stevepafford.com

10/07/2025

It’s the Christmas holidays of 1981. The Human League are the festive No. 1 and two 12 year-old boys at Sir Frank Markham school in Buckinghamshire suddenly find themselves inventing a naughty-silly version of the chanty chorus to Kool And The Gang’s hit of the season, Get Down On It.

Rather inexplicably in the pre-internet age, their oral reimagining went viral and soon a panoply of jocular juveniles from John o’ Groats to Land’s “End” were united in reciting this tasty tunette:

“Get down on it
Suck my helmet
Please don’t bite it
Just excite it”

Ooh La, La, La. Get this, because, I kid you not, but one of those lyrical bastardisers is the author of the piece you’re reading.

Though, in the interests of égalité, I feel obliged to hand over to a more famous writer who’s just turned 71: Pet Shop Boys frontman Neil Tennant, who interviewed the Gang in his first full year as a journalist on Smash Hits, for the zany pop mag’s 100th issue.

It is indeed a celebration, lovingly republished at the salivating Steve Pafford blog.

He’s still got the mouth

Get ya back up off the wall, ’cos here’s a freaky fun fact on 45.

09/07/2025

With delicious irony, one of the acts I didn’t catch at Glasto was a turn who garnered many of the column inches, though not for their music.

Looking like an angry Aswad, this rap duo’s divisive performance saw them use their platform to voice their support for Palestine, as well as calling out the BBC, Israel, the US and UK governments and all the rest of it.

All I’ll add is that dear Aunty Beeb knew full well what would happen — just look at the moniker: Bob Vyle, an’…? Oh, the power of comedy ‘controversy’.

By the way, Pazzo is Italiano for crazy. Which is what you may well become if you read this review from our roving reporter Steve Pafford. He’s tenacious

https://www.stevepafford.com/glasto25/

Is it me or was there a severe lack of big box office draws at Glastonbury 2025? Not to mention a smattering seriously dodgy vocal performances.

01/07/2025

June is a key month for many reasons. Not just the midway point of the year and the time of the Summer Solstice, but a plethora of birthday anniversaries, everyone from the two Georges (Michael and Orwell) to Ziggy, Marilyn, Macca *and* me and my p***y.

It’s also the time of Pride Month, a celebration of diversity that kicked off with Stonewall on the day I entered the world, yet which seems to be under threat in some of the very countries that espoused freedom and liberty for all.

Still, if parties and parades reminding you that gay people exist bother you then here’s the solution: stop behaving in ways that justify the need for it. It’s that simple.

On that note, let us cast our collective taste buds back to the recent past, and a funny little island in the North Atlantic called Little Bwitain.

In the summer of 2019, Marks & Spencer created a new limited edition ‘gay’ sandwich that caused gormless gammons such as the tabloid trash that is Piers Morgan to boil their own heads. What made it even more hilarious was that it contains actual BACON!

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Steve Pafford blog LINK:

Warning: this post to celebrate the conclusion of the Holy Month of Pride is hammier than a pig farm, but as always, there’s an underlying existential

26/06/2025

Beware the savage jaw, she’s just turned 64.

I share my birthday today with an effervescent array of star turns, including Chris Isaak and the Clash’s Mick Jones.

Oh, and this lovely lady, who played my old hometown at the weekend: Terri Nunn of Berlin.

She’s your babe!

As if by magic, the Steve Pafford blog has the low-down on three coruscating cuts from the catalogue. Just don’t mention Blondie.

Beware the savage jaw, Terri’s just turned 64…

19/06/2025

No one is entirely sure when summer starts in the Northern Hemisphere. Is it May? Is it June? And if so is it the pinch punch first of the month, or the Summer Solstice of the 20th, 21st or 22nd?

As an on-off resident of Australia I can tell you if it weren’t so Down Under in its antipodean seasons it’d be June 1, as the cobbers start all seasons on the first of the relevant quarterly month.

Whatever the date, there’s no season more welcome than the start of summer.
It also helps when you have a stellar playlist – the kind that draws on golden classics and shiny modern meisterwerks alike to really add a healthy dose of mood-lifting magic we all covet.

From Style Council staple to effervescent Sinatra sparkle, drivetime epics to sweaty bangers, our Perfect 10 playlist of essential summer anthems captures all the fun and frolics you want when it comes to soundtracking your sunniest months. Is your balmy fave rave there?

https://www.stevepafford.com/summer/

Compiled by Steve Pafford

No one is entirely sure when summer starts in the Northern Hemisphere. Is it May? Is it June? And if so is it the pinch punch first of the month, or the

08/06/2025

Born in Cambridge, UK to a MI5 officer who’d worked at Bletchley Park, Olivia Newton-John was perhaps the only female singer to anticipate both Madonna’s early bump-and-grind anthems and Taylor Swift’s winsome country ballads.

Despite the Bletchley connection (I’d worked there during the period the Berlin Wall came down), I regard ONJ to be the first Australian of pop music in so many ways - particularly as the Bee Gees were performing before they emigrated Down Under, only living in the sunburned country for nine years.

Whatever the geography, Livvy travelled a long hit-making path filled with unexpected reinventions and surprise collaborations. She was also one of the loveliest shining lights of our times.

This is her songbird history, over at the Steve Pafford blog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HhcbZEzZnM&t=55shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LqI5X8oIGkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBo_eDreKtk

06/06/2025

Talking Heads were exceptional for a lot of reasons, and listening to their catalogue in order the one thing that stands out is the incredible stylistic shifts that occur.

