Author: 80stastic

TOTP 18 SEP 1998

Posted on by 80stastic

There was something going on with the scheduling and timing of shows at this point in TOTP history. The programmes were less than 30 minutes long it seems because the BBC had embarked upon a programme of repeating episodes of Fawlty Towers straight after our weekly dose of chart songs. As they were 35 minutes long, TOTP was truncated to allow them to fit. The Fawlty Towers episode being shown following this particular show was ‘Waldorf Salad’ which is one of my favourites. The scene where the American guest tells Basil to lay it on the line to his chef (who Basil has let go home early) that he’ll “bust his ass” if he hasn’t got the ingredients to make a Waldorf salad is just brilliant.

The other thing happening was that TOTP was being repeated in a late night slot, after midnight on Sunday morning, similar, I guess, to how these BBC4 repeats get shown again in the early hours. There’s something odd about the late night repeat of this show but we’ll get to that in time. Kate Thornton is our host and guess what? The first song of the night is last week’s No 1 which is no longer No 1 but which is being shown anyway. This was a standard and established Chris Cowey tactic by now as he fought to battle the constant flow of changing chart toppers. I get it (sort of) – why only show a big selling record just once especially if it hangs around the Top 10 for a while after debuting at No 1? However, the optics of this practice are odd – ending one show and beginning the next with the same song (and in some cases the same performance). Maybe that’s exaggerated though in these BBC4 repeats with two shows aired back to back. Was it not so noticeable at the time of original broadcast when seven days of viewers’ lives had passed since the last time they’d seen a performance of that song?

This week’s last week No 1 (if you get my drift) is “Booty Call” by All Saints who have dropped from the summit to No 7 in just one week which doesn’t bode well for a long lasting hit. Hang on, let me check the official charts database…

…no, it didn’t hang around the charts long at all. Just five weeks in the Top 40 in total and only two of those inside the Top 10. In fairness, it was the fourth single lifted from their album which had been out for about 10 months by this point so the fact that they’d got to No 1 at all was an achievement (or clever first week of release price discounting you might argue). The group (or record label London) weren’t done with that album just yet though and an improbable fifth single was released from it in late November and it made it to No 7. Presumably, this was to give the album a sales boost just before Christmas and also allowed them to add a promotional sticker to saying something along the lines of ‘includes the No 1s Never Ever, Under The Bridge/Lady Marmalade and Booty Call plus the Top 10 hits I Know Where It’s At and War Of Nerves’. I seem to recall that reorders of the album at this point did actually have such a sticker applied to them and it was green in colour to match the cover artwork. The things you remember. Now, where did I put my house keys?

Next up an American band whom I’m guessing, traditionally wouldn’t have had the ingredients for a Waldorf salad at the top of their rider list for their gigs. Anyway, Kate Thornton is suggesting to us that Aerosmith have put on a concert just for TOTP which can’t be right can it? She seems pretty convinced though; in fact she’s “full on” sure about it as she’s says the phrase twice in the space of a few seconds in her intro to “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing”. Come on Kate – I thought you were a safe pair of hands.

As with All Saints, this was only on the show just last week as well. Now, after double checking the chart stats in this one, I can confirm that despite all the success this single had globally, in the UK it actually went down the charts from No 12 to No 14 this week in 1998. Despite that fall, Chris Cowey had it back on the show and this extra exposure would catapult it into the Top 10 where it would spend the next two months, peaking at No 4. So, the question is, would the worldwide success the song received have been replicated in the UK without Cowey’s decision to ignore them descending the charts and have them on the show again for a second consecutive week? And what was the reasoning behind that decision? Here’s a third question though – am I overestimating the influence and pull that TOTP wielded at this point? I fear I may be. Back in the 80s, the show could make or break a hit but in 1998 was that still the case? I’m not sure. Probably the fact that the film it was taken from – Armageddon – had been released in UK cinemas by this point maybe had something to do with the song’s success. Still, it’s best to consider all angles with these things. I wouldn’t want you to miss a thing after all.

Returning to Fawlty Towers, a writer in The Guardian once described Jarvis Cocker as having “long Basil Fawlty legs” and you can see where they were coming from as the two do share a similar physicality. Said physicality is centre stage in this performance which would prove to be a valedictory one for Pulp for the 90s. Yes, “Party Hard” was their last hit of the decade and also the final single to be released from their “This Is Hardcore” album. Following “Different Class” was always going to be a big ask but I’m not sure anybody would have predicted the disparity in sales that would unfold. “Different Class” went four times platinum selling over a million copies whilst “This Is Hardcore” would sell a tenth of that. This was reflected in the chart positions of the latter’s four singles which achieve the following peak positions:

8 – 12 – 22 – 29

In the case of “Party Hard”, its chances were hamstrung by the second CD single including remixes of the track that were too long to count as sales according to recently introduced chart eligibility regulations. Talk about an own goal. Written about clubbers having to come to terms with ageing out of the nightlife scene, it’s a decent song but hardly one of their most memorable. All the reviews I’ve read about it point to Jarvis’s vocal sounded (deliberately?) like David Bowie but if I hadn’t read that beforehand, I’m not sure I would have picked up on it. Maybe I’m just not a big enough Bowie aficionado. I did pick up on the strange look this performance has with the cheerleading-type dancers and the studio audience holding helium filled balloons behind the band which lends the balloons an unnatural look as if they were lollipops or something. I’m not completely convinced that it all hangs together cohesively to be honest. And talking of honesty, when was the last time I was in a nightclub? I think it was in Manchester in 1999 when I would have been 31 which does seem to be too old for that type of thing on reflection.

There are plenty of examples of music stars whose offspring have followed their parents into the charts. Off the top of my head there’s Billy Ray Cyrus/Miles Cyrus, Bob Marley/Ziggy Marley, Frank Sinatra/Nancy Sinatra and John Lennon/Julian Lennon. There’s a sub genre though that isn’t so easy to name examples from. Parents who were in a pop group whose children also went on to be in bands with their own siblings. How many are there out there? There’s Wilson Phillips, 3T and…erm…The Osmond Boys? Well, add to that list Alisha’s Attic who were sisters Shelley and Karen Poole, the daughters of Brian Poole of Brian Poole and The Tremeloes fame. Having established themselves as a bona fide chart artist in 1996/97 with four hit singles and a Top 20 album, the time had come to progress that success with a second album and they had a very consistent yardstick to live up to. Look at these chart peaks for those first four singles:

14 – 12 – 12 – 12

As it turned out, the lead single from that sophomore album would continue the streak admirably by going to No 13. “The Incidentals” was its title and it was more, thoughtful, tuneful, well constructed pop on which they had made their name. However, it didn’t really push any musical boundaries and was reliant on their fanbase wanting more of the same. Initially they did with parent album “Ilumnia” also going Top 20 but by the time of third album “The House We Built” in 2001, times and tastes had changed and it disappointed commercially with the duo splitting soon after.

Both sisters went on to be very successful songwriters for other artists including Kylie Minogue, Lily Allen, Rita Ora, Sugababes, Boyzone and Westlife. Shelley is also a member of alt-country band Red Sky July with her husband Ally McErlaine (ex of Texas) who my wife caught recently as support for Eddie Reader at the Cottingham Folk Festival. Very good they were too apparently.

Whilst looking into the career history of the Honeyz, I discovered that they had appeared on ITV’s The Big Reunion show in 2013. The premise of the show was to get seven acts who were big in the 90s to reform and rehearse for a comeback show at the Hammersmith Apollo. Basically, it was a steal of MTV’s Bands Reunited from a decade earlier. Anyway, some of The Big Reunion episodes are on YouTube so I checked the Honeyz one out and one of the revelations that came out was that one of the members of the band couldn’t really sing, used to have her microphone turned off when performing and was only recruited for her looks! I’ll leave you to guess who that was but it got me thinking about members of bands throughout musical history who didn’t really do anything. Now, I’m not saying I agree that the people on the list below contributed nothing at all but that in some people’s/the media’s perception, they didn’t:

  • Sid Vicious (Sex Pistols)
  • Andrew Ridgeley (Wham!)
  • Bez (Happy Mondays)
  • Paul Rutherford (Frankie Goes To Hollywood)
  • Craig ‘Ken’ Logan (Bros)
  • Anyone in Boyzone who wasn’t Ronan Keating or Stephen Gately

OK, the last one is a bit facetious but you get my point. As for the Honeyz, OK it was Naima Belkhiati who had her microphone turned off (allegedly), the one on the left in this performance. There, she’s been “Finally Found” out.

