Depeche Mode

FLA 31: William Ham Bevan (14/09/2025)

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Journalist, travel writer and editor William Ham Bevan has worked for nearly every national newspaper in Britain at some point over the past 30 years, plus a raft of magazines and other publications. When I first met him, about 45 years ago, when we lived in the same street and our mums were best friends, we used to talk endlessly about our twin obsessions: pop music and ridiculous TV programmes. His perceptiveness and wit has only grown since then. On the one hand, he is one of the most brilliantly professional journalists I’ve known. He is also the first person I knew who posted something on the world wide web: in around 1996, when we hadn’t seen each other for a while, I happened to find a post by him in a discussion about the scariest TV logo, and he nominated the Yorkshire TV chevron. Especially when it moved, at the start of the Ted Rogers game show 3-2-1. Don’t have nightmares.

We talked over Zoom one afternoon in early September 2025, covering such conversational terrain as: being lucky enough to have parents who are open-minded about music, keeping old tapes of the top twenty, synthesizers, schools TV soundtracks, and why sometimes humour should belong in music.  

—-

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So what’s the first music you remember hearing? What sort of music was being played in your home?

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Well, it would almost certainly have been on Swansea Sound. When I was living with my Mum and my grandfather, from 1974 till 1980 when we moved to Mumbles, I remember music being on in the background pretty much all the time. It was almost always Swansea Sound – commercial chart music. I was always quite aware of tunes that were in the charts: ABBA, the Bee Gees, or the songs from Grease. And Showaddywaddy obviously, because they never seemed to be off the charts.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Always available.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Top of the Pops would be the other thing, which we watched each week. Mum would have been in her mid-thirties at the time. Grandpa would watch it too – he’d come in, and he’d have three stock phrases. One would be: ‘Why do they keep dancing around? They’d be able to play a lot better if they stood still.’ When Legs and Co or whoever the troupe was at the time came on, he’d say, ‘God, I’ve seen more meat on a skewer.’ And then, at some point, he’d excuse himself and go out to roll a fag, saying, ‘Well at least they look as though they’re enjoying themselves.’

I reckon he looked forward to those five minutes of performative bemusement every Thursday night. Look at the costumes, shake your head, go out to the kitchen.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Pop TV now has this understanding that pretty much everyone alive has a connection with pop as we know it because rock’n’roll is seventy years old, so if you’re aware of that tradition, you’re familiar with it. But back then, there were these very wide generation gaps.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Back in those early years, I don’t remember much pop on TV beyond Top of the Pops, Tiswas, Swap Shop… and obviously those fillers on HTV when they’d play videos of ‘Wuthering Heights’ or whatever because a live broadcast had finished three minutes early.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Or they hadn’t sold enough advertising.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Indeed. But record collections… Grandpa was very much into big band stuff like Count Basie, but he was quite open-minded, as were Mum and Dad. There was no real consideration of genre – if they saw something or they heard something they liked, then they’d get it.

When it was the US bicentenary in 1976, there were a lot of broadcasts from the States of military parades and tattoos. Gramps actually wrote to the US embassy saying he really enjoyed some of this music that was played, and wondered what it was and how he could buy it. About two weeks after that, a huge package wrapped up in ribbons turned up on the doorstep, from the US embassy: it was about seven or eight box sets of LPs, some of them pressed on red, white and blue vinyl. I’ve still got some of them – things like ‘A Bicentennial Salute to the Nation from the United States Guards band’.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There’s going to be a lot of Sousa, isn’t there?

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Yeah, I think the Monty Python theme [‘The Liberty Bell March’, composed 1893] is probably in there somewhere.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So did your grandfather’s interest in big band music lead to this amazing interest in music in his children?

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

I’m not sure how the Hams came to be such a musical family – although we were really only two-thirds of a musical family. My Mum had two brothers: John was a jazz trumpeter, had a music shop in town, and had a jazz radio show on Swansea Sound. And then you had Pete, who’d been in Badfinger, and tragically ended up taking his own life. But Mum was the cuckoo in the nest. I mean, she tried learning violin when she was at school. She was a bit of a tearaway, apparently – I used to have one of her old end-of-term school reports, and the headmistress had written, ‘Wicked without malice’. She fell off the roof of the school – no idea what she was doing up there – and she injured both of her arms. Her violin teacher said, ‘Well, let’s take that as a sign from God.’ That was the end of her musical ambitions, and I’m afraid I’ve taken after her, rather than John or Pete.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Didn’t you do some keyboard playing, though? I seem to remember, though this was after my time, that you were in a band at school.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

I did muck about with synths. We used to cover ‘The Perfect Kiss’ by New Order, because if you look at the Jonathan Demme video, quite a lot of it is close-ups of Peter Hook’s fretboard and Gillian Gilbert’s keyboards. So it actually shows you how to play it. And yes, we did do one gig at the Bishop Gore Comprehensive school hall. There’s one surviving tape of it, and I keep it under lock and key.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

What else was in your set, then?

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

We did ‘Everything Counts’ by Depeche Mode. And then we did ‘Tainted Love’ and something very odd happened to the sequencer, halfway through. It started hammering out tom-toms on the drum machine, turning the song into a mash-up of something not far off ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ by Joy Division. Our set was followed by two heavy metal acts, and that was a salutary tale, because people had been politely sitting down in the hall during our set, but once the metal band came on, the whole stage was swamped and there were people moshing in the front. And we thought, Oh, okay…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s always been a big rock town, has Swansea. But your mum, who was a great friend of my mum’s – this is how we know each other – and who I was terribly fond of, had worked in telly for a bit, at Thames Television in London.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

She didn’t spend a long time at Thames, but she did hang round with a lot of people from that scene… a Fleet Street crowd. People like the This Week presenter Llew Gardner – she was his PA for years – the Parkinsons, Michael and Mary, and Hugh McIlvanney. And she’d been part of that quote-unquote Swinging London world. There were so many tales that she’d start telling me and would then say, ‘I’ll tell you the rest when you’re older’; sadly, she died when I was 17, so she never had the chance to. She’d mention stuff like having been present at the party where Germaine Greer’s husband walked out on her – apparently everybody was smashed out of their heads – or going to see the England v Scotland football international with Telly Savalas. It turns out he was a sports producer and reporter before he got into acting.

But to bring it back to music, she knew a lot more than she let on about. She didn’t often volunteer it, and I think that had a lot to do with what happened to Pete. I think she almost felt guilty, and didn’t like to think too much about what she used to listen to, because she loathed what the music business did to her brother and it was bound up in all of that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Actually, I can remember being about 11 or 12, this was the early 80s, and being this curious pop obsessive, and trying (innocently, I think) to ask your mum about Pete and his career – I knew he’d died tragically young but I didn’t know how it had got to that – and she understandably changed the subject very abruptly.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

What did connect us, though, was The Rock’n’Roll Years [a presenter-free programme using news footage, music clips and captions, running on BBC1, 1985–87, and covering the years between 1956 and 1979*), one of the few programmes we’d watch religiously as a family – it was that, M*A*S*H and Ski Sunday. But things would come on The Rock’n’Roll Years, and Mum would make remarks… a band like Nazareth would appear and she’d say, ‘Oh I went to see them once’, and you’d think, Hm, that doesn’t strike me as being very you.

[*A further Rock’n’Roll Years series covering the 1980s aired on BBC1 in 1994.]

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I think as a young person, though, you quite often go and see all sorts of things, just because you go out. Regardless of what it is.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

That programme was a massive piece of my education in rock and pop music – probably second only to coming over your house, reading Smash Hits and hearing your latest purchases. It was so well put-together, and not all the musical choices were obvious. you even had some album tracks, like ‘Hairless Heart’ by Genesis or ‘Medicine Jar’ by Wings, which I didn’t identify till years after.

I genuinely believe The Rock‘n’ Roll Years should be part of the National Curriculum. The downside is that even now, some songs are firmly linked in my mind with the news images played over them. ‘Life on Mars?’? That’s the Russian Concorde blowing up at the Paris Air Show. ‘Tubular Bells’? The IRA bombing Oxford Street. And unfortunately, Cyril Smith winning the Rochdale by-election for Alice Cooper’s ‘Elected’.

—–

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Something we both had as kids, now, but we didn’t know about at the time because we didn’t know each other: we each had one tape of the Radio 1 top 20. Yours is from Sunday 18 September 1977, when the number one is Elvis’s ‘Way Down’. Mine is from Sunday 2 April 1978, when the number one is ‘Wuthering Heights’.

(The dates above refer to the Sunday broadcasts for that week’s top 20 singles chart, but are officially dated for the previous day, ie the Saturday. You can find the full chart for that week in September 1977 here, and the full chart for that week in April 1978 here.)

JUSTIN LEWIS:

When I spoke to Ian Wade for the last episode [FLA 30], he described this multi-artist K-Tel compilation he owned as a small child as having ‘all the food groups’ in music, it had lots of different genres present. And these top 20s we had on tape, before we started buying our own records, have that same sort of air. I would say my tape has about fourteen belters on it out of twenty, and even the novelty records have a charm to them. I had my favourites – Blondie, Kate Bush, Costello, Nick Lowe, Darts – but I would often put the tape on and play all of it, no skipping ‘Ally’s Tartan Army’ or Brian and Michael. I’d just leave it running.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Yeah, I felt like it was cheating to skip songs. This sounds such a very odd thing to say in the streaming era – where, in one click, you can get just about and track you want – but I was insanely superstitious about cassettes. I always felt as though if you listened to one side, you had to listen to the other. Even if I didn’t particularly like one side of the cassette, I would force myself to listen, because the artist had put as much effort into side two as side one. It’s such a bonkers way of thinking.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

But it’s listening to an album as an album, though – as a complete piece of work.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

It’s the same with this chart cassette. I’ve still got it, with all Tom Browne’s links. Terrible sound quality, as the tape has degraded, but you can just about make it out. And at the end of the one of the sides, my grandfather managed to tape over the end with a recording of the three-year-old me singing ‘A Bonnet Made of Lace’, which I think cuts off part of ‘Float On’ by the Floaters.

Inevitably, I’ve made that top 20 into a Spotify playlist. A few months back, one song – Carly Simon’s ‘Nobody Does it Better’ – suddenly became unavailable, and it really pisses me off when anything like this happens. It drives home to you that not only do you not own any of this music, you don’t even own the rights to listen to it. It’s entirely at somebody else’s whim whether you’re permitted to or not. Entirely my own fault for using Spotify, of course. I hate myself for it, but I’m a heavy Spotify user, and I was an early adopter.  

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Space’s ‘Magic Fly’ in there, the nostalgia rush for me there was just ludicrous.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Having ‘Magic Fly’ at number two in that top 20, and ‘Oxygène’ by Jean-Michel Jarre at number four, very similar in some ways – both gateway drugs for me and electronic music. And there’s another synth-tinged instrumental in that chart, ‘The Crunch’ by the Rah Band.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Which is a bit like an electronic cover of ‘Spirit in the Sky’.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Yes, now you mention it.

