2025)

November 23, 2025December 5, 2025 / whenisbins / Leave a comment

As a first-year university student, one of the first songs of the 1990s I cherished was ‘De-Luxe’ by the London-based quartet Lush, who were signed to the independent record label 4AD. I was in the habit of taping Annie Nightingale’s Sunday night programme on BBC Radio 1 at the time, and I’m pretty sure that’s where I first heard it. It opened their first EP, Mad Love, and I quickly bought that on CD. I wasn’t a particularly big follower of indie-rock at the time, though I liked The Sundays and Pixies and the Cocteau Twins, but there was something about the sound of Lush that drew me in.

Lush – co-founded by Emma Anderson and Miki Berenyi, and completed by bass guitarist Steve Rippon (succeeded by Phil King from 1992) and drummer Chris Acland – had already released a mini-album called Scar (1989), and they went on to issue a compilation of their early EPs (Gala, 1990), and three full-length albums: Spooky (1992), Split (1994) and Lovelife (1996). A relentless touring schedule, and especially the unexpected and devastating suicide of Chris Acland in October 1996, hastened the end of the group. Emma Anderson formed a new duo in the late 1990s, Sing-Sing, with singer Lisa O’Neill, and made two (in my opinion) undervalued albums. But in the past few years, Emma has re-emerged in her own right with the terrific album Pearlies (2023).

Emma and I connected via social media a while back, and I had wanted to talk to her for this series for some time, especially after I heard Pearlies. I was thrilled when she accepted my invitation. A new reissue of Lush’s Gala in November 2025 seemed an opportune time for us to chat at length on Zoom one Sunday about first, last and wildcard recordings, and it was in that same month that 4AD uploaded Phil King’s film of Lush footage, Lush: A Far from Home Movie, to YouTube. The 35-minute film is fondly dedicated to Chris Acland’s memory.

—–

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I always start with this question. I’m aware you had a slightly unusual upbringing, which we’ll come to, but what music did you have in your home early on?

EMMA ANDERSON:

This was probably before we owned a record player, but I had one of those mono tape recorders with the buttons at the front which were probably really meant for recording speech, and I used to tape stuff off the telly.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Oh, I used to do this.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I think a lot of people did!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Before there were video recorders.

EMMA ANDERSON:

And your parents would walk in and start talking over it, and you’d go, [loud whisper] “Be quiet!”. But I used to tape stuff mainly off Top of the Pops and the Eurovision Song Contest.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The Eurovision Song Contest, prior to things like Live Aid, was the most amount of music you’d see on TV in one go, really. You’d get three hours once a year. And it was also television from another country, quite often, there didn’t seem to be a house style for Eurovision like you tend to get for it now.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I also liked Eurovision because as a kid I loved geography, maps and stamp collecting and the rest of it [laughs] so Eurovision kind of fed into that. I collected all these cassettes of Eurovision which I used to listen to repeatedly.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I had a black and white TV in my room, from about the age of eight – an extravagance, I soon discovered – and am I right in saying you did too?

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yes, and the reason for that was, my dad was the secretary of a gentleman’s forces club in Mayfair and the flat we lived in was part of the building. Needless to say, it was a strange place for a child to grow up. We moved there when I was about three and we left when I was about fifteen so that’s quite a big chunk of my childhood. The flat came with the job and in the same building were hotel-like rooms which members could stay in, and all these rooms had rental TVs in them. So, my parents didn’t pay for the two rental TVs in our flat, they were paid for by the club as part of a deal, I guess.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The reason I asked about a TV in your room was because of the possible relationship with the technology. The reason I had one… we weren’t rich, but I was a complete TV obsessive in those days, and it was a window on the world, and I did learn a lot from it.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I did watch a lot of TV and I was an only child as well so I consumed a lot of not just pop music but culture and films… I was quite unsupervised too so was even able used to sit up late and watch horror films which were on quite a lot in the 1970s!

The other thing was, because we lived in the club, and a lot of the members didn’t live in London, they’d come in from the Home Counties and they’d visit our flat and sit and a have a drink in the living room with my parents. So another reason to keep me occupied in my room was because there were constantly guests around and my parents wanted to keep me away from ‘the adults’.

It was an unusual, atypical upbringing. I didn’t live in a normal house in a normal street in somewhere like Dorking, if you see what I mean.

—–

EMMA ANDERSON:

Going back to ‘tech’(or lack of it!), I do remember having a toy record player when I was quite small, I think an aunt might have given it to me. It only took 78s and it came with its own records and the two I remember were ‘Tea for Two’ and ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk’! [Laughs]. It was not a technological marvel; it had one of those massive needles. But then, we got a ‘real’ record player (sort of) – my mother was quite a heavy smoker, she smoked Embassy cigarettes, which came with these little vouchers in the pack. She saved all these up in a jar, and there was a catalogue you could from and ‘pay’ with the vouchers so we got the record player like that. I must have been about ten.

To be honest, my parents weren’t massively into music; they were from a different era. My dad was born in 1919 [laughs], and my mum was born in 1928. He was forty-eight and she was thirty-eight when I was born both of which, of course, these days doesn’t seem that old…….

JUSTIN LEWIS:

…But in those days, it would have been.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yes, and I was adopted too (that’s another story for another time). Both my parents had been married before they were with each other and their heydays were from a time before popular music as we know it now, I suppose. I think there’s a watershed time where people’s teenage years and twenties were before the Sixties and The Beatles and so on.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Well, in your dad’s case, it would have been before the word ‘teenager’ even existed. That wasn’t a thing.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Exactly. They did buy some records when we got this record player, though: my dad bought some Edith Piaf. He liked classical too classical but popular classical – eg A Little Night Music by Mozart…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I mean, Radio 2 in the Seventies – and Radio 4, actually – would play popular classical music.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yes, obviously they catered to a different demographic then. My mother also bought some records, She loved Frankie Vaughan but also The Ink Spots and Nat ‘King’ Cole’… Those are the ones I really remember.

