80stastic

TOTP 26 JUL 1996

Posted on October 8, 2024 by 80stastic

It’s the Summer of 1996 and the Olympic Games are being held in Atlanta, Georgia. For Team GB though, it was a games to forget as we endured our worst performance since 1952 with just one gold and only 15 in total. Lack of sufficient funding was identified as a major issue – cyclist Chris Boardman had to resort to practicing in his bathroom with the shower turned on in an attempt to create the humidity conditions of Atlanta for acclimatisation training. In a rare moment of celebration, the day after this TOTP aired, that single gold medal was won by rowers Matthew Pinsent and Steve Redgrave in the Men’s Coxless Pair. Meanwhile, in this week’s show, there seemed to be no shortage of cocks but sadly, like Team GB, hardly any gold standard performers. Where were Shed Seven and Gene when you needed them?*

*See what I did there? “Going For Gold”? “Olympian”? No? Oh well, it’s the taking part that’s important not winning so they say.

Bit of admin before we get going. Tonight’s host is Lisa I’Anson and we start with another to camera piece featuring the latest winner of the meet and greet competition who is in Hollywood with New Edition. The first act in the studio though is Pato Banton & The Reggae Revolution. What the guy who had a No 1 with his version of “Baby Come Back” in 1994? That guy was still having hits two years later using the same formula of reggae-fying old pop hits?! That guy?! The very same but his take on the 1967 hit “Groovin’” would be his last UK chart entry. He never got close to repeating his chart topping feat with this one peaking at No 14. He did like a collab as the kids say though – two with Sting (who seems to have a weakness for this type of artist seeing as he’s also teamed up with Shaggy), one with Ranking Roger and now this one with The Reggae Revolution. Who were they? I can’t find out much about them though I did note one of their members is called David Forskins. Stop sniggering at the back – he’s a drummer. Skins? Drum skins? Geddit? What? It was me that mentioned members? Oh, you young rascals!

Next up is Mark Morrison and for once he’s not singing “Return Of The Mack”. No, he’s finally got round to releasing a follow up single or should I say rereleasing as “Crazy” had been out before, making No 19 in 1995. Morrison doesn’t tamper with the formula much with it basically being “Return Of The Mack II”. I did notice though that the lyrics have Morrison claiming “I went to Number One (like a bomb)” presumably referring to his recent chart topper so my question is, were those the lyrics when “Crazy” was originally released before ROTM went to No 1 or did Morrison rewrite them after the event? If it’s the former, he was either very lucky or very arrogant. Either way, he then bangs on about girls “trippin’” on him since he got famous which apparently means acting crazy and is a word he seems very keen on as it was also the title of his next single. The two after that were called “Horny” and “Moan & Groan” – he was a classy fella our Mark.

He’s got a rapper in to help with the flow on this one and his name is Daddy Wattsie. When I was at polytechnic back in the 80s, I knew someone with the surname Watts who insisted on people calling him ‘Wattsie’. He was a bit of a knob and I’m not sure about Daddy Wattsie either. Had I not had the subtitles on iPlayer, I wouldn’t have had a clue what he was going on about (which is some nonsense about hip-hop ragamuffin DJs or something). Meanwhile, Morrison is singing about “doggin’” (that got past the censor) and then blatantly pinches Bobby Brown’s shtick by harping on about his prerogative. It’s all rather unpleasant and Morrison tops it off when he whips out his trademark handcuffs. Well, he had to keep up his ‘king of the cuffs’ moniker that Lisa I’Anson gave him in her intro I suppose. It’s hardly the same as being known as an Olympic champion though is it?

This next track should come with a health warning – it used to come close to giving me panic attacks. There was something about “Higher State Of Consciousness” by Josh Wink that would scratch at my nerve ends. It made me feel claustrophobic and like I just needed to escape from its sonic reach every time I heard it. Was it something to do with its frequency, its bpm, all its little bleeps, breaks and bass (to quote the title of an old dance compilation series)? Or was it that it sounded to me like a car alarm going off? Whatever it was about it that disturbed me so, what was even worse was that I foolishly let my record shop colleagues know about its effect upon me and they would mercilessly play it when I was on the shop floor.

Not content with giving me the jitters for five weeks in Autumn 1995 (the length it spent inside the Top 40), Josh Wink – a DJ, producer and remixer from Philadelphia (real name Joshua Winkelman) – decided to double down on my uneasiness by rereleasing it less than a year later under the shortened name of Wink. I mean, why? It had already been massive in the clubs of Europe and a No 8 hit in the UK on first release so why put it out again? Ah, well – it was all about the remixes wasn’t it? “Higher State Of Consciousness 96 Remixes” included a version by Dex and Jonesey (whoever they were) which deemed it worthy of another push at the charts. It succeeded as well peaking one place higher than its 1995 predecessor. Pass the paracetamol!

The first of two songs on this show that I will always associate with each other. Not for any musical reasons but purely because they formed an end panel display in the Our Price store where I was working at the time. In fairness, they were also both comeback singles of a sort. The first one is from Suede who released their first new material for nearly two years with “Trash” , the lead single from their third studio album “Coming Up”. It was also the first new material written without Bernard Butler who had left the band after the “Dog Man Star” album so there was a lot riding on this song. Would the absence of Butler prove to be insurmountable for the band? Or would his replacement Richard Oakes prove to be a just as gifted songwriter? History shows us that it was the latter scenario that played out. “Coming Up” would become Suede’s biggest selling album going platinum in the process. It generated five Top 10 singles with “Trash” itself the biggest of those and Suede’s joint highest charting hit ever when it peaked at No 3. You could hear why. It was a great tune displaying a much bigger pop sensibility than anything on “Dog Man Star”. Apparently, it was a deliberate choice by Brett Anderson to go down that route after the downturn in sales experienced by their 1994 album. Although, defiantly more ebullient, “Trash” also retained the band’s edge. This was angular pop with Brett singing about being “litter on the breeze”. It worked and it worked well.

Obviously the band toured the album and I caught them in Blackburn with my mate Steve in February of 1997. They were supported by Mansun who would release their excellent debut album “Attack Of The Grey Lantern” two days later but that’s all for a future post. For now, Suede were back and how. They’d survived the fallout from Bernard Butler’s departure and added to their ranks in the aforementioned Richard Oakes and keyboard player Neil Codling (who Lisa I’Anson rather fawned over in her intro). Britpop may have seemed to have washed them away but they had surfaced from the depths and were riding their own wave and not the zeitgeist.

Although mostly overshadowed by her 60s career and subsequent rise from the ashes in the 80s, Tina Turner was remarkably consistent in the 90s. I’m not talking gold medal standard here (most of it wouldn’t even make the medal podium) but she was certainly a qualifier for the final. She achieved 18 Top 40 hits in the UK during the decade albeit that most of them were distinctly medium sized with only four making the Top 10. The fifteenth of those hits was her cover of the soft rock classic “Missing You”. The third single to be lifted from her “Wildest Dreams” album, this was a stinker from start to finish. The 1984 John Waite original had always been a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine but Tina’s rendition is simply the worst. It just doesn’t suit her growly vocal and overblown delivery. Whoever made the decision for Tina to record should have been disqualified. I was surprised to learn that Trevor Horn produced it because the backing sounds all tinny and hollow. There’s even a sound in there that is reminiscent of that ‘boing’ effect you get from a mouth harp. Just horrible. Let’s move on quickly…

I’m still not convinced by this meet and greet competition. I mean, the locations are great – so far we’ve had the likes of Madrid and now Hollywood – but the pop stars involved don’t strike me as stellar. After Shampoo the other week, this time we’ve got New Edition. That’s New Edition of “Candy Girl” fame from 1983. That’s 1983! Since then, despite continued success in the US, they’d scored just one more hit single in the UK with “Mr. Telephone Man” from 1985. Sure, after the group split in 1988, all the members went on to solo success (or trio success in the case of Bell Biv DeVoe) especially Bobby Brown but when they reformed in 1996, would they have been seen as a huge name? I guess what I’m saying is would the competition winner have been blown away by meeting them? I’m not so sure. Had TOTP been an American TV show, maybe the chance to hangout with New Edition would have been a huge deal – after all the 1996 version of the group scored a huge hit in comeback album “Home Again” which sold two million copies in the US and went to No 1. It wasn’t the same level of success over here though. The album stalled at No 22 whilst it’s lead single “Hit Me Off” peaked at No 20 (it was an R&B chart topper and No 3 hit on the Billboard chart over the pond). I suppose we just weren’t as invested in the group here – we didn’t have that level of connection with them.

Anyway, the performance here is from the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios, Hollywood which explains why there is a huge crash of water behind them every now and again as the log flume ride splashes down. By the way, if you’re thinking that there seem to be more members of New Edition than you remember, don’t worry. You’re not losing it. There were five in the original line up but there are six here as both Bobby Brown and the guy who replaced him – Johnny Gill – are both featured. As for their song, it sounds like every other R&B song from this era with them singing about spending “an hour in the shower when it’s nice and wet”. If only they had misjudged the staging of this performance even slightly then maybe that log flume ride would have made their desire to be soaking come true.

Who remembers Joyrider? Not me for one. As Lisa I’Anson tells us in her intro, they were from Portadown, Northern Ireland and this was their big moment. One solitary week in the UK Top 40 and a TOTP appearance. They can’t gave thought this would be it for them surely but it pretty much was. Their single fell out of the charts despite this exposure and the follow up peaked at No 54. They did release an album but initial pressings didn’t include their only hit – a rock cover of Jane Wiedlin’s “Rush Hour” – which seems like a massive oversight though I believe it was reissued with it as included at a later date.

Listening back to this frenetic, high speed run through of one of the finest pop records of the 80s, the first question that comes to mind is ‘Why?’. Maybe their label desperately needed them to have a hit and we all know which position to assume in that scenario and, after all, such a tactic had worked for Gun a couple of years earlier when they gave Cameo’s “Word Up” the rock guitar treatment. Then there’s California rockers Redd Kross who did a brilliant job on “Yesterday Once More” for a Carpenters tribute album offering more proof that songs from one music genre could work in that of another given the right choice and treatments but something about Joyrider’s example of this just didn’t click for me. I think it’s that the pop brilliance of the original just can’t be beaten so any attempt at doing something different with it was doomed to failure if indeed you can call a No 22 peaking single a failure. What I can say with some certainty is that we won’t be seeing Joyrider on TOTP ever again.

And so to that other single that was on the end panel in Our Price alongside Suede that week. Just as Gary Barlow was toppled by the Spice Girls, here came another chart adversary but this one was much closer to home and with a much deadlier rivalry. Since leaving Take That in 1995, – labelling Barlow a “clueless wanker” as his parting shot across the bows as he went – the only time we’d seen anything of Robbie Williams was in the tabloids being out of it on another bender. His much hinted at solo career seemed to be taking an age to appear*

*I assume there were some record company legalities to be sorted before he could officially extricate himself from Take That’s label RCA and therefore release anything? His choice of song to cover for his debut single certainly suggested so and indeed, he signed to Chrysalis Records ultimately.

Finally, there was something with his name on it that you could buy in the shops when “Freedom” came out. His version of George Michael’s “Freedom 90” though seemed fairly redundant to me. It was a pure copy of the original with only Robbie’s trademark gurning vocals any sort of differential. What I found really revealing though was that the extra tracks on the CD singles were just remixes of “Freedom” and an interview with Williams in two parts. I recall saying to an Our Price colleague how pathetic this seemed and asking where his songs were. I was convinced at this point that he was doomed to fail as a solo artist. Within a year, Williams would meet Guy Chambers (ex of the wonderful Lemon Trees) who would answer my question about where his songs were and after a couple of false starts, Robbie would become a superstar. I watched a documentary about him on Netflix recently and although I had anticipated it portraying him as all self indulgent and woe is me, he was actually brutally honest about what a f**k up he was/is. In July ‘96 though, I for one thought I had him all figured out and had proclaimed sentence on him. I was wrong. Very wrong.

The Spice Girls have gone to No 1 with “Wannabe” and in so doing, become the first all female group to top the UK charts since The Bangles in 1989 with “Eternal Flame”. Perhaps more significantly, they were the first UK all female group to do so ever. This really did feel like a changing of the guard moment with the deposed former No 1 artist having been a member of the recently defunct biggest boy band in the UK. The Spice Girls were here to wash all them and all the pretty boys that followed in their wake away – it was time for ‘girl power’.

Like last week, the group are still in Japan but this time we get to see them at night in an oriental garden. Interestingly, they subvert the usual model of performance by running across bridges whilst miming before eventually lining up together to knock out some loosely choreographed dance moves. Obviously, we also get Sporty Spice doing her back flips. In another life she was surely an Olympic gymnast*.

*She has completed the London Triathlon twice.

The play out video is “Mysterious Girl” by Peter Andre which is still in and around the top end of the charts. Thankfully we only get a few seconds of the repugnant Andre and his cartoonish six pack. Apparently, his 16 years old son Junior wants to follow in his Dad’s footsteps and become a pop star – he is already signed to Columbia Records. As if there aren’t enough problems in the world along comes a dynasty of Andres making music. There really should be a law against it.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Pato Banton & The Reggae Revolution	Groovin’	Nah
2	Mark Morrison	Crazy	No
3	Wink	Higher State Of Consciousness 96 Remixes	Hell no!
4	Suede	Trash	No but I had their Coming Up album
5	Tina Turner	Missing You	Never
6	New Edition	Hit Me Off	Nope
7	Joyrider	Rush Hour	I did not
8	Robbie Williams	Freedom	Negative
9	Spice Girls	Wannabe	Not likely
10	Peter Andre	Mysterious Girl	Are you crazy?!

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/p00fsvcm/top-of-the-pops-26071996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 19 JUL 1996

Posted on October 3, 2024 by 80stastic

We’ve jumped from the end of June straight into the middle of July ‘96 with these BBC4 repeats having missed two whole shows in the process. Why? Well, general consensus amongst the TOTP community seems to be that there were some issues with the meet and greet competition winners in terms of criminal proceedings being brought against them in later life. Yet another depressing indictment of our society.

With that sombre start to the post, I’m looking for some positive energy now so who’s hosting this week? Well, he’s certainly bringing the energy but whether I’ll have a positive reaction to him is in doubt for our host tonight is Keith Allen or more specifically his alter ego ‘Keithski’. I find Allen the person quite intriguing and his autobiography was a good read but ‘Keithski’ was a bellend. Totally unfunny and intensely annoying. Before we even get to him though, we have the direct to camera message at the top of the show and this one is a little piece of pop music history. Was this our first glimpse of the Spice Girls on our TVs? Probably not as they must have been doing the media rounds to promote “Wanabe” to have got it to debut at No 3 in the charts but it must be their first TOTP appearance and given the show would have been the most obvious choice for pop fans to get their weekly fix of chart music then it might well have been a first for many viewing at home.

Anyway, they’ll be along in due course but we start with …who? Umboza? Yes, Umboza. Surely you remember their first, Lionel Richie sampling hit “Cry India”? Erm, no I don’t actually and I must have reviewed it for this blog. The only thing I recall writing is that their name reminded me of the tropical fruit drink Um Bongo which had that memorable ad campaign featuring the jingle “Um Bongo Um Bongo they drink it in the Congo”. However it seemed that one hit wasn’t enough for these fame guzzlers and so they were back with “Sunshine” using the same formula as before but with a different sample. Instead of “All Night Long (All Night)” we had “Bamboléo” by the Gipsy Kings – it seemed that Lionel Richie wasn’t the one they were looking for this time (I’ll get me coat later). Given the ubiquity of that song (it always seems to soundtrack any piece of film that has a Latin theme to it), I was amazed to discover that it’s never been a hit in the UK in its own right. In fact, the Gipsy Kings have never had a single make the Top 40 which makes you wonder how they became so popular over here. Was it something to do with the late 80s lambada craze?

As for Umboza, this sounded to me like music for bozos. Were committed clubbers seriously out dancing to this on a weekend? Maybe it was popular at some of the more cheesy nightclub establishments? Certainly the guy fronting this nonsense has gone down the cheddar route with his Saturday Night Fever suit and wide winged collars. The whole thing seems very unnecessary on reflection and should be consigned to the pop music waste bin of bad ideas.

As an antidote to the crap that opened the show, here’s some rock music from Terrorvision who were on to their third hit of the year with “Bad Actress”. I say antidote but it was more like a placebo (no, not the band!) as I feel like this particular song gave off the sense that it was better than it actually was. Oh sure, compared to Umboza, it was the best song ever recorded but, in reality, it wasn’t even Terrorvision’s best song. After some great earlier hits like “Oblivion” and “Perseverance”, “Bad Actress” was quite pedestrian or at least was jogging along rather than running at full pelt. Tony Wright has to annunciate the word ‘actress’ as ‘act-tress’ rather than ‘actriss’ so as to enable some rhyming lyrics and the whole thing feels forced as if the band was told to hold up in the studio and not come out until they’d written and recorded a single from scratch. Terrorvision would finish the year with a fourth and final Top 20 hit before disappearing for two years and then returning with the “Shaving Peaches” album and that No 2 hit single.

Oh not this again. Why was the “Theme From Mission Impossible” by Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jnr going back up the charts? Well, it’s an easy and obvious answer – the film had been released in the UK and was doing big business. This caused the ripple effect of blowing out the burning fuse about to detonate the chart life of its iconic theme tune and sending it from a low of No 27 to a second peak of No 16 before finally leaving the Top 40 by stealth four weeks later. I don’t know what else to say about this one other than “What’s done is done when I say it’s done”* and my review of this hit is done.

*It’s a line of dialogue from the film if that doesn’t mean anything to you

Here’s another song that’s been similarly knocking around the charts for a few weeks. By my reckoning, this was the sixth week on the chart for “Don’t Stop Movin’” by Livin’ Joy with all of them spent inside the Top 10. It was a most orderly descent of the chart with one place dropped per week from its debut at No 5 for the first five weeks until a rise of one place back up to No 8 afforded this further TOTP appearance. In total, it would spend three months in the Top 40 and nearly re-entered it in November when it missed achieving that feat by just one place. There was one last week at No 62 before it ignored the instruction of its title and did, indeed, finally stop moving…sorry…movin’.

