Right, the BBC4 TOTP repeats schedule has gone tits up for the second time recently. After the Gouryella controversy a couple of weeks back causing us to miss two reruns of the grand old show, we’ve now just missed three in a row and suddenly find ourselves at the end of August 1999. This, of course, is just one of the consequences of the fall out of the sacking by the BBC of Scott Mills from his Radio 2 Breakfast Show job. It might seem quite minor compared to some of the other repercussions in the fallout from the whole saga but the online TOTP community picked up on it immediately, quickly predicting that any episodes hosted by Mills would now not see the light of day. That the final three shows he presented were consecutive has engineered this huge leap in broadcast dates. So what did we miss? Let’s have a look shall we?
My word that’s slim pickings! There’s at least three (I’m guessing dance acts) that I’ve no idea about at all. Then there’s repeat showings of Ricky Martin and D.J. Jurgen Presents Alice Deejay and that Ronan Keating No 1 from Notting Hill. I can live without all of those. The Groove Armada track is a bit of a classic and I’d have been interested in the Skunk Anansie single but that’s it. Two out of eight for me on that one. How about the following week?
Dear oh dear. It’s worse if that were possible! There’s Ronan again plus repeats of D.J. Jurgen Presents Alice Deejay and Five plus three dance tracks I have zero memory of. Travis? It’s OK but I don’t think it’s one of their better tracks. Basement Jaxx? So possibly two out of eight again. Possibly. The week after?
Well, that’s a bit better. I like that track by The Divine Comedy and Super Furry Animals were always interesting at least. I couldn’t be doing with Bran Van 3000 which I just found annoying (more on that later) and Westlife can do one as well. There a repeat of Travis and I have no interest in Puff Daddy or Mary J. Blige. That leaves Texas and Feeder who were OK I guess. How many’s that? Four out of nine? I’m almost starting to feel grateful to the BBC for their reaction to the whole Scott Mills thing.
All of this lands us at the back end of August 1999 and this episode also requires some explanation. For a start, it’s another of those TOTP on tour shows and once again it comes from Scotland and (once again) it’s presented by “the wee, local lass” (as she describes herself) Gail Porter. The last time the BBC did this was back in May when the show was filmed in Archaos nightclub in Glasgow as part of BBC Music Live 1999. So why were they doing it again? Here’s the ever excellent @TOTPFacts with the answer:
So there you go. To start the tour off, this show was extended to 45 minutes and includes 11 artists. Right, after all that preamble, let’s get to the music and we start with Apollo Four Forty and their ninth of ten hits “Stop The Rock”. Now this lot wouldn’t normally have been my bag and indeed weren’t a lot of the time but you (and I) had to admire their creativity. Having already had hits based around legendary drummer Gene Krupa, a Van Halen guitar riff and a John Williams composed TV theme, here they were turning to the masters of three chord chug-rock Status Quo for their latest smash. “Stop The Rock” takes inspiration from the Quo’s 1974 hit “Caroline” and is quite the noise but noise in a good way – it’s in your face certainly but with a sense of excitement rather than foreboding or discomfort. Apparently, the guy on vocals here is one Ian Hoxley aka Mary Byker of ‘grebo’ band Gaye Bikers On Acid who I do remember though I’m not as familiar with their catalogue as those of other members of that scene like Pop Will Eat Itself and the Wonder Stuff. Though undoubtedly a dance track, it is refreshing to see “Stop The Rock” actually performed by a band with guitars no less and thereby stopping the rot of the usual staged nonsense that accompanied hits of that genre on the show (i.e. female vocalist out front, two nerdy blokes on keyboards and some synchronised backing dancers to give it a whiff of visual appeal).
As mentioned earlier, the last time that TOTP was recorded outside of London it was also in Scotland and as such the BBC made sure that at least two of the bands performing live and in the venue were Scottish. To this end we had Travis play their newest chart offering “Driftwood” and Texas with their latest single “Summer Son”. Except the use of the word ‘latest” was rather disingenuous. Yes, it would become their latest single but not until it was released nearly three months later! I commented in the post for that TOTP in Glasgow from May 1999 that it felt like executive producer Chris Cowey was really trying to shoehorn Texas into the show just to maintain a theme. I’m sure it was all more complicated than that with various talks, meetings and commitments made by the BBC and the band’s’ management team but that’s what it looked like. As I knew there would he another Texas appearance coming for when the single was actually released, I didn’t say too much about “Summer Sun” the song in that first post. As it turned out, the first opportunity to review it was missed when that happened during a Scott Mills hosted show as mentioned earlier. However, they were back on our screens just a week later with the start of the TOTP on Tour series of programmes beginning in Edinburgh. Well, if Cowey could get them on three months before the single was released, he wasn’t going to miss the chance to get them on the show when “Summer Son” was legitimately in the charts was he?
