Box Set: Loungecore

A collection of some of my recent features on mid to late nineties loungey indie dance music...

It looks as though some of you aren't aware that I now have a new website (which you can find here), and are still hanging around here wondering where all the new 'content' is. Well it's over there, obviously. To give you all some idea of where to start, though, I'm adding some new posts here with themed collections of links, and this time it's some of my recent features and podcasts about the long-forgotten Britpop spin-off Loungecore...

Come On And Love Me Now - the enduring appeal of Life by The Cardigans

Amongst Them Trevor The Sheep - what really happened when Chris Morris' Blue Jam got taken off-air halfway through a show?

I Love The Gentle People - how did a kitschy lounge/dance act come to be all over daytime television and 'lad' mags?

Food Processors Are Great! - why I still find Modern Life Is Rubbish by Blur inspiring and exciting, and why the nonsense about it 'inventing' Brexit should be slung into the nearest burning bin.

Looks Unfamiliar: Emma Burnell - Emma shares her memories of nineties Easy Listening radio station Melody Radio.

Looks Unfamiliar: Jenny Morrill - Jenny talks us through her attempts at looking like Justine from Elastica.

I'm Leaner, I'm Meaner, I Ain't No Inbetweener - late nineties Post-Diana moody trip-hop and the bewildeirng rise of unlikely chart star Jimmy Ray.

Je Suis Perdue Dans La Nuit, Dans Cette Ville Où Je Vis- how I discovered 1968 by France Gall.

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Not On Your Telly is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here. And there's several other books to choose from here...

Can't Help Thinking About Me

Can’t Help Thinking About Me is a new book by me, full of old features given a new twist. It’s part autobiography, part cultural history, part bewildering manifestos about ridiculous sixties pop records and terrifying television puppets. Inside its massive page count you’ll find…


– An introduction from Samira Ahmed

– Over a hundred pages – and over three hundred footnotes – with all new material on how and why I came to end up writing about such obscure and absurd subjects

– Previously unseen features on Sound Of The 60s, Michael Caine films, The Ghosts Of Motley Hall, Chorlton And The Wheelies, and why I prefer forgettable cinematic rubbish to ‘landmark’ movies

– Previously little-seen features on Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, Chigley, A Clockwork Orange and David Bowie’s lost early television appearances, as well as a series of philosophical meditations on the para-cerebral properties of dubbed television bear Barnaby

– New and updated versions of the features on The Beatles’ Carnival Of Light and the 1970 Christmas Eve edition of Play School, with newly-discovered extra behind-the-scenes detail; yes, I do know what presents Brian and Julie gave each other now…

– What happened after I found some lost episodes of a late seventies BBC children’s programme

- At long last, the full version of the epic tale of my spiritual quest to find a copy of Music From BBC Children’s Programmes

– features on Radio Times, Jimi Hendrix, That Was The Week That Was, Camberwick Green, Trumpton, Chigley, The Beatles, BBC Test Card F, The Stone Roses, Blur, The Beach Boys, The Monkees, Smash Hits, Battle Of The Planets, Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons, The Mersey Pirate, Hardwicke House, Blue Jam, Elvis Presley, Doctor Who, 1986’s Top Christmas Present Wish List, why I really hated Play Chess, and much much more. Yes, including Skiboy!



You can get Can’t Help Thinking About Me in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

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Can't Help Thinking About Me is available in paperback here or from the Kindle store here.

E Arth Welcome... In Blue Jam

Since his last appearance on the station on Boxing Day 1994, there had been an open invitation of sorts for Chris Morris to do some more work for Radio 1.

The following two years had been taken up with work on Brass Eye, a six-part television series for Channel 4 that took his concepts of spoofing hoaxing news and current affairs to their logical conclusion, presenting a series of hard-hitting documentaries based around entirely fictitious subjects. Brass Eye was nothing if not provocative television, operating on a far more powerful level than practically any other comedy show ever transmitted, and an incident in which a hoax over the fabricated recreational drug ‘cake’ had spiralled out of control, and found itself the subject of a parliamentary discussion, caused enough concern within Channel 4 for station controller Michael Grade to postpone the series from its intended transmission while he verified whether or not it had transgressed broadcasting guidelines.

Brass Eye did indeed resurface, albeit in a substantially edited form, running from 29th January to 5th March 1997. Even in this slightly tamed incarnation the series was still strong stuff, but by this point the months of setbacks had taken their toll and Morris was thoroughly fed up with Brass Eye and keen to move on to something new. Rumours of a forthcoming new radio series had begun to circulate while Brass Eye was still airing, and over the summer of 1997 Morris recorded a pilot for Radio 1 under the working title Plankton Jam. It is perhaps telling that while the subsequent rash of inferior post-Brass Eye emulators were still little more than vague proposals, the man who inspired it all was making moves to distance himself completely from ‘news parody’.

Blue Jam, as the new Radio 1 series would eventually be renamed, did not even start out as a comedy show. Morris, who had always appreciated the woozy world of late-night radio where laid-back music tracks are linked by presenters talking in hushed tones that give a sense of the isolation of broadcasting from a largely empty building in the middle of the night, originally intended to create a more experimental take on this sort of show, a “3am lug lube” with an appropriate musical backdrop behind “first person stories that slowly went off the rails, from the point of view of the presenter”. While this would almost certainly have been diverting listening, it is interesting to ponder on whether or not they would actually have constituted ‘comedy’ as such; in effect, it would only have been a slightly exaggerated and distorted version of what could be found elsewhere on the radio dial at that time of night[1].

As work on the show progressed, sketch material began to find its way in through a somewhat roundabout route. According to Morris, the original concept of first person narratives evolved into “framing those narratives as ‘found sound’ as well, like bits of documentary actuality, and then dramatising bits of all of the scenarios”. This effectively grew out of a mocked-up ‘fly on the wall’ documentary in the pilot about a doctor who treated his patients with kisses and other displays of affection; this was considered by all who heard it to be the most effective item by far, occasioning a change of direction and a move towards outright sketch material with no DJ element. The doctor himself, caught up in increasingly bizarre scenarios but remaining unflappably by-the-book throughout, would go on to become the most heavily recurring character in the show.

Blue Jam was quite unlike anything that had been heard before in the name of radio comedy. The familiar presentational style, fabricated news stories and love of subverting pop music were all gone, replaced by a hazy montage of music over which fragments of monologue and conversation, alternately whimsical and disturbing, drifted in and out seemingly at random. The word ‘dreamlike’ has often been used to describe Blue Jam – and indeed an early pre-series trailer featured references to 'The 1FM Dreamline' – but not in the traditional sense. Instead, Blue Jam effectively evokes the disquieting, half-formed thoughts that pass through the semi-conscious mind in the early hours of the morning[2]. Although many have suggested that the nightmarish, otherworldly ambience of Blue Jam was influenced by the effects of hallucinogenic drugs, the reality of the situation is far more mundane and unpretentious. The original press release for the series included a list of the stylistic cues that had informed the show, which included Vivian Stanshall’s long-running Radio 1 tales of life at Rawlinson End, the ambient dance music act The KLF, and the effects of influenza, alongside the expected world of late-night radio; all indicative of a blurry and indistinct state, but one that is reached naturally rather than through any kind of chemical stimulation. Blue Jam was more effective in creating its own abstract ambience than any boring slab of drug-fuelled meandering could ever hope to be.

The first run of six hour-long instalments of Blue Jam went out on Radio 1 at midnight on Friday mornings, during November and December 1997. The most immediately striking feature, not to mention the most important in terms of setting the required tone, was the music. On a simplistic level, the shows could be divided down into the established ‘music show’ format, interspersing speech material with tracks played in full. However, the speech material was surrounded by looped sections of music tracks, which flowed in and out of the longer selections in one long pulsating soundtrack that ebbed and flowed with the mood of the material; so neat and seamless that it was difficult to determine where the music and comedy ended and started. This soundtrack was made up of excerpts from a selection of music tracks that were markedly diverse yet also strangely aligned, ranging from ambient dance music to spectral ballads, 1960s European pop numbers, and even a scratchy old blues record that claimed to be “dreamin’ ‘bout a reefer five feet long”. The KLF, Brigitte Bardot, Bjork, David Byrne, The Chemical Brothers, Stereolab, The Cardigans, Sly And The Family Stone, The Beach Boys, Beck and even the middle-of-the-road duo The Alessi Brothers were just a handful of the artists that found themselves absorbed into the first series of Blue Jam.

Each edition of Blue Jam opened and closed with a warped approximation of ‘beat’ poetry, conjuring up surreal juxtapositions and disturbing imagery and delivered in an obscure patois, conveying a feeling of distorted reality with a bleakly comic twist. Each edition also contained a lengthy monologue delivered by Morris, and written jointly with Robert Katz. These had their roots in ‘Temporary Open Space’, Katz’s contributions to Morris’ Greater London Radio shows (indeed, some of the monologues were adapted from earlier ‘Temporary Open Space’ pieces); these monologues probably give the clearest indication of what Morris had originally intended for Blue Jam. In the eventual transmitted shows they were surrounded by shorter sketches, written variously by Morris, Peter Baynham, David Quantick, Jane Bussmann, Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews, and performed by a regular cast that included David Cann, Amelia Bulmore, Julia Davis, Kevin Eldon, Mark Heap, and on occasion Sally Phillips, Lewis MacLeod, Melanie Hudson and Phil Cornwell.

The sketch structure was to say the least unconventional, lacking deliberate start and end points (it was not unusual for a sketch to ‘end’ simply by fading into the distance on an echoed word), and divided between dialogue, monologue and a quasi-documentary approach. Twistedly humorous concepts introduced to listeners over the course of Blue Jam included an American couple who enter their baby in vicious fighting contests, a landlord who persuades his tenants to leave by slicing imperceptible slivers of skin from their feet as they sleep, a four year old girl with a secret double life as a ruthless gangland killer, a disease nicknamed “The Gush” that causes porn stars to literally ejaculate themselves to death, and an eyewitness account of a man who, lacking an available high window to throw himself out of, simply opted to commit suicide by repeatedly jumping from a first floor window.

While certainly highly amusing, such sketches have given rise to a belief that Blue Jam concerned itself solely with bleak humour based around shock tactic themes. This could not be further from the truth; the majority of sketches featured in the series are merely surreal, disorientating whimsy that are as light as the darker material is disturbing. Memorable examples included an angry man in search of the “owner” of the birds that annoyed him with their dawn chorus, an agency that hires out thick people to annoy customer service staff, a plot to joyride Professor Stephen Hawking around a racetrack, and David Bowie’s little-known side career as a relationship guidance counsellor. Meanwhile, Morris’ old standby of cutting and pasting of recorded speech resurfaced in a mangling of Radio 1’s Newsbeat (“police in Northumberland have sex with schoolgirls, and it’s all legal”), while an unsavoury backwards message was discovered in Elton John’s tribute to Diana, Princess Of Wales, Candle In The Wind ‘97.

The latter item, along with an interview with royal biographer Andrew Morton – quizzed on his attitude to non-existent internet-based games based on the crash, and how he would feel if a signed copy of his book was presented to Princes William and Harry by a Diana lookalike – formed part of an extraordinary run of material spread throughout the first run of Blue Jam, inspired by the outpourings of emotion that had followed Diana’s death. At no point was this material ever in any way cruel or insensitive about the situation itself, nor indeed about the people who felt affected by the tragedy; it simply reflected the feelings of someone who, like many others, had grown tired of the disproportionate public displays of grief, and the attendant media hysteria and hypocrisy, and their apparent refusal to abate even some months later. Blue Jam suffered from very little interference or censorship throughout its existence, but an item that was originally planned for the last show of the first series pushed Radio 1’s tolerance too far.

