I started the previous post talking about the poor state of the BBC’s musical output in 1993 and the landscape altering changes that were coming to both Radio 1 and TOTP. Well, one of them has just happened ahead of schedule. Radio 1 DJ and pretty much the embodiment of the comedy characters Smashie and Nicey Dave Lee Travis resigned on air three days after this TOTP aired. Apparently he was due to leave the station in ten weeks time anyway when his contract ran out but so irate was the ‘Hairy Cornflake’ about what was going on in the corridors of power at the station that he chose to have his own little private or rather very public moment of venting.
“…and I really want to put the record straight at this point and I thought you ought to know – changes are being made here which go against my principles and I just cannot agree with them”
“Profile: Dave Lee Travis”. Aircheck Tracker. Archived from the original on 22 October 2009. Retrieved 13 November 2008.
DLT was referring to the changes being ushered in by new controller in waiting Matthew Bannister that would lead to a massive overhaul of the station and its presenters. Simon Bates, Gary Davies, Alan Freeman, Bob Harris and Paul Gambaccini would follow him out of the door soon after. Eventually even Steve Wright whom Bannister had put on the breakfast show slot would resign* ushering in the era of the self styled saviour of Radio 1 Chris Evans. Heaven help us.
*Writing this coincidentally on the day of Steve Wright’s last ever afternoon show on Radio 2
TOTP would undergo its own major transformation a few months on from the comings and goings at Radio 1 but for the moment it was business as usual. Let’s see who was doing the rounds this week…
Well, there’s Juliet Roberts opening the show with her single “Caught In The Middle” for starters. Long before this hit, Juliet had a gig on a TV show called Rockschool. Nothing to do with Jack Black, it was a BBC programme that ran for four years and showed viewers techniques for making rock and pop music using guitar, keyboards, bass, drums etc.
I don’t remember this at all but by the comments against some of the clips on YouTube, the 80s kids loved it. It did have some pretty big names appear on the show such as Gary Moore, Vince Clarke, The Communards and Midge Ure. The presenters were pretty wooden but they were good musicians. Guitarist Deirdre Cartwright in the thumbnail below had been in a band called Painted Lady who would go on to become Girlschool. Play the opening song in the clip below. It sounds like prog-poppers It Bites who knew their way around a tune or two…
The clip below features Juliet (1:56) talking about singing styles. She also co-hosted a Channel 4 show called Solid Soul that was basically a retooling of America’s Soul Train.
All that work in front of the camera should have made her TOTP appearance here a doddle. She looks pretty confident for sure and nice to see an almost totally female backing band behind her (I think the drummer is a bloke). The 1993 trend of the tall hat started by Linda Perry of 4 Non Blondes carries on with Juliet’s choice of headgear. Top (hat) stuff.
What on earth is going on here?! Daniel O’Donnell on TOTP?! At a time when Matthew Bannister was lurking the corridors of Radio 1 on a dinosaur hunt to turn the station back to its original raison d’être of being for ‘young listeners’, what was the natural successor to Val Doonican doing on the BBC’s prime time pop music show?! Bizarre doesn’t begin to cover it. Even host Mark Franklin sounds surprised when he introduces him.
Look, I know Daniel O’Donnell has a massively loyal fan base who swear by him and he wasn’t doing any harm by giving them what they wanted to hear but in terms of the symbiosis between the BBC’s two main musical arms, it seemed like an outlier at best. To put it into context, it wouldn’t be long before Radio 1 Head of Production Trevor Dann would ban Status Quo records from being played on the station.
“Whatever Happened To Old Fashioned Love” was only O’Donnell’s fourth single release and he would only ever release eighteen in a fourteen year period fifteen of which would make the UK Top 40. Albums were a different matter altogether. Check out these numbers:
- Studio albums: 38
- Compilation albums: 13
- Live albums: 4
Wow! That’s a lot of Daniel O’Donnell! Big props by the way to the floor managers for this show for getting the studio audience to scream at Daniel as if he was a member of Take That.
The Madonna video for “Rain” again?! This is the third time in four weeks! And it was a non-mover this week (albeit within the Top 10)! Overkill much? It would get no higher despite all this exposure. I said in a recent post that you only had to look at the fact that all five singles from the “Erotica” album made the Top 10 in the UK as evidence that she was still current, popular and relevant at this time. However, what I didn’t say was that four of them (the four consecutive releases after the title track) failed to make the Top 5, the first time that had ever happened. She wouldn’t have another No 1 record until “Frozen” five years later.