Next, a charity record for a very worthy cause – The Nordoff -Robbins Music Therapy Centre – whose aim is to help children with psychological, physical or developmental disabilities using the tool of music. Back in 1996, the Rock Therapy project was set up to raise funds for the charity via the release of the single “Reaching Out”. Sadly for the charity, and in a cruelly ironic twist, the song failed to raise much money when it peaked at No 126. Yes, No 126. Not a great example of the power of music and its ability to help change lives. This lowly chart peak was despite the presence of such huge names as Queen’s Brian May, ex-Free singer Paul Rodgers, “Stop” hitmaker Sam Brown, the “Wide Eyed And Legless” Andy Fairweather Low and…erm…the drummer from Wet Wet Wet. The sad truth was though that “Reaching Out” was a stinker of a record. Words can’t quite express how awful it was but I’ll try. How about lumbering, insipid, lifeless, soulless or passionless? No? A sleeping pill in the form of a song? Not quite there? Musical melatonin? Yes, that’s the one. Nailed it which incidentally is what should have happened to “Reaching Out” – a nail put through every copy.

And so it begins. The time of the Spice Girls is here. Sporty! Scary! Ginger! Baby! Posh! Girl Power! An undeniable global phenomenon and it started with debut single “Wannabe” and what a curious thing it was. Musically all over the place but with enough cohesion and charisma to make it a worldwide chart topper. Look, I can’t recount the whole Spice Girls story in one post and I’m guessing you wouldn’t want nor need me to but just a few words about their origins seeing as we’re starting at the beginning. Recruited Monkees style by Bob and Chris Herbert of Heart Management via an advert in the trade paper The Stage, their intention was to create a girl group to rival the boy bands that were dominating the charts of the early 90s. After whittling down 400 hopefuls to just five – Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Victoria Adams, Geri Halliwell and, with their very own Pete Best figure, one Michelle Stephenson. The group were originally titled Touch of which Stephenson was seen initially as an important ingredient (she’d received the highest scores at the first audition). However, she was removed from the project by Heart Management amid accusations of laziness and lack of commitment. Stephenson naturally refuted such claims stating that she left of her own accord to care for her mother who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Victoria Adams (later Beckham) wrote in her autobiography that Stephenson “just couldn’t be arsed” to work as hard as the rest of the group. Whatever the truth, she was ultimately replaced by Emma Bunton and the rest is history. Michelle Stephenson would forge herself a career as a television presenter for a while whilst also finding work as a backing singer for the likes of Ricky Martin and Julio Iglesias.

As for this satellite performance from Japan, it’s notable that Posh Spice is the only person in the group not to have any solo lines in the song. Stephenson has her own story behind that as well claiming “Wannabe” was originally written with Stephenson in mind and that after she left, Adams refused to take on her parts. Other accounts suggest that it was due to Adams experiencing scheduling conflicts during the writing of the track (which happened after Stephenson’s departure). Yeah, right. Just one more thing, wasn’t Ginger Spice meant to be called Sexy Spice originally? Stephenson has her own take on that as well claiming she was going to be given that nickname. Ginger does make a lot more sense if we’re talking spices but then I’ve also never seen any spices called Sporty, Scary, Baby and Posh on the racks of my local supermarket either.

As with the Spice Girls, there’s a lot to unpack about the story behind the next song and given the song in question, I’m not sure I can be bothered to go through it all. Damn the completist in me! Right, let’s go through this quicker than a Cole Palmer hat trick. Two Andalusian Spanish blokes who’d had a Latin lounge act called Los Del Rio since 1962 went to a private party whilst touring Venezuela thirty years later and witnessed a dance by a local flamenco teacher. One of the fellas is inspired to write some lyrics in tribute to the dancer’s moves and calls it “Macarena” after his daughter. Initially released in 1993 to mediocre success, the track turned into a true worldwide sensation three years later thanks to a remix by The Bayside Boys who added a dance beat and English language lyrics. Its popularity in nightclubs led to a dance being associated with the song which would become a global craze. Fourteen weeks at the top of the US Billboard Hot 100 followed making it the best selling single of 1996 in America. With Europe falling in line with the track’s dance moves, it clocked up No 1s all over the continent. Dear old Blighty initially resisted the charms of these two codgers and their insanely infectious hit when it spent two weeks at Nos 64 and 77 in June but come July, it leapt straight in at No 11 making it one of the then biggest leaps up the chart in history. It would go on to sell eleven million copies worldwide and is a staple of party playlists to this day. I myself have witnessed teachers and children alike performing its moves at end of year discos when my son was in primary school. And that’s all I’m saying (for now) about “Macarena”. Ay!

Neneh Cherry burst onto the music scene in the late 80s with the box fresh, street wise sound of “Buffalo Stance” and her debut, platinum selling album “Raw Like Sushi”. She was one of the big stories of 1989 though she’d actually been around the industry for years before that performing in the likes of The Slits and post-punk outfit Rip Rig + Panic. Indeed, her stepfather was the American jazz musician Don Cherry. That first blast of success though proved hard to sustain with 1992’s sophomore album “Homebrew” a significant commercial downturn. In the intervening four years though, Cherry had actually come up with two of her biggest hits albeit that neither was completely under her own steam. “7 Seconds” with Senegalese artist Youssou N’Dour was a perhaps unexpectedly huge hit almost everywhere whilst her appearance alongside Cher, Christie Hynde and Eric Clapton on 1995 Comic Relief single “Love Can Build A Bridge” would provide her only career No 1 record.

In 1996 though, she would come up with a last commercial hurrah as a purely solo artist with the album “Man” and hit single “Woman”. Written as a response to James Brown’s 1966 hit “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World”, it talked of the hardships faced by women in life and very much espoused and sought to empower the female voice. Culturally, in the same week that the Spice Girls were making their debut on the show, the difference in style between “Woman” and ‘Girl Power’ was marked. Still, two techniques to amplify your point however dissimilar they were from each other is surely better than one. Matching its themes was the sound of “Woman” – brooding yet soulful, did it have a hint of Portishead about it? The single would give Neneh one last Top 10 hit whilst the album would achieve silver status for sales of 60,000 copies. She is still releasing music to this day with her last album, 2022’s “Versions” being reworking of songs from her back catalogue. Her two daughters Tyson and Mabel are both singers, with the latter having had both her albums go Top 3.

P.S. Nice to see Bernard Butler up there on stage with Neneh, He has a credit on the song for a ‘Special Guitar Section’ plus a shout out from Keithski.

Ah yes, Keithski. How to evaluate Allen’s alter ego in this TOTP? Irritating? Vexatious? Infuriating? Probably all of the above. He seemed determined to get one over the TOTP producers by slipping in some innuendo into his segues but some of it was so cryptic (“Banging out the round ones”, “Check the pellets in my pistol”, “Bump and grind to the garden tribe”) he just sounded like he was talking crap at high speed. Allen finally drops the act to announce the winner of the latest meet and greet competition before fake yawning as he introduces this week’s new No 1…

Hard as it is to remember, there was a time before the reemergence of Robbie Williams when all signs pointed to another ex-member of Take That being the one with the stellar solo career. Everybody expected Gary Barlow as the chief songwriter of the group to be the one to carry on seamlessly with chart hit after chart hit and sure enough, here he was first out of the traps with his debut solo single “Forever Love” straight in at No 1. The natural order of things was happening just as expected. To nobody’s surprise, his first post Take That hit was a big, slushy ballad with the piano to the forefront demonstrating our Gary’s musicianship as he sought to do a George Michael and transcend from boy band star to mature recording artist. It would sell over 100,000 copies in its first week of release before eventually going gold. There’s a bit in this performance when the screaming audience are at their loudest where Barlow almost smirks to himself. Maybe it was from embarrassment or maybe it was his inner voice saying “You’ve cracked it Gary lad. This solo star stuff is a piece of piss. All your dreams are coming true”. And it looked like they were. Uptempo follow up single “Love Won’t Wait” also topped the chart whilst his debut solo album “Open Road” did the same achieving platinum status sales. Meanwhile, as we shall see in next week’s show, Robbie decided to launch himself with a copycat, pointless version of George Michael’s “Freedom”. Nah, Gary was clearly the true talent. Fast forward two years and the roles were well and truly reversed. Barlow couldn’t buy a hit whilst Williams was unavoidably everywhere, racking up the hits as fast as Keithski could speak. Pop had raised see its fickle finger once more…

After a weak pun from Keithski where he refers to Gary Barlow as Ken Barlow, we’re into the play out song which is “Krupa” by Apollo Four Forty. As you might have guessed, I didn’t take much notice of this electronic dance group from Liverpool who’d made their name as remixers initially before raiding the charts in their own right. After three small Top 40 hits, “Krupa” became their biggest ever (at the time) when it peaked at No 23. Essentially an instrumental track, it was inspired by the jazz drummer Gene Krupa. So here’s the question that needs answering – did I know who Gene Krupa was back then? You know, I think I did. I have a vague recollection of having watched a documentary about the most influential drummers in music history and Krupa was featured. I could be bullshitting myself of course as we all know that the memory shifts and re-edits things to make false recollections but I’m sticking by my stick man story. Apollo Four Forty would go onto rack up a further six UK Top 40 hits including their biggest “Lost In Space” from the soundtrack to the 1998 film of the same name which was a remake of the 60s TV series.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Umboza	Sunshine	As if
2	Terrorvison	Bad Actress	No
3	Theme From Mission Impossible	Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jnr	Nope
4	Don’t Stop Movin’	Livin’ Joy	Nah
5	Rock Therapy	Reaching Out	Never
6	Spice Girls	Wannabe	I did not
7	Los Del Rio	Macarena	Of course not
8	Neneh Cherry	Woman	No but my wife and the album
9	Gary Barlow	Forever Love	Negative
10	Apollo Four Forty	Krupa	Not my bag

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/m00239nb/top-of-the-pops-19071996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 28 JUN 1996

Posted on September 30, 2024 by 80stastic

It’s another of those episodes where the climax of the show isn’t the No 1 but an exclusive appearance by a featured artist doing a two strong song performance. After Paul Weller the other week, it’s the turn of the Sex Pistols this time around who have reformed for the Filthy Lucre tour. As for the rest of the line up, there’s only six other chart hits on the show of which we’ve seen three previously. I have to say I’m not liking this new format that’s been adopted since the move to Friday nights. Thankfully, this is the last of these I understand. Maybe audience reaction to them wasn’t great? By the way, our host tonight is Gina G who is as famous as she’ll ever be at this point after her Eurovision entry “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit” topped the UK charts just a few weeks back.

We start though not with Gina but with David Howe from Chingford in Essex. Don’t ask “Who he?” – he literally tells you in his direct to camera message that he’s the first winner of the TOTP meet and greet competition and his prize was a trip to Madrid to hang out with Shampoo. I pondered in my last post what David would have thought of that and he looks rather underwhelmed despite the gloriously sunny backdrop behind him. The Shampoo girls Jacqui and Carrie look miserable with the whole situation. Maybe David was star struck whilst Shampoo were cultivating their abrasive ‘riot grrrl’ image?

It’s one of those ‘new’ songs to kick off the show from Everything But The Girl and “Wrong”. Despite being their most commercially successful period with three consecutive Top 10 hits as opposed to just three Top 40 singles in their entire career previously, I was having serious trouble getting on board with this new direction that they’d taken. I could appreciate that Todd Terry remix which had single handedly rejuvenated their career but I was missing their old stuff like the deserts miss the rain as the song went*.

*It was also the title of a 2002 Best Of album that tellingly didn’t include “Wrong”.

The gorgeous “Baby, The Stars Shine Bright” album was a particular favourite but all this electronica dance stuff was becoming a big turn off for me. Would it be wrong of me to suggest that this latest hit was basically just a retread of “Missing”? They’d even got Todd Terry back in to remix it! Tracey’s voice was as affecting as ever but the track didn’t stand up to repeated plays for me. “Wrong” would effectively draw a line under this era of the band being their last ever single to visit the Top 10 and ushering in a return to more conservative chart positions before Tracey and Ben took a quarter of a century off from Everything But The Girl only returning in 2023 with the “Fuse” album which went Top 3.

By 1996, Britpop had totally embedded itself in UK culture and its musical landscape. The movement’s swagger was hard to avoid but there were signs that a different type of genre was emerging as an antidote to all that Britpop brashness. From small pockets, intelligent, wrily observed, quirky pop music was sprouting. We’d already seen Space in the charts recently with a single that featured a glockenspiel and now came The Divine Comedy. Channeling the spirit of 60s baroque pop, this outfit from Northern Ireland was mainly just a vehicle for the creative genius of Neil Hannon. Having formed in 1989, they’d already released three albums into the pop void before Radio 1’s Chris Evans championed “Something For The Weekend”, the lead single from fourth studio album “Casanova”. With that backing, a first ever Top 40 hit was achieved when it debuted and peaked at No 14. Hannon’s distinctive, almost spoken vocal delivery style might have almost put the song into the novelty bracket à la The Mike Flowers Pops but there was something more substantial to it. Maybe it was the storytelling in the song which relates the tale of a suitor’s unwanted advances to a young woman who tricks him into looking in the woodshed only for her friends to knock him unconscious and steal his car and money. You don’t get songs detailing that kind of stuff everyday of the week. The line “There ain’t nothing in the woodshed…except maybe some wood” was typical of the humour Hannon would bring to his idiosyncratic songwriting. He even looked unconventional for a pop star but that was also part of his appeal I think. I have a friend who adores him and when she met him and got him to sign something for her, he included the famous woodshed line alongside his signature.

“Something For The Weekend” would usher in a run of chart hits that would last the entire 90s and into the middle of the next decade. Perhaps their best known tune is “National Express” with its lyric about having an arse the size of a small country which made the Top 10 in 1999. That same year, the marvellous Best Of album “A Secret History” was released achieving gold status sales and peaking at No 3. It’s a great starting point for anyone wanting to investigate the band’s catalogue. In a bizarre turn of events, psychedelic Welsh rock band Super Furry Animals would have a hit with a track also called “Something For The Weekend” just a couple of weeks after The Divine Comedy had done so though they changed the title to “Something 4 The Weekend” for the single release.

I saw The Divine Comedy live back in 2017 when they supported Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott at Craven Park, home of rugby team Hull Kingston Rovers. As good as Hannon was, I wish it had been in a smaller setting rather than a stadium gig. Maybe something like that woodshed if they cleared out all the wood.

It can’t be time for Celine Dion again already can it?! I think this is the third time she’s been on with “Because You Loved Me” and to add insult to injury, it’s that concert performance once more that the TOTP producers tried to convince us was a live satellite link up when it obviously wasn’t. I hadn’t noticed before but the camera picks out members of the audience some of whom are visibly touched by what they are witnessing. One woman had clearly been crying. Now, I’m not going to go down the musical snobbery route – people like what they like and may have a strong emotional attachment to a song based on some event from their own private lives – but it did take me by surprise. Haven’t seen tears on TOTP like that since that teenage girl was highlighted sobbing on the Duran Duran video for “The Reflex”.

Right, it’s time for that exclusive performance from Madrid by Shampoo now that was the mystery prize for the meet and greet competition won by Dave from Chingford. Presumably he was watching from the sidelines off camera. Shampoo were one of a number of female duos that were successful in the 90s including Shakespears Sister, Scarlet and Alisha’s Attic. Jacqui and Carrie though were a curious outfit. A handful of moderately sized hit singles in the UK and yet they sold a million copies of their debut album “We Are Shampoo” in Japan and Asia. There’s probably some deep connection at play there which warrants some detailed cultural analysis but I haven’t got time to go into all that now. All I will say is that their sound and image didn’t seem to be anything particularly new. Hadn’t we seen something similar from the likes of Transvision Vamp and Fuzzbox previously?

Anyway, it’s time to address the elephant in the room which is the title of this their last ever hit. Literally in the week that the phenomenon that would become the Spice Girls released their debut single “Wannabe”, Shampoo were in the charts with a song called “Girl Power”. Yes, the slogan that Sporty, Posh, Baby, Scary and Ginger used to promote themselves around the world was already out there in the cultural vernacular. Now, I’m not suggesting some act of dishonest appropriation not least because Shampoo didn’t invent the phrase themselves. The origins of ‘girl power’ are recognised as belonging to US punk band Bikini Kill who used it as the subtitle to their second feminist zine in 1990. However, it is quite the coincidence don’t you think? Could the Spice Girls management have been influenced by the Shampoo single or is that just me forcing an event that never happened to create my own narrative? Surely the marketing strategy for the Spice Girls had been months in the formulating and hadn’t just adopted something as pivotal as the ‘girl power’ mantra on the hoof? Well, apparently it was. The Spice Girls did just nick it off Shampoo! Here’s @TOTPFacts with the story:

"Girl Power" charted a week before The Spice Girls' "Wannabe". In a 2016 interview, Geri Halliwell said she got the phrase from Shampoo. “I saw them and I thought, 'Oh my God, that is so good.'” #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) September 20, 2024

"Girl Power" was previously the title of a 1991 zine by US riot grrrl band Bikini Kill, which is presumably where Shampoo saw it. Mel C: "It was very much in existence already. It was then Geri who shouted it during an early television interview and it stuck." #TOTP pic.twitter.com/GvXkqjixWX
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) September 20, 2024

Ha! Well, I guess Shampoo themselves must have nicked it off Bikini Kill then. After all, it was sometimes spelt ‘grrrl power’ after the ‘riot grrrl’ movement they aligned themselves with in their early days. What’s undeniable is that the fortunes of Shampoo and the Spice Girls went in wildly different directions from this point on. The latter would conquer the world in less than six months while the former never returned to the charts and whose last single release was a desperate cover version of a song by Christmas playlist perennials The Waitresses. Rubbing salt in the wound, whilst Jacqui and Carrie were having to entertain Dave from Chingford in Madrid, they were missing out on being in the TOTP studio at the same time as their heroes the Sex Pistols. For what it’s worth, I preferred Shampoo’s brand of “Girl Power” to anything the Spice Girls released under that banner.

