In recent years the calling of a general election has been a relentlessly regular occurrence. Between 2015 and 2019 the country had to go through this process three times. Back in 1992, we hadn’t had one for five years but the day before this TOTP aired, sitting Prime Minister John Major announced that there would be a General Election in April.
Whilst I would no doubt have taken notice of this statement, I would have been more focussed on my imminent trip down to London. Yes, despite being permanently skint living in Manchester on a record shop worker’s wages, I had somehow managed to squirrel away enough money for a trip to the capital.
I was staying with my friend Robin and he’d got us tickets to go and see my beloved Chelsea play. See, there’s the proof above. As ever with Chelsea in those days I came away disappointed:
Those Chelsea tickets weren’t the only tickets Robin got for us that weekend. His sister is an actress and was appearing in a play that weekend so along we popped. I can’t remember exactly what it was about but my main recollection was that it was decidedly weird. When Robin reminded me of this event recently we had a strange WhatsApp conversation which went like this:
Robin: Remember seeing The Fall with Right Said Fred?
Me (incredulous): Absolutely nothing. The Fall supported by Right Said Fred?!
Robin: No we watched a play called “ The Fall”, only 8 people were in the audience and one was the ‘Freddie with porn star hair.
So there you have it. A weekend of footballing disappointment and a close encounter with a genuine pop star (sort of). Right Said Fred aren’t on this particular TOTP but are on in two week’s time. Damn the gods of synchronicity!
Suppose I’d better get in with the music then and tonight’s opening act are Gun with “Steal Your Fire”. In keeping with the major political announcement of the day before, presenter Tony Dortie keeps it topical with a reference to the contents of Norman Lamont’s briefcase. I’m guessing as Lamont was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, this would have been to do with interest rates (I’m certainly not going anywhere near that Julian Clary reference!) though I doubt at the time I was following the Exchange Rate Mechanism that closely. Now I’d quite liked this lot with their hits “Better Days” and “Shame On You”, the latter of which I’d even bought. By 1992 though, I’d completely lost track of them. I remember second album “Gallus” coming out and the cover of it but I’m not sure it was ever played in the Our Price I worked in (there wasn’t much of a rock fraternity amongst the staff) so I’m not familiar with it at all, not even this single. Having listened to it back though, it seems that Gun were, like Margaret Thatcher before them, ‘not for turning’ when it came to their musical direction. “Steal Your Fire” stuck rigidly to the formula.
The single peaked at No 24 which at that point was the band’s biggest chart hit but their peak would come in the Summer of ‘94 when they took their cover of Cameo’s “Word Up” into the Top 10.
One of the stories of the 1992 Top 40 was the blatant (and amusing) attempt by The Wedding Present to manipulate them. Yes, decades before the charts were hijacked by the X Factor and social media galvanised campaigns to artificially create hits, David Gedge and co were already at it.
Their cunning plan was to match Elvis Presley’s chart record of having twelve Top 30 hits in one calendar year, something The King had achieved in 1957. To do this, they released a limited edition single every single month in 1992. The limited stock quantities (only 10,000 were pressed for the UK and 5,000 for the rest of the world) created a frenzy amongst their fan base and crucially a brief but significant sales spike each month propelling every single into the Top 30 for one week before dropping like a stone once copies were exhausted. A genius ruse from Gedge! Meanwhile back in the record shops it was causing carnage as desperate fans tried to ensure they didn’t miss out. Even our shop which was a two trading floor city centre store would only get a handful of the singles which fans wanted to pre-order. That’s fine but woe betide the staff on release day if the system went wrong and all copies were sold before those pre-orders were picked up. Like I said, carnage.
The TOTP appearances that this practice created for the band – they were on the show four times in 1992 – only added to the chaos. Here’s Gedge himself courtesy of @TOTPFacts:
For the record, “Three” was neatly the third of these monthly single releases despite Gedge’s confusing jumper with the number four on it (oh you little scampi Dave!). They weren’t just called ‘One’ to ‘Twelve’ though. “Three” peaked at No 14.
Tony Dortie’s nicked one of my phrases! I’m sure I referred to a ‘rave conveyor belt’ in a recent post. Tony is using it in reference to the next act who are Toxic Two performing their one and only hit “Rave Generator”. Now I know I say this a lot and in my defence we are talking about tunes from 30 years ago but I genuinely did not know of the existence of this until just this moment. It seems to be a mash up of “French Kiss” by Lil Louis and “Pacific State” by 808 State.