Around fifteen minutes into the original edit of show six, the following re-edit of the Archbishop Of Canterbury’s sermon from Diana’s memorial service appeared:

“We give thanks to God for those maimed through the evil of Mother Theresa, whose death we treasure. We pray for those most closely affected by her death, among them Trevor the sheep. Lord, we thank you for the precious gift of the sick, the maimed, and all whose lives are damaged, and for the strength we draw from all who are weak, poor and powerless, in this country and throughout the world. Lord, we commend to you Elizabeth, our Queen, whose death may serve the common good. We give thanks above all for her readiness to identify with God almighty, and for the way she gave sauce to so many people. Her mother, her brother, Dodi Fayed, and many, many, many more. We pray for the Royal Family as they discharge their members in Trevor Rhys Jones. Give them AIDS. Lord of landmines, hear our prayer. And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three… but the greatest of these is tortoise”

Morris was aware that this was likely to be problematic, and to that end recorded a deliberately obscene ‘Doctor’ sketch containing libel, blasphemy and an intentionally unsavoury remark about Diana, which was never seriously intended for broadcast (and not particularly funny either) and could be excised as a bargaining counter to argue for the Archbishop edit to remain uncut. Radio 1 seemed happy with this; the contentious sketch was duly removed from show four (which ran correspondingly short as result, with an extra music track added after the outro to make up the time[3]), and the full edit was cleared for broadcast as part of show six. However, when the sequence actually went to air, Radio 1’s duty manager insisted that the episode should be faded out and replaced for the rest of its duration with a repeat of show one. It is reputed that the engineer charged with the task of swapping the broadcast was a fan of the show and deliberately took his time, resulting in the offending item going out pretty much in its entirety, with only a single line of inoffensive material left unbroadcast. Quite why this came about is uncertain. Some of those who worked on the show claim that the sketch was mistaken for the excised ‘Doctor’ sketch by the inattentive duty manager, and faded out for that reason, while Radio 1 claimed at the time that they had changed their minds over the suitability of the Archbishop edit and had requested an alternate edit that never arrived[4].

Whatever the circumstances, Radio 1 subsequently became very unhappy about the item. When Morris tried to get the full version of show six broadcast, still with 45 minutes of unheard material, as part of a repeat run early in 1998, Radio 1 refused and in the absence of an alternate edit put out show one – its fourth airing in three months – in its place. Eventually, when it became clear that they were not prepared to give way, Morris relented and provided an edited version, which went out as the first of a new six-show run between March and May 1998 .

By now, Blue Jam was gaining both critical approval – it won the Sony Gold award for Best Radio Comedy for two consecutive years – and a small, but intensely loyal, audience. A third set of six shows running between January and February 1999 showed some signs of fatigue, particularly in the choices of music, but the material was generally of the same exceptionally high quality, and there could be little doubt that Blue Jam was an experiment that had succeeded beyond expectations.

[1] In fact, it may well have ended up somewhat reminiscent of Mark Radcliffe’s Radio 1 show Out On Blue Six, which achieved a similar detached ambience through judicious manipulation of the traditional music radio format with laid-back music and surreal interjections. Morris professes to have enjoyed Out On Blue Six greatly.
[2] Morris reinforced this point to me when he claimed that “the material generally came from a sense of wanting to make things hypnotic and unignorable”.
[3] This was Best Bit by Beth Orton; despite assumptions to the contrary, this actually appears on the broadcast master of the episode.
[4] More confusingly still, Radio 1 denied all knowledge of the incident to several listeners who called in during the broadcast to ask what was going on. Complicating matters still further, Radio 1’s then-Controller Matthew Bannister claimed in BBC Radio 4 Extra’s Morris retrospective Raw Meat Radio in 2014 that the entire incident had never happened and that all supposed off-air recordings were a hoax perpetrated by a fan. All I can say is that, hand on heart, my off-air recording is genuine. Numerous listeners will attest that this actually happened and it was reported on by a couple of newspapers at the time. Matthew Bannister politely declined to be interviewed for Fun At One, feeling not unreasonably that he had expressed his point of view definitively on several previous occasions.
[5] The item was first heard in full as part of a Blue Jam ‘Live’ event at the Battersea Arts Centre in 1998. A video version, prepared for the TV transfer jam but not actually used in the series, was later made available at www.bishopslips.com – this effectively comprised the 22nd track of the Blue Jam compilation CD released by Warp in 2000. It was also included on the limited edition Blue Jam Extras CD.

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This is an abridged excerpt from Fun At One - The Story Of Comedy At BBC Radio 1, which is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

This Is The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society/Now On The Kindle Store For You To Add To Your Library!

The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society, a book collecting some of the ridiculously lengthy diversions I've gone on about archive TV and pop music when I really should have been working on something more substantial, is now available from the Amazon Kindle Store. Regular readers may be interested to know that it includes exclusive and previously unpublished pieces on Chigley, Wait 'Till Your Father Gets Home and David Bowie's early TV appearances. Elsewhere there are features on Doctor Who, The Monkees, Battle Of The Planets, Tin Machine, Skiboy, The Stone Roses, Glam Rock, Jimi Hendrix, Hardwicke House, Rubik's Magic, Blue Jam and Camberwick Green. There's quite a lot about that, in fact.

You can get The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society from the Kindle Store by clicking here. Or if you'd prefer, you can still get the paperback from here, or the original full-colour eBook from here.

The Nation's Not-Quite-As-Favourite

Some time ago, I had an idea for a book about comedy on Radio 1.

