The 24th of May 1990 was not a slow news day as England football manager Bobby Robson chose this day to inform the media that he would not be renewing his contract after the Summer’s World Cup competition in Italy. Sir Bobby had a job lined up with Dutch club PSV Eindhoven which led to accusations from the tabloid press of him being unpatriotic. Hmm. It seems we haven’t progressed much in 30 years.
That year’s World Cup would become inextricably linked with the music world thanks to New Order’s “World In Motion” song but that’s for the next repeat’s post. For now though, we start with The B-52s and their follow up to their No 2 hit single “Love Shack” called “Roam”. I’d loathed “Love Shack” so probably wasn’t expecting that much from “Roam” but it it turned out to be vastly superior to its predecessor to my ears.
There seems to be a lot of discussion online about the true meaning of the song’s lyrics. On there surface an innocent message about freedom, travelling and seeing the world, the online conspiracy theorists would have you believe that it’s all just one big double entendre and is actually about the sexual act with lines like ‘Take it hip to hip, rocket through the wilderness, Around the world the trip begins with a kiss’ clearly being about cunnilingus! What?! Mind. Blown.
Moving on swiftly, for me the performance here and indeed the sound of the song is all about Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson and their rousing vocals which are just perfectly weighted for the song. So dominant are they visually that Fred Schneider, who had been so high profile in their performances of “Love Shack”, is relegated to shaking his tambourine almost absentmindedly throughout. I wonder if he was OK with that? Reminds me of a story I once heard about the single “Nobody’s Fool” by Haircut 100. When percussionist Mark Fox first heard it, he complained that there weren’t enough parts in it for him and he wasn’t going to just stand their on TOTP with a bloody tambourine thank you very much!
There’s a parody of “Roam” called “Comb” which was a skit on Australian comedy sketch show Fast Forward about Pierson’ and Wilson’s hairstyles. There’s also a COVID-19 parody that I found on YouTube featuring lines like “No more hip to hip, keep your social distances” but now doesn’t seem the time to be dwelling on that.
“Roam” peaked at No 17 in the UK but went all the way to No 3 in the US.
The first video of the night comes from Mantronix featuring Wondress with “Take Your Time”. I have zero left to say about this one so I’ve had to plunge into the internet to come up with something. What I found chilled me to the bone. This single was taken from an album called “This Should Move Ya” the title of which alone should have been enough to set my warning bells ringing but nothing could have prepared me for what I found out about that album. It includes a version of “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll” by Ian Dury And The Blockheads! Obviously then I had to give it a listen and I’m not yet sure I have recovered. If you are brave, or possibly a masochist, listen to this….
Just horrible. Anybody involved in this heinous crime should hang their heads in shame.
“Take Your Time” peaked at No 10.
En Vogue are up next and actually in the studio for their very first visit to TOTP as presenter Anthea Turner advises. She also tells us that they have style and you have to admit she’s not wrong. They give a mesmerising performance including that a cappella intro which is actually a song within a song as it is a treatment of “Who’s Lovin’ You” by The Miracles.
I was amazed to see a filmography section in the band’s Wikipedia entry but they have actually appeared in three films – Aces: Iron Eagle III, their own Christmas movie and this fleeting cameo in Batman Forever whichI had no idea was them until now…
Four Breakers this week and Anthea Turner perversely announces them in the reverse order to the one that they actually appear. The first one then is actually Movement 98 featuring Carroll Thompson with “Joy And Heartbreak”. I had no recall of this at all before hearing it on this repeat at which point it did sound familiar but that’s probably because it is based on the melody of Erik Satie’s “Les Trois Gymnopedie”. No really. Listen to just a few seconds of Satie below…
and then play the start of the Movement 98 track….
…see? That classical music trick would be repeated later in the year when The Farm scored a huge hit with “All Together Now” which was based on Pachelbel’s Canon but that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Back to Movement 98 though and Wikipedia informs me that this was a Paul Oakenfold project with input from Rob Davis, the earrings and dresses wearing guitarist from Mud who would go onto write such huge hits as “Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)” for Spiller and “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” for Kylie. As for vocalist Carroll Thompson, she has quite the musical pedigree. An award winning reggae singer, she was also a member of Floy Joy briefly and also sang on Aztec Camera’s “One And One” track from their “Love” album. She has also worked as a session singer with the likes of …deep breath…Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Natalie Cole, Pet Shop Boys, Robbie Williams, Boy George, Maxi Priest, Sting, Billy Ocean, Chaka Khan, Aswad and M People. Phew!
As well as Satie’s influence, “Joy And Heartbreak” also reminds me of something else which I can’t quite put my finger on. Is it Shanice’s “I Love Your Smile”? A Janet Jackson track maybe? It’ll come back to me …probably in the middle of the night.
“Joy And Heartbreak” peaked at No 27.
