horoscope. They had an in-house astrologer for the fucking album this album mamuna completely passed me by at the time but but i i thought i should give it a listen as a bit of background research just regarding where ferry was at in this era yeah and and it does that tightrope walk thing he does of staying mostly just the right side of boring while making sure that nothing much happens yeah a couple of times it strays over the line okay um the title track mamuna involves him saying

oh mamuna mamuna for five minutes while nothing much happens um there's there's another one called gemini moon that's the same and to the untrained ear it doesn't even seem to have a chord change it's as if things like melodic churn are somehow vulgar it all sounds very opulent and the market value of your house rises by five percent when you play it um you know they say you're meant to bake bread or make fresh coffee when you've got potential buyers coming around forget that Stick on Mamuna by Brian Ferry the weird thing is it sounds like I'm sneering at it Make bread or make fresh coffee when you've got potential buyers coming around. Forget that. Stick on Mamuna by Brian Ferry. The weird thing is, it sounds like I'm sneering at it.

I kind of enjoyed it. It's the ultimate in background music. But I kind of prefer that to what you actually hear in allegedly sophisticated joints these days, which is usually AI-generated Spotify techno, which when you try and Shazam it it doesn't have an artist credit you know you know the sort of thing i mean so all of this is what he was gearing up to when he recorded taxi and god we used to we used to take the piss out of taxi at melody maker well david stubbs did oh david the idea being that brian ferry was secretly some kind of northern hick who thought that taxis were fancy. But, yeah.

Surely it should have been called Limo. Maybe he just thought, you know, I need to damp this down a little bit. Let's go taxi instead. Or Viscount or Blue Ribbon. Oh, I see where you're going. Yeah, nice. Or Club.

Fucking hell, how many biscuits sound like Brian Ferry solo LPs? Not United, though. United wouldn't, no. Ferry solo LPs? Not United, though. United wouldn't, no. No, that wouldn't work. United, maybe. Oh, yeah, you. Yes, very good. Is he United?

He's something, isn't he? He's not the sort who would turn down an honour, let's say that. We know that. Fucking hell. So him doing a covers album, as you say, not the first time. And I guess he was just doing an album of old standards, just to clear the lungs or clear out the pipes if you forgive that so he could sort of gear up for an actual

album original material because he hadn't done anything for five years the cast list uh on taxi is very similar to that of mamuna with the addition of uh greg filiganes and flaco himaneth right um so some big names on there but the thing with those 70s cover albums, so there's these foolish things, there's another time, another place, and let's stick together. There seemed to be something different in the meaning of them.

It was a bit more, I suppose, like Bowie's pinups, in that they are to be taken in the context of what the artist is doing around that time. So he's almost taking those old, you know, great American songbook standards and recontextualising them in Roxy Music's world. There were these kind of implied inverted commas around them. For me, that makes it more exciting and more interesting

than just a cynical deployment of familiar songs so Roxy music to begin with were all about artfully and gleefully deconstructing the very concept of glamour you know baby James and Acapulco we are flying down to Rio and all that you know but by the time of Mamuna that glee in glamour I think has subsided to the blasé. He sounds jaded with the high life, like an older version of the protagonist from Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero. Yeah, now the party's over, he's so tired. Exactly! Oh, well done, I wish I'd thought of that.

There is something subtly attractive about that. He sounds as if he finds his own blessed boredom faintly erotic somehow. I do have, and I'm sorry to be that guy, but I have a problem with Brian Ferry being a fox hunter and being a Tory, right? Because him being a Tory is so on the nose and it just seems to diminish everything he was originally about. Oh, you enjoy posh stuff, do you?

Oh, so that means you have to be a tory whereas um i always thought roxy music stood for glamour as a permanent state of the imagination and for the democratization of fancy stuff as long as you had the necessary imagination you were allowed past the velvet rope but no it turns out he was just really literal about it. You have to actually be wealthy to experience his world. Of course, the one good thing that came from that was that amazing photo of him during a plane hijack, where he could not look more unruffled by what's going on. I haven't seen that picture for a while,

but in my mind, he has some kind of pink cocktail glass in his hand. If he doesn't, then it's implied. But doing this song, I'm not sure that Ferry's kind of pink cocktail glass in his hand. If he doesn't, then it's implied. But doing this song, I'm not sure that Ferry's kind of blasé posh stick really serves the song very well. I put a spell on you. The original, by Screaming Jay Hawkins from 1956, is a berserk blues ballad in a drunken waltz time. And Hawkins does actually sound like some kind of deranged warlock or voodoo priest

capable of putting a spell on you yes i mean screaming jay hawkins eventually died of an aneurysm and he sounds like he's halfway to causing that aneurysm on his recording of i put a spell on you ferry being ferry is more functional and precise it more, I put a spell check on you. We only get a few seconds of it, as you say. So my main thought during those few seconds, despite having just spoken for about five minutes, is he could be Brett Anderson's dad. Definitely, yeah.

It is an achievement of sorts to take such a unique, characterful song and siphon it into this sort of lounge slop. I mean, I actually do like this kind of opulent sound that he has. It is very sort of luscious and noir-ish and, you know, yeah, brilliant. But you could do that with anything. Like, I don't know why you would pick this to do in the nightclub style. I just, I don't understand the kind of thought process behind it. I mean, yeah, obviously the Screamin' Jay Hawkins original is just a mind blowing thing to try to listen to. And, you know, it's been covered by lots of people. But I think the definitive version for a lot of people is the Nina Simone version. And I mean, obviously,

he's not trying to follow that. He's going completely the opposite direction, but it's so ragingly emotional. It is like the ultimate breakup song. And Nina Simone's version, as in most things she ever did, all things she ever did, just sounds like she's wrenching the words from her innards in such a way that it might actually put a curse on your lousy no good ass

and freeze your cheating balls the next time you try to use them. It's like the ring. It's like you hear that song and then seven days later your knob falls off into the toilet. I just kind of can't get with this really, and 24 seconds was enough for me because it's like, OK, I see what you're doing. I don't really know why, but you do you, Brian.

The video's essentially an even more expensive reprise of the top of the pops performance that was on the previous week right it's a bit like a really expensive and opulent cabaret night at tony's trattatoria in heidi heid you know they've got all the fishing nets hanging from the walls and they've got women dressed up as parisians and throwing each other about and all that kind of stuff and it's like yeah that was all right while fishing nets hanging from the walls and they've got women dressed up as parisians and throwing each other about and all that kind of stuff and it's like yeah that was all right while we're watching this then what's the fucking point yeah haven't you made enough money brian yeah you've got to keep himself in smoking jackets and other smoking jackets i don't know i can't i'm just

trying to think what does brian ferry spend his money on now that he's got the giant house and the priceless Abyssinian rugs? Smoking jackets, just the whole rooms of them. You know, like MTV Cribs went round and people just lying on the floor crying, I can't take any more smoking jackets. I mean, he's at the point in 1993 where a lot more artists are now. You know, they've been around for long enough that all they've got to do now is just be there. And anything they do will just get a little ripple of interest

and it'll get them in the charts and it can just remind everyone that he's still alive and then he can fuck off back to his big collection of smoking jackets. Yeah. So the following week I put a spell on you, nipped up four places to number 18 but no further but the lp entered the album chart at number two in the first week of april denied the top spot by songs of faith and devotion by depeche mode the follow-up a cover of the shirelles will

you still love me tomorrow got to number 23 in June of this year and he closed out 1993 with his cover of Elvis' The Girl of My Best Friend, only getting to number 57 in September. Because you're mine Because you're mad Double A-sided new entry at number 12, Jesus Lizard and Nirvana, Puss and Oh The Guilt. Give me something to start the breathing Formed in Aberdeen, Washington in 1987,

Nirvana are fucking Nirvana. They've just finished recording their third LP in Utero and are currently arguing with their label and themselves over the quality of the mix. But before all that, they decided to donate a track they recorded a year ago, Oh The Guilt, to the Chicago independent label Touch and Go Records, who handled many of the bands Kurt and the lads grew up on, and is, sort of, the follow-up to In Bloom,

which got to number 28 in December of 1992. The label put the single out as a double A side and the other side was offered to the Jesus Lizard, a band who were formed in Austin, Texas in 1987 and relocated to Chicago to link up with Touch and Go in 1989. Despite agonizing over it looking like they were riding on the bigger band's coattails they decided that they wanted in on this double a side business and donated a track from their third lp liar which came out last year unsurprisingly it smashed into the chart this week at number 12 but very surprisingly stanley appell has opted to give the lesserknown band a shine and here's a bit of the video.

So, chaps, what is going on here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's quite a fun thing. Again, hats off to the editor of The Breakers here who had to dab the cold sweat from their brow once more and find a pre-Watershed snippet from this video which is basically just gnarly industrial torture, I think we can say. And the lyrics as well, which are pretty horrifying.

Apparently, David Yao says that it's about a horrible man that he knew in Chicago who threw a woman down the stairs. Oh, right. So it's about that and also a little bit about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Oh, lovely. So, yeah, well, very unlovely in fact but yes puss as in uh it refers to him being a coward as well as puss to mean mouth as in sourpuss smacker in the purse but like the the chorus is entirely just sort of ways to say smack my

bitch up um oh including including plum in the kisser which is, what's that from? What's Powell writing the kisser? I don't know That old American sitcom that is now held up as the example of like You wouldn't do it like that anymore It's quite confrontational, this song And yeah, so well done to them for managing to find, again, the clean bit The clean 20 seconds Oh yeah, Jackie Gleeson, The Honeymooners Yeah, that's the one, yeah You clean 20 seconds oh yeah jackie gleason the honeymooners yeah that's

the one yeah you see i really enjoyed this because it's like it's in the middle of um it doesn't sound like anything else the closest thing obviously is to it's it's closer to rage than anything else but um i mean journalists at the time used to refer to um the jesus lizard and shellac who they really um you can really hear the resemblance but they were grouped together as pig fuck which is is obviously quite derogatory, but it's as descriptive as anything. It's sort of gritty. Was that Robert Criscow's phrase, I think?

It sounds like him, I guess. But it's this sort of gritty, grotty, witty, shitty, clattery American noise rock of the time, which is now kind of very well respected and kind of held up as an influence on a lot of people. Jesus Lizard kind of made music to accompany your night terrors in lyrics full of worms and amputations and fleshy gruesomeness

but all underpinned by a certain intellect. You can see why Nirvana would be happy to stand alongside them because it's very rough and taut and spiky and mildly upsetting. And a fun name which obviously sounds faintly blasphemous and flows a bit better than Iguana Nun or Mediterranean House Gecko God.

There actually is such a thing as a Jesus lizard, isn't there? There is. It's a type of basilisk that can run on water and looks hilarious while doing it, just to get out of, you know, to get out of danger and stuff. And they go up on their hind legs and go, Oh, my God. Oh, is that a crocodile? Oh, my God.

Turns out that Kurt Cobain always wanted Nirvana to sign to Touch and Go. Right. And sent them numerous copies of their first demo in 1988, but they kept knocking them back. So presumably this is him either giving a leg up to his favourite label or ticking off something on his bucket list because, you know, he can do that nowadays. And there's possibly a bit of

here's what you could have won thrown in. Yeah, and it's them showing that they're still in touch with the underground. Yes. Which was a sort of touchy subject for Nirvana because they were always accused of being sellouts and they were very sensitive about that kind of talk. We've not spoken about Nirvana on Chart Music yet.

And we're not. We're not really going to here. But it's safe to say that this single is not being sold on the strength of the name of the jesus list no it's like you know in the 2014 world cup semi-final one of the greatest football matches of all time that you could euphemistically say that brazil and germany shared eight goals yes it's a bit like that isn't it and it also reminded me of in terms of coattails you know you've got robbie williams and his mate jonathan wilkes that he kept trying to foist on us do you remember that uh or paul gascoigne's mate jimmy five bellies or alex turner's mate

miles kane you do get a lot of this sort of thing I think the Jesus Lizards are of higher quality than those but it's just what the phenomenon reminded me of. How much of a deal was the forthcoming release of a new tarot in the Melody Maker office Simon? Oh huge yeah everybody wondering whether it was going to be more slick than Nevermind of course once we knew that Steve Albini was on board not producing because he doesn't like to be called a producer you have to say Steve Albini recorded it uh but yeah you you knew that it was going to go the opposite way if anything so yeah absolutely a huge deal when the album came out and uh of course um Everett True our our ass ed assistant editor was very close with Kurt and Courtney

so we had a bit of an in in that way and bands like the Jesus Lizard were covered a lot in the paper yes not just because they were mates with Nirvana but because that there was genuinely quite a large sort of faction of people at the Maker who were really really really into all that stuff that Sarah was just talking about I had some crossover with with that stuff it didn't really tickle my fancy so much I did go and see the Jesus Lizard at the right garage at Highbury in Islington and and your man David Yao Yao you've got to say like that uh Yao he was quite a dynamic performer very physical very visceral he was sort of midway between Iggy Pop and Gigi Allen that kind of

thing you know Gigi Pop yeah yeah you thought heigi Allen, that kind of thing, you know. Jiggy Pop. Yeah, yeah. You thought he was going to hurt himself or hurt you, you know, on stage. I quite like the way that he doesn't look like a rock star. He just looks like an ordinary bloke. And you know that normally when people say that, you sort of think of cast or the enemy or something, or those sub-Oasis bands. But I don't mean in that kind of

quite knowing stylized way where people will dress like a football casual or something i mean that he's genuinely not rock starry whatsoever um yeah the closest thing i can get is the guy from future islands you know he looks like he should be running an Italian cafe in Chicago rather than singing in a band. I do quite like that. The clip that we do see from the video, it's great that Sarah's spelt out what the full video involves because it's just all we see is one man shouting while another man does some welding, right?

And again, it's the second time I mentioned flash dance, but it made me think of fucking flash dance. Again, like most of the videos on this episode, it's the second time I've mentioned Flashdance, but it made me think of fucking Flashdance. Again, like most of the videos on this episode, it's a bit questionable. It did get banned on assorted channels, both here and in America, because, yes, it does feature the band doing a bit of welding, and by the end you realise that they're welding someone else

into an office chair. Right, yeah. So, yeah, you don't want kids to start doing that kind of shit. I suppose it could only happen in the pre-internet age because these days, if the BBC even showed a few seconds of it, it would then mean that kids go running straight to YouTube or wherever they get their videos to see the full-length thing. And that would be considered irresponsible

to even give them that kind of click-through or that push-through. But yeah, it was fairly safe that the BBC could show this and that is literally all any British people are going to see of it. To be honest with you, if I did go on MTV, it would be the sort of thing that I'd see for about five seconds and go, oh, yo, MTV raps isn't on then, and flick over and go and look for some wrestling or see what tat's being sold on QVC

or if I was really lucky, there'd be a 70s German sex comedy on. Because let's recall that the early 90s were a fucking golden age for tatterlight, if you will, before Sky made everything digital and fucked it all up, man. I'm sorry that I haven't got to see them live, actually, because they've reformed a couple of times, but I don't think they're going to do it again. They are the sort of thing that I would risk getting covid for i've been watching

loads of live clips of them and just going like fucking hell yeah that's a that's a compelling act really incredible rhythm section and just a guy screeching sort of gnomic phrases over and once you can actually understand what they are it's lyrics that would make brett anderson blush beneath a broken branch face down in the grass no mason or bricklayer he a trowel was in his ass that does something for me i don't know why but yeah he's very big on audience interaction and kind of climbing into the audience and taking all his clothes off at the uh not necessarily at the same time but you know who wants to be welded into a chair tonight, then? He seems like, um, Yao, David Yao, seems like a really intelligent, interesting guy.

