2025)

September 7, 2025September 7, 2025 / whenisbins / 1 Comment

Ian Wade is a pop writer and DJ who is obsessed by its past, its present and its future. His superb and acclaimed book 1984: The Year Pop Went Queer, first published in the summer of 2024, has been a Guardian Book of the Year and a Clash Book of the Year. It documents a twelve-month period in which, despite a largely homophobic mass media, bands and artists like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Bronski Beat became best sellers by being themselves. High-energy music popular in gay clubs crossed over to the top ten to be absorbed by the work of future hit machines Stock Aitken Waterman and Pet Shop Boys, while emerging figures like Madonna and Cyndi Lauper championed tolerance and awareness in a mostly hostile climate when it came to sexuality.

After training as a chef, and working at Our Price Records, Ian’s real entrance into popworld came in the 1990s at the age of 24 when, as part of a media course at Suffolk College, he landed some work experience at Melody Maker in London, where he worked alongside the likes of Caitlin Moran, Pete Paphides, David Stubbs and the late Neil Kulkarni, and set about making himself useful to the point of being indispensable. Stints at Vox, Smash Hits and The Face followed, as well as on the Music 365 website, before he became a press officer, which led to work on Later… with Jools Holland, Top of the Pops, and BBC Radio. He currently writes for Classic Pop, The Quietus, Record Collector and MusicOMH, among others. He also occasionally DJs at various joints around London, is very slowly working on a new Blood Everywhere album, ‘helps out’ at What A Fucking Record and has begun writing another book.

In short, Ian is a busy bee, and is fantastic and funny company. I was so grateful that he spared quite a bit of time to talk to me over two sessions in one day in late August 2025, about his career, his book, his passion of pop, and just some of his numerous key record purchases. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

—

JUSTIN LEWIS:

First question I ask every guest: What’s the earliest music you remember hearing in your home, what did your parents have in their collections?

IAN WADE:

It was a mixture. There was a piano, which was there for my mum, although she never played it when I was growing up. My dad was like an ‘MFP [Music for Pleasure] and instrumental ‘nice-bit-of-music’ type chap. And I was the youngest of five kids. My eldest sister, Janet, was about sixteen when I was born – and so in the early 70s she was into Deep Purple, Rod Stewart, Alice Cooper, that kind of thing. Next there was Pauline, very into Motown, and reggae – lots of Trojan compilations. With Christine, I always think of Hot Chocolate, Real Thing and Stylistics, but all that mid-70s pop and soul. And then Cathryn came in with disco, Chic, Shalamar, ‘Rapper’s Delight’ and stuff like that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

So you’ve got four sisters.

IAN WADE:

Yeah, well, there’s only two now, sadly. But all of them fed into my love for music, early on. Each birthday Pauline would ask me what I liked in the chart and would buy me three singles. Christine took me to my first record shop and also bought me the Guinness Hit Singles books. Janet bought me my first copy of Smash Hits, and when she moved out and got married, she gave me some of her singles, and had written ‘IAN’ on about ten of them – things like Sparks’ ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both Of Us’ and ‘Hey Rock’n’Roll’ by Showaddywaddy, which is a banger.

—-

**FIRST (1): VARIOUS ARTISTS: 22 Dynamic Hits Volume II (K-Tel, compilation LP, 1972)**

Extract: ‘Son of My Father’ by Chicory Tip (CBS, single, 1972)

IAN WADE:

But the first album I remember being obsessed by was 22 Dynamic Hits Volume II. I must have been about three or four. I remember everything on this LP sounded so quiet, obviously later realising that that’s because they were trying to get eleven tracks on each side.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And unedited too, I believe, is that right? There’s a couple of five-minuters on there. And it has a most unlikely opening track.

IAN WADE:

Yeah, ‘Sylvia’s Mother’, which is not terrifying, but still slightly disturbing for young ears.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Feels like it should be a side-ender. Yes, the sequencing feels like the FA Cup third round draw panel are just fishing records out of a hat.

IAN WADE:

But then, when I looked at it again a few years later, I thought, ‘Oh this is all over the place’ probably because K-Tel was in its infancy in the UK and there was no real care taken. K-Tel and Arcade had this rivalry in the early 70s in the album charts with these compilations, a bit like the NOW/Hits Albums [in the 80s]. And in Christmas week 1972, the top three albums were all K-Tel compilations. Number one was 20 All-Time Greats of the Fifties, which was flicking back to records that were fifteen years old, the equivalent of looking back to 2010 now. Number two was this 22 Dynamic Hits compilation. Number three was 25 Rockin’ and Rollin’ Greats which we had as well. Oh and number four was Arcade’s second volume of Fantastic Hits.

We weren’t an artist albums family as such – it was Motown Chartbusters, Joe Loss having a crack at stuff or Marble Arch. Oh and lots of Hammond or Tijuana brass things – but there wasn’t a copy of Hunky Dory or The Dark Side of the Moon. The only one I really remember like that was Bridge Over Troubled Water, which I think everyone had to own by law.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That or Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits.

IAN WADE:

And the rest of that album chart had David Cassidy and Slade, but I would be interested to know what the music industry’s vibe towards it all was at the time, whether they thought these compilations were good or bad.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

But also… November 1972 was the 20^th anniversary of the first NME charts. So pop has its own proper history by now, it’s been growing, and then you get these what I suppose you’d call post-modern bands. Roxy Music quoting old riffs, 10cc, Steely Dan in America to some extent – all taking the influences and mixing them up. And Charlie Gillett had just written Sound of the City [first published in the US in 1970]. The first of those story arcs about pop music, no-one had quite done that before.

IAN WADE:

And meanwhile, around the same time, you had the big rock’n’roll festivals at Wembley with people like Wizzard and they unearthed Little Richard.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And Chuck Berry at the Lanchester Arts Festival. But going back to this compilation… I mean there are two Chicory Tip singles here – which is like the two Kajagoogoo singles on the first NOW album. But apart from the weird sequencing, I was struck by how many straight lines go from this album to the other records you’ve selected for this, the things I know you’re really into. There’s some reggae here, there’s some funk – Billy Preston’s ‘Outa Space’, fantastic record, but I don’t think a ‘hit’ as such.

IAN WADE:

When I look at this album, this is where all my essential music food groups throughout my life come from. Chicory Tip, well the whole Giorgio Moroder thing [starts there]. T Rex, who, whenever your favourite pop stars in Smash Hits did a ‘My Top Ten’, T Rex and Bowie and Roxy were always in there. And there’s tracks I love by Sly & the Family Stone, Carpenters, Bill Withers, and like Hot Butter’s ‘Popcorn’…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Having that straight after Johnny Cash’s ‘One Piece at a Time’!

IAN WADE:

I might actually have to go on to Spotify and make it more palatable. Because it’s… just off. I seem to remember Joe Cocker[‘s ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’] going on for about eight hours.

—-

FIRST (2): CHICAGO: ‘If You Leave Me Now’ (CBS, single, 1976)

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Tell me about buying your first single, then.

IAN WADE:

Yeah, Chicago’s ‘If You Leave Me Now’. It was meant to be ‘Dancing Queen’ by ABBA, which in retrospect might have been a bit too on the nose for me.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Had the shop sold out of that?

IAN WADE:

Yes. So that was like: Uh, typical! But this was the first time I was taken to a record shop, so the disappointment wasn’t huge as I was overwhelmed. Lots of previous times, I’d like a song, and people would buy it for me. But this was the first time I was taken to a record shop. It was Debenhams in Ipswich, and it felt like this glorious dark silvery cave of wonder. My mind was blown. ‘This is where all the records are. This is everything.’ Of course, we learn later… But I remember following my sister Christine around this shop. She was showing me bits and pieces, and she bought this Invictus Chartbusters album, which had this amazing mirrory sleeve. And I got ‘If You Leave Me Now’ – this must have been just after my birthday when my sister Pauline had got me ‘Couldn’t Get It Right’ by Climax Blues Band, Sherbet’s ‘Howzat’ and Lalo Schifrin’s ‘Jaws’.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That completely conjures up the soundtrack to the Swap Shop swap top ten. And this would have been autumn 1976, the point where I would have properly been watching Top of the Pops every week. I remember with Chicago, they didn’t come into the studio, they had some film clip of them performing it somewhere, with a full orchestra behind them.

IAN WADE:

Yeah, and it always looks slightly out of focus and kind of cosy and warm because, I mean, yeah, that’s sort of September, October… When seasons were seasons, Justin.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

A ‘clocks going back’ record.

—-

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I’m just going to read out a quote from your book – 1984: The Year Pop Went Queer – which you move on quickly from. ‘Music was going well once I’d binned the violin’. Now – had you got so far with it, and realised it wasn’t for you?

IAN WADE:

When I started school, I thought, ‘I’ll learn violin’ but also during that ‘autumn of the futurists’, in 1981, I wanted to learn keyboards because obviously synth-pop was in the air. I wanted to be Ian Burden in the Human League and pressing buttons, or Adrian Wright [with his slides]. And so my parents took me to do organ lessons, because I felt like piano was perhaps too difficult, but also because organs had built-in beats and melody. Plus my dad was a huge fan of the sound of the Hammond organ.

So, with electronic music, I found it was so much easier to put on a little beat as there were always these pre-programmed rhythms and basslines. And I realised it was far easier to make a piece of music with this than scraping across a couple of strings on the violin, though I got up to Grade 5.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

That’s not bad. It’s a hard instrument.

IAN WADE:

But that was more by applying my keyboard skills to the violin. I managed for about a year, but the teacher would say, ‘You haven’t practised’. And I hadn’t. But with the organ, there were these The Complete Organ Player books and I managed to go through those a lot quicker than the stuff at school.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

What sort of repertoire are we talking here, with The Complete Organ Player? Was it a bit of everything?

