2025)

August 17, 2025 / whenisbins / Leave a comment

I began as a fan of Ben Baker’s work, before I became a friend. I’m still a fan – should clarify that. For nearly twenty years now, I’ve been listening to and enjoying his various podcasts, which later expanded into more and more podcasts, books and radio shows. He currently presents on one of the best internet radio stations I know, Noisebox Radio, where his shows include the soon-to-return hour-long music show Middle-Aged Teenage Angst. He also co-hosts the podcast, ALFsplaining, a compelling episode-by-episode deep dive into the US 1980s sitcom ALF [which stands for Alien Life Form], a podcast returning for its third series this autumn. Plus he’s always working on projects. He’ll have hatched two or three just while you’ve been reading this paragraph.

The conversation that follows took place on Zoom one afternoon in early July 2025. As well as Ben’s reminiscences about his first, last and wildcard purchases and acquisitions, you can find out how the music of the mid-1990s (both in the charts and on the fringes) coalesced and became a teenage obsession for him. You will also discover why silliness in music holds a special place in his heart, and how an internet radio station aims to attract and hold its listenership. Plus! What is the first ever track in the history of FLA to be chosen by two separate guests?

I’ve just realised: FLA is ALF backwards. Coincidence? Probably.

—–

BEN BAKER:

The earliest memory of music I can remember is not so much listening to it as visual. My dad had this little red box of records and he had it for years and years – to the point where it was more and more taped up with brown parcel tape around the side. So as a kid, I was always digging through them, which I don’t think my dad appreciated. Because as a kid, I don’t think you’re quite delicate with that sort of thing. But I was fascinated with certain artwork. Bad Manners singles always had cartoons on them, or ‘Oxygene’ by Jean-Michel Jarre with the ‘skull in the earth’ thing which used to freak me out.

So I’ve got lots of visual memories in my very early years, but also my dad has several younger brothers, and they were obsessed with Madness. So my grandma’s house – my dad had moved out – had three sons there, always life going on, and ‘Our House’ reminds me of that. Genuinely, there was always something going on that was usually quite loud – and it does make me a little bit melancholy, that record. With certain Madness records, you don’t pick up on that different level till you’re older, even though they were young men themselves when they did a lot of this stuff. I have an actual Uncle Sam – confusing because obviously there is a Madness song called that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

With both Bad Manners and Madness, it was very visual. ‘Special Brew’ by Bad Manners was maybe the fifth or sixth single I ever bought.

BEN BAKER:

They were kind of like 2-Tone without the sort of political stuff of say, the Specials. They were cartoons.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s interesting that Bad Manners became massive when the Specials cut down on relentless touring and would only gig at weekends. So they moved away from ska, and Bad Manners filled that role of being gregarious. And well, there are about forty-two people in the group as well.

BEN BAKER:

This is the thing. You look back at Top of the Pops footage and with Buster Bloodvessel, you wonder, ‘How old is he?’ You look back and he’s like 21, 22. He’s not old at all, but he doesn’t look youthful, he looks like a 48-year-old brickie.

Later, in ’92, when Madness came back, my dad bought Divine Madness, the compilation. I hammered that, used to walk around listening to that all the time, for maybe a year. I remember saying to my dad at one point, ‘When did Madness go serious?’ – and he went, ‘They didn’t go serious, what are you on about?’ Because I’d got this impression listening to that compilation, in chronological order. If you go from ‘The Prince’ [1979] to ‘Waiting for the Ghost Train’ [1986], that is a huge leap in terms of themes and styles and emotional stuff. Coming back to ‘Our House’ and stuff like that, there’s a lot of melancholy… also ‘Yesterday’s Men’, ‘One Better Day’.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s there as early as ‘Grey Day’, really.

BEN BAKER:

Yeah, yeah. Which is an extraordinary thing to be a top ten single.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And ‘Embarrassment’ which I bought and had no idea it was about racism. But there’s often a very light touch to these songs – there’s that music hall tradition running through what they were doing as well.

BEN BAKER:

I think that’s why Madness are ace, because there are levels to them. There’s always something deeper there if you want it, and if you don’t, they’re still great pop songs.

—–

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Obviously, I know you a fair bit anyway, but just from listening to your shows on Noisebox Radio, and your various podcasts, and reading your books over the years, it’s clear that you’ve absorbed all this information and enthusiasm. But where does that drive come from? Before there was any internet, were you just watching and listening to as much as possible?

BEN BAKER:

Oh yeah, I used to love stuff like Boxpops [BBC2, 1988–91], the follow-on from Windmill [BBC2, 1985–87], which showed archive TV clips and old pop stuff. I would soak up anything that had old stuff in it, and I was very lucky that I grew up during a time when there was still a lot of old stuff on TV.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Do you think TV’s the main thing, that all the other enthusiasms have come from that, like music?

BEN BAKER:

We got Sky quite early on, 1990. Someone literally came round and said, ‘Here, do you want to buy a second-hand dish and a receiver box?’ And my dad went, ‘Yeah, alright then’ because you didn’t need a subscription except for the films back then. There wasn’t a lot of kids’ stuff on there, so I’d find myself watching MTV a lot, just because the loud noises and flashing colours just drew me in, even though I wasn’t fully into music at that point. Music came from TV for me, definitely – which is ironic because I’m a radio person more than anything now.

—-

FIRST (1) – PARTNERS IN KRYME: ‘Turtle Power’ (SBK, single, 1990)

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So, the first record you were given, and the first record you bought, are very different matters. The first record you were given is the first record that has ever come up twice in this series. Which has really made me realise this must have been massive at the time. You know like how Desert Island Discs always seemed to have ‘The Lark Ascending’ on every few weeks? It now seems that every week, First Last Anything will have to have ‘Turtle Power’ by Partners in Kryme. [Laughter]

BEN BAKER:

‘Turtle Power’ is not from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, famously renamed Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles in the UK in case kids became this vast swathe of ninjas suddenly coming over the fields of schools everywhere. The BBFC under James Ferman were very nervous about ninja stuff, apparently. So obviously there was editing with it on television, big cartoon comics… but ‘Turtle Power’ is from the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. You’ll remember that when I was ten, when you were ten, films didn’t come out the same time in America and the UK, you’d get six months delay here. I don’t know why, whether we were just reusing prints? But there was always six months. One of my favourite pieces of trivia of all-time is that Ghostbusters and Gremlins came out on the same day in America [8 June 1984]. And then… six months later [7 December 1984], they both came out the same day in London.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Wow. So, in Britain, Ghostbusters was a Christmas film, right?

BEN BAKER:

Yeah, and Gremlins was because it is a Christmas film. But it came out in the summer in America.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Suddenly this reminds me why the Ray Parker Jr ‘Ghostbusters’ theme went back up the charts round about Christmas ’84, having already been in the top 10 months before.

BEN BAKER:

But with the Turtles… Not only was I a big fan because I was nine years old and obviously susceptible to hype like any nine-year-old… but also it was something that felt just out of reach. ‘I want to see this film, but it’s so far away…’ You see this thing: ‘I want Turtles. Bring me the Turtles.’

Then, a couple of months before it came out in the cinema, a friend of my dad’s went, ‘Got that new Turtles film on a pirated tape.’ ‘Oh my God.’ So we all went round to his house that night to watch it. And remember, the size of screens in homes, even big screens, it would have been 18 inches maybe. It snowed a lot in that film… based on the air tracking. But the point was, I was watching it, and before most of my mates as well. So I’ve always got this fond memory of it.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I realised that ‘Turtle Power’ was doing what Tim Burton’s Batman had done [1989]: you take something quite cuddly from telly, and you remake it as a darker thing for the cinema.

BEN BAKER:

But also, in both of those cases, both came from comics that were darker anyway to begin with. So a lot of it was going back to basics.

I haven’t thought about ‘Turtle Power’ in a long while, but I’ve always liked that it’s a proper rap song. It’s not DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. Because I loved De La Soul, DAISY Age, all that. Rap and hip hop was the first sort of music I really loved because it was so colourful and there were these big characters – MC Hammer who was obviously ridiculous, the Fat Boys, Heavy D and the Boyz. I think that was what I was drawn to initially. So Partners in Kryme was very much that. And ‘Do the Bartman’ – the second record I was given – was another one tied to hype. Again, because we had Sky early, I had actually seen and loved The Simpsons.

The radio was always there, though. When I was younger, my parents had some businesses – for example, they had a transport café – and so, the radio was always on in there. Always Radio 1, until about ’93 when my dad was in his early thirties, so he wasn’t super-old, but he felt Radio 1, 1FM as it became known, was not for him. So, my parents and me diverged at that point.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yes, Radio 1 became a ‘young person’s station’ at that point, reputedly 15 to 24-year-olds. So did your parents opt for commercial radio instead?

BEN BAKER:

Yes, they went to Virgin 1215 [which launched 30 April 1993] as a lot of people did at that time. Radio 2 wasn’t there with open arms for people coming away from Radio 1.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

A few years later [from 1996], Radio 2 started to become almost like Q magazine on the radio, but in 1993 it was still pretty MOR. Even though there were individual presenters I liked – Wogan, Martin Kelner, people like that.

