Hello and welcome to the big british castle It's time for anim and joe to broadcast on the radio There'll be some music and some random toys
That was Reuchsop with Happy Up Here.
There was laughing at the beginning of that track as well.
There was.
I was just having a stretch there.
Yeah.
It's nice to have a stretch in the morning.
Yeah.
It's lovely to have a stretch.
That's what the Chinese do.
Is it?
Yeah, they all go out in big regimented lines and have a stretch in the morning.
That's forced stretching.
It's still good though.
Really?
Or would you like to be stretched on a rack?
Yes.
Would you like to be stretched in Iraq?
Yes.
Really?
All that says you're up for all of that stretching.
I'd like to be stretched on Iraq.
Yeah, yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
You love stretching.
Yeah.
Hey, thanks to Yare for doing the show.
We never thank Yare, and that's just bad manners.
He's a lovely chap.
We always have a nice chap with him when we come in in the morning.
Yeah, it's always nice to see him, you know?
It's lovely to inherit a studio from a man like Yare.
He smells very nice.
Smells good.
He's got his top button up.
He's neat.
He's dapper.
He's orderly.
Yeah, he's like a hospital orderly.
And yet he's got a nice demeanor, he's dependable.
You don't come in some weeks and he's absolutely miserable and sulky and, you know, pushes you and is rude to you.
Like some people I could mention.
Who?
I don't know.
You.
Me.
Listen, I've got a new technique, listeners.
By the way, this is Adam and Joe.
Good morning, I'm Joe.
Hey, good morning, I'm Adam.
I've got a new technique for the music on the show, Adam.
Oh yeah.
And listeners.
We get a list of everything on the show when we come in in the morning.
The playlist.
Yeah.
And what I've done is I've gone through it with ticks and crosses.
And I think if we hand it back to the people that set the records up, gradually they'll learn what we like and what we don't like.
Now the problem is I might alienate some listeners when I tell them... You could call it the genius playlist.
That's a good idea.
I might alienate some listeners who like songs that I'm vetoing, but for instance, we were due to start with the choral, right?
But I vetoed that.
Why?
I said no choral, go straight to Reich's song.
Which choral song was it?
In the Morning.
Oh, that's a smash!
Do you mean that?
I love that song!
Well, I vetoed it.
I'll tell you what else I've vetoed.
That's gone, you see.
I've put a question mark by Smile by the Supernaturals, because I don't know it, and a question mark by Wintersleep by Oblivion.
I don't know it.
Is that wrong?
What does the question mark mean?
Well, I don't know.
It just means, you know, be careful.
Do we have to have this?
I don't know it.
I've put a question mark by your free choice.
Because I don't know it.
Because you're not aware of it.
Yeah.
Future heads with the hand of love I've put across by.
Here's a man who fears and is distasteful of anything new.
Yeah, I don't like anything beyond the late 80s.
Is that bad?
Anyway, you can have a look at my choices there, Adam, and see whether you disagree.
Okay, well what about this next track, then?
Oh, this is my free play!
Yeah, I'd put a cross by that.
Hey, you know, did you like The Moldy Peaches, Joe?
What do you mean?
Well, you know the Mouldy Peaches turned up, they were used heavily in the film Juno.
Right.
And they'd been around for a while.
They were touring back with the Strokes when the Strokes first came on the scene.
Yeah.
In, when was it, 1990?
I love Juno.
And so they are quirky New York sort of slightly folky hipsters, right?
Right.
But I found out that this guy, Geoffrey Lewis, is actually a contemporary of theirs.
In fact, I think some of his stuff, maybe the track I'm going to play right now, predates the Mouldy Peaches.
and certainly they sound very similar, but in their own limited way, the mouldy peaches achieved far more success through the film Juno.
Look, what are you doing?
You should be sitting up and clapping.
None of the words made any sense to me.
This is why you're putting crosses in question marks by everything because you're not sufficiently engaged with the amazing musical Tales I'm Weaving.
No, it sounds exciting.
The Moldy Peaches, Juno, The Man with the Record.
What are you going to play?
Well, listeners, I hope you enjoy this.
If you like the Moldy Peaches.
You should play I Monster First because it's not cash that one.
What?
You see, it was all in vain.
What wasted everyone's time and ear energy?
I can talk for five minutes about Jeffrey Lewis, if you like.
We'll come back to it.
Well, this has been a disaster.
Thanks, Ben.
Thanks, Joe.
See, it's because I put a cross by it.
Here's I, Monster.
Hasn't been cashed.
This is Sucker For Your Sound.
That's I, Monster with Sucker For Your Sound.
It's the first single from I, Monster's forthcoming album, Beware The Eyes That Parallize.
That was very good.
I enjoyed that very much.
Congratulations, I, Monster.
My Jeffrey Lewis track still hasn't... What is it?
What's the word?
Cashed.
C-A-C-H-E-D.
What does that actually mean?
It's being downloaded onto, like, the 6 Music Card Disk.
The hard drive.
The brain.
Hal.
Why can't you put a CD in the CD player and just press play?
I was thinking this the other day.
Do we have turntables in this studio?
Yeah, there's some next door.
We should bring some vinyl in.
Do some...
Yeah, we could have a vinyl free play.
It sends them into a spin, though, whenever you do anything like that.
Yeah, but it would be fun.
It would be fun.
To see how prepared 6 Music is to play an actual record.
Because, you know, once I suggested bringing an iPod in and putting it on shuffle and just sticking it into the desk with a lead.
Well, that's futuristic.
What I'm suggesting is atavistic.
So that might be more fun.
The other thing is, I suspect that vinyl, when played over the radio, actually sounds better than a CD.
Well loads of people play vinyl on the radio though.
Do they?
I think it sounds better.
I think the bass is better.
Right.
And the sound is a bit crisper.
I'd like to test that out.
You're welcome.
You're not going to join in?
Yes, of course.
I haven't got that much vinyl.
I've got some singles and stuff.
They're still in my moving boxes and things, but I'll dig them out.
Yeah, that'd be good.
We should have a vinyl free play each next week.
All right, that's a good idea.
I'll sort that out.
I'll do some digging.
OK, now, so we haven't got Geoffrey Lewis.
That's a shame.
Should we do some more teasing about what's in the show?
Yeah, we've got lots of stuff coming up in the show.
I won't say exciting stuff like I usually do, because it makes you angry.
No, it doesn't make me angry.
It makes me excited.
We've got exciting stuff coming up in the show.
I've got an exciting new jingle for an exciting, I'm saying it too much now, am I?
For an exciting new segment.
We've got a piece of mystery audio that our producer Ben won't tell us anything about.
You've got a jingle, because I noticed there were a couple of emails that we got during the week from people saying, why doesn't Joe do any jingles?
Were you stung into action?
That's a good point actually.
I was stung into action by a couple of emails, but it's a good point.
I don't do enough jingles.
I don't think I've done.
Have I done any jingles for our six music tenure?
I don't think you have.
Pretty lazy, isn't it?
Really.
So I've done one and so that'll be popping up later.
What else have we got?
We're going to launch Text the Nation a bit earlier than usual because we thought that would give people more of a chance to contribute.
And I think one of the main traumatic things this week for me personally is going to be some audio, some childhood audio.
Right.
Recorded when you were how old?
10, 11.
Right.
We were teasing this last week.
And I... Sorry.
We were discussing when, as a child, you get a little tape recorder and pretend you're a DJ.
Yeah.
Most people do it.
I did it.
And I found the results the other week.
And it's awful.
Is it?
Yeah.
Are you heard a bit of it?
It sounded good to me.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's going to be painful, but that's going to be coming up later in the program.
I tried to find, because I was convinced that I had a similar thing.
And in fact, I did, but unfortunately, I taped over a lot of it.
How frustrating.
And it was, I taped the Stranglers over it.
Their album, Oral Sculpture, later on.
in my teen years but what a jerk it was some sweet stuff of me I must have been about six or seven years old doing the breakfast show but very little of it pretending to do the breakfast yeah yeah I wasn't actually on air that's the way you said it sounded as if you were it was in my brain
But, well, I'll play it to you later on.
It features what would now be considered a borderline offensive joke.
Ah, that'd be good to play.
Anyway, that's all to look forward to, listeners.
But right now, here's Tribe Called Quest.
This is a ward tour.
Good stuff there.
A ward tour.
That's Tribe Called Quest.
This is Adam and Joe here on BBC 6 Music.
It's a beautiful morning in old London town.
It is, isn't it?
It's cold and bright.
It's warming up a little bit.
Yeah?
Oh, it's springy.
It's getting a bit more mild and nice.
It's getting a bit more springy.
I like it.
But listen, why don't we preview my exciting new jingle?
What do you think, Ben?
Because this is going to make it into the podcast in a different form, I think, this jingle.
But the idea is to have a section in our podcast that's podcast exclusive.
Oh, yes.
That you can only hear are in the podcast.
And we thought what we might do is kill two birds with one stone, as well as having something podcast exclusive.
Good.
I hate birds.
Yeah.
We thought we might, you've made me confused.
Sorry, man.
Podcast exclusive.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
We thought we might.
The other thing people have been complaining about is that if you don't listen to the live show and you listen again or listen to the podcast, then you don't get a chance to join in with Text the Nation.
Yeah, that can be frustrating for some listeners.
So we thought we'd do a section in in the podcast where we catch up on on late submissions to Text the Nation for this as well.
Did you?
Yeah.
Did you bring it in?
Yeah.
What's on the... Well, I'll play it later.
Okay, well, here's my jingle.
Are you ready with this, Ben?
Yeah, here's my jingle for what I thought we should call retro-textination.
That's not it.
That's my one.
Ben, what's going on?
Play that one if you want, Ben.
That was my jingle for the section.
Actually, it was more for a feedback section, you know what I mean?
Right.
So, like, communications that we get just from podcast listeners.
That's good.
We would preface it with that jingle.
We can have two exclusive segments.
One at the beginning and one at the end.
Because we like to take care of the podcast listeners.
Yeah.
You know, and we always bang on about it, but if you listen to this show and you don't listen to the podcast, you're missing out.
Let's hear Joe's jingle.
It's funky.
Uh, Jamiroquai actually helped me with that.
You know, I used that backing track before.
Did you?
Yeah.
For a jingle?
For a jingle we used on the show?
Yes.
Not that I remember.
And, uh, it's on the podcast.
You know, it turns up in the podcast.
And now you've gone in and used the same jingle track.
But you've done it slightly better.
I wouldn't have done that if I hadn't known.
And that's very humiliating.
For me... We got Adam's jingle with the same music in there, Ben.
We're really pushing Ben this morning.
It's impossible for Ben to source it.
But, you know, I mean, it's a good... I love the jingle.
I think we should play them both back-to-back and see which is best.
Well, we'll dig it out later on in the show.
It's like Ant vs. Deck.
Yeah.
But in this case, who am I?
I'm the little one.
Yeah, the little one.
I'm Deck.
Your aunt.
Well, I'm Deck, and in this case, it's not fair, because Deck, you know, I did this jingle ages ago, years ago even, and got no credit for it.