——

FIRST: 10cc: The Original Soundtrack (Mercury Records, album, 1975)

Extract: ‘Une nuit à Paris’

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

I’d had other records bought for me before I bought this 10cc album. The first one I remember was ‘Mississippi’ by Pussycat (1976), so I’d have been about two when it came out – I’d probably tried to sing along with it once, and then Mum thought, Oh I’ll get this for him. Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)’ – that was another one.

But Original Soundtrack was the first tape that I went and paid cash money for – probably with a fiver from a Christmas card. Phonogram had a low-price reissue series in the mid-80s called ‘Priceless’ and all the early 10cc albums were in that range. Dad already had the 10cc Greatest Hits [1972–78] compilation, which I absolutely loved. But I wanted the cassette of this. I didn’t like handling vinyl records – media people lionise vinyl, but I hated it, I was paranoid about scratching them.

In terms of getting hold of old stuff, reissue labels were an absolute boon, something that’s been quite forgotten. That EMI bargain imprint, ‘Fame’ – we had loads of those tapes in the house. You could buy them from filling stations and newsagents, along with all sorts of other weird and wonderful stuff on the Music for Pleasure label. In places like Lewisnews in Mumbles, there’d be a carousel of tapes by the counter.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Can you remember where you bought this from, then?

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

I can’t, I’m afraid. I can tell you where I got my third-ever cassette, which was 10cc’s previous album, Sheet Music (1974). I know I got that from the David Morgan’s department store in Cardiff, because I still have the till receipt from February 1986 in the cassette sleeve – you kept those in case the tape got chewed up. Original Soundtrack would have been the year before that. And my second purchase, in between Original Soundtrack and Sheet Music, was Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygene.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So you’d have known the 10cc singles from your dad’s compilation, but can you remember how you reacted to something like the ‘Une nuit à Paris’ suite that opens The Original Soundtrack?

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

I was about eleven when I bought this, and before that, I thought albums were just collections of singles or songs. I didn’t realise they are things that are supposed to work together, or have suites that could take up an entire side of tape. But this cassette also lacked a lyric sheet, and generally early on with cassettes, the packaging was an afterthought. If you wanted the big sleeve with all the artwork, you had to opt for the LP.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yes, a convenience thing when it came to the cassette format.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

It was a couple of years later that I saw the proper gatefold sleeve of the LP, which had the lyrics inside. The lyrics for ‘Une nuit a Paris’ are presented like a rock operetta, with all the characters’ names and lines. Now, one factoid you tend to see all over the Internet is that it was the inspiration for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ [released in October 1975, seven months after Original Soundtrack], but I’ve never seen reliable evidence for that. I think it’s just that they sound similar – they’re trying to achieve similar things and they were quite close in time.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I’ll tell you who I thought of when I was listening to ‘Une nuit a Paris’ yesterday: vocally it sounds like Neil Hannon! But reading around, I found some interesting quotes about this record. I’m sure you know all these, I know you’re a very big 10cc fan. The band’s Eric Stewart said this: ‘When “Une nuit a Paris” first came out, it was passed off as a “10cc trying to be funny again” track.’ And then Kevin Godley is quoted as saying that it was supposed to be ‘a serious piece of music… but someone dismissed it as an extended piece of fun which pissed me off.’

Now – 10cc often got accused of ‘cleverness for the sake of it’, and if you are creative and imaginative in how you make records, it leaves you open to a charge of cleverness. What are your feelings about that, and how do you process their serious tracks and their more frivolous work?

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Maybe it goes back to that Frank Zappa album title, Does Humour Belong in Music? I think it does, but it’s something that really seemed to fall out of fashion from the late 80s into the dreary, earnest 90s – this idea that you can be humorous, arch, witty, and still be writing serious and credible music. Anything that’s lyrically funny almost gets written off as throwaway.

Some of 10cc’s songs are absolutely beautiful: things like ‘Fresh Air for My Mama’ on the first album (10cc, 1973) or ‘Old Wild Men’ and ‘Somewhere in Hollywood’ on the Sheet Music album (1974). That one’s Godley and Crème par excellence. I mean that’s probably them pushing godleyness and cremeliness as far as it can go.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Cremeliness is next to Godleyness.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Yes, I thought we’d get round to that one. And another thing that’s all over the Internet with 10cc: they’re forever compared to Steely Dan. OK, they have the studio perfectionism in common and the musicianship – though that’s something often overlooked with 10cc…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There’s a bit more jazz in the influence with Steely Dan, I think.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

But where it falls down for me is that both Steely Dan and 10cc had spent time as songwriters for hire. Both paid their dues in Brill Building, Tin Pan Alley-type settings – having to come up with quotas of songs, quickly. Steely Dan loathed having to do that, they felt they were degrading themselves. Whereas all four members of 10cc did it, but there’s still this residual affection about that pop sausage machine – even if they did satirise it in stuff like ‘Worst Band in the World’.

As for the humour with 10cc, a lot of it sailed over my head at the time. I didn’t have any knowledge of the common tropes of Jewish humour, and they are a very Jewish group, when you look at the set-ups and pay-off lines: ‘Art for art’s sake/Money for God’s sake’. But it’s also very British. It’s like I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue: they can’t resist the obvious pun or the cheesy joke. That’s something I love. Lines like ‘It’s me that’s been dogging your shadow/It’s me that’s been shadowing your dog’ [from ‘Iceberg’, 1976] or ‘Waiters mass debating my woman’ [from ‘Don’t Hang Up’, 1976]. Part of me thinks, ‘Oh for God’s sake’, but I also find it endearing – that they probably know it’s terrible but they can’t resist it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There’s often this thought process with pop: don’t put anything in that will jar, or which could put people off you. Better to have something bland and beige rather than ‘what the hell are they on about?’ Which is sometimes a shame, because the mystery is part of the allure.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

With 10cc, if you counted up all the songs, the majority of them are written from the point of a view of a fictional protagonist. That’s one aspect where the Steely Dan comparison does hold water. It’s generally someone very unsavoury, a low life. You have stalkers, voyeurs, even a talking timebomb that’s about to blow up a jumbo jet [‘Clockwork Creep’, off Sheet Music]. It’s always risky, because there are people keen to take lyrics at face value, and assume it’s the singer venting their own sentiments. Why can’t music be dramatic in that sense of the word? When Hamlet’s giving a soliloquy, you don’t think ‘That’s what Shakespeare thinks.’ That’s a terrible analogy, but you know what I mean.

—–

LAST: RON GEESIN: Basic Maths (Trunk Records, album, 2024)

Extract: ‘Welcome to Mathematics’

JUSTIN LEWIS: This might be a contender for the most niche choice so far in our 31 episodes… and yet, to anyone who watched or experienced schools television in the UK around the turn of the 1980s, they will know this. This is a collection of theme and incidental music from the ITV schools series Basic Maths (ATV, 1981, Central 1982–86ish) by the Scottish-born experimental musician and composer Ron Geesin. And the only disappointment about this is it led me to see if Ron’s soundtrack for the earlier ITV maths series Leapfrog (ATV, 1978–81) was out on there on streaming. But it isn’t. At least, not yet. I mean, the Leapfrog theme is kind of nightmarish.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Yeah. We were both at Mumbles Junior Mixed School, though not at the same time. It’s only with the passing of time that I’ve realised how bizarre that school was. Parts of it were absolutely Edwardian – stuff like the teacher blowing a series of four whistles to pipe you in from the schoolyard, like it was a parade ground; segregation of the sexes at playtime; and of course, corporal punishment administered in front of the whole class with a bloody cricket bat. And then in the middle of all that, you’d have the TV wheeled in for these very progressive and whimsical schools programmes. Two that we watched were Starting Science and Basic Maths, and both of those were scored by Ron Geesin.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Wow, he did Starting Science as well.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Yes. Starting Science had a track called ‘Twisted Pair’, which has been my ringtone for about the past ten years.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s funny how maths and science schools series in particular seemed to go with classical music for a while and then changed tack. There was a show called Maths Workshop, made before colour came in, but was still being repeated in 1978 with the same theme as Face the Music… you know, ‘Popular Song’ from William Walton’s ‘Façade’. Then there was Maths Topics which had no presenter, all animation, but which had JS Bach’s ‘Badinerie’, which had also been the Picture Book theme in the 50s and 60s. If you go and check these out, they’re immediately recognisable. But then you had this influx of radiophonic electronic output, it was everywhere. And I had assumed that Ron Geesin was part of the Radiophonic Workshop for a while, but he had an entirely different sort of career, as you will probably know. I’d imagine you’re something of a connoisseur of his by now.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Yeah, though at the time, I don’t know if we even saw the credits of this – the teacher had probably already switched off the television and was wheeling it out of the room on its sturdy metal trolley. But yeah, he was a sort of one-man ITV Radiophonic Workshop. I’ve been following his stuff for a while, he’s not a particularly prolific composer. He’s done a few soundtracks… Sunday Bloody Sunday…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And also this strange documentary film from 1970 called The Body, about the human body, made by Tony Garnett and Roy Battersby. Geesin did the soundtrack with Roger Waters, who’d been a golfing opponent of Ron’s, apparently, this was just before Geesin helped out on Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother – and it had lots of experimentation on it, to the point where one track, ‘Our Song’, basically consists of lots of fart noises. He put a mic down the toilet pan and it was a pun on ‘stereo panning’. So there you have it.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

I caught him live just before COVID hit, in what he said on stage would be his last ever gig. I think it was the 50th anniversary of the Chapter Arts Centre, in Cardiff. Originally when they were raising money to start Chapter [founded in 1971], he was on the bill at a gala concert at Sophia Gardens. So he came back to Chapter Arts – and it was literally just him on stage with a tack piano and a Steptoe’s yard of other stringed, keyed and skinned instruments. And he just improvised for an hour and a half. I mean, it was absolutely compelling, the most bizarre concert I’ve ever been to. I’ve always bracketed him with Ivor Cutler, probably for no more complicated a reason than ‘they’re both Scottish’. But anyway, at the end, he said – and I’m not going to attempt the accent [let the record state he did not attempt the accent], ‘Well, this is my last gig, because I’ve found doing live concerts now interferes with my bowels too much.’ I don’t know if he’s actually held to that, or if he’s done any more performances since.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

As with 10cc, I do find myself wondering if it’s meant to be funny sometimes.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Have you read his books?

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There are books?