Right, what’s wrong with this picture with said picture being Black Grape performing “England’s Irie” with their mates Keith Allen and Joe Strummer? Well, two days before this went out, the England football team lost their Euros 96 semi final with Germany in heartbreaking fashion on penalties. Thus, the timing of this exultant performance of a song about them seems slightly off. Surely they should have released it a few weeks earlier when “Three Lions” came out? By the time it was finally in the charts, all the expectation, excitement and general sense of positivity that had engulfed the nation had completely dissipated. I did mention recently that the release schedule for Black Grape’s singles had been too tight when “Fat Neck” came out the month before “England’s Irie”. Maybe someone at the label messed up? Or maybe they’d banked on England making the final which would have given the record a whole weekend’s trading before the game on the Sunday evening to rack up some monster sales? Either way, this performance was rendered a bit after-the-Lord Mayor’s-show by the events of the Wednesday evening.

Talking of which, who can forget Gareth Southgate’s tortured face after being the only person to miss his penalty? I recall that the next morning, the aforementioned Chris Evans conducting a debrief of the match on his breakfast show (he always was a bandwagon jumper and being a footy fan was now seen not just as acceptable but the done thing in the era of ‘lad culture’). He pronounced that Southgate was a “top man” and played “Walkaway” by Cast as a tribute to him and the team whilst the nation cried into our cornflakes. As for Black Grape, they would only trouble the Top 40 compilers once more after their second album “Stupid Stupid Stupid” was poorly received though they are still releasing new material to this day with latest album “Orange Head” having come out earlier this year.

The Fugees reign supreme still at the top of the charts with “Killing Me Softly”. Yet again we have the same studio performance we’ve always had, presumably as it was the only time they were in the country. They could have mixed it up a bit and showed the official promo video for it at least once. After all, it did win an MTV Video Music Award for Best R&B Video. Interestingly, the TOTP producers let the ending credits roll over the top of it even though we still have the Sex Pistols to come creating a false ending effect. There are no further credits when the Pistols finish.

Lauryn Hill had a small acting career that briefly ran in tandem with her singing one. Most notably she starred in Sister Act 2: Back In The Habit. I think this is my favourite scene from the film:

Somebody remarked on Twitter that Gina G must be really tall as she seems to be stooping in every link that she does and they’re right. It’s like she’s a mime artist performing being trapped in a cube. Most odd. Not as odd though as the ‘punk’ outfit she has on to introduce the Sex Pistols. What’s with the feather headdress? That look is more Hiawatha than high priestess of punk.

Anyway, the Sex Pistols are finally here to perform for us. I was just too young when they were at the height of their fame/infamy in 1976/77 to be caught up in the punk phenomenon though I was aware of the band’s name (which seemed very dangerous to the then eight year old me) and that two of the band were called Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten. I couldn’t have named any of their songs or told you what they sounded like though. My next encounter with the band came a few years later in a music lesson at Grammar school (I’d passed my 11 plus exam) when the hardest kid in class Paul Dukes convinced the recently qualified and wet behind the ears teacher that “Friggin’ In The Riggin’” from “The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle” album was a suitable song for composition appreciation. Inevitably, the needle was abruptly removed from the record long before the song’s end. As I got older and more into music, I expanded my knowledge of rock history which included getting to know the band’s story and music though mainly the holy trinity that is “Anarchy In The UK”, “God Save The Queen” and “Pretty Vacant”. I eventually bought the “Never Mind The Bollocks” album as well.

There had been a mini Pistols revival in 1992 when Virgin raided the band’s rather limited back catalogue to release the “Kiss This” compilation that achieved gold status and made the Top 10 on the charts. Four years later, a full on reunion including original bass player Glen Matlock was put into effect for the six month long Filthy Lucre tour. One of the dates was at Finsbury Park on the 23td June, the day after England had defeated Spain in a quarterfinal of the Euros on penalties. Yes, the one with that Stuart Pearce celebration…

Pearce and Gareth Southgate somehow found themselves at Finsbury Park introducing the Sex Pistols on stage the following day. No, really look:

Stuart Pearce and Gareth Southgate introducing the Sex Pistols on stage at Finsbury Park – the day after England beat Spain on penalties at Euro ‘96. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🎸#Euro96Relived pic.twitter.com/CjmnQQEE0b
— Stu’s Football Flashbacks (@stusfootyflash) May 12, 2020

Also there that day was my manager at the Our Price where I was working, the late, great Pete Garner original bassist with the Stone Roses. I had to cover his Sunday shift in the shop so he could go. I only know this as it’s all in my recently found diary that handily covers the whole of 1996. It also tells me that I listened to the Sex Pistols gig live on the radio that evening. Back to this TOTP performance though and inevitably the band do one of the ‘holy trinity’ tracks. “Pretty Vacant” made No 6 in the charts when released in the Summer of 1977 and would usher in the band’s first ever appearance on TOTP so I guess there’s some history and symmetry at play in the band choosing to perform it here. It was the follow up to the press baiting and BBC banned single “God Save The Queen” released at the height of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee celebrations. That ban clearly had zero effect on the band’s sense of daring as they then released a song that included John Lydon’s surely deliberate annunciation of the word ‘vacant’ as ‘vay-c**t’. Twenty-six years later, The Darkness tried a similar linguistic trick on their festive hit “Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End)”. Bells End? Bellend? We all caught up? Good.

For the second track, the band went for a less obvious choice in “New York”, a song generally perceived to be about US glam rockers New York Dolls whom, of course, Malcolm McLaren used to manage before switching his attention to the Pistols. Clearly the passage of time had softened the band’s edges as they presumably relented to BBC demands about the song’s lyrics with the word ‘shit’ sung by Lydon as ‘it’ and ‘faggot’ as ‘maggot’. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Everything But The Girl	Wrong	I did not
2	The Divine Comedy	Something For The Weekend	No but I had that Best Of album
3	Celine Dion	Because You Loved Me	No
4	Shampoo	Girl Power	Nah
5	Black Grape / Joe Strummer / Keith Allen	England’s Irie	Nope
6	The Fugees	Killing Me Softly	No but my wife had the album
7	Sex Pistols	Pretty Vacant	I have the Never Mind The Bollocks album
8	Sex Pistols	New York	See 7 above

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/m00233z0/top-of-the-pops-28061996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 21 JUN 1996

Posted on September 25, 2024 by 80stastic

Here’s a blast from the past. Anyone remember Julia Carling? I have to admit I’d forgotten all about her but here she is presenting TOTP in 1996. OK, the show was maybe not commanding the same profile as in its 70s and 80s heyday but it was still the BBC’s flagship music programme. So who was/is Julia Carling and how did she get this gig? Well, she was a TV presenter (obviously) who’d started as a VJ on VH-1 and guested on Channel 4’s Big Breakfast before her spot here. She was also the wife of England rugby player Will Carling though Wikipedia informs me that the couple divorced in this year. Will was rumoured in the tabloids to be romantically linked with Diana Princess of Wales something that must have passed me by at the time. As for Julia, she spent some time on This Morning before disappearing from our screens to concentrate on a career in journalism and writing a book.

Before we get to Julia though there’s the return of the direct to camera message from a featured artist that was curiously replaced by a highlights montage the other week. Not sure what all that was about but there’s no ignoring its reappearance as we get Black Grape in the slot this week but it’s Keith Allen not Shaun Ryder taking centre stage as he’s joined them for their Euro 96 single “England’s Irie”. Unfortunately, Allen is there as his alter-ego, the never-not-annoying Keithski banging on about the football so let’s move on quickly to opening act Longpigs. Although more often than not categorised as Britpop, they never seem to get talked about as much as some of the movement’s other luminaries. In fact, the most frequent comment about the band always see seems to be that their guitarist was Richard Hawley who, of course, went on to forge a career as a solo artist in the new millennium. Longpigs had some decent tunes though of which this one – “She Said” – is probably my favourite. Despite sounded like the band are performing it under duress, it also has a power and menace of its own. Part of that menace comes from the repeated lyric “you better hit her”. I’m not quite sure what songwriter and singer Crispin Hunt was getting at when he wrote it but, certainly taken in isolation, the line is dubious. That apart, I do think the track stands up with that piano scale leading into the chorus simple yet very effective. Back to Crispin though and his name must be up there as the most posh boy moniker in all of Britpop. What? How about Crispian Mills of Kula Shaker? Oh hush!

Gabrielle’s career is a curious mixture of massive hits and middling, blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em chart entries. For every “Dreams”, “Rise” and “Out Of Reach”, there was a “Because Of You”, “I Wish” or this one – “Forget About The World”. The second single from her eponymous sophomore album, it would peak at No 23 whilst spending just three weeks on the Top 40. As such, I don’t recall this one at all but *whisper it* it’s actually quite good. A nice tune, perfect for Summer with a polished but not ostentatious production, I much prefer it to some of those aforementioned bigger hits. One thing that does let it down though, and this applies to nearly all of Gabrielle’s work, is her lack of diction. I had to have subtitles permanently on to be able to understand what she was singing about. Annunciate Gabrielle annunciate! Never mind forget about the world, she forgot about the words!

Another female solo artist now as we get the latest single from Mariah Carey who, after a slowish start to her UK chart career, was on a hot streak of Top 10 hits by the mid 90s. “Always Be My Baby” was the eleventh in a row to achieve such a chart peak over here. Of course, in the US, it had always been huge smash after huge smash right from the start with eight of her first ten hits going to No 1.

This track was the fourth and final to be lifted from her “Daydream” album and would go straight in at No 3 (it was a chart topper in America obvs). It would stay within the Top 40 for eight weeks, quite the feat of endurance in a chart era of singles debuting high then falling away rapidly. Contrast that with the stats for Gabrielle’s single – two comparable hits with wildly fluctuating chart performances. Why was that exactly? I’ve been writing this blog long enough to know that question is largely unanswerable. I even wrote a dissertation on it as a student and couldn’t get to the bottom of it. If I had to guess, I’d say that maybe Mariah had more airplay behind it than Gabrielle? Could be as I thought I didn’t know “Always Be My Baby” but the “doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-dum” hook sounded very familiar. Maybe though I was thinking of this 1992 hit from Betty Boo…

If it looks, sounds and has the whiff of an act of desperation, then it surely is an act of desperation. It had been two years since Let Loose had a huge hit single with “Crazy For You” that had transformed them briefly into contenders for the next teenage heartthrob band. By 1996 though, despite having a clutch of medium sized hits to their name, nothing had replicated the success of their breakthrough song and their album had sold moderately. Enough to warrant a follow up but a chart high of No 20 wasn’t going to give Boyzone sleepless nights.

The alarm bells must have truly started ringing though when the lead single from their second album – “Everybody Say, Everybody Do” – could only scramble to No 29 in the charts at the back end of 1995. Seven months would pass before the band reappeared. Presumably, in that time, the decision was made to break the pop music emergency glass and execute the standard, fall back contingency plan which was – altogether everyone – RELEASE A COVER VERSION! Yes, of course. When in need of a career reviving hit, that was the obvious move. In the case of Let Loose, their safe word song was the old Bread hit “Make It With You”. Now OK, it’s a nice ballad and it certainly did the job (albeit a stop gap one) when it returned the band to the Top 10 but that particular track had already been used for a similar purpose by The Pasadenas* only four years previously when their version peaked at No 20. Stealing ideas from the “Tribute (Right On)” hit makers was surely a low. Despite the cover’s chart success, the band still ended up going down the pan when second album “Rollercoaster” hit the skids and then disappeared without trace taking Let Loose with it. Ah, the ups and downs of life as a 90s boy band.

*The Pasadenas had done a whole album of covers in an attempt to rebuild their career.

And so to a band who had just announced that they were splitting up according to Julia Carling and she was right as Crowded House (initially) called it a day in 1996 after having been around for about a decade. Was she right about it being their last time on TOTP though? Having done a little research, I think she might have been. 1-0 to Julia. Anyway, Crowded House were going out with a bang in that they released their first Greatest Hits album called “Recurring Dream” which would go on to sell over a million copies in the UK twice as many as their previous bestselling studio album “Woodface”. It included three new songs of which “Instinct” was one. Taking of things recurring, thus was yet another track that I thought I didn’t remember until I listened to it and it was hidden deep in my memory banks, presumably buried behind a heap of recollections of drunken nights out or the name of that kid from school that I can never recall. Anyway, it’s a very Crowded House tune which seems a lazy but accurate way to describe it. Another way would be that it was a typical example of their thoughtful, well crafted melodic rock/pop which I’ve always been a sucker for. In fact, perhaps one of my favourite gigs ever was seeing them play The Academy in Manchester around 1991 when bassist Nick Seymour did his infamous ‘chocolate cake’ party trick. Is “Instinct” one of the band’s best tunes? No, I wouldn’t say so but it’s a decent tune and at least they used the correct word for its title and didn’t make one up just so it scanned better. Yes, I’m talking about you Gary Kemp!

A second new track called “Not The Girl You Think You Are” was released as a follow up which I do remember as it sounded so much like The Beatles which was apparently deliberate as Neil Finn has described it as an homage to the Fab Four. It would help propel “Recurring Dream” to the top of the charts. It was also assisted in achieving that chart feat by an advertising campaign that featured a tag line that went something like “you know more Crowded House songs than you think you do” which I remember thinking was quite clever at the time. Its sales performance felt similar to that of The Beautiful South’s “Carry On Up The Charts” Best Of from a couple of years prior. Not shed loads of massive hits but enough familiar songs that it felt like a soundtrack to your life and therefore something you would need to own to represent it.

Crowded House would reconvene in 2007 and release the “Time On Earth” album though without founding member and drummer Paul Hester who tragically committed suicide in 2005 after battling with depression. The band’s latest album “Gravity Stairs” was released just four months ago in May of this year.

Oh shite! It’s that dreadful Simply Red song that was appropriated as the official Euro 96 anthem. “We’re In This Together” should have been made available on the NHS for insomniacs – talk about soporific! I mentioned the last time this tripe was on that my reaction to it was in line with a Joe Pasquale heckler who threw his crutches away whilst shouting “I’d rather fall over than listen to this shit!” on the way down. Following on from that, I’ve remembered another extreme reaction that was in response to actually hearing a Simply Red track. When at polytechnic, a friend was in the student bar and not in a particularly good mood. Whatever was troubling him was not helped by Hucknall and co coming on the bar jukebox. His response to this was to set fire to his hair! Talk about “A New Flame”!

By this point in his career, Maxi Priest had been having chart hits for a decade beginning with “Strollin’ On” in 1986. Although there were a many a single that missed the Top 40 along the way, there were also plenty of major successes. Look at his 1990 hit “Close To You” which combined New Jack Swing and soul so well that it went to No 1 in America making him one of only two reggae artists (alongside UB40) to ever achieve a US chart topper.

However, to some uneducated ears (and I include my own in that description), it might seem that Maxi has become an enduring figure predominantly off the back of doing some reggae covers of already well known songs like “Some Guys Have All The Luck” and “Wide World” but that perhaps doesn’t tell the whole story. Maxi established himself by being able to adapt his natural reggae tendencies to align with the predominant musical trends of the day. His Wikipedia page lists his own musical genres as being Roots Reggae, R&B, Lovers Rock, Dancehall and Reggae Fusion. He’s worked with artists as diverse as Jazzie B, Roberta Flack, Lee Ritenour and Apache Indian. His choice of collaborator hasn’t always been spot on though. His willingness to follow the zeitgeist meant teaming up with two of the three S’s* of 1993’s ragga phenomenon. “Housecall” saw him join forces with the despicable Shabba Ranks before this track – “That Girl” – had him in partnership with the laughable Shaggy. Sampling “Green Onions” by Booker T. & the M.G.’s, I’m convinced that this would be so much better if Shaggy had not been involved. He’s turned up and done his usual nonsense in that low growl of his so we get random interjections like “Gangsta kinda lover”, “Fancy kinda lover” and, inevitably, “Sexy kinda lover” before he just resorts to making grunt noises. Come on Maxi! You were better than that!

*A Maxi Priest / Snow duet has yet to happen thankfully

It’s time for this week’s ’exclusive’ performance from Black Grape with their contribution to the “Beautiful Game” compilation album (which also featured “Three Lions”) entitled “England’s Irie”. I never really got this one perhaps because, like Simply Red’s awful “We’re In this Together”, it doesn’t seem to have that much to do with football. Sure, there’s a few stock phrases in there like “Cross into the box”, “A perfect pass” and “It’s a football thing” that clearly anchor it as a football song but some of the lyrics are tenuous at best. “Dribble around my socks”? “Check my shirt and drink my shots”? “Squeeze me in box”? I suppose that last one could relate to the infamous photo of Vinnie Jones grabbing Gazza by his nuts but still. Maybe Shaun Ryder’s lack of a connection to football might explain it. Here’s @TOTPFacts:

Shaun Ryder on “England’s Irie”: “I know fuck all about football. I was born at the back of Old Trafford and I’m a red by birth, but I don’t do football. It means absolutely nothing to me.” #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) September 20, 2024

Hmm. Shaun was aided in this track by Keith Allen and Joe Strummer who, as Julia Carling states in her intro vowed never to appear on TOTP with The Clash (2-0 to Julia). The fact that he broke that vow to perform on this track, well…I think this sums it up:

Of all the songs Strummer could have performed on TOTP THIS is the one 😠😫
— Simon Davies (@dinodonkey83) September 21, 2024

Keith Allen, of course, was carving out a nice little side career for himself with football songs. As well as this one, there’s “World In Motion” with New Order and he would go on to release three further football ‘songs’ under the Fat Les banner. Cheers for that Keith. Apart from the lyrics, there are other things about “England’s Irie” that confuse me. For a start, what has the word ‘Irie’ got to do with the England football team? Here’s @TOTPFacts again:

(Explaining to a judge) “Irie” is Jamaican slang that originated in the Rastafari movement. Anything that makes you feel “alright” – that’s cool, enjoyable, or positive – can be described as irie. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) September 20, 2024

Secondly, apart from Strummer, nobody seems to be wearing an England football shirt. Shaun’s looks more like an England rugby top, Keith Allen is wearing orange as if he’s Dutch but also a kilt as if he’s Scottish. The drummer’s wearing an Argentina shirt for Chrissakes! It’s all a bit of a mess but then this is Black Grape we’re talking about so…

Before the No 1 record, Julia announces the first winner of the TOTP meet and greet competition and it’s David Howe from Chingford in Essex! I wonder what David thought of his prize – a chance to hang out with Shampoo as they shoot an ‘exclusive’ performance for the show in Madrid. A trip to the Spanish capital would have been nice but Shampoo? They were hardly the biggest of names were they? At least it wasn’t Peter Andre though!

