Back to NOW!

Welcome to Back to NOW - the podcast where we bravely revisit the CDs that once lived permanently in your parents' car stereo! Yes, it’s the ‘year’ 2000! After years of warnings that planes would fall from the sky and toasters would become self-aware we woke on January 1st to discover that the biggest crash was people falling asleep waiting for the apocalypse. If your Nokia ringtone wasn't...

Greetings Pop Pickers! If you tuned into the BBC Light programme in September 1961, a new voice was presenting Pick of The Pops. Booming out across the airwaves, delivering this now legendary announcement - Alan 'Fluff' Freeman. The call to teenagers up and down this sceptred isle that sent exciting shockwaves to all who heard it. The Hit parade was here! As the the 1950s had taken leave o...

Gimme Fried Chicken! Well, if that sentence means anything to you at all, other than being a slightly curt way of asking for, er, fried chicken, then you are in the right place! Yes, of course this was Queen's hilarious final line in their anthemic autumn pop sound 'One Vision'. It rhymes, you see? But, BUT, not only was One Vision an enormous No7 hit in the autumn of 1985, it was the opening trac...

Nineteen Ninety Three. It's a country we've visited on a number of occasions in this particular parish of variously compiled pop. And it's always one that welcomes us back warmly. There's our strident, shiny boybands working up a sweat down at your local nightclub or hanging around the street corners looking menacing. There's the noticeably older relatives who had hits back ion the 80s and are bac...

1976. You’d think that people would have had enough of silly love songs. Well, silly or not, the charts of this fascinating year were full of big, big hits. Crowdpleasers, I hear you cry? Well, whatever way you view 1976, and many so-called rock journos and hacks would do so rather disdainfully, the twelve months bookended by number ones by Queen and Johnny Mathis (!) were certainly colourful and...

Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of 99: So the year/decade/century/millennium was coming to a close but before the apocalypse didn’t actually arrive at midnight on 31st December 1999, there was the small matter of a quite poptastic summer to be had.  And did we party like it was 1999? Of course we did! We even squeezed in a completely rubbish total eclipse - remember that? No, neither do we....

The Big Pig is back! As July, turned into August in 1985, the world was still basking in the afterglow of, what was already being called the event of the decade. No, not the ceasing production of the Sinclair C5, or even the latest episode of Blind Date with our Cilla. Live Aid had defined the coming together of all things pop for a generation, in the name of raising money for African famine. And...

Oh, that’s bad! No, that’s good! If you know your 80s dancefloor bangers, you’ll recognise that S-Express vocal insert and will already be donning your sparkly bellbottoms, possibly even getting right-on one (matey) because it’s Summer 1988!  What was making the headlines? (shuffles papers, looks directly into camera in a serious way): Poll tax announced! Gay rights activists invade the six o...

Swing it, shake it, move it, make it! …is exactly what the nation was doing in 1997. Yes, that’s right, Channel 5 was here and fiddling with that aerial to try and get a reception to see The Jack Docherty Show was what we were all up to. Robbie Williams even changed the lyrics to his breakout hit ‘Old Before I Die’ in honour of this revolutionary fifth channel twiddlesome pastime.  But of cou...

Welcome back to 1987! The decade of decadence, extravagance, elegance and other words that end in -nce was powering its way towards the later end of its cultural tenure. And whilst there is no doubt that perceived wisdom (or, the internet as we now call it) would tell us that 1987 was the year of big hair, big shoulder pads, and big mobile phones, those of that were there can tell a different stor...

How do you begin to describe 1992? Well, Her Majesty called it her Annus horribilis , for a number of reasons. Quite possibly including the three weeks Boyz II Men spent at number one, possibly not. But whatever the reason, we can safely say that the twelve months of glittering pop culture that we call '92 were definitely diverse and, quite frankly, bonkers. As we've ascertained in this pop parish...

Welcome to the utterly swingorilliant Autumn 1987! Frightwigs ahoy! Pass around the rock’n’roll mouthwash because the Ver Kids knew that pop was back, Back BACK! Actually, what this all really means is that in 1987 the nation’s favourite fortnightly pop magazine and the nation’s favourite compilation series had - quite literally - come together and created the greatest album in the world EVER (pos...

