I said in the last post that we hadn’t yet reached the Kate Thornton/Gail Porter/Jamie Theakston era of TOTP presenters and yet here was the last of those three names on our screens just the following week. Was I mistaken in my claim then? Not really. It turns out that Theakston’s appearance here was as a ‘guest presenter’ and he wouldn’t become a part of the regular roster of hosts until 1998. So kind of like an audition then, similar to what happened with Sarah Cawood the other week? Probably not as he was already an established BBC presenter being onto his second series of co-hosting Saturday morning kids TV show Live & Kicking alongside TOTP regular Zoe Ball so I’m guessing he was just filling in as no-one else was available? These days, Theakston hosts the Heart radio breakfast show with Amanda Holden though my first thought when his name is mentioned is that, like Angus Deayton, he was exposed by a tabloid newspaper for visiting a brothel and snorting cocaine in 2002. Two BBC presenters making the same misdemeanour in the same year. The Beeb was having a public relations nightmare!

Anyway, let’s see how Theakston did on his TOTP debut. We start with Oasis who are in the studio to promote their single “Stand By Me”. The second track taken from their “Be Here Now” album, it would peak at No 2 thus becoming another of those songs denied being a chart topper by the Elton John phenomenon. At the time, the album received mostly positive (and even gushing) reviews in the music press but, in retrospect, has come to be seen as the point where it all started to go wrong for the band. Criticisms of it being overproduced and bloated were given credence by the length of some of its songs. Ignoring the “All Around The World (Reprise)” outro, only two of the eleven tracks clocked in at under the five minutes mark. “Stand By Me” itself has a running time of five seconds off six minutes and we get nearly all of that 5:55 length in this performance. Was that a mark of the power and influence that Oasis held at that time? That they could command such an exposure on the BBC’s prime time music show? After all, “Be Here Now” was the best selling British album of 1997 and the fastest selling of all time in the UK.

Anyway, with some temporal distance and the revisiting of the album, although history hasn’t been too kind to it, people have generally… well…stood by “Stand By Me” which has been regarded as one of its standout tracks. I can hear why. It’s a bloody good song though it hardly broke any new ground and indeed, always reminded me of Mott The Hoople’s “All The Young Dudes” – that ascending scale at the end of the chorus? I’m not the only one who thinks that. Noel Gallagher was asked in a Q Magazine interview if he’d pinched the riff from the Bowie penned song and he admitted that he had! Not only that but that he’d used it for “Don’t Look Back In Anger” as well (though the chords for that are almost identical to “Streets Of London” by Ralph McTell). It’ll be interesting to see how many songs from “Be Here Now” that Oasis play in their 2025 reunion tour. I’m guessing not many but if there’s to be just one, my money would be on “Stand By Me”.

Theakston goes a bit un-PC in his intro for the next artist who is Louise giving it the whole Sid James steam-coming-out-of-his-ears look. Well, it was the era of ‘lads mags’ I guess so it was probably more acceptable back then. Now, continuing with the theme of pinching song ideas which we started with Oasis, Louise seems to have done a bit of appropriating herself as new single “Arms Around The World” sounds an awful lot like Janet Jackson’s “Runaway”. No, I mean like really an awful lot…

See? Anyway, “Arms Around The World” was the lead single from Louise’s second album “Women In Me” and would become her then biggest hit when it peaked at No 4 meaning five of her first six solo outings into the charts had gone Top 10. Not quite reaching the recent No 1 heights of her old band Eternal but pretty impressive all the same. There’s another (albeit more tenuous) link with the aforementioned Oasis whose next single would be “All Around The World”. “Arms Around The World”? “All Around The World”. As Sid James might have said “Cor, blimey! You lot are hard work!”.

We stay in the studio – there was a definite preference for studio performances under executive producer Chris Cowey – with No Doubt whose name allows Theakston to deliver the most woeful, lame and obvious line imaginable his intro. Like most people I’m guessing, my first encounter with Gwen Stefani and co was via super-hit “Don’t Speak”. What stands out to me about their subsequent releases is how they sounded so very little like that global No 1. “Just A Girl” and this one – “Spiderwebs” – were much more of that ska punk/pop fusion sound that characterised their origins. Of course, I’m not familiar with those origins – it’s just what I’ve read – as, despite working in a record shop, I’d barely heard the band’s “Tragic Kingdom” album from which the hits came. I did know said hits though and “Don’t Speak” seemed to me to bear little resemblance to what followed. Was it a deliberate attempt to go more mainstream or just a song that came about organically and ended up with a more wide reaching sound?

As for “Spiderwebs”, it’s a pretty cool track although it’s subject matter about Gwen Stefani receiving unwanted attention from a smitten suitor isn’t the most obviously appealing source material. Still, similar to No Doubt, there was another band who based their career on a post-punk/ reggae fusion sound and who scored the biggest hit of their career with a song about stalking so who am I to be the songwriting…ahem…police?

Now here’s a curious thing and I’m not just talking about the artist for whom the adjective ‘curious’ could always be applied. No, I’m referring to the fact that Chis Cowey found a place in the running order for Björk whose release “Jóga” was never going to make the Top 40. Why? Because it broke the chart regulation of being released in more than three formats. The lead track for third album “Homogenic”, it was only made available in the shops as a three CD and VHS Box Set, hence in four formats. It seems a curious (there’s that word again) marketing strategy to launch your artist’s next collection of new material – releasing the very first example of it in a format that broke chart rules. Did her record label One Little Indian not understand these rules and so it was a massive error on their part? Maybe so as Wikipedia says that they tried to argue that the VHS was bundled for free and so the release didn’t contravene the Official Chart Company’s three format restriction but the OCC weren’t having any of it. Host Jamie Theakston says in his segue that “Jóga” wouldn’t chart as only 3,000 copies of it had been made. Was that true? Or was that One Little Indian retrospectively trying to cover their backs? As I say, the whole thing is very curious.

