I commented in a recent post about the machinations that were happening at Radio 1 in the Autumn of 1993. Incoming new controller Matthew Bannister was on a mission to revitalise the station’s image that hadn’t been ‘hip for the kids’ for quite some time. The day after this TOTP was broadcast, there was another change – not as headline making as Dave Lee Travis’ recent on air rant / resignation but fairly big news all the same. Simon Mayo’s tenure at the helm of the station’s most high profile slot The Breakfast Show came to an end after five years. He’d been in place whilst I was a student, through getting married and now into full adulthood but to be honest, I wasn’t that arsed about his departure. He always came across as a bit smug to me and was single handedly responsible for making chart hits out of some awful records like “Kinky Boots” and “Donald Where’s Yer Troosers?”. He would move to the mid morning slot before leaving Radio 1 altogether in 2001. After spells at Radio 5 Live and Radio 2, he currently resides at Greatest Hits Radio I believe. He will be one of the faces that return to TOTP when the BBC4 repeats reach 1994 and the ‘year zero’ revamp changes are reversed.
Talking of faces…We start the show with 2 Unlimited and their latest single “Faces”. I’m sorry but this was just milking the formula dry. I’ve read some reviews from the time that suggest that this was a deviation from their usual blueprint with some changes of tempo evident but it sounds exactly the same as their previous single and the one before that to me. There is a bit right at the start where Anita sings the word ‘faces’ and it sounds like “Spaceman” by Babylon Zoo but then it straight into those uncultured synth riffs and some nonsense lyrics about there being different faces everywhere. Banal and pointless. This was just terrible. Somehow it still made the Top 10 just like five of their previous six hits had done.
A full outing for a Breaker from last week now as we get “Disco Inferno” by Tina Turner. Taken from the soundtrack to her biopic What’s Love Got To Do With It, the video features clips from the film alongside Tina performing the track herself. I quite enjoyed the film but apparently both Ike Turner and Tina weren’t keen claiming that there were many inaccuracies in it.
Given her legendary status, I was quite surprised that she has only released nine solo albums and of those, the first four did absolutely nothing commercially. Within her renaissance ‘rock’ era, she made five albums in fifteen years which isn’t too shabby I guess but of those, surely only “Private Dancer” and “Foreign Affair” are truly seen as super successful? Her eight times platinum in the UK Greatest Hits “Simply The Best” should maybe be included in there as well? Or maybe you can’t judge an artist’s reputation purely on sales? Talking of which, “Disco Inferno” peaked at No 12.
The chart hits in the early to mid 90s for Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine were as consistent in their regularity as they were in the eccentricity of their titles. After “Sheriff Fatman”, “Do Re Me So Far So Good” and “After The Watershed (Early Learning The Hard Way)” comes “Lean On Me I Won’t Fall Over” with a picture of a weeble on its cover.
This was their seventh consecutive Top 30 hit and the lead single from their fourth album “Post Historic Monsters”. The budget for the set for their performance here must have been vastly reduced from their last visit to the TOTP studio when they had a whole campfire with real flames laid on for them. This time there’s just Jim Bob and Fruitbat and a ton of dry ice and is it me or is the former reading the lyrics from a stage monitor? His eyes are looking down for the majority of the performance as if he hasn’t learned the words yet. Jim Bob’s hair though is truly a thing of wonder. Don’t think I’ve seen anything like it since…? The bloke from King Kurt who got tarred and feathered?
“Lean On Me I Won’t Fall Over” peaked at No 16.
Despite this No 17 hit, the time of Kenny Thomas the pop star was nearing its end. He would have only two further Top 40 entries (neither of which got any higher than No 27) so I’m guessing this could have been Kenny’s final TOTP appearance. If so, he went out on a tune called “Trippin’ On Your Love” which was nothing to do with the almost identically titled Bananarama early 90s flop but was actually a cover version of a song originally recorded by The Staple Singers. Kenny seemed to have a talent for recycling obscure songs that punters possibly didn’t realise weren’t Thomas originals. “Outstanding” was a Gap Band track, “Best Of You” was originally recorded by Booker T. Jones and “Tender Love” was a No 23 hit in 1986 for the Force MDs.
All of the above helped to make him an unlikely chart star. He looked like a telecom engineer (which indeed he had been prior to becoming a singer) and his sartorial choices weren’t always the best but the guy could sing as he displays in this performance. Farewell then Kenny. I couldn’t stand you at the time but on reflection, you had some pipes and seem like a decent guy.
I can’t find a clip of this live by satellite performance by Terence Trent D’Arby of “She Kissed Me” but if you squint a bit this could be Lenny Kravitz – both visually and sonically. Maybe it’s the rare sight of TTD playing a guitar or the driving rock riffs but seriously…this is almost a doppelgänger. Lenny Trent D’Arby? Or Terence Kravitz? The former is better phonically I think. Talking of names, if you look up his back catalogue on Spotify, it’s all listed under the name Sananda Maitreya which is the name the former Terence has gone by since 2001.
This week’s Breakers now starting with New Order and “World (Price Of Love)”. This was the third single taken from the band’s “Republic” album and caused quite the rift on Twitter as to its merits. No starker a voice was the band’s ex-member Peter Hook who had this to say (courtesy of @TOTPFacts):
Wow! Apparently he had very little input to the recording of the track so maybe that explains his stance. The opinions of other contributors to the debate ranged from total agreement with Hooky to saying it was better than previous single “Ruined In A Day” but not as good as “Regret” to completely loving it. I think I’m with option two. The video hardly features the band but those fleeting glimpses would be the last we round see of them in a video for twelve years.
