Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - Chart Music #73 (Pt 3): 4.3.93 – Frank Bald

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

Sarah Bee, Simon Price and Al Needham end up having a massively deep dive on Suede, before being whipped over to Hawaii to watch the Lower-Case Canadian sit on a box for a bit. Oh, and Runrig!Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | PatreonGet your tickets for Chart Music at Birmingham Town Hall on Jan 13th HERE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This will certainly have an adult theme and might well contain strong scenes of sex or violence, which could be quite graphic. It may also contain some very explicit language, which will frequently mean sexual swear words. What do you like to listen to? Um... Chart music. Chart music. Hey, you pop-crazed youngsters, and welcome to part three of episode 73 of Chart Music,

which finds us, that is to say, Simon Price, Sarah B and me, Al Needham, stuck in the middle of an episode at Top of the Pops dated March the 4th, 1993. And there is absolutely no opportunity for a fanny about. So let us rejoin the episode in progress. All about it, that's Mark coming on top of the pubs. Now, we were due to have Sway playing live on the show tonight, but unfortunately, Brett is not feeling too well. Brett, what's the matter? I think my voice is deserted.

I've been singing too violently, honestly. Hey, listen, get well soon. We wish you all the very best. Here's the video, though. New entry at number seven, get well soon. We wish you all the very best. Here's the video, though. New entry, number seven, Animal Night Raid. We cut to a tight shot of Franklin on an empty stage. Who tells us that the next act was supposed to be here in the studio tonight, but are not.

And as the camera pulls back, we see a very pouty young man with his arms tightly folded, looking out upon the kids with barely concealed contempt. Brett Anderson. Franklin asks him why his band aren't playing and he says i think my voice has deserted me i've been singing too violently fucking hell this has got serious come to the front of assembly and explain how you've let the school down vibes hasn't it who's made him do this and why i can only assume that the decision was made quite late in the day because those curtains that we see on the stage those sort of ruched

dark red silk drapes are from the animal nitrate video oh yeah yeah and so so clearly they were planning to recreate their little world you know their sort of video world on the top of the pop stage. It was, you know, they were going to make it their domain and it was all set up, ready to go. Yeah, I mean, in terms of why it might have happened. Well, I did look at their tour dates and it turned out that they had just finished touring their debut album about three days earlier in Cambridge. And far be it from me to speculate as to, you know, what kind of celebrating they might have done at the end of that tour.

But that might possibly have something to do with the fact that Brett's voice is apparently fucked. Hey, listen, get well soon, says Franklin, and gently shoves him out of shot and introduces the video to Animal Nitrate by Suede. Formed in London in 1989 by Justine Frischmann, her boyfriend Brett Anderson and Matt Osman, Suede started playing covers

until they realised that neither of them were much cop on guitar and in October of 1989 they placed an advert in the NME which read young guitar player needed for London based band Smiths Commotions Boer

Pet Shop Boys No Musos Some things are more important than ability called Brett which led to them being joined by Bernard Butler. After a series of gigs with the drum machine in late 1989, they sent off a demo to Gary Crowley, who was presenting a show called Demo Clash on Greater London Radio, and their song Wonderful sometimes won five weeks in a row,

leading them to sign a deal with the Brighton-based independent label RML and the song appearing on a compilation cassette. But a debut double-A side single was scrapped when the band didn't like it and almost all of the 500 copies were destroyed. After being let down by the drum machine one gig too many they finally put an advert in the NME for a drummer and were astonished to get a reply from Mike Joyce who'd been looking to get back into the game after the Smiths split up but both parties realised it'd be a bad idea and they went for Simon Gilbert on the recommendation of their manager at the time Ricky Gervais. After Frischmann

and Anderson split up and the former was thrown out of the band after she started going out with Damon Alban and turned up late for a rehearsal because she'd been at a Blur video shoot they began 1992 being touted about as the best unsigned band in the country. Nude Records, a London independent, got in first with a two-single deal and a week before the first one came out, the Drowners were on the cover of Melody Maker Build as the best new band in Britain, which helped get the single up to number 49 in May of that year. This single, their third, is the follow-up to meckle mickay

which got to number 17 in september of 1992 it's also the third cut from their debut lp suede which comes out at the end of the month and this week it's smashed into the charts at number seven this week's highest new entry oh fucking hell where where do we begin chaps i just think this is where the episode begins yeah this is when it gets exciting my heart skipped i'll be honest when i saw brett standing there in this episode immediately i thought that is a pop star i mean fucking hell. It looks like he's going to go into a full Rigsbear of the kids, which would have been fucking mint. My God. He's totally in character, isn't he?

It's like just for that very brief moment. And he's contorting himself like an angle poised lamp in leather. Yes. It's really funny as well, because he has like a poker straight posture in real life. He's just cocked everything to make his body into an s shape for suede yes and he's like fucking hell brett whatever's happened to your throat it's nothing compared to what's happening to your vertebra suede are one of our bands and when you see one of our bands on the top of the pop stage

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

not interested enough to make me investigate them more. And shamefully, this lot are a complete black hole to me. I was interested to see what your take was going to be, Al, because I kind of predicted 60-40 that you were going to fucking hate them. No, not at all. It was just like, all right, is this what that lot are getting up to now? Okay, it's it's an advance on fucking ned's atomic dustbin and the wonder stuff right that lot meaning kind

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

any way undefined like it's startling from this video and also just from that couple of seconds of Brett looking like a vampire bat that's kind of accidentally hung himself on a washing line. He's just trying to style it out. It's startling how clearly swayed they are right away. And the strength and the confidence of the aesthetic that they are presenting is so striking. It's a bit messy and it's slightly rough around the edges, but fucking hell. You just see it, don't you around the edges but fucking hell you just see it don't you go fucking hell yes so simon you were a melody maker at the time melody maker putting

him on the cover saying here's the best new band in britain did you have a hand in that um yeah i was there um quite a long time before that in fact my backstory with suede goes way beyond them being suede even right there are so many weird coincidences okay first of all brett was born four days after me right he grew up in haywards heath um i went for two years to a school that was just outside haywards heath um we then both ended up at ucl university college london at the same time. And I remember him knocking about, right? And I only realised it was him in hindsight. I did a lot of work at the student union, UCL union, because we had a mobile disco set up. And we used to make a bit of money for ourselves and for the

union by allowing the mobile disco to be hired out to sometimes a sort of private outsiders hotels and so on and sometimes to the departments of the university and various society right we had it all on a massive trolley stolen from euston station um the whole set up and one time uh we were hired and i was hired to do it by the architecture department and i think either justine or brett i think it might have been just, was a student at the architecture department and I went along there and I set up in the sort of common room there and I remember this couple

and the guy had this bright yellow duffel coat coming up to me and just hassling me for David Bowie all night. I really vividly remember that and they were pissing me off a little bit actually, you know what I mean? But it was only afterwards I read an interview where Brett was talking about hanging around UCL in this bright yellow duffel coat I thought fucking hell it was him all along at least he didn't ask you for any Oasis song yeah probably because they didn't exist yet yeah

exactly no so by the time I got to melody maker when suede sort of changed from being shitty bull and gay also rands to being suede i was editing a section in the paper called preview which was stuff about film and tv and comics and all that which i think i mentioned earlier a colleague of mine ian watson was running the section called advance uh confusingly similar kind of names and advance was where we wrote about brand new bands. Right. And he handed me a cassette tape one day and said to me,