The Fugees are No 1 for a third week with “Killing Me Softly”. This was one of those singles that flew off the shelves. There were a few of them in the 90s where anticipation for a song’s release created phenomenal demand. “Mmm Bop” by Hanson (no really!) was another along with “Don’t Speak” by No Doubt and “…Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears. Nothing though can touch the clamour for Elton John’s “Candle In The Wind 1997” after Princess Diana died but that’s a whole other story for a future post.

The play out track is “Where It’s At” by Beck. This was a track taken from his “Odelay” album (the one with the shaggy dog jumping over a hurdle on the cover) and was only his second UK hit when it peaked at No 35. Everyone I ever worked with at Our Price seemed to love Beck as he was perceived as being super hip. My view? Yeah, I quite liked him though not as much as my wife who bought “Odelay”. “Where It’s At” was typically edgy and alternative with samples a plenty and a whiff of 60s psychedelica. It would win Beck a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance though, for me, it wasn’t as memorable as follow up “Devil’s Haircut”. Still, what did I know.

P.S. In a link more tenuous than an “England’s Irie” lyric, there’s a connection between Julia Carling and Beck…Jeff Beck the rock guitarist with whom she lived for six years from the age of 18.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Longpigs	She Said	No but I had their album I think
2	Gabrielle	Forget About The World	No
3	Mariah Carey	Always Be My Baby	Nope
4	Let Loose	Make It With You	As if
5	Crowded House	Instinct	No but I had the Best Of album with it on
6	Simply Red	We’re In This Together	Never!
7	Maxi Priest / Shaggy	That Girl	Nope
8	Black Grape / Keith Allen / Joe Strummer	England’s Irie	Nah
9	Fugees	Killing Me Softly	No but my wife had the album
10	Beck	Where It’s At	See 9 above

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/m00233yy/top-of-the-pops-21061996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 14 JUN 1996

Posted on September 19, 2024 by 80stastic

It’s mid June 1996 and the TV schedules are full of football as the Euros tournament is in full swing. England have started with a disappointing draw against Switzerland so there’s a lot riding on the next game against Scotland the day after this TOTP aired. As flagged by Nicky Campbell last week, the show has moved to Friday night for the duration of the football but it would never return to that hallowed Thursday night slot. In retrospect, it could be argued that this was the beginning of the end for TOTP with the subsequent decision to change its time of broadcast from 7.00 to 7.30pm an act of wanton self destruction, pitting it against Coronation Street as it did.

Before any of that though came an act of physical destruction that would put football and audience figures for a pop music show into a terrible and shocking perspective. The day after this episode of TOTP was broadcast, the Manchester bombing happened when the IRA detonated a 3,300 lb bomb on Corporation Street in the centre of the city. I was living in Manchester at the time (but working in the Our Price store in Stockport) and had booked the Saturday off to watch the England game. I wasn’t in the centre that morning though my wife had been as she’d gone to pick up her Mum from Piccadilly train station as she was visiting us for the day. Fortunately, they were in and out before the bomb was detonated at 11.17am. Thanks to the efforts of the emergency services (and the fact that an IRA code-worded warning had been made an hour and a half prior to the detonation), there were no fatalities that day though 212 people were injured. The explosion caused a 300m high mushroom cloud to rise above the city and could be heard up to 15 miles away. I was out walking at the time (can’t remember why) and, like everyone else in the vicinity, heard the bomb go off. My immediate thought was that a waste incinerator had exploded rather than a terrorist attack. Sadly, I was wrong. The devastation to the area would prompt the regeneration of Manchester City centre at a cost of £1 billion in today’s money that was paid out by insurers. 400 businesses in a half mile radius of the blast were affected 40 percent of which never recovered. There is a narrative that the bomb was the best thing to ever happen to Manchester City centre though the counter argument is try telling that to people and businesses that were caught up in it. Also, there were already regeneration schemes in place following the city’s ultimately unsuccessful bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. Whichever side of the argument you came down on, the IRA bomb of 1996 will never be forgotten.

On that sombre note, I’ll try and shift subject to the rather more trivial subject of pop music and there was no greater example of its sometimes redundant nature than Peter Andre. Now the last time I reviewed “Mysterious Girl”, I forgot to mention the contribution of rapper Bubbler Ranx who was brought in as Andre, it turned out, was as hopeless at rapping as Gazza* was when he tried out for the John Barnes role on “World In Motion”. Congratulations then Bubbler for your part in “Mysterious Girl”. Who can forget your cry of “Baby girl” that opens the song and your superb control of language and beautiful phrasing on lines such as “Body weh you have a make de man dem a bawl”. Yes, your legacy to pop music is that you made this dreadful track even shittier than it already was. Well done sir. Reports suggest that Ranx has retired from rapping and is now a preacher. Lord have mercy!

*Thankfully he was much better at football as his iconic goal in that England v Scotland game proved.

A couple of pieces of housekeeping to mention at this point. Firstly, tonight’s host is Mark Owen who is still a few months away from launching his solo career with the “Child” single and “Green Man” album so he seems to have been spending his time since the dissolution of Take That cultivating a look that resembles 1970s TV series Catweazle or at last an extra in a Robin Hood movie. What was going on there Mark? His look isn’t much better these days with someone I work with recently telling me that she thinks Owen looks like a tramp!

Secondly, there’s been a change to the show’s opening with the direct to camera message by a featured artist having been replaced by a montage of clips of the acts to come on tonight’s show. I’m not sure I have an opinion either way on which one I prefer. Thirdly, Owen reminds us of a competition that the show is running in which you can win the opportunity to meet and hang out with a mystery pop star. I don’t remember this at all but what are the chances that said pop star was Peter Andre?!

Back to the music and we now get “Don’t Stop Movin’” by Livin’ Joy. Nothing to do with the chart topper by S Club from 2001, this was the follow up to the act’s somewhat surprising No 1 from the previous year “Dreamer”. This was a case of some things change, some things stay the same as the band had a new singer in the extravagantly named Tameko Star replacing original vocalist Janice Robinson but their sound on this new song was exactly the same as previously. Robinson herself had superseded Penny Ford as the vocalist with Snap! as the Eurodance /Italo House merry-go-round twirled throughout the 90s. She would continue a career in music post Livin’ Joy supporting the likes of Tina Turner on tour before eventually ending up as a contestant on X Factor in 2018. No, really. Look…

Anyway, Janice’s departure didn’t stop the flow of hits as “Don’t Stop Movin’” went Top 5 and was followed by another three UK chart entries. As I hadn’t liked “Dreamer” much, it will surprise nobody (including myself) that its follow up did little for me either. It was all a bit too frantic and energetic and listening to it now, it reminds me of “Don’t Give Me Your Life” by Alex Party but guess what? The two Italian brothers in Livin’ Joy were also members of Alex Party! Clearly, the notion of having two creative ideas as opposed to one they kept recycling was beyond these people!

It’s the theme tune to the biggest movie of the year according to Mark Owen now as “Theme From Mission: Impossible“ by Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton is up to No 7. So, was it the biggest movie of 1996? Well, depends on what you mean by ‘biggest’ I guess. Seeing as the film hadn’t even been released in the UK by this point, Owen was either referring to its reception in the US where it opened in the May or the hype that was surrounding it. Going by gross box office receipts though, no it wasn’t the biggest film of the year – that was Independence Day. It wasn’t even second in that list as it trailed in third after disaster movie Twister. Maybe it got the best reviews then? Probably not. Reviews ranged from mixed to positive with aggregator Rotten Tomatoes giving it an average of 6/10. Indeed, the cast of the original 60s TV series were also unimpressed with one actor leaving the cinema before the film ended. It did, however, open in a then record 3,012 theatres in America becoming the first film to break the 3,000 mark. It also broke the record for the biggest receipts for a film opening on a Wednesday with $11.8 million.

The soundtrack was also a success selling half a million copies in the US. Looking at the track listing for the album, it’s not a bad collection at all featuring contributions from The Cranberries, Massive Attack, Pulp, Skunk Anansie, Longpigs, Cast and of course the reworked theme tune. However, only the Clayton and Mullen treatment and The Cranberries from those names above actually feature in the film.

To get us in the mood for the much heralded Paul Weller double live performance later in the show, here are mod revivalists Ocean Colour Scene as his warm up act. Too harsh? Probably. Were/are they a ‘mod’ band? I don’t think so really but having turned around their initially failing career thanks to a leg up from Weller whom invited them to tour with him in 1993, the lazy labels coming their way from the music press were inevitable. That connection continued when guitarist Steve Craddock and singer Simon Fowler were invited to contribute to Weller’s “Wildwood” album when the whole ‘Modfather’ tag started to appear. Having seen Ocean Colour Scene live just last month, I couldn’t detect much of a ‘mod’ vibe coming from them or their music though there were plenty of Weller style haircuts on middle aged men in the audience.

As for being Weller’s warm up act here, that’s also unfair as the band were becoming firmly established in their own right by this point. This track, “The Day We Caught The Train” – was their third consecutive hit single (and joint biggest of their career) when it debuted on the chart at No 4. My accusation is also undermined by the presence of Weller himself self on piano in this performance so he would have effectively been supporting himself which doesn’t quite work*. As we shall see with Weller later, the vocals here are live. In fact was the whole show meant to be live performances? Tameko Star could have been for Livin’ Joy earlier. Peter Andre? Surely not?

*Having said that, I once saw Haircut 100 at Cadogan Hall and Nick Heyward was his own support act.

As for “The Day We Caught The Train”, this is probably my favourite OCS tune (did people really refer to them in abbreviated form like OMD?) but why didn’t they do the “We’ve got the whole wide world” line as the song comes out of the middle eight? Maybe because it has a definite sound effect over it on the recorded version and they were doing this live? What was the song about? It seems to have been inspired by the 1979 film Quadrophenia with lyrics like “riding the coast” referring to Mods riding their Lambretta scooters down to Brighton whilst the song’s protagonist Jimmy surely refers to the film’s lead character Jimmy Cooper played by Phil Daniels. There’s even a picture of a scooter in the cover of the single. So they were mods after all!

Right, is anyone having it that this was a live satellite link up with Celine Dion? It reeks of being pre-recorded to me. The fact that there’s no actual conversation between her and Mark Owen suggests that the whole thing is staged. A quick search of the internet shows me that Celine did indeed play Quebec for two nights in June 1996 but on the 7th and 8th of that month. Given that this TOTP was broadcast on the 14th, even allowing for the fact that it might have been recorded the day before, there’s no way that link up was live. Celine didn’t play a live concert on the 14th and she was in Sydney not Quebec on the 13th. Pure hokum. Fair play though to Celine for playing along with it and doing a little intro as if she was talking to Owen. Not good enough though – just like your song “Because You Loved Me”.

Right, what’s this nonsense? A horrible, hackneyed dance tune based around the chorus of Blur’s “Girls & Boys”? Oh brilliant! Just what we all needed and wanted I’m sure. Pianoman was actually Bradford producer James Sammon who worked with the likes of Ian Brown, Craig David and…erm…Donna Air whilst still finding the time to be a pirate radio DJ and run a record shop. His only hit under the moniker of Pianoman (he had others, didn’t they all?) was “Blurred”. Confusingly, the TOTP caption says it was originally a hit in March 1994 but I’m guessing that refers to the Blur track itself as I can’t find any record of an official release for “Blurred” other than this one in 1996 though Wikipedia tells me it was a hit in Ibiza in 1995 – a ‘hit’ presumably means it went down a storm on the dance floors of nightclubs.

Even back in the mid 90s this must have sounded dated – the production feels very start of the decade to me albeit the track is based around a song that didn’t even exist then. Why did they need a rapper on it to shout the inane, generic phrase “Move to the groove” or that computerised voice that says “One, two, three” and “Breakdown”?! The guy on keyboards in the red Adidas T-shirt looks like the geekier, younger brother of Graham Coxon (if indeed it is possible to look geekier than the Blur guitarist). The whole thing is just nasty but enough people bought it to send it to No 6 in the charts. Sammon tried to repeat the trick by sampling Belinda Carlisle’s “Live Your Life Be Free” for the follow up but thankfully the British public didn’t fall for this nonsense a second time.

After the Top 10 rundown, as ever, we get to the No 1 but it isn’t the usual climax of the show. No. We still have those two live performances by Paul Weller to come so it’s a bit of a false ending and I’m not sure it worked. From its very beginnings, TOTP always ended with the No 1 record; it was the natural apex of a chart based show; it made sense. What didn’t make sense was having two more songs after the chart topper one of which had already been a hit a year before, live version or not. If this was a new direction for the show, it didn’t feel properly thought through.

Anyway, let’s deal with that No 1 which is the Fugees for a second week with “Killing Me Softly”. With sales of over 350,000 copies in just two weeks, it was always going to stay at No 1 but nobody surely foresaw the phenomenon it would become, not even the band’s record company Sony who would have to actively withdraw it from sale when it was still at No 2 into August to allow follow up single “Ready Or Not” to be released unimpeded.

The song was a No 1 US hit for Roberta Flack in 1973 and was originally recorded by Lori Lieberman in 1972 after she collaborated on the lyrics with Norman Gimbel. Then came the all conquering take on it by Fugees but there exists out there another version which is both dreadful and entertaining at the same time…

There’s one more piece of housekeeping to be discharged before the Weller double bill and it’s the details of that chance to meet and hang out with a mystery pop star that may involve foreign travel. Ooooh! I love the fact that the BBC felt the need to put the ‘Lines are now closed’ caption up for a competition that happened 28 years ago! Also, the price of the phone call to enter was 20p!

Finally Paul Weller is on stage and he kicks off with “The Changingman”, the second single from his 1995 album “Stanley Road”. Quite why I’m not sure. It seems an incongruous choice for a music show that is based around the current chart. Presumably I’ll have reviewed this when it was initially a hit. I wonder what I said about it. If you’re wondering too, well, here’s the link to the relevant post:

TOTP 04 MAY 1995

Here’s the answer to that competition question which Weller helpfully announces. “Peacock Suit” was the lead single to his fourth studio album “Heavy Soul” but it didn’t actually get released until the 5th August, nearly two months after this performance. “Heavy Soul” itself wouldn’t appear until June 1997! Why the long gap? I’ve no idea – all I know is that it pissed off both Weller fans and record shop employees when the former would try and buy the record only to be told by the latter that it wasn’t out yet. Cue lots of “It must be, it was on Top of the Pops last night” type comments. Listening to “The Changingman” and “Peacock Suit” back to back, I’m struck by how similar they sound. That’s not a criticism – they’re both decent enough tunes – but an observation. In the case of the latter, just as Ocean Colour Scene were similarly inspired earlier, it’s surely about those pesky, preening mods again isn’t it? The single would debut and peak at No 5 when it was finally released making it not only Weller’s highest charting solo hit ever but also his biggest since “You’re The Best Thing” achieved the same position as part of the “Groovin’” EP in 1984.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Peter Andre featuring Bubbler Ranx	Mysterious Girl	Never
2	Livin’ Joy	Don’t Stop Movin’	Nah
3	Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton	Theme From Mission: Impossible	Nope
4	Ocean Colour Scene	The Day We Caught The Train	No but maybe should have
5	Celine Dion	Because You Loved Me	As if
6	Pianoman	Blurred	No chance
7	Fugees	Killing Me Softly	No but my wife had The Score album it was from
8	Paul Weller	The Changingman	No but I had the Stanley Road album it was from
9	Paul Weller	Peacock Suit	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/m0022v3w/top-of-the-pops-14061996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 06 JUN 1996

Posted on September 13, 2024 by 80stastic

Ah, it’s time for that infrequent event of a TOTP being aired on my birthday. This particular show coincided with my 28th birthday (I’m now 56) and usually I wouldn’t have remembered what I got up to on my special day but, as I revealed just the other week, I recently rediscovered an old diary that helpfully covers the year 1996 in its entirety so lets see what occurred that day.

*checks diary*

Well, sensibly I’d booked the day off work and so had lunch in town with my wife before another meal in the evening at a favourite restaurant. Perfect. I did fit in going to my first aid course in between eating and I hope I was listening carefully as I spent the next couple of days with a gippy stomach. Maybe that favourite restaurant shouldn’t have been such a favourite! Anyway, presumably I didn’t see this TOTP episode due to being out so let’s see what I missed.

Tonight’s host is Nicky Campbell and the first act he introduces is Louise who is back in the charts with her third, and possibly most well known, solo single “Naked”. This was the point in the ex-Eternal member’s career when her management/label made a clear and definite decision to change her image from angelic, girl-next-door to pvc-clad, sex goddess. It worked as well. FHM Magazine readers voted Louise second in their list of the ‘100 Sexiest Women’ of 1996 (X–Files star Gillian Anderson came first). I’m guessing one of those that voted for Louise may have been this fellow (@jjtotheb) who commented on the YouTube video of this performance:

“I remember having my first tug to this”

Well, you can’t argue with that I guess. Or maybe you can. Providing the view from the other side is this chap on Twitter/X:

I remember this performance vividly. My reaction is still one of, "why is someone with no sex appeal trying so very hard to convince us all she has it?" I mean, you might just as well be putting that tight PVC on Sister Wendy Beckett. #TotP
— Tony T-Rox Cowdrill 🦁⭐️ (@TonysaurusRox) August 31, 2024

Hmm. Well, whatever your feelings about Louise, we should probably do her the courtesy of discussing her song rather than just her looks and clearly “Naked” was written as a integral component of her rebrand. With lyrics that include the words ‘sexual’, ‘sensual’ and, of course, its title, there was no doubt that this was a much sassier type of track than she had been given previously. To my ears it was a catchy, competent soul/pop hit that was a bit Madonna-lite* and no more but it’s No 5 peak helped to establish Louise as a genuine solo artist with a chart career. She would clock up a further nine UK hits all but two of which would go Top 10.