—–

FIRST: LA BELLE EPOQUE: ‘Black is Black’ (1977, single, Harvest Records)

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s occurred to me there was this period in the mid-to-late 70s when there are these disco remakes of 60s hits. That version of ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ by Santa Esmeralda, and ‘Painter Man’ and ‘Sunny’ by Boney M, and even ‘Macarthur Park’ by Donna Summer, like quite a European disco take on 60s music. And then there’s this.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I didn’t know, until I was going to do this interview, that ‘Black is Black’ was a cover. And the song was only about ten years old at the time – you know if you had someone today doing a cover from something in 2015, it wouldn’t feel that long ago.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yes, They were Spanish, Los Bravos who did the original of ‘Black is Black’ – although it was Johnny Hallyday who had the big hit in France with it, so maybe La Belle Epoque took their cue from that version.

EMMA ANDERSON:

There was a record shop near where I lived, and I bought this there. What else from that time? Baccara, ‘Yes Sir I Can Boogie’, ‘Silver Lady’ by David Soul.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

This is all literally from the same few weeks, autumn ’77.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Oh ha – maybe I bought them all at the same time. And then – slightly later I remember buying ‘Northern Lights’ by Renaissance and we had the Grease soundtrack album. This feels like quite a strange thing for a ten- or eleven-year-old child to have, but I bought a Gladys Knight and the Pips album, Still Together.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

She’s quite underrated, I think, she’s got a brilliant voice. Sifting through all the interviews you’ve done over the years, I was reading how you started reading Smash Hits, around the same time I did, in the very early 80s. And it feels odd to think now that, in those days, they had a section on indie, the independent charts, they’d write about people like Crass.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yes, the first one I bought [25 June 1981] had Kirsty MacColl on the cover and it had a feature on Crass, a review of Cabaret Voltaire. I was obviously into pop, but I was fascinated by the indie page as well. I am planning on seeing Cabaret Voltaire live next year, funnily enough.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I inherited my first several issues of Smash Hits from my cousin Philip, who’s five years older than me, he happened to be getting rid of them, and I asked if I could have them. I think the earliest issue had the Undertones on the cover [26 June 1980], and there were all these references in it to Joy Division, because Ian Curtis had just died, but it took a while to work that out because I wasn’t a John Peel listener or anything like that.

EMMA ANDERSON:

It’s funny you mention The Undertones because in 1981, getting into more ‘alternative’ music (though still in the Top 40) really started for me and I bought ‘It’s Going to Happen!’ by The Undertones, ‘Treason’ by The Teardrop Explodes, ‘Sound of the Crowd’ by The Human League, and ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ by New Order. And I can tell you where I got ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ from – we lived on Half Moon Street, just off Piccadilly, and at the Curzon Street end there was a newsagent’s which sold ex-jukebox singles really cheaply – you could tell because the middle was knocked out. I had no idea who New Order or Joy Division were at this point in time. I had just heard the song in the Top 40.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

At what point did you start to think, ‘Maybe I could do this? Maybe I could be in bands?’ Because you were going to gigs, right?

EMMA ANDERSON:

The first gig I went to was Japan, supported by Blancmange [Hammersmith Odeon, 23 December 1981], and then The Teardrop Explodes…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Was that when the Ravishing Beauties were supporting?

EMMA ANDERSON:

That’s right, with Virginia Astley – and I remember Julian Cope poured honey all over his body in the encore. There was also Soft Cell. Echo and the Bunnymen – but I also saw Haircut One Hundred and Duran Duran, the more poppy end. ABC, I saw. My friends went to see Spandau Ballet, I had a ticket for that, but I was ill and I couldn’t go and I was gutted.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And this is still early 1980s, before these groups are playing arenas. They’re playing theatres.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I saw Duran Duran, Japan, ABC and Haircut One Hundred at the Hammersmith Odeon. Teardrop Explodes, Soft Cell, Bunnymen, U2, were all at the Hammersmith Palais.. I saw Simple Minds at the Lyceum… these were fairly sizeable venues but compared to where some of them they went on to play… quite small, yes.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I can’t bear arena gigs, for the most part.

EMMA ANDERSON:

No, I can’t. At these gigs, we’d run down to the front of the venue when the doors opened and so we’d watch the whole of the support band. But you were asking ‘What made you think you could do this?’ Later on, I started to go to a lot more gigs in the back of pubs – and that’s when I started to think about that. Because it was a more DIY/post-punk environment, and you started to get to know people, especially in London when you’d get used to going to a huge number of gigs. Because it wasn’t glossy, the stage might only be a few inches off the floor. There was quite a community and in that era of late 80s London, people were squatting, a lot of people in bands were signing on – you could live in London cheaply. Camden and Notting Hill even were full of squats – hard to believe now, obviously. East London too – Hackney, Stoke Newington – and Brixton as well. But in that environment, you could pick up a guitar, bass or drumkit, and have a go. It’s a lot harder now.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Oh god yeah. I don’t know how anyone gets started now.

—-

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Before you and Miki Berenyi formed Lush, around 1987 you were both in separate bands playing bass, right?