Simon, I think you're going to like this. And it was a suede demo tape, four tracks on it, which included The Drowners and Metal Mickey and a couple of The B-Sides. So basically their first two singles. And I played it. And the recording wasn't great quality,

but the fucking songs, man, they were so good. It was one of those things, you get a demo tape, and I was just playing that over and over, more than I was playing my actual record collection. It was very Bowie, very Smiths, but I was in the market for a bit of that. So this was good editing, by the way, by Ian Watson. He could have taken it himself. He could have thought, well, this band's obviously going to be huge huge i'm going to do it but he he knew that it was right

up my street and and he gave it to me bless him yeah i went to a rehearsal studio in hackney and and i met them and uh i interviewed them i gave them their first bit of coverage in the sort of mainstream weekly music press under the headline pigskin heads and the thing with it is steve sutherland the assistant editor of melty maker then jumped on board really quickly and he re-interviewed them soon afterwards and yeah and he slapped them on the front cover of melty maker with the infamous headline the best new band in britain and i feel like i'm being fucking written out of history and also gaslit by the fact that everybody thinks that was their first coverage no let's set

the record straight right here yeah on an old laptop i've got the jpeg of that original pigskin heads piece in which i talk about the fact that they all dress in charity shop clothes and they've got kind of brian ferry hairstyles and just this really distinct aesthetic this sort of very 1970s aesthetic that nobody had at the time but even the official suede biography love and poison by david barnett which i had a hand in i was actually slated to co-write that and i actually did a bit of preliminary work on it and i sort of ducked i backed out in the end but even that book just skims over the the fact that i wrote the first interview oh jesus christ the thing with the best new band in britain which is a really bold thing to say and i i love the fact that melody maker did that but we kind of bottled it i don't know

if you've seen that front cover but it's a right fucking patchwork suede at the top of the cover and it says the best new band in britain but we hedged our bets by also having and this is for memory because i haven't seen in a while but thousand yards stare and emf also on the cover and it's like if you're gonna say an unknown band is the best new band in britain fucking say it yeah fucking just put a picture of them and that headline and dare the world to deal with that. Don't say, oh, but never mind, you might like EMF or, you know, that kind of fucked me off.

Yeah, that was the fundamental difference between Melody Maker and the NME. The NME would put up one massive image for their cover with a little bit of something on the side, whereas Melody Maker would just seemingly throw everything at the cover. Sorry, mate, but the NME's covers always look better. No, you're right. Our front cover design wasn't great,

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

Sometimes they would go out on a limb and put fucking things like Terrace, do you remember them, on the front cover? The Kingmaker. Yeah, but mostly our job was to be the sort of talent scouts, the sort of A&R department of IPC. And our strapline became Tomorrow's Music Today after a while, to be the sort of talent scouts the sort of anr department of ipc and our strap line became tomorrow's music today after a while because basically you've got two magazines that are very similar in the same building under the same publishing house one floor above or below each

other sharing the same fucking ad department and everything so we had to differentiate ourselves somehow just from a publishing point of view it made no sense for ipc to have those two papers so we had to kind of try and put some clear water between us and enemy so we became the paper that discovered bands and so it was with suede we put ourselves out on a limb not far enough out on a limb as far as i'm concerned but we did it and then by the time enemy did it's like well you know brett is really famous by now but anyway the video because that's what we getME did, it's like, well, you know, Brett is really famous by now. But anyway, the video, because that's what we get. And yeah, it's absolutely sodden with 90s video cliches. There aren't actually cliches yet in 1993.

We get an interior of ruched velvet curtains with a carpet very similar to the one in The Shining with clips of the rest of the band. So their glossy hair tosses about just so. And that's punctuated with shots of a very skinny lead singer slouching around the Lisson Green estate in Westminster. And we get a bit of artiness as well with someone wearing a pig's head,

because, hey, it's 1993, everyone. Yeah. And that ties in with the record sleeve as well. There's a sort of illustration of somebody in a suit wearing a pig yes yeah i love that they did that there was that kind of continuation it were these things always always matched you know it was always well that's the thing suede had their worlds they created a world um and this is something that when i wrote that very first piece that's what i was trying to get across that they had a very very distinct aesthetic

and they even had their own lexicon you know the lyrics were all about council homes nuclear skies acid rain loveless bum sex and that kind of stuff you know and they're inviting into this world that only they are writing about really in pop and yeah they they'd obviously put so much thought into it they actually owe it all to top the pops um i found out from the aforementioned book, which is actually a good book, despite the fact that it tried to write me out of history, Love and Poison,

that they were sitting around pre-record deal, watching an episode of Top of the Pops in October 1989, actually. And it made them get serious about Suede because they just thought this is fucking awful we've got to do something right because i think they were kind of a bit of a baggy adjacent band yeah to begin with if you see the way they dressed brett wearing these sort of like loose tops and beads around his neck and that kind of stuff they did look a bit like a sort of i don't know almost um a candy flip kind of hat you know what i mean if you look at photos i didn't see them in that time so i can't say if that uh actually crossed

over into their music at all but they obviously just had a complete rethink i thought no fuck it we're gonna have our own world our own aesthetic we're gonna look like the dodgy uncles out of a 70s sitcom and we are gonna do our hair like brian ferry and we are gonna sing like bowie and if anybody says oh you're ripping off bowie fuck it we're just gonna do it just like the 80s then well yeah exactly fucking love them for that i really do it's impossible to imagine suede as baggy when they are so tight yeah they just went off the polar opposite of baggy in so so many ways um i mean brett really puts in a shift in this video, doesn't he? Yes.

This is a man who has considered how this is going to look at every level and how he is going to look. It's such a performance. And I'm sure it's been refined in the edit, which is extremely good. But he's really giving everything. There is a python at some point. And Brett does, in fact, several times, like a snake, unhinge his entire lower jaw. Like a python swallowing an egg.

I mean, that might be something to do with the things that they have said they took that got them through the day. But also, it's not, you know, it's easy to say that. It's not that he's gurning. He's performing, you know. And he's so coquettish and girlish and weird and kind of awkward and sexy and it's very moody and he's like a moody teenage girl kind of slouching around the and then kind of talking to a pig's head and caressing it and then punching it and kind of there's a bit where he just turns to look at the camera with this sort of quizzical look on his face and turns the pig's head at the same time.

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

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

But it's not just that he styles it out. I think he's confident that the video is no less. It's not like, oh, sorry, we can't perform for you live. I'll have the video as consolation. Like the video is as good, you know you're not losing anything it's actually their their second top of the pops appearance if you can call it an appearance because the first one was for metal mickey and they were mortally drunk on that occasion and brett repeatedly slapping his ass with a microphone of course that was his trademark yes and they they were the first unsigned band to appear on top of the pops despite what uh what bis might tell you um because they'd actually

fulfilled the two single deal they had with nude records but they decided to stick with nude in the end so basically when they were on top of the pops they didn't have a record deal oh by the way um the the guy in the pig mask who's sitting in a kind of mastermind type black leather swivel chair i've sat in that chair oh did you put the pig's head on as well god this really goes deep doesn't it fucking did you sniff it simon did i sniff the pig no the chair well well here's the thing the chair uh had it previously belonged to Brett, and Brett moved house and didn't have room for it anymore. So he gave it to David Barnett, the author of the biography,

who was also running the Suede fan club at the time. David was living with Errol Alcan, the well-known DJ, who was also a mate of mine, in a flat above a shop on Fortis Road in Tuffle Park. And I live just around the corner. So, you know, occasionally I'd end up there and sitting on that chair. And it was one of those chairs where, you know, you can imagine these mastermind chairs. You're sitting on a black leather cushion, but the cushion is stitched down.

