Chris’s new house had an east wing and a leaking ceiling
Scott and Chris returned after the archive week, with Chris broadcasting from a new home.
The room was so echoey that Scott immediately started making jokes about Chris having moved into a mansion and working from the east wing.
Reality arrived quickly: the ceiling had started leaking almost as soon as he moved in.
Chris did have a new doorbell he was pleased with, although Scott was more interested in what had disappeared from the old house. Chris could no longer spend the show watching the unpredictable neighbours he used to see across the road. His new view, he said, was basically “just bush”.
Scott had attempted football chat with Liam Gallagher
Scott had recently interviewed Liam Gallagher on the Official Chart and proudly played Chris the moment he tried to bond with Liam over football.
Chris remembered that Scott’s previous encounter with Liam years earlier had been rather less friendly, but Scott chose not to bring that up during the new interview.
He had also run through other artists in the album chart and asked Liam for his opinions, producing exactly the kind of blunt reviews they expected from him.
Garbanzo bean exposed Don’t Look It Up
Don’t Look It Up included foreign names for foods.
Scott and Chris knew that an American eggplant was an aubergine and that cilantro was coriander.
The Spanish-world term “garbanzo bean” caused more difficulty. Chris guessed something like lentils while Scott went for baked beans.
The answer was chickpea.
Another round dug up Live Lounge performances that had genuinely happened but had almost vanished from the presenters’ memory.
Mike Skinner was Chris’s genuine hero booking
Chris made no attempt to play it cool when Mike Skinner joined for the guest mix.
The Streets had soundtracked some of Chris’s favourite nights out, and he described Mike as one of his heroes.
Mike’s first selection was a lockdown choice built around glamour and physical closeness — things he felt were particularly absent at the time.
He then chose Roger Sanchez’s *Another Chance*, which reminded him of collecting glasses in a bar on Birmingham’s Broad Street. Mike remembered the area in its wild weekend years, with Scott and Chris joining in on the memories of packed clubs and chaotic nights out.
Another selection was Empire of the Sun’s *Walking on a Dream*, chosen partly because Mike had been listening to summery music at home.
Later came The Strokes’ *Someday*.
Chris finally asked the mysterious CD:UK question
Chris also returned to an old lyric from The Streets which had always bothered him.
Years earlier, during a late-night conversation with Mike, Chris had apparently tried to ask about the identity of the woman referred to in a line involving *CD:UK*.
He still wanted the answer.
Mike carefully avoided giving it publicly and suggested it might be something to discuss at the right kind of party instead.
The evasiveness only preserved the mystery Chris had been carrying around for years.
Mike finished with a Streets classic
Chris told Mike how much The Streets live shows had meant to him, including one particularly messy night when he had ended up on somebody’s shoulders and spotted *This Country* star Charlie Cooper in the crowd.
Mike mentioned some of the unexpected famous people he had seen at shows, including Peter Crouch and Billie Eilish.
Scott described Mike’s conversational style as almost philosophical: the sort of person who made an interview feel like a 3am chat.
For the final record, Mike chose one of his own: The Streets’ *Don’t Mug Yourself*, partly because it had been recorded in his wardrobe and therefore felt oddly relevant to musicians creating things at home during lockdown.
Tap End reached Chris’s first night at university
The day’s *24 Years at the Tap End* went back to Chris at 19, arriving at university and confronting the reality of moving away from home.
He was nervous and desperate to make friends.
A fresher’s representative called Oggy stood out immediately. Chris saw him confidently talking to girls and decided this was the person to attach himself to. Oggy would later become one of Chris’s housemates and an important character in his university stories.
Trying to impress him on that first night, Chris told an enormous lie: he claimed he had recently got off with “the ginger one from the Sugababes”.
Chris had once genuinely met her in a nightclub, but the reality had amounted to an awkward hello and very little interest from her.
At university the lie grew. It eventually became a story that they had briefly gone out before Chris dumped her so he could arrive at university single.
The claim earned him the first-year nickname “Sugar Babe”, meaning he then had to keep supporting a reputation built entirely on something that had never happened.
Rachel Stevens received an equally dubious voicemail
Chris also had access to what he believed was Rachel Stevens’ phone number, acquired through a chain somehow connected to Bradley from S Club 7.
Again trying to impress people, he rang the number and left a deliberately vague voicemail along the lines of “It’s Chris, give us a call back”, hoping Rachel might assume she was supposed to know him.
She did not call back.
At the end of the night Chris returned to his room, put The Streets’ *Original Pirate Material* on his CD player and felt the mix of homesickness and excitement that came with his first night away.
It made Mike Skinner’s presence earlier in the same podcast especially neat: the artist Chris was now interviewing as a hero had also been the soundtrack playing as one of the most important periods of his life began.
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