Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - Chart Music #73 (Pt 2): 4.3.93 – Frank Bald

Episode Date: January 4, 2024

Simon Price, Sarah Bee and Al Needham begin their slog through an early-Nineties episode of The Pops with an examination of the changes Stanley Appell wrought upon our fave Thursday Evening Pop Treat. Then we’re immediately assailed by the sight of someone grabbing one of Right Said Fred’s arse as they do a bit for Comic Relief, followed by SuperMuso and Some Rap. STICK IT OUT, POP-CRAZED YOUNGSTERS!  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.

The queens of R&B, Xscape, and SWV, live across North America, with special guests, Maya, Total, and 702. Get tickets now at LiveNation.com. 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 sharp music Hey up, you pop-crazed youngsters, and welcome to part two of episode 73 of Chart Music. Here I am, Al Needham, and standing by my side today are sarah b all right and simon price hello and chaps here we are early 1993 i was a bit worried about this because the early 90 ones

are usually festooned with cat shit this one's all right though isn't it considering there's some fucking good stuff in here yes there is very little in the way of cat shit, I'd say. Um, there's that too. Oh, yeah. A sprinkling of cat shit. Yes. A generous sprinkling of cat shit. Like a sort of territorial sprinkling,

just to let us know that the cat is still around. Yes. Oh, yeah. I like to think, chaps, that 1993 is probably the last time in pop music in this country where there's factions still at play okay there is dance music but you know you can divide that up into techno and your standard rave and your hip-hop there's rock music which is grunge and proto brit pop and there's all the other shit as well it's interesting because there was this sort of crossover starting to happen

between indie kids and crusty types listening to techno music because of that whole kind of free festival movement and yes you know castle donington not no castle morton i should say castle morton and all that yeah castle donington monsters of rave yeah exactly and i wonder what kind of percentage of people would have gone to both so there was that that whole kind of blending happening, I think. But I think there were still battle lines, and I knew which side of the battle lines I was on when it comes to several things. Yeah, I'm sure I've mentioned before, this was actually a couple of years after this, which is a lifetime in Top of the Pops terms.

But when I first started going out in Halifax, I went to a club called The Zoo Bar, which was attached to another club called the Tram Shed basically Tram Shed was dance and the zoo was indie and rock and metal and there was communal outside area and there was a communal kind of room in the middle with lots of seating and no music and everybody just mingled a chill out room if you will it was really nice it was you know but I would I would sort of divide my time between both of them and uh yeah never any fights or anything it's quite boring really no it was not boring it was great i think that sort of thing is more commonplace than we imagine because when you hear people talk about the 70s they would often talk about going to

clubs that had two or three different rooms and and one of them would be playing Northern Soul, and the other would be playing Glam Rock or something, and people would just sort of drift between the two. I like that. All right, then, pop craze youngsters. It is time to go way back to March of 1993. Always remember, we may coat down your favourite band or artist But we never forget, they've been on top of the pops more than we have

It's 7pm on Thursday, March 4th, 1993, and Top of the Pops, like the mainstream music industry, is in a slump. It's been years since the show was a regular fixture in the Bob BBC One Top 20 ratings. The Year Zero revamp, which took place in 1991, is being seen as a dead cat bounce, and rumours are swirling that the incoming controller of BBC One,

Alan Yentob, has already put the show on his kill list. It's not all bad news though. Repeats of Top of the Pops are holding down the top five places in the ratings for the new satellite channel UK Gold but despite all that to use the parlance of the time the knives are out for top of the pops oh dear oh dear oh dear chaps i think now's as good a time as any to examine the career of the sixth executive producer of top of the pops and the changes he wrought, don't you? Sure.

Born in Stepney in 1933, Stanley Appel became a cameraman for Top of the Pops in 1966 when the show was relocated from Manchester to London and spent the rest of the decade upskirting Dolly Birds and crushing youths under the wheels of his EMI 2001. After working as senior cameraman on the music show Something Special, an international cabaret in the late 60s, he was earmarked for promotion and became the production assistant for Top of the Pops in 1971, a position he held throughout the first half of the 70s. In 1974, he made the next step up

when he became the director of the TV special Singer Song of Seacombe and the music show They Sold a Million, hosted by Vince Hill and featuring the Young Generation. And a year later, while he was directing the new series Lulu, the Valdunica music show and six episodes of Parkinson, he was being billed as assistant producer of Top of the Pops under Robin Nash, but had his title changed to director soon afterwards. By August of 1978 he's directed the series Max Bygrave Says I Want to Tell You a Story the final series of the Black and White Minstrel Show and the second series of Jim'll Fix It and had been promoted up again to producer of Top of the Pops

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

and working as the director of the late, late breakfast show, Wogan, the main attraction, the Keith Harris show, and the old sailors' Saturday tea time variety show, The Old. In 1986, he became joint producer-director of Top of the Pops, sharing the role with Paul Ciani and Brian Whitehouse. And when Ciani took over from Hurl in 1988, Appel stepped away to work on Blankety Blank, Every Second Counts and I've Got a Secret

But when Chiané's health started to decline in late 1989 Appel was drafted back in to mind the shop for a while And in the autumn of 1991 He officially took over from Chiané And was given carte blanche to pull the programme out of the shit and improve on its rating of just under 8 million viewers a week. And chaps, fucking hell, who knew that there was still a meritocracy at the BBC in the 90s, eh? Because if there's anyone in 1993 who knows the workings

and the heritage atop of the pubs, it's this man right here. And the good news is, is that this man of experience has been given the opportunity to do what he likes. The bad news is that in March of 1993, he's three months away from his 60th birthday. That's the thing. Fucking hell, Top of the Pops is not real kids' issues anymore. When we talk about new incoming producers of Top of the Pops,

as we often do, they usually seem to be kind of a new broom, you know, sweeping away all the crap and radicalising everything. But this guy's very much a company man, isn't he? He's come up through the ranks. He's very much the kind of Roy Evans through the boot room rather than a sort of Gerard Houllier figure. But it is analogous to

Matthew Bannister coming in at Radio 1 it's around the same era Bannister is getting rid of you know the likes of DLT and so on and ruffling a lot of feathers doing that and well without spoilering what we're about to see Stanley Apple Appel has has done that here by basically changing the rules about who gets to present the program and let's talk about those changes because it might not be a new broom. It's probably a bit more of a triggers broom, but it's a broom nonetheless, isn't it? So the changes then, well, Top of the Pops is moved from television centre to the BBC's Elstree Centre, which it bought off Central Television in 1984 to accommodate the set of EastEnders and has been given a budget

of a quarter of a million pounds to build a new set. Theoretically, chaps, that studio and Walford was built by the cast of Alveda's ain't pet, because that's where they filmed the on-the-job scenes in the first series. Amazing. After intensive

audience research, it is revealed that a British public doesn't give a wank about the Radio 1 DJs who've been presenting the show. So for the first time in 24 years, the bond between Top of the Pops and Radio 1 is severed and a squad of new presenters are drafted in. Appel finally bans miming from Top of the Pops,

as he's never liked the idea of it, and puts it about that at the very least, he will allow the playing of musical instruments to be mimed, but the singer has to be live. Do you reckon he was just seething all those years behind his big, unwieldy BBC tank-like camera? He was thinking thinking fucking hell god they're not fucking real yeah he thought it was cheating didn't he yes i'd never have it it's

still performance you know there's there's a whole fucking show now based on lip syncing and dance battles you know so uh i think really having thought about this a lot too much really it would have been nice to give everyone the choice. You know, it's like, well, if you want to puss out, that's fine. Just have some extra dancers. And then if you want to sing, then go for it. It would be nice to have a mixture. But I suppose I understand what he was getting at, but I don't agree.

In keeping with top of the pops of the late 80s, videos are to be used as sparingly as possible. But a chunk of the production budget is to be earmarked for live satellite broadcasts, mainly from America, of acts performing live. More importantly, the rules of the scheduling atop of the pops, which have stood pretty much unchanged since 1964, have been ripped up in an attempt to get the old uns interested again. Article in the stage, dated September 12th, 1991, Top of the Pops abandons young music fans.

Fewer songs could reach the UK's top ten singles chart as a result of changes about to be made to Top of the Pops, a chart expert warned this week. The corporation aims to revive the show, which has experienced a dropping viewing figures of late by encouraging more live performances and opening the show up to feature acts from the album charts and US charts. According to the new rules, the number one single will still be played, but any record in the top ten can be played regardless of its position and even if it was featured in the previous week's show.

Singles climbing between positions 11 and 40 will be eligible for inclusion, but will be played only once unless they reach the top 10 chart analyst alan jones predicted that the new guidelines may mean that the top 10 may remain static with a more rapid turnover of songs in the lower part of the top 40 many singles need to be shown twice on top of the pops for them to make the top ten, he said The corporation maintains the programme's new look has been prompted by the public's growing preference for long playing records while sales of singles, which are bought mainly by young teenagers, have slumped Producer Stanley Appel, who will choose the acts for the new look Top of the Pops,

said the inclusion of the American charts and tracks from the album charts will not only interest the older teenager who is developing more sophisticated musical tastes, but also young people with specific musical preferences. Yes, chaps, you heard that right. musical preferences. Yes, chaps, you heard that right. Stanley Appel, on the verge of turning six there, has complete control of the book at Top of the Pops.