But I’ve realised – there’s ten years between us, I’m ten years older – that your ‘generation’ had experienced a much more casually visual dimension to music than mine had. When I was a kid, rather than a teenager, there was some Saturday morning telly, there was Top of the Pops, but Old Grey Whistle Test was on after you went to bed, there was no Channel 4, and you might see a music act on a variety show but there weren’t many programmes – let alone whole channels like MTV.

BEN BAKER:

You look back at old ITV pop shows, like Get it Together and it’s like from a different universe: a man and an owl puppet singing along to ‘Gertcha’ or what have you.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Have you ever seen the clip from Get It Together of Roy North the presenter singing ‘Swords of a Thousand Men’ by Tenpole Tudor? [Laughter] I think it’s the last series, 1981.

BEN BAKER:

It wasn’t automatically the best acts showing up.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Although famously Bowie first turned up to do Starman not on Top of the Pops but on Lift Off with Ayshea Brough, a kids show in the afternoons. And the reason it’s generally forgotten is that the clip doesn’t exist in the archive.

BEN BAKER:

It’s like ‘We’ll do pop music, but our way of doing it, the safe, comfortable way that won’t upset you’, because this is still when telly was for the whole family.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So the first record you bought – as opposed to the first record you were given – was 1995. So in those four or five years, what was going on? Were you still just listening and watching everything?

BEN BAKER:

My dad used to buy the NOW compilation tapes, and I used to just play them and play them and play them, in that kind of way where you don’t know that Side C is actually all dance stuff and Side D is old-school rock. NOW 19 was the first one I properly got into [spring 1991], and that’s got Hale & Pace’s ‘The Stonk’ on it, another early single of mine, and stuff like ‘G.L.A.D’ by Kim Appleby. I just remember it being a good fun mix of stuff. So I’d listen to those a lot, watch Top of the Pops, MTV Europe.

—–

FIRST (2): PULP: ‘Common People’ (Island, single, 1995)

JUSTIN LEWIS:

We were saying earlier about how Radio 1 went much younger in 1993, and then a year or two later, they changed all the producers as well, which is when it became a big youth station, probably the reason it’s still here now.

BEN BAKER:

Yes, and summer 1995 is the summer of me properly becoming a music fan. Literally having the radio on from the moment I got up, to the time I went to bed, and buying singles every single week from then on.

When Oasis announced this new tour [for summer 2025], there was such a scramble for people to say how much they didn’t like them to begin with – and that’s fair enough if you didn’t, there’s a lot to dislike about them – but for me, fourteen years old and with stuff like Definitely Maybe… it was an explosion. I’d not heard this sort of energy and excitement.

I don’t think you get it with [the second LP What’s the Story?] Morning Glory, that’s quite a safe, produced record, but if you go back and listen to Definitely Maybe… I mean, I’ve always said, if you listen to ‘Listen Up’ by Oasis, the B-side [to ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’] and you don’t feel like ‘Bloody hell, this is something bigger’… You know, it’s a daft throwback, very T Rex-y, as a lot of their early stuff was a lot of big changing chords and stuff like that. It just felt different and exciting. And adding all the other acts who were labelled Britpop… it was a really good starter kit for someone like me who wanted to explore this more alternative side of music.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Absolutely, and to have Radio 1 pushing that, and all sorts of other things too. You know, when I was fifteen, a decade earlier in the mid-80s, it couldn’t do it in the same way because it had to cater to everyone. It wasn’t entirely Radio 1’s fault – the BBC weren’t going to provide another pop station, and at that point Radio 2 which had co-existed as a popular station playing MOR but also finding room for Culture Club and Eurythmics, decided to go more MOR, and a result Radio 1 had to carry all pop music, 30 years’ worth at the time, a hell of a hard job. So, to have Radio 1 concentrating on the utterly contemporary in 1995; I just thought, thank God this has finally happened.

BEN BAKER:

It was a quiet revolution. I remember we finished school for the summer on the Friday, and on the Saturday, my uncle Sam – mentioned earlier – got married. It was a full wedding… I had to wear a monkey suit… and at the disco, the guy kept playing a lot of new records: ‘I’m a Believer’ by EMF and Reeves & Mortimer, ‘Alright’ by Supergrass was out at that point, Shaggy’s ‘In the Summertime’… and ‘Common People’.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Quite unusual to have current records at a wedding reception disco.

BEN BAKER:

Well, they’re quite young. I suspect my uncle would have been thirty, late twenties? And he loved Oasis, so he probably said to the DJ, ‘Play a lot of indie stuff’. But I remember thinking, ‘I love this.’ That was the Saturday. On the Monday, Mum said, ‘Go to Boots, get the photos developed, if there’s any money left you can keep it.’ I had three quid left, so I went to Our Price and bought ‘Common People’ because it had been living in my head. On cassingle because I didn’t have a CD player at that point.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

What was on that? ‘Common People’ and ‘Underwear’? And was it the long version of ‘Common People’?

BEN BAKER:

It was the short version. Which is weird, because you don’t hear that now – nor do you hear the single version of ‘Disco 2000’ very often either, the Alan Tarney version.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

With the little talk over.

BEN BAKER:

But the time between ‘Common People’ and ‘Disco 2000’ that Christmas… that period in 1995 was the most exciting for me. The beauty of it is that, as much as I’d have loved all this stuff to be number one – Sleeper, Echobelly, The Wannadies, all these bands I was slowly getting into – it was better they weren’t, because it meant they were still mine. You know, ‘Common People’ got to number two, kept off by Robson and Jerome, wasn’t it?

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That’s right: ‘Unchained Melody’. [‘Common People’ spent two weeks at number two – in its second week, it outsold Michael and Janet Jackson’s ‘Scream’, the first new Jackson song in over three years.]

BEN BAKER:

It kind of fed into that underdog aspect, didn’t it? Probably in hindsight, it did a lot for them, and I think that’s why people have more instant love for Pulp, for example, than Oasis or Blur.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Because Oasis and Blur had the number one singles.

BEN BAKER:

It feels like Pulp were always bronze, third place in that table. And it’s shifted a little bit in recent years, I think. But at one point Oasis were so far ahead in terms of success that no-one was ever going to catch them. And it’s the best thing really, actually – because music had to go somewhere else.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And Pulp had to wait so long for success. Blur had some fairly early on, and then they wobbled a bit. Oasis became massive fairly quickly.

BEN BAKER:

Oasis never had a song not going top 40.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

‘Supersonic’ did go in at its highest position [#31, April 1994] and fell away quite quickly, but obviously everything kept going back in the charts later.

With Pulp, I know they’re South Yorkshire, and you’re West Yorkshire, but is the Yorkshireness of bands like them important to you? Obviously Terrorvision, who I know you love, are West Yorkshire.

BEN BAKER:

Pulp, not relevant in that way, I only discovered that later. Terrorvision are very local to me. I was born in the same hospital as Tony [Wright] from Terrorvision. Though there was like 13 years between us.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Terrorvision had an excellent run of singles in the 1990s, and I don’t know where they get played now. Would 6Music play them, I wonder?

BEN BAKER:

I didn’t realise that this thing I was living through was going to be rewritten. There’s a ‘Britpop story’ now, which is ‘Oasis versus Blur’. Pulp was the third band, you know – and then the Spice Girls came along, which was a different thing.

But Terrorvision existed before Britpop. If anything, they’re part of Britrock, alongside people like Skunk Anansie and Feeder, but it never really caught on as a catch-all scene. And they’re part of the Britpop scene as well, with the Ocean Colour Scenes and Kula Shakers and Casts, but they stand out there like a sore thumb. Terrorvision did so many different kinds of songs – they were generally seen as ‘power-pop’ but they did ballads and proper heavy stuff and dancier stuff. Which is partly why they were never really pigeonholed. And if you can’t pigeonhole something now, it just disappears. So on radio, if a station like Absolute 90s played ‘Perseverance’ or ‘Oblivion’, I’d be very surprised, even though they were both big hits. ‘Perseverance’ was #5 in the UK. ‘Tequila’ got to #2. ‘Bad Actress’, #10. They had big hits for a short period of time, they were definitely a big deal.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s quite refreshing when you get rock in the mix. You forget how big it got in the 90s sometimes. But rock, heavy rock certainly, has never quite been integrated with the rest of pop. And maybe the rock fraternity like that, it means it belongs to them.

BEN BAKER:

I had a big love for a few bands like Deftones, still like them a lot too. But I think Britpop killed off a type of indie music. The kind that would fit on Beechwood Music compilations [eg the much-loved Indie Top 20 compilations released between 1987 and 1997]. Bands that got to number 47, but still had a career because there was money in the record industry to keep things going.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

You’re probably familiar with that David Cavanagh book on the history of the Creation record label [My Magpie Eyes are Hungry for the Prize], and that point in 1993-ish when Sony buys a 49% share in the label, so they can still argue that they still are more indie than not-indie. But you can’t really be an indie label after that, anymore. Before that, if you were in the main charts, it was a bonus. But suddenly after Oasis, if you’re not in the main charts, it’s disastrous. But not everything can be Oasis.

BEN BAKER:

And people do forget a lot of the acts that Creation signed in the wake of Oasis – Heavy Stereo and stuff like that. I mean, one of my favourite bands of all time are Super Furry Animals who don’t feel like a Creation band at all.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And if they do, they feel like earlier Creation because they were doing what they wanted to.