Of course, urban alienation is a major theme running through the band’s work, yet the delivery and sonic palette was always brilliantly varied. They’d gone from angsty NYC energy and subdued minimalism to an international collective that explored everything from art-funk to polyrhythmic worldbeat and simple, melodic guitar pop.

All this while managing to earn several memorable hits to boot, one of which the first time I heard it as an 11 year-old little creature I thought it was one of the greatest songs I’d ever heard. I still do.

On the 50th anniversary of their first gig at CBGB (and *that* brand new video), the Steve Pafford blog assesses the Perfect 10 of Talking Heads albums, with extra star stylee for ratings purposes. Let’s have a heated debate.

Talking Heads were exceptional for a lot of reasons. But a bleeding obvious one was that you got a sense that all of the songs this art rock cm new wave

02/06/2025

What is reality? On his 2003 album of the same name, David Bowie declared that reality had become an abstract, unreliable concept.
And in the post-truth world we find ourselves navigating two decades later that seems to be ever more apparent.

Case in point: The Reality War, Saturday’s finale of Doctor Who, had had many scratching their heads. Bowing out, Ncuti Gatwa was our favourite Time Lord in Family Guy mode, facing the Rani in order to save a little girl, and boasting surprise cameos from two formidable females from New Who as the Doc appeared to travel through alternate universes.

Despite a shock coruscating cliffhanger, the future of the Whoniverse’s iconic flagship is entirely up in the air. There won’t be a Christmas special (bah, humbug) and a new season has yet to be commissioned by Disney or the BBC.

In his article debut for the Steve Pafford blog, Welsh wonder Paul Richard Evans feels baffled, overwhelmed, frustrated, and uncertain about the overstuffed finale as speculation mounts over the show’s future.

What is reality? On his 2003 album of the same name, David Bowie declared that reality had become an abstract, unreliable concept. And in the post-truth world

29/05/2025

On this day in 1983, Michael Jackson’s Thriller was spending a fifth week at No. 1 in the UK charts.

It’s a little known fact that its title track started life as a shiny but unremarkable romantic ditty called Starlight.

Consequently, the album of the same name went through various working titles of its own.

FULL STORY ⬇️ AT THE Steve Pafford BLOG:
https://www.stevepafford.com/mjbowie/

27/05/2025

“It’s like giving someone your dog to take out for a walk, and they bring back a different dog”, remarked Blur bassist Alex James, sardonic glint and all.

When not to remix? That is the question.

Since the Britpoppers’ Girls & Boys, mixmeisters Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have built up a considerable catalogue of side hustles. Everyone from The Killers and MGMT to Paul Weller and Noel Gallagher to Lady Gaga and Madonna have had Team PSB sprinkle some stardust on their current choons.

So, how on earth to describe the Pet Shop Boys’ bizarre reworking of Tina Turner’s recently discovered outtake Hot For You Baby — Opportunistic, perhaps?

It’s certainly something of a first, in that PSB have never remixed a track from a dead person’s archives before. Alas, the results have gained them a torrent of perplexed reactions, including from collaborators and fans, such as “Did Chris have a stroke? That’s the only possible explanation.”

Featuring cameos from Bowie and Yoko, plus exclusive brand new interview input from composer arranger Richard Niles (Left To My Own Devices, Go West), Mott The Hoople’s Morgan Fisher (All The Young Dudes) and NRG DJ Colin Balmer, the Steve Pafford blog attempts to unpick exactly what went wrong.

File it under lukewarm affair.

FULL STORY BELOW ⬇️

“It’s like giving someone your dog to take out for a walk, and they bring back a different dog”, once remarked Blur bassist Alex James, sardonic glint and all.

27/05/2025

The seventh Roxy Music album is generally accepted to have been released in the UK on 23 May. Pedantry details following, because as veteran record peddler Marshall Jarman tells that Steve Pafford guy, back in the day, ‘release dates’ were “always given as Friday but they weren’t in the shops on Friday … a ‘release date’ referred to the day they left the label’s premises.”

Fourteen months after 1979’s Manifesto, Roxy Music returned in 1980 with a 42 minute work that solidified a notable transition in their sound. Bryan Ferry and co had moved away from the experimental art rock that had characterised them in their early days to elegantly embrace the nuances of disco, new wave, and luxuriant sophisticated pop.

The result was a more accessible album, but no less intriguing. The second of the band’s three number one studio sets, this is Flesh + Blood.

Fourteen months after 1979’s comeback record Manifesto, Roxy Music returned in 1980 with a 42 minute work that solidified a notable transition in their sound.

25/05/2025

This is prescient, pertinent comedy gold. RIP to the Dames.

“Never consider cosmetic surgery, Joan. Madge has had so many facelifts, the small of her back is like a Brussels sprout”

Collins and Rivers shift uncomfortably. Quelle surprise.

Edna: “My husband has a rumbling prostate. The neighbours often complain but what can you do? There’s no volume control on it, Joan.”
Joan Collins: “What is a prostate?”
Edna: “It’s a Cinderella organ, that’s what it is. He’s had a transplant but there’s some possibility my husband’s organ may be rejected - you ought to be used to that by now, George.”

https://youtu.be/UVA72Pw6t68?si=ex4tUCzdsYAUyy8k
Via Steve Pafford

Dame Edna in 1st US appearance on Joan Rivers talk show