Robbed By An Italian Bastard

1981 (16 YEARS OLD)4 weeks ago

I remember the actual date of this incident: February 19th, 1981.

Because it was two days before my 16th birthday.

It was a Thursday. The plan for the following day was for a piss up with the lads at a new wine bar in the market square called The Rain (if they’d let us in). Some girls had even said they were coming. And Saturday, my parents were having a do at our house. It was mostly for adults, and my friends wouldn’t have come, even if my mum had invited them.

Which she didn’t.

So I was sitting in front of the tele, getting ready to watch Top of the Pops.

That night, I was going to see Ultravox’s Vienna claim its rightful spot at #1.

At (almost) 16, I had started to get a handle on my image. I had been well past the wannabe Teddy Boy nonsense for some time.

But I was meandering through what I wanted “to be” until I got into Ultravox, with their phenomenal substantive synth music and their retro-1920s style.

Yes, that was for me.

I bought some white shirts (some collarless), loose pants, braces (suspenders, for Americans – not the metal contraption like Cindy would have when I would bump into her later), and a bow tie. I even found some vintage paisley ties at Oxfam.

My dad had a rather nice beige raincoat that would have done the job, but it was ridiculously short on me.

This style would really come into its own later that year, when Granada (ITV) released its adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

But by then, Oxford would be home to throngs of upper-class twats, poncing through the city, dressed in this style, carrying teddy bears.

And, in Britain at that time, nobody (other than my mum) were impressed by upper-class twats.

So that would put an end to that.

But it was interesting while it lasted.

So I sat watching TOTP, waiting for the the expected reveal of number one:

And it was a pretty typical lineup of groups performing. A couple of good ones and a couple of shit ones.

Then the top-10 countdown began.

I sat on the edge of our purple paisley settee.

And at #2 was Ultravox.

WTF?

And to make matters worse and to rub salt into the wound, a gang of old ladies, people with questionable taste in music, ironists, ice cream vendors (who were mostly Italian at the time), and the hard of hearing had banded together and conspired to make number one:

Joe Fucking Dolce!

And his joke fucking song.

My faith in institutions had been forever shattered.

Vienna, despite being one of the best songs of the 80s, would never be #1.

POST SCRIPT

If you want to see what I had to put up with, here’s the actual video of the bastard:

I also found the video of the (almost) full TOTP that I watched that night. Fortunately, the poster had the good taste to edit out the end with the “number one”.