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Ideas, experiments, imagination.So, what was the optimum Britpop™️ year? Academics, thinkers and BBC documentary makers have wrestled over this question for many a year. Possibly even as long as it takes to listen to Be Here Now.1993 - Yanks, go home?1994 - Maybe, perhaps definitely?1995 - Different class, I’d suggest?So where were we by the spring of 1996? Three years of evolution, trademarked Beatles and Kinks mimicking, and countless cans of Red Stripe had taken it’s toll. Would it be perceived wisdom, or 21st century hallowed hindsight, to suggest the original spark of Britpop was beginning to flicker as the winds of pop change were ‘spicing’ themselves up in the wings?There’s no doubt that the all conquering 94/95 pop of Pulp, Supergrass, blur and Oasis were still casting a huge Union Jack shaded shadow over the charts. But, oh, there was so much more! (We’ve been here before, haven’t we?)Big dance acts! (Some faceless, some disguised as wrestlers!)Big pop acts (Some a bit cheesy, some disguised as Eternal and Lighthouses!)Big legacy acts (Some a bit past it, some disguised as Queen, some having soap stars being sick in their hair!)But lest we forget, as 1996 got underway and the first BIG NOW of the year presented 4o Top Chart Hits for our delectation - whether your ‘flava’ was pop, rock, dance or hippy - there was an unbridled swagger and confidence to the music. The decade had shaken off any allusions of baggy or grunge and was telling us we could indeed live forever. Viva Forever, as some might (and indeed will) say! Join author and all round 90s pop kid Neil Collins as we revisit NOW33 and the spring of 1996. 'Neil's new book International Velvet: How Wales Conquered the 90s Charts revisits the unforgettable Cool Cymru era when the Manics, Catatonia, Stereophonics, Super Furry Animals, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci and many more won over the masses!Along the way rediscover how TV adverts were still providing a soundtrack to our denim purchases and drink breaks. How dads were very well catered for in the mid 90s (rock bands, not Louise!), what cassettes were in Neil’s parents car as they attempted to break the traffic system of Paris, and why NOW33 has the best ending of ANY compilation EVER. And there’s even honourable mentions for the Smurfs and Robson & Jerome! Don’t look back in (too much) anger! 

Dylan Jones once described the Eighties as being shaped by ‘a new type of bohemianism, one empowered by a certainty and an optimism that was only fleeting back in the sixties.’ *Moreso, K.Tel records importantly reminded us that home taping was killing music. So, it’s November 1981, and this young music fan is feverishly taking ownership of two cassettes in his local Woolworths. One blue, one red. One bought, one free. Together this maiden compilation purchase - from the aforementioned compilation giant K.Tel, Charthits ‘81 - as kicked off by the ever so eighties drum crash from Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin – was the start of a lifelong love for variously compiled pop. One that would lead to, well, NOW. Forty years later and the superlative team at NOW HQ delivered their Yearbook for 1981. 85 of the biggest, brightest and best hits (thank you Mr. Mulligan for that very nice tagline). A year that started tragically with the death of John Lennon, and ended with Susanne and Joanne from the Human League with spray foam in their mouths amidst highly flammable Christmas trees in BBC Television Centre.And inbetween, a dazzling twelve months where the decade began to take shape and form an identity that remains with us today. Pop, soul, disco, funk, rock, reggae and metal. All present and correct. But, as Thursday nights on BBC1 would testify through those iconic theme tunes of Tomorrow’s World and the newly christened TOTP Yellow Pearl in July, electronica was elbowing its way through the queue at the Blitz club to make a defining mark on the sights and sounds of 1981.With the able assistance of guests Chi and Ian from ElectricityClub.co.uk, this episode revisits the NOW Yearbook 1981 (and it’s stellar accompanying extra volume!). An iconic line up of music and memories awaits including Duran, Duran, Ultravox, Soft Cell, Kim Wilde, The Human League and ABBA. We explore how the year saw some seventies survivors glam up and mobilise for this new decade with assistance from the new video pioneers such as Russell Mulcahy and David Mallet. We also consider how retro never sounded so good, what made a good (and bad) medley hit, how tribal factions and cultural identity shaped our school days (and the streets across the UK), how news and popular culture were living under the ever present threat of global destruction and how pop saved us all once again.Grab some blank tapes, switch off one of the three channels on your TV and join us as we head back to a glorious year in pop, 1981.Ridicule is, as you know, nothing to be scared of. * Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics: Dylan Jones (2020)

We’re going where the sun shines brightly,We’re going where the sea is blue…1986 really was very Cliff. He had celebrated his first No1 of the 80s with the cast of The Young Ones, featured in some devastating billboard action in the (rerun) finale of the aforementioned BBC comedy show, been covered by the TVam rat and gerbil, and even had one of his most famous songs feature on a rather unique (and quite frankly ghastly) novelty Euro hit. And in July of the very same year, this very prominent track (it’s Summer Holiday folks!), Cliff’s ubiquitous seasonal anthem to double decker buses and Una Stubbs, was sitting proudly as track 1 side 2 on the latest NOW, That’s What I Call Music album.But wait!The gloriously designed blue sky and beach umbrella that housed the latest variously compiled pop selection was not to feature such 1986 chart toppers as Wham!, Dr and the Medics and Chris De Burgh(!). This wasn’t the impending 7th volume of the (rapidly becoming) world famous series of compilations, this was NOW - The Summer Album, and it was…well, different.Just as the wonderful team had done in November 1985 with NOW - The Christmas Album, here was the brand’s second venture into a ‘theme’. And what a theme it was! Four decades of summer anthems, summer hits, sizzling memories - phew what a scorcher!But as it transpires, with guest Tim Worthington, we discover that the album announced from the pages of Smash Hits in July 1986 (featuring the most summery of acts, The Jesus and Mary Chain!) was much more than that just sun loungers and factor 30. Because growing up in the 70s/80s in the UK summer was often quite different indeed!What NOW - The Summer Album perhaps did do, was provide a template of summers we all wished we’d known; a sixties summer of love, a fifties summer of rock n roll, a seventies summer of…cricket (?) and of course an eighties summer of Radio One roadshows, and quite probably, traffic jams.It was an album that also provided a range of genres, new bands from the past to discover and a template for all summer soundtracks to come.So, dive back into an iconic chapter in the NOW series. Find out how some VERY big pop names appeared (TWICE!), why sound effects always make summer songs better, how some songs were longer (and shorter!) than others and why John Menzies probably didn’t anticipate how well this summer set would sell.And importantly, remember your Plymouth dealer is, indeed, a dealing man.

“What we’re gonna do right here is go back, way back!”If you were really down with the cool kids in 1984, you would have most definitely have been passing around the school prized C90 cassettes featuring much copied Streetsounds compilations. And somewhere in there was Kurtis Blow’s AJ Scratch track with those immortal sampled words from the Jimmy Castor Bunch in 1972. Straight out onto The BMXs and down to throw some funky worm shapes on that strip of lino!Or, in this writer’s case, 1984 was mainly spent in a bedroom hovering over the play and pause button to catch a clean edit (without Simon Bates) of Two Tribes, still at number one after 5 weeks! But which mix would we get this week? Now, THIS was anticipation, pop kids!1984. A pop year of decadence, contradictions, conflict, controversy and coming of age. A year that authors (and the BBC) told us would feature impending, inevitable Armageddon. Annihilation, it turned out, came in the shape of a plethora of 12” mixes, plastic smiles, snoods, 808 drum machines, hairspray, neon and (red) balloons. How was it for you?In the third decade of the 21st century, a time surely we wouldn’t (a) remember 1984 or (b) still be around to remember 1984, the team at NOW Music HQ presented the second in a (now) glorious series of curated Yearbooks. And what an album (and accompanying extra volume!) we have to rediscover. The sun is most definitely shining brighter than Doris Day!So for this special episode we’re joined by two poptastic friends of the show to take a deep dive into 1984. Journalist, DJ and author Ian Wade and journalist, author and broadcaster Jude Rogers.Jude can be found contributing musings and writing about music, culture and much more in The Guardian, Observer and The Quietus amongst many others. Her first (best selling!) book, The Sound of Being Human: How Music Shapes Our Lives is available through White Rabbit books.Ian has written for Classic Pop, Record Collector, The Quietus, Official Charts, Sunday Times Culture as well as doing time at such titles as Smash Hits and The Face many years ago. He has worked as a PR on BBC’s Later… with Jools Holland and occasionally DJs at Spiritland and Duckie. And his debut book 1984: The Year Pop went Queer is published by NineEight Books in July 2024.And whilst we don’t take a forensic look at every one of the 80 tracks on the 1984 Yearbook (and the further 60 on the extra volume) we instead provide you with an opportunity to explore the sights, sounds, culture, music, genres, tribes and (school!) fashion that makes this year so thoroughly iconic for so many reasons.Join us then, as we turn up the neon and dance through mutually agreed destruction in celebration of 1984! 