You can't pick the cushion up as such. But you can kind of get your hands around the outside of it right and in the crease around the outside of it um they would often find just ecstasy pills from when it was brett's chair and they just you know brett and his mates are just casually sort of scattered or lost a load of you know ease down the side of it good lord yeah so so i've sat on that chair did it give you a sense of enormous well-being around the arse yeah but even the video and top of the box air in it has caused problems as a news article in this week's enemy bears out headline chart show kissed off with suede right suede's video for animal nitrate was pulled from last saturday's chart show had missed allegations that producers objected to a scene

depicting two men kissing oh my god the video was shown on friday's late night show which is only screened in the london area but was mysteriously absent from the version which appeared the following lunchtime a spokesperson for the chocho denied that any kind of censorship was imposed he told the enemy we just didn't like the video when asked why in that case the promo featured on the previous night's program he retorted we make a children's tv program a spokesperson for the band declined to comment on the story i mean obviously that scene's been removed but fucking out suede have just made top of the pops come off as more daring than the chart show yeah anything else to say oh yeah quite a lot we're not even spoke about the song yet

jesus the thing with animal nitrate is um it is a song about domestic abuse just like the marksman song was um it's about loveless chem sex and and bumming basically um because the refrain kind of chorus now you're over 21 um seems to be a reference to what was then the gay age of consent of course it actually dates it perfectly to this year because the age of homosexual consent was lowered to 18 uh the following year in 1904 it was in the criminal justice act which i should point out um having slagged it off earlier for good reason it's not all bad and also it would have been lowered to 16 at that time if uh edwina curry's amendment had succeeded so there you go do you reckon the government were thinking well we could keep the age of consent as it is but that guy from

suede seems really angry about it better listen to the kids you know um the thing with suede and queerness is a controversial issue because they got a lot of stick at the time there was the interview where brett said that he considered himself a bisexual man who'd never had a homosexual experience and people ripped the fucking shit out of him for that saying that he was co-opting gay culture when he had no right to yeah and that suede were just straight boys faking it the thing is the least gay looking member of the band was the gay member of the band and that's simon gilbert the drummer right and um i knew him kind of before he was in suede as well

because um you were having gay sex with him al oh come on j come on, Simon. That's beneath you. And don't make a joke about beneath you either. Yeah, in addition to doing stuff at UCL Union, I was doing quite a lot of work at ULU, the University of London Union, for the whole uni, which is down the road. And that's the place that Ricky Gervais was the boss of. And it's where Ricky and I used to put gigs on and stuff like

that and yeah um Ricky was basically running suede out of that office but downstairs in the lobby there were two things there was um STA student travel association so cheap holidays interrail tickets and all that and there was this tiny little booth where you could buy gig tickets mostly gigs at Yulu itself um because do you remember the days when to get a ticket you actually had to go somewhere i know fucking you know pay with money or a credit card or whatever there was there was one down by station yeah but simon gilbert was just sat there all fucking day so i was on kind of nodding terms you know speaking terms with with him already and And yeah, he was the gay man, but no one thought it was him because he had sort of like short, spiky ginger hair, you know, a bit like Johnny Rotten.

They thought, well, he's obviously not gay. So, yeah, it was kind of hiding in place. Didn't have a handbag or anything. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But all these people sort of just really, really attacking Suede for being, I suppose, tourists, sexual tourists, were bang wrong. They just completely missed the point. Simon, weren't you in the building

when Brett Anderson said that? Was I? Well, I believe you were. That quote came from a massive interview. Oh, was it the sex debate at Melody Maker? The sex debate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When Melody Maker did the sex issue.

Yeah, fuck's sake. Which was quite the thing to do in the 90s. Yeah, it, yeah. during the course of the debate that I actually wasn't gay or bisexual myself and afterwards boy George came up to me just like no way man he was like he was convinced I was gay he couldn't believe it I was really proud of that I thought fucking hell boy George the king or the queen of gays thinks that I'm a gay I thought yes that's kind of cool you know I think there's a lot to suggest that you know queerness is it's a very there are people who think that this is not a word you should use still. But there are other people who think that the umbrella is quite big, you know, and it refers more to a sort of general way of life than just sexuality. Also, I think Brett's comment, I mean, he has kind of read back on it since.

And I think it was slightly the wording may have been slightly slightly clumsy but it's not actually a controversial statement because the the stereotype is is that you know in order to be uh certified bisexual one must uh have at least one other person of another gender hanging off of you as you go about your business you know like you have to collect them like like tokens but actually you you you don't you know it's people know what their sexuality is before they have any sexual experience exactly a lot of the time or they discover it later or they change them or you know whatever yes i think if somebody said that today, it wouldn't make a ripple, would it? I mean, fair play to a band for blurring the lines and all that. It does come off like them youths in the first term of uni

who put about this lie that they're all, I just don't know, am I gay, am I not? You know, in an attempt to make them more interesting and convertible to girls, which is what my mate with the playing cards also did shame on him there's quite a bit about them at this point that is affected and sort of arch you know a little bit but i think all that very quickly yeah yeah yeah but i think but it's a little possibly slightly too far in the same way that brett's voice is this kind of spiky bark at this point because he hasn't quite you know worked it like by the time the dogman star it's kind of he's worked it down a bit more uh into his chest and there's a song you know so it's got a little bit

more room there it's kind of moved it down from the kind of bed sit esophagus to the sort of studio apartment of the the ribs i think the sort of that edge that was a little bit too sharp they didn't lose the sharpness but it kind of burned off a bit like alcohol in a sauce you know but it kept them from ever being jarringly earnest this song it sounds like a really obvious single it's got that chorus oh you know it's a real sort of sing-along thing incredibly itibly, it nearly wasn't a single. They wanted to put Sleeping Pills from the album out instead. Right.

But then they wrote this song quite late on in the process of making the album, and Saul Galpin from Nude Records said, no, come on, that's the single. And it just seems mad now that it was ever not going to be the single. Yeah, you can't imagine it, can you? It's a phenomenal record. I really think it's just a gobsmacking piece of work it really is yeah yeah um animal nitrate felt important um jane savage who was their pr person at the time sent a cassette of it sell a tape to a velvet cushion to the enemy on a motorbike um right i don't recall melodyody Maker receiving one, which is, you know, I'm a bit pissed off about that.

And Select Magazine gave a whole page to the single, separate from the usual singles page, about a month before it even came out. It was like, this is too important to be on the singles page. This song has to have a feature about it right now. So, yeah. And they started, Select Magazine listed it among their singles of the year

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

tie event completely bemused while bre Brett goes on there and slaps his ass with a microphone um trashes the microphone stand the band drop their instruments and walk off at the end um brilliantly right Bernard Butler went on stage with his coat he takes off his coat to play the song then he put his guitar down and put his coat back on before leaving the stage. I love that. The movement that did feel the benefit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Bernard Butler, we haven't really talked about him.

But obviously he's the guy who answered the ad in NME. And he is a fucking musical genius. And he turns up and apparently what he said to them, because they were about 25, the rest of them, and he was 22. You know, he went along to audition and he said to them, how old are you then? And they go, well, we're 25. And he said, well, you better hurry up then, haven't you? It's a fucking love. Now, you old bastards of 25.

This performance at the Brits, Suede were the only alternative bands on the bill. I mean, Al, you spoke about our bands, as it were, from a Melody Maker perspective. It felt very punk. To give you some context, I've got the rest of the line-up here from that year. So performing were Andy Bell and KD Lang doing No More Tears, Enough Is Enough.

Madness doing Nightboat to cairo peter gabriel doing steam the e17 song god rod stewart doing a cover version of ruby tuesday and then sway doing animal nitrate and uh tasman archer doing sleep in saturday right the winners that year right annie lennox obviously because them's the rules right take that shakespeare's sister peter gabriel mick hucknall annie lennox again simply red again rod stewart prince okay prince um rem yeah okay rem n, yeah, right. Nigel fucking Kennedy and Wayne's World. It's broadly very establishment, very mainstream. So, honestly, I can just vividly remember to see Suede

breaking out of their usual context, which was still kind of the 100 Club or the Africa Centre, like little venues, and storming the Brits. Felt like a real invasion. Yeah, I mean, it's of a piece with everything else about them, with the video and with Brett standing there next to Mark Franklin. It's very arresting and striking and, whoa! You know, it really sort of knocks you back in your seat in a really good way.

Although possibly not for the people who were there on the night. You can feel there's kind of no air in the room at all. It doesn't affect them whatsoever. There's no self-consciousness. There's just, they're there to do what they do. They're there to be swayed. And it is quite mind-boggling. What about you, Al?