As there are hardly any lyrics in it (there’s a sample of someone saying ‘How do you feel now?’) the show has the perennial problem of how to stage the performance of it. They’ve gone for some zoom in zoom out camera trickery, some overlaid special effects and a panoramic view of the studio audience to try and create the impression that we are witnessing a rave in full flow. Oh and those dancers in leotards who look like they’re doing a yoga class on speed. Were people really dancing like that in clubs around this time?
There’s a noise in “Rave Generator” that reminds me of the blast sound from a Blake’s 7 ray gun. Maybe it was the same sound. After all, the aforementioned 808 State used sound library clips. Here’s @TOTPFacts again:
“Rave Generator” peaked at No 13.
The grunge bandwagon rolls in with Nirvana’s follow up to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. Now it’s never occurred to me before and so I must have missed this story at the time but there was some controversy around “Come As You Are” and it wasn’t to do with Kurt Cobain’s lyrics about guns. No, it was to do with the fact that the song bore very strong similarities to the track “Eighties” by Killing Joke. And it does. Now I’ve made the connection I can’t unhear it. Apparently Killing Joke considered legal action against Nirvana but sacked it off as a bad idea after Cobain’s suicide in 1994. Or maybe it was because there’s a case to be made that Killing Joke weren’t innocent of plagiarism themselves and that they based their song on a Damned track called “Life Goes On”. Maybe they didn’t want to draw too much attention to that with a high profile law suit.
At the time though, if I’d have been asked about similarities between “Come As You Are” and another song I’d have replied ‘Yes, it sounds like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” only less frenetic’.
Cobain’s hometown was a place called Aberdeen, Washington but the story I draw your attention to isn’t that there’s somewhere with the same name as Scotland’s Granite City in America but that the sign welcoming you to Aberdeen includes the line ‘Come As You Are’.
“Come As You Are” peaked at No 9.
Who’s next? Clivilles & Cole? Who were they then? Well, they were the guys behind C+C Music Factory of course ( C+C geddit?) but for some reason they felt the need to release this single – “A Deeper Love” – under their own names. I’m not sure what the criteria was for that decision. Was it because “A Deeper Love” was a change in musical direction and therefore wouldn’t have sat comfortably under the C+C Music Factory name? My dance head credentials are really good enough to make that assessment. Sure, I can tell that “Things That Make you Go Hmmm…” was of a much more popper flavour than “A Deeper Love” but was it really that different from “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)”? I’m sure someone out there could tell me ‘Of course it is and here’s why…’. Anyway Clivilles & Cole it was (although co-host Claudia Simon confusingly refers to them as just C+C) and singer Deborah Cooper was chosen to front it. The only other track that Clivilles & Cole released under their own names was this cover of U2’s “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” who was the flipside to “A Deeper Love”.
The performance here includes the return of the bubble machine that we saw when Manic Street Preachers were on the show the other week. There you have it then. In the world of TOTP 1992, there was seemingly little difference between house anthems and alternative rock.
“A Deeper Love” peaked at No 15.
It’s the video for Eric Clapton‘s “Tears In Heaven” next. I went into the back story of this one in the last post so I don’t propose to go through it all again now not least because it’s already well known to most people.
However, what I didn’t say was that the track was co-written with one Will Jennings who also wrote “Up Where We Belong” for the soundtrack to An Officer And A Gentleman which was sung by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes. Joe of course was in the Breakers section last week alongside Clapton. Yeah, this little bit of pop trivia really should have gone in last week’s post shouldn’t it. Once again I curse the gods of synchronicity! Jennings also wrote “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic which gave Celine Dion a huge No 1 hit. Maybe any more references to Will Jennings are best left alone then.
“Tears In Heaven” peaked at No 5 in the Uk and No 2 in the US.
The Exclusive performance this week comes from Annie Lennox who is embarking on a solo career after her and Dave Stewart decided to put Eurythmics on an indefinite hiatus. Striking out on her own would prove to be a very successful decision for Annie with debut album “Diva” going four times platinum in the UK. In hindsight it seems ridiculous to imagine anything other than further success for Lennox but I can’t recall whether that was the general perception at the time. Surely Annie herself must have experienced some self doubt given that she had spent the last 15 years working with Dave Stewart? If she did have any nerves about being on stage alone, Annie certainly conquers them in this performance. The closing “You don’t know how I feel” line is delivered with real conviction.