*Actually, the synthesised riff in the chorus of “Naked” is very reminiscent of the intro and outro motif of “Father Figure” also now I come to think of it.

After “Children” gave Robert Miles a continent-straddling mega-hit earlier in the year, it must have seemed to the poster boy for ‘dream house’ music that the obvious way to follow it up was to release another track that was almost identical to its predecessor. Genius! And lo, it came to pass, that the single “Fable” did just that. The record buying public did what they always do and fell for the trick by buying enough copies to send it to No 7. So, the moral of the story of fable is ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ otherwise known as ‘don’t f**k with the formula’.

Now, before carrying on, I feel I should pull Nicky Campbell up on something he says in his intro for the next artist who is Tina Turner. Our host describes her as “the great soul survivor” and notes that the performance we are about to see of her new single “On Silent Wings” is from a live concert in Rotterdam before announcing “and let’s face it, if you can survive Rotterdam, you can survive anything”. What?! Why the need to slag off Holland’s second biggest city? Has he even been there? I can’t vouch for what it was like in 1996 but I visited it in 2018 and it was delightful. The Markthal (Market Place complex) is a marvel, its skyline stunning and parks wonderful to spend time in. A few months after this TOTP aired, The Beautiful South would have a big hit with “Rotterdam (Or Anywhere)” though I’m not sure that was a love letter to the city either. Around the same time that song was in the charts, I found myself on holiday in Barcelona where Tina’s Wildest Dreams tour was in town at the Palau Sant Jordi sports arena. I didn’t feel the need to shell out a small fortune that I didn’t have for tickets, I must admit.

Anyway, back to “On Silent Wings” which was the third single pulled from her “Wildest Dreams” album which was, rather surprisingly, her first collection of new studio material since 1989’s “Foreign Affair”. Those intervening years had been filled with a Best Of and the soundtrack to the biopic of her life. I’m guessing I wasn’t really paying much attention to this era of Tina as I couldn’t tell you how any of the songs from this album went but I was surprised to read that it was produced by Trevor Horn. The country-tinged slumber fest that is “On Silent Wings” is a world away from his iconic work with the likes of ABC, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Art Of Noise. Apparently, the studio recording of the song also features vocals by Sting which obviously we don’t get to hear in this ‘live’ clip. Money for nothing or money for old rope? You decide.

Really?! In 1996, did we really have to have this in the charts?! A pretty much identikit version of one of Cliff Richard’s most naff, sickly and insipid tunes by a bloke who would be given the middle name of ‘love rat’ by the tabloids?! I refer, of course, to Darren Day, a former Butlin’s redcoat who made a small name for himself in 1988 via talent show Opportunity Knocks (then hosted by Bob Monkhouse) before carving out a bigger career on London’s West End theatre circuit. His appearance on TOTP though arose from his turn as the star of the touring stage version of the 1963 film Summer Holiday. I’m guessing there was a soundtrack album to go with the show and so the titular track was released as a single. I can’t quite work out who would have wanted to shell out hard cash to purchase this though. Someone who had been to the show and wanted a souvenir of it? Wouldn’t a tour programme have sufficed?

Day does a passable impression of Cliff in his performance of “Summer Holiday” but I don’t think the presence of the songwriters (Bruce Welch and Brian Bennett of The Shadows) on stage with him is as a big a scoop as Nicky Campbell tries to make out in his intro. Day looks like someone who you would be happy to take home to meet your parents here, in total contrast to the image he would go on to cultivate. In the 90s alone, he was engaged to Ana Friel, Tracy Shaw and Isla Fisher. Into the 2000s, he was in a relationship with Hear’say singer Suzanne Shaw (he seemed to have a thing for women with that surname) with whom he had a child and they would also work together in a relaunch of the Summer Holiday show. The last entry in his filmography on Wikipedia came back in 2018 with a minor role in The Krays: Dead Man Walking.

Next up we have the first sighting of a group that my friend Robin once dismissed (he’s good at dismissing things) as being a “joke band”. In Robin’s defence, he wasn’t alone in his opinion. Scousers Space gave the music press a dilemma in that they were hard to categorise. ‘Wacky’, ‘Novelty’, ‘Quirky’ and, in a spectacularly failed attempt by some hack to appear pithy, ‘Queasy Listening’ were just some of the descriptors used to label the band’s sound. Lead singer Tommy Scott was especially combatant in his refusal to accept such tags:

“It is because I just do not want to stick to one genre of music. I am into everything so why can’t it all just go into one song? Why would you want to do just country or rock? Why can’t you just do what you want?”

Skillen, Paul (29 January 2021). “‘Scouse Pop: Essay On Creativity”. University of Chester.

Have that Robin! For my part, I quite liked their stuff. Yeah, it was a bit out there yet catchy enough to make daytime radio playlists. My wife liked them enough to buy their debut album “Spiders” which would furnish the band with four hit singles no less. The first of those (though actually their fourth single release) was “Female Of The Species”, its title no doubt inspired by both the Rudyard Kiping poem and the title track to 1950s James Bond rip off film Deadlier Than The Male by The Walker Brothers.:

In this performance, Scott looks just the right side of being a wide eyed, crazy person but then such an image never did Keith Moon any harm did it? Well…yeah it did I suppose seeing as his self destructive behaviour led to him dying at the age of 32 but you get my point. The really lazy option was to lump them in with all those Britpop bands (I’m sure we did in the Our Price store I was working in when it came to setting up a Britpop display) but that was…well…really lazy. They were distinctly different from the usual Britpop candidates like fellow scousers Cast* who were ploughing a much more ‘authentic’, 60s influenced guitar sound.

*I should point out that I did also like Cast to be fair

The “Spiders” album peaked at No 5 whilst 1998’s follow up “Tin Planet” went Top 3 but it seemed as if, once the 90s were over, so were Space’s commercial fortunes. A third album’s release was constantly delayed leading to the band leaving their record label whilst line up changes meant that they pulled their own legs off in 2005 by breaking up the band. A reunion in 2011 has seen them release a further four albums (including that ever delayed third one “Love You More Than Football”) and they still tour to this day proving that there is still space for Space even three decades later.

Due to its success and ubiquity, we would all be forgiven for thinking that “Three Lions (It’s Coming Home)” by Baddiel & Skinner / Lightning Seeds was the official song of the Euro 96 football championships. It wasn’t however – that particular ‘honour’ fell to Simply Red who gave the world this woeful own goal of a song “We’re In This Together”. Apparently this was the last track on their 1995 album “Life” and ‘last’ is how previous act Space might have described it in their Scouse vernacular because it was and remains a terrible track. Awful. Just no good. It hasn’t even got any thing to do with football as far as I can tell judging by the lyrics in which Hucknall wails about “the train of universal feeling” and his eyes being “open just like the ocean”. Utter drivel.

The track was performed at the opening and closing ceremonies of the tournament but I’m guessing hardly anyone remembers it despite that exposure. Of all the plethora of football songs that littered the charts around this time (and there were a lot most of which were indescribably terrible), I think this is the worst. I listened the other day to an interview with the comedian Joe Pasquale (stay with me) and he recounted the tale of an early gig in Wales when he was on the end of what he described as the worst heckle in the world. A member of the audience who was on crutches threw them at Joe and then slumped to the floor shouting something in Welsh at him as he fell. Pasquale picked up the crutches and left the stage at which point a guy met him round the side and said could he have his mate’s crutches back. When Joe asked him what his mate had shouted at him, he replied “You don’t want to know”. Pasquale insisted and was told that he’d shouted “I’d rather fall over than listen to this shit!” and he was true to his word. This is exactly how I feel about Simply Red’s “We’re In This Together”.

From a dodgy tune to a tune by Dodgy now as the “Staying Out For The Summer” hitmakers return with “In A Room”, lead single from their third studio album “Free Peace Sweet” (see what they did there?). I think this track gets overshadowed rather by subsequent single “Good Enough” which is surely their best known hit (apparently one of the most played tracks on British radio in the last 25 years) but it’s actually a pretty decent song in its own right. Angular guitars allied with some breezy drumming courtesy of Matthew Priest and a strident if not completely obvious hook would give them their then biggest hit when it debuted at No 12. Just a few short weeks later though would come that ever present hit making Dodgy good enough for daytime radio playlists everywhere and consigning “In A Room” to also-ran status. Shame.

By 1996, it was four years since Shakespeares Sister had topped the charts for eight weeks with their mammoth hit “Stay” but it felt more like forty. The pop world had not so much moved on as relocated to the other side of the planet and Siobhan Fahey was struggling to find her way back to it. I say Siobhan Fahey as Marcella Detroit had long since been jettisoned from the band rather publicly via an acceptance speech by the former’s publisher at the 1993 Ivor Novello Awards ceremony. After dealing with some personal issues (not least her divorce from Eurythmics Dave Stewart), the Shakespeares Sister project was relaunched with the single “I Can Drive”. Much less ‘pop’ than their previous stuff, it has a definite glam rock bent to it with Siobhan’s much maligned vocals and delivery making her look and sound like she’s auditioning for a part in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. The song itself has shades of “All The Young Dudes” to it but the verses sound just like those of this hit for OMD that was released just a couple of months after this TOTP aired. Who copied who I wonder?

“I Can Drive” didn’t provide the jump leads to restart Shakespeare Sister’s career that Siobhan must have been hoping for when it stalled at No 30. Relations between her label London Records deteriorated to the point that they refused to release third album “#3” and a parting of the ways became inevitable. The album was finally released in 2004 on Fahey’s own website and a reunion with Marcella Detroit in 2019 saw the duo release a new single and embark upon a tour together.

And so we arrive at the record that would become the biggest selling single of 1996 in the UK. Although the Fugees had already had a Top 40 hit earlier in the year with “Fu-Gee-La”, I don’t think I’d even noticed it as it debuted and exited our charts in just three weeks back in April. Fast forward a couple of months and they went supernova with their cover of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song” which they retitled as “Killing Me Softly”. If I remember correctly, this was around the time that record companies started to allow new singles to be made available in the shops to buy on the Sunday of the week of release as opposed to the traditional Monday. I guess they realised that with stores now routinely opening on both weekend days after the Sunday Trading Act of 1994, there was some logic in stimulating more sales of their products by having them on the shelves for an extra day. I was working in the Our Price store in Stockport on the Sunday that “Killing Me Softly” came out and all I remember doing is selling copy after copy of it from opening to closing time. I couldn’t refill the shelves quick enough (Stockport was a two floor store and I think there was only two of us in that day; I was downstairs where the singles were). It was absolutely relentless.

Why did it capture the nation’s hearts so? Well, it was a bloody good cover version with the hip-hop slant the band put on it coming up trumps alongside some unusual hooks such as the synth sitar sound that kickstarts the track and Wyclef Jean’s “One time, two times” interjected chants. Even so, did that explain its stratospheric sales? It was No 1 just about everywhere and the best selling single of the year not just here but in Germany, Holland, Iceland and Belgium as well. In the UK, it spent nine consecutive weeks at either No 1 or No 2 and 15 weeks inside the Top 40. Its sales were still going strong when the band released follow up “Ready Or Not” causing their record label Columbia to withdraw it from sale to clear the path for its successor. Maybe it was something to do with the amount that radio got behind the track. It broke the record at the time for the most radio plays in a week in the UK. Whatever the reasons, it made the Fugees superstars for a while and led to successful solo careers for all three members Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel.

After blowing smoke up their collective arses for most of this review, I have to say that the performance here is actually quite annoying mainly due to Wyclef Jean who insists on shouting about being on Top of the Pops and bellowing “Yo!” and “Pow!” over and over. Makes you wish he was “Gone till November”.

The play out video is “The Changing Man” by Paul Weller. Why were we seeing the video for a hit from 12 months previous? It was to trail the fact that Weller would be doing two tracks live on the show next week that Nicky Campbell referred to. It was a feature designed to promote the new Friday night slot that the show was shifting to over the Summer due to the Euro 96 football tournament. It would prove to be a short lived phenomenon with only the reactivated Sex Pistols going on to perform two songs on the show later in the month. As I’ll have already reviewed “The Changing Man” in the 1995 TOTP repeats, I won’t delay myself here any further.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Louise	Naked	Nope
2	Robert Miles	Fable	Negative
3	Tina Turner	On Silent Wings	Nah
4	Darren Day	Summer Holiday	As if
5	Space	Female Of The Species	No but my wife had their Spiders album
6	Simply Red	We’re In This Together	God no!
7	Dodgy	In A Room	No but my wife had the Free Peace Sweet album
8	Shakespeares Sister	I Can Drive	No
9	Fugees	Killing Me Softly	No but my wife had The Score album it came from
10	Paul Weller	The Changing Man	No but I had the Stanley Road album with it on

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/m0022v3t/top-of-the-pops-06061996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 30 MAY 1996

Posted on September 4, 2024 by 80stastic

Those sneaky BBC4 schedulers have done me dirty by suddenly announcing with a day’s notice that the 1996 TOTP repeats are back. I thought I had at least another week to knock out this last remaining episode for review before they’d start again! Serves me right for dragging my feet I guess. Sadly, as well as being my favourite word, procrastination is also my middle name.

Before I crack on with this particular show, I should address the fact that we’ve missed one. The 23rd May episode was not repeated with the general consensus being that it was for reasons of sensitivity. One of the artists featured was the actor John Alford who is best known for his roles in Grange Hill and London’s Burning. Alford was giving this soap star turned pop star malarkey a go – well, it had worked for loads of others before him including another ex Grange Hill pupil in Sean Maguire who, by massive coincidence, was also on the same show. Alford managed three UK chart hits in 1996 (all cover versions obviously) but subsequently disappeared after his only album tanked when peaking at No 171. In later years he has had several run ins with the law and is currently awaiting trial for alleged sex offences involving a girl aged under 16 hence the decision not to air the show he featured on presumably. I’ve had a look at the rest of the running order for that particular episode and there is little chance of FOMO raising its head in my personal opinion. In addition to the aforementioned Alford and Maguire, most of the other hits on that week we’d already seen before including those by Robert Miles, Black Grape, Tony Rich Project, Gina G and, unbelievably, Mark Morrison (again!). We did miss out on SWV and Dodgy but I can live with that.

Tonight’s hosts are funny men Jack Dee and the late Jeremy Hardy who do the whole show as if they were BBC presenters from the 50s which is fairly amusing for most of the time. We open with, I read to my astonishment when researching them, the best-selling boy band of all time!! What?! The Backstreet Boys?! That’s what Wikipedia tells me, yes. It also says that they are the first group since Led Zeppelin to have their first ten albums reach the Top 10 on the US charts. OK, so there are a couple of things to unpack here before we go any further. Firstly, the Backstreet Boys have made ten albums?! Surely not! I’m checking their discography. Wait there…

…they have! Although, one of them is a Christmas album and didn’t make the Top 10 in America. Maybe that claim included Greatest Hits compilations? Secondly, the biggest selling boy band of all time? What about New Kids On The Block or Take That or One Direction? Or even one of those K-pop groups? And what criteria are we using to define boy band? Were The Beatles* a boy band or The Jackson 5? If they qualify the. Surely they outsold Backstreet Boys?

*Obviously they weren’t but I’m playing Devil’s Advocate here

Whatever the truth behind the claim, their sales certainly didn’t start out like that. Not in the UK anyway. Their first two singles releases failed to make the Top 40 over here (though both were subsequently rereleased and became hits). Somehow the UK were initially impervious to the five piece’s charms but we finally caved when third single “Get Down (You’re The One For Me)” made it to No 14. Quite why though remains a mystery to me as it’s awful, useless, just no good. Based around that annoying swing beat riff that was prevalent about a year before and used on hits by the likes of MN8 and Montell Jordan with hackneyed, pseudo sexual lyrics, it truly stank the place out. They weren’t even that good looking were they? Maybe the pretty boy one with blonde hair but the rest? What did I know though. Their next thirteen singles went Top 10 in the UK including a No 1, two No 2s and four No 3s. It seemed that we really were getting down with the Backstreet Boys and they were indeed the ones for us.

From a boy band to a collaboration that was rather more out of left field albeit that one of the collaborators was about to become so successful that a crossover into the mainstream would be inevitable. Jamiroquai were an established chart act by this point with two hit albums and a readily identifiable sound to their name. They also had Jay Kay as their frontman who was providing the gossip columns with material as he embraced the pop star lifestyle. In 1996, their third album “Travelling Without Moving” was released and would go on to sell eight million copies worldwide, four times more than the sales of their first two combined. It also generated their three highest charting singles to date in “Virtual Insanity” (No 3), “Cosmic Girl” (No 6) and “Alright” (No 6). Before all of those though came “Do U Know Where You’re Coming From”. This was a joint project with jungle pioneer M–Beat and you might be forgiven for thinking that this was a revamp of the similarly titled Diana Ross hit “Theme From Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To)” given that M-Beat’s last hit had been a cover of another female soul singer – Anita Baker’s “Sweet Love”. It wasn’t (thank God!). What it was though, to my ears, was a track that was trying to tick too many musical boxes but ended up being a confused, mess of a song. I think there might be a decent tune in there somewhere but all those shuffling, jungle breakbeats just kept fracturing any cohesiveness it might have had.

The single did get to No 12 and was included as an extra track on “Travelling Without Moving” (albeit with a very slight title change). M-Beat (aka Marlon Hart) would not have any further UK chart hits though he did produce remixes for Soul II Soul and Roy Davis Jr. who would have minor hits with them in the late 90s. Hart himself would become homeless not long after this TOTP appearance before taking IT consultancy positions for McLaren F1 and Lloyds Bank and finally returning to music in 2022. So he did know where he was coming from after all!

Well, this is shaping up to be a show of extremes. We move from a jungle/acid jazz-funk mash up to some hard rock courtesy of Metallica. A Top 10 hit pretty much everywhere, “Until It Sleeps” was the lead single from new album “Load”. It’ll come as no surprise to anyone who’s taken even a passing interest in my blog previously that I‘m not the biggest Metallica fan. I can acknowledge the power of “Enter Sandman” but that’s the extent of my appreciation. Consequently, this track didn’t and doesn’t make my musical radar bleep.

