It’s early September of 1996 and I’m on holiday in Barcelona. I loved it though I did get a case of Montezuma’s revenge the day before we were due to go back which made for a very uncomfortable flight home I can tell you. Sticking with that theme, although I really enjoyed Barcelona, a friend who visited there after me hated it saying that he’d rather go on holiday in his own toilet bowl. What has any of this to do with TOTP? Nothing really though I wonder how many shit songs we might get in this particular show?
Our host for tonight is Julia Carling (remember her?) and we start with a group that my mate Robin once described as a ‘joke band’ so I presume he thought they were a big pile of poo though I think that’s a harsh description. Space were certainly idiosyncratic and they may not have been to your taste but I don’t think they can be dismissed out of hand as complete shite. After securing themselves a bona fide hit in “Female Of The Species”, the scouse band were back with a follow up in “Me And You Versus The World”. As with its predecessor, it wasn’t your conventional pop song with Tommy Scott’s grainy vocals telling a Bonnie and Clyde type story in which the protagonist admits he’s “just a joke” (maybe Robin was right after all!) before a rather grizzly end is revealed. Scott channels his inner Victoria Wood when he gets the line “a tin of baked beans and a Woman’s Weekly” into the lyrics. The single would debut at No 9 providing the band with their first Top 10 hit. Space were in full launch mode. Who was laughing now?
Hit or Shit? I’m going hit with this one
Now this, this is a complete scandal. How on earth were Clock allowed to do this?! Well, presumably they got copyright clearance from the original artist but it’s still a disgrace. Having decided the only way to score major hits with their yucky brand of Eurodance was to cover previous hit records and polish them into turds, they’d already sprinkled flecks of shit onto “Axel F” and “Whoomph! (There It Is)”. Harold Faltermeyer and Tag Team were one thing but Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons were sacrosanct! How dare they take their 1976 UK and US No 1 “December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night)” and give it the shitty stick treatment! They even had the temerity to rename their version as “Oh What A Night” (unless that was a stipulation of being granted permission to cover it – maybe they couldn’t use the song’s original title?). I mean, you just can’t improve upon the original, you can only make it worse so why try? Were they hoping to appeal to young record buyers who may not know The Four Seasons original? It’s just wrong on every level and yet somehow it was a hit spending four non consecutive weeks at No 13 unluckily for us.
I have to admit to being a bit biased in my denigration of Clock here as I do love Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. I’ve seen Jersey Boys and, in my current job working in a theatre, have seen a couple of tribute acts all of which I’ve enjoyed. As such, this Clock nonsense really offends. They weren’t finished here though going on to cover the likes of Hot Chocolate, KC and the Sunshine Band and The Jacksons.
Hit or Shit? A massive, steaming turd
Next up are Kula Shaker with their No 2 hit “Hey Dude”. I discussed this one in quite some depth in a previous post so I don’t propose to say an awful lot more this time around. However, what I did discover in my research for it is that the band’s keyboard player Jay Darlington was a touring member of Oasis from 2002 until their 2009 break up. So, will he have had the call from Noel and Liam for the 2025 reunion tour and if he has, will he be allowed to go as he is currently back with Kula Shaker? When he was with Oasis, due to his long hair and beard, he was often introduced by Noel as “The Shroud”, “Gandalf” or even “Jesus Christ” leaving to the crowd chanting “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…”. Never mind Noel and Liam giving him a call, maybe Donald Trump* might reach out to Darlington. What an endorsement that would be!
*For any avoidance of doubt, I despise Trump.
Hit or Shit? Definite tune this one!
What on God’s green earth…? If I thought we’d reached a nadir with Clock, I hadn’t bargained on the sodding Smurfs making a comeback. People of a certain age (i.e. me) will have strong childhood memories of The Smurfs not least because of the ridiculous single “The Smurf Song” spending six consecutive weeks at No 2 in the UK charts during the long, hot Summer of 1978. That bloke with the long flowing beard? No, not Jay Darlington! Yep – Father Abraham (no, not the biblical patriarch but Dutch singer-songwriter Pierre Kartner). He had a bowler hat as well I seem to remember. Anyway, we finally came to our senses as a nation about The Smurfs (though there were two minor follow up hits as well) and left it all behind us after 1978 but across the rest of Europe they never went away and so, in 1996, EMI deemed it was time for their return to our shores (and ears) courtesy of “The Smurfs Go Pop” album which spent 12 consecutive weeks inside the Top 10 of our charts over the Summer and Autumn of that year. Similar to the Clock concept earlier, The Smurfs (or whoever had the licensing rights to them) took modern day hit tracks and smurfed them up with high octane vocals that were enough to give you a migraine. And we thought Pinky and Perky* were bad enough!
*In fairness, I recall there being a Pinky and Perky record in our house when I was a tiny child and presumably the infant version of me loved it.
Brilliantly, they tried to get permission to do covers of some Oasis songs but Noel Gallagher wasn’t having any of it. In the end, the songs covered were fairly awful including “Mr Blobby”, “Cotton Eye Joe”, “Saturday Night” and “No Limit”. However, the single chosen for release was their take on Technohead’s recent gabber hit “I Wanna Be A Hippy”. Clearly, a brand aimed at young children couldn’t feature any references to drugs as the original did so they were all stripped out and replaced with the tale of a small dog and retitled as “I’ve Got A Little Puppy”. A happy hardcore version of The Smurfs sounds appalling and yet the single, as with the album, was a huge hit peaking at No 4. Who the f**k was buying it?! Working in Our Price, I must have sold it to punters many times over but I can’t actually recall doing it. Perfectly for the theme of this post, the lyrics included the refrain “pooper, pooper scooper!”.
Hit or Shit? A huge pile of dog poo
Here’s a curious thing – when an artist’s biggest hit is also one of their least known. I speak of Dina Carroll and her comeback single “Escaping”. I use the word ‘comeback’ as we hadn’t seen her for nigh on three years since her annus mirabilis in 1993 saw her become one of the breakout stars of that year. Four hit singles and a four times platinum selling debut album in “So Close” saw her named Best Female Artist at the following year’s BRIT awards. She was set for superstardom and then just seemed to vanish. Health issues and record label contractual problems caused a lengthy delay to her releasing any new material and so it was not until 1996 that she returned to the charts with “Escaping”. Despite this debuting at No 3 making it her joint highest charting single alongside “Don’t Be A Stranger”, I had real trouble recalling how this one went. That may be a common experience – when was the last time you heard it on the radio? Once I’d re- listened to it, it did sound faintly familiar but I do recall being surprised at how high it had gone into the charts back in 1996 given her low profile for the previous three years. The album it was taken from “Human Nature” also did well going to No 2 and achieving platinum sales status though its predecessor sold four times as many copies.
A mixture of an hereditary bone condition that affected her ears, bad luck (a cover of Dusty Springfield’s “Son Of A Preacher Man” was aborted due to Dusty’s untimely death) and more record label and management wrangling meant that Dina never did release a third album and drifted away from the music industry come the new millennium. She seems an almost forgotten figure somehow which strikes me as unfair I have to say.
Hit or Shit? Hmm. Difficult one this. “Escaping” is pleasant but not exactly memorable but then it was her joint biggest hit. Is this an “all fart, no shit” scenario?
What the heck?! What’s going on here? Why is “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell, a No 1 record in 1981, on TOTP in 1996? Well, this show was the first of ten that had a start time of 7.25pm. So? Here’s @TOTPFacts to take up the story…
Hmm. I think Blaxill was hoping against hope with that idea. In reality, it was probably just to further plug the return of TOTP2 that Julia Carling mentions at the song’s end. As my TOTP blog only dates back to the 1983 repeats, I’ve never properly discussed “Tainted Love” before but do I really need to go into the backstory on this one? Actually, there is a little bit of its origin that ties in nicely with this post. After becoming aware of the song due to its Northern Soul profile, Soft Cell decided to insert it into their live set. The song it replaced? “The Night” by the aforementioned Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. For years it was known as the biggest selling single of 1981 in the UK until the Official Charts Company recalculated the data in 2021 and gave that title to “Don’t You Want Me” by The Human League. “And I’ve lost my light” indeed.
Hit or Shit? For years it was one of those unlistenable tracks for me that you can’t hear anymore because it’s been so overplayed. However, it has recently become more acceptable to my ears again and is definitely a hit!
This next one comes charged with emotion for the band performing it. Less than two months before this appearance, Rob Collins, keyboard player for The Charlatans, died in a car crash aged just 33 on his way back to the studios where the band were recording their fifth album “Tellin’ Stories”. Despite the devastating loss, the band decided to carry on and completed the album with Primal Scream’s Martin Duffy drafted in to cover the keyboard parts. “One To Another” was its lead single coming out a good eight months before the album. I remarked in a recent post about how there seemed to be a trend around this time for huge time gaps between lead singles and its parent album being released quoting the examples of Paul Weller and Shed Seven. In the case of The Charlatans though, the loss of Collins more than explains the delay. The band had supported Oasis at their giant Knebworth gigs in the August and just weeks after Collins had died so maybe “One To Another” was released when it was as a tribute to their departed band mate? Perhaps there was also one eye on capitalising on the huge media profile those Oasis dates had generated?
