Top of the Pops: 25th August, 1977.

The Boomtown Rats in 1981. Author unknown;
Photo courtesy Orange County Archives
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

A little bird tells me that tonight's show sees the Top of the Pops debuts of two very memorable acts.

Will we get to see them in full? Or will one of them be relegated to a thirty second slot, playing over the chart rundown, while the other gets stuck on the play-out ?

More to the point, will I actually be able to get through an edition without losing my reception?

Only Noel Edmonds can tell us.

And tell us he does - because the rundown music is by no debutante. It's by Donna Summer, with Down Deep Inside. Was this the theme tune to Peter Benchley's The Deep, or am I going completely mad?

Whatever it's from, she's sounding extremely tired as she sings it; loads of moaning, groaning and sighing. I think she needs a good lie down.

Eddie and the Hot Rods certainly don't. Why? Because The Bloke Who Isn't Eddie's full of bounce.

You can tell he's the authentic voice of punk. He keeps getting too close to the camera.

But who can believe it? The audience are actually showing an interest and are actually moving.

Could it be? Could the segment of the nation represented by Top of the Pops finally have embraced the new music that's forced Kid Jensen into endless euphemisms these past few weeks?

A man who forces no euphemisms is the highest new entry. It's Elvis Presley. I bet he was excited when he found out about that.

This doesn't seem to be a very highly regarded song but, as a non-Presley fan, I've always liked it.

But Legs and Co are looking far too cheery to be dancing to a song that's only on the charts because its singer's dead.

And why do they insist on pointing upwards when he sings, "Way on down"?

There's no time to ponder that because it's the first of those memorable acts I mentioned.

It's the Boomtown Rats.

They're doing Looking After Number One.

They don't seem to be taken very seriously these days but, to some of us, they were a breath of fresh air at the time.

First Eddie and the Hot Rods. Now the Boomtown Rats. The Top of the Pops' times really are a-changing.

Like The Bloke Who's Not Called Eddie, Bob keeps getting too close to the camera.

And, as with The Bloke Who's Not Called Eddie, the audience are joining in with Bob.

I'm not. But that's only because I've just lost reception.

What is it? Every week this happens. Are Elkie Brooks fans trying to block transmission to this house in a desperate attempt to stop me posting my always wrong opinions on her?

Whatever the truth of the matter, they won't succeed. I'm determined to inflict my irrelevant drivel on this land, no matter what it takes.

I'm back and the Rats have gone, replaced by a woman whose identity I'm not sure of. Is it Deniece Williams?

Whoever she is, she's wearing my curtains and singing what appears to be That's What Friends Are For.

It is Deniece Williams. My knowledge of pop never ceases to amaze me.

Thin Lizzy never cease to amaze me either. How many times can they be on with the same song?

Like Not Eddie and Bob, Phil's also too close to the camera.

Has he got a black eye or is it just makeup?

Someone must have put something in the audience's coffee tonight because they're even bobbing around to this one, creating an effect strangely redolent of Wings' video to With a Little Luck, only with teenagers instead of children.

Is that John Helliwell from Supertramp on sax?

Look at me. I can even identify sax players. I'm like the new Paul Gambaccini.

Now it's Space and Magic Fly.

I used to have a space helmet like that. I used to pretend it was a portable TV.

Actually, my space helmet was better. It said, "NASA,"on it and had a fake microphone that didn't do anything.

I got mine in 1969, eight years before Space got theirs. Take that, pop stars.

But now it's the second of the memorable acts I mentioned.

It's the Adverts and Gary Gilmore's Eyes.

Gary Gilmore's Eyes and Looking After Number One are the first punk songs the show's featured that I remember from when they came out. I suppose this means this is the week punk's finally arrived for me.

I never noticed before that this sounds like the Monster Mash.

And the audience are bobbing again.

Unlike Gaye Advert who looks suitably disinterested.

The Adverts depart and I miss Noel's intro to the next act, meaning that, so far, I don't have a clue who it is.

It's a strange woman who's borrowed her hair from Rula Lenska and her wardrobe from Suzanne Danielle

Whoever she is, she can't sing.

She looks like someone I used to know at school. Actually, she looks exactly like someone I knew at school.

It's all over and, apparently, she and her equally tone deaf friends were called Page Three.

And just to drag us all down completely from the show's previous highs, the Floaters are somehow at Number 1.

I wonder why luminous blues suits went out of fashion?

As we contemplate that mystery, we play out with Jean Michel Jarre and what I think is Oxygene, meaning we've had two foreign instrumentals in one show - the show in which Noel Edmonds declared it's rare to get instrumentals on the chart.

