Monday, March 13, 2017

Unknown pleasures

Panel programmes featuring George Michael, Morrissey and Tony Blackburn discussing Everything But The Girl albums, films about breakdancing, pretentious books about Joy Division and Atlantic reissues? It's a shame they don't make 'em like Eight Days A Week anymore.

In this 1984 episode, Blackburn predictably comes across as a lecherous old fuddy-duddy, expressing profound disapproval of Joy Division but giving a positive verdict on Breakin' (which his fellow panellists both slate) largely on account of star Lucinda Dickey having "a lovely bum".

Even more predictably, Morrissey smirks and eyeballrolls his way through, evidently considering himself above both the proceedings and whatever he's being asked to comment on. Sat with his hearing aid in, he shows a remarkable lack of self-awareness by criticising Joy Division for their "affectation". Oh the irony.

George Michael, though, is something of a revelation, savaging Breakin' but most intriguingly declaring an unexpected love of the second half of Joy Division's Closer - if not the book under discussion and particularly Paul Morley's contribution to it. 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go' may have been sitting in the charts at the time, but he was showing as early as this (before the release of 'Careless Whisper', alluded to in the chat about Atlantic's back catalogue) that he was clearly no fly-by-night pop airhead.

No comments: