Ah, it’s time for that infrequent event of a TOTP being aired on my birthday. This particular show coincided with my 28th birthday (I’m now 56) and usually I wouldn’t have remembered what I got up to on my special day but, as I revealed just the other week, I recently rediscovered an old diary that helpfully covers the year 1996 in its entirety so lets see what occurred that day.
*checks diary*
Well, sensibly I’d booked the day off work and so had lunch in town with my wife before another meal in the evening at a favourite restaurant. Perfect. I did fit in going to my first aid course in between eating and I hope I was listening carefully as I spent the next couple of days with a gippy stomach. Maybe that favourite restaurant shouldn’t have been such a favourite! Anyway, presumably I didn’t see this TOTP episode due to being out so let’s see what I missed.
Tonight’s host is Nicky Campbell and the first act he introduces is Louise who is back in the charts with her third, and possibly most well known, solo single “Naked”. This was the point in the ex-Eternal member’s career when her management/label made a clear and definite decision to change her image from angelic, girl-next-door to pvc-clad, sex goddess. It worked as well. FHM Magazine readers voted Louise second in their list of the ‘100 Sexiest Women’ of 1996 (X–Files star Gillian Anderson came first). I’m guessing one of those that voted for Louise may have been this fellow (@jjtotheb) who commented on the YouTube video of this performance:
“I remember having my first tug to this”
Well, you can’t argue with that I guess. Or maybe you can. Providing the view from the other side is this chap on Twitter/X:
Hmm. Well, whatever your feelings about Louise, we should probably do her the courtesy of discussing her song rather than just her looks and clearly “Naked” was written as a integral component of her rebrand. With lyrics that include the words ‘sexual’, ‘sensual’ and, of course, its title, there was no doubt that this was a much sassier type of track than she had been given previously. To my ears it was a catchy, competent soul/pop hit that was a bit Madonna-lite* and no more but it’s No 5 peak helped to establish Louise as a genuine solo artist with a chart career. She would clock up a further nine UK hits all but two of which would go Top 10.
*Actually, the synthesised riff in the chorus of “Naked” is very reminiscent of the intro and outro motif of “Father Figure” also now I come to think of it.
After “Children” gave Robert Miles a continent-straddling mega-hit earlier in the year, it must have seemed to the poster boy for ‘dream house’ music that the obvious way to follow it up was to release another track that was almost identical to its predecessor. Genius! And lo, it came to pass, that the single “Fable” did just that. The record buying public did what they always do and fell for the trick by buying enough copies to send it to No 7. So, the moral of the story of fable is ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ otherwise known as ‘don’t f**k with the formula’.
Now, before carrying on, I feel I should pull Nicky Campbell up on something he says in his intro for the next artist who is Tina Turner. Our host describes her as “the great soul survivor” and notes that the performance we are about to see of her new single “On Silent Wings” is from a live concert in Rotterdam before announcing “and let’s face it, if you can survive Rotterdam, you can survive anything”. What?! Why the need to slag off Holland’s second biggest city? Has he even been there? I can’t vouch for what it was like in 1996 but I visited it in 2018 and it was delightful. The Markthal (Market Place complex) is a marvel, its skyline stunning and parks wonderful to spend time in. A few months after this TOTP aired, The Beautiful South would have a big hit with “Rotterdam (Or Anywhere)” though I’m not sure that was a love letter to the city either. Around the same time that song was in the charts, I found myself on holiday in Barcelona where Tina’s Wildest Dreams tour was in town at the Palau Sant Jordi sports arena. I didn’t feel the need to shell out a small fortune that I didn’t have for tickets, I must admit.
Anyway, back to “On Silent Wings” which was the third single pulled from her “Wildest Dreams” album which was, rather surprisingly, her first collection of new studio material since 1989’s “Foreign Affair”. Those intervening years had been filled with a Best Of and the soundtrack to the biopic of her life. I’m guessing I wasn’t really paying much attention to this era of Tina as I couldn’t tell you how any of the songs from this album went but I was surprised to read that it was produced by Trevor Horn. The country-tinged slumber fest that is “On Silent Wings” is a world away from his iconic work with the likes of ABC, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Art Of Noise. Apparently, the studio recording of the song also features vocals by Sting which obviously we don’t get to hear in this ‘live’ clip. Money for nothing or money for old rope? You decide.
Really?! In 1996, did we really have to have this in the charts?! A pretty much identikit version of one of Cliff Richard’s most naff, sickly and insipid tunes by a bloke who would be given the middle name of ‘love rat’ by the tabloids?! I refer, of course, to Darren Day, a former Butlin’s redcoat who made a small name for himself in 1988 via talent show Opportunity Knocks (then hosted by Bob Monkhouse) before carving out a bigger career on London’s West End theatre circuit. His appearance on TOTP though arose from his turn as the star of the touring stage version of the 1963 film Summer Holiday. I’m guessing there was a soundtrack album to go with the show and so the titular track was released as a single. I can’t quite work out who would have wanted to shell out hard cash to purchase this though. Someone who had been to the show and wanted a souvenir of it? Wouldn’t a tour programme have sufficed?
