It’s two thirds of the way through March in 1990. The 21 year old me is still unemployed and has been since the start of the year. My girlfriend is miles away in Hull while I languish in poverty and hopelessness back in my parents’ house in Worcester. The only highlight of this particular week was my beloved Chelsea winning an actual trophy on the Sunday after this TOTP was broadcast. Back then, Chelsea were not the trophy winning machine they are now so any cup win was a big deal. The Zenith Data Systems trophy may seem like a joke to johnny come lately fans now but winning a final at Wembley was a huge deal for us diehards back then. Unfortunately, this was 1990 and very few games were being shown live on terrestrial TV so I couldn’t witness it live but my brother’s mate who has a Sky dish taped it for me and I watched the whole thing back on a VHS the following day. Apparently Moore’s Leisure Centre in Stockton was the place to go though. There was even a fellow Chelsea fan in there…
Enough football though. This is a music blog so play on sir and after last week’s ‘TOTP in decent tunes shocker’ episode, the question now is will that continue into this week’s show?
It’s a poor start. In fact, it’s a shocking start as the opening act are those three berks collectively known as Big Fun though why anybody would derive any fun (big or otherwise) from this turd fest, I have no idea. They’re in the studio after last week’s Breakers slot to perform their hit single “Handful Of Promises” and guess what? Absolutely everything about this is dreadful. The song, the bag of a fag packet dances moves …everything. Smash Hits ran a competition to win a copy of this single and I think the question they posed says it all about Big Fun:
Which of the following is an anagram of one of the Big Fun hunks’ name?
Is it :
- BIG WOBBLY NETHER REGIONS
- CHEST LIP WRICK
- DIPSTICK OF THREE
Heh. “Handful Of Promises” peaked at No 21.
I sometimes wonder if Erasure get the credit they deserve. Their longevity alone should be recognised (2020 is the duo’s 35th year together) whilst their creativity and productivity has been prolific. Their stats alone are amazing:
- 35 x Top 40 singles
- 16 x Top 10 singles (including 1 x No 1)
- 18 x studio albums
- 4 x No 1 studio albums
- 1 x No 1 Greatest Hits album
- 1 x Ivor Novello award for Most Performed Work
- 1 x BRIT award for Best British Group
- 1 x Mercury Music prize nomination
Despite all of the above, I wonder if they are unfairly seen now as a retro act permanently tied to the 80s and early 90s of their imperial phase. I would also put Duran Duran in that category and yet a peer like U2, who although undoubtedly having their critics and detractors, are seen as somehow more ‘credible’? Is it just a rock v (electro) pop prejudice?
Anyway, that Ivor Novello award mentioned above was actually for this single “Blue Savannah” which had a limited edition 30th anniversary re-release this year as part of Record Store Day.
One of those pesky electronic dance acts next that caused the TOTP producers so many problems with what to do with them on the show. When dance music exploded at the end of the 80s, permeated the mainstream and produced bona fide chart hits, TOTP was left with the problem of how to put them on the show. The hypnotic beats as pop songs and faceless DJs as pop stars format was TV kryptonite for a popular music TV show and so it came to pass that Orbital (brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll) served up one of the most lacklustre performances in the show’s history when they were on to promote their dance anthem “Chime”. The brothers give a wonderful interview in the TOTP – The Story of 1990 film about said performance. They pushed just about every TOTP producer button when they :
- Refused to mime
- Left plugs on their keyboards to show they weren’t playing live
- Refused a dancer on stage with them and so when one was forced upon them, refused to acknowledge she was even there
- Wore T-shirts with political slogans on them (‘No Poll Tax’) when they had been explicitly told such behaviour was outlawed
Excellent work all round lads!
I always get Orbital confused with The Orb (not being a dance head and all) which to an 80s pop fan must be the same as a clubber confusing Howard Jones with Nik Kershaw! Blasphemy!
“Chime” reached a high of No 12 and the duo would return with even bigger hits later in the decade with “Satan” and the theme tune to the The Saint film reboot.
Fed up of dance tunes yet? No? Good because here’s another from 49ers who are back in the charts with their second of two Top 20 hits in “Don’t You Love Me”. Please note that these Italo Housers from Brescia are just 49ers and not The 49ers (think Eurythmics and not The Eurythmics). This is important as there is another musical act called The 49ers who are a hip-hop duo from Newark, Delaware who consist of members Jas Mace and Marchitect (I’m not making this up).
Yeah…you got me. I’ve got nothing else to say about 49ers so I’m just filling time….