Its video is more interesting to me though. It looks like the set of a horror movie or perhaps the darker moments of Stranger Things most of the time but its imagery is apparently inspired by the work of 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, specifically The Garden Of Earthly Delights, Haywain and Ecce Homo. I can’t say that I’m that familiar with Bosch’s work but here’s @TOTPFacts with the visual evidence:

The video for “Until It Sleeps” was inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. This bit has a basic similarity to “Ecce Homo”, for example. #TOTP pic.twitter.com/ySF60N1qPw
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 9, 2024

And this human-eating monster is a nod to “The Garden of Earthly Delights” #TOTP pic.twitter.com/gW5BapAz4t
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 9, 2024

From high art to a rancid fart of a song. That dreadful moment of the 90s is upon us – it’s time for Peter Andre and “Mysterious Girl”. Brace yourselves everyone, we’re going in! It seems an odd concept to grasp now but there was a time when Peter Andre wasn’t a part of our lives, always there in the cultural milieu, grifting away at his latest cash grab and attempting to give himself a sheen of relevance and currency. So embedded is he in our society that in the 2007 British comedy film Grow Your Own starring Eddie Marsan, at one point in its story about locals on an allotment reacting angrily when some refugees are given plots on it, one character announces “You know who I blame? Peter Andre!”.

Back in 1996 though, he was only known for one minor hit single in the UK called…erm… “Only One”. A concerted media campaign targeting teen magazines though raised his profile enough to put out a follow up. “Mysterious Girl” was actually a rerelease having peaked at No 53 in September 1995. We all dodged a bullet then but when the gun was reloaded for a second time we were hit right between the eyes with both barrels. This horrible, cod reggae, Inner Circle rip off would spend eleven consecutive weeks in the UK Top 10 mainly skittering between Nos 2 and 3. Thankfully it never made it to the top of the charts though even that silver lining would become a black cloud burst in 2004 when it got to No 1 after a concerted campaign by DJ Chris Moyles. Gee, thanks Chris. I was working in the Our Price store in Stockport in 1996 and we sold this single over and over and over again. When we’d finished doing that, we sold it some more and every time I did, the questions running around my head were “What am I doing with my life? How did it come to this?”. I’d had similar thoughts when I’d been the stand in Father Christmas in Debenhams seven years earlier whilst sat in Santa’s Grotto surrounded by soft toy reindeers and nodding penguins. Peter Andre – so much to blame him for.

It’s an Antipodean double whammy as we go from an Australian dope in Peter Andre to a song called “Australia” that’s pretty dope – I believe that can also mean ‘good’ in the modern vernacular*.

*God, I sound like the two stuffy characters Jeremy Hardy and Jack Dee are using to present the show!

Occupants of the revived ‘album’ slot are Manic Street Preachers and a track from their “Everything Must Go” album that would also turn out to be the fourth and final single released from it when it made No 7 in the charts in the December of 1996. The album had only been out for ten days at this point and with it going straight in at No 2, a place on the BBC’s flagship music show was not only deemed appropriate but also assured and deserved. Interestingly, the band shunned the chance to preview their next single, the album’s title track, that would hit the shops in July and instead opted for this song that was written as a metaphor for getting as far away from the UK and its tabloid press as possible in the wake of band member Richey Edwards’ disappearance the previous year. Also of note in this performance is the nerdy look of James Dean Bradfield including spectacles and a neat and tidy haircut. Quite the change from those early “Generation Terrorists” era TOTP appearances.

I’d seen the Manics support Oasis* at their Maine Road gigs a month before this show aired and would see them headline their own show about a year afterwards. I also had the album – I was becoming quite the fan though what I was not a fan of was the cardboard sleeves they insisted releasing their singles in at this time. Working in a record shop as I was, they were a pain to display.

*No, I didn’t get involved in the frankly shameful Oasis reunion gigs tickets fiasco. I saw them when they were at the top of their game and relevant – I have no desire to revisit the money grabbing so and so’s they seem to have become nearly thirty years later.

If it’s time for Celine Dion then it must also be time for a big, heart string pulling ballad and we do indeed get both these outcomes with “Because You Loved Me”. Released as the second single from her “Falling Into You” album, it was also included on the soundtrack to the film Up Close And Personal starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. I’ve never seen this film before but reading the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, I don’t think I’ll be seeking it out for a viewing anytime soon. A rather stodgy sounding news drama/romance that bore no resemblance to the book on which it was based? No, I’m alright thanks. Pfeiffer was making a habit though of starring in films that had a huge big hit single featured in them. Just a few months before, Coolio had conquered the globe with his Stevie Wonder channeling “Gangsta Paradise” from Dangerous Minds.

As for “Because You Loved Me”, it’s all pretty laboured and predictable to my ears but was clearly aural nectar for lots of other people’s lugholes as it went to No 1 in America and won a Grammy and was nominated for an Academy Award. And to think we’re still 18 months away from her even bigger film ballad “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic. Gulp!

Having finally scored themselves a massive hit by rereleasing their debut single “Lifted”, the Lighthouse Family have shone their spotlight onto another earlier release to secure themselves a follow up. As well, as being the title track of their debut album, “Ocean Drive” was also their second ever single and their first ever Top 40 hit when it peaked at No 34 in October ‘95. Could the old rerelease strategy work for a second time? Of course it could and not even the fact that “Ocean Drive” was almost identical to “Lifted” would stop people buying it for a second time. Harsh? Possibly but almost certainly accurate. Yes, this was more of that radio friendly, lilting groove, smooth vocal, easy listening soul/pop that they made their name on. And why not? You didn’t have to buy or listen to it if it didn’t float your boat did you eh?

So where is Ocean Drive? Well, there’s a mile long road in the South Beach neighbourhood of Miami Beach, Florida which bears that name and is famous for its Art Deco hotels, restaurants and bars. So, that must be what inspired the song then? Well, according to Wikipedia, it wasn’t as it’s about a road in the UK. A quick search of the internet reveals that there is indeed an Ocean Drive and it’s not that far from me in Hull being located in a village in the East Riding of Yorkshire called Newport. There might not be any Art Deco buildings there but google maps shows me that there is a pub called the Crown & Anchor, one called The Jolly Sailor Inn and a fish and chip shop called Johnny Haddocks so Ocean Drive kind of fits the nautical theme. Mr and Mrs Lighthouse (as name checked by Dee and Hardy in their intro) would fit right in.

After being on the show as an ‘exclusive’ two weeks prior, Bryan Adams is back again as his single “The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You” has blasted into the charts at No 6. There’s something different about this second performance though that I can’t quite put my finger on…oh yeah, that’s it…Bry’s missing a member from his band. Where’s the guitarist that was standing on his left from the last time? In an attempt to fill the space, they’ve moved the keyboard player to the front of the stage but he’s no substitute for standing back to back with Bryan and rocking out like his guitarist did. Also, the drummer looks very different. On the first appearance the guy behind the kit had huge Afro hair but that’s all gone this time around. Is it the same guy? Was he just wearing a wig the first time? If it was the latter, he clearly decided to ignore the advice of the title of the track he was drumming on and ditched it.

Listening back to this, is it me or is there a slight whiff of U2 about some of the guitar work as it comes out of the chorus? No? Nothing like The Edge? How about Bry’s bass player then? If you squint your eyes does he look a bit like Adam Clayton? OK, you got me. All this talk of drummers, Adam Clayton and U2 is me trying to tee up the show’s play out tune but more of that later. First, we have a new No 1 to deal with…

And so after weeks of anticipation and a flurry of football songs in the charts that weren’t that football song, it’s finally here and it’s gone straight in at No 1. As with Peter Andre, it’s hard to recall now that there was a time when “Three Lions (It’s Coming Home)” wasn’t a part of the national psyche, wasn’t trotted out every time England played in a football tournament and wasn’t sung on the terraces. A time when the subject of a song about the England football team would instantly bring to mind New Order’s “World In Motion” or possibly “Back Home” from 1970. All of this was trampled into the turf by Baddiel, Skinner and the Lightning Seeds in 1996. Now bearing in mind that Euro 96 hadn’t even started by this point, the promotion surrounding the release of the single must have been pretty extensive to have propelled it straight to the top of the charts on week one. Despite working in a record shop at the time, I can’t recall if there was a massive buzz around the song before a ball had been kicked in anger but we must have sold loads of it in that first week. After debuting at the very top of the charts, the following month saw it mostly at No 2 with a solitary week at No 4 before returning to No 1, with sales no doubt fuelled by the England team progressing to the semi-finals. We all know what fate befell them there sadly. That month gap between the two occasions that “Three Lions” was the UK’s best selling single saw “Killing Me Softly” by Fugees at No 1. It dropped a place as Euro 96 came to its climax and then leapfrogged back to the top for another week after it had finished. This meant that these two singles spent seven weeks swapping the No 1 position between them. There’s another less talked about twist of trivia that bonded the two together acts together and it really is quite bizarre – the single that the Lightning Seeds released before “Three Lions” was a song called “Ready Or Not” whilst the single that the Fugees released after “Killing Me Softly” was a song called…yep…”Ready Or Not”. What are the chances eh?

Quite why the FA approached Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds to write a song for the tournament I’m not sure but Broudie’s decision to get Frank Skinner and David Baddiel involved made perfect sense (ooh, see what I did there? ‘Perfect’ and ‘Sense’? Oh never mind!) what with the duo having recently finished the third and final series of Fantasy Football League for the BBC. Both comedians were by now also synonymous with the beautiful game with Skinner professing his love of WBA and Baddiel a fellow fan of my beloved Chelsea.

Like everybody in the country it seemed, I got caught up with the feel good factor that the football was bringing and “Three Lions” seemed a perfectly good soundtrack to that period. However, its repeated appearance at every football tournament since has made it almost unlistenable now. They really did flog it to death. An updated version with changed lyrics went to No 1 two years later for the 1998 World Cup and it topped the charts again as England reached the semi final in 2018 in the same competition. As far as I can tell, the only tournaments that England qualified for since the song was originally released when “Three Lions” hasn’t featured in the charts were the 2000 and 2004 Euros. My research tells me that Fat Les’s “Jerusalem” and a version of “All Together Now” were the predominant England songs for those years respectively.

The play out track is “Theme From Mission: Impossible” by Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jnr. Yes, here’s the reason for my cack handed referencing of the two members of the aforementioned U2 earlier in the post. The very first movie of the Mission: Impossible franchise was released this year and nearly 30 years later it is still going, still with Tom Cruise as the star and with the most recent outing Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (the seventh film so far) having been released in 2023. I caught the first film at the cinema in Stockport as the Our Price store there where I was working had an arrangement with the local cinema to supply them with CDs to play in the foyer. It might even have been a special preview screening that I attended as I seem to remember coming out with a press pack of still photos etc. I think I enjoyed it but I’m not sure that I’ve watched any of the sequels in their entirety. I recall watching the original 60s TV series as a small child and being confused by Leonard Nimoy being in it but not being dressed as Mr Spock!

I’m guessing that Adam and Larry were approached to record the movie’s theme tune off the back of U2’s wildly successful contribution to the previous year’s Batman Forever film. They don’t muck about with it too much though they’ve clearly danced it up a bit and explore that further with a number of remixes on the 12” and extra tracks on the CD single. At the end of the day though, it all pales in comparison to the iconic original which kind of negates the whole thing. Competing with its composer Lalo Schifrin really did prove to be an impossible mission.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Backstreet Boys	Get Down (You’re The One For Me)	As if
2	Jamiroquai / M-Beat	Do U Know Where You’re Coming From	No
3	Metallica	Until It Sleeps	I did not
4	Peter Andre	Mysterious Girl	Sir! You insult me with your impertinence!
5	Manic Street Preachers	Australia	No but I had the album
6	Celine Dion	Because You Loved Me	Never
7	Lighthouse Family	Ocean Drive	Nope
8	Bryan Adams	The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You	Negative
9	Baddiel, Skinner and the Lightning Seeds	Three Lions (It’s Coming Home)	Nah
10	Theme From Mission: Impossible”	Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jnr	Another 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/m0021s8z/top-of-the-pops-30051996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 16 MAY 1996

Posted on August 28, 2024 by 80stastic

The BBC4 TOTP repeats schedule is all over the place at the moment with some rather large gaps punctuating the 1996 episodes. As such, I’ve taken my eye off the ball somewhat but have realised that there are two shows from that year that I haven’t reviewed yet so I’m officially back to it. We pick it up in the middle of May and find footballer Ian Wright in the ‘golden mic’ slot. I think this may have been his very first shot at TV presenting which kicked off a lengthy and varied media career including game shows, panel shows, his own talk show and, of course, football punditry. Back in 1996, though coming to the end of his career, Wright was still an Arsenal player and over a year away from becoming their all time top goal scorer at the time. However, the 1995-96 season which had just finished had not been a happy one for Wrighty. He didn’t have a good relationship with dour Scottish manager Bruce Rioch leading to him putting in a transfer request (albeit that was later withdrawn). I’m guessing that Rioch wouldn’t have automatically given his blessing to one of his players hosting a pop music show (just as well that the football season had just finished) but then Wright had a natural affinity with the show having been a pop star himself (nearly) in 1993 when his single “Do The Right Thing” got to No 43 in the charts. It wasn’t totally terrible in fairness…

Anyway, TOTP executive producer Ric Blaxill showed considerable foresight giving Wright his break in TV presenting given what he went on to do in his post football media activities. I’m expecting a lot of bubbly enthusiasm from him. Let’s see how he does…

We start, confusingly though, with another footballer (sort of). Eric Cantona had risen Lazarus like from his ‘king fu’ take down of a Crystal Palace fan in 1995 and the eight month ban that followed to drive Manchester United to a second double in three seasons having just scored the winner in the FA Cup final just five days before this TOTP aired. His star would never shine so bright as it did at the culmination of the 1995/96 season. To mark his remarkable comeback from potential football oblivion, there was a song in the charts honouring his achievements. In the ‘direct to camera’ section at the very start of the show, the producers had hired a Cantona lookalike to stand in a United shirt as a camera spins around him and a football commentary plays in the background. I’m not sure it works on reflection especially as the guy doesn’t look that much like Cantona and has an expression on his face that says “Ah what you gonna do? They’re paying me for this!”

Enough of football though, to the music and we start with “There’s Nothing I Won’t Do” by JX. I really haven’t much to say about this apart from I don’t remember it obviously. Their previous single- “Son Of A Gun” – I could confidently have named unprompted, probably because it was a hit twice (No 13 in 1994 and No 6 the following year) but this one? My memory banks are emptier than Liz Truss’s head. And yet, listening back to it some 28 years later, it does sound familiar but I’m putting that down to the generic nature of its Eurodance sound. As my Dad used to say to me back in the 80s, “it all sounds the same”. With awful inevitability, I know say the exact same words to my 14 year old son when he plays his music in the car.

Not remembering one Eurodance hit out of a whole ocean of them in the mid 90s is one thing but not being able to bring to mind a whole artist? That’s another level but that’s what has happened with this next artist. Who is/was Horace Brown?! I would have thought that a name like Horace would have made him more memorable to me; I mean, how many Horaces are there in the history of music? There’s Horace Andy the Jamaican roots reggae singer songwriter and…erm…Horace Wimp from the ELO song? Anyway, it turns out that this Horace was an American R&B singer who had two middling sized hits in the UK whilst signed to the Motown label. This one – “One For The Money” – was the bigger of the two when it peaked at No 12.

Taking lyrical inspiration from “Blue Suede Shoes”, it sounds a bit like… well…Another Level (to use that phrase again). Whilst those 90s soul boys were all about the sass and sang about whipped cream and licking things (eeew!), Horace Brown was less salacious and more tedious singing the rather childish line “Three to get the honeys”. That’s not even the worst lyric of “One For The Money” though. At one point he sings about “living in an eight room mansion on the hill”. An eight room mansion?! Surely a mansion has more rooms than that?! I live in a mid terrace house in Hull and we have… let me see…nine! OK, we had a loft conversion done but still. Maybe he meant eight bedrooms? Details Horace, details!

It’s yet another football song now that still (still!) isn’t that one nor is it even the Eric Cantona single but instead comes courtesy of Liverpool FC & Boot Room Boyz whose “Pass & Move (It’s The Liverpool Groove)” is this week’s highest new entry.

Wrighty gives it the big ‘un about those now infamous cream suits that the Liverpool team wore as they strolled about the Wembley turf before kick off sarcastically calling them “blinding” but Ian himself hasn’t always got his fashion choices correct. Who could forget his bouncy castle puffer coat?

If this was old twitter there would be an account called Ian Wright’s big coat pic.twitter.com/NgD4GQq90f
— Cake 🍰 (@rigby113) December 3, 2023

Now here’s a mystery. Quite why did Black Grape feel the need to release this standalone single called “Fat Neck”? The usual answer would be to fill the gap between albums. There were two years and three months between the band’s debut “It’s Great When You’re Straight…Yeah” and disappointing follow up “Stupid Stupid Stupid” so a new track was an established record company strategy of maintaining their artist’s profile. Mystery solved. Except…a month after “Fat Neck” another Black Grape single came out and yes, it was another football song – “England’s Irie” for the Euro 96 tournament. Admittedly, it was a collaboration with Joe Strummer and Keith Allen but surely everyone knew it as a Black Grape song which would have done the job of keeping the band’s name in lights without the need for “Fat Neck” as well?

Added to this was the fact that back in March, they’d released the third and final single from “It’s Great When You’re Straight…Yeah” in the form of “Kelly’s Heroes” meaning that Shaun and co had three singles out in four months. Both “Fat Neck” and “England’s Irie” were released on the same label (Radioactive) and even had sequential catalogue numbers so this was clearly deliberate and not a scheduling cock up between two different labels’ calendars. So the question remains why the need for “Fat Neck” especially when it wasn’t much of a song but rather Black Grape-by-numbers. In the label’s defence both singles ended up going Top 10 so maybe they knew what they were doing after all.

As Ian informs us in his next intro, it was the Eurovision Song Contest two days after this TOTP aired so it must be time for a plug for the UK entrant Gina G with “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit”. I’ve lost count the amount of times Gina has been on the show now but it’s a lot. She secured herself one further place in the running order* by going to No 1 in the charts the week following Eurovision despite finishing an underwhelming 8th on the big night.