I don't like the sound of that. The thing that really jumps out at me is bands being able to appear the following week when, you know, regardless of whether they've gone up or not, that's heresy. We've already seen that in short music, haven't we? When they put on Don't Look Back in Anger, even though it slipped down to number two. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that is cheating. Sacrilege! For a while, the Appel reformations worked. The first episode under his stewardship put on an extra million viewers and by early 1992 was pulling down a regular audience of nine and a half million. But at the end of the year, ratings went back into decline with rumours circulating that Appel was about to be sacked and replaced by Janet Street Porter.

Fucking hell, can you imagine that? That's a sort of Damocles, isn't it? So do you think that the changes that Top of the Pops wrought in the early 90s had an effect on the charts? Because we're not yet at the stage where singles will just rocket straight into the top three and then drop the next week. Yeah, I don't think the industry have really got their shit together

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

my favourite band is on Top of the Pops, that means they are a big deal, and the whole of the UK is seeing it. Well, no, actually, the whole of the UK wasn't necessarily seeing it. So it wasn't the force it was, maybe. So it's hard to prove what forces something up and down the charts there have been so many examples of what we might think is a brilliant top of the pops performance followed by you know a song sinking with lead diving boots but you know you used to think that there was some kind of correlation maybe by this point not yeah sarah you were the target viewership i suppose yes were your choices informed to any extent by what you'd seen on top of the pops like oh i'm gonna go out and buy that um not really it was probably um radio did it

more because i suppose you know when you get playlists and you hear it all the time it just gets hammered into your brain so i don't think it did really right we're treated to the annoying rave wasp sound of now get out of that by tony jibber the eighth and possibly worst top of the pot scene which was introduced in october of 1991 any argument on that no i really don't like the sequence either just it's kind of uh industrial and industrious you know it yes it looks like hard work it makes pop music look like you've got to sort of be physically fit and yeah you've got to put the graft in yeah yeah it's like you know the the words top the pops are made out of these kind of proto steampunk cogs and wheels and they're shot from these well they're not shot

it's probably computer generated but from these vertiginous angles. And the dancers are doing stuff that looks like hard work rather than the expression of freedom with the human body that the dance is meant to be. It's like outtakes from Flashdance, but, you know, the rehearsals. No, I didn't like it at all. T.O. and T.P. Music Factory, if you will. Yeah, there's these kind of shadowy, faceless figures. It's all quite humourless isn't it much as i am happy for top of the pops to have some seriousness because when it's too wacky it's extremely annoying there is a slightly sort of transatlantic whiff about it as

well it's definitely moving away from being british in that way the the shadowy mysterious figures of the dancers you know if this were today there'd be a whole subreddit devoted to decoding the hidden messages in their movements. And talk about, does it point to a conspiracy within the BBC? It is nice. I have to say, it's nice to see them kick it off with a little running man. Yes.

A little classic move. I can, in fact, running man. Not at the moment moment but someday that is the plan i tell you what relief said fred pop pickers stick it out right not off comic police sweep the uk and bright set red tape this year's 1993 anthem to number 13 when you're on the doctor's couch you've got to stick it out and Bright Set Bright Play this year's 1993 anthem to number 13. When you're on the doctor's couch, you've got to stick it out. You want to be a world champ, you've got to stick it right out.

As the film of youths working that body in a warehouse is overlaid by the mechanical spinning of the top of the pops logo which then transmogrifies into a tomato we're greeted by tonight's host alan fucking freeman there he is in tech in front of a marshall stack and behind some decks looking like cypress hills dad wearing a t-shirt with a logo of a letter G on a Union Jack underneath an oversized denim jacket and a woolly hat. And, yeah, he's making his first Top of the Pops performance since he pitched up on the 25 years of Top of the Pops special on New Year's Eve 1988.

And first question, chaps, what the fuck is that T-shirt? Because it's doing my edding it's like a g a lowercase g like the guardian logo but on a round union jack and it looks so familiar and i i just cannot fucking remember what it is do my edding yeah if any of the pcy's can figure that out oh god yeah it's not a band logo. It can't be a logo of a product because it's BBC. What is it? It's doing my head in.

Yeah. No, you need to check out the BBC Conspiracy subreddit. Yes. They'll know. Anyway, good old Fluff having a bit of a moment after his appearance

on the last ever episode of Harry Enfield's television programme in April of 1992 when Mike Smash and Dave Nice visit him in a care home and he's clearly the only one radio DJ of his era to take the criticism of old-school Radio 1 on the chin. DLT was absolutely fucking well-dischuffed by Smashy and Nice, eh?

Yeah, I think Freeman was seen as this kind of lovable harmless relic um of the swinging 60s who was willing to send himself up a bit and uh yeah you're absolutely right some of the other presenters of his generation did not want to even accept for one moment that they were not completely relevant but they needed to do that really just let it go because people love it people love someone who has a bit of sense sense of humour about themselves in that way. And it feels so good once... It's like admitting that you're wrong. I mean, that's not actually admitting it wrong,

but, you know, if you admit you're wrong, it feels so good, I'm telling you. Like, people resist it with their life. But it's like, it's OK, just admit you're wrong. You feel great. And, you know, if you can take the piss out of yourself a little bit. It's like, at first, you're like, oh, no, this will be the ruin of me.

And it's like, no, it'll be fine. You'll be a national treasure. Don't worry about it. It's like taking off you're like, oh, no, this will be the ruin of me. And it's like, no, it'll be fine. You'll be a national treasure. Don't worry about it. It's like taking off a tight pair of shoes. Well, that's what Tony Blackburn eventually ended up doing. Yeah, I don't know. I think Blackburn basically stayed in the same place and the world came back round to him. And it turns out that he was always really sound, you know.

I mean, maybe Alan Freeman's quite happy to have the piss taken out of him because he's still in work. At this point, he's the host of the Friday Rock Show, so, yeah, he's all right. But what he's actually doing is appearing in the video of the first single of the night, Stick It Out, by Right Said Fred and Friends. Born in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1953 and 1956, respectively, Richard and Christopher Fairbrass began their musical careers

with a gig at East Grinstead Women's Institute in 1974 before going on to join the actors who toured with Suicide and supported Joy Division in 1978. After spending the 80s as session musicians, Richard as a bassist for David Bowie and appearing in the video for Blue Jean, and Christopher, who became known as Fred, playing guitar for Mick Jagger and appearing as a band member in the Bob Dylan film Hearts of Fire, they ended up running a gym at the end of the decade recruited a guitarist on the side and formed right said fred by the way chaps you're not going to believe this but do you know the name of that

guitarist no go on frank bold fuck off no it's rob manzola who played in the funk band The Strutters in the 70s. After writing an album's worth of songs, and inspired by the outright preening twattery they observed on a daily basis at their gym, they wrote a song called I'm Too Sexy, which they demoed at night in a studio with the lights off because the studio had gone into receivership and they were paying off an engineer

who still had the keys after shopping the demo around they were not only turned down by every label in london but also dropped by their booking agent however the song was passed on to the record plugger guy holmes who listened to it in his car turned it off after a minute because he thought it was cat shit, but after the people in his passenger seats were still singing along to it, he offered to take them on. After he recommended that they knock off the rocky edges of the demo and go for a full-on dance version, and eventually compromise him for a pop feel,

he got the new version onto Capital Radio, for a pop feel, he got the new version onto Capital Radio and, more importantly, into the hands of the kingmaker of pop himself, Simon Bates, who played it to death. And in August of 1991, I'm Too Sexy began a seven-week run at number two, held off number one by everything i do by brian adams they began 1992 with a follow up don't talk just kiss which got to number three in the first week of january and finally made it to the summit of mount pop when deeply dippy spent three weeks at number one in april of that year while at the same time their debut lp up thudded into the album charts at number one in April of that year, while at the same time their debut LP Up thudded into the album charts at number three and would spend one week at number one. This is the follow-up to the double A side, These Simple Things slash Daydream, which only got to number 29 for two

weeks in April of last year, but more importantly,'re builders right said fred and friends all to give them their full title right said fred and hugh and peter and alan and jules and steve and clive and pauline and linda and richard and rob and basil and bernard the reason for this is because they've linked up with comic relief which was formed in 1985 by Richard Curtis and Lenny Henrere as a response to the Ethiopian famine and launched from a refugee camp in Sudan by Noel Edmonds on the Christmas Day episode of the Late Late Breakfast Show. It's been put out in advance of the fourth Red Nose Day, which takes place a week tomorrow. So therefore, this is also the follow-up to I Want To Be Elected,

the cover of the Alice Cooper song by Mr Bean and the Smear Campaign, which got to number nine in April of 1992. It entered the charts last week at number 15, and this week it's only nudged up two places to number 13 but they're working for the bbc now and the bbc looks after its own so here they are in the studio with the turbine of bbc star power firmly at their back and fucking hell chaps here is a hefty fatberg of pop culture that needs breaking up don't you think let's begin by talking for once about right said fred the band as opposed to right said fred the disinformation farm because it is very easy to forget that in

the early 90s that they're a very big deal indeed weren't they i mean the newspapers were calling them the saviors of pop for being recognizable characters in a sea of rave anonymity um there were grown men in a musical climate that's currently skewed towards the youth and a band with multi-generational appeal i feel i mean i i did not pick up on that at the time um they did seem like they were everywhere yeah well. Well, kids liked them. Yeah. Even the oldens. And mums.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you know who they remind me of round about this time? Go on. Michael Barrymore. Yeah. To use the term being bandied about by television people in the 90s, they were mainstream weird.

You know what I mean? Kind of like a little bit end of the pier, family friendly, a quirky edge, a bit saucy, a bit camper bit camp yeah they had the common touch didn't they i suppose um a bit like that kind of acceptable level of queerness that you're allowed to exhibit yes people like paul o'grady i suppose although you know paul o'grady would definitely push the envelope and push you know push the boundaries of what was acceptable. But yeah, the Freds were very harmless. They're more in the kind of Dick Emery mould.