He's really into photography and cookery and graphic design. Any interview with him, you just realise he has a very amusing turn of phrase. And he released a book, he's a big cat guy as well, he released a book of cat illustrations. David Meow. Exactly. Sorry, I didn't trample on your joke there, did I? No, that's fine.

I've got more. Don't worry. He interviewed sadly departed celebrity cat Lil Bub for the AV Club, which is a truly delightful four minutes where he asks Lil Bub things like, have you ever been naked on stage? And Lil Bub supposedly replies, I'm always naked, David. What's Lil Bub famous for? Just, you know, how they have celebrity animals these days.

Oh, right. She had all sorts of genetic malformations and was, you know, sort of extremely cute. But the guy adopted her when nobody else wanted her. And it was just, you know, it was a lovely story. And he made some money, but mostly gave most of the money that little bub generated he gave to charities and so you know so yeah oh it was very nice yeah you you little bub me yow oh hello was that an actual cat replying bit? Bit of cat content there for you. So the following week, Puss Slash Oh The Guilt dropped 52 places to number 64. And Jesus Lizard's next and last chart appearance with Down was in September of 1994 when it got to number 64.

to number 64. Meanwhile, Nirvana's next release, Heart Shaped Box, got to number five in September of this year. Hats off, Stan Leopold. Yeah.

Getting down with the kids. One step up at number 11, the brilliant new song from Madonna from the album Erotica, Bad Girl. I smoke too many cigarettes today I'm not heavy when I act this way We've done Madonna eight fucking times on Chart Music and this, her 34th single, is the follow-up to Deeper and Deeper,

which got to number six last December. It's the third cut from her fifth LP, Erotica, an album and an era where Madonna uncharacteristically did her sex, publishing a slab of coffee-tell pond-scrot at the same time, which sold a million and a half copies in the first month at $50 a go. But 1993 has started badly for her, with her latest film Body of Evidence getting coated down across the world, and she's not enjoying the current film she's working on, Dangerous Game. Meanwhile, this single is a new entry at number 11 this week.

So here's a clip of the video which features her as an entrepreneur called Louise Oriole who cops off with loads of blokes with Christopher Walker being roped in in one way or another, I don't know. So yeah, it's been a while, hasn't it? Since we've done Madonna.

So to speak. And thus far in her career, Madonna's been a post, hasn't it, since we've done Madonna? So to speak. And thus far in her career, Madonna's been a post-disco party girl, a vixtress, Marilyn Monroe, a pregnant teenager, some sort of flamenco dancer, Dick Tracy's girlfriend, Black Jesus' girlfriend,

a bollock-naked hitchhiker, and now she appears to be a dead body. What a great... I'm sorry, that... You can't appears to be a dead body what a great i'm sorry that you can't read that and just go what a great cv she's only 10 years into her career there is a reason why madonna has been on like every other episode of this podcast it's because she put herself there she put herself at the center of pop culture and the pop charts and just stayed there for decades like no one else has done so you know i'm afraid that's what you get being alive at this time it's it's madonna's time and the gases will

never converge in this way again in the universe so you know you might as well you might as well enjoy it you might as well enjoy it i know we might as well call this the madonna and shaking stevens podcast and i've done with it. A Depeche Mode. Yeah. Oh, God, imagine if them two had done a fucking single together. Imagine if Madonna had done a rock in good way instead of Bonnie Tyler. Fucking hell. Yeah. The universe would fucking collapse in on itself.

I had this album on cassette, obviously, and I loved it, and I like a lot of her ballads, to be honest, which is, this is like the type C Madonna song. It's quite nothingy, but it's moody. It's got an evocative sound palette. It's very nicely produced. The video is quite a ravishing little mini movie

directed by David Fincher. Indeed. After Mark Romanek, who's done everything else in this episode. He passed on it because he was busy doing something else. And yeah, it's Christopher Walken. This is one of only two videos that Christopheropher wolkin has ever done that's right and the other one being a weapon of choice by fat boy slim which is a video it's the best thing fat boy slim ever did but the video is so much so much better than the song it's actually fun to put the video on

and um just put other stuff to it and just see christopher wolkin dancing to anything else you can think of yeah by this time Madonna could have just done a video dressed up as a giant fanny with arms and legs and you know by 1993 people are peaches basically oh yeah yeah peaches yeah you know and people are just shrug because it's it's not that people seem to be bored with Madonna by 1993 this is her 10th top 10 hit so far in this decade and we're only 27 months into it. But no one's capable of being shocked by Madonna anymore. You know, that's who she is.

This is what she does. It's successful. Good for her. There's a really good article in The Atlantic that I read recently by Sophie Gilbert called What Madonnaonna knows and explains better than i can how madonna's entire everything is essentially performance art and uh which and cindy law perclocked this after the mtv music awards where she sort of put on a wedding dress

and showed her pants to the world and everyone was scandalised and Cyndi Lauper went, I know what she's doing. And that's what she's always done. She's very, very good at it. Yeah, and the video is directed by David Fincher who got his start as assistant cameraman on Return of the Jedi

and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Then he did the usual route. He did a load of adverts. Then he got into promo videos, which are just longer adverts with a bit of music. did we don't have to for jermaine stewart englishman in new york for sting straight up for paula abdul and then he linked up with madonna to do express yourself and vogue he stepped back from videos over the past two years in order to direct his first film alien 3 but fell back into it for Who Is It by Michael

Jackson. And the video is essentially Madonna as a sort of high-powered female executive of the early 90s that you usually see pouring blue water on a pad with a dry weave top sheet. And she's going about a business of copping off with a sort of blokes in diners and bars uh punctuated by shots of her washing her drawers in the sink and licking cat food off her finger and christopher walker just hangs about and watches on until as they used to say it was moida it seems like a waste of walken yeah it's a waste of walken because he's not doing a funny dance. No. And nor is he telling a small child about having a wristwatch hidden up his arse.

And that's kind of what we want from him. He looks great, though. Can I just point out, he looks amazing. He's just smouldering away in a big black coat. He's apparently supposed to be a guardian angel, which is, he's not a very good guardian angel. He's not doing his job very well. well i i assume that he was a guardian angel as well but you know because he hangs about on ledgers and whatnot reading the paper about a

murderer and all this kind of stuff but right at the end just before her last cop-off comes back from washing his dick in the sink or whatever he's up to. Christopher Walken appears and kisses Madonna and you think, oh, hang on a minute, you're actually the Grim Reaper, aren't you? Because right at the end, we see both of them up in a crane watching the coppers taking the body away and Madonna doesn't seem to be that arse about being murdered. She's accepted it.

She's going to heaven with Christopher Walken. Yeah, fair dues. Come on, wouldn't any of us be all right with being grim reaped by christopher did you pause and zoom in on the newspaper that he reads it's the the new york post tell me more simon well i i did it's tantalizing because i couldn't get all of it i think the main headline is bloody carnage or something like that it's bloody something um but in the in the sort of subheading it says cape teen chops hands off dad and then something something parakeet maybe feeds to parakeet oh brilliant yeah would parakeets want to eat people's hands though probably don't they

tend to like not sauce them or a cracker if it's in a cage it's got to eat what it's given and if it if that's you know cape dad's hand and so be it yeah i know it's sort of nominally set in the present tense but i thought the way that she's styled is actually yes quite kind of 1940s film noir and it's not the first time she's done that which is sort of stepping back from the sort of sexy madonna thing well it's a different type of sexy, but it's, yeah. She looks a bit kind of like something out of a Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane novel. She looks like she ought to be called a broad or a dame, you know, in this, I thought. The song though, you know, like many of Madonna's 90s hits,