If she did then the chart performance of debut single “Why” must have settled her nerves. A soulful ballad with a hint of gospel with existential dilemma lyrics, it was a hit all around Europe including the UK where it peaked at No 5. Some critics described it as her attempt to write her own version of “My Way”. I’m not sure about that though the first person lyrics give it a very personal touch.
Annie would score a total of eight hit singles throughout the 90s including four Top Tenners.
The Breakers are a bit weird this week. There’s only two of them and they’ve both already been on the show as performances via satellite. U2 were on the 27 Feb show that we missed due to the Adrian Rose issue whilst Mr. Big were only on last week. Were they not actually in the Top 40 when we saw those satellite performances and therefore they’ve been allocated as Breakers because now they are? Seems a bit rum to me.
Anyway, it’s Mr. Big up first with their drippy ballad “To Be With You”. This is the official promo video as opposed to that satellite performance and it’s as dreary as the song. It’s just the band sat around in a railroad car performing the track. Halfway through it changes from black and white to colour. That’s it. Now when I was a student at Poly, we had to make a video as part of one of the course’s modules and one of the visual effects that we used was switching from black and white to colour. It may have even been my idea. However, we were just a bunch of clueless 18 year olds messing about not a professional video director. Surely whoever was for this promo could have come up with something better than this? Very poor.
And so to the twice aforementioned U2. Now there seems to be three different videos for “One”. TOTP shows the version directed by Mark Pellington which has a buffalo running in a field (an image that would be reused for the cover of their second greatest hits album “Best Of 1990 – 2000”). A second video directed by the band’s long time official photographer Anton Corbijn depicted the band in drag and featured Bono’s father Robert Hewson. The video was pulled after the band announced that royalties from the single would go to AIDS charities and they were worried that the drag theme might link AIDS to the gay community in a negative way. Finally a third video was shot by Rattle And Hum director Phil Joanou which was basically Bono sat at a table in a club smoking and drinking interspersed with footage of the gang performing the song.
I have to say that “One” is up there as one of my favourite U2 songs and is certainly my fave from the “Achtung Baby” album. I even performed my own version of it at my guitar class many years ago. Thankfully I don’t think any recordings of it exist. The lyrics resonate with the line ‘We’re one but we’re not the same’ pithily conveying the notion that humanity has to get along for the world to survive. It should surely have been a bigger hit than its No 7 chart peak. Its legacy though has outlasted that commercial peak and it regularly features in various ‘the greatest song of all time’ polls.
Shakespear’s Sister remain at No 1 with “Stay” and this week we get to see its famous video. Inspired by the 50s American independent sci fi film Cat-Women Of The Moon, it depicts Marcella Detroit at the bedside of her comatose lover willing him to regain consciousness before Siobahn Fahey appears as some sort of grim reaper/ angel of death figure come to take him to the after life. A physical fight between Detroit and Fahey ensues (a metaphor for the man’s struggle between life and death presumably) in which the former wins out and her lover awakes. I think it’s the demonic look on Fahey’s face that makes the video so memorable.
As with the video for “November Rain” by Gun N’ Roses last week, this promo was also lampooned by French and Saunders, just as Baddiel and Newman had done.
| Order of appearance | Artist | Title | Did I buy it? |
| 1 | Gun | Steal Your Fire | Nah |
| 2 | The Wedding Present | Three | Even working in a record shop couldn’t secure me a copy |
| 3 | Toxic Two | Rave Generator | Hell no! |
| 4 | Nirvana | Come As You Are | No |
| 5 | Clivilles & Cole | A Deeper Love | Not for me thanks |
| 6 | Eric Clapton | Tears In Heaven | Nope |
| 7 | Annie Lennox | Why | No but my wife had the album |
| 8 | Mr. Big | To Be With You | Negative |
| 9 | U2 | One | No but I had the album |
| 10 | Shakespear’s Sister | Stay | I didn’t |
Disclaimer
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.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0013vgd/top-of-the-pops-12031992
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 