BEN BAKER:

But also having hit singles. Not massive hit singles – they never had a top ten hit, for example, but they had an #11 (‘Northern Lites’), a #13 (‘Golden Retriever’) and a #14 (‘Juxtaposed with U’). And they had a Welsh language album get to #11 [Mwng in 2000] – an extraordinary achievement to get that into the charts. I love that band, but again, because they weren’t top tier, they could keep doing what they wanted.

—–

**LAST: PULP: More (Island, album, 2025)**

Extract: ‘Got to Have Love’

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Their first LP for nearly 25 years. Has your perception of Pulp changed, do you think? Is it too early to say yet where it belongs in the Pulp canon?

BEN BAKER:

See, for me, when I found out Pulp were doing a new record, I was just excited. I was like, ‘I don’t care what it’s like.’ I adore His ‘n’ Hers, but I also adore This is Hardcore – and I like Different Class a lot, though I’ve never had quite the same love for that as the other two. So I was like, ‘Oh, whatever, it might be awful.’ With the first song, ‘Spike Island’, lots of people had opinions about the video because they went full AI, and they were sort of making a statement. I think the record of ‘Spike Island’ is much better, it took a listen or two. But the second song, ‘Got to Have Love’ – it was just bang! Straight away, classic. For me, it felt like their scrappier, early 90s stuff like ‘Countdown’, ‘My Legendary Girlfriend’, when they were working out how to make pop records, but it was still a bit weird.

It does feel like a continuation from the last album, We Love Life (2001) in a lot of ways. Like you’ve got songs like ‘Grown Ups’, like a sequel to ‘I Spy’, this six-minute song, and it’s all about not knowing what you’re doing in bed in the early days of a relationship, that kind of stuff. But it’s Pulp NOW, it’s not Pulp then. It’s Pulp in their sixties with lots of lyrics which are ‘ohh, we got old’.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Well, of course, Pulp, very unfashionably, did a song about being old in 1997. ‘Help the Aged.’

BEN BAKER:

Absolutely.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

When Cocker would have been, 33, 34, I mean he’s only seven years older than I am. I think the fact that he in particular had to wait so long for their breakthrough success, it’s probably made him quite circumspect. People aren’t meant to suddenly become famous pop stars in their thirties. It didn’t even happen much then.

BEN BAKER:

The very early records haven’t aged well. I like their first album, It (1983), quite good, it’s not what we know as Pulp now, but it’s quite jangly pop, I’m very fond of it. I think that’s the key thing – I don’t need them to sound like any one era because they’ve had several.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I’ve got used to the idea that sometimes bands I really love are gonna make records that I don’t like as much, and that’s absolutely fine. I’d rather they tried different things rather than stick to a formula.

—-

**ANYTHING: FRANK SIDEBOTTOM: Frank Sidebottom Salutes the Magic of Freddie Mercury and Queen and Also Kylie Minogue (You Know… Her Off ‘Neighbours’) (In Tape, EP, 1988)**

Extract (1): ‘I Should Be So Lucky’

Extract (2): ‘Love Poem for Kylie’

BEN BAKER:

When I first got into Frank Sidebottom, and then the Freshies, and discovering more about Chris Sievey, it was bit by bit because the information wasn’t all out there. My ‘anything’ choice for this is a cassette made for me in late 1996 by someone whose name I have sadly forgotten, I genuinely can’t remember. But Mum and Dad had a pub, I was in the pub with them, and someone said to me, ‘You’ve never heard Frank Sidebottom? I’ll do you a tape.’ Two days later, he came back with the tape and he didn’t say what any of it was. I later discovered it was [a compilation of] the Timperley EP in full (1987), his Medium Play mini-album (1990), and his brilliantly named Frank Sidebottom Salutes the Magic of Freddie Mercury and Queen and Also Kylie Minogue (You Know… Her Off ‘Neighbours’) EP (1988).

And I was transfixed, I was just in love – because I remembered Frank from Saturday morning kids’ TV stuff [notably CITV shows No 73, Motormouth, What’s Up Doc?], and he was always a bit freaky with the big papier mache head. It was its own world, in its own universe, and that’s what I continue to love about Frank. Long after Sievey’s gone [he died in 2010], he left us this world. I think Frank was meant to be in his mid-thirties, living at home with his mum, and she can’t find out he’s a pop star or she’ll go mad. And if you took this character the wrong way, it could be creepy. It could be a bit unsettling. But it wasn’t, it was just a big kid and people either loved that kind of enthusiasm or they completely didn’t. I do not think there is anybody in this world who doesn’t mind Frank Sidebottom. I think you love him, or you just don’t get him, and that’s Chris Sievey’s brain, I think.

There are so many things that have come out in stuff like Being Frank, the Chris Sievey story film, which I was a Kickstarter backer on and to the point where I actually backed £200 for it, and got a box of his old belongings from his brother. It was just stuff from his house, and his old records. There was like a Steve Austin wrestling figure in there, a rubber dinosaur, some 3D glasses, some old fanzines. It’s so crazy, it’s like his brain. There’s some Beatles stuff in there, some robot stuff, obviously a bunch of Frank stuff as well. It’s a fascinating slice of his brain.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Sounds like he was like us. Spending his formative years building up this collection of stuff.

BEN BAKER:

Yes and no. Every report suggests he was a very impulsive man. Famously, he bought a ZX-81 home computer [made by Sinclair in the early 80s], which he programmed stuff on. A friend of ours, Rhys Jones has been doing a lot of research into this – Chris did this single called ‘Camouflage’ [1983], and on the B-side there are several programs for the ZX-81. But he only bought the computer because he’d been sent out to pay a bill, and he’d seen this in the shop, and bought that instead. Which is a great story, but I imagine living with that would have been absolutely horrendous.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The world of Frank is so prolific, and I’m thinking it must have taken real commitment, and I suspect some bloodymindedness, to keep that going for that long. And the moment in 1985-ish where he must have decided, ‘I know! I’ll put a big papier mache head on, and cover “You Spin Me Round” by Dead or Alive and some other songs on a single.’ But that decision coincides with some completely different material he was recording – which eventually got released under the title Big Record. Now he would have been doing those two things at the same time, and the material for Big Record is completely sincere.

BEN BAKER:

Yes, he wrote proper pop songs as well, but no-one was ever really interested in that side of him. He was a huge Beatles obsessive, and that bleeds into Frank as well. Like Chris and his brother went to London when they were teenagers, and tried to get signed by Apple, and would make homemade tapes. I really envy that level of self-belief.

We don’t know, and never will, now, sadly, but every time you see footage of Chris Sievey, he’s like, ‘Of course, this is gonna be massive. I’m going to be a pop star. I’m back in computer games. Oh, now I’m Frank Sidebottom.’ You know – you get these impulsive acts but born out of ‘I can do this’.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

You never know what will catch on, though. Given we were just talking about Pulp, if you’d heard the first Pulp album in the mid-80s, hard to imagine that a decade later they’d be huge pop stars. I doubt even Pulp could have pictured it in quite that way.

But of course, one of the strangest moments in Frank Sidebottom’s career is when he’s part of the bill for the Bros Wembley Stadium concert in 1989 [along with Debbie Gibson, Inner City and the Beatmasters featuring Betty Boo].

BEN BAKER:

All they said to him was, ‘You can do anything you want to – just don’t do any Bros songs.’ And so he did a Bros medley [as Frank] and was booed offstage. He had the opportunity to play, but he couldn’t not do that. It’s so self-destructive.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The first time I’d have ever heard him was when they played the ‘Frank’s Firm Favourites’ medley on Roundtable, the record review show, on Radio 1 [in Aug 1985]. The panel was Alannah Currie from the Thompson Twins, I think Richard Skinner was hosting. Can’t remember who else was on the panel now. But my memory is, they left the faders up while the record was playing, and the panel was just in hysterics. ‘What the hell is this?’, you know.

BEN BAKER:

This is the thing. Frank starts off as the Freshies’ biggest fan, that’s how it starts, he needs to be their biggest fan. And then you get these medleys of then-current songs, and that never really changed that much throughout the career. Songs that always end, ‘You know it is, it really is – thank you.’ Or a variation on that.

‘Frank’s Firm Favourites’ came out initially as a demo, and then he got signed to EMI for a couple of singles, and was allowed to restart their Regal Zonophone sub-label to put them out. And the medley form was huge at that time, but it’s not ‘Stars on 45’ although it’s also not the Portsmouth Sinfonia either. It’s somewhere between the two. He knows what he’s doing – it’s that Les Dawson thing, you’ve got to know how to play the right notes before you can play the wrong ones. And I think the joy of Frank Sidebottom is this bluster, this sheer enthusiasm, like John Shuttleworth. John doesn’t know he’s naff – John still thinks he’s writing songs that Bono wants to cover.

With ‘Frank’s Firm Favourites’, it would either have been number one or a flop, I don’t think there was a middle ground.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It got to 97.

BEN BAKER:

So he gets three singles on Regal Zonophone, and his second one is ‘Oh Blimey It’s Christmas’ [#87 at Christmas 1985]. Which I love. We play that a lot on Noisebox Radio at Christmas time. It’s such a daft British thing because it is about a British Christmas, it’s about parties and getting drunk and cheap Christmas trees.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There are various offshoots from this particular question, but I know you have a fascination with let’s say ‘novel’ music, unusual or funny. There are people out there who have a suspicion of ‘comedy songs’ but you’ve always liked them, right?