No! Surely not?! It can’t be?! The aforementioned Boyzone are on the show AGAIN?! WHY?! That’s five out of the last six weeks they’ve featured. Yes, OK “No Matter What” was No 1 for three of those appearances and it stayed at No 3 for three consecutive weeks after that but even so!

Look, I’ve nothing else to say about this one. Instead, here’s Basil Fawlty to describe my frustration at its reappearance with actions saying much more than my words ever could.

Right, this is the point where this episode gets a bit complicated as previously mentioned. The version of the show that I watched and that exists currently on iPlayer featured T–Spoon and a track called “Sex On The Beach” which was at No 2 in the charts. However, back in 1998, the version that aired in the show’s usual early evening slot had Steps “One For Sorrow” on in place of T-Spoon. When the late night repeat aired in the early hours of Sunday morning, it was T-Spoon and not Steps who featured. So what gives? Well, apparently the BBC had received complaints from listeners to the Radio 1 Chart Show the previous Sunday when “Sex On The Beach” was played having debuted at No 2. Apparently, the lyrics “I wanna have sex on the beach, come on move your body” which are repeated throughout were the cause of the offence and so the BBC took the decision to not show it in the pre-watershed show at 7.30 as originally intended. However, presumably to pacify all those involved in the T-Spoon hit, a performance was recorded and it was shown (instead of Steps) in the late night rerun. Was the BBC right to take such action? On reflection, it seems a peculiar hill to die on. There have been far more controversial records to have charted and appear on the show than this one surely?! Just recently, a 1998 TOTP repeat included “Horny” by Mousse T – was that not cut from a similar cloth? Or was it the use of the word ‘sex’ that rattled the BBC powers that be? If so, how come “Generation Sex” by The Divine Comedy was on the very next week? I’ve checked out the rest of the lyrics and I’m not convinced they were a danger to the moral well being of the nation’s youth to be honest. Most of it I can’t understand anyway but there’s a reference to ‘ding-a-ling’, a term which didn’t stop Chuck Berry having a No 1 hit in 1972 based on the double entendre. Anyway, what’s surely more offensive is the way the thing sounded which was atrocious. I think I spotted the following influences in its composition:

  • The naffness of Peter Andre
  • The ‘toasting’ style of Chaka Demus and Pliers
  • The hollow production of Ace Of Base
  • The inane sing-along chanting of Inner Circle’s “Sweat (A La La La La Long)”

It’s hardly a ringing endorsement. As for T-Spoon, they defended themselves by stating that “Sex On The Beach” referred to the name of the infamous cocktail but nobody was really buying that. The whole thing was a sorry episode from start to finish.

Robbie Williams has bagged his first No 1 single with ”Millennium” and to celebrate that he’s performing the song in a dress and not just any dress but a sheer, floor length gown through which you could see his undergarments. I guess the obvious question is ‘why?’. So I asked AI. It had an answer for me which I could have guessed if I’d thought about it a bit more. According to AI it was a “provocative and attention-grabbing choice…designed to be memorable and push boundaries”. Yes, probably. Or was he just copying David Beckham wearing a sarong skirt just a few months earlier which caused a tabloid frenzy? In any case, he wasn’t the first nor the last music star to don a dress. David Bowie was famously photographed in a cream and blue satin dress whilst reclining on a chaise lounge for the cover of the UK release of his “The Man Who Sold The World” album. In 2020, Harry Styles was the first male to feature on the cover of Vogue magazine and he did so wearing a Gucci dress and just to come full circle on this post, although I don’t think Basil Fawlty ever wore a dress, I’m pretty sure John Cleese has at some point in his career.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1All SaintsBooty CallIt’s a no from me
2AerosmithI Don’t Want To Miss A ThingNegative
3PulpParty HardI did not
4Alisha’s AtticThe IncidentalsNope
5HoneyzFinally FoundNah
6BoyzoneNo Matter WhatBig NO
7T-SpoonSex On The BeachAs if
8Robbie WilliamsMillenniumAnd 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/m002lvjr/top-of-the-pops-18091998

TOTP 11 SEP 1998

Posted on by 80stastic

In the 1997 ‘epilogue’post, I hinted that my mental health had taken a dip that year and that in 1998 it would turn into a full blown crisis. I think the BBC4 TOTP repeats schedule has arrived at the beginning of that time. I was working as the Assistant Manager of the Stockport branch of Our Price where I had been for three and a half years but our manager, whom I’d had a good working relationship with, had recently been transferred to another branch. I think she requested a move as she’d had enough of Stockport after a year – it was a big unit and took a lot of managing and could be quite stressful at times. We also had a HMV down the road so we had a lot of pressure on us to generate decent sales under stiff competition. I didn’t blame her for having had enough and she duly transferred to a smaller store with a staff of just four and get this, their names were Lisa, Lisa, Lisa and Elisa!

Anyway, that meant my store needed a new manager and, having done that role temporarily the year before, I wasn’t about to put my hat in the ring again. The new manager appointed was somebody I’d worked with before much earlier in my time at Our Price so I felt reassured that it was someone I already knew and had got on with OK. It turned out that he had changed quite a bit in the intervening years and was much more hard nosed and ruthless in his dealings with people. I won’t give his name as that would be unfair but some ex-colleagues who may be reading this can probably guess his identity. Suffice to say things went badly wrong very quickly and never recovered. Our relationship was a train wreck. We had totally opposite views on how to treat people and his approach to me was “you go home when the job is done” rather than by what time the clock says. Going to work became a daunting task progressing to being something to actually be worried about. In a couple of months, I’d reached breaking point and one morning I just couldn’t get out of our flat to go to work and kept pacing around it, over breathing and basically having a panic attack. It led to me being off work for five weeks and being transferred to a smaller store I had worked at previously. I didn’t go back to Stockport for 18 years after that morning, long after I’d left record retail behind. I’m not saying that the manger was solely the reason for my mental health issues; it was probably an accumulation of a lot of things but he was certainly a catalyst. Given all that, I’m guessing I might not like too many of the songs in the charts at this time as they could have negative associations linked to them? Let’s see…

How wrong could I be as we start with a banger from a perhaps unexpected source. “Everybody Get Up” is, for me, easily the best thing Five ever did (even if the pickings are slim). Famously based around samples from “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll”, that track was originally released by The Arrows in the 70s but is better known for the version by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts from 1982. Whoever in the Five camp came up with the idea to plunder that song was a genius with the boy band’s track brimming with bravado and swagger and making use of the rapping skills of J and Abz to full effect. I’m not entirely sure what the lyrics are all about but there’s a definite nod to a number of film titles including Lost Boys, Armageddon, The Fifth Element and Hound of the Baskervilles. There also some rather left field name checks for Fujian wrestler Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka and American mafioso and crime boss John Gotti. Actually, scrap the left field description of Gotti as Wikipedia tells me that he has a whole host of cultural references both pre and post the Five single including in tracks by House Of Pain, Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z and the hit single “King Of New York” by Fun Lovin’ Criminals. Who knew? Clearly not me. Something else I didn’t know until now is that Abz doesn’t rap the line “I’m lyrically black” which I’d always misheard and thought was a strange thing to say but “I’m lyrically blessed” which does make more sense.

