The 20 Million Club

The record company thought it might sell 50,000 copies if they were lucky. It went on to sell 30m. What was it about the darkness and anger of Nevermind that made it so successful?

The team look at some of the other songs in the charts the week of August 18, 1986: Dave Lee Roth's Yankee Rose, Bruce Hornsby & The Range smash The Way It Is and the neo-prog-pop of It Bites' Calling All The Heroes.

Peter Gabriel's chart-busting Sledgehammer was inescapable in August of 1986. But what was it about the ex-Genesis man's single that so caught the imagination on both sides of the Atlantic? Was it just its bonkers video? Or was there more to it? The team discuss…

In August 1996, the charts in the US and the UK were full of songs from the movies: Top Gun, The Breakfast Club, The Karate Kid, Pretty In Pink. But why?

In memory of Meat Loaf, we've reposted this celebration of his classic game-changing album, Bat Out Of Hell. Big, daft and loveable, with gloriously huge songs about teenage love and going-all-the-way, Bat Out Of Hell was an album that was both preposterous and actually very relatable. RIP marvellous Marvin Lee Aday, the mighty Meat Loaf. (This episode was recorded in February 2021.)

Nicky, Sian and Paul discuss Bon Jovi’s hit record ‘Slippery When Wet’, discussing how the band managed to straddle between hair metal and heavy rock, how they upset Metallica and also they managed to take a heavy style of music and successfully bring it in the radio rock mainstream - getting more audiences across the world to raise their hands.

In which Scott goes on an impassioned but barely comprehensible rant about why certain punk bands mean so much more than, say, More Than A Feeling can ever hope to mean.

In the charts, December '76, More Than A Feeling practically invented AOR and was an unlikely influence on grunge. But is it just a nice pop song?

Tonight's The Night was a US no.1 the week of Hotel California's release. Unbelievably, it's also the 19th biggest US single. We talk dodgy videos, the punk rock wars, comfy slacks and the source of THAT rumour about Rod.

How do you follow the best-selling album of the 20th century? By releasing the 5th best-selling original album, that's how. But the success of Hotel California brought a dark side: fist fights, scandals, arrests, and eventually genuine tragedy.

FURTHER READING

1991 GQ interview with Don Henley about his 1980 arrest
https://archive.li/Gk6sp

The story of the death of Lana Rae Meisner, Randy Meisner's wife:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/wife-of-eagles-randy-meisner-shot-and-killed-investigation-ongoing-191471/
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/07/entertainment/randy-meisner-wife-shooting-feat/index.html