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

He’s produced a two-volume encyclopaedic history of the adjustable spanner. He’s the world authority on the adjustable spanner. And it’s entirely earnest.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Oh that’s right. I read an interview with him in The Wire. Seems he acquired the collection of the previous world authority on the adjustable spanner after he died.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

But anyway. When I heard that this Basic Maths album existed, there was no question, I was bloody well going to get that. A nice bit of nostalgia, but also a chance to work out if it’s as good or as strange as I recalled. Obviously I’d seen odds and sods of these programmes uploaded on YouTube. But this album… I was blown away. I really think some of it stands comparison with Wendy Carlos and Vangelis.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There’s loads of ideas in it.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

It’s amazing that all that musical inventiveness and effort went into a TV schools series that must have been produced on a shoestring – animations produced using scissors and sticky-back plastic, and Fred Harris and Mary Waterhouse just talking over a few building blocks and stencilled shapes.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I find myself thinking of how Look Around You, Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz’s schools science pastiche in the early 2000s used their own specially composed music [under the name Gelg] to evoke that early 80s period, but actually the music in this is weirder. And obviously one immediately thinks of things like Boards of Canada…

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Well, I’m not really on board with the whole hauntology trope. I think it’s a really reductive way of looking at things. The idea that everything back in this earlier era was uncanny, eerie… I just don’t think that holds water with Ron Geesin. I find his music very human, very humane if you like, very joyful, very playful. I can’t bracket it with that ‘spirit of dark and lonely water lurking behind you’ or ‘chucking a frisbee into the substation’.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yes, I do wonder if public information films have a lot to answer for there. I think some of that is just because the technology was still evolving. Television back then was generally a comforting presence with the proviso that something could come on that might scare the crap out of you, whether an electronic sound or the nightmarish face of a puppet. But that fear could be quite momentary, and then you’d be on to the next thing. I think the reason the hauntology thing took off is that, on television now, everyone’s a bit too keen to be your mate, whereas back in the day, it wasn’t quite that simple.

But one thing I really didn’t know about Geesin… I’d assumed he had a classical background or something, but not at all, seems it was jazz, he was a big Louis Armstrong fan, loved Black American jazz.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

There’s a sort of general ease, a looseness, that’s quite human. A lot of the electronic music I like does colour outside the lines a bit. I think I read in one of the muso mags once that Pet Shop Boys’ ‘West End Girls’ didn’t work until they stopped sequencing the bassline and decided to play it live in the studio. Because the previous versions just didn’t have that feel. It needed that looseness.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I once heard Brian Eno on some podcast – might have been Adam Buxton’s – saying that he thought Superstition by Stevie Wonder is actually quite sloppily played. But that’s part of the appeal, I think, it means it swings.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Absolutely. When I listen to 70s Kraftwerk now, which was branded ‘robot music’ at the time, they use things like the Vako Orchestron – actually an electromechanical device, with a spinning playback disk inside it. What stands out is the wow and flutter on it. It’s not precise. It may be a robot, but it’s a very analogue, sloppy robot, with dials and clockwork gears, working to fuzzy tuning signals rather than digital pulses.

—–

ANYTHING: TANGERINE DREAM: Exit (Virgin Records, album, 1981)

Extract: ‘Exit’

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I note this album was released in September 1981, the very same month Basic Maths debuted on television.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

I did not know that!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So why this one in particular? Because obviously Tangerine Dream has quite a back catalogue.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Well, two things really. One is perfectly simple. When I get my end-of-year Spotify report, it always tells me this is the album I’ve listened to the most, by a quite extraordinary degree.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Do you put this on when you’re working?

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Yeah. I find, when I’m working, that I can only listen to familiar music. I can’t do new stuff, particularly if I’m doing close work such as editing. If it’s new music, I end up getting wrapped up in it. But on to the other reason for choosing this. I got into electronic music in the mid-80s – Jean-Michel Jarre first of all, as I mentioned earlier – and it was difficult to know where to go from there. There weren’t other people in school who liked this stuff. So I could take a punt on spending my pocket money on something, but that’d be a gamble.

By chance, my dad worked with someone who was into this kind of thing, and he happened to mention to him once that his son liked Jarre. So this bloke taped the entire Jarre catalogue that I didn’t have – Equinox, Zoolook and Magnetic Fields – plus a Tangerine Dream compilation, which was the first I’d heard of them.

Having got all that, Christmas was coming up, and I went into HMV, looked at all the cassette sleeves of Tangerine Dream albums and wondering which was the best introduction to this group after that compilation. This one, Exit, is the one I chose. And so I got that for Christmas, but that year, I also got a yellow Sony sports Walkman.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I remember those looked rather stylish at the time!

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Oh, it was amazing. It was the first Walkman to have in-ear headphones. They weren’t like the ear buds you have now – they still had the band that went around the top, but not those horrible foam rubber earpieces that perished into tacky gloop. Instead they had these little discs that went sideways into your lugholes. And the sound was absolutely amazing. I mean, my yardstick at the time was the JVC mono boom box I had in my room, so it didn’t have to clear a particularly high bar, but you know… Christmas morning that year, Tangerine Dream and the yellow Walkman, and when I shoved that tape on, it really was one of those ‘Dorothy lands in Oz’ moments when everything suddenly goes into colour.

But even without the nostalgia kick, I think this is a genuinely great album – it’s the soundtrack to the greatest 80s sci-fi movie never made. At the time, Tangerine Dream had just scored Thief, the Michael Mann film, originally called Violent Streets. That was all right. But it’s a measure of how good Exit is that it’s been used so much for TV and film. Part of it got used in Risky Business, which the group mostly scored using bits of their old albums. More recently, ‘Exit’ cropped up on Stranger Things, and was supposedly a big influence on the original music created for it.

There’s something about this era, the early 80s, that I love. It’s that early digital sound – those really brittle, crunchy tones. One thing you may notice at the start of ‘Kiew Mission’, the first song: it uses the same sound as the start of Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ (released at the end of 1982), which was apparently a stock sound from the Synclavier.

That spell when people were using early digital stuff like the PPG Wave synthesizer, really speaks to me. There’s also Larry Fast, Peter Gabriel’s keyboard player, who made a series of albums under the name of Synergy, and used the Bell Labs digital synthesizer; and Wendy Carlos was making very similar sounds, too. It just evokes this mood I like to wallow in – this sort of dystopic, rainy, neon-lit Middle-European soundscape, although that may just be me projecting Tangerine Dream’s German-ness on to it.

After that, everyone discovers digital systems like the Fairlight and the Synclavier, but they only use them for sampling – why bother laboriously adding up harmonics when you can just sample the sound of someone banging a lampshade? And OK, you do get some fantastic stuff out of that avenue, like Jarre’s Zoolook and the Art of Noise. And Yamaha launches the DX7 [in 1983] with its wipe-clean digital sounds, and that took over pop as we knew it. Suddenly everything sounded like a DX7.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Where would you suggest people start with Tangerine Dream if they’re unfamiliar with the oeuvre?

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

Well, 80s Tangerine Dream is very different from their 70s stuff, and it’s dictated by the technology. I wouldn’t start with the earliest albums, on the Ohr label in Germany. They’re quite hardcore. The start of their period on Virgin Records, 1974, you’ve got albums like Phaedra and Rubycon, dictated by these sequencers that can only play eight or sixteen notes, so you get these repetitive, hypnotic pieces. Gradually they became more melodic and then, the turn of the 80s, there’s a revolution in the technology. Until around 1980, I think, most of their concerts were almost entirely improvised. After that, you get whole 40-minute suites that are pre-programmed.

Both 70s and early 80s Tangerine Dream throws up some fantastic stuff. But I suppose the golden rule is this: don’t listen to anything they did after 1986. That’s when they became terrible – what you’d now call a new age group. There’s one interesting thing around that time, one of the big what-ifs: they very nearly did the Miami Vice soundtrack, and they only didn’t because they’d already signed up to do Street Hawk [which lasted just 14 episodes in 1985]. I wonder if Miami Vice would have had an entirely different feel had it been scored by Tangerine Dream rather than Jan Hammer? And would [Tangerine Dream frontman] Edgar Froese have ended up on a NatWest advert?

—-

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

I’m hugely grateful to Mum and Dad for this idea that there should be no barriers to entry with music. If you hear something you like, get it. I can visualise the stack of tapes in the kitchen, and there’d be Jacqueline du Pre, Enya, John Cougar Mellencamp, Gershwin… as you said, all the food groups. There was one episode of [the eclectic BBC2 music programme] Rapido that I watched with Mum – she liked Voix Bulgares, the Bulgarian choir, and I liked Front 242, and we both bought the albums. Dad, who’s now 88, got into Propaganda and Frankie Goes to Hollywood in his retirement.

One other thing sticks in my mind. I remember playing Depeche Mode’s Violator in the car shortly after it came out, 1990. We were driving through France, and Dad said, I like this because it reminds me of The Moody Blues. Not a link I would ever have made, but I realised after a while that he was absolutely right: some of the production flourishes are a dead ringer for Moody Blues at the height of their prog era.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I wonder if the song was ‘Sweetest Perfection’ because the rhythms in the vocal line are exactly ‘Nights in White Satin’.

WILLIAM HAM BEVAN:

You’re right! And listen to the orchestral segues in ‘I’m Just a Singer in a Rock and Roll Band’ next to ‘World in My Eyes’ – or compare the endings of ‘Legend of a Mind’ and ‘Policy of Truth’. What Alan Wilder was doing with millions’ worth of digital sound technology, Mike Pinder had managed by twiddling the tape-speed knob on a Mellotron.

Incidentally, Mum’s phrase when I was listening to slightly more challenging music in my teenage years… if I put something like Einstürzende Neubaten on the downstairs stereo, Mum would poke her head round the door and say, ‘Can you put something on that we can all enjoy?’ For all my parents’ open-mindedness, there were limits, and the sound of a load of half-naked Germans banging the walls of an underpass crossed the line for them. I suppose we all have our red lines.

—–

William now looks after the content agency Flong (www.flong.wales), providing editorial services for creative studios, businesses, universities and public bodies. 

You can follow William on Bluesky at @hambevan.bsky.social.

—-

FLA 31 PLAYLIST

William Ham Bevan

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Thanks to Tune My Music, you can also transfer this playlist to the platform or site of your choice by using this link: https://www.tunemymusic.com/share/BWo1ohOiiF

Track 1:

PUSSYCAT: ‘Mississippi’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGL07TLQ5hM&list=RDeGL07TLQ5hM&start_radio=1

Track 2:

NEW ORDER: ‘The Perfect Kiss (12” Version)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_12gjuysec&list=RDl_12gjuysec&start_radio=1

Track 3:

RAH BAND: ‘The Crunch’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIxnshqW84c&list=RDhIxnshqW84c&start_radio=1

Track 4:

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE: ‘Oxygène, Part 4’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PycXs9LpEM&list=RD_PycXs9LpEM&start_radio=1

Track 5:

SPACE: ‘Magic Fly’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TONnzySDbqk&list=RDTONnzySDbqk&start_radio=1

Track 6:

10cc: ‘Une Nuit a Paris (Part 1)’ / ‘The Same Night in Paris (Part 2)’ / ‘Later The Same Night in Paris (Part 3)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc7drqD4RtI&list=RDDc7drqD4RtI&start_radio=1

Track 7:

10cc: ‘Old Wild Men’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4it5yrI1MsA&list=OLAK5uy_ludkI5Lr35_6CwakMigXibZnBmgjyLVM8&index=4

Track 8:

10cc: ‘Somewhere in Hollywood’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW76HfE_zm0&list=OLAK5uy_ludkI5Lr35_6CwakMigXibZnBmgjyLVM8&index=7

Track 9:

RON GEESIN: ‘Welcome to Mathematics’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=395GMpPlmME&list=RD395GMpPlmME&start_radio=1

Track 10:

RON GEESIN: ‘Soft Mirors’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zL__7YW_cU&list=RD0zL__7YW_cU&start_radio=1

Track 11:

RON GEESIN: ‘Twisted Pair’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISDv0hLGmjk&list=RDISDv0hLGmjk&start_radio=1

Track 12:

TANGERINE DREAM: ‘Exit’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCPF_4eJJME&list=RDUCPF_4eJJME&start_radio=1

Track 13:

TANGERINE DREAM: ‘Network 23’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyyq83h4808&list=RDvyyq83h4808&start_radio=1

Track 14:

THE MOODY BLUES: ‘I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xvr5l8s4YY&list=RD5Xvr5l8s4YY&start_radio=1

Track 15:

DEPECHE MODE: ‘World in My Eyes’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY3e46pf03Y&list=RDXY3e46pf03Y&start_radio=1

Track 16:

EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBATEN: ‘Sehnsucht’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOk_8foS0BM&list=RDcOk_8foS0BM&start_radio=1

FLA 21: Sangeeta Ambegaokar (16/07/2023)

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When I was first thinking about First Last Anything, I knew I wanted to include a range of guests, including those who were learning and performing music at amateur level. And so I thought of my friend Sangeeta Ambegaokar, a medic based in Birmingham whose spare time outside her day job is these days dominated by music. She has weekly saxophone lessons and plays in an amateur orchestra for mixed ability players, called The Rusty Players Orchestra. She also sings in four different choirs in the city – and is a member of a bell choir.

 

Sangeeta kindly and helpfully shared her experiences of all these groups with me when we spoke on Zoom in the early spring of 2023 – since when she has achieved distinctions in her Grade 3 and 5 theory examinations. We both hope this conversation may inspire you, whether at beginner, intermediate or lapsed level, to seek out amateur or community groups in your area.

 

Sangeeta and I also talk about her formative years in the UK and the United Arab Emirates, about the Absolute 80s Sunday night show Forgotten 80s – which is how we met, as fellow listeners! – and of course discuss her first, recent and wildcard record choices. But as usual, I started with one question: what music was being played at home before she started buying records?

 

 

—-

 

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

I was born in Newport, in South Wales. I don’t remember us having music in the house much, although the radio and Top of the Pops always featured highly, but early on, I can remember at bedtime – I don’t know if you’d call it a lullaby – my dad singing ‘All My Loving’ by The Beatles. We had the ‘Red’ and the ‘Blue’ albums.

 

I was three when ‘Save Your Kisses for Me’ by Brotherhood of Man came out, and at the end it goes, ‘Even though you’re only three’. You’re very egocentric about age then – you think everything would be about you, so I was of course convinced that it was written about me as a three-year-old.

 

ABBA was a big thing. I can remember being absolutely terrified of ‘Tiger’ [from Arrival]. ‘I am behind you, I always find you, I am the tiger.’ And Showaddywaddy as well, ‘Under the Moon of Love’, that kind of sticks.

 

I also remember going to a childminder, who had a record player, and things like ‘I Love You Because’ by Jim Reeves, and a copy of ‘The Laughing Policeman’ which had a scratch on it at a really inopportune time, on the last word – the last laugh in fact, on and on and on, so even more terrifying, and it’s quite terrifying anyway.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It really is. The guy who did that record, Charles Penrose, had a career of making all these records about laughing. Even though ‘The Laughing Policeman’ was 50 years old in the 1970s, they were still playing it on Junior Choice on Radio 1. I suspect that it was people writing in and requesting it for their grandchildren. Because I never met a child who liked it.

 

—

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

When I was five, so from 1978 to 1991, we moved to the Middle East. And although from 1983 I went to boarding school back in the UK, for those first four years I’ve got this real gap in popular culture. In the UAE, we got quite a weird selection of things available to watch and to listen to. But the two ‘local bangers’ that everyone who lived in the UAE in the late 70s and 80s will recall are ‘Life in the Emirates’ and ‘Back in Dubai’.

‘Life in the Emirates’, The Establishment (1979)

‘Back in Dubai’, The Establishment & Sal Davies (1984)

By about 1982, around the time we got a video player, we used to go to the local video rental place. Somebody had recorded all the episodes of Top of the Pops in the UK and they’d send them over, so you’d get like a month’s worth of Top of the Pops to watch, four episodes, and then a great month when there were five episodes. It must have been summer ’82 – ‘Happy Talk’ by Captain Sensible was number one.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Were these official BBC tapes?

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

I don’t think there was anything official about anything that went on over there! [Laughter]

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Ah, I just wondered if it was a BBC World Service thing.

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

I used to listen to the charts on the World Service, but it was really hard to hear. Before that, there used to be a programme on Dubai Television called Pop in Germany, which was all in German, and occasionally you’d see a band you’d recognise, like Boney M… which would figure, given it was from Germany. And we had a radio station that played music from all over. But with Top of the Pops, I vividly remember seeing one of these tapes of the 1000th episode, with Spandau Ballet’s ‘True’ at number one (original broadcast BBC1, 5 May 1983).

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Oh yes, when they’d celebrate the programme, and say, ‘Let’s now look back at the old days, the five clips from the sixties we haven’t burnt.’ Cue ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’ by Status Quo.

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

And with these tapes of Top of the Pops, something similar happened again later with Live Aid (13 July 1985), though as you can probably imagine, this stretched to about five different video cassettes, and came in Part 1, Part 2, and so on. So we did manage to watch the whole of Live Aid in the UAE, but not actually in the correct order!

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I saw you tweet a picture of one of your 80s compilation tapes yesterday. One of the tracks was by ‘TMTCH’ – presumably The Men They Couldn’t Hang?

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

I seemed to have a cassette of them playing live so I must have taped it with one of those double cassette recorders. The song’s called ‘A Night to Remember’. I don’t want to upset any Men They Couldn’t Hang fans but in my view, the live version is much better. The album version sounds quite clunky.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The reason we know each other is because of something called Forgotten 80s, a radio show on Absolute 80s on Sunday nights, hosted and compiled by Matthew Rudd, with a considerable listener input, and quite a social media community has sprouted up around that over the years. With that show, have you found yourself joining dots you couldn’t join during the 80s? How did you discover that show?

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

My other half was a fan of Forgotten 80s. At that time they used to repeat it on a Thursday, he’d be doing the ironing, and listening to it, and saying, ‘This is a great show, loads of forgotten tunes from the 80s’. I had imagined – nothing against The Fall – but that it would be that kind of obscure stuff which I wasn’t really into. And then one week, I heard them play ‘The Last Film’ by Kissing the Pink. And I thought, ‘God, I haven’t heard this on the radio for years.’ So I thought this show might actually be quite good. That must have been eight, nine years ago. Not quite since the beginning!

 

In 1983, I came to boarding school in the UK, in Monmouth, so from then, I’d see Top of the Pops when it went out, and there was Radio 1 so I was an avid listener. Mike Read was on the breakfast show at the time, and the signal to go to school was this feature he did called ‘First Love’.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, with Scott Walker and the Walker Brothers’ record, ‘First Love Never Dies’, as the jingle!

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

I’d latch on to any kind of music then. On TV, Fame. In those days, if you missed an episode, and we didn’t have a video recorder at school, then that was it. So I remember buying the cassette of the Kids from Fame album, really liking ‘It’s Gonna Be a Long Night’, and being really gutted I’d missed the episode that song was played in. But at the start of lockdown, I got the whole series on DVD, and started watching them.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So was Fame shown on television in the UAE?

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

Yeah, on Dubai Television, which used to start at five o’clock with the reading from the Holy Quran.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Fame was massive in Britain because it was on straight after Top of the Pops, wasn’t it? In fact it did much better than in America, where I think it might otherwise have been cancelled because the ratings weren’t great there. And there were all these Kids from Fame albums. Were there two or three, a live one?

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

I think I might have four of them!

—-

FIRST: FUN BOY THREE: ‘Tunnel of Love’ (Chrysalis, single, 1983)

JUSTIN LEWIS

So your first purchase was this, which comes from this same period.

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

I’m renowned for liking this song so much. People now tweet me to tell me when it’s on.

I first saw them do it on Top of the Pops. I was mesmerised by the whole thing – the song, and also all the musicians they had playing with them, who were all women. So that really drew me to them. The cello player [the great Caroline Lavelle]! I don’t think I’d ever seen a cello on Top of the Pops before. I remember us being out at the shopping centre in Dubai, God knows how much it cost, because it was real, not pirate. My sister bought Orange Juice’s ‘Rip It Up’. So we each bought a single. And then my sister had a pirate cassette of Fun Boy Three’s first album, which I got a copy of as well, and then I got Waiting, their second album.

 

But the charts in general were a big thing. Remember when Simon Mayo on the Radio 1 breakfast show used to do Highest New Entry, Highest Climber and Number One at about 7.45? My life was run by bells when I was at boarding school. At twenty to eight, there was a bell: ‘Make sure you get over to breakfast, 7.45.’ And you couldn’t have music on during breakfast, but by then you could get these ear-pod-type headphones, and I’d have my Walkman in my pocket with a radio on it. I’d have the wire going down my sleeves and into my hand, so I’d tell everyone on the breakfast table what Mayo was announcing.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s hard to explain that era to anyone young now. There wasn’t music everywhere then. Radio 1 wasn’t even 24 hours a day. I remember at secondary school, taking a tiny little radio in on a Tuesday lunchtime, and Gary Davies would announce the brand-new chart. I don’t know what this says about me, but people from school still remember this about me! This stuff felt important then. But meanwhile, what was your involvement in music at school during this time?

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

[I did various things at school.] At primary school, when I was five or six, I started playing the piano, my sister had lessons. So I looked at her piano book, it was John Thompson’s Teaching Little Fingers to Play. I think everyone had those back in the day. I started going through it, and teaching myself how to play the piano – probably not very well. And then mum and dad decided they should probably pay for lessons for me as well. Then, at secondary school, I started learning the violin because of ‘Come On Eileen’. But I quickly realised I was awful at the violin and it was never going to happen.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s a hard instrument. Professional violinists say this!

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

I don’t think I have the patience either, because I think I’ve got quite a good ear for music, so I could hear it wasn’t in tune, and it was all about moving my fingers. I got really fed up with that. But I carried on with the piano, I was in the choir at school. And I’d played the recorder in primary school as everybody did. I was probably one of the better players at school, so a couple of us got to play a duet in a concert.

 

So I always had an aptitude for music, I guess, but then after that, year 10/11, it was all ‘you ought to be in the school opera and school performances’. It all looked a bit much, so I didn’t do any music at all after that.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s a lot of extracurricular activity, isn’t there, and it requires a lot of commitment. Not unlike being in sports teams. You have to give up evenings, and after school – if you’re going to take this seriously, I suppose.

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

I had a brief foray into playing percussion in the orchestra in sixth form. They needed percussionists, and there were four of us. It was hilarious because I think a couple of us were okay, we had a decent sense of rhythm, but one of my friends, they put on cymbals, and she never quite came in on time. I stuck to tambourine and castanets – those were my specialities.

—-

LAST: DEPECHE MODE: Black Celebration: The 12” Singles (Venusnote/Sony Music, vinyl box set, 2022)

Extract: ‘Stripped (Highland Mix)’

JUSTIN LEWIS

We should perhaps explain that this isn’t the album of Black Celebration. This is a lavish repackaged box set that assembles all the 12” singles released from that album in 1986: ‘Stripped’, ‘A Question of Lust’ and ‘A Question of Time’, some of them released in multiple formats with extra mixes, B-sides and live tracks. They really seemed keen to give the fanbase value for money, and it’s beautifully packaged too.

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

I’ve got this real affinity to the Black Celebration era of Depeche Mode. When we were in the USA in summer 2022, we were staying in Los Angeles, and nearby there was this big record shop called Amoeba Records. On our last day, we went in, and just as when I used to go into record shops, went straight to the Depeche Mode section. There were a few box sets of the different albums’ respective singles, but Black Celebration was the one. I was wondering: ‘Should I get this, because it’s expensive. And do I really need it?’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

How much was it? Because it’s, what, five 12” singles? £100?

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

It was less than £100, but it didn’t take a lot to talk me into it. It was an unexpected impulse buy. Depeche Mode was my first ever concert as well, at Newport Centre [The opening date of the Music for the Masses tour’s UK leg, 9 January 1988.] ‘Behind the Wheel’ had just come out, they started off with that.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So you saw them on the same tour at Newport that ended up in California, where they recorded the 101 live album, because it was the 101st and final date of the tour [18 June 1988]. Which of course led to a live album and a film, and you see this stadium of people all singing the ‘Everything Counts’ chorus at the end. And they become huge in America. But how did you first get into them?

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

The first song I remember was ‘Get the Balance Right!’ on Top of the Pops, ’83, but just before I started boarding school the same year, if you bought a pair of Start Rite shoes, you got a free single from the top ten, and so I got ‘Everything Counts’ by Depeche Mode. I kept up with their singles – I remember Lenny Henry reviewing ‘Love in Itself’ in Smash Hits.

JUSTIN LEWIS

It was his Single of the Fortnight, I think.

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

Yeah, and he was bowled over by it sounding like it had some proper instruments on it, rather than just synths. So he went, ‘Guys, are you okay?’ The other thing about ‘Love in Itself’ – I’m the sort of person who, if somebody says a word, I break into a song with the word in it. When I was a student, there was a bloke – it usually was a bloke – saying something like ‘You can’t come out with a song with the word “insurmountable” in it.’ And I went, ‘Well, actually…’

 

I got Some Great Reward (1984), then the Singles 81–85 compilation (1985), and then in Year 9, we had to do a project at school on music. I originally started doing my project on the Thompson Twins, but then I lost the book I was using, so I decided to do it on Depeche Mode, and nobody else seemed to like them, which I suppose drew me towards them even more. When I was writing their biography for the project, on how they came to be, I asked other people to write comments about them, and they’d either put, ‘They’re really boring and depressing’, or ‘I think their music is fab, but I don’t think much of their image.’

 

Their next album was Black Celebration, which I played over and over. Another girl who started at the school about then, was really into them as well, so we bonded over them.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You mentioned just now that you have teenagers. Do you keep up with new stuff through them?

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

They’re 18 and 14. Yes, it’s a bit of a standing joke as to which songs that me and my other half have heard of that they’re listening to. Watching the Brit Awards with your teenagers is always quite amusing. Even my 18-year-old said, ‘You complain that all the songs sound the same’ – in fact she complained herself that all new music sounds the same! Which is quite interesting because our generation remembers our parents used to say that as well.

 

—

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

We’ve established that you had these forays into music at school. But then, years later, you are in an orchestra playing the saxophone. Tell me about how that came about.

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

I’ve always been drawn to the saxophone, I guess. Especially with Spandau Ballet, the Steve Norman sax bits, and then ‘Your Latest Trick’ by Dire Straits. So it was always in my head. And then, one day, in around 2000, I bought a saxophone from a second-hand music shop near where we lived in Birmingham. I had one lesson at the time, and worked out that the fingering was the same as the descant recorder.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, tuned to E flat rather than C, but otherwise similar. I learned alto saxophone when I was a teenager. And the flute, which I already played, was similar fingering, although again in C.

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

Yeah. After that one lesson, work and life took over for a time. But we have this [organisation] called Birmingham Music Services, which goes into schools and does music lessons and has loads of ensembles, which are all free to join, they have them for all standards from beginners up to Grade VIII symphony orchestra. So if you play an instrument you can join any of the ensembles.

 

When they started doing lessons in the evenings at our local school and they opened it up to adults, I thought, This is my opportunity. I can actually have saxophone lessons now. At first they were full, but a couple of weeks before term started, I got a phone call: ‘We’ve got a space, someone’s dropped out.’ This was 2019, so a few months before lockdown, whereupon they switched over to Teams. And because of the singing, and having a good ear, and reading music, my teacher said after a few months, ‘It would be really good if you could join some sort of ensemble, you’ll progress much more if you’re playing with people.’ There was a real gap for adults in ensembles, as the Birmingham Music Service ensembles are only for school age children. If you feel you’re really, really good, obviously there are orchestras, but if you’re a learner or beginner, there’s a real gap.

 

After that, a friend sent me a link to an orchestra they found on Facebook, called the Rusty Players Orchestra, which was an offshoot of the People’s Orchestra, a charity based in West Bromwich. As you know, in orchestras, saxophones aren’t a central instrument, but as they were a saxophone-welcoming orchestra… So it’s for people who used to play when they were younger and would like to go back to playing or for people who are kind of beginner or intermediate and want to play in an orchestra.

 

I went along to rehearsal, in January or February 2020, and there was quite a motley crew of us. They’d welcome any instrument at all, they’d find music for you. So we had concertinas that were playing the violin part, for instance. It’s a proper range of ages too – our youngest player is from year 10 (so he must be 14 or 15) and our oldest player has just turned 80! Some started learning recently, but quite a lot were a good standard at school and are coming back to play.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Do they have similar projects elsewhere in Britain?

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

They do, in places. There are two branches in South Wales actually: in Barry and Carmarthen.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Not in Swansea, unfortunately?

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

Not at the moment, by the look of it, no.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I went back to the flute last year, after a long time away from it, and I thought, What on earth do I do with this now? Because I don’t yet feel good enough again to go and audition for a proper orchestra. And of course, with an instrument like the flute, they only have two or three in an orchestra anyway. But it sounds like there’s no formal audition process for the Rusty Players Orchestra.

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

No, you just turn up. The first week I went, I probably played about three notes! I was too scared to play any more than that. I remember we were playing ‘Moon River’, me and a clarinet player. Both of us quite new, she was newer than me, but I was still anxious. We were both supposed to come in at a particular point, but neither of us did, we were too scared!

 

But now, our conductor is a student at the Birmingham Conservatoire and it’s a bit more relaxed. You come along, you have a go, it doesn’t matter if you can or can’t play, but the following week, you’re likely to be able to play more notes – and then you just keep going. So there’s really no pressure at all.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What are your plans in the near future with the saxophone?

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

I’m lining myself up to do the Grade 6 exam.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Wow, you really are coming on in leaps and bounds. So what sort of things are you learning in your lessons? What’s your repertoire in those?

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

A mixture, really. One of my pieces is Scott Joplin. I often just turn up with things, but one thing I really want to be able to play is the sax solo from ‘Will You’, the Hazel O’Connor song. It’s really really hard.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s a long solo too. Two minutes or so!

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

And with Grade 6, you’re first starting to learn those top notes anyway. So that’s a bit of a work I progress. And in the orchestra, we’re playing a lot of film stuff: Hamilton, Chicago, Blues Brothers. It’s quite a nice range.

 

 

—-

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

As well as the Rusty Players Orchestra, I’m in four choirs and a bell choir. The biggest choir is called So Vocal, and it’s the community choir of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which is 150, up to 200 singers in that. And we’d sing with the CBSO every Christmas in the Christmas Concerts which is amazing. We started off being the free performance before the concert, and then we graduated to singing in the concert. Clearly, they thought, ‘Actually, they’re not too bad!’ We ended up going on tour to Poland.

 

I’ve made some really good friends through that. About two years ago, me and a friend went to an experience day with the London Community Gospel Choir. You have a day of learning songs, and in the evening, you join one of their rehearsals. A few of us go to this summer school as well, which is called Sing for Pleasure. It’s a three-day course, you learn some songs, and then there’s a concert at the end. You don’t have to think at all for three days, it’s like a holiday from life! One year, our group was taken by Themba Mvula, who runs a gospel choir in Lichfield, and he’s just out of this world. When you sing, you’re encouraged to go a little bit off-piste if you want to, make your own stuff up, sing as you feel. And though I’m not somebody who really does that, actually you find yourself coming out with stuff.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Is it like improv?

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

Sort of. It’s like pretending you’re a bit of a diva. It’s quite a lot of fun, actually. You have that moment, and everyone else – who are all like-minded – has a bit of a go.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The first time I actually met you in person, it was at a Forgotten 80s event, and there was a karaoke bit, and you seemed well into that. Have you always been?

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

I don’t do karaoke, generally. If there is karaoke, I could be persuaded to join in. But I would never say, Let’s go and do karaoke.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Does that mean, then, that you like having rehearsal and preparation time? The learning process.

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

Not specifically. I think it’s just, you might have had a day at work where your brain is full of stuff. It’s just doing something totally different from that – singing and making music with people. You’re using a different part of the brain, so all the things you were doing earlier are forgotten.

 

The choir I’ve been in the longest is a Ladies Choir called Bournville Vocal Ease which is based close to where I live. When my daughter started at the local school, one of the parents was talking about a choir there, and I thought, God, I’d love to join a choir. Within the school is a carillon, and they’ve got a set of handbells they lend the school. In Year 6, all the children learn how to play the handbells, and so when our Ladies Choir conductor decided to form a bell choir, I joined that. I’ve been in that about six years or so. We play with bell plates.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was watching the YouTube clip where your group does ‘Singing in the Rain’. That would require a particular kind of co-ordination, even if you’ve only got two bells to play.

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

Well, not necessarily only two! Sometimes you’ll have five bells, and you have to swap and pick up the right one and they change key often. And then sometimes the person next to you can’t play that bell because they’ve got too many notes, too many bells already, so someone else has to step in and play their bell temporarily! It can be quite complicated – and you have a proper musical score as well, so you go through and highlight your bells. What’s really amazing, though: there’s a couple of people in the bell choir that actually can’t read music, but they’re playing from a score and they’re actually just learning what their notes look like and highlighting them and learning how to count.

