Here we go then with another year of BBC4’s TOTP repeats. Do I have high hopes for 1998? Not really but I am willing and hopeful to be proved wrong. The first show since the Christmas Day broadcast has a mixture of hits we’ve seen before and some brand new ones plus something of a chart rarity concerning the No 1 record. Our host is regular presenter Jo Whiley and we kick off with the Lighthouse Family and their latest single “High” which is an apt title as the band were at the highest point of their popularity and success. Sensibly held back from the December release schedules to avoid being lost in the rush, it would peak at No 4 becoming their joint biggest single alongside “Lifted”. Taken from their four times platinum, sophomore album “Postcards From Heaven”, it couldn’t have been more easy listening playlist if it had been fiendishly crafted by Dr. Easy Listening in the laboratory for producing Easy Listening songs. And yet…if I had to, at gunpoint, take one Lighthouse Family song with me throughout my life, it would be this one as it’s so life-affirmingly positive.

Having said that, it’s a good job it wasn’t recorded in the 60s. The lyric “one day we’re gonna get so high” wouldn’t have got past the network censors on the Ed Sullivan Show and somehow I can’t imagine singer Tunde Baiyewu pulling a Jim Morrison. That reminds me – I was at a wedding recently and at the sit down meal at the reception found myself talking to a perfectly pleasant young man to my right who was planning a holiday to Paris. When asked by him if I’d ever been, I replied in the affirmative and started listing the attractions he might want to visit including the Père Lachaise cemetery but I gave warning of all the drugs paraphernalia directing people to the grave of Jim Morrison. The young man’s reply? “Who?”! He didn’t know Morrison or The Doors though he thought he might have heard the song “Riders On The Storm”. I’m so old.

“Jiggle your bits to this!” says Jo Whiley. Jiggle your bits? Were you allowed to say that back in the day before the watershed? In the age of lad culture you probably were sadly. Anyway, although this was our first glimpse of Steps on TOTP, their debut hit “5,6,7,8” had actually been around for weeks by this point. Eight of them in fact having ricocheted between the Nos 23 to 17 before finally peaking at No 14 prompting this appearance. It would then spend a further four consecutive weeks inside the Top 20 before finally bowing out of the Top 40 in its 15th week since release. Although one of the group’s lowest charting singles, it’s their third biggest hit thanks to subsequent streams of over nearly 38 million by 2021.

I think it’s fair to say that this track is not typical* of the rest of their back catalogue and I’m guessing that maybe they were only put together on a one single deal written to take advantage of the line dancing phenomenon that was sweeping the nation at the time. Responding to an advertisement in trade publication The Stage, the quintet surely didn’t expect the success and longevity that they have enjoyed.

*Of course, they’re not alone in having their debut hit sound nothing like subsequent releases. Some of the biggest names in pop music history could tell a similar tale. Look at the difference between “Love Me Do” and, say, “Strawberry Fields Forever” or between those early Beach Boys surfing hits and “God Only Knows”. Not that I’m putting Steps in the same bracket as Brian Wilson (RIP) nor Lennon & McCartney obviously.

Look at some of these numbers:

• 22 million records sold worldwide
• 5 million album sales in the UK
• 4.8 million singles sales in the UK
• 13 consecutive Top 5 singles in the UK including two No 1s

Not bad for an act that was put together to sell a one-off, line dancing hit. Ah yes, that hit. It really is atrocious. As if we hadn’t been tormented enough with “Cotton Eye Joe” by Rednex a few years before. Nobody should have been surprised to discover that Pete Waterman was involved in this mess with the group signed to his EBUL label in partnership with Jive Records and the man himself acting as co-producer. I think it’s fair to say that he ultimately saw Steps as a second chance to launch the British ABBA after his initial attempt with Bananarama in the early 90s had failed to ignite the charts. Sure, “5,6,7,8” sounded nothing like the Swedish pop superstars but their follow up “Last Thing On My Mind”* certainly did as did their third single “One For Sorrow”. Steps would ultimately transcend that idea (if not ABBA’s sales) to establish themselves in the premier league of late 90s pop groups.

*That track was released as a single by Bananarama in 1992 but failed to chart.

Despite having two separate periods of hiatus that amounted to the group being inactive for a total of 15 years, their story is still not fully told as the jukebox musical Here & Now featuring the hits of Steps opened last year and is set to tour the UK from August this year until May next.

P.S. As I was writing this, I turned on the TV and on BBC1 was Ian ‘H’ Watkins giving an interview about his small music festival in the town of Cowbridge where he lives that had been forced by the US Coachella festival to change its name from Cowchella to Moo-La-La. Rather than be disappointed, H was delighted with the publicity the story had generated for his festival. Boot scootin’ indeed.

It’s a re-showing of a previous Janet Jackson appearance next as we see that dress-down Friday performance of “Together Again”…erm…again. Supposedly, Janet’s inspiration to write the track came from the 1996 Nuyorican Soul hit “Runaway” which had been huge in the US clubs. However, it wasn’t contemporary clubs that had been at the forefront of Janet’s mind in writing the song but perhaps the most famous club of all time – New York’s Studio 54. Apparently, “Runaway” reminded her of being in there as a child. What the hell was she doing in Studio 54 as a child?! The club was notorious for its open drug use and sexual activity by its patrons. There’s a famous photo of Canadian First Lady Margaret Trudeau at Studio 54 without any underwear on! And Janet was in there as a minor! I think I’ll leave that story there.

