Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - Chart Music #73 (Pt 1): 4.3.93 – Frank Bald

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

#73 (Pt 1): 4.3.93 – Frank BaldSarah Bee, Simon Price and Al Needham gird their loins for a plunge into a TOTP from the early Nineties, but before all that there’s a comprehensive leaf through that week’s NME. a heartrending discussion about the misery of gym knickers and hair loss, and a massive plug for our live show in Birmingham…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 to listen 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, it is. 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, yes. 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 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 uh because we've got a baby on the way good lord yeah well you know first child music baby janie has a baby on the way you know i had only a small amount to do with it about 10 cc's

worth you know so you're not going to be going around saying we're of course we're pregnant 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 runner 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. 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 the 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 you know. Would you mind if I gave my copy away to one of the Polk Race patrons? Uh not at all why is that you hate the, basically. I just think they deserve it more than I.

So at some point after this episode has gone out, I will be conducting a random draw and one of the Pop Craze Patreon people will be getting my copy sometime in January. But anyway, I am still reeling from the effects of that beautiful day in September when the pop craze youngsters assembled for our live show at King'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. Yes. 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 Chop Music. with the 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 Ch chop 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. to heaven jonathan hewitt hazel sidesurf nick reed hez ray blake titus cotton grassy knoll john broadlayer andy nyko russell horton and dan dummer thank you babies 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. Ghostface Scylla. Oh, what a chart, me dears. 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, yes. It was a working name for Zeke Zeke Sputnik before they were Zeke Zeke 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 i 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 symbolizes is that grunge and american alternative music in the broader sense had sort of curdled and the dregs were now being scraped from the barrel but yeah like you say uh britain hadn't yet stepped up with enough to replace it you had suede and the manics and saint etienne and pulp but nobody was

using the b word yet um of course but yeah that well they were i mean like punk and disco brit pop 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 be a capital b yeah i know I know what you mean I don't know you 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 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 recession's dragging on and you know and it 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 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 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 sighters 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. Onward! 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. I don't think that happened in the end, thank fuck.

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 the pub i did a pub quiz at and he was living in stans at the time and every now and 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 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.

Yeah. 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. 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. Vicar 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 are the ira there not just there for the nasty things in life so getting rid of noel edmonds for an evening sort of to be fair the ira only threatened to kill somebody on noel edmonds's primetime tv

show noel succeeded yes 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 you know there was this flurry of optimism that kinnick was going to get in a flurry to which sadly kinnick himself was only too prone well all right all right yeah you know but yeah when when that failed it was like oh god we got another five years of the fucking tories yeah 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's 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 Peebo Bryson and Regina Bell and the number one LP is the soundtrack to The Bodyguard by Whitney Houston. 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 that were 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 the kind of social death of of competitive sport it sucked while wearing knickers was set 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 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 it was hockey, so you were just like up to your neck in filth and 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 and 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 um because you don't get the full effect from the audio you need to see her face and chris needham's 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 what do you think 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 uh yes he asks this other girl what they think of heavy metal music yes this girl goes oh say it's brilliant nicole and she goes it's brilliant really taking the piss it's such a teenage thing like you know you're as soon as you're asked anything by by someone you know who's who's older than you and 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 i took i take inspiration from her hang on minute. If you're the child music girl, that means all the rest of us are Chris Needham. I'm afraid it does. Well, can we deny it?

Strutting up to you with our musical knowledge hoisted over our shoulder and banging against our head. That's a bit scary. Yeah, so I was grudgingly appreciative of Taylor. My best friend was a huge fan. Who was her favourite? Jason. Oh, yeah, yeah. fan. Who was her favourite? Jason. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Jason Orange. I think she chose well. I think that has... History has proven her right on that one. Wasn't he the nearest one there was in Tate 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? Yeah. Jason was just ever so nice. And she met him and he was just absolutely lovely so you know but you know that 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 and I thought Prey was a banger so you know and I stand by that I was very into 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. Yeah, that's the way love goes, which was the massive single. 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 Duran Duran understand to be great. 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 um i was a bit of a rising star by this point i suppose 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 ofis 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 westcut 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 on the breast pocket so i could only i could wear it underneath a jacket but yeah it's basically completely useless and that's what pins are for yeah that's what it is what badges are for patches or something i should have thought about that but yeah i was in a bedsit on the top floor of a side street in Tufnell 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 um 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 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 i'm really about i was 25 man it's too late in life to to be that. Shameful. I pride myself on being very rational, you know.