ANYTHING: RICHARD SMALLWOOD: ‘Total Praise’ (composed 1996)

London Community Gospel Choir, ‘Total Praise’

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

In one of the choirs I’m in, the So Vocal choir, we sing a real mixture of stuff, and our conductor introduced us to this piece by Richard Smallwood, ‘Total Praise’. I think this was our first real foray into gospel singing, although we’re not a gospel choir and I’m not religious at all. But singing gospel music, something about it takes you somewhere else, so when we all sang it together, it was a powerful experience. We sang it in a few concerts, and then a choir member passed away, and at the next rehearsal after we heard the news, we all decided we wanted to sing it as a tribute to him. It’s something that feels like it draws us all together, wherever we are. All the arrangements that I’ve heard of it blow you away.

 

Some of the choirs I’m in are relatively straightforward, but I’m also in this a capella choir, Cantoras. Really challenging, and I had to audition on Zoom. We sing in Latin and German, even Norwegian, all sorts.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I found a clip on YouTube, which I enjoyed watching.

‘Sing My Child’, composed by Sarah Quartel, performed by Cantoras Upper Voices Chamber Choir

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

I went to a taster day. You could go along and sing, and then if you wanted to audition, then you could. And I realised: I know I can sing, I can read music. A lot of the people in Cantoras are musicians or singers who do it for a living or teach music, so it’s a different sort of group. In some of the choirs, I’m one of the stronger musicians, whereas in Cantoras, I’m one of the weaker ones. But that lifts you, it stretches you, and I guess doing the other choirs has given me the confidence to do something new and exciting and challenging that I wouldn’t have done before.

 

Interestingly, I’m a different voice part in each choir: Soprano 1, Soprano 2, Alto 1 and Alto 2. Just because, for various reasons, the first choir I went to, I was a soprano because they didn’t have enough of them. Second choir, they said, ‘Soprano or alto?’ and I said, ‘I don’t mind’, and they were, ‘Well, we need more sopranos.’ With the third choir, they had too many sopranos, and I fancied a change, so I was an alto.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Where would you say you belong most naturally in terms of vocal range?

 

SANGEETA AMBEGAOKAR

I’m probably not quite a Soprano 1. I’m a fairly comfortable Soprano 2, but I can sing low as well. With the choir I auditioned for, where I’m an Alto 2, she did a range test, and I could hit the Alto 2 notes.

 

With the Cantoras group, we went to see an a capella group recently called Papagena – an all-female vocal quintet. They’re well worth looking up, and quite an inspiration because one thing we try and do is sing songs by female composers or arrangers, and we’ve sung a song that they’ve done as well, called ‘When the Earth Stands Still’. I don’t know if that’s on the YouTube channel. It’s nice to do things for fun, but also to stretch yourself. You might be at an age where you think your best days are behind you, but perhaps that isn’t the case! 

 

 

—-

 

You can follow Sangeeta on Bluesky at @mango24.bsky.social. She is also on Threads at @mango___24.

 For more on The Rusty Players, visit The People’s Orchestra website, where you can also find information on The People’s Show Choir. They have branches around the country. https://thepeoplesorchestra.com/the-rusty-players-orchestra/

If you’d like to know more about Sing For Pleasure, who organised the singing summer school Sangeeta mentioned, see here: https://singforpleasure.org.uk/. The charity focuses on the enjoyment of singing, trains choral leaders, publishes some excellent songbooks, and runs events for singers. 

This is an excellent resource for details of amateur orchestras across the UK: https://amateurorchestras.org.uk

The radio show we mentioned, Forgotten 80s, hosted by Matthew Rudd, is broadcast on Absolute Radio’s Absolute 80s station every Sunday night between 9 and 11pm. You can listen to episodes here.

 —-

FLA 21 PLAYLIST

Sangeeta Ambegaokar

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: THE BEATLES: ‘All My Loving’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdajVoRgx3w

Track 2: BROTHERHOOD OF MAN: ‘Save Your Kisses for Me’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yJUi6ke71I

Track 3: ABBA: ‘Tiger’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htziQt0pCAQ

Track 4: THE MEN THEY COULDN’T HANG: ‘A Night to Remember’ [5 Go Mad on the Other Side Version]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtV1m_UjD-8

Track 5: KISSING THE PINK: ‘The Last Film’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuRdrAoroSw

Track 6: THE WALKER BROTHERS: ‘First Love Never Dies’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KszX9WAas-0

Track 7: THE KIDS FROM FAME: ‘It’s Gonna Be a Long Night’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWLwcfw3C-s

Track 8: FUN BOY THREE: ‘Tunnel of Love’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi7BXqmYxiw

Track 9: DEPECHE MODE: ‘Stripped’ (Highland Mix): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Dx9ZvpUD8U

Track 10: DEPECHE MODE: ‘Behind the Wheel’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEAuMiKqP-4

Track 11: DEPECHE MODE: ‘Love in Itself’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pi_egc6qkY

Track 12: DIRE STRAITS: ‘Your Latest Trick’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blPf0-WphFQ

Track 13: HAZEL O’CONNOR: ‘Will You?’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDa-uPzlzDg

Track 14: DONNIE McCLURKIN & RICHARD SMALLWOOD: ‘Total Praise’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8NIr9fqLBQ

Track 15: DON MacDONALD AND PAPAGENA: ‘When the Earth Stands Still’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJmbEecjjMA

FLA 3: Meryl O’Rourke (12/06/2022)

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 Joining me in this episode is the comedy writer and performer Meryl O’Rourke. As well as being a mainstay on the stand-up circuit and writing for other performers (notably Frankie Boyle), Meryl has created and developed two one-woman shows, Bad Mother… (2011), and 2019’s Vanilla.

Vanilla is a very funny and thought-provoking show about sexuality – especially female sexuality – in the modern age, and is still available to live-stream at https://nextupcomedy.com/programs/meryl-orourke-vanilla

Meryl and I recently had an entertaining and wide-ranging chat about the defining music in her life. In addition to discussing her First/Last/Anything choices, she talked to me about music at funerals, why 80s pop could be even more politically charged than you thought, and the thorny issue of sexual representation and imagery in current mainstream music – which is a major theme of Vanilla.   

 

CW: The middle section of this conversation contains some discussion about sexual behaviour and representation, relating specifically to music videos and lyrical content, pressurisation and consent. We both realised that it was near-impossible to have this discussion without mentioning certain explicit sexual acts and terms, and so some of these appear. Like all the other conversations in this series, it has been edited with the co-operation of the guest, but this is mostly for reasons of length and not content. Please also note the second of the three YouTube links, for the Megan Thee Stallion clip, is NSFW.

 —-

MERYL O’ROURKE

I don’t think my house was musical at all when I was a child! Now you’ve asked… Hmm… My parents were both comedy and literature fans. With music my dad liked, I have zero idea. He died when I was seven, and he was very ill from when I was about four, too ill to properly play with me, he could just sit in his chair. So, yeah, the music I associate with him would be when I would dance to the theme tunes he liked. So, The Rockford Files, I mean, of course, that’s some damn funky music… and When the Boat Comes In. He wasn’t from Newcastle, he was Irish…well…he was from Brixton, but he was so ghettoised amongst Irish people that he had an Irish accent, despite not being born there. So he used ‘mammy’ rather than ‘mum’, so When the Boat Comes In reminded him of the Irish dialect: ‘Dance to your daddy/Sing to your mammy’. Whereas my mum didn’t listen to music for pleasure. I remember her liking novelty things like ‘Telephone Man’ [by Meri Wilson]. Comedy songs.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I know that before you ever became a professional comedian, you were – like me – a big fan of comedy in your teens. But unlike me, you were able to go to live recordings in London of various radio and TV comedy shows.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

Yes! I have totally lived my life backwards. The last concert I went to was an 80s festival. But in the actual 80s, when all my friends were going to see Spandau Ballet, I was going to Radio 4 recordings like an old lady. The Paris Studio, off Piccadilly in London, where BBC radio comedy shows were recorded. My mum was a huge comedy fan, as I say, but while you couldn’t take a child to stand-up, you could go to the Paris at fourteen – and it was free! We got tickets for everything when I was 14, 15, but the big one was Radio Active.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I loved Radio Active too. For those who don’t know or don’t remember, it was this very funny pastiche on Radio 4, of a local radio station, starring Helen Atkinson Wood, Angus Deayton, Geoffrey Perkins, Phil Pope and Mike Fenton Stevens. Which had lots of spoof jingles, and parodies, and pop group pastiches, and which later became KYTV on BBC2 in the 1990s.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

I fell desperately in love with Phil Pope, who did the music for Radio Active and Spitting Image, and who was also in Who Dares Wins, a late night Channel 4 TV comedy show. I know he was an unusual choice for a first love, but he would chat to me after recordings and, well, he’s no odder than Tony Hadley who, frankly, looked like someone shaved a bull and took it to Dorothy Perkins. So I guess, in the 80s I regarded the people in Radio Active, Who Dares Wins, Spitting Image, as if they were pop stars. I mean Phil and Mike had a number 1 with ‘The Chicken Song’ during that time, so I WAS hanging out with pop stars! Spandau weren’t getting any number one singles by ’86 – SO WHO’S THE WEIRD GIRL NOW, STEPHANIE?

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In the days before mass-produced video and DVD, there was a lot of merchandise for comedy: tie-in books, LPs… And all those shows did them. The HeeBeeGeeBees made albums! We should say the HeeBeeGeeBees were this group on Radio Active, involving Phil, Mike and Angus, who did parodies of all the big pop groups of the day – The Bee Gees, Status Quo, The Police, Duran Duran, etc – and Mike Fenton Stevens has mentioned that they got to tour Australia in the early 80s, and were practically treated like a real pop group, did loads of television, were playing rock venues. Especially as a lot of the real pop bands rarely toured extensively out there.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

I think if you asked Phil Pope, ‘What are you?’, he would say, ‘A musician, who became an actor.’ I don’t think he’d even refer to himself as a comedian. He was a musician who was skilled at parody and became a comedy actor through that experience and association.

 

 

—-

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

I always feel awkward when I’m asked about first album, because the first one I bought was Rattle and Hum, but that was because Mum was a librarian, and so she would just bring everything home. So it wasn’t the first thing I LIKED. The big thing Mum brought home was a Depeche Mode album, in fact it was a greatest hits cassette [The Singles 81–85]. It’s meant to be very non-muso to have greatest hits albums, isn’t it?