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yeah, they were both kind of rockabilly/garage groups (before what ‘garage’ means now!). I was asked to join The Rover Girls. They’d done a lot of gigs without a bass player already then I think they thought, ‘actually, I think we need one’. We did a few covers in that band (actually it all bordered on cabaret a little) – we did things like ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ and ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’’. One of our original songs was called ‘I Fell in Love with a Kebab Man’ – which I had no hand in writing, I should add! It was a bit of fun really.

When we formed Lush originally, we were a five-piece. As you probably know, there was another singer, Meriel [Barham, who later joined Pale Saints]. We played a lot of gigs on the London circuit, supporting a lot of people, and then after Meriel left, the songwriting changed a bit.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It feels like things started to happen quite quickly after ’88, you get signed to 4AD, you get to make a mini-album [Scar] in ‘89.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Personally, I don’t think it happened particularly quickly. I mean, you heard of bands like Flowered Up who played two gigs or whatever who ended up on the cover of Melody Maker. I do consider that we did pay our dues. We played in a lot of pubs supporting a lot of bands!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I suppose I was just thinking in terms of how the priorities of the independent sector change completely during the career span of Lush (1988–96) because the definition of ‘indie guitar music’ changed. And it must have been a thrill to sign to 4AD because I know you were a fan of a lot of the bands.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Oh, I was a massive fan. It’s not a secret!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And the sleeve art for 4AD releases just looked so special. I’ve never quite understood when people say, ‘As long as the music’s great, that’s all that matters’ because something on 4AD – or Factory come to that – always looked so special. It looked like something you wanted to own.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yes, they were pieces of art.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Were the Lush sleeves all Vaughan Oliver’s work?

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yeah, there was no collaboration with the band. You didn’t collaborate with Vaughan Oliver! It was fine to let him get on with it [Laughs]

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So did he design the sleeve not knowing what the record would sound like?

EMMA ANDERSON:

No, he was definitely inspired by the music because I remember that the scratches on the Scar sleeve were there because of the kind of raw abrasiveness in the guitar sounds. And then later, Spooky, which Robin Guthrie produced, was a much rounder, softer sound. And the sleeves reflect all that. Lovelife, Chris Bigg did that one (I don’t know if Vaughan liked Lovelife much).

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Looking back now, you and Miki did write certain songs together, but most of the songs are credited either to you or Miki as solo compositions. How did you get started as a songwriter?

EMMA ANDERSON:

When Meriel was in the band, we did a demo which we used solely to get gig at that time.. I wrote a song, Miki wrote a song, Meriel wrote a song, and I think the last one on the tape was ‘Sunbathing’ which was the only one that then made it on to a later Lush release.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The Sweetness and Light EP, right?

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yeah, I remember when we were making that [1990], ‘Oh god, we need another B-side!’ [Laughs] So we went back to that demo tape, and since then, you know… Jenny Hval has covered it, it was used in a Canadian TV series a couple of years ago… Of the other songs on that first demo, Meriel’s was actually the best! After she left, I did start writing differently. I don’t really know what happened, but something clicked where I did start writing better melodies and structures. How and why, I don’t know.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

When you look at the back catalogue of Lush, do you have a favourite album, one that you’re most proud of?

EMMA ANDERSON:

I can tell you the one I’m least proud of is the last one [Lovelife, 1996]. I don’t like being negative about our work, really, but I don’t think that one’s stood the test of time as well as the others. I think it lost something in that whole [mindset] of ‘Let’s go back to basics and get rid of the effects pedals.’ And obviously that whole Britpop influence was going on at that time. The only track I can listen to really off that album is ‘Last Night’, but that had a completely different approach as I was into trip-hop at the time and it shows there. Steve Osborne, who worked with Paul Oakenfold, mixed it so it has more of the dance, trip-hop vibe. I do love the outro of that song, actually.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Quite apart from the terrible tragedy that happened with the loss of Chris shortly afterwards, I wonder if one problem Lush faced after the shoegazing scene was you never seemed to be considered part of subsequent scenes, which always puts established bands at a slight disadvantage. Because the music press had this idea of what category everything should be in. And also because 4AD put out two singles on the same day (‘Hypocrite’ and ‘Desire Lines’ in 1994)…

EMMA ANDERSON:

Oh yeah, that wasn’t our idea.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

…which may have seemed like an inspired idea when they’d done it with Colourbox [‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’ and ‘Baby I Love You So’, both released on the same day in 1986], but the indie world was entirely different back in the eighties.

EMMA ANDERSON:

That idea came from our American A&R man, Tim Carr, and 4AD ran with it; there was a feeling that we weren’t going to get into the top 40 anyway, so it was, ‘Let’s do something a bit weird and sabotage things’ – why?!! But we had been in the Top 40 (‘For Love’, January 1992) but it charted quite low, and while ‘For Love’’s a great song, it was released on 30 December [1991], and it was a very quiet week.

But the other thing [by ‘94] was that almost everyone in the industry around the band was so obsessed with the idea of breaking America.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Did you have a profile in America particularly? I know you had records coming out there, and ‘De-Luxe’ had got on the alternative rock radio playlists over there. Maybe it’s my age, but I feel very tired when I read about bands touring America for months on end for not particularly enthusiastic audiences.

