We’ve entered December of 1997 with these TOTP repeats which can only mean one thing – Christmas is coming! By this point, with me working in the Our Price store in Stockport, I would have been in full-on hectic work mode with Christmas temps, queues of customers and long days of trading the norm. And what were the great British public buying their loved ones for Christmas? Well, the record companies had long since shuffled their pack of cards and got their dominoes in order (not sure where I’m going with this metaphor) to finalise their release schedules for optimum festive sales. A quick scan of the December album charts shows that, unsurprisingly, the Spice Girls were at No 1 with their sophomore album “Spiceworld” with Celine Dion showing strong sales of her “Let’s Talk About Love” album just behind. So far, so mainstream. The rest of the Top 10 is made up of four Best Ofs from Eternal, Enya, Lightning Seeds and, in a blast from the past, Wham! All Saints were on the climb with their recently released eponymous debut album whilst one of the year’s consistent big sellers – “White On Blonde” by Texas – was still shifting major numbers despite 44 weeks on the chart already. Grimly, the Backstreet Boys were in there but perhaps the biggest surprise and certainly the least mainstream artist inside the Top 10 were The Verve whose “Urban Hymns” album would ultimately go eleven times platinum in the UK but more of them later.

Jayne ‘pouty mouth’ Middlemiss is our host for tonight and we start with M People and their single “Fantasy Island”. Nothing to do with the TV series starring Ricardo Montalban and Hervé Villechaize (“De plane! De plane!”) nor (thankfully) the 1982 Top 5 hit for Tight Fit, this was the second track take from the band’s “Fresco” album. I don’t recall this one at all but that’s probably because it only spent one week on the Top 40 peaking at a lowly No 33 making it quite the outlier in the band’s discography. Not since “Someday” five years earlier had they experienced such a low charting single.

So what happened here? The other two singles from the album both peaked at No 8 either side of “Fantasy Island” so what was it about that track that should have caused such a fluctuation. I don’t believe it was a sudden drop in the band’s popularity. Although they weren’t quite hitting the heights of their commercial heyday when “Elegant Slumming” and “Bizarre Fruit” sold 2.5 million copies between them in the UK alone, “Fresco” was still a platinum selling album. So was there a dip in quality for this particular song? Well, musical taste is subjective of course so I can’t really make any definitive judgement on that score but “Fantasy Island” seemed to hark back to the template of those earlier hits so was the formula becoming a bit tired. It couldn’t have been the Samson-effect surely that saw Heather Small’s vocal power reduced by the removal of her usual towering hairdo? No, of course not. Possibly it was just that it got caught up in the Christmas rush (15 of the Top 40 songs that week were new releases) – that seems the most plausible explanation. What was sure was that the time of M People was coming to an end. The only albums released since “Fresco” have been Best Of compilations and box set retrospectives as Heather Small launched her solo career and Mike Pickering pursued a career in A&R.

Also experiencing some commercial difficulties around this time was Kylie Minogue. Her first single in nearly two years – “Some Kind Of Bliss” – had been her first ever release not to make the UK Top 20 (all of her previous 23 singles up to that point had achieved this). Presumably spooked by this, her record label Deconstruction delayed the release of its parent album. Originally scheduled to be called “Impossible Princess”, it had already been postponed once and when Princess Diana died at the end of August, the reason given for its second shelving was issues of sensitivity surrounding its title. On reflection, that seems quite a convenient smoke screen. A second single was lined up to test the waters further in an attempt to divine public opinion about Kylie’s new direction. “Did It Again” was heavily promoted (including a CD-Rom of the promo video on some versions of the single) and it duly improved upon its predecessors chart position by peaking at No 14.