So it's all over and you can't get away from it, it was a show in which the bracing wind of modernity was unmissable. Instead of the usual rubbish, we got not one but three songs that could be called punk. We got two euro synth instrumentals. We got Thin Lizzy who were hardly new music but certainly weren't traditional Top of the Pops fare and we got Donna Summer.

Page Three and the Floaters aside, it has to represent a jolting leap into what was then the present, a reminder that the 1970s were nearing their end and a whole new musical age was inescapably looming into view.

Top of the Pops: 11th August, 1977.

Thin Lizzy's Phil Lynott; by Helge Øverås (Own work)
[CC-BY-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

As the nights start to draw in and we begin to say goodbye to the summer, we plunge straight into the sunset with Kid Jensen who introduces us to Jonathan Richman and his Modern Lovers.

Sadly, Jonathan's not able to be with us tonight and so we just get to hear him played over the countdown.

I don't care how time-saving such a move may be, it's still not right to hear anything that's not a theme tune performing such a function.

Not only that but its use as the intro music means we don't even get to hear the whole of the song, even though Kid tells us it's this week's highest climber.

I have no doubt we will however get to hear the whole of Showaddywaddy.

This is a good thing, as they might not be musical heavyweights but they do know how to do Top of the Pops. In fact, I'd go so far as to say they're the quintessential Top of the Pops group.

Are Dave's flies undone?

That's definitely not Quintessential Top of the Pops.

Neither are the Steve Gibbons Band. Assuming, as always, that the singer's the eponymous Steve, he looks to have been round the block a few times too many for that.

Kid clearly doesn't care. He's happily dancing along in the background.

I wonder if Status Quo ever did a cover of this? You could imagine they would have.

Barry Biggs is back, what seems like months since his last appearance, but still doing the same song as before.

But now hooray! It's Eddie and the Hot Rods with Do Anything You Wanna Do - even though Kid seems to think they're just called The Rods.

This has to be one of the greatest pop songs of the late 1970s; the closest Britain's ever produced to its own version of Born to Run. Quite frankly, anyone who doesn't like this has to have something wrong with them.

They're getting close to the spirit of punk, even if they have see-through drums.

Not getting anywhere near to punk are Legs and Co who're on next, dancing to Rita Coolidge.

They seem to be doing some sort of corrupted Gap Band type dance. I hope everyone at home's joining in with it. I know I am even though I'm on my own.

I really don't know what this dance has to do with the song, and I'm missing Rita's cactus.

A band who're so good they can get by even without the aid of a cactus are Thin Lizzy who're still dancing in the moonlight.

As always, halfway through the show, I've lost my reception.

When it comes back, as always I'm confronted by someone I don't recognise.

Whoever he is, he seems to be in the Labi Siffre envelope, though I say that as someone who doesn't have a clue what the Labi Siffre envelope is.

No problems of recognition with the next act. It's Fleetwood Mac doing Dreams.

This isn't good news, as the only Fleetwood Mac song I like is Tusk.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that I actively dislike any of their other tracks. It's just that, pleasant though they are, they just make me start to nod off after a minute or so.

On the plus side, Stevie Nicks is looking nice.

John McVie's looking like that impressionist, the one with the long nose who does all the sports people but never looks like any of them.

Lindsey Buckingham's looking like Jeff Lynne.

Between them they could start their own lookalikes agency. Admittedly Stevie Nicks would have to work as a Stevie Nicks lookalike but I like to feel she could pull it off.  She really does look remarkably like herself.

But I do wish they'd liven themselves up a bit. Does this song actually go anywhere? It just seems to meander endlessly, like someone doing the feather dusting.

Now it's another act I've never heard of - JALN.

The intro sounds like Diamonds On The Soles Of  Her Shoes. Could it be that Paul Simon wasn't being as original as we thought when he did Graceland?

My god, this is bad.

It sounds like something from a children's show.

Meanwhile, Donna Summer's photo's still Number 1.

Kid, give up on the whole, "Good Love," thing. I can say this as someone living thirty five years in the future, it's just never going to work.

More importantly, there's no play-out this week - and that means no Boney M. For a seasoned fan of The M, like me, that's almost enough grounds to throw my TV out the window.

So it's all over, and there's no doubt about it, Eddie and the Hot Rods bestrode the show like colossi. So much so that I'm straight off to Youtube to listen to them all over again.

The Jam didn't manage to make me do that, the Stranglers didn't manage to make me do that, Showaddywaddy didn't manage to make me do that but Eddie - and Eddie alone - has. If that doesn't prove the Hot Rods deserve a place in music history, I don't know what would.

Top of the Pops: 21st April, 1977.

Because Jolene Blalock alone cannot keep Aggy satisfied,
here's ex-Star Trek Voyager sex-bomb Jeri Ryan.
Photo by Gary Burke  (Jeri Ryan)
[CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

It's been an exciting day today, as the nation's gone to the polls to decide just who's going to be ruling our towns and cities for the next few years.

But there's only one man rules our hearts.

And that's Tony Blackburn.

Why?

Because only he can guide us through the strongholds and marginals that are the pop charts of 1977.

And we kick off with someone or other.

Is it Eddie and the Hot Rods? I'm basing this assumption on the singer's bared chest and the fact he's moving around a fair bit. I don't have a clue what it's called but I do know it's not Do Anything You Wanna Do.

He's dangerously close to doing the splits. Some things I don't want to see even on TOTP. I can't help feeling he's what you'd have got if Iggy Pop and Get It Together's Roy North had produced a love-child. Then again, who's to say they didn't?

It WAS Eddie and the Hot Rods. No wonder they let me do a life-or-death blog about pop when I have musical knowledge like that.

On the other hand, here's OC Smith. Apart from him having a very well-known TV show named after him that featured the bloke who was Jim Robinson in Neighbours, I still don't have a clue who he is.

Is this the song he did the other week? Or is it another one?

He still looks like Phil Lynott's dad.

I'm still not gripped by it.

It's all gone scary as we suddenly get a weird lingering close-up of a woman's face.

But no. It's not just any weird woman's face. It's a Legs and Co weird woman's face.

They're dancing to Sir Duke by Stevie Wonder.

I must confess I've never been a Stevie Wonder fan. I always like his songs when they start but, after about a minute, I'm always starting to lose the will to live.

Legs and Co are very shiny and sparkly tonight. I don't know whose idea those outfits were but one thing's for sure, the chicken'll be going without bacofoil this week.

They've flashed their bums! It's shocking the things people'll get up to now it's 1977. I've got a good mind to ring Mary Whitehouse. Wherever will this Rock and Roll anarchy end? I predict, if it's not checked, it'll end with people wearing meat bikinis. And I'm making that prediction in 1977, so, if I'm proven right, it'll be an incredible act of foresight.

Now it's Tavares.

I remember this one. I remember liking it - mostly because it mentions Ellery Queen.

I remember seeing the pilot ep for the Ellery Queen show in the 1970s and concluding that Ellery Queen was the murderer. I didn't realise it was Part 1 of a series and he couldn't be the murderer because that would've made it a very short series. I'm still smarting over the humiliation.

Tavares, meanwhile, are giving an oddly winning performance. You wouldn't exactly call their dance routine twinkle-toed but you can't help liking them.

It's time to round-up the votes of the Steve jury as Mike Moran and Lynsey de Paul are back with Rock Bottom.

I don't care how pretty she is, I just can't warm to Lynsey. There's still something I don't trust about her.

Actually it's probably because she is pretty that I don't trust her. I don't mind beautiful people – I'm fairly scrumptious myself - but they who are pretty, I don't trust.

The audience look bored rigid.

I don't blame 'em.

It's no Scooch.

Leo Sayer's on now. I don't recognise the track yet and I thought I knew every hit Leo ever had.

I know it now he's finally started singing. It's How Much Love. I think this is one of his high-pitched ones.

What a strange video. There's millions of Leos leaping up and down, spinning around, floating about in mid-air, and mostly being silhouettes.

I'm trying to work out if it's heavily influenced by Elton John or if Elton John was heavily influenced by Leo Sayer. Either way, this track could easily have been on an Elton John album.

Now for Delegation and Where Is The Love?

Someone else had a hit with a song called Where Is The Love, didn't they? Was it Black Eyed Peas? Or was it Lisa Stansfield? Or was it both?

As for Delegation, I'm not familiar with them but their style's familiar.

It's very pleasant but very like the Real Thing. I suspect you could easily sing Can't Get By Without You right over the top of it.

Elkie Brooks is back – and backless. I hope she's not going to be sexy again. The trouble I got into last time over the whole issue of Elkie and sexiness. All I can say is I will never again question the untrammelled eroticism of Elkie Brooks.

Deniece Williams is back with Free. It's another one I always like for the first minute before completely losing all interest.

She's doing strange hand movements to try and keep us interested. She's succeeding. I'm still not interested in the song but I am at least strangely taken by her hand gestures.

Now she's starting to sound like a kettle boiling.

ABBA are still at Number 1.

This week's show seems to have flown by, which I suppose means I must've found it entertaining even though there was little on it you'd call either remarkable or memorable.

And, continuing the TOTP tradition of saving the best song till the play-out, we finish with Peter Gabriel and Solsbury Hill.

This is bad news. I think I'm starting to get how it works; which is that, once a track's been on the play-out, it's doomed to never be on the show proper. Which presumably means Peter's had it.

That's a shame, as Solsbury Hill's one of the few songs from 1977 that I'd call a classic.