Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - Chart Music #73 (Pt 4): 4.3.93 – Frank Bald

Episode Date: January 6, 2024

Simon Price, Sarah Bee and Al Needham hit the final stretch of this episode of TOTP with the chance to hear 20 seconds of a Xmas Number One, Bryan Ferry going through the motions, some Americans who want to weld you into a chair and Dead Madonna, then Diana Ross gets all excited at the sight of an oiled-up saxman, and we continue our ongoing mission to praise the Belgians. REACH FOR THE SKIES, 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.

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. It's Thursday night. It's about 90 minutes past the seven.

It's March the 4th, 1993. And this episode of Top of the Pops. It's all right, you know, I'm a bit shocked by how not catch it is. Anyway, Pop Craze youngsters, welcome to the final part of episode 73 of Chart Music. I'm Al Needham, they're Simon Price and Sarah B, you're you, and this is Top of the Fucking Pops. So let's tuck in. Here we go with this week's Top 40 Breakers. Climbing at number 25, Rage Against the Machine, Killing in the Name. We go straight from Run Rig to the sting for the breakers section

without even bothering to go back to Frank. He's getting fuck all airtime in this episode, isn't he? Yeah, basically a glorified voiceover artist. First up, it's Killing In The Name by Rage Against The Machine. Formed in Los Angeles in 1991, Rage Against The Machine got their name from a song that front person zach de la roca wrote for his old band inside out in december of 1991 after garnering a following on the la gig circuit they recorded a 12 track demo tape which they started selling

at gigs with a cover consisting of newspaper stock exchange figures with an actual match affixed to it. And after they sold over 5,000 copies of it, they started shopping it around to record labels. One label, Atlantic, was so taken by it that one of the staff bootlegged it and sold hundreds of copies of it under a different cover, which led the band to reject their overtures and sign to Epic instead. This single, their debut, is the lead-off track from their first LP, Rage Against The Machine,

which came out last November, which already caused heads to snap back in the record shop due to its cover, which featured the Vietnamese monk Thich Qu tic quan doc who set himself on fire in protests at the persecution of buddhists in south vietnam in the early 60s it crashed into the chart last week at number 27 and this week after an incident that we may discuss later on it's nudged up two places to number 25 and here's a very selective clip of the video which was directed by peter gideon one of tom morello's guitar students who filmed the band

having fun on stage at the whiskey a go-go and the club with no name and panel this is why i was so down on lenny kravitz earlier because i knew this was coming fucking hell i love this song fuck yeah i knew it was coming and still when it came on when i was watching the episode i went fuck my diaphragm just twanged a little bit it's like there's there's a set of muscles um this is actually scientifically proven there's a set of muscles in the neck and jaw that can only be activated by this record it's like a's a set of muscles in the neck and jaw that can only be activated by this record it's like a natural reflex you know like when the doctor hits your knee with his toffee hammer i mean we only get 23 seconds of it possibly because the bbc have

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

after broadcasting the band's current single, Killing In The Name, unedited during last Sunday's Top 40 chart show. DJ Bruno Brooks played the original version of the single, culminating in the line, Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me, repeated 16 times a spokeswoman for radio one said a studio mix-up meant the obscene version was played instead of the edited clean version we apologize to everyone who phoned up to complain she said it was an unfortunate mistake these things happen two days after the fiora bbc twos the late

show censored the band's live version of bullets in the head on tuesday's no nirvana grunge special which repeated the word motherfucker disgusting and it's also worth noting that not only have the supposedly down with the kids enemy have censored all the swear words themselves, but they've also written motherfucker. You know, like newsreaders of the 80s used to say skinhead. Yeah. Yeah. The story goes that Brooks have put the record on without checking and slipped off to record a promo or something. Came back absolutely unaware that he'd laid

16 fucks upon the nation. And apparently was suspended for a week. So there we go. Rage Against the Machine have done nothing else. They've got rid of Bruno Brooks for a week. Amazing. You know, this is one thing that always does my head in about DJs. You know, you'd see them on things like Nationwide

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

paul craig's youngster i have never ever made or owned a tape of myself having a massive wank and not holding my mouth right but yeah but ai will take care of that god yeah deep fakes yeah i didn't think about that and that fear is lingering you know even nowadays you know when i what usually happens is we pick out what top of the Pops are going to do. And I send you the video. The minute I press the send button, I think, you know, what if this isn't Top of the Pops, but me unattractively availing myself of my own facilities? All I'm saying is if Bruno Brooks has been as paranoid as me, he wouldn't have got himself into this shit. Yeah, I actually DJed on the BBC about 15 times a few years ago. Yeah, I was on BBC Radio Sussex,

and I was a guest presenter on BBC Introducing quite a few times. And there was a track I was playing that I knew had a fuck on it. And I sat there hovering over the mute button because I knew when it was coming. I didn't have the skills to actually do my own edit of the song. So I had to do it live, like fucking just hit that button for a split second to bleep out the fuck.

And I did it. So that's professionalism, Bruno Brooks. That is professionalism. Yeah. But anyway, again, with the early 70s riffage, fucking hell. Yeah. Rage Against The Machine are the other band on this episode where I got there first.

Ooh. And I can't claim any special credit for that because it's not like they were some obscure indie band playing in pubs. They were already signed to Sony. Well, you know, Epic, but they had the Sony machine behind them. Yeah. But what happened was, the previous year, in 92, promos of this song had started circulating

right a long long time before even the album had come out and one of them reached me and one of them reached two djs called jonathan and eco who ran a night called feet first at the camden palace which was a legendary tuesday night indie night for students. It was either a quid to get in or sometimes it was free if you had the right kind of flyer. And, you know, it's a bit of a legendary place. I saw Jane's Addiction there, I saw Swayze, I saw Ride, Daisy Chainsaw, all kinds of bands that became a big deal just for free at that club but jonathan and eco started playing killing in the name by rage against the machine months before anybody knew who rage against machine were and the crowd used to go absolutely fucking mental for it and people got coming up and go what's

that song what's that song that's actually quite impressive because indie nightclub crowds can be very conservative they basically wanted to hear size of a Cow by the Wonderstuff or The Only Living Boy in New Cross by Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine over and over and over. Or if they're being really daring, they would leap about to Out of Space by the Prodigy. So for this kind of funk metal, this angry funk metal political epic

to get dropped in the middle of a primetime DJ set week after week and for people to go fucking nuts to it tells you something about what kind of song it is and what it was and it had the same effect on me you know even though it was on a major label I did have to pull a few strings and do a bit of digging to find out well you know how do I get hold of these fuckers when are they coming over and I ended up interviewing them in the dressing room of the camden underworld right which is you know that's the level they were at at the time to write what turned out to be their first uk interview i've got them i've got yeah i've got rage games machine i've got suede i've got the darkness right and and wu-tan clan who in various ways i can claim as my personal firsts.

But yeah, I thought this record was just fucking superb. And it's been done to death now, and it's become the stuff of mockery for various reasons, which I'm sure we'll come to. But if you just try and wipe all that away, and just imagine the visceral feeling of hearing this for the first time. And as Sarah says, just what it does to your body involuntarily it's extraordinary it's just a very very exciting piece of music and yet there was kind of a lot of

this sort of thing about I already mentioned Jane's Addiction but in terms of funk rock or funk metal we'd had Red Hot Chili Peppers we we'd had Faith No More. They were sort of crossover things, collaboration things. So you had Public Enemy with Anthrax, and you had Ice-T with his band Body Count, and things like the Beatniks and stuff like that. So there's a lot of that stuff going around. But Rage Against the Machine really fucking carried it off. They actually, probably more than anyone other than Public Enemy

in their collaboration with Anthrax, managed to harness the excitement of rap and metal at the same time in a way that it became horribly influential of course um yeah and and it does mean that the refrain fuck you i won't do what you tell me has gone from being a kind of critique of the American military industrial complex to basically adolescent petulance. And essentially, it gave birth to all those Papa Roach type bands. Oh, yes. Whose main message was really, fuck you, mom, I won't tidy my bedroom. Yes.

That's what it gave us. But it's not, that's not Rage Against the Machine's fault. They can't help that. And this single, and also Bullet in the head and bomb track were just astonishing and the things that tom morello does with his guitar it's it doesn't sound like a guitar it sounds like some kind of industrial vinyl scratching or god knows what he's doing there because there's been so many attempts to make walk this way by run dmc happen again and most of them being absolute catshit but this lot here they've cracked it by simply having a lead singer who shouts and someone who can kind of make his guitar scratch. And he sounds fucking brilliant.

Well, he's a nerd, Tom Morello. He's a fucking guitar nerd. And sometimes, in fact, I would say nine times out of ten, that leads nowhere good. But every now and then you get someone like him who has this incredible grasp of technique and does something kind of awesome with it you know and again from a british perspective here's another example of a trend that

started to kick in in the early 90s because you know if we as british kids were worked up into a froth about the idea of america in the 70s and then we're crushed under the weight of american cultural juggernauts in the 80s the 90s, or at least the early part of it, was all about being told by Americans that America was just as shit as our country. This was the decade when the curtain was pulled back to reveal people from trailer parks fighting with each other on Jerry Springer. And it's like, oh, America's actually not all that after all. Yeah, well...

Yeah, grunge told us that. Hip-hop told us that. And here's another example. Yeah, you've got Zach De La Rocha basically saying that there is significant crossover between the US military and the KKK. And the police. Some of those who burn crosses are the same that join forces.

Yeah, exactly. And also, you know, the idea of an American rock band who were properly left-wing, that was a fucking mind-blast in 1993. Yeah, it was. You know, you either had American rock bands who were kind of bozos politically or just didn't really care,

they weren't engaged politically, but they could rock. Or you had hip-hop acts who did know where it's at politically but weren't really interested in rock. So to have the two together was unexpected. Yeah, definitely. They were really smart as well, Rage Against the Machine.

They were prone to sloganeering. And fuck you, I won't do what you tell me is nothing if not a very basic and direct slogan. But they knew what they were doing. They knew that's how rock works. That's how you reach people. You're not really going to reach people with um impenetrable marxist dialectic you have to boil it down to a slogan tom morello was really fucking smart he had an honors degree in um political science from uh harvard which you know nobody expects that from a fucking guitarist an american rock band did you see that thing that

happened on twitter in 2018 about this? No. This was so funny. This is the best own I've seen on the internet. So he posted a photo of his guitar with Fuck Trump painted on it. Yeah. And some book wrote, another successful musician instantly becomes a political expert. Right.

So Morello's reply was amazing right he said one does not have to be an honors grad in political science from harvard university to recognize the unethical and inhumane nature of this administration but well i happen to be an honors grad in political science from harvard university so i can confirm that for you it It's fucking brilliant. Nice. See, I think that this is actually piss-take proof. I think it is bulletproof because it's so serious. Zach Del Roscio is a serious man, a serious activist who really cares and really, you know, that's what he is first almost before a musician, you know.

And I don't think any amount of recontextualising or overexposure can really tarnish it. It's also another track that is very interesting in terms of what perspective it's written from. It kind of zooms in and out. There's a kind of philosophical, abstract perspective, and then there's a kind of crash zoom to an accusation. Now you do what they told you. Now you're under control.

So it's very urgent, but it's almost mocking, poking at you know and so there's these kind of dizzying shifts in perspective i think at the end as well with the coda it's like it's not just zach speaking it's a sort of radical ventriloquism where it's like i'm speaking for you now yeah it's like and it's irresistible it's like it's like his voice just becomes this kind of disembodied chant. And you know who it belongs to, but it's taken on a life of its own. And he starts quietly and gets louder and louder, like he's awakening to how things really are. Also, I don't know about you,

how long do you think the final motherfucker is in there? Just off the top of your head. In your head, how long do you think it is? Eight seconds. I'd say about eight seconds. Right isn't at all it's really short because like the final fuck you i won't do what you tell me is very emphatic and you can hear the full stop and the kind of mic drop and the motherfucker after it is just like an extra shoe in the ribs but it's very short you just remember it as a long scream in your head because that's what everyone does. Everyone just goes, motherfucker! But what it actually is, is motherfucker! It's short. It's really short.

It's so funny how it actually becomes something else because it, hey man, it belongs to the people. I mean, it truly is the alt-rock, Come On Eileen. Drop it at the wedding. See that dance floor go off. Yes. And Chop Suey by System of a Down. Those are the two. Yeah.

Right. I did start to think I was trying to compose a list of, you know, songs that speed up and slow down, which is a risky gambit. But, you know, if you can pull it off, it will get people fucking going. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It does that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah because uh little louis did the opposite oh yeah slowed it down and and that was that was audacious as well as salacious but there's not very many there's also my favorite piece of classical music and also the only one that i can name is in the hall of the mountain king by greek right and that's you know the one and that speeds up a little bit towards the end. Some versions of it, they really go all out.

Which kind of misses the point. You only need to do it a little bit. And another extremely overexposed, decontextualised piece of music that is used. Editors love it just that slap it over a montage of just some chaos happening in a reality show. It's just like oral shorthand for chaos, hedonism or general semi-scripted skull fuckery. But it doesn't matter to me. Every time I hear that, I go, oh, and I get this tingle of like, I don't know what it is. It's just like, oh, my God.

It's like being captured by trolls and born aloft down the mountain by such and i i realize that it hasn't in real terms it has not been preserved with its original meaning and it lost that long time ago and it's grim to think about the state of america now which is terrifying and depressing and you know there's 30 years later and and i i think the some of the right wing did try to claim this for themselves before they realized what it was actually about it's that kind of knee-jerk oppositional defiant yeah which is just kind of running rampant among public life in in america now yeah when this record first came out you could be confident if you suffered a miscarriage you could get medical help and not have to stagger bleeding from one hospital to the next to find a doctor who wasn't afraid of being accused of baby murder.

So it's... There's something really bleak about it. It's like, I just imagine Wall-E doing his rounds after humanity has left the trash planet and finding a little tape deck with this in it, you know. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. But this song, man, it's the soundtrack to one of my most cherished memories. You sure you want to tell us this, Al?

Six months after this episode, I suddenly find myself in Ludlow in Shropshire. Good start, okay. As the staff writer of a new Mega Drive magazine. Got the job straight from graduating. Nice. From an advert in The Guardian. And I'm fucking loving it man i'm practically running to work i'm hammering out page after page a copy in a converted mill with a mixture

of media professionals poached from other mags and farm lads who could write and those farm lads fucking out their idea of a good night out was getting into a field getting some weed or some pig tranquilizers or sniff some silage a bottle of mad dog 2020 and listen on a tape deck to rage against the machine black sunday by cypress hill and the judgment night soundtrack oh yeah yeah yeah oh they were fucking banging to that yeah judgment night that was the whole gimmick wasn't it it was like hip-hop act juxtaposed with rock act all the way through sorry carry on yeah so uh anyway it's the christmas do in the local theater and i end up sitting at a table with the owners of the company called roger and ollie fray and their history was fascinating they they were practically run out of

london by the met in the late 70s because they published a game magazine called Zipper. And they ended up in Shropshire and they started doing catalogues in the early 80s for ZX81 games. Realised no one was doing any actual games mags and they started up Crash and Zap, which, you know, if you were that way inclined, monuments of the 80s.

And both of them fucking love me. So we end up at this table chatting about my future plans and everything and i'm sitting there realizing fucking hell they're talking about fast tracking me right up the ladder and i'm looking at being an editor by the end of next year so i'm leaning in hard to hear what they're saying and then some of the farm lads who've been pestering the dj to stop playing all this christmas party shit and put some proper music on one of them's just run back from his house with black sunday and rage against the machine and told him to put that on and they play killing in the name yeah while all this serious discussion about my career is going on i noticed out the corner of

there like five of my mates um miles who was a greb lad with hair down to his arse and about 50 bangles up his arm my mate the accessible games dog who i ended up living with a chap called pricey who was essentially kurt cabane but with more lynx nevada a welsh goth called will who was pretty much the world's first emo, may he rest, and Johnny Sex Cat had all climbed up on the stage and were going absolutely fucking psychabilities at a Meteors gig on each other to killing in the name. And I'm watching this out the corner of my mind. I fight so hard not to howl with laughter at it.

I end up blowing an actual snot bubble in front of my paymasters. It didn't really matter in the end because the night ended with everyone getting pissed up I end up blowing an actual snot bubble in front of my paymasters. Oh, Al. It didn't really matter in the end because the night ended with everyone getting pissed up and Ollie absolutely off his box with his shirt completely undone, grabbing the mic off the DJ and screaming, everyone, dance, dance for your magazines. And in six weeks' time, the entire company would fall. Oh, shit. Because the financial director had embezzled

half a million pounds out of the company. So, yeah. Oh, well, the snot bubble didn't matter that much then. That's all right. No, it didn't. I've DJed to that demographic myself. I went to Baskerville Hall, which is in Hay-on-Wye, which is just inside Wales, but basically is next to Herefordshire,

which is not far from Shropshire, obviously. And Baskerville Hall had this massive kind of barn. It's like a disco attached to it. And yeah, it is that Baskerville Hall, by the way, as in, you know, Conan Doyle. I was DJing for a mate's wedding down there. And I was just playing stuff like Daft Punk or whatever, because it was that sort of era, and it went fine. But that crowd, they are fucking hardcore, that's for sure, right?

And hearing what you're telling me now, I should have played Rage Against the Machine just to see the reaction. Oh, they would have fucking gone off, mate. The name, of course, Rage Against the Machine, lent itself to all kinds of fun. So David Stubbs, when writing the comedy pages of Melody Maker TTT, used to have a section every week for quite a long time of every week, rage against the machine, rage against a machine. Zach Della Rocha, just really swearing about a fucking fax machine or a washing machine or

whatever it may be. And of course, I'm pretty sure that we had Glastonbury coverage at one point with a headline, rage against Against the Latrine. It did gladden my heart slightly last year or the year before to see how deeply embedded this track is in the culture in America and in a good way. Al, you know the Herman Cain Awards? Yes. Subreddit, it's slightly distastefully. Oh, gosh, yes. People were very defiant about COVID and wouldn't wear masks and all this kind of thing and made a big deal of it on their social media.

It's assembling their life and death in their memes and posts. And inevitably, the last ones being, yeah, I think I'm feeling better. And then here's a GoFundMe for the funeral. But one of these posted a meme that was George Carlin quote, never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups referring to you know all the sheep following the rules about covid and some brilliant wag underneath said some of those that quote carlin are the same that win darwin oh yeah nice very good nice so the following week killing in the name dropped 12 places to number 35. The follow-up, Bullet in the Head, did even better, getting to number 16 in May, and they'd round off the year with Bomb Track getting to number 37 in September. They went on to notch up three more top 40 hits over the rest of the decade, including

getting to number eight with Balls on Parade in April of 1996 and Split Up in 2000. A year later, in the wake of 9-11, Clear Channel Communications, the biggest radio station conglomerate in America, circulated a list of lyrically questionable songs that were not to be played on radio because they vaguely remind people of planes flying into buildings with all 43 recordings made by Rage Against the Machine on the blacklist. There's a fucking achievement. Would you care, chaps, to hear a selection of the other tunes on that list?

Yes, please. Okay, so, Another One Bites the Dust and Kill a Queen by Queen. Right. It's the End of the World as We know it by rem jump by van halen oh fucking hell i know great balls of fire by jerry lee lewis right break stuff by limp biscuit ruby tuesday by the rolling Yeah, 9-11 happened on a Tuesday you see What? I know

So I'm guessing Everything's Tuesday by Chairman of the Board was on that list as well Benny and the Jets, Rocketman and Daniel by Elton John Why Daniel? He's flying away isn't he? I suppose Fly Away by Lenny Kravitz Sorry Lenny Imagine by John Lennon.

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

Yeah, but why was the Vandellas one? But I just don't get it. Racism. 99 Red Balloons by Naina. Right. St Elmo's Fire by John Parr. What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong. The Night Chicago Died by Paper Lace.

And Bits and Pieces by the Dave Clark Five. Yeah. But then, in early December of 2008, the DJ John Mortar was so appalled at the Christmas number one race being ruined by the X Factor that he launched a social media campaign to run a designated spoiler unfortunately his choice of single that year never gonna give you up by rick astley only became that year's christmas number 73 but a year later possibly inspired by a news story about an

asda in preston getting into trouble by playing killing in the name the previous year he tried again and killing in the name enter the chart at number eight air the week before christmas after being invited to perform the song live on the radio five breakfast show on the condition that they cut the swearing out and then not doing what the BBC told them, leading to Nicky Campbell and Sheila Fogarty having to apologise. The single soared 79 places to number one. Whoa, that's the biggest soar you've ever done. Fucking hell.

Did you hear that live? No, I didn't know about it. It was so beautiful. I mean, what do they think's gonna happen well yeah bbc radio five live go up to him and say yeah you know that song where you say you won't do what we tell you uh can you do it but in this case can you do what we tell you there's a live clip of it on youtube and at the beginning he refrains from the fuck you, but he just builds up and then he just goes into it. And your fists, both your fists and your feet

go up in the air. He's like, yes! And I've got to say, man, that night when he got to number one, it did feel like a moment. Yeah, I think that was brilliant. It was a perfect deployment of American sincerity in the service of British absurdism.

Yes. I don't think it diminished it at all it was it was fantastic i think at the time i didn't i didn't like it because um i got the hatred of simon cowell and x factor and all of that sure but i just thought the way to beat bad pop is with good pop not to beat it with proper real rock music, you know, by real musicians. And I felt that's what was going on. I felt like, yeah, but I've kind of mellowed about it now.

And I'm glad that RATM, R-A-T-M, however you say it, do we say RATM? No, no one ever says that. I'm glad Rage Against the Machine have a number one to their name. Yeah.

It seems only right and righteous. They're always going to be there, man. That's, that's it now. Christmas number one to their name. Yeah, it seems only right and righteous. They're always going to be there, man. That's it now. Christmas number ones, which now mean less and less. You know, at a time when it still meant something, there they are forever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is brilliant.

And since then, the song has been used in 2012 at UKIP rallies. Fuck, man. And by a load of Trumpalumpas at a Republican Party rally in 2020. Both times, the band told them, quite rightly, to fuck off. Now you do what they told you He was live here last week Great new song from Brian Ferry New at 22, I Put A Spell On You

I put a spell On you Born in Washington, County Durham in 1945, Brian Ferry spent the late 60s studying fine art at Newcastle University and dabbling with local bands until he relocated to London in 1968 to teach art and pottery at Holland Park School. 1968 to teach art and pottery at Holland Park School. In 1970, he auditioned for the role of lead singer of King Crimson, and although he wasn't deemed a suitable replacement for Gordon Haskell, he so impressed Pete Sinfield that the band he went on to form, Roxy Music, was signed to Sinfield's EG record label. They put out their debut single, Virginia Plain, in August of 1972

and scampered up the charts to number four, kicking off a career that would spawn 10 top 10 singles and a number one with Jealous Guy in March of 1981. However, Ferry also began a solo career almost right from the off Starting in 1973 when he put out the covers LP These Foolish Things With the lead off cut, a cover of Dylan's A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall Getting to number 10 in October of that year And went on to put out 5 more solo LPs throughout the 70s After splitting up Roxy in 1983, he resumed his solo career, racking up his first and only number one LP with Boys and Girls in 1985, knocking out five

top 40 hits over the latter half of the decade. In 1987, he reunited with Brian Eno, however, and commenced work on his next LP. And by the time 1993 came round, it was still being worked on. However, he's taken the time to knock out Taxi, another almost all-covers LP which comes out next week. And this is the lead-off single from it. This is the lead-off single from it. It's a bash at the 1956 Screaming Jay Hawkins single, which the Alan Price set took to number nine for two weeks in April of 1966, but by this point was best known for Nina Simone's cover,

which got to number 28 in February of 1969. It came out last week, and he was immediately hustled over to Elstree for a live performance with an all-female band, loads of candles and fishing nets and that French dance where women get thrown about and this week it's entered the charts at number 22 so here's a clip of the video all 24 seconds of it. I mean they're obviously trying to lump in as many tunes as possible and they're clearly fretting about the attention span of the Sonic and Mario craze youth of today but I think you get more of a feel of the song

and the artist on an Al Price advert, don't you? I'm amazed it was as much as 24 seconds. I didn't time it but it felt more like five, you know. Yeah. I mean, five years ago, a slot in the breaker section, that's going to bag to you anything from 45 seconds to a minute and a bit of airtime. Right.

Which would be more than enough to make you either want to hear it in full or sit tight and see what's on next. But I feel this is doing no one any favours, really. Yeah, I'm surprised it was 24 seconds, but I think it's enough in this instance. So anyway, Brian Ferry in 1993. What's the point of him? I used to travel by Virgin Atlantic quite a lot in the 90s,

back and forth to Los Angeles or Las Vegas to interview bands for Melody Maker. And before takeoff, they would always show you this film, and it was clearly aimed at the passengers who turned left at the door instead of right uh which which i never did because i'm not brian fucking ferry you know and on that film there was a little promotional clip for necker island richard branson's private island resort in the british virgin, no relation. And of course, private island resorts have got a bad rep these days due to the Jeffrey Epstein and the King of England's younger brother

affair. But in those days, they were still seen as aspirational. And the soundtrack for that advert, obviously, was Roxy Music. The implication being that if you were one of the passengers who turned right at the door and you wondered how wealthy you'd need to be in order to visit Necker Island, the answer was more than this. So by the early 90s, right, Brian Ferry was just this byword, this living, walking byword for affluence and luxury. That was his public image. And I guess it had been since the NME started calling him Byron Ferrari almost two decades earlier. schtick to the absolute extreme um it's called mamuna and it's um yes currently being reissued in a deluxe format um as if brian ferry records could be anything other than deluxe and it's it's a overseen by friend of the show mark wood hello mark oh hey mark and the list of personnel alone is absurdly lavish right so it includes brian Eno, Richard Norris out of The Grid, Phil Manzanera out of Roxy Music,

Niall Rogers, Pino Palladino, Guy Pratt, the rock auteur, who's another friend of mine, hello Guy, Maceo Parker, Andy Mackay out of Roxy Music, Carleen Anderson,

and here's my favourite credit, Nan Kidwell, Astrologer. The album was originally going to be called Horoscope. They had an in-house astrologer for the fucking album. This album, Mamuna, completely passed me by at the time. But I thought I should give it a listen as a bit of background research just regarding where Ferry was at in this era. And it does that tightrope walk thing he does of staying mostly just the right side of boring while making sure that nothing much happens yeah a couple of times

it strays over the line okay um the title track mamuna involves him saying oh mamuna mamuna for five minutes while nothing much happens um there's there's another one called Gemini Moon that's the same. And to the untrained ear, it doesn't even seem to have a chord change. It's as if things like melodic churn are somehow vulgar. It all sounds very opulent. And the market value of your house rises by 5% when you play it. You know, they say you're meant to bake bread or make fresh coffee when you've got potential buyers coming around. Forget that. Stick on Mamuna by

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

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

Yeah, nice. Or Club. Fucking fucking hell how many biscuits sound like brian ferry solo lps not united though united wouldn't no no that wouldn't work you united maybe oh yeah you very yes very good he's united he's something isn't he he's not the sort who would turn down an honor let's say that we know that you know fucking hell so um him doing a covers album as you say not the first time and i guess he was just doing an album of old standards just to clear the lungs or clear out the pipes if you forgive that so he could sort of gear up for an actual album original material

because he hadn't done anything for five years the cast list uh on taxi is very similar to that of mamuna with the addition of uh Filinganes and Flacco Jimenez. Right. So some big names on there. But the thing with those 70s cover albums, so there's These Foolish Things, There's Another Time, Another Place, and Let's Stick Together,

there seemed to be something different in the meaning of them. It was a bit more, I suppose, like Bow bowie's pinups in that they are to be taken in the context of what the artist is doing around that time so he's almost taking those old you know great american songbook standards and recontextualizing them in roxy music's world there were these kind of implied inverted commas around them. For me, that makes it more exciting and more interesting than just a cynical deployment of familiar songs. So Roxy Music, to begin with, were all about artfully and gleefully deconstructing the very concept of glamour. You know, Baby Jane's in Acapulco, we are flying down to Rio and all that,

you know. But by the time of Mamuna, that glee in glamour, I think, has subsided to the blasé. He sounds jaded with the high life, like an older version of the protagonist from Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero. Yeah, now the party's over, he's so tired. Exactly. Oh, well done.

I wish I'd thought of that. There is something subtly attractive about that. He sounds as if he finds his own blessed boredom faintly erotic somehow. I do have, and I'm sorry to be that guy, but I have a problem with Brian Ferry being a fox hunter and being a Tory, right? Because him being a Tory is so on the nose and it just seems to diminish everything he was originally about. Oh, you enjoy posh stuff, do you? Oh, so that means you have to be a Tory. Whereas I always thought Roxy Music stood for glamour as a permanent state of the imagination and for the democratisation of fancy stuff. As long as you had the necessary imagination, you were allowed past the velvet rope. But no, it turns out he was just really literal about it.

You have to actually be wealthy to experience his world. Of course, the one good thing that came from that was that amazing photo of him during a plane hijack. Yes. Where he could not look more unruffled by what's going on. I haven't seen that picture for a while, but in my mind, he has some kind of pink cocktail glass in his in his hand if he doesn't then it's implied but doing this song i'm not sure that ferry's kind of blasé posh stick really serves the song very well i put a spell on you the the original by screaming jay hawkins from 1956. It's a berserk blues ballad in a drunken waltz time. And Hawkins does actually sound like some kind of deranged warlock or voodoo priest capable of putting a spell on you. I mean, Screaming Jay Hawkins eventually died of an aneurysm and he sounds

like he's halfway to causing that aneurysm on his recording of I Put a Spell on You. on his recording of I Put a Spell on You. Ferry being Ferry is more functional and precise. It's more I put a spell check on you. We only get a few seconds of it, as you say. So my main thought during those few seconds, despite having just spoken for about five minutes, is he could be Brett Anderson's dad.

Definitely, yeah. It is an achievement of sorts to take such a unique characterful song and siphon it into this sort of lounge slop i mean i actually do like this kind of opulent sound that he has it is very sort of luscious and noirish and and you know yeah brilliant but you could do that with anything like i don't know why you would pick this to do that to do in the nightclub style i put a bell on you i just what i i don't understand the kind of thought process behind it i mean yeah obviously the screaming jay hawkins original is just a mind-blowing thing to try to listen to and um you know it's been covered by lots of people but um i think the definitive version for a lot of people

is the Nina Simone version. Yes, exactly. And I mean, obviously he's not trying to follow that. He's going completely the opposite direction but it's so ragingly emotional. It is like the ultimate breakup song. And Nina Simone's version, as in most things she ever did, all things she ever did,

just sounds like she's wrenching the words from her innards in such a way that it might actually put a curse on on your lousy no good ass and freeze your cheating balls the next time you try to use and it's like the ring it's like you hear that song and then seven days later your knob falls off into the toilet i just kind of can't get with this really and 24 seconds was was enough for me because i it's like okay i see what you're doing i don't really know why but you do you brian the video is essentially an even more expensive reprise of the top of the pops performance that was on the previous week right it's a bit like a really expensive and opulent cabaret night at tony's trattatoria in heidi heid you know they've

got all the fishing nets hanging from the walls and they've got women dressed up as parisians and throwing each other about and all that kind of stuff and it's like yeah that was all right while we're watching this then what's the fucking point yeah haven't you made enough money brian yeah you've got to keep himself in smoking jackets and other smoking jackets i I don't know. I'm just trying to think, what does Brian Ferry spend his money on now that he's got, you know, the giant house and the priceless Abyssinian rugs? Smoking jackets, just the whole rooms of them, you know,

like MTV Cribs went round and people just lying on the floor crying, I can't take any more smoking jackets. I mean, he's at the point in 1993 where a lot more artists are now you know they've been around for long enough that all they've got to do now is just be there and anything they do will just get a little ripple of interest and it'll get them in the charts and it can just remind everyone that he's still alive and then he can fuck off back to his big collection of smoking jackets yeah so the following week i put a spell on you nipped up four places to number 18 but no further but the lp entered the album chart at number two in the first week of april

denied the top spot by songs of faith and devotion by depe. The follow-up, a cover of the Shirelles' Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, got to number 23 in June of this year, and he closed out 1993 with his cover of Elvis' The Girl of My Best Friend, only getting to number 57 in September. Because you're mine Because you're mine Because you're mine

Double A-sided new entry at number 12, Jesus Lizard and Nirvana, Puss and Oh The Guilt. Give love something to start the bleeding Formed in Aberdeen, Washington in 1987, Nirvana are fucking Nirvana. They've just finished recording their third LP in Utero and are currently arguing with their label and themselves over the quality of the mix. But before all that, they decided to donate a track and are currently arguing with their label and themselves over the quality of the mix.

But before all that, they decided to donate a track they recorded a year ago, Oh The Guilt, to the Chicago independent label Touch & Go Records, who handled many of the bands Kurt and the lads grew up on, and is, sort of, the follow-up to In Bloom, which got to number 28 in December of 1992. The label put the single out as a double A side, and the other side was offered to the Jesus Lizard, a band who were formed in Austin, Texas in 1987, and relocated to Chicago to link up with Touch and Go in 1989.

Despite agonising over it looking like they were riding on the bigger band's coattails, they decided that they wanted it on this double A-side business and donated a track from their third LP, Liar, which came out last year. Unsurprisingly, it smashed into the chart this week at number 12, but very surprisingly, Stanley Appel has opted to give the lesser-known band a shine. And here's a bit of the video. So, chaps, what is going on here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's quite a fun thing. Again, hats off to the editor of The Breakers here,

who had to dab the cold sweat from their brow once more and find a pre-Watershed snippet from this video, which is basically just gnarly industrial torture, I think we can say. And the lyrics as well, which are pretty horrifying. Apparently, David Yao says that it's about a horrible man that he knew in Chicago who threw a woman down the stairs. Oh, right.

So it's about that and also a little bit about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Oh, lovely. So, yeah, very unlovely, in fact. But yes, puss as in it refers to him being a coward as well as puss to mean mouth as in sourpuss. Right. Smack her in the puss. But like the chorus is entirely just sort of ways to say smack my bitch up. Oh, including including Plum in the Kisser, which is what's that from? But the chorus is entirely just sort of ways to say, smack my bitch up, basically.

Including Plum in the Kisser, which is... What's that from? What's Pow Right in the Kisser? I don't know. That old American sitcom that is now held up as the example of, like, you wouldn't do it like that anymore. It's quite confrontational, this song. And, yeah, so well done to them for managing to find again the clean bit

yeah the clean 20 seconds oh yeah jackie gleason the honeymooners yeah that's the one yeah you see i really enjoyed this because it's like it's in the middle of um it doesn't sound like anything else the closest thing obviously is to it's it's closer to rage than anything else but um i mean journalists at the time used to refer to um the jesus lizard and shellac who they really um you can really hear the resemblance but they were grouped together as pig fuck which is is obviously quite surrogate tree but it's it's as descriptive as anything it's sort of gritty is that robert krisskow's phrase i think it sounds it sounds like him i guess but this is sort of gritty grotty w shitty, clattery American noise rock of the time

which is now very well respected and held up as an influence on a lot of people. Jesus Lizard kind of made music to accompany your night terrors really and lyrics full of worms and amputations and fleshy gruesomeness but all underpinned by a certain intellect. You can see why Nirvana would be happy to stand alongside

them because it's very rough and taut and spiky and kind of mildly upsetting and a fun name which obviously sounds faintly blasphemous and flows a bit better than iguana nun or mediterranean house gecko god there actually is such a thing as a jesus lizard isn't there there is there's a type of basilisk that um can run on water and looks hilarious while doing it just to get out of you know to get out of danger and stuff and they go up on their hind legs go oh my god oh is that a crocodile turns out that Kurt Cobain always wanted Nirvana to sign to touch and go right and sent them

numerous copies of their first demo in 1988 but they kept knocking them back so presumably this is him either giving a leg up to his favorite label or ticking off something on his bucket list because you know he can do that nowadays and there's possibly a bit of here's what you could have won thrown in yeah and it's them showing that they're still in touch with the underground yes which was a sort of touchy subject for nirvana because they were always accused of being sellouts and they were very sensitive about that kind of talk. We've not spoken about Nirvana on Chart Music yet. And we're not. We're not really going to here,

but it's safe to say that this single is not being sold on the strength of the name of the Jesus list. No, it's like, you know, in the 2014 World Cup semi-final, one of the greatest football matches of all time, that you could euphemistically say that brazil and germany shared eight goals it's a bit like that isn't it and it also reminded me of in terms of coattails you know you've got robbie williams and his mate jonathan wilkes that he kept trying to foist on us do you remember that uh or paul gascoigne's mate jimmy five bellies or alex turner's mate miles kane you do get a lot

of this sort of thing i think the jesus lizard are of higher quality than those but it's just what the phenomenon reminded me of how much of a deal was the forthcoming release of a new tarot in the melody maker office simon oh huge yeah everybody wondering whether it was gonna be more slick than never mind of course once we knew we knew that Steve Albini was on board, not producing because he doesn't like to be called a producer. You have to say Steve Albini recorded it. But yeah, you knew that it was going to go the opposite way, if anything. So yeah, absolutely a huge deal when the album came out.

And of course, Everett True, our ASS true our ass ed assistant editor was very close with kurt and courtney so we had a bit of an in in that way and bands like the jesus lizard were covered a lot in the paper yes not just because they were mates with nirvana but because that there was genuinely quite a large sort of faction of people at the maker who were really really really into all that stuff that sarah was just talking about i i had some crossover with with that stuff it it didn't really tickle my fancy so much i did go and see the jesus lizard at the right garage at hybrid islington and uh and your man david yow yow you've got to say like that uh yow he was quite a dynamic performer very

physical very visceral he was sort of midway between Iggy Pop and Gigi Allen, that kind of thing, you know. Gigi Pop? Yeah, yeah. You thought he was going to hurt himself or hurt you, you know, on stage. I quite like the way that he doesn't look like a rock star. He just looks like an ordinary bloke. And you know that normally when people say that, you sort of think cast or the enemy or something or those sub oasis bands but i don't mean in that kind of quite knowing stylized way where people will dress like a football casual or something i mean that

he's genuinely not rock starry whatsoever um yeah the closest thing i can get is the guy from future islands you know he looks like he should be running an italian cafe in chicago rather than singing in a band i do quite like that the clip that we do see from the video it's it's great that that sarah's spelt out what the full video involves because it's just all we see is one man shouting while another man does some welding right and again it's the second time i mentioned flash dance but it made me think of All we see is one man shouting while another man does some welding, right? And again, it's the second time I mentioned flash dance, but it made me think of fucking flash dance.

Again, like most of the videos on this episode, it's a bit questionable. It did get banned on assorted channels, both here and in America, because, yes, it does feature the band doing a bit of welding, and by the end you realise that they're welding someone else into an office chair right so yeah you don't want kids to start doing that kind of shit I suppose it could only happen in the pre-internet age because these days if the BBC even showed a few seconds of it it would then mean that kids go running straight to YouTube or wherever they get their videos to see the full-length thing and that would be considered irresponsible to sort of even sort of give them that kind of click through or that that push through yeah but yeah it was it was fairly safe that the bbc could show this and that is literally all any british

people are going to see of it to be honest with you if i did go on mtv it would be the sort of thing that i'd see for about five seconds ago oh yo mtv raps isn't on then and flick over and go and look for some wrestling or see what tat's being sold on QVC. Or if I was really lucky, there'd be a 70s German sex comedy on. Because let's recall that the early 90s were a fucking golden age for tatterlight, if you will. Before Sky made everything digital and fucked it all up, man. I'm sorry that I haven't got to see them live, actually, because they've reformed a couple of times, but I don't think they're going to do it again.

Oh, right. They are the sort of thing that I would risk getting COVID for. I've been watching loads of live clips of them and just going, like, fucking hell, yeah, that's a compelling act. Really incredible rhythm section and just a guy screeching sort of gnomic phrases over. And once you can actually understand what they are, it's lyrics that would make Brett Anderson blush.

Like, beneath a broken branch, face down in the grass, no mason or bricklayer, he, a trowel was in his ass. That does something for me, I don't know why. But yeah, he's very big on audience interaction and kind of climbing into the audience and taking all his clothes off at the, not necessarily at the same time, but you know know who wants to be welded into a chair tonight then he seems like um yow david yow seems like a really intelligent interesting guy he's uh he's really

into photography and cookery and graphic design any interview of him with with him you just realize he has a very amusing turn of phrase and he released a book he's a big cat guy as well he released a book of cat illustrations and david meow exactly oh sorry i didn't trample on your joke there did i no that's fine i've got more don't worry he interviewed sadly departed celebrity cat lil bub for the av club which is a truly delightful four minutes where he asks lil bub things like have you ever been naked on stage and lil bub supposedly replies i'm always naked david what's lil bub famous for just um you know how they have celebrity animals these days all right she had all sorts of genetic malformations and was you

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

Meanwhile, Nirvana's next release, Heart-Shaped Box, got to number five in September of this year. Hats off, Stan Leopold. Yeah. Getting down with the kids. It's the world. Let's go. Let's go, go, go, go.

One step up at number 11, the brilliant new song from Madonna from the album Erotica, Bad Girl. Don't do any cigarettes today. I'm not happy when I act this way. We've done Madonna eight fucking times on chart music. And this, her 34th single, is the follow-up to Deeper and Deeper, which got to number six last December. It's the third cut from her fifth LP, Erotica, an album and an era where Madonna uncharacteristically did her sex, publishing a slab of coffee-tell pond-scrot at the same time,

which sold a million and a half copies in the first month at $50 a go. But 1993 has started badly for her, with her latest film, Body of Evidence, getting coated down across the world, and she's not enjoying the current film she's working on dangerous game meanwhile this single is a new entry at number 11 this week so here's a clip of the video which features her as an entrepreneur called louise oriole who cops off with loads of

blokes with christopher walker being roped in in one way or another, I don't know. So, yeah, it's been a while, hasn't it, since we've done Madonna? So to speak. And thus far in her career, Madonna's been a post-disco party girl, a vixtress, Marilyn Monroe, a pregnant teenager, some sort of flamenco dancer, Dick Tracy's girlfriend, Black Jesus's girlfriend, a bollock naked hitchhiker, and now she appears to be a dead body. What a great, I'm sorry, you can't read that and just go,

what a great CV. She's only 10 years into her career. There is a reason why Madonna has been on, like, every other episode of this podcast. It's because she put herself there. She put herself at the centre of pop culture and the pop charts and just stayed there for decades like no one else has done so you know i'm afraid that's what you get being alive at this time it's it's madonna's time and the gases will never converge in this way again in the universe so you

know you might as well you might as well enjoy it you might as well enjoy it i know we might as well call this the madonna and shaking stevens podcast and i've done with it mode yeah oh god imagine if them two had done a fucking single together imagine if madonna had done a rock in good way instead of bonnie tyler fucking hell yeah the universe had fucking collapsing on itself i had this album on cassette obviously and uh i loved it and i i like a lot of her ballads to be honest which is this is like the type c madonna song it's quite nothingy but it's moody it's got an evocative sound palette it's very nicely produced the video is quite a ravishing little mini movie directed by david fincher indeed um after mark romanek who's done everything else in this episode

he passed on it because he was busy doing something else and yeah it's Christopher Walken this is one of only two videos that Christopher Walken has ever done and the other one being Weapon of Choice by Fatboy Slim which is the best thing Fatboy Slim ever did but the video is so much better than the song

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

You know, that's who she is. This is what she does. It's successful. Good for her. There's a really good article in The Atlantic that I read recently by Sophie Gilbert called What Madonna Knows. And it explains better than I can

how Madonna's entire everything is essentially performance art. And Cindy Lauper clocked this after the MTV Music Awards where she sort of put on a wedding dress and showed her pants to the world and everyone was scandalised and Cindy Lauper went, I know what she's doing.

And that's what she's always done. She's very, very good at it. Yeah, and the video is directed by David Fincher who got his start as assistant cameraman on Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Then he did the usual route. He did a load of adverts. Then he got into promo videos, which are just longer adverts with a bit of music. He did We Don't Have To for Jemaine Stewart, Englishman in New York for Sting,

straight up for Paula Abdul. And then he linked up with Madonna to do Express Yourself and Vogue. He stepped back from videos over the past two years in order to direct his first film alien 3 but fell back into it for who is it by michael jackson and the video is essentially madonna as a sort of high-powered female executive of the early 90s that you usually see pouring blue water on a pad with a dry-weave top sheet. And she's going about her business of copping off with a sort of blokes in diners and bars, punctuated by shots of her washing her drawers in the sink

and licking cat food off her finger. And Christopher Walken just hangs about and watches on until, as they used to say, it was murder. It seems like a waste of walken yeah it's a waste of walken because he's not doing a funny dance no and nor is he telling a small child about having a wristwatch hidden up his arse you know and that's kind of what we want from him yeah he looks great though can i just point out he looks amazing he's just smouldering away in a big black coat. He's apparently supposed to be a guardian angel,

which is, he's not a very good guardian angel. You know, he's not doing his job very well. Yeah, I know. A shit one, yeah. Well, I assume that he was a guardian angel as well, but, you know, because he hangs about on ledgers and whatnot, reading the paper about a murderer and all this kind of stuff. But right at the end end just before her last

cop-off and comes back from washing his dick in the sink or whatever he's up to christopher walker appears and kisses madonna and you think oh hang on a minute you're actually the grim reaper aren't you because right at the end we see both of them up in a crane watching the coppers taking the body away and madonna doesn't seem to be that arse about being murdered she's accepted it she's going to heaven with christopher walton yeah fair dues come on wouldn't any of us be all right with being grim reaped by christopher did you pause and zoom in on the newspaper uh that he reads it's the the new york post tell me more simon well i i did it's tantalizing because i couldn't get all of it i think the main

headline is bloody carnage or something like that it's bloody something um but in the in the sort of subheading it says cape teen chops hands off dad and then something something parakeet maybe feeds to parakeet oh brilliant yeah would parakeets want to eat people's hands though probably don't they tend to like nuts or something or a cracker if it's in a cage it's got to eat what it's given and if it if that's you know cape dad's hand and so be it yeah i know it's sort of nominally set in the present tense but i thought the way that she styled is actually yes quite kind of 1940s film noir and it's not the first time she's done that, which is sort of stepping back from the sort of sexy Madonna thing. Well, it's a different type of sexy, but it's, yeah.

She looks a bit kind of like something out of a Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane novel. She looks like she ought to be called a broad or a dame, you know, in this. I thought. The song, though, you know, like many of Madonna's 90s hits I've honestly never heard this before in my life I know I feel a bit gaslit by the claim that it even exists and and I had a look because when we've talked about Madonna's 90s hits before like you said Simon it's a proper pointless question isn't it oh yeah very much yeah yeah it is and and leaving aside cover versions like

don't cry for me argentina if we look at her actual own sort of hit singles from the one prior to this which is deeper and deeper um which i couldn't sing with a gun to my head um right through to frozen in 1998 which i vaguely. And then Ray of Light comes after that. And then I could, yeah, I know that, obviously. But there are five years of consistent hits, particularly in the UK, you know, some of them top 10. No, no idea. It's really weird, really odd.

Yeah, you were just, you know, into other stuff. It's like, you know, I think much as Madonna is omnipresent, it is also possible if you try really hard to ignore her so well i'll be honest i can't stand madonna i really fucking can't stand my daughter so yeah if i could ignore her i would so that kind of goes some way to explaining it so the following week bad girl nudged up one place to number 10, its highest position. However, in America, it only got to number 36 on the Billboard chart, the first Madonna single not to make the American top 20 since Holiday in 1983.

Fucking hell, what a run. The follow-up, a cover of Fever, entered the chart at number six in April, but got no higher, and she had one last squeeze of the erotica tea bag when rain got to number seven for two weeks in july she then spent the rest of 1993 ripping up a photo of joey buttafuoco who was famous in america at the time because his wife shot his 17 year old lover in the face while having a bum sex related surname on saturday night live in a piss take of shenaid o'connor and then rubbing the flag of puerto rico against her

fan air at a concert oh no oh no the thing with madonna is yeah i can't stand her but i feel weirdly protective towards her at the moment because she's getting so much shit at the moment for being an older woman who has a had cosmetic surgery and b is still you know prancing about on stage and being sexy yeah and all the criticism i see her getting i think fuck off you know i've you know i almost find myself becoming a fucking madonna fan just to spite them you know what i mean well you don't have to do that but it is like in some ways like this is what madonna has always done is she's a genuine provocateur and she's always sought to push people's buttons and in some ways this is i'm sure it's hard for her she's a human being but also she is well versed in pissing people off

and responding to the atmosphere that but she pisses everyone off it's like there are young people on tiktok going oh nana's got out again and like people have been doing that since she was 30 so like she's been well prepared for ageism i'm sure yet like i said i'm sure it's incredibly difficult but yeah you do feel protective of it because she is daring to still be madonna in the way that she always has and putting herself into the public consciousness. And I don't think it is that it's just she's desperate and she wants to cling to her youth or anything like that because that's not her deal.

I think it's, in some ways, it's an opportunity for her. It's an opportunity to provoke people. All you have to do as an older woman is exist and be in public and people are going to have fucking opinions about it so and she's always loved to it's like yeah give me all your opinions motherfuckers so i think she's okay and it is inspiring to be honest as you know someone she has been massive for about as long as i've been alive or as long as i've been listening to pop music and i have no intention of um kind of cavorting around in the madonna fashion as i

as i age but um well there goes the next chart music live well i could be i could be persuaded you know but it is bracing and bolstering to see her as she is doing what she does now i'm about a year younger than she was when she did hung up right oh yeah you know in her pink leotard and uh looking as that atlantic article says as sinewy as a gazelle right looking incredible and just the sheer force of will and defiance that it has taken for madonna to create herself and sustain herself it's just i don't know something to look to as a woman and i don't think she did it for anyone but herself. It's just, I don't know, it's something to look to as a woman. And I don't think she did it for anyone but herself.

But she's not just a complete need monster. It's not just, you know, she kind of, she works in mysterious ways. You know, I'm glad of it. I'm glad that she's still around and doing what she does. But robbing the flag of Puerto Rico against your fanny. That's not on. You know, it's hard to believe I introduced Diana Ross live on this programme almost 18 months ago

and I'm extremely proud to do it again with the new song Heart Don't Change My Mind. You know, it's hard to believe I introduced Diana Ross live on this programme 18 months ago, says Franklin Cool story, bro Yeah

That's your fucking job, mate. It's like your fucking bin man saying, oh, it's hard to believe I pushed this garden waste wheel a bit of Fortnite ago and here I am again. Oh, poor little Mark. No, but he's, to be fair to him, 18 months ago, he was 12. Yeah. This is like a formative memory for him.

He then goes on about how proud he is to introduce her again it's diana ross with heart don't change my mind we've covered diana ross a time or two in chart music most recently in chart music number 18 when she took love hangover to number 10 in may of 1976 since then she left motown went all post disco with now rogers tried to shove mary wilson off the stage at the motown 25th anniversary tv special sonically copped off with lionel rich air sweated for a bit in the gym linked up with the bgs for her first number one in 15 years faded out in the the late 80s, then rejoined Motown, got on the Whitney train and roared back to number two on two non-consecutive weeks with When You Tell Me That You Love Me in December of 1991. This single, the follow-up to

If We Hold On Together, which got to number 11 in January, is the eighth cut from her LP, The Force Behind the Power, which came out 18 months ago. It's not in the charts yet, but no way is Stan Leopold turning down the opportunity to have the boss in his studio. And here she is. Let's get Diana out the way first, because she's the least interesting thing about this performance extremely shared up i believe wearing a tight spandex all-in-one

adorned with a big chunky gold belt and topped with a leather jacket that's miles better than any of run rigs i think the overall effect she's gone for here is Rose out of keeping up appearances, attending the local biker bash and pig roast. She's got black gloves on as well, though. It's like a cross between Alvin Stardust and Mark Almond or something. Little gloves with pearl trim, as it turns out. I had a jacket like that with its own belt. It was brilliant. I did not, though, have a sort of bustier top with net decolletage.

It's a sexy get-up, isn't it? And what would now be known as treggings, I guess. Treggings? Trouser leggings. Yeah, they're kind of wet look, aren't they? Which is very prevalent now, but you didn't see so much in those days. She was ahead of the curve. I watched it again last night, and it's like, hang on a minute, is she miming? Oh, God. That's against the rules would

stanley allow this i think he'd make an exception for diana yeah i mean just the whole setup is very unreal isn't it that she's in this kind of fake almost sesame street style cityscape where yes you've got a walk don't walk sign you've got a working walk don't walk sign it's a pretend new york street corner isn't it it's very it's quite elaborate yeah You've got a lamppost. Yeah, a working walk, don't walk sign. It's a pretend New York street corner, isn't it? It's quite elaborate. Yeah, you've got one of those blue bin things for getting a newspaper out of that they have in America. You know those ones.

Are you sure it's that? I thought it was an American post box. Oh, is it a post box? I thought it was a post box. Oh, maybe. And there's a fire hydrant, definitely, you know. There's a manhole cover with all dry ice coming out of it. Oh, yeah, that's what you want.

What it made me think of was, and I'm sure this was not a deliberate reference on diana's part but do you guys know the book rock dreams yes guy yeah yeah it's it's gui pellet or probably yes um sorry sorry yeah yeah he's dead now you can say what you want um so for those who don't know he was the um artist who usually used airbrush who was responsible for for example the sleeve of diamond dogs by david bowie so i'm sure everyone can sort of visualize his style from that and this book uh rock dreams it's it's just a magical thing it's from about 73 i guess that kind of era. And it involved the journalist Nick Cone writing little kind of paragraphs about rock legends, rock icons, and these kind of imagined scenarios that Pellet

has painted of them. So, for example, you've got the Rolling Stones several times, you know, on one occasion they're dressed up as Nazis, time, they're sort of fetish transvestites and stuff like that. You've got Bob Dylan in the back of a limo looking troubled and all this kind of business. You've got Sam Cooke's dead body on the motel room floor. Diana Ross appears in it twice. The first time, it's the Supremes. And what we see is an actual streetscape, which reminded me a little bit of this. It's got, you know, a sort of 1950s looking car or 60s, I suppose it would have to be,

with a massive poster of the Supremes on the wall of what looks like a very down at heel neighbourhood. And it's really sort of flagging up the idea that the Supremes came from a kind of down at hill Detroit neighbourhood. And they are now very much living the glitzy high life. And then a few pages later, we see Diana, and she's solo, and she's sat in the back of a limo with loads of jewellery on and a fur stole wrapped around her neck, looking really traumatised and frightened as she looks through the window

and sees a bunch of presumably homeless guys stood outside on a on a litter blown street and the text from cone says no cause for alarm even now after all these years great ladies of the music scene came back and cruised the streets and gazed into tenements and floated off down alleys just to check nothing had changed. Dot, dot, dot. And it's just a really wonderful evocative picture of this incredibly successful and wealthy woman just looking with kind of horror at what her life used to be. Maybe it's a stretch, but when I saw the sort of fake rough streetscape on this performance,

I thought of rock dreams. The thing with Diana is, and we've done the mortality maths with Madonna already, Diana is 48 here, which is, you know, considerably younger than I am now. I just remember at the time, and I'm sure this isn't false memory, thinking, oh, who's this old granny on top of the prom, what's she doing there? Which, you know, obviously those opinions come back to haunt you. I don't know that I said so in print, but that is certainly what would have been going through my mind. So I thought I'd have a look to see who is 48 now. Just for comparison.

And I know we're in a different world where you're allowed to stay young for longer, but okay, so here we go. Melanie Blatt and Shazne Lewis of all saints are both 48. Will.i.am and Fergie out of Black Eyed Peas. Lauren Hill, Scary Spice, CeeLo Green, Enrique Iglesias,

Natalie Imbruglia, Katie Tunstall, Jack White, Marion Cotillard, Lisa Scott Lee, Sia, Ant McPartlin, Ronny O'Sullivan, Big Boy, 50 Cent, Gary Neville, Juninho, David Beckham and Robbie Fowler. So those are all 48-year-olds now, which, okay, they're people of a certain age, but you don't think if one of them turned up on the top of the pops, well, if Ronnie O'Sullivan did, you'd be surprised.

But do you know what I mean? That age doesn't seem as completely over the hill as it did then. No, and it's partly because of people like Diana Ross as well as Madonna and Tina Turner, who absolutely bossed that. Yeah. This is the designated heritage act, which starts to pop up on a regular basis

on top of the pops round about this time, doesn't it? You know, last week it was Brian Ferrer, next week it will be Cliff Richard. Essentially, you know, new singles by older artists that aren't in the charts yet, but are looking for something to be on now that wogan's finished yeah exactly something for the oldens if you will i feel like this is quite uh similarly to

brian ferry yeah for a lot of artists who were kind of transitioning from the 80s into the 90s they're just kind of coasted yeah there's no need to try and be on the cutting edge anymore no which you know which is fine but also christ i kind of suffered through this a bit this is very very 1988 as well. Yes. Like, who gives a shit? No one cares. Someone's going to buy it and keep her in diamonds, you know, and she's earned it, you know, fair enough.

But nobody needs this in their life, do they? But anyway, Sarah, saxophone solo. Saxophone solo. Fuck me. Yeah, in our chart music wiki pop cra Crazy Jokes, there is an entire section entitled Sarah B's Search for the Last Great Sax Solo. Thanks to a request you made in chart music's Passive. And currently it only goes as far as The Best

by Tina Turner in September of 1989. So I believe we have a new winner. I don't know. I might endorse that as a fact, but I'm not happy about it. Of course, the thing to say here is, of course, unless you know better. Unless you know better. Got a white bloke with his sleeves rolled up. Very Cronenberg advert, isn't it?

Oh, God, it's so funny. The way that this is edited is, you know, there's this kind of really grindy ballad going on and um you know it just it sounds like the big serious ballad in the middle of a regional theater production of puss in boots you know where puss has lost his boots and she's there smiling away in a slightly incongruous fashion and and then suddenly there's a sax man the way that it's just oh yeah where did you come from you stealthy saxman he just suddenly appears it's very much like um the the saturday night live short the curse from uh about 12 years ago um i don't know if you've seen this it features john ham who's best known from mad men

but is also a brilliant comic actor as this oiled up saxman very much uh he's he's obviously uh like tim capello who was tina turner's sax man through the 80s and 90s and also uh most notably the oiled up sax man from the lost boys right he's the one true original oiled up sax man anyway um basically uh andy sandberg is going about his business and wherever he goes john ham will suddenly explode through a wall oiled up with a saxophone and looks at the camera and goes, Sergio! Everywhere he goes and he goes to his therapist, he's like, oh my god, I don't know what's, I think I'm going mad. Everywhere I go, this oiled up sexy sax man just bursts through the wall. And it's like,

are you sure? And then of course, he bursts through the wall kind of on top of the therapist, just gets worse and worse and worse until his wife actually gives birth to the full-sized, oiled-up, sexy saxophone Sergio. It's very disturbing. Anyway, that's inevitably now what happens when I see Diana Ross get interrupted in, you know, what she was doing by a sexy saxophone. She gets very excited by his arrival, doesn't she? Gets her jacket off.

She gets her jacket off, throws it to the ground and starts spinning around and stuff. Which is really good stagecraft, but also, yeah, it doesn't really seem warranted, throws it to the ground and starts spinning around and stuff. Which is really good stagecraft. But also, yeah, it doesn't really seem warranted, does it? He is a sexy sax man in a leather waistcoat. And I was kind of sceptical. And, you know, I don't know if I'm a spoilsport for this, but I just thought, is he really a sax man? Because he's just too buff.

And I looked into it. And on the record, on the album, album force behind the power the saxophonist is john helliwell of super tramp okay and i google image searched john helliwell of super tramp oiled up and muscular and super tramp they don't go together do they john helliwell looks with the best will in the world like a geography supply teacher um or you know basically a member of super tramp yes right so this guy the sexy sax man on top of the pops i'm watching his fingers and i'm skeptical about him even being a saxophonist he looks more like a hunk from central casting whose next job is probably

you know the diet coke ad where a load of office women look at him taking his top off on a construction site yeah i think that's what it is that's what's going on here or on a scooter in a gino ginelli advert yes exactly yeah i think tim capello actually kind of set the standard for the sexy sax man at this time you know people were just like that's what you need you know you can't just have some schlub playing the saxophone it's such a raucously bawdy instrument, you know, you've got to get out the banana boat and get slippery. Just something else about Diana Ross here, obviously, consummate performer and, you know, radiantly beautiful. But one of the things I'm really sorry to say is one of the things I didn't enjoy about this performance, I enjoyed how

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

well i have the utmost respect for diana ross but i don't want to feel like I'm supposed to curtsy at this point. Do you know what I mean? Is that a terrible thing to say? I really do respect her extremely. And she's made some of the greatest records ever. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it's remarkable. You know, someone who sings on some of my favourite records of the 60s,

you know, The Happening, the 70s, Ain't No Mountain High Enough or Love Hangover. The 80s, Upside Down. But her appearance on this show just makes me go, ugh, when she turns up, you know. I suppose it's largely just the song. It is a nothing song, Heart Don't Change My Mind, written by Robbie Buchanan and Diane Warren.

Diane Warren, of course, just wrote fucking everything, you know. Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now by Starship, Unbreak My Heart, Tony Braxton, Don't Wanna Miss A Thing by Aerosmith. You know, just those enormous songs. But it's just a really bog standard song about trying to summon up the resolve to leave someone. It makes no sense to stay, living my life in yesterday.

I'm leaving, I'm leaving, and leaving and i'm begging you heart don't change my mind oh heart be strong this time blah blah blah originally recorded by streisand in 84 and right of course streisand was the absolute queen of grown-up divorce pop in that era and yeah this this is that it's it's grown-up divorce pop and i guess there's a demographic who want that with their top of the pops not me not then and not now and yeah i just thought bore off diana ross and i felt weird for thinking that because yeah she's done so much great stuff yeah also just the production of this track is so kind of sloppy and she does have this slight edge to a voice like a slightly reedy kind of edge. And it just cuts through too harshly.

It's like a massive cleaver through a cheesecake. And there's like nothing underneath, so it doesn't display her ability to its best. It's like, this is not the best use. There's no biscuit base. There's no buttery biscuit base. It's kind of soggy, soggy cheesecake, you know. Do you know it's not even on her Wikipedia discography?

If you go on there, this single is not there. Yeah, it's been written out of history, and maybe for the best. So the following week, Heart Don't Change My Mind entered the chart at number 31, and then dropped four places to number 35. Oh, heart, it's hot for you, I know. Let me let it go The UK's favourite ten, down a ten, E17 and deep

Down one at number nine, Depeche Mode, I Feel You This week at number eight, Falling Six, Take That, Why Can't I Wake Up With You And at number seven, the highest new entry, Suede, Animal Nitrate At number six, down two, Whitney Houston, I'm Every Woman. And at number five, the brilliant O'Carolina from Shaggy. At number four, Lenny Kravitz, you saw him earlier, Are You Gonna Go My Way? And at number three, Annie Lennox, double A-side, Little Bird and Love Song for a Vampire. At two, Michael Jackson, Give In to Me.

Which means still at number one, two unlimited, Give In To Me, which means Stella's number one. Two unlimited, this is no limit. Let me say yes! Franklin, still off camera, pitches straight into the top ten with absolutely fuck-all fanfare. And right at the other end comes this week's number one, No Limit by 2 Unlimited. Formed in Antwerp, Belgium by Jean-Paul Da Costa and Phil Wilde in 1989, by Jean-Paul da Costa and Phil Wilde in 1989, Biz Niz were a dance production duo who landed a UK hit when Don't Miss the Party Line

got to number seven for two weeks in April of 1990. In May of 1991, they worked up an instrumental dance track called Get Ready for This, which rocked the club scene of Peepoo Land, but got no further. So, deciding they needed some rap on it, they called upon someone they'd already worked with on a business demo, the Amsterdam rapper Ray Schlingard,

who was dividing his time between getting the party started and working as a chef at Shiphole Airport. They lobbed him a demo tape and told him to get on with it. When he returned his version, they were surprised that, along with some rap, there was also some bird. Anita Doth, who was working as a secretary in an Amsterdam police station, possibly for Van der Volk. Da Costa and Wilde were so delighted at what they heard,

they decided to put them together and, lo, two Unlimited were born. Their debut single, Get Ready For This, was a continent-wide smash, spending two non-consecutive weeks at number two over here in October and November of 1991. They followed that up with another number two hit, Twilight Zone, in January of 1992 and a number four with Workaholic in May of 92. This single the follow-up to Magic Friend which got to number 11

in August of 1992 is the lead cut from their second LP No Limits which is due out in May. It was put out in the last week of January and immediately smashed into the chart as the highest new entry at number four, then nipped up the following week to number two, and a week later finally obliterated the ten-week reich of I Will Always Love You by Whitney fucking Houston.

Yes! Go on, Too Unlimited. This is its fourth week atop the summit of there aren't any mountains in Belgium or Holland. And since they've already appeared in the top of the pop studio three times already to

do this song, it's finally time to get the video out. And panel, if we've done one thing on our chart music odyssey, it's giving thanks and praise and final rightful respect to the belgians don't you think two man sound belgian world in action making moldy old dough a hit jacques brell doing terry jacks a favor and now this and we haven't even got to technotronic or plastic bertrandsets come on Belgium yeah um I was fully behind this

uh even though it doesn't seem like the kind of thing I would have been into at the time and it caused all kinds of trouble basically um you know this this sort of music was really becoming dominant in the charts at this time and I kind of loved it or I loved a good old chunk of it i think some of the greatest records of the 90s are uh dreamer by living joy oh yeah you sure do by uh strike or baby d let me be your fantasy and stuff like that you know uh and uh there's one in my head and anyway never mind can't you remember granddad it's got a sort of piano we break down oh that narrows it down a bit

no but this bit where it all stops for ages and it's all just like rain falling and this diva really going for it and right uh it's not not naked in the rain uh no oh set you free uh oh set you free yeah it's atlantic yeah oh okay she's she's uh in the video she's uh i don't know why i know this from the chart show probably she's sticking out of the isn't it entrant oh is it i thought it was entrance yes entrance no you're right and set you free by entrance there you go so i've been in a fucking care home listening to your tune. I'll expect David Van Day

to pitch up any minute now. Yeah, all of that. It's all very sort of very kind of feather light new disco post-rave kind of twinkly. Yeah, I love to hear those whenever they pop up.

It always gives me a tingle. I thought it was the glam rock of its day. I thought it was like, you know, these simple terrace chants yes that you know they weren't for music snobs but they were really straight and to the point yeah very stompy yeah very stompy indeed but dainty with it i think yes so i lobbied to do a special edition of melody maker just about that and melody maker of course was a indie rock magazine mainly but I just thought we're a weekly paper and we're a music paper and we have a certain duty to cover cultural phenomena and I thought Euro disco or Euro pop Euro dance whatever you want to call it was a

really important 90s cultural phenomenon so I kind of took control for one issue and I interviewed Two Unlimited. I also interviewed Culture Beat. Mr. Vain, that's a fucking banger. Come on. Yeah. And yeah, Culture Beat. I remember Culture Beat being really bemused when I started asking them any details at all about the music or the lyrics. Because, you know, they're like, well, we don't fucking know. God, that's become a regular joke in our house

where if anybody wants something, it's, I know what I want and I want it now. I want food because I'm Mr. Food. You can do it with anything and it's so dumb and annoying. It's brilliant. God, how was lockdown in your house? Oh, my God. It was brilliant.

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

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

Yeah, yeah, maybe it was that. There were other people... Oh, didn't they get in the tub? If they're E17 and you're doing that, man, the first thing you do is get in the tub or floor and just start rubbing it into your chest. Being all homoerotic and suggestive. Did a sexy sax man at some point burst out of it?

Having gone in dry? See, this is why they needed you kind of stage managing it. But there were all these sort of like sort of second division celebs like Chris Quinton from Coronation Street and Daniela Westbrook from EastEnders, who was soon to get married to one of these 17, I think at that time. David Kidd jensen was there oh my god yeah yeah blessing page three girl suzanne mitzi remember her and she was in a pop trio at that time called rumor has it it was really the strangest event i ever covered but two unlimited are there and you know it's all just in a day's work for them and that they're they're total pros you know they take it in their stride tom sheehan the legendary photographer who's just done all the sort of proper rock stars

and everything just comes along with me and he's taking photos of ray and anita and you know she's sort of snarling and clawing at the air and and he's throwing some mean sinister shapes and all of that and yeah fucking hell i found them quite interesting to talk to you because all right they can't compete with david yow for lyrical depth but they were interesting people that just their experience of what the fuck it's like being into unlimited at that time was something that i wanted to find out about we talked about stuff like the the drugs laws in amsterdam because that's where they're from you know and and all that kind of business and i thought it was really worth doing were you massively complimentary to them simon i think i had just the right amount of distance but i i sort of i i fed them questions which allowed

them to come out of it in in a good light they should have called the article flora and fauna oh right there we go see what i did there. Yeah, yeah. Wasn't it shit? I think that's more of a subheading than a type of workshop. Yeah, I can't sugarcoat it. I did have a massive crush on Anita. So, you know, I wasn't going to be too mean. But I put it to them that, you know, there was this nickname they had, Too Untalented, that people hilariously used to say.

And that there was this perception they're brainless puppets and uh i found the interview and anita says of course i'm not going to say of course she says of course because it cannot be true that uh two people have so much success something must be wrong either we don't sing or we've got masks on or whatever in fact the producers write the music we write the lyrics it's 50 50 now you might think i've let them hang themselves i've given them enough rope there say that they write the lyrics like come on techno techno techno techno but yeah they basically faced snobbery from rockist types and from dance purists they were getting it from both sides really shot by both sides i thought um no limit even though it's played to fucking death it's an absolute banger you can't argue with it it's it's just this kind of force of nature and i i thought

um let the beat control your body was even better that was just a fantastic track and i i wondered what the great simon reynolds would have thought this. So I went up into the attic earlier on today and fetched down his book Energy Flash, which is, you know, a history of dance music. And Simon in that book does make a case for kind of hooligan techno almost, just like really, really simple techno tracks with like a grinding riff that goes over and over and over and just grinds you into submission. And I thought that part of him might approve of Two Unlimited, but no, they're barely a footnote in that book. So, yeah, yeah. But one of the upshots of me interviewing them, first of all, there was a massive backlash

on the capital B backlash pages of Melody Maker. Almost a whole week's worth of letters just slagging me off and slagging off the paper for for doing all that stuff yeah it was safe to say that that issue of Melody Maker didn't join the stack of all the other Melody Makers in the student bedsits of 1993 exactly yeah yeah and within the paper our dance music experts uh Ben Turner and Push really nice guys and they basically ran the dance section at the back of the paper they were really pissed off that the words well the word four times techno

techno techno techno had been put on the front of melody maker emblazoned across a photo of two unlimited because to them the word techno was something precious and you know important and intelligent and progressive and they thought that Two Unlimited were not worthy of that word so from then on in the pages of Melty Maker Ben and Push changed the spelling of techno their type of techno to T-E-K-N-O because they didn't want anything to do with it I thought that was really funny but bless them for that this track uh I think there's a little joke in there that's been lying dormant for years that no one's noticed there's a bit where ray goes let me hear say yeah and you hear a crowd going no yes i swear they're going no really yeah they're not going, yeah. Yeah, they go, no. No, it's just a very, it's quite a distant sort of hiss of like, yeah.

Yeah. I think they're just saying yeah in Dutch. I've gone on about too unlimited too long. It's got to be your turn now, Sarah. No such thing, Simon. No such thing. I mean, I said earlier in this episode that I was hoovering up the local pirate stations at the time. But the minute they started playing proper techno,

fucking radio's coming right off. I had no time for that bollocks. But this sort of thing, when it came out, it amused me because it was, yeah, it was clearly glambonium. Yeah.

And it pissed off no end of people. The minute I heard it, I thought, well, well, this is going to be number one. Yeah. No fucking problem. Yeah. I mean mean if i was 12 or something i'd have a right old stomp around

the bedroom to this it does kind of sound like kids music superficially but yeah it's you can't really write it off as a simplistic record for babies you know because it is more deceptively interesting i mean at the time i have to admit that I found it annoying and stupid, but I have come to appreciate it. And I'm now very fond of it. I can't imagine any circumstances under which I'd actually put it on. But that's, you know, that's not the point. I was glad to see it here at number one. Musically, it is. Yeah, it's not really techno, but it doesn't matter. There's kind of an interesting thing happening because it is very. matter there's kind of an interesting thing happening because it is very yeah but there's there's interesting stuff going on in the first 32 bars there's different synth patches playing the same hook so it's actually more varied than than it feels it's like thing comes in then does the same thing in a different way that goes away different thing happens again it's like they're swapping in and out different color filters which is quite unusual yeah um and there's also this um in the chorus there's the kind of classic house drone in the background which uh sounds quite like open

your mind by yuzura which is a track that gets played quite a lot in this house in various circumstances and there's a sort of phantom bass line like it doesn't really have a bass line but you can sort of you know you put one in yourself it sort of reads as a hymn to hedonism because of the musical context because it's a dance track and because of the delivery because of like how powerful it is and how she's got this very soulful voice which is being deployed to the same sort of effect that other people were doing at the time yeah basically it's a song about achieving your true potential and powering through to greatness and it had to get to number one to prove it was true so it is and i love it when this happens it is a demonstration of the theory it advances oh yes or of course to anita

who has survived cancer more than once um she now considers it it's it's something that she loves because she feels it's about overcoming adversity she said you know it's such an explosion of positivity and we are limitless beings they do what they want and they do it with pride yeah al that was the last line of my article as well it had to be didn't it of course they do what they want and they do it with pride and what they want in this video is to uh be in a massive pinball table yes which looks mint yeah it's fucking brilliant proper old school pinball table as well yes i think there is actually technically a limit to pinball or that they will throw you out pinball man i fucking loved it because i i worked in a student union as i mentioned earlier yeah and uh on the second

floor of the building we had a robocop pinball machine and we had monday night football and the first thing i'd do in the morning i would go the cafe, get a hummus and sweet corn bap and forget about my office. I would just sit at those machines for about two hours. And if anybody needed me, they knew where they'd find me. And yeah, I can still hear in my head, like I'd buy that for a dollar and that kind of stuff. There's the voice going over and over.