One place higher than Madonna we find Urban Cookie Collective with “The Key The Secret” and unlike her Madgesty, they are on the up. Their ride up the charts so far has been as follows:
40 – 29 – 20 – 11 – 6
They would rise to No 2 the following week where they would stay for two weeks kept off the top spot by Freddie Mercury. It would then spend the next three weeks inside the Top 10 and a further three inside the Top 40 before finally dropping out.
The other day the tweet below appeared on my timeline:
The replies to Lucy’s tweet showed that there were loads of us with similar lines from songs that we pull out automatically given the correct prompt. Mine and my wife’s include “(Hey You) The Rock Steady Crew” by Rock Steady Crew and “Fresh” by Kool And The Gang. Within the replies to Lucy’s tweet, someone managed to get in another 1993 reference:
The well worn tale of soap star to pop idol has another chapter. How many had already made that transformation by August 1993? Well, off the top of my head there’s Kylie and Jason obviously, Kylie’s sister Dannii, Craig McLachlan, Stefan Dennis (!) and that’s just from Neighbours. If we look closer to home, we find perhaps where this whole phenomenon began with another resident of the aforementioned Albert Square. Seven years prior to this, Anita Dobson took “Anyone Can Fall In Love” into the Top 5 starting a flurry of EastEnders chancing their arms as pop sensations. Nick Berry, Letitia Dean and Paul Medford, Sophie Lawrence all had hits of varying size whilst there were also some feeble failures from the likes of Tom Watt and Peter Dean. None of them though seemed to have the credibility that Michelle Gayle had.
She’d been on our screens as Hattie Tavernier for over three years by this point but left Albert Square to pursue a pop career full time. Her debut single was “Looking Up” and it was no crappy cover version designed to deliver a one-off hit. I could imagine someone like Dina Carroll, Kim Appleby or even Louise post Eternal performing it. An uplifting, catchy chorus aligned with a well placed one word sample (‘Rejoice!’), it sounded current and relevant and well…on the money for 1993. Michelle herself displays no signs of imposter syndrome in her confident TOTP turn but then this wasn’t her debut musical performance…
Fresh ‘n’ Fly there wrekkin’ the mike (PSYCHE!). “Looking Up” made No 11 (not quite the Top 3 that host Mark Franklin predicted then) and its success was enough to convince Michelle and her label RCA that she should quit EastEnders to be a full time pop star. She would go on to have seven Top 40 hits (including her most well known tune “Sweetness”) and recorded two albums before leaving RCA to sign with EMI where she was the victim of an artist rostering reshuffle and never released any recordings with them. She has returned to music periodically with a second place finish in 2003’s Reborn In The USA retro music contest and even had a go at Eurovision in 2008.
They’ve dropped the number of Breakers from five to four this week (thank god!) and we start with a collaboration between two artists at either end of the alphabet. Aswad and Yazz were at school together Mark Franklin tells us and they looked each other up again to record a cover of Ace’s 1975 hit “How Long”. We’ve seen the cover version as career revitaliser strategy countless times before but both Aswad and Yazz’s fortunes certainly needed a tonic in 1993. Neither had managed a hit in three years and in the case of Yazz especiall, her career was a mess. After the huge success of “The Only Way Is Up” and the “Wanted” album at the end of the 80s, she’d record two albums for two different labels neither of which was released. “How Long” was the lead single from her third LP attempt that did see the light of day but “One On One” disappeared without trace leaving only that Ace cover to remind us of Yazz’s name. It would be her final chart hit when it peaked at No 31. Aswad though would score a Top 5 hit with “Shine” the following year. They were in the news for tragic reasons recently when founding member Drummie Zeb died aged just 62.
Next a huge dance hit from The Goodmen or is it The Good Men or is it Chocolate Puma or even Zki & Dobre? Confused? Well, these were just a few of the names that Dutch DJ and production duo René ter Horst and Gaston Steenkist went by. Not names that roll off the tongue naturally – that may explain the aliases. If their real names aren’t familiar then their tune “Give It Up” surely is to anybody frequenting the club scene around this time as it was huge. An African rhythm combined with that regimented drum sound was ubiquitous and led to it being a global hit especially in the US where it topped the dance chart. So massive was it that it crossed over into the mainstream and became a No 5 hit on the UK Top 40. Given its success, it’s rather surprising that it was never shown on TOTP again. Maybe they didn’t know what to do with it. Its impact led to it being sampled two years later by Simply Red for their No 1 hit “Fairground” but let’s not go there eh?
Talking of No 1 records, here comes a future one courtesy of Culture Beat and “Mr Vain”. This lot were yet more Eurodance chart botherers and as they will be chart toppers shortly, I’ll keep my comments about them in this brief Breakers appearance…well…brief. Here’s a nice little bit of pop trivia for now though. “Mr Vain” was the first record to got o No 1 in the UK that wasn’t released on 7’’ vinyl.
Bon Jovi complete this week’s Breakers with the fourth single from their “Keep The Faith” album. Was “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” just a rewrite of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”? Bit harsh but then the band have incorporated the Stones song into their composition when performing it live so there must be some similarities structure wise. The black and white promo video features a number of scenes clearly meant as a tribute to / stolen directly from A Hard Day’s Night and also Jim Morrison’s grave in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. I went there once and there are some incredible figures from history buried within it. Chopin, Edith Piaf, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde…and yet all anybody seemed interested in was the singer of The Doors. I saw many hand made signs saying ‘This way to Jim’ and at his actual grave, someone had laid not flowers but a nicely rolled joint. It’s what he would have wanted.
“I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” peaked at No 17.
This week’s live by satellite performance is by UB40 and comes from the Garden State Arts Centre, New Jersey. It’s another pointless exercise as the only camera angle we get is of the band performing “Higher Ground” on a two level stage. Completely dull. Also completely dull was their song which was the second single from the “Promises And Lies” album.
This was a very commercially successful time for UB40. As Mark Franklin says, they’d just had a No 1 single in “(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You” and the album was also a chart topper. By my reckoning, this was also the last really successful era of the band. There had been a few during their career – the heady days of their politically powerful first hits like “One In Ten”, their covers period of “Labour Of Love” and “Red Red Wine”, the chart topping collaboration with Chrissie Hynde on “I’ve Got You Babe” and then this 1993 spell. “Higher Ground” was a bit of a stinker though.
This episode of TOTP became ‘The UB40 Show’ by be end of it with Ali Campbell introducing the next act who was actually one of their mates. Bitty McLean was a tape operator at the band’s recording studio originally – the reggae Rick Astley then – before being promoted to co-producer and engineer for them. He even provided backing vocals for some of the “Promises And Lies” album. His debut single was a cover of a 1961 Fats Domino tune “It Keeps Rainin” which he retitled “It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes)” presumably much to the annoyance of the TOTP graphics team.
I hated this as it was just more evidence to me of what a terrible year for music 1993 was turning out to be. Plastic reggae with a ragga style shout out at the start of it just to jump on that bandwagon. Horrible. As always, I was in the minority and the record soared to No 2 in the charts. Bitty would have a total of seven UK Top 40 hits.
A fourth and final week at the top of the heap for Take That with “Pray”. They needn’t have worried though as it was the first of eight No 1 singles in the first part of their career. They will be back in a few weeks with “Relight My Fire” accompanied by the dreadful Lulu.
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| Order of appearance | Artist | Title | Did I buy it? |
| 1 | Juliet Roberts | Caught In The Middle | Nope |
| 2 | Daniel O’Donnell | Whatever Happened To Old Fashioned Love | As if |
| 3 | Madonna | Rain | No |
| 4 | Urban Cookie Collective | The Key The Secret | I did not |
| 5 | Michelle Gayle | Looking Up | Negative |
| 6 | Aswad and Yazz | How Long | Nah |
| 7 | The Goodmen | Give It Up | No thanks |
| 8 | Culture Beat | Mr Vain | Never happening |
| 9 | Bon Jovi | I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead | No but I had a promo copy of the Keep The Faith album |
| 10 | UB40 | Higher Ground | I did not |
| 11 | Bitty McLean | It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes) | Just awful – no |
| 12 | Take That | Pray | And no |
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/m001c94b/top-of-the-pops-05081993
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 