EMMA ANDERSON:

We were signed to 4AD for the world and they had a licensing deal with Warners/Reprise. It was great that Warners were behind us there, and we toured a lot, and did things like Lollapalooza which, actually, I really loved. I had a great time. But, alas, I do think America took its toll on the band mentally and physically. Having said that, the audiences were actually very enthusiastic and we did build up a very good fanbase there, which exists to this day. But we didn’t sell a million albums, much to the disappointment of management/labels etc.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I was quite surprised to find out quite how much touring in America you did.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Part of the problem, I think, was the band members had different ways of approaching this. We all enjoyed different aspects of touring (and to be honest of the whole business and being in a band anyway). I personally wasn’t particularly into these long tours and endless weeks away from home. One tour was OK but then not long after came number two and then number three. Miki had spent a lot of time in America, her mother lived there, so she was much more used to being in the US. I think Phil quite liked it; he had never been to America before being in Lush. I didn’t hate it but, I have to be honest, it was gruelling. On the last album, we were doing this tour of shows put on by local radio stations, all these gigs where the punters got in for free. They were throwing bottles and shoes at the stage and when I told management that morale in the band was low, they said, ‘You’re only here so we can get the radio station to play your record.’ But you’re just thinking, ‘Is this really why I wanted to do music?’

JUSTIN LEWIS:

You were doing a lot of TV back in the UK, round about Lovelife time. Is it true you did Live and Kicking one Saturday morning?

EMMA ANDERSON:

That was one of the better ones! We had a very good TV plugger, the late Scott Piering. We did Top of the Pops [for both ‘Single Girl’ and ‘Ladykillers’] … Big Breakfast with Zig and Zag, twice. This Morning with Richard and Judy, we went up to Liverpool to do that. Then there was Pyjama Party [co-hosted by Katie Puckrik and a young Claudia Winkleman], Hotel Babylon with Dani Behr, Dear Davina… We did some quite trashy stuff around the Lovelife time.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I’m surprised I don’t remember seeing you on these, I used to watch quite a lot of night-time TV back then.

EMMA ANDERSON:

We did All Rise for Julian Clary [courtroom mock-up variety show for BBC2]… him and Captain Peacock [Frank Thornton] from Are You Being Served? That was Phil’s moment of ‘How low can we get with this?’, that show. So embarrassing.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

In what capacity were you doing that?

EMMA ANDERSON:

Basically, there was this young girl – about 12 years old. She’d collected a load of NMEs, a few hundred probably, and somebody had chucked them out by mistake. She was so upset that either she or somebody else wrote to this programme who obviously then contacted the NME who got together all these [replacement issues]… And our role was to come on and present this girl with all these NMEs. That was it.

—–

LAST: TAYLOR SWIFT: ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ (2025, single, Republic Records)

JUSTIN LEWIS:

You mentioned this as something you wanted to bring up.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I’m going to make a massive admission here: I don’t really consume a lot of new music. My finger is not on the pulse of new releases. But this obviously came to my attention because you can’t really get away from it. I don’t really have an opinion on Taylor Swift – I never understood why she was so massive, but I’ve also been intrigued by why she’s so massive. But I do think this single is alarmingly good. I cannot get it out of my head. I go to bed singing it, and I wake up singing it. The video is amazing, and then of course on Instagram when you look at one thing – in this case ‘the dance’ – the algorithm sends you all these clips, so I’ve now watched about fifty different people all doing ‘the dance’. And I’ve realised this really is quite a phenomenon.

So then I looked into the background of it, because I’m always interested in the production side, and it’s Max Martin and Shellback who’ve both worked with Britney Spears amongst others. And then, I started breaking down the actual song in my head. So there’s a chorus, but then as I said to my daughter, ‘It’s like there’s a post-chorus.’ And she said, ‘Of course there’s a post-chorus.’ My daughter’s been getting into K-Pop and that’s got post-choruses. I thought I knew about pre-choruses. But then I realised, actually, that there’s a song I’ve got on my Pearlies album called ‘The Presence’ and that’s got a post-chorus on it!

So I think I brought this Taylor Swift song up because it’s just made my brain ticking about lots of things. It’s quite fascinating, and so I am starting to understand why she’s so massive.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There’s another thing I was going to say about Taylor Swift which I find a bit off-putting. With her previous album, two hours after that ‘dropped’, there was another album that came out immediately.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Oh, I was vaguely aware of that, yes.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So what they said this time was: With the new album, no extra songs after it comes out, this is the album – only to then bring out lots of limited edition formats, each with one extra alternative version and demo of the existing songs on the album, which technically means there were no new extra songs, but it did mean that all the fans felt obliged to shell out for all these extra formats – and especially given her fans are often really young… I find it all a bit cynical.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yeah, as much as I think aspects of her are great… that whole re-recording her back catalogue. You can slag off your original record company, but they put the work in in the early period. Is that taken into account? Without the work they put in, would you be able to do this now? But I get the idea that the fact they own your material is obviously quite an anathema to a lot of people, especially if you become huge (as she has done).

—–

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I wanted to ask you about Sing-Sing, the duo you formed after Lush broke up. Was this a way of trying to do something totally different from Lush?

EMMA ANDERSON:

After Chris’s death [Oct 1996], that whole year was just… awful. Even before Chris died, it’s not a secret, I wanted to leave the band. My way of coping after, in a way, was carrying on, and quite quickly start writing some more songs. But at that stage, I didn’t have a singer and I didn’t think I could sing.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I mean, obviously, you were singing on the original Lush records.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Backing vocals, yes, which is completely different from doing lead which I had never really done at all. In fact, around 1997 I did some demos which 4AD paid for as they were interested in hearing new material and Pete Bartlett – our soundman who’d produced Lovelife – produced them in his flat. I gave them to [4AD founder] Ivo, and he said to me [laughs], ‘You can’t sing, Emma’. (Looking back, though, this is funny because Ivo actually really loves Pearlies, my solo album, and he absolutely thinks I can sing now. This actually means a lot to me as I have really obviously always valued his judgement.) Anyway, then myself and the remaining Lush members got dropped so I went looking for other singers. I found Lisa [O’Neill] via a couple of ways. She worked at an animation company called Bermuda Shorts with a really old friend of mine, Bunny, who I knew from school, but she also went out a guy who shared a flat in Camden with a guy that I was going out with. PLUS she’d also sung on the hidden track on a record by Mark Van Hoen’s project, Locust, an excellent album called Morning Light (1997). PLUS another connection: my friend Polly worked at a PR company called Savage and Best – they did Pulp, Elastica, Curve etc. John Best gave me a promo cassette of Morning Light. So, I thought, ‘Maybe this is meant to be’ – and we started working together.

