Pop ! What is it good for ? with Paul Morley

Sugababes were the only act he talked to either during or just before a performance - bit unfair on all parties to expect a decent discussion out of this situation.

by the end of the bit about 'Lola' i had gone from hating the song at the start to appreciating it a bit more. who knew Suggs could make such an apparently convincing case.

the intro outside euston station with the rail jobsworth coming along to ask them to stop filming: why were they filming there in the first place?

Yes, I agree - I just couldn't see the point in including it - other than, I suppose, to attract a bigger audience. It's telling that the still on the BBC's iPlayer watch again site does show him talking to the 'babes.

No idea why Euston, other than that being the London station for trains from Stockport.

damn, where can non-brits see this? !#$%ing internet.

i watched this last night, oddly enough; there was some mention of it on the louis-goes-batshit-at-hazelwood thread on ILE. yeh, i enjoyed it -- especially simon armitage, and especially the bit when morley was struck dumb by armitage's analysis of the opening line of "this charming man" ("wow!") -- but it was kinda ephemeral in the general scheme of things. like so much pop music, i suppose. hurrah! for unwitting (or was it?) metatextuality.

Mike Joyce was clearly surplus to requirements as well, wasn't he ? If that interview was in Dry bar, they've changed the colour scheme since 1994.

Yeah I rather enjoyed this as well, but the Sugababes had clearly been caught on the hop, didn't care and had no idea what he was getting at, and therefore kept trotting out the "we actually write our own songs" PR line. I expected Morley to grab them and go "look it's alright if you don't write the songs, I don't care!"

I might have appreciated the programme as a whole more if I really loved any of the records included, but Morley is still one of the few journalists who can narrate in the way he writes and not sound like a twat.

i know what you mean about mike joyce, but actually that: "i just thought it was a great riff!" said far more than i think he realised.

that was a bit odd with the sugababes, yes.

What is Morley's favourite single of the 90s?

not Morley but Maconi's Pop On Trial has been OK - I particularly enjoyed Caitlin Moran's anecdotal squeeing (journey juice, i killed kurt, the scariness of dance music) last night altho she was a bit harsh on the Spices

the '5 biggest selling singles of the 90s' bit seemed worse than the equivalent for the other decades - poor Goldie looked very upset by it.

im trying to imagine how caitlin moran talking about being scared of dance music could be enjoyable...

it helped that she was quite self-deprecating on the endearing side, not annoying.

Sawyer was quite good on the 80s one too. At one point Maconie looked a bit irked because she was asking Jazzie B more questions than he was. Martin Fry was also good value altho his eagerness to drop pub quiz knowledge after every clip done him in (e.g. "Fun Love And Happiness was their follow up" re Mel & Kim) the end. Great guy tho.

Jazzie B when asked about glaring omissions: "For the heterosexuals...Sade"

that's a comeback album title right there.

haha, he slipped up there: it was Fun, Love and Money. His defence of SAW in this programme echoed a defence I remember him making at the time on a Radio 1 discussion programme at the time. I think it may have been a broadcast from In the City, tho I am not sure. He defended SAW and Fuzzbox criticized them. Fuzzbox were hurt that they had had one of their records reviewed on Singled Out and the reviewer said they sounded like Bananarama.

I only tuned in part way through the Maconie programme when Maconie was saying some interesting things about the development of hip hop.

the general slagging of hip-hop after PE was pretty lazy with only Jazzie defending it, predictably. on the 90s one Maconie also claimed re Melody Maker that putting Moby or Fatboy Slim just weren't as interesting on a front cover as Morrissey or McCulloch but this wasn't countered (like Keith Flint and photoshopped Aphex Twin being more successful examples).

depends how you mean successful -- pissing off core indie/goth readership without bringing in new clubbier readers would not have been seen as a win.

never did get my head around this idea of people who stopped buying a weekly magazine because of the choice of cover star one particular week

No, me neither. Apart from Bruce Springsteen, which would do it for me. And Led zep.

The book he wrote of which this was a kind of truncated version was a lot more interesting, playful and engaging. The programme was frustrating to someone who had read this as it just seemed to be leaving all the entertaining and/or interesting points out.

Everything Paulo Hewitt said on that Pop on Trial:'90s thing was prefixed with "Noel Gallagher once told me... ".

Paolo

inevitably the 70s one

the debate last night about which decade was the best wasnt bad. morley was good on the 'jury'. some of the people stating their case for each decade could have been a bit better though. miranda sawyer was the best, but the woman doing the 90s didnt even mention 90s hip hop, jungle, garage, nothing, really. not unexpected as the whole thing has been quite rockist (maconie saying hip hop was crap after the 80s was pathetic) but still. when morley said nothing new rhythmic had been invented, D&B should have been mentioned. and the whole discussion about ipods and the net was premature, thats the 00s, not the 90s.

Two things that came out of this 'debate' for me:

Prog is the only genre it's now OK to hate without reservation. (I don't necessarily disagree, but the smugness of the consensus made me want to defend it.)

Led Zep have become the early 70's rock band it's OK to like. (Sabbath exist only in the shadow of Ozzy's reality TV success. Metal otherwise pretty much ignored.)