Yeah, there were loads of people I knew round about this time who went through a tarot phase because they were 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 fuck's sake 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, lunge. 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'd been invited to. So I'd just sit there late at night Oh no!

Why? Why? When you take your eye off the ball and then you'd realize that somewhere they were falling off the edge there's a cliff that you're like oh no that's yeah 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 silver fish 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 silver fish but brown ones and maybe they were really old silver fish that got tarnished well it should be the other way around that like the 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 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 um wearing a uniform and a cap um 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 chauffing 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 parker 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 no 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 einster zende 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 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 um 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, is he going or is he just me? Is he or isn't he? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I was going, 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 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 Ax axl rose style bandana and hulk hogan yeah right yeah um 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 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, you know. 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 street. It's like sort of abacus. If I didn't place the beads 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 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 appearance it's like the nora effron quote about like if i'd known if i had known when i look 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 eisel with my, 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 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 Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye. 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, getting into Jungle

and I'm religiously taping Westwood on Capital Radio every Friday. That was a lifeline to me. 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 not a play hater 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 newbie and 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 won't go to 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 anyway chaps 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, March the 6th, 1993. Shall we leave? Boo his, yeah. 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 Rydell 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, band 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 P45s to all 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

most of the band have wives girlfriends families and mortgages said the source the ami deal off of 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 ride is found time to attend court where is 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 he claimed that he has absolutely no disposable income and asked to pay the fine in installments before leaving with oriole leach the daughter of former monday's

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? Yeah, 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 2000 strong audience that he had not been booked to appear at the venue that night contrary to posters slapped up all around Hertfordshire. 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. to produce an interactive Zoo TV CD, revealed the NME. 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 dis-chuffed that his current UK tour is in disarray after RSPCA protests and concerned local councils have cancelled his shows in Bristol, Portsmouth and Edinburgh. 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 Crow crowler defended his bile beer 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 canel did you go and see them no i did right it's a clapham grand um 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 that the guy regurgitating his stomach flu i did not drink any of it myself no the highlight of the show was mr lifto do you know about mr lifto? 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 I guess it was based on Todd Browning's Freaks that kind of traveling free show and it was them it was the jim rose circus yeah by the way in case anyone is uh is thinking about eating slugs or maybe you know is 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's amazing that we got away with, you know, 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 Hop, The Young Gods, Living Colour,

The Manic Street Preachers, Hole, Pulp, Gil Scott Heron, Gangstar with Roy Ares 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 the sort of festival that didn't know what it was. It was very eclectic, to a fault almost. There were just so many different stages. There'd be a jazz stage, a 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 airfield 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 at 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 um right uh i i went in goal for probably wasn't water then exactly yeah um did it rust your uh your dread beads yeah probably i went in goal in a penalty shootout against um the cardigans or between the cardigans right and nina person scored a goal past me possibly i was a little bit distracted by the fact that it was nina person and my friend

emmy kate montrose from kenicky did the most amazing thing she wasn't looking where she was going and she bumped into culio and knocked him flat on his ass if nothing else phoenix festival gave me that memory over in stateside usa the enemy reveals that prince's much publicized meeting with morris air plan to coincide with last week's grammys has been postponed after the latter decided not to attend the ceremony the enemy reports that a spokesman says moza is recovering from a bout of flu but plans to reschedule the chin wag 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 no god what the fuck you know i like singing about

sex oh well i don't all right bye then yeah it'd be like that guardian thing dining across the divide wouldn't it oh god yeah and finally salt and pepper 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 Noisnik's 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, 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, 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 girl 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 oh well that that's feminism sorted then that's fine you know yeah because you know that's done

now no no it fucking isn't oh by the, therapy with a question mark on the end. Do you say their name like you're Australian? With uptalk therapy? The question mark at the end was because of Letraset. They were sending out demo tapes, and they'd 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. 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 took us all out to the Sierra Nevada desert to do a photo shoot you know and it's proper American desert you can hear snakes rattling and all that kind of stuff and everyone else is sort of 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 you were the original goth in hot weather weren't you simon i was i fucking was my favorite memory of that trip though was that evening um we all went to some kind of cocktail bar on the Strip in Vegas. And there was an Elvis impersonator. And for those who don't know, Tom Sheehan is a Cockney gentleman who speaks in Cockney rhyming slang. A lot of it, it's not the standard rhyming slang. He often makes up his own.

