Evans is a place on Earth: The Only Way Is Up:A UK Pop Map of the Eighties.

"Eighties, I'm living in the eighties" - Eighties, Killing Joke.

BBC4's three part series Smashing Hits! The 80s Pop Map of Britain and Ireland (presented by Midge Ure and Kim Appleby - both ends of the decade covered there) was really just an excuse to show more clips of a time when British music was dominant, innovative, catchy as fuck, and exploding in so many different directions that it was often pretty difficult to keep track of.

As Midge and Kim drive up and down motorways mucking around, bantering (Kim compliments Ure's 'well groomed moustache' in the Vienna video and Midge ribs her about her former penchant for shoulderpads), and singing to each other we get to visit London, Coventry, Sheffield, Glasgow, Dublin, Rhyl (!), and Manchester to discover what made the music from those different cities stand out in that particular decade. There's a look at key influences, brief mentions of social factors, and even briefer considerations of political events but, mostly, it's a light hearted, and fun, look back to the decade in which I came of musical age.

So I was bound to like it. Nostalgia is strong. Memories get more melancholic the further we move from them and there were a couple of occasions in which I was so reminded of my younger, more innocent, self that I ended up wiping tears from my eyes.

Depeche Mode - New Life

More about that later. We start in post-punk London with Gary Kemp, Rusty Egan, and Steve Strange holding court about The Blitz Club ("Studio 54 for the poor" according to Kemp) and the Sex boutique on King's Road and reminiscing about bands they were in like Visage and The Rich Kids and bands they probably wished they were in like Kraftwerk. Footage plays of clubbers dancing to The Model and Marco Pirroni talks about the two other leading influences in the scene:- David Bowie and Roxy Music.

Kraftwerk - The Model

Roxy Music - Ladytron

Spandau Ballet - To Cut A Long Story Short

"From half-spoken shadows emerges a canvas. A kiss of light breaks to reveal a moment when all mirrors are redundant. Listen to the portrait of the dance of perfection: the Spandau Ballet" is the now infamous introduction given by broadcaster and Face journalist Robert Elms for their early gig at the Scala. It's something that was immediately filed away in Pseud's Corner but To Cut A Long Story Short is still way better than you probably remember it to be.

It retains traces of Spandau Ballet's former iteration as post-punk outfit The Gentry but with guitars replaced by synths as the dominant instrument, and it gives no clue as to the band they'd soon be, smart suited balladeers crooning out over erection sections at school discos and provincial nightclubs up and down the country.

Many a young lady would have what felt like a frozen Mars bar thrust into her gut unsolicited during True during the decade. Nobody had a last dance to Adam and the Ants. That's when the teenage boys joined the floor to pretend to be dandy highwaymen. Smashing Hits actually bothers to tell a little of Adam Ant's story.

Adam And The Ants - Xerox

Adam And The Ants - Dog Eat Dog

Quite rare as normally that's jettisoned in favour of tales of expensive videos, a look at his fantastic outfits, and the story of the time he lobbed a car alternator through a pub window in Kentish Town because people in there had laughed at how he was dressed. He'd obviously forgotten that 'ridicule is nothing to be scared of'.

With songs like Zerox and Car Trouble, the Ants were not making any serious inroads into the early eighties post-punk scene so, for the price of a 'grand', Malcolm McLaren got on board as an advisor. He suggested they ditch the leather gear and dress up as pirates and also played them The Royal Drummers of Burundi. A sound which, as we all know now, Adam and the Ants incorporated to huge success.

They made it. Along with The Police they were THE band for school kids at the time. I know. I was one. Spandau Ballet hit it big too, and they were soon joined by Duran Duran and Culture Club in the ranks of the pop elite. Cue vintage footage of Noel Edmonds interviewing Boy George and the not particularly contentious idea that the first issue of Smash Hits, The Face going colour, and, most of all, the beginning of MTV were the three main motors that moved the music scene fully into the day-glo eighties.

Adam And The Ants - Stand And Deliver

Soft Cell - Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

Spandau Ballet and, far more so, Duran Duran were soon making statement videos, Rio and Wild Boys still look ridiculous today, and it wasn't long before Gary Kemp was done up in a white suit pretending to be Al Green or Marvin Gaye. True, at least, was a memorable tune. The same could not be said for much of their output from that era.