A proper one hit wonder next (in the UK at least) but in the case of Jennifer Paige, her song was enduring enough to still be played on daytime radio to this day. “Crush” was a huge international hit – check out its numbers:

  • No 1 in three countries – Australia, Canada and New Zealand
  • Four weeks at No 3 in the US selling 700,000 copies
  • No 4 in the UK and France going gold in both territories

You could hear why it had all that success. A very accessible sound with broad mainstream appeal, confident vocal delivery and that winning hook of the little breathy sigh that punctuates the chorus. All very well constructed and yet…I didn’t like it much. I possibly should have but it didn’t grab me – competent but not commanding. Jennifer couldn’t build on the success of “Crush” much like those who had come before her including Alannah Myles, Paula Cole, Meredith Brooks, Billie Myers and Donna Lewis. After losing both her parents within two weeks of each other, Paige retreated into herself and lost her love of performing, choosing instead to write for others but she did release a crowd funded album in 2016. Incidentally, her full name is Jennifer Paige Scoggins and her surname was presumably considered an obstacle to promotion by her record company and so dropped from her stage name. Fast forward three decades and we seem a little more forgiving off such monikers…

Sometimes I forget when reviewing these TOTP repeats that they were different times when they were recorded and broadcast and things that would raise an eyebrow if not outrage today, were seen as perfectly acceptable back then. For example, I don’t think I would have been staring at the TV, mouth gaping at tonight’s host Jamie Theakston saying “More top transatlantic totty now” in his segue between Jennifer Paige and the next artist Sheryl Crow but I can’t imagine someone on the BBC saying the phrase ‘top totty’ nowadays – bias issues and ‘errors of judgement’ when it comes to editing yes but people saying “top totty”? I doubt it…unless it was Boris Johnson of course.

Anyway, Sheryl Crow. She’s on the show for a second time to promote her latest single “My Favourite Mistake” which has entered the charts at No 9 after her pre-release TOTP performance the other week. Heavily rumoured to be about her ex-Eric Clapton (which Crow denies), in an interview on the Songfacts website with her writing partner Jeff Trott, he speculated that marriage between the two had been on the cards but that their relationship didn’t last as Clapton would have wanted a very traditional marriage with Sheryl in a housewife role which she was clearly never going to agree to. Clapton is well known for holding some dodgy views. In 1976 during a concert in Birmingham, he voiced vile, racist comments, endorsing politician Enoch Powell and using the National Front slogan ‘Keep Britain White’. Using the phrase ‘top totty’ seems pretty small fry compared to that.

Just as with Boyzone on the previous show, last week’s No 1 is getting a repeat despite dropping down the charts and for similar reasons – they had an album coming out on the Monday after this TOTP aired. I’m not convinced that’s a valid reason but then I guess that’s down to record company marketing and promotion strategies. The lucky recipients of this additional exposure are Manic Street Preachers and their single “If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next” which was the lead single from that aforementioned album “This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours”. My main memory of that album wasn’t that it was the band’s first chart topper nor that it produced four hit singles but that it had a part in getting me chucked out of a record shop. Let me explain. It wasn’t the store I worked in but a rival one. Remember I said we had an HMV just down the road from us? Well, it wasn’t them either. No, it was another retailer who I believe were called Music Zone. I think that the chain had began in Stockport as a one shop operation but had expanded with stores in other town centres. Indeed, they bought all of MVC’s failing stores in 2005 to become a 104 unit empire. I’m not sure if the Music Zone in Stockport in 1998 was the original shop or not (somebody reading this might be able to confirm) but I recall that you had to climb a set of stairs to get into the shop and that they also sold a load of miscellaneous items like badges as well.

Anyway, original shop or not, this store had relaunched in Stockport around 1998 and it had come to our attention at Our Price that they were knocking out some chart CDs for around £9.99 and severely undercutting us in the process. During an Area Manager visit, the topic was discussed and a visit to Music Zone was proposed to see what was going on. Myself, the Area Manager and the store manager (yes, that one) donned our coats and went for a snoop, trying not to look too conspicuous. It turned out that Music Zone had somehow got their hands on some cheap imports of certain chart titles of which the newly released Manics album was one. The Area Manager and our store manager took a copy of it to the counter and demanded to know who was supplying them with this stock at which point the Music Zone manager told us to leave his store and called for security to make sure we left the premises. And that’s the story of how the Manic Street Preachers helped to get me thrown out of a record shop.

Up to this point, if the average punter in the street had been asked what was Aerosmith’s biggest hit, I’m guessing they might have gone for “Dude (Looks Like A Lady)” or their collaboration with Run-D.M.C. on “Walk This Way” or perhaps their debut 1973 hit “Dream On” but all three of those hits were about to be blown out of the water by a song that they didn’t write themselves. Penned by the prolific and legendary songwriter Diane Warren, “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” was the theme song to the sci-fi film Armageddon starring Bruce Willis, Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck. Warren originally envisioned it being sung by someone like Celine Dion who had, of course, already one huge ballad from a movie to her name. Another artist in the frame was U2 who again had their own track record when it came to soundtrack songs having contributed “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” to the Batman Forever movie. However, once Steven Tyler’s daughter Liv was cast in the film, attention turned towards Aerosmith.

Although, their late 80s/early 90s comeback had re-established them as a rock super power, by 1998, their fortunes, if not waning, were stalled rather by Tyler’s ACL injury which forced the band off the road in the April. With momentum lost, they needed a commercial boost once Tyler returned and boy did they get it with “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing”. No 1 around the world including America where it topped the charts for four weeks, it is easily their biggest selling hit ever. A huge, strings drenched ballad, it even had what sounded like an overture at its beginning just to up the ante and leave the listener in no doubt about the scale of what was coming. I think they pull it off admirably too. Would U2 have done it better? No, I think it would have been different but not better. As for Celine Dion, I’m guessing it would have been unlistenable (for me) in her hands/voice. As for the film, I didn’t catch it at the cinema and I don’t think I’ve seen it all the way through from start to finish but have seen the ending so I’m unlikely to seek it out for a full viewing though anything with Steve Buscemi in it is usually with doing so.

Here’s a hit the lyrics of which include some pretty high brow literary references and yet there seems to be a disparity between them and the name of the band performing the song. Shakespeare, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and…erm…Hole. Just me? OK then. How about the title of the song itself and those heavyweight literary names? “Celebrity Skin” was also the name of a pornographic magazine specialising in celebrity nudity. Still me that finds it a bit jarring? The lead single and title track from their third studio album, this was seen as a definitive move towards a more commercial sound. It’s still blistering, in your face indie rock but perhaps the contribution of Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan (including the guitar riffs) had an effect. It would give the band their second biggest hit in the UK. Right, my last attempt to highlight the incongruity of those literary references and the song – it soundtracks the ‘tongue twizzler’ scene in American Pie. Gulp!

That last bit got a bit unintentionally overly sexual but I’m afraid that the theme continues with the new No 1 which is “Booty Call” by All Saints. A third consecutive chart topper for the group, we all know what that the title refers to. Then there’s the fact that Melanie Blatt is clearly pregnant and unless it was an immaculate conception then she’d clearly had the birds and the bees chat. I didn’t like this one much and thought it easily the weakest hit they’d had so far. It was just a groove rather than a song and they seemed to be trying too hard to be En Vogue rather than All Saints. I did appreciate the jerky, slow motion dance moves the group were doing in this performance – was this for the benefit of Melanie whose movements were understandably restricted?

A few years ago, I went on a work colleague’s stag do in Leeds. I didn’t know that many people there but it was a good night anyway. Why am I telling you this? Because it transpired the next morning that one of the party had actually made a booty call in the early hours of the morning. It was quite the revelation not the least because it made me realise that a booty call was actually a thing that real people do and not a culturally concocted myth. I’m so naive.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1FiveEverybody Get UpLike it as I did, I couldn’t bring myself to buy a single by Five. I’m a music snob as well as naive
2Jennifer PaigeCrushI did not
3Sheryl CrowMy Favourite MistakeNah
4Manic Street PreachersIf You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be NextNo
5AerosmithI Don’t Want To Miss A ThingLike Armageddon, I gave it a miss
6Hole Celebrity SkinNope
7All SaintsBooty CallNo but I think my wife and the 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/m002lj3r/top-of-the-pops-11091998

TOTP 04 SEP 1998

Posted on by 80stastic

With Jo Whiley having vacated her seat in the TOTP presenter merry-go-round recently, it’s time for Kate Thornton to take centre stage. Having already passed the audition with her guest stint back in July (when Jayne Middlemiss was ill supposedly), here she was as a fully fledged member of the team. I quite liked her – she seemed like a safe pair of hands and, crucially, didn’t do that knowing head tilt/smirk thing that Middlemiss did ALL THE TIME!