…until the Breakers! Thank God! We start with another tune that I don’t remember at all and it’s a collaboration between Queen Latifah and De La Soul with “Mama Gave Birth To The Soul Children”. Queen Latifah is one of those artists who seem to have been around forever but I’d be hard pressed to name any of her songs as demonstrated by me not knowing this one. I’d probably know her filmography better than her discography to be honest. She’s great as Motormouth Maybelle in the 2007 version of Hairspray for example.
Having listened to “Mama Gave Birth To The Soul Children” though, it’s definitely a tune and De La Soul provide that extra special ingredient to make it a potent dish. An embarrassing spoonerism from Gary Davies when he introduces the Queen as Queen La-feet-ah doesn’t take anything away from the track.
Now despite all this dance music bouncing around the charts back in 1990, somehow there was also room for some soft metal from a band that we hadn’t seen for a couple of years. Heart had staged a delayed assault on the UK charts back in 87-88 when they broke big with Top 3 hit “Alone” before belatedly finding an audience over here for their back catalogue which also made the charts when re-released off the back of that breakthrough hit. Fast forward to 1990 and here are the Wilson sisters again back with a new song in “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You” which turns out to have some of the most excruciatingly cringey lyrics ever committed to vinyl.
It’s basically one of those story songs but it’s completely ill advised. For a start there’s the plot about a woman who picks up a male hitch-hiker with the sole intent of taking him to a motel to have sex in an attempt to get pregnant. She then departs the next day leaving a note for the guy saying not to try and contact her. Inevitably they then run into each other years later with his child and she admits to him that she only did it because the man she is in love with is not able to father children. Look, I’m not making any judgements about the protagonist’s behaviour at all but is that really the best subject matter for a song? The band themselves hated it – they didn’t write it, rather it was penned by producer ‘Mutt’ Lange and they felt pressurised to record it. Here’s singer Ann Wilson from a 2017 ultimateclassicrock.com interview:
“I didn’t believe in the way the original lyrics were devaluing the man in the story. Just going, ‘Yeah, I can pick you up. We can have a night of love. We can never even know each other’s names. You can be so miraculous, and then I can just get up and leave you a note and walk out on you. Have a baby and sort of gloat about your surprise when you see the kid.’ To me, that was kind of an empty, weird, sort of hateful story.”
The song was actually banned in Ireland because the main character was a woman advocating random sex with a hitchhiker and the band didn’t play it live for years.
Then of course there are those lyrics. Here are a few of Lange’s (ahem) ‘beautiful’ words:
So we found this hotel
It was a place I knew well
We made magic that night
Oh, he did everything right
He brought the woman out of me
So many times, easily
And in the morning, when he woke
All I left him was a note
Eewww! And pray, what did the note say?
I told him I am the flower
You are the seed
We walked in the garden
We planted a tree
I mean really. It reminds me of another salacious story song – “Platinum Blonde” by Prelude.
Enough muck! Something a little more edifying please? Oh come on! What fresh hell is this? A dance version of a Phil Collins song? Talk about a double whammy of crapness! As far as I can tell, Jam Tronik were a German dance project who specialised in making naff dance versions of well known songs. There only UK hit single (peaking at No 19) was “Another Day In Paradise” – like the world really needed such a thing! Some of the other artists whose work they bastardised included The Carpenters, Meatloaf and Ben E. King.
As hateful as this is, it’s not the worst Phil Collins incident I have been witness to this week. I was watching some TV quiz show about music presented by that bloke from JLS and his partner the other day and they had AJ Pritchard on it – you know, that Strictly Come Dancing professional dancer whose now on I’m A Celebrity...Well, played the intro to “Mad World” by Tears For Fears, he had to identify who the artist was. His answer? “Is it Phil Collins?”. I despair.
Back in the studio now and it’s one of the biggest songs of the year (the 10th best selling in fact). Snap! were a German Eurodance group formed in 1989 by producers Michael Münzing and Luca Anzilotti and “The Power” would become the first of two UK No 1 singles for them. As with Black Box before them (and Milli Vanilli almost simultaneously), there was a ‘who’s the real singer?’ scandal attached to Snap! I think the female vocalist up there on stage with rapper Turbo B is one Jackie Harris who didn’t actually lay down the vocals for the track. That was Chaka Khan backing singer Penny Ford. With the Milli Vanilli lip sync scandal about to break and with Snap! being on the same record label as those two charlatans, a second miming furore was not what was required and so Penny was found pretty quickly and officially restored to the Snap! line up.
As for the song itself, it wasn’t my cup of tea at all but you certainly couldn’t ignore the blistering force of it. It fair smacked you about the face the first time you heard it. It will be No 1 soon enough.