BEN BAKER:

Yeah. Part of doing radio as I do is getting a reaction to a record. Sometimes I’m playing an amazing record, just sublime, beautifully played, gorgeous harmonies. But sometimes, I’m just playing something ridiculous. And it’s not like I’m sat there like Mike Smash with his car horn. But I do have a love of the daft, or the less serious.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I can see a line from Sidebottom to the humour of what you do. [Agreement] Obviously the influences are coming from all sorts of other places as well. But what made you start to think in terms of doing things like internet radio or writing? What happened there?

BEN BAKER:

I always loved comedy, and sketch shows in particular. The obvious influence on me, you can hear it a mile off, is Mark Radcliffe, particularly that ‘graveyard shift’ show on Radio 1, 10 till midnight, 1993–97. I only caught him towards the end of that run, but that had a big impact on me, not just because it was funny – and when you think of Mark and Lard now, you think of the afternoon show and the catchphrases and it’s much sillier – but the ‘graveyard’ show was a mixture of the silliness and the passion. He was so passionate about the records: ‘You should hear this.’ And so I think he definitely fed into my musical and comedy interests. Though I should also mention the first person I remember listening to a lot on Radio 1 in that way was Mark Tonderai [a regular night-time presenter in 1993–95], who went on to do a lot of comedy stuff [as a performer and producer]. I mean, he’s gone on to do much bigger things, obviously – he’s a director now [The Five, Doctor Who, many other things], but he did this period of Radio 1 when he was on late and I used to love that sort of thing.

In the back of my head, I always wanted to do that sort of thing on the radio, but I didn’t have the confidence necessarily to go through hospital radio, like you did. So I had to wait for a time where I could make my own thing. And the first-ever thing I did was… It was streaming, but my mate found this thing that you could broadcast off your computer. So we’d make a programme like an album, with tracks and songs in between. That was fine, it wasn’t particularly exciting, but I took the bits I liked from that, made a half-hour edit, and put it on my webspace for people to download. This was early 2002, before podcasts.

I’m not particularly proud of a lot of that early stuff – it’s a guy in his early twenties working out what makes him laugh. That’s perfectly obvious.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

We’ve all got to start somewhere.

BEN BAKER:

Certainly, in the 2000s, I got into doing a bit of internet radio. Someone once called one of my programmes the ‘Keighley Everett Show’ – I’m from Keighley in West Yorkshire – and that’s the biggest compliment I’ve ever had. It’s completely nonsense – I was too young to enjoy Kenny on the radio but he had this marvellous skill and, again, passion. Because he loves the records as well. It fuels everything and I think that’s me.

Now I’m on Noisebox Radio, I’m a founder member of this radio station, we’ve just hit our third anniversary. I’m head of programming, and my friend Steve Binnie is head of music. There’s not a lot of us, but we’re trying to do a radio station that we always wanted to do. And I like mixing the stuff up, so recording loads of trails and stings, all very nonsensical stuff that’s there to make me laugh.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Do you think that there’s an element missing from a lot of music radio now? There seems to be an absence of humour or irreverence. But Noisebox doesn’t do that, it’s often very funny.

BEN BAKER:

I think there are people who are funny on the radio, but radio hasn’t got these slots anymore to accommodate them. Radio 2 has gone very personality based, so they can have a bit more of a waffle. Whether that’s pre-prepared or not, I really don’t know. But with Noisebox, the tagline I threw out for it is ‘It’s pop music for adults, but not necessarily grown-ups.’ Because I think there is a generation of people who are grown up, who still listen to music, still love music. But they also like silly, they want fun. They don’t want Q magazine-style or Jools Holland-style broadcasting.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It can get too earnest. With some people, it’s like they had to find a religion and their religion is music.

BEN BAKER:

See, we talked about music growing up. There wasn’t a lot of it, but what there was, was presented as entertainment – and now it’s completely the opposite way. When you watch something like Later with Jools Holland, you’re meant to politely clap. It’s all a bit po-faced.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yes – and one of the strengths of internet and community radio is that freedom to try things, and have surprise elements. Of course, sometimes that can topple over into indulgence. How do you make sure that what Noisebox does avoids that risk?

BEN BAKER:

I am very conscious of that, both as a listener and as a presenter. I felt frozen out by 6Music when they made big changes, like when they put Mary Anne Hobbs on daytime. And I love Mary Anne, brilliant late-night broadcaster – Breezeblock on Radio 1 was absolutely fantastic – but they tried to replicate that in daytime, and it didn’t work at all, and I still think they’re chasing a listener who’s not there.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Sometimes with 6Music during the day, I wonder if some of the listenership has got very easy working environments because I can’t really listen to it while I’m trying to do my job. Evenings and weekends – fine. But the daytime…

BEN BAKER:

I’m confident with the programming of Noisebox that we have playlist hours, a live hour – instant festival and all that stuff – so we mix it up, but I’m also very aware that people want a mixture. At the moment, I do an indie show called Middle-Aged Teenage Angst. The whole idea with that is: I’m an adult, but I’m still very much that teenager, still into noisy old records. I could do more hours, but I just like doing an hour. And this year, I’ve ended up doing a different theme each week, so it helps me narrow down selections – but it also means I’m not clashing with the shows that play alternative music on Noisebox. So I want 30% stuff you definitely know, 30% you might have forgotten, and the rest is wildcard, depending on the theme. But genuinely I’m conscious to avoid going down the path of, say, playing five songs back to back that someone doesn’t know. Or that there’s no recognition factor. Sometimes I might put a cover version in there, which they might not know, but they can find it interesting and have an opinion.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

You’re connecting with the listener.

BEN BAKER:

I think that’s really important. When anyone comes to do a show on Noisebox, I always say to them: ‘Look, the music’s obviously important, but without any passion and personality…’ The talking is why it’s a show, not a Spotify playlist, and that’s why I’ve no interest in generic hits radio. We’ll play a different song – there are other ELO songs besides ‘Mr Blue Sky’.

So it’s important that people do have that indulgence – you’ve got a slot, but if your personality is not in that show, it’s not really a show I think we should have on.

But also, it’s still a radio station, so it’s a bit of everything. There’s a show on after mine, Off the Chart [Tuesdays, 9–11pm], a popular 80s chart show, with two lovely guys. Absolutely fantastic. So I try and do a show which is complementary to anyone who might be listening to that… Towards the end of my show, I include recognisable stuff for those tuning in early for Off the Chart, because I want people to go, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe I’ll check this show out next week.’ Again, I think it’s finding that balance.

—

BEN BAKER:

I have different approaches to live and pre-recorded. Wth pre-recorded shows, I make sure I get all the art together, so I can be posting on Bluesky while we’re on. It is a balancing act. If I’m live, I can’t do that, so instead I’ll make a folder of maybe fifty songs, and I’ll only play twenty, but that gives me enough range to think about without it being a thousand songs or every single record on my computer.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So you can have an instinct.

BEN BAKER:

Yeah. With pre-records, I used to wing them a lot more, but I’ve just found it more satisfying to plan. With Middle-Aged Teenage Angst – as I mentioned, I’ll have a theme each episode now: for instance, ‘Acts That Only Did One Album’, for whatever reason, or ‘Albums from 1995’ because it’s thirty years on. So it’s trying to find that right balance between songs you know, songs you don’t, or maybe a cover or two.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

But I think having an hour concentrates that. I know you’re a great believer in making something that’s packaged, whether it’s radio shows, or podcasts, and you will tighten up and cut stuff out.

BEN BAKER:

There are multiple strands of thinking when it comes to that. Some people love a five-hour podcast, some people don’t. Personally, I think it comes back to my days listening to radio comedy. They were half an hour, 45 minutes or an hour. It’s like there was a structure to them. And I still think in that kind of way, there is a beauty in that. I have a bit of a script now, I don’t write every single word out, but it means if I write it, I can go back and put some more jokes in there or do a silly thing there. And that makes it a lot quicker when I’m recording it.

I do this podcast with my friend John Matthews [aka @ricardoautobahn on social media] called ALFSplaining. We are online friends who decided to look back, episode by episode, at this American sitcom, ALF (1986–90), which turned out to be a lot better than we remembered it. We certainly didn’t go into it with irony or sneering intent. We intended to love it, and we have, and thankfully we’ve managed to interview lots of great people – Paul Gannon, Ruth Husko, Tim Worthington, Nina Buckley – but also we’ve managed to get a few people who actually worked on ALF, including ALF.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yes. It’s insane you’ve managed to get Paul Fusco, the voice and the creator of the puppet, but also people like Mike Reiss and Al Jean, who were writers on the show, and who went on to be showrunners on The Simpsons. Indeed, Al Jean still is.

BEN BAKER:

That’s entirely John’s work, because he’s one of them pop stars off of the charts [as member of Cuban Boys, Spray, Rikki & Daz, Pound Shop Boys]. He’s got more confidence now, so he just went to Mike Reiss and asked him, Hey, do you fancy talking about ALF? And he was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I never talk about all that. Brilliant.’ Again, it comes back to this structure, this putting things together. Having a certain timeframe in mind. There was so much more I could have asked Mike Reiss and Al Jean for hours and hours – they worked on Sledge Hammer!, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, they created The Critic. But that’s not what ALFsplaining’s about.