It's all part of, you know, the way I do things.
And Joe suddenly turns up with his jingle.
Oh, look at my jingle!
It's exactly the same as yours, but slightly better.
And expects everyone to give him a round of applause.
That's what's going on, right?
I wish you would look at my jingle.
Well, if you get it out, I will.
You can't see my jingle, it's audio only.
Yeah.
I think my jingle's brilliant.
Yeah, listen, I never said at any point that your jingle wasn't brilliant.
I just sort of launched off.
Just pulled the whole thing into a nest of neurosis.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
As per usual.
Well, I think it's fair there, you know what I mean.
So there we go, that's an exciting tease for a segment in the podcast to be listened to.
Yes, very good.
That's, uh, that's Joe's jingle.
Right now it's Jeffrey Lewis time.
We're going to just play it off a CD.
Hope you enjoy this listeners.
This is called the East River.
Jeffrey Lewis.
Sorry, I've got things in my throat.
Things?
Frogs.
Uh, what other things do you have in your throat?
Saws.
No, I'm not saws.
Well, as in a sore throat, polyps.
Polyps.
Nodes.
Maybe I've got nodes and frogs in there anyway, I'm sorry about that.
Hope you enjoyed that, listeners.
Geoffrey Lewis from his album.
I think it's just been released and it's called The Last Time I Took Acid, I Went Insane.
So it's a cautionary tale there for you.
Now we're going to launch Text the Nation early this week.
because we thought that maybe it would be better to give people more of a chance to send their ideas in, you know what I mean, rather than leaving it to the last half of the show.
Yeah.
And then you haven't got enough time, right, to respond, if you want to respond.
So let's have the jingle.
Text the nation.
Text, text, text.
Text the nation.
What if I don't want to?
Text the nation.
But I'm using email.
Is that a problem?
It doesn't matter, text.
Yes, Text the Nation listeners is the part of the show where we introduce a subject and you text us about it and then we read the best ones out.
Now this one you thought of, right, Joe?
Yeah, but there's no need to pin responsibility on me so early in the proceedings.
I mean, it sounds like you're setting me up for a fall there.
That's what you do to me.
Yeah, but you're not allowed to do it to me It's what's called a one-way street All right.
Okay the traffic signs.
Okay.
Sorry officer So well, you can correct me when I go sometimes I do that to you if it's going badly Yeah, if it's going well, then I like to share the credit
That's the best technique.
Yeah.
Well, my understanding of your idea for Text the Nation is that this is a kind of street acting or public performances that you do pretty much for your own benefit in order to disguise something else.
Yeah.
So for instance, if you are walking down the street
and you see maybe an attractive lady or man walking past a lady man or an attractive lady man and you want to sneak another look at them you might pretend that you're lost momentarily in order to avoid just looking like a lech yeah right so you might pretend to be lost and look left and right and up and down with sort of expression on your face going
Where is the road I'm looking for?
So that your glances sweep across the regions you're interested in.
Exactly, exactly.
A similar thing can be done on the underground if you want to look at a detractive person at a detractive person.
A detractive person.
At an attractive ATAT.
sitting opposite you on the tube.
And this is another bit of, what are we calling it?
Street acting.
Yes.
I don't know what it would be called, like private mime or something.
You're reading a newspaper and you just read the article at the very top of the page.
Do you ever do that?
And then you just adjust your eye line and inch above.
And glance over the top of the paper.
And look at the person, yeah.
And then if there's any sense that they're looking back at you, you quickly pop down to the article.
Does that work?
I'm practicing it now on Adam with a piece of paper.
Well, the nice thing that you can see, can't you?
Yeah, yeah.
The nice thing about that is that you can get some reading done at the same time.
Yes.
But you don't have to be.
I mean, here's a couple of things that I do, right?
Sometimes when I'm, funnily enough, going the wrong way down a one-way street on my bike, which I know is wrong and evil and dirty and bad, and it's one of the many reasons that people hate cyclists,
What I do to excuse the practice is I sometimes I pause every now and again and I look around as if I'm just about to dismount and get onto the pavement and go into a doorway in a building.
What are you disguising there?
What are you covering up?
I'm covering up the fact that I'm brazenly cycling the wrong way down a one-way street.
So in my head I'm thinking, what I'm displaying to the public is, oh it's okay, I'm not going down a one-way street.
I'm actually just about to get off my bike and go into one of these doorways here.
I'm just checking to see which the right doorway is.
So if you tell me that I can't go the wrong way down a one-way street, you'd be wrong because I'm just about to get off my bike so... That's good.
In your face.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
And before they know it, I'm at the end of the one-way street.
Wow.
And the king, I've gone right the way down that runway street the wrong way.
Because I was looking for a doorway.
Here's, I've thought of another one I do.
Yeah.
If I turn up at, say, a cinema or a place where I'm meeting a friend, and the friend is late, I don't want to look like a loser.
And I think this is something that a lot of people do.
Sure.
So I get my mobile phone out.
Yeah.
And just pretend to be dealing with texts.
Oh, yeah.
And what I'm actually doing is reading really old texts that I've read before.
Yeah.
And I don't need to read them.
I just randomly press buttons sometimes.
Exactly, to make it look as if you're really busy.
Not even switched on.
Do you ever pretend to be taking a call?
Definitely.
For any reason?
Under what circumstance would you pretend to take a mobile phone call?
Back of a taxi.
I'm sure I've done it.
Back of a taxi is a classic place for doing all kinds of pretending.
Right.
To avoid talking to the taxi driver.
Right.
If he's a chatty man and you think, I just can't face it, definitely do a little pretend phone call.
And here's another thing I do in taxis sometimes.
I ostentatiously put in my headphones and then, because I don't want to be rude and just imply that I'm just going to listen to music to avoid talking to him, I take out my notebook and I pretend to be making notes.
about the music I'm listening to because that's my job.
Right.
Right?
Because I'm an A&R guy.
You are an A&R guy.
Or I'm a journalist.
Or I'm a radio DJ.
You're an A&R and an S and an E guy.
So that's text the nation this week.
Get your ideas in.
Things that you pretend to do to cover for other behaviour.
We're trying to think of a good term for it.
Public pretending?
Public pretending, street mime.
Not sure, but fake behaviour that covers other behaviour.
Okay.
The text number is 64046.
Nicely remembered.
uh 6 4 0 4 6 the email is adamandjo.6music at bbc.co.uk just gone 9 30 here on 6 music it's time for the news oh blimey that was black kids with what's it called i'm not going to teach your boyfriend how to dance this is adamandjo on bbc6 music and now our producer ben
when we came in this morning told us that he had some mystery audio to play us.
Neither Adam and I have any idea what this is.
And this is unusual behaviour for Ben, isn't it?
It's exciting.
Ben is turning into a flamboyant producer who comes up with all kinds of flourishes to improve and enrich our lives.
We appreciate it very much.
And we've been trying to gauge whether this surprise bit of audio is going to be genuinely surprising or a little bit disappointing.
We don't know anything about what this could be.
In the past, we had a very exciting audio clip from Fiona Bruce.
One from Stephen Fry.
What else?
Those are the only surprises we've really had.
Oh, we had the teacher on the phone was a surprise for you.
That was a great... Once or twice I've surprised Adam.
But never have we had our producer surprise us both.
So we're basically excited, but also because we're quite experienced and world-weary, we are expecting to be disappointed.
So what's the best thing this piece of audio could be, Adam?
The very best.
Well, personally speaking, David Bowie.
Saying that he lists a piece of audio with David Bowie saying he listens to the show.
Yeah, I mean, but there's no reason for it.
It's got to be reacting from like if you were David Bowie and you listen to the show.
Listen to David Bowie.
I just want to say that I listen to your program, me and Joey, and the little gnomes in the bottom of the garden, and we really enjoy it very much.
We'd like to come on and do a song wars with you.
Yes, that's right.
You mentioned a while back that you'd like famous people to mentor your song war songs.
I'd very much like to mentor Joe, because he's my favourite.
I should very much like to mentor Joe.
So that's the best it could be, and if he was mentoring me as well.
That would be amazing.
Who would I get to be mentored by?
Nobody.
Oh, Scooch.
Hey, this is Jackie from Scooch.
Hello, this is Craig from Scooch.
Love the show.
We're coming on to mentor you.
Get ready for Scooch.
That would be your favourite thing.
Yeah.
And what's the most disappointing thing it could be?
Maybe just a recording of Ben as a child.
Hello, this is my lean class.
Oh, come on, that would be exciting.
Would it?
Would you get excited about that?
Yeah, she's attractive.
How about you?
Who would you think was disappointing?
Oh, disappointing?
Well, if it was a recording of Ben as a child or something, that would be disappointing.
Yeah.
Maybe if it was, I don't know.
I don't know.
I think we better just hear it.
Yeah, we should.
So here is the mystery audio.
Hi Adam and Jo, this is the Icelandic ice maiden.
Just wondering what's going on really.
I've been waiting quite some time for my song wars.
Nothing seems to be happening.
He's been keeping me hanging on for weeks and weeks, but then nothing happens.
So I'm going to leave it up to you guys to make the final decision.
You've got my phone number, you've got my email address, so maybe I'll hear from you, maybe I won't.
So just to fill people in, right?
This is a lady that first got in touch with the show a few weeks ago.
What's her name?
Something... Sif Goodman's daughter?
No, that's Bjork's name.
But it's something like that.
And she claimed to be a glamorous model, which we laughed off.
We went on her website.
She is a glamorous model.
Yeah, she's very glamorous.
She's incredibly beautiful and she's an Icelandic lady.
I actually went home and boasted about the fact of my wife, which caused a little bit of domestic problems.
And so I was sort of, in a way, part of me was hoping the problem might have just gone away, you know, and it's one of those things that goes out of your life.
So hearing Sif on the phone there, she has a good tone.
Did you tell listeners that we had promised maybe to do an Icelandic, a Nordic, a Björk, Fleet Fox's style?
I know they're not Icelandic, but a kind of... Yeah, who's that band that we were playing the other day?
A kind of echoey, folky song wars.
They're not called tongue, but there's another band with a... Tongue or a bit like that.
Yeah.
We had sort of talked about doing that, dedicated to her.
Yes.
And Icelandic... In fact, was it even her suggestion that we do that?
I think it was, yeah.
And that's why she's built up a sense of expectation.
And what a great distillation of a disappointed lady's tone there.
I know.
Do you know, she really captured something there that sends a chill down a man's spine.
And then further down the spine.
Yeah, to the grinal area.
Plus the Icelandic accent is adorable.
It's very adorable, but she does sound disappointed and that there's a sort of note of resignation in there as if she never expected that we'd do it in the first place and that we've damned hopes that were... She's thrown down the sexy gauntlet.
She's thrown down a sexy lacy gauntlet.
What are you gonna do?
Are you gonna pick up the Lacey Gauntlets?
We'd better do it then, hadn't we?
If I start picking up Lacey Gauntlets... Your wife will be an upset.
My wife's gonna get beaten to death.
Yeah, but you're just writing her a song.
That's true, isn't it?
Yeah.
There's no actual... And if your wife listens to that, there's no way she can say that she shouldn't respond to that.
That's true, isn't it?
What are you going to do?
We've got to write the song and then we've got to get her in the studio.
Yeah, we do.
We do have to get her in the studio and do some really sort of uncomfortable radio.
Yeah, and then we'll both get fired.
There'll be a big sleaze scandal.
Right.
You know, because people don't like it when men of a certain age get sleazy and lecherous with beautiful women.
Doesn't do well for anyone, right?
But does well for a man of a certain age.
It's nice when it's happening.
Anyway, listen, so there you go.
Thank you very much, Sif, though, for your message.
Thanks, Ben, for that surprise.
Did she call off her own accord, or did you provoke that?
Kind of provoked it.
Oh, you provoked it, you lunatic.
Well, I suppose in a way that makes it better, because she would be insane if she just called off her own accord.
I don't think so.
I would have liked that.
Really?
Here's another track for you listeners.
This is more of the current vogue for Crazy Sounds of the Eighties, Empire of the Sun with Walking on a Dream.
How?
It's to Google Empire of the Sun and see how many pages up the search they take over from images of the Steven Spielberg film.
Yes.
Well, they would have a hard time at the moment, though, because presumably Empire of the Sun hits her up after Bale's tirade.
Do you think?
Yeah.
Why would people search for Empire of the Sun so that they could be reminded when he was innocent?
Yes, exactly.
Where he got his stars.
That's right.
Yeah, well at the moment you get two pages of Empire of the Sun's Spielberg imagery, and then on page three, the crazy Aussie 80s retro band start popping up.
I like their outfits.
You were talking last week about their crazy poster.
I was thinking about the fact that maybe, because they are extremely ludicrously dressed, right?
Like no one else at the moment.
Well, he's got, one of them's got the Adam Ant sort of band across his eyes.
White stripe thing.
And a kind of bellowy-sum, spiky peroxide hairdo.
Nice bellowy-sum reference.
Thanks, mate.
And a Michael Jackson mid-90s style sort of, uh, king of, of chocolate land or wherever Michael Jackson was king of.
You know, the place in Chichi Chichi Bang Bang.
What was that place called?
Yeah, it was called Chocolate Land.
Chocolate Land.
Emperor of a fictional, uh, Rococo State.
Yes.
And then the guy, it's all quite Adam and the ants actually, but then they've also got some Frank Herbert dune style imagery, a futuristic city, and then they've got a bit of Rudyard Kipling style tiger action.
Presumably these chaps were quite badly picked on as young Australian boys.
Do you think so?
They've got a touch of the sort of mica
flamboyant.
Because Australia, when they were growing up, presumably, this is a very broad generalisation about the culture.
Looking forward to it.
But I mean, it would not be one of the kindest places to be flamboyant in that way, growing up as an Australian teen.
It's quite a rough, tough... Yeah, we've both seen the film Australia, so we know quite a lot about the reality of life in that country.
Exactly.
If you're not out there droving and you're fully heterosexual, you're going to get a bad time, generally, I would think, right?
Compared to, for example, the Kiwis, who are a lot softer.
I was watching the new series of Flight of the Conchords.
Yes.
Which is going out in the States at the moment, and it is wicked.
There's a very funny episode about the... They go to war with the Australians.
Right.
And there's some Australian guys who start teasing them and torturing them, and then later on, Germaine gets an Australian girlfriend and...
That causes all kinds of problems, directed by Michel Gondry.
It's really great, the second series.
Anyway, that's By the By.
But this is inspired as well by all things 80s, of course.
And Joe's got an 80s free play coming up.
And we were thinking as well that maybe we should do an 80s song wars.
But now we're conflicted by Sif.
Because of Sif's passionate message.
Incidentally, do you think Sif used to be known as Jif?
Yeah, then she had her name changed so she was more recognisable across Europe.
She had to less spend... what?
She had to spend less money on branding all her pencils.
Yes.
and her business cards and letterheadings.
So what should we do?
Should we go for an 80s song or should we appease Sif and pick up her gauntlet?
Well, the edge is taken off Sif's plea because Ben provoked it.
Right.
You know what?
If she'd actually called in and left that message, that would be different.
Well, she did that.
I mean, did she?
She was happy to do so.
Did she?
Yeah.
So it's as good as?
Well, let us know, listeners, what you think.
Do you want us to do a sort of Icelandic song wars in a Björk style, or would you rather we did the ultimate 80s song wars, to try and create songs that sound as 80s as physically possible?
Yeah, the ultimate 80s song.
I mean, most of our jingles, like Garageband is good for doing that because a lot of those sounds are very 80s.
And I do an 80s singing voice quite a lot on my song wars anyway.
What's that?
It's sort of that.
Oh, I see.
Martin Fry.
Exactly.
Yeah.
The declarative.
Is that a word?
Declamatory.
But I would do something very different.
Yes.
For this one.
I'm going to play one of those kind of tracks a bit later on.
A new wavy sort of thing by new music.
But here's some 80s bunkum for you.
This is a track from the Human League album Hysteria.
Was it their follow-up to Dare?
Was it?
I think it might have been, or was there one in between?
I can't quite remember, but it was definitely their attempt to recover the success of Dare and release another amazingly classic album.
It didn't quite happen, but it's got one or two very good tracks on it, including this one, which is called Louise.
Here it is.
Good little spoken word passage there.
What kind of wounds do you not want to heal then apart from ones that make you feel really good?
Those are the only ones.
Oh, right, right.
Yeah.
Which aren't really wounds, are they, if they've made you feel good?
Not as such.
They're pleasure wounds.
Yeah, it's not like the film Crash.
No.
No, not that sort of pleasure wound.
Um, this is Adam and Joel in BBC Six Music.
That was, uh, Human League with Louise.
Sounded good, man.
It was so stripped down.
Yeah.
And actually that galvanised us into thinking that maybe we should go for the 80s for Song Wars.
Well, we're letting, we're still going to take listener votes on that, I think.
Okay.
See what the listeners think.
We also noticed there that obviously that had a spoken word passage and we were thinking that was quite popular in the 80s.
We could think of two other 80s songs that have spoken word passages, The Look of Love by ABC.
What does he say there?
He goes, Martin, some people say Martin, one day you might find true love.
I say maybe, but I still can't find the answer to the one thing, the one thing.
and that you can't find or something.
He does that, yeah, that's brilliant.
Yeah, he does a great sort of musical site.
And then Fantastic Day by haircut100 also had a bit where he goes, I tried to shave myself again, be a happier guy, something like that.
Does he say shave myself or save myself?
Well, I always used to hear it as Shane.
That'd be a happier guy.
Yeah, that's right.
So if we did an 80s song wars, we'd definitely have to have a spoken word.
Yeah, spoken word passage in it.
Yeah.
But let us know what you think, whether we should do the Icelandic one or an ultimate 80s song wars.
We're going to play a trail and then we've got a session track coming up from Young Marble Giants from the John Peel show.
I'm looking forward to hearing that.
And then I think we'll catch up with Text the Nation just after the top of the hour.
This is Adam and Jo here on BBC Six Music.
This is the voice of the big, pretty castle.
It is the top of the hour.
Ooh, that's wonderful.
I got so bored with the last hour and had it scored.
So there was a question mark next to that one in your list, Joe, at the beginning of the show.
You were putting question marks next to certain songs you weren't absolutely 100% about.
Well, I don't know.
I was listening, sort of half listening.
I was actually reading some text donations, but it sounded all right.
It sounded a bit like something that might be used on a mobile phone.
I think it was at some point.
Oh, was it?
There you go.
Well, then I should have put a cross by that one.
That was Super Naturals with Smile.
No insult to them.
No, no, you wouldn't want to insult the supernaturals.
No, but, you know, maybe it's been heard enough already.
Maybe.
But music, we should be playing exciting new stuff like Louise by the Human League.
There you go.
Now it's time for Text the Nation.
Let's have a jingle.
Text the Nation.
Text, text, text.
Text the Nation.
What if I don't want to?
Text the Nation.
It doesn't matter.
Text.
So the subject of Text the Nation listeners this week is street acting or what are we going to call it?
Public pretending.
Things that you do in public, sort of miming that you do to mask some forbidden behaviour or embarrassing behaviour.
Sometimes.
It doesn't necessarily have to be mimed.
It's just a little bit of theatre to cover something up, for example.
You get the idea when we read some out.
I've got one more example from my own locker here.
Sometimes when I'm in a shop, right, and I've gone down and done a bit of browsing, but the browsing has taken a bit too long for me to make a speedy exit, especially if I'm the only person in the shop.
The shop assistant is there, right?
And I'm embarrassed that I don't intend to buy anything.
So I want to just get out of the shop but I can't face it.
So I say to the shop assistant, what time are you closing tonight?
You don't?
Yeah.
Really?
To imply that I might be coming back.
Coming back.
I haven't got my wallet or sometimes I pack my trousers or look in my wallet and go, oh!
As if I'm going to go out to the cash machine and then come back.
Ah, I think I might have done that one.
I'm, what's on your clothes?
I'll be, I'll be, I'm, cause I'm coming back.
That's in a small shop where you're the only customer.
Exactly.
And the shopkeeper looks pretty excited.
Right, exactly.
And where you've had to say hello on the way in.
Yeah.
Cause sometimes it can be weird to go into a shop with just you and the shopkeeper and not say something to them.
Right.
It's like walking into someone's front room and looking at some of their belongings and just walking out again.
I know it's, and it's rude not to really.
And then it's even ruder not to buy something or you can sense the disappointment.
Especially if the shop is full of quite weird or quirky items.
Quirky items.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, you go in there and you sort of think, ooh, look, they've got quirky items in there.
It's run by Pauline Quirk.
Right, exactly.
Pauline Quirk's working there.
She's filled it with loads of her little, uh, the shop is called Quirk Box and she's filled it with loads of little knick-knacks and things she's found and you, you get seduced into going into that, into Quirk Box.
But then you, you'd have no intention of buying anything.
Not only do you have to grin right the way through your browsing, right?
And sort of go,
You don't have to.
I know, but you have to.
Otherwise, Quirk might start weeping because she knows that you hate the shop.
Well, you grin because the products are making you look so happy.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I'm sort of thinking, love your shop.
That's just inane.
What I'm implying is Pauline, I love Quirkbox.
She'll be desperate for you to get out of the shop.
She'll even have her finger hovering over the alert, the police alert.
Listen, obviously Pauline or the shop assistant
doesn't care at all about my reaction.
No, because her primary source of income is Birds of a Feather DVDs.
Yeah.
The shop's just a sideline.
Listen, it's more to Pauline than Birds of a Feather and Quirkbox.
Yeah, she's a very accomplished actress.
Yeah, that's true.
But what I'm saying is that this is the thing about this text the nation.
These things are almost entirely for your own peace of mind.
Now you've filled up the whole allocated link time with your story.
Well, let's have a couple of suggestions.