I think I didn't mind a bit of Fred at the time. I remember I went to see him live at Brixton Fridge. Oh, wow. And I wrote a mostly positive review for Melody Maker, I think. Right. Yeah, I liked I'm Too Sexy. I liked Don't Talk, Just Kiss. Although I was very childish and I used to sing

Don't Talk, Just Shit all the time because that's really witty if you just change one word of a song to shit. Oh, gotcha. And Deeply Dippy, even though it was obviously a total rip-off of Daydream by Loving Spoonful, which is why, of course,

they then, you just mentioned it yourself, they recorded Daydream on the double A side of one of their singles. which is why of course they then just mentioned it yourself they they they recorded daydream on the double a side of one of the singles um yeah i i didn't have any high hopes for them becoming a great force in in popular music but i thought they were a sort of quite enjoyable diversion and thought you know they were basically on the side of the angels how little we knew yeah i i liked i'm too sexy it's funny because it's such a one-hit wonder isn't it it's it's like a nailed on one-hit wonder which i think it was i think it made it to america didn't it and

there they really are a one-hit wonder but then they kept on number one in america yeah yeah fucking hell but it is it's it's very jolly and naughty and clever and you know yeah it's brilliant yeah deeply dippy when that came out oh no this is a tune it's number one Yeah, and Deeply Dippy, when that came out, I was like, oh, no, this is a tune. It's number one, is it? Oh, good. Good for them. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I'm Too Sexy does feel like a classic one-hit wonder. They're breaking the rules by having a string of hits.

What the fuck are they playing at? They're not allowed. Their star is clearly on the wane, but here they come doing the bit for charity. Yeah, well, the heart just sinks, doesn't it? As it's borne out by this performance i mean it's a melange of a studio performance with clips from the video flown in and out it's essentially a display of bbc star power circa 1993 but we'll get to that later because right at the beginning

did you notice this the band they're on a slightly raised platform and right at the beginning of the song a young madam reaches up and just pinches fred fairbrass right on his arse did you see that no i missed that yeah yeah and he turns around and has a conversation with her mates and you can clearly see her immediately going all serious and shaking her head and raising her arms up as if to say that's not me and i just thought oh that's interesting because of who the band are and what they're representing i fully expected that to be the commencement of a bit which would end up with that girl getting up on the stage and they start

snogging and maybe she'll even take his clothes off or her clothes off but alas no genuine audience fiddling with the band i mean i can't believe a sexual assault took place on top of the pop's premises richard of the freds has his ass partly out he's got they're not chaps are they i think they're they're actually yeah the leather trousers with the ass cut out yeah yeah um which is not to suggest that you you know, even if you're on a stage parading around with your arse out, this is not an invitation to pinch. But, yes. And it says, what does it say on his arse? Fat bum.

It says fat on one cheek and bum on the other. And it's gauze, it's on a bit of gauze. So it's not bare arse, but, you know, it's arse nonetheless. Yeah, and it's a bit disingenuous, so it's not bare arse no it's you know it's arse nonetheless yeah and it's a bit disingenuous isn't it to say fat bum when he is a man who uh is clearly in extremely good shape um and you know it's not a fat bum is it richard certainly not so mix a lot wouldn't be the slightest bit interesting no absolutely not his anaconda would not want none. Anyway, so we're going to talk about what a mess this is. So anyway, by the time your attention has gone back to Richard Fairbrass,

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

Vegas by punching Richard Fairbrass in the head and then helping him up. While in the foreground laughing his tits off in a country squire outfit is Hugh Laurie who is currently filming the final series of Jeeves and Wooster on ITV but has been a constant

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

who, after a regular stint on Cracker Jack, popped up on all manner of game shows like a new-age Willie Rushton. Surprisingly, his wife at the time, Victoria Wood, hasn't got involved this year. So, The Stonk was the comic relief single in 1991, and it was a double a side with the smile song by victoria wood um which i didn't know until i started until i disappeared down this

fucking rabbit hole which i think is is really how you should do it if you're going to do comic relief you just get victoria wood to do a parody song and she parodies all of the big people of the time and you know it's mildly amusing and the wordplay is extremely um sharp and that's that's what you should do really just have everyone else do a little cameo a little interjection if you want you know but i honestly never knew about that and then popping up to say who says white people don't have rhythm is right yeah peter cook peter fucking cook mate i've just read david stubbs book at different times the history of british comedy and he makes a very convincing case for peter cook being this kind of towering genius of brit com i've got to say i never really got it partly

because when i worked at melody maker uh there was somebody who worked on the news desk who used to bring in the tape of Derek and Clive and play it in the office right and he'd sit there cackling and so would other members of staff as far as I could tell the whole point of it was a man saying cunt on tape god who wants to listen to some man saying cunt all the time I like to think that we do it artistically on here you know there's something more than just the mere fact of a man in a deadpan voice saying cunt. We only use it when absolutely necessary. No, I never really got it with Peter Cook.

And I just think that this video, in fact, you know, it shouldn't be me here. It should be David here. David should be having this video rubbed in his face because all of his fucking heroes being shown up for the craven whores that they are. Well, he's spent the 90s so far with very little telly work, but he's about to commence filming for the One Foot in the Grave Christmas special, as well as doing an elongated interview with Chris Morris for the Radio 3 show Why Bother?

And by this point has pretty much replaced Kenneth Williams as that bloke you book for your chat show and let him get on with it. You know what I mean? National treasure, I believe, is the word that's being used about him at this time. We then see him dressed like Hugh Laurie doing some comedy dancing with... Clive Anderson. Clive Anderson, who's still very much a Channel 4 man,

as the host of Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Clive Anderson talks back, but he's been a comic relief participant since it started and will be defecting to the BBC in a few years. Then we get about two seconds of Ronnie Corbett in his leather chair, except it isn't. It's Steve fucking Coogan, mate. Who at this point has been a regular of the Radio 4 show On The Hour and has just finished the first series of the radio version of Knowing Me, Knowing You, but was best known on television at the moment as an impressionist.

And here he is doing Ronnie Corbett. Why couldn't they get real Ronnie Corbett in? It's too expensive. During the studio performance, by the way, the kids have all been given red noses and car radiator grill adornments to wear on their head. And there's someone with a handheld camera getting stuck in, as was Top of the Pops' want round about this time.

But at one point, they've angled Viz to the side, and we see something I've never seen before, which was an older bloke in a jumper off to the side of the kids and crouching down and going from side to side making this frantic grabbing gesture like an enormous crab what the fuck it's like yeah he's herding them from the knees yeah he's cackling the kids in his head i guess he's he's sort of trying to duck under the line of the cameras but the yeah dismal man looks like he's raving to the crab by michael barrymore the single he put out in the late 80s and played relentlessly on his television show in a doomed

attempt to get it into the charts but then we see the fucking true hero of this video basil fucking brush and an enormous red nose who hasn't been on the BBC since being the co-host of Crackerjack in 1984 but has made himself available to his public earlier this year when he appeared on Fantasy Football League with Roy Hattersley

I fucking love Basil Brush, who doesn't man every time he appears on a screen I just can't help but cheer with glee. You've seen the DVD Charlie Says, haven't you? Yeah. I got that the week it came out in 2001, as I was already aware

that this century stank of unwiped arse, and I wanted the old one back. And instead of the warm bath of nostalgia I was expecting, it was so fucking traumatic. You know? The spirit of dark and lonely water yeah sensible children babies being pitched into shopping bags filled with glass kids trapped under frozen ponds joe and petunia dying in a car crash which i'd never seen before

that absolutely traumatized me and then about an hour in we get a double barrel of protect and survive which i hadn't seen before well you know you're all gonna die but we'll pretend that you won't because we don't want any panic the air attack warning sounds like this is the sound yeah it was the one where they tell us that if you've got a dead body in your shelter right next to you, you've got to live with the fucking thing for five days you just want to slash your wrists and have done with it but immediately after that you're hit with Basil, Brush and

Roy North telling you not to go out into the sea on a dinghy and you just go, YES! we all lived, and so did Basil the next one after that is Royal Ferris in a swimming pool with some kids, but never mind. Never mind. No, he's quite brave sticking his head above the parapet on this occasion,

because we're still four years out from New Labour's election victory and the fox hunting ban. Yeah. So going out in public like that. Good to have him back. Possibly the first and only time he's ever been on Top of the Pops, which is wrong. He could have hosted it, man.

That would be brilliant. Oh, that would actually have been brilliant, yeah. I never liked Basil Brush at the time because I'd... Well, I thought Foxes were great, but I thought he was kind of letting the side down by not being, you know, elegant and sleek. Were you upset that he didn't savage chickens by the throat on Saturday Tea Time, Sarah?

Or have very noisy sex. No, Basil Brush presenting Top of the Pops would have been fucking mint. Because he always used to dress up as whatever special guest was on his show. I mean, the classic example of that, of course, is when Demis Roussos pitched up and Basil's there with a caftan and they're both singing along.

