PSY finally gets his toad in the hole
PSY had promised during an earlier phone interview that he would visit Radio 1 when he returned to Britain, and he kept his word. That earlier conversation also contained a second promise: Scott had told him he needed to try toad in the hole. By the time PSY arrived in the studio, one was already in the oven.
The first mouthful revealed a problem. The sausage and batter were so dry that PSY struggled to speak, leaving Scott filling while somebody hurriedly found him water and suggested gravy might have been wise. PSY eventually rated the dish six out of ten, which everybody accepted was generous given the specimen they had served him. Scott later admitted it was one of those ideas he might remove if he could do the interview again, while Chris happily finished the leftovers.
Food was particularly topical because PSY was running an online competition to find a chef who could travel with him. Three finalists remained, and he joked that an attractive female chef would make the arrangement even better. Scott suggested Delia Smith as the obvious British solution, describing her as exactly the person PSY needed.
The hidden operation beneath PSY’s concerts
PSY explained why his concerts could run for extraordinary lengths of time. A normal show might already last two and a half hours, then the encore could continue for at least another hour depending on his mood. His personal record was around four hours and 45 minutes. He saw that length as part of giving people value: performing was his daily job, but for somebody buying a ticket it might be their big night of the year.
Keeping his body working for that long required a system the audience never saw. During a DJ section he could remain visible from the waist up behind the decks while a team worked on his legs below, massaging them, treating them with hot water and even using acupuncture. At times he had almost nothing on his legs while the crowd assumed he was simply DJing normally.
Scott loved the contrast between the immaculate show above the desk and the frantic recovery operation underneath it. It also made PSY’s apparently comic stage persona look much more like an athlete’s routine, something PSY himself compared with the treatment a footballer might need during a match.
Gentleman, Gangnam Style and a fifth world record
The team played PSY an excessively formal English reading of the translated lyrics to “Gentleman”. He liked how the British accent made deliberately silly words sound deep and serious, particularly the solemn treatment of the party lines. It was another sign that he remained happy to laugh at the character he had created rather than protect it too carefully.
He also revealed another Guinness World Record from a huge Seoul performance. Around 100,000 people had horse-danced together in the city, adding a fifth record to his collection. Scott immediately wondered whether Radio 1 could somehow beat it, before recognising the scale of what would be required.
PSY was working towards an album which he hoped could appear by September. He wanted it to contain a broader range of music without changing so dramatically that international audiences who knew only “Gangnam Style” and “Gentleman” were confused. Scott encouraged the idea of a full ballad video with PSY looking mournful in the rain on a cliff, a deliberately extreme image of the reinvention he was wary of attempting too quickly.
The fake PSYs meet the real thing
When Scott had last spoken to PSY, the singer joked that there were already plenty of impersonators around the world. Soon afterwards a particularly convincing fake had appeared at Cannes, attended celebrity parties, posed for photographs and reportedly even performed while surrounded by three bodyguards. The real PSY had only one bodyguard and was in Singapore at the time.
Scott and Chris had their own much less convincing version. Chris believed Scott shared PSY’s mannerisms and dressed him in sunglasses and a Gangnam Style-inspired outfit before sending him onto Oxford Street to see whether anybody would believe the disguise. Nobody seriously did. Several people pointed out the most obvious difficulty, while one accepted that Scott could perhaps pass as PSY’s brother.
PSY watched the video in the studio and understood what they were attempting, even if the resemblance was not strong enough to threaten the Cannes impersonator. The encounter then became stranger when Chris asked PSY to recreate the “cup of fart” gesture from the “Gentleman” video directly into his face. PSY obliged without the actual fart and concluded that Chris was one of the weirdest people he had met. Chris considered that praise of the highest order.
Brian May, Beyonce and what comes next
The conversation stretched well beyond the novelty around PSY’s videos. He had met Beyoncé at the Met Gala but kept their conversation private, and he was particularly excited about plans to have brunch with Brian May. Queen had been an inspiration since he was a teenager, making the prospect of meeting May far more intimidating than many of the celebrity encounters his worldwide success had already produced.
PSY was also heading to Toronto for the MuchMusic Video Awards and continuing an exhausting international schedule. Asked what he liked about Britain, he praised the audience rather more enthusiastically than the weather or the food, especially after that afternoon’s toad in the hole.
After he left, Scott returned to his own weekend in New York, where a quiet afternoon drink with his former flatmate had unexpectedly turned into a party with four women celebrating a birthday. Scott had gone to the toilet, returned to find the previously empty bar transformed and ended up joining the shots and dancing. A photograph of his new friends became the afternoon’s other visual attraction, although Scott was keen to make clear that the dollar bills visible in one woman’s top had nothing to do with him.
Dan and Phil return for Real or No Real
Dan and Phil were back after recovering from Radio 1’s Big Weekend and brought a new video of themselves attempting to tidy a green room while behaving like flamingos. They then joined Scott for Real or No Real.
Astronomers really had identified chemical signatures in a dust cloud near the centre of the Milky Way associated with the smell of rum and a key component of raspberries, a fact which Dan and Phil initially regarded as nonsense. Simon Cowell was not following only former X Factor winner Steve Brookstein on Twitter merely to keep an eye on him, and the first .co.uk domain had not been a fan site for Jo Brand’s Through the Cakehole.
The most showbiz-sounding claim was genuine: Wayne Bridge had proposed to Frankie Sandford after dressing their dogs as a bride and groom. Dan and Phil both found the mental picture horrifying enough to be plausible. They finished joint winners on 30 points, while Scott celebrated finally having a share of a victory himself.
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