We’ve entered October with these TOTP repeats and three days before this show aired, an album hit the shops that would prove to be a landmark release in UK music history. “(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?” by Oasis would shift 345,000 copies in its first week and spend 10 weeks at No 1 on the album chart in total. It would eventually go 17 x platinum in the UK alone and win a Brit award for Best British Album. It even broke through in America going to No 4 over there selling 4 million copies in the process. It spawned two chart topping singles and two No 2s. In short, it was a monster, a phenomenon even. After the Battle of Britpop in the Summer that had put record shops at the heart of the national news, this album was a slam dunk off the back of it for the takings of stores across the country. It sold and sold and sold and then it sold some more. It sold more than any other album in the entire decade that was the 90s. Whether you liked it or not, you couldn’t ignore it.
Something else that you couldn’t ignore but it would be hard to like are the comedy characters dished up for our entertainment by tonight’s ‘golden mic’ hosts Hale & Pace. So, I have questions. To start with, why were these two on the show in the first place? Well, the eighth* series of their TV comedy series was just about to air but that was on ITV so it can’t have been seen as an opportunity to plug one of the Beeb’s shows.
*I know! Eight! They even did a couple more before it came to an end in 1998.
Was it just that they had these characters Jed & Dave who were like the stoned rocker versions of Smashie & Nicey and so executive producer Ric Blaxill took a lazy decision to get them in as guest presenters? It certainly wasn’t anything to do with Comic Relief as we’d already had that in March. Whatever the reason, they were in the TOTP studio and were ready to annoy!
There may not be any of the aforementioned Oasis on tonight’s show but there is certainly some Britpop. We start with Sleeper who are just getting into their stride with their third and biggest hit of 1995 with “What Do I Do Now?”. The lead single from their second album “The It Girl” which would be released the following May, it built on the success and sound of previous chart entries “Inbetweener” and “Vegas” but if anything was even more radio friendly. With that sophomore album not making an appearance until well into the following year, its subsequent success would mean that Sleeper were never as big as they were in 1996. “The It Girl” would go Top 5 and sell 300,000 copies in the UK spawning four Top 20 hits including two No 10s.
The performance here seems to me to cement Louise Wener’s position as one of the faces of Britpop and what a face! Wide eyed innocence, wrapped up in knowing coyness and a smile that you knew meant she’d be the best person to have a laugh with down the pub. I caught Sleeper live at the Manchester Academy in 1996 and they were pretty good as I remember. I went with my mate Steve and I have a clear memory of him grooving away to “What Do I Do Now?” which was way more entertaining than anything Hale & Pace served up on this TOTP.
Oh come on! How many times is this now that Smokie and Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown have been on the show? I think this is the third already. The success of “Who The F**k Is Alice?” was absolutely baffling to me. Were there really people up and down the country whom, having bought the single, took it home, put it on their stereo system, pressed play and then listened to it waiting for the chance to shout out “Alice? Who the f**k is Alice?!” at the top of the voices and then chuckling to themselves?! I guess there were mobile DJs who bought it and would play it at a birthday do they’d been booked for. That might account for some sales but this single stank out the charts for a total of 14 weeks on the Top 40 including 8 within the Top 10. It spent 9 consecutive weeks without once going down the charts. Surely wedding DJs can’t have accounted for all those sales?! And where was the outcry from the press about this record ?! Sure, it couldn’t be played on the radio unless it was a bleeped version but I don’t recall the papers in a meltdown about this youth corrupting filth. No, they were too busy getting their knickers in a twist about another chart hit but more of that later.
By the way, Hale & Pace’s intro with one of them (I never did know which one was which) getting lifted in the air on a wire really wasn’t worth setting up as the punchline for a limp play on words. Give me Cheryl Baker instead any day…
Some West Coast hip-hop next from Cypress Hill. As a pop kid, this lot were never really going to be my bag though I did quite like their previous hits “Insane In The Brain” and “I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That”. This one – “Throw Your Set In The Air” – was the lead single from their third album “III: Temples Of Boom” but I have to say I don’t remember it. Cypress Hill were one of those ‘parental advisory explicit lyrics’ sticker artists which meant we weren’t supposed to play them on the shop stereo in the Our Price store I was working in at the time. Consequently, I was never that familiar with their work. I knew the album covers of such artists better than their songs due to the fact that the CD and cassette inlays were so nickable that we would keep them behind the counter and put a temporary, generic inlay out on the shop racks. This was in the days before the stock was security tagged and out on the shop floor live as it were. Rather pathetically, the hip-hop/rap artists would most likely be pinched by middle class white kids pretending they were from the hood (or something).