Fucking Demis Roussos loves it. I've not seen that. Apparently in the 70s, when he had his Saturday Tea Time show in the Generation Game slot, fucking foreign singers would be fighting to get on the Basil Brush show and their agents would say, look, I've got you booked in on Saturday Tea Time on BBC One. You've got to sing with a fox who's dressed up as you and taking the piss and they'd be like no book it mate so by rights on this video he should be there in a pair of leather trousers with your

ass hanging out yes exactly but you never get to see his ass do you you know no it's true they hadn't developed the technology yet you know i'll go to my grave having never seen basil brush's arse man what a waste of a life i've had he's got a tail though and he sort of sticks up behind him yeah a brush if you will yeah yeah well indeed yeah and then we get linda robson and pauline quirk who are the stars of the bbc one sitcom birds of a feather which is by now four series in. We don't get Leslie Joseph, who played proto-Milf Dorian Green, and there's no clip of him on Top of the Pops of them two mauling Richard Fairbrass's arse. I think we've seen enough arse mauling for one episode of Top of the Pops, don't you? Yeah. You know what, though, right?

I just remembered that my girlfriend at the time fancied Fred Fairbrass. Oh, really? Yeah, and he was a bald man, and I was starting to lose my hair a little bit around this time. And I just, you know, as I mentioned previously, and I just remember thinking, oh, you know, maybe it's okay. Maybe there's some hope for me. What I didn't think was I've also got to go to the gym every fucking day.

And then finally, at last, the partnership the country has been waiting for because here comes bernard fucking cribbins yes he's currently resting but he's popping up from time to time as a vicar in noel's house party and there we go a barrage of celebrity circa 1993 yeah cribbins mainly sort of known to me as as the aggy bloke from faulty towers yes we all know the reason why he's particularly connected to this record don't we yeah yeah because he had a hit single called right said fred in the 60s yeah that's a little visual joke what we don't see on top of the pops that's in the video is the clip of the african toddler being made to dance

fuck me or any reference to the people and places that the event's raising money for. Which brings us quite neatly on to Red Nose Day 1993. I have to ask, Simon, did Melody Maker do anything for the day? Did we fuck? Didn't David sit in a tin bath full of beans and review the singles? I mean, I can't speak for the politics

of the other members of the Melody Maker staff, but in any civilised and properly functioning society, this would not be allowed to happen. And not just because the record is shit. I tended to take the view informed by Paul Heaton in his House Martins days on the song Flag Day of, you know, charity basically being a fig leaf over the obscenity of capitalism. You know, you thought you'd like to change the world, got Blue Peter to stage an appeal. And it's a waste of time if you know what they mean. Try shaking a box in front of the Queen.

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

Jesus Christ. No, it disgusts me. It disgusts me. And the thing is, people think that that means you're a miser, that you're mean-spirited if you say that. Absolutely not. I think that we as a society as a whole need to sort shit out and it should be embarrassing and shameful to all of us every day of our lives that there are things whether in this country or abroad which are so fucked that we have to stage charity appeals to sort them out

that's what tax is for that That's what taxation is for. Yeah, I have come to understand that charities are essentially a failure of government, isn't it? And the trouble is that you grow up, it takes you a long time to go, hang on about this, because you grow up believing that it's the most purely good thing. How could it possibly be bad? And sadly, then you go, oh, yeah, fuck, actually, it it kind of is you get carte blanche when you are doing good in this way you get carte blanche to be as manipulative as you like and i understand why people would want to jump on this to do their bit shore it up and stick it out yeah i mean sarah's right that intention has to count for something and also just the practical realities of things is that if the government is clearly not going to be minded to sort shit out, then it's on us. You know, you've just got to sort shit out somehow in the immediate short term. But the trouble is that the short term then becomes Red Nose Day and sorts out whatever shit that year's Red Nose Day is sorting out.

Then the very next Sunday on whichever political programme it is on the BBC, Paxman should sit down with John Major or whoever his representative is that day and say, aren't you embarrassed? Aren't you ashamed that we, the BBC, have had to go grovelling to the public, your voters, to sort this out? It's the same now. We have a government where the Home Secretary until, well, the person who was Home Secretary until she was recently deposed, said that being homeless is a lifestyle choice, right? More than ever, charities like Shelter are so important because charities like that act as pressure groups as much as just sort of fundraisers to, you know, to throw people a few quid. My dad was a founder member of Shelter Cymru. So it's always, you know, if I ever raise any money for anything, it's usually that. And that's precisely because for decades now, we've had governments whose housing policy is almost willfully directed to allow a certain amount of homelessness. Because if you allow people to become too comfortable and to think, oh, well, I'll never end up on the streets, they cease to become obedient little participants in work, in capitalism. So unfortunately, you know, we have to have things

like shelter to kick the government's arse and to say, what, you know, what are you doing? Why aren't you sorting this out? There are also things like Greenpeace, which by its very nature is anti-governmental because it's trying to fight against government policies, not just this government, but governments all around the world. So there are certain causes where you think, well, we absolutely have to give them our money just to keep governments honest. But something like this, if it's just to feed people who are starving, come on, that's what government's for. That's what tax is for. Sorry, end of rant. Sermon over at last. Yeah, I've done a bit of volunteering with homeless charities and one christmas i helped with the shelter at the union chapel they kind of open up the basement of the union chapel in in islington

and make it into a shelter for for a couple of weeks and um me and this other girl kind of did the beds we like did this um it was just like camp beds however many 20 or 30 or something in this basement room. And then we stood back and kind of admired our handiwork when we were done. And it was warm in there. You know, it was a basement, but we had lots of heaters. And it was just like, oh, isn't that nice? Oh, God, isn't that awful?

Both of us just had such mixed feelings. It's like the warm glow that you get from doing a charitable thing, doing a nice thing, and then realizing how disgusting it is that this that you had to do it at all that's the charity experience really but like i said for a lot of people you just get the first part you know you get the warm glow there's that cognitive dissonance isn't there of the um christmas one you know that these charities that raise money to make sure that nobody is out on the streets on Christmas Day. And then what? On Boxing Day, they just turf them all out again. You know, as if there's something particularly special about Christmas.

Oh, we don't mind there being homelessness, but God, not on Christmas Day. Fucking hell. Yeah, these are all very nice words you're coming out with, but I'm afraid to say that they're not buttering the parsnips of advertising and product placement. So allow me to talk about the sponsors of Red Nose Day 1993. Woolworths are the official vendors for the red noses, which this year look like a tomato that's been thrown against the wall.

70p. C&A are selling the official T-shirt in association with global hyper color so the tomato changes color when you get a bit of a sweat on they're available from six pound to eight pound you can get a tomato nose for your car or lorry from shell one pound fifty or five pound and m&ms are doing a bag of red only shaking minstrels and are donating 3p for each bag sold. So there you go. Capitalism working there. No one could ever accuse you, Al, of skimping on your research.

No. Fucking Nora. Man, it's what the Pop Craze youngsters expect. I am in awe. Yeah, same, same. As for the TV show, well, Mr Bean teamed up with Cella Black for a special episode of Blind Date.

There was a mash-up of A Question of Sport and Have I Got News For You. There was an interactive episode of Casualty where plot twists were voted on by the audience. Ben Elton exhumed the corpse of Friday Night Live. There was a horrific, not even a cover, but more of a singing over of Bohemian Rhapsody, featuring the casts of, get ready for this,

the casts of Tomorrow's World, That's Life, Birds of a Feather, Red Dwarf, Blue Peter, Brookside, El Dorado, Drop the Dead Donkey and London's Burning, Ian McCaskill, Gloria Hunniford and Karen Keating, Trev and Simon, Smashy and Nice Air, Ed the Duck,

Gordon the Gopher, Patrick Moore, Edmonds, Jill Dando, Seth Armstrong, Chris fucking Cunting Evans, Nick Owen and Ad Diamond, Terry Christian, and Nicholas Witchell miming the piano on the news desk. Fucking hell, have you seen that?

Fuck me, no, no. Right, so Fred made an appearance. Of course they did. They played Stick It Out live in a random street, and they put on spinal tap afterwards because you know they needed to put something funny on after all that 480 minutes of cheap peak time television which raised 18 million pounds the second lowest total on any comic relief event don't you know yeah i can't think why but really chaps the song and the video

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

They'll say, it's just a bit of fun. Yeah. You know, as if sticking a red nose, or in this case, a fucking plastic tomato on it, makes anything immediately funny. Just the intention of it being funny is enough and suddenly all quality control goes out the window because it's for charity yeah you know i i really hate that what it tells us about the british psyche is so depressing

that they will take this we think now that we're sort of scraping the barrel with things like mrs brown's boys but that kind of basicness was always with us and particularly with us in the barrel were things like Mrs Brown's Boys. But that kind of basicness was always with us, and particularly with us in the late 80s, early 90s. Fuck me. I mean, charity records are inherently cynical operations, aren't they? Because they only exist to be bought. Yeah, and they're totally blatant about that. I mean, fucking hell, the motherlode of charity singles,

Do They Know It's Christmas, they're saying, look, just buy five copies, even if you hate the song. Yeah, yeah. Buy five copies and give them all to people who can't afford them yeah we don't give a fuck what you do with it just buy it they are kind of saying well it doesn't have to be good it's not an actual song it's not really music it's a guilt trip in musical form basically i mean it's calculated to make you feel feelings of one sort or another the primary one being buy this or there'll be no milk for the babies again tomorrow. And, you know, whether or not it's good is irrelevant.

Is this the way to Amarillo? Who gives a shit? Give us the money. And from a television point of view, it's a brilliant way of getting loads of famous people. Of course. Some of whom don't even work for you to produce hours of unpaid content. Yeah, that's very true. You know, everyone wins apart from the world.

A lot of those people are just doing work that I'm sure that they tend to sort of sweep under the carpet these days. Hugh Laurie, you know, a man whose career includes Blackadder Goes Forth and A Bit of Fry and Laurie and House. It's fair to say that his finest work doesn't include waddling about with two red balloons between his knees. No. As he does here. Which later turns out to be two painted bald heads, let's recall.