I've honestly never heard this before in my life. I feel a bit gaslit by the claim that it even exists. And I had a look, because when we've talked about Madonna's 90s hits before... Like you said, Simon, it's a proper pointless question, isn't it? Oh, yeah, very much. Yeah, yeah, it is. And leaving aside cover versions like Don't Cry For Me Argentina, if we look at her actual own hit singles,

from the one prior to this, which is Deeper and Deeper, which I couldn't sing with a gun to my head, right through to Frozen in 1998, which I vaguely remember, and then Ray of Light comes after that, and then I could, yeah, I know that, obviously. But there are five years of consistent hits, particularly in the UK, some of them top 10 uh no no idea it's really weird really odd yeah you were just you know into other stuff it's like you know i think much as madonna is omnipresent it is also possible if you try really hard to ignore her so well i'll be honest i can't

stand madonna i really fucking can't stand my daughter so yeah if i could ignore her so well i'll be honest i can't stand madonna i really fucking can't stand my daughter so yeah if i could ignore her i would so that kind of goes some way to explaining it so the following week bad girl nudged up one place to number 10 its highest position however in america it only got to number 36 on the billboard chart the first madonna single not to make the american top 20 since holiday in 1983 fucking out what a run the follow-up a cover of fever entered the chart at number six in april but got no higher and she had one last squeeze of the erotica tea bag when rain got to number seven for two weeks in july she then spent the rest of 1993 ripping up a photo of joey butafuco who was famous in america at the time because his wife shot his 17 year old lover in the face while having a bum sex related surname

on saturday night live in a piss take of shenaid O'Connor and then rubbing the flag of Puerto Rico against her fan air at a concert. Oh, no. Oh, no. The thing with Madonna is, yeah, I can't stand her, but I feel weirdly protective towards her at the moment because she's getting so much shit at the moment for being an older woman who has, A, had cosmetic surgery and, B, is still, you you know prancing about on stage and being sexy yeah and all the criticism i see are getting i think fuck off you know i've you know i almost

find myself becoming a fucking madonna fan just to spite them you know what i mean well you don't have to do that but it is like in some ways like this is what madonna has always done is she's a genuine provocateur and she's always sought to push people's buttons and in some ways this is what Madonna has always done is she's a genuine provocateur and she's always sought to push people's buttons and in some ways this is I'm sure it's hard for her she's a human being but also she is well versed in pissing people off and responding to the atmosphere that but she pisses everyone off it's like there are young people on TikTok going oh Nana's got out again and like people have been doing that since she was 30. So like she's been well prepared for ageism.

I'm sure, like I said, I'm sure it's incredibly difficult. But yeah, you do feel protective of it because she is daring to still be Madonna in the way that she always has and putting herself into the public consciousness. And I don't think it is that it's just she's desperate and she wants to cling to her youth or anything like that because that's not her that's not her deal i think it's in some ways it's an opportunity for her it's an opportunity to provoke people all you have to do as an older woman is exist and be in public and people are going to have fucking opinions about it so and she's always loved to it's like yeah give me all your opinions motherfuckers so i think she's okay and it is inspiring to be honest as you know someone she has been massive for about as long as i've been alive or as long as i've been listening to pop music and i have no intention of um kind of cavorting around in the madonna fashion as i as i age but

well there goes the next chart music live. Well, I could be persuaded. But it is bracing and bolstering to see her as she is doing what she does now. I'm about a year younger than she was when she did Hung Up, you know, in her

pink leotard and looking as that Atlantic article says, as sinewy as a gazelle. Looking incredible and just the sheer force of will and defiance that it has taken for Madonna to create herself and sustain herself. It's just, I don't know, it's something to look to as a woman. And I don't think she did it for anyone but herself.

But she's not just a complete need monster. It's not just um you know she kind of she works in mysterious ways you know i'm glad of it i'm glad that she's still around and doing what she does but robbing the flag of puerto rico against your fanny that's not on you know it's hard to believe i introduced diana ross live on this program almost 18 months ago Smoke two and a cigarette today I'm not happy You know, it's hard to believe I introduced Diana Ross live on this programme almost 18 months ago, and I'm extremely proud to do it again with the new song, Heart Don't Change My Mind.

You said we'd try again But trying's not enough You know, it's hard to believe I introduced Diana Ross live on this programme 18 months ago, says Franklin. Cool story, bro. Yeah. That's your fucking job, mate. It's like your fucking bin man saying, oh, it's hard to believe I pushed this garden waste wheel a bit of Fortnite to go and here I am again. Oh, poor little Mark. No, but he's to be fair to him. 18 months ago, he was 12. This is like a formative memory for him.

He then goes on about how proud he is to introduce her again. It's Diana Ross with Hot don't change my mind we've covered diana ross a time or two in chart music most recently in chart music number 18 when she took love hangover to number 10 in may of 1976 since then she left motan went all post disco with now rogersile Rodgers, tried to shove Mary Wilson off the stage at the Motown 25th anniversary TV special, sonically copped off with Lionel Richer, sweated for a bit in the gym, linked up with the Bee Gees for her first number one in 15 years,

faded out in the late 80s, then rejoined Motown, got on the Whitney train and roared back to number two on two non-consecutive weeks with When You Tell Me That You Love Me in December of 1991. This single, the follow-up to If We Hold On Together, which got to number 11 in January, is the eighth cut from her lp the force behind the power which came out 18 months ago it's not in the charts yet but no way stan liappel turning down the opportunity to have the boss in his studio

and here she is let's get diana out the way first because she's the least interesting thing about this performance extremely shared up i believe wearing a tight spandex all in one, adorned with a big chunky gold belt and topped with a leather jacket that's miles better than any of run rigs. I think the overall effect she's gone for here is Rose out of keeping up appearances

attending the local biker bash and pig roast. She's got black gloves on as well though. It's like a cross between Alvin Stardust and Mark Almond or something. Little gloves with pearl trim, as it turns out. I had a jacket like that with its own belt.

It was brilliant. I did not, though, have a sort of bustier top with net decolletage. It's a sexy get-up, isn't it? And what would now be known as treggings, I guess. Treggings? Trouser leggings. Yeah, they're kind of wetup, isn't it? And what would now be known as treggings, I guess. Treggings? Trouser leggings. Yeah, they're kind of wet look, aren't they?

Which is very prevalent now, but you didn't see so much in those days. She was ahead of the curve. I watched it again last night, and it's like, hang on a minute, is she miming? Oh, God. That's against the rules.

Would Stanley allow this? I think he'd make an exception for Diana Ross. Yeah. I mean, just the whole set- setup is very unreal, isn't it? That she's in this kind of fake, almost Sesame Street style cityscape where you've got a walk, don't walk sign. You've got a lamppost.

A working walk, don't walk sign. It's a pretend New York street corner, isn't it? It's very, it's quite elaborate. Yeah. You've got one of those blue bin things for getting a newspaper out of that they have in America. You know those ones. Are you sure it's that?

I thought it was an American post box. Oh, is it a post box? I thought it was a post box. Oh, maybe. And there's a fire hydrant, definitely, you know. There's a manhole cover with all dry ice coming out of it. Yeah, that's what you want. What it made me think of was, and I'm sure this was not a deliberate reference on Diana's part,

but do you guys know the book Rock Dreams? Yes. Guy Peel. Yeah, it's Guy Peelette. Or probably, yes. Oh, fucking hell. Sorry, sorry, Guy. Yeah, yeah, he's dead now.

You can say what you want. So for those who don't know, he was the artist who usually used airbrush, who was responsible for, for example, The Sleeve of Diamond Dogs by David Bowie. So I'm sure everyone can sort of visualise his style from that. And this book, Rock Dreams, it's just a magical thing. It's from about 73, I guess, that kind of era.

And it involved the journalist Nick Cone writing little kind of paragraphs about rock legends, rock icons, and these kind of imagined scenarios that Pellet has painted of them. So, for example, you've got the Rolling Stones several times. On one occasion, they're dressed up as Nazis. Another time, they're sort of fetish transvestites and stuff like that. You've got Bob Dylan in the back of a limo looking troubled and all this kind of business. You've got Sam Coo the back of a limo looking troubled and all this kind of business. You've got Sam Cooke's dead body on the motel room floor. Diana Ross appears in it twice.