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Greatest hits albums are fine! I’m a big defender of them. And anyway, in the case of Depeche Mode, lots of their singles weren’t on albums anyway.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

‘See You’ was the first time I heard a record that made my whole body react, that made me lie down on my bed and let it wave over me. Which Martin Gore had written when he was fifteen, I think. It’s Martin Gore’s ‘Careless Whisper’.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

We’re talking about this not long after the very sad, sudden death of Andy Fletcher.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

When Fletch died, I kept returning to ‘Shake the Disease’ which is about feeling that you’re always saying the wrong thing, and hoping the person you’re with loves you enough to forgive you for being a bit of a twat. That still speaks massively to me! And Gore constantly returns to that theme. ‘Enjoy the Silence’ on Violator is exactly the same theme. It’s quite interesting for a professional lyricist to constantly return to ‘I say stupid stuff – therefore, can I just not speak?’ Martin is quite known for the odd embarrassing lyric: ‘A career, in Korea, being insince-ere’ …but I guess because he kept writing about hating words, we, in the fan base, forgave him.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s an interesting distance in that Martin is the lyricist, but he usually isn’t the singer. That’s Dave Gahan’s job. Like when you hear an Elton John song, you half-forget Elton didn’t write the words – it’s usually Bernie Taupin doing that. And at some level you know that, but you don’t think about it when you hear the song.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

I’m constantly trying to link Elton John’s songs to his homosexuality, completely forgetting that the lyricist wasn’t gay. But in Martin’s case it was because Dave was already the lead singer, when Vince Clarke formed the group – though I’m a Depeche purist, very much Anno Vince. And Dave is almost quite a stereotypical frontman. Depeche Mode sort of channel through him, in a way. Some frontmen get annoyed by the fact that they are just looked at, as in ‘you look good and you sound good’ and it’s forgotten often they do write and play, but Dave is a conduit. His deep voice contrasts so well with the binky bonky electronica. Dave was very sexual, his hips would rotate throughout every song. One reason I stopped going to see them live… I went to see the ‘Songs of Faith and Devotion’ tour in the 90s, when we didn’t know Dave was on heroin, and he spent the whole show lying on the floor! He just lay on the stage. For one thing, I thought, ‘I’m here for the hips mate’ and on a practical level, if you’re standing at a gig, you can’t see somebody who’s lying down! Dave was hunkier, but it was Martin I got the crush on because of his brain.

 

Martin did soundscapes, that really felt like they enveloped you. Whenever I hear ‘Enjoy the Silence’, I remember my mum shouting, ‘Surely a song called “Enjoy the Silence” shouldn’t be listened to so loud!?’ A lot of bands, you have to turn the volume up, but with them, it’s about being immersed in a soundscape. One of my favourites, ‘Stripped’, starts with the sound of a car engine being turned on and engine just ticking over, which becomes the percussion of the song. ‘Stripped’ is one of Martin Gore’s many allegorical songs, along with ‘Master and Servant’, where he’s singing about sex, but he’s actually singing about capitalist society.

 

Rediscovering and properly listening to 80s music, I’ve noticed that because Thatcher was so censorious, a lot of the bands did songs that you thought were about sex but were actually about capitalism, like Heaven 17’s ‘Temptation’, ‘Labour of Love’ by Hue and Cry etc. Apparently even ‘Land of Make Believe” by Bucks Fizz is about Thatcherism!. Martin Gore was obsessed with two things – sex and industrialisation – so ‘Stripped’ is partly about ‘let me see you take your clothes off’ but the whole lyric is ‘I don’t want you watching television’, ‘I don’t want you with your earphones in’, “I want to be in a forest’, ‘I don’t want any of this horrible noise.’ And a lot of that came from them living in this very urban landscape of Basildon. When Fletch died, Alison Moyet tweeted, ‘We lived on the same council estate from the age of ten.’ So they lived in these very crowded situations, which is why Depeche Mode became a keyboard band. They were rehearsing in each other’s houses, and they couldn’t use acoustic instruments because the neighbours would complain. They could put headphones on and not upset their mums and dads.

—

FIRST: U2: Rattle and Hum (Island Records, 1988)

Extract: ‘Desire’

MERYL O’ROURKE

I remember thinking, ‘I need to just stop taping things from the library’. I was at a garage or motorway service station – ‘I am older now, I have some money, and I should probably buy this.’ So the impact of finally buying an album for the first time didn’t feel as special as it might have been for other people. I even remember thinking, ‘I need a “first album”.’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Were you a U2 fan anyway?

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

With ‘Desire’, I liked that sigh at the start. I like alliterative music, stuff that sounds like what it’s doing. It’s called ‘Desire’ so I’m going to sound desirous. I like a track to do what it says on the tin. You know that wave of sad songs that sound happy? They piss me off!

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

If you’re going to convey doom, use doom.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

With U2, you can hear the passion in the music. And like Depeche Mode, U2 are now not just unfashionable but derided. This trope of ‘how terrible it would be for U2 to do a surprise concert’.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Or drop a free album on to your iPod.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

I often think the hatred of U2 comes not actually from the music but from how the band behaves. The things Bono says, etc.  My second boyfriend was a big muso, was at the Hacienda every weekend, and he hated U2, so I had to kind of keep it secret. But I don’t think anyone can deny the passion and popularity of the music.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

My main issue with them then, although this has largely dissipated now, many years ago, was that they were so ubiquitous. And in the sixth form, at school, they had this kind of image of ‘this is real music’. So I perhaps unfairly held them responsible for that.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

Well, what’s ‘real music’? I liked both U2 and Depeche Mode, they both made noises that made my body react. If I’ve got my eyes shut, and the music’s making my body react, then I like it. What instruments you’re playing that on is less important to me. The Edge is hitting a guitar string or Martin’s hitting a shopping trolley – am I dancing? Yes.

 

—-

LAST: MEGAN THEE STALLION:

‘Thot Shit’ (1501 Certified/300 Records, 2021) (NSFW)

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

This was my last download because I played it as the audience walked in for Vanilla. I thought I’d hate it because the publicity was all her arse, but then I watched the video and it’s hilarious, it’s her saying, ‘We all have arses’, and the video is endless, haunting, relentless arse. Megan’s style of rapping is relentless and monotonous – it’s not melodic, it’s almost like percussion. ‘Thot Shit’ doesn’t go up or down or have a middle-eight, it’s just, ‘This is relentless, this is relentless, this is relentless’. I really like that. The problem is, the video has nothing to do with the lyrics, AS EVER.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The style and content of contemporary music videos is a major theme of Vanilla, which people can now live-stream. I was trying to think of a way of summing up the show – shall I have a go? To me, it discusses the generation gap between your formative years as a growing sexual being, and now looking at the world through the eyes of your children about the same subjects. Are you okay with that?

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

That’s a theme in it, yes. As an overriding theme, it’s about whether female sexuality is liberating or oppressing. People tell us constantly that being very sexual is liberating, but our actual experience of that can be very oppressive, and it’s often used against us. I mean that’s what the ‘Thot Shit’ video is about: ‘accept it, get over it’. Vanilla is about the bullshit we’re told about sex, especially about female sexuality, and especially what young girls are told. So there’s a lot of stuff about music videos and lyrics that are just bullshit.

 

In the show, I talk about how now there’s some choreo where women put their hands round their necks because we’re meant to be into choking. Even if you are into choking, that’s the most dangerous method! With sex, there’s this really weird disconnect, there seems to be no desire to do things properly or safely. If you said, ‘I’m really into scuba diving’, that would imply that you were PADI-registered [laughter], that you’d had a few training sessions. But with ‘I’m really into choking’ – well, have you looked up how to do it safely, and which things not to do, because some things can kill you? Or have you just copied ‘WAP’?

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

As Vanilla does reference music video and pop songs, you’ve had to keep revising and updating the show. I first saw it during the first lockdown, online, in about April 2020, which predated the song ‘WAP’.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

There’s no point still talking about Little Mix getting their bits out at the BRITS when it’s a year later – pop music moves by so fast, and I had to talk about ‘WAP’. And all this stuff about how they’re the first female rappers to rap about sex! No they’re not! Salt-N-Pepa made an entire career out of rapping about sex but it’s like they’ve been erased. Sometimes I think they must have upset Stalin. When you go through their lyrics, Salt-N-Pepa were pretty explicit: ‘He keeps me open like a seven-eleven’ [from ‘Whatta Man’].

 

In ‘WAP’ they talk about being choked, tied up, spat on – and at the same time, we’re saying to people, ‘This is liberating’. I understand the nuance of ‘It’s liberating to say I’m submissive’ but we’re not telling young people that. We’re telling them, ‘You are dominant when you’re submissive’. But there are never any dominant songs by women about tying up the men. When I was researching, I asked people if they could think of any songs where the man is tied up. And we literally had to go back to the fifties: Elvis Presley’s ‘Teddy Bear’. And could you believe I was so distant from Depeche Mode I’d forgotten about ‘Master and Servant’! Which is absolutely about Martin being submissive. He was very visibly submissive – he would wear bondage gear on stage. He’d cause shock wearing black nail varnish, and now Little Mix wear bottomless leather harnesses and we put them on little kids’ sticker sets?

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I also remember about three years ago, you were tweeting about Stormzy’s record ‘Vossi Bop’ and it being played at breakfast time on Radio 1.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

Oh, you remember that! I phoned Radio 1, such a Karen.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

As someone who’s now unarguably middle-aged and clearly not the main target audience, I sometimes hear records like this and think, ‘What do I do with this?’ Whereas the fourteen-year-old me would have imagined me celebrating it as ‘the new “Relax”’ or whatever.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

But it’s horrible.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It is. And apparently there are two versions of ‘Vossi Bop’, an uncensored and a clean version, but even the clean version appears to have a line about ‘giving a facial’ in the chorus. I suppose that there’s an argument for saying that’s not swearing, but…

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

I think being the mother of a teenager helps in these situations. When I phoned Radio 1, the woman I spoke to was also middle aged, and I said to her: ‘As middle-aged women, we might think Stormzy’s singing about putting on a mudpack and some cucumber over his eyes… but the teenagers know exactly what he’s talking about.’ People seem to feel that the most urgent issue with ‘…that’ is not questioning why as an act it’s become so mainstream, but giving it a name that means it can be discussed at breakfast. That seems to have been the main priority here.

 

But also, in the lyrics, he’s facialising this girl as a punishment, because she was ugly and she was somebody else’s girlfriend. The thing is, I didn’t want to be disappointed in Stormzy. I love Stormzy [agreement], he’s south London, and I’m south London. There’s a rap bit where he mentions a bus route that I use – it’s so exciting when he mentions things that I know about. And politically, too – the stuff he said after Grenfell. So I didn’t want to complain about him: ‘Hang on a minute, that is the chorus of your song, and it’s being played at breakfast time on Radio 1?’ But at what point can we say, ‘This is not okay’? Because every time we do say, ‘This is not okay’, we’re told we’re being oppressive.

 

There’s a bit in the show where I talk about J-Lo’s very explicit Superbowl show, and I have to make it very clear that I’m not slut shaming. She mooned the world’s children, and she knows that’s not okay, because if you did it out of the window of a school bus you would get detention. And we’re so obsessed now with looking after these adult women’s sexualities that we are completely forgetting about the children who are their fanbase.