I mean, it's a bit fruity, this song, isn't it? They go on about an erection and Hugh Laurie nips and says, oh, a building, a building. Yeah, stick it out. The it means a willy. It means a cock. Fucking hell. Yeah, it's of a piece with the stonk, isn't it? The level of humour of it. Or, stick it out, there'll be a decent song on later.

This is the idea, isn't it? It's a kind of half-successful double entendre, isn't it? Because they're doing the whole stiff upper lip, emphasis on the stiff right you know chin up cock out keep calm and insert homily here it's really weird this song again fully in the knowledge that in some ways it's not meant to be good but they must have they sort of tried something a bit and then just kind of gave it up and went, this will do. I don't think anyone needs to be too embarrassed about this

because that's the other thing about charity records. Because they're not really records in the true sense. They just lift right out of the culture, I think. And they lift out of anybody's CV quite readily, I think. And you could say one of the most deserving charities of Comic Relief 1993. Right said, Fred. Their child positions are fucking sliding right down aren't they yeah yeah well this is a blip isn't it yeah yeah so this this record right they've had the idea to kind of do a blues which is fine i mean the blues is very forgiving and uh indeed hugh laurie uh went on to uh make make some blues albums ah yeah yeah man

loves the blues it's a little bit always look on the bright side of life that's kind of how it starts out and then there's a sort of slightly cleaner riff on the chicken song briefly and then they kind of drop that as well but that's how it starts off if they'd kind of stuck to that a bit you know the idea of yeah everything's terrible but let's make the best of it and that's kind of the idea but it's not really followed through like i said it feels like the work of about 20 different people who've just put in ideas and you know like you said stick a red nose on it and it'll be funny and even if it isn't give us the money anyway yeah you know, like you said, stick a red nose on it and it'll be funny. And even if it isn't, give us the money anyway. Yeah. There's almost like a really sort of crass suicide prevention idea in there as well.

It's like somebody at some point goes, it's either laugh or die, isn't it? What? Is that a threat? Are you the joker? What are you talking about? It's either laugh or die. That's what I've always said. I think the BBC are very good at this sort've always said i think the bbc are very

good at this sort of thing um depending on the meaning of the word good comic relief sport relief children in need you know up until recently they had three of these going every year and let us recall that round about this time itv had a go in the late 80s with their biannual telethon, but they scrapped it in 1992 when their studio was invaded by a disabled pressure group during a live broadcast who protested against ITV's cloyingly patronising treatment of the subject matter. They just strolled up and interrupted Michael Aspel and Claire Raynham.

Yeah, ITV just stopped doing it i think comic relief realized not that long after this that they should probably retire this flavor of novelty record um because they used to come in two flavors sincere and wackadoo and this was very much the latter and sensibly retired and just go you know and then it was just stuff like a couple years later um share ch, Chrissie Hynde and Nenna Cherry were doing Love Can Build a Bridge. But previous to this, we had The Stonk in 1991, which I think is a toss up between this and that for worst. It's tough to rank the comic relief singles, really. But, you know, it gets quite boring and safe after a bit, which is fine by me.

Yeah, it moved on very quickly to, let's get the biggest band in the country to do a cover version. Yeah, which makes much more sense. But I do wonder, like, who bought this? Like, you know, because people, you could donate in lots of different ways. You could donate on the night, and you could buy a T-shirt and whatever.

So, you know, buy like a T-shirt to sleep in, you because you're not gonna like wear it are you um but you know where do the seven inch singles of stick it out end up you know and i thought oh i know there's right now there's an aging millennial somewhere going through the loft of their recently deceased boomer mum and pulling a seven inch of stick it out from the bottom of a dusty caved in box that used to hold supermarket own brand ketchup and mirthlessly looking at it and going huh and then wanging it down through the hole in the floor to join the sort of drift of crap at the bottom of the ladder and then soon they're going to gather it up into another bin bag and take another carload to the tip while musing ruefully on the needless smallness of their parents' lives, and how that inevitably

shaped their own life, and how it technically isn't too late to find something more, something bigger, something more meaningful for themselves, but really, they know in their bones, it's too late. Stick it out! Ha ha ha! So,

the following week, Stick It Out jumped four places to number nine. But when Red Nose Day kicked into full gear, it got to number four, its highest position. The follow-up bumped, entered the chart at number 32 in October and immediately slid downwards. Diminishing returns set right in through the early 90s and they never bothered the top 40 for the rest of the decade resurfacing in 2001 when you're my mate got to number 18 in october that year and then disappearing again and we never heard from right said fred ever again yeah right oh come on we've got to address this anti-vax said fred yeah um for all my misgivings and that's putting it mildly about this song and about the

concept of charity telethons in in general i probably would have looked back upon right said fred with a certain amount of fondness after all this time worry not for the fact that they have mutated into a toxic fucking bin fire of covid denial and dog whistle racism pitching up in provincial shopping centers and bothering pedestrians right said don is still exactly you know they say oh well you should separate the art from the artist yeah maybe not in this case hey no no no before we go on it has to be said that rob manzole frank bold he's kept right out because he left the band in an amicable split in 1999 you know who he's playing with now? Screwdriver? George fucking Clinton.

Right, okay, fair play. He's in the P-Fun Call Stars. He's played with Sly Stone and fucking Outcast. Oh, that's nice. Good for him. Yeah, and he's still got his hair. But yeah, why do people give a fuck about whatever right said Fred or anyone like that thinks about anything?

It's the Twitter brain parasite is what it is, which affects millions of people. It makes people think that you know well i've got a platform and i've got influence and so therefore you know i need to use it but it also gives you looking at that a false impression of how much weight that carries you know so everybody it's a massive distortion field um and you know i i want no part of it because in 1993 if someone had come up to you in the pub and said you know that hank marvin out of the shadows he's so against the fucking maastricht agreement you just shrug and get on with your fucking life yeah yeah you wouldn't care but i think it is quite enjoyable on some level when you look at the rogues gallery of washed up celebrities who are part of this

whole grift, you know, these fucking grifters who are into the COVID denial and the dog whistle racism and the anti-trans thing. You look at the calibre of people that are being held up as the figureheads of that. And it is basically Matt Letizia, Lawrence Fox and the singer out of right said fred it's fucking comical it's funnier than anything on this fucking record let me tell you and uh ian brown let's oh let's not forget oh ian fucking brown actually let's do and stick it out became the fourth least selling comic relief single ever above absolutely Fabulous by Pet Shop Boys and Absolutely Fabulous I want to be elected by Mr Bean and the Smear Campaign

and Bruce Dickinson and I know him so well by Susan Boyle and Geraldine McQueen I'm sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, sticking out, number four from Lenny Kravitz, Are You Gonna Go My Way. The camera doll is back and to the right to reveal tonight's host in a dark grey suit over that hyper-colour comic relief T-shirt, which has already turned blue, so he must have had the right sweat on. Born in Swindon in 1974, Mark Franklin began his career by applying for a job at his local hospital radio station,

but was turned down for only being seven years old. He eventually bagged a slot there while still at school, and in April of 1989, he landed a gig on the brand new local radio station BBC Wiltshire Sound presenting a weekly youth program. Then on August the 22nd 1991 while he was studying English and communications at New College in Swindon he chanced upon an advert in the stage sandwiched between Jacqueline's discotheque-required glamorous dancers and topless female dancers required for Istanbul nightclub, which read as follows. BBC TV, top of the pops. How would you like to be a presenter of the number one pop music show?

Auditions are being held shortly. If you are young, charismatic and rearing to go, exclamation mark, then please ring Stanley Appel 081 576 1613. He made the call, sailed through the audition and on October the 3rd, 1991, he launched the revamped TOTP with Tony Daughter, becoming the youngest Top of the Pops presenter ever at the age of 17, and, unless of course you know better, the first to be born after the first episode of Top of the

Pops. This is his 35th appearance on top of the pops as part of a talent pool which currently consists of him daughter and no one else they alternate each week right through 1993 and chaps he's the only dj who's presenting top of the pops at the moment because he's doing the Breakfast Show on Chilton FM, a commercial station. Fucking hell, that must have pissed off Radio 1 DJs, eh? I mean, we'll recall that in 1989, Ashlyn and Linda Reynolds said,

can't they see that every generation has music for its own identity? But why the DJ on the radio station is always more than twice the age of me. And it's like the BBC have held up Mark Franklin and said, happy now? I mean, how does he get on, chaps? Have they made a boy do a man's job?

A baitzer's job, if you will. The first thing to say is, I'd never heard of this guy. No, again, another one Yeah, because it was Paul Jordan research that we hadn't heard of and we had to do a lot of research into Oh God, yeah So yeah, Mark Franklin, no idea So I did a little bit of research

and I, you know, where is he now? and found him on Twitter and I want to say, right at the top he seems like an absolutely brilliant bloke yeah yeah he hates the Tories yes he's very sound on matters of gender and sexuality and so on I mean I share so many of his beliefs just scrolling down through his sort of feed I followed him in fact I thought you know it seems like a good guy to follow I say all that as a

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

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

But he gives nothing away of himself on Top of the Pops. It's almost as if the response from Stanley Apple, I'm going to say Apple, to having previously had so many excessive and outlandish personalities presenting Top of the Pops was to hire presenters with no personality at all. Mark Franklin makes Paul Jordan look like Kenny Everett, essentially, in terms of extroversion and all of that.