The first time it's the Supremes and what we see is an actual streetscape which reminded me a little bit of this. It's got you know a sort of 1950s looking car or 60s I suppose it would have to be with a massive poster of the Supremes on the wall of what looks like a very down at heel neighbourhood and it's really sort of flagging up the idea that the Supremes came from a kind of down at hill Detroit neighbourhood and they are now very much living the glitzy high life and then a few pages later we see Diana and she's solo. And she's sat in the back of a limo with loads of jewellery on and a fur stole wrapped around her neck, looking really traumatised and frightened as she looks through the window and sees a bunch of presumably homeless guys stood outside on a litter-blown street.

And the text from Cone says, No cause for alarm, even now, after all these years. Great ladies of the music scene came back and cruised the streets and gazed into tenements and floated off down alleys, just to check nothing had changed. Dot, dot, dot. And it's just a really wonderful evocative picture of this incredibly successful and wealthy woman, just looking with kind of horror at what her life used to be. Maybe it's a stretch, but when I saw the sort of fake rough streetscape on this performance, I thought of rock dreams. The thing with Diana is, and we've done the mortality maths with Madonna already, Diana is 48 here, which know considerably younger than I am now I just remember at the time and I'm sure this isn't false memory

thinking oh who's this old granny on top of the prom what's she doing there which you know obviously those opinions come back to haunt you I don't know that I said so in print but that is certainly what would have been going through my mind so I thought I'd have a look to see who is 48 now just for comparison and I know we're in a different world

where you're allowed to stay young for longer but okay so here we go um melanie blatt and shaznay lewis of all saints are right 48 um will i am and fergie out of black eyed peas lauren hill scary spice silo green enrique inglesias nataline brulia katie tunstall jack white marion cotillard lisa scott lee sia ant mcpartlin ronnie o'sullivan big boy 50 cent gary neville junino david beckham and robby fowler so those are all 48 year olds now which okay they're people of a certain age but you don't think if one of them turned up on top of the pops well if ronnie o'sullivan did you'd be surprised but but but you know what i mean it's that that age doesn't seem as completely over the hill as it did then no and it's partly because of uh people like dana ross and as well

as madonna and uh tina turner who absolutely bossed that yeah this is the designated heritage act which starts to pop up on a regular basis On top of the pops round about this time Doesn't it? Last week it was Brian Ferrer Next week it will be Cliff Richard Essentially new singles by older artists That aren't in the charts yet

But are looking for something to be on Now that Wogan's finished Something for the oldens if you will I feel like this is quite similar to Brian Ferrer For a lot of artists who were kind of transitioning from the 80s into the 90s they're just kind of coasted yeah there's no need to try and be on the cutting edge anymore no which you know which is fine but also christ i kind of suffered through this a bit this is very very 1988 as well yes like who gives a shit no one cares someone's gonna buy it and keep her in you know and she's earned it, you know, fair enough.

But nobody needs this in their life, do they? But anyway, Sarah, saxophone solo. Saxophone solo. Fuck me. Yeah, in our chart music wiki, Pop Crazy Jokes, there is an entire section entitled Sarah B's Search for the Last Great Sax Solo. Thanks to a request you made in Chart Music's Passive.

And currently it only goes as far as The Best by Tina Turner in September of 1989. So I believe we have a new winner. I don't know. I might endorse that as a fact, but I'm not happy about it. Of course, the thing to say here is of course unless you know better unless you know better got a white bloke with his sleeves rolled up in very cronenberg advert isn't it oh god it's so funny the way that this is edited is um you know there's this kind of kind of really grindy ballad going on and um you know it just it sounds like the big serious ballad in the middle of a regional theater production of puss in boots you, where Puss has lost his boots.

And she's there smiling away in a slightly incongruous fashion. And then suddenly there's a sax man the way that it's just, oh, yeah, where did you come from? You stealthy sax man. He just suddenly appears. It's very much like the Saturday Night saturday night live short the curse from uh about 12 years ago um i don't know if you've seen this it features john ham who's best known from mad men but is also a brilliant comic actor as this oiled up sax man very much uh he's he's obviously uh like tim capello who was tina turner's sax man through the 80s and 90s and also

most notably the oiled up sax man from the lost boys right also, most notably, the oiled-up sax man from The Lost Boys. He's the one true, original, oiled-up sax man. Anyway, basically, Andy Samberg is going about his business, and wherever he goes, Jon Hamm will suddenly explode through a wall, oiled up with a saxophone, and looks at the camera and goes, Sergio! Everywhere he goes, and he goes to his therapist, he's like, oh my god, I think I'm going mad.

Everywhere I go, this oiled-up up sexy sax man just burst through the wall and it's like are you sure and then of course he bursts through the wall kind of on top of the therapist it just gets worse and worse and worse until his wife actually gives birth to the full-sized oiled up sexy sax man sergio it's very disturbing anyway that's inevitably now what happens when i see diana ross get interrupted in you know what she was doing she gets very excited by his arrival doesn't she she gets a jacket she gets a jacket throws throws it to the ground and starts spinning around and stuff yes which is really good stagecraft but um also yeah it doesn't really seem doesn't seem warranted he is a sexy sex man in a leather waistcoat. And I was kind of sceptical.

And I don't know if I'm a spoilsport for this, but I just thought, is he really a sax man? Because he's just too buff. And I looked into it. And on the record, on the album, Force Behind the Power, the saxophonist is John Helliwell of Supertramp. And I Google image searched John Helliwell of Supertramp. Oiled up and muscular and Supertramp.

They don't go together, do they? John Helliwell looks, with the best will in the world, like a geography supply teacher, or, you know, basically a member of Supertramp. Yes. Right? So this guy, the sexy sax man on top of the pops, I'm watching his fingers,

and I'm sceptical about him even being a saxophonist. He looks more like a hunk from Central Casting whose next job is probably, you know, the Diet Coke ad where a load of office women look at him taking his top off on a construction site. I think that's what it is. That's what's going on here. Or on a scooter in a Gino Gianelli advert.

Yes, exactly. Yeah. I think Tim Capello actually kind of set the standard for the sexy sax man at this time you know people were just like that's what you need you know you can't just have some schlub playing the saxophone it's such a raucously bawdy instrument you know you've got to get out the uh the banana boat and uh get slippery um just something else about Diana Ross here, obviously, consummate performer and, you know, radiantly beautiful. But one of the things I'm really sorry to say is one of the things I didn't enjoy about this performance, I enjoyed how

much she seemed to enjoy it and how together she is and how she knows completely what she's doing and what she wants to project. But there's this kind of extravagant graciousness about her this is kind of regal bearing that i find slightly overbearing especially when it's such a nothing track yeah it just doesn't really seem warranted when you see tina turner tina turner is this very kind of impressive imperious presence but then she's like yeah it's tina time get on down. And this is very sort of removed and very sort of, it's the nature of the song, you know, it's only appropriate. But just her whole Diana Ross thing is sort of, you may worship me. And it's like, well, I have the utmost respect for Diana Ross,

but I don't want to feel like I'm supposed to curtsy at this point. Do you know what I mean? Is that a terrible thing to say? I really do respect her extremely. And she's made some of the greatest records ever but oh absolutely yeah i mean it's remarkable you know someone who sings on some of my favorite records of the 60s you know the happening um the 70s ain't no mountain high enough or love hangover the 80s upside down but her appearance on this show just makes me go yeah she turns up you know i suppose it's largely just the song it is a nothing song heart don't change my mind

written by robbie buchanan and diane warren diane warren of course just wrote fucking everything you know nothing's gonna stop us now by starship unbreak my heart tony braxton don't want to miss a thing by aero smith know, just those enormous songs. But it's just a really bog standard song about trying to summon up the resolve to leave someone. It makes no sense to stay, living my life in yesterday. I'm leaving, I'm leaving, and I'm begging you. Heart, don't change my mind. Oh, heart, be strong this time, blah, blah, blah.

Originally recorded by streisand in 84 and right of course streisand was the absolute queen of grown-up divorce pop in that era and yeah this this is that it's it's grown-up divorce pop and i guess there's a demographic who want that with their top of the pops not me not then and not now and yeah i just thought bore off diana ross and i felt weird for thinking that because yeah she's done so much great stuff yeah also just the production of this track is so kind of sloppy and she does have this slight edge to her voice like a slightly reedy kind of edge and it just cuts through too harshly it's like a massive cleaver through a cheesecake and there there's, like, nothing underneath, so it doesn't display her ability to its best.