After becoming bona fide pop stars in 1996 with some quirky hits straight out of left field like “Female Of The Species” and “Neighbourhood”, Space weren’t about to rest on their laurels and released sophomore album “Tin Planet” just 18 months after debut “Spiders”. The lead single from it was “Avenging Angels” which seemed to me to pursue a more mainstream sound than some of its predecessors. I mean, it still wasn’t your standard rock/pop song – it still had that spooky, twangy guitar sound in the mix – but the chorus was more conventionally melodic it seemed to me. They did retain that retro sound though – in fact, listening back to it now it could be the theme tune to a 60s sci-fi show or maybe I’m just fixating on the ‘angels’ part of the song and conjuring up images of the female fighter pilots from Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons. There’s two other parts of the song that needs some discussion. Firstly, I could never get along with the “kick ass angels” lyric of the chorus – it always really jarred with me for some reason. Secondly, that megaphone sung middle eight part. Apparently, Radio 1 said they wouldn’t play the single unless its length was cut in half. It duly was and “Avenging Angels” became a No 6 hit, the band’s biggest ever to that point.

It’s yet another appearance by All Saints again next as their uber-hit “Never Ever” continues its lengthy yet inevitable rise to the top of the chart. After witnessing the dance extravaganza that was Steps earlier in the show, I have to say that despite all the bells and whistles of that Steps performance, I find the All Saints…erm…steps more effective. Yes, all the thumbs down the waistbands, the twirling, the handclaps, the sidestepping, the lassoing and gun toting moves I found less memorable than All Saints stepping around in a circle shrugging their shoulders. Less really is more sometimes.

Now here’s a genuinely intriguing collaboration and yet I have zero recall of it. Absolutely nothing at all so listening to it now was quite illuminating. We’d already seen the worlds of rock and pop and classical collide on hits such as The Farm’s “All Together Now” and rap and a classical come together on Coolio’s “C U When U Get There” both of which were heavily based on Johann Pachelbel’s “Cannon”. However, had we seen rap and opera combined before? The people to thank for this (if ‘thank’ is indeed the right word) were West Coast rapper Warren G and Norwegian soprano Sissel Kyrkjebø who together went by the name of The Rapsody (see what they did there?) and gave us the track “Prince Igor”. Inspired by the “Polovtsian Dances” of Alexander Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor”, it topped the charts in Norway and Iceland and was a respectable No 15 hit in the UK. It was the lead single from a whole album of opera/hip hop mash ups entitled “The Rapsody Overture: Hip Hop Meets Classic” and I thought I would unreservedly hate it but it has something to it that engaged me. I think it’s the aria part sung by Sissel rather than Warren G’s rapping to be fair. Oh and remember my Captain Scarlet reference earlier when commenting on Space? What was one of the Angels pilots call signs? Yep, Rhapsody (spelt correctly this time). The others were Symphony, Harmony, Destiny and Melody if you were wondering.

Now if you thought “5,6,7,8” was a novelty hit, get a load of this! What on earth was going on here?! Just like All Saints, there were four members of Vanilla and two of them were sisters but that is undoubtedly where the comparisons end. Quite what this said about the contempt that EMI who released this tripe had for the record buying public can’t be articulated. The whole sorry episode also spoke volumes of those poor gullible fools that bought what is surely one of the worst singles of the decade. LBC Radio presenter James O’Brien has a phrase he uses in respect to the Brexit debate which is ‘Compassion for the conned, contempt for the conmen’ but I would struggle with the first part of it when it came to anyone who spent their money on “No Way, No Way”. Based on “Mah Nà Mah Nà” by Italian composer Piero Umiliani which became internationally recognised for its usage on The Muppets and The Benny Hill Show, it almost registers zero brain activity in its conception and execution. Apparently, when they were offered the chance to record it, the group weren’t sure as they wanted to pursue an R&B style but were convinced by the argument that “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls was as essentially a novelty hit so ‘what the hell’. Yes, it brought them instant yet brief fame of sorts but did they really think they could build a career off the back of it?!

Of course, they couldn’t. After getting to No 14 with “No Way, No Way”, the follow up single “True To Us” only made No 36 despite conducting a number of appearances at schools and being on the Disney Channel UK 1998 tour. In 2011 the inevitable happened when one of the group appeared in the Identity Parade section of Never Mind The Buzzcocks…

Despite the ridicule the group received, they seemed like good sports appearing multiple times on The Big Breakfast in a feature called ‘Vanilla’s Thrillers’.

Thankfully, if I think of The Muppets, the association in my head isn’t Vanilla but this from Alan Partridge’s Mid Morning Matters series…

So to that rare chart event surrounding the No 1 record as “Perfect Day” by Various Artists returns to the top some five weeks after it initially wore the crown. Now it wasn’t a unique occurrence for a single to return to No 1 after being temporarily deposed by another hit but it was the length of the gap between being the best selling song of the week that was surprising. Having been released at the end of November and being at No 1 for two weeks, it the spent a fortnight at No 3 over Christmas. Traditionally, the first No 1s of the New Year around this time could be snatched by a less mainstream hit with careful/cynical release timing when singles sales slumped dramatically after Christmas. Think Iron Maiden in 1991 and Tori Amos in 1997. However, for a single to regain the top spot after it seemed to have peaked was unusual though as I said earlier not unique. The Lightning Seeds achieved a return to No 1 in the Summer of 1996 after a four week gap but that phenomenon was fuelled by the Euros ‘96 football tournament. What was propelling sales of “Perfect Day” all over again? It would hang around the Top 40 for another six weeks before finally going home when it got dark.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it ?
1	Lighthouse Family	High	Only with a gun held to my head
2	Steps	5,6,7,8	Never
3	Janet Jackson	Together Again	No
4	Space	Avenging Angels	Nah
5	All Saints	Never Ever	Nope
6	Warren G and Sissel Kyrkjebø	Prince Igor	I did not
7	Vanilla	No Way, No Way	Hell No!
8	Various Artists	Perfect Day	And no

Disclaimer

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All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002dfcb/top-of-the-pops-09011998?seriesId=unsliced