August 1989.The final year of ‘the finest pop decade ever’™️ is moving along quite nicely thank you very much. There’s most definitely a change in the air, and we don’t mean the launch of the FOUR channel Sky TV network. Relax everyone, UK Gold and TOTP reruns are coming in three years!No, real change was coming. The second summer of love in 1988 (sorry Danny Wilson, probably a year out) as witnessed on the utterly imperial NOW 11, 12 and 13 had demonstrated that the 90s were calling and they would be decked out in dayglo. And most importantly a new positivity was being felt in the air, across the airwaves and through the pop we were all immersed in.And let’s not beat about the bush, folks, 1989 was a seismic year for music. Let me indulge you listeners:Disintegration, Three Feet High and Rising, Doolittle, Technique, Club Classics Volume One, Raw Like Sushi, The Stone Roses, , Like A Prayer, Hats, The Seeds of Love, Flowers In The Dirt, Paul’s Boutique, The Raw And The Cooked…And of course Neither Fish Nor Flesh (A Soundtrack of Love, Faith, Hope & Destruction).And so, to our favourite compiler of variously compiled pop. 1989 saw four (yes, as many as that!) new NOW, That’s What I Call Music albums. Why four, I hear you cry? Well, because the summer was adorned with the first new dance volume since 1986, an album that, NOW fans will know, featured Love Can’t Turn Around by Farley Jackmaster Funk - the first House track to break the UK. And 1989 was time (not for the guru, that’s 1990 of course) to celebrate how dance was back, Back, BACK!And this additionally delicious dance volume enabled the BIG summer fifteenth volume to go deeper into the year’s genres. So step forward delights including Soul II Soul’s era defining classic, Paul McCartney’s Hofner bass-adorned celebration of TV dinners, Swing Out Sister’s mind-bending, sumptuous sixties throwback and De La Soul’s daisy-age makeover of Hall and Oates (the ultimate backward nod to the outgoing 80s?).What a time to be on the edge of seventeen (deliberate Stevie Nicks nod, there) as this listener was!And joining me for this sepia-tinged and frankly tear-stained 1989 nostalgia fest through NOW 15 is the music journalist and author of the 33 1/3 book on George Michael's Faith, Matthew Horton.Discover how homemade mixtapes (his mums AND his own) inspired many a house party and achieved (almost) legendary status. Which cassettes were stuck in his Walkman at the outdoor Lido pool, why goth stars and American soap operas need to come together, which rapper performed for Matthew (and others, obviously) at Bristol University and (YES!) why the love for Fish and Flesh will never go away.And amongst these glittering 1989 delights, experience the moments when I actually say positive things (almost) about our friends from the north The Beautiful South and Hue and Cry.Join us on the glorious beach (best cover ever™️ - Jude Rogers) as we head back to NOW15. I think it’s going to be alright.

It was the wise prophet and occasional flower impersonator Peter Gabriel that said, ‘I don’t remember, I don’t recall,I have no memory of anything at all.’Do you remember 2008?Yes, it's only (!) 16 years ago, so I’ve no doubt you still have packets in the kitchen cupboard that are older, but do you also remember how the pop landscape of 2008 was mapping out? Indeed, what on earth was going on in your life eight years into the 21st century?You see, this writer (it’s, me IAIN!) has quite a glitchy view back of his shoulder to this year. Life had thrown a few curveballs (listen in, it’s kinda revealed) meaning that pop memory has become patchy. Perhaps for you, dear listeners, 2008 is similarly harder to initially grasp hold of. Fear not! The world’s finest compilation series (as always) is on hand to jog memories, restart downloads an piece together for us what was selling, streaming, rising and falling up and down the hit parade that we call “The Charts’. It’s NOW, That’s What I Call Music 69!And crikey, what a mix we had!Torchsongs, soul songs, Neo-soul songs, Soul-dance songs, Northern soul songs! Songs that weren’t soul soul songs but would like to be!Big pop statements from Britney, Robyn, Girls Aloud!Slightly smaller pop statements from Shane Ward and Leon Jackson!We also had some huge ghosts of pop pasts resurfacing thanks to the likes of Rihanna, Duffy, Kylie and others. And some iconic artists that would stay with us through some era defining tracks. Because sometimes pop is the only thing that helps us when things aren’t OK (but will be OK). Our special guest for this episode is author of the frankly wonderful Don't Stop the Music - A Year of Pop History, One Day at a Time, and lifetime pop fan Justin Lewis.AND, if all of this wasn’t enough (and don’t forget Basshunter is in there too), find out where Joe Fagin fits in, who the Kajagoogoo of NOW69 is, which group may (or may not) have their own day time quiz show, how Justin grew up with Tom and Annie on Radio One and grew back in love with music in 2008 through some of these songs, and also which tracks deserve 10 out of 10. And of course, why pop is still so important for making sense of the world around us, in any decade!All of this, and I’ve managed not to say anything negative about Scouting for Girls!Oh no, wait…