I'd never really spent a lot of time thinking about Gary Kemp's love life. Or any to be honest. But I was both surprised and disappointed (my teenage self would have been utterly distraught) to discover that it was, possibly - the guilty parties remain coy, written for Clare Grogan. Beautiful, cool, Clare Grogan. Turning up as Ian Beale's 'love interest' in Eastenders, of course, remains an all time low but - Gary Kemp. He was in uncool Spandau Ballet. She was in the brilliant Altered Images. We'll come to them later.

As British pop took over America, like in the sixties, the pressure of playing the pop game was too much for some of those involved. Under pressure of constant touring, Adam and the Ants imploded at the 1981 Children's Royal Variety performance at the London Palladium. Sandwiched between Rod Hull and Emu and The Krankies on a bill for the times, Kevin Mooney threw his bass to the floor and totally gave up on miming. Adam Ant did not look best pleased.

Luckily for Mooney, Mr Ant did not have an alternator handy that evening. We'd be back in London later in the series to pick up on the scene that developed following the post-punk implosion and as a placeholder we signed out with Soft Cell's tender and beautiful Say Hello, Wave Goodbye. A song that captures the feel of old, romantic, seedy Soho. A Soho that's all but disappeared now.

Toots And The Maytals - 54 - 46 Was My Number

The Upsetters - Return Of Django

Midge and Kim head north-west to Coventry, the UK's spiritual home of ska. Pauline Black talks about being the only black kid in her school at Romford and laughs about being, probably, the only black person who was introduced to ska music by white friends. In her case the Dagenham skins!

Pauline Black's journey to Coventry was not much more than one hundred miles but others came from much further afield to work on rebuilding the city following the huge war damage Coventry suffered. Immigrants from the Caribbean would buy reggae music in an underground shop owned by the unlikely figure of Pete Waterman. One, future Special Neville Staple who'd moved to Warwickshire from Jamaica at the age of five, used to hide there when he was bunking off school and when Waterman's back was turned would nick records off of him.

Waterman employed MCs to toast in his club too. It was a long way from Steps, Sinitta, and Rick Astley. Black, Staple, and Waterman all crop up to talk about this formative time in 'Cov' and there's even footage of a young, but already front toothless, Jerry Dammers playing Professor Longhair and Fats Domino tunes on the piano and cracking open beers.

The Specials (Dawning Of A) New Era

The Coventry Automatics - Too Much Too Young

Dammers and Hall formed The Coventry Automatics, adding Staple as a roadie to begin with, but their mix of reggae and punk attracted no major label interest whatsoever. So Dammers started his own label. The soon to be legendary Two-Tone. Run from a suburban house in Coventry, like a West Midlands Motown. The very first release, Gangsters by The Specials (The Coventry Automatics had chosen a less location specific name even if the sound remained rooted in the locale), was a hit and soon other Two-Tone records followed.

Special Lynval Golding invited The Selecter to the label, Rhoda Dakar talks of The Bodysnatchers supporting Shane MacGowan's pre-Pogues Nipple Erectors and ending up on TOTP after only two gigs (no wonder, Do Rock Steady was and is a great tune), and Pauline Black talks about her experiences with racism, recession, and the National Front sieg heiling at gigs and recruiting at school gates. Staple weighs in with a story about being gobbed at on stage.

It's a time I remember well and I feel fortunate that the music of Two-Tone spoke to me so strongly. I'd been won over so completely by the sound I could not fail to follow the political message but I'd like to think even if I'd thought the music was absolute pony I'd have still realised that the message was a better one than that being put out by the likes of the NF at the time.

The Specials - Gangsters

The Selecter - The Selecter

The Bodysnatchers - Do Rock Steady

Madness - The Prince

The Specials - Ghost Town

The song that best encapsulated the malaise, and the deterioration of working class towns up and down the country at the time, was Ghost Town. As riots broke out in Brixton, Leicester, Leeds, and elsewhere, Ghost Town knocked Michael Jackson's One Day In Your Life off the UK number one slot. While the country was rioting some were glued to the television watching Charles and Diana getting married.

Like now, the country was split and soon The Specials were too. Two-Tone, both the label and the movement, slowly disintegrated and Madness (a London band who'd signed for the label before departing for Stiff after their first single, The Prince) went on to become more of a pop band. A hugely successful one who went on to have more than twenty Top 20 hits.

Not that much of this impinged on Midge Ure's consciousness. Midge didn't get ska so he'd handed that section over to Kim. By the time they reached Sheffield, Midge was back in control, back in his comfort zone. David Bowie once described the music of Sheffield as "the sound of the future" and Glenn Gregory and Martyn Ware from Heaven 17 were on hand to josh with Ure about the city's musical heritage like the likely lads they are.

From 1979 onwards, Maggie Thatcher had set out to heavily cut the steel industry and that ended up leaving lots of mucky old industrial buildings available for cheap rent and these were the breeding grounds for a music scene that, despite The Human League covering Gary Glitter's Rock'n'Roll, looked far more to Brian Eno and Kraftwerk than it did rock and roll.

Gregory says he found guitars old fashioned and The Human League even went so far as to write a musical manifesto - (1) only electronic music (2) no samples (3) no love songs - that, along with Oakey's spectacular asymmetrical hairstyle, and the passion for brutalist architecture meant that the sound of Sheffield was, like Bowie had said, the sound of the future.

The Human League - Path Of Least Resistance

The Human League - Being Boiled

On first hearing Being Boiled, Bob Last of Edinburgh's Fast Records remarked "fucking hell, that bassline's epic" and compared it to Bootsy Collins! Bands like Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA added to the Sheffield industrial sound but one local band, Vice Versa, were struggling and after calling in Trevor Horn, changing direction, and changing their name created a Sheffield sound that was very different to The Human League.

The Human League - The Dignity Of Labour

The Human League - Rock'n'Roll

Heaven 17 = (We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang

ABC - Poison Arrow

Vice Versa became ABC, the Yorkshire Temptations, gold lame suit and all. It wasn't long before people were talking about the perfection of their pop sound and though their time in the sun was short, songs like Poison Arrow and The Look of Love are instant classics even now.

The post-industrial consensus was crumbling a little as bands from Sheffield admitted they actually liked funk groups like Parliament and disco acts like Chic. Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware left The Human League, and with Glenn Gregory formed Heaven 17, and The Human League got 'the girls' (Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall) in after, legend has it, Oakey spotted them dancing idiosyncratically in Sheffield's Crazy Daisy nightclub!

ABC - The Look Of Love

The Human League - Don't You Want Me?

Heaven 17's (We Don't Need No) Fascist Groove Thang stalled just outside the Top 40 in 1981 (written, Gregory recalls, as the band were concerned about nuclear attacks and the rise of fascism) but that year The Human League scored the Christmas number one (holding off both Cliff Richard's Daddy's Home and Abba's One Of Us) with the deathless, and utterly fantastic, classic Don't You Want Me?

By April 1983, Heaven 17 nearly equalled that feat when Temptation reached number two. A song they describe as "based on the Lord's Prayer about sexual gratification that just keeps building like an Escher staircase". The Human League's third album Dare would go on to be a critically acclaimed global hit that, Don't You Want Me? aside, churned out another three massive hits in The Sound of The Crowd, Love Action, and Open Your Heart. They carried on having hits well into the nineties but they never reached the commercial, or critical, peak of Dare again.

Heaven 17 - Temptation

The Proclaimers - I'm On My Way

Two hundred and fifty miles north of Sheffield in Glasgow they were getting down to a very different beat indeed in the eighties. Kim gets Midge to sing Vienna in a Scottish accent for a laugh, there's a blast of The Proclaimers just to remind us where we are, and then it's time for another quick history lesson.

The river Clyde is the artery that made Glasgow the second city of Empire and it brought in sides of rock'n'roll, soul, and country from America too. Under the Tories, Scotland had been particularly badly hit by recession and out of this mix of exposure to Americana like The Byrds and having lots of free time to practice due to lack of work sprang bands like Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, The Bluebells, Altered Images, and Hue & Cry.

The Byrds - All I Really Wanna Do

Orange Juice - What Presence?!

