So I’m 500 not out in TOTP Rewind posts but there’s no time for patting myself on the back as I’m behind with the BBC4 repeats schedule so it’s on with No 501 and we start with Bitty McLean. I’ve genuinely run out of things to say about Bitty – mate of UB40? Tick. Penchant for reggae-fied versions of classic songs? Obvs. What he did post fame? Yep, been there done that. Little Britain joke? Yeah, yeah. He is the uncle of a retired professional footballer called Aaron McLean who spent his career in the lower leagues and played for the England C team (yeah, I didn’t know there was such a thing either) but is that really such an interesting fact especially in a music blog?
OK, how about the song he’s singing here? Well, “Dedicated To The One I Love” was originally recorded by an American R&B group called The “5” Royales in 1957 and then by girl group The Shirelles who took it to No 3 to in 1961. Surely the best known version though is that of The Mamas & The Papas who had a No 2 hit with it in 1967. The track features Michelle Phillips on lead vocals for the first time as opposed to Cass Elliot. Phillips would go on to have an acting career after the band broke up in 1970 and starred in the acclaimed crime biopic Dillinger earning a Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Newcomer. Roles in TV films followed until she joined the cast of US soap Knots Landing in 1987 where the tale of “Dedicated To The One I Love” comes full circle. In a 1992 episode in which Phillips featured, the Mamas & The Papas’ version of the song plays in the background. The producers even called the episode Dedicated To The One I Love. Yeah, that’s it for this one – that’s all I’ve got.
Right, what’s next? Oh no. Not another ragga version of a pop standard?! Unlike Bitty McLean who specialised in putting an almost lovers’ rock sheen on his covers, C. J. Lewis fancied himself as the UK equivalent of Shaggy as he takes on classic 60s pop song “Sweets For My Sweet” by festooning it with loads of ‘toasting’ including the classic cliche shout out “Hear Me Now!”. Oh gawd. This was just a racket both sonically and artistically. Horrible stuff.
The version we all now by The Searchers from 1963 was a UK No 1 and is it immeasurably better than this load of nonsense. Whilst I prefer Manchester rivals The Hollies, it’s hard to resist the charms of this Merseybeat combo – “When You Walk In The Room”, “Don’t Throw Your Love Away”, “Needles And Pins”, “Sugar And Spice” and of course this one are all great 60s pop tunes…all of which makes C.J. Lewis’s dreadful cover even more heinous. Even the single’s artwork adds to the nastiness of the thing as it appears to depict a woman lifting up her skirt as Lewis looks on from his sofa. WTF? Everything about this guy was wrong including his stage name. Why did he go by the moniker of C. J. Lewis when his actual name was Steven James Lewis? He would stick with the formula of applying a ragga tip to established hits when he followed up “Sweets For My Sweet” with a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Everything Is Uptight (Alright)” and The Emotions’ “Best Of My Love”. Heaven help us.
Yes! Finally a proper song made by a proper artist! Despite being a huge name, The Pretenders hadn’t had a UK Top 40 hit since “Hymn To Her” in 1986. In their defence, they’d not actually released much material in that time with their only album since “Get Close” (from which “Hymn To Her” came) being 1990’s underwhelming “Packed!”. There had also been a successful Best Of compilation in 1987 (“The Singles”) and Chrissie Hynde had renewed her relationship with UB40 to guest on 1988’s “Breakfast In Bed” single. Oh and not forgetting that Moodswings song “Spiritual High (State Of Independence) Pt.II” that featured Chrissie on vocals and samples Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. It’s not a lot though in an eight year period. Having said all of that, it seemed a bit churlish of the TOTP caption person to just put ‘Back after 8 years’ as their comment. They couldn’t have put something about how many records they’d sold in their career or the fact that they had the first new No 1 record of the 80s with “Brass In Pocket”? 1994 though did see the band return in good form with Top 10 album “Last Of The Independents” and its storming lead single “I’ll Stand By You”. Supposedly, Chrissie wasn’t sure about the song initially. Written specifically to be a hit with songwriters Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg, she doubted her motivations about the song when it was finished. However, having played it to some friends outside of the music industry who were reduced to tears by the track, she relented and let it be released. It’s not a million miles away from “Hymn To Her” to my ears which is a compliment by the way. I like both songs. “I’ll Stand By You” has a power to it I think and Chrissie’s vocals are always right on it.
They say you can tell the quality of a song by how many times other artists have covered it. If so, “I’ll Stand By You” is a tune a few times over. It was done by Girls Aloud in 2004 as that year’s Children In Need single and three years later was also chosen as a charity record when American Idol artist Carrie Underwood recorded it for the Idol Gives Back campaign. Three years after that it was again recorded for a charitable concern when Shakira released it as a fundraiser for the Hope For Haiti Now effort after the earthquake there in 2010. I guess the track’s meaning had a major crossover quality which leant itself to supporting people in crisis as well as its original intention of describing being loyal and faithful to a person.
There’s something very appealing I think about this TOTP performance of the song; something to do with Chrissie’s dress down image and the fact that you can see her panic ever so slightly when she struggles to pick up her guitar halfway through. Nice to see founding member Martin Chambers up there on drums who had rejoined the band after leaving in 1986 after problems with his drumming after cutting his hand badly on tour and also struggling to deal with the deaths of band members James Honeyman-Scott and Pete Farndon in 1982 and 1983 respectively following issues with drug use. I guess that caption was pretty accurate in the case of Chambers then. “I’ll Stand By You” peaked at No 10 whilst the album went gold for selling 100,000 copies.
It’s the video for “Always” by Erasure next and it’s quite a thing. Set against an ancient China backdrop with Andy Bell dressed as some sort of mythical spirit, the plot revolves around the passing of the seasons as metaphors for good and evil with a battle ensuing between Bell’s character and a bad dragon type dude with the former trying to protect a Mother Nature type figure. Sheesh! The length of that sentence shows how much was going on in the video. It works pretty well though I think but then Vince and Andy always seemed to want to put some drama into their promos. Actually, I don’t think Vince is in this one at all unless he’s under that bad spirit costume which seems unlikely given Vince’s slight frame. “Always” would peak at No 4 and would also provide the title for their fourth Best Of compilation from 2015 celebrating the 30th anniversary of the formation of the band.
A new name appears from nowhere with a dance smash that gives them the highest ever UK chart entry for an unknown artist when it crashes in at No 3, enjoys a huge hit with the record and then pretty much disappears again bar a couple of minor follow ups. A footnote in musical history is created and that’s the end of the story. Right? Wrong. Who had money on a Crystal Waters comeback? No you didn’t! I’m sure even Crystal would have been surprised. Back though she was with “100% Pure Love”. Yes, the artist who brought us “Gypsy Woman (La Da Dee La Da Da)” had set her sat nav for the Top 40 once more and with a track that didn’t stray too far from the blueprint of her monster hit. As with Chrissie Hynde earlier, Crystal’s voice is distinctive to the point of being beyond replication but unlike with The Pretenders’ singer, that wasn’t a positive for me. I could never get on board with her vocals, catchy hook or not. Plenty of people disagreed with me though and the single was a sizeable hit in the US and around Europe (it went to No 15 in the UK).
I have to admit to not really remembering this one. If I think of the phrase ‘100%’ in the mid 90s, I think of the Telstar compilation series which started with the title “100% Dance Hits” and expanded out to cover musical genres such as Acid Jazz, Christmas, Blues & Soul, Reggae etc. There must have been one called “100% Pure Love” surely?
Now here’s a song that divides opinion. “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by Crash Test Dummies received a lot of positive reviews at the time for being original, melodic and taking on the difficult issue of the suffering and humiliation that children can experience if there was something in their life that marked them out as different. Retrospectively though, the track regularly appears in various ‘worst song ever’ type polls. For what it’s worth, I’d place myself in the former group. It seems to me that much of the criticism it receives is about its title and by extension chorus. What is it that people object to? That it’s lazy? Silly? That doesn’t really add up though. There have always been songs with nonsensical titles – some by major artists. Look at “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” by The Beatles or “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da Da” by The Police. Or is it vocalist Brad Roberts’ deep singing voice that offends listeners so? Again, there have always been singers with low registers whose work people love. Look at Johnny Cash for example.
Anyway, the song was a huge international success including the UK where it made No 2. Bizarrely though, it was probably least successful in their home country of Canada where they’d already had a huge hit with “Superman’s Song” in 1991. Subsequent releases from parent album “God Shuffled His Feet” were more successful there than “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”. All very curious. One of those releases, “Afternoons & Coffeespoons” gave the band a No 23 hit in the UK whilst a cover of “The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead” by their heroes XTC for the movie Dumb And Dumber supplied their final hit over here when it made No 30.
Talking of dividing opinion, this next band have always been rather good at that. Some see them as master crafters of intelligent pop music whilst for others, they are the antithesis of that, inauthentic chancers with an overblown sense of their own worth. I’m talking about Deacon Blue -and I’m firmly in the former camp. Some people really do hate them though. I found someone online who’s written a piece about how he’d been reminded about how much he hated them when he saw them live. Eh? Well, in his defence, they were the support band for Simple Minds so he hadn’t chosen to catch them in concert per se, he was there for the headline act. He despised them so much that when they were on stage, he took the opportunity to delete some emails off his phone rather than raise his head to look st them. Simple Minds though we’re great according to him. Hmm. Another who shared this view was my Our Price manager at the time who commented on the band’s TOTP appearance here that it was the most cliched, hackneyed performance they could possibly have come up with. Again, hmm. Show some dignity guys.
Ah yes, “Dignity”. Ricky Ross, Lorraine McIntosh (swoon) and…erm…the others were on the show to plug their first Greatest Hits album “Our Town” which would be a platinum selling No 1 (so there were quite a lot of us who liked them after all). The album featured all but two of their singles and three new tracks including “I Was Right And You Were Wrong” (another song title for the doubters) which had been released as a single and made No 32 but which didn’t generate a TOTP appearance. Instead, we get “Dignity” which was actually given a formal rerelease as a single (its third time in total) and it made No 20, its highest ever position on the UK charts. Deacon Blue would split up in this year only to return in the new millennium from which point they have released six further studio albums.
It’s that Tony Di Bart fella now, possibly the most unlikely and unconvincing pop star since…well, who? Chesney Hawkes? Glenn Medeiros? At least they had pin up appeal. Is it too harsh to suggest that you couldn’t say the same thing about Tony? Maybe it was all about the song in this case and not the guy who was delivering it? Time has been kind to “The Real Thing” with it being seen as a genuinely great pop record as opposed to part of the handbag house brigade that was all the rage in 1994. I can’t say that I share that opinion though. I found its success bewildering. Maybe I wasn’t going to the right type of clubs? Host Mark Goodier (who seems to have spent the whole show lurching about like he’s got a bad back) was wrong in his rather insensitive (given who was standing next to him) chart prediction – Di Bart wasn’t No 1 the next week though he was the week after.
Wait! What? Was that bloke stood next to Mark Goodier and who did the personal message to camera at the top of the show not Prince?! Was it just a very good lookalike?! I ask because at no point does Goodier actually refer to the guy nor acknowledge his presence and in that VT clip he does send himself up for the whole symbol moniker. If it was a lookalike, what was the point? Just to mess with our minds?
On the other hand, maybe it was the real thing as we don’t get the standard video promo but an exclusive pre-recorded performance. But then, if he was actually in the country and at the studio, why wouldn’t he have done a regular run through of “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World” like all the other artists on the show did with their songs? This was just weird as was the version that Prince recorded for the show. The slowed down, sexy take might have been the bedroom choice but it wasn’t the song that everyone was hearing on their radios and buying in the shops was it? Anyway, it was Prince’s first and only UK No 1 having missed out twice before when the 1985 reissue of “1999/Little Red Corvette” and 1999’s “Batdance” both peaked at No 2.
The play out song is “Back In My Life” by Joe Roberts but who was/is Joe Roberts? Well, he’s English and had a handful of minor hits in the mid 90s before disappearing whence he came. Ironically, the single that came out after this No 39 hit was a cover of Prince’s “Adore” so not only did he follow the Purple One on the TOTP running order but his singles release schedule also followed him. He sounds a bit like a poor man’s Curtis Stigers whilst one promo shot of him that I found sees him looking like Bo Selecta’s characterisation of David Blaine. Shazam!
| Order of appearance | Artist | Title | Did I buy it? |
| 1 | Bitty McLean | Dedicated To The One I Love | No |
| 2 | C. J. Lewis | Sweets For My Sweet | God no! |
| 3 | The Pretenders | I’ll Stand By You | Liked it, didn’t buy it |
| 4 | Erasure | Always | Nope |
| 5 | Crystal Waters | 100% Pure Love | Nah |
| 6 | Crash Test Dummies | Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm | See 3 above |
| 7 | Deacon Blue | Dignity | No but I had the original Raintown album with it on |
| 8 | Tony Di Bart | The Real Thing | Not my bag – no |
| 9 | Prince | The Most Beautiful Girl In The World | I did not |
| 10 | Joe Roberts | Back In My Life | 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/m001jn48/top-of-the-pops-21041994
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 