However, it was a temporary and not altogether substantial reprieve. When the album did finally come out, it underperformed. A third single from it could only replicate the chart high of “Did It Again” creating a hat-trick of singles that didn’t make the Top 10. Additionally, the British press seemed to have fallen out of love with Kylie around this time. Accusations of anorexia and a belittling of her ‘IndieKylie’ persona (that itself was a creation by the media and not something encouraged by Kylie herself) dogged her whilst the three year gap between albums and a perceived lack of promotion from Deconstruction were seen as contributing factors to a downturn in her popularity. By the time the 90s had ended, Kylie seemed like she was a chart dinosaur but somehow survived pop music extinction to capture the hearts of the public and a No 1 record with “Spinning Around” in 2000. She’s not really looked back since.

As for “Did It Again”, her vocals here are a bit ropey and I’m not sure that the drag queens on stage with her really add anything to the performance ( yes, I get that they are recreations of the various Kylie personas from the video) but it’s OK. Also, is it in my imagination or does it sound a bit like Garbage (the band!) at the start? After that though, there is no complication as it displays a definite eastern vibe before there is no hesitation as it propels headlong into a catchy chorus. Maybe Kylie should consider herself so unlucky that it wasn’t a bigger hit. Ahem.

Next up, a song that may not be the most well known or highest charting of this particular band’s career but has been singled out by the man behind it as the favourite of his that he’s ever written (so far). That man is Richard Ashcroft, the band is The Verve and the song is “Lucky Man”. The third single released from their aforementioned classic “Urban Hymns” album, it’s a widescreen, epic sonic soundscape of a track though it’s actually got a very basic chord structure that even a lazy strummer like me could handle. Maybe that’s the secret to its power and allure – its simplicity. Of course, the recorded version that we all know is multi layered so that it sounds almost sprawling but as with its chords, it has a simple and pure message in its lyrics – that of the “raw nature of yourselves”, as Ashcroft himself puts it, that is allowed to be displayed between a couple in a committed relationship and the beauty within that ease of being. Yes, it’s anthemic but there’s no bombast to it. I think it’s probably my favourite song by The Verve as well Mr. Ashcroft.

As Jayne Middlemiss says in her intro, this performance was taken from the band’s appearance on Later…with Jools Holland which was broadcast on 10th November 1997 and the orchestral string backing really elevates it to a higher plane sonically. The other artists on that particular show were Rickie Lee Jones, UB40, Roni Size and Jewel. With respect to those names, I consider myself to be a lucky man not to be reviewing that show as well.

Sometimes I really cannot dredge up anything from the recesses of my poor, overworked brain to comment on about a past hit relived on these TOTP repeats. It may be because I can’t recall it at all or that it’s from a genre of music that didn’t speak to me and therefore I have nothing to say about it. In the case of “It’s Over Love” by Todd Terry it’s both. Obviously I do know the name Todd Terry and that he’s a house music legend but apart from that I couldn’t tell you much about his canon of work other than his involvement in the remix of Everything But The Girl’s “Missing”. His discography lists two other UK Top 10 hits that he had with Martha Wash and Jocelyn Brown in 1996 and 1997 and I can’t even remember them! Did I review them for this blog?!

My blushes are spared though by the featured vocalist in this track who is Shannon whom I definitely do recall. Back in 1984 she had three bona fide chart hits in “Sweet Somebody”, “Give Me Tonight” and the biggest of the lot “Let The Music Play”. Thirteen years later and she was back in the TOTP studio and she doesn’t look that much older to me. Am I misremembering? Make your own minds up…

By 1997, I’d started to lose sight of Paul Weller’s solo career. After he’d re-emerged from the wilderness with his 1992 eponymous album, he cemented his position as a respected elder statesman of British guitar rock (even though he was only 35 at the time) with the following year’s “Wild Wood”. By the time that 1995’s “Stanley Road” had gone four times platinum, Weller was the ‘The Modfather’, or even ‘The Godfather of Britpop’ (along with a few other candidates for the title). However, just as Britpop couldn’t and didn’t sustain, neither did Weller’s solo career sales. His fourth solo album ”Heavy Soul” arrived two years on from “Stanley Road” and though a healthy seller, it didn’t come anywhere near the numbers of its predecessor. It felt like he was appealing to his (admittedly large) fanbase still but that crossover into a larger audience that we saw with “Stanley Road” was no longer there.