Day does a passable impression of Cliff in his performance of “Summer Holiday” but I don’t think the presence of the songwriters (Bruce Welch and Brian Bennett of The Shadows) on stage with him is as a big a scoop as Nicky Campbell tries to make out in his intro. Day looks like someone who you would be happy to take home to meet your parents here, in total contrast to the image he would go on to cultivate. In the 90s alone, he was engaged to Ana Friel, Tracy Shaw and Isla Fisher. Into the 2000s, he was in a relationship with Hear’say singer Suzanne Shaw (he seemed to have a thing for women with that surname) with whom he had a child and they would also work together in a relaunch of the Summer Holiday show. The last entry in his filmography on Wikipedia came back in 2018 with a minor role in The Krays: Dead Man Walking.
Next up we have the first sighting of a group that my friend Robin once dismissed (he’s good at dismissing things) as being a “joke band”. In Robin’s defence, he wasn’t alone in his opinion. Scousers Space gave the music press a dilemma in that they were hard to categorise. ‘Wacky’, ‘Novelty’, ‘Quirky’ and, in a spectacularly failed attempt by some hack to appear pithy, ‘Queasy Listening’ were just some of the descriptors used to label the band’s sound. Lead singer Tommy Scott was especially combatant in his refusal to accept such tags:
“It is because I just do not want to stick to one genre of music. I am into everything so why can’t it all just go into one song? Why would you want to do just country or rock? Why can’t you just do what you want?”
Skillen, Paul (29 January 2021). “‘Scouse Pop: Essay On Creativity”. University of Chester.
Have that Robin! For my part, I quite liked their stuff. Yeah, it was a bit out there yet catchy enough to make daytime radio playlists. My wife liked them enough to buy their debut album “Spiders” which would furnish the band with four hit singles no less. The first of those (though actually their fourth single release) was “Female Of The Species”, its title no doubt inspired by both the Rudyard Kiping poem and the title track to 1950s James Bond rip off film Deadlier Than The Male by The Walker Brothers.:
In this performance, Scott looks just the right side of being a wide eyed, crazy person but then such an image never did Keith Moon any harm did it? Well…yeah it did I suppose seeing as his self destructive behaviour led to him dying at the age of 32 but you get my point. The really lazy option was to lump them in with all those Britpop bands (I’m sure we did in the Our Price store I was working in when it came to setting up a Britpop display) but that was…well…really lazy. They were distinctly different from the usual Britpop candidates like fellow scousers Cast* who were ploughing a much more ‘authentic’, 60s influenced guitar sound.
*I should point out that I did also like Cast to be fair
The “Spiders” album peaked at No 5 whilst 1998’s follow up “Tin Planet” went Top 3 but it seemed as if, once the 90s were over, so were Space’s commercial fortunes. A third album’s release was constantly delayed leading to the band leaving their record label whilst line up changes meant that they pulled their own legs off in 2005 by breaking up the band. A reunion in 2011 has seen them release a further four albums (including that ever delayed third one “Love You More Than Football”) and they still tour to this day proving that there is still space for Space even three decades later.
Due to its success and ubiquity, we would all be forgiven for thinking that “Three Lions (It’s Coming Home)” by Baddiel & Skinner / Lightning Seeds was the official song of the Euro 96 football championships. It wasn’t however – that particular ‘honour’ fell to Simply Red who gave the world this woeful own goal of a song “We’re In This Together”. Apparently this was the last track on their 1995 album “Life” and ‘last’ is how previous act Space might have described it in their Scouse vernacular because it was and remains a terrible track. Awful. Just no good. It hasn’t even got any thing to do with football as far as I can tell judging by the lyrics in which Hucknall wails about “the train of universal feeling” and his eyes being “open just like the ocean”. Utter drivel.
The track was performed at the opening and closing ceremonies of the tournament but I’m guessing hardly anyone remembers it despite that exposure. Of all the plethora of football songs that littered the charts around this time (and there were a lot most of which were indescribably terrible), I think this is the worst. I listened the other day to an interview with the comedian Joe Pasquale (stay with me) and he recounted the tale of an early gig in Wales when he was on the end of what he described as the worst heckle in the world. A member of the audience who was on crutches threw them at Joe and then slumped to the floor shouting something in Welsh at him as he fell. Pasquale picked up the crutches and left the stage at which point a guy met him round the side and said could he have his mate’s crutches back. When Joe asked him what his mate had shouted at him, he replied “You don’t want to know”. Pasquale insisted and was told that he’d shouted “I’d rather fall over than listen to this shit!” and he was true to his word. This is exactly how I feel about Simply Red’s “We’re In This Together”.
From a dodgy tune to a tune by Dodgy now as the “Staying Out For The Summer” hitmakers return with “In A Room”, lead single from their third studio album “Free Peace Sweet” (see what they did there?). I think this track gets overshadowed rather by subsequent single “Good Enough” which is surely their best known hit (apparently one of the most played tracks on British radio in the last 25 years) but it’s actually a pretty decent song in its own right. Angular guitars allied with some breezy drumming courtesy of Matthew Priest and a strident if not completely obvious hook would give them their then biggest hit when it debuted at No 12. Just a few short weeks later though would come that ever present hit making Dodgy good enough for daytime radio playlists everywhere and consigning “In A Room” to also-ran status. Shame.
