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Birthday No. 1 Blues #16 - Jack Your Body

I am sixteen years old and Jack Your Body is number 1. Top of the Pops has never felt more like a televised version of Radio Free Europe than at this point. There is no house music in Ceredigion. Dance culture round our way meant one of three things. Firstly the traditional twmpath scene of Young Farmers and WI events. Then there was the fortnightly disco in Tregaron, a truly terrible occasion whereby some local idiot with a PA and some lights would encourage drunken hillmen to brush the silage from their wellies, hit the floor and spill local piss on their piano ties to the sound of Wake Me Up Before You Go Go. Finally there was Aberystwyth. Aber. So good they shortened its name. Nearest fucking town. 18 miles. Two nightclubs. Straight out of Road House the pair of them. You would not be hearing house music there. You’d hear breaking glass, jaws and ambulances but you would not be becoming familiarised with the latest strain of urban American electronica. Not that I could fre...
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Birthday No. 1 Blues #15 - The Sun Always Shines on TV

  Everything is wet. The moment you step outside you experience the first instalment of drowning. Sleet, mist, snow, fog, drizzle. Take your pick. Always something watery in the weather. But mainly there is the rain, the insistent, persistent, consistent rattle of water on the hood of your coat, the flimsy window of your bedroom, the windscreen of the bus, the driving of it in the gale force wind towards your face as your sadistic new games teacher, an actual paedophile, gleefully watches as you and thirty other boys try and play something like a game of rugby in the middle of a mudlake. Later he will join you all in the showers scrubbing himself mad as though he’s not been under several layers of tracksuit the whole time. The sun has become a memory, a rumour. You see very little of it in the first year you spend in Wales. Wellington boots stand ever present by the front door, stuffed with newspaper to soak up the latest intrusion of water. The roof leaks. Everywhere is damp. So...
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Birthday No. 1 Blues #14 - I Want to Know What Love Is - Foreigner

  I am fourteen years old and Foreigner are Top of the Pops.   I have been living in Wales, proper Wales, actual sheep shit in the wintry air, slate roof, Cymraeg-speaking, terrifyingly rural Wales for about three months.  Our house is 250 years old and the roof is falling apart. The television signal is intermittent and one of the channels is in a language that, right now, is completely alien to me. My dad regularly uses the phrase "character-building". My mum doesnt. It has not been the making of me. I am miserable and even pop music, at last, is starting to bore me.   By early 1985 the pop video has become all important to the success of a pop song. Certain visual cliches have emerged, especially in the last few months. Shots of unbearably earnest rock bands pretending to record their parts in the studio with a producer at the point of exhaustion, drumkits inexplicably located upon mountain tops, impossibly attractive women struggling to sleep in artfully li...
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Birthday No. 1 Blues - #13 - Pipes of Peace - Paul McCartney

I am thirteen years old and, for the second time in my life, Paul McCartney is Top of the Pops . It says a lot about this country that you can stick an ex-Beatle in an average at best song, make a sentimental video set in the apocryphal footballing truce Christmas World War One story, and watch the money roll right on in. The First World War, Beatles and Christmas. If that story hadn’t already been invented, someone would have by now. Probably Richard Curtis. Hugh Grant playing the grandad of John Lennon saying “What’s “whoopsie in German” as he gets slide tackled by the grandfather of one of the blokes from Kraftwerk, etc. Pipes of Peace isn’t even the worst thing McCartney would do in 1984. For my thirteenth birthday, I am given a Walkman and a record voucher to buy a cassette album to go into said Walkman. It’s not a proper actual Walkman of course because my parents are fucking broke. It’s some Bush or Alba thing but I don’t notice this because I’m Charlie Bucket levels of g...
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Birthday No. 1 Blues #12 - Phil Collins - You Can't Hurry Love

I am twelve and Phil Collins is number one in the charts. Hard really to explain the Phil Collins phenomenon to anyone younger than 45. He’s the drummer in a prog rock band who becomes the singer when the singer quits to make mental music on his own . Collins decides to drag his band in a more commercial direction and then decides he can get even more commercial by doing stuff on his own. Initially, he goes down the sensitive singer songwriter route but then he needs a shitload of cash and decides he could cover a Supremes classic, do a cheeky retro video and clean up. And the bastard did. The decade is his from then on. Apart from Madonna and Michael Jackson, no one had the hits like Phil. Like Ed Sheeran today, you look at this weird little scrotum headed man and wonder, who the fuck’s idea of a pop star is this? Nothing sums up the eighties better for me than the sight of Phil Collins taking a flight on Concorde to go and play his second nauseating turn of the day on Live Ai...
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Birthday No. 1 Blues #11 - Bucks Fizz - The Land of Make Believe

I am eleven years old and two terrible things have happened. Firstly, my grandad has died. The day before my birthday. He had cancer. He was a quiet, sweet man from the Valleys. He'd been a miner, a gas fitter, a builder. He once fell off a cooling tower and survived. He saw some serious action in the war and would never speak about it. Medals were hidden and memorials avoided. He was a doting grandfather who came from a time when doting was hard. Secondly, and more relevantly, Eurovision-winning pop bastards Bucks Fizz were top of the charts. I wasn't at this point aware that " The Land of Make Believe " was a subtle dig at Thatcherism. That's because it's so subtle it's barely credible. Perhaps " Boom Bang a Bang " is about Louis Althusser's comprehension of the visible and invisible state . Either way, I'm 11 and I'm living in a house with a father who has lost both his parents to cancer in less than two and a half years. Anyway, t...
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Birthday No. 1 Blues #10 - Imagine - John Lennon

I am ten years old, and a recently murdered Beatle is top of the Pops. The Beatles were not part of my childhood till this point. My parents were young enough to have been huge fans, but they were soul kids and their small record collection was mostly Motown and Stax etc. Radio didn’t play them much and their films were never on. It was as though, having dominated the Sixties, it was time to move on. The Fab Four were the Covid of their day. The only exposure to the Beatles I had up until this point was the occasional rendition of Yellow Submarine by one of our guitar-wielding primary school teachers at the end of the day. At school, we had been given a project to report on something in the news and draw a picture. Being nine years old, the boys got very excited at the chance to draw a bearded rock star being assassinated in New York. On realising this, our teacher removed the drawing element of the task. I stuck with writing about John Lennon’s murder. I put something like “an...
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