I think I must have been one of those that fell by the wayside. Both “Wild Wood” and “Stanley Road” CDs were to be found in our flat in Manchester but “Heavy Soul” was noticeably absent. Its lead single “Peacock Suit” was OK but beyond that, I hadn’t felt the need to investigate further. As such, I don’t really remember the fourth and final single lifted from the album called “Mermaids”. Having watched this performance back, it’s a decent tune though a bit Weller-by-numbers. The “sha-la-la-la” hook has me wondering if Mr Weller had been listening to “Sha-La-La-La-Lee” by the Small Faces or even “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison. Whatever the truth, there seemed to be a trend for records using that lyrical refrain in 1997. Remember “What Do You Want From Me?” by Monaco?

P.S. That tank top Paul! Dearie me!

Somebody who was never going to be found in the Top 10 of the album chart I talked about at the start of the post is Gala. Not in the UK at least. In the rest of Europe she shifted a fair few copies of her album “Cone Into My Life” (nothing to do with the Joyce Sims hit of the same name) but over here she was a singles artist. In fact, she was known for one single in particular and it wasn’t this one. Whilst “Freed From Desire” continues to have a life of its own thanks to its adoption as a football chant, does anybody remember “Let A Boy Cry”? Well, you might if you’re Italian, Belgian, Spanish or French as it went to No 1 in all those countries but one week at No 11 was all it could muster in the UK. To my ears, it sounds very similar to its predecessor but…well…just not as good. Its subject matter about encouraging male sensitivity and emotional intelligence is laudable but it’s just not that memorable. Gala’s shaky vocals in this performance didn’t help its chances. A third UK Top 40 hit would arrive in the form of the album’s title track the following August but a high of No 38 was hardly likely to add longevity of her pop career. The longevity of “Freed From Desire” on the other hand…

With Take That now out of the way and despite the increasing claims of the Backstreet Boys, Boyzone continued to be the premier boy band of this era of the 90s. Their cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Baby Can I Hold You” was the group’s tenth consecutive UK hit of which only one didn’t at least make the Top 3. Of those though, a whopping 40% were cover versions. Hmm. Is that cynical or clever song selection at work? As with their other covers, this was another ballad but unlike its predecessors, it was brutally ignored despite the high profile it enjoys to this day when originally released in 1988 when it made No 94 on the UK chart. No 94! It’s not the only example of this phenomenon. Off the top of my head there’s “Summer Of ‘69” by Bryan Adams (No 42 in the UK) and “Rhiannon” by Fleetwood Mac (a UK No 46). They’ll be many more I’m sure. There would also be many more actual hits for Boyzone (another 10 to be precise including four No 1s) but beware lads as you won’t have it all your own way in the boy band stakes for too much longer – Westlife will be racking up the chart toppers as well before the decade is out.

It’s another cover version still riding high at the top of the charts as “Perfect Day” by Various Artists resists the challenge of *Boyzone to remain at No 1.

*Ronan and co do, of course, feature on “Perfect Day” as does M People’s Heather Small who opened the show thus top and tailing it nicely.

Watching the video back, I’m struck by how many of the contributing artists are no longer with us. Look at this list…

• David Bowie
• Stephen Gately (Boyzone)
• Tammy Wynette
• Shane MacGowan
• Dr. John
• Andrew Davis (conductor)
• And, of course, Lou Reed himself

I suppose it’s to be expected that not every artist would still be alive 28 years later but still.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it ?
1	M People	Fantasy Island	No
2	Kylie Minogue	Did It Again	Negative
3	The Verve	Lucky Man	No but I had the Urban Hymns album
4	Todd Terry featuring Shannon	It’s Over Love	Not my bag at all
5	Paul Weller	Mermaids	Nope
6	Gala	Let A Boy Cry	Nah
7	Boyzone	Baby Can I Hold You	I did not
8	Various Artists	Perfect Day	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/m002c5fq/top-of-the-pops-05121997?seriesId=unsliced