Right then, the era of Betty Boo is upon us. Having introduced herself to UK pop fans the previous year as the vocalist on Beatmasters’ single “Hey DJ / I Can’t Dance To That Music You’re Playing”, she was signed to Rhythm King Records on the strength of demos that she presented to them for “Doin’ The Do” and “Where Are You Baby?” with the former becoming her debut solo single. Mixing her hip hop roots with some irresistibly catchy pop hooks, the track was an immediate hit taking Betty (real name Alison Clarkson) to No 7 in the charts. She was a bona fide pop star in her own right.
The video worked well in promoting her cartoony rebellious image as she revisits her old school in a leather jacket and hot pants to take issue with the teachers who said she would amount to nothing. In a 2019 Classic Pop Magazine interview, Clarkson related the origin of the song:
“When I left my A-Levels I did have my tail between my legs,” she reflects, “in that [after the She Rockers split] I did go back to the head of sixth form and say, please may I come back and do my A-Levels again, and she said no. I was so annoyed with them. So I thought it’d be great if I just channelled that. I was sticking two fingers up, basically.”
For a while back there in 1990, Betty Boo was hot news. Her debut album “Boomania” went to No 4 in the charts and contained four hit singles. However, inevitably the hits dried up after taking two years to come up with a second album and she retired from the music world after losing her Mum to cancer. As with the aforementioned Rob Davis though, she would carve out a career as a successful songwriter penning hits for Girls Aloud, Dannii Minogue and the No 1 single “Pure And Simple” for Hear’Say.
In a recent TOTP repeat we saw British rock act Thunder on the show and this week we get another of the acts of that early 90s UK rock scene in Little Angels. Having been in existence since 1984 after forming in Scarborough, the band had released four singles up to this point that had all failed to make the Top 40 but they rectified that with the release of “Radical Your Lover” which was their first chart hit peaking at No 34. If you check out the details of the release, it’s actually credited to Little Angels and The Big Bad Horns with the latter being a trio who provided the brass parts to complement their out and out rock sound.
Listening back to this now, it seems almost interchangeable with that of Thunder but then I’m not a die hard fan. Having said that, I did own a copy of their No 1 1992 album “Jam” at one point which was a freebie from Our Price – record companies would often supply the chain and its shops with a promo copy of their artists’ albums ahead of official release date to play in store to ‘create a buzz’ about it. Not sure what happened to my copy though. I also once saw them do a PA at Manchester’s HMV store to promote that “Jam” album. They performed a short set and they sounded pretty good to be fair.
More interesting than any of the above though is the fact that the band’s guitarist was called Bruce Dickinson. Yes! Exactly the same as Iron Maiden’s lead singer! What are the chances?!
Talk Talk in the charts in 1990 with a re-release of a single that flopped when originally issued in 1984? What gives? Well, “It’s My Life” had been reissued by EMI to promote the band’s first ever Best Of Collection called “Natural History: The Very Best of Talk Talk” which the band themselves had disproved of. It performed surprisingly well commercially given that the band only ever achieved three Top 40 singles despite much critical acclaim. So well that EMI released a remix album the following year called “History Revisited: The Remixes” which angered the band so much that they sued EMI claiming that material had been falsely attributed to them. Talk Talk won the case with EMI agreeing to withdraw and destroy all remaining copies of the album. I would have been working in Our Price at that point but I must admit I can’t remember having to take that album off sale.
It seems that the band were never on that good terms with their record company. As far back as the single’s original release six years previous, EMI had interfered with the band’s creativity when, disliking Tim Pope’s original video showing Mark Hollis with lips sealed and covered by animated lines (a statement against lip synching), they insisted on another video which was basically the band performing against a back drop of said original promo. The band’s exaggerated movements suggest that they weren’t totally on board with EMI’s idea!
As for me, back in 1984, I’d liked “It’s My Life” on its original release and also subsequent singles “Such A Shame” and “Dum Dum Girl”. I’m pretty sure I had plans to purchase the parent album also called “It’s My Life” but somehow that purchase never materialised. The 1990 re-release peaked at No 13.
Two songs we’ve already seen on the show before are up next starting with “Won’t Talk About It” by Beats International. Featuring Lindy Layton on vocals, I’m pretty sure this would have been the band’s last ever TOTP appearance as they never made the Top 40 again after this single.
Although Lindy attended stage school in the 1980s and appeared as an actor in TV shows such as Casualty and Press Gang alongside numerous adverts, she did not, contrary to rumours, appear in Grange Hill. Apparently the press reported at the time that she had been in the long running school drama but they had confused her with the actress Lindy Brill who played Cathy Hargreaves. Maybe the reason for the confusion was that Brill did seem to have some musical chops. Witness her here in a story line about her school band who were rehearsing for a scout hall dance gig in the school’s music room at lunchtime….