The other thing about Mark Van Hoen was that he was an electronic musician and a whizz-kid programmer. After being in a traditional band set-up with a drummer and a bass player etc, for me, that was so refreshing. All the records I had made before, everything recorded had been recorded on to tape but this way you could just sit around the computer and it was BANG – it all got done very quickly and smoothly. But I still wrote songs in exactly the same way, and Lisa wrote songs too.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Did you write together in Sing-Sing, or were these songs separately written compositions?

EMMA ANDERSON:

It was slightly different. Lisa couldn’t play an instrument, so she’d come up with melodies. Sometimes I’d flesh them out a bit, eg ‘I’ll Be’, and sometimes Mark would put chords to her melodies. But they were still her songs, and obviously her lyrics. But the whole process was just so different because it was of the computer-centric process. I’d never really done it like that before, and Mark’s such a excellent programmer. There were a few samples on the record, which were a nightmare to clear, legally [laughs]. But just watching him do it all was amazing, because he’d just pull out a record and say, ‘This would make a good drum sample’. And it would fit perfectly! It was a real eyeopener, and I enjoyed it immensely.

But then the problems weren’t about making the records, it was about getting them out there. I wasn’t on 4AD anymore…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

What was it released on in the end?

EMMA ANDERSON:

‘Feels Like Summer’ [the first version, 1998] came out on Bella Union but that was never going to be a permanent label. After that we actually became signed by Sanctuary and made the album with them but there were internal shenanigans and we got dropped and we were able to take the album with us, so I went to Alan McGee, who’d just started Poptones [his label founded after the end of Creation Records]. I knew Alan because I’d worked for Jeff Barrett (who owns Heavenly Records now but had been a PR) in the late 80s which was in the Creation Offices at Clerkenwell. And Alan said ‘yes’.

It’s funny now, because Lush are really celebrated – there’s all these reissues – and everyone loves shoegazing, and Slowdive and Ride and My Bloody Valentine. But in the late 90s, Lush were not seen as a particularly cool band. I was in my thirties when I was doing Sing-Sing and it’s hard to believe this now this, but ‘older’ women in music weren’t particularly respected back then. Now you’ve got PJ Harvey, and Björk, and Alison Goldfrapp, Kim Deal, all in their fifties, early sixties, you know? And it’s fine. But back then, people would literally say to me, ‘Emma, you’re over thirty, no-one’s interested’, even though the music was good, it was really good. But I think it didn’t really fit in with the early noughties time, The Strokes and The Gossip and Kaiser Chiefs and all that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Not really my thing either, that. I had just turned thirty, in 2000, and I find that period of guitar music in the early noughties even harder to listen to than Britpop. I mean, I like some Britpop – I was suspicious of the tag, but most of the bands made at least one record I liked. But I find the noughties a very strange period to revisit now. I wanted to listen to something else. But the other thing about this period – you got a ‘proper job’ as it were, right?

EMMA ANDERSON:

I’d worked before Lush, As I said, I worked for Jeff for a while, and after that then obviously Lush was my job. But by 2000 I had to go back into the world of day jobs. My first job was working for Duran Duran, I was their PA, 2000–02 and it was when the line-up was Nick, Simon and Warren Cucurrullo. Now obviously they’re back with John and Roger and they’re playing arenas, but when I worked with them wasn’t their most memorable period, although the album I worked on at the time, Pop Trash, was actually pretty decent. The single that came off that, ‘Someone Else, Not Me’, was really good. So I did that for a couple of years, and Sing-Sing were going at the same time. Then I worked as a management assistant at the company that managed Goldfrapp, Ladytron and a band called The Shortwave Set. I did that for two or three years, and then worked for the PR company Hall or Nothing who did Oasis and the Manics, as office manager. After that I moved to Brighton and got a job at 13 Artists, which is the booking agency for Arctic Monkeys, Suede and Radiohead amongst others.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

One thing I often think about, with being in a band: there must come a point when you start thinking, ‘Where are we today?’ You know your role is to do a gig and then travel to the next gig, but when you have an ‘ordinary’ job, you at least have a sense of place.

EMMA ANDERSON:

There’s a lot to be said for actually living a relatively normal life, you know?! Not knocking being in a band, but the weird thing is, Justin, I was only actually in Lush for about eight years. I’m fifty-eight but people associate me solely with being in Lush though it took up a relatively small portion of my working life. I’ve actually been an office worker way longer than I was a professional musician! It’s true!

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I’ve got a quote, which I’m going to read back to you, and you said this in 1992, so I appreciate you might think differently now, but I’ll mention it because it ties in with what you just said. To Simon Reynolds, in The Observer newspaper: ‘It’s weird to hear people talking about us as pop stars. When we were young, I used to be mesmerised by them, and even now I think we still can’t help seeing ourselves as part of the audience.’

EMMA ANDERSON:

Even now sometimes people say to me, ‘You’re a pop star’ and I baulk at it to be honest… I suppose I consider pop stars to be Prince or Beyoncé or Taylor Swift. I do remember that quote, and I was a little criticised for saying it, actually, I seem to remember.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There’s a lot of sense in it.