*BBC4 didn’t show that particular TOTP denying us one last Gina performance of her most famous tune but we’ll go into that in further detail in the next post.

Quite why Gina’s undeniably catchy song failed to garner more votes remains unsolved. It was a Top 10 hit all round Europe including Norway where the contest took place. It was suggested that perhaps Gina wasn’t actually up to doing the live singing on the big night with her credentials for doing so seeming to rest on the fact that she was the songwriter’s then girlfriend rather than her vocal talents. I’m not sure if that’s correct or fair though as she had done some singing for an Australian dance group called Bass Culture in the early 90s with a single called “Love The Life” getting a legitimate commercial release. Whatever the reasons behind her lacklustre points total, it didn’t matter when it came to being a pop star as, in addition to bagging the first UK No 1 single to originate from Eurovision since Nicole’s “A Little Peace” in 1982, she would go on to achieve four further Top 40 hits including two Top Tenners. She was a bona fide pop star for a while and how many of us can say that?

I said in a previous post that one of Gina’s backing dancers reminded me of Samantha Janus though it wasn’t actually her. This time, I’m thinking she looks like another EastEnders actress but this time Kim Medcalf who played Sam Mitchell (the second version) on two separate occasions over a period of 20 years. Again, I’m fairly sure it’s not her in reality. These are hardly ‘doof doof’ revelations are they?

Surely with deliberate planning on behalf of the producers, we now have the rarely seen/heard “Ooh Aah” segue as we switch from Gina G to 1300 Drums featuring Unjustified Ancients of M.U. and their hit “Ooh! Aah! Cantona”. Yes, it’s another football song but still not that one! What’s going on here?! Anyway, I’m guessing that this track was released to cash in on the Cantona effect. Eric was possibly at the peak of both his powers and profile at this time having successfully resurrected his image following the ‘kung fu’ incident the previous year which led to a ban of eight months from playing football. As mentioned earlier, five days before this TOTP was broadcast, he’d scored the only goal of the FA Cup final to secure Manchester United the ‘double double’. He’d almost single-handedly hunted down a Newcastle United side that held a twelve points lead over United at one point. Within a year, he would be gone, retiring at the age of 30. Following his retirement, he had both the phrase “Ooh Aah Cantona” with which his adoring fans serenaded him and his name and number from his shirt (Cantona 7) patented as commercial trademarks. If that was to prevent further records by the likes of 1300 Drums being made without his approval, then I raise my collar to you sir for this hit was missing an ‘s’. It’s just a generic Italo House backing to what I always thought was a fairly moronic chant. What a bunch of chancers! The Unjustified Ancients of M.U. were nothing to do with The KLF’s Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond as far as I’m aware but just a pathetic play on words.

The performance here is bizarre but then I’m not sure what on earth any choreographer could have done with this. Presumably, the Can Can dancers are to reflect Eric being French but it’s all a bit tenuous. Then they wheel out the aforementioned Cantona lookalike who does pretty much nothing other than stand there with a cup which, by the way, looks about as much like the FA Cup as he did like Cantona. If he does look like a footballer at all it’s Chelsea legend Dan Petrescu who himself is a dead ringer for X Files star David Duchovny. There’s a couple of guys in Cantona masks which I’m guessing were modelled on his Spitting Image puppet. In 2009, said masks were used to superb effect in the Ken Loach film Looking For Eric which is a great watch if you get the chance. Cantona himself would, of course, embark on his own career in film after leaving football appearing in multiple movies (including the Loach one as himself) and only this morning I saw him on my TV as the face of the latest William Hill bookmakers advertisement. The world has not forgotten Cantona, and you can bet on that.

The TOTP producers have missed a trick with this next artist. Judging by the cutaway from Ian Wright’s intro, this is just a repeat of the studio performance from the other week of Smashing Pumpkins doing “Tonight, Tonight”.

So what you may ask? Well, they could have shown the promo film for the single which won six awards at the 1996 MTV Music Video Awards including Video of the Year. Stylistically based on the 1902 Georges Méliès silent film A Trip To The Moon, it featured primitive special effects, backdrops and puppets which made for a piece that was at turns both charming and disturbing. The plot concerns a male and female protagonist couple making a journey to the moon on a zeppelin. On arrival, they jump off the zeppelin to fall to their destination with their descent slowed by their umbrellas. Once on the moon, creepy looking hostile aliens take them prisoner before our heroes fight them off again with their multi purpose umbrellas. Escaping in a rocket, they then encounter a sea-god type who fortunately is friendly and puts on a show for their entertainment featuring mermaids and starfish before returning them to the surface in a bubble. Lovely stuff as Alan Partridge might say. Stylus Magazine put it at No 40 in their 2006 list of the top 100 music videos of all time. I think the video might have lived in the memory longer for the TOTP audience longer than the straight studio performance they’d already seen before .

Right, let’s have a little check in with how Ian Wright is doing as host. Well, he’s been competent I would say in not fluffing his lines and has kept his Tigger-ish over exuberance in check. However, he does seem overly intent on name checking his then Arsenal teammates. We had ‘Ooh Aah’ Ray Parlour during the Gina G link and now he manages to squeeze in Tony Adams for the next artist on account of the fact that it is his namesake Bryan Adams. Somewhat surprisingly, “The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You” was his first single released from a studio album since “Do I Have To Say The Words?” in July 1992. I say ‘somewhat surprisingly’ as it wasn’t as if Bry hadn’t been seen in our charts since then. Quite the opposite in fact. Look at this lot:

“Please Forgive Me” – No 2 – 1993 – to promote a Best Of album
“All For Love” (with Sting and Rod Stewart) – No 2 – 1994 – Three Musketeers soundtrack
“Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?” – No 4 – 1995 – Don Juan DeMarco soundtrack

On top of that, he appeared on TOTP alongside Bonnie Raitt for a performance of non-hit single “Rock Steady”. It was like he’d hardly been away and yet here he was back for more with the lead single from a new album called “18 Til I Die. I couldn’t be doing with any of those stop gap, turgid ballads listed above but “The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You” was more of a return to form. He was back with some bluesy rock swagger and a memorable hook in the chorus (that tiny bit of guitar that pre-empts the words “is you” makes it). Sure, the lyrics are a bit hackneyed and the title undeniably cheesy but, for me, this was his best hit in quite some time.

We’re into the home straight now as Wrighty gets to grips with the Top 10 countdown. He goes for a straightforward, factual, no gags presentation until he gets to No 5 when he can’t resist taking the piss out of poor old Chris Eubank’s lisp from a few weeks back by pronouncing it as “Thethilia and Thuggth”. Before introducing George Michael at No 1 for a third week with “Fastlove”, he’s back on the footballer name drop game when he mentions his mate Paul Ince aka ‘The Guv’nor’. It’s a clumsily constructed reference with it only being made it so he can call George the guv’nor of the music business but otherwise I think he’s done an OK job as host. I didn’t know this until now but Ince has a solid link to pop music and no, it’s nothing to do with him appearing on any Manchester United singles. He is the uncle of ex The Saturdays star and now TV presenter Rochelle Humes. Well I never!

As for George Michael, I’m kind of surprised that “Fastlove” stayed at top of the charts for three weeks given that we were entering the era of weekly straight-in-at-No1s but looking at the charts, the competition wasn’t that strong at the time with the Top 3 stagnating rather with two hits that had been around for ages in “Return Of The Mack” and “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit”. Eventually, “Fastlove” couldn’t resist the push given to Gina G following the Eurovision Song Contest which aired two days after this TOTP.

As Wright closes the show with a massive Afro wig on for some reason, Bryan Adams wonders into shot from out of the studio audience wearing a Chelsea shirt! What?! Our host asks Bryan the question I want to know the answer to – “Are you a Chelsea fan?”. It turns out that he is and has been since about 1985 which is when he came to live in London. How did I never know that the Groover from Vancouver supported my beloved Chelsea?! Clearly I can’t have watched this particular TOTP when it aired originally.

The play out video is “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette. Like the aforementioned singles by Mark Morrison and Gina G, this was another hit that was enjoying an elongated time on the charts. Seven weeks inside the Top 40 was quite the run and this second outing on TOTP was due to it going back up the charts from No 25 to No 23 having spent the previous three weeks descending them.

As with the Smashing Pumpkins video I mentioned earlier, the promo for this one also won big at the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards collecting three gongs but losing out to Billy Corgan and co in the Video of the Year and Best Direction in a Video categories. One of those three wins was for Best Editing and you can see why with the illusion of there being four different Alanis Morissettes travelling in a car all done without any special effects. The different versions of herself are colour coded (red, green and yellow sweaters) to display different aspects of her personality. According to Alanis, the driver in the red beanie hat is the responsible one in control, yellow sweater with the braids is the quirky one, red sweater is a romantic risk taker and green sweater is the fun one who gets into trouble. To be honest though, I can’t see much to distinguish them from each other as they all just seem to spend the entire journey laughing, shouting, singing and throwing their arms about. Ok, red sweater (the risk taker) climbs out of the window and is nearly taken out by a bridge and the (responsible) driver tries to stop her but that seems a to be the only demonstration of their dominant character traits. There is a final ‘irony’ at the video’s end when the car runs out of petrol despite the start of the promo showing Alanis driving away from a petrol station. We don’t actually witness her filling up the tank though so maybe she just bought the coffee in her hand potentially confirming that “Ironic” really is the song that can’t stop not being ironic. That’s a little ironic, don’t you think?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	JX	There’s Nothing I Won’t Do	No
2	Horace Brown	One For The Money	Negative
3	Liverpool FC & Boot Room Boyz	Pass & Move (It’s The Liverpool Groove)	Never
4	Black Grape	Fat Neck	Nah
5	Gina G	Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit	Nah
6	1300 Drums featuring Unjustified Ancients of M.U.	Ooh! Aah! Cantona	As if
7	Smashing Pumpkins	Never Never	No but I probably should have
8	Bryan Adams	The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You	Nope
9	George Michael	Fastlove	I did not
10	Alanis Morissette	Ironic	No but I bought her album

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/m0021s8x/top-of-the-pops-16051996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 09 MAY 1996

Posted on August 8, 2024 by 80stastic

There’s ten hits on this episode of TOTP but we’ve seen four of them before and one of the new ones is a football song (no, not that one; not yet). We’ve also seen the presenter before and not that long ago – it’s that Beertje Van Beers woman again. I’m not sure she was any more famous than she had been the first time she hosted the show a few weeks before (despite the exposure afforded her by that appearance) so why was she back again? Was it all about how she looked? In the era of Britpop and lads mags then I suppose that was a distinct possibility.

Beertje’s first job is to introduce one of those hits we’ve seen before – it’s Suggs featuring Louchie Lou and Michie One with “Cecilia”. The last time they were on led to an infamous incident when lisping boxer Chris Eubank had to contend with a bit of a tongue twister when doing the Top 10 countdown. As A-ha’s Morten Harket once sang on “I’ve Been Losing You”, he was hissing his ‘S’s’ like a snake. Poor Chris and poor the watching British public as this was a honking cover version. I’ve said this before but Suggs’s solo career has always been completely at odds to his Madness one for me. I like Madness and have even seen them live but Suggs on his own just doesn’t compute. For some reason in the mid 90s though, his awful Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel covers won the approval of UK record buyers giving him two Top 10 hits. Parent album “The Lone Ranger” achieved silver sales status and provided Suggs with a further three smaller chart hits but by the time of his second solo album “The Three Pyramids Club” (which sounds like the title of a Richard Osman novel), this brief infatuation was over and it sank without trace. Suggs never really returned to his solo career although he did have a hit with “Blue Day” in 1997 which was the FA Cup final song for my (and his) beloved Chelsea FC (more about cup final songs later). However, just last year, he teamed up with Paul Weller for the Slade-esque spelt single “Ooh Do U Fink U R”.

I’m always very cautious when it comes to commenting on rap artists purely because I don’t know enough about their music and its culture. I’m a white man who grew up in Worcester as a pop kid. If I tried to do any kind of analysis, it would be totally inauthentic. I guess I’m still allowed an opinion on what I’m watching and hearing on these TOTP repeats though right? I can’t just skip over a rap artist appearing on the show can I? The completist in me won’t let me just swerve this so here I go. I know the name Busta Rhymes – of course I do. I spent the 90s working in record shops. Could I name any of his tracks unprompted? Not a one. Would I recognise any if I were to check out his discography? Let’s see…

*checks Busta Rhymes discography*

Oh yeah. He did “Hit ‘Em High (The Monsters Anthem)” from the Space Jam soundtrack with B-Real, Coolio, LL Cool J and Method Man. And therein lies the problem. The only Busta Rhymes hit I know is from a movie about basketball starring Bugs Bunny. I don’t have any depth of knowledge nor relevance to the world of rap. OK, I’ll have to just go for the most superficial of reviews. “Woo-Hah!! Got You All In Check” was the debut single for Busta Rhymes and would peak at No 8 in both the US and the UK. I initially thought that the BBC censor was sleeping again to have let the lines “let’s get high” and “roll some weed” get through but then I checked led out the full, explicit lyrics. Dearie me! There’s no way any of that was getting through the BBC bad language filter. Mary Whitehouse would have self combusted.

Now this is an interesting link from Beertje even though she possibly only used it for its play on words. “In Holland we have three types of people; soccer players, cheeseheads and Klubbheads” she informs us. OK, so let’s break this down. Soccer players? Well, of course the Dutch have a rich history of producing fantastic footballers. One of my mates could talk for hours about Johan Cruyff and ‘total football’. Cheeseheads? I had to do some research on this I have to admit. It’s not a term to refer to enthusiasts of Dutch cheese though that would seem legitimate. No, apparently its usage dates back to the 19th century when Holland was occupied by Napoleon’s army and Dutch cheese producers got fed up with French soldiers stealing their beloved Gouda cheese. As a form of protection when confronting said soldiers, the Dutch wore helmets made out of cheese barrels hence ‘cheeseheads’. The term actually became an insult used by the French and Belgians when referring to Dutch people. Hmm. So by making sure she shoehorned in a play on words to introduce a Dutch dance act, Beertje actually insulted her own country? Oh well.

Said dance act are a team of Dutch dance producers with more than 40 aliases for their recordings including Hi_Tack, Da Klubb Kings and my personal favourite Drunkenmunky. For this their biggest hit “Klubbhopping” however, they went by the moniker of Klubbheads. I’m not going to lie, listening back to this is just making me feel nauseous, like somebody’s taken a club to my head. Klubbheads indeed.

Finally something approaching a decent tune. Having made it big with their last single “Slight Return”, The Bluetones weren’t about to rock the boat by messing with that hit formula and so they didn’t with its follow up “Cut Some Rug” which was certainly cut from the same cloth as its predecessor. Jangly guitars, a shuffling backbeat and some acerbic lyrics (“And all the time you remind me of blitzkreig and the doodle bug, salt upon a bubbling slug”) all allied with a hummable chorus. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it was the gameplan here alright.

Having gone off on a tangent earlier when discussing the origins of the phrase ‘Cheeseheads’, let’s continue that theme with an exploration into backstory of an expression that I’ve certainly used in this blog before- ‘cut some rug’. Apparently, it dates back to the 1930s and 40s when the ‘jitterbug’ dance was popular. Owing to its high energy moves, its protagonists would leave lots of marks on the dance floor that looked like cuts in a carpet or rug. I’m not sure that ‘The Bluetones shuffle’ as demonstrated by Beerjte in her intro would inflict such damage. By the way, I might make this cultural references thing an occasional series you know! Or maybe not.

One of those nearly one hit wonders now when an artist who is only known for one big hit single but whose discography shows that they actually had a further but minor chart entry. Yeah, one of them. The Tony Rich Project was, unsurprisingly, the project of one Tony Rich (real name Antonio Jeffries), a songwriter for LaFace Records who penned compositions for the likes of Toni Braxton, Boyz II Men and TLC. He made the leap into the sphere of artist in his own right with debut single “Nobody Knows”, a tender, soulful ballad that hit big both in the US and over here. Follow up single “Like A Woman” made it to No 27 in our charts then nothing. Well, not nothing as Tony continued to record and release new material well into the new century with his last album appearing in 2017 but he would never have any other major chart success. There is no truth in the rumour that Tony’s artist name inspired the title of 1999’s supernatural horror film phenomenon The Blair Witch Project. That particular movie’s name was influenced, of course, by British soft rockers The Alan Parsons Project.

“Let’s get rocked!” as the next band once sang. Def Leppard (for it is they) hadn’t released a studio album since 1992’s “Adrenalize” filling that gap with a greatest hit and B-sides collection. When the new album finally arrived, it wasn’t quite the Def Leppard of old. There were a few reasons why, not least that the band had seen which way the wind was blowing in the arena of rock music and had understood that post grunge, the sound that had served the so well in their late 80s pomp wasn’t going to cut it in the mid 90s. Added to that was the realisation that they’d been, as described by guitarist Vivian Campbell, living in a state of arrested development singing songs about putting out the trash and that they should write more mature songs that reflected their adult experience. And there was plenty of source material – founding member Steve Clark had died in 1991, guitarist Phil Collen had got divorced, bassist Rick Savage was battling facial paralysis condition Bell’s palsy and the death of his father whilst drummer Rick Allen and lead singer Joe Elliott had been arrested for spousal abuse and assault respectively. Given all that dark and heavy material, the album’s title track and lead single “Slang” seems remarkably jaunty. I can’t say that I’ve ever listened to the rest of the album but supposedly it does see the band operating outside of their comfort zone with more industrial and electronic sounds incorporated. It garnered mixed reviews ranging from a confused mess of an album to plaudits for trying to do something new. Back to the single though and it doesn’t really go anywhere for me and sounds like a poor man’s version of “Slam” by Dan Reed Network.

The one thing that did stand out for me was Joe Elliott’s super straightened new hairdo. It put me in mind of – and this is very niche – a particular style of grooming that some owners of the Maltese breed of dog go in for. We have a Maltese dog and we make sure he has a regular trim at the dog groomers but I’ve seen owners displaying their dogs at Crufts with the fur all grown out and straight as a curtain. Poodle rock indeed.

