Just as Ziggy Greaves had Imelda Davies, Kappatoo had Sigmasix, T-Bag had Jenny, Sally and/or Penny with occasional unlikely assistance from T-Shirt and Brian Arthur Derek Boyes had Edward ‘The Slug’ Slogg, so Smash Hits had its very own nemesis in the form of Number One. Launched by IPC as a deliberate rival to EMAP’s wildly popular pop-not-taking-seriously shelf-hogger in May 1983, it intentionally encroached on Black Type and company’s territory whilst equally intentionally positioning itself as everything that Smash Hits was not. Weekly rather than fortnightly, printed on high-end comic style paper rather than with a gloss finish, introduced by celeb-worshipping cleavagey ‘portable phone’-toting jacuzzi-friendly swanky entertainment correspondent type Lola Lush in place of the star-baiting sarcastic nihilism of Bitz, and – crucially – based around the never less than statistically suspicious Independent Local Radio-favoured renegade alternative to the Gallup Top Forty the Network Chart, it also exercised conspicuous caution in its approach to its chartbound cover stars, rarely subjecting them to anything more cutting than mild fun-poking that always took care to allow them in on the joke, which if nothing else must have afforded some temporary respite to poor old ‘Belouis’ ‘Some’. Despite a winning way with free gifts and an eye for the sort of posters that adolescents of either gender might, erm, ‘appreciate’, Number One always felt just that little bit too polite and reserved and reluctant to question the absurdity even of Bros for fear of upsetting their more devoted fans, with the additional consequence that they just plain could not engage with the apparently genuine antagonism between the two titles in any sort of an effective fashion. Whereas Smash Hits would wait until they were provoked before breaking out a ferocious and gleefully vindictive parody – their pretence that Number One‘s star columnist Bruno Brookes had jumped ship for a brand new pop column that simply read “Hi Kids – catch you again in a fortnight!” was a particularly memorably devastating broadside – Number One seemed incapable of doing anything other than repeating the phrase ‘Smashed Twits’ multiple times in a single characteristically brief sentence until it lost any semblance of wit it may or may not have held in the first place.

Despite seeing in the new decade with a cover exhorting all and sundry to ‘Give Us A Yell! For 1990’, much like the luckless pop duo it sought to champion as the exciting heralds of a new era Number One folded in October 1990 and the ‘kids’ would no longer be catching Bruno again; it was subsequently bought by BBC Magazines, who repositioned it as a more sophisticated and closely Radio 1-aligned take on the central concept of pop-based positivity. While there are entire websites devoted to analysing every issue of Smash Hits right down to those ads for clothing companies still pushing ‘Punk’s Not Dead’ t-shirts in 1986 – and there’s more about that bafflingly persistent clarion call here, incidentally – you will struggle to find anything much of Number One online beyond the front covers, and even then a huge number of them are absent or only available in an extremely low resolution, including that ill-fated push for Daniel and Paul in January 1990. This should not be considered any form of suggestion, however, that Number One was entirely without merit. It was, after all, bought religiously by a huge readership at least up until the very commencement of the nineties, including those who may well allegedly be able to recall all those Belinda Carlisle posters more vividly and readily than they can their own phone number, and if we are alighting on a section of this look back through this website’s archives that includes a feature celebrating how much of an influence Smash Hits had on me as a writer, then it is only right and proper to give Number One some credit; sometimes, positivity is equally as important as cynicism. Plus of course no issue of Number One was complete without a whopping great coffee mug stain encircling two thirds of Ben Volpierre-Pierrot’s face like a passport stamp in a Cold War thriller courtesy of some bone idle family member who felt that it constituted a more suitable coaster than the one that was a whole twelve centimetres away, which due to the porous nature of the paper would seep progressively across the next six pages, so if you’d like to help me celebrate this phenomenon by slamming a mug down on this feature then you can always buy me a coffee here. Anyway, let’s jump straight in with an occasion when Looks Unfamiliar had a problem, as you can plainly see…

Looks Unfamiliar: Lisa Parker And Andrew Trowbridge – He Looks Like A Normal Boy With A Nose