But in his defence, Simon, I feel that he's been given as little opportunity as possible to put himself over on this episode. Don't know what the other episodes are like, but we don't see that much of him. And when we do, he doesn't get that much airtime. This is more what you expect from a presenter role. We're so used to the presenters of top of the pops being

an outsized imposing themselves and being an outsized part of the show and kind of you know elbowing their way into the view of the camera every opportunity and it's like um you know with mixed results but with an awful lot of you know extremely tiresome pratting about this is much more of a sort of conventional presenter gig as it is at this time in this kind of unsatisfying quite slick

era of Top of the Pops and he's just perfect for that he fits the role he doesn't fit the jacket he's got the sort of half-weighted

David Byrne suit jacket there you know he's kind of and you may find yourself presenting Top of the Pops. Well, how did I get here? I rang Stanley Apple and he said, all right then. He's kind of a Category C presenter, you know,

if you think of Category A as creeps and Category B as other sundry narcissists, I suppose. He's like kind of trainee Mark Goodyear. Yeah, yeah. Mark Good, Mark Down. Markists, I suppose. He's like kind of trainee Mark Goodyear. Yeah, yeah. Mark good, Mark down. Mark three, see me. I mean, to be fair, he presented more episodes in the end than Mark Goodyear. And as I discovered from a Q&A in Wales on Sunday that he did,

his biggest ambition was to become a household name like Noel Edmonds. Right. He's a real pro, isn't he? I mean, you've got to hand it to become a household name like Noel Edmonds. Right. He's a real pro, isn't he? I mean, you've got to hand it to him. He's just right for this era. He's friendly and enthusiastic. He's incredibly self-possessed, considering he's barely allowed into the BBC bar,

the Elstree bar at this point. And he's got lovely hair, which is now, as I've seen from his social media, a lovely platinum shade. He looks like his first career choice was boy in a boy band but he is totally happy with this one yeah well you know he's happy to be there um which i like to see over most people who are like no i'm too good for this you know he absolutely doesn't have that attitude yeah and the thing is in order to become a household name like edmunds you'd you have to be a dick essentially yes in order to become a household name like Edmunds, you have to be a dick, essentially.

Yes. In order to become a household name like Savile, you've got to be something far worse. He's managed to not become a household name, but also not be any of those horrible things. So fair play to him. That's how you do it. That's how you do it.

And you know how people go on about, oh, isn't it terrible when you see policemen that are younger than you? Fuck that. Having a fucking top of see policemen that are younger than you fuck that having a fucking top of the pops presenter that's younger than you that would have been a dagger of ice down the spine in 1993 wouldn't it especially for me being you know on the fringes of the media you know working at meldy maker it's not as if i wanted to be a top of the pops presenter do you know what i mean but i i at least wanted to think well i yeah i am a hip young guns gunslinger and those old farts at top of the pops aren't good enough yeah but you know

if i'm not presenting top of the pops that's because i'm too cool for it you know i'm too young and hip and relevant and then some some 19 year old comes along he's doing it already it's like oh no if only disca down was still going simon. You'd have been a lock for that. Yeah. I mean, yeah, he's pretty much become the face of the new Top of the Pops and has been going around saying that at this point he's already presented more episodes of Noel Edmonds and Jimmy Savile, which I'm afraid to say is absolute bollocks because Edmonds ended up doing 74 and Savile did 272. But at this point, it looks very feasible

that he could take this show right through the 90s and beyond because you know by the year 2000 he'd only be 26 which is nothing in top of pops terms do you remember him sarah from the time i i had forgotten he existed to be honest so no i don't but um that is kind of a backhanded compliment because he was so out of the way of the act he was so out of the way of fred fairbrass and his ass and uh you know everyone else it's like that morrissey song little man what now i remember you except i don't remember but really just goes to show that the new regime at top of the pops is it's not about the presenters anymore no which i suppose is a good thing just the music man yeah yeah but there were more phases

after this of kind of having you know celebrities oh yes yeah that would all change yeah true which you know was not necessarily an improvement because presenting is um very much like podcasting in fact it's a skill on its own you can't just assume i know i'm on very thin ice here but you can't just assume that because you're good at one thing you can immediately i'll just do this thing it's fine any dickhead can do that that's such a great song it deserves to be a number one because it's such a great pop record says Franklin, as he holds up a red nose and shills comic relief one more time. He then immediately throws us into 75% of the top 40 over the video of Are You Gonna Go My Way by Lenny Kravitz. Born in New York in 1964, Leonard Kravitz was the son of a TV news producer and the actor Roxy Rocha, who became part of America's first interracial sitcom couple in The Jeffersons.

where he joined the California Boys Choir and eventually attended Beverly Hills High School at the same time as Maria McKee, Nicolas Cage and Slash. He began his career properly in 1985 when he started calling himself Romeo Blue and spent the next three years demoing a debut LP. And in 1989, after a bidding war between four different labels and being

encouraged to bin off his shit stage name, he was signed by Virgin. His first LP, Let Love Rule, was a minor hit in America, and it and the three singles from it stalked the lower end of the UK charts, but the next LP, 1991's Mama Said, put him over the top here with the single It Ain't Over Till It's Over getting to number one for two weeks in June of that year. This single the lead off cut from his third LP of the same name which came out this week is the follow-up to Stand By My Woman, which only got to number 55 in September of 1991. It entered the chart at number 11 a fortnight ago, and it was immediately flown over to Elstree for an in-studio performance,

which helped it jump six places to number five. This week, it's crept up one place to number four, so here's the video, which was directed by Mark Romanek, which did the videos for Sweet Bird of Truth for The The, Ring Ring Ring for De La Soul and Free Your Mind for En Vogue, and was filmed in Las Vegas. So chaps, let's get the charts out of the way first because hey, that's what Top of the Pops is doing nowadays, isn't it? Yeah, we don't get the pictures. No. No! Can I just point out, by the way, that Mark Franklin leads into this brilliantly by saying,

Are you gonna go my way? Yes! This is such good emphasis. As far as the charts go, out of the 30 singles that have run down, I knew only seven of them. Fucking hell. Shame on me for not being down with the youth then. Yeah, but that just reinforces the point that the charts and Top of the Pops were not central anymore. No.

And that we were finding our music in different ways. And stuff was almost sort of meaninglessly becoming a hit. Almost randomly, stuff would sort of fall into the top 30, the top 20, then fall out again without really having any traction with with the public yeah but going through that chart now fucking out neil young rod stewart juran juran

brian ferrer madonna roll faris fucking out welcome to the new decade everyone yeah yeah exactly the 90s haven't started yet no you have have they? No, no, no. Despite, you know, all this sort of, you know, 1987, 88, Second Summer of Love, Acid House Rave, it's a whole new era, all that kind of stuff. No, it's not really. It's Curtis Stigersville, isn't it? Yes, very much so. Well, it's because all of that stuff,

a lot of that stuff really kind of flamed out. So, yeah, you're not going to see that at this point. But, yeah, it's a bunch of olds, isn't it? So, anyway, Lenny. I mean, if you came up to me and said, said look i've got a spare ticket for this gig the bloke's influenced by all these different elements of black music he's worked with people like curtis mayfield he's sampled public enemy and all this i'd have took your fucking hand off and then i'd look at the ticket and go lenny fucking kravitz fuck off mate i'm not friends with you anymore yeah i mean what is there to say about are you going to go my way by

lenny kravitz except this is such a hilarious record There's something meditative about it. Like you can't, it's the answer to itself. It's like a perfect, dumb, shiny sphere. It's so flawlessly kind of planet shaped and filled with, you know, pseudo deep knowledge. And it's so unsmilingly cheerful. It's cool. It's dorkish. It's flimsy it's rock solid it's not shameless because it would have had to address the notion of shamefulness in order to reject it which it hasn't done i love it i don't love it it's just one of the undeniable facts of life it just is i i love that it doesn't have a question mark either in the title or in the delivery because that would undermine its power it's a rhetorical question through and through yeah and the answer is something surprised me about myself when this kicked in and maybe it's just the context coming straight after right said fred and mark franklin but i found myself going yes right like beavis and or butthead i really did and i i thought what the fuck has happened to me because obviously yeah he is

shaking hendrix and um obviously this song is shaking crosstown traffic or crosstown traffic jam maybe and we all kind of disdained and disparaged him at the time and it can't just be that he was so retro because so were very many things that we and when i say we i mean critics that we loved you know um everybody was falling over themselves to praise delight for example and, for example, and stuff like that. Or, I don't know, World of Twist, or some of those kind of bands that were in the music press all the time. But yeah, Kravitz was the wrong type of retro. Maybe it was too on the nose.

Massively on the nose. I remember when, yeah. In fact, he was more on the nose than the red nosers that were on the noses of the people who'd just been on celebrating Red nose day yeah it was almost as if he was deliberately calibrated in some kind of laboratory to appeal to the q magazine reading demographic basically dad rock because my dad was really impressed by lenny kravitz when he first came out because my dad was a massive john lennon fan and his early stuff kravitz Let Love Rule was very much Lennonesque you know yeah that song in particular the title Lennon Kravitz if you will yeah and he

had the little round glasses and everything you know so so there was that angle before he went full-on Hendrix but in between those phases you mentioned the song it ain't over till it's over or um to pronounce it the way he sings it till it's over yeah um i i fucking love that song i've got to admit yes because i yeah yeah yeah i am a sucker for um philly soul pastiche you know there was that uh that act quite recently silk sonic which is is anderson pack and br Bruno Mars made a whole album of that kind of stuff and I'm just like yeah take my money I fucking love that stuff so yeah when Kravitz did It Ain't Over Till It's Over I was like oh fair enough you know he's made a fucking brilliant record here this record yeah it's like okay we can see exactly what you're doing we can

see it's Hendrix by numbers and at the time I thought well like like Sarah says it's this kind of unstoppable undeniable fact it's this fucking thing that was made to be a huge hit and it's going to be a huge hit we know that but somehow just listening to it now out of context like I say I surprised myself by responding to it well on a on a visceral level. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're saying about pastiche, like I love a lot of pastiche. A lot of stuff that I love is pastiche, which is a very widely misunderstood thing, you know, because it isn't parody.