Speaking of things that happened on the show all the time, here are Boyzone singing “No Matter What” for the fourth week in a row. Yes, I know they were also the last artist we saw on the previous show thereby making a curious set of bookend appearances but that was no unusual occurrence in the Chris Cowey era. And yes, I know they had slipped from No 1 to No 3 but again, that was no obstacle to consecutive appearances under Cowey. However, he was really taking the piss this time though as this was literally just a reshowing of the same performance that ended last week’s show! Unlike their previous appearances, the lads weren’t all in matching outfits this time – it was hardly dress down Friday stuff but it was a more casual approach all the same. According to Kate Thornton, the reason for them being on the show again was to acknowledge that that their latest album “Where We Belong” had gone back to No 1 in the album charts off the back of “No Matter What”. Having checked, this is true – it had debuted at No 1 back in June and then spent three months kicking around the upper end of the charts before jumping from No 21 to the top again this week. OK, so you could argue that was, indeed, reason enough to grant them another slot in the running order (I don’t agree as it goes).

What doesn’t make sense here though is that “Where We Belong” originally didn’t include “No Matter What”, the song that was sparking all this interest in the album and generating all those sales. A special edition came out in the November that included it plus “I Love The Way You Love Me” which was subsequently released as a single but back in September, the original UK version of the album didn’t feature “No Matter What”. This clearly didn’t matter to the record buying public as they helped create a Joe Cocker / Jennifer Warnes* moment for the lads pushing “Where We Belong” up to the top spot.

*”Up Where We Belong”? No? Please yourselves.

Steps weren’t helping themselves when it came to dispelling those ‘ABBA on speed’ accusations were they? Third single “One For Sorrow” actively encouraged those comparisons with its pure pop confection ways. I know I’ve previously dismissed them as bubblegum/ candy floss but time retrospectively seems to have been kind to this particular track with the Official UK Chart inducting it into their ‘Pop Gem Hall of Fame’. Clearly taking inspiration from the traditional children’s nursery rhyme about counting magpies, it would peak at No 2 becoming their then biggest hit. For any one of my age though, the phrase ‘one for sorrow’ will always be associated with the legendary kids TV programme Magpie…

For those who don’t know it, Magpie was the delinquent cousin to BBC’s Blue Peter. Way cooler and with much hipper (and attractive) presenters, it was to Blue Peter what Tiswas was to Multi Coloured Swap Shop. So would Steps have been Magpie or Blue Peter viewers?

Next up is one of the shortest chart hits of the year. Clocking in at just two minutes long (though Kate Thornton gets her maths wrong by calling it “178 seconds of pure Mansun action” which by my reckoning is nearly three minutes – maybe she wasn’t such a safe pair of hands after all?) “Being A Girl (Part 1)” was Mansun’s ninth consecutive Top 40 hit. Taken from their “Six” album, in its original format it was 7:53 long but it was chopped up and its opening two minutes were released as the lead track from their “Nine EP” (hence the “Part 1” suffix). Its frenetic, almost pop-punk pace was at odds with the band’s previous output. Apparently, “Part 2” is of a much more experimental rock nature though I can’t say I’ve ever listened to it. Now, when I said that “One For Sorrow” by Steps was inspired by the children’s nursery rhyme about counting magpies, I hadn’t bargained on it being completely trumped by the origin of one of Mansun’s lyrics. Check these out:

Blimey! I reckon Zhou would have been a Blue Peter fan rather than a Magpie viewer then.

Before the revolving door of members that was/is (?) the Sugababes, there was the Honeyz. Yes, perhaps the most notable thing about this lot was the times that their line up changed with individuals leaving and returning multiple times. Here though, they were in their infancy with their original members and debut hit “Finally Found”. Its smooth production and sound with a trip-off-the-tongue chorus was always going to find a home in the upper echelons of the charts at this time when you couldn’t move for all girl groups peddling a pop infused R&B sound. However, I did find myself asking whether saturation point was being reached? I mean, they weren’t really offering anything new were they? It could have been Eternal up there on stage singing that song couldn’t it?

Just like Eternal, the Honeyz had a member leave the group just as their success began but for Louise Nurding read Heavenli Roberts (formerly Abdi) who dropped out after just two singles. Unlike Louise though, she would rejoin the group, leave again, rejoin again, leave again, rejoin, leave one more time before finally rejoining with her current status being a fully paid up member of Honeyz. Confused? You will be. Her replacement the first time she left was Mariama Goodman who we saw on TOTP just the other week as part of Solid HarmoniE. Her time with her new group was short lived (about 14 months) before she left and was replaced by the retuning Heavenli Abdi. She would remain with the group until 2003 when they spilt following diminishing commercial returns and being dropped by their label. However, following an appearance by the original line up on ITV’s Hit Me, Baby, One More Time show in 2005, the group was reactivated and went back out on tour. However, Naima Belkhiati wanted to pursue an acting career and so was replaced for said tour by Candace Cherry, sister of lead vocalist Célena. By August of 2006, it was all change again as Heavenli Abdi departed for the second time and was replaced by Mariam Goodman (again). They continued with this line up until 2010 when the group went into hibernation. Two years on and Honeyz were back once more, lured together by another ITV show The Big Reunion and for this convening, the trio was Cherry, Abdi and Goodman, the first time that the latter two had been in the same line up together. The trio toured throughout 2013 before Abdi left for a third time in 2014. The duo of Cherry and Goodman released the first Honeyz single for 14 years in 2015 but it failed to chart. Over the next few years the duo would appear in reality TV shows such as Celebrity Coach Trip and Pointless Celebrities before, in 2023, Abdi announced she had rejoined the group. Within a year Goodman left again was replaced by Candace Cherry which is the current state of the line up. Phew! I’ve finally found the end of the story of the Honeyz group changes. Got all that? Good.

“Now watch out Songs Of Praise. The big fella’s got a new job. Haven’t you heard? God’s a DJ”. So says Kate Thornton in her intro to the next hit which can only be “God Is A DJ” by Faithless. I can’t recall such casual blasphemy since football commentator Alan Parry called Liverpool legend “the creator supreme” back in the early 80s. As Danny Baker said in his Match Of The 80s series, “The creator supreme? One in the eye for Christians everywhere there”.

Apparently, the inspiration for the track’s title came from a slogan on a T-shirt that the band’s guitarist Dave Randall used to wear to rehearsal if you were wondering. This was the lead single from the band’s second album “Sunday 8PM” and whilst there appears to be a lot going on sonically, my main take away from re-listening to it was that it seemed like there was a void where maybe some lyrics could/should have been. I get that it’s a dance track and so maybe words aren’t the thing but if you call said track a provocative title like “God Is A DJ”, I was hoping for a bit more than the late Maxi Jazz repeatedly telling us “This is my church, this is where I heal my hurts”. I know he says (and literally says, not sings nor raps) more than that and that there are fuller lyrics to be found on the internet that maybe exist in different remixes to the edit we get here but still. Is the message as simple as ‘music is my religion’? Conversely you could say it’s full of words and meaning if, as I suspect, Maxi was doing some sign language of what he was saying in this performance. Was that what he was doing? I think I’m just confused by the whole thing and better move on to…

…The Corrs…for the second time in consecutive weeks with “What Can I Do” despite dropping from No 3 to No 7. The technique of superimposing the presenter over the artist in the intro is already starting to look really tired and jaded, probably even back in 1998. When Kate Thornton moves towards the camera at one point, it really emphasises the clunky nature of the technology and looks like a special effect from a 70s episode of Dr. Who or something. Compare Kate with the guy hovering in this clip…

As for The Corrs, they were on the verge of their imperial phase with their next two singles going to No 6 and No 2 before they scored their first and only No 1 in the summer of 2000.