—

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Is Noisebox actually looking for presenters at the moment or for contributors, and if so, what sort of thing might you be looking for?

BEN BAKER:

If you’ve got an idea, that’s what we want. We’ve had demos with people saying, ‘This is me, I’m someone, playing some music.’ It’s like, ‘Cool, but what’s your idea?’ We particularly like specialist shows, so if you have a speciality – not indie, that’s been taken – go away, make a demo for us, obviously include some music but don’t, for instance, play the full version of ‘This Corrosion’ and do a small link at the start and end, because we want to get an idea of you. That’s what we need.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

To give people an idea, some of the things you do… You have a show about international pop music, It’s a Small World. Louis Barfe’s Barfe Night, a Sunday night jazz show.

BEN BAKER:

There’s also Brand New Beats, playing spanking up-to-date music, FFS Live – which is a request show – or The Bitter Sound Experience, which is our new goth show. Amongst many others.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Rhys Jones does a show about Welsh language pop…

BEN BAKER:

Which he’s actually expanded to Celtic music now, it’s called Celtic Connection. With all these shows, the people involved were saying, ‘This is something I know about.’ And I’m like, ‘That’s a show.’ It is that simple – I don’t hear that idea anywhere else. And even if I did hear that idea anywhere else, it’s not being presented by you.

——-

If you’re interested in suggesting ideas and possible shows to Noisebox Radio’s schedule, do contact them at hello@noiseboxradio.com.

Noisebox Radio is on every day – livestream it from here. Give it a go!: https://noiseboxradio.com

You can check out the Noisebox schedule here: https://noiseboxradio.com/schedule/

For all things Ben Baker and his various and varied output as writer, creator, podcaster and broadcaster, take a look here: https://linktr.ee/BenBakerBooks.

Upcoming is a new zine called MATAZINE, based on themes from the last series of Middle-Aged Teenage Angst. A new series of the show is likely to air in September 2025.

A third series of ALFSplaining, with Ben and his co-host John Matthews, will be back in October 2025.

On Bluesky, you can follow Ben at @benbaker.bsky.social, Noisebox Radio at @noiseboxradio.com and ALFsplaining at @alfsplaining.bsky.social

—–

FLA 27 PLAYLIST:

Ben Baker

(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/RCJQPCkOri

Track 1:

MADNESS: ‘Our House’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwIe_sjKeAY&list=RDKwIe_sjKeAY&start_radio=1

Track 2:

PARTNERS IN KRYME: ‘Turtle Power’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxHWm_bGScY&list=RDuxHWm_bGScY&start_radio=1

Track 3:

DREAM WARRIORS: ‘My Definition Of A Boombastic Jazz Style’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIF_jdrj5L0&list=RDjIF_jdrj5L0&start_radio=1

Track 4:

PULP: ‘Common People’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acKCgLseDC8&list=RDacKCgLseDC8&start_radio=1

Track 5:

TERRORVISION: ‘Perseverance’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bECD7ardHhA&list=RDbECD7ardHhA&start_radio=1

Track 6:

SUPER FURRY ANIMALS: ‘Arnofio / Glô In The Dark’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTHw9pv00RA&list=RDbTHw9pv00RA&start_radio=1

Track 7:

PULP: ‘Got to Have Love’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r30F2FI_nk&list=RD-r30F2FI_nk&start_radio=1

Track 8:

PULP: ‘Grown Ups’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjIKF6Z_uXk&list=RDWjIKF6Z_uXk&start_radio=1

Track 9:

FRANK SIDEBOTTOM: ‘I Should Be So Lucky’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26GA-LnyYnU&list=RD26GA-LnyYnU&start_radio=1

Track 10:

FRANK SIDEBOTTOM: ‘Love Poem For Kylie’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHasLuCJjus&list=RDDHasLuCJjus&start_radio=1

Track 11:

THE FRESHIES: ‘Wrap Up the Rockets’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDl1osbZbZ4&list=RDtDl1osbZbZ4&start_radio=1

FLA 26: Gary Panton (10/08/2025)

August 9, 2025 / whenisbins / Leave a comment

Additional artwork (c) Dotty Sutton

I never know what people are going to choose for FLA, and this is part of the joy of doing it. Even when I’ve known the guest for some time, as with this episode’s collaborator.

I met Gary Panton in the early summer of 2007, when we were working in the same office, compiling TV listings information. Subsequently, we both worked in publishing, though usually in different places. We shared a similar sense of humour, and so I’m so pleased to see that Gary’s career as a children’s author has taken off so well this year, 2025. His first book, The Notwitches, published in early 2025, has been warmly received by many younger readers. His flair for daft, surrealistic humour has been acclaimed by some grown-up critics too: The Times newspaper likened The Notwitches’ dialogue to that of Blackadder and Python, admiringly calling it ‘a triumph of nonsense’; The Scotsman summed it up as ‘a madcap adventure’ and also drew attention to the book’s ‘fun-filled illustrations’ by Dotty Sutton – as did the i Paper, who called the result ‘irresistibly fun’.

With August 2025 seeing the publication of Gary’s second Notwitches book, Prison Break, I spoke to him on Zoom in early July of that year, to discuss some of the music that has fired his imagination over the years. In the conversation that follows, we touch on the influence of music in popular cinema during the 1980s and early 1990s (during Gary’s formative years), what it’s like to be a fan of a band for many years, and ultimately talked about what everyone simply won’t shut up about during the summer months: Christmas music.

——

JUSTIN LEWIS:

What sort of music was playing in the Panton household in your early life?

GARY PANTON:

I can remember my dad had quite a big music collection, quite a lot of vinyl. He was into the sort of stuff that I guess would be called ‘dad rock’ now – Dire Straits, quite a lot of Bob Dylan. My mum, I don’t think was ever that into music, but – I was thinking about this earlier – she had this exercise cassette, that plays music and someone gives out instructions over the top of it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Oh yes, they were called ‘Shape Up and Dance’ albums, some of them.

GARY PANTON:

And this one came with a massive poster that she used to lay out on the floor, and you had to move all the furniture to make room for it. She’d play the cassette, and me and my sister would be a nuisance in the background while she did these exercises. But it was weirdly all mid-tempo-to-slow songs on this, which you wouldn’t really exercise to now.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Everything’s a ‘running playlist’ now!

GARY PANTON:

I can remember it being quite Motown-y stuff, like Lionel Richie. I really remember the song ‘Being With You’ by Smokey Robinson being on there, and I loved that when I was quite young. So, I don’t really remember my mum having much actual music other than that, but I just always associate her musical taste with that tape.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I wonder if it’s the Shape Up and Dance with Felicity Kendal album from 1981? Features soundalike covers.

GARY PANTON:

Having just listened to some of this on YouTube, there’s a very good chance it is this! Surprised to hear it’s covers, though very convincing covers.

[We couldn’t track down the accompanying poster, regrettably. Or maybe we did:]

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Dads seemed to control the stereo in those days. I think that’s changed. I’ve noticed a pattern just doing this series, where the music mums liked in the past was sometimes not taken very seriously.

GARY PANTON:

I do remember my mum telling me a couple of times that there’s loads of songs that she loves, but she wouldn’t really be able to tell you who they’re by. She doesn’t have a favourite artist, she just likes lots of things.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

My mum’s like that.

GARY PANTON:

Which is the complete opposite of how I am with music because if I like any song, I just immediately want to know who it’s by. I want to know all the information about it. When it was physical music, I’d want it in my actual collection.

—–

—

JUSTIN LEWIS:

You were born about ten years after me, and one thing that occurred to me: your earliest musical memories, in the 1980s, are associated probably more closely with visual accompaniment. I mean, I remember the ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ video on Top of the Pops for weeks on end, but pop groups rarely made proper videos in the 70s. Whereas pop video in the 80s…

GARY PANTON:

I was definitely very attracted to songs that came with a good video. And when we got Sky TV, which I guess would have been in the early 90s, I suddenly had access to music channels: MTV and VH1. I used to watch them all the time – a lot of my music knowledge comes from that because when the video was playing, the year and the album title would come up on screen.

As a kid I used to particularly love any song that came with an animated music video. So things like ‘Sledgehammer’ by Peter Gabriel, ‘The Motown Song’ by Rod Stewart and the Temptations, ‘Club at the End of the Street’ by Elton John… and the ultimate one was ‘Opposites Attract’ by Paula Abdul.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

With that last one, I seem to remember you mentioning on Twitter, some years back now, that with ‘Opposites Attract’ they don’t ever seem to discuss that it’s a cat.

GARY PANTON:

The whole song is built around them listing their differences, but at no point do they mention the key difference – she’s a real-life woman and he’s an animated cat. In that sense, they have quite a big ‘opposite’ there, which is going to make the relationship very difficult.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s kind of like: ‘Never mind the smoking, you’re a drawing.’

GARY PANTON:

‘You’re two-dimensional. This is not gonna work.’ I’ve always wondered if the song was written with the video in mind. Maybe it was originally just meant to be a duet between any two singers, in which case you wouldn’t mention one of them being a cat. But then the cat comes into it and neither of them ever acknowledge it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The album had been out for quite a while, before that was a single. Was it MC Skat Kat?

[After our conversation, I discovered Skat Kat was indeed in the video, but the vocals on the track itself were from The Wild Pair, ie Bruce DeShazer and Marvin Gunn, previously of the band Mazarati, and therefore also backing singers on ‘Kiss’ by Prince!]