So, the actual song…yeah, it’s OK. As with the rest of the “Hush” album, it didn’t deviate much from the formula that brought them so much success with “White On Blonde” but having waited their whole career for such huge sales, you couldn’t really expect them to throw the blueprint out overnight. The official video that accompanied it featuring Sharleen Spiteri cavorting about with a half dressed bloke in a bed and was considered too provocative for many broadcasters and was certainly never going to be shown on pre-watershed BBC. It’s on YouTube if you want to see what all the fuss was about but it seems very tame by today’s standards.
A quality tune up next and one of the best that the artist behind it ever recorded to my ears. Faced with the prospect of delivering the dreaded ‘difficult third* album’ hurdle, Supergrass made light of the fabled obstacle by trailing it with two quality singles. First came “Pumping On Your Stereo” in the May before following it up with “Moving” which was perhaps even better. The almost acoustic opening was a clever move to intrigue the listener by presenting them with a non-typical Supergrass sound before the funky meat of the track kicked in. I thought it was cleverly constructed though some reviewers criticised it for not being seamless enough in that you could see the joins of the two parts of the track as if it was two different songs superglued together. Personally, I don’t see an issue with that. One of the most lauded songs ever is exactly that. “A Day In The Life” has the Lennon penned “I read the news today” heavy style verses whilst McCartney supplied the more upbeat “Woke up fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head” middle part and that worked perfectly.
*Is the difficult album the third one or the second? I’m never quite sure.
Talking of working perfectly, “Moving” was used across the ending credits of the marvellously entertaining film East Is East and it was an inspired choice both sonically and visually. My mate Robin attended a premiere for East Is East as his sister is in the film – she played the part of Stella, the blonde girl on the film poster who had designs on Jimi Mistry’s character Tariq. Whilst at the event, Robin met the film’s director Damien O’Donnell and he congratulated him on the movie, especially the music featured in it, highlighting the choice to include “Moving”. Damien had to admit that he’d had very little to do with the music decisions and that’s me being a supergrass, outing a film director’s lack of input to his own film. Well, sort of, alright?
After the established practice of how TOTP staged a dance act in the late 90s was destabilised by Apollo 440 at the top of the show, by the fourth performance in, were already back to the status quo (see what I did there?). Who the deuce were Binary Finary?! Well, I could give you the names of the trio behind this project but frankly who cares? Look them up yourself on Wikipedia if you really must. Their hit was called “1999”…or was it? You see, this trance track had already been a No 24 hit the previous year when it was called…yes…”1998”! Remixed, rereleased and renamed it would go to No 11 the second time around. Binary Finary would pull off this trick of rehashing and retitling again in 2000 but we’d all got bored of it then and it peaked at No 84.
Obviously there was nothing down for me in “1999” but I did note that, in an unusual turn of events, although reverting to the normal staging for a dance act, there were more anonymous blokes behind keyboards on stage than there were female dancers for once (note dancers not vocalists as the track had no lyrics). Oh and that link by Gail Porter about getting tickets to see TOTP on tour? That was all a bit contrived wasn’t it? Nobody was calling the show ‘TOTP 1999’, tour or not – a very clunkily constructed segue and no mistake.
Staying with Gail, she now informs us that although “Bugs” is the second hit by Hepburn, they haven’t actually made it into the TOTP studio yet. She’s right you know as the all female group, just like Texas, also appeared on that BBC Music Live 1999 broadcast from Archaos nightclub in Glasgow back in May which was their debut on the show. They would eventually get to that hallowed ground of the studio of the Beeb’s legendary music show in 2000 to perform their third single “Deep Deep Down”.