In Orange Juice, Edwyn Collins mixed his love of The Byrds with the sounds of punk and disco and in interview we can see a cocksure young Edwyn making bold, and later to be proved untrue, claims that he wouldn't be moving to London. Clare Grogan's got a far more interesting story to tell than one about Gary Kemp (Gary Kemp, ffs) writing love songs about her.

Altered Images asked her sister to join them first. She wasn't interested but she mentioned that her little sister, Clare, was a big fan of Siouxsie and the Banshees so she'd probably do it. Which, of course, she did. Brilliantly.

Altered Images went on to support the Banshees on tour and bassist Steve Severin even ended up producing the band. John Peel picked up on them during a gig in Leeds but then a disastrous coincidence nearly saw them fall at the first hurdle. Their debut single, titled Dead Pop Stars, was released the exact same day that John Lennon was assassinated outside the Dakota in New York.

It reached number sixty-seven but they'd hoped for better. The follow up, A Day's Wait, failed to even bother the charts but the single after that, Happy Birthday, became their breakthrough and remains a staple at birthday parties to this day (perhaps third to Happy Birthday To You by the Hill sisters and Stevie Wonder's MLK tune). Old footage of it being performed on TOTP actually made me cry with joy.

Altered Images - Don't Talk To Me About Love

Altered Images - Happy Birthday

Altered Images - I Could Be Happy

Aztec Camera - Oblivious

Orange Juice - Rip It Up

It was so joyous, so happy, so young, so positive. Positivity as a reaction to the economic peril that Thatcher's policies had inflicted on eighties Scotland. Motown had been huge in Glasgow too and Pat Kane talks about his love of The Temptations' Ball of Confusion and Stevie Wonder's Living in the City before we're treated to a blast of Hue & Cry's Labour of Love.

I'd have struggled, back then, to draw a link between Motown and Hue & Cry. Hue & Cry were not my scene at all and though I love the sentiment the song still doesn't do much for me. I found their fellow travellers Deacon Blue (don't worry, I won't share Dignity) even more dull but I did have a small soft spot for Wet Wet Wet whose Wishing I Was Lucky wasn't a bad song. By the time they were covering Love Is All Around I'd lost all interest.

Hue & Cry - Labour Of Love

There's a brief coda to the Scottish sojourn, more an aside really, as Kim visits Govan's Grand Ole Opry and hears Scottish music described as "music to get drunk to" or music to cry over. The Proclaimers' Sunshine on Leith is cited as a prime eighties exemplar. Perhaps there's some condition in broadcasting that if you make a programme about the music of Scotland you have to include at least two Proclaimers songs.

In Dublin, Midge and Kim kick off with Thin Lizzy's mix of hard rock and Celtic mysticism (Midge Ure actually briefly played guitar for Thin Lizzy) before taking a brief detour north of the border to Belfast and Derry. There's footage of The Undertones playing My Perfect Cousin but you know what that sounds like and there's also evidence that Stiff Little Fingers were The Clash of Northern Ireland but The Clash who actually fucking lived it. 1970s Belfast would have been a considerably more volatile place than 1970s Ladbroke Grove!

Stiff Little Fingers - At The Edge

U2 - The Ocean

U2 - New Year's Day

Back in Dublin, a city he clearly adores, Ure hooks up with his old Band Aid chum Bob Geldof who swears like a trooper (a tonic for the trooper?) as they focus on the biggest band to come out of Ireland ever. U2. Who it's easy to forget were once, a very long time ago, actually pretty good.

I know, it's hard to believe. Early days saw U2, like many of their contemporaries, ripping off Bowie, Joy Division, and Echo and the Bunnymen but by the time they had their first top ten hit, New Year;'s Day, in 1983 they'd developed a sound uniquely their own - whether you liked it or not.

The Edge's (what's his real name again?) guitar sound had something very Irish/Celtic about it. You can hear it particularly in Pride (In The Name Of Love) which wasn't as good as earlier songs like I Will Follow and 11'o'Clock Tick Tock (according to my mate Vicki about being locked out of a Fall gig!) but far better than the albums full of dross they've been churning out for the last two decades.

They went from a decent post-punk band to pompous oafs in leather waistcoats and, ultimately, complete irrelevance. That they tried to mitigate this irrelevance with faux irony only compounded what a dreary prospect they'd become. As they say, though, nobody ever lost money by underestimating the poor taste of the public and as sure as they filled stadiums they emptied souls.

There's film of Bono shaking hands with Vladimir Putin and Kofi Annan and then we get to see him tie his hair back to look like Julian Sands in a critically disparaged erotic thriller from the next decade (yes, Boxing Helena) before Geldof puts the icing on this particularly shitty cake by getting the bands Love and Bread mixed up.

It's not often that cutting to a segment about Clannad and Enya could be described as an improvement but anything to get away from U2. The green valleys of Donegal, harps, hairspray, intense Irish eyes, an ethereal air, and, oh fuck it, Bono's rocked up again. Looking 'soulful'. Fuck off, man. Stop giving your albums away for free to people who don't want them, stop turning up at other people's parties, and stop taking newly famous musicians to one side to give them 'the talk'. It's bad enough you ruined your own band. Stop ruining everybody else's!

Enya - Orinoco Flow

I like Irish music (tin whistles, bodhrans, and even totally cliched fiddly diddly shit) but Enya and Clannad I struggle with. Moya Brennan comes across as absolutely lovely but trad Irish music mixed with a 10cc style production is something I could probably have managed to live without. I was clearly in a minority however. In 1988 Enya's Orinoco Flow, weirdly, spent three weeks at number one of the UK charts. Sandwiched between Whitney Houston and Robin Beck's The First Time!

The eighties wasn't the decade you think it was. It wasn't all brick mobile phones, big hair, gender bending, and people playing synths with their suit jacket sleeves rolled up. A cursory stroll round any medium sized market town would have found plenty of people in denim jackets covered in Judas Priest patches and crusties listening to Ozric Tentacles. There was also a strange passion for faux-Celltic claptrap as evinced by Enya's success. I'm surprised The Waterboys didn't show up on the programme.

Instead of that Midge Ure and Bob Geldof don't miss a chance to reminisce about Band Aid and Live Aid. As well they might. It was a demonstrably good thing and they've earned the right to be proud of what they did. But that's a whole other story and it's one you already know and one I have no intention of going into here except to say that I had hitherto been completely unaware that Do They Know It's Christmas was a rip off of the Z Cars theme tune. Oh, and also that many on the Band Aid record (Sting, Paul Weller, Wham!, Bananarama, and Paul Young) are all conspicuous by their absence elsewhere in this series.

To Wales next and a very brief history of Welsh pop music. Bonnie Tyler may not have had the looks of Keren Woodward (or the hair of Nick Rhodes) but she could belt out a tune. As could Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones but we were making a very specific stop in the north Welsh seaside town of Rhyl for a chat with Mike Peters from The Alarm, thankfully bandana free for once.

The Alarm - Deeside

There's some cliched shit about valleys and choirs, a blast of Total Eclipse of the Heart (I saw Bonnie brave the bottles that later broke Meatloaf's nose at Reading festival in 1988, she was a trooper), some stuff about English holiday cottages being burnt down by Welsh extremists, some more positive things about the hugely successful campaign to boost the Welsh language, and then a look at how bands who sung in the Welsh language, most Welsh bands at the time, were destined for obscurity.

The crowds in Wales went mad but, elsewhere, nobody could understand them! The Alarm sang in English and mixed the influence of The Sex Pistols with that of folk musicians from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan and when Public Image Ltd pulled out of a TOTP performance, The Alarm stood in with Sixty Eight Guns. Still a great song.

Soon their mouth organs and, to nick one of their own jokes, so much hairspray that they're held responsible for the hole in the ozone layer became a familiar sight even as their music became less and less interesting. Mike Peters came across really well though. Articulate, poetic, friendly, and self-aware as he recounted how the Welsh music scene had previously been based in the southern cities of Cardiff and Swansea so to come from Rhyl and make it big was really something.