The scout hall dance gig was small fry though compared to actually being on TOTP itself, a feat which Brill achieved as part of the St Winifred’s School Choir backing singers on Brian and Michael’s No 1 hit “Matchstalk Men And Matchstalk Cats And Dogs” some 12 years before Lindy Layton fronted Beats International on the show. Lindy Brill – only the woman Lindy Layton could have been.
“Won’t Talk About It” peaked at No 9.
Oh come on now! Seriously?! Michael Bolton on again?! How many times is this? Three? Four? It’s just the same old clip of that original performance of “How Can We Be Lovers” recycled again and again to boot. OK – let’s look on the bright side. Despite a haul of 17 chart hits in the UK, we won’t see Bolton on the show again for at least another year as his next three single releases didn’t make the Top 40 and he would only make the Top 10 twice more; once with a cover of Percy Sledge’s “When A Man Loves A Woman” in 1991 and secondly with the creepily titled 1995 No 6 hit “Can I Touch You…There?”. Bolton also had a hit with a song called “Said I Loved You But I Lied” – I’m starting to think Michael might not be all that nice a guy.
A song next which seemed to be the go to track if you wanted to cover it for a hit. Like most people, I knew “Venus” from the Bananarama version of it in 1986 rather than the Shocking Blue 1969 original. However, it’s also been covered by the likes of Tom Jones through to Weird Al Yankovic via Sacha Distel. Weird is certainly the word. In 1990, it was revitalised once more by Italian / German dance project Don Pablo’s Animals who took it all the way to No 4 in our charts. It’s a horrible instrumental version though with that omnipresent ‘whoo, yeah’ sample all over it. Just nasty.
And that name? What was that all about? Here’s @TOTPFacts with a decent guess:
Oh OK. So Don Pablo was basically a prototype Joe Exotic of Tiger King notoriety. Joe, of course, liked a sing-song (before was sentenced to 22 years in prison for hiring someone to murder his nemesis Carole Baskin) . Here he is with “I Saw A Tiger”…
Wikipedia advises me that it wasn’t really him doing the singing though. Say it ain’t so Joe.
Back to Don Pablo’s Animals, I think my wife had this on a “Smash Hits Rave” compilation album which, after a quick google search, shows me that it also included Betty Boo’s “Doin’ The Do” from earlier in the show. I have never played said album in my life.
In a very static Top 5, Adamski (featuring Seal) comes out on top for a third straight week with “Killer”. It’s the video this week rather than a studio performance. It’s pretty basic looking stuff by today’s standards with Seal’s body less, spinning head enhanced by some flashing graphics. Adamski himself also features as some sort of Dr Frankenstein figure with Seal portrayed as his creation.
The song has been covered numerous times most famously by George Michael and by Seal himself but there are other versions too. Witness Sugababes who recorded it as a B-side to their 2003 single “Shape”:
Four years before that, there was this vile version from German trance act ATB in 1999 which I must have voided from my memory banks and for good reason:
The play out video is “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” by Was (Not Was). I would have had no clue as to when this was a bit. I’d have maybe gone for later in the decade to be honest but this cover of The Temptations classic by David and Don Was (not their real names) was the lead single from their fourth studio album “Are You Okay?”. It didn’t do much for me I have to say but I did like the other two singles lifted from the album which were “How the Heart Behaves” and “I Feel Better Than James Brown” neither of which made the Top 40.
In a neat bit of symmetry, Don Was produced four tracks on The B-52s album “Cosmic Thing” from which opening song on tonight’s show “Roam” was taken (although not that track itself but he did produce “Love Shack”).
For the sake of posterity, I include the chart run down below:
| Order of appearance | Artist | Song | Did I Buy it? |
| 1 | The B-52s | Roam | I didn’t |
| 2 | Mantronix featuring Wondress | Take Your Time | I could take all day but I won’t change my mind about this – no |
| 3 | En Vogue | Hold On | Nah |
| 4 | Movement 98 featuring Carroll Thompson | Joy And Heartbreak | Nope |
| 5 | Betty Boo | Doin’ The Do | No but my wife had it on that Smash Hits Rave album |
| 6 | Little Angels | Radical Your Lover | No |
| 7 | Talk Talk | It’s My Life | No but I have it on a compilation CD of theirs (not Natural History though) |
| 8 | Beats International | Won’t Talk About It | No but my wife has their album with a version of it on |
| 9 | Michael Bolton | How Can We Be Lovers | NO! |
| 10 | Don Pablo’s Animals | Venus | See 5 above |
| 11 | Adamski | Killer | No but I had the Seal album with his version of it on |
| 12 | Was (Not Was) | Papa Was A Rolling Stone | No but I have it on their Best Of compilation Hello Dad…I’m In Jail |
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/m000qcx2/top-of-the-pops-24051990
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 