By this point, I was starting to look further afield for potential Looks Unfamiliar guests. I’d been listening to Lisa and Andrew’s podcast Round The Archives, in which they essentially have escalatingly absurd yet also critically incisive conversations about the sort of old obscure television shows that most others would tend to approach with tedious and disproportionate solemnity – I still howl with laughter at their assertion that after one single episode, one particularly obnoxious seventies sitcom was now so far back in their ‘to watch’ pile that it was technically next door – and felt that there was something in their double act that could lend itself brilliantly to something wider than observations about the increasing wonkiness of the moustaches in Sergeant Cork. The second they sent over a list that included Matchbox Cascade, The Jaws Game, Virtual Murder and my longstanding nobody-remembers-this obsession Big John Little John I knew we were in for a great show, but even then I hadn’t anticipated just how well they would instinctively tailor their flights of baffled questioning to work with my responses as the host and just how hilarious it would all get, and in fact I honestly believe that each time they have come back on to Looks Unfamiliar it has only got funnier and funnier, and I’ve been delighted to have guested on Round The Archives in return a couple of times too. Although I can already hear them asking if I was similarly delighted to eat United and how this can possibly be measured on a recognisable scientific scale. You can find the full show here and the chat about The Jaws Game in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

Je Suis Perdue Dans La Nuit, Dans Cette Ville Où Je Vis

This was written as a celebration of France Gall, a sixties French pop star and indeed early winner of the Eurovision Song Contest, who bizarrely wound up soundtracking a good proportion of my student days, and correspondingly I gave it a title borrowed from the lyrics of Chanson Indienne from her ‘gone psychedelic’ album 1968 – translation ‘I am lost in the night in the city where I live’ – which was intended to evoke the rush of Britpop-era nights out rather than whatever France was on about after partaking in that, erm, ‘tobacco in bloom’. This probably both dented its search engine ranking and put off casual readers who were wary of clicking on something that might well turn out to be entirely in French, as it’s always struggled for views a little which is a shame as it turned into quite a nice rumination on the ‘Loungecore’ boom, hunting for rare and exotic popular culture in the days when the Internet was more or less limited to the official Jamiroquai website containing a lone message from Jay Kay stating that he couldn’t actually think of anything to say, and, well, bilinguality, but changing it to something more along the lines of faire exactement ce qui est écrit sur la boîte would not really have been staying true the intention that I had started off this new website with, and ironically the muted but enthusiastic response that it met with did actually do a great deal to give me a great deal more confidence in running with more experimental ideas, many of which would prove equally if not less popular with the general public. Anyway it’s all ce que l’on gagne d’un côté, on le perd de l’autre, as you can always sneak these less popular tangential musings into collections where they will effectively be ‘new’ to a lot of readers, so while you can find the original version here there’s also a reader-bating expanded version in Can’t Help Thinking About Me here.

Looks Unfamiliar: Steve O’Brien – E.T. Pretzel Design

Another associate from printed fanzine days – and not to be confused with fellow associate from fanzine days and indeed fellow Looks Unfamiliar guest Stephen O’Brien, but believe me, they certainly do get mistaken for each other – Steve may have gone on to become a leading entertainment journalist but his background in all things obscure and esoteric meant that he was another name I’d had in mind since day one. He also once – and this is no word of a lie – watched Blakes 7 with Traci Lords for SFX magazine and frankly, you can’t go wrong with that. Although the sheer blistering virulence of Salt And Vinegar KP Sky Divers – ‘the vindaloo of corn snacks’ – certainly seemed to strike a chord and there were more than a few appreciative acknowledgements of the inclusion of Simon In The Land Of Chalk Drawings and the Alfred Hitchcock And The Three Investigators books, I was actually a little surprised by the lack of response to the discussion of BBC’s adaptation of Brat Farrar, a series I had remembered as being phenomenally popular at the time and with lovelorn adolescent girls with their heart set a-flutter by Mark Greenstreet in particular. There is nothing so fickle as a teenage crush. Either that, or there just weren’t many female listeners yet, which was definitely something I had already set out to address. I also got a fair bit of disproportionately irate shouting in reaction to my weary dismissal of those two new songs that the weird Frankenstein version of The Stone Roses showcased live in 1996 immediately before splitting up, but that was honestly only to be expected really and I was never going to say they were any good just because Bye Bye Badman was. Incidentally, due to being relatively new to all of this, I accidentally cued in the Simon In The Land Of Chalk Drawings theme too early and locked it in to the completed edit underneath our conversation – I could probably have gone back and removed it but the temptation to refer to the mistake at the start of the next one was too great to resist. Also it served as early proof that nobody will ever ‘correct’ you on actual mistakes but woe betide you if you get something slightly and trivially wrong in good faith. You can find the full show here and the chat about High Time and Ice Cold Cube by The Stone Roses in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