It's like, this is not the best use. There's no biscuit base. There's no buttery biscuit base. It's kind of soggy, soggy cheesecake, you know. Do you know it's not even on her Wikipedia discography, if you go on there? This single's not there. Yeah, it's been written out of history,

and maybe for the best. So the following week, Heart Don't Change My Mind entered the chart at number 31 and then dropped four places to number 35. The UK's favourite 10, down a 10, E17 and deep.

Down one at number nine, Depeche Mode, I Feel You. This week at number eight, Falling Six, Take That, Why Can I Wake Up With You? And at number seven, the highest new entry, Suede, Animal Nitrate. At number six, down two, Whitney Houston, I'm Every Woman. And at number five, the brilliant O'Carolina from Shaggy. At number four, Lenny Kravitz. You saw him earlier, Are You Gonna Go My Way? And at number three, Annie Lennox, double A-side,

Little Bird and Love Song for a Vampire. At two, Michael Jackson, Give In to Me, which means still at number one, two unlimited, this is No Limit. Franklin, still off camera, pitches straight into the top ten with absolutely fuck-all fanfare. And right at the other end comes this week's number one, No Limit by 2 Unlimited. Formed in Antwerp, Belgium, by Jean-Paul Da Costa and Phil Wilde in 1989,

Biz Niz were a dance production duo who landed a UK hit when Don't Miss the Party Line got to number seven for two weeks in April of 1990. In May of 1991, they worked up an instrumental dance track called Get Ready for This, which rocked the club scene of Peepoo Land but got no further. So, deciding they needed some rap on it, they called upon someone they'd already worked with on a business demo, the Amsterdam rapper Ray Schlingard, who was dividing his time between getting the party started and working as a chef at Shiphole Airport.

They lobbed him a demo tape and told him to get on with it. When he returned his version, they were surprised that along with some rap, there was also some bird, Anita Doth, who was working as a secretary in an Amsterdam police station, possibly for Van der Volk. Da Costa and Wilde were so delighted at what they heard, they decided to put them together and lo, two Unlimited were born. Their debut single, Two Unlimited Were Born. Their debut single, Get Ready For This, was a continent-wide smash, spending two non-consecutive weeks at number two over here in October and November of 1991. They followed that up with another number two hit, Twilight Zone, in January of 1992, and a number four with Workaholic in May of 92.

and a number four with Workaholic in May of 92. This single, the follow-up to Magic Friend, which got to number 11 in August of 1992, is the lead cut from their second LP, No Limits, which is due out in May. It was put out in the last week of January and immediately smashed into the chart as the highest new entry at number four, then nipped up the following week to number two, and a week later finally obliterated the ten-week reich

of I Will Always Love You by Whitney fucking Houston. Yes! Go on, Tour Unlimited. This is its fourth week atop the summit of, well, there aren't any mountains in Belgium or Holland, and since they've already appeared in the top of the pop studio three times already to do this song it's finally time to get the video out and panel if we've done one thing on our chart music odyssey it's giving thanks and praise and final rightful respect to the belgians don't you think two man sound belgian world in

action making moldy old dough a hit jacques brel doing terry jacks a favor and now this and we haven't even got to technotronic or plastic bertrand yet come on belgium yeah um i was fully behind this uh even though it doesn't seem like the kind of thing I would have been into at the time. No. And it caused all kinds of trouble. Basically, you know, this sort of music was really becoming dominant in the charts at this time. And I kind of loved it. I loved a good old chunk of it.

I think some of the greatest records of the 90s are uh dreamer by living joy oh yeah you sure do by uh strike or baby d let me be your fantasy and stuff like that you know uh and uh there's one in my head and anyway never mind can't you remember granddad it's got a sort of piano we break down oh that narrows it down a bit no but this bit where it all stops for ages and it's all just like rain falling and this diva really going for it and right uh it's not not naked in the rain uh no oh set you free uh oh set you free yeah it's atlantic yeah oh okay she's she's. She's in the video. I don't know why I know this from the chart show, probably. She's sticking out of the...

Isn't it Entrance? Oh, is it? I thought it was Entrance. Yes, Entrance. No, you're right. And set you free by Entrance. There you go. It's like being in a fucking care home. I'll expect David Van Day to pitch up any minute now.

Yeah, all of that. I'd expect David Van Day to pitch up any minute now. Yeah, all of that. It's all very sort of very kind of feather light, new disco, post-rave kind of twinkly. Yeah, I love to hear those. Whenever they pop up, it always gives me a tingle. I thought it was the glam rock of its day. I thought it was like, you know,

these really brutal, simple terrace chants. Yes. That, you know, they weren't for music snobs, but they were really straight and to the point. Yeah, very stompy. Yeah, very stompy indeed. But dainty with it, I think. Yes.

So I lobbied to do a special edition of Melody Maker just about that. And Melody Maker, of course, was an indie rock magazine, mainly. But I just thought we're a weekly paper and we're a music paper. And we have a certain duty to cover cultural phenomena. And I thought Euro disco or Euro pop, Euro dance, whatever you want to call it, was a really important 90s cultural phenomenon. So I kind of took control for one issue and I interviewed Two Unlimited. I also interviewed Culture Beat. Mr. Vain, that's a fucking banger.

Come on. Yeah. culture beat mr vein that's a fucking banger come on yeah um and yeah culture i remember culture beat being really bemused when i started asking them any details at all about the music or the lyrics because you know they're like well we don't fucking know you know god that's become a regular joke in our house where uh if anybody wants something it's, I know what I want and I want it now. I want food because I'm Mr. Food. You can do it with anything and it's so dumb and annoying. It's brilliant. God, how was lockdown in your house?

It was brilliant. It was a hoot. Yeah, so I interviewed Ray and Anita. Anita Dels, as she was known at that time i don't know right i don't know where anita doth comes from i don't know what which is the correct one uh but i have seen both but but we called it anita delce because i guess that's what it said in the press release that we said um i went to this really fucking bizarre event at it was either earl's court or olympia one of those big ones um it was the flora aerobathon um sponsored by sponsored by flora margarine and there was a massive fucking terry wogan there no but there was i see where you're

going with that there was a massive tub of margarine on the stage like 20 feet wide and eight feet tall just a giant fucking tub of margarine did it have margarine in it um i didn't get to climb over the edge and have a look but everyone had to perform in front of it first rule of journalism is find out how much margarine in a massive tub it was uh really odd there were 20 000 people there and they're all doing right it was like it wasn't mr motivator it was a fake mr motivator shaking motivator putting everyone through their pacing mr encourager yeah yeah and and every now and then um an actual pop star would come on stage uh so um e17 were there um doing whatever their new single i guess was it steve deep yes or was it deep deep yeah so they were you can rest upon my

chest yeah yeah maybe it was that um there were other people if they're e17 and you're doing that man you first thing you do is get in the tub of flora and just start rubbing it into your chest being all homoerotic and suggestive yeah did a sexy sax man at some point burst out of it having having gone in drive you know see this is why they needed you kind of stage managing it um but there were all these sort of like sort of second division celebs like chris quinton from coronation street around and uh and daniella westbrook from eastenders of course who was soon to get married to one of these 17 i think at that time david kid jensen was there oh my god yeah yeah and uh page three girl suzanne

mitzi oh remember her and she was in a pop trio at that time called rumor has it it was really Oh my God. Yeah, yeah. Blessing. And Page Three girl, Suzanne Mitzi. Ooh. I remember her. And she was in a pop trio at that time called Rumour Has It. Right, yes. It was really the strangest event I ever covered. But two Unlimited are there. And, you know, it's all just in a day's work for them. And they're total pros.