This again?! This is the third time the video for “Lily Was Here” by Candy Dulfer and David A. Stewart has been on the show and I’m out of things to say about it now. Erm…oh yeah! I’ve got Dave Stewart’s autobiography. I wonder what he had to say about this record?
*much flicking of pages and skip reading later*
Well, he said….precisely nothing about it. I couldn’t find one mention of “Lily Was Here” or Candy Dulfer. Bit rude. I mean, I know he’s worked with just about everyone in both the music and movie worlds so it might have been hard to fit every collaboration into one tome but even so. I wouldn’t expect a Christmas card from Dave anytime soon Candy. He’s well moved on…
“Lily Was Here” peaked at No 6.
In amongst this seemingly endless ocean of generic (and frankly mostly dreadful) dance tunes, there comes the odd life raft of relief….and ‘odd’ is certainly the word for this next act. Quite how US alternative art rockers They Might Be Giants came to score a UK Top 10 hit at this time is almost as big a mystery as the lyrics to “Birdhouse In Your Soul”. This curious and beguiling piece of pop still intrigues me 30 years on. Everything about it from its peculiar song structure to its oblique lyrics screams ‘this is not a hit record’ and yet it somehow works. Ah yes, those lyrics. Making references as disparate as Jason and the Argonauts and The Longines Symphonette whilst including phrases like ‘filibuster vigilantly’ which really should have no place in a pop song, the piece is supposedly written from the perspective of a a blue nightlight shaped like a canary. As you do.
The performance here is delightfully bonkers with front man John Linnell throwing some very David Byrne-esque shapes. I also liked the follow up to this which was called “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” but it failed to make the Top 40 but they returned there again one final time in 2001 with “Boss Of Me” which was the theme tune to the US TV sit com Malcolm In The Middle.
“Birdhouse In Your Soul” flew all the way up to No 6 in the UK.
A fourth and final week at No 1 then for Beats International with “Dub Be Good To Me”. I’m guessing that they might be on TOTP at least once more as their follow up single “Won’t Talk About It” hit the Top 10 but they never appeared in the Top 40 again after that. Why did they break up? Who knows? Maybe Norman Cook was disillusioned with the project after the commercial failure of the ska/reggae influenced second album “Excursion On The Version”? Maybe he wanted to pursue a different musical direction as he did with the acid jazz inspired Freak Power? Or maybe he just wanted to widen his palette of production skills by working with lots of other artists? Whatever the reason, thank God they made “Dub Be Good To Me” with its stretch at the top of the charts that thereby deprived Jive Bunny of a fourth consecutive No 1 single.
The play out track is “Read My Lips (Enough Is Enough)” by Jimmy Somerville. This was the title track of his debut solo album and came on the back of two other hit singles taken from it in “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Comment Te Dire Adieu”. Unlike the previous two, this was a Somerville original and he wrote it to promote gay rights. Indeed, there was a definite association between the song and the ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) movement and that organisation’s ‘Read My Lips’ kiss-in events to demonstrate positive expressions of queer sexuality.
Aside from its political overtones though, it’s a bloody good disco record to boot. I like the way that Jimmy wove in the phrase ‘enough is enough’ into the song – I’m guessing it was a small homage to “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)” the 1979 disco stomper by Donna Summer and Barbara Streisand.
“Read My Lips (Enough Is Enough)” peaked at No 26.
For posterity’s sake, I include the chart run down below:
| Order of appearance | Artist | Song | Did I Buy it? |
| 1 | Big Fun | Handful Of Promises | …and a pocketful of shite, NO! |
| 2 | Erasure | Blue Savannah | No but It must be on their Greatest Hits collection that I own. |
| 3 | Orbital | Chime | Nah |
| 4 | 49ers | Don’t You Love Me | No I don’t |
| 5 | Queen Latifah and De La Soul | Mama Gave Birth To The Soul Children | Nope |
| 6 | Heart | All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You | It’s a no from me |
| 7 | Jam Tronik | Another Day In Paradise | NOOOOOOO!!! |
| 8 | Snap! | The Power | Not for me thanks |
| 9 | David A. Stewart and Candy Dulfer | Lily Was Here | Another no |
| 10 | They Might Be Giants | Birdhouse In Your Soul | Not the single but it’s on a Q – The Album compilation LP that I bought |
| 11 | Beats International | Dub Be Good To Me | No but my wife had their album |
| 12 | Jimmy Somerville | Read My Lips (Enough Is Enough) | No |
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/m000p9v4/top-of-the-pops-22031990
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 