Back to “Bugs” though and it was more of that uptempo, pop/rock sound that they gave us with first hit “I Quit”. Although a polished production, it was designed to sound a bit more kick ass than something like “Truly Madly Deeply” by Savage Garden hence the almost “Smells Like Teen Spirit” intro before it morphs into something you could imagine The Rembrandts releasing. In fact, just like “I’ll Be There For You” being the theme to Friends, Hepburn did appear on the soundtrack to an American TV series – not a comedy what with the “Don’t want to die like bugs on the windshield” line but Buffy The Vampire Slayer which made a bit more sense. Maybe.
As a little footnote, do you think their rivals in the all female guitar based band stakes – Thunderbugs – were pleased or pissed off at the title of this Hepburn hit? Pleased with the potential spin off publicity or pissed off for partly nicking their name?
Similar to Supergrass earlier, TLC were on to their third studio album as the end of the 90s beckoned and also like Supergrass, the first two singles released from it (“Fanmail”) would garner a reputation as some of their finest work for many people. Following long term chart dweller “No Scrubs” was never going to be easy but with “Unpretty”, they made a beautiful job of it. A second consecutive US No 1, it would also consolidate their success over here by peaking at No 6. To maintain the Supergrass comparison, “Unpretty” also had an almost acoustic feel to it which actually made for a much more mainstream sound and was an ocean away from the likes of hip hop debut hit “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg”. This was almost an orthodox rock/pop song.
Based around a poem written by Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins about her incandescent reaction to men calling women “fat pigs” on an episode of Ricki Lake, it would go on to receive two Grammy nominations. As for this ‘exclusive’ performance, it was clearly recorded in an empty room judging by the fact that there’s no cutaway shots to any studio audience members. Well, I guess you can’t get any more exclusive than having nobody there.
When in Edinburgh…Chris Cowey doubles down (literally) on the Scottishness of this show by having Texas perform a second song for no other discernible reason other than than that they are, indeed, Scottish and…well…there. “Tell Me The Answer” is the second track from their fifth studio album “The Hush” and listening to it, you can kind of understand why it was never released as a single. It’s got a nice enough if unoriginal sound to it but it seems like it’s in the wrong key for Sharleen’s voice to me judging by her almost falsetto vocals in this acoustic (there’s that word again) version. It’s not just me is it? Is she struggling to make those notes? Normally her voice is pretty on point but not here.
“The Hush” became their second No 1 album of three (if you include their Greatest Hits collection from 2000) and would spend 12 non-consecutive weeks inside the Top 10 going three times platinum in the UK. It was at No 4 in the charts at the time of this TOTP.
So despite the Scott Mills induced skipping of three episodes which meant that I was spared two appearances of D.J. Jurgen Presents Deejay Alice, I’m not away scott free as here they are again for a fourth time on the show with “Better Off Alone”. Hell’s teeth! In fairness to Cowey on this one, it did spend nearly two months inside the Top 10 including three consecutive weeks at No 2. For this performance, they’ve dropped the…erm…more elderly lady on the keyboards who appeared on the 30th of July show so we left with the trio of vocalist and two backing dancers only.
Now, I have tried to go forensic on this one and I really think that one of the dancers is not the same person who performed in that previous show. In fact, it didn’t require that much detailed investigation as the singer and other dancer are both wearing the same clothes whereas the new woman has a totally different outfit to the girl in that 30th July episode. I’m not sure what any of this means other than to suggest such dance hits were all about the beats and not the visuals.
Just like Texas, Supergrass are allowed to perform two songs in this specially extended TOTP and they give us the track “Mary” which would become the next single released from their third, eponymous album. Unlike the other two singles, it would underperform significantly chart-wise peaking at No 36. There are reasons for this I think. Firstly, is the fact that the album had already been in the shops for two months by the time “Mary” was released so that could well have diluted potential sales. Secondly, its promo video, an homage to Hammer Horror movies, was considered too scary for broadcast (also like Texas) and had to be heavily edited with the offending scenes replaced with, bizarrely, pictures of onions. All those shenanigans can’t have helped the single’s promotion. Thirdly, and most significantly I feel, although it’s a great track, it was a strange choice as a single. Nowhere near as radio friendly as its two predecessors, it’s definitely more of an album track to my ears with its “Ah-ya-ya” shouted chorus and heavy guitars. “Mary” would be the last hit of the 90s for Supergrass, drawing a rather unsatisfactory line under that era of their career.
