A Dance To The Time Of Music

[Nearly Sane]

On Friday, when Channel 4 News reached the really depressing story in a region you've barely heard of, I switched to BBC4 to indulge in the balm of nostalgia that is their repeats of Top of the Pops.

The one that I switched too was 1995, a bit late for a proper wallow in the past but ok. It was followed by one from 1983, and then 1980. On the basis of the last 2, one might deduce that between 1980 and 1983, teenagers and the makers of ToTP discovered colour and movement.


Status Quo appeared in the 1980 one, miming What You're Propising. I flashed back to the 16 year old me watching and thinking 'What old fashioned shite by old men'.

At the time saying this out loud would often prompt a contemporary with an older sibling to say - 'They weren't always like that, they used to be a psychedelic trendy band - have you heard Pictures Of Matchstick Men? And no it's not the Brian and Michael shite!'

At the time, Francis Rossi was 31! 2 years younger than Taylor Swift is now. Their first hit was in 1968. If we go back 12 years from today, you have a chart Rihanna, Adele, Wiz Khalifa, Bruno Mars.

Obviously getting older changes one's perspective but in 1980 seeing earlier ToTPs was rare - many had been wiped. Your mate with the older brother couldn't hand you their phone with Status Quo playing Pictures Of Matchstick Men on Youtube.

The times they are a changing faster than ever. Though given Pan's People 'dancing' to Casanova by Coffee, a song of which I have no memory, on the 1980 edition....

https://youtu.be/baldXX5Z2W0?si=WsM761NqMXmgyfP8

[SteveH]

Choosing old TOTPs to show without showing anything of the vile Mr Savile must be tricky - or do they just show the acts, and leave the DJs out of it?
I always think of TOTP as "tot-up".

[Nearly Sane]

Choosing old TOTPs to show without showing anything of the vile Mr Savile must be tricky - or do they just show the acts, and leave the DJs out of it?
I always think of TOTP as "tot-up".

They skip the Savile ones, and Gary Glitter ones.
 

[Aruntraveller]

I quite often catch these old re-runs.

There was indeed quite a lot of shite.

What surprises me is that I know I watched them when I was younger, but some of the songs mean nothing to me. I obviously saw/heard them at the time but they don't even provoke a "that sounds vaguely familiar" from me. Nothing.

[Nearly Sane]

As I skipped daily like a dancing cavalier through the list of famous birthdays today to select some delightful morselettes for the Music Was My First Love thread, I noted that on this day in 1940, John Lennon was born.

He was murdered a monrh or so after the ToTP epiaode with Status Quo that I covered in the OP was shown. I remember hearing the announcement on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show. Having grown up in a house with elder sisters who loved The Beatles, it was quite a shock. He seemed relevant to me at the time in a way that Francis Rossi never did.

I think that's wrapped up not just with my sisters' playing the music, and the gulf in impact between Ths Beatles and Status Quo but also the relative closeness of Status Quo, and that they still appeared on ToTP made them morw despisable.

[Nearly Sane]

I quite often catch these old re-runs.

There was indeed quite a lot of shite.

What surprises me is that I know I watched them when I was younger, but some of the songs mean nothing to me. I obviously saw/heard them at the time but they don't even provoke a "that sounds vaguely familiar" from me. Nothing.

Yes, as they do the chart rundown even during eras when I was an avid watcher there are usually about 3 or so that I have no memory of the artist or song, and an additional couple where I know the artist but not the song, such as Pop Goes My Love by Freeez in the one from 1983 on Friday.

[Nearly Sane]

The Friday Night Nostalgia Trip that is TOTP continues to deliver odd relections. Currently they show two episodes of 1995 which is not that deep nostalgia for me, though in the week that a new Beatles song is released, 1995 was when Free as a Bird was released.

There is then 2 episodes which seem to be sort of random but earlier. The first one this week was 1990, the second 1979. In both of them Status Quo were in the chart. The gap between the 2 seems greater than the 1990 to now but time is very different when you are young. 1977 - 80 is when TOTP was most 'meaningful' to me. In the charts for that programme just between 21 and 30 were The Selector with On My Radio, XTC and Making Plans for Nigel, A Message to Rudy from The Specials, and The Jam, Eton Rifles.

The Jam were the only one of those played in a show that had a bit of everything, with some awful, some briiliant, and some just odd. The special awful last night was The Ramblers with I'm Only A Poor Little Sparrow. No ToTP of the period was really complete with some song with as much appeal as Suella Braverman, sung by bunch of kids from St Random's Primary School. All of those kids are now in their mid 50s or older. Many will have died with the memory of those appearances haunting them.

Almost inevitably the number one was Lena Martell with One Day at a Feckin' Time

[Nearly Sane]

A shift to Saturday, and as I switch from Strictly over to BBC you watch Blondie at the BBC, time decides to do some magic tricks. I've just watched Angela Rippon reach the end of the pier but still she's 79 you know. The Blondie programme pogos about in time and some of the sessions are recent where Debbie Harry has turned into Angela Rippon.

But then she's 78 you know.


Blondie are an odd band. As is covered in the programme that follows, Blondie in the UK, they arrive in the UK as punk rises. They're heralded at a subsonic level by the music press as an exemplar of NY punk. Fresh from some kitchen of hell called CBGB's. The mean streets mean business.

After all it's a band where the lead is a women. Is she Blondie? The blokes definitely aren't. If our feral youth are revolting, then what of New York's Worstest?

She has swagger, this Debbie. She'll probably spit on you  she does wear ripped clothes so you see it's all true. Probably gargles with piss, and will have an abortion on stage .


The songs though. They're melodic. And yes, she's got an odd way of singing, nasally, some yelps but is that disco? Or maybe calypso? This seems the wrong box!

And she's pretty, I mean it might not be office make up but you might be able to take her to see your racy aunt, you know the one that went to see the Beatles when she was 13.

There's a tea party for punk wonen. A fucking tea party! What what is going on?? Are these women really punks but yes, there's Poly Styrene, that's probably not even her real name you know, and Viv Albertine from a band called The Slits (ooohhh), and Pauline Black who is well black, and Siouxsie Sioux, who was seen on TV in the presence of an F word, and Chrissie Hynde and she plays guitar in a band and worked in a SEX shop, well a shop called Sex.

These young people...

But as Blondie become a punk Abba, we realise that maybe punk in the Big Apple is from a different place, and that young Debbie isn't. Young, that is. I mean she's not old but she's older. She's older than Bowie and his USAican chum Mr Pop. She's 4 years older than Francis Rossi who appears in the decidely non punk, Status Quo. She's older than all of Abba except folkmeister Bjorn. Where had she been?

When Harry first appears on UK TV, she's older than Angela Rippon was when she appeared on Morecambe and Wise. As a throbbing adolescent at that time, my mind still refuses that timey-wimey polarity reversal. People are younger now, but she was younger then.

[Aruntraveller]

Caught some of this, but couldn't stand to watch all of it. The age thing, I think. Never blessed with the strongest of voices, her live singing has, over the years, become more and more erratic, which in some singers becomes, to me at least, endearing (I'm looking at you McCartney) in Harry's case my reaction is more visceral. Just stop ruining the memories of brilliant pop music.

I know originally they were linked to punk, but Blondie when I think of them, were just the most sublime purveyors of the most wonderful pop music.

[Nearly Sane]

Caught some of this, but couldn't stand to watch all of it. The age thing, I think. Never blessed with the strongest of voices, her live singing has, over the years, become more and more erratic, which in some singers becomes, to me at least, endearing (I'm looking at you McCartney) in Harry's case my reaction is more visceral. Just stop ruining the memories of brilliant pop music.

I know originally they were linked to punk, but Blondie when I think of them, were just the most sublime purveyors of the most wonderful pop music.

Ah, the voice. It's odd. I watched it as soneone who had always thought it was more about the attitude and the phrasing, and so a lot of the later stuff wasn't a problem for me. But you watch the stuff from the Hogmanay Show at the Apollo in 1979 and she has a unique voice that allows her to do songs, other better singers would struggle with.

https://youtu.be/Kymcob7Dw7c?si=4mZr0y0Y-RGPIL13

It's worth watching the documentary that was on at 9pm
 

[Nearly Sane]

A different trigger, or rather two yesterday. The death of Shane MacGowan, and reading the biography of John Martyn:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Small-Hours-Long-Night-Martyn/dp/178760019X

Two 'hell raisers' that lived in that odd semi disapproved demi monde of drunken balladeers, where somehow their addictions are softened by their art....


Or some such bollocks.

Graeme Thomson does the usual searching through the runes of Martyn's childhood to explain the ruins of his life. And, as ever, signs can be found, his relationship with his parents, their divorce, his father's alcoholism but the search for reasons bleeds into excuses.

His, Martyn's, daughter is quoted as saying that Martyn hurt himself more than anyone else, and while that may be true, you have a right to hurt yourself that doesn't extend to others. His vicious abuse of his first wife seems to have been excused because it was just John.

Or rather Iain McGeachy. The name change to John Martyn due to the infelicitousness of his surname to London ears. The duality of personality matched by that of identity.

Neither Martyn, nor McGeachy, nor indeed MacGowan invented the drunken, and other intoxicants, ballad singer. Martyn had his roadmap directly from Hamish Imlach, 8 years older, who died at 56. The subtitle of the biography 'The Long Night of John Martyn', a nodding tribute to a biography of Chet Baker who followed the same path.

Martyn and Baker were both pretty youths but the gilding was soon  stripped away. In our warped perceptions, the early death of another, Nick Drake, with whom Martyn was close, preserves that prettiness in a way that makes the slow seeping of beauty more tragic than death.

I can't remember the first time listening to Martyn. I am somewhat surprised that I wasn't introduced to him by one of my older sisters but perhaps it was the perceived folkiness of him that caused that. And yet while like MacGowan he had a clear connection to folk, he wasn't really a folk singer. Too jazzy.

So he was an artist I had to go back and discover. His greatest period being in the 70s but his exploring made him an oddity even in the gangs he belonged to. His best known song 'May You Never' never bothered the charts, and yet its success seems to have soured it for him. Though years after his first release of it, he could reinvent it

https://youtu.be/sBPTuAl2Qyk?si=wDBvaMH_7AuCuCVh


I never saw a good concert from him. I was unlucky but not amazingly so. By the time, I went to see him, you needed to get the right night. But I never saw him without him doing something extraordinarily beautiful.

He's a very confessional writer and his life plays out in his songs, and as the physical changes brought about by wide ranging substance abuse continued, what had been the ethereal voice became the roar, and snarl of a bear baited by the life it chose.


https://youtu.be/q-PVgkbpSG0?si=oCbsswLydxhFYGBy

[SteveH]

A Dance to the Music of Thyme.

[Nearly Sane]

The usual watch of old ToTP on BBC4 last night revealed a surprising best chart ever in 1985. After catching the end of one 1995, followed by the next 1995, populated entirely too much by Mick Hucknall in what was very expensive leather outfit that looked liked some dodgy vinyl  bought knock off at the back of the Arndale, a palatable but not that interesting 1986 was served.

This was followed by an edition from 1985 which in itself was good with some weak notes was nevertheless formed from the best chart ever. Now this is not mere opinion, ot's formed from a number of hard developed prejudices, and backed up by being entirely sober. My wife, while agreeing in the assessment, was not so sober.

The programme started, unfortunately, with a later Shakin' Stevens, singing a tune I was not knowingly aware of and doing a strange, even for Shaky, jig. I fear a need to update his bopping to match a new more disco style with the oddly named Break Up My Heart had led to something more epilectic than necessary. The song was not memorable but seemed in parts to remember Young Turks by Rodney Stewart.


Enough, however, of the programme, and Mr Stevens attempts at mid 80s relevance. Why was the chart the best ever? Well first, let's be clear it was far from pefect but perfection is too high a bar in the charts. We can rule out anything after 1989 because it's factually not as good. And really I might have had that date at 1984 were it not for last night. Anything prior to 1977 is out because while filled with quality, there was too many really odd things that didn't work without exactly the right drugs. Note I don't mean the songs written on drugs, just the ones you needed drugs to listen to.

The chart does contain that concentrated nubbin of shite Atmosphere by Russ Abbot, and yet... It has a good mix of just pure banging classics, no 1 is You Spin Me Round, and variation - No 2 is I Know Him So Well. It has a strong representation from the US of great stuff - Material Girl, Solid, Dancing in the Dark, The Boys of Summer. Two Prince singles Let's Go Crazy AND 1999. Bowie with This Is Not America.

There's songs that are niche, Sharpe and Numan
 Change Your Mind, Art of Noise Close to the Edit and some brilliant light pop, Kiss Me, Love and Pride, Thinking of You, This House. It also has the sublime Kirsty MacColl with A New England.

Go listen and enjoy


https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/singles-chart/19850303/7501/

Warning: this post is for entertainment purposes only. Chart singles may go down as well as up. Your data may be retained and used in a court against you.  Listening to this music may produce side effects such as nausea, heart attack and itchy feet.