You know, they take it in their stride. Tom Sheehan, the legendary photographer, who's just done all the sort of proper rock stars and everything, just comes along with me. And he's taking photos of ray and anita and you know she's sort of snarling and clawing at the air and and he's throwing some mean sinister shapes and all of that and yeah fucking hell i found them quite interesting to talk to you because all right they can't compete with david yow for lyrical depth. But they were interesting people. Just their experience of what the fuck it's like being in Two Unlimited at that time

was something that I wanted to find out about. We talked about stuff like the drugs laws in Amsterdam, because that's where they're from, you know, and all that kind of business. And I thought it was really worth doing. Were you massively complimentary to them, Simon? I think I had just the right amount of distance but i i sort of i i fed them questions which allowed them to come out of it in in a good light they should have called the article flora and fauna oh right there we go see what i did

there yeah yeah i mean wasn't it shit i think that's more of a subheading than a than a time yeah i i can't i I can't sugarcoat it. I did have a massive crush on Anita. So, you know, I wasn't going to be too mean. But I put it to them that, you know, there was this nickname they had, too untalented, that people hilariously used to say. And that there was this perception they're brainless puppets. And I found the interview and Anita says, I'm not going to say, of course.

puppets and uh i found the interview and anita says of course i'm not going to say of course she says of course because it cannot be true that uh two people have so much success something must be wrong either we don't sing or we've got masks on or whatever in fact the producers write the music we write the lyrics it's 50 50 now you might think I've let them hang themselves, I've given them enough rope there, to say that they write the lyrics. Like, come on, techno, techno, techno, techno. But yeah, they basically faced snobbery from rockist types and from dance purists. They were getting it from both sides, really.

Shot by both sides. I thought No Limit, even though it's played to fucking death, is an absolute banger. You can't argue with it. It's just this kind of force of nature. And I thought Let the Beat Control Your Body was even better. That was just a fantastic track. And I wondered

what the great Simon Reynolds would have thought of this. So I went up into the attic earlier on today and fetched down his book Energy Flash, which is know history of dance music and simon in that book does make a case for kind of hooligan techno almost just like really really simple techno tracks with with like a grinding riff that goes over and over and over and just grinds you into submission and i thought that part of him might approve of Two Unlimited but no they're barely a

footnote in that book so yeah yeah but one of the upshots of me interviewing them first of all there was a massive backlash on the capital B backlash pages of Melody Maker that almost almost a whole week's worth of letters just slagging me off and slagging off the paper for for doing all that stuff yeah it was safe to say that that issue of melody maker didn't join the stack of all the other melody makers in the student bedsits of 1993 exactly yeah yeah and within the paper our dance music experts uh ben turner and push really nice guys and they basically ran the dance section at the back of the paper, they were really pissed off that the words, well, the word four times, techno, techno, techno, techno, had been put on the front of Melody Maker

emblazoned across a photo of Two Unlimited. Because to them, the word techno was something precious and important and intelligent and progressive. And they thought that Two Unlimited were not worthy of that word. So from then on, in the pages of Melty Maker, Ben and Push changed the spelling of techno, their type of techno, to T-E-K-N-O. Oh.

Because they didn't want anything to do with it. I thought that was really funny, but bless them for that. This track, I think there's a little joke in there that's been lying dormant for years that no one's noticed.'s a bit where ray goes let me hear say yeah and you hear a crowd going no yes i swear they're going no really yeah they're not going yeah yeah no it's just a very it's quite a distant sort of hiss of like yeah yeah i think they're just saying yeah in in dutch i've gone on about uh too unlimited too long it's got to be your turn now no such thing simon i mean i said earlier in this episode that i was hoovering up the local pirate stations at the time but the minute they

started playing proper techno fucking radio's coming right off i had no time for that bollocks but this sort of thing when it came out it amused me because it was yeah it was clearly glambonium yeah and it pissed off no end of people the minute i heard it i thought well well this is going to be number one yeah no fucking problem yeah i mean if i was 12 or something i'd have a right old stomp around the bedroom to this it does kind of sound like kids music superficially but yeah it's you can't really write it off as a simplistic record for babies you know because it is more deceptively interesting I mean at the time I have to admit that I found it annoying and stupid but I have come to appreciate it and I'm now very

fond of it um I can't imagine any circumstances under which I'd actually put it on, but that's not the point. I was glad to see it here at number one. Musically, it is, yeah, it's not really techno in any sense, but it doesn't matter. There's kind of an interesting thing happening because it is very eh, eh, eh, eh. Yeah.

But there's interesting stuff going on. In the first 32 bars, there's different synth patches playing the same hook. So it is actually more varied than than it feels it's like thing comes in then does the same thing in a different way that goes away different thing happens again it's like they're swapping in and out different color filters which is quite unusual yeah um and there's also this um in the chorus there's the kind of classic house drone in the background which uh sounds quite like open your mind by yuzura which is a track that gets played quite a lot in this house in various circumstances and there's a sort of phantom bass line like it doesn't really have a bass line but you can sort of you know you put

one in yourself it sort of reads as a hymn to hedonism because of the musical context because it's a dance track and because of the delivery because of like how powerful it is and how she's got this very soulful voice which is being deployed to the same sort of effect that other people were doing at the time yeah basically it's a song about achieving your true potential and powering through to greatness and it had to get to number one to prove it was true so it is and i love it when this happens it is a demonstration of the theory it advances. Ooh, yes. Or, of course, to Anita, who has survived cancer more than once, she now considers it's something that she loves,

so she feels it's about overcoming adversity. She said, you know, it's such an explosion of positivity and we are limitless beings. They do what they want and they do it with pride. Yeah. Al, that was the last line of my article as well. It had to be, didn't it? Of course. They do what they want and they do it with pride. Yeah. Al, that was the last line of my article as well. It had to be, didn't it? Of course.

They do what they want and they do it with pride. And what they want in this video is to be in a massive pinball table. Yes. Which looks mint. Yeah, it's fucking brilliant. Proper old school pinball table as well. Yes. I think there is actually technically a limit to pinball or they will throw you out.

Pinball, man. I fucking loved it because i i worked in a student union as i mentioned earlier yeah and uh on the second floor of the building we had a robocop pinball machine and we had monday night football and the first thing i'd do in the morning i would go to the cafe get a hummus and sweet corn bap and forget about my office i would just sit at those machines for about two hours and if anybody needed me they knew where they'd find me and and yeah i can still hear in my head like i'd buy that for a dollar and that kind of stuff yeah there's the voice going over

and over but if there was a two unlimited actual pinball machine fuck me oh fucking hell yes just like playing their songs over and over. And when the ball goes down, it goes... Yeah! No! Yeah, if you fuck up, it goes... No! Fucking hell, I miss pinball. I hate those new pinball tables you see in pubs

that have made as small as possible. No! That's no fucking good. I'm depressed now. But cheer up, Al, because Two Unlimited were so lovely in this. They're so pretty and they're being hard, but they're so adorable. And they're called Ray and Anita as well, man. Which sounds like they should be on Opportunity Knocks in 1972.

Or Bullseye. Or the neighbours on the other side of George and Mildred. Yeah, they should be like my dad's friends like i say my dad oh what'd you do last week oh yeah we just went to have dinner with ray and anita you know yeah yes exactly yeah saw the holidays yeah the vintage gibraltar you know there's some very good hand movements in this video oh yeah absolute bare cheek of invoking uh no valley too deep no mountain too high in the lyrics. That's next level.

But yeah, so... Same episode as Diana, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, just to emphasise this, no valley too deep, she points down, and then no mountain too high, points up. You see? And he does, at some point, Ray, who is dressed in a very fetching combination of baggy PVC, which has now come back, actually. You're allowed to have baggy PVC once again. And he does a very good reprimanding finger wag to camera to indicate there are no limits.

No, no, no. No, no, no, no. No, no, no. He's got no top on under his leather coat, but he can get away with it, you know, so fair play. They're both very saucy, aren't they? But overall, there is something very sort of clean and innocent about it. Yes, wholesome.

It's quite wholesome. It's not actually very drugs. I think, you know, they're probably being Dutch and being from Amsterdam. They can choose to or not, and it's probably not such a big deal. It's like people who live in Blackpool never had a stick of water in their life. It's definitely more scentier than salvia, I think. Anything else to say? My interview was certainly kinder to them than the Chris

Morris interview. Oh, yes. Have you heard that? Oh, no. Oh, my God. Right. So, basically, if you haven't heard it, I think Chris Morris was on Radio 1 at that time. I think that must be how he had access to them. So, they go in completely innocently, you know. They go in wholeheartedly

thinking, oh, well, you know, this guy Chris Morris wants to interview us. Our English friends want to talk to us. Yeah, yeah. So they go in and he pretends that he thinks that There's No Limit, We Reach for the Sky is a tribute to Britain's World War Two flying ace Douglas Bader, whose biography and, you know, biopic was called Reach for the Sky. And he starts thanking them and congratulating them for that. And they are completely baffled. They don't know what he's talking about. And then he gets really offended, saying,

that's so disrespectful. How will you not know who Douglas Bader is? I think you should apologise right now and dedicate it to him. And they're really flustered and they go, there's no limit, we reach for the sky. That one's for you, Doug. So No Limit would spend a fifth and final week at number one before being usurped by Oh Carolina by Shaggy

and would keep Why Can't I Wake Up With You by Take That and Give In To Me by Michael Jackson off number one. The follow-up, Tribal Dance, would spend two weeks at number four in May, and they'd go on to have eight more top 40 hits, three of which made the top ten. But when their five-year contract came up for renewal in 1996, Schlingard and Doth had had enough and walked away so decosta and wilde just recruited two more people and carried on regardless by 2009 after doing pas and student union performances separately the original two decided to reunite under the name

ray and anita and then linked back up with Dick Costa and were given their name back, which they've used to this day. Oh, that's nice. Although Anita stepped down again in 2016. Bringing pinball machines back into fashion to Unlimited at number one. That's it for Top of the Pops this week. Join Tony Dalton next week when live in the studio we'll have Cliff No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, closes the book on this episode of Top of the Pops. What's on telly afterwards, you may ask? Well, BBC One kicks on with Michelle's daughter Vicky

getting kidnapped outside her school in EastEnders. Then David Attenborough gets to see a gang of 60 chimpanzees hunting and killing smaller monkeys for their tea in Wildlife on One. Louisa Ricks and coffee wanker gareth hunt play mismatched neighbors in the sitcom side by side then it's the nine o'clock news the lenny henry sitcom chef question time the american crime series law and order ramadan call to prayer the weather and then they close down at five past midnight ramadan call to prayer is a sort of Muslims talking about what Ramadan means to them

and not a live broadcast from Mecca, although I wish the BBC had done that because that would have winded up some gammon. BBC Two has just started First Sight, which focuses on bullying in the office. Then Muriel Gray whoops it up in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for the ski ponds program The Snow Show. Then it's Top Gear, followed by French and Saunders having a go at Guns and Roses and Ingmar Bergman, the second part of A Labour of Love, the documentary series about child care in the early 20th century, staggering stories of Ferdinand de Bargos, Newsnight, The Late Show, The Weather and a bit of Open University Ramall. ITV showing that episode of

3D with the HIV positive vicar along with a piece on Emma McCune, the convent girl who married the leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Army. After the bill, Arthur Daly organises a football match with the local police in a bid to keep the Winchester Club open in Minder. Then it's disguisers, where Adam Holloway goes undercover to investigate care in the community. Afternoons at 10 and regional news in your area, it's more snooker, the equaliser and night time. Prisoner's Soul Block H and Casey Kasem, basically.

Right. Channel 4 eventually comes out of Channel 4 News and goes into close to home, which is about how fucked off the people of North Wales are at English cunts coming over here with their funny smelling food and Morris dancing and all that. After The Secret Life Of looks at the word processor, it's the last in the series of Turning the Screws, the documentary series about life in Wandsworth Prison.

That's followed by a team-building session in Drop the Dead Donkey, the new series Harry Enfield's Guide to Opera, a repeat of The avengers a repeat of dispatchers and they finish off at 1am with a repeat of the dick pal theater so me dears what are we talking about in the playground tomorrow this bit is always such a headband isn't it because is it you as you were in 1993 but somehow at school, like an imaginary version of you as a 10-year-old, but cool, you now pretending to be young? I don't know.

Me, as a small child, I'd be talking about Rage Because Swears. And I bet a few kids actually got detention after this. And also Suede Because Fucking Wow. Yeah. I'd just be talking about Suede, I think, the best band in the world. I'd just be thinking, fucking hell, yeah, the future is theirs.

I was probably saying exactly that at the Melody Maker office. What are we buying on Saturday? Well, imaginary cool me, Suede, but uncool, more realistic me, Lenny Kravitz. I guess I didn't really buy records in those days. I just phoned up and got them delivered for free. But yeah, I guess Rage Against the Machine, Suede and Two Unlimited yeah. And what does this episode tell us about March of 1993? The thing is with this question is I feel like I always want to answer the same which is that there's always

something even if this is a kind of weird gutter in between the road of rave and the pavement of Britpop there's always going to be something interesting and and Madonna what we're meant to say on any sort of documentary that you see these days is well Britpop was just around the corner and then the world changed and that kind of thing and yeah it kind of was but suede aren't number one suede are number fucking seven you know much as I love them. Number one is too unlimited. You know, that's the real 90s. And people like Hadaway, What Is Love?

You know, that's a bigger deal than anything Suede ever did. And I fucking adore Suede. So I do think there's this kind of rewriting of history that goes on. So yeah, I think this episode of Top of the Pops tells us that the real 1993 was a lot more mixed than we are led to believe by historians. Yeah, and not as shit as we were led to believe either. You don't look at this and just think, oh, God, I hope Oasis and Blur turn up soon and sweep all this away.

No, not really. I suppose I was a bit frustrated by Ferry diana ross turning up on what's meant to be a sort of young person's pop show yeah oh and also fucking right said fred and their horrible comic relief thing that can absolutely get to fuck yeah and don't think i forgot about you pudsy bear just because it's not children in need i fucking hate pudsy as well you know he can fuck right off and that pop craze youngsters brings us to the end of another episode of chart music all that remains for me to do now is pump out the usual promotional flange 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. Tickets still available for our Chart Music All Day at Birmingham Town Hall, Saturday 13th of January 2024. Oh, it feels so funny saying that, 2024. Yeah, exciting though. See you there. Yeah. Thank you very much, Sarah B. Cheers, lad.. See you there. Yeah. Thank you very much, Sarah B. Cheers, lad. God bless

you, Simon Price. Ah, bless you too. My name's Al Needham and I really hope you've been listening to a podcast about Top of the Pops and not accidentally listening to audio of me having a massive wank. Ha ha ha!

Chart music. Love Hurts, down to a 28 on the official countdown. This is Bruno, stand by for another new entry. That's next. Rage Against The Machine, killing in the name is inert. Number 27. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, motherfucker! Rage Against The Machine, killing in the name. That's a new entry at 27. Calling all pop crazed youngsters You asked for it, we were offered it

So we said alright then, fuck it, why not Saturday, January the 13th, 2024 Birmingham Town Hall Chalk music live all day Yes, Pop Graze youngsters, Chalk Music is getting on down to Benetton with the

power trio of Simon Price, Neil Kulkarni, and Al Needham for a fourth day of Chalk Music ramble. We commence with a return of Here Comes Quism, the Chomp Music pub quiz. And then, a three-hour live episode of Chomp Music.

And then, we round off the evening with a Chomp Music disco, where we dance the night away to the white-hot sounds of Joy, Sarnie and Two Man Sound. It do be the complete chop music experience Miss Diane and can be yours for a mere £15 so see that internet

mashabit.ly slash cm24 that's bit.ly slash cm24 lay your money down and be prepared to be That's B-I-T dot L-Y slash C-M-2-4 Lay your money down And be prepared to be pop-crazed all day long In beautiful downtown Birmingham

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