Maffia Mr Huws - Cysylltiad

The Alarm - Sixty Eight Guns

Catatonia - Road Rage

Sadly, for this programme, the flowering of Welsh pop with the Manic Street Preachers, Super Furry Animals, Catatonia, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, and, if you must, The Stereophonics didn't really happen until the nineties but it was bands like The Alarm, as well as Welsh language stalwarts like Datblygu and Anhrefn, that created the foundation for those groups to have such success. Or not, outrageously, in the case of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.

Two hundred and fifty miles away from Rhyl in London things were moving in a very different direction. The aftermath of the new romantic scene had thrown up the rather cringily named 'sophistipop' scene and bands like Swing Out Sister and Matt Bianco (famously called a "bunch of wankers" live on Saturday Superstore) joined with Sade and Paul Weller's post-Jam outfit The Style Council in creating a soundtrack for yuppies to drink champagne and shout into mobile phones to.

The Jam - Town Called Malice

The Style Council - Shout To The Top

Sade - Smooth Operator

Sade - Your Love Is King

Most of their fans weren't wine bar frequenting, pearl necklace (fnarr, fnarr) wearing Sloanes but simply working class people. Aspirational to use an utterly devalued adjective. I was a teenager throughout most of the eighties so wine bars, jazz, and grown up romance wasn't stuff I had the foggiest idea about.

So most of this music meant little to me. I did see how much the poppier stuff wound up the 'real' music fans though so took to wearing a Five Star badge. Five Star were an absolute curio and they seemed to anger people in a borderline racist way. Buster Pearson from Romford was such a huge Jackson Five fan he got his kids to form a band who, remarkably, went on to have twelve top ten hits in the UK - the best, by far, being System Addict. Not bad for an act who got their big break on Pebble Mill at One!

Five Star - System Addict

Five Star were pure pop. Nothing sophisticated about it. But they existed at the same time and their self made, independent, story had more of a political dimension than Swing Out Sister or Matt Bianco. The Style Council aside, London's sophistipop (it hurts just typing it) was hugely apolitical.

It was different in Manchester where ex-Frantic Elevator Mick Hucknall's Simply Red released Money's Too Tight (To Mention) as their debut single in 1985 before going on to follow it with a steady stream of ever more boring singles. Holding Back The Years is so dull that it seems to slow down time and suck everything around it into a vortex of utter despair. I daren't risk listening to it. Some things you can't come back from!

Luckily, there were much more interesting things than Simply Red happening in Manchester. The Smiths and The Fall are passed over in favour of the Factory bands but that's ok, Morrissey's a vile racist dickhead these days and The Fall, despite being historically my favourite band, were hardly regular chart botherers.

Shaun Ryder talks about the influence of punk and Bowie (you do start to spot a theme in eighties music whatever the city) and how when Happy Mondays formed some of them were still at school. Peter Hook pops up to note that Paul Ryder used to be his postman and would pass early Happy Mondays tapes to him.

New Order - Temptation

Happy Mondays were around a very long time before they found success but the story of Manchester music in the eighties really begins with Ian Curtis' suicide in May 1980. Curtis liked Kraftwerk, Donna Summer, and Giorgio Moroder but their influence was never particularly apparent in the music of Joy Division.

That changed with New Order. In May 1982 the Hacienda, part of Tony Wilson's vision for Manchester, opened but it struggled. People didn't want to go there. It was big, it was cold, and the DJ booth, we're informed, was a 'joke'. The fact New Order were getting huge wasn't even enough to pull in the punters. There's a great story about New Order refusing to mime on TOTP for Blue Monday. The no show led to the record dropping out of the charts so New Order became the first band to perform live on TOTP with the same song. After staying up all night the night before their performance could be most kindly described as 'unenthusiastic' and Blue Monday immediately dropped ten places in the charts. When the charts still mattered.

New Order - Blue Monday

Away from the TOTP studio, house and techno sides from Detroit and Chicago were being dropped on the Hac dancefloor, many of them brought back from Illinois by Mike Pickering on his trips to the US. Similar things were happening in London and we're treated to S'Express' Mark Moore talking about his mum's love of Stax, Motown, and James Brown and Moore himself DJing at The Mudd Club and mixing up Swiss oddballs Yello with Dead or Alive.