 

I find Megan Thee Stallion difficult, because I am fifty-one and I’m surprised by how much I love her. But I was watching Ellen one day, and there was a bit where Megan visited a children’s hospital, and you think, ‘Mate! You rap about wanting someone to tie you up and fuck you. Don’t go to a children’s hospital!’ I really admire the artists like Rihanna and Miley Cyrus who have both said, ‘I am not here for your children. Do not bring your children to my concert.’ And then I see people like Megan Thee Stallion and Nicki Minaj who are very explicit – they’re welcoming kids to their concert. It makes me… uncomfortable. We don’t have that line anymore – and a lot of Vanilla is asking to have that line back. You know, 9pm. It’s impossible, so we have to find a new 9pm.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Watching that Megan Thee Stallion video, it occurred to me how rarely I actually watch music videos now. If I hear ‘Sledgehammer’ or ‘Take on Me’ or ‘Ashes to Ashes’, it’s impossible for me to hear those songs without picturing the videos. I am quite removed now. I may listen to lots of new music, but I don’t really watch new music. But it sounds like you do. Now, is that because you have children?

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

It’s because I was writing Vanilla. And I don’t write without researching. And if I’m going to write about what our children are experiencing, then I need to find out what it is.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

With ‘Thot Shit’, I’ll probably have to flag it with NSFW in the link.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

Which by the way: if you watch it on YouTube, there is no way to stop your child from watching it.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

No age restriction! I know, I was surprised.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

A huge problem I have with female music videos is they pretend sex is political, to make it ‘okay’, but just by mushing it all together unnaturally – which I suppose is the essence of sex. Ha-ha. I talk about ‘God is a Woman’ where the video is quite deep and has a lot of feminist imagery – Ariana Grande with a huge hammer smashing a glass ceiling. But the song is just about shagging. The premise of the song is: She is so good in bed, you will forget the existence of a patriarchal god. I mean, she says she’s good in bed, she can’t even wrap her tongue round a consonant…

 

And then you go on to ‘Run the World (Girls)’ by Beyoncé. Which has very feminist lyrics, but the video is just Beyoncé rolling around in dirt, in her knickers. And people might say, ‘Well it’s feminist to do that’, but it’s naïve to think that’s not distracting people away from the lyrics. But to show you actually on your hands and knees in your pants, jerking about, whilst you’re singing about equal pay… You know very well that men are not watching that video thinking, Wow – I really must increase the wages of my female staff.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, if there’s that many levels of irony to get to that point, the message hasn’t really succeeded.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

‘Run the World (Girls)’ is very clever, in its knowledge of what men and women are aroused by. So men, biologically respond to images, women to conversation. We might not like it, but it’s science. So Beyoncé is managing to excite both genders. The lyrics are having a conversation, bigging up women – ‘Look at what you’ve done, and you can do this and this and this’ – but the movements are saying to her male fans, ‘Look at how sexy I am.’ So both groups of fans are aroused, and both groups of fans enjoy the song but possibly whilst totally ignoring the other’s reasons. One of the things we forget about the music business is, it’s fucking clever. You are constantly being manipulated by every single successful pop group, including the ones you love.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And the people behind them. That’s fascinating – the different messages different audiences are getting.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

I think a lot of younger pop stars are groomed. They’re constantly told, ‘You want this.’ In the Jesy Nelson documentary, she has this dual thing in her head, wanting to be beautiful and being told, ‘In your underwear, you are powerful.’ But at the same time, she doesn’t feel powerful.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So she’s been told what to do.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

There’s a bit in the making of one of the Little Mix videos, and Jesy Nelson’s being cinched into a corset, and she says, ‘I hope that the girls who watch this don’t think this is comfortable.’ But they do because the band spend a lot of time talking about how powerful their clothes make them feel. She was getting up at five in the morning to wash her hair and do her make-up so that her boyfriend never saw her without her hair done or her make-up done. It was heartbreaking. These levels of ‘want’ – ‘we want this’, well… do you want it ALL the time? I want to look beautiful now and then, for that day, but I don’t want to get up at 6am, so that I have to look like that all the time. A lot of younger pop stars are being told, ‘You are very powerful when you do this, when you wear as little clothing as possible.’ So they say to their fans, ‘This will make YOU powerful.’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s like they say, ‘We want to do this’, but really it’s ‘There are people who need me to do this.’

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

The trouble with publicising Vanilla is I can’t really talk on radio stations about the music videos my daughter was watching. Like just now, we were saying, for this interview, ‘Can we say “facialising”?’ Because us old people are still living in a nine o’clock watershed world. I’m sorry, but kids don’t live in that world. They’re on TikTok, on YouTube. We are adults but we’re not having the conversation that children are having. Children are accessing this stuff, so if we can’t implement physical censorship, we have to start prizing euphemisms, rapping like Salt-N-Pepa did.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

A revival of innuendo, perhaps?

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

Yeah, it’s almost as if ‘Push It’ wasn’t about hill-starting a Morris Minor…

 

——-

ANYTHING: JOHNNY DRILLE FEATURING AYRA STARR: ‘In the Light’ (Mavin Records, 2021)

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

I am the kind of white, middle-class, handwringing liberal who is quite worried about how much I’m allowed to like Afrobeat.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Although it’s not as if it’s in the mainstream, is it, in this country?

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

Johnny Drille is incredible. His music is beautiful, beautiful love songs. I always refer to him as the African Ed Sheeran. And his voice is almost too perfect. I think he won the Nigerian version of The Voice or something like that [Project Fame West Africa, in 2013]. There is literally no reason why he shouldn’t be played on Radio 2, let alone on 6Music that does world music. That he’s not world famous is a disgrace. He’s a balladeer. Though! On his new album, he’s got this song about the government in which he employed a death metal artist – it’s hilarious there’s suddenly this guy shouting ‘TTAAKKEE IITT BBAACCKKK’. His stuff is beautiful, beautiful though. And he released the new album by having a pyjama party, with a brass section on stage, with all his teenage fans wearing onesies, even his manager is wearing one. There’s something about his music that’s both passionate and sexual but also accessible. Your kids could listen to it. You don’t worry about those teen fans.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You’d think that, given the rise of K-pop and J-pop and lots of Latin music… that there’d be more global music superstars from Africa, but there haven’t been many.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

Fela Kuti, and he’s from… how long ago?

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Youssou N’Dour – again, though, from years ago.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

And the thing is, Afrobeats is a very specific part of African music. It’s a particular beat. Johnny Drille sings ballads. They’re not all actually Afrobeats. It’s like if you took every musician from Brooklyn, and called them a rapper because they’re from Brooklyn – even if they’re playing classical music. And it’s a whole continent, Africa – it’s like calling any music from Britain ‘Europop’.

 

I discovered Johnny Drille because he did a duet with Simi, who I’d already been listening to. She is quite interesting as an artist. She’s married to Adekunle Gold, who’s quite hard Afrobeats and playlisted on 1Xtra in this country. And she apparently produces most of his music. She, though, has a very cute voice, she has a song called ‘Gone for Good’, with these delightful little trills in her voice. And ‘Jamb Question’ about street harassment which is hilarious – she just makes fun of the guy who’s harassing her. ‘Jamb Question’ is slang for not just ‘stupid question’ but ‘the stupidest question’. He’s asking her things like ‘Did I go to school with your brother?’ and it’s sarcastic but still very sweet.

           

But recently she brought out a single, ‘Woman’, and it’s much harder and political. She swears on her new album.  A lot of her male fans have been like, ‘How have you written this angry song when you’re such a sweet girl?’ ‘Woman’ is literally about women being whatever they like and they’re telling you can’t change. Missed. The. Point. She’s very opinionated about the industry. As a personality, as a spokesperson, in terms of navigating herself through this industry, she’s very interesting.

 

——-

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

When my mum died in 1995, our rabbi was on holiday, the rabbi my mum had grown up with was too ill, and the rabbi I had grown up with, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, was on a book tour. My mum wasn’t religious but we started going back to synagogue when Julia was there, I think she was the first female rabbi to have her own congregation. So my mum started going back to synagogue as a feminist statement. But I didn’t want a stranger taking my mum’s funeral – that just seemed wrong, and I’d seen it go wrong before. So Julia just talked me through doing it on the phone, how to take a funeral. In 1995, that was very unusual. But it was nice – I can see why people do it now.

 

Mum not being a big music fan made choosing the music easier! I knew her favourite songs were ‘Can’t Take My Eyes off You’ by Andy Williams and ‘Somethin’ Stupid’ by Frank and Nancy Sinatra. For the service, I’d planned the music to just be ‘Somethin’ Stupid’, but the funeral director said to me, ‘It’s difficult to time exactly when we’re going to start… walking down the aisle? That sounds like a wedding! But… that…’

 

So at the service we just played the whole album – Nancy’s greatest hits – on a loop, for people as they come in. But because Lee Hazlewood’s music was really gothic, it was perfect! My mum was actually carried in to ‘Friday’s Child’, which is so depressing, so deeply miserable. It’s got the perfect beat, this really slow 1950s bluesy swing beat! ‘Hard luck is her brother, her sister’s misery’ – so it was a suitably dramatic gothic entrance. Nancy’s very chatty on Twitter and I did actually get to say to her, ‘Your greatest hits album was played at my mum’s funeral’, and she was like, ‘I’m …sorry??’  

 

—

 

Meryl O’Rourke’s Vanilla is still livestreaming at: https://nextupcomedy.com/programs/meryl-orourke-vanilla

Meryl continues to perform stand-up sets all over Britain. Check her social media or ents.24 for latest news.

In November 2024, the first reading took place of Meryl’s play Thrown by Giants, at the Arts Depot in North Finchley, London. The play was inspired by her mother and grandmother’s experiences of the internment camps on the Isle of Man in the 1940s. A further table read of this play will be taking place at The Glitch in London SE1 on Wednesday 16 July 2025. When tickets become available, I will add a link here.

You can follow Meryl on most social media platforms – just search for @MerylORourke, although on TikTok you can find her as @MerylOR.

 

FLA Playlist 3

Meryl O’Rourke

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: Royal Northern Sinfonia/Alex Glasgow: Dance to Your Daddy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edl8b_efyNU

Track 2: Meri Wilson: Telephone Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuiDjROPR0s

Track 3: HeeBeeGeeBees: Meaningless Songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-gZKRKNy4w

Track 4: Depeche Mode: See You: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuWQitNlvf0

Track 5: Depeche Mode: Stripped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU8UfYdKHvs

Track 6: Depeche Mode: Master and Servant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsvfofcIE1Q

Track 7: U2: Desire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8rQ575DWD8

Track 8: Megan Thee Stallion: Thot Shit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KynkMn5Hv3Q (NSFW)

Track 9: Salt-N-Pepa, En Vogue: Whatta Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vgV_dVkXN4

Track 10: Beyoncé: Run the World (Girls): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBmMU_iwe6U

Track 11: Johnny Drille featuring Arya Starr: In the Light: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrPv3xoTnTU

Track 12: Johnny Drille: Lies (To Whom It May Concern): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX7Gwitq_kg

Track 13: Simi: Jamb Question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYDXuk4s5Mc

Track 14: Simi: Woman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udnkr-pMRa8

Track 15: Nancy Sinatra: Friday’s Child: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUpPOugzhos