Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which writer and occasional broadcaster Tim Worthington talks to a guest about some of the things that they remember that nobody else ever does. Joining Tim in this episode is writer Stephen O'Brien, who wonders why he gets blank looks all round whenever he mentions Steven Moffat sitcom The Office, early 'lad mag' LM, eighties puzzle cash-in paperback You Can Do The Cube, KLF-affiliated early Stock Aitken Waterman act Brilliant, The Beachcombers and other last-minute ITV emergency schedule replacement standbys, and The Morecambe And Wise Board Game. No he's not making that last one up. Along the way we'll be finding out how many issues of 'Razzle And Wise' were published, how many characters Stefan Dennis can play on stage at once, and which seventies action serial is slightly less preferable to actually being at school.
Support Looks Unfamiliar by buying one of Tim's books! The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society is available in paperback here, from the Kindle Store here, or as a full-colour eBook here. And there's several other books to choose from here...
While Alan McGee’s failure to transform Primal Scream, Saint Etienne, My Bloody Valentine and Teenage Fanclub overnight into globe-straddling millionaire megastars was almost entirely down to both the ultimately uncompromising nature of their music and, in most cases, the varyingly ‘difficult’ nature of the artists concerned, it is still true to say that any such ambitions were decidedly at odds with an industry that was heavily weighted against allowing independent labels to succeed on their own terms.
Indeed, there was some suggestion around this time that The British Phonographic Industry felt that it was time that the troublesome independent sector was brought into line. Amongst several moves seemingly intended to weaken its constitution and assimilate it comfortably into the mainstream were a series of showcases for indie bands in 1991 under the banner ‘The Great British Music Weekend’, from which no participants seemed to walk away with anything short of serious misgivings, and a concerted push to replace the Independent Chart with a wider Alternative Chart, which would have allowed major label million-sellers like Nirvana to dominate at the expense of smaller scale acts; this latter ambition was seen off by a particularly sustained rebuttal from the NME. If the independent sector was to retain its integrity, then clearly it would have to stand apart from any attempts to get it to play by everyone else’s rules.
Perhaps sensing all of this, on 12th February 1992, The KLF brought the curtain down on the artier end of indie music’s association with the mainstream in fine style. Rumours had been circulating for some time that the million-selling yet defiantly uncoinventional dance music duo were struggling with the pressures and demands of the industry and their unexpected and indeed unprecedented level of success, and that Bill Drummond in particular was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Reports had filtered out that the follow-up album they were working on, tentatively titled The Black Room, combined solidly commercial hooks with hardcore techno and ugly guitar noise. With a likely award for Best British Group in the offing, The KLF were booked to open the 1992 Brit Awards, the annual music industry corporate bash notorious for lavishing more attention on money men and high earning artists – even if they hadn’t released a record in several years – than on any actual developments in the music scene. For two erstwhile punk rockers and art students who had already developed a serious grudge against the industry ‘suits’, the temptation to create havoc was too great to pass up.
Instead of the expected high-concept spectacle, the audience were treated to a flashing blue police light and Drummond – walking with the aid of a crutch – announcing "this is television freedom" before yelling the lyrics to their previously radio-friendly singalong 'Stadium House' chart-topper 3am Eternal at a ferocious speed, accompanied by hardcore punk-metal band Extreme Noise Terror, and closing the performance by firing blanks at the audience from a machine gun while the band’s publicist Scott Piering announced "Ladies and Gentlemen – The KLF have left the music business". The audience had in fact got off lightly – only at the very last minute did Extreme Noise Terror manage to talk Drummond out of catapulting a dead sheep into the middle of the parade of expensive evening wear.
The final close-up of Drummond – who would subsequently devote himself exclusively to art and writing (though occasionally with musical elements) – shows a man clearly feeling like a huge burden has been lifted from him; the audience – apart from classical conductor Georg Solti who had laughably walked out in ‘protest’ - simply clap out of politeness with disgusted expressions, although a longshot reveals veteran agit-prop singer-songwriter Billy Bragg applauding with great enthusiasm. Rarely has the distance between art and commerce been so neatly – if accidentally – encapsulated. It would be left to bands more willing to play the game – amongst them Blur, Suede and Pulp, who in time would all have their own hair-raising escapades at The Brits – to pick up the baton a couple of years later.