Pre-acid house boom the sound that was taking over London, at least gay London, was that of hi-NRG and venues like the Astoria and Heaven were the birthing grounds for it. Hazell Dean, from near Chelmsford, was one of those unlikely pop stars Britain's so good at unearthing. From an early performance on Cheggers Plays Pop she went on have an 'indie' hit with Searchin' before calling in Stock, Aitken, and Waterman for its follow up Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go). A song, described at the time by my mate Bugsy, as Blue Monday as if remixed by a clown!

Hazell Dean - Searchin'

Hazell Dean - Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go)

In the US, hi-NRG had been given the rather fantastic name of 'boystown' and Stock, Aitken, and Waterman (who'd clearly moved on from his ska era) loved boystown. Waterman called it "modern Motown" and set about transforming it into pop music suitable for teenagers. Making its homosexuality less 'threatening' you could say, or sanitising it.

After Hazell had given them their first pop hit in 1984 they followed up with Sonia, Rick Astley, Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan, and the show's co host Kim Appleby and her sister Mel. None of these are acts who will trouble compilers of lists of the best albums ever but all of them were huge at the time. You really could not escape them - and many wanted to.

The advent of CDs had pushed the music industry away from singles to albums and SAW exploited the space that'd been left by filling it with Sinitta singing Toy Boy and Kylie's cover of The Locomotion. They went on to produce thirteen number one singles in a style Waterman (who, quite bizarrely namedrops Bogshed during his interview) describes as "northern soul records with a drum machine".

But, far away from the manufactured pop stars and formation dancing of TOTP and SAW, the house music scene was still rising. In 1987 Paul Oakenfold and his mates come back from Ibiza, that same year Steve 'Silk' Hurley topped the UK charts with Jack Your Body, and then, in '88, ecstasy fuelled the second summer of love. Rick Astley didn't cut it. Nor did Taffy.

Steve "Silk" Hurley - Jack Your Body

Taffy - I Love My Radio

S'Express - Theme From S'Express

M/A/R/R/S (Pump Up The Volume), Bomb The Bass (Beat Dis), and S'Express (with their Rose Royce sampling theme tune) did. They stood up with the best American imports but Radio 1 was not interested. These records received very little airplay, often they didn't have videos (as any regular Chart Show viewer will recall), and yet both S'Express and M/A/R/R/S had number one singles.

A lot of these records were made by black people and as Jazzie B says, and has been proven, many black people at the time were subtly excluded from clubs, So a parallel scene cropped up, inspired by Jamaican sound systems and from this, Jazzie's Soul II Soul were born. They started selling clothes in Camden and then went on to making their own records. Mark Moore talks about London's eclecticism but Jazzie B's experiences show that it was not as open to all as it should have been.

Sugar Minott - Good Thing Going

Soul II Soul - Keep On Movin'

Soul II Soul - Back To Life

As Soul II Soul began to prove London's dancefloor dominance, in Manchester, and in Hulme specifically, A Guy Called Gerald hit back with the timeless Voodoo Ray. Originally titled Voodoo Rage but Gerald ran out of sample space (!), it reached number twelve in the charts but its future ubiquity and infectiousness resulted in Voodoo Ray being termed THE British house anthem.

A Guy Called Gerald - Voodoo Ray

Happy Mondays - Wrote For Luck

Which is fair enough. When acid house broke in Manchester, Happy Mondays kept hold of the guitars (Shaun Ryder talks of loving Captain Beefheart, The Ramones, Frank Zappa, and even Showaddywaddy) but they weren't missing out on the clubbing - and definitely not the drugs. All the bands on Factory, even the shit ones Ryder asserts, were cool.

His were one of the coolest, and best. When Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses both appeared on the same episode of Top Of The Pops in November 1989 (a show I remember watching and being very excited by, if a little confused by Kirsty McColl's guest appearance) it seemed like a victory for Manchester, a victory for our music against the yuppie music, and even a victory for punk spirit, if not turgid punk rock music.

The takeaway message I got from Smashing Hits! The 80s Pop Map of Britain and Ireland was that Britain may have crap cuisine, crap weather, and an absolute shower of shit running the country, but when it comes to music we're really fucking good at it. To quote a huge band of the eighties strangely absent from this programme, give a little respect!