EMMA ANDERSON:

There was that whole Madchester thing at the time… there was a lot of swagger going around.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

‘We’re the best band in the world’ type of thing.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yes. And journalists kind of liked that. Of course they did. To me, being in a band was just something I did. I was never particularly ambitious. I always felt that I just picked up a guitar, wrote some songs, got signed, and we toured, we were able to do that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

With your solo album, Pearlies, which I can’t quite believe already came out two years ago: I gather some of these songs date back to the Lush reunion from about a decade ago.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I had one or two songs, and some bits left over from the reunion (as I thought we were going to make an album. Or three). But that’s how I write anyway, in bits and pieces and I assemble them into whole songs sometimes. And I thought, I’d quite like to carry on. Originally, I thought I’d find another singer, again, like I had done with Sing-Sing. I did some demos with Audrey Riley [great cellist, many credits], and we did three tracks, but even with that, I said, ‘I’m not singing’, and she said, ‘Emma, you can sing! Just do it!’ She got in one of her students, a Norwegian girl called Anna, who sang the songs very beautifully, but I didn’t end up doing much with those demos. And then when I spoke with Robin Guthrie about doing some more demos, he said, ‘I will only do them if you sing. Forget it otherwise’ And that made me think, ‘Maybe I should do this.’

Then COVID happened, and Robin lives in France… but I realised there’d been all these people telling me I couldn’t sing all that time. Even when I was at school, I was quite into music, I did like singing, and there was a choir which I so wanted to get into. Every term I auditioned for it, and he’d say, ‘I’ll put you on the reserve list’ – as he felt a bit sorry for me.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I’m really glad you did do it for Pearlies. Because it’s all about having personality in your voice anyway.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I don’t think it’s just about the voice, though. The thought of standing at the front of the stage in the middle, being the focus, petrified me [laughs].

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Oh I can understand that.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I don’t have that personality. I don’t really enjoy being the centre of attention. I was perfectly happy being at the side with Lush and Sing-Sing – in fact, I found it preferable.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Thinking about it, when you see a band on TV, the camera tends to focus on the singer, they only cut away to someone else when the singer isn’t singing. You haven’t been touring the record, but I know there are good reasons for that.

EMMA ANDERSON:

The main reason is that I’m a single mother of a school-age child so going on tour is – well, nigh on impossible. I also work (I am a bookkeeper) and there are some financial constraints to touring too, especially as I am a solo musician now.

Some people have suggested, ‘Oh, just do it with you and a laptop.’ But I don’t want to do it like that, I’d want a proper band – and if it was just me and a laptop and a guitar, and it was a bit rubbish, you get people filming things and putting them on YouTube. So there’s an element of caution with it as well.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Speaking of YouTube, I note that the Lush film, Lush: A Far From Home Movie – which was quite hard to see here, but was on the Criterion streaming site in America – is on YouTube now.

EMMA ANDERSON:

It’s Phil’s film, and we did some live showings of it. It was great, actually. It’s a sweet film.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s nice and prescient that someone thought to capture that footage at the time. We’re used to doing that now on a camera or phone, but in the 90s, people weren’t thinking like that so much. So even to just have some bits filmed, you weren’t necessarily going to do anything with them.

EMMA ANDERSON:

Yeah, Phil had a Super-8 camera, so black and white, no audio. You could only film literally a few minutes at a time. So it’s very evocative. Even though it was filmed in the 90s, because of the quality it looks like it could have been filmed in the 50s. And there’s lots of Chris in it as he was so good in front of the camera.

—–

ANYTHING: GAVIN BRYARS: ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’ (1975, Obscure/Island Records)

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I always have to take a deep breath before listening to this because I find it so overwhelming.

EMMA ANDERSON:

In a way, I chose it because you asked for something that made you think about music differently. I did my degree at what was then Ealing College of Higher Education but it is now, after many name changes, the University of West London. The degree was called Humanities – you did six subjects in the first year, and then you majored in one and minored in two. My major subject was History of Art but one of the minor ones was Music, and there was a teacher and lecturer there called Allan Moore, who’s a musicologist. He used to play us things like Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung, and also this by Gavin Bryars. I just remember sitting in this lecture room, in this college, and him putting this on, and being completely transfixed, as in ‘What am I listening to here?’ This obviously old recording, of this old guy singing, outside, looped over and over, with these strings that built and built… It’s a very emotional experience.

But it’s quite important to me that I actually heard this at college, rather than on the telly or at a mate’s house. And I’ve got the record now.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Which version is this, because there are several?

EMMA ANDERSON:

The other side is ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Ah, the original record, that came out in the 70s.

EMMA ANDERSON:

And I noticed, when I knew I was going to do this interview, that Tom Waits has also appeared on a recording. Which makes total sense. And Audrey Riley who I mentioned earlier – she’s played with Gavin Bryars as well, she knows him quite well. So I’m not an afficionado of modern classical music or whatever, but this has meant a lot to me and made me see things in a different way. And it was interesting working in Lush with Audrey on string arrangements… I mean, when I was a child, I really wanted to learn music, the piano specifically. I begged and begged to have piano lessons, but I wasn’t allowed, basically. So I do sometimes wonder, had I had piano lessons and got into that world, my life might have been a bit different.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That’s a real shame you never got that opportunity then. Is ‘Jesus’ Blood’ classical music or not, then, I wonder? Because it lies somewhere between lots of things. I have a feeling I first heard this in the early 1990s, because incredibly, this was on the Mercury Prize nominations list [the 1993 list, and a three-minute edit of the Tom Waits recording which you mentioned was included on a Mercury sampler album alongside PJ Harvey, Suede, Apache Indian and the Stereo MCs]. They used to put out a sampler every year of the Mercury nominations, not sure they do this anymore, but at the end there’d always be the token classical record, which would never win, and you wish it would sometimes.