It's bespoke. 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 the callards on that cunt and we're like what callards and he goes oh yeah I've got it I've got it callard and bowsers trousers yeah I remember the classic Tom Sheehan-ism was, fucking hell, someone spilt beer. 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 some years later when I think they got back together at the electric ballroom. And it was really great and very loud. And Andy Cairns led the crowd in a chant of You Fat Bastard. Have you ever shagged on acid? Your cunt feels this big,

says Leslie Rankin of Silverfish tofish to sean pattern before she can even get the top off her biro not brown fish not brown fish brown fish 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 short list yeah or the name of their road and now i remember in 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 of them silverfish were great yeah but that yeah i can see why they wouldn't be having any of that right

girl's stuff awkwardly the enemy of devoted four pages to a riot girl special is it riot girl or riot girl go for it al stretch it out okay, the NME 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 bear see all around them, the indie whores, right swells, tedious transit van 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 center 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 no and i said well if you don't do it enemy will basically like alan partridge where he's not you

know partridge is going on about uh monkey tennis and inner city sumo you know presented by chas and dave 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 enemy 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. Yeah, smell my rock, you mother. We were brought together by a 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 rides in Pendant 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 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 now? Yeah, not long after this.

This was to LA. And their tour manager in the States was the third Copeland brother. So you've got Stuart Copeland, you've got Miles Copeland, and you've got this other guy who was a Vietnam vet. And he 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 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 rides 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 Eyre, 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 is deemed that shit is not a particularly top of the pops friendly words they're 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. Hey! The trademark SOD barrage of techno rock and acid-edged mayhem

is still as spiky and wicked as Beelzebub's tail, 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. 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. 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. It was amazing. They were such a good band but 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. 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 as 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 is as catchy as a cold on the underground see it all started so positively but it ended with going to prison for storming the capital 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's 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 sidibu saeed are called a girl group not you understand that gender is a yardstick by which to measure anything during steals review twilight eyes die 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 sombre strings of Baron de Verlange's Saint-Spectre-Morse theme will allow Morse's memory to live on.

Dig it, kids! I had a mate who was obsessed with Die Cheerleader and used to go to all their gigs, but he thought they were German and they were called Die 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, but Deli for Deli dismisses it as an insubstantial corporate take on indie rock. Deke and 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 trend air why else have they paid credit to cost producers paul oakenfold and steve osborne to make them sound like the happy mondays asked 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 look-alike 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 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's 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 10 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 Cat Walk at the Borderline, Terminal Cheesecake at the Islington Powerhouse, Radiohead at the Underworld, Eric Clapton at the Albert Hall, Daisy Chainsaw at Camden Palace 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 Stourbridge,

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 Trent Pollair, Alice in Chains at Rock City, and wound up the week checking out spare parts at Loughborough's The Swan in the Rushers.

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 tamzin 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, Sian Pattenden has been entrusted with angst this week, and the main topic of conversation is a response to a letter of Fortnite 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 in power. So Simmons, just fuck off! Middle-class anti-fascist from Stockport, however, has a somewhat different point of view. Get real, Terrence Simmons, you working-class dickhead. Why does the NME continue to follow the sad old oi, Gary Bush or 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, Chris 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 arse, mate, people are going to assume that you went there. For fuck's sake. When we fight nazis on the streets we're fighting the working class yes you terrence you thick homophobe when we argue against stall 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. Terrence, 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 Martens 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. Please, 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 girl thing right girl right girl oh no that's that's

a bit too dexter it's a bit too roy orbison yeah um the riot g contingent at Melty 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 happens to anyone. 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 band 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? Before you dismiss me as a chauvinist pig, I am very much in favour of equal rights. But to openly distinguish between the sexes in this way amounts to blatant sexism in the extreme. 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 gavin of leicester was very excited to see his hometown featuring in the pages of the enemy for the first time since the days of show wadi wadi thanks to a recent interview with corner shop the whole corner shop 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. 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 no 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 disabled 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, 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 rates 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 organizers 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 one 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 6 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. 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 wicks british snooker opening darby more news and regional news in your area blockbusters where's wale 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 a 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 goss at hans memlin 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 opal 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 yes oh so kenny rogers the gambler they should have made a follow-up film about islands in the stream in which he's just 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. Oh, right, right. Well, me dears, I do believe that a table of sorts has been laid.

And we're going to tuck into a feast of 1993 in the next episode of Chart Music. So, all that remains for me to say is thank you, Sarah B. In a bit. God bless you, Simon Price. See you later. My name's Al Needham. Stay Pop Crazed! This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long.

Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply.