(TX: BBC-4, 22/05/2015)
Imagine a universe where scantily-clad, objectified and anonymised women
strut about mechanistically to daintily piano-led jazz-funk music that now
evokes distant memories of late-1990s late-night music for Ceefax. Picture, if
you will, the Dionysian racket of Motörhead - introduced oddly as
'Leatherhead' by presenter Tommy Vance - followed immediately by the saccharine
tupperware pop of The Nolans.
This edition of TOTP is epitomised by openers New Musik, complete with
vaguely telefantasy-style watery set. If I haven't written about their From
A to B album before, then that's a massive oversight: it's a lovely fusion
of power-pop and synth-pop. The bassist appears thoroughly impassive, like a
Jeff Lynne statue in large dark glasses. The keyboardist plays the fool,
anticipating so much great Thomas Dolby geekery. Wimbledon-born Tony Mansfield
paces to the syncopated rhythm, both out-of-place and utterly comfortable on
this Top of the Pops. Mansfield went onto produce Cleaners from Venus,
responsible for that great unheard 1982 indie opus, Midnight Cleaners with
its impossibly lovely jangling volleys like 'Only a Shadow' and the best askew
pop essay in Englishness this side of XTC or Robyn Hitchcock.
That New Musik didn't mutate into fixtures of the pop scene in Britain
is testament to the usual British conservatism... That rare alignment of New
Musik, Buggles, Korgis and McCartney II is one of the most
delightful of 1980 English musical constellations.
Disco's there - how could it not be? Narada Michael Walden's 'I Shoulda
Loved You' shimmers gorgeously, with its soul-jazz horns and elemental groove.
Slightly less compelling is the reappearance of a latter-day Jimmy Ruffin, in a
Hawaiian shirt, belting out some mildly Barry White-esque soul ballad on a
balcony.
The 3-4 years late 'punk' brigade seem to fill one or two slots in every
1980 TOTP show, and The Chords are eminently forgettable in a sub-sub-The Jam
style. The distinct heavy metal presence is different to most 1970s charts, and
Tommy Vance is the apposite host, pronouncing 'lovin'' naturally without the
'g'. The genre has been on my mind, what with Marcello Carlin's sterling
writing on Iron Maiden and Def Leppard on Then Play Long. And,
also, Jeremy Deller's exhibition-come-treatise All That is Solid Melts
into Air, which I saw at the Laing art gallery in Newcastle, which used
Saxon's 'Wheels of Steel' as one of its video exhibits - the Sheffield band who
appear in this very TOTP. The conceptual exhibition also included popular
broadsides from the Victorian era, including one imagining a future utopia of
1973, as well as family trees of the Messrs Ryder, Holder and Ferry. Deller is
from the more analytical, socially engaged end of conceptual art; ironically,
given his Marshall Berman-citing title regarding modernism, his connections
became ever more concrete the more you moved around the exhibition and thought.
De-industrialisation was being experienced by young men in places like
Sheffield; not just Mick in Barry Hines and Ken Loach's 1981 film Looks
and Smiles, but Saxon and their 'Steel City' contemporaries. As Deller
argues, heavy metal is hewn from the memories of industry and its noises.
Then, there is the uncannily serene slice of jazz-funk I alluded to at
the start. Legs & Co. function as, well, legs and assorted objects to
accompany this almost chillingly calm piece of music: 'The Groove' by Rodney
Franklin. Sophisticated in a manner perhaps only achievable by instrumental
jazz-funk of this era. The fifteen year-old Gilles Peterson would surely have
enjoyed this, even if it is like the super-ego to the id of Incognito, Cymande
or Hi-Tension, a wonderful strain of British music he played much of on last
week's show.
During the 24/04/80 show, Steve Wright remarks: "Nice to see
something so unusual in the charts" - and he says that of Sky... The same
show included a one-two of The Cure's 'A Forest' and Elvis Costello's 'High
Fidelity'. There's more here; we don't just have an ode to UFOs with a
drone-like long introduction from supposedly 'safe' Hot Chocolate, but also
Kate Bush's 'Breathing', one of the most horrifying and gut wrenching of any
responses to the Second Cold War and the threat of nuclear
doomsday. It's from the same album as the crystalline John
Dowland-as-subtle-protest-song 'Army Dreamers'. If you aren't into Kate Bush by
this stage, then your taste is unfathomable to me! There's no more radical
place to start than Never for Ever and The Dreaming and
start all should.
The Beat - 'Mirror in the Bathroom': a window on a whole new world, to
paraphrase the great Dennis Potter. And Dexys Midnight Runners are at number
#1, with 'Geno'. It may not quite be my favourite of theirs: that is 'This Is
What She's Like' from five years hence. But it is another evolutionary step as
a number 1, following 'Going Underground' a month or two earlier.
To add to the unexpectedly purplish standard, we are thankfully not treated to
B.A. Robertson, a bane of this era and, not so much a poor man's Ian Dury, as a
'wacky' Bob Willis, Sky TV's inveterate misanthrope of a cricket commentator
(now sentenced, Rochester style, to inserts in the studio). This episode also
spares us the egregious Steve Wright, arms flung 'chummily' around invariably
female and voice-less audience members.
The audience lasses are permitted but a few words by Vance, and no, sadly,
they aren't colloquial or choice ones. Of course, when introducing the Cockney
Rejects, Wright emits an unspeakable 'amusing' blend of cockerney and his
mid-Atlantic RP: witness this and cringe.
Alas, this installment doesn't quite avoid Johnny Logan, as his 'What's
Another Year' plays over the yellow credits. Yes, blandness, or beigeness in
Kate Tempest's terms, always asserts itself in British culture, even amid the
more awakened musical culture of 1978-82. However, this programme is generally
of a different, stellar order to 1976 TOTP, which I wrote about over three
years ago here. We are seeing the infiltration of
subcultures and artistry of an altogether weirder and fresher hue, led by
talismans such as Kate and Kevin and overseen with wisdom and lightness of
touch by a 37-year-old Scouser named Paul. For the moment, commercial
compromise and cynicism seem to have been kept out, with the hapless Nolans the
ones marooned and marginalised.
Bizarrely, BBC-4 ordain to show an edited thirty minute version on
Thursday evenings, and then the full forty or so minuter later in the early
hours of Friday (here it is on iPlayer). Needless to say, the
edit is superfluous. As a friend has rightly argued, they should further
contextualise the show in its era by accompanying the TOTEP re-runs with
repeated dramas like Play for Today or documentaries like Russian
Language and People - which is at least partially available here,
happily.
Tommy Vance unfurls a one-liner, following New Musik's sprightly opening
number... "Just a minute I thought I was going to drown there,
but luckily I didn't." As Richard Hawley would appreciate, the ocean is
bountiful and strange enough to desire immersion.
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