As for what “Jóga” sounded like, well, I’ve had to revise my opinion about Björk in this blog many times from my initially derogative stance as I’ve leaned to appreciate her craft more but I’m going old school on this one – what a racket! Supposedly a love letter both to her best friend called Jóga and her native country Iceland, the story goes that Björk gave the concept of the track to her engineer Markus Dravs who then came up with a rhythm track that she felt was too abstract. Then producer Mark Bell took said track and added “some noises” which just about sums the whole thing up – a noise. No amount of strings can polish it up for me and Björk wailing away about being in a “state of emergency” wasn’t going to convince me otherwise.

Although M People hadn’t released anything since their cover of the Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park” in 1995, their absence hadn’t been as pronounced as it might have been due to the use of their “Search For A Hero” song to soundtrack a series of TV adverts for Peugeot during 1996. Despite its exposure causing a clamour for the song all over again (it had already been a No 9 hit), the band resisted all calls to rerelease it. Working in a record shop in pre-digital times, it really used to annoy me when this sort of thing happened. An artificial demand for a track caused by an advert or a radio station deciding to add it to their playlists which wasn’t actually available as a single to buy. Another example was when a Manchester radio station started playing “Acquiesce” by Oasis* despite it not being officially released as a single. We had loads of people ask for that convinced it was their new single. Fortunately, in that case, we could flog them the “Some Might Say” CD single as it was an extra track on that and we always kept all the Oasis singles in stock at all times what with us being in Stockport. Another example where there was no simple solution though was when the film Mannequin was first shown on TV in the early 90s and the next day, we had a procession of people come in asking for “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” by Starship which had been a hit in 1987! None of this will mean anything to people that have grown up in the era of streaming platforms and digital music but those who were there will recognise my pain!

*”Stand By Me” itself would be used for a series of adverts for the Halifax bank between 2021 and 2023.

Anyway, back to M People and they finally did release a single (of new material no less) in “Just For You” from their fourth and final album “Fresco” in 1997 and although not one of their most instantly recognisable tracks, it’s a very pleasant sound all the same. Gone was that rather clunky production that characterised their early hits and in its place was a much more smooth soul sound. It was perfect for daytime radio scheduling but perhaps they missed a trick by not releasing it a couple of months earlier as it had a great Summer vibe to it. However, its chart peak at No 8 would be their penultimate Top 10 hit. The time of M People was coming to an end.

The aforementioned Janet Jackson now with, for the third artist in a row, a lead single from a new album. Having signed the then biggest record deal in history with Virgin Records, our first taste of the fruits of that deal was “Got ‘Til It’s Gone” from “The Velvet Rope” album. As indicated by its title, the track took inspiration the Joni Mitchell song “Big Yellow Taxi” with the copyright cleared sample running throughout it so majorly that it a credit was given to Joni on the song. Also featuring was Q-Tip (no, not Paul Young’s old band) from A Tribe Called Quest. I can’t say that it did much for me and I much preferred the original (excruciating laugh and all). I also didn’t think much to the over the top staging of this performance with Ms Jackson not being revealed from her backwards facing throne until nearly a minute in. Get over yourself Janet!

Now, just as Louise seemed to have stolen from Jackson’s “Runaway”, so Janet seems guilty of some musical thievery as she was on the end of litigation from UK soul singer Des’ree who claimed that “Got ‘Til It’s Gone” was very (meaning too) similar to her hit “Feel So High”. In 1998, she was awarded an out of court settlement of 25% of the publishing royalties equating to about £2 million. You can hear why she won…

Clearly it was felt that they’d been enough wailing and wringing of hands caused by the death of Princess Diana by this point and so we don’t get “Candle In The Wind ‘97” this week but the other song on the Elton John single. Yes, it was a double A-side single though that fact has been mostly forgotten now. The ‘other song’ was “Something About The Way You Look Tonight” and was essentially the lead single from his album “The Big Picture”. Wikipedia tells me that the track was released on its own without “Candle In The Wind ‘97” five days before the double A-side but I don’t remember that at all. Indeed, the official charts website makes no reference to this. Is it possible that it was just a case of bad timing and the single was all ready to go before the tragic car crash in Paris on 31 August and its release was just overtaken by events?

Whatever the truth, the song itself was a typical 90s Elton ballad which sounded like it could have been on the Lion King soundtrack to me. It wasn’t though and another song that wasn’t on an album was “Candle In The Wind ‘97” which did not feature on “The Big Picture”. I wonder how many people bought it thinking it was?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Oasis	Stand By Me	No, I’d given up on buying their singles by this point
2	Louise	Arms Around The World	Nope
3	No Doubt	Spiderwebs	Nah
4	Björk	Jóga	Definite no
5	M People	Just For You	Negative
6	Janet Jackson	Got ‘Til It’s Gone	I did not
7	Elton John	Something About The Way You Look Tonight / Candle In The Wind ’97	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/m0029vby/top-of-the-pops-03101997?seriesId=unsliced