The Daily Tonic: Horns At The Front

Mick Hucknall stoked some controversy yesterday when he decided, voluntarily, to start ranking the world’s cultures in terms of their “coolness” (his top five: African Americans / Working Class British Musicians / Jamaicans / American Jews / Flamenco Gypsies…)

One of showbusiness’s most rampant shaggers, Hucknall once suggested that he had slept with over a thousand women in 1985, and had racked up similar numbers in ’86 and ’87 too.

Warren Beatty has traditionally been the high-water mark for celebrity shagging, with biographer Peter Biskind estimating he’d slept with 12,775 women in the 35 years between him losing his virginity (at 20) and marrying Annette Benning (at 55).

2020 marks 35 years since Hucknall’s first thousand-shag year. So if he’s managed to keep up the pace, accounting for leap years, Hucknall will have knobbed close to 38,350 women. Roughly equivalent to the entire population of Skelmersdale.

In honour of the iconic (if highly contested) incident in which Martine McCutcheon drunkenly puked in Mick Hucknall’s dreadlocks, we want to know if any of you have ever hurled in the presence of greatness – or disgraced yourself in some similar fashion.

If you need to apologise to a star for being a hideous drunken mess, tell us about it at hello@popbitch.com and we’ll absolve you as best we can.

Plus, we’ll send some goody bags to our favourites.

DW writes:
“My tenuous claim to fame is that Tom Baker bought me my first proper pint in a bar. I was 14.

“Tom was recording a radio play at my local theatre and they wanted a live audience. After the show, I approached him in the bar nervously, a copy of Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks in my grubby mitts for him to sign. Tom was well into a G&T, whereupon he drained it, looked at me and said ‘Fancy a pint of lager?’ Of course I said yes, despite only being 14.

“He popped to the bar, came back and plonked my first pint in front of me, gestured for me to sit down and then proceeded to talk at me for about 30 minutes and a very quick three more G&Ts while I sipped nervously.

“Then he looked at his watch, apologised that he had to go, signed my book, slipped his mac on, picked up a plastic bag and shambled out of the door. I still had about three quarters of my pint left.”

ZZ writes:
“I met Madonna on the tube at Mill Hill East. She was trying to find Elstree studios to film Top Of The Pops. My chaperone recognised her from Smash Hits and I approached her and got talking and got her autograph. She said I was cute. It was 1983 and I was 10. I think it must have been her first autograph in London. We directed her to Mill Hill Broadway station which is the way to get to Elstree by train. Subsequently she became an icon and no one believes that I met her.”

ROH writes:
“I once saved Torvill and Dean some money. Their PA came into the store I was working in wanting champagne and Guinness to make black velvet cocktails. I eventually persuaded her that doing this with Perrier Jouet Belle Epoque (the duo’s preferred, rather pricey, champers) was a dumb idea and a bog standard sparkling Australian would do the job just as well.”

JN writes:
“In the late 90s, I tried to crash a wedding reception, failed, and was duly thrown out of London’s Waldorf Hotel in front of Stefan Dennis (Paul Robinson from Neighbours), who watched with his jaw agape.”

ST writes:
“Was in the gents at Wolverhampton Civic Hall halfway through Prodigy’s set on the Fat of the Land tour. Someone stood at the urinal right next to me and I was about to say something, when I spotted the green mohicans, eyeliner and yellow T-shirt with ‘The Dirty Dozen’ on the front. Think I asked Keith whether he should be on stage right now…”

Bookended with some of pop music’s finest saxophone solos, today’s audio round is another random assortment of songs from the last five decades all snipped and smudged together.

You get a point for naming the song, a point for naming the artist – and a huge amount of satisfaction for taking part.

[Get playing]

Take On Me arranged for washing machine
[See on TikTok]

Interesting piece about how Richard Curtis took Yesterday from the story’s “co-creator”
[Read on Uproxx]