OK, we’ve just had Valentine’s Day in 1990 but much more important than that is the fact that four days prior to this TOTP broadcast, the world saw Nelson Mandela released from incarceration after 27 years. A world changing event of immense political importance…or so you would have thought. I clearly recall there being complaints from viewers to the BBC about their coverage of this historic event interrupting their enjoyment of Antiques Roadshow! Some simple research of the internet confirmed that they received 500 (!) such complaints! If that wasn’t bad enough, 23 years later, they received about 850 complaints about the extent of its coverage of Mandela’s death, including its decision to interrupt a repeat of sitcom Mrs Brown’s Boys on BBC1 to bring viewers news of his death. Mrs. Fucking. Brown’s Boys.
Anyway, enough of world events, back to the music and tonight’s show is hosted by Anthea Turner who has just got married to her manager and ex- Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell. Peter, of course, went out with fellow Radio 1 DJ Janice Long between ’84 and’85. It was a complicated web of relationships at Radio 1 back in the day. Anthea has ditched all that rock chick, back combed hair (for the wedding presumably) and the first act she introduces tonight are Black Box with “I Don’t Know Anybody Else”. This was the follow up to their huge No 1 “Ride On Time” which was the best selling single in the UK of the previous year so this track had a lot to live up to. Despite early encouraging signs (it crashed into this week’s chart as the highest new entry at No 5), it ultimately fell short of emulating its predecessor when it peaked at just one place higher the following week.
It always sounded like a pound shop version of “Ride On Time” to me – looks / sounds the same but isn’t quite as good. My overriding memory of this track though relates to a visit to see my girlfriend around this time whilst we were geographically separated (I was in Worcester and she in Hull). I’d saved up my dole money and traversed north to stay with her for a few days. One night, we ventured out into town and ended up in a bar called The Mint who were having a music quiz night. Fancying my chances, we entered and found ourselves in a tie break situation for first place. The winner was to be decided by the team that was the first to spot a current chart hit but played backwards. To my elation then (and shame now) I was first up off my seat to correctly identify Black Box and “I Don’t Know Anybody Else”. We won a cheap bottle of bubbly but in the bleak, unemployed Winter of 1990 it felt like gold.
Oh blimey it’s Cher again with her “Just Like Jesse James” video. On reflection, this is just Cher doing her version of Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead Or Alive” (indeed Jon Bon Jovi himself would come as close as dammit to covering his band’s own song for his almost identical solo hit “Blaze Of Glory” later in the year). This isn’t that surprising given that “Just Like Jesse James” was co-written by Desmond Childs who was responsible for the Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer”, “Bad Medicine” and “Born To Be My Baby”. By pure coincidence (or was it?), he also wrote “How Can We Be Lovers?” for Michael Bolton who will make his TOTP debut later in the show (gulp!).
This was Cher’s first hit of the 90s in the UK but she wouldn’t stop there. Oh no – she released 21 further singles over the course of the decade resulting in 16 Top 40 hits of which 6 went Top 10 and 3 were No 1s (if you include a charity single she featured on in “Love Can Build a Bridge”). Say what you like about her, she could spin a modicum of musical talent an awful long way.
After, Eric Clapton contributed guitar to Phil Collins current hit “I Wish It Would Rain Down” the other week, Phil returns the favour now by supplying the drums on Clapton’s new single “Bad Love”. Now this always sounded like Clapton had just re-written “Layla” to me and guess what? He had! Here’s @TOTPFacts:
It really is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster of a record with the bridge part of it basically stolen from “Badge” by Cream which Clapton also wrote of course. Apparently that was the idea of one Mick Jones – no not the lead guitarist with The Clash but the one from AOR dinosaurs Foreigner (boo!). For all its calculated and knowing composition, I didn’t mind it – at least Clapton was just stealing from himself and wasn’t trying to jump on the latest bandwagon. An Italo House Clapton anyone?
“Bad Love” peaked at No 25.
Despite the proliferation of dance tunes that seemed to dominate the charts (and therefore TOTP as well) around this time, we’ve actually seen some undeniably indie bands feature on the show in recent weeks as well. We’ve had peroxide blonde Brummies Birdland and psychedelic doomsters The House Of Love on the same show previously and now we get one of the biggest names of all indiedom in The Wedding Present. Now my mate Robin had been well into this lot back in Poly but I hadn’t really got on board in the same way. I knew their single “Why Are You Being So Reasonable Now?” from a couple of years before which had just missed the Top 40 and also “Kennedy” their bona fide chart hit from ’89 and of course the iconic sleeve for their indie label debut album “George Best” but that was probably about it.
This single “Brassneck” was taken from their first major label album release “Bizarro” (albeit in a beefed up production form compared to the album version) and was a shot across the bows of the then prevalent mainstream chart music. Uncompromising is the word I would use and that can also certainly be applied to main man David Gedge’s performance of the song here. No cheeky grins and jumping about from the Gedge here. His look of disinterest is almost defiant. Apparently it wasn’t deliberately conceived but more rather grew organically. Here’s Dave himself with the story during an interview with https://gedgesongs.wordpress.com:
“I was just following an old tradition established by some of my heroes… those punk bands who didn’t take Top Of The Pops seriously and who took the mickey out of the whole ‘miming’ thing. I started doing it during the TV rehearsals, fully expecting a producer or director to tell me to stop messing about but no one did. So with each run-through it became a little more… extreme, ha, ha”.
Some 10 months or so on from this broadcast I was working at Our Price In Manchester and went out for a drink after work with some colleagues (possibly in the pre-IRA bomb version of Sinclair’s Oyster Bar or maybe the Old Wellington for the Manc pedants out there) and our table was joined by a woman who turned out to be one of Mark E Smith’s sisters. She turned to me and asked me to sing some Wedding Present songs as I was the spitting image of David Gedge! And it turned out I was back then…well sort of. She also told me that Gedge was a ‘sex god’ to use her phrase which immediately turned my complexion bright red. There’s a clip of The Wedding Present doing a cover of “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)” on TOTP where I swear it’s me up there doing the vocals. Obviously the middle aged me doesn’t look like him now of course (to be fair Gedge doesn’t look like Gedge anymore) but as a skinny 22 year old I could pass for him. In my 80s blog I revealed how I spent three years being called ‘Dan’ at Sunderland Poly due to my resemblance to the actor Dan Ackroyd so Dave Gedge was a step up! Sadly I look more like Sam Allardyce these days. Bah!
“Brassneck” peaked at No 24.
Talking of cover versions, here’s Rod Stewart doing his best to murder the Tom Waits track “Downtown Train”. Rod included his version on his 1989 “Best Of” album and it just sounds so sanitised compared to Tom’s original. Stewart somehow manages to purge all the earthiness from the song.
Not content with ruining one Waits composition he repeated the crime again two years later when he covered Tom Traubert’s Blues”. You know what, I do like some Rod Stewart stuff – “The Killing of Georgie (Part I and II)” for example is fabulous – but he’s also done a lot of crap and I get the impression that he’s not that nice a character either.
“Downtown Train” peaked at No 10 over here and No 3 in the US.
‘Sybil!!!!’ When the singer Sybil (full name Sybil Lynch) was in the charts I never made any connection (subconscious or other wise) with Basil Fawlty’s wife but every time I hear her name mentioned now I can’t get the Fawlty Towers character so superbly played by Prunella Scales out of my head!
Sybil the singer’s cover of “Walk On By” peaked at No 6 but she would continue to release cover versions in her later career including treatments of Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day”, Al Greens’s “So Tired Of Being Alone” and Carole King’s “It’s Too Late”. None of them made the UK Top 40. Despite her reliance on other artists for the majority of her hits, she went on to work in education, at one point teaching lyric & songwriting composition and creative writing. Who said ‘I know nothing’?!
Stand well back! The career of Depeche Mode is about to rocket into the stratosphere! In March 1990, the band released their “Violator” album and their world was never the same again. It went triple platinum in the US selling 3 million copies and propelled the band into playing gigs in huge super size stadiums – an estimated 1.2 million fans across the planet saw the World Violation Tour. Such was the extent of Mode mania in the US that when the band held an in-store autograph signing at Wherehouse Entertainment in Los Angeles to promote the album, some 20,000 fans turned up with a near riot ensuing. Not that the band had been small fry by anyone’s description before then but this was next level stuff.
“Enjoy The Silence” was the second single to be taken from the album (following the excellent “Personal Jesus” ) and I’m going to say that it is perhaps the band’s most well respected and important of their career. It won Best British Single at the 1991 BRIT Awards and went Top 10 both in the US and here. Indeed, it was the first time the band had visited the UK Top 10 since “Master And Servant” six years previously. In a Q Magazine interview in 2008, Dave Gahan said of the track:
“It really made the album cross over into another cosmos. It had been a constant climb over the previous 10 years, but I don’t think we were prepared for what was about to come. The album was a worldwide success and suddenly these huge royalty checks started coming in and you were able to do whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted – the velvet rope was always open.“
It really is an excellent song and the iconic video with its King Midas imagery (a man who has everything but just wants a quiet place to sit down) cements its reputation. Songwriter Martin Gore seemed to like songs that included the word ‘silence’ as much as Sybil liked cover versions – they had a 1982 hit song with “Leave in Silence” of course.
Oh bloody hell! It’s Michael Bolton! And you know what this means…my Michael Bolton story! OK, I’ve told this one before in my 80s TOTP blog when a certain Kenny G* featured on the show but here it is again. In 1993, I went to see Michael Bolton in concert! Oh God, even just typing the words out looks wrong! There are mitigating circumstances I swear!
I was working in Our Price at the time and was on a works’ night out that ended up at a nightclub where I was well and truly off my tits. A guy I worked with called Andy was also there. Andy loved his mainstream pop music and was quite a character. He named his car Jason after Jason Donovan and just about shoved me out of the way one day so he could get to serve Barbara Knox (Corrie’s Rita Fairclough) in the shop. He also loved Michael Bolton and asked me, whilst I was under the influence in the nightclub, if I would go with him to see the poodle haired one in concert in Sheffield. And I said yes. Now remember, I was blotto – that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Andy bought the tickets the next day before I could back out and so I found myself travelling to Sheffield a few weeks later to see Michael Bolton. I seem to have blacked out anything that I witnessed that evening from my memory but my impression is that Andy enjoyed it rather more than I did. Still, it’s a good story.
*And what has this to do with Kenny G? Well, Kenny was the support act. Yes, just when I though it couldn’t be any more of a surreal experience, it turned out that ‘the G man’ (as Bolton referred to him) was on the same bill!
For the purposes of factual acknowledgement, “How Am I Supposed To Live with Out You” was Bolton’s first (and biggest) UK hit peaking at No3. It was a US No 1 despite the fact that Laura Branigan (of “Gloria” fame) had already had a Top 20 hit with it in 1983.
The Stranglers‘ run of 80s chart hits had started to peter out by the middle of the decade and so to arrest that trend they used the old cover trick to beef up their profile by releasing a version of “All Day And All Of The Night” by The Kinks. It worked, returning them to the Top 10 in ’88 for the first time in five years.
Needing another fillip to start the new decade they repeated the exercise by releasing “96 Tears” which had been a US No 1 in 1966 for ? and the Mysterians. Nothing to do with Captain Scarlet (that was the Mysterions), they were a garage rock band from Michigan but you could be forgiven that “96 Tears” was a Stranglers original so easily does it fit their trademark sound. The distinctive organ riff that runs thorughout puts me in mind of those Oldham baggy stars Inspiral Carpets and guess what they also did a version of it…
Back to The Stranglers and their version would peak at No 17 and they would enjoy a brief renaissance in 1991 when their “Greatest Hits 1977–1990” collection album went all the way to No 4 in the album charts off the back of a successful TV ad campaign.
Sinéad O’Connor is still at No 1 with “Nothing Compares 2 U”. It’s the third of four weeks at the top spot and if the UK record buying audience hadn’t tired of it already, it seems the TOTP producers were starting to. We get just over two minutes of the song in this clip. The single sold three and a half million copies worldwide and was the second biggest selling single in the UK in 1990. That’s how you do a cover version Rod Stewart!
We close with “Steamy Windows” by Tina Turner. The third single from her “Foreign Affair” album, it peaked at No 13 in the UK.
The song was written by blues rock guitarist Tony Joe White who wrote “Polk Salad Annie” famously recorded by Elvis Presley. Tony was one of those artists that would get played during one of our specialist music mornings when when I worked for Our Price. You were only allowed to play music of a certain genre like easy listening, jazz or blues. Here’s his version of the track which I think I prefer to Tina’s histrionic take on it…
For posterity’s sake, I include the chart run down below:
| Order of appearance | Artist | Song | Did I Buy it? |
| 1 | Black Box | I Don’t Know Anybody Else | It helped win me a bottle of bubbly but I didn’t celebrate by buying the single – no |
| 2 | Cher | Just Like Jesse James | No – phew! |
| 3 | Eric Clapton | Bad Love | Nah |
| 4 | The Wedding Present | Brassneck | I may have looked like Gedge but I didn’t feel the need to buy his single |
| 5 | Rod Stewart | Downtown Train | God no |
| 6 | Sybil | Walk On By | No |
| 7 | Depeche Mode | Enjoy The Silence | It seems I did enjoy the silence as it’s not in my singles collection. WTF? |
| 8 | Michael Bolton | How Am I Supposed To Live Without You | Quite easily Michael…oh except I saw you in concert. Oh God the shame! |
| 9 | The Stranglers | 96 Tears | It’s a no |
| 10 | Sinéad O’Connor | Nothing Compares 2 U | Don’t think so |
| 11 | Tina Turner | Steamy Windows | Nope |
Disclaimer
OK – here’s the thing – the TOTP episodes are only available on iPlayer for a limited amount of time so the link to the programme below only works for about another month so you’ll have to work fast if you want to catch the whole show.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000nwtc/top-of-the-pops-15021990
I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).
All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.
Some bedtime reading?
https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 