Back when Madonna was still relevant and hadn’t been totally eclipsed as the most famous woman on the planet by Taylor Swift, her releasing a new single was still a major deal. Faced with such an event, Chris Cowey’s ridiculous no video policy wilted before the power of her Madgesty. However, Cowey would still get his bit in by allowing just 1:45 worth of screen time to be shown of the promo for “Drowned World (Substitute For Love)”. There may have been good reason for Cowey to cut short the video for the third single from and opening track of Madge’s “Ray Of Light” album but he didn’t exercise that here. There was some controversy surrounding the scenes where Madonna is chased in her car by paparazzi on motorbikes which critics likened to the events that led to the death of Princess Diana the year before amid accusations of insensitivity and crassness. However, we get to see those scenes in this short clip so it’s shortened length clearly wasn’t due to the editing out of the offending images. In Madonna’s defence, her publicist Liz Rosenberg said that they were nothing to do with Princess Diana and were a reflection of Madge’s own personal experiences with the paparazzi. As for the song itself, it’s a bit of a lost classic that deserved a higher chart placing than its No 10 peak. That William Orbit production that permeates the whole album is very much in evidence with Madonna, whose voice I’ve never really considered as her biggest asset, giving a great vocal performance. Is it fair to say that “Ray Of Light” is Madonna’s best ever album? Quite possibly.

As we saw earlier, Boyzone no longer had the No 1 single but who had knocked them off? I can’t decide if the next occupants of the top spot were a surprise or not? What do we think about “If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next” by Manic Street Preachers being No 1? I don’t mean the quality of the song but that they could sell enough copies to outstrip everyone else. On the one hand, they’d nearly achieved that chart feat two years earlier when perhaps their best known song “A Design For Life” made No 2. This was backed up by a three times platinum selling album and the fact that all four singles released from it went Top 10. That album – “Everything Must Go” – had seen the band breakthrough into the mainstream so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that anticipation for new material would have increased off the back of it, thus contributing to the sales of “If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next” when it was finally released. Maybe I’ve already answered my question with an earlier comment though when referring to “A Design For Life” as ‘perhaps their best known song’. Is that why, in retrospect, I’m surprised? The fact that ‘their best known song’ wasn’t their first chart topper? Or is it even that the song that did do it for the band has such an unwieldy* title? Is it a purely a case of me being offended by the linguistic aesthetics?

*Apparently, it’s in the Guinness World Records as the No 1 single with the longest title without brackets

So what about the song itself? Inspired by a Spanish Republican propaganda poster warning of the horrors of not resisting Franco’s nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War, it’s suitably epic sounding with those trademark broad sonic brush strokes whilst James Dean Bradfield manages to make that elongated title fit into a chorus somehow. It’s a good song but not a great one in my opinion and certainly not my favourite Manics tune. In the end though, it was their first No 1 single and so has its own individual elevated place in the band’s history but somehow I can’t help thinking whether it would have topped the charts without that other factor which I haven’t considered before – the dastardly record company tactic of first week discounting.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Boyzone No Matter WhatNever
2StepsOne For SorrowI’d rather listen to the Magpie theme tune
3MansunBeing A Girl (Part 1)Negative
4HoneyzFinally FoundNope
5FaithlessGod Is A DJNo
6The CorrsWhat Can I DoNah
7MadonnaDrowned World (Substitute For Love)No but my wife had the album
8Manic Street PreachersIf You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be NextI did not

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/m002lj3p/top-of-the-pops-04091998

TOTP 28 AUG 1998

Posted on by 80stastic

We’re at the fag end of Summer 1998 and with Autumn bringing with it new TV schedules, there’s a shake up happening in pop music programming. No, TOTP isn’t being axed (that doesn’t happen until 2006) but over on ITV, a new challenger to the grand old show is emerging. The day after this TOTP aired, cd:uk made its debut. Replacing The Chart Show which had run for nine years on ITV (it was on Channel 4 for three years prior to its move), it was the companion programme to SM:tv LIVE, the new Saturday morning kids show commissioned to rival BBC’s Live & Kicking and was presented by Ant & Dec with Cat Deeley. SM:tv LIVE proved to be a huge success and was the show that cemented Ant & Dec in the nation’s affections and also saw them successfully transform from pop stars to entertainment presenters. The branding of both shows was strong with their distinctively formatted titles (I always thought the ‘cd’ part of cd:uk stood for compact disc but it was actually count down – in my defence, I was working in a record shop at the time!), and the continuity of the presenters with all three just carrying on from one show to the other.

The BBC must have been concerned especially as cd:uk, rather controversially, introduced a ‘Saturday Chart’ which, although unofficial, gave a pretty fair assessment of the Millward Brown compiled chart that would be announced on Radio 1 the following day. The main consequence of this was that it made the chart countdown shown on TOTP on the Friday look out of date as it was, of course, last week’s chart in effect. Again, I wonder what the Beeb made of that? In fact at, lets take a closer look at the two charts for this week:

Chart PositionTOTPcd:uk
1BoyzoneManic Street Preachers
2StardustSteps
3The CorrsBoyzone
4Savage GardenStardust
5SweetboxHoneyz
6Sash!Faithless
7AldaMadonna
8Spice GirlsThe Corrs
9EmbraceSavage Garden
10Pras MichelSweetbox
11CleopatraSash!
12Simply RedMansun
13KavanaAlda
14Puff Daddy / Jimmy PageSpice Girls
15Brandy + MonicaPras Michel
16Apollo Four FortyTruce
17Another LevelCleopatra
18Eagle-Eye CherryElectrasy
19Ace Of BaseBrandy + Monica
20Foo FightersAnother Level

Wow! That’s quite the difference! Five new entries in the cd:uk Top 10 and eight overall. I think the Beeb might well have taken note!

OK, so with that all said and done, let’s get to the music. Our host is Jamie Theakston for the second week running and we start with an act that was only just on last week – Sweetbox with “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright”. This is just a reshowing of that performance but when I commented on it in the last post, I don’t think I mentioned the four backing violinists who have been dressed up in 18th century period costumes and wigs that look like they came from the wardrobe department of the film Dangerous Liaisons. I get that the idea behind it was to emphasise that the track was based around Johann Sebastian Bach’s Air on a G String but it looks so clunky, cack-handed and rather ridiculous, especially when positioned next to a DJ spinning turntables. And is it my imagination or have they made them up with white face powder to create that look that the French aristocracy favoured using, what AI tells me, was called ‘ceruse’? I would like to say that I blanche at the very idea for a nice quip but, in my early teens age years, I used to put talcum powder on my face and pat it off with a towel if my complexion was suffering from a spot outbreak. What was I thinking?!

Someone who definitely knew what he was thinking back in 1998 was Kavana and what was on his mind was his desire to transition from a pop pin-up to a mature, respected artist. Could he do it? Well, he gave it a try with the track “Special Kind Of Something”, the lead single from his second album “Instinct”. Having broken through in 1997 with two Top 10 singles and a Smash Hits Award for Best Solo Male Artist no less, Kavana succumbed to the notion that so many pop idols have considered, that of wanting to be taken seriously and not seen as just a pop puppet peddling catchy tunes and cover versions. Sadly for Kavana, as is so often the case, the record buying public weren’t overly keen on the pop star becoming an artist and “Instinct” bombed leading to the end of his pop music career.

Relocating to America, he had a brief acting career before resorting to the ultimate path of all ex-stars who can’t quite give up on fame, the world of reality TV. Stints in Grease Is The Word, The Voice UK, The Big Reunion and, of course, Celebrity Big Brother followed. After spending time in rehab for his alcoholism, Kavana has been sober for three years and has written a well received memoir called Pop Scars.

I know I say this a lot but how is it possible that at the time of these songs being in the charts when I was working in a mainstream record shop (presumably selling copies of them to customers) that there are some that I have zero recall of. Like nothing. At all. “Real Good Time” by Alda is yet another example. So who was/is Alda? Well, she was born in Iceland but was based in Sweden at the time of her pop career so she was kind of like a cross between Björk and Robyn and get this – her middle is, indeed, Björk!