GARY PANTON:

Yeah. I do still love that song. It’s on one of my playlists – it came on in the car the other day, and this very conversation we’re having happened between me and my wife. And it’s around that time [1990] that I started buying my own music.

—–

**FIRST: ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (SBK, 1990)**

Extract: Partners in Kryme, ‘Turtle Power’

GARY PANTON:

I was already right in the prime target market for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles… or Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles as it was called here.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yes, it was like Top Cat becoming Boss Cat all those years. I’m going to be absolutely transparent here about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I don’t think I have ever seen it – even when I was a student and it used to get shown on Going Live! every Saturday, that would be the twenty minutes when I’d go and shower or make breakfast. But with ‘Turtle Power’ – because I promise you that I really do try and listen to everything before we discuss the records – I was playing the soundtrack, and I assumed I knew ‘Turtle Power’. But when it came up, I had no memory of it sounding like this at all. My memory of it is some hybrid of [Bobby Brown’s] ‘On Our Own’ from Ghostbusters II, ‘What’s My Name’ by Snoop Doggy Dogg, ‘Do the Bartman’ [by The Simpsons] and bits of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. And yet this was number one for a whole month when I was working in record shops.

GARY PANTON:

It’s funny how the songs you just listed are basically the other songs I was considering for this. Definitely ‘On Our Own’, which I bought as a single. Anything that was connected to a film or a TV series. And I was obsessed with the Turtles. I would have pestered my parents for the T-shirts and the action figures, so obviously when I started to get into music, it was, like, of course I have to buy this soundtrack when it comes out.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And the film which I haven’t seen either, but it was directed by Steve Barron who’d done Electric Dreams but also the ‘Take On Me’ video for A-ha.

I’m sure MC Hammer was a draw as well because he’s on this soundtrack, as is Ya Kid K, who’d been with Technotronic.

GARY PANTON:

MC Hammer was definitely a draw for me at that time. I guess in a way, if you were a kid, you could feel like you were listening to serious hip hop: ‘I’m liking some real music here, this isn’t just kids’ music.’ The film’s a bit like that as well because it has a much darker, more brooding tone about it than the cartoon series. Which is quite clever because as a kid, you feel like you’re watching something that’s a bit grown-up.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Which is kind of what the Tim Burton Batman film had done the previous year [1989].

GARY PANTON:

Yes, it’s very, very along those lines.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So did you have this sort of visual appreciation of music at this time, that it was about the video or film as much as the record? Because I know soundtracks are important to you… Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, and you also mentioned Beverly Hills Cop.

GARY PANTON:

Yes, a lot of the early albums I bought were these 80s and 90s soundtracks. Even now, I love all that stuff. It takes me back. It’s a nostalgic thing, but it also takes me back to something that I don’t think really exists anymore. I don’t think movie soundtracks are as much of a thing now.

Another thing you don’t really get in films now, and ‘Turtle Power’ is just one example of this, is a rap over the end credits that basically summarises the whole plot of the film. I think that peaked with Will Smith doing it for Men in Black and Wild Wild West, and maybe then people started to think it was a bit cheesy and stopped doing it, but it coincided with that emergence of hip hop into the mainstream, and so every film thought it had to have a rap in it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

As you mentioned Will Smith, doesn’t The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air also explain the premise of the show over the opening titles?

GARY PANTON:

It does, yes.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So when did you last put on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles soundtrack?

GARY PANTON:

I listened to the ‘Turtle Power’ song literally just before we started, but I haven’t listened to the full soundtrack in a long time. I don’t think it’s available in full on streaming platforms. There’s a song on there called ‘9.95’ [by Spunkadelic, written by Dan Hartman and Charlie Midnight, also writers of James Brown’s ‘Living in America’], which I maintain is one of my favourite songs ever, and you just can’t get it anywhere. There might be a version on YouTube, but it’s not on any streaming platforms. I tried to find it on Apple Music and there’s a Chinese cover version of it (I think, as the group are from Hong Kong), but the original is really hard to find. It’s the same with the Ghostbusters soundtrack, I tried to listen to that recently, and there’s just a lot of songs that aren’t available to listen to on platforms anymore. I think that’s where owning a CD really still has a lot of value, because those songs are always yours to listen to and you’re not reliant on platforms keeping the music up there for you.

Spunkadelic: ‘9.95’

JUSTIN LEWIS:

A lot of soundtracks now are existing hits, but in those days, soundtracks would have songs written for the film, or songs donated by artists which wouldn’t fit on their albums. But they’d also have, usually near the end of Side 2, incidental music from the film.

GARY PANTON:

I absolutely love the main theme on the Back to the Future soundtrack. ‘Axel F’ from Beverly Hills Cop was a great one too. I think I also had the Crocodile Dundee soundtrack, and that had a cracking score. And one thing about all this is they’ve started bringing some of this stuff back. I watched the new Beverly Hills Cop film quite recently, and it basically has all the songs from the soundtracks of the first couple of films. Same with The Karate Kid – there’s the Cobra Kai series on Netflix and particularly in the first season of that, they play a lot of the music from the original film. Same with Ghostbusters – there’s a big nostalgic feel to all this stuff.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I guess it stands to reason that the people running film studios are probably somewhere between your age and mine, and so they’re saying, ‘Let’s go back and reboot things that I liked when I was young.’

—-

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Tell me about The Notwitches, then, which is your first book for children.

GARY PANTON:

The Notwitches is a story about a little girl called Melanda Notwitch, who lives with her three aunts, who are just the most horrible people you’ll ever meet. She’s basically trapped with them, so she has a pretty terrible life, until there’s a knock at the door from a girl who claims she’s a witch. The witch promises Melanda that she knows a magic spell that can help her out of her predicament, but to complete the spell, they need one special magic ingredient. So they go off on a little quest to find this ingredient.

Obviously, they have to confront the aunts along the way, but they also meet lots of weird characters, goblins and monsters. And there’s a cat that can talk, but it can only say three words.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I really really enjoyed reading it.

GARY PANTON:

Thank you.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s in that grand tradition of children’s literature in being about outlandish and grotesque and humorous storytelling. Was that the kind of book you enjoyed reading as a kid yourself? Also, it feels quite filmic.

GARY PANTON:

I think Roald Dahl’s probably the obvious one. I was obsessed with Roald Dahl, particularly The Witches. I now read quite a lot of horror and ghost stories for adults but I still think the bit in The Witches with the little girl trapped in the painting is probably one of the scariest things I’ve ever read. So I loved anything that was a bit scary. But I was also into anything that was funny and silly. I used to love reading the Asterix books, Dr Seuss… just anything that would make me laugh. I think the influences for The Notwitches are a combination of books I read, TV series, funny films. It’s interesting you say it’s filmic, because I always wanted the book to be quite visual. It was always important to me that we’d be able to do things like play around with different fonts, and have the art really integrated into the story.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I don’t have children, and my nephew is now sixteen so there’s no reason for me to seek it out naturally, but – and I don’t know how common this effect is in children’s literature now – I enjoyed how, with each double page, there’d be some kind of illustrative effect, even if it was just a cobweb in the corner, your illustrator Dotty Sutton would contribute as well. You’re not just reading text, you’re reading images as well.

GARY PANTON:

That was definitely what I wanted from the book. When I first spoke to the publisher, Chicken House, I told them that I really wanted this to be a visual experience, and I wanted there to be something that makes you laugh on every page. I need to give a shout-out to Dotty because she’s done such an incredibly good job. She’s one of the best illustrators around, and it feels a real privilege to have been able to work with such a talent on my very first book.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

How did you make contact with her?

GARY PANTON:

I said to the publisher, I really want this to feel anarchic and silly. Maybe 10% sweet and innocent, but 90% energetic and over-the-top and laugh-out-loud funny. I basically wanted the visual equivalent of the humour of someone like Rik Mayall. We looked at a few different illustrators and they were all really good, but the thing that stood out with Dotty’s work was that it just had that humour. You can tell she’s a really funny person who understands comedy. I didn’t give her much instruction at all, she just knew how to make the art funny.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So did you send her the text for her to illustrate around it?

GARY PANTON:

Basically, yes. There were maybe only two or three places where I had specific things that I asked for. Most of the rest of it just came out of Dotty’s own head, even down to how the characters look. Some of the characters don’t get described in much detail in the text, so she’s just come up with a lot of that herself.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And when she came back with the illustrations, did it make you tweak the text at all, or made you rethink anything?

GARY PANTON:

That happened a couple of times. In Book 2, which is coming out shortly, one of the new villains has a quiver of arrows on his back. That wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the text, but when I got that sketch back from Dotty, I just found it so funny that he wears that for no reason. So I tweaked the text to mention that in the description of him. But for the most part, when I see Dotty’s art, I don’t want her to change anything. It goes straight into the book as it is.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Not to be too restrictive about it, but did you have a readership age group vaguely in mind?

GARY PANTON:

Not at all. You know what? I wouldn’t even really say I wrote it specifically as a children’s book. I just wrote what I wanted to write. I wanted to write something funny and quite surreal, and for it to be illustrated, and the silliness of the humour makes it very child-friendly – so all of those things make it a children’s book. But I don’t particularly write with kids in mind or adults in mind. I just write what I find is funny. When I was first looking for an agent and I was showing it around, a couple of them actually said that they thought it was something adults would like to read. But the problem is that would put it in a genre that doesn’t really exist. Illustrated comedy stories for adults aren’t really a thing in literature, at least not in a big way.

Another big influence on The Notwitches was TV comedy, especially The Mighty Boosh. Originally I was trying to come up with a way for Melanda, as the lead character, to end up in a really weird, surreal world. But when you try to do that, you spend four or five chapters just having her finding a portal, going into a portal, getting sucked into this other world… and then you need to find a way for her to get back out of it. And then one night I was watching a few episodes of The Mighty Boosh, and I realised that those characters are already in this really ridiculous, surreal world, and it never needs to be explained. People just go with it. So I never really say in The Notwitches what this world is, or why it’s so weird, but kids just get it straight away.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

With a second Notwitches book, Prison Break, out imminently, did you write the first one realising that it might have legs and you might be able to write a sequel or even a series? Or did your publisher encourage you?

GARY PANTON:

A bit of both really. The first book works as a self-contained story, but it finishes with an open-ended suggestion that there’s another adventure coming, and that suggestion was always there from the very first draft. And I always had in mind that, if there was a second story, it would be about Melanda trying to find her parents. So the publisher made it a two-book deal with the agreement that Book 2 would be a second Notwitches book rather than a different story. And they delayed the publication of the first one to give me time to write the second one, so that I would be able to release them both quite quickly. Because obviously when you’re writing kids’ books, children are going to grow up quickly. And if I wait two or three years between books, the readers of the first book will have moved on to something else and they won’t be into it anymore. So speed is quite important with a children’s series.

I found writing the second book a lot of fun because I love re-visiting those characters. In this one, Melanda is trying to break her parents out of a prison for witches, but in order to do that she has to get into the prison first. So the first half of the story is about her trying to get into the prison, and the second half is about her trying to get back out of it. It gave me a lot of opportunity to riff on various prison movie cliches along the way, which I loved.

It’s a really interesting experience writing a sequel. I always thought it would be easier because you’ve established the world and its rules, but actually that’s what makes it harder because you have to stick to those rules and can’t just make it up as you go along in the same way that you did with Book 1.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

In the acknowledgements for the first Notwitches book, I noticed you said you’d originally taken this idea to a writing group. So what were you writing before that?

GARY PANTON:

I’ve written all sorts of things over the years. I started out as a football journalist for a while. That was when I was a student. I got paid £20 to go to Scottish Premier League football matches, and I used to sit and count shots on target, shots off target, all that stuff, so that they had the stats at the end of the game. And I’d write the little short match reports that would be used in Match magazine, if anyone remembers those. I also did a little bit of live music journalism for the Sunday Mail. My main memory of that is that they refused to give me any sort of press pass, which meant a couple of times I turned up to gigs and the people at the venue didn’t believe who I was. They thought I was just someone trying to blag my way in, which always made it really awkward. I also did a few celebrity interviews over the years, lots of writing for magazines, and I worked in TV listings for a while too.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Which is how we met, working together!

GARY PANTON:

And then I ended up working in publishing, and through that I started doing a little bit of freelance children’s writing, which was mainly nonfiction, things like picture books, lift-the-flap books for preschool age. A little bit of activity stuff, books for The Beano and Hey Duggee, and that kind of thing. I still do freelance writing on Hey Duggee books, and also Bluey books. I did some Danger Mouse stuff as well when the series made a comeback a few years ago.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s really weird to interview your friends and discover they’re working on things you didn’t know about!

GARY PANTON:

But I’d always really wanted to do my own thing. The thing is, when you’re writing for a brand, you have to follow their rules pretty tightly. You have to be respectful to other people’s characters. And I increasingly really wanted to create something of my own, that I could push a bit further. Something I could make a bit more disgusting and revolting and over-the-top – all that sort of stuff that I find funny.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It sounds like you’ve had some very good write-ups for the book. You’ve done lots of school events for kids, is that right?

GARY PANTON:

Yeah, me and Dotty have been going around schools doing little shows and signings. We did the Borders Book Festival a couple of weeks ago, which was an amazing experience. It’s actually fairly rare for an author and illustrator to even meet, let alone do these things together, so it’s been really good that the two of us have formed this little partnership. Hopefully that will continue. I was reading an Amazon review of the book where someone described it as an author-illustrator partnership that reminded them of Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake and that was really the best compliment I think I could ever receive.

But to go back to your previous question about the writing group, working in children’s media definitely helped me with writing the book. You pick up so many little hints and tips about what kind of characters are going to be successful. And taking the Notwitches idea to that writers’ group was really good for me because I sometimes find writing with no deadline can be a bit of a struggle. With that group, we would meet up every couple of weeks and read each other’s work, and then we’d all discuss it together. Everyone was so nice that there wasn’t that much criticism, so I don’t know if creatively it helped that much, but it definitely helped from the point of view of getting me to actually sit and write a thing.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I think that’s half the battle, though. I honestly do. If you’ve got a deadline.

GARY PANTON:

It must have been eight or nine years ago that I was in that group and first started writing what became The Notwitches. I abandoned it for a while after that, but during COVID I decided to give it a proper go because I was sitting at home a lot, and I thought, I might as well try to finish it. It was a struggle at times but I’ve learned to just keep writing until the ending comes to me. Once I get to that point I can always go back and edit the earlier bits so that they work with the ending. I don’t plan any of the stories that I write, because I find that when I try to plan, nothing comes to me. Whereas if I just write and keep going, the ideas will come. I don’t know if you’ve read On Writing by Stephen King…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I have – although not for a while.

GARY PANTON:

I found that really useful. He says: don’t worry what the plot is, or what the themes are, or the meaning. Just write and see what comes out – and that’s very much what I decided to do. I think you’ve got to be finding out the story as you go along. It’s like reading someone else’s book or watching a film and not knowing what’s coming next – I don’t usually know what’s coming next when I write, but I have the power to control it, which is a brilliant feeling to have.

—–

**LAST: DEACON BLUE: The Great Western Road (Cooking Vinyl, 2025)**

Extract: ‘People Come First’

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Obviously I knew Deacon Blue were still going and I knew they were still touring, and obviously we’re having this conversation only about ten days after the death of their keyboard player, James Prime. But they’ve been together for 40 years, and I hadn’t quite realised that they’ve made all these new albums especially over the past ten years.

GARY PANTON:

It’s quite hard now to know the last thing you either bought or listened to, because you’ve just got everything coming at you, but actually this was the last physical album I bought. Because I otherwise never buy physical albums anymore – I stream my music like everyone else. But I used to be really into collecting music. And the one concession I made when I left physical music behind was to carry on collecting Deacon Blue’s music. I have everything they’ve done – bootlegs, all the albums, all the singles, everything Ricky Ross has ever done as a solo artist, which is seven or eight albums. I’ve been to see them live more times than I can remember. And with this new album, although I’ve streamed it loads of times, I’ve not even taken the cellophane off the physical CD, because I don’t have a CD player now. But it’s just important for me to have it in that collection.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So when did you first get into them, then?

GARY PANTON:

I probably didn’t discover them until they actually broke up, which was around ‘94.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yes, there was a greatest hits album at that time, called Our Town. And I’d known their first two albums quite well [Raintown, When the World Knows Your Name] but I didn’t really know the ones after that.

GARY PANTON:

In a lot of ways, I’m too young for Deacon Blue. When I go to the shows, I’m generally one of the youngest adults there. The audience tends to be people older than me and their kids, but I’m the generation in between. For a lot of people, Deacon Blue were their ‘student band’ in the 80s, but I’m about ten years too young for that. But yeah, that ‘greatest hits’ album you mentioned…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That was your way in?

GARY PANTON:

Yeah, I played that a lot. Probably bought that before I knew they’d split up. But then, I often like music about 10 years after it’s been popular. It’s the same with Britpop – I was never into it in the 90s, even though I was a teenager at the time and I was probably right in the middle of the target market for it. Whereas now I actually quite like a lot of it. I don’t know what it is – it’s maybe similar to the movie thing in that it taps into my love of nostalgia … I like my music to be old!

In the late 90s, a few years after Deacon Blue split up, I was at uni in Stirling, and I started buying up their old stuff in the local record shops: second hand singles, previous albums. And then in 2001, they got back together, and I’ve been going to their gigs pretty regularly since then. They’re the band I always come back to, the one I listen to the most. The sound has changed quite a lot over the years, since the days of ‘Real Gone Kid’ and ‘Fergus Sings the Blues’. They’re not going to do that kind of thing again, I don’t think. But I think the new songs still do have quite a similar sound to Raintown, which was the first album.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Raintown seems to be the one that everyone agrees on as the best one, or do you think there’s a better one?

GARY PANTON:

I would say so. I mean, it’s weird – Raintown didn’t really have any hit singles. Most of the hits were from the second album, When the World Knows Your Name – that’s got ‘Real Gone Kid’, ‘Wages Day’, ‘Fergus Sings the Blues’, the more uptempo poppy stuff. But now, if you watch them live, the ones that get the warmest reception are the Raintown ones, especially ‘Dignity’ obviously.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Of course, and that did nothing when it first came out. Number one hundred and something! Eventually got in the top 20 when the greatest hits came out, but you still think of it as being much bigger, don’t you?

GARY PANTON:

Yeah, I believe their most successful chart single was the cover of Bacharach and David’s ‘I’ll Never Fall in Love Again’. Which I think got to number two.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Behind Bombalurina!

GARY PANTON:

For a band who I generally think of as writing all their own stuff, it’s amazing that the biggest single was a cover.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Although I think the reason for that is Deacon Blue are a good example of an ‘albums band’ and it was never on an album at the time, it was a stand-alone single EP. But it is interesting how a lot of people, when they first get into a band or like them belatedly, buy the greatest hits and decide that’s enough for them. Whereas you presumably heard something in those hits where you thought, I want to investigate more of this.

GARY PANTON:

Yeah, as someone who often got into bands after they were popular, a lot of the music that I’m into came through hearing greatest hits albums and then wanting more.

I think with Deacon Blue, with the new stuff, they’ve definitely matured a lot in their sound. But I would say there’s a sort of unique Deacon Blue sound – country meets blue-eyed soul meets what seems to be a very Scotland-specific yearning for better times. Quite similar to Del Amitri, who I also like.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Did you know Justin Currie has a memoir coming out shortly? [The Tremolo Diaries, published by New Modern Books on 28 August 2025]

GARY PANTON:

Oh I’ll be up for that. One of me and my wife’s first dates was a Justin Currie concert.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Oh how fantastic.

GARY PANTON:

I really love Justin Currie’s solo material in particular. In his solo shows he does a lot of the Del Amitri stuff, but just acoustically and on his own. Love love love Justin Currie.

Something I’ve just remembered is that my parents had an album of ‘the greatest Scottish hits’, and that had ‘Somewhere in my Heart’ by Aztec Camera’ – another favourite band – on there, and ‘Always the Last to Know’ by Del Amitri. There was probably some Deacon Blue on there too. I don’t think I was ever specifically liking music because it was Scottish, but I just seemed to gravitate towards a lot of these bands.

I have seen Roddy Frame once, I guess it must have been about 15 years ago. He actually did play ‘Somewhere in my Heart’ when I saw him. It was just him on his own in one of the West End Theatres in London, which was quite an unusual venue. But yeah, it was great.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I was going to ask if the Scottish connection was important with these bands, because you’re from… is it Perth?

GARY PANTON:

I’m from Perth, yeah. Del Amitri are from Glasgow. Deacon Blue are basically from Glasgow, although Ricky Ross is from Dundee.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Is there a famous band from Perth? I’m trying to think.

GARY PANTON:

There’s the Average White Band’s singer Alan Gorrie.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That’s a good one!

GARY PANTON:

And also, Fiction Factory, who did ‘Feels Like Heaven’. That’s basically it as far as I know.

—–

**ANYTHING: VARIOUS ARTISTS: It’s Christmas (EMI, compilation, 1992)**

Extract: Cliff Richard: ‘Mistletoe and Wine’

JUSTIN LEWIS:

We’re recording this on the first of July, by the way. This is a Christmas hits compilation from 1992, which I remember well because I was working at HMV as a Christmas temp (and went on to be full-time there for a while). Now – why have you chosen this?

GARY PANTON:

I mean, to give it a bit of context, I’m a massive Christmas fan.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

You’ve got all its records. All its posters, everything.

GARY PANTON:

Yeah. I’m trying to collect everything Christmas ever did.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

You’re like that bloke in the papers who has Christmas dinner every day!

GARY PANTON:

I’m not a religious person at all. But the cultural side of Christmas is something I just love: Christmas movies, Christmas books, Christmas food, going to Christmas markets. All of that stuff, so I think Christmas music obviously goes hand in hand with all of that. I think this compilation was one that my parents had, and I remember me and my sister just playing it all the time. It’s kind of ‘ground zero’ in terms of Christmas collections because it’s before a lot of the other stuff has taken off. It’s a lot more common now for artists to bring out Christmas songs, but these feel like the original Christmas pop hits to me.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

It’s a very interesting selection. It’s before the Pogues were on all Christmas compilations ever. And it’s pre-‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ so there’s no Mariah. But the big selling point for me on this one is Kate Bush’s ‘December Will Be Magic Again’, which is not even on streaming as we speak.

GARY PANTON:

I think this was like my introduction to the idea of Christmas songs as being one body of work. You keep coming back to them every year, unlike any other music. There’s a specific time of year when you listen to these precise songs, and it’s like a genre of its own, even though it contains completely different genres. I would never listen to these outside Christmas, which actually can be a problem because I’ve got so much of this stuff on my Apple music account that if I ever have it play random favourites, it’ll throw things up like ‘Fairytale of New York’ in July, which I don’t want to hear. I want to keep it special for Christmas.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So you don’t occasionally try and see if it works at another time of year? Because I have a Slade compilation on my iPod, and when I play it from time to time, I do not skip ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’. Because to me, for a lot of the year, it doesn’t sound like a Christmas record, it sounds evergreen.

And at Live Aid, and we’re speaking in the run-up to the 40^th anniversary, the Wembley side of the concert ended with a group rendition of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ In July. And in fact, that Band Aid single nearly got back in the top 100 after that concert.

GARY PANTON:

One thing I love about Christmas records is there are songs that really have nothing to do with Christmas, but as long as they’re marketed in the right way, everyone just happily accepts them as being festive. Two of my favourites are East 17’s ‘Stay Another Day’, and ‘Never Had a Dream Come True’ by S Club 7, both of which are only Christmas songs, really, because they wear warm jackets in the videos.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And they’re in the charts at Christmas. Or they overdub sleigh bells on to the backing.

GARY PANTON:

Even ‘The Power of Love’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood – I’m not sure what’s Christmassy about that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

The video, really, I think. So at what point do you bid farewell to Christmas music? Do you do as the radio does and stop on Boxing Day, or do you keep going till Twelfth Night?

GARY PANTON:

I have quite a long period of Christmas music, but it does basically stop on Boxing Day. I’ll introduce it in the last week of November, so that I can get a good four or five weeks out of it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So, with this compilation, if you had to choose one or two from it, what would you go for?

GARY PANTON:

You know what? You might hate this, but I quite like a bit of ‘Mistletoe and Wine’, and I quite like Shakin’ Stevens’ ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’. My general feeling is that Christmas is the great leveller for music, there’s not really any room for snobbery. I mean, if you look at this album, there’s Lennon and McCartney – both have got songs on here – but there’s Shakin’ Stevens too. At Christmas, it doesn’t really matter who these people are. They’re all just bunged together into one great big mix.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So does that mean when you’re listening to this, are you thinking of the artists particularly or just thinking of it as being a particular mood?

GARY PANTON:

I’m not that fussed about who the artist is. I mean, for most of the year I can’t bear Cliff Richard, so I guess it’s definitely that Christmas association with ‘Mistletoe and Wine’ that turns it into a regular listen for me. I draw the line at ‘Saviour’s Day’, though.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I often think with Cliff, he’s like Elvis and Diana Ross in that some of his records are great, and some of them are terrible but he seems to have no quality control at all. But do you think, as a whole, the Christmas pop songs have become the new Christmas carols? Because you don’t really hear Christmas carols so much now unless you actually hear the Nine Lessons and Carols or go to church.

GARY PANTON:

No, I mean, I really like Christmas carols. I really like brass bands at Christmas time as well. I love all that stuff.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

On the subject of playing Christmas records out of season: when Danny Baker used to present Morning Edition, the daily breakfast show on BBC Radio 5 (before it became Radio Five Live), there was one morning [25 May 1992] and it was a bank holiday and he was just playing records under the banner of ‘What if rock’n’roll had never been invented’. And he proceeded to play, on a warm early summer’s morning, with no announcement, no wink, nothing, the Ronettes’ ‘Sleigh Ride’, from off A Christmas Gift for You. And it sounded absolutely amazing. Sometimes these things work in any context, against the odds.

——

Gary Panton’s The Notwitches is available now as a paperback and ebook from Chicken House Books. The second book in the series, The Notwitches: Prison Break is published in the same formats on 14 August 2025.

You can order Gary’s books through this link to a variety of outlets: https://garypanton.co.uk/books/

Gary and Dotty will be doing book-signings and draw-alongs at the following Waterstones stores in Scotland:

Waterstones Perth, Saturday 16 August, 11am
Waterstones St Andrews, Saturday 23 August, 11am
Waterstones Edinburgh Fort Kinnaird, Saturday 6 September, 12pm

Keep an eye on Gary’s social media for other events that are yet to be announced:

Bluesky: @garypanton.co.uk

Instagram: @garypanton

FLA 26 PLAYLIST:

Gary Panton

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/BdxXrgoAQI

Track 1:

SMOKEY ROBINSON: ‘Being With You’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTC5NYSBhts&list=RDKTC5NYSBhts&start_radio=1

Track 2:

PAULA ABDUL WITH THE WILD PAIR: ‘Opposites Attract’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xweiQukBM_k&list=RDxweiQukBM_k&start_radio=1

Track 3:

PARTNERS IN KRYME: ‘Turtle Power’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxHWm_bGScY&list=RDuxHWm_bGScY&start_radio=1

Track 4:

HI TEK 3 FEATURING YA KID K: ‘Spin That Wheel’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrOVoplyjCI&list=RDSrOVoplyjCI&start_radio=1