I was never a member of the TOTP studio audience. Despite watching the show religiously since about 1982, it was never really an ambition of mine. It didn’t actually look like that much fun, being herded around a studio, told where to stand and when to cheer in the faint hope you would end up in shot behind the presenter so you could mouth “Hello Mum” to the camera or just generally act daft. Obviously, there was the appeal of occupying the same space as and being up close and personal with a pop star or band but you were completely at the mercy of the running order for whatever show you got tickets for. Take this one for example. June the 8th, 1995 was not a vintage episode. The biggest star in the studio that week by a mile was Annie Lennox. Of the other five acts actually there in person, two are fairly anonymous dance groups, one is a band just breaking through but who would come to be seen as a second tier Britpop artist, a singer who would be remembered for just one song that isn’t this one and two actors turned unlikely and unlikeable pop stars. It’s not a great haul is it?! Even the host is just a Radio 1 DJ (Nicky Campbell) rather than a ‘golden mic’ guest presenter. I think I would have felt short changed had I have been in the audience that week.

We start with one of those dance groups in Loveland who had notched up three middling sized hits before this one – “Don’t Make Me Wait” – took them to No 22 in the charts. Their resident vocalist was Rachel McFarlane who sings on this track but her status within the group seemed to be constantly up for debate. Sometimes their records were described as ‘Loveland featuring Rachel McFarlane’ and sometimes they carried the legend (as this single did) ‘featuring the voice of Rachel McFarlane’. Wonder what that was as all about? A legal / contractual thing? As for the song, it’s a pretty standard house dance tune, the like of which I thought had mainly been in the charts in the early part of the decade. Indeed, it puts me in mind of Ce Ce Peniston’s 1992 hit “Finally”.

Next that aforementioned Britpop band. Although I referred to them as second tier, I did rather like Dodgy and even had one of their albums. I think I used that phrase to distinguish them from the likes of Blur, Oasis, Pulp and Supergrass who I saw as the real vanguard of the movement. In 1995 though, I didn’t really know too much about Dodgy other than their name as someone I’d worked with at the Our Price store in Market Street, Manchester knew them personally. After a debut album with an awful title (“The Dodgy Album”? Seriously?) in 1993 that didn’t set the world alight – it peaked at No 75 in the charts – they regrouped and came back the following year with “Homegrown” that performed much better achieving gold status in the UK. It also provided the band with three Top 40 singles the first of which was “Staying Out For The Summer” which made No 38 in October 1994. Perhaps realising that they’d made a balls up with the release date, label A&M authorised a second assault on the charts in, you know, the Summer and the song was back in June 1995.

It’s a pretty cool track and I was reminded of that recently. To explain, I recently started volunteering as an usher at Hull Truck Theatre and one of the first plays I worked was called Pop Music by Anna Jordan. Set at a wedding where the two characters meet years after they were at the same school together, it tells the story of their lives since; the highs and mainly lows and how pop music has soundtracked their life landmarks. It’s a great play and the version I saw (six times) featured two wonderful actors. Their time on stage is accompanied by a constant playlist of pop songs including a selection from the Britpop era. The first one to feature? Yep, “Staying Out For The Summer”! My time watching the play reminded me what a great (and possibly underrated) tune it is. Sure, it displays its Beatles influences pretty heavily but that’s not a bad thing in most people’s book is it? Dodgy would return in 1996 with their biggest album and single in “Free Peace Sweet” (the one I had) and “Good Enough” respectively. Nigel Clark and Andy Miller would look pretty different from this TOTP appearance sporting peroxide blonde, bouffant locks. Dodgy barnets anyone?

