The Rolling "Top of the Pops" BBC4 Revival thread.

TOTP Christmas 1984 drinking game: down a shot every time someone with a mullet appears.

Hahahaha! I bet it absolutely crushed Simon Le Bon's soul at the time to have to introduce Paul Young.

It's bizarre how normal Frankie Goes to Hollywood look in comparison to some of the mega mulleted folks like Le Bon and Young...

Also LOL at Weller miming Bono's line on 'Do They Know It's Christmas?'

Russ Abbott's 'Atmosphere':

• worse than I remember
• cheaper sounding production than I remember
• forgot about the Frankie Goes To Hollywood reference
• does the bass synth rip off 'I Feel Love'?

(what is with the 1981 repeats btw?)

Don't know. I thought they were trying to get through the episodes quicker, then I read the episode dates and realised they were repeats. Of repeats.

'81 > '85 fwiw

Big Sound Authority ... these guys are going to be big, apparently!

Ksssssss

Art of Noise, featuring the "Hey!" sound that ends up in Prodigy's 'Firestarter'.

Oddly I thought this Colourfield track was from later in the 80s.

Maybe because the lyrics, arrangement, and general performance pre-empt The Beautiful South.

We're barely into 1985 and already I'm wondering what the fuck happened!

lol King!

Featuring future MTV VJ Paul King!

"We're going to see Foreigner now"

Hmm yeah, no we're fucking not, mate!

*grabs remote*

ABBA mk 2 - lol at how the video really tries hard to minimise the height difference between Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson.

x-post:

Ha yeah, I remember seeing an interview Paul King did with Richey from the Manics, and Richey found some way of getting a dig in at him about it.

xxp 10 year old snoball thought this Foreigner track was a bit depressing but I think of it as a bunch of self pitying posturing toss.

Paul King still had that fuck-awful mullet even in the early 90s.

Still, be did revive DMs as a fashion item.

Get your boots on!

> lol King!

i remember a friend was excitedly planning to go see King play in gloucestershire somewhere but they cancelled and did totp instead.

Just realised that Paul King looks like one of my co-workers in a bad mullet wig.

Phil Collins nailing the 'Del Boy from Only Fools & Horses pretending to be a yuppie' look.

Bruce Springsteen is "America's answer to Russ Abbott" and Prince is "another American". Who knew?

Maybe it's because of the repetition of the performances on endless clip shows but parts of tonight's episode feel like they happened last month.

Shaky with a song that sounds like something mid 80s Rod would have passed on for being too shit.

It's not on here yet!

Straight out of the gate with some Glenn Frey yuppie music this episode..

...I'd never seen the video to 'Be Near Me' by ABC before... that song should have been fucking huge.

xp I was catching up on last night's programme.

All of REO Speedwagon's hairstyles can fuck off.

Pat Benatar - another singer who was big in the US but hardly known in the UK apart from a couple of singles.

More like REO Shitewagon...

I was and still am always amused by how far off Simon Bates' predictions were: "These guys are going to be huge!" *tumbleweeds*

I've never really considered 'The Heat Is On' to be yuppie music because I associate it so heavily with 'Beverley Hills Cop'.

Y'know when people say "the '80s were shit" or take the piss out of the fashions etc., this is the exact era of the '80s they mean. 1985 feels like it's worlds away from 1981 etc., not a few years away. The drop in quality from even the preceding year has been noticeable.

This video for 'Easy Lover' is fucking awful - I always remembered it as being quite slick but the 'candid' bits make Phillip Bailey & Phil Collins seem very punchable.

More like REO Shitewagon...

Classic song and video!

"Prince's girlfriend Madonna" ???

One of my favourite Prince stories is from Madonna: she went to his place to discuss a possible collaboration, and Prince's chef had set out a massive amount of food on the dining table. Madonna was shovelling food into her mouth when she noticed the purple one wasn't eating. "Aren't you going to have anything?" she asked. "No" whispered Prince.

Hey look another shit UK Eurovision entry.

Whistle Test never looked older or grayer.

I'd forgotten how shit and cheesy the video to 'View To A Kill' was.

Also I'd forgotten how shit and cheesy a lot of these videos from 1985 were.

There's very little about 'A View to a Kill' that's aged well - I actually don't mind the song itself, but the production is really lumpen and the video, as you say, is cheesy and shit. Particularly when Simon le Bon goes into his Bond spiel.

If the cracks were starting to show on Seven and the Ragged Tiger, Le Bon's bum note at Live Aid was the moment it all smashed to pieces.

Pure 1985 toss so far tonight. It says something that I'm actually almost glad to see Fish's "oh I just smelled a really noxious fart" gurning face.

I have a lot of time for Robert Palmer but Power Station's cover of T Rex's 'Get It On' is fuck awful. Also I'm fairly sure Bowie saw this and thought "I can do way worse that this" and then formed Tin Machine.