P.S. “Mary” would provide lyrics that seemed to be the reverse of the band’s biggest hit “Alright”. Look at these lines:
“I like to push you over into my stream
I like to point out that her teeth are green”Songwriters: Michael Quinn / Gareth Coombes / Robert Coombes / Daniel Robert Goffey
Mary lyrics © Bmg Rights Management (uk) Ltd.
“Teeth are green”! I thought Supergrass kept their teeth nice and clean!
A classic one hit wonder next…or were they? The chart record of Bran Van 3000 (or “Bread Van 3000” as Mark and Lard used to call them) presents an unusual question – can you be a one hit wonder if you’ve had two hits but both said hits were with the same song? It’s a conundrum for sure. Anyway, here are the facts about “Drinking In L.A.”; make your own mind up:
- Released June 1998 – peaked at No 34
- Released August 1999 – peaked at No 3
- No other UK Top 40 hits
What d’ya reckon then? One hit wonder or not? I guess there’s no right answer just as there’s no definitive opinion as to whether “Drinking In L.A.” was any good or not what with musical taste being subjective and all that. For what it’s worth, here’s my thoughts on both questions:
- Yes, they are a one hit wonder because they only have one song that anybody (except superfans) know them for.
- I really didn’t like “Drinking In L.A.” for quite a niche reason.
Ah, so what was that niche reason you ask? Well, it was one tiny element of the track that only lasted about two seconds and that was the spoken word intro that says “Hi, my name’s Stereo Mike”. For some reason, that little snippet used to annoy the hell out of me. There was plenty about chart music in 1999 to be offended by but those five words used to wind me up something rotten. When I made the mistake of letting my colleagues at the Our Price I was working in know this, they used to put “Drinking In L.A.” on the shop stereo and keep pressing the play button constantly so that “Hi, my name’s Stereo Mike” would sound on repeat. I still can’t get past that intro.
If I could, what would I say about the rest of the song? Probably that it was a bit of a slacker anthem similar to “Loser” by Beck which possibly contributed to its popularity but that the real reason for its ascent up the charts second time around was this advert:
Oh and that has there ever been another hit in UK chart history that features the word ‘bupkis’?
After all the hype and expectation and then anti-climax surrounding the release of Geri Halliwell’s debut solo single “Look At Me”, there presumably was some anxiety lurking in the offices of Geri’s management team and record company. The next single had to be bigger which meant topping the chart. Despite those aforementioned representatives of Halliwell wanting “Lift Me Up” or “Bag It Up” to be the next release, it was “Mi Chico Latino” that made the cut and, lo and behold, it flamenco-ed its way straight to No 1.
Now let’s address the two elephants in the room straightaway – was this just a rewrite of “La Isla Bonita” by Madonna from her 1986 album “True Blue” and was Geri just jumping on the Latin pop phenomenon of the time? ‘Yes’ and ‘possibly’ would be my answers to those questions. There’s no doubt about the first one but in Geri’s defence re: the second, she reckons she wrote it the previous year before the Latin pop trend really took off in 1999. Who am I to give a definitive verdict on that? What I can say is that her lyrics for this one seem to be a little confused. Whilst there is heavy usage of Spanish throughout like “Donde esta el hombre con fuego en la sangre” and “Donde esta mi chico latino” and a whole middle eight in that language (supposedly to pay homage to Geri’s Spanish mother), there is also the lyric “Find my love my dolce vita” which features four times. “Dolce Vita” is Italian not Spanish surely?
| Order of appearance | Artist | Title | Did I buy it? |
| 1 | Apollo Four Forty | Stop The Rock | I did not |
| 2 | Texas | Summer Son | Didn’t happen |
| 3 | Supergrass | Moving | No but I had the album |
| 4 | Binary Finary | 1999 | It was hardly Prince was it? No |
| 5 | Hepburn | Bugs | Negative |
| 6 | TLC | Unpretty | Nope |
| 7 | Texas | Tell Me The Answer | N/A |
| 8 | D.J. Jurgen Presents Deejay Alice | Better Off Alone | Big no |
| 9 | Supergrass | Mary | See 3 above |
| 10 | Bran Van 3000 | Drinking In L.A. | Couldn’t get past that intro – no |
| 11 | Geri Halliwell | Mi Chico Latino | Nah |
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/p00fsvhp/top-of-the-pops-26081999
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 