Geography and nomenclatures she may have had in common with Björk but sonically they were continents apart. Her song was very chorus heavy, catchy yet ultimately insubstantial and say what you like about Björk (and I have in this blog many times) but insubstantial she is not. The other thing that they singularly did not share was hairstyles. Jamie Theakston can’t stop going on about Alda’s towering hair but I think I’ll leave the last word on that subject to @TOTPFacts and one Anna Cale:

I give up! Despite being on the show three times already (twice as the No 1 record and once as an exclusive performance before it was even released) and despite being at No 8 in the charts this week, here, for a fourth time, are the Spice Girls with “Viva Forever”. Why?! Why Chris Cowey?! Why?! And if you insist on including it in the running order unnecessarily, at least show the animated video that took months to create and not this exclusive performance yet again which wasn’t really ‘exclusive’ any more. Cowey could have given one of my faves Embrace a slot who had entered the charts one place lower than the Spice Girls with their single “My Weakness Is None Of Your Business” but, just as with their last hit “Come Back To What You Know”, it was cruelly ignored. Bah!

P.S. I’m assuming that Theakston’s lame intro about the band being all about Baby these days was a reference to the announcement that Victoria Beckham was pregnant with her and David’s first child Brooklyn.

From a song the chart position of which didn’t really justify an appearance on the show (in my humble opinion) to one which wasn’t even in the charts due to the fact that that it hadn’t yet been released. ‘New!’ said the caption for “My Favourite Mistake” by Sheryl Crow where its chart position should have been. When at last released, it would debut and peak at No 9 thus becoming Crow’s last ever UK Top 10 hit. The lead single from her third studio album “The Globe Sessions”, it ostensibly was more of the sound we’d become used to over the previous four years but was it? Apparently, Sheryl had agonised over the writing of the album to such an extent she thought about cancelling the release of it but in the end its release was deferred instead by six weeks. A change of narrative voice in her lyrics had been the issue with Crow struggling to come to terms to writing in the first person. “My Favourite Mistake” was a point in case with it being about an unfaithful ex-boyfriend (rumoured to be Eric Clapton) which created a whole “You’re So Vain” vibe to it. Crow dismissed the speculation saying she was very private about her relationships though, in 2003, she began dating cycling superstar Lance Armstrong in a very high profile and public romance.

As for “My Favourite Mistake”, it’s not my favourite single of Sheryl’s though it has an understated intensity to it but it is, apparently, Crow’s pick as her favourite song of hers and in 2023, The Guardian voted it their favourite Sheryl Crow track out of a list of 20 so maybe I should reconsider my opinion.

Next we find the Foo Fighters in a reflective mood with their hit “Walking After You”. Very much a melancholy tune, it was originally a track on the band’s “The Colour And The Shape” album but was subsequently re-recorded for inclusion on the soundtrack to the first X–Files film. I can’t say it does much for me; it’s very one paced and dare I say it, a bit dull. Maybe in the right setting or environment it might make more sense but performed in the TOTP studio it failed to make much of an impact on me but then I was rather distracted by Dave Grohl’s eyes. They must be coloured contact lenses that he’s deliberately wearing presumably to tie in with the X–Files connection as they do rather make him look alien-like. The TOTP cameramen seem to be in on the ruse given how much they focus on Grohl’s eyes in the lingering end shots.

The discography of The Corrs is a complicated thing, full of rereleases, remixes and special editions. Take this hit “What Can I Do” for example. Originally released in the January it struggled to a peak of No 53. However, after the subsequent success of the Todd Terry remixed Fleetwood Mac cover “Dreams”, it was given a second chance though not before it too was remixed, this time by Tin Tin Out. Replacing its original doo wop sound with dance beats and a guitar riff that was very reminiscent of Eddie Brickell’s “What I Am”* and lyrics half inched from Elton John’s “Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word”, it debuted at No 3 on the charts.

*Tin Tin Out clearly had a thing for that song as they released their own version of it with Emma Bunton the following year.

As Jamie Theakston said in his intro, all of this success has helped propel the group’s album “Talk On Corners” to No 1, one of 10 weeks at the top of the charts. It would spend two whole years (!) inside the Top 40, its presence presumably helped by the release of a special edition of it in the November which included those remixed singles including subsequent ones by K-Klass (“So Young”) and another by Tim Tin Out (“Runaway”) both of which were big hits. We’ll be seeing a lot more of The Corrs in forthcoming TOTP repeats.

Right, what’s going on here? Why are Jamie Theakston and Robbie Williams (dressed like James Bond) having a stilted, on screen conversation whilst seemingly being unaware that the cameras are rolling? Well, presumably this was a pre-planned skit (something about who’s got the best girlfriend?) as a way of introducing another new single that wasn’t even out yet – “Millennium”. I’ve made cases before in this blog that pinpoint sliding door moments in the career of Mr. Williams. “Angels” obviously but also “South Of The Border” and “Let Me Entertain You” but this, I think, is another one – Robbie’s first solo No 1. Interpolating the Nancy Sinatra Bond song “You Only Live Twice”, it sounded impressive right from the very first listen and if there had been any doubt that we were all in it for the long haul with Williams, this was surely the clincher. Yes, it was a bit cynical by being released in between two Bond films (Tomorrow Never Dies in 1997 and The World Is Not Enough in 1999) and also by naming it “Millennium” with one eye on the rapidly approaching end of the century but it just worked. Even the potentially annoying ‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough’ yobbish football chant seemed to fit. At this point Robbie Williams could do no wrong. Even the video for “Millennium” won the BRIT Award for British Video Of The Year.

But wait…now what? He’s doing another song? Theakston plays along by protesting that he’s not allowed to despite the running order clearly having been pre-agreed. For the second song, Williams performs “Man Machine” which was never released as a single but was an album track off “I’ve Been Expecting You” which seems an odd choice in retrospect. Surely he would have been better off doing a long tail preview of a future single like “Strong”? Had they not already chosen which songs were earmarked for release as a single by this point? “Man Machine” is OK I guess but it’s not particularly memorable with some lyrics that don’t make much sense but which seem to be a list of rhyming non-sequiturs. Are they vaguely about how the press perceived Williams at the time based around a space theme (“I’ve heard they’re not very well in the sun”)? Robbie throws in a quick arms-behind-the-back Liam Gallagher stance at one point but it all seems a bit too cocky. Maybe he should have left it as just a one song-performance? After all who did he think he was? The Jam? Oasis? Well, there was that Liam Gallagher moment…

It’s a third and final week at the top for Boyzone and “No Matter What” and it’s a third separate studio performance. Unlike week one, Andrew Lloyd Webber hasn’t flown in to be on the piano – presumably he was too busy unlike in 2015 when he flew into the UK on a private plane to vote in the House of Lords in favour of Tory proposed tax credit cuts, the bellend. A lifelong Conservative, in 2021 he said he would never vote for that party again no matter what due to their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and their treatment of the arts sector during that time.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1SweetboxEverything’s Gonna Be AlrightNegative
2KavanaSpecial Kind Of SomethingNah
3AldaReal Good TimeNever happened
4Spice GirlsViva ForeverNot for me
5Sheryl CrowMy Favourite MistakeNope
6Foo FightersWalking After YouNo thanks
7The CorrsWhat Can I DoI did not
8Robbie WilliamsMillennium / Man MachineNo
9BoyzoneNo Matter WhatAnd 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/m002l6rx/top-of-the-pops-28081998

TOTP 21 AUG 1998

Posted on by 80stastic

Right, a small explanation as to why I’m so behind with my posts on this blog which has seen me fall of the pace of the BBC4 TOTP repeats schedule. I was on holiday last week and out of the country for a few days during which time I only intermittently managed to write anything and as such I have ended up with four shows to review this week if I’m to catch up. I hate being behind but a family holiday is more important than banging on about the Top 40 from 28 years ago so it is what it is. Right, a bit of housekeeping before we get into it fully. Jamie Theakston is our host and his intro about it being 6.55 and TOTP being on BBC2 was due to BBC1’s coverage of the European Athletics Championships as opposed to some deliberate move to sideline the show. It had, of course, been channel moved before during Euro 96 for example but it wouldn’t take up permanent residence on BBC2 until 2005, a year or so before its ultimate axing.

So to the music and we start with a great song. I used my words carefully there – ‘song’, not ‘single’ and definitely not ‘artist’. “The Air That I Breathe” was one of the first songs I ever knew as a small child as my Dad bought the hit version by The Hollies that made No 2 in 1974 and what a song with which to begin my musical life! A huge, epic track with that massive, soaring guitar and strings in the middle eight – it made a huge impression on the young me and ignited in me a love of The Hollies. This, however, is not that version of the Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood penned song. No, this was the Simply Red version (gulp).

Here’s the kicker though, it’s not as bad as I remembered it. I mean, it’s nowhere near the quality of what is surely the definitive version by The Hollies but Hucknall doesn’t completely butcher it either to my ears. So what gives? Well, apparently there were two versions recorded by Simply Red which is the root of my confusion. There’s this one and another one with the suffix “Reprise” added to it which is a different take on it, sung to a different tune and which, very unwisely and completely inexplicably, incorporates the riff from “Jack And Diane” by John Cougar. That must have been the one I was thinking of.

Both versions were unusually included on parent album “Blue” with the ‘non-reprise’ take also being used in an advert for Sky TV at the time (not sure why Roy Hattersley and his dog were in it!).

They say the mark of a good song is how many times it has been covered and in how many different styles. If that is true, then “Air That I Breathe” is up there in the greatness stakes with it having been recorded by the likes of Olivia Newton John, Julio Iglesias, Semisonic, k.d. lang, Phil Everly and The Mavericks. And that’s not even counting “Creep” by Radiohead the chord sequence of which was so similar that Hammond and Hazlewood had to be given writers credits. Proving its longevity, there’s even a version from as recently as this year by Belinda Carlisle from her “Once Upon A Time In California” album. “The Air That I Breathe”, a song with huge lungs.

From one ‘air’ song to another, sort of. Pop hits based around classical pieces of music were nothing new. Way back in 1967, Procul Harem had a worldwide smash with “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” which used Johann Sebastian Bach’s Air On A G String movement from his Orchestral Suite No 3 In D Major as its basis. In 1985, Sting gave us “Russians” based on Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé and in 1990, The Farm’s “All Together Now” made unashamed use of Pachelbel’s Canon In D Major.

None of those though seemed quite as obvious as the Sweetbox hit “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright”. This German outfit who had plied their trade in the shallow waters of Eurodance previously, decided to switch to hitching their wagon to classical music with a topping of rap. It really was as simple a format as that. The aforementioned Air On A G String was the blueprint for the hit which the non classical music buffs among us would know from the long running series of Hamlet cigar adverts, my favourite of which would be this Columbus themed one featuring Blake 7 actor Paul Darrow…

According to their Wikipedia page, Sweetbox has burned through seven lead singers since forming which must be a record surely? The person on stage here is Tina Harris who was the third of the group’s vocalists (this is starting to get a bit Henry VIII!) and started her music career via her her cousin who is Snap!’s rapper Turbo B (there’s a stroke of luck). He chose Tina’s sister Jackie to mime on promotional activities for their hit “The Power” and that connection earned Tina a place as a dancer in Snap!’s tour and videos. After leaving the Snap! family and spending some time in a couple of Eurodance outfits, Harris was contacted by Sweetbox prime mover Roberto ‘Geo’ Rosan to become their singer and she lent her vocals to their debut eponymous album which became a huge success in Japan. However, in a contractual dispute that made George Michael v Sony look like a playground tiff, Tina tried to renegotiate her contract for the band’s second album with their record label. However, they decided to ditch Harris and replace her with another singer. Not only that but the contract she had signed prevented her from releasing music for eight years! In the end though, everything was alright as she did release her debut album “Sunshine” in 2007. As for Sweetbox, they are still an ongoing entity apparently though they haven’t released anything since 2020.

Two of the first three songs on this show are cover versions as we get Cleopatra comin’ at us with their take on “I Want You Back” by The Jackson 5. It turns out though that their take is almost identical to the original 1970 hit save for Cleo Higgins telling us that it’s 1998 just before the end. Like we didn’t know Cleo. This seemed like a pretty cynical choice of song to record to me and the fact that the girls hardly deviated from the original only convinces me more. Perhaps they were relying on an assumption that their fanbase (whom I’m guessing were very young) wouldn’t know the Jackson 5 original and believe it was the girls’ own work? Even allowing for the fact that it had also been a hit in 1988* as well as 1970, that was still 10 years before the Cleopatra version so maybe?

*A remix titled “I Want You Back ‘88” credited to Michael Jackson with The Jackson 5 peaked at No 8

If it was designed to keep the group’s success rolling, it worked with the single going to No 4. However, aside from their contribution to the ABBA tribute single “Thank ABBA For The Music” the following year, they would never return to the Top 10. Inevitably given the age of the group and their fanbase, the clock was ticking on Cleopatra’s salad days…

P.S. I’ve never seen moves like that on a Twister mat before

Next up are Savage Garden with a textbook display of an established music industry practice. No, not doing a cover version (we’ve had enough of those in this show already) but that of the rerelease. It’s a familiar tale – artist’s early single doesn’t chart but subsequent releases do so said early single is revisited, remixed (sometimes), repackaged and rereleased and becomes much bigger hit second time around. “To The Moon And Back” was originally released in 1997 but stalled at No 55 in the UK. Following the global success of “Truly Madly Deeply” though, it was ripe for another go and debuted at No 3 to become the band’s highest charting single in this country.

Still mining that 80s retro synth pop sound, it didn’t quite have the smooth flow of its predecessor and sounded a bit more laboured to my ears. No, not laboured but like it had spent too long fermenting in the pop song laboratory if that makes sense. Slightly overcooked. What I did like in this performance of the song though was the guy who played electric and Spanish guitar. I’ve seen double fretted guitars before but can’t recall someone playing one guitar whilst having a second one draped around his neck. It’s quite the look.

Now here’s a classic case of an artist being so known for just one hit that it overshadows everything else they ever did, regardless of the quality of those releases. “We’re a band not a song” said 4 Non Blondes singer Linda Perry when it happened to her band but you wouldn’t have blamed Stephen Jones for saying the same thing about Babybird. Back in 1996, “You’re Gorgeous” was everywhere, riding high in the charts and at saturation point on daytime radio. Two years on and despite three follow up, Top 40 charting singles, it felt like it was still the primary association with the band. Those other hits had only achieved relatively minor chart positions which was a shame as they deserved better. It was a similar story with “If You’ll Be Mine”. Spending just two weeks inside the Top 40 and peaking at No 28, no wonder it was quickly forgotten. This acoustic performance displaying its spare and brittle nature should have propelled it up the charts, but no, the record buying public were more interested in homogeneous dance music and so it promptly disappeared. Talking of this performance, I’m not sure why there needed to be the four of them up there on stage. Apart from Stephen Jones on vocals and the guy finger picking on the guitar (who some viewers remarked online that he looked like Eric Bristow) what are the other two blokes doing? The second guitarist hardly seems to play anything whilst the maracas man is surely surplus to requirements?

Sash! didn’t half like what the youth would now call a ‘collab’* didn’t they? Just about everything listed in their singles discography featured another artist ranging from Dr. Alban to Boy George to Boney M and even Sarah Brightman. This hit though – “Mysterious Times” – featured Tina Cousins whom the German DJ/production team would work with again in 2000 on Top 10 hit “Just Around The Hill”.

*Apparently collab is now listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. Is nothing sacred anymore?!

Like Cleopatra earlier, Cousins would feature on that ABBA tribute single and would also have a few hits of her own including “Pray” (No 20) and “Killin’ Time” (No 15). One that didn’t make the Top 40 was “Forever” which peaked at No 46 but, according to Wikipedia, in a chart recount it was shown that it should have been No 38. What?! Back in the day that could have been the difference between a successful career or not. A Top 40 position may have meant a TOTP appearance and in any case would certainly have raised the artist’s profile. Scandalous stuff!