Here are some that have come in from listeners for public pretending.
This is from Simone in Stoke.
If I trip while walking down the street, I'll immediately start to run, to disguise the trip as a kind of start to my run.
I still do it, even though I've witnessed others doing it with very unconvincing results.
Yeah.
So, masking a trip as a kind of... In fact, I saw... I went to dinner with the brilliant and lovely magician Darren Brown once.
Yeah.
And we were coming out of the restaurant and he tripped.
and he fell over quite badly he was going to literally fall on his face and his recovery was so flamboyant you know he had to really swing his arms to keep himself from falling over yeah and he turned it into a big sort of ballet move right but there was so much momentum and kinetics that the ballet move was was really huge and flamboyant
So it was a very eccentric bit of sudden physical movement.
That's the thing, sometimes to recover from those things.
But he did it brilliantly is the end of my story.
He went completely the other way, he made it huge and ridiculous and therefore brilliantly recovered.
That's one way of going.
A friend of mine told me a story about when he was out cycling and he was going round and round about, he wasn't paying enough attention and he wiped out spectacularly in front of a lot of traffic, right?
Traffic all came to a halt
Yeah, people were sort of gasping a little bit because it looked as if he might have really done his... He was centre stage, everyone's staring at him.
Yeah, yeah.
And he'd really bashed his leg quite badly, so he got up and his leg immediately buckled because it was so painful.
So it was double humiliation for the guy, he was still there, because in that situation all you want to do is be somewhere else.
Yeah.
So instead he stood up and he bowed.
He turned round and bowed to everyone who was watching.
And then he sort of put his hands in the air like, yay, I'm the champion.
That's the perfect response.
Right.
And then he got on his bike and hobbled off because his leg was absolutely magnetic.
And then went somewhere in private and screamed.
Started screaming and weeping.
Here's another one from a listener.
This is from JP in, I don't know how to say that place.
How do you say that place?
uh ancient ancient uh he says and this is a good one i think everybody does this if i'm on a squeaky chair and it makes a fart noise i have to wiggle and shuffle to replicate the noise to prove that it was the chair and not me everybody does that absolutely
And then sometimes you do it if you do do a fart.
That's the thing.
And then you desperately think, well, what am I sitting on?
Airborne... Maybe I can make it make a similar noise.
Quick, quick.
Airborne toxic events are the cause of a great deal of public pretending.
because you're trying, obviously that's a massive thing that you want to cover up a lot of the time, right?
What happens to me sometimes, and this happened the other day, I was outdoors, I was coming out of Sainsbury's and there was a covered walkway there and it was quite a blustery day, so I thought this is an ideal opportunity for an airborne toxic event and there's no one around, so I unleashed the event, but at that moment a couple came out from a store, right, and ploughed directly through the airborne toxic event, right?
to the extent that I was certain that they would have had to say something, because it wasn't, it was quite a severe attack.
Of the windy.
Yes, yes.
So, again, mainly for my own benefit, I just started talking and humming to myself to cover up whatever comments they might have made.
I thought that would be a better thing to do than to actually hear.
Because I was terrified that I might hear them going, did you smell that airborne toxic event from that revolting man?
If you ever wonder when you actually started going insane, that was the moment.
That was the moment when you stepped over the line.
No, no, I'm not hearing your comments about my father.
That doesn't even fit the text the nation remit.
That's just mad.
That's when we do madness.
OK.
Here's some music.
Yeah.
Are we going to say?
No, I was going to say that we're going to play some music.
Yeah.
Well, we are.
Yeah.
This is now who's the band and what's the name of the band is winter sleep.
Right.
And the track is Oblivion.
There you go, that's Wintersleep.
Thanks very much.
Thanks for Wintersleep.
I'm 17 years old.
There you go, there's Wintersleep.
They're from Nova Scotia.
Thank you.
Here's your Wintersleep.
It says on the notes here, you may be familiar with their side project Holy F.
No.
So that's a no, Ben.
But they played it a lot on 6 Music last year.
There's a picture of them.
Our producer, Ben, started to put full-colour pictures of the bands on our sheet.
Aspect ratio's off, though, Ben.
Yeah, they're a bit compressed.
That looks like a 4x3 that's been squashed to 16x9, Ben.
A couple of them are a little on the chubby side anyway, I think, and it's not doing them any favours to have the photo squashed.
They're certainly not dressing up, are they?
Not like Empire of the Sun.
There's lots of sweaters and shirts hanging out and scruffy jeans.
What kind of impression are they thinking they're going to make like that?
You know what I mean?
He hasn't even polished his trainers.
It's as if they've been asleep all winter.
Now, we had a couple of bits of feedback, I suppose you would call it, about the show that kind of crossed over into the public sphere during the week.
We did.
There was an article in the Media Guardian that mentioned the show that we won't go into because it's controversial.
Is it?
Why?
Because they may have... It's just best not to talk about that sort of thing.
We're not sure where they got their figures from.
You're talking about it.
Okay.
Don't.
Well, it was about the ratings, right?
Well, now you're talking about it more.
But I'm trying to explain.
It's a radio show.
People are going to be going, what's the point of bringing up a subject and then obfuscating it?
Because it's tantalising.
People can look for themselves.
You think they like to be tantalised?
Yeah.
They like to have a little bit of, you know, research to do themselves.
People loathe being tantalised.
Do they?
Yeah, they want it all on a plate.
Do they?
They want to eat it.
Well, you're the man for that job.
What do you mean by that?
Plate presentation.
I told you not to put it on the plate and immediately out came the plate with it on it.
That's what I'm saying, I'm making them happy.
Anyway, there was that and the other thing was on Radio 4's Roger Bolton presented show feedback where listeners have a chance to tell Radio 4 what they like and dislike, right?
About BBC programmes.
Yeah, there was a segment on this programme and a very lovely lady had written into feedback and told them how much she liked this show so they ended up playing a clip of it on feedback, right?
That's right.
Her name was Catherine Ayer.
I don't have a clip of her actually speaking.
She's from Darlington.
But to quote her, she said, this show has just the right blend of lightheartedness without stupidity or rudeness that other presenters resort to.
Obviously, she hasn't been listening for that long.
But that's what a lovely thing to do, and then to send it into feedback.
I was absolutely bowled over.
She sounded really nice.
And I've done you a little song, Catherine, if you're listening in celebration.
I say little.
I mean, it's barely a song.
It's more of a jingle for you.
But here it is.
Here's a little song I wrote for Catherine of Air Catherine of Air's the kind of lady I'd be proud to know Because she went on air on Radio 4's feedback to say she likes this show I bet she's very well respected by her friends and all her family Because she is
Yeah, how do you reckon she'll be feeling?
After that, really disappointed and angry.
No, she'll be very touched.
Yeah, I hope so.
You know, I mean, lots of people email us and write to the show and say nice things.
One or two email and write to the show and say horrible things.
Yeah, of course, of course.
It's a balance.
It's free speech, that's the nature of free speech.
But, you know, I'd like to, if I could, I'd like to do a song for every single one of those people.
So would I. But it's just not practical time-wise.
And I was spurred on to do that because I was so knocked out by being mentioned in the context of Roger Bolton's show.
Good old Roger Bolton, yeah?
Yeah, he helped us out years ago on The Adam and Jo Show, didn't he?
What was the show he used to do on Channel 4?
It was a similar thing.
It was a similar... Right to reply, wasn't it?
Yeah, there you go.
He used to host Right to Reply.
And he helped us out doing a goofy link.
Is that on our DVD, I wonder?
Anyway, this is turning into a boring digression.
Yeah, let's have some music and then we'll catch up with some more text-to-nations.
We've had loads and loads of examples of public pretending.
Yes.
Now, here's a free play.
This is a very 80s free play for you.
Can I make a point?
Yes.
I don't have any free plays this week because I failed to burn them off on the CD.
Has that ever happened to you?
Yeah.
I'm sure I put the CD in and pressed burn on the iTunes things and I went downstairs and watched some telly and when I came up I just didn't bother to check it.
That's one of the most tragic stories I've ever heard.
I came in this morning, nothing on the CD.
Did you have some really wild stuff that you'd picked out as well?
Oh brilliant stuff.
You can bring it in next week.
Like Louise by The Human Week.
Luckily that was in the 6th Music Library.
So you've had to go, have you challenged the library for your other free plays?
Nah.
Not really.
You've gone for fairly well-known stuff.
Yeah, they didn't have Clint Eastwood singing Gran Torino.
Ah, sorry about that.
Next week.
Well, here's a nugget that I wouldn't... Maybe it's in the library, I'm not sure.
But anyway, this is a band called New Music, Music with a K, and they were... I was watching Top of the Pops 2 the other day, and Steve Wright was introducing them playing a different track, actually, not the one I'm going to play.
And Steve Wright's introduction was, this is one of those massive Euro hits sung by a bloke who looks as if he doesn't want to be here.
He's either nervous or he knows this song is cack.
What kind of introduction is that for a band?
I love Steve Wright, but I thought that was a bit harsh.
I love new music.
I like the song that he was just about to play on top of the Pops 2, but as I said, this is a different one from the early 80s.
I think this was their third single from 1980.
This is called World of Water.
Massive attack, safe from harm.
It says on these notes, last time we played this track on the show, we asked, do you love it or hate it?
You loved it, so it's back.
Did we ask that?
You said it was rubbish, and then everyone said it was great.
No, I wouldn't have said that was rubbish.
Why would you say that was rubbish?
I got that album.
I love that album.
It doesn't sound like something cornballs would say, Ben.
No, I wouldn't have said that, Ben.
Are you sure you didn't say it was rubbish, Ben?
Perhaps I did.
Perhaps you did.
No, maybe you were just in a bad mood that day.
I don't mean to slap you down, Ben, for your effort in, like, making some retro notes.
But I don't think that's accurate.
Point of order, noted.
Get your coat and get out, Ben.
We'll produce the rest of the show ourselves.
Did you watch the Brits this week, Joe?
I didn't watch the Brits, no.
The Brits, correct me if I'm wrong, seem to be sliding back into the place they used to occupy.
I have a problem with James Corden, is that his name?
Yeah.
Not socially, I like Gavin and Stacey a lot, but I find him very hard to look at when he's not in Gavin and Stacey.
Why?
I don't know, there's something, I don't know, it's my problem, not his.
You don't like the way he fills his suits?
It's not that, it's just, I don't know.
What about Matt Thorne, the Ray Liotta guy that he does that show with?
Right, I don't mind him.
Yeah.
He was, I thought he was more objectionable than Corden on the programme.
I'm not saying that Ivan were objectionable.
On the Brits.
On the Brits, yeah.
They sort of came and went in a strange way.
Because Kylie Minogue was sometimes hosting with Matt Thorne, every now and again James Corden would pop back and say something semi-controversial and bumptious.
Like he introduced Nick Frost by saying that he was, he'd just been working with Nick on this film, Richard Curtis' film.
The boat that rocked.
The boat that rocked, but then James Corden said, and I've just been cut out of the film, and so it was a bit strange.
But you must take that.