It's something more refined than that. It's not ripping off. It's, you know, you need to know what you're doing to pastiche. Yes. It's a highly, it's quite a high grade practice. You know, when it's good, it can be highly intelligent and sincere and deeply respectful of its source materials. You can't really do it any other way. And it can be like a refinement of what it's working on. You know, once a genre exists, once a type of sound exists, you can just do that thing however you

want, because it's all, it's open source. Anyone anyone can do that and it can become part of a lineage you know it's not just like a kind of lay by where you've just kind of pulled over and just like well we'll stop here you know um it's like a sort of farmed pearl you know it's it requires a really high level of literacy and attention to detail and boldness you know bordering on oblivious, which I think is what you get here. I think Lenny Kravitz is the impression that I get of him is that he's quite a simple man, you know, not overburdened with brains. But obviously has a really, really good ear and has a great deal of musical talent and just has that nous, you know, it's that kind of savant thing that he has. I mean, he's kind of like he's like a hayman in human form isn't he but um yeah this is you can't you can't resist this i mean you

you can but like i said it doesn't matter it's not trying to win you over it's not doing you know because like i said it would have to address the idea that you need to be won over and that it needs to win anyone over it's just this unstoppable juggernaut of garbled but brilliant nonsense and the other thing is al you know at the start of every episode you say uh never forget they've been on top of the pops more than we have and all that a lot of um uh the sort of criticism of critics that one hears is oh well you're just jealous yes you're just jealous because you know they're living this amazing life i think there actually was a bit of that with lenny kravitz because you know he's fucking beautiful right and he's he's somehow getting away with being an old style

type of rock star a 70s or even 60s type of rock star yes in an era where we thought we dispensed with all that he's getting away with living that life you know shagging supermodels and all of that and just just having an amazing time and obviously um we're gonna grumble about that oh yeah yeah funny you should say that simon because by this point 1993 it did appear to be the time that early 70s rock was finally allowed to display itself again i believe this is a time that you could actually play a led zeppelin record and you wouldn't be called a hippie yeah because you had new bands like soundgarden um stuff and also black crows playing kind of southern rock and that kind of stuff yeah yeah i mean yeah but my relationship with lenny kravitz it's weird

because when his first album came out i had a mate whose girlfriend worked at Oasis, the clothes shop, and that album would be on all the fucking time. But even then I thought, oh, he's trying to be someone else. And I do remember when his first album came out, it was like the comparison, the main comparison that was made was Elvis Costello. And by this time, you know, I'm at university and there was a music course there

which was quite big and as i've mentioned before produced reef and chesney hawks as backing band as you may recall from chart music's passing and every bloke i knew on it wanted so badly to be lenny kravitz or at least have his life because in, Lenny Kravitz is super muso. He's also the rock version of Jamiroquai. You know what I mean? He's taking on these old styles and trying to mould them to himself. But to me and my peers,

this was dismissed as girls' music. Really? Yeah. The implication being that you, the female Lenny Kravitz fan, oh, you think you're a cut above the Take That and E17 fans, but you only like him because you fancy him, which is massively disrespectful to the women folk.

Their musical tastes are only going to be respected if they're restricted to other women or lumpy but talented men like, I don't know, the Wurzels. Yeah, I think that it's safe to dismiss that in terms of like the the cultural commentary of of the time you know you're accepting al's belated implied apology for being a sexist pig at the time i'll think about it anyway the video uh we get lenny doing his Jimmy Marley thing in front of a load of models with an all-female band.

And the overall effect is one of them Christmas perfume adverts or a more expensive remake of the Studio Line advert where they all burst through the wall and pretend to play saxophones with mad hair. But to my mind, the real star is the lighting rig, which was put together by someone called Michael Keelan and is a chandelier of 983 bulbs being run through a series of chase sequences and looks fucking skill.

Yeah. I feel like I should point out, in case it isn't clear from what you said, that, you know, the band in the videos is mostly women and they are an actual band, you know. Yes. Yeah, it's not even a Robert Palmer. It's not Addicted to Love, yeah they are an actual band you know yes yeah it's not doing a robert palmer it's not addicted to love yeah no although you know not that i would disapprove of

that necessarily but uh yeah um cindy blackman is the extremely cool drummer um who was she's not on the record but she was his touring drummer for 18 years and yes it's a great video and it's exactly right for the song yeah it's in this sort of um this drum isn't it this sort of it's exactly right for the song. Yeah, it's in this sort of, this drum, isn't it? This sort of, it's almost like one of those things that they had at travelling fairs with a motorbike in it. But it's full of people, all stood on various levels and some of them jumping off those levels in a kind of stage divey way, implying a sort of level of mayhem

that you probably never actually got at Lenny Kravitz concerts. No. But yeah, it all seems quite exciting,'t it yeah yeah it's kind of an amphitheater but it's just shot in such a way that it looks slightly otherworldly like this is not a gig you could go to in in real life um obviously Lenny looks great because he always did and still does he's 59 now just don't look at recent pictures of him because it's just too depressing he's wearing a sort of long red button through skirty thing it's like a pope's vestment it's like he's the pope of rock i i don't think what you're saying about oh he's trying to do this and he's trying to do that i think he just did what he did he just uh it's just that's his authentic musical

self and i don't think of him as a sort of pretentious guy this is another thing about pastiche it doesn't imply that you think you're great you know that you think you're as good as these people it's just like well that was his thing and he just did it yeah he did it without fear or inhibition which is a lot easier to do as i've often said if you're american because you know you are uh yeah i'm far less militant about him and this nowadays because you look back and you go oh hang on a minute he's wearing his influences firmly on his sleeve and he got slagged off for that but you know you look back at people like bobby omni shake and they were allowed to get away with it wonder why that is and thing is, I like this song now.

You do? Yes. Well, welcome. Welcome, Let's Party. I am going your way now, Sarah. Yeah. Because like Eye of the Tiger, it was only when I started playing the bass on it in Guitar Hero on expert level, ladies,

that I thought, fucking hell, yeah, this is all right, actually. It's such an incredible riff, and it goes. It knows it's an incredible riff. Yes, it is. Because it goes all the way through the song. It's such an incredible riff. And it goes, it knows it's an incredible riff. Yes, it is. Because it goes all the way through the song. It's like a redwood tree. Yes.

And all the rings, if you cut it, all the rings are just riff all the way through. And it's so satisfying. It does a little bit of a change and then it falls into the drums and picks itself back up again. And then the chorus has a completely different riff, which is also really good.

Tell you what, though, Lightning Doesn't Strike Twice, and when he came back a little while later with, was it Fly Away, that one? Was it a British Airways advert? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it was a car advert. Was it a car advert? Yeah.

And that was a huge hit. Number one. And it was basically the same kind of thing. And it was like, it just didn't have the same energy to it. I'm like, nah, don't do it again, mate. No. And we've not even spoken about the lyrics yet which are um interesting oh my god so i didn't realize i i had never had cause until now to to actually look up what the lyrics are and um yeah it is kind of i i am the prophet

who has come to tell you to stop killing each other and stuff which is a laudable message you know which is you know we can all get behind and he's not asking us for any money if he said it in the street though you'd be fucking sectioned yeah i think maybe he's doing a bit i don't think he actually wanted to say that he was born long ago when he was you know he's only in his 30s um but yeah so so it's like why tell me why we we got to die and kill each other one by one. Sorry, I can't help myself. Anyway, and then it goes, we got to hug and rub a dub. We got to dance and be in love.

I was like, oh, that's that's suggestive. It's like, is it you're talking about doing it? And it's like, you're not not talking about doing it. Yeah, he wants to stick it out. It's not that different, really. I mean, you know, I don't want to conform to the stereotype of girls' music here. If Lenny Kravitz suggested that it would be a good thing if we were to hug and rub a dub, I would consider this so the following week are you gonna go my way stayed at number four and would get no higher

all the power of top of the pops but the lp entered the uk album chart at number one the follow-up believe was immediately rushed out but only got to number 30 in May of this year. But as we mentioned, he'd eventually get to number one with Fly Away. And Michael Keeling outdid himself ten years later when he used just under 10,000 light bulbs for the set of the video of Rock Your Body by Justin

Timberlake. That's you. Coming soon live by satellite from Hawaii we have Katie Lang and her brand new song Constant Craving. Ten new entries in the top 40 this week and here's one of them. In at 28, All About Eve, Marksman. We cut straight from the video back to elstree as four youths skulk about on stage

and the voice of franklin spoilers an upcoming performance and tells us that there's been 10 new entries this week one of which is all about Eve by Marksman. Formed in London in 1989, Marksman were a collaboration between two Dubliners, Oisin Lunet and Hollis Byrne, whose dads were in the 70s rock band the Emmett Spiceland, a rapper from Bristol named MC Phrase and a local DJ called K1. In 1992, they signed a deal with Talking Loud Records and put out their debut single, Sad Affair, an adaptation of the John Gibbs folk ballad, Irish Ways and Irish Laws, which was immediately banned by the BBC for using the phrase Chucky R. Law, the rallying cry of the IRA.