Now when I referred to homogeneous dance music before, I surely wasn’t meaning this next track which would become one of the biggest hits of the year. Stardust was nothing to do with one of my favourite ever films starring David Essex but would turn out to be a one off project involving a member of Daft Punk, a directionless DJ and his mate from boarding school. Having dropped out of university and completed a year of military conscription, Alan Braxe decided to pursue a career in music and a chance meeting with Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk in a nightclub led to Braxe giving his new acquaintance a demo of a track he had been working on called “Vertigo” which Bangalter released on his own record label. Whilst rehearsing for a performance in a Paris club with a line up completed by Braxe’s friend Benjamin Diamond on vocals, the trio worked up another track called “Music Sounds Better With You” using a looped sample of an old Chaka Khan track called “Fate”. Having recorded the track in Bangalter’s home studio in just six days, it was released (again on his own record label) with demand for it on the continent and especially Ibiza crossing over to the UK resulting in enough sales of the import to qualify for a chart placing of No 55. When eventually licensed to Virgin for an official release, it spent two weeks at No 2 and nearly four months inside the Top 40. After the single’s success, Virgin offered the trio $3 million to record an album but after producing some demos, they gave up on the idea and the Stardust project was at an end leaving a legacy of one track that has consistently polled as one of the greatest dance tunes of all time.

Well, that’s the history of the song but was it really that great? I thought so at the time but listening to it 27 years later, it does seem very repetitive. Very repetitive. Maybe that didn’t matter on the dance floor though. Indeed, was it those recurrent beats that made it such a club classic? The ‘performance’ here is very unusual. Theakston informs us that there was no artist nor video to show so they dressed somebody up in 70s disco garb and superimposed her over the top of what looks like some old footage of TOTP studio audiences from that decade. It’s an odd concoction but at least it was better than ignoring a huge hit. Subsequently, a video was produced by Michel Gondry who would go on to direct the rather excellent if confusing film Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.

Boyzone remain at No 1 with “No Matter What” despite stiff competition from Stardust who had led the boyband in the midweeks. Significantly, this was the first of their chart toppers to spend more than one week at the pinnacle which many took as a sign of the quality of the song and that it was appealing to more than just their usual fanbase. Crossing over in other words. Yeah, you could perceive it like that or you could, like me, hold firm with the opinion that it was schmaltzy shite. I stand by that, no matter what.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Simply RedThe Air That I BreatheIt’s a no
2SweetboxEverything’s Gonna Be Alright”No thanks
3CleopatraI Want You BackDidn’t happen
4Savage GardenTo The Moon And BackNegative
5BabybirdIf You’ll Be MineNo
6Sash! featuring Tina CousinsMysterious TimesNah
7StardustMusic Sounds Better With YouNope
8BoyzoneNo Matter WhatI did not

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/m002l6rv/top-of-the-pops-21081998

TOTP 14 AUG 1998

Posted on by 80stastic

There’s a whole swathe of hits in this TOTP show that we hadn’t seen before back in 1998…and I don’t think I could have told you how any of them went without watching this BBC4 repeat back. Let’s see if that is actually the case. Our host is Jayne Middlemiss but we actually start with a song that bar the No 1 record was the last hit we saw in the previous show – “Lost In Space” by Apollo Four Forty. Yes, despite having dropped two places from its debut position of No 4, it was still considered a big enough seller by executive producer Chris Cowey to be featured again just seven days later. In fairness to Cowey, all but one of the other hits (including the No 1 record) on this show are new entries so maybe I’ll let him have this one. This is just a repeat of that initial performance so clock up another one for Cowey’s recycling policy. So successful was this venture into contributing songs for film soundtracks (“Lost In Space” was their biggest ever hit) that Apollo Four Forty would go there again two years later when they reworked the Charlie’s Angels theme for the 2000 reboot starring Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu which also featured Matt Le Blanc in a smaller role than he commanded in Lost In Space. How you doin’ Matt the film star? Not so good apparently.

Just like Karen Ramirez from a few shows ago, we are faced with a solo female artist who prompts the question “whatever happened to…?”. In this case it’s Hinda Hicks who was briefly talked about as the next big name in UK R&B but who would ultimately drift away to the ultimate status of ‘current whereabouts unknown’. After her debut album “Hinda” went Top 20, she received three MOBO and two BRIT award nominations (the later of which The Guardian unkindly dismissed as just ‘making up the numbers’). This single – “I Wanna Be Your Lady” – was actually a rerelease of her debut single that initially peaked at No 89 but made No 14 second time around to become Hinda’s highest charting hit possibly helped by her support slots on tours with Boyzone and 911. However, that old chestnut of record label mergers meant that promotion of her new material for the second album was undercooked and she would not return to the Top 40 again with that sophomore album never receiving a full commercial release. She would make a third album available via R&B label Shout Our Records in 2004 but it failed to chart and a fourth album announced in 2007 remains unreleased. As of 2015, Hinda has been missing in action from her social media channels and the story of Hinda Hicks has gone cold with the only notable mention of her coming from Lilly Allen tweeting that she was experiencing ‘Toni Braxton Hinda Hicks’ about the pregnancy of her daughter in 2011 referring to the condition of ‘Braxton Hicks’ or practice contractions. As of 2025, we are still awaiting the rebirth of the career of Hinda Hicks.

As Jayne Middlemiss says in her intro, this next bloke seems to have a “different lass” with him every time he appears on the show. Sash! though, was actually three blokes, what with them being a German DJ/production team who racked up a string of massive hits in the late 90s/early 00s. Famously, they achieved the most No 2 hits without ever getting to the top of the charts.

“Mysterious Times” was their fourth hit of five to miss being No 1 by one place (the other made No 3) and no, I don’t remember it on the account of it being totally forgettable. This is despite it featuring another new vocalist, this time the UK’s Tina Cousins who would go on to carve out a small solo career of her own but it didn’t last too long with her biggest hit actually being part of the conglomerate that included Steps, Cleopatra, B*Witched and Billie Piper who recorded the medley “Thank ABBA For The Music”. Rather inevitably, she ended up on the ‘Identity Parade’ section of Never Mind The Buzzcocks though I did enjoy her giving host Simon Amstell the finger…

By this point in the 90s, had the whole concept of girl groups not been done to death in the same way that boy bands had in the earlier part of the decade? I know subsequently the format would spawn super successful names like Girls Aloud and The Saturdays but at this particular time of the summer of 1998, hadn’t we had our fill of them? The Spice Girls, All Saints, Eternal, B*Witched, Cleopatra, N-Tyce had all had success ranging from global domination to a few medium sized chart hits with styles of music encompassing either all out pop or an R&B/pop hybrid. Did we need anymore? Well, apparently we did. The very end of the 90s saw no let up in the girl group phenomenon with the likes of Honeyz, Hepburn and Precious all chart regulars. In between came Solid HarmoniE (no capital ‘E’, no points). Conceived as the male counterpart to the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC by Lou Pearlman, the man behind those two boy bands and a very shady character indeed*, they would have three Top 20 hits that all started with the word ‘I’. This one – “I Wanna Love You” – was the last of those three and it’s a nice enough pop song but it was never going to set the world alight or ignite a global sensation like “Wannabe” did for example.

*I’d never heard of him before now but reading up on him, he had his fingers in all sorts of business pies and would end up being sentenced to 25 years in prison for conspiracy and money laundering. He died incarcerated after serving just two. There’s probably a film to be made about him though

One of their number – Mariama Goodman – would leave the band, rejoin, leave again and throw her hat in with the aforementioned Honeyz before giving it all up and retraining as a midwife…and then joining up with her ex-band mates for the ITV2 series The Big Reunion in 2013. After that series finished, I presume she went back to being a midwife. As with Hinda Hicks, there are no further signs of her pop career being reborn.

There seems to be a theme of rebirth/renewal emerging within this post which certainly wasn’t planned but I guess the title of this next hit kind of plays into that? “Pure Morning” was the lead single from Placebo’s second album “Without You I’m Nothing” but was actually a last minute addition to the album, having emerged during a B-side session after the rest of the album ahead been recorded. I have to say that the idea of a ‘B-sides session’ doesn’t sit well with me like they’d sat down to write some songs they didn’t want to be as worthy as their A-sides. Is that how the creative process works for some artists? That they can deliberately write songs that they know will never reach the widest audience? It all sounds very cynical. I’m put in mind of the story about Creation Records founder Alan McGee telling Noel Gallagher that “Acquiesce” was too good a song to be just an extra track on the “Some Might Say” single to which Noel replied “I don’t write shit songs”. McGee, of course, was right about “Acquiesce” in the same way that Brian Molko was right to make “Pure Morning” an A-side and not a B-side. Created around a repeated guitar loop, it sounds kind of like a demo version of “Nancy Boy” which is