But if there was a two unlimited actual pinball machine, fuck me. Oh, fucking hell, yes. Just like playing voice going over and over. But if there was a two unlimited actual pinball machine, fuck me. Oh, fucking hell, yes. Just like playing their songs over and over. Da-na-na-na-na-na. Da-na-na-na-na. Yeah. And when the ball goes down, it goes,

ta-da, ta-da, ta-da, ta-da. Yeah. No. Yeah, yeah. If you fuck up, it goes, no. Fucking hell, I miss pinball. I hate those new pinball tables you see in pubs that have made as small as possible. No!

That's no fucking good. I'm depressed now. But cheer up, Al, because Two Unlimited were so lovely in this. They're so pretty and they're being hard, but they're so adorable. And they're called Ray and Anita as well, man. Yeah.

Which sounds like they should be on Opportunity Knocks in 1972. Or Bullseye. Or the neighbours on the other side of George and Mildred. Yeah, they should be like my dad's friends. Like, I say to my dad, oh, what did you do last week? Oh, yeah, we just went to have dinner with Ray and Anita, you know. Yes, exactly. Yeah, saw the holidays.

Yeah, yeah. The vintage Gibraltar, you know. There's some very good hand movements in this video oh yeah absolute bare cheek of invoking uh no valley too deep no mountain too high in the lyrics that's that's next level but yeah so um same episode as diana yeah yeah yeah yeah um but yeah when just to emphasize this no valley too deep she points down and then no mountain too high points up you see and he does at some point, Ray, who is dressed in a very fetching combination of baggy PVC,

which has now come back, actually. Right. Yeah, yeah. You're allowed to have baggy PVC once again. And he does a very good reprimanding finger wag to camera to indicate there are no limits. No, no, no. No, no, no, no.

No, no, no. He's got no top on under his leather coat, but he can get away with it, you know, so fair play. They're both very saucy, aren't they? But overall, there is something very sort of clean and innocent about it. Yeah, it's wholesome. It's quite wholesome. It's not actually very drugs. I think, you know, they're probably being Dutch and being from Amsterdam. They can choose to or not, and it's probably not such a big deal.

It's like people who live in Blackpool never had a stick of water in their life. It's definitely more scentier than salvia, I think. Anything else to say? My interview was certainly kinder to them than the Chris Morris interview. Oh, yes. Have you heard that? Oh, no. Oh, my God. Right. So basically, if you haven't heard it,

I think Chris Morris was on Radio 1 at that time. I think that must be how he had access to them. So they go in completely innocently, you know. They go in wholeheartedly thinking, oh, well, you know, this guy Chris Morris wants to interview us. Our English friends want to talk to us. Yeah, yeah. So they go in and he pretends that he thinks

that There's No Limit, We Reach for the Sky is a tribute to Britain's World War II flying ace, Douglas Bader, whose biography and biopic was called Reach for the Sky. And he starts thanking them and congratulating them for that. And they are completely baffled. They don't know what he's talking about. And then he gets really offended, saying, That's so disrespectful.

How can you not know who Douglas Bader is? I think you should apologise right now and dedicate it to him and they're really flustered and they go there's no limit we reach for the sky that one's for you doug so no limit would spend a fifth and final week at number one before being usurped by oh carolina by shaggy and would keep why can't i wake up with you by take that and give in to me by michael jackson off number one the follow-up tribal dance would spend two weeks at number four in may and they'd go on to have eight more top 40 hits three of which made the top 10 but when their five-year contract came up for renewal in 1996, Schlingard and Dothard had enough and walked away. So DeCoste and Wilde just recruited two more people

and carried on regardless. By 2009, after doing PAs and student union performances separately, the original two decided to reunite under the name Ray and Anita and then linked back up with DeCosta and were given their name back, which they've used to this day. Oh, that's nice. Although Anita stepped down again in 2016. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, there's no limit. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Bringing pinball machines back into fashion to Unlimited at number one.

That's it for Top of the Pops this week. Join Tony Dalty next week when live in the studio we'll have Cliff Richard with his brand new song. Comic relief, don't forget it is next Friday. Get your red nose. We'll see you here at Top of the Pops next week. Good night. And that, me dears, closes the book on this episode, Top of the Pops, next week. Goodnight. And that, me dears,

closes the book on this episode of Top of the Pops. What's on telly afterwards, you may ask? Well, BBC One kicks on with Michelle's daughter Vicky getting kidnapped outside her school in EastEnders. Then David Attenborough gets to see a gang of 60

chimpanzees hunting and killing smaller monkeys for their tea in wildlife on one louisa ricks and coffee wanker gareth hunt play mismatched neighbors in the sitcom side by side then it's the nine o'clock news the lenny henry sitcom chef question time the american crime series law and order ram Ramadan, Call to Prayer, The Weather, and then they close down at five past midnight. Ramadan, Call to Prayer is assorted Muslims talking about what Ramadan means to them and not a live broadcast from Mecca.

Although I wish the BBC had done that because that would have winded up some gammon. BBC Two has just started First Sight, which focuses on bullying in the office. Then Muriel Grey whoops it up in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for the ski ponds programme The Snow Show. Then it's Top Gear, followed by French and Saunders having a go at Guns N' Roses and Ingmar Bergman. The second part of A Labour of Love, the documentary series about childcare in the early 20th century, staggering stories of Ferdinand de Bargos, Newsnight, The Late Show, The Weather and a bit of Open University Ramall. ITV showing that episode of 3D with the HIV positive vicar along with a piece on Emma McCune,

the convent girl who married the leader of the Sedan People's Liberation Army. After the bill, Arthur Daly organises a football match with the local police in a bid to keep the Winchester Club open in Minder. Then it's Disguisers, where Adam Holloway goes undercover to investigate care in the community. Afternoons at 10 and regional news in your area, it's more snooker, the equaliser and night time. Prisoner's Soul Block H and Casey Kasem, basically.

Right. Channel 4 eventually comes out of Channel 4 News and goes into Close to Home, which is about how fucked off the people of North Wales are at English cunts coming over here with their funny-smelling food and Morris dancing and all that. After The Secret Life Of looks at the word processor, it's the last in the series of Turning the Screws, the documentary series about life in Wandsworth Prison.

That's followed by a team-building session in Drop the Dead Donker, the new series Harry Enfield's Guide to Opera, a repeat of The Avengers, a repeat of Dispatchers, and they finish off at 1am with a repeat of the Dick Powell Theatre. So, me dears,

what are we talking about in the playground tomorrow? This bit is always such a headbend, isn't it? Because is it you as you were in 1993, but somehow still at school, like an imaginary version of you as a 10-year-old, but cool? Are you now pretending to be young? I don't know. Me, as a small child, I'd be talking about Rage Because Swears. And I bet a few kids actually got detention after this.

And also Suede Because Fucking Wow. Yeah. I'd this. And also Suede, because fucking wow. Yeah. I'd just be talking about Suede, I think. The best band in the world. I'd just be thinking, fucking hell, yeah, the future is theirs. I was probably saying exactly that at the Melody Maker office. What are we buying on Saturday? Well, imaginary cool me, Suede, but uncool, more realistic me, Lenny Kravitz.

I guess I didn't really buy records in those days i just phoned up and got them delivered for free but yeah i guess rage against the machine swayed and too unlimited yeah and what does this episode tell us about march of 1993 thing is with with this question is i feel like i always want to answer the same, which is that there's always something, even if this is a kind of weird gutter in between the road of rave and the pavement of Brit that kind of thing. And yeah, it kind of was. But Suede aren't number one. Suede are number fucking seven, you know, much as I love them. Number one is too unlimited. Yeah.

You know, that's the real 90s. And people like Hadaway, What is Love? You know, that's a bigger deal than anything Suede ever did. And I fucking adore Suede. So I do think there's this kind of rewriting of history that goes on on so yeah i think uh this episode of top the pops tells us that the real 1993 was a lot more mixed than we are led to believe by historians yeah and not as shit as we were led to believe either you don't look at this and just think oh god i hope oasis Blur turn up soon and sweep all this away. No, not really.

I suppose I was a bit frustrated by Ferry and Diana Ross turning up on what's meant to be a sort of young person's pop show. Yeah. Oh, and also fucking Right Side Fred and their horrible comic relief thing. That can absolutely get to fuck. Yeah. And don't think I forgot about you, Pudsey Bear, just because it's not children in need. I fucking hate Pudsey as well. You know, he can fuck right off.

And that, Pop Craze Youngsters, brings us to the end of another episode of Chart Music. All that remains for me to do now is pump out the usual promotional flange, www.chart-music.co.uk, facebook.com slash chartmusicpodcast, reach out to us on twitter at chart music t-o-t-p money down the g-string patreon.com slash chart music tickets still available for our chart music all day at birmingham town hall saturday 13th of january 2024 oh it feels so funny saying that, 2024. Yeah, exciting though. See you there.

Yeah. Thank you very much, Sarah B. Cheers, lad. God bless you, Simon Price. Ah, bless you too. My name's Al Needham and I really hope you've been listening to a podcast about Top of the Pops and not accidentally listening to

audio of me having a massive wank. Chart music. Love Hurts, down to a 28 on the official countdown. This is Bruno, stand by for another new entry. That's next. Rage Against the Machine, killing in the name is in at... Number 27. Rage Against the Machine, Killing in the Name.

That's a new entry at 27. Calling all pop-crazed youngsters. You asked for it, we were offered it, so we said, 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 Chomp Music Ramble. We commence with a return of Here Comes Quism, the Chomp Music pub quiz. And then, a three-hour live episode of Chomp Music. And then, we round off the evening with a chart 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 chart music experience, Miss Diane, and can be yours for a mere £15. So, see that internet.

Mashup bit.ly slash cm24 That's bit.ly slash cm24 Lay your money down and be prepared to be pop-crazed all day long in beautiful downtown Birmingham.

Hey! Piss Troll! we're coming for you.