This is an abridged excerpt from Higher Than The Sun, the story of Screamadelica, Foxbase Alpha, Bandwagonesque and Loveless, and how, long before Britpop, Creation Records took on the world and nearly won. You can get it as a paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.
Higher Than The Sun is a book about four albums released late in 1991 - Screamadelica by Primal Scream, Foxbase Alpha by Saint Etienne, Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub and Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, and how, long before they discovered Oasis, Creation Records took on the world and nearly won.
Back in the days before daytime radio would touch indie music with a bargepole, and when indie arists in turn were still similarly wary of the mainstream, these four albums, without a shred of compromise, came closer to commercial and critical mainstream acceptability than almost any of their peers had previously managed. Higher Than The Sun tells the story of the closely intertwined making of the four albums - one of which was completed with change left over from the recording budget, whilst another very nearly bankrupted Creation - and the sometimes unlikely shared influences and extra-curricular escapades of the four bands.
There's also plenty about their friends, colleagues and rivals including Blur, Ride, The KLF, House Of Love, Adorable, Denim, The Jesus And Mary Chain, The Manic Street Preachers, Flowered Up and Fabulous. There are stories of wild parties in hijacked mansions, studios infested by poltergeists, and listening to French football matches late at night. Along the way they cross paths with Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Chris Morris and (almost) Brian Cant. It's a story that starts with a compilation tape, and ends with a jaw-dropping act of career sucicide, and in between someone gets chased by a cow. And what's that? One of the albums wasn't on Creation? Well, that's covered as well...
You can get Higher Than The Sun in paperback here, or from the Kindle Store here.
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.
It's safe to say that I've never exactly got on with the Brit Awards. To an ordinary music-buying member of the public, it's never looked like anything other than a shallow, empty excuse for the people who sell the music to get together and show off about how great they think they are for selling it, under the pretence of celebrating the artistic achievements of musicians they clearly couldn't give a flying fuck about. If you're reading this and fuming in disagreement, well then, do something about it. It's your bloody ceremony.
In fairness, bombastic television presentation and bewildering levels of tabloid excitement aside, the actual ceremony itself is something that it's always been easy to avoid. As indeed have the actual awards and accolades that it doles out; any victory-related excitement and braggadocio soon fades and it's a fair bet that even fans of Brit recipients would be hard pushed to tell you how many they've won and what for. Meanwhile in some cases - naming no Simply Reds - the presence of that pompous stuffy emblem and a flash proudly proclaiming an album to be the work of a 'Brits Nominee' only seems to amplify the waves of tedium and laughability pulsating outwards from the rapidly Charity Shop-bound CD. It's a bit like, well, all of those other high-profile media awards which grab endless acres of column inches without ever having the slightest impact on your own personal reading, viewing or listening habits.
What's harder to avoid, however, is the constant nagging awareness at the back of your mind that The Brits exists. True, it's hardly The Great Satan, or even The Big Victor, and it's not even really the lingering bastion of Thatcherism that some try to make it out to be, but in symbolic and totemistic terms it's a troubling reminder that there's an entire industry out there that if it had its way would happily do away with anything you're remotely interested in, and churn out kerching-friendly bland music for bland people for ever more. Let us not forget that the Brits-approved music world is something that X Factor and its ilk are actually an alternative to.
It's hardly surprising, then, that over the years there have been a couple of high profile attempts at rocking the Brits boat, but even that has now been effectively streamlined and locked-down into a managed, controllable, headline-friendly and 100% safe form of 'controversy' that doesn't reflect badly on anyone involved with the ceremony itself. Adele got a bit mardy! Liam Gallagher was drunk! A dance music DJ had 'words' with an old rocker! And other entirely surprising things you weren't expecting at all! None of which - conveniently - involve anything other than a surly malcontent refusing to play along and spoiling it all for everyone who works very hard behind the scenes to make the Brit Awards the great success story that it is. Even as far back as the Mick Fleetwood/Samantha Fox-hosting debacle in 1989, there was a conscious attempt to blame it on the two admittedly ill-suited hosts (and it's worth pointing out here that La Fox had been doing live TV and radio for several years by that point without any comparable disasters; Fleetwood however should have stuck to being remixed by Arthur Baker) rather than whoever cued in the wrong guests, set up the stage back to front, or gave the green light to the whole thing in the first place. Only the year before, of course, production shortcomings had led to Andrew Lloyd Weber's meaningless speech about nothing (or at least nothing to do with anything or anyone apart from himself) overrunning so badly that there wasn't time for Rick Astley to collect his 'gong' for Single Of The Year, with a mysterious hair-mousse bloke in an expensive suit virtually snatching it away from the presenters before a sharp cut to The Who doing a not particularly exciting show-closer. Doesn't get mentioned quite so often, that.
Even the few brief but incendiary moments of subversion that did get through have been deftly swept under the carpet and are kept as far apart from official Brits history as possible. If you want evidence of this, look no further than the fact that no less than three attempts to upload videos to go with this post to YouTube have resulted in an immediate takedown due to a 'Copyright Claim' from the BPI, whereas endless clips of fucking Dido et al graciously accepting awards remain online ad infinitum. Well, yah boo sucks to that. We're going to be celebrating the incidents that The Brits would rather forget, but which are the only moments anyone else remembers, whether the BPI likes it or not. This, in a very real sense, is Television Freedom...
1992, and unlikely million-selling dance music duo The KLF are named Best British Group - albeit jointly with the depressingly inevitable Simply Red - and are booked to open The Brits at the exact moment they decide to jack in the musical project that's got out of their control and return to their quieter former existence as artists and writers. Instead of the expected pyrotechnic-laden big production number of the sort the band have become known for, the 'suits' get a lone flashing police light and a frantic thrash-metal version of 3am Eternal, ending with Bill Drummond firing some very loud blanks at an audience who probably considered U2 to be a little on the raucuous and unkempt side. Confused silence and close-ups of sour-faced women in expensive dresses ensue.
The following year, a rare outbreak of criticism over the event's predictabler-than-predictable beige-hued line-up from traditionally supportive tabloid pop columnists sees up and coming indie sexuality-straddlers Suede added to the bill at the last minute. Realising they are not going to win any friends at the event whatever they do, Brett and company up the musical abrasiveness and discomfort-occasioning homo-hetero-erotic posturing to a truly remarkable degree, scaring the audience into even less applause than you'd find at a Rebekah Brooks-led Pro-Horsemeat Rally with an address about the future of libraries from Terry Deary. Still, it's not like anyone remembers Tasmin Archer's performance, is it?
1996, and the one you've all been waiting for, as Jarvis Cocker famously pulls the rug from under Michael Jackson's innocence-proving-beyond-all-doubt Christ allegory spectacular through the medium of walking briskly across the stage whilst dressed as the 'Bionic' one off The Boy Who Won The Pools. To be honest, despite being more exciting, hilarious, and generally part of the all-too-brief Brass Eye-era 'something might change because of this' feeling that people were actually trying to start a quiet revolution from the inside, in a way it's not quite as subversive as the other two, as pretty much everyone who wasn't an insanity-fuelled Jackson fan came down heavily on Jarvis' side and applauded it as A Good Thing. Still, it was a truly thrilling moment, and without question Britpop's single greatest achievement, made all the more surreally enjoyable by the crowd cheering wildly when Jarvis appears as though they thought he was about to launch into a duet with Jacko, and by the ensuing press statement which claimed "Michael Jackson respects Pulp as artists". I'd love to know what his favourite track off Freaks was.
Meanwhile, we won't be mentioning Chumbawumba throwing a bucket of water over John Prescott, as it was a feeble and inappropriately-targeted publicity-courting gesture seemingly undertaken to prove that great revolutionary Chris Tarrant did not die in vain.
Why, you may be wondering, did all of these incidents take place so close to each other in the early nineties? Well, that was a time when the Brit-orientated side of the music industry thought that it could bring the troublesome 'alternative' sector's house into some sort of order and get it to play by their rules - anyone else remember the hideous British Music Weekend events? - but found that it still had enough fire in its heart to resent and reject such moves. Even Kingmaker, who were hardly ideological firebrands, released a single expressing their desire to 'bomb' the Brit Awards, admittedly in the days before the authorities would take such a statement too seriously and the right-on brigade would take it literally. A couple of years later, of course, Noel Gallagher and company were only too happy to play along with the mainstream's overtures, which led us into the even bigger mess we're in today.
So when James Corden hosts this year's bash on the 19th, instead of watching it go and listen to whatever you actually want to listen to. Something. Anything. Even Something/Anything, if you fancy a bit of seventies AOR. After all, in the words of another early nineties Brit-snubber, "don't be told who to like/it's your right/it's your choice to choose who to listen to..."
