Is This Show Overrated?

The Epic Finale to the unexpected miniseries in which Vince, Neil, Jeremy, and Wayne discuss Band Aid, USA For Africa, and Live Aid in way more detail than is necessary.

From rating Phil Collins to re-enacting a Duran Duran interview about that awful, awful note. And a completely necessary digression to Peter Gabriel, who wasn't even there.

Whilst Live Aid Wembley was giving us Sting on a lute, over the pond in Philadelphia, a stoned Ozzy Osbourne was belting out Paranoid with Black Sabbath. And things just get better...

It's our 50th Episode!

In this bumper-length special episode, we go act-by-act, hour-by-hour through the Live Aid Wembley performance from the summer of 1985, and we break out into spontaneous terrible Sean Connery impressions.

We feed Queen to the Overrated Machine, question why Sting is ever allowed on stage, and take The Who to task for their poetry.  It's a wild, unruly show, and it's surely what Bob Geldolf would have wanted if he had any idea of who we are, which he doesn't.  Or does he?

No. No, he doesn't.

In this jumbo-sized episode, we mop up Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas? by taking a look at who wasn't on the recording, and we come up with a few conspiracy theories that probably don't touch reality at any point.

Then we feed USA for Africa to the voracious Overrated Machine, and wonder (rather cynically) if the money from these charity projects reached Ethiopia, if long-term help was put in place, and if ultimately all that was achieved was to create a monster in the abomination that is Sting and his barefoot rain forest lute.

Along the way, Jeremy challenges Wikipedia to a fist fight; Wayne struggles to remember that good Adam Ant album from the '90s; we play a game of Charity or Calamity?; and we wonder if sultry Smooth Operator Sade knows even the basics of north American geography.

In the first part of our multi-episode deep dive into Band Aid/USA For Africa/Live Aid Wembley & Philadelphia, we head back to the winter of 1984 and look at Bob Geldolf's & Midge Ure's passionate response to the Ethiopan famine, the charity single Do They Know It's Christmas? by the superband Band Aid.

And Jeremy is with us!  Hooray!

We conclude our mini series on photographic album covers with a look at controversial album covers. We discuss Grunge babies and flannel shirts, heroin and capitalism, David Bowie's testicles, and those Scandinavian black metal idiots who burned down churches.

Content warning: suicide, heroin addiction, inappropriate imagery, Wayne's beard.

Album covers are great, and so varied, and so integral to the way we used to experience music. The photo on the album cover of Rumours by Fleetwood depicts beautiful Californian Stevie Nicks in her classic and iconic Rhiannon persona, and lanky Brit drummer Mick Fleetwood in a pony tail and with two big balls dangling between his legs.

As Neil frantically shovels mountains of coal into the yawning, hungry furnace of the increasingly malevolent Overrated  Machine, and Wayne rants about how much he hates Fleetwood Mac for spurious reasons that don't stand up to scrutiny, Vince wonders if the 1970s was one big cocaine  binge for everyone except him.                            

This time round, as Neil  frantically works the bellows and turns all the dials on the Overrated Machine to 11, and Wayne's lapses of memory begin to become a very real problem, and Vince exhausts all his patience and can't even tell 12 inches from 33 revolutions, and we all ponder on what exactly awaits us on the long, lonely highway at night, and we can't get to grips with just how big The Eagles are, and... well, it's quite the episode.

In the second and final part of our look back at MTV and the music video revolution, Neil enthuses about George Michael's phenomenal success as a respected singer-songwriter;  Wayne admits he completely out of his old white dude depth when it comes to hip hop but gamely tries to rate Run DMC; and Vince gives run downs of the most popular MTV videos of the '80s and '90s ... and confesses he has no idea about a great deal of them.

MTV was launched in August 1981, and formed the music TV backdrop of our generation. But was it overrated? How much of it can we remember? What were the best videos? And those hot ladies with guitars in that Robert Palmer video - where are they now?

We look at The Buggles Video Killed the Radio Star, and Tine 'TT' Turner's What's Love Got to Do With It? as we run down the history of MTV in its early years and try to determine through Neil's precision-tooled Overrated formula if any or all of it is overrated.