IAN WADE:

It was. My dad always loved me playing ‘Amazing Grace’, and that was in Book 1, so it got slightly harder after that. ‘I Love You Because’ by Jim Reeves, ‘Hava Nagila’ which was a favourite because it just gets frantic. ‘El Condor Pasa’ as well. I did feel, though, none of this was particularly recent, given I wanted to be the Human League.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

On the upside, you could easily have won the £1000 jackpot on Name That Tune.

IAN WADE:

But when I was at high school… we’re similar ages, so did you have options, after the third year?

JUSTIN LEWIS:

O levels [now GCSEs]? Yeah, that’s right.

IAN WADE:

Four people wanted to do Music as a first choice, but apparently they needed another person, otherwise it was pointless them doing it. So, I think I was only the fifth person in the rest of the year to put Music as one of my five options, and as art was oversubscribed they asked me to consider changing.

But my music teacher was really switched on. A real cool cat, he wasn’t ‘hey kids’ and he wasn’t trying to be a mate, but he knew what to teach us. For the final exam, you had to make your own music, come up with a piece.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Wow, that’s extraordinary. We were never asked to compose anything, it was so weird.

IAN WADE:

I was trying to play guitar, but guitars hurt your hands, you know. Whereas at home, I’d been mucking around with tapes and things, and I had this tape-to-tape, which also had a voice recorder and stuff. I was into things like Art of Noise, Cabaret Voltaire… so I was making these little soundscapes, and taping my organ beats, like that Hammond/Jerry Dammers thing. I made all these tapes under the name Industry and brought one in to play to my music teacher, and he was like, ‘Whoa, yes! You can enter this!’ We’d have these one-to-one chats where he’d talk to me about Music Concrete, [Edgard] Varèse and [Karlheinz] Stockhausen… It’s like I’d unlocked something in him about his passions which were off the curriculum. And he could see that the people I liked, like Art of Noise, were equally inspired by those figures. He played Stimmung by Stockhausen in the class once, which made you giggle but you were also almost in awe that somebody’s managed to have this idea and do it. But I haven’t really sat down properly with actual keyboards for years.

—-

JUSTIN LEWIS:

1984 – The Year Pop Went Queer seems such an obvious subject for a book, it feels faintly incredible that no-one had really done it before. And the only thing I could put that down to might be that for a long time, music criticism wasn’t very keen on the 80s – and certainly not the mid-80s unless it was the indie scene. And yet, 1984 is the top selling singles year of the decade in Britain. Six singles sold at least a million copies, which had never happened before. So, had you been waiting or wanting to write a book like this for a while?

IAN WADE:

I always felt like 1984 was my year growing up after 1981. The book I wanted to do, first of all, was like a Gay Jukebox. To coincide with 50 years of Stonewall [in 2019], I wanted to do one of those 1001 Albums projects or the records of each year, covering people like Bowie, or Suede, or kd lang almost like the LGBTQ+ Record Collection. I listed all the years in a document, and then went through everyone who I might write about in those particular years. So,1970: Kinks, ‘Lola’, you know… And Jobriath and Bowie and Lou Reed, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ and glam… But for 1984, that was the section that was growing and growing and growing. There wasn’t just Frankie Goes to Hollywood and obviously Bronski Beat… there was the rise of high-energy, Madonna, all these sorts of things. And so when I mentioned this to my publisher, he said, ‘Yeah, focus on that.’

You see, some people have said, ‘But there was already Annie Lennox and Boy George and Soft Cell [before ‘84]’ but I think 1984 was the most explicit year for gay acts. Boy George and Marc Almond were still perceived as ‘still haven’t met the right girl yet’.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And it wouldn’t have occurred to me that George Michael, for instance, was in the closet.

IAN WADE:

I look at this book very much through two lenses: there was what they were saying at the time, and there was what we were seeing. So, you’d get Holly Johnson’s Personal File in Smash Hits [January 1984] where he’d talk about going to sex shops – whereas two years earlier, you had Marc Almond and ‘Sex Dwarf’ and all that and yet none of that was kind of hinted at anything other as ‘disgusting’ or whatever. And then you had Bronski Beat who were so revolutionary, by talking unapologetically about being gay, but there were no frills. There was no drag or eyeliner – they just looked like you, or your neighbours or your relations. And so those two acts – Frankie and Bronski Beat – just seemed like the big ones. Then there’s high-energy coming through, and Stock Aitken Waterman getting together at the start of 1984. During that year, they have their first big chart entry with Divine [‘You Think You’re a Man’], their first top five single with Hazell Dean [‘Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go)’] and by the end of the year, they’ve made ‘You Spin Me Round’ with Dead or Alive – previously this chart-allergic band – which is on its way to Number one in 1985, and so they’re preparing to revolutionise pop for the rest of the decade.

I wanted the book to be very much from a chart point of view. Everybody in it had to have actual chart hits that year, and that allowed me to bring in Sylvester, who came back with this really amazing album [M-1015], but everyone was just asking him about Boy George, you know. And he was a bit pissed off by that.

But then, people like Rob Halford and Judas Priest, and especially George Michael, through the benefit of hindsight, when you see what they were up to at that time. During research, I discovered that George had come out to Andrew and Shirlie on the set of Wham!’s ‘Club Tropicana’ video [summer 1983]. I realised that with Wham! in 1984, you can see in George a very, very driven person wanting to be as huge as possible in pop regard. So he’s parking his sexuality, because you look at ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’… Even when you look at the videos, and you look at his eyes while he sings to you… he’s so driven. It’s like he’s got everything planned, even down to splitting up.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Some of it’s confidence, too, isn’t it. Andrew is arguably the real pop star at the beginning of Wham!, I think, he understood image really well, and pop in general. He wasn’t a songwriter but he was as lucid and thoughtful about the presentation as George was. You can see he’s been watching everything. But I guess the other thing about Wham! in ’84 is they had that terrible recording contract they’ve managed to extricate themselves from, and there’s that feeling of ‘Right, we’re going to do this properly now’.

IAN WADE:

Yeah – ‘We’ll show you.’

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I love the first album, Fantastic!, but it’s clear in retrospect that that’s everything they’re prepared to put out for the time being, they’re holding back a lot of the best stuff for later. To know that you’ve already got ‘Careless Whisper’, for instance.

IAN WADE:

That’s what I love about Fantastic! John Peel likes them, the NME likes them, but it isn’t really till ‘Club Tropicana’ when Smash Hits puts them on the cover, and they actually look like a pop pin-up force. So then it all goes to shit because of all the legal stuff, but what felt like forever then was only, what, six months.

But yeah, with George, I wanted to reflect on how a lot of gay people live and work and exist – do you have to park your true self, and your sexuality in order to become successful? It’s like that for a lot of people in general. Even though there were these bitchy barbs from Boy George towards George Michael when you read between the lines.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Oh, looking back, you can see it, can’t you?

IAN WADE:

Oh yeah, and I also wanted to include people like Madonna and Cyndi Lauper… both of who would do so much for gay causes and AIDS awareness, that’s why I used ‘queer’ as the angle of the book. ‘Queer’ was something that suggested something else rather than the sex.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Going back to Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Bronski Beat… it’s interesting to consider how Radio 1 reacted so differently to those two acts breaking through. Once they realised what ‘Relax’ was about, and banned it after playing it quite a lot for two months, and yet I remember being slightly surprised that they had no problem with Bronski Beat whatsoever, who also promoted ‘Why?’ on Saturday Superstore. Was it because the Frankie approach was hedonistic and the Bronski approach was… responsible?

IAN WADE:

That’s possibly it. Because a lot of the arguments, certainly part of Mike Read’s reasons, for banning ‘Relax’ were about the video. ‘Relax’ as a record is an exuberant disco romp, really. But when you see the video, when you see what’s going on with some of the extras… And also the cover art. ZTT were perhaps testing the waters and didn’t quite realise what they were doing, but yet they went with it. Whereas, with Bronski, when you watch the video for ‘Smalltown Boy’, which is like a Mike Leigh-type clip, there’s homophobia there and you can see the message going on – hanging round a swimming pool mooning over a hot guy in Speedos, you know. But I guess, as you say, because it wasn’t quite so explicit, and wasn’t about the sex… But both those videos are directed by the same guy.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Really?! Bernard Rose also directed ‘Smalltown Boy’?! And he did UB40’s ‘Red Red Wine’ before ‘Relax’. While we’re on the subject of ‘Relax’, I’ve never managed to track down a recording of Mike Read announcing on air that he wasn’t going to play it [c. 8am on Wednesday 11 January 1984].

IAN WADE:

It’s weird. I remember hearing it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

There are no direct quotes in the papers of the time of what he said, just press statements afterwards. No-one seemed to record it, although I suppose why would you be recording medium-wave era Radio 1 at breakfast time?

IAN WADE:

So, is Chris Barrie’s Mike Read impression taking the piss out of the ban on the ‘Power of Love’ 12” version [released November 1984] the only citation?

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And even that isn’t strictly correct, because Barrie’s impression claims that ‘Relax’ is number thirty-five, whereas on the day of the ban, it was at number six.

—-

**LAST: SAINT ETIENNE: International (Saint Etienne/PIAS, album, 2025)**

Extract: ‘Glad’

[Note: Ian and I spoke on 26 August 2025, ten days before the official release of this record, on 5 September. You can read his review for The Quietus here.]

JUSTIN LEWIS:

As you’ve selected this, I’d like to talk about farewell records. Because if something is trailed as ‘this is our last record’, you can’t help but listen with different ears, as opposed to a band splitting six months or a year after an album release. So obviously, Wham! spring to mind [‘The Edge of Heaven’ single, 1986] and The Jam [‘Beat Surrender’ single, 1982] – but, given that you have heard an advance copy of this, and I haven’t yet, apart from two tracks, how did it feel listening to International, the final Saint Etienne album?

IAN WADE:

Strange and sad and yet happy. When Saint Etienne first came along, in 1990, their ideas and references suggested so much, they were setting out their stall on records like Foxbase Alpha [1991] and So Tough [1993] – ‘This is who we are.’ Now, 35 years on, they have their own club. They’ve explored all those areas really well. It’s not like they kept themselves in a rut – and this has got a nice circular element with its in-between track references from people like Katie Puckrik. There are lots of little motifs in various tracks which remind you of this or that [from their back catalogue]. So whether that was a conscious decision when they were making this, because I know they were making the previous album, The Night, at the same time. And The Night is a very different album to International. While they’ve always been a really good pop band, this one – while not ‘He’s On the Phone’ twelve times – is very much them in ‘classic pop’ mode.

I love what’s in Bob Stanley’s head, and Saint Etienne’s outlook. There’s that spirit of having grown up with them. Foxbase Alpha was all about being in the centre of London: ‘We don’t have much money, but we’re just going to have an adventure, we’re going to have a great time.’ And that’s how I felt when I first moved to London, I went and visited all these places that were mentioned in their songs, all the tube stations and so on.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Sometimes I wonder why weren’t they bigger than they actually were. I think you put your finger on it when you said they didn’t stay with one thing for too long. But also, most of their records have got a weird bit in them. Even ‘Glad’, the first single off this, has a dead stop after the first chorus, which you wouldn’t get on, say, a Sophie Ellis-Bextor single. Saint Etienne never lost that indie ethos of making things a bit odd.

IAN WADE:

There’s that thing in your own pop world where Saint Etienne are number one, whereas they’re sadly nowhere near in the real world. There was a recent interview where they said, ‘Oh it’s a shame we never had a top ten single.’

JUSTIN LEWIS:

‘He’s on the Phone’ (1995) and ‘Sylvie’ (1998) came close.

IAN WADE:

Yeah, it seems silly that Cola Boy [a Saint Etienne alias project] did manage it [‘7 Ways to Love’, summer 1991], but they never managed it as Saint Etienne.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Unless you count ‘Tell Me Why’, the Paul van Dyk collaboration (#7 in 2000).

IAN WADE:

But I think eventually there wasn’t anything for new fans to get hold of. They didn’t seem to attract new people. ‘He’s on the Phone’ was a major crossover in terms of being a banging top record, but…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I wonder why they disappeared for two years after that, although they did that weird thing of putting out an album only in Japan [Continental, 1997, but out as a deluxe edition everywhere now], when if they’d put it out here as well, that could have taken off. Why didn’t they put out ‘Burnt Out Car’ as a single in early ’96? Surely a lost massive hit!

IAN WADE:

They were their own A&R team, they’ve always picked canny remixers for their remixes. But there’s also the indie ethos where they wouldn’t pull loads of singles off an album. I wish they’d been a lot bigger. It amazed me that I’ve Been Trying to Tell You (2021) was their first top twenty album in over twenty years [since 1998’s Good Humor].

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I must say, I love that side of them, I loved I’ve Been Trying to Tell You – and I loved Sound of Water, which I know divided the fanbase somewhat.

IAN WADE:

All the people I know and love a lot: friends and lovers and whatnot, we’ve been there together through Saint Etienne, but yet I’ve rarely known of anyone coming into that circle. Saint Etienne’s way is curating and keeping that audience going. It’s not like Oasis, where suddenly a whole new generation of kids gets into them, or even Blur when I saw them live a couple of years ago – I was surprised how many youngsters were there.

I sound ancient, but I think that’s been the downside with Saint Etienne. They could have crossed over, could have pulled in more people, but after ‘He’s On the Phone’, they deliberately kept away from the whole Britpop thing, even though they were initially mentioned when the term was first coined in that Select feature [spring 1993]. When Britpop encompassed the Auteurs, and Denim and Pulp. Also, they never really slogged themselves around the live circuit – even the past 10 or 15 years – they’ve not done massive tours. And there have been quite big gaps between albums.

But to me, they are superstars, for everything they represent, and the people I know through them. You know, even I, I guess my partner is kind of somebody I’ve got into Saint Etienne and that was kind of make-or-break. But there hasn’t been anything for a while that’s brought people in.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I remember a few years back, when Graham Norton still did Saturdays on Radio 2, one morning he played ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’, their very first and probably still their most played record from 1990. And it sounded exciting to hear it there, but it sounded lo-fi, it sounded weird, it sounded indie. It really didn’t sound like it belonged there.

IAN WADE:

And that’s the thing. They don’t really fully sit anywhere, but that’s pop. The catalogue is all very shifty, good in a way, and bad in a way. It’s a shame, really. But they’ve said, ‘Look, we’re not splitting as such, we just decided [to stop]…’

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Because they are still friends.

IAN WADE:

Yeah, and maybe more people should know when to stop. We’ve all been fans of bands where eventually we’ve collected the albums on autopilot. Yet you don’t get that with Saint Etienne. Nothing sounded automatic. And with Saint Etienne, they’ve all got kids, they’re all about sixty, well Bob is. Virtually everyone I know has been facing various challenges to do with age recently with illnesses and bereavements and all that, and Saint Etienne have reminded a lot of those people of that kind of post-ecstasy carefree time…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

What really scares me is that the song ‘Teenage Winter’, a song about growing older, is itself now 20 years old.

IAN WADE:

Exactly! And ‘He’s On the Phone’ is 30 this year.

—-

**ANYTHING (1): CHICKS ON SPEED: Will Save Us All (Unicat Records, album, 2000)**

Extract: ‘Euro Trash Girl’

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I didn’t know this at all, I must confess. I’d heard of them, but I’d not heard them, I don’t think. It’s brilliant.

IAN WADE:

This dates back to a period in the late 90s when I first heard like a split single with them and DJ Hell covering [The Normal’s] ‘Warm Leatherette’. I liked them as they felt a bit like The Slits where it was art and ideas over ability, and I just absolutely loved it. It’s pre-electroclash… almost just pre-Internet, really. I didn’t even have an email address until around then. Around 2000 I was working at Music 365 and Angus the reviews editor would say, ‘Look on the review shelf and see if there’s anything you fancy covering’. I saw Chicks on Speed Will Save Us All, and convinced Angus to let me write about it as he had no idea of what it was and was won over by me being a bit deranged about it. I reviewed it under the name ‘Dixon Crack’ [Laughter]. That was around the time I reviewed Glastonbury while on E, so… ah, halcyon days.

It’s just so amazing though. ‘Euro Trash Girl’, the cover of The B-52’s’ ‘Give Me Back My Man’. At the same sort of time, Peaches were coming through, and then eventually Fischerspooner became seen as the big electroclash act with ‘Emerge’ a few months later. But it definitely felt as if there was something happening, you know? This kind of European art-pop thing.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I don’t know if this is just because it was from abroad, but it made me think of Pizzicato 5 from Japan. I’m not sure how I missed this at the time though.

IAN WADE:

I think that there’s a line from this sort of thing, via mash-up culture, then to the sort of Xenomania stuff being made for people like Rachel Stevens and Sugababes and it leads to something like Charli XCX’s Brat album – that kind of ‘up yours, I don’t care what you think’ vibe. I guess, although Chicks on Speed might be horrified by all that.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Did you know that ‘Mind Your Own Business’ was a cover back then [Delta 5, post-punk classic from 1980]? I don’t think I’d have known.

IAN WADE:

No, it sounded familiar but I had no idea that ‘Euro Trash Girl’ was a cover of the record by Cracker, who’d been Camper Van Beethoven. I didn’t realise that half these songs were covers, but when you hear the originals, you can see what the attraction was.

There’s a boxset of electroclash coming out in October [When the 2000s Clashed], compiled by Jonny Slut, who ran the Nag Nag Nag club. It’s got all this kind of stuff on it but also people like Kylie, LCD Soundsystem and Soulwax. And the fifth and final disc has the origins, so like Cabaret Voltaire and Human League and so on. Electroclash felt like a very American-European thing, and the nearest British act to the scene felt like Ladytron. And then maybe Goldfrapp a bit later, that kind of sexy electronic sound. But I’m really glad electroclash is having this revival. Felix da Housecat, and Chicks on Speed have both recently come back with new stuff. But we’re also getting a throwback to it with current people like Decius – sexy, randy dance music with minimal electronics, which seems and feels very 1981, 1988 and 2001.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

We’ve used the term ‘perfect pop’ but I often think of this kind of thing as ‘imperfect pop’, this element of the music that threatens to sabotage it. It might be a strange sound, or humour, or the singer might not be technically brilliant. Do you know what I mean?

IAN WADE:

Yeah! It’s like The Hacker and Miss Kittin track, ‘Frank Sinatra’, it just makes me laugh, the bleak humour of it. Kittin goes ‘You know Frank Sinatra? He’s dead’, and she sort of laughs this really cold laugh, this dominatrix lick-my-legs-in-an-airport-lounge vibe. Or maybe it’s nervous laughter, maybe it’s not meant to be as cold as that, but yet it is so perfect for that.

—-

**ANYTHING (2): AMANDA LEAR: Sweet Revenge (Ariola Records, album, 1978)**

Extract: ‘Follow Me’ (Single Version)

JUSTIN LEWIS:

How to define Amanda Lear – forming the connection between Salvador Dali and Bryan Ferry. How has there not yet been a full-length biography of Amanda Lear?

IAN WADE:

It is an amazing story.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And we still don’t entirely know which bits are true, and which bits aren’t.

IAN WADE:

Not officially, no. For years, I’ve been fascinated by the kind of artists who are huge in certain territories. A few years ago, during lockdown, Steve Wright – God bless him, but at the time, I was furious – played ‘Do It Do It Again’ by Raffaella Carrà, and he was taking the piss, as if it was this comedy naff piece of shit. And while that record is not ‘full’ Raffaella, when you watch things like the performances of ‘Rumore’ where she’s just really going for it, it’s just incredible. There’s a documentary which was on Disney [Raffa, 2023], and you realise she was bigger than Madonna and Elvis combined. Massive. But over here, there’s just this one song. And then there’s people like Dalida, in France, who has statues and areas of Paris named after them. I follow this account on Instagram called Disco Bambino, which puts clips of late 70s/early 80s performances from Italian entertainment shows. And Amanda Lear is always on those and she always looks absolutely amazing, fantastic. She would really benefit from a book, yes, but also the type of compilation Grace Jones got with Island Life [in 1985], because people knew all the Nightclubbing songs…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yes – I didn’t know her early disco stuff at all.

IAN WADE:

No. But that really contextualised her work in how she got to ‘Slave to the Rhythm’. But Amanda only had her first chart hit in the UK a couple of years ago because ‘Follow Me’ (which peaked at #68 in November 2023) was on the Coco Chanel Mademoiselle advert. And then there’s ‘Enigma (Give a Bit of Mmh to Me)’, which is on a dog food advert. And both of them are on this album, Sweet Revenge. Early last year, I didn’t have any of her records other than on download, and when me and my other half went to Stockholm, we were in one record shop, and the guy had a Discogs account, and I left with five singles and an album – and this was in Sweden! And then a few weeks ago, when my boyfriend was out of town, and I could spend more than five minutes in a record shop, I was in Crystal Palace, digging through the crates, and I found another Amanda Lear album. So suddenly I had gone from zero to about a dozen Amanda records. I mean, they’re an acquired taste, you know. Her cover of ‘Back to Black’ is… quite something.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

I really enjoyed listening to Sweet Revenge for this.

IAN WADE:

I do love that Eurodisco pop from the late 70s, there’s that kind of space fantasy about it.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Yes, yes, it is like everyone’s in space. There’s Space’s ‘Magic Fly’…

IAN WADE:

Nightflight to Venus by Boney M…

JUSTIN LEWIS:

‘Automatic Lover’ by Dee D. Jackson.

IAN WADE:

It’s a kind of cosmic disco. Every time I do a Eurodisco compilation, I find there’s another hundred things to discover on the playlist.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

For a long time, we tended to look down on European pop in this country. We were even pretty grudging about ABBA, or at least the music gatekeepers were. But I wanted to mention this Seaside Special special from August 1979, recorded in Belgium – you might have seen clips from this on that Instagram account, actually. It went out on BBC1, and ITV was on strike at the time, so there was almost nothing else to watch on TV at all, so this must have got huge ratings. But it was a cast of European pop stars in one venue. So you’ve got the Gibson Brothers, Dalida who you mentioned earlier, Plastic Bertrand, Eruption… and Amanda Lear. And the whole kaboodle was linked by, of all people, Rod Hull and Emu.

IAN WADE:

Oh my god, I’ve got to see this.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Michael Hurll, the entertainment producer at the BBC, was often trying out these pan-European specials.

—-

**ANYTHING (3): KING TUBBY & AUGUSTUS PABLO: King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown (Yard Music International, album, 1976)**

Extract: ‘Keep on Dubbing’

IAN WADE:

Lately, I’ve been finding myself listening to lots of minimal music because I want to have something to drown out my own thoughts. After my sister Cathryn dying suddenly in February, and then my mum died in April, it’s been no end of family history and obsessions and collections to go through clearing out the house. Mum was ninety-five and had been there 68 years and so it was just heartbreaking as first I cleared all the stuff of mine I had there – about 90 per cent of my record collection and all sorts – then her everyday stuff, and then we’re going through cupboards, where you’ve got family stuff – cards, letters, photos, no end of things that mum kept hold of. So I’ve been almost assaulted by all this ephemera and memories that I grew up with… all these associations, like a crash course. And a family record collection that had all our names on whose record belonged to who, so it’s been an onslaught of memories.

I found myself wanting to listen to something detached from it, something which didn’t throw up any of those memories. I don’t want to sound too Bobby Gillespie about this record, but in a way, for all his faults, sometimes he’s on to something with what he recommends, and this really is amazing.

Also, as if this year hasn’t been difficult enough, I had an operation on my ear, and had a grommet put in. For years and years, I thought my hearing had been affected by seeing My Bloody Valentine at UEA in Norwich on the Loveless tour. I was at the front even when my mates fled to the back. I assumed it was that, and I thought, ‘Well it’s a small price to pay, at least I lost my hearing to something worthwhile eh’.

But over the years, I’d be in bed listening to the radio, and when lying on one side, the sound was getting increasingly mumbly. And with sinuses and colds in recent years, it was becoming really painful. It turned out that my ear canal is very strange and there’s a couple of tiny bones that are fused together, which has actually stopped me being able to use my ear properly. I could hear around the ear, but not directly through it.

But since the grommet’s been put in, I can hear things again! I feel like I have to apologise for all the albums and artists I’ve slagged off over the years because my ears have been impaired. I was also tested for my ears when I was five or six because my parents thought I couldn’t hear properly even then, but I’d never really thought about it. I just played everything really loud.

So anyway, I’ve been re-listening to music because of going through all that, and dub – because of all the space in the music – was something I wanted to try and get lost in again. This particular King Tubby album has got lots of space, echo, dimension, and it also just took my mind off everything else going on.

I’ve always been a toe-dipper with dub. If you remember those Blood and Fire compilations which Mick Hucknall bankrolled, the King Tubby things – I had those and loved them. And there’s lots of Lee Scratch Perry and Adrian Sherwood stuff I like. It’s also the perfect music, I find, when you’re on a plane. I don’t know why, but hearing Prince Jammy as the plane was just taking off sounded perfect.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Listening to what you’ve just been saying, looking at my prep notes, do you know the first thing I’ve written for this bit? ‘Is this the music I find most comforting when I’m grieving?’

IAN WADE:

Oh my God.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

In my case, the record I listened to a lot after my father died, which was late 1994, was the Mad Professor version of Massive Attack’s Protection album. The Massive Attack singles at the time always had some dub versions on them, slightly unsettling some of them, but I loved that album. I loved the original Protection album as well, but I loved the way this emphasised different things in the music. I loved how dub takes things away, or amplifies something else. And what I find charming about this King Tubby album is how tracks just stop, it’s like a tape has run out, you don’t get these elegant fade-outs.

IAN WADE:

It’s like they’ve been uncovered and done on the hoof. There doesn’t seem to be any ego in it. There isn’t a main singer, or a key vocal, and I’ve always liked minimal dance and acid house in the same vein for the lack of ego. I mean, it drives my other half mad if I’m listening to something for about twelve minutes and nothing is happening. He looked like he wanted to open a vein when we were out the back in Space Hall in Berlin where they keep all the dance stuff.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

But the other thing I wanted to mention with dub is that when I started buying 12” singles in the 80s, they’d often have a ‘dub version’ on the other side, or in the case of Scritti Politti singles, they’d call it ‘version’, and I didn’t at that point know what all this was referencing. I didn’t know the tradition, I barely owned any reggae at that point. In fact, Scritti’s ‘The Word Girl’ – the flip side which was called ‘Flesh and Blood’ with Ranking Ann – was where the penny dropped and I went, Oh okay, that’s what this means.

IAN WADE:

I didn’t really think of it as dub at the time, but we had things in the house like the Dave and Ansel Collins singles, ‘Double Barrel’ and ‘Monkey Spanner’, which had ‘Part 2’ on the other side, which was either a continuation or a version minus the words.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

And obviously something like Love and Dancing by the League Unlimited Orchestra, effectively a dub version of Dare by the Human League. Which I don’t think I knew about for quite a long time after it came out (1982).

IAN WADE:

Dare is my favourite album of all-time, and I’m so in awe of Love and Dancing – the fact that it was all manually done.

JUSTIN LEWIS:

Martin Rushent trapped in a room for weeks sticking bits of tape together.

IAN WADE:

The way he became so obsessed with that record. They’ve just reissued the first two Pete Shelley albums – Homosapien and XL-1 – and Martin Rushent produced the first one. I knew the ‘Homosapien’ single, but I’d never really known the albums. They sound so fresh for things that are nearly 45 years old. Probably my favourite reissues this year.

—-

IAN WADE:

My ethos, my worldview… I’ve always wanted to be a DJ, I guess, in a club or on the radio. In writing about music or making playlists, and I’ve always been making tapes and stuff like that throughout my life, saying to people, ‘Listen to this.’ I like being enthusiastic about things. This morning, my other half was telling me about when we first met, and the CDs I made for him, where I was basically saying, you know, ‘Here are twenty songs that say a bit more than me talking for an hour and boring you.’ And that’s been the icebreaker for how I’ve made half my friends. I was always a bit awkward and shy, but music helped me with all that.

—-

Ian Wade’s 1984: The Year Pop Went Queer is published in paperback by Nine Eight Books/Bonnier Books. It will be published in the US in October 2025. You can order it from loads of places, but let’s say Bookshop.org.

You can follow Ian on Bluesky at @wadeywade.bsky.social and on Instagram at @ianedwardwadeywade.

—-

FLA 30 Playlist

Ian Wade

(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/CLVcuTUYfY

Track 1:

CHICORY TIP: ‘Son of My Father’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8mf4i_10mE&list=RDx8mf4i_10mE&start_radio=1

Track 2:

T REX: ‘Get It On’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuIOfvAFQqs&list=RDGuIOfvAFQqs&start_radio=1

Track 3:

CHICAGO: ‘If You Leave Me Now’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9_d-sFhmRM&list=RD-9_d-sFhmRM&start_radio=1

Track 4:

THE HUMAN LEAGUE: ‘Love Action (I Believe in Love)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRo27TwTaWg&list=RDwRo27TwTaWg&start_radio=1

Track 5:

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN: ‘Stimmung: Model 44: diffffdaffffdiffffff’

Singcircle, Gregory Rose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3EU35xWLrw&list=RDy3EU35xWLrw&start_radio=1

Track 6:

FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD: ‘Relax (Come Fighting)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKBbMlp0nEA&list=RDAKBbMlp0nEA&start_radio=1

Track 7:

BRONSKI BEAT: ‘Smalltown Boy’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5i2Wa7daDA&list=RDE5i2Wa7daDA&start_radio=1

Track 8:

SAINT ETIENNE: ‘Glad’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5fWxY9IHkw&list=RDh5fWxY9IHkw&start_radio=1

Track 9:

SAINT ETIENNE: ‘Avenue’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAjgW-q-IeQ&list=RDAAjgW-q-IeQ&start_radio=1

Track 10:

CHICKS ON SPEED: ‘Euro Trash Girl’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBXoZQmZoQw&list=RDJBXoZQmZoQw&start_radio=1

Track 11:

PEACHES: ‘Lovertits’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZz5nBc2_Bw&list=RDwZz5nBc2_Bw&start_radio=1

Track 12:

MISS KITTIN & THE HACKER: ‘Frank Sinatra’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXN2UrmdRHY

Track 13:

AMANDA LEAR: ‘Follow Me’ (Single Version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9ajaniHukc&list=RDF9ajaniHukc&start_radio=1

Track 14:

RAFFAELLA CARRA: ‘Rumore’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD8Gb8VkhME&list=RDnD8Gb8VkhME&start_radio=1

Track 15:

KING TUBBY & AUGUSTUS PABLO: ‘Keep on Dubbing’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spD6nZehlzI&list=RDspD6nZehlzI&start_radio=1

Track 16:

PRINCE JAMMY: Jammy’s a Shine’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zknELG5yQE&list=RD7zknELG5yQE&start_radio=1

FLA 12: Ian Greaves (28/08/2022)

May 20, 2025September 20, 2025 / whenisbins / Leave a comment

Fifteen years ago, the writer and editor Ian Greaves and myself were going mad. We were spending most spare minutes of our lives researching and eventually writing a 700-page book about the long-running BBC Radio 4 topical sketch series, Week Ending. We know. The BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham, Berkshire, became a semi-regular workstation for our frankly ludicrous project.

Prime Minister You Wanted to See Me? – A History of Week Ending took us a whole year to complete. Two things, I believe, kept us going. One was the knowledge that we were undertaking a subject that genuinely interested us – how do you find new and exciting creative talent in radio comedy? The other was the amusement that we were obsessively cataloguing and analysing every single episode (1132 of them) of a programme that we never actually liked that much. The writer and critic David Quantick (FLA 6) was kind enough to give it (we think) a glowing review for it in The Word magazine in early 2009, ending his piece with the phrase, ‘makes the Domesday Book look like Baby Spice’s autobiography.’ There’s one for our headstones.

I first met Ian Greaves, online and then in person, in 2000. He was and is much younger than I am, and was already frighteningly well-informed on broadcasting in particular. He appeared to have seen far more television than even I had. We would work together regularly over the next decade or so, on articles, doomed book pitches and ultimately Prime Minister, You Wanted to See Me? We often take the piss out of ourselves for writing that book, but we remain immensely proud of it.

Together we also worked as consultants on Lucian Randall’s acclaimed Chris Morris biography, Disgusting Bliss (2010), and separately we contributed chapters for No Known Cure (2013), an assembly of new, exclusive essays on all things Morris.

Subsequently, Ian has contributed to many Radio 4 documentaries and series, and to BFI Screenonline. Plus he has compiled and edited some magisterial anthologies. The Art of Invective (2015, with David Rolinson and John Williams) presents highlights and curios from the playwright Dennis Potter’s extensive archive of non-fiction, while One Thing and Another (2017) is an incredible collection of Jonathan Miller’s writing on everything from humour to opera to surgery to theatre. ‘This stunning collection is a must,’ was US talk show legend Dick Cavett’s reaction. Dick Cavett!

One subject Ian and I have always chatted about sporadically, although we’ve rarely written collaboratively on the subject, is music, and so I knew I wanted Ian as a guest on First Last Anything. Partly because I’ve often wondered how he became so immersed in what can be some of the noisiest and most uncompromising music around. But also because he is forever tremendous company and makes me laugh a lot.

In August 2022, one Sunday, we spent about 90 minutes exploring Ian’s itinerary from novelty childhood records, through pop epics, towards what you might call The Music of Sound. Enjoy!

——

IAN GREAVES

My persistent memory of the first record I had was ‘The Birdie Song’ [by The Tweets]. I’ve got a cousin, Mark, who’s a few years older than me and my elder sister, and I know him very well these days, but back in the Eighties he was this sort of distant figure who would ask for a Tom Waits album at Christmas from the family. He’s remained good on music ever since, but I’m sure he delivered ‘The Birdie Song’ to me. Maybe he didn’t want it in the house!

I’d listen to the charts with my sister. Keith Harris and Orville, ‘Orville’s Song’, that was a record we very much approved of. I’ve never really had any snobbery about novelty records, and I’ve always quite liked comedy records.

JUSTIN LEWIS

You’ve got to start somewhere, as a listener. Hardly anyone at the age of four is going to be at the 100 Club watching The Clash or whoever.

IAN GREAVES

And my parents had records. A great bone of contention in my dad’s life was that his dad got rid of all his Beatles albums as a sort of punishment – and he was a fan throughout, although I think he went off them a bit when the drugs kicked in.

But if my dad is reading this, the Beatles album in our house was Rock & Roll Music, the original double LP from 1976. And I’ve got that copy right here! [holds aloft] A weird collision of stuff. But I’ve always had sympathy with Alan in I’m Alan Partridge where he says his favourite Beatles album is ‘The Best of the Beatles’. I always say, ‘Oh I don’t own any Beatles records’ in a slightly posturing way, as if to suggest that the scenic route is more enjoyable. But it’s really because I nicked this off my dad. I think I only heard Abbey Road two years ago. They’re fine. [Laughs] I hear they’re good.

JUSTIN LEWIS

They’ll go a long way.

IAN GREAVES

So my dad had The Beatles and Ray Charles, I adore Ray Charles, my first connection with jazz really. I was slanted to the poppier end of my parents’ collection early on: ABBA, Queen, Motown compilations, there was a great 60s rock and pop CD collection… wish I could remember the name of that. Later, as a student, I was hoovering up mood albums. People like Al Caiola, who I still really love. But it transpired that my mother actually had things like George Shearing albums, Dave Brubeck. I imagine I was put off by the covers when I was younger but later I would put them on to minidisc and take them back to university with me.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Did anything happen with musical instruments and tuition?

IAN GREAVES

I probably lasted two piano lessons. Back then, if it was something I was really interested, I’d be really good at it. Anything so-so tended not to get that treatment.

JUSTIN LEWIS

What sort of age are we talking there?

IAN GREAVES

About 12.

JUSTIN LEWIS

An age where it could go either way: obsession or apathy.

IAN GREAVES

And because I was 12 in 1990, we’ve neatly arrived at the year of my first record.

——

**FIRST: FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD: Welcome to the Pleasuredome (ZTT Records, 1984, released on CD, 1985)**

Extract: ‘Two Tribes (Annihilation)’

[NB: During the early years of Trevor Horn’s Zang Tumb Tuum label, especially 1983–85, numerous versions of its releases appeared in the shops, with different mixes, sleeves and contents. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s singles and first album was no exception – the CD version of Welcome to the Pleasuredome, which came out nearly a year after the LP and cassette versions had a noticeably different running order, including this first 12” version of ‘Two Tribes’ rather than the three-minute single. More recent CD reissues of Welcome to the Pleasuredome have reverted to the running order of the original LP, and so this 12” version (subtitled ‘Annihilation’) can only currently be found on compilations.]

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s interesting that you bought a copy of Welcome to the Pleasuredome on compact disc in 1990. Holly Johnson had been a fairly big solo artist a year earlier… but why this, and why then?

IAN GREAVES

My memory is that my dad had definitely subscribed me to the local record library. You had to be registered by an adult for some reason, so whether they were stocking Derek & Clive albums, I don’t know. But that’s how I discovered The Goons, borrowing things like Tales of Old Dartmoor, those 70s issues with loads missing off them. And I definitely heard Holly’s Blast by borrowing that, too.

But the reason for ‘Two Tribes’ is very specific. On 1 January 1990, Radio 1, they broadcast The Top 80 of the 80s, the best-selling singles of the decade, all in a six-hour block, hosted by Alan Freeman and Mark Goodier. I taped the whole thing and it was a good way of consuming pop music cheaply. A real mixed bag. Like, ‘Coward of the County’ by Kenny Rogers was number 78.

JUSTIN LEWIS

One of the darkest number ones ever.

IAN GREAVES

And very near the top was the ‘Annihilation’ mix of ‘Two Tribes’… Nine minutes. I listened yesterday to what I think is the standard version of ‘Two Tribes’, and it sounded a little ordinary. But when I listen to the ‘Annihilation’ 12-inch mix, there is no other version as far as I’m concerned.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Just before it came out as a single, in 1984, Frankie said something like, ‘Radio 1 will play it to death’, as if to over-compensate for the banning of ‘Relax’ a few months earlier. And they did. In one week alone, in July 1984, ‘Two Tribes’ was played by Radio 1 twenty-five times.

IAN GREAVES

I bought the CD of Pleasuredome with a voucher for my twelfth birthday, so this is March 1990. I dragged my dad down Woolworths, to help me use this voucher. Which I assumed entitled me to the CD automatically, but it actually entitled me to something like one-tenth of the price. My dad was slightly annoyed by this point, but we’d got this far, so he just bought it for me anyway.

I don’t know what happened to that original CD, but for recent reissues they’ve changed the running order: just the single version.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, now it just duplicates the running order of the original LP and tape. But the first time I heard that ‘Annihilation’ mix of ‘Two Tribes’ was on Peter Powell’s show on Radio 1 because he used to count down the new Top 40 on a Tuesday teatime, and when he got to number one, he played this much longer version instead. Quite often, it was common with 12” versions back then to hold back the main song for as long as you possibly could – and it’s five and a half minutes before the main vocal arrives.

IAN GREAVES

I wasn’t used to remixes, and it’s actually a terrific way of discovering the art.

JUSTIN LEWIS

As a teenager I was obsessed with how things worked, how they fitted together, and the 12” mix is like laying bare the components of the song. The bassline is there, uninterrupted, there’s that guitar riff exposed, which is buried when you hear the song on the radio. And some of this was merely a way of extending the track for the sake of it, to fill the space, but it’s like an inventory of sound.

IAN GREAVES

Like an Airfix kit. It’s perfect for that age, really. Also, it was tapping into all the things that would interest me in music. It’s such a clatter of a record, so busy, so much happening that you can’t really take it all in at once. It’s got samples in it but they’re not samples.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, it’s Patrick Allen re-reading or reading slightly different versions of his own commentary from the Protect and Survive government information films.

IAN GREAVES

Panorama had covered them earlier [If the Bomb Drops, 10/03/1980], they were public knowledge, and so there was nothing to stop Patrick Allen revoicing them, but it has the effect of being a sample, so it’s also commenting on something that was emerging in music at that time.

JUSTIN LEWIS

And having Chris Barrie from Spitting Image and A Prince Among Men doing his Reagan impression, but using that impression to read out extracts of statements from Castro and Hitler.

IAN GREAVES

And getting it on to Radio 1 without any citation. You either know or you don’t. I may have done more homework for this than I needed to, but I listened to the whole album again, and it is not a good album. And there’s also this 3-CD Frankie collection called Essential, which came out this year, but it’s already in the bargain bins. So many mixes. It’s got all but the last two tracks from [the second album] Liverpool which by any measure does not reflect the meaning of the word ‘essential’.

JUSTIN LEWIS

No.

IAN GREAVES

Also, I never want to hear ‘Warriors of the Wasteland’ ever again. But Welcome to the Pleasuredome’s four singles are all great, even if the title track tends to get forgotten.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Way too many covers on it.

IAN GREAVES

‘Born to Run’ is like: Can we expose ourselves to the fact that we do not have Clarence Clemons, because boy does it show.

JUSTIN LEWIS

One of ZTT’s big ideas in the early days was to have a cover version on the B-side of every single, an experiment which lasted until ‘The Power of Love’, when Frankie reportedly flat-out refused to cover The Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’.

IAN GREAVES

The first Frankie session for Peel, end of ‘82, is a sort of primitive funk-punk. And the early version of ‘Two Tribes’ – everything about the arrangement is all there. I wish I could hear more of that side of them because the song structures are really interesting.

JUSTIN LEWIS

The big question with ‘Relax’ was ‘how much did Frankie play on it?’ and I’ve seen Trevor Horn quoted as saying that because ‘Relax’ ‘needed to be a hit’ – because the label was getting started – it needed to have this epic production sound, and I suspect the real ‘Frankie group sound’ would not have been as big a hit.

IAN GREAVES

No, they’d have been a cult band like 23 Skidoo or something. I don’t know what my dad thought he was doing, really, letting me have this album! All the sleeve art – I’d forgotten the ‘bang’ symbolism is sperm. I wonder if that made it easier for me later to get into bands like Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle and Coil… who used sexual energy – and often gay sexual energy – as a central theme.

But the other thing about Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and what you said about quotations – they’re putting in references for you to work out. A more obvious version of that would be the Manics who are like a reading list with guitars. Take The Holy Bible, the only album of theirs that I really really love. Probably my first awareness of Pinter is on that album, and Sylvia Plath – and I was the right age for all of that stuff too. [“I spat out Plath and Pinter”¸ ‘Faster’]

And musical threads. If you discover The Fall, as I did when I was sixteen, then you will discover Beefheart, the Monks, Can, the Groundhogs (god help you if you get Groundhogs albums), Henry Cow… They covered Henry Cow… How many people have covered Henry Cow?

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think I first knowingly heard The Fall in about ’84, doing ‘C.R.E.E.P.’. You were telling me that this festive John Peel Session from December 1994 was the moment you fell for them.

IAN GREAVES

I tuned in because Elastica had a session, that was pretty good, they were doing Christmassy stuff. And it was the first Festive Fifty I heard.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Which was the sort of listeners’ poll Peel held every Christmas.

IAN GREAVES

Where I first heard ‘Dirty Epic’ by Underworld, which was obviously thrilling. But above all, in that show I heard The Fall, with Brix Smith who I love, returning to the band and being fantastic. (I was there the night after she walked out again. My first Fall gig, and they didn’t even make it to the stage.) But no-one can truly be prepared for their Peel Session version of ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ because, outside of Brix, it’s not often you hear a female voice on a Fall record. Which is Lucy Rimmer.

I put that Fall session on a tape for John, my mate, who I’ve known since ’89, and we’d swap records all the time. He became as much of a Fall fan as I did, and I do not judge him for this, but the next day he thrust the tape back in my hands and said, ‘That was shit.’ [Laughter] This horror that anyone considered that to be music. But eventually he realised that The Fall is as much a sort of organised chaos at its best as [Beefheart’s] Magic Band ever were.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Together, you will remember, we interviewed Stewart Lee live on the radio, on Resonance, nearly 20 years ago. And he said something like, ‘The first time you hear The Fall, you think, “Oh my God, what’s that? It’s awful”, and then a few weeks later you hear the same record again, and you think, “Oh my god, what’s that? It’s brilliant.”’ It’s like getting used to a cold bath.

IAN GREAVES

I did like The Fall immediately, but I thought it was absurd. I stuck with this rule for years, and it’s always true: if a Fall album doesn’t make you laugh, then it’s not a good Fall album, and sadly that began to happen in the 2000s. I think there’s still great stuff in that period, and I saw loads of gigs, but it does kind of drift for me.

JUSTIN LEWIS

So the humour is the key to it?

IAN GREAVES

Yeah, because Mark E. Smith’s a contrarian, isn’t he? So you either get into that or you don’t. But his phrasing is funny. His choice of words is funny. The noises he makes are funny. For my dissertation at university, I did ‘Lyricists from Manchester’ so I interviewed John Cooper Clarke, Howard Devoto, Vini Reilly – and eventually Mark. That was an experience. I tried to get answers from him about a couple of songs and he just refused. He could be a bit of a self-caricature at times in interviews, but it was a game for him because he wanted you to work a bit.

—-

**LAST: DEREK BAILEY: Domestic Jungle DAT (2022, Scatter)**

Extract: ‘DAT Edit 5’

JUSTIN LEWIS

I had a number of thoughts on this.

IAN GREAVES

Can you tell me what you made of it?

JUSTIN LEWIS

I listened to bits and pieces. The ones I especially enjoyed was the Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass album he made (1996). I was just fascinated by the idea of this guy who would have been – what? – in his sixties by this point…

IAN GREAVES

He had a bus pass by the time of recording, yeah.

JUSTIN LEWIS

…And improvising guitar over pirate radio stations in London playing drum and bass. Is that about right?

IAN GREAVES

Essentially. That album was done in a studio, and he’s playing against tapes done by someone in Birmingham to get around the whole kind of white label copyright grey area. With the release I’ve picked, Domestic Jungle DAT, no-one seems to care about that! [Laughter] And also, Shazam helps these days so we know what things are. I’m not sure if Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass is the first Derek record I bought, but it’s one of the earliest. It’s still got the receipt in it. It’s on John Zorn’s label Avant. I bought it in Virgin in Leeds, so I’d just started university. 4 October 1997, one minute past four. £17.99. And still to this day, if I see a first pressing of a Derek Bailey album in a shop, I just buy it. Regardless of the price, almost. I just want everything by him.

JUSTIN LEWIS

When we were setting up this conversation, you used the word ‘elemental’, so it obviously really made a fundamental impression on you.

IAN GREAVES

It cuts to the heart of my non-musicality, while also being very interested in music. You know when Blur came to John Peel’s house and he said the reason he hadn’t played their records before that was ‘dangerous amounts of melody’. [Laughter] I’m not against melody, that would be a ridiculous position, but my default is kind of noise, I suppose, and sound.

Derek Bailey, early in his career, used to work in the orchestra pit playing for Morecambe & Wise. But when I first heard him, he was playing with a very noisy Japanese group called Ruins on Radio 3’s Mixing It, recorded at the Purcell Rooms [03/04/1997, transmitted 14/04/1997]. There was this exoticism, and implied seriousness, and also people were being allowed to do this. [Laughs] And I’d listened to metal, I’d loved Iron Maiden as a kid and all that sort of thing, so that was fine, but in the middle of this maelstrom, there was this man outdoing them. And then I found out: Oh, it’s this old guy from Yorkshire. I instantly know when it’s him playing.

I am aware that people hear improvised music, and think, ‘It’s just a load of noise, they’re just making it up.’ But that line ‘between thought and expression’, as Lou Reed said – it’s such a short line with Bailey. There’s loads happening, and instantly. He joked somewhere that he’d spent almost 50 years of his life tuning up in public. [Laughs] Which is what it may sound like to people. Here he’s listening to those pirate stations, playing jungle, and remember this is a 65-year-old man in his living room in Hackney. There’s no artifice here. Later on, he referred to jungle as ‘fast as fuck and really shifting’.

There’s two things there. The ‘fast’ – that’s the speed his brain still works at. But the ‘shifting’ – he loves to perform with other people, not to trip them up or argue with them. A lot of improvisation is quite conversational, but often with Derek, he’s trying to drag everyone out of habit. There were very few musicians he would continue to play with over many, many years.

JUSTIN LEWIS

So was the frustration that collaborators would lapse into their default way of playing, and he would get impatient or bored?

IAN GREAVES

Totally, totally. He was going off to Japan in the 70s, finding guitarists, and other new people to play with. Evan Parker, the saxophonist, would do that as well. They ran a label together, were touring together. Bailey’s discography is enormous. There’s lots of good solo records, but I think his best stuff is with percussionists, and probably his best records are with Han Bennink, his most enduring collaborator, because Han would play anything. Ostensibly, he’s a drummer, but whatever happens to be in his vicinity gets played as well, so when I started to hear those records, it freed up all my notions of what music was. And it wasn’t jazz either. I think there’s this kind of interchangeability when people say ‘improvisation’ and ‘free jazz’, and they’re not necessarily the same thing. We need Philip Clark [FLA 4] here to explain that properly!

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’ve found a few really great quotes about Bailey, or from him. He wrote a book, you will know, around 1980 called Improvisation.

IAN GREAVES

A brilliant book. Based on the radio series [Tuesday afternoons, Radio 3, Feb/Mar 1974].

JUSTIN LEWIS

Aha! Like Hitchhikers Guide.

IAN GREAVES

Exactly like that.

JUSTIN LEWIS

This is from The Guardian review of the book, and it says of him, ‘He’s not interested in the competitive spirit, which drives so many jazzmen now.’ So it’s not ‘Right now I’m in the spotlight, it’s my turn’, fine as that can be, but he appears to have no interest in that. It’s all about ‘the conversation’, rather than a soliloquy.

IAN GREAVES

Yeah, and it’s important to say ‘conversation’ rather than ‘argument’. Sometimes if it’s loud, it’s assumed it’s hostile. But it’s often not.

JUSTIN LEWIS

This quote is from the LA Times, in the 1980s, which describes him as ‘pursuing sounds and textures, rather than melody and rhythm’. Melody and rhythm are prioritised in music, but the sounds, the textures, are also key, whether or not they’re connected with the melodies or the rhythms. I mean, some of the most famous pop songs ever written have all sorts of splurges of noise in them, but we don’t necessarily think about those things.

Phil Oakey once said that when they first got synthesisers in the Human League, the equipment didn’t come fully programmed or even constructed so they had to work out how to get a sound out of them.

IAN GREAVES

You know Robert Rental and Thomas Leer made this album The Bridge (1979), which got reissued by The Grey Area earlier this year. That came originally from Industrial Records: Throbbing Gristle, I think just for a laugh, gave them some money and equipment and sent them off to the studio for a week. And they literally had no idea how to get the thing to make noise. They ended up making a fairly good album at the end of it.

I should just say, by the way, because there may be pockets of Derek Bailey Twitter, who will be appalled. Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass is a divisive record among the fanbase because it’s not the purest stuff. And we’ve waited until 2022 to get the real thing – Domestic Jungle – which are tapes that he’d either send out to friends or make for himself of him playing along to jungle stations.

The point is: I’ve chosen a Derek Bailey record with a tune on it. And that’s unusual – he didn’t do much in the way of tunes. Gavin Bryars managed to get him to play one every now and again. But that was about it. Derek’s on ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’.

But Domestic Jungle is not just a 65-year-old keeping up with jungle. On that track I’ve picked out, ‘Edit 5’, he’s saying, in a broad Yorkshire accent, ‘Come on, lad, faster!’ [Laughter] He’s infuriated, because this kid is keeping him back. When Derek speaks on his records, and sometimes it’s him just chatting to the audience or plugging his record label, you get such a powerful sense of his personality. And he has an often comic way of playing guitar against his speech as well.

JUSTIN LEWIS

You kindly sent me a copy of the interview he did with The Wire in 1998, for the feature ‘Invisible Jukebox’, where the guests get played records with no context, or identification, and have to react… He gets asked about what it would be like to hear his own work in a lift, I think [Laughter], and he says: ‘Imagine you’ve got to pass a bit of time. It would be nice to play this in a railway station. It’s just something to listen to instead of being reminded of something.’

Now that made me think about how we react to art of all kinds. Do we react to art as ‘something new’, or as ‘this is like that other thing we know’. So much of my approach to hearing new music centres around ‘what are my reference points’, because I have so much past music in my head all the time. It’s very hard to get past that. Do you have that, or have you been able to free yourself?

IAN GREAVES

No, I haven’t freed myself from that and I think it happens retrospectively as well. I have this awful habit of listening to older music at the moment just because I’m buying so much older stuff. It sort of worries me that I’m not listening to enough new stuff. I listened to something this morning and I just thought, ‘Oh this is just that, that and that’, a combination of three things, and when I was 18, I thought that album was the bee’s knees. Which is unfair, because, you know, Bowie was a magpie. That’s pop and it’s how it goes. You could listen to, say, LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver, which I think is a terrific album – and you could say, grumpily, ‘Oh, that’s just Bowie’s Lodger, and that bit’s Liquid Liquid’, but it’s a DJ trying to turn the music he plays into an original piece of music. It’s turntablism through the prism of a band. And you can ruin this kind of stuff for yourself if you overthink it.

People just have influences, and it comes through and it’s inevitable. And yeah, one thing that is increasingly obvious as I get older – and you’ll know this – is that my reference points mean nothing to anyone half my age.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, this has been happening to me for some time now!

IAN GREAVES

The alarm bell was when I realised I was writing books about things that appealed to mostly people who’d be dead… So… that was a problem. I thought, I might need to just wind this back about 30 years.

JUSTIN LEWIS

And that’s going to get even weirder for the people behind us, believe me.

IAN GREAVES

It’s a common culture thing as well, isn’t it? You can’t help but key into all the stuff that you and lots of other people your age have enjoyed over the years: songs, films, catchphrases… And popular art feeds other popular arts. I don’t think this has really addressed your original question! But I still react to the past all the time, and it’s fine. I don’t get upset about it.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I find it harder to work out what I think on one listen now. Which reminds me of a direct Derek Bailey quote where he said he hated records. Once you’ve done it, what’s the point of listening to it?

IAN GREAVES

One thing missing from that Wire piece, because he hadn’t quite started doing it then, was that at the turn of this century, he was just making too much music. He would mail out CDRs to friends of him playing and talking, instead of letters, and then he started to do print-on-demand CDRs of concerts and whatever else. And I think he’d be mortified – he died in 2005 – that those CDRs still work!

JUSTIN LEWIS

That they’re supposed to have obsolescence.

IAN GREAVES

Yeah, and he probably quite contentedly used poorer resources for them as well. I just think that’s funny. But yeah, these CDRs go for a fortune, and you buy them, thinking, ‘…Is this gonna play?’ [Laughs] But then, maybe in this case, a CDR that skips and jars is fitting.

JUSTIN LEWIS

He’d probably love that.

IAN GREAVES

Yeah. I love it when people say what dead people would love! [Laughter]

—-

JUSTIN LEWIS

So roughly when did you start to explore this very different direction of music?

IAN GREAVES

I was at college. It was 1996/97. And I got a job in a record shop. A couple of years earlier, when I was getting into other bits of Radio 1, going to second hand shops… I went to a record fair, and they had a collection for sale of the first 90 issues of Q magazine [covering autumn 1986 to early 1994]. So I bought them, and honestly, I think I read them all within six months, and then – like a firecracker – I was off.

JUSTIN LEWIS

You had your map.

IAN GREAVES

I had my map, and I’m pretty sure the reason I got a record shop gig was because I now had a working knowledge of a lot of different music. I don’t think I’ve listened to George Thorogood and the Destroyers since Live Aid, but I could wing that conversation, you know?

JUSTIN LEWIS

Record shops before computers: it required a lot of knowledge from us underpaid staff.

IAN GREAVES

A copy of Music Master [big doorstop of a catalogue], that was it.

JUSTIN LEWIS

And your own memory.

IAN GREAVES

And your opinions.

JUSTIN LEWIS

And between you all, you could work out most things.

IAN GREAVES

Our folk section was very strong, Blues and prog, all that sort of thing in our back catalogue, but I was there as the young guy who knew about the ‘young stuff’. I’d get all the college kids chatting to me. One of them brought in a comic strip of me once – it was of me getting annoyed about them not knowing enough about industrial music. [Laughter] They did it in such a way that they probably thought, ‘This will wind him up.’ I actually loved it. Still got it somewhere. I was like Douglas Hurd buying a cartoon of himself.

I worked in that record shop when Be Here Now came out, and I took the day off, because I couldn’t stand the idea of serving people who’d be buying it. I went to Newcastle for the day, to my favourite record store, Surface Noise – and we just listened to Ivor Cutler and Beat Happening and whatever else. So my idea of a ‘day off’ was to go to another record shop! That’s fairly dysfunctional.

Meanwhile, I was reading The Wire magazine, listening to Mixing It. And both the Derek Bailey and the next record are sort of cheats, as my ‘Last’ and ‘Anything’ came to me – as artists – at about the same time. I like your premise for this series: what’s changed your listening, or what’s changed the way you listened. Which I think is what Tim Gane of Stereolab said about Nurse With Wound.

——

(Link to Scatter page at Bandcamp.)

https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/track/dat-edit-5?from=twittercard

—–

ANYTHING: STEREOLAB/NURSE WITH WOUND: Crumb Duck (1993, single, Clawfist)

Extract: ‘Animal or Vegetable (A Wonderful Wooden Reason…)’

JUSTIN LEWIS

Now, as I understand it, you are – certainly were – a big Stereolab fan anyway. But then you’ve become perhaps a bigger Nurse With Wound fan.

IAN GREAVES

Oh god, yeah.

JUSTIN LEWIS

And we should probably give a content warning here about some of their music and certainly some of the artwork, particularly if someone is hunting down sleeve designs.

IAN GREAVES

Yeah, don’t do what I did, in the 90s, before the Internet. I asked my parents one Christmas for two Nurse With Wound albums, in amongst all the other presents and the Terry’s Chocolate Orange.

JUSTIN LEWIS

No!

IAN GREAVES

Innocently! One was A Missing Sense (1986) which has quite an odd cover, but it looks like a painting I guess so it was just about acceptable. But the other was The 150 Murderous Passions (1981), which was a collaboration with Whitehouse, and I can’t fully describe the cover. I think you’re just going to have to find it for yourself in the comfort of your own home, and definitely not on a work laptop. And that Christmas Day, I don’t think we even had a conversation about it. I think we just moved on very quickly.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Did they wrap it?

IAN GREAVES

Well, they must have done! Honestly, you’re unwrapping it, you’re thinking, ‘This isn’t very Christmassy…’ But ‘Animal or Vegetable’ is another record I’ve chosen for potential conversation purposes. This is not the best Nurse With Wound record, or the best Stereolab record, and it isn’t my favourite record of all time. But I think it does connect to a lot of things.

My first Stereolab record was Refried Ectoplasm (1995), which was a collection of seven-inch tracks and rarities, and the rarities had all had handmade sleeves or been in very limited runs and were consequently very hard to get hold of. In the middle of this compilation there are two songs. One is ‘Exploding Head Movie’, a kind of remix of part of ‘Jenny Ondioline’, which had been on the album Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (1993). What a title. And the B-side is ‘Animal or Vegetable (A Wonderful Wooden Reason…)’, the bit in brackets being a quotation from Faust’s ‘It’s a Rainy Day Sunshine Girl’.

I don’t think I’d heard of Nurse With Wound. I heard this, this 13-minute thing, and then Steve Stapleton (who essentially is Nurse With Wound) was on the cover of The Wire pretty soon after [Issue 160, June 1997], my first issue of The Wire. I was still somehow absorbing everything and hunting down everything that was being mentioned, and he sounded like an incurable record collector who was more than twice my age, so I thought, ‘Well, he’s probably alright.’ Then I was down on the Darlington town market record stall one Saturday and they happened to have this Nurse With Wound collection called Crumb Duck which also featured these two tracks from the Stereolab collaboration. So it was like this divorce, basically, with the same tracks on two separate artist collections!

Again, some Nurse With Wound fans will be very disappointed that I’ve chosen Crumb Duck because it’s got rhythm, and when Steve Stapleton had started to use rhythm, around 1992, lots of the fans thought, ‘I’m not having this’ because it had been very noisy or very weird or very cut-up music for a long time. I mean, my favourite NWW record is The Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion (1985), which is 40 minutes of just relentless cut-up – and very funny with it. It’s my ultimate record because – even though I’ve probably heard it 100 times and know it really well now – a lot of the appeal of this kind of music is that it’s so overwhelming, and it’s often so tuneless [Laughs] that you can never feel like you’ve drawn the map of it in your brain. You can’t recall it exactly, and so it always has this ability to surprise you.

JUSTIN LEWIS

It sounds like a puzzle you can’t solve, perhaps?

IAN GREAVES

A very big jigsaw, but it’s taking you ages, and every time you get up in the morning, some poltergeist’s taken all the pieces apart again and you have to put it back together. [Laughter]

JUSTIN LEWIS

You’re like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill every day.

IAN GREAVES

That is me getting through a Merzbow box set, that’s right.

JUSTIN LEWIS

We met in the early 2000s because of our interest in comedy, and broadcasting, and so on, and it struck me how much of 90s comedy on the fringes – late night radio and TV in particular – traded in the surprising, even the unsettling. Was that part of the appeal with this kind of music?

IAN GREAVES

It all goes back to the Goon Show records. I think you’re onto something, mainly that I have never been of the view that all avant-garde music is serious. I like it when it’s got a glint in the eye or a sense of humour, and you’ll have heard in ‘Animal or Vegetable’ those two minutes of complete madness, which are just obviously meant to be funny and astonishing. It’s not that boring Paul Merton whimsy, it’s rooted in dada. It’s got a kind of intellectual edge. It scalped me. Changed me forever.

We’ll get back to your question [Laughter], but it drives me mad when people are at concerts for this kind of stuff at places like Café Oto, where it’s a full house, and I’ve heard things that I think are hilarious yet no-one else there is laughing. Jandek – how do you describe Jandek? Every album sounds like a suicide note, but he was doing a show at Oto once where he had this kind of John Shuttleworth big keyboard, and he was playing it the way Leonard Cohen does it on I’m Your Man [the album]. There was something in his phrasing, and I just said to my mate, ‘This is clearly supposed to be funny.’ But for everyone else it was ‘We’re watching Jandek, we’re not supposed to laugh.’ No! We’re supposed to be having fun.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Music is often sold to us as relaxing, reassuring, familiar, benign – all well and good. But it tends to be written off if it’s funny, perhaps because people don’t quite know what to do with humour and music, or with the disruptive in general. It might not be for everybody, but nobody questions cinema’s role in reflecting the unsettling aspects of life.

IAN GREAVES

Loads of film music nowadays is like Nurse With Wound or industrial, quite strange or directly avant-garde music. We went to see Nope last night and that’s terrific. Mica Levi, the stuff she does, Cristobal Tapia de Veer who scored Utopia – the Channel 4 series. For a long time, we went through a period in film and television where soundtracks were ostensibly classical music. But way before that, when I was growing up, it was radiophonics… Anyone from about… 1958 onwards was subjected to that in the mainstream of the BBC. You ask the KLF and the Orb and that generation, and that’s what they were all listening to. That’s the music that corrupted them. It was the Doctor Who and the Sea Devils music – Malcolm Clarke.

David Stubbs, who wrote that book Fear of Music asked ‘Why do people get on with Rothko but they’re scared of Stockhausen?’ I think in truth people accept this stuff osmotically, but they don’t necessarily know it. What about cartoon music in the 50s and 60s! Pierre Henri would fit in on those, you know.

—-

IAN GREAVES

I don’t think I’ve told you, or anyone, this before. I was nearly blinded by a seven-inch single when I was twelve or thirteen. We were in the school assembly hall. There was a teacher at the other side of the hall. There were six or seven of us just arseing around in that pointless destructive way that children do. And there was a box of scratched seven-inch singles, which I think had been used for country dancing lessons. So already a relic of a thing to be doing. Screamadelica was out; we were doing country dancing.

There was a lad who shall not be named and also, I can’t remember his name. They’d already been snapping the edges off the records, and some of them still had airborne potential. And he just started throwing them, not in a deliberate [targeted] way like a bully would. But he just span it towards me, and it was probably one of the snapped-off bits on the edge that caught me, as near as you could have got just under the eyebrow… It cut me, not that badly, but the teacher was horrified, realised they hadn’t been paying attention. I never told my parents, I don’t think. They would have just gone spare.

I wish I could tell you what the record was. [Laughter] Does that count as my first single?

—-

Ian’s latest book is an utter treat: Penda’s Fen: Scene by Scene, about the 1974 Play for Today written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, published on 23 June 2025 by Ten Acre Films publishing. You can order it here: https://tenacrefilms.bigcartel.com/product/pendas-fen-scene-by-scene

Prime Minister, You Wanted to See Me?: A History of Week Ending is published by Kaleidoscope.

Dennis Potter: The Art of Invective: Selected Non-Fiction 1953–94 (edited by Ian with David Rolinson and John Williams) is published by Bloomsbury.

Jonathan Miller: One Thing and Another: Selected Writings 1954–2016 is published by Bloomsbury.

You can follow Ian on Twitter at @GreavesIan. He is also to be found on Bluesky at @greavesian.bsky.social, and on Instagram as @greavesian78.

FLA PLAYLIST 12

Ian Greaves

(NB: Derek Bailey’s ‘Edit 5’ from the Domestic Jungle album is not currently on Spotify, but should that change in the future, it will be incorporated into this playlist. Meantime, you can access it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdRxUvrWUPQ&t=531s)

Track 1: THE TWEETS: ‘Birdie Song’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNcUPje_0hk

Track 2: THE BEATLES: ‘Drive My Car’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alNJiR6R5aU

Track 3: GEORGE SHEARING: ‘One Note Samba (Samba De Una Nota So)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi4rcF0Vkw4

Track 4: FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD: ‘Two Tribes (Annihilation)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHFPuH5iEww

(Currently not available on Spotify.)

Track 5: COIL: ‘The Anal Staircase’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH9zK8tvK6s

Track 6: MANIC STREET PREACHERS: ‘Faster’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rl2Jv4dzFqg

Track 7: UNDERWORLD: ‘Dirty Epic’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phWYWpu5KUQ

Track 8: THE FALL: ‘Glam-Racket/Star’ (Peel Session, TX 17/12/1994): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FHpf_7SIug

Track 9: THE FALL: ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ (Peel Session, TX 17/12/1994): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGMpTuHSEL4

Track 10: DEREK BAILEY: ‘N/Jz/Bm (Re-Mix)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah0MQm1Qe4w

Track 11: THE HUMAN LEAGUE: ‘Morale…/You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSbLpd-SSvI

Track 12: LCD SOUNDSYSTEM: ‘Get Innocuous!’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GpLkFv-CKU

Track 13: STEREOLAB/NURSE WITH WOUND: ‘Animal or Vegetable (A Wonderful Wooden Reason…)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h56tXx8JHMI

Track 14: MALCOLM CLARKE: ‘Doctor Who: The Sea Devils’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwhTqTiOkG8

(Currently not available on Spotify.)

FIRST LAST ANYTHING

Justin Lewis – Books Conversations Art Writing

The Human League

FLA 30: Ian Wade (07/09/2025)

**FIRST (1): VARIOUS ARTISTS: 22 Dynamic Hits Volume II (K-Tel, compilation LP, 1972)**

Extract: ‘Son of My Father’ by Chicory Tip (CBS, single, 1972)

FIRST (2): CHICAGO: ‘If You Leave Me Now’ (CBS, single, 1976)

**LAST: SAINT ETIENNE: International (Saint Etienne/PIAS, album, 2025)**

Extract: ‘Glad’

**ANYTHING (1): CHICKS ON SPEED: Will Save Us All (Unicat Records, album, 2000)**

Extract: ‘Euro Trash Girl’

**ANYTHING (2): AMANDA LEAR: Sweet Revenge (Ariola Records, album, 1978)**

Extract: ‘Follow Me’ (Single Version)

**ANYTHING (3): KING TUBBY & AUGUSTUS PABLO: King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown (Yard Music International, album, 1976)**

Extract: ‘Keep on Dubbing’

FLA 30 Playlist

Ian Wade

FLA 12: Ian Greaves (28/08/2022)

**FIRST: FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD: Welcome to the Pleasuredome (ZTT Records, 1984, released on CD, 1985)**

**LAST: DEREK BAILEY: Domestic Jungle DAT (2022, Scatter)**

ANYTHING: STEREOLAB/NURSE WITH WOUND: Crumb Duck (1993, single, Clawfist)

FLA PLAYLIST 12

Ian Greaves