But the thing about an extract of something like this – it doesn’t really work. You have to have the whole thing. [EA agrees] Because it takes about five minutes for the strings even to start.

EMMA ANDERSON:

It’s very gradual which adds to the emotional weight of it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And then the effect of having the strings start to drown out the man’s voice – and at times, you only hear the man’s voice whenever the strings pause, before starting again. I have to ration it because it’s one of those pieces I wouldn’t want to get too used to. It’s a record that’ll stay with me for ever.

This is the kind of record I was thinking of, with wildcard choices for this textcast. I couldn’t get my head round repetition when I was very young, and what shook me out of that was firstly modern classical music, and then also dance music. Because that was also about minimalism and loops. I suddenly realised I’d have to listen to music differently. Because I was 17, 18 when acid house came in.

EMMA ANDERSON:

I was actually really into dance music – I used to go clubbing quite a lot in the late 80s/early 90s and I’ve got a few records from that period.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

What would be an example of an acid house ‘anthem’ that would evoke that time for you?

EMMA ANDERSON:

‘Strings of Life’ by Rhythm is Rhythm… I loved that. ‘The Real Life’ by Corporation of One, which has got samples from Simple Minds’ ‘Theme from Great Cities’ and then it cuts in with Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. What else? ‘Where Love Lives’ by Alison Limerick was always a favourite. ‘Sweet Harmony’ by Liquid. Sometimes I’d hear things at the time but wouldn’t know what they were. But I was quite into this stuff, because I worked for Jeff and there was that whole club scene… I went to the Hacienda a few times, Shoom, Milk Bar with Danny Rampling…

I expect people maybe assume I must only be into My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins… but I’ve got quite a broad taste (I like to think so anyway!).

—-

Lush’s Gala compilation was reissued on 4AD on 14 November 2025, marking its 35^th anniversary, and completing the label’s reissues of the group’s back catalogue. More information here: https://4ad.com/news/22/9/2025/35thanniversaryeditionofgala

Phil King’s film, Lush: A Far from Home Movie, can now be seen in full on 4AD’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow3jEIV0s74&list=RDow3jEIV0s74&start_radio=1

Emma Anderson’s 2023 solo album Pearlies is out on Sonic Cathedral Records, as is its 2024 remixed version Spiralée (Pearlies Rearranged). Further information at her Bandcamp page: https://emmaanderson.bandcamp.com/music

You can follow Emma on Bluesky at @emmaandersonmusic.bsky.social, and on Instagram and Facebook at @emmaandersonmusic.

—–

FLA Playlist 34

Emma Anderson

(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/4z65FUBy0X

Track 1:

LA BELLE EPOQUE: ‘Black is Black’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3nf4UsEdlA&list=RDv3nf4UsEdlA&start_radio=1

Track 2:

EDITH PIAF: ‘Je ne regrette rien’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r454dad7tc&list=RD4r454dad7tc&start_radio=1

Track 3:

RENAISSANCE: ‘Northern Lights’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKBJqHvQvjg&list=RDHKBJqHvQvjg&start_radio=1

Track 4:

CABARET VOLTAIRE: ‘Nag, Nag, Nag’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWGZWYrR5Nw&list=RDpWGZWYrR5Nw&start_radio=1

Track 5:

THE UNDERTONES: ‘It’s Going to Happen!’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQtaqgW6MXg&list=RDaQtaqgW6MXg&start_radio=1

Track 6:

THE TEARDROP EXPLODES: ‘Treason’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV8cEIsFX-A&list=RDrV8cEIsFX-A&start_radio=1

Track 7:

ABC: ‘Date Stamp’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=434lTbIZsJ0&list=RD434lTbIZsJ0&start_radio=1

Track 8:

NEW ORDER: ‘Everything’s Gone Green’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v5ivB7bM1k&list=RD4v5ivB7bM1k&start_radio=1

Track 9:

JAPAN: ‘Gentlemen Take Polaroids’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlyI2isjAas&list=RDSlyI2isjAas&start_radio=1

Track 10:

LUSH: ‘Thoughtforms’ (2^nd version):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWYXR78pf7k&list=RDgWYXR78pf7k&start_radio=1

Track 11:

LUSH: ‘Last Night’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHngGUzLkD4&list=RDbHngGUzLkD4&start_radio=1

Track 12:

TAYLOR SWIFT: ‘The Fate of Ophelia’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko70cExuzZM&list=RDko70cExuzZM&start_radio=1

Track 13:

SING-SING: ‘Far Away from Love’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cuOr2TCcQw&list=RD_cuOr2TCcQw&start_radio=1

Track 14:

SING-SING: ‘I’ll Be’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLhsWXlCmUo&list=RDrLhsWXlCmUo&start_radio=1

Track 15:

DURAN DURAN: ‘Someone Else Not Me’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyThuzD1vUo&list=RDRyThuzD1vUo&start_radio=1

Track 16:

EMMA ANDERSON: ‘The Presence’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCyo6Dq6Dvg&list=RDrCyo6Dq6Dvg&start_radio=1

Track 17:

EMMA ANDERSON: ‘Inter Light’ (MEMORIALS Mix):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3At7nRpepY&list=RDx3At7nRpepY&start_radio=1

Track 18:

GAVIN BRYARS: ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’ [1975 original]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfJXXOFLzfQ&list=RDrfJXXOFLzfQ&start_radio=1&t=82s

Track 19:

CORPORATION OF ONE: ‘The Real Life’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AEp9-BOGOw&list=RD9AEp9-BOGOw&start_radio=1

Track 20:

RHYTHM IS RHYTHM: ‘Strings of Life’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGFw2qeUp0s&list=RDvGFw2qeUp0s&start_radio=1

Track 21:

ALISON LIMERICK: ‘Where Love Lives’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGYdeSnux68&list=RDwGYdeSnux68&start_radio=1

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

September 14, 2025 / whenisbins / Leave a comment

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 50^th 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

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

MAN’S LAUGHTER

January 29, 2017May 6, 2025 / whenisbins / 1 Comment

file_000 Maybe because it’s felt like the 24-hour news media has been laughing at us for months, but I’ve started to be plagued by the memory of a most disturbing record. ‘The Laughing Policeman’ by Charles Penrose is the aural equivalent of being poked in the ribs by The Sun. You rarely hear it nowadays, but in my childhood in the 1970s, Junior Choice on Radio 1 was still playing it. It was already fifty years old, yet no child I knew liked or enjoyed it, and I suspected that grown adults were writing in to troll us by requesting it.

Even now, it makes me feel queasy for several reasons. As an infant, I shunned an ITV children’s show with the same title, even though it featured Deryck Guyler off Sykes and whom I liked, because of its inevitable theme tune. If it came on the radio, I would make a quick getaway, defeated by a mixture of embarrassment (‘Stop doing it, this isn’t funny’) and alarm: ‘Why is he laughing, again and again? He doesn’t sound happy. Why?’

What did this police officer, one presumably in busy full-time employment, find so uproariously funny? Miscarriages of justice? Assuming he was ‘always on the beat’, what sort of weekly targets was he expected to meet? Did his laughter impede his ability to arrest potential suspects? (We discover, at least twice, that yes, it did.) Did his colleagues in the force suffer from other behavioural quirks, like the Crying Desk Sergeant or the Petrified Superintendant?

Is this the ultimate example in comedy of ‘You had to be there’? Because nothing, not Duck Soup, not Seinfeld, not even Three Up Two Down, is that funny. Nothing warrants four ferocious choruses of whooping and barking that makes Kriss Akabusi sound like Droopy the Dog. And it brings to mind another tiresome record that Junior Choice patronised: ‘I’ve Lost My Mummy’ by a now-disgraced Australian entertainer, which replaced the machine-gun laughter with furious mock-sobbing. Who on earth was this rubbish for?

‘The Laughing Policeman’ has no sincerity. It’s the cabaret at Trump Tower. You can imagine Nigel Farage miming to it; it doesn’t laugh with its eyes, only its lungs, a kind of physical exertion like clearing your throat. It’s laughing at nothing – whereas at least David Bowie’s ‘Laughing Gnome’ attempted puns with an ‘-ome’ suffix. One of my favourite bits of laughter in pop, though, is Bernard Sumner on New Order’s ‘Every Little Counts’ where he splutters over the line ‘I think you are a pig/You should be in a zoo’. Here the laughter sounds genuine – because he’s trying not to laugh.

If only ‘The Laughing Policeman’ were an isolated offence by Charles Penrose (aka Charles Jolly). But no, for this was a self-styled ‘laughing comedian’. Its B-side on its 1926 release, ‘Laughter and Lemons’ is, disconcertingly, a barrage of forced mirth over the Open All Hours music. There were, still, others: ‘The Laughing Major’, ‘The Laughing Ghost’, ‘The Laughing Monk’ (sadly not a Trappist one), and – a sure sign that someone will not shut up – a sequel: ‘Laughing Policeman Again’ in which the policeman finds a girlfriend who also laughs inanely. As that Glasgow Empire heckler perceptively said of Mike and Bernie Winters, ‘Oh fuck, there’s two of them.’

It seemed appropriate, in the week that Desert Island Discs celebrates 75 years on the radio, to check if anyone had ever chosen ‘The Laughing Policeman’. Four people have, including Twiggy and Hugh Grant, and I shudder to think of having that in your list of eight for ever more. What is it there to do – maybe it was to remind company-starved hermits of how to laugh? And it reminds me why I dislike that laugh certain comedians do: not the laughter of amusement, more the laughter of existence, tediously and constantly reminding you they’re still in the room while other people are speaking. At least Paul Whitehouse’s Chuck Perry character on the radio phone-in parody Down the Line has a point to his relentlessness: formless laughter simply at the inappropriate or even mundane subject under discussion.

It has given me an idea for a new TV drama series, though:

‘The Laughing Policeman’: Like Midsomer Murders but set in the fictional village of Hillarity. DI John Lafferty (played by, I dunno, Robson Green, it often is) tries to solve crimes of murder, except he can’t because he’s laughing. We don’t know why yet. Theme tune is ‘The Laughing Policeman’ but slowed down, like off a John Lewis advert, and sung by Emeli Sande. Repeated Fridays on ITV3. Be there.

FIRST LAST ANYTHING

Justin Lewis – Books Conversations Art Writing

New Order

FLA 34: Emma Anderson (23/11/2025)

FIRST: LA BELLE EPOQUE: ‘Black is Black’ (1977, single, Harvest Records)

LAST: TAYLOR SWIFT: ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ (2025, single, Republic Records)

ANYTHING: GAVIN BRYARS: ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’ (1975, Obscure/Island Records)

FLA Playlist 34

Emma Anderson

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

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

Extract: ‘Une nuit à Paris’

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

Extract: ‘Welcome to Mathematics’

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

Extract: ‘Exit’

FLA 31 PLAYLIST

William Ham Bevan

MAN’S LAUGHTER