We Are Very Quiet Persons Who Do Not Like To Brag

The only real downside to the escalating popularity of Looks Unfamiliar – apart from perpetually being bombarded with passive-aggressive ‘offers’ to be on it, usually couched in the middle of complaints about some of the choices being too familiar – was that my original intention of publishing anecdotally-driven book reviews by the shelf-load went straight out of the window and flew directly to the pavement with the speed and velocity of a falling copy of Prime Minister, You Wanted To See Me?. I’m Not With The Band, the autobiography of Smash Hits and NME staff writer Sylvia Patterson, however, was something that I could not allow to pass without comment. Smash Hits in general and Sylvia’s contributions in particular were an enormous influence on my writing style even at an age when I should probably have been more interested in the mid-magazine posters of Tiffany, especially when it came to the difficult art of knowing when to use and indeed when not to use an arcane submerged bit of abstract humour, and it was something of a startling surprise to find out that so many of what I had just assumed were off the cuff indulgences of silliness at pop music’s expense actually had their roots in something bizarre that had happened mid-interview or in an unreasonable or baffling press release, and indeed how closely by sheer coincidence these mirrored my own approach to creative lateral thinking. Maybe some writers are so good that you can pick up on how they got there without actually realising. It was, of course, also an excuse to look back at some of my favourite Smash Hits gags and at days spent trying to devour an issue uninterrupted on the bus to and from school, while the title was taken from an interview with hapless Eurodance sensation Milli Vanilli which had proved to be an enduring source of bemused fascination for me, so it only felt fair to offer a few words in defence of poor old ‘Rob’ and ‘Fab’ as well. It appears that quite a few readers agreed as I really was pleased with how well this went down. You can find the original version here and a much longer version with much more on the wild days of Smash Hits silliness in Keep Left, Swipe Right here.

Looks Unfamiliar: Rae Earl – I Think It Was A Cerebral Cheggers Plays Pop

Rae had originally got in contact with me after laughing at something I’d said on Channel 5’s Best Of Bad TV: The 90s, and given both that we had been enjoying chatter about Five To Eleven and Go For It! and how much I had loved My Mad Fat Diary, it was perhaps inevitable that I ended up inviting Rae on Looks Unfamiliar. Thanks to the cross-hemispheric time difference we had to record this at a million o’clock in the morning, which as far as I am concerned only added to the mayhem and hilarity as we discussed Codename Icarus, Rock’n’Bubble gum trading cards, Puzzle Party and The Home Cookery Club, although some very boring gentlemen were not particularly taken with our refusal to treat Battle Of The Planets with a reverence usually reserved for the Latin Mass and told me so in no uncertain terms; I still bristle when I think about one particular missive demanding that I ‘tell your guest that…’. On the other hand, next big comedy thing that weren’t Cheese And Onion were mentioned in Inside No. 9 not long afterwards, which I would like to think was not a coincidence, although we still have yet to find any evidence of The Yellow House other than a TV Times listing with absolutely no other information other than the title, time and date. All things considered, it’s fair to say that I really was thrilled with how this one turned out. You can find the full show here and the chat about Codename Icarus in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.

Top Of The Box

It has very little to do with any of the above – and, typically, plenty to do with several inclusions in the previous instalment of Through The Square Window – but if you’re interested in the story behind every single released by BBC Records And Tapes from Every Loser Wins by Nick Berry to Awesome Dood! by Edd The Duck, then you’ll definitely be interested in Top Of The Box, which is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Mystery Link! If you want to just go straight to a surprise page completely unrelated to any of the above, click here.

© Tim Worthington.
Please don’t copy this only with more italics and exclamation marks.