By 1996, it was four years since Shakespeares Sister had topped the charts for eight weeks with their mammoth hit “Stay” but it felt more like forty. The pop world had not so much moved on as relocated to the other side of the planet and Siobhan Fahey was struggling to find her way back to it. I say Siobhan Fahey as Marcella Detroit had long since been jettisoned from the band rather publicly via an acceptance speech by the former’s publisher at the 1993 Ivor Novello Awards ceremony. After dealing with some personal issues (not least her divorce from Eurythmics Dave Stewart), the Shakespeares Sister project was relaunched with the single “I Can Drive”. Much less ‘pop’ than their previous stuff, it has a definite glam rock bent to it with Siobhan’s much maligned vocals and delivery making her look and sound like she’s auditioning for a part in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. The song itself has shades of “All The Young Dudes” to it but the verses sound just like those of this hit for OMD that was released just a couple of months after this TOTP aired. Who copied who I wonder?
“I Can Drive” didn’t provide the jump leads to restart Shakespeare Sister’s career that Siobhan must have been hoping for when it stalled at No 30. Relations between her label London Records deteriorated to the point that they refused to release third album “#3” and a parting of the ways became inevitable. The album was finally released in 2004 on Fahey’s own website and a reunion with Marcella Detroit in 2019 saw the duo release a new single and embark upon a tour together.
And so we arrive at the record that would become the biggest selling single of 1996 in the UK. Although the Fugees had already had a Top 40 hit earlier in the year with “Fu-Gee-La”, I don’t think I’d even noticed it as it debuted and exited our charts in just three weeks back in April. Fast forward a couple of months and they went supernova with their cover of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song” which they retitled as “Killing Me Softly”. If I remember correctly, this was around the time that record companies started to allow new singles to be made available in the shops to buy on the Sunday of the week of release as opposed to the traditional Monday. I guess they realised that with stores now routinely opening on both weekend days after the Sunday Trading Act of 1994, there was some logic in stimulating more sales of their products by having them on the shelves for an extra day. I was working in the Our Price store in Stockport on the Sunday that “Killing Me Softly” came out and all I remember doing is selling copy after copy of it from opening to closing time. I couldn’t refill the shelves quick enough (Stockport was a two floor store and I think there was only two of us in that day; I was downstairs where the singles were). It was absolutely relentless.
Why did it capture the nation’s hearts so? Well, it was a bloody good cover version with the hip-hop slant the band put on it coming up trumps alongside some unusual hooks such as the synth sitar sound that kickstarts the track and Wyclef Jean’s “One time, two times” interjected chants. Even so, did that explain its stratospheric sales? It was No 1 just about everywhere and the best selling single of the year not just here but in Germany, Holland, Iceland and Belgium as well. In the UK, it spent nine consecutive weeks at either No 1 or No 2 and 15 weeks inside the Top 40. Its sales were still going strong when the band released follow up “Ready Or Not” causing their record label Columbia to withdraw it from sale to clear the path for its successor. Maybe it was something to do with the amount that radio got behind the track. It broke the record at the time for the most radio plays in a week in the UK. Whatever the reasons, it made the Fugees superstars for a while and led to successful solo careers for all three members Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel.
After blowing smoke up their collective arses for most of this review, I have to say that the performance here is actually quite annoying mainly due to Wyclef Jean who insists on shouting about being on Top of the Pops and bellowing “Yo!” and “Pow!” over and over. Makes you wish he was “Gone till November”.
The play out video is “The Changing Man” by Paul Weller. Why were we seeing the video for a hit from 12 months previous? It was to trail the fact that Weller would be doing two tracks live on the show next week that Nicky Campbell referred to. It was a feature designed to promote the new Friday night slot that the show was shifting to over the Summer due to the Euro 96 football tournament. It would prove to be a short lived phenomenon with only the reactivated Sex Pistols going on to perform two songs on the show later in the month. As I’ll have already reviewed “The Changing Man” in the 1995 TOTP repeats, I won’t delay myself here any further.
| Order of appearance | Artist | Title | Did I buy it? |
| 1 | Louise | Naked | Nope |
| 2 | Robert Miles | Fable | Negative |
| 3 | Tina Turner | On Silent Wings | Nah |
| 4 | Darren Day | Summer Holiday | As if |
| 5 | Space | Female Of The Species | No but my wife had their Spiders album |
| 6 | Simply Red | We’re In This Together | God no! |
| 7 | Dodgy | In A Room | No but my wife had the Free Peace Sweet album |
| 8 | Shakespeares Sister | I Can Drive | No |
| 9 | Fugees | Killing Me Softly | No but my wife had The Score album it came from |
| 10 | Paul Weller | The Changing Man | No but I had the Stanley Road album with it on |
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/m0022v3t/top-of-the-pops-06061996?seriesId=unsliced
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 