It’s a time for a repeat of that performance by Bon Jovi of “This Ain’t A Love Song” now. Filmed in Milan, this was shown the other week as an ‘exclusive’ but is recycled here as the single is at No 7 in the charts. TOTP had history when it came to re showing Bon Jovi exclusives – the Niagara Falls one for “Always” was on about three times. Maybe executive producer Ric Blaxill thought the band was too big a name to just show it once. To be fair, despite having become globally successful in the 80s with an image of being one of those ‘hair metal’ bands, the stats say that they were more successful in the 90s. In the UK for example, they only had one Top 10 single between 1986 and 1989 out of nine releases. By comparison, the band’s first nine singles of the 90s yielded six Top Tenners. “This Ain’t A Love Song” would become the seventh and the fifth in a run of eight consecutive Top 10 placings. OK, the album sales might tell a different story but TOTP was historically based around the singles chart and this ain’t an album blog so…

That second dance act now and it’s yet another from the seemingly eternal conveyor belt of German Eurodance artists. Following on from Snap!, Real McCoy, Haddaway, Culture Beat, Captain Hollywood Project and preceding Sash!, Fragma and ATB came Jam & Spoon. This duo (real names Rolf Elmer and Markus Löffel) had been having hits all over Europe since 1992 but the UK had proved a tough nut to crack. Indeed, this hit “Right In The Night (Fall In Love With Music)” had already had a tilt at our charts the year before but had to be satisfied with a peak of No 31. As was the trend around this time for minor hits being given a second chance, it was rereleased to become a Top 10 hit. The track would be revived in 2008 by an artist who is also on this very TOTP. All will be revealed later.

As these things go (and I certainly wasn’t a fan of Eurodance), this one isn’t the worst example of the genre and the flamenco guitar interlude serves to distinguish it from some of the dross we’d heard this decade so far. A word on vocalist Plavka. She started her career singing as a soprano with the Santa Monica opera before decamping to London to join electronic dance pioneers The Shamen on their “En-Tact” album and then working with Jam & Spoon. That’s quite the varied career.

Now if we thought Bon Jovi was a big name worthy of an exclusive performance repeat, what about this fella? Not just perhaps the most famous person on the planet at the time but he’s brought his superstar sister along for good measure. I can only be talking about Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson (and indeed I am). “Scream” was their much talked about duet and a taster of Jacko’s forthcoming double album “HIStory: Past, Present And Future Book I” a studio album of new material coupled with his first Greatest Hits package. Much was expected of “Scream” and its $6 million video and the single did debut on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart at No 5, no other single before it had entered the chart at a higher position. However, it got no further than that peak and it was a similar story in the UK where it topped out at No 3. The reason why? Was it a backlash against Jackson following the recent child sex abuse allegations brought against him by Jordan Chandler and his family which were settled out of court by Jackson at a cost of $23 million. Certainly host Nicky Campbell felt emboldened to make a few jibes at the King of Pop calling him “dodgy” and declaring that he had written bigger cheques than the cost of the “Scream” video recently. All fairly distasteful given the nature of the source material. Back to the point about “Scream” and its failure to top the charts though. I think the main reason for its disappointing sales was the fact that it wasn’t very good. There’s hardly a proper song structure in there, rather it was mostly a riff and some trademark Jacko squeals.

As for the video shown here, it appears to be a hastily cobbled together montage of previous videos and clips of Jackson in concert owing to the fact that the official promo wasn’t ready for release yet. Ric Blaxill would have to show it the following week when it was slipping down the charts from No 3 to No 5, thereby breaking the show’s own rule about not featuring songs that were going down the charts. That’s how big a name Michael Jackson was. Eat your hearts out Bon Jovi!

The answer to that query about who did a cover of Jam & Spoon’s “Right In The Night (Fall In Love With Music)” now – yes it was “Saturday Night” hitmaker Whigfield who gave us her take on it in 2008. Wanna hear it? OK…

Hmm. Not bad. Possibly better than the original. Back in 1995 though, Whigfield was pursuing a much more pop vein with this, her third hit, “Think Of You”. Not as annoying as “Saturday Night”, this would still worm its way into your brain and take root for the Summer once heard. Impossibly catchy (some might even say cutesy), it would take her to No 7 in the chart. A one hit wonder she may be remembered as but the reality was that she wasn’t anything of the sort. Two more chart entries would follow this year though one was an ill advised cover of Wham!’s “Last Christmas”. You know that Christmas game Whamageddon where you try and avoid hearing said song from 1st to 24th December? Yeah, I don’t think there will ever be a game called Whigageddon.

After launching her cover versions album “Medusa” with a little known track from the 80s that never even made the UK Top 40, Annie Lennox went to the other extreme in her choice of follow up single by going with one of the most famous No 1 songs of all time. Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” was a chart topper around the world in 1967 and went on to sell 10 million copies. In comparison, “No More ‘I Love You’s’” released by The Lover Speaks in 1986 made it to the dizzy heights of No 58 despite being absolutely wonderful. Annie’s version, though not bad at all, was inferior to the original and so it was to be with “A Whiter Shade Of Pale”. Some may say that she was always onto a loser taking on a song which sits on such a pedestal.

The performance here is a continuation on a theme from the drag ballet dancers that accompanied her for “No More ‘I Love You’s’” though this time they are dressed in French maid costumes. The Minnie Mouse headgear is still there though. Annie would release a third single from the album, a cover of Bob Marley’s “Waiting In Vain” which I came across the other day as it is featured in the rather charming John Cusack film Serendipity. Knowing that I would be writing about Annie in this post, that discovery was…well…serendipitous.

No Jacko style video premiere issues for this next song. U2 had not released anything since 1993 before they contributed “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” to the Batman Forever soundtrack. Apparently the film’s director Joel Schumacher tried to shoehorn in a cameo role for Bono in the guise of his MacPhisto alter ego which he used during the Zoo TV Tour. When that didn’t materialise, Bono agreed to give a song to the soundtrack instead. And it was quite a song. Worked up from a demo from the “Zooropa” sessions and playing on the title of the song made famous by Mel Carter in 1965 and revived just the year before by Gloria Estefan, it swoops and soars around a jagged riff which does admittedly sound very similar to “Children Of The Revolution” by T-Rex.

The video directed by Kevin Godley and Maurice Linnane works pretty well I think even if the animation would be seen as clunky by today’s standards. Working in the MacPhisto / The Fly characters alongside clips from the actual film, it has a certain charm I think. Oh yeah, the film. Was it any good? Well, for me it was inferior to the Michael Keaton movies but so much better than the Batman And Robin flick with George Clooney as the Caped Crusader. Val Kilmer played it straight without the idiosyncrasies of Keaton’s portrayal but then he was probably wise not to try and outdo Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones as The Riddler and Two-Face respectively.

The single would lead a charmed chart life spending eight consecutive weeks inside the Top 10, even going back up the charts after falling initially when the film hit UK cinemas on July 14th. It also benefited from another song from the film being in the charts at the same time as Seal’s “Kiss From A Rose” was rereleased after peaking at No 20 in 1994 but making it all the way to No 4 a year later. I think both singles helped raise the other’s profile.

And so it came to pass that the musical legend that was Michael Jackson wasn’t able to dent Robson & Jerome’s hold on the No 1 spot* as their version of “Unchained Melody” reigned supreme. This was just getting silly now.

*Not only that, he couldn’t even dislodge Pulp from the No 2 position.

The play out tune is “Are You Blue Or Are You Blind?” by The Bluetones. The first chart entry for another band forever associated with Britpop, it would peak at No 31. This was the sound of a band gearing up for the big time. Within eight months they would have a No 2 single in “Slight Return” and a No 1 album in “Expecting To Fly”. I think their success is sometimes overlooked and get remembered by those that didn’t invest in the band just for that one song. In fact, they would have thirteen Top 40 singles in total and two further Top 10 albums after “Expecting To Fly”.

The band continued to release new material and tour long after Britpop had withered before splitting in 2011 only to reform four years later.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Loveland	Don’t Make Me Wait	I did not
2	Dodgy	Staying Out For The Summer	No
3	Bon Jovi	This Ain’t A Love Song	Nope
4	Jam & Spoon	Right In The Night (Fall In Love With Music)	Nah
5	Michael Jackson / Janet Jackson	Scream	Never happening
6	Whigfield	Think Of You	Negative
7	Annie Lennox	A Whiter Shade Of Pale	Sorry Annie but no
8	U2	Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me	Liked it, didn’t buy it
9	Robson & Jerome	Unchained Melody	As if
10	The Bluetones	Are You Blue Or Are You Blind?	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/m001sfw6/top-of-the-pops-08061995