The next three hits we have seen before on the show starting with an ex-No 1! Yes, it’s that curious TOTP phenomenon of a record having gone down the charts and either going back up or putting the blocks on its descent to such an extent of being afforded a place on the show’s running order. We saw it in an earlier 1996 show when Oasis’s “Wonderwall” got a repeat airing when it re-entered the Top 5 having dropped out of the Top 10 a few weeks earlier. Now it’s the turn of Mark Morrison whose “Return Of The Mack” is still holding at No 2 despite having been on the charts for two months. The last time Beerjte was hosting, she introduced Morrison as that week’s No 1 and he celebrated by picking her up and carrying her off at the end of the song. Thankfully, she’s put enough physical distance between them this time to ensure that doesn’t happen again. In her intro, there’s a moment where she throws a look in the direction of Morrison on the stage behind her and I’m sure you can detect something in it that says “don’t think of trying it again mister”. I hope so anyway.

I would never describe Damon Albarn as a “Charmless Man” but by his own confession, this period of Blur’s career saw him potentially as a clueless one. If that sounds harsh, look at this from Damon himself:

The following year, Damon Albarn described “Charmless Man” as “The work of someone who was severely fucked up,” adding, “Where is it coming from? It's got nothing to do with anything.” #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 5, 2024

See? I think I said in my last post when Blur were on the show performing this track in the ‘exclusive’ slot that it was a decidedly decent song and I stand by that though it’s clearly not one of their most high profile despite its chart peak of No 5. I’m sure Liam Gallagher would have dismissed it as “chimney sweep music” though. I’m not sure what drummer Dave Rowntree’s over sized drumsticks nor Graham Coxon’s shrunken guitar in this appearance were all about – presumably some band in joke. Graham’s ‘Freedom For Tooting!’ t-shirt was obviously a reference to the 70s sitcom Citizen Smith starring Robert Lindsay as hapless revolutionary Wolfie Smith. I recently listened to an interview with Lindsay and he recounted that the fame that the role brought him had its downsides including being harassed by both admiring women and jealous boyfriends on a night out and, in one extreme case, being blamed for an outbreak of football hooliganism when attending a match played by his hometown team of Ilkeston as the perpetrators had come dressed as Wolfie for the day. I’m pretty sure that Graham Coxon would never have done anything so charmless.

George Michael stays at No 1 with “Fastlove” for a second of three weeks. This track would prove to be his last hit in America, a territory that he dominated in his “Faith” era. That album provided George with six huge hit singles including four consecutive No 1s between ‘87 and ‘88. Quite phenomenal. Things started to tail off a bit with 1990’s “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1” albeit that lead single “Praying For Time” did furnish another chart topper. By the time of the “Older” album nearly a decade after his late 80s pomp, although sizeable hits, “Jesus To A Child” and “Fastlove” would peak at Nos 7 and 8 respectively whereas both hit the top spot in the UK. This was very much a role reversal of those “Faith” chart positions – of those four American No 1s, in the UK the corresponding peaks were:

2 – 11 – 8 – 13.

Although his US numbers were down, George continued to stack ‘em high over here throughout the rest of the decade. These were the chart positions of his seven single releases after “Fastlove” until the end of ‘99:

2 – 3 – 2 – 10 – 2 – 2 – 4

There may have even been cultural differences in terms of chart compilation and release strategies that explains the contrasts highlighted above but I thought they were…well…worth highlighting.

We play out with another football song but, as I said at the top of the post, it’s still not that one. This TOTP aired two days before the 1996 FA Cup final between Liverpool and Manchester United and it tuned out to be a complete damp squib of a game that was decided by a solitary goal by Eric Cantona (himself the subject of yet another football song in the Top 40 that will feature on the following TOTP repeat). Already in the charts was the cup final song by United called “Move Move Move (The Red Tribe)” which would peak at No 6. Released a week later was this effort from their ultimately defeated opponents under the name of Liverpool FC & The Boot Room Boyz. Despite losing the cup final (cream suits and all), this pile of shite actually won the chart battle when it entered the chart at No 4. With a similar title to United’s hit – “Pass & Move (It’s The Liverpool Groove)” – it also tried to capture the predominant dance sound of the time much as their rivals had. Both failed dismally. Liverpool should have just updated 1988’s “Anfield Rap” – now that was a football record with a groove.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Suggs featuring Louchie Lou and Michie One	Cecilia	Never
2	Busta Rhymes	Woo-Hah!! Got You All In Check	No
3	Klubbheads	Klubbhopping	Not likely
4	The Bluetones	Cut Some Rug	I did not
5	The Tony Rich Project	Nobody Knows	Nah
6	Def Leppard	Slang	Negative
7	Mark Morrison	Return Of The Mack	Nope
8	Blur	Charmless Man	No but I had their Great Escape album
9	George Michael	Fastlove	Another no
10	Liverpool FC & The Boot Room Boyz	Pass & Move (It’s The Liverpool Groove)	As if

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.

TOTP 02 MAY 1996

Posted on July 27, 2024 by 80stastic

When I write these reviews, I try and make reference to what else was going on at the time of the show’s broadcast either nationally, globally or indeed personally on occasion. Well, I’ve made a discovery on the last of those angles – I’ve found an old diary from 1996. I’d forgotten that I used to keep one from about 1991 to 1997. I can’t find the rest of them which were presumably lost in various house moves but the ‘96 one is intact. Now obviously I’m not going to reveal my inner most thoughts from back then but it might prove to be a gold mine for filling in some background details. So what was I doing on the day of this particular TOTP?

*refers to diary*

Ah excellent! It was my day off (I was working in the Our Price store in Stockport) so what did I do with it? I went into town to pay our council tax bill! The 27 year old me knew how to live back then! In my defence, I don’t think I paying bills by direct debit was commonplace in 1996 and though I was no poll tax rioter, I probably wanted some control over when I paid it on account of permanently being skint. Paying bills wasn’t the only thing I was doing though. In an unlikely push to better myself, I was doing two courses at this time. One was a First Aid class and the second was about 50s music. Get me! These days I struggle to read an online article in its entirety. I also note that on this day, Glenn Hoddle accepted the offer of becoming the next England manager and would be leaving my beloved Chelsea at the end of the season. I write this post the day after Gareth Southgate has just resigned as national team coach following England’s loss to Spain in the Euros 2024 final. Whilst it may have seemed as if the appointment had come a bit early in Hoddle’s career, he looked like Pep Guardiola compared to the current crop of names being lined up to replace Southgate. Graham Potter?! Do me a favour!

Now this is all very interesting (or not) but what about TOTP? What about the music? You’re right of course so let’s get to it and we start with “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit” by Gina G. Despite having been on the show at least twice already, she’s back on tonight in another promotion push as the UK’s 1996 Eurovision entry with the contest just over two weeks away. Due to the multiple appearances, Gina and her backing dancers were step and word perfect by this point and I have to say it all hangs together pretty well. Gina seemed to be channeling her inner Kylie with her glittery micro dress and wide, perma-smile and why not? One of her dancers (the one in the pink dress) looks a bit like ex-EastEnders actress Samantha Janus who of course represented the UK at Eurovision in 1991. It isn’t her but she had me fooled for a while or perhaps I should say just a little bit.

In a recent TOTP repeat, we witnessed the sad spectacle of Miss Diana Ross making a fool of herself by covering Gloria Gaynor’s disco classic “I Will Survive” as she searched desperately for a hit to keep her relevant in the mid 90s. I said at the time of reviewing her performance that we would be seeing and hearing another cover of the track very shortly and that time is now. Chantay Savage (nothing to do with Robbie, Lily or Doc) however took the track in a completely different direction, slowing it down so much that it was reconstructed as an R’n’B ballad. Although it did little for me, I give her full marks for creativity. Sadly, such imagination was lacking when it came to naming her album which was called “I Will Survive” (Doin’ It My Way)” – a more literal title it’s hard to conceive. Chantay would never have another UK hit single in her own right though she did co-write “We Got A Love Thang” for CeCe Peniston in 1993 which went Top 10.

I should have said that tonight’s host is the very affable Michelle Gayle who is perhaps being slightly disingenuous when she says in her intro to The Manchester United FA Cup Final Squad and their hit “Move Move Move (The Red Tribe)” that she doesn’t know if United will win the league and FA Cup double for the second time in three years. History records that the Red Devils did indeed do the ‘double double’ in 1996, a view that was obviously not available to Michelle seeing as those events were yet to happen but I’m pretty sure that they were red hot favourites to do so. Three days after this TOTP aired, Fergie took his team to Middlesbrough, easily won 3-0 and secured the Premier League title having successfully hunted down Newcastle United who led the table by 12 points in January, Kevin Keegan rants and all. Six days on from that, they were at Wembley for the FA Cup final against a Liverpool side who were no slouches but neither were they anywhere near the great teams of their 70s and 80s history. It would have been a shock (albeit a mild one) had the Scousers triumphed. As it turned out, the 1996 final was a terrible game with Eric Cantona’s late winner sparing us the misery of extra time. The fact that the final is best remembered for the Liverpool squad’s horrendous cream suits says everything.

Alex Ferguson’s United were in the middle of their 90s pomp but at least their dreadful cup final song for this season didn’t replicate the success of its 1994 counterpart “Come On You Reds” which inexplicably topped the charts. The good news is that unless they released one for the 1999 FA Cup final which formed part of their historic treble (I can’t recall if they did or not) this should be the last time I have to review any more of their singles. The bad news is that we haven’t seen the last of football related hits in 1996 by a long chalk.

Blimey! This next song is as dull as my diary! If I thought 3T’s last hit “Anything” was as drippy as the roofs of some of the stadiums at EURO 2024, I hadn’t reckoned on its follow up “24/7”. Jacko’s nephews have tried to inject a slightly more uptempo beat to it than its predecessor but it seems to just shine an even harsher light on how insipid a tune it is. The guy who dramatically flung his rucksack to the ground during performances of “Anything” (I’ve no idea which one he is out of Taj, Tyrell and TJ) seems to have lost his prop for this single – maybe the song wasn’t his bag (ahem).

I’m guessing that after being introduced by Chris Eubank the other week as “an absolute tottie’, Sleeper’s Louise Werner might have expected a less suggestive intro from a fellow female artist but Michelle Gayle can’t resist referring to her as “sexy” and lumping her in with similarly categorised pop star Louise (“she’s called Louise – aren’t they all?”). Louise and her band (now I’m at it, making it all about the female lead singer) are into the Top 10 for the first time with “Sale Of The Century” and to celebrate, she’s come in a top that is appropriately Britpop in style. In fact, what with that and her jumping and hopping stage moves, she’s coming across like a feminine version of Damon Albarn (more of whom later). At least she’s not just standing there statuesque (see what I did there?).

Louise would go on to be a successful author post Sleeper and before their reforming in 2017 writing both fiction and an account of her music career Just For One Day: Adventures In Britpop (also published as Different For Girls: My True–life Adventures In Pop). The blurb for that autobiography includes the line “eating Twiglets backstage and enviously eyeing up Damon Albarn’s plate of foreign cheeses”. Don’t cheddar tear over him Louise! It’ll ruin your mascarpone. These cheese puns are starting to grate now aren’t they?

As is the case with Erasure, there’s a list of every Pet Shop Boys single in my memory banks from 1985 to the early 90s that I’m pretty sure I could recite in its entirety. However, as is also the case with Erasure, it all starts to go a bit hazy around the mid 90s when, despite working in record shops for the entire decade, I must have taken my eyes off what both duos were up to. “Before” is a case in point. This track is definitely not anywhere to be found in my ageing grey matter cells. It was, however, the lead single from sixth studio album “Bilingual” which was actually Chris and Neil’s first since 1993’s “Very”. However, there had been Pet Shop Boys releases in the meantime in the form of the collections “Disco 2” and “Alternative” which were a remix album and B-sides compilation respectively.

“Bilingual” didn’t appear until the start of September so “Before” preceded it by four months making it feel like a stand alone single which maybe explains why I don’t remember it. I do recall second single “Se a vida é (That’s The Way Life Is)” which came out a few weeks before the album which is presumably why I would have sworn that was its lead single. Why the early release date for “Before”? I’m not sure but Wikipedia tells me that in 1995, Neil and Chris ended their contract with the American arm of EMI and singled with Atlantic who launched a renewed marketing campaign to promote the duo in the US so maybe that had something to do with it? Or maybe they wanted to consolidate on the success they had achieved with their collaboration on “Hallo Spaceboy” with David Bowie in the February and didn’t want to leave a gap of six months until their next single? Either way, I’m not sure “Before” deserves all this retrospective attention and consideration as it’s a pretty weak track in my opinion. Sure it was a Top 10 hit but the Pet Shop Boys fan base would always guarantee that for a release of brand new material. It’s not terrible it’s just not that memorable. Listening to it now, I could imagine its chorus being sung by (the horror!) Take That on one of their 90s hits. Even the video is just full of special effects and computer graphics which seems to dominate all their promos around this time and which showed a lack of foresight as they have dated so much as to appear naff now if not…erm… before.

The last time The Cure were on the show performing “The 13th” I wasn’t especially complimentary about the song. I’m not the only person who has a downer on it. A regular reader of this blog commented that the whole album it was taken from – “Wild Mood Swings” – was such a disappointment when it came out and the fact that “The 13th” was one of the better tracks on it shows how poor it was. Online forums seemed to be split in their judgement on it. Some people rate it in their Top 10 songs by The Cure whilst others state (and I quote) “The 13th is justifiably shat on by most fans” and that “it sounds like something brought up from the sewer”. On reflection, have I been too harsh? Sure, it’s a bit out there and maybe not what we might have expected but look at their back catalogue. The Cure have always innovated and reinvented themselves. Look at the difference between “The Walk” and “The Lovecats” first example – two non-album singles that were released within four months of each other in 1983 but were years apart sonically it seemed to me. If only “The 13th” could have peaked at No 13 instead of its actual high of No 15, my musical itch would have been scratched.

If asked to come up with a song by the Smashing Pumpkins then “Tonight, Tonight” would be the only track I could name with total confidence. Nothing to do with the Genesis hit which almost shared the same title (theirs had an extra ‘Tonight’ in it), there’s a reason why this one has stood tall and proud in my music recollections – it’s magnificent. A sprawling epic masterpiece, it was recorded with a 30 piece string section courtesy of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It’s one of those rare songs where the standout hook of the chorus is actually purely instrumental with no vocal, well for me it is anyway. Those swooping, descending strings allied to rousing guitars and a galloping drum riff – remarkable stuff. Somehow though it didn’t make me explore their material any further. Maybe I should do now that investigating an artist’s back catalogue is so much easier due to streaming platforms like Spotify. As for host Michelle Gayle’s claim that although it was the band’s first appearance on the show that she was sure it wouldn’t be the last, as far as I can tell, they never made it back to the TOTP studio despite having a further five UK Top 40 hits.

George Michael is straight in at No 1 with “Fastlove” just as he did with previous single “Jesus To A Child”. This was impressive stuff given it was all happening at the peak of Britpop and George’s chart toppers had been a melancholic ballad and then a funky, R&B workout. The successful streak continued when parent album “Older” was released eleven days after this TOTP aired and immediately went to No 1, going on to sell 1.8 million copies in the UK. It was quite a comeback given his last studio album had been six years earlier.

It wasn’t the first time he’d had consecutive No 1 singles. His first two solo hits “Careless Whisper” and “A Different Corner” both scaled the heights albeit two years apart and punctuated by a raft of Wham! releases. If you count his 1987 duet with Aretha Franklin “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)” then it’s three on the bounce. Similarly, if you go back to George’s involvement in the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert and his version of “Somebody To Love” on the “Five Live EP” in 1993, then there’s also a run of three No 1s including “Jesus To A Child” and “Fastlove”. However, despite a subsequent string of No 2 hits, the latter would prove to be his final UK chart topper.

Perhaps lazily, when talking about the Battle of Britpop in the Summer of 1995, the phrase ‘Blur won the battle but Oasis won the war’ is often trotted out. This translates as “Country House” beat “Roll With It” to No1 but in terms of albums, “(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?” sold loads more than “The Great Escape”. Whilst that is true with the former achieving sales equivalent to seventeen times platinum compared to the latter’s three times, Blur’s fourth studio album sometimes unfairly gets a bad rap. Yes, all the critical plaudits go to “Modern Life Is Rubbish” and “Parklife” for being musical milestones and I don’t disagree but if you apply a purely statistical analysis, “The Great Escape” is the only Blur album to furnish the band with four Top 10 hits including a No 1. 1997’s eponymous follow up album came close to matching that accomplishment but was let down by fourth single “M.O.R.” peaking at No 15. The fourth single from “The Great Escape” was “Charmless Man” which is a decidedly decent song that doesn’t have the profile it maybe deserves with TOTP not contributing to it by only showing 30 seconds of its video over the closing credits. Said video features the actor Jean-Marc Barr as the titular protagonist who would be one of the actors regularly employed by the controversial film director Lars Von Triers in his movies. In this very year of 1996, the first of his Golden Heart Trilogy of movies was released. Breaking The Waves though, is one of the most miserable films I have ever seen – truly charmless.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Gina G	Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit	I did not
2	Chantay Savage	I Will Survive	No
3	The Manchester United FA Cup Final Squad	Move Move Move (The Red Tribe)	Never!
4	3T	24/7	I’ll give you one guess…
5	Sleeper	Sale Of The Century	Nope
6	Pet Shop Boys	Before	Negative
7	The Cure	The 13th	Nah
8	Smashing Pumpkins	Tonight, Tonight	Apparently not but I really should have
9	George Michael	Fastlove	It’s another no
10	Blur	Charmless Man	No but I had The Great Escape album

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/m0020sr3/top-of-the-pops-02051996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP Rewind – the 90s

My memories of 90s chart music

Author: 80stastic

TOTP 26 JUL 1996

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TOTP 19 JUL 1996

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TOTP 28 JUN 1996

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TOTP 21 JUN 1996

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TOTP 14 JUN 1996

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TOTP 06 JUN 1996

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TOTP 30 MAY 1996

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TOTP 16 MAY 1996

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TOTP 09 MAY 1996

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TOTP 02 MAY 1996

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