Welcome to a special festive episode of Back to Now.  We first revisited Now - The Christmas Album in 2020. You remember 2020, don’t you? It was a Christmas that needed some light to overpower some rather dark shades. We did a track by track commentary. We shared thoughts on the classic Christmas songs. The sequencing, the rediscoveries. We shared personal - often emotional - memories. And of...

Gonna use my…imagination. 1980 saw the UK chart taking some incredible leaps forward into the new decade. As the 1970s biggest superstars, Pink Floyd, stepped aside as the last chart topper of that decade and ushered in something fresh, new and suitably brassy. As always, the pop landscape would continue to be varied, diverse, sometime a bit bonkers but of course nothing short of fascinating.&nbsp...

Welcome to the 21st Century! Or did you call it Y2K? And if so, can I ask WHY? Yes, pop fans and curators of variously compiled pop, we had survived the End of the Century. The millennium bug turned out to be nowhere near as life threatening as as we were told. No planes fell from the sky, no computer meltdowns and no return to the dark ages overnight. In fact the most terrifying thing about Decem...

Is this the way they say the future’s meant to be? It’s November 1995. Pop was pulling in many different directions. But predominantly, it was swaggering its way towards the end of the century in a confident, Union Jack draped fashion. Whilst dance music, boybands, TV based retro crooners and a range of other co-stars were vying for our well earned pounds in the likes of HMV and Virgin, it was the...

It’s the end, the end of the Seventies. It was a decade that had started with Edison Lighthouse and ended with Another Brick in the wall. After 221 number one singles, the decade that had given us everything from Bowie to Bell bottoms, from Chopper bikes to Chiquitita, Glam to Punk, and Sapphire to Steel, was closing down - and at a sensible hour too! On the 31st December 1979, Kenny Everett asked...

Poor old Johnnie Ray. Actually, I wonder what the heart wrenching vocal superstar of the fifties made of his starring role in the biggest selling single of 1982, thirty years after his own chart topping run? Did anyone ever ask how he felt watching the footage of his younger self in the video for Come On Eileen intertwined with Kevin’s dungaree festooned Emerald Express on a London street corner....

Wake up, it’s a beautiful morning! It’s the spring of 1995. That most eclectic of decades, the nineties if you will, was no longer the new kid on the millennial block. Pop culture has boxed up the eighties for another day, had shaken off baggy, was in the process of returning grunge back to the US and was now striding confidently onwards with a swagger all of its own. The country was beginning to...

2002.  The pop culture landscape would never be the same again. No, we’re not talking about Robbie Williams £80m, six album deal (although Rudebox would indeed shift the landscape, if not exactly many copies). We’re not even talking about Pop Idol top ten contestant Jessica Garlick coming (joint) third in Eurovision, although that was pretty good.  We could be talking about the arrival o...

Can You Feel It? It’s July, 1989 and the temperature is hot!  Actually, for a lot of the UK it surprisingly was, but let’s leave meteorological memories aside, we’re talking the dancefloor. The country, the WHOLE nation was completely right on one, matey.  Well maybe not the entire nation, but there was no doubt that the BPMs were sweeping the nation much quicker than the BSB squarial wa...

In 2025, the iconic NOW series moves into the world of musical theatre with a brand new show ‘NOW, That’s What I Call A Musical’ delivering a storyline that ties friendship and incredible 80s pop music together perfectly. A dynamic cast, a sure fire story from Pippa Evans filled with a rollercoaster of emotions and laughter is coupled by choreography from Craig Revel Horwood for a guaranteed hit n...

The United Kingdom in Summer 1998 was an interesting place indeed. In June, the DVD was released for the first time and presumably the first person to ignore random extras, interviews and photo galleries was welcomed with open arms. The Crime and Disorder Act introduces Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOS) was introduced into our vocabulary and the tabloids jumped for joy at the possibility of a p...

Welcome, everyone, to the Back to Now review for 2024! Following in the well-loved festive traditions such as fingering your way through the double edition Radio Times, fumbling your way to the back of the cupboard for the remnants of last year’s Baileys or just thumbing through some nuts next to an open fire, we bring you a finale to another variously compiled year in pop in the company of s...

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, trademark...