Well, it wasn't really a book at first. Initially it was just a list of transmission dates for all those Radio 1 comedy shows I'd once listened to religiously - somewhat ironic, considering the religion-baiting themes that many of them had mined for their humour - such as The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Blue Jam, Victor Lewis-Smith, The Chris Morris Music Show, Lee & Herring's Fist Of Fun and, erm, Intimate Contact With Julian Clary, really more for my own amusement than anything else. Then I started to get curious about all of those shows that I hadn't liked. And then the ones that I'd never even heard of. And what about all of those magazine, documentary and even DJ shows that were essentially 'comedy' in all but name? Needless to say, that list would soon expand into something far more substantial, so come with me now into the swirling mists of human inadeq...

Anyway, eventually, after long hours spent scouring randomly through Radio Times listings and attempting to negotiate copies of off-air recordings of the little-heard likes of Songlines, Windbags and Z Magazine from surprisingly cautious collectors, the time came to try and pester a couple of erstwhile performers and producers into answering a couple of questions, clearing up a couple of obscure details, and generally reminiscing about their days spent trying to fit jokes around Bomb The Bass records. And, surprisingly, nearly all of them were prepared to have a bit of a chat with the self-publishing nobody with the bizarre open-ended research project. From Mark Radcliffe and David Baddiel to Dave Cash and Danisnotonfire and even zany old Chris Morris, they were all more than happy to spend half an hour or so nattering about mostly long-forgotten shows that they clearly all still held a great deal of affection for, and seemingly everyone that I spoke to had an almost inexhaustible supply of amusing behind-the-scenes anecdotes or recollections of sketches and routines that had given them a rarely-recaptured professional thrill. Needless to say, there were plenty of exciting moments in all this, from The Mary Whitehouse Experience's original producer Bill Dare breathlessly recounting virtually word for word his experiences both encouraging and bruising with BBC 'suits', to The Ginger Prince from Radio Tip Top suddenly breaking into character on the phone when I managed to track him down after months of effort, to Adrian Juste's extraordinary rant about how "it's very unhealthy to let politicians, and this preponderance of celebrity nonentities we have now, get away with the crap they spout uncontested... they are so up their own arse, and getting worse, if you don't stop them by pricking their little bubbles of pomposity... we all need a good laugh now and again - at their overpaid, mollycoddled expense". But, just occasionally, there were slightly more uncomfortable moments.

Sometimes, in the progression of the conversation, the names of some of the more comedy-averse (usually in both senses) 'old guard' of daytime DJs would come up, and that was the point at which many of the older contributors, from both in front and behind the microphone, would suddenly go a bit quieter. Often this went no further than moving rapidly on to the next question, but once or twice, one or two of them tried to subtly drop hints that there was some sort of potential minefield here that should be avoided at all costs. Without wishing to give too much away, one individual who was involved in an on-air prank at the expense of a now-discredited DJ darkly hinted that they weren't just sending him up as an affectionate in-joke, and virtually spat out every word when having to actually talk about him as a person. Meanwhile, one Radio 1 veteran went even further and, without even hinting at details, named names, warning against featuring them in any detail or even in any context because it wasn't likely to be long before "some stuff will come out about them and nobody will want anything to do with your book". What this 'stuff' might have been, I had no idea, and looking back now I'm glad that I didn't.

In the meantime, work on what would eventually become Fun At One continued apace and its scope increased dramatically, extending to cover not just such nominally non-comedy shows as In Concert, Collins And Maconie's Hit Parade and The Antiques Record Roadshow, but all kinds of other rarely acknowledged cornerstones of Radio 1's output like Newsbeat, live sessions and late night dance music shows; sorry, but you'll have to buy the book to find out exactly how and when they collided with the world of comedy. And, on top of all that, every time that I thought I'd finally managed to find the whole lot of them, the list of actual proper comedy shows kept on increasing too. The happily accidental upshot of all this was that, with a couple of notable (and thankfully all still respectable) exceptions, there was literally no room nor indeed need to mention any of the self-styled 'Welly Boot Mafia' as anything more than passing references. Which was handy as, frankly, none of them were ever that amusing, or even likeable, and in short there are few things less funny than someone who thinks that they are.

Eventually, after what seemed like endless amounts of research, writing and rewriting, not to mention a last minute change to the entire final chapter when Radio 1 decided to actually start making comedy shows again, Fun At One was finally ready to hit the virtual presses. Graham and Jack Kibble-White helped out with some amazing design work, Ben Baker came up with some great promotional ideas, and the few people who had read it in advance of publication all seemed to be confident that it would be a huge success. And then... well, you all know what happened next.

In fairness, quite a few people were very generous in their attempts to help plug Fun At One - I'm particularly grateful to Richard Herring - but, well, it really was just the wrong book at the wrong time. Regrettably, that cautious interviewee had been proved right; nobody was saying as much, but by then it really wasn't the done thing to be seen to be celebrating Radio 1 in any way, and, well, it seems that it still isn't the done thing. At the time of writing, Fun At One has been outsold three times over by my anthology of pieces on neglected TV Not On Your Telly, a good third of which had already seen print in one form or another. Even fan forums that I'd assumed would go wild for the book seemed to be giving it a wide berth. This isn't a whinge or a complaint by the way - it would be crass to intimate that a couple of pages about Sound Bites With David Baddiel was somehow more important than the vexing questions of how and why those scrawny old bastards got away with what they did for so long, let alone use it as an excuse for a sales pitch (though doubtless some prats on Twitter will accuse me of doing just that) - and sometimes it's just the way these things turn out. In fact, in moments of sharing the unease, I've actually considered withdrawing Fun At One from sale once or twice, though more sensible people have always talked me out of that.

What this is a plea for, though, is for an end to this tainting of the whole of Radio 1 by association. As Fun At One arguably demonstrates, there was - and is - so much more to the station and its staggeringly broad output than the off-air antics of a handful of presenters who were only there for a fraction of its existence anyway, and all of it deserves celebration and appreciation that now seems to be roundly denied. Which is understandable, but has to stop some time. So go out and listen to a BBC Sessions album by The Beatles, Belle & Sebastian, The Jimi Hendrix Experience or whoever takes your fancy. Catch the imminent repeats of series two of Blue Jam on Radio 4 Extra. In short, remember what you liked about Radio 1, and start liking it all over again. Because, let's be honest about it, nothing would have hurt those talentless egomaniacs more than being overshadowed by something that was actually good.

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Fun At One - The Story Of Comedy At BBC Radio 1 is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

The Memorex Years: The Cardigans 'Life'

More from the short-lived blog The Memorex Years, this time taking a look at an album that was a very big deal for me in the mid-nineties, Life by The Cardigans. I'm actually very proud of this as a light-hearted yet intense look at a band that are often mistakenly written off as throwaway bubblegum pop timewasters when there's a lot more substance to both their music and their lyrics.

"She will not get bothered at all, she's just watching the water at fall"

It's perhaps an indication of how much the media's attitude to what constitutes 'pop' music has changed in recent times that, in the mid-nineties, a sudden deluge of really rather good Scandinavian bands that were perfectly suited to mainstream audiences found themselves shunted to the sidelines and made to stand in the corner marked 'indie'. Despite sounding not unlike A-ha had done ten years previously, none of them were to enjoy quite the same sort of radio and press support that Morten 'Horten Forten' Harket and his semi-animated bandmates had benefitted from, and as a result never quite managed to make the same kind of chart breakthrough.

The Wannadies and Whale both had their moments (well, to be strictly accurate, Whale had their moment), but it was clear from the outset that The Cardigans were the leaders of this particular pack. Somewhere between girlie bedsit indie, loungey jazz and stereotypical Scandinavian pop music, they also had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of very good songs and by a stroke of good fortune their UK launch couldn't have been better timed. The Cardigans' music sat perfectly alongside both so-called 'Britpop' (which, although the 'history books' seem keen to forget this, had a far wider pan-European slant before Oasis came along and started messing everything up) and its curious offshoot, the easy listening-fixated 'Loungecore' movement. Having a sensitive, bookish, extremely easy-on-the-eye lead singer didn't exactly hinder their cause either.

Life, the 1995 album that brought them to the attention of the UK's record-buying public, was promoted as their first offering but that wasn't strictly true. Life was in fact an amalgamation of the best tracks from the two albums they had already released in their native Sweden, Life and the previous year's curiously-titled Emmerdale. Even though the resultant 'new' album was somewhat overmanned, some tracks had to be lost along the way and were consigned to back catalogue oblivion. A lot of this was slighter fare including In The Afternoon, Cloudy Sky, Our Space, Seems Hard, Last Song, Pikebubbles, Sunday Circus Song, Closing Time and the endearingly silly Over The Water (although some of these did feature as bonus tracks in other territories); a more surprising omission was Black Letter Day, a strong and catchy number that had previously been released as a single in Sweden. Meanwhile, if anyone can shed any light on what the elusive Happy Meal (presumably an earlier version of Happy Meal II, as featured on their 'second' - ie third - album First Band On The Moon) was exactly, then please do. [Update! It was just an early mix of Happy Meal]

A bit of a myth has grown up in recent years, particularly after The Cardigans' brief dalliance with heavy rotation on MTV, that Life was largely twee and cloying and generally unlistenable to anyone bar particularly fey indie kids who were scared of loud guitars. This, it can be safely said, is nonsense; the album does admittedly have one foot in a studied form of what might be termed tweeness, but this is tempered by mellow jazzy tones and touches of mock-abrasiveness, and by the fact that the songwriting is garnished with the sort of frost-dusted ambience that might reasonably be expected of a band who had grown up amid excessive quantities of snow. This was - perhaps unintentionally - mirrored by the sleeve design, where subdued light blues and turquoises rubbed shoulders with a photo of vocalist Nina Persson dressed up as a cutesy fluffy-jacketed ice skater. This was in fact part of an 'interchangeable cover design' conceit that also featured the floppy fringed Boy Cardigans dressed up as acrobats, submarine commanders and the like, but it's a fair bet that the pretty girl in skates remained steadfastly rooted to the front of most copies.

Life opens with a swirling organ flitting from speaker to speaker, and the sound of Nina fumbling with some matches, clearing her throat and lighting a firework, which explodes in a hilariously muted fashion just as the music kicks in. This is the intro to Carnival, the first track to be released as a single from this reshuffled version of the album. It also manages to put paid to all this 'twee' nonsense straight away; not just with the funky colourful-lights-on-a-dark-wintry-night backing that shuffles around like a barrel organ caught between two bumper cars (and also has some weird stretchy guitar sounds hidden away in the mix), but with the lyrics as well. Carnival is an everyday story of boy-meets-girl on the way to see the "bright lights from giant wheels", but they're both too shy to do anything about it and just end up going on the bumpy slide for a bit. For obvious reasons it's presented from the female protagonist's point of view, bemoaning the fact that she'd intended to "take you down there just to make you mine in a Merry-Go-Round" but has resigned herself to the fact that "I will never know 'cause you will never show". Her frustration - both at the non-move making indie boy and at herself - is cleverly signposted through occasional repetitions of the chorus line "come on and love me now" being growled with an impatience that suggests she wishes one or the other of them would just get on with it and make said 'move' before they have to go home and watch Den Olaf Prott Utställning (Inlemmande Moose Omväxling Timme) on Sveriges TV.

Carnival is a fine way to start any album, which is why it's strange to find Gordon's Gardenparty straight after it. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with this prettified laid-back piano and flute-driven bossanova about being told you have a cute dress whilst drinking "bubbly pink champagne on ice" at a party also attended by, erm, Inspector Clouseau, just that it's a lot closer to the wrong end of the Twee-o-meter than the opening track and sounds a little out of place next to it. That said, it does boast a rather impressive non-twee instrumental break featuring an Isley-Brothers-meet-Edwyn-Collins guitar solo and handclaps.

Daddy's Car, on the other hand, is much more like it. A world away from the boneheaded, risibly 'debauchery'-fuelled road trips depicted in the average (in both senses of the word) Hollywood movie, this is a chronicle of some polite and civilised European youngsters borrowing the titular parental vehicle for a jaunt "from Luxembourg to Rome, from Berlin to the moon, from Paris to Lausanne, from Athens to the sun", burning the candle at both ends in a whirl of hotel bars and finding a card to send from wherever they went. It's by far the best composition on here - no mean feat in this impressive showcase of songwriting skills - and serves up yet another challenge to the lazy critical assumption by throwing in a lot of jerky distorted guitar work over the expected mannered jangling.

Sick & Tired was the second single to be lifted from the album, and possibly the only chart-troubler in history to make prominent use of a bassoon. Although the band were far from being 'Sixties Revivalists' or any such nonsense, there were certainly some retro tinges to Life and this minor key jangler was heavily rooted in them, containing as it does an anachronistic woodwind arrangement, 'Beat Boom'-era strumming and a Hank Marvin-esque guitar solo. However, the sixties they were harking back to was a very different one (or should that be 'were very different ones'???) to that which their unimaginative UK-based post-Oasis 'Noelrock' dullards believed themselves to be mining. This was an altogether different vision of that over-eulogised decade, and probably a much colder one too, refracted through a land where chilly Moomin-fixated winds blew as The Hootenanny Singers were held up as the last word in far-out psychedelia. Perhaps betraying Cultural Imperialism in full effect, the idea that 'The Sixties' might have been subject to slight cultural variations is generally a mystery to those who are force-fed the legacy of Swinging London, only ever vaguely and tantalisingly hinted at by European films, literature and indeed pop records. Its influence is all over Life, though, and not just in the music itself; the promo videos for Rise & Shine and Black Letter Day leaned heavily on the grainy European art film semi-genre (particularly the latter, which was built around black and white footage of Nina miming to the song on a couch in a threadbare studenty 'pad'), while Carnival saw them decked out as a sixties cabaret band.

Despite containing the lone English-as-a-second-language slipup of the entire album ("tired of being weightless, for all these looking-good boys", and it's still not clear whether the narrator was trying to get attention by starving herself or simply ejecting herself into space), the downbeat lyrics of Sick & Tired are a real highlight and point towards the band's obsession with darker themes of emotional anguish, which were also lurking just below the surface of a couple of other tracks on Life and would be given an alarming full-blown exploration on First Band On The Moon. It's basically the sound of a moping attic-flat-dwelling girl putting on a brave face after rejection and/or humiliation, feigning contempt for transparent excuses ("you can always say you did no major harm, oh spare me if you please"), but at the same time admitting to being "sick, tired and sleepless, with no-one else to shine for, sick of all my distress, but I won't show I'm still poor"). Just in case there was any doubt, the coda spells it out in no uncertain terms: "symptoms are so deep, something here's so wrong, nothing is complete, nowhere to belong, I think I'd better stay here on my own". Turned out nice again, eh?

Just as the listener is starting to get a bit worried about the narrator of Sick & Tired, and wondering how to make sure that all sharp objects and Sylvia Plath books are put out of her way on a high shelf, along comes the altogether brighter Tomorrow. An Obvious Third Single That Never Actually Was, this cod-Motown number with a cheerful brass accompaniment is one of the slighter offerings but not really for musical reasons; rather that the third person lyrics about someone missing a girl who's a full "fifteen hour trip away" don't have the same impact as the more confessional overtones of other numbers. Still, it's well worth it for the great guitar breakdown section towards the end.

Rise & Shine, The Obvious Third Single That Actually Was, is generally considered to be Exhibit 'A' in the case of Sweeping Rock Generalisms vs. The Cardigans Being A Bit Twee. It has to be admitted that, on face value, this criticism holds a certain amount of weight, but Rise & Shine is a good deal more sophisticated than the average annoyingly chirpily-chorused pop song. The rising and shining suggested by the title is not some Rod, Jane & Freddy-esque celebration of the fact that when the sun comes up it's morning, but a futile exhortation by the presumably now slightly less distraught narrator of Sick & Tired to herself to cheer up a bit. Although she claims that "I want to be alone for a while, I want the Earth to breathe to me, I want the waves to grow loud, and I want the sun to bleed down", she's also getting a bit tired of her own miserablism and so has taken to raising her head and whispering "rise and shine". Whether or not this did ultimately put paid to her desire to see the wounded moon is sadly unrecorded. Meanwhile, as far as gradations on the scale of tweeness are concerned, it's worth noting that the ringing one-note guitar line is a remnant from the decidedly un-chirpy original Sweden-only recording, which was somewhat angular and jagged in its minimalist arrangement and barely recognisable as the same song.

The delicate, arpeggiated Beautiful One happily sees a further upturn in mood, sung from the perspective of a girl watching her "beautiful wonderboy" dozing as the daybreak pokes through the curtains, casting "soft beams from an early sun on my truly beautiful one". More descriptive than much of the rest of the album, the lyrics take a poetic slant and speak warmly of "an envelope filled up with words for you", being "lost in the blankets", and "tasting like roses and candy bars, coffee and old cigars". Which doesn't sound very flattering, although some early promo photos of The Cardigans suggested that they were rather taken with unlit Cuban air-pollutants.

Travelling With Charley veers off at an altogether different tangent, opting for a surprisingly convincing pastiche of Cold War thriller soundtrack jazz to accompany a song about being the glamorous sidekick of some sort of psychic secret agent. By the sound of it ("my agent hasn't solved a case, my agent never finds a trace"), he's certainly no John Steed and she's the brains of the outfit; when things are left to the hapless Charley, who once had his memory wiped and walked straight into a tree, they invariably find that "once we're getting to the place, someone else has solved the case". Even going as far as to end on a 'mystery' chord, Travelling With Charley could have made a great theme for an off-the-wall detective series about the two mismatched characters. Instead, Nina Persson later ended up singing on the theme tune for a miserable remake of an off-the-wall detective series that didn't need remaking in the first place, but that's another story.

Though still far from sounding like Black Flag, Fine is a lot heavier than the rest of the album, featuring a comparatively hard sound with thumping drums and squealing guitars. Harking back to the obsessions and indeed obsession of Carnival, the protagonist here is irked that her boyfriend won't ask her to marry him, despite the fact that she already wears his "golden ring inside" ("suits me very fine"). It seems it doesn't matter whether they're upon a roof below the moon, nearby a park bench in the sun or upon the stairway to your room, she's always left pleading "why won't you wrap your life around those certain words I just found?". Despite its relative rocking-ness, Fine ends with some pretty harmonies and a fadeout flourish on the organ (not to mention Nina adding an off-mic "ooh"), and segues neatly into the jazzy waltz-time Celia Inside.

The lush arrangements of the rest of the album give way to a stripped-down sound here, with most of the song built around some improv-friendly acoustic guitar jamming and soft drumming, the odd electric piano tinkle and burst of loungey trumpet adding that bright-sunshine-on-an-icy-day feel that mirrors the mood of the lyrics. Yet another tale of moping around in a bedroom, albeit a third-person one ("you don't want the sun to shine in, so you turn the curtains down... and you don't feel it's sunny outside"), it turns out that the titular Celia is the cause of all this misery as "she won't care one way or the other" about the feelings of her jilted suitor. That jilted suitor - and it's (presumably deliberately) ambiguous over whether they are male or female - certainly does care both one way and the other, utterly crushed by her heartlessness ("you don't want no joy for a while, but you stay up late at night, it hurts you that she's still alive") and immersing themselves in poetry for comfort, but still in awe of her beauty and her purity (erm, considering the apparent situation, what 'purity' would that be exactly?).

Hey! Get Out Of My Way is another sort-of rocker, 'sort of' in the sense that the band's sturdy arrangement is counterpointed by a stereotypical Nordic flute and the reappearance of that celebrated bassoon. It appears to find the overemotional young lady sketched out in previous songs finally discovering a bit of self-confidence and telling a useless boyfriend to sling his hook in no uncertain terms ("I'm sick and tired of your dramatic ways, and when I think of all those wasted days, I shake loose of your laces"). As the song progresses this self-confidence only builds, with her first becoming blunt ("I'm not in love with you") and finally threatening "I'll be good to you if you stay gone, far out of my view".

Self-confidence is not, however, in much evidence during After All.... A piano and husky voice duet recorded in such intimacy that you can almost see Nina leaning against a grand piano in a nightclub scene in a film, it's an unremittingly bleak offering and even the brief guitar solo sounds as though it's being played by someone so haunted by the song that they give up after a couple of seconds. The opening line states "after all you were perfectly right, but I'm scaring close to insanity, though our relation just split me in two", and that 'scaring close' becomes just plain scaring when it degenerates into a long list of how on a night like this nothing stays the same, nothing looks the same, pieces fall apart, visions fall apart and finally nothing could be worse. Like The Smiths' Asleep, this is so frighteningly close to a suicide note in song that it almost makes you want to reach for an international phone directory and try and convince the young lady that life isn't so bad after all. There's something of an attempt at lightening the mood by closing with a 'nice' piano chord, but that chord really is fighting a battle that's already been lost.

Fortunately, there's a little bit of humour on hand to lift proceedings in time for the end of the album. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is, as the title rather obviously suggests, the old Black Sabbath number transposed into Cardiganland to fantastic effect, with the monster riffs of Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler replaced by jangly guitars and electric pianos, and Ozzy Osborne's bizarre Peter-Cetera-With-A-Peg-On-His-Nose singing replaced by girly whisperings. Some critics expressed bafflement at the choice of cover version and decided it must have been deliberately 'ironic', but it's worth remembering that the band were after all Euroteens and therefore no doubt not averse to punching the air to Van Halen's Jump just before chucking-out time at Club Rok Diner; indeed, they would later go on to cover Sabbath's Mr Crowley and Iron Man and Thin Lizzy's The Boys Are Back In Town, with barely a knowing smirk on their faces. Meanwhile, 'proper' heavy metal fans just got a bit shirty and humourless about it all, ignoring the fact that hearing the apocalyptic lyrics delivered in the manner of sweet nothings actually makes them even more sinister in a way.

Life is not, as so many would have us believe, the sound of overgrown toddlers resenting the fact that they advanced past the age where they could legitimately have jelly and ice cream at their birthday parties, and whose one aim in life is to metamorphose into a huge pile of that crystallised sugar from inside flying saucer sweets. Instead, it's pretty much what Nick Drake would have sounded like if he'd been Swedish, a girl, and noticeably less haunted by indefinable inner demons. For an album that actively pursues the path of the lightweight pop melody it's surprisingly deep and moody, and not for nothing did Chris Morris repeatedly plunder its contents when looking for music to back the disturbing sketches in his radio show Blue Jam.

No doubt to the annoyance of those who spent several frustrating weeks in 1995 searching for a surprisingly elusive copy after hearing Mark Radcliffe and Lard playing Sick & Tired on their in-studio Bontempi organ, Life is still widely available. No doubt with the 'Nina' cover still firmly in place.