Another contrived yet duff intro from Hale & Pace about going metric and rhyming ‘a litre’ with Oleta ushers in the return of Oleta Adams. Yes, I was surprised to see her on the show again too. In my head, she had one massive hit single in the early 90s with her version of Brenda Russell’s “Get Here” (the success of which also catapulted her album “Circle Of One” to the top of the charts) and then nothing. This was plainly not the case though. Exhibit A, m’lud – “Never Knew Love”. The lead single from her “Moving On” album, its sound was nothing like the balladeering of “Get Here” but rather a competent if unremarkable R&B track – Oleta had indeed ‘moved on’.
Of course, I should have remembered earlier that in addition to “Get Here”, Oleta had added her considerable voice to the Tears For Fears hit “Woman In Chains” back in late 1989. By a pleasing quirk of fate, TFF were back in the UK Top 40 nine places below Oleta this week with their single “Raoul And The Kings Of Spain”. However, by this point, Curt Smith had left the band and it was essentially a Roland Orzabal solo track. By the way, I’m pretty sure that’s Shirley Lewis on backing vocals in this performance who was married to Luke Goss of Bros fame for 23 years before splitting in 2017. She clearly did “Drop The Boy” though I have no idea if there is any truth that Luke said of the divorce settlement “I Owe You Nothing”. I know – I’m looking for my coat as I type.
After their first appearance in the TOTP studio since 1980 the other week, Iron Maiden are back on the show again though clearly the experience scarred them as they have put a distance of approximately 3,000 miles between them and London for this second performance of “Falling Down”. Obviously, that’s not the reason – they’d played a gig in Jerusalem and then travelled to the ancient fortification of Masada to record this footage. It’s a stunning backdrop and is another example of the show’s executive producer Ric Blaxill’s vision of taking the satellite performances away from empty concert halls and giving them landmark locations instead.
However, I’m not sure that the helicopter views aid the song. It just makes the band seem small, inconsequential and rather silly against such a massive vista. I’ll leave the final word on this though to a Twitter user who posted this rather sage observation:
Robbie Williams wasn’t the only high profile departure from a successful five piece group in 1995. Louise Nurding left Eternal amid unsubstantiated rumours that a prominent US radio station dedicated to music made by black artists wouldn’t promote an interracial group. Rather obviously, a solo career beckoned and after a small rebrand (Nurding possibly wasn’t the best name for a pop star), Louise emerged with her debut single “Light Of My Life”. Now, I remember this as being a huge ballad but hearing it back, it’s quite a slight thing really. Written by Simon Climie of Climie Fisher fame, it never really gets going despite all those strings in the mix trying to beef it up. More 40 watt bulb than incandescent theatre spotlight. Watching this performance, Louise’s miming doesn’t seem very convincing somehow. Not that she’s out of sync or forgets the words or anything like that but just it all seems a little artificial – most strange.
Louise would go onto have a procession of hits including nine Top Tenners and two platinum selling albums. I know, I wouldn’t have believed it either if I hadn’t read it for myself. She would shed the girl next door image and then some by the time of her hit “Naked” but that’s for a future post. Let’s not get to that point too quickly (ahem).
And so to the hit that the British press couldn’t turn a blind eye to as they seemed to be able to with “Who The F**k Is Alice?”. Pulp’s double A-side single “Mis-Shapes / Sorted For E’s And Whizz” had careered into the UK charts at No 2 – we’d seen the band perform “Mis-shapes” on TOTP two weeks earlier as an exclusive preview. However, it was the second song that had caused controversy. Now, clearly its title contained some rather in your face drug’s references but that didn’t seem to bother the BBC as Jarvis Cocker is allowed to sing the lyrics without any censure* in this show.
*I think they may have shortened the title to just “Sorted” for the caption on that performance of “Mis-Shapes” though it is restored to its full, corrupting glory here.
And why would he have? If you listen to the lyrics, Jarvis isn’t pro recreational drugs but rather he’s pointing out what a hollow experience it ultimately is; that it’s just an artificially induced high and that the comedown can be brutal. He was writing from personal experience of attending raves and taking Ecstasy but at no point does he condone drug taking. The actual song title had come from something a girl he knew had said about going to see the Stone Roses at Spike Island in 1990. All she could recall of it was loads of dodgy looking geezers going around asking people if they were sorted for E’s and Whizz. Talking of the Roses, Pulp stood in for them at that year’s Glastonbury at the last minute whilst I myself was working in the Our Price store in Stockport alongside the late and very great Pete Garner who was their original bass player. I distinctly recall Pete saying that he couldn’t believe that Pulp had got away with releasing a single called “Sorted For E’s And Whizz”.
However, one newspaper in particular was determined to publish a story of outrage about the song and so turned their attention to the CD single’s cover which included an illustration of how to fold a speed wrap (though it doesn’t mention anything about it being used for that purpose in the text). The Daily Mirror went all in on this “sick stunt” as they called it with the article being written by one Kate Thornton later of X Factor fame. Here’s @TOTPFacts with the details:
DJ Neil Fox jumped on the bandwagon and refused to play it on his show and in the end, the band pulled the artwork and replaced it with something non controversial. With echoes of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax”, all the press attention just increased sales of the single. Jarvis used both these TOTP appearances to make wry observations on all the fuss. In the “Mis-Shapes” performance, he channels his inner Bob Geldof and reads a copy of the Daily Mirror with that front cover during the middle eight and in this one, he finishes the song by producing an origami bird sculpture. Nicely done Jarvis.
One of the most interesting hits of the year now as we get Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave with “Where The Wild Roses Grow”. Everybody at the time was talking about how had this duet come about, so unlikely was the pairing – Cave, the gothic Prince of doomy art rock with the intimidatingly deep voice and Kylie, the Princess of Pop. Really though, there was no great story behind it. They were both Aussies and Nick really liked Kylie and so he wrote a song for her. Well, I say ‘liked’ but in his own words Cave described himself as having:
“…a quiet obsession with her for about six years.”
Jenkins, Jeff; Meldrum, Ian (2007). Molly Meldrum presents 50 Years of Rock in Australia. Melbourne, Vic: Wilkinson Publishing. p. 227. ISBN 978-1-921332-11-1.
Hmm. Doesn’t sound like the best starting point for a friendship but still. The song he came up with after a few ‘inappropriate” (his words again not mine) attempts was a murder ballad, that dark sub genre of the ballad form that told the narrative of a crime and (usually) gruesome death. I suppose that wasn’t your typical subject matter for a chart hit in 1995. However, it was quite brilliant – haunting, disturbing and yet beautifully melodic with both singers telling their version of the story superbly in tandem. It wasn’t just their differing musical backgrounds that made the duet so curious (though Kylie was well into her first career transformation from perceived SAW puppet to dance diva by this point) but their physical appearance. Cave has naturally…erm…striking (?) looks whilst Kylie has those fine, beautiful features but then there’s also the height difference – it really shouldn’t have worked but it absolutely did.
Around fifteen years after this TOTP performance, I did my own version of “Where The Wild Roses Grow” in a guitar class I was attending at the time, as a duet with a fellow student called Lisa. It even got recorded by the teacher. If only I could work out how to get it embedded into this post…
Simply Red are No 1 again with “Fairground” and this is already the third time in four weeks that it’s featured on the show. Mick Hucknall is, by all accounts, a massive…wait for it…Man United fan (you thought I was going to say something different then didn’t you?!) so no doubt he would have been delighted that his beloved team beat Liverpool in the FA Cup quarter final on Sunday just gone. Somebody who wasn’t impressed was my Hucknall despising mate Robin who texted me at the final whistle to say that United’s victory was the “footballing equivalent of a new Simply Red album”. I was just glad the result stopped Liverpool’s pursuit of a quadruple and thereby putting a spoke in the wheel of the media’s Jürgen Klopp love in. Jürgen Klopp…now he really is a “bleep” to quote Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown!
| Order of appearance | Artist | Title | Did I buy it? |
| 1 | Sleeper | What Do I Do Now | Liked it, didn’t buy it |
| 2 | Smokie and Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown | Who The F**k Is Alice? | Away with you! |
| 3 | Cypress Hill | Throw Your Set In The Air | I did not |
| 4 | Oleta Adams | Never Knew Love | Nah |
| 5 | Iron Maiden | Falling Down | Nope |
| 6 | Louise | Light Of My Life | No |
| 7 | Pulp | Mis-Shapes / Sorted For E’s And Whizz | No but I had the album Different Class with them on |
| 8 | Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue | Where The Wild Roses Grow | No but I sang it! |
| 9 | Simply Red | Fairground | Never! |
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/m001wsmh/top-of-the-pops-05101995?seriesId=unsliced
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 