Your correspondent is disgracefully late with an update from the world of 1980. But hey available for another 21 days to UK brethren on the iplayer. To kick off Smokie take good care of my baby – the seventies don’t die easily do they. A thin leather tie is a very token nod to the 1980s, a bit like leg warmers for men.
Video for Macca – Coming Up – including a very prominent Linda on backing vocals. Everyone has wacky costumes and facial fuzz. His solo career at this point was a bit wierd – this, temporary secretary, it’s all over the shop.Look out for Linda and her finger!
The Cure take us back to new wave concerns with a forest. V difficult to see Robert Smith in his pre lipstick and birds nest days as just another angsty young man. Have you ever seen him and Helen Bonham Carter in the same room? No concessions here, Mr Smith looking like a young Michael Owen and everyone in the band is trying to do the blankest blank stare. Excellent roto toms set up – is that the right word?
ELvis Costello video next for hi fidelity – he is holding onto a very strange mic for grim death and indulging in some dad dancing.
Repeat of Skyy doing toccata in the studio – the charts were pretty diverse at this time. Cod-classical prog not dead either.
Sad cafe repeat clip of My Oh My, followed by the Cockney Rejects with the greatest cockney rip off. There is a lot of red light and it is fair to say the audience don’t quite know what to make of bovver boy cum music hall that is the cockney rejects.
No disco yet – oh no here’s legs and co with a fairly simple task to dance to Bobby thurstons check out this groove.
Bad manners next with ne ne no nun nu – it’s a pretty fine ska track – check out busters laugh-along with the sax solo. What with Madness and this ska had a heavy grip on the primary school playground.
Dull, dull, dull David Essex with his motorbikes for dream racer
Corking clip next of The Undertones – my cousin Kevin – feargal hogs the cameras in a top sarah Lund jumper. Most of the other undertones don’t get a look in until the guitar solo.
May means Eurovision so here’s fresh-faced Irish legend Johnny Logan what’s another year – well about thirty-five in this case.
No video for Blondie just clips from American Gigolo intercut with stills – and is that the legs? Sneaking in for a second appearance. They made this one up 30 mins before airtime surely.
Oh that Macca video was hideous. I can only assume it was all his idea and no-one had the guts to tell him how awful it was. ‘And then I’ll be in a beard for the drum bit, and gurning! It’ll be hilarious!’ ‘Yes, Paul. Whatever you say.’
Great track, though, genuinely subverting our expectations of an ex-Beatle. Or, at least mine.
It scared Lennon back into the studio. Which tells you something.
Was considered to be great at the time. The point being that he played all the instruments on Coming Up and the rest of the album. Was a very nice record, interestingly the B side went to no. 1 in America, a live version featuring Wings. One can assume that this was the version Lennon heard and he probably never saw the video in these pre MTV days.
Should put paid to the “Ringo was a crap drummer” meme….the drumming in Coming Up is hardly virtuoso.
It was a good episode. Another I had on VHS from the UK Gold repeats many years back. The Cure was always a fave song. Far from Bad Manners best tune, same goes for David Essex and The Undertones, never really liked My Perfect Cousin. The Cure aside a good line-up of acts but not their greatest songs. The Sad Café song is awful. Heard it several time now and its poor.
Have to mention this coming weeks episode on Thursday, it looks very good. Whitesnake, Saxon, Motorhead (in the studio) The Nolans, The Beat, Kate Bush and Dexys at number 1 with Geno. What’s not to like?
Not a repeat of the Sky performance shown a couple of weeks earlier – a different one. Much better camera angles – the first one, all the cameras seemed to be in the crowd…
Always loved that clip for Tristan Fry – there’s nothing so cheering as seeing someone on TotP thoroughly enjoying themselves and clearly having a much better time than the audience (see also Don McLean and his band doing American Pie c1991). He did the timpani on A Day in the Life, y’know.
I was quite the Sky fan in my youth. I loved the B-side to Toccata – a cover of Curved Air’s Vivaldi and used to play it to death – Never had a clue who Curved Air were – still don’t.
Never mind Tristran “my drum solo in Hotta lasts exactly sixty seconds” Fry and what he played on, that’s Herbie Flowers on bass who gave us one of the greatest basslines ever “Walk on the Wild Side”.
I’ve often wondered when watching him do his Tuba Smarties number with Sky while dressed up as Noddy (friend of Big Ears, not Holder) whether there is a more obvious musical encapsulation of the phrase “from the sublime to the ridiculous”. It’s not on Youtube. I’ve looked.
Coming Up is a brilliant track. I remember being very surprised at who it was.
I must say that these episodes are sending me straight back to a highly memorable time. I was 13 and I can almost smell the classroom, see my friends at the time, visualise what the actual singles looked like.
The presence of David Essex and Johnnie Logan shows what a mixed bag TOTP was. Many was the time I sat through The Dooleys or Kenny Rogers while waiting for something happenin’ to come on. And then parents think that you’re avidly watching the The Dooleys.
I WAS watching The Dooleys!!
The Cockney Rejects – lawd
Still going it would seem
My suspicion (negative) has yet to be overturned through this never-ending trawl through the late 1970s and 1980s.
To my eyes, and ears, it seems much more dated than the RSGs of the mid-60s.
Anyone got Dave Clark’s phone number?
Really? I’m not in your head, but yes the 70s TOTP shows are very dated – but there’s an amazing variety of material there. I would contend that Ready Steady Go was poptastic and fab – but a little pedestrian in comparison to what TOTP delivered in the 70s and 80s every week.
Any chance of ITV’s Supersonic being repeated again? One of the channels (Granada something,) repeated those several years back, some great performances from SAHB, Roxy, all the usual mid-70’s crew. Looked a lot of fun. They should be repeated again as well.
That was a strange show from a kid’s point of view. There was the presumed knowledge that we all knew who Mike Mansfield was and the Old Grey Whistle Test material shown at a Sooty Show time slot.
The best bit about the David Essex video was the racing footage from Donington and Silverstone from 1979. The Silver Dream Racer was, in fact, real (British made) and was raced, but was never a serious challenger.