Well, you know me, Simon. This sort of thing, it wasn't going to be my cup of tea. But to see that lot doing what they're doing amongst fucking Annie Lennox and Rod Stewart. And I just thought, well, you know, there's a lot worse of this sort of thing knocking about. to see that lot doing what they're doing amongst fucking Annie Lennox and Rod Stewart. And I just thought, well, you know, there's a lot worse of this sort of thing knocking about. And if this is going to be the coming thing, then good, bring it on. You know, to paraphrase the parlance of the day, I might not like it, but I'm going to have to go along with it. Ich nichten lichten. Yeah, yeah.

So I looked in Love and Poison, the biography, to see what was going on behind the scenes at the Brit Awards, which took place at Alexandra Palace. And John Aidman, who was their manager at the time, says, everyone was really nervous and we got given a big old Winnebago thing, which we sat in all day i think they de-stressed themselves by changing their clothes a lot and brett recurringly asking me for a hair dryer i went to the production office and they were having share problems because she would only take her water in small bottles and they bought big ones amateurs so the bloke from suede's hairdryer was not the major concern i love that so first of all share being really kind of spinal tap about about the format in which her water has to be served and then apparently when when they go on stage charlie charlton who was of the management team and then later became their manager apparently knocked bernard's guitar when he handed it to him so the guitar was all out of tune no they go on he's got to play so he plays and so it sounds a bit ragged and that's why um and there was a guy doing the sound for them who'd

never done their sound before so it's all a bit shambolic it was all fucked and the theory that charlie has is that brett just sensed this and just really fucking went for it because he's like we're gonna sound terrible i've got to leave them with something to remember. So he goes into full arse-slapping mode. The party afterwards was in a specially made fun fair, because that's what the Brit Awards is like. And they took a load of ecstasy, because that was their thing as well as coke at the time. They're all on a high after what they thought was

just this mind-blowing television moment, right? And Saul Galpin's mum, Saul being the boss of nude records Saul's mum phoned him up to commiserate she said oh Saul I'm so sorry I've just seen suede on the brits are you okay she thought his career was finished and suede was finished and he he had to tell her that was the greatest moment of my life i suppose we got to talk about the lyrics because uh yeah fucking hell you wouldn't want to explain them to your non-art so i don't know if i've said this before um about uh using the the second person so it's written in the second person which uh gives a certain immediacy but it also gives you a certain distance it's like often when um yeah you're taking i out of it and you're putting a sort of

little grass verge there that could protect you or give you a few steps away to make sense of things or reaching for something universal it's like i noticed a while ago and you're going to notice it too now that when people are interviewed um by news after some traumatic incident immediately or later they very often use you when speaking about what happened and they'll switch mid-sentence from first to second person like the lightning struck me and it was like you were being burned all along your veins you know it's like stepping out of your own harrowing experience to help yourself and it's also stepping towards the person who's asking you about it sort of invite them to understand imagine if you were struck by

lightning imagine yourself as me you know so there's that but there's also it's probably it's probably just that he was writing in a kind of omniscient storytelling position i mean i just think it's a great use the second person it sort of adds this layer of discomfort and accusation but i think it can also be interpreted as stealth first person because i kind of you know i know the song really well and it's like it's such a bop you know and it's got such dark subject matter that it's like okay i haven't really thought about this um i thought the tone is really vile and vicious. And it's like, where does that come from? Who would say this? Like, I don't know, a bad parent or a scorned lover or, oh, it's like somebody's nasty inner voice. Like that's the only way that you get that horrible. It's like talking to them as they're squirming in self-loathing, which is so clever and disquieting. Like people who have been abused will often blame themselves. And this is in a brilliant bouncy sing-along bit of glam pop. So the dissonance is incredible.

And it's so marbled with ambiguities as well. People take the piss out of Brett, sometimes correctly for his lyrics. But this is such a deceptively clever bit of songwriting. You know, it could be moralising or finger wagging, or it could be envious or belittling or admiring. You know, everything is, you know, if you call someone an animal, it could be a great compliment in a sexual sense or completely damning. Like, what's wrong with you? You've lost all your humanity. It could be a pet really dehumanising, taking away their agency or elevating them to the status of an ancient god. It's very sophisticated and daring.

Like, now you're over 21. Okay, so now you're legally free to fuck who you want or you're already over the hill for the kind of sketchy guys you know. And the self-loathing deepens. Like, is this about freedom and pleasing yourself? Or now your animal's gone? Or is it about the inexorable trap of formative experience? And when the cage is opened, you just stay in it.

You know, this unhealthy, unpleasant, violent, exploitative, drug-fueled, pain-wracked, illegal relationship was your first. And you hated it and it fulfilled you and you loved it and it destroyed you. And now it's over. Nothing is ever going to feel so good and so wrong again nothing's ever going to make you feel anything again what does that say about you what sort of creature are you what does it take to turn you you know it's so kind of crawling creeping with with all this extremely uncomfortable stuff and i i love it yeah yeah i i think you're completely right about that dissonance because we're looking at Suede, they're this young, sexy band

singing about sex. You expect them to write in a kind of randy way, do you know what I mean? But instead it's really fucking bleak. And yeah, like Sarah, I can't even say the lyrics without almost bursting into song but the idea of you know what does it take to turn you on you know the idea of being unable to get it up essentially it runs so counter to this strutting sexy band that they were and that that is what's so brilliant about it. And yeah, at the end, this supposedly brutal lover that the subject of the song had is described as an animal.

You know, he's just an animal. There's a real venom to when he does it live, because in the live version, he always sings, he's just a fucking animal. You know, he really goes for it at that moment i just completely endorse everything that sarah just said it's a brilliant brilliant lyric i love the fact that um even the fact that it isn't clear exactly what position he's um i mean it's kind of suspended judgment in some ways but also it's not clear who the character is or where the voice is coming from and i think that's another thing that kind of destabilizes you as you're listening to it but it's all held together with this brilliant brilliant pop tune i wonder if it's the same animal as in the song animal lover on the album where brett sings um i heard you've been inside but what were you in for right yeah so just a bit

what's happened to him where has he gone did he leave is he in prison is he dead what has happened yeah yeah and they put this on a thursday evening when kids are watching fucking hell it's so obviously dirty it's like that's sex isn't it that's some sex don't know what's going on but it's sex but yeah i mean the way we're going on we ought to round this up by saying that they became the biggest band of the 90s and became so influential and everything. And what happened? bigger than suede how must that have felt but oasis as well and then um obviously suede was scuppered um for a little while by the fact that bernard left and they had to bring in a new guitarist who was um this untried 17 year old kid richard oakes who's actually brilliant but it sort of dented their credibility in the eyes of some people so that even when they were bringing out

their absolute masterpiece of a second album dog man star it felt a little bit when they were bringing out their absolute masterpiece of a second album, Dog Man Star, it felt a little bit like they were holed below the waterline. You know, it really did. And then when they actually made it big again and again, the third time round with Coming Up, it felt like they were riding on the coattails of Oasis, which is so wrong. But it just felt like, well, the world is now ready for guitar-based bands. And Suede had toned it down by this point. He was wearing sensible shirts rather than blouses and pearls.

And his onstage persona was a bit more geezerish, I remember. So it was a bit sad that in order to get the success that was really overdue, they had to sort of play by Brit rock or dad rock's rules. But we're getting a bit ahead that that in order to get the success that was really overdue they had to sort of play by brit rock or dad rocks rules but we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves but yeah basically as you hint there al they they never did become the sort of all-conquering dominant force that they should have done but but it felt like they were gonna yeah them and the manics suede and the manic street preachers were the two bands in the early 90s that I personally I thought fucking sign me up this is my army I'm joining the army I will fight to the death for you guys it was it was a

cause to get behind Suede and the Manics and I remember once um because I was always writing about both those bands in Melody Maker I remember once being at some kind of music biz after party and Matt Osman approaching me and saying come on Simon, Simon, you've got to tell me, who do you prefer, us or the Mannix? Ooh! And I paused and I said, I'm sorry, but it's the Mannix. And he said, I knew it, I knew it! Do you think your lot over-egged it with Suede?

Because apparently they were on 18 magazine covers before their album even came out. It creates a lot of resentment if you hype up a band that much and say they're the best new band in Britain, even if they are plainly the best new band in Britain. And yeah, maybe it was too much too soon. And some of the front covers didn't do them any favours. There was the infamous Select magazine cover,

which superimposed Brett on the Union Jack I think we might even have mentioned that in a previous episode and Brett didn't want anything to do with that sort of flag-waving bullshit even though culturally Suede were part of the fight back they were very much the fight back of British references and a British kind of indie glam sensibility against that kind of chest-beating hairy hairy, macho American rock that grunge represented. But they didn't want to be involved in this stupid fucking almost keep calm and carry on business that Britpop became.

Do you know what I mean? What would an American reader think of that cover? Some bloke slapping his arse and saying, Yanks go home. Which he never said, of course. I mean, I don't really know what Brett's opinion was of grunge bands. It doesn't really matter.

But it can't have done them any favours. I don't even know if that magazine reached the United States. But if it did, it cannot have done them any favours. But then Suede are a classic example of one of those British bands who are only going to appeal to Anglophiles on the coast in the States. I love that they were

the London Suede. Yes! It's a better name. The London Suede is a better name. I've got a copy of Stay Together that's credited as the London Suede and it's one of my most prized Suede possessions. It's a good name. I always call them the London Suede.

I'm surprised I haven't been doing it all the way through this this chat actually it's weird to me the uh the union jack thing because obviously it would have been way worse if it had just been an english flag because you you just know just none of that but i do think of suede as a very english band specifically they show a route to not taking pride in Englishness, but pleasure and a release of shame. It's like an inversion or a subversion of that kind of English shame about, you know, empire and sex and everything in between, you know. And they kind of mine, that's a seam that they mine, you know. And it's got nothing to do with jingoism or exceptionalism. And there's so many things about Englishness that they kind of correct. They don't really satirise it and they don't really dismiss it. They just kind of offer some sort of alternative to it. And there's so much about them that you don't instinctively associate with the English, like, you know, lusciousness and, you know, lasciviousness. Yeah. But just, yeah, I don't know. There's kind of upgrade to Englishness that they have. Like, we are a dirty, grubby people.

And they know that and they haven't cleaned that up. They've just kind of excavated under it to find the really good stuff, to find the sort of depth. Man, Suede is such a fascinating band and it's way beyond the wit of me to make full sense of them. But I completely get it. I completely get it. I completely get it.

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

get mentioned and and stuff like that this is Saint Etienne I'm talking about now I think Bob and Pete and Sarah presented a kind of positive Britishness and Suede came along and and did a similar thing in a slightly different way because Suede were not ones to sort of name drop anything. Their lyrics are quite universal. But they did come from that hinterland outside London that's neither London nor the coast. It's sort of between London and Brighton. And I've written about The Cure in a similar way, but I first picked up on this when I was reviewing the Suede b-side compilation sci-fi

lullabies suede by the way wrote fucking brilliant b-sides their b-side album it's a double album and it's better than most people's fucking studio album but but in in writing that a review of that i i was saying that there are all these places it's sort of dormitory towns that are just within reach of london where you can see the lights of London almost down the railway track, but you're not quite there. So Colchester, with Blur, Croydon, St Etienne, Haywards Heath, Suede,

and so on. And I really think, and Crawley for the cure, but... Woking. Yeah, Woking. Yeah, absolutely. Jam, yeah. But Suede are a bit more similar to the cure in that they don't name check British stuff. Their sensibility is uniquely English, but they are at least allowing a door open for anyone in the world to kind of get it, I think, if they share that sensibility deep within it there's something about otherness and you know not belonging anywhere yes which is the experience of a lot of people who just desperately want to go to london then they go to london it's like yes i've made it oh fuck because london will never let you in either

i mean it will tolerate your presence but it is as brutal as nature you can never really be a part of it you go oh no and so there's a whole country of people who don't feel they belong and suede they they are of that thing as well very much and the other thing about suede is you can't really lump them in with anyone else i mean every time i see on facebook some flyer for another fucking brit pop night they've always got this collage of noel and liam and damon and Jarvis and, you know, Mr Motivator and the Spice Girls. And then you see Brett Anderson there and you just think, what are you doing there? You might as well take him out and replace him

with a cutout of Hulk Hogan. Because he doesn't belong there either. This is the thing about not fitting in anywhere. It is a hard road to tread, but it has its compensations. I think they transcend Britpop now and they did then you know like the context that they have now is still their own and it always was and i think yeah obviously they suffered for it but they've kind of come through it and outlasted it in the largest way obviously there was the kind of manufactured uh blur versus oasis thing at the

center of supposedly at the center of britpop but it's really kind of Suede and Pulp or blur and Oasis, isn't it? You know, that's kind of how it's separated out. Whatever backlash there was against Suede in a year or so's time was down to them not selling enough records. That was the big slag off about them. It's like, haha, I got you.

You think you're so big and clever. Well, why aren't you number one? You know, and clever. Well, why aren't you number one? You know, Oasis number one. Why aren't you number one? Yeah, yeah, there's all that. By the way, Sarah mentioned Suede outlasting all the bullshit. I've got to add here that of all the bands who have split up and then got back together and maybe playing sort of nostalgic heritage gigs,

Suede are the one who have made fucking brilliant new albums since getting back together it's extraordinary the first one okay the first one blood sports was kind of finding their feet it sounds like a suede album it's just them basically saying yep we can still make a suede kind of record but the three they've done since then are grand artistic statements they are incredible really ballsy of them to do that and actually way better than the final album of their first incarnation which is a new morning which shamefully i gave a five out of five review to just just out of loyalty really because it was not not a very good album yeah i think brett has disowned that one now hasn't he yeah yeah yeah

but yeah seriously of all the comeback bands you know normally like when pixies came back the first couple of tours fucking incredible just to see them sounding better than ever before but then it's like the dreaded thing of like well here's our new album it's like no no no no we've done but but suede are the exception they really are i mean technically you could say they're a heritage band at this point but they don't feel like that at all like um i mean for one thing brett's voice hasn't changed at all and their hearts are still in it they found a new way to be the band that they are and i think there's there's still they've maintained a kind of sincerity and and an innocence somehow and and a beauty that that is quite magical, really.

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

And you see the fucker, right? He looks incredible. He comes swaggering out on stage. I love how cocky he is, by the way. Even now, he's still ridiculously starry. He's an elegant sir. He is an elegant sir in a Tevilline shirt, yeah. So he sort of struts out on stage.

He's got this little wooden box with white gaffer tape around the edge so he doesn't fall off that he jumps up on and he uses it to sort of propel himself just so that his onstage jumps are that bit higher. And, you know, he goes into the crowd, people sort of tearing at him and it's so physical. He's just got so much incredible energy about him. It's feral is what it is.

I remember a couple of years ago when he first started pulling this shit out of the box and performing like that. My wife and I saw them at Hammersmith Apollo. And my wife turned to me and said, is he all right? Is he dying? Because she thought it was the performance of a dying man who just wanted to fucking put it all out there one last time. But he's doing that. He's doing that every fucking night at the moment at the age of 56.

I just can't get my head around it. He is a phenomenon. The best thing that happened in the afterlife of this song, and I don't know if you've seen this, do the words or the word gay penis bum mean anything to you separately yes together not so much oh my god have you got a treat in store right okay so there's this guy um on twitter he was called colincidence but he somehow had his account suspended i don't know what he's done wrong. And on YouTube, he's Colin's surname.

And his YouTube account is still there. What he did, he's a fucking genius, this guy. He made a mockumentary, if you will, about Suede called The Insatiables. And it starts off with a voiceover that goes, In 1989, Bret Wood Anderson andwell osmond advertised in the nme wanting to form a band for people who pretend they're gay to listen to i i should say for a start i'm i'm pretty certain that colin is gay himself so you know um anyway and it continues brett combines the homoerotic charisma of 70s front men with the homoerotic charisma of 80s front men.

And then there are these little snippets of Suede songs that he's kind of adapted. Animal Nitrate is changed to Gay Penis Bum. And it goes, oh, what turns me on? Oh, gay penis bum, because I'm homosexual. And this went kind of viral, right? And the next gig that actual Suede played in Dublin, Brett actually sang it like that. Oh, raw bone.

Brett sang gay penis bum at the gig. I mean, who says Suede don't have a sense of humour? See, comic relief, right? That is actually funny, okay? Yes. Yeah, I think it's... I do think it's okay to write in character, even if it's not directly from your experience, I think.

Brett Anderson was not the first person to do this and will not be the last. It's fine. Kate Bush was not actually a foetus during the war, but it's fine. So the following week, Animal Nitrate stayed at number seven and would get no further.

But Suede became the fastest-selling debut LP since Welcome to the Pleasure Dome by Frank Care and entered the album chart at number one. The follow-up, So Young, only got to number 22, but they'd go on to have seven more top ten hits throughout the 90s and two more number one LPs. You Can you make the top 40 last year dueting with royal person for crying now solo and on its second release Constant craving is a 21 and life by satellite from Hawaii Even through the dark space Being thick or thin

We're transported straight from Lisson Green to a shot of some apartments on the coast of Honolulu as Franklin brags on about the BBC's satellite capabilities as we drop in on a live performance of Constant Craving by KD Lang. Born in Edmonton, Canada in 1961, Catherine Dawn Lang was relocated to the village of Consort in Alberta at the age of nine months, where she would grow up. While attending Red Deer College and becoming obsessed with Patsy Cline, Lang decided to have a go at a singing career. Moving back to Edmonton after graduating in 1982 and forming a tribute band called The Reclines,

and forming a tribute band called The Reclines, which played a sort of country venues in the city whilst finding time to do a seven-hour performance piece reenactment of Barney Clark's artificial heart transplant. It says here in Wikipedia, citation needed. In 1984, The Reclines, now called K.D. Lang and the Reclines, put out the LP A Truly Western Experience, and she'd release another with them before she went solo in 1986 and worked with Dave Edmonds on the LP Angel with a Lariat.

A year later, Lang was approached by Roy Orbison to duet with him on a re-recording of his 1961 single Crying for the soundtrack to the film Hiding Out, which got to number two in Canada and won a Grammy, but did nothing over here. And it would take a performance during the closing ceremony of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary to get Lang on British television when she sang the Alberta Rose. In 1992, Lange put out the LP on Genou and this, the follow-up to Barefoot which failed to chart, was the lead-off single which got to number 52 over here in May of that year. But then two things happened. The first one was an interview with the American LGBT magazine Advocate in June where Lang proclaimed she was playing gold tender for the other ice

hockey team or whatever term they use in Canada and then a re-release of Crying caught on in the UK and went all the way to number 13 in August. In the wake of increased interest in her, Constant Craving was re-released, and last week it entered the chart at number 37. This week it soared 16 places to number 21, which has inspired Stanley Appel to fire up the satellite and send it over Hawaii for a live performance of the song, presumably before a gig or something.

And, you know, I feel top of the pops of Mr. Trick here, chaps, because, you know, people of that era would have seen those white apartments after being told that they were in Hawaii and immediately put two and two together. So what you should have done was a sped-up camera zoom towards the balcony and have KD Lang standing there dressed up in a suit like Jack Lord for that Hawaii Five-0 opening credits vibe.

That would have been nice. And, panel, we've already experienced this sort of thing with Etta James 3T and Montel Jordan, haven't we? You know, it's that pop star you've heard about, but singing live in that America where they make all the films. But it's got to be said that the thrill of live transatlantic broadcasting is it's worn right off by the early 90s hasn't it i mean madness introducing house of fun live from japan and maine nine years previous

that was an absolute fucking mind blast wasn't it but things like this by 1993 see the thrill's gone hasn't it yeah there's a kind of weird flatness and a fuzziness about the satellite top of the box yeah that just kind of i don't know what it is it always feels very remote i think they fucked it i think they fucked it up because yeah it's live in hawaii but what we get is this establishing shot of hawaii from the air it's almost like proto drone footage of beaches and hotels but then we cut and it's just kd sat on her own in the dark she could have been anywhere yeah yeah yeah and it comes back there's a guitar break later on where we see some more irrelevant footage of the flora and mountains of

hawaii but there's no connection between that and the actual performance it's yeah get out on the beach because i remember sim, previously you were talking about going to see your first gigs and being disappointed that they didn't sound as good as the records. And you almost always get the same feeling when a satellite performance was trotted out. It just feels like the talent shows they have today, which are about seeing if someone could reach a standard.

Yeah. You know, like Torval and Dean doing their compulsories oh and here we're being told to just sit back and see if this artist can actually do it without all that studio trickery and computers and whatnot well the thing is I don't know if you've noticed this but it doesn't have the backing vocals no where she harmonizes with herself and it made me realize that her harmonising with herself on the record totally makes it, you know. And when you don't have that, I mean, it's a very sparse backing here as well.

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

kind of a little curl or a little tickle and so you know it's live yes and she doesn't overextend herself for the high notes i mean it does lose something in the chorus yeah you're right because there's usually that i will not attempt it myself but it is missing that high note a bit but she's not overextending herself she's probably has to save her voice for like more important stuff she's quite happening to be honest there's a very sound checky vibe about it in there yeah but you know if that was a sound check while you were in the place you'd sit and listen to the whole thing wouldn't you yeah it's got to be said the lowercase canadian can piss this sort of thing out of her ass all day can't she so it's no burden to sit through this she's there sat on the edge of a platform

in a harley davidson t-shirt underneath a denim shirt And she's much better served by the video, which appears to be set in a Jim Rose circus-like performance during the Depression. It's meant to be Waiting for Godot, isn't it? Yes. Mark Rummenick is a really good director. Yeah, it's supposed to be a theatrical premiere of Waiting for Godot is the premise of it.

But as far as satellite broadcasts from top of the pops go, we've seen far, far worse, haven't we? Absolutely. And it does show she has a fantastic voice. Not that I ever particularly doubted that. No. It really does. Even though it's a shame that there aren't two of her,

one harmonising with the other. Yeah, it's still really impressive from that point of view. And I really surprised myself with my reaction to this because I think I was a bit anti-KD Lang back in the day. Not for any massive reason, but part of it was the lowercase lettering. It was like E.E. Cummings, which was such a fucking annoying affectation.

Dream Hampton. Yeah, or a late 80s sandwich bar in Islington that thinks it's something special and it's called something like refuel you know that's what it reminded me of the whole conceit of lowercase lettering was a very sort of trendy middle class thing in that period and it kind of rubbed me up the wrong way is it I didn't realize that a case had a class oh yeah oh yes trust me trust me it was kind of styled after E.E. Cummings.

And I think for the same reason, which was to separate the kind of performance self from the person. It is a bit annoying, but it's not like the audience grade annoying, where it's like, oh, it's all one word. Oh, no. It's like wearing sunglasses, isn't it? Sunglasses at night. Yeah, but I don't want people staring in my eyes all the time.

So I get it. The enemy of Microsoft World spell check isn't it yes she might as well had a red wobbly line underneath her name as well yeah because it is quite attention-seeking in a way we have to tackle the lesbian elephant in the room yeah lesbian elephants come on well this is another reason why I was maybe slightly set against her not because I'm a massive homophobe. No, what it is, right, it was obviously very important at the time that she was a visible lesbian woman in pop, and she was a pioneer of that. And also, not a fun lesbian like you get in porn or in Katy Perry videos.

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

Right. There was the Indigo Girls. And that was about it. I mean, some would have mentioned or guessed Michelle Shocked, but she doesn't identify as lesbian. Tracy Chapman has never confirmed her sexuality. So Katie Lang was way out in front on that score. And because of that, because she was that important figure, you felt at the time there was a moral imperative coercing you to like her. I'm very resistant to that sort of thing so yeah I think I probably just rolled my eyes at

the fucking first of all the lowercase lettering and secondly that this kind of there was an edge to if people said do you like Katie Lang there's a certain edge to the question of like if you don't like it then you're a bigot do you know what I mean yeah are you or are you not a friend of Catherine exactly so I suppose I hadn't given her any thought for decades until we chose to look at this episode of Top of the Pops. And what I would never ever think over all those years was what I need now is to hear Constant Craving by Katie Lang. But I heard it and it just made me stop in my tracks for a moment. It feels like a song with significant emotional heft. It feels important in the same way that the Suede song feels important.

Even lines like, maybe a great magnet pulls all souls towards truth, has a profundity to it, you know? And yeah, this was probably the big shock of the episode for me was oh wow i really like constant craving by katie lang and it was definitely played upon if not necessarily by her because in 1993 nobody gave the slightest bit of a fuck about a country singer in britain a country music singer from Canada who didn't eat meat and was a lesbian as well that's a lot of hooks you can hang things on isn't it well that takes balls being a gay woman or a gay man in the world of country music yeah I mean seriously man

and also that yeah the whole thing about opposing the meat trade that she's vegetarian and she actually launched that meat stinks campaign and yes given that she grew up and she actually launched that Meat Stinks campaign. And given that she grew up in Alberta, which is a cattle ranching state, as we know, and she ended up getting banned from more than 30 radio stations in Alberta and more than a dozen in the US. I don't know if you saw this bit, but there was a sign in her hometown of Consort which said, home of KD Lang. That was burned to the ground. And she was actually denounced by alberta's agriculture minister for her supposed betrayal i mean fucking hell it's like the wurzels doing meat is murder isn't it right exactly i'd be engaged but talking about the whole sexuality

thing and her kind of androgyny and her status as as an icon of that a few months after this song there's that famous um august 93 issue of vanity fair oh yes that photo of her um on the cover in a barber's chair being shaved with a razor by cindy crawford that that's yet stuff like that in a pre-internet age that was big i really think so yeah yeah because by 1993 it was it was kind of accepted even if it was grudgingly by most people that gay men weren't going to go away and just wanted to get on with it and obviously being at university at the time you know i was massively aware about same-sex palaver going on there'd be people at college that you knew who were gay or had suspicions that they were gay but they mainly kept it on the down low but at college that you knew who were gay or had suspicions that they

were gay but they mainly kept it on the down low but at uni lads would be coming out left right and center yeah and the ones who were already out some of them practically went into orbit you know especially when you were living in london yeah yeah but that option didn't seem to be available to the women folk who were that way inclined. You know, after I graduated, there were at least three women I knew and linked up with afterwards. And, you know, they sat me down and told me that they were lesbians. And I always had to say, yeah, everybody knew Doc. So for someone like Katie Lang to come out back then,

even if it was before she was really known over here, it must have been a massive deal. I mean, it doesn't hurt that she looks like a really cute member of the Undertones. You know, one of my mates was telling me that he went to a KD Land gig and it was absolutely full of women who were just screaming at her as if she was Donny Osmond right the way through. Wow. I can imagine, yeah.

Yeah, these things are important in the culture, aren't they? And, you know, I think she can be proud of the part she played. But also, she was just living her life. There was another photo shoot with her as actually as Elvis, wasn't there? And, you know, I think she can be proud of the part she played. But also, she was just living her life. There was another culture shoot with her as actually as Elvis, wasn't there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't remember what that was for, but that was brilliant. And I suppose we got used to the idea of gay male pop stars in the 80s, haven't we?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think everybody was on board with that. It's like, even if it was grudgingly, it's like, OK, well, some men are gay and some of those gay men are going to be pop stars and they're going to be very successful ones yeah more birds for the rest of us eh but yeah not not with women the other thing is as well that she is clearly uh dressing down for this performance you know and and didn't feel any need to kind of conform to any stereotypical beauty standards in that way but um also she's her voice is very feminine she's got this very pure clear tone

to her voice she almost sounds like Liza Minnelli like as a Broadway singer slipping between musical contexts as you listen I mean she did she kind of meandered between genres I mean partly because country would not really accept her you know I mean she lived in Nashville it's like that was tough you know what though for everything I said about country being a difficult place for a gay woman, Roy Orbison choosing, when KD was still very early on in her career, to duet with her. Fucking respect to Roy Orbison for that, you know? Yeah, yeah.

That was before she was out, though. Oh, come on. You know what I mean? Like the same as your friends at uni. Come on. Of course, when you're an lgbt songwriter everything has an extra layer of meaning or at the very least other people try to lump on an extra layer of meaning you know even when it's not there you know like when george michael was forced out you'd go

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

You know what I mean? Yeah. Depends which pocket you put the packet well i do think you're right that everything does get given this extra layer and i wonder if i don't want to sort of speak for you but did you mean by that that uh constant craving is hinting at the kind of longing and yearning for forbidden fruit yeah yeah and that being the situation under which gay people had to basically live for centuries you could say it elevates the context of the song from boohoo you don't fancy me because i'm not attractive enough for you with someone else to oh fucking hell you don't fancy me because nature and biology yeah it's got a sort of echo of you know radcliffe hall the well of loneliness

or something like that yeah i think you know good or great songwriters will uh generally draw from their own experience but they will strive to reach others you know that's kind of what they do so um a lot of you know a lot of great songs are it's not that it's ambiguous it's just that it's expansive and and large and um people can relate to it. You know, they'll find something in it to relate to. And if you're a gay person, it's going to be about your own experience as a gay person. But you're also a person and you want to connect with all kinds of audiences. And we can sit all day pulling apart the semiotics and inner meanings and all that cobblers

while millions of other people are coming across it on Radio 2 and thinking, oh, this is lovely. It is lovely. It is lovely. And that's it. Next time it's on the radio, I will listen because I wouldn't say it's blown my mind, but it's certainly given me a slight slap upside the head that I like this song.

So the following week, Constant Craving jumped two places to number 19 and a week later would get to number 15, its highest position. The follow-up, The Mind of Love, open brackets, Where Is Your Head, Catherine, close brackets, would only get to number 72 in May, and she never got near the top 40 again,

but she closed out the year with that cover of Vanity Fair, where she got a shave off Cindy Crawford, and appeared at the Concert of Hope for the National AIDS Trust with George Michael David Bowie and Mick Hucknall. I would just like to ask why wasn't there a happy hardcore track sampling this

called Constant Raving? Hey! constant craving has always it's always great to introduce the band on the show when it's their first time especially knowing they've worked so hard to get here from sc Scotland at number 29, Run Rig will be excellent. Wonderful. It's always great to introduce a band on the show when it's their first time, says Franklin off camera again,

as we look at a whammy bar being interfered with, especially when they've worked so hard to get here. He's talking about Run Rig and Wonderful. Formed in the Isle of Skye and Glasgow in 1973, when the accordionist Blair Douglas' mam needed a band at short notice for a North Oost and Burneray Association dance in Glasgow and linked her son up with the Macdonald brothers, Callum and Rory, the Run Rig Dance Band spent the first five years of their career

tearing up the dance halls of the west coast of Scotland with their rocky take on the traditional music of the Highlands and Islands. In 1978, they put out their first LP, Play Gaelic, an entirely Gaelic album, apart from the title, which caused no end of Mither with the record label, but caught the mood of much of the country at the peak of the Scottish devolution wave, and the band suddenly became a very big deal north of Hadrian's Wall. It wouldn't be until 1982 that they put out their first single, a cover of the 18th century folk standard Loch Lomond, and it got to number 86 in the UK chart in the first week of 1983. Although they failed to crack the charts on two separate occasions in

1984, they spent the rest of the decade consolidating their position as a hugely popular independent band in Scotland. And when they signed a deal with Chrysalis in 1988, they started to gain a following on the continent, and they closed out the decade with their six LP Searchlight, entering the album chart at number 11 in October of 1989. In 1991, their next LP, The Big Wheel, smashed into the charts at number four. They played a gig to 50,000 people, reasonably close to the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond, and they eventually breached the top 40 when the Hot Hammer EP got to number 25 in September of that year. This single, the follow-up to Flower of the West, which got to number 43 in November of 1991, is the lead-off cut from their eighth LP Amazing Things, which comes out a week tomorrow and it's a new entry this week at number 29

and here they are in the elstree studio making their studio debut on top of the pops and yes chaps the music industry may be in crisis at the moment with a drop in record sales but here's the upside bands with a dedicated fan base suddenly having the clout to get their faves into the charts what is there to say about wonderful by run rig seriously help help me well here's the thing right i found mark franklin's introduction incredibly patronizing when he says right so he says it's always great to introduce a band on the show when it's their first time especially knowing they've worked so hard to get here hang on a minute right run rig by this point had had two gold albums and two silver albums and were a massive live act in scotland yeah i guarantee you

i don't know if any members of run rig have ever written their memoirs, but if they have, you will not find any member of Runrig saying that appearing on Top of the Pops in 1993 was a highlight of their career. No fucking way, right? But yeah, they are having their Clannad moment. You know Clannad were massive in Ireland and then they finally had a hit in the UK with the theme from Harry's Game. Not quite on the

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

that um you know a lot of bands um occupy there are there are bands who have really good careers that don't interact very much with you know occasionally they'll kind of merge with the mainstream and then they'll you don't hear them again but that doesn't mean that they cease to exist yeah i mean even people in the actual music biz didn't know anything about them there was an oral history about red wedge in mojo the red wedge tour of 1986 and they were added on the bill during the scottish leg and tom robinson said run rig turned up at edinburgh playhouse and most of us didn't have a clue who they were then they went out on stage and the whole place went ape shit amazing we were all

standing at the side saying who are these guys and donnie monroe the lead singer said it was unusual for us back then to be suddenly thrust amongst all these top chart acts but we were really delighted to be able to do the show we did a song called dance called america because it was about forced emigration from Scotland and feudalism and it related to the sense of loss of community that we were experiencing under Thatcherism. So yeah, they deserve their spot there.

I mean, Simon, as a proud woe-smeared Kelch, you've spoken of your love for big country back in the day and Rum Riggs always been depicted as the Laphroaig to big countries bells and teachers so did you ever dabble no um and i don't really see the comparison apart from the fucking tartan shirt they shared one member today they did share a member with yeah there was there's

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

It's like they've just come from the office and they've had to throw on leather jackets to go on top of the pop. And they're not even the right kind of pleated trousers, are they? They're not the David Stubbs ones. They're not semiotic trousers. Are they diegetic trousers, though?

And they've got those really bad early 90s shirts under leather jackets. So they all look like a biker gang who only shop at C&A. Well, one of them's got the biker jacket, but the other, it's a blues on, which is just never good. It's like Jimmy Nail in Spender or something. It's, oh, fuck me. Mullets as well, some serious mulletage going on. Yeah.

And they look so old. I mean, the main guy, Donny Munro, I looked it up and he's 39 when this is recorded. He looks every day of that and you can probably add another 15 on top. I mean, the main guy, Donny Munro, I looked it up and he's 39 when this is recorded. He looks every day of that and you can probably add another 15 on top. I mean, fucking hell. He's the kind of 39 that people used to be in the 50s. Yes, yes. I didn't watch this episode when it originally came out. So when I realised that Run Rig were on it, I was like, oh, I'm going to find out what this band are all about.

You know, like Crass. Because, you know, you'd see Crass in the late 70s on the walls everywhere, and you never heard them. You just thought, oh, God, what must they be like? And it wasn't until, like, the turn of the century that I started listening to Crass. I thought, oh, fucking hell, this is all right. But I can't say the same for Runrig.

I don't know what I was expecting. Probably a musical version of McGlashan out of Absolutely but you know what we get here is a melange of mid 80s windy Celticness and incidental music from an episode of Tiger don't we? Yeah like the Adventures or the Silencers or something like that.

The thing with it is I don't believe and this is for my own superficial skim through what Runrig are about that this is representative my own superficial skim through what Runrig are about, that this is representative of them as a band. No. It happens without anything happening. There's all one chord for ages at the start and not even a melody to speak of.

No. And they play their instruments like they're display models and they're trying to play really softly, trying them out, and they'll be handing them back to the shop assistant any second now do you know what i mean at least they're not doing smoke on the water though give them that or stairway to heaven um yeah there's kind of the vague atmosphere of rock about it but there's no emphasis on anything in particular and there isn't really a riff and it's not in any particular key and there isn't really a hook but other than that it's it's great yeah it sounds vaguely christian doesn't it it's very sorry but it does i think their earlier material would be more spirited and maybe more roots based

than than this but this yeah it doesn't even have a chorus It's just got a title that's repeated. So wonderful, too wonderful, so wonderful, too wonderful. It's, oh, come on, guys. So it's kind of surprising that of their entire catalogue, this is the one that gets into the charts. But, you know, what can you do? Yeah, I don't know what that says about people who buy records, really. I mean, it's honestly, because Runrig were often name-dropped as, oh, well, you think you know about Scottish rock. Well, wait till you hear Runrig, you know. So here we are hearing Runrig were often name-dropped as, oh, well, you think you know about Scottish rock,

well, wait till you hear Runrig, you know. So here we are, hearing Runrig, and all I can say is it's just as well that the Jesus and Mary Chain and Mogwai and The Associates and Franz Ferdinand and Orange Juice and Bell and Sebastian and all those other bands exist, so that we don't have to judge the rock of Scotland on this one song and this one performance.

Yeah, it's very much the sound of middle-aged Scotland, isn't it, this? But we get a proper look at the main stage for the first time and, ooh, we can see where the BBC's chucked the money. It's a properly wide stage, flanked by metallic stairs and balconies to the side, with a huge bank of scaffolding at the back. And the band have decorated that with a massive bank of scaffolding at the back and the band have decorated that with a massive banner which depicts the cover of their new lp which is a photo of the

hugh mcdarmid memorial created by the artist jake harvey so there is that yeah hugh mcdarmid was a poet and one of the founders of the national party of scotland i discovered great so yeah a learning experience yeah no disrespect to them who they've had an incredible career and made a lot of people of the National Party of Scotland, I discovered. Great. So, yeah, a learning experience. No disrespect to them. They've had an incredible career and made a lot of people very happy, but they're not a top-of-the-pops band, and this is not a top-of-the-pops song, and it's not barely even a song, I think.

So, the following week, Wonderful dropped 14 places to number 43. The downside to having a hardcore fanbase that buy shit on week one with no one else there to pick up the slack and a very chilling port into the very near future. But by the end of the month, the LP entered the chart at number two, held off the summit of Ben Chartis

by their greatest hits by Hot Chocolate. The follow-up, The Greatest Flame, got to number 35 in May, but they'd go on to score six more top 40 hits throughout the 90s, and even got to number nine in November of 2007, when they linked up with the Tartan Army for a revamp of Loch Lomond. In 1997, their lead singer, Donny Mun Munro who had already served as the rector of the University of Edinburgh at this very moment left the band in order to run at the general election as the Labour candidate for Ross, Sky and Inverness West but lost to Charles Kennedy and the band would put out six more studio LPs and five live LPs before splitting up in 2018.

Oh, and Run Rig was a system of arable land tenure from late medieval times where strips of farmland were rotated amongst villagers on a yearly basis so no one could permanently bagsy the most fertile land. Dig it, kids! Well then, Pop Craze youngsters, I feel that now is as good a time as any to shut the lid on this part of Chart Music 73. But fear not, we'll be back tomorrow for the final furlong of this episode.

So, on behalf of Sarah B and Simon Price, this is Al Needham advising you to sit tight, listen keenly and stay pop crazed. Chart music. Calling all pop crazed youngsters. You asked for it. We were offered it. So we said, alright then, fuck it, why not? Saturday, January the 13th, 2024.

Birmingham Town Hall. Chalk music live all day. Yes, pop 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. So, see that internet. Mashabit.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!