“World (The Price Of Love)” peaked at No 13.
In a musical landscape dominated by Eurodance anthems comes a recording artist with an album to blow all of that out of the water. Mary J. Blige’s 1992 debut “What’s The 411?” was widely recognised as bringing the combination of hip-hop and soul into the mainstream and conferring on her the unofficial title of ‘Queen Of Hip Hop Soul’. “Real Love” was the second single from the album and was also on its second time of release having peaked at No 68 in the UK in 1992. This 1993 remix would give her a genuine Top 40 success when it made it to No 26. I have to say though that, despite all those plaudits, it wasn’t really my bag.
A band next that were much bigger in America than over here which may explain my lack of knowledge of them. Stone Temple Pilots were very much seen as part of the grunge movement when they released their debut album “Core” but grew well beyond it during a career lasting well over thirty years barring a five year hiatus in the middle of it. I do remember the cover of “Core” from working at Our Price but couldn’t tell you what it sounded like. “Plush” was the second single from it and it was a huge hit on the US Rock charts though it only made No 23 over here and would prove to be their only UK Top 40 hit. Listening back to it now, it could be Pearl Jam so I can certainly understand why they were categorised as part of the movement of which Pearl Jam were one of its leading protagonists.
Lead singer Scott Weiland died in 2015 after years of well documented drug addiction problems. Tributes to him came in from the likes of Slash of Guns N’ Roses, Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell.
Apparently this track never got more than these few seconds of exposure on TOTP which seems extraordinary given how ubiquitous it was at the time but then it did only reached No 14 which itself almost defies explanation. “Wild Wood” was the title track of Paul Weller’s second solo album and it seemed to me at the time was an undeniable confirmation that he had re-established his credentials as the fine songwriter he had always been. I say always but the last knockings of The Style Council had been so excruciating that record label Polydor refused to release the band’s final album – the deep house experiment that was “Modernism: A New Decade”. It finally got a release a decade later.
Two albums into his solo career though and Weller was back with the “Wild Wood” single, a bold statement so early on. A mellow, reflective, mature sound, it demonstrated Weller’s restored confidence. It surely couldn’t have been written during The Jam years? Only “English Rose” from “All Mod Cons” comes close. It’s strange to consider that in a recording career of forty-five years standing, the vast majority of that time has seen Weller as a solo artist such was the impact of The Jam (and to a lesser extent The Style Council). Paul has now released sixteen solo studio albums the most recent being 2021’s “Fat Pop (Volume 1)”. Six of them have gone to No 1 and seven to No 2.
Oh not this fella again! For a man peddling such a slight (some may say shite) tune, Bitty McLean got an awful lot of screen time on TOTP. Listen to “It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes)” and tell me in all good conscience that it deserved three full studio appearances and that “Wild Wood” was only worthy of thirty seconds as a Breaker. You can’t. I’m sure Bitty is a nice bloke but his song was crud. Just awful.
What on earth was happening here?! Well, surprise surprise! It’s Cilla Black and here’s our Graham to explain what the chuff this was all about…
…actually it’s me and not Graham but I do have some details for you. We may predominantly have known Cilla for her TV work throughout the 80s and 90s but she was also a singer and pop star with a huge back catalogue. In fact, she was the most successful UK female recording artist of the 60s and, as host Mark Franklin rather generalised in his intro, had been on TOTP “loads of times”. However, she hadn’t had a major hit record since 1971 so what was she doing on the show now? The answer was that she was promoting her new album called “Through The Years”. I say new but it was a hotchpotch of tracks (autocorrect turned hotchpotch into ‘horrible’ and I was tempted to leave it!) including re-recordings of her old hits, cover versions, some new material and three duets with Cliff Richard, Barry Manilow and Dusty Springfield.
The title track was released as a single which Cilla performs here and the comments on Twitter in reaction to it were almost all negative if not out and out insults. I mean it is a terrible song, a nasty re-write of “Wind Beneath My Wings” to my ears. Incidentally, Nancy Griffiths’ “From A Distance” was one of the cover versions on the album which both Bette Midler (who had a hit with “Wind…”) and the aforementioned Cliff Richard also covered. Neither the single nor the album were hits peaking at No 54 and No 41 respectively.
And yet…Cilla wasn’t always crap. I know someone who swears by her 1968 hit “Step Inside Love” and he’s right – it’s great. Cilla sadly died in 2015 after a stroke caused her to fall at her home in Spain.
And still Culture Beat top the charts with “Mr. Vain” despite the efforts of hip-hop soul (Mary J. Blige), grunge (Stone Temple Pilots) and even Cilla Black to challenge Eurodance as the dominant music genre of 1993. I don’t think Simon Mayo had anything to do with the release of this single but it could have been written about him.
| Order of appearance | Artist | Title | Did I buy it? |
| 1 | 2 Unlimited | Faces | Faeces more like – no |
| 2 | Tina Turner | Disco Inferno | Nah |
| 3 | Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine | Lean On Me I Won’t Fall Over | I did not |
| 4 | Kenny Thomas | Trippin” On Your Love | No |
| 5 | Terence Trent D’Arby | She Kissed Me | Liked it, didn’t buy it |
| 6 | New Order | World (Price Of Love) | Nope |
| 7 | Mary J. Blige | Real Love | Not really my bag |
| 8 | Stone Temple Pilots | Plush | Negative |
| 9 | Paul Weller | Wild Wood | Not the single but I had the album |
| 10 | Bitty McLean | It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes) | Never! |
| 11 | Cilla Black | Through The Years | As if |
| 12 | Culture Beat | Mr. Vain | 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/m001crzy/top-of-the-pops-02091993
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 