Either way, the single was a banger, a huge, barrelling sound with groovy riffs aplenty. As Julia Carling said in her intro, it was their highest charting single ever when it crashed in at No 3. Interesting to note that there’s not much camera time given to Martin Duffy* on keyboards here. Could that have been at the request of the band who would have wanted to be respectful to Collins’s memory and not make it look like he’d just been effortlessly replaced?
*Tragically Duffy would also die young aged just 55 in 2022.
Hit or Shit? Huge tune this. Definite hit.
From the sublime to the ridiculous – it’s time for Los Del Rio again. Is it time to talk about the dance that went with the “Macarena”? I guess we have to at some point. I don’t propose to give a breakdown of the various moves – go online and find them yourselves if you want a refresher. However, what’s more interesting is the psychology behind why people would want to do it. In 2015, Oxford University published research into collective, synchronised dancing and found that the practice raised tolerance levels, fostered connectedness and friendship and broke down barriers promoting a feeling of togetherness. So there was some benefit to this ludicrous song. It’s still musical excrement though.
Hit or Shit? Definitely shit
And so to Rockets From The Crypt – a one hit wonder but one which I do actually remember. American punk rockers hailing from San Diego, their singular chart entry was “On A Rope” which would peak at No 12 in the UK charts. What stands out most in my memory about this one was that it was released as three different CD singles in cardboard slip covers. As I was working for Our Price, and, as we were not yet displaying stock live on the shop floor, you had to be really careful to get the correct disc from the filing behind the counter. Some of my more rock leaning colleagues were quite into this one but it didn’t do much for me I have to say. It was all a bit repetitive and certainly these days, aged 56, I would say it was too loud. It’s crap getting old isn’t it?
Hit or Shit? Is there a category for the non committed as I really couldn’t give a shit
It’s the last week at the top for the Spice Girls and “Wannabe”. Its success must have exceeded everything that record label Virgin could possibly have imagined for the debut release from a brand new act. It’s interesting to note that although the UK remained enamoured by them for the duration of their career (the first part of it at least) with nine of their first ten singles topping our charts, “Wannabe” was the only one to go to No 1 across the board in every territory globally.
The early copies of the single had a cover which doesn’t actually say Spice Girls on it but rather just ‘Spice’ with images of the individual members depicted within the lettering of the word. I think some of my colleagues were confused by this and actually just wrote ‘Spice’ as the artist name on the master bag for the filing system we used. It’s hard now to imagine a world where we didn’t know the name Spice Girls.
Hit or Shit? Sales phenomenon not withstanding, it was still a bit shit
The play out video is “How Bizarre” by OMC. By my reckoning, this is its fourth appearance on the show and therefore I have nothing left to say about it. Literally nothing. OK, OK…I’ll think of something. How about this? In 2002, “How Bizarre” was ranked at No 71 on the 100 Greatest One Hit Wonders show hosted by William Shatner. That’s William Shatner. Shatner. Shat-ner. The theme of this post? Oh forget it.
Hit or Shit? My wife bought this so I fell duty bound to say ‘hit’
| Order of appearance | Artist | Title | Did I buy it? |
| 1 | Space | Me And You Versus The World | No but my wife had their album |
| 2 | Clock | Oh What A Night | NO! |
| 3 | Kula Shaker | Hey Dude | No but I had a promo copy of their album |
| 4 | The Smurfs | I’ve Got A Little Puppy | Are you mad? |
| 5 | Dina Carroll | Escaping | Nah |
| 6 | Soft Cell | Tainted Love | I did not |
| 7 | The Charlatans | One To Another | No but I had it on their Best Of album Melting Pot |
| 8 | Los Del Rio | Macarena | Never |
| 9 | Rockets From The Crypt | On A Rope | Nope |
| 10 | Spice Girls | Wannabe | Negative |
| 11 | OMC | How Bizarre | No but my wife did |
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/m00241bt/top-of-the-pops-06091996?seriesId=unsliced
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 
Hit or shit – what a fantastic game for daytime TV!
“if you don’t do it, Sky will”
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