Oh.
Doing their UFO performance.
Right.
It was very odd.
Somebody told me that was maybe a veiled dig at Robbie.
Was it?
Yeah, because Robbie's into UFOs.
He did that documentary with John Ronson on Radio 4.
No, surely they wouldn't go to those lengths.
Someone said to me.
I mean, it's not a very good dig because it looked like quite a rubbish UFO.
So the two bits of exciting gossip I got this week.
Did you want to know the other bit of exciting gossip I got this week?
Yeah, go on.
It's not really on subject, but someone told me that Zavi, that Virgin Megastore changed their name to Zavi so that they could go broke without embarrassing Richard Branson.
Right.
That's quite a good theory, isn't it?
That sounds insane.
I think it's a good theory.
Branholm, he wouldn't let that happen.
Well, no, he wouldn't let a virgin company go publicly broke, so he quickly sold it and turned it into something else.
It's such a ludicrous ruse.
It's just a good rumour.
Not saying it's true or not.
Yeah, but I want it to be true, but at the same time, I want to say it's ludicrous.
What else happened to the Brits?
I'll tell you later.
It's time for the news.
There might be something about it in the news.
It's 10.30.
Here it is.
That was Hounds of Love, covered by the future heads there.
This is Adam and Jo on BBC Six Music.
We were talking briefly about the Brits before the news.
And I didn't have that much to say other than the Brits does seem to be going back to its bad old self you know what I mean like for a while towards the end of the nineties with Brit pop and stuff it was all groovy and exciting and dangerous yeah but now it seems to be sliding back into a bit of a mulch.
Well, there's a very conservative atmosphere in the media in general, isn't there?
Yes, tough times.
So the Brits are likely to be sort of like some sort of Chinese government celebration.
I would say, though, that the best thing about it now... I would try to be tightly controlled.
Yes, yes.
Not with excellent food.
Well, that as well.
Right.
Afterwards, the Brits Aftershow thing that you get on ITV2 or wherever it is, is quite good.
They often get Sarah Cox and Rufus Hound to do coverage.
The ITV2 shows are always better, aren't they?
They're a bit shoddy and things go wrong and they sort of assume no one's really watching.
But they're good presenters, Hound and Sarah Cox, although they made one mistake.
Hound and Cox.
It's a pub.
That's right.
It'd be a good pub.
I'd go drinking there.
They made the mistake of getting Mel Blatt and Natalie Appleton, formerly of All Saints, to come in and sort of roam around interviewing people, logic being presumably that they're such megastars themselves, that all the other megastars would be delighted to talk to them.
And that philosophy paid off in a kind of way when they were accosted by Bono and the Edge.
and proceeded to do a link that I think was about 15 minutes long.
I'm not exaggerating.
And they kept on saying, Oh, they're winding us up.
They're winding us up, but we're not going to, we're going to carry on talking.
And they literally just plowed on for another like five or 10 minutes after they were wound up by the... Were they saying interesting things?
No.
It was one of the most bizarre, nothingy, pointless conversations between some very famous people.
So did you record it?
Yes, I did, but it was too boring to play on this programme.
Surely not.
It was.
I mean, it was just mind-numbing.
Every now and again, they would squeal and go, oh, you were so good at the beginning of the show.
That was the best Brits opening ever.
Oh, wow.
You're brilliant.
And then they were sort of saying, there should be another word for brilliant.
You're brilliant.
I'm paraphrasing.
It sounds good.
I'm making some of that up.
I want to hear it.
But you can probably find it on YouTube.
The other thing, of course, was Coldplay on there doing their big Coldplay act.
And now I feel as if I've seen them doing that a number of times.
They're getting really slick.
With the confetti and the special jackets.
Yeah, and Chris Martin's moves as if he's doing athletics and he's just about to hurl a javelin or something.
Do you know that move?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When he propels himself forward.
And then there's the guy who hits the big bongo drum, you know?
And he's going mad at the beginning of a song.
Kettle drum.
You know the one I mean?
Is that what it's called?
A big kettle drum?
Yeah, it's not a bongo.
Well, it's like a big bongo, isn't it?
It's like an un-bongo.
Right.
Anyway, that King Kong comes out.
Yeah, exactly.
From the Kongo.
But it's a good... Yeah, I feel as if I've seen it a lot of times, but they're really cementing, though.
They've honed their biggest band in the world, shtick, haven't they?
Don't you reckon?
Yes, I do.
With the Mighty Coldplay.
Interestingly, Coldplay were on 60 Minutes, an American programme, being interviewed by the American interviewer there, and he was interviewing Chris Martin in the studio.
And Chris Martin, at one stage in the interview, referred to a photocopied or a sort of printout pinned to the wall of the studio, which turned out to be Coldplay's rules.
In what way rules?
Well, Coldplay have a list of ten rules that they obey.
And this is genuine, this is real.
Band rules?
Yeah, this interviewer spotted these rules and he asked Chris Martin to tell him what they were and Martin took him through a couple of the rules but then the conversation moved on.
But people on the internet have freeze-framed these rules and transposed them.
Nice.
So I've got in my hand the ten rules by which Coldplay operate
the process of recording our albums, managing their band and managing their public image.
Rule one is albums must be no longer than 42 minutes and nine tracks.
Good rule.
Do you think that's a good rule?
Yeah.
Pithy?
Very good rule.
Rule number two, production must be amazing.
But with space, not overlaid, less tracks, more quality groove and swing.
The drums and rhythm are the most crucial thing to concentrate on.
Differentiate between bittersweet and science of silence, which is a reference to the verb and a Richard Ashcroft solo record.
Yeah, what do you think of that?
Well, that seems like a strange... Production must be amazing.
Yeah, it's a strange thing to actually write down and photocopy.
Less tracks, more quality.
Album is one of the rules.
Albums should be really good.
pretty much groove and swing is interesting for a rocky band like that and to put such a lot of emphasis on the drums and the rhythm drums and rhythm are the most crucial thing to concentrate on yeah so they're saying that's the thing that makes people's ears pick up kind of thing these sound like original rhythm uh eno assisted rules well this is i think they were i think they were co-formulated with eno rule number three computers are instruments not recording aids
So they're saying use a computer as a machine to make weird noises, not just as a thing to record your tracks on?
Yes, as a source of melody.
Yeah, do you think that's what that means?
Like glitching and dropout and digital interference and stuff?
Yeah.
Yes, I suppose so.
I mean, Coldplay love Radiohead and Radiohead obviously do a lot of that.
Have done a lot of that kind of thing.
Number four, imagery must be classic, colourful and different.
Come back in glorious technicolour.
I think their previous album was quite black and white, wasn't it?
And so they wanted to come back all bright and the imagery is indeed classic.
Number five, make sure videos and pictures are great before setting the release date and highly original.
Yeah.
Well, that's a good, I mean, that's a good rule though, because sometimes those things can get forgotten and then you end up with a hasty photo shoot and you just think, no, that's not right.
Yeah.
That's like the company pushing them to deliver in time, but they're saying, no, hold your ground and make sure everything's completely finished before you release it to the public.
That's a good thing to be aware of.
I'm gonna go quickly through the rest.
Number six, always keep mystery, not many interviews.
So the more interviews you've done, the less mysterious you become, and the more the public just get used to you.
You know what I mean?
Well, that's a nice rule, but it's not practical, and I don't think they've stuck to it.
No, they haven't.
They've failed on that one.
Like, Tom York's got a lot more mystery than Chris Martin.
Yeah, exactly.
And Tom York doesn't studiously avoid giving interviews.
I mean, he's just... Yeah, Chris Martin.
He's just in choosy.
But anyway, they're going to change that, obviously.
John writes the melodies Yeah, and the rest of them are a bit boring number eight is promo review copies to be recorded on vinyl Well, that's going for your idea that vinyl sounds better and maximize the right Oh, no, cuz cuz they can't be copied.
I think as well stops copying problems sounds and looks better.
Oh
right then number nine something about the nspcc and number 10 is about their charities set up something small but really enabling and constructive reference jamie oliver's 15 so they want to make a charity like jamie oliver you know something yeah small and constructive
Why do you think they would write them down and photocopy them?
They're keen on writing things down.
As part of the interview, Chris Martin talked about how he writes melodies down just on the wall, on the piano.
They have to repaint their piano at the end of every album session because he just writes notes down anywhere.
And we know he writes on his hands as well.
Anybody who does anything creative knows how important it is to write an idea down as soon as you have it.
He should write on his face like Jim Carrey in that film, Lucky No.
13 or whatever it was called.
Oh, the number 13.
Yeah.
Anyway, I was trying to think of some rules that we might go by, but I'll do those later because this link is becoming very long.
OK, here's a bit of music before that, and we should also check back with Text the Nation before the hour is up.
This is School of Seven Bells with, what is it?
I Am Under No Disguise.
All one word.
Here we go.
That's an unusual sound, isn't it?
What an unusual sound.
It's kind of magical.
Is that the right word?
School of Seven Bells with I Am Under No Disguise.
This is Adam and Joe here on BBC 6 Music.
Let's have the Text-a-Nation jingle, Ben.
Text-a-Nation.
Text, text, text.
Text-a-Nation.
What if I don't want to?
Text-a-Nation.
But I'm using email.
Is that a problem?
It doesn't matter.
Text!
Jingle Ben, Jingle Ben, Jingle all the way.
Oh what fun it is when Ben plays Jingle, he's gay.
That's just a bit of playground taunting.
And I don't mean anything by it, it just rhymed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that's very lazy use of the word gay as well.
It is.
It's completely wrong in all ways.
Yeah.
And really reprehensible.
Yeah.
Will you get your coat and leave the show now?
Yep, I'm off.
Bye.
OK, thanks very much.
We're looking for a new presenter for a popular six-music show.
He needs to be tall, haughty and lazy.
Horrible things to say!
Sorry, I didn't mean it.
It's Text the Nation time listeners, this is the part of the show, yeah, you know what happens in Text the Nation, but this week the subject is all about public pretending, miming you do to cover up for some kind of behaviour which you're embarrassed about in public, right?
Yeah.
You still getting over my song about Ben?
I like your song about Ben secretly.
We've had some very good texts that have come in.
This is one from Steve in Roehampton.
He says, sometimes I pretend to be chewing gum when walking past a pretty girl on the street because I think it makes me look cooler.
That's insane.
It's tragic, Steve.
Why would you think that?
You know what?
I've turned into my dad about chewing gum.
I think it looks dreadful.
Really?
I really do, and I see people chewing gum.
And when I see myself chewing gum sometimes, if I've been interviewed or whatever, I think that's a shame.
I shouldn't have done that.
Uh, who is it?
Adele?
Does she sing chasing pavements?
She was, she was at the Brits and she was interviewed by Mel and Sue backstage or whatever it was.
Mel and, who was it?
Mel Black and Nicole Appleton.
Anyway, she was chewing gum like for England, Adele, and it looked awful.
If I was her mum, I would say, listen, you might be a soul singing genius with lots of awards, but take that gum out of your mouth at this instant.
Here's one from Paul in Hitchin.
He says, good morning Adam and Joe.
Sometimes when I've locked my van at work, I walk away from my van and suddenly think, did I lock my van?
So I walk back to my van, unlock the van and have a jolly good look inside to cover up my obsession with thinking, did I lock my van?
Then I lock it and walk away.
Did I use the word van enough?
Paul in Hitchin.
That's a pretty good one.
Make it look deliberate.
Like if you're doing sort of insane behaviour, make it look like part of the plan.
Do you think you'd be able to tell if you saw Paul doing that?
Do you think if you think, ah, he's not looking for anything in that van, he's just trying to cover up the fact that he forgot whether he loved it.
I would never be able to tell.
Do you spot- But I will now that we've done this feature.
Right.
I'll be able to spot a lot of this miming now.
I mean, that's what mainly people are doing 90% of the time when they're in public anyway, is pretending in some way or another.
I would think.
You think?
Yeah.
Charades.
But I never, but you never think of it.
I mean, you wouldn't think to spot other people's pretending, would you?
No.
Well, no one's safe anymore.
Here's one from John in Cheshire.
He says, sometimes when I walk past scary-looking youths, etc., in the street at night, I'll avoid eye contact by pretending that I'm trying in vain to sort out the complex zips, velcro and buttons on my jacket.
It might make me look like an idiot, but it always seems to make me invisible to scary people.
Yeah.
That's just a good rule for living in the big city, isn't it?
Uh-huh.
Don't make eye contact.
Pretend you're just involved in something, you know, personal.
Yeah.
Sometimes a bit of opposite psychology is good.
Otherwise someone will step to you.
They'll assume that you're fronting on them.
And they'll step to you.
And their gats will come out.
Absolutely, they'll black you with their cat.
Nobody wants that.
No one wants that.
Sometimes if I'm passing scary utes, what I'll do is I will look as ridiculous and chirpy as I can.
Right.
Because I think why would they want to pick a fight with a stupid chirpy man?
Yeah.
Hello!
Hey!
All right, that's... That's kind of me.
Bang.
Dead.
Here's one from Sarah.
Doherty.
She says, I've pretended to stretch so I can check if the smell of BO is me.
That's a big one.
That makes sense.
I'll do an exaggerated yawn, turn my head and sniff.
I've also done a look over there.
Big point.
And then check for BO.
That's less subtle.
But the stretching is a good one.
That's a very good one.
Ben in Norwich, and here's a pretty standard one.
Not in a bad way, in a good way.
I elaborately pretend to take a phone call at a bus stop to avoid talking to a chatty tramp.
My acting was terrible, says Ben.
Hello.
Hey.
Yeah.
No, busy.
Right.
How's that, Princeton?
That's very good.
See, that's quite good.
The laugh as well, yeah.
What you mustn't do is fall into the movie trap where you're going, hey, oh, hello, Susan.
Right.
How are you?
How was the charity shop?
You know, you're saying everything back to her, which they say in movies for expositional purposes, but you never do that in real life.
At 12.30, at the bingo hall, see you there.
That kind of thing.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Don't do that.
No, well, tramps is a good one as well because you have to do a lot of acting sometimes.
You do one.
You do a fake call now.
Oh.
See how good you are at it.
Hello?
Yes, I'm Adam Buxton.
Yes, the printer is a bit repaired now.
I'm no good.
Thank you very much for your help.
Thank you for your call.
Oh.
Was that the printer?
I'm hanging up.
Phoning you back.
Yeah.
That's good.
You see, that's detail.
That's what they did.
Makes it seem more realistic.
They phoned me back during the week, you know.
Right.
It wasn't real though.
I don't know.
Was it?
No, it was.
It was actually real.
Was it?
They phoned me back and they said, uh, could you remember?
I said, I'd been on there.
Well, you asked.
I said, I'm picking up a story from last week.
I know it's right in the middle of Texanation, but
Here's one from Daisy.
You're just ignoring me now.
Carry on then.
She says, I'm superstitious, so when I see a lone magpie, I always salute it.
Yeah, my wife does that.
Really?
Yeah, good morning.
Never heard of that before.
But I don't want to look like a nutter, so when other people are around, I disguise it as scratching my forehead.
Yes, quite right.
And here's one from Tim.
If I realize I'm walking the wrong way and I need to do a 180 degree turn, I stop at the side of the street and pretend I've got a text.
I then leave the other way.
Can't say I've done that in the past.
Oh, Tommy's texted and we're not meeting at that corner.
We're meeting at the other corner.
Right.
And what's the logic, do you think?
You think that if people saw you just...
He doesn't know where he's going.
Darrin, look at that bloke.
He's got no clue where he's going.
Reveals a profound sense of public paranoia.
Darrin says, no, no, wait.
Self-consciousness.
No, Steve, wait.
He's got to call his texting.
Oh, right.
So I didn't realise, mate.
Didn't realise you were texting.
I thought you didn't realise where you were going.
Exactly.
Here's finally one from Jay Lee, which says, Dear Adam and Jo, when I'm meeting some friends in town and they call me to say they're running late, this is a very common one, I'd say, I sometimes pretend to look around for them, even if they're not arriving for ages, just because I don't want to look like a loser with no mates.
I stand on tiptoes, I stretch my neck up and look through the crowd of people and feign a look of disappointment that says, oh, that's not them.
I often end up repeating the above for the next 10 minutes.
Yes.
Everybody does that.
That's perfect.
And sometimes it's a way of kind of keeping you at arm's length, if you know what I mean.
You're right in saying that it's utterly unnecessary.
Yeah.
Like no one in the world is going to go, loser, he's obviously waiting for some friends and they haven't turned up, so he hasn't got any friends.
Yeah.
Are they?
Well, no.
No, they wouldn't.
I mean, some really appalling, like, horrible teenagers might.
Yeah.
But nobody who you would give any respect to would think that.
No, same person would.
Why do we do it?
Oi, Billy, no, mates.
That's what you're sort of thinking, someone's going to say.
I've done that myself.
Like, I remember being stood in cinema forays and people haven't turned up and I start slapping my thigh and huffing and puffing and going, oh, God.
and doing all this.
So, you know, even say the word sometimes.
Late, late.
They are so late, late.
Looking at what's your, gosh, late, late, late, they are late.
I'm waiting for the late people in this cinema foyer on my own.
That kind of thing.
Yeah, well, I'm sure it's very effective.
Well, listen, please keep them coming in, listeners.
The text number is 64046.
The email is adamandjo.6music at bbc.co.uk.
We'll get to those later.
Sorry, yeah, just to clarify, if you've just tuned in, this text the nation is about kind of public pretending that you do, you know, little things that little charades that you perform in order to cover up some kind of other behavior when you're in public.
Anyway, yes, it's time for some music.
Now, is this your... I know this is a trail for George Lamb.
This is exciting.
What do you think will be in the trail?
Danny Wallace.
Really?
Yeah.
Oh.
Trail Wallace for Lamb.
Oh, that means he's filling in for him.
I should read the... Let's play it.
Otherwise, our spiel about the trail will be longer than the trail.
This is the voice of the big, pretty castle.
It is the top of the hour.
Ooh, that's wonderful.
I got so bored with the last hour.
That's the members with Sounds of the Suburbs, or is it just Sound of the Suburbs?
Sound of the Suburbs.
It was recorded for the John Peel show on Radio 1 on the 17th of January 1979, and coincidentally enough, we're about to take you back to approximately 1979, or maybe more like 1981, because I'm going to play you now listeners something a bit ill-advised.
These are some recordings I came across of myself pretending to be a DJ when I was about 11.
Right, as opposed to pretending to be a DJ when you're almost 40.
Exactly, which is what we're doing now.
Yeah, well, that's the point of these, to show that apart from the playlist being improved, nothing's really changed.
And I don't know what this, I mean, this is going to do various things, it's going to make me acutely embarrassed.
I don't really know why I'm playing these, because it's really profoundly painful.
And I wonder whether this is the same for everybody, whether anything recorded of them before their voice broke is just, per se, really painfully embarrassing.
I think the rule is, before your voice is broken, it's all fine.
It's like laughing at a baby.
Exactly, because you're guileless then.
Yeah.
At least you should be.
The other thing is I sound amazingly posh.
I sound like Penelope Keith.
And it sounds as if I drove to school in a Rolls Royce pedal car wearing a top hat.
Scattering five pound notes to the impoverished residents of Brixton as I went to my posh delage.
That's true though, isn't it?
Not really.
I mean, we're both well spoken.
Yeah, but we used to be very well spoken.
We're not that posh.
Yeah.
It's just back then you aspired to be posh.
Everyone on Blue Peter spoke posh.
That's right.
The news people spoke posh.
That was before there was a cultural shift where children's programs and Charlie Brooker talks about this, doesn't he?
Or is it David Mitchell?
Somebody had a good rant about this.
that, in the past, children's television presenters used to talk like adults.
That's right.
Or like teachers, and now they're like the kids' mates, desperate to please the kids.
Well, let me put this in context.
Before you play your clip, I tried to find a clip of myself, right, and I knew I had one somewhere.
But it turned out that, unfortunately, a lot of it was erased.
I've got a little bit that I'll tell you later on.
But one of the other things that I found on this tape, which clearly belonged to my dad, I'd obviously borrowed one of his cassettes and used his tape recorder,
I think he'd got an assistant to go out and record travel notes, because my dad was a travel writer, right?
So he would get a reporter kind of assistant person to go out and record notes about a various place, and he would use them in his article that he was writing.
A various place.
Of various places.
Yeah.
But check out the accent on this lady, right?
I mean, this is an accent that you don't really hear anymore in modern times.
And I guess this would have been from the late 70s.
But it's quite sexy as well.
Check out what she sounds like.
No, no, no.
Sorry, Ben.
It's Fruity Lady.
This is the, this is the second, actually, let's play the, let's play the second clip.
Yeah, she's on a beach somewhere in the south of France or something, and she's describing the beach.
So there's, there should be another clip after that one, Ben.
Number three.
La Pla Pasable.
Very small beach.
The entrance fee is 1.20.
The cabins for one person, five, two people, six, for three people, eight.
Is she an English woman?
Yeah.
Two francs, a parasol, two francs.
Pedallers, three francs for half an hour.
What is going here?
Twenty francs for a quarter of an hour.
60 francs for an hour.
For that she sounds quite turned on.
60 francs for an hour.
But that's true, isn't it?
Yeah.
I mean, when was that recorded then?
Yeah, late 70s.
Late 70s.
So it's later than you think, but everybody in the public eye did aspire to speaking amazingly poshly.
Because you think that sounds almost Germanic.
She sounds almost foreign.
Yeah, I mean, her accent, her French accent is very good on that tip, so maybe she is a Euro lady, I don't know, but you would think that that kind of accent was from the 40s, like brief encounter or something almost.
But people, even in the 70s, even with the punk wars going on, that's how the middle classes spoke a lot of the time.
When did the change happen?
It happened in the mid 80s, do you think?
Yeah, when people started, you started getting estuary vowels on the BBC and stuff like that, and quite rightly, all kinds of different accents were represented.
When Damon, it's Damon
Robin did it, when he denied his poshness and started to talk like he was from some housing estate somewhere.
And in Terry Christian and regional accents and all that kind of thing, when that started being more... But that's a good thing, isn't it?
Of course, I'm not saying it's bad.
For regional accents to be reflected accurately on the BBC is a good thing.
Well, I heard someone complaining... Because it caters to the whole country.
on feedback the other day that they weren't enough regional accents.
But for children's presenters to actually kind of downgrade themselves, dumb their accents down, is maybe not such a good thing.
Or maybe it is when you listen to me pretending to be a DJ, aged 11.
Check out my playlist and also remember that I'm in character.
I'm pretending to be a DJ called John Scott.
John Scott!
When did you get the name John Scott?
I don't know.
He just sounded like business, like charismatic DJ John Scott.
So here's the first little bit.
Oh god.
Good choice.
That's brilliant, man.
Yeah.
So how old are you, like 13 or 12?
No, no, no.
11 or 12.
Oh, really?
I don't actually want, it's not that I couldn't work it out, but I don't want to work it out, because I'm frightened that I'll be older than I think I am.
John Scott's amazing.
John Scott, yes, he's very good.
I like the intonation there on some of that stuff.
He's very mellow, and he's got a really, he plays B-sides, man.
Yeah.
They've got 100 B-sides.
October is orange.
Yeah.
Here's, do you want a bit more?
Please.
Here's a bit more.
It's from playing Mannequin, okay.
Now I'll quickly just spin you a Tears for Fears latest single.
This is called Mad World and it's very original style and I knew they had to make it someday, Tears for Fears.
And I'm very glad that they have, at last, tears for fears, Mad World.
Well, elongating the last syllable.
I love the fact that John Scott's been a champion of tears for fears for so long, and he's really pleased that they're finally... Yeah, they've broken through.
Because they've got such an original sound.
man the spiel about tears for fears was actually longer i cut it down because it was so painful i talk about how depressed i've been lately and how tears for fears express how depressed i've been and how there should be more depressing music in the charts but i had to snip that out
Mad world.
So that must have been about 81.
Yeah.
So you'd have been 11.
Yeah, that's all right.
That's all right.
There's one more clip, I think, which sort of recaps the records I've played.
Here we go.
The records you've played so far have been October's Iron Check at 100.
The B is Walking on the Moon, My Goldfield, Wonderful Land, Keep Creole and the Copernauts, Annie I'm Not Your Daddy, Savannah Valley Lifeline, and this one was Shalimar, with Knight, just writing it down myself, to remember.
Nothing's changed.
Nothing has changed.
I'm playing the same music.
80s music.
But I'm still writing things down.
The last 30 years have been utterly inconsequential.
But look, listen, the reason I'm playing that is, I don't know why, just to mess my head up.
That was good, man.
That was brilliant.
And also to encourage anybody who can find similarly excruciating clips of themselves.
If you're a bloke, then before your voice broke is quite key because there's something really painful about that.
Yeah.
Or if you're a lady girl, just something really miserably embarrassing from when you were young.
Particularly our generation who had those little cassette recorders.
And like we were talking about last week, the discovery you made, that instead of having to buy a blank cassette, you could actually put bits of sellotape over the tabs of a pre-recorded tape that you had, and then go crazy recording things.
So if you have the facilities to convert any of that to MP3s and send it to us, we'd love to play some embarrassing stuff.
Have you got anything of yourself, Adam?
I do, but it's no John Scott.
And it's from even younger.
I must have been about six or seven.
Really?
So I can barely speak.
You don't want to play it?
Well, it's a bit crappy.
Let's play a real track just to give people a breather and give them an opportunity to escape.
if they want to.
This is Friendly Fires with Skeleton Boy.
I mean, it is kind of like a time capsule, this program though, isn't it?
That's very 80s as well.
That was Friendly Fires with Skeleton Boy.
This is Adam and Joe here on BBC 6 Music.
Now, Adam was not going to play us the clip of him on the radio as a child, but I just demanded that Ben played it in the studio while that record was on and we've got to play it to the listeners.
Well, what happened was I was very disappointed.
I went back and I found this tape and it was marked very old tape from when we used to live in Wales, I think.
And I must have been about seven, maybe eight, I don't know.
And what I used to do was, pre-VCRs, I would just use my dad's dictaphone to tape the audio of my favourite programmes, right?
Did you ever do that?
Yeah, I had the whole climax of Moonraker.
on audio.
And because you wanted to preserve the experience so much, I don't think I ever listened back to them.
Maybe I did, actually.
I think I listened back to the Muppets shows.
I don't think it needs too much introduction.
So it's got the beginning of a Muppet show, and then it goes into Adam Buxton as a DJ, and then it cuts out prematurely, but you're going to bridge the gap for us.
Yes, exactly.
So what I do is I start telling a joke, but then as I'm setting it up, it cuts out.
Yeah, that's just serious.
And no one ever knows.
I'm afraid.
Julie Andrews joins the Muppets on Christmas Day at a quarter to six.
Oh well, never mind.
See you tomorrow with another breakfast show at the same time.
Tomorrow.
Bye!
Oh, just a minute, we've got a joke here.
It says here, two Irishmen.
Oh dear.
Oh, two Irishmen.
Oh no.
Three men.
Two Englishmen and...
Oh dear.
It's like a young Jerry Seinfeld.
The Irishman said, bet you can't, we'll go first.
Put the watches downstairs, went down, smashed them into these pieces.
Yes, well, the Irishman put his watch in the first place, went home, had lunch, had tea, had supper, came back.
Right, so there's Terry Wogan there at the end who gets taped over the middle of the joke.
Your junk telling skills have improved.
Do you reckon?
Yeah, I mean, that's very, that joke fragments and dissipates pretty early on.
I mean, three Irishmen in and of itself is a good start.
It's a little bit racist.
It's two.
It turns out there was just one in the end.
There was two Englishmen and one Irishman.
Right.
Yeah, it's a racist.
I mean, in the 70s though, it was all fine.
It was like on TV, it was all Irishmen, Scotsmen, all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, that was all fine.
But that was good.
I think I don't necessarily think we need to hear the rest.
The thrill there was just... Do you want to hear the punchline?
Okay.
Is it long?
It's very poor quality.
So basically, right, the Irishman has challenged the Englishman and said, I bet you I can slide my watch down this banister, go home and have all these meals and then come back and grab it before it smashes, right?
And so the Englishman do it, but their watches smash into a million pieces, but the Irishman does it and he manages it.
So they're saying, how did you do that?
And I think I come back and I do a little characterization for the Englishman, how they might talk.
And I add some extra touches like, you know, those watches cost a lot of money, you know.
I added that myself, right?
That wasn't part of the original joke.
And then I come back and I do like a slight accent for the Irishman explaining how he did it.
Let's hear that bit then, Ben.
And he resolves his duties with...
to the top of the stairs said, how do you do that?
Those watches cost more than money you know.
And the elephant said, well, my watch is three hours small.
See you tomorrow.
You got very cheery buys going on there.
Yeah, I'm going to buy Wow, that's powerful stuff.
Nothing to be embarrassed about my watch was three hours slow though.
What a good joke I really couldn't follow the joke because that's how he met was able to catch the watch on the banister Cuz it's a bit rambly you still haven't what are you still?
Managed to sort that out
I do go off in various different directions.
Bit rambly.
It's all there though, isn't it?
It does.
It proves to everybody that nothing changes.
No, plus a change.
Yeah.
Anyway, there you go.
If you've got your own excruciating childhood audio clips to send in, we'd love to hear them.
Yeah.
Can we give them an address?
What was the address again, Ben?
Well, we want people to send MP3s, really.
That's the best thing, isn't it?
You know, people should be able to do that.
Adam and Joe, that's an ampersand, not A-N-D, dot six music at bbc.co.uk.
That's the address for anything like that.
You'd like to send us?
Oh, I feel quite exhausted and dirty.
Purged.
Yeah, do you feel dirty?
I feel purged.
Do you?
Yeah.
Clean.
Exorcised.
Okay, good.
I think we should stop the show.
This should be the last one.
Alright then, this is Billy Bragg with sexuality.
This is Dom Scott for you, yeah?
And I'll be with you for the next hour, playing the best from the charts and the best of your choice.
Start off by getting things on the road with this track.
The B-side to Nobody's Fool by Heather 100.
It's called October is Iron.
Las Vegas there with flowers and football tops.
You're listening to Adam and Joe here on BBC 6 Music.
It's a great pleasure to have you along.
Last year with John Scott.
Hello!
No, last week we did a segment called Pop Psychology where we were offering psychological help to young bands and we spoke to Liam from the Stroking Coats and offered him some advice on how to get that band going.
We'll come back to this segment next week probably
But one of the problems with stroking coats was they were worried that their dads were interfering too much.
They were a young band, 15, 16 year olds, and their dads were overstepping the boundaries, you know, and maybe interfering too much.
And we suggested that they ditch their dads or got their dads on stage and stuff like that.
We were suggesting humiliating the dads.
That was one of our main bits of advice was lose the dads or make them a feature of ridicule.
Yeah, so if you were listening to that, you might be interested in this email we've received from Rich.
I assume that's short for Richard.
He says, Adam and Joe, I'm standing up for the rights of all dads out there that help with their son's band.
I just listened to the podcast in which Liam from Stroking Coats was interviewed.
And what have you started?
I bet he never thought we'd hear it, because I'm one of the dads.
Not Liam's dad, but Chris's dad, the lead guitarist.
Now look, 16-year-olds can't drive tour buses or vans, and taxis are pretty dear these days, and trying to carry your bass guitar and amp on a pushbike, I wouldn't advise it.
It's also a pretty long walk to some of the gigs, us dads secure for them.
Can you see where I'm going with this?
He says, this is an angry dad.
As dads, I think it's important that we impart some of our worldly knowledge and experiences onto them, but we draw the line onto passing on our flares and tank tops.
We think they're an excellent young band, they've done a lot with our support in a short space of time, and hopefully some of your listeners logging onto their Myspace, then he tries to plug the band.
Fair enough, he's a dad.
Can you not remember when your parents took an interest in something you were doing as a youngster and you looked back and thought, you know, they were right.
So you see dads play an important role.
That's something parents say to you all the time, isn't it, when you get older you'll understand.
But I cannot for the life of me remember a single moment where I've ever gone, you know, he was right.
No, I just don't think... I think that's fundamentally... Not that they weren't, right?
I think it's fundamentally at odds, or it should be at odds with what you're interested in at that age, you know?
Well, the dad shouldn't expect to pay off to that kind of advice.
No.
It's unconditional.
I know what he means about, listen, as a dad, of course, what are you going to do?
You want the best for your sons or daughters, right?
You're going to drive them around, you're going to make sure they're okay, you want to get them safe to the gigs and get them back and all that kind of thing.
But it is, there's no getting away from the fact that it is at odds with the beating heart of rock and roll.
Well, it's when a dad tries to have creative control.
That's when you have big trubs.
Right.
Okay, it's fine as a manager and organisational, but you don't want them writing the songs.
Do you?
or playing.
It's all you're trying to say, but thank you very much for emailing, Richard.
It's now time for the news.
Now, Ben, there was quite a big cross on the playlist after John Scott went through it earlier on, indicating which songs he wanted dropped.
And John Scott does not like Oasis.
No.
They know her got 100.
John Scott likes Shalimar.
And October is orange, the B-side.
D'you have to be very depressing.
How dare you mock me.
So John Scott doesn't want any more oasis.
What Scott says goes.
You don't want to be on the receiving end of Scott's Roth.
Tiny little John Scott.
Tiny little rain of fists from the Scott Meister.
This is Adam and Jo on BBC Six Music.
It's time for some more text-the-nations now, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Let's wrap this up.
Jingle band, please.
Text-a-nation.
Text, text, text.
Text-a-nation.
What if I don't want to?
Text-a-nation.
But I'm using email.
Is that a problem?
It doesn't matter.
Text!
Now we've got lots of really good ones and we won't be able to get through them all, unfortunately, so... Hey, but listen, we might be able to include a few in the podcast, right?
That's true, actually.
Yeah, bonus ones in the podcast.
Okay, but here are some.
This is from Jenny.
Sometimes, just to set up the premise, this is public performance.
Things you pretend that you're doing in order to get out of different...
difficult social situations.
Yeah, to cover up things that you're embarrassed or awkward about.
Behavior you're embarrassed about.
Yeah, so Jenny says, sometimes when I get off the bus in the morning, I pretend I need to get off first and just run down the street as if I'm in a rush to get to work.
The truth is, it doesn't really matter what time I get to work.
I think I just like the excitement of running.
She's busy.
She's got something to be.
Pretending to be.
I'm busy.
Oh, look.
Yes.
John in Wrexham says, sometimes when I fall into a daze at work and I spot that someone has noticed my lack of activity, I'll pick up and shake my computer mouse or fiddle with the wires behind the computer in an attempt to blame it on some sort of IT problem.
I sometimes even say something like, at last, or that's got it before hurriedly getting back to looking busy, says John in Wrexham.
Nice one, John.
At last!
I mean, at last I can do some work.
That's basically half of what you do in an office anyway, though, isn't it?
Yeah, that's basically crippling Britain's productivity.
It's trying to look busy and staring at the screen.
Something I do every now and again when I'm in that situation is I will, again, use my notebook.
A notebook is a very useful thing to have around you at all times, like for when you've got real ideas or when you just want to pretend, you know?
I'll look at the screen, then I'll look down and pretend to be making notes.
I'm making notes from the things I'm looking at on the screen.
Yes, good prop.
Robert in Bermondsey says sometimes while listening to the Adam and Jo podcast while in public, I'll emit a loud involuntary bark of laughter which tends to attract attention.
When this happens I'll often clutch the cable of my iPod next to my phone, creating a makeshift hands-free kit, then improvise an amusing phone conversation to mask the fact that I'm laughing in the loneliest way possible.
That's quite elaborate, isn't it?
But, I mean, I would say that's a particularly weird one, because who would begrudge another person a bit of laughter?
Well, some people don't understand podcasts.
Right, right.
Well, they don't understand the nature of that kind of thing.
Have you ever been tempted to ask someone what they were listening to when they laugh out loud?
No, I really have.
Have you?
Yeah.
I almost have just said, excuse me, sorry to interrupt, but what are you laughing at?
Is that insane?
Here's one from Tim.
No, it's perfectly logical.
It's good.
Tim says, if I need to spin 180 degrees in the street, I used to put my finger up in the air like I'd forgotten something.
Now I just purposefully turn around as if my last step is the exact destination I want to get to, then walk back and revel in the thought that anyone around me has just witnessed that slightly odd and amusing sight of someone completely changing direction.
I like the finger in the air.
That's quite sort of forties, isn't it?
Ah!
and turning round that's the opposite that's not hiding something it's it's going over the top with it in order to sort of make it deliberate yeah make it super conspicuous exactly ian in knottingham says sometimes when i'm at work i like to grab a clipboard and just walk around the stock room picking up various products pretending to observe them then making pretend notes yeah pretend notes is where it's at for me as well yeah that's a kind of time-wasting technique i suppose
Here's one from Jason Ward, seeing someone famous and pretending you don't know who they are as you don't want to appear rude.
This happened to me the other week when I literally bumped into Joe at Sainsbury's in Vauxhall and had to pretend I didn't know exactly who he was.
Do you remember that guy?
No I don't, he did a very good job of pretending.
uh any more well let's save a few for the podcast okay so this is an added incentive for you guys to download here's a literary tip somebody anonymously has texted in the sentence your text the nation this week seems to be a riff on irvin gothman's the presentation of the self in everyday life which i presume is a book all about this kind of
thing.
So that's a further reading tip.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
It's a reference.
But it's never going to be, Ervin Gough's never going to have presented it with the same Elan and with a little jingle at the top.
That's true.
That's where Gough falls down.
Yeah.
You always did your time, Goughman.
The Goughmeister.
Okay, thank you very much indeed for all your texts and emails.
And yes, don't forget that we will include some of them, a few little extra ones, in our podcast, which you'll be able to download from Monday evening.
But that's it for Text the Nation this week.
It's time for a trail!
That is... wickles and wackles, isn't it?
That was Pulp.
And were they in session there?
Oh, I thought it was wickles and wackles.
I prefer them.
Yeah, they were in session for John Peel's programme on Radio 1, 30th of May, 1992.
Now, just to wrap up a bit of business, we were asking you to help us decide what the next Song Wars theme should be, and it was between doing a tribute song for lovely Hif.
Sif, our beautiful model who was in touch with us a while back, and Ben, our producer, dropped a bombshell by playing a recorded phone message that she left.
She's imploring us to do a song for her.
Yeah.
And it's between that and the idea of doing some 80s songs.
We were going to try and make a song each that sounded, you know, the most powerfully evocative 80s song possible.
So basically it was a choice between trying to impress a beautiful lady that we've never met before or doing an 80s song.
And thank you for everybody who helped us make our decision.
Apparently, we're not allowed to call this a vote.
I don't know why.
It must be some more fallout from the big bomb that went off two years ago.
Yeah.
Socksgate.
Socksgate, or whatever it was.
But we can't call it a vote.
So in no way was this vote a vote.
But here are the results of the vote that isn't a vote.
It was an indication, an aggregated indication of opinion.
Yes, and what were the scores?
What were the percentages?
Are you not going to read them out?
And how did the vote pan out?
Who won the vote?
Who wasn't the vote?
68% for who?
For the 80s.
So I'm afraid, Sif, that 80s has won out.
It's going to have to wait.
I mean, we might still do that.
I don't want you to think that we're not interested in Iceland and new and songs.
I'm very interested.
uh you know we might do it at a later date but we want to make it right for the time being we're going to concentrate our efforts on doing the ultimate 80s song it seems to be the right moment to do that you know and we're going to give ourselves two weeks to do it so we won't unveil the finished songs next week but but the week after
And if you've got any suggestions listeners for any lyrical content or any particular facets of an 80s song you'd like us to try and represent for instance One of the conditions is it has to have a spoken word segment.
Yeah, we were discussing that earlier so if you can think of any other tropes that that are particular to 80s music and what about the Musical style because obviously you were a big fan of the funk.
We know dr. Scott
Yeah, but I wouldn't say, I'd say a lot of 80s was funky, but not, you know, through and through funky.
It was a weird, a lot of it was a weird hybrid of funk and rock, wasn't it?
That was one of the things that was going wrong or right, or however you look at it.
Right, that kind of gang of four, angular, choppy guitar sound, the haircut 100 type thing, as opposed to a lot of the... Well, the 80s was a long decade.
There were lots of different styles, but our challenge is to cram all those styles in.
So it sounds like the ultimate, you know, the ultimate 80s song.
Oh, man.
I'm not sure my musical drop's gonna be up to it.
I need, we need the help of an actual 80s band.
If only I could get Phil Okey to help me do something like that.
If only I could get Nick Haywood to help me do something like that.
You could cut, yeah, because if you got Haywood, you could come in with the ultimate choppy-funk masterpiece.
Exactly.
Someone out there has got to know Nick Haywood and Phil Okey.
You know?
Or, um... Or Nick Bellowy's son was still around.
Bellowy's son, surely.
What's Bellowy's son?
What about Blemange?
Although Blemange was too idiosyncratic, perhaps.
Oh, but they were good.
They were great.
What was his name, Neil?
Neil Arthur.
If you can get us in touch with any of those people and they'd be prepared to help with our 80s song wars, please get in touch.
Adamandjo.6music at bbc.co.uk.
Thanks to everyone.
Are we doing another link before we say goodbye?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So I would retract those thanks.
Yeah, take back those thanks.
No thanks to anybody.
Way premature on the thanks front.
Here's some more music.
This is Pete Fox's.
That's Fleet Foxes with... He doesn't know why.
Yeah, I'll be seeing them at the Roundhouse in London on Sunday.
I'm very excited about that.
I bet there'll be some Stevenage there.
I hope so.
Did you see Mickey O'Rourke on Jonathan O'Ross?
No.
Last night.
He was great, man.
Yeah.
People love Rourke.
He's gonna clean up at the Oscars, don't you think?
Do you think?
Yeah.
Yeah, well, his life story is inseparable from the story in the movie, right?
You would think so.
I haven't seen that movie either.
I can't wait to see it though.
I'm looking forward to it.
And he is a lovable rogue.
The nice thing about him is that he seems so genuinely contrite and he seems kind of, you know, relatively well balanced after all his ups and downs.
When are the Oscars?
Are they this Sunday?
I think they're Sunday night, yeah.
Is it?
Sunday night?
Ooh!
Imagine all the Oscar news we'll have next week.
I mean, when I say news... I can't watch them.
I got rid of my sky.
Did you?
Yeah, Credit Crunch.
Credit Crunch.
You know, I whittled down a whole load of my subscriptions on Sky.
I got rid of all the movies.
Well, will you video them?
Yes, I will.
Video them and burn them off onto a DVD or at least report.
Because they're going to do it all different.
It's going to be like a club and Jackman's doing something weird.
They're trying to save it.
No.
They're going to present the awards in a different kind of way.
club.
Yeah it promises to be a spectacular bit of car crash television.
Oh no.
So please video it because it could be good.
Will do.
Listeners thank you so much indeed for joining us we really appreciate it as ever.
Yeah thanks to everyone who's texted in the email.
And don't forget
We're just about to go and record our special extra links for the podcast right now, and you'll be able to download the whole thing, the edited highlights from this show, plus our little extra nuggets on Monday evening after our producer Ben has woven his magic with it.
We'll be back with you at the same time next week, 9 till 12 on Saturday morning here on BBC 6 Music.
Stay tuned for Liz Kershaw and have a wonderful week.
Take care.
Bye.