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Higher Than The Sun, the story of Screamadelica, Foxbase Alpha, Loveless and Bandwagonesque (and much more besides), is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Inside The Infinite Misery Jumper

It just goes to show how much the internet has changed the world in such a short space of time. Back in 1997, I was what can only be described as a rabid Chris Morris fan, and more to the point not just one who was already aware of the burgeoning online fan community (and indeed had taken part in the Channel 4 messageboard pitched battle when the original transmission of Brass Eye was cancelled late in 1996) but even knew that Morris had been in talks with Radio 1 about a new show, and yet the first that I really knew about Blue Jam was when a friend phoned me up the day before the first episode went out, telling me that they had unexpectedly heard a preview clip on The Evening Session. Nowadays, of course, it would have been hashtagged to within an inch of nanomolecular implosion before the first episode had even been written (Sundays, 10:30pm, BBC2).

Quite what I might have been expecting from this new late night music-based show is something that I genuinely cannot recall; all that anyone really knew for certain was that while promoting Brass Eye earlier in the year (because, of course, he 'doesn't do interviews'), Morris had dropped some fairly substantial hints that he both wanted to go back to radio and wanted to do something completely different. Yet even then - coming as it did after three intensive years of some of the most startling and provocative comedy ever produced, characterised by full-on in-your-face attacks on all aspects of the media which for a time at least gave the feeling that change really was in the air, and which crucially included his own previous Radio 1 DJ show, which remains the most genuinely 'dangerous' radio ever broadcast - few can really have predicted just how different it would prove to be. Of course, I did later find out what his motivations for this were, and indeed how it was very nearly a very different kind of show altogether, but I'm afraid you're just going to have to read my book about Radio 1 comedy Fun At One to find that out.

And so it was that I tuned in to Radio 1 at midnight on 14th November 1997, as eager to just find out what was going on as I was to hear some new comedy, and it's no exaggeration to say that what I did hear had a significant impact on me. From the meaningless new-age-isms of the murmured intro and the hilariously disturbing opening monologue (in which Morris even seemed to be poking fun at his own work) onwards, the surreal, disorientating material which veered between shock and silliness with the frequency of a Warp Records bassline pulled you in and refused to let go. The combination of ambient dance music, Loungecore, exotic sixties pop and spectral laid-back indie that sat behind it, looped together so effectively that it was often difficult to determine when one track had finished and another had started, proved equally irresistible to someone who'd already been drawn sideways in that direction after Britpop had reneged on its original wit and verve. The overall effect was as if a melancholic beat poet had gatecrashed a late-night local radio 'Love Zone' armed with a scratched copy of the Andrew Weatherall remix of Only Love Can Break Your Heart, and it really doesn't get much better than that.

That first show carried the presumably few listeners along on a pulsating soundwave of Bjork, Stereolab, Bomb The Bass, The Chemical Brothers, Ivor Cutler, The KLF, Brigitte Bardot, an interview about American 'baby fighting' pageants, a sting about Steve Lamacq trying to shake hands with an elephant, and Morris somehow persuading some hapless individual who had complained about a TV show to judge whether Mother Theresa or Mother Theresa II would be a more suitable role model for youngsters. By the time that it washed the listeners back out into reality with a replay of the intro and an extract from the Eraserhead soundtrack (and, almost like blowing a raspberry at the end, a fragment of REM's worst single to date), something really had changed. And it wasn't the sort of change that Brass Eye had left you anticipating, either. It was an astonishing and total reinvention for someone whose name had been utterly indivisible from news-based satire only days previously, and achieved with the least fanfare imaginable. As amusingly creakily archaic as this sentence may read now, I spent the next evening running off cassette copies which I then forced into the hands of unsuspecting friends on Saturday night, who probably all thought I'd gone mad. But people HAD to hear it.

And the astonishment didn't stop there. Over the next couple of weeks came four further equally strong shows and a sixth that, only fifteen minutes in, was faded out and replaced with a repeat of the first one when it went into a thoroughly disrespectful re-edit of The Archbishop Of Canterbury's speech about The Princess Of Wales (again, if you want the full straight-from-the-horse's-mouth account of what actually happened there, you'll be wanting Fun At One). Amazingly, a full half year after that surreal couple of weeks, it still felt shocking that someone was prepared to be less than solemn and reverent about it in public. More amazingly still, Chris Morris had somehow managed to land himself in just as much hot water as ever while playing some fairly exclusionary records in the small hours of the morning. It's when you remember incidents like that you can understand why people still cling to this strange notion of him being a tireless fearless right-on crusader for something or other where nobody's actually sure what it is but whatever it is it's the satire that had to be made and no mistake down with the Daily Mail etc etc.

Of course, it couldn't last, and after three series of small-hours hilarity - Speedking Hawking, Bowie's Romantic Dinners, the Rothko monologue, "are they YOUR birds??", Fucking Noddy and his car, Michael Alexander St. John's Club News and so many others, and that's before we've even got anywhere near the over-lauded 'dark' material - and sublime music, the TV transfer followed and was inevitably a boringly literal comedown for anyone who'd been hooked by the radio version and indeed had spent long hours trying to figure out how in the name of sanity they could do a visual version in the first place. Ahead would lie several serious differences of opinion with the work of someone whom I'd once been such a rabid fan of, but that's another story and in any case, maybe that's the exact same point that he was trying to make with that bit of REM back in the very first show.

Anyway, the whole point of this is to say that Blue Jam is being given a hopefully more or less intact repeat run by Radio 4 Extra starting tonight - its first repeat anywhere, in fact - and you really ought to give it a listen if you're even vaguely interested in comedy or music. Oh and by the way, that loop under the first 'Doctor' sketch is from Le Madrague by Brigitte Bardot.

You can get Fun At One in paperback here or as an eBook here.