And before I go on, I'd like to immediately apologise to the pop craze Irish, the Protestant community, and fuck it, while I'm here, the IRA as well. This single, the follow-up to Ship Ahoy, which failed to chart despite having Sinead O'Connor on it, is the third cut from their debut LP, 33 Revolutions Per Minute, which came out on Monday and fucking hell it's only gone and entered the charts at number 28 this week so here they are in the studio

making their top of the pops debut and oh chaps absolutely typical I wait ages for some hip-hop to talk about on chart music and when it does it's something I've never even heard because I'm afraid to say this lot totally passed me by in 1993. Shocking. Me too. Me too. The thing is, music history is littered with the kind of scraps that no one remembers that was just big enough to get on telly at the time. Like that's the bulk of it. But it feels really odd, doesn't it?

It's like I have never heard hide nor hair of these people before now it's like if you suddenly recovered a memory from when you were blackout drunk which isn't actually possible because when you are blackout drunk your brain is not on record thank god so there's no memories to to find i mean hip-hop in 1993 it's it's all about the west coast isn't it yes it is price cube but um there was quite a bit of this sort of very politicized hip-hop around they weren't the only ones yeah arrested development and all that well i mean they were kind of soft option really i was thinking more of things like consolidated who was a sort of marxistist American outfit. You had things like Paris, you had the disposable heroes of hypocrisy, stuff like that.

Yeah, marksmen were very much being hyped up or even self-hyped as the Irish public enemy. And yeah, some of the tracks you've named there, so Sad Affair, the one with Chucky Arla in it, it does say violence is wrong in the lyrics. It stops short of supporting the IRA, but it is fiercely Republican. And it calls the Union Jack the butcher's apron, which is a phrase I do like. It says the six-county state is a bastard state.

And it compares the situation of Irish Catholics to that of African Americans. Right. In regard of the slave trade. Obviously, a lot of people would say that is over the top, but it was a common comparison. I've got a really good book about the Troubles called Ulster's White Negroes, and it's about the racism doled out towards the Catholic catholic community over there so you know marksman weren't alone in making that comparison in fact white n words was the epithet that was thrown at them by the occupying forces and uh and and by protestant militants and so on so marksman have very much sort of taken that idea and run with it, which was, you know, really not going to get them much airplay. Yeah, Simon Bates isn't going to play that, is there?

Ship Ahoy, the one with Sinead, also made that comparison with wage slavery to the slave trade, which, you know, that's controversial. I've certainly heard people from the point of view of African-Americans saying that you cannot make a comparison. You just, you know, it's obscene to even do that. Just don't, honestly. Make any comparison you want, just not that. But yeah, marksmen have just gone for it there.

I'm kind of dancing around the fact that this isn't a very good track. This song that we're singing, it's got good intentions. It's about domestic violence. It tells a story of someone who has to wear long sleeves in the summer to hide the bruises. But it doesn't really pop, does it? It doesn't leap out of the screen at you. Yeah, I agree with Simon.

I mean, there's not very much to it, is there? Yeah, I mean, it sounds nice. There's a very subtle sample of the beginning of I'd Be a Fool Right Now by Stevie Wonder from one of his late 60s LPs. But that's the thing nowadays with hip-hop, the element of surprise that you used to get when a tune would just storm in out of nowhere

and fuck with your head. That's kind of gone now. Songs like this, they kind of like fade in and swirl around for a bit and then go and you forget about them straight away. There's some good elements, but it's quite a mush, isn't it? It's quite sonically quite mushy, which is what they did with uh ship ahoy as well um with shenaid o'connor doing the chorus really unforgivably low in the mix just so that it could be anybody which

is not you not the best use of your shenaid o'connor it's mellow to the point of meaninglessness really and you know also that the lyrics the the first guy sorry i don't know which of them is which the first guy's diction is just not very good it's like all the lyrics are getting stuck in his cheeks on the way out once i realized what this is about i was like okay but i couldn't find the lyrics anywhere and i listened to it a few times just going and kind of squinting in that way you do there was a line that i picked out somewhere in the middle as for all the marks and the bruises i guess that's the choice that she chooses it seems like the protagonist of the of the song is trying to help her and she's rejecting it or that she is feigning interest in him i don't know i found that slightly alarmingly sort of

peevish or petulant i don't know it's a weird tone to have in the middle but like i said i i couldn't pick out most of it so i mean fair play to them for tackling a subject like this but the problem is is they're doing it in hip-hop and you know 99 of hip-hop is about the rapper as the focal point you know it's about who they are and what they're going to do or what they've already done the idea of rapper as bystander i can't really think of many examples probably i don't know millie pulled a pistol on santa by day where something wrong's going on behind the scenes with someone they know right but they don't know what the fuck's going on until right at the end where santa gets shot for being a wrong and but it's got to be said that irish rappers are not shy about piling into this sort

of stuff as anyone who's seen the 1990 performance on the Late Late Show of What Did I Do Wrong by a collective of rappers called Rap Against Rape with Hazel O' fucking Connor. Have you seen that? No. Fucking hell, man. Not only do they all sound like DJ Sven,

they all look like DJ Sven. And it's up there with Boyzone's debut appearance on the late late show oh yes now i have seen that and yes simon you're right you know there will be interesting irish or at least part irish hip-hop in the very near future but sadly it's going to be generated by house of pain who are decidedly paddywhack. House of Pain with a very different attitude towards violence against women. I got this bit from, I'm sure you also looked at Marksman's Wikipedia page.

And you know when you see someone's wiki and it's very obviously been written by them? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really got that. It's very, very citation needed, right? Marksman were a great band for a while. Basically, right? Yeah, it goes,

their politics were at the fore and breaking down musical boundaries was paramount. And, you know, nowhere along here are those little numbers to give you a link. The band was very well respected live and it was on stage that the power of their music really came across.

Despite working with a number of high profile musicians, collaborating with James McNally of the Pogues and having Sinead O'Connor as a guest vocalist on the single Ship Ahoy. So, yeah, all of that, you know, just saying very much a rap group. That's not how you phrase things on Wikipedia. So, yeah, somebody's been tinkering with that, obviously. wikipedia so yeah somebody's been tinkering with that obviously yeah but let's talk about the performance because hip-hop on top of the pops it's always been a melange of awkwardness ever since the real roxanne and hitman howie t did bang zoom let's go go in the summer of 1986 because chaps by its very nature the rapping obviously has to be live you can't mime it but hip-hop gigs are always been more about setting a mood and getting the

crowd worked up and involved which is impossible to do in three minutes with an audience who are still getting over right said fred but you know fair play to them they do a decent job of it do they though i think it is impossible public enemy could have done it yeah give public enemy five minutes or three minutes and they will excite your arse off. It sounds like the mics aren't turned up high enough for one thing. But also, hilariously, one of them has on a comedy nightcap. Yes. Which really evokes the sleepiness of this, of the performance in general. Rip Van Winkle.

Rap Van Winkle, if you will. Rap Van Winkle. Whee! It actually looks really comfy. I would wear that and then then i'd overheat and get a migraine whereupon i would wet the nightcap in cold water and put it back on and feel slightly better no i actually met the rap van winkle guy you know relatively recently in the last sort of five six years all right he is oshin lunny that's who it is that's the one who it is

um it was on a train journey from london back to Brighton. We had mutual friends and I kind of came and joined them on their table. He didn't have the hat on at the time. And do you ever meet someone who has got such charisma about them that you just think, you must get so much fanning? Honestly, he was i mean the accent helps that oh yeah you know what i mean yeah i just thought i bet women just fucking melt because honestly he had he had that twinkle in the eye and he had that that almost stereotypical kind of irish banter that you know he was oh i almost fancied him myself you know he's done really well since marksman i don't know if you looked into any no educate me simon basically became a bit of an entrepreneur and apparently made millions from fiber optic cables yeah yeah when that was the hot thing and then went into online radio there's a radio station in brighton called slack city that he contributes a little bit too but i i think he's made his pile

and just lives a really nice life now. Great. So, yeah, good for him. He sees the means of production then, Simon. Exactly, yeah. Oh, so he didn't invent the thing that comes up when you start to research Marksman, which is a sort of bright green pen that you use in DIY.

So, the following week, All About Eve dropped seven places to number 35 and exited the top 40 a week later. Meanwhile, the LP entered the album chart at number 69 but dropped right out a week later, with a percentage of the take going to victim support charities. The follow-up, a re-release of of ship ahoy entered the chart at number 64 in june but similarly dropped straight out and although they spent the end of 93 supporting you too for a couple of dates on the european leg of the zoo tv tour and depeche mode on the

euro leg of the devotional tour they never troubled the charts again. And on that note, I feel we need to step back and catch us breaths, Pop Craze youngsters, because it's only going to get more full on in the third part of Chart Music 73. Seriously, me ducks, if you thought we went on about right,

said Fred, oh, just you wait. So, on behalf of Simon Price and Sarah B, this is Al Needham asking you nice to stay Pop crazed. Chart 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 craze youngsters.

Chalk music is getting on down to Benetton with the power trio of Simon Price, Neil Kulkarni and Al Needham for a fourth day of Chalk Music Ramble. We commence with a return of Here Comes Quism, the Chalk Music pub quiz.

And then, a three hour live episode of Chalk Music. And then, we round off the evening with a Chalk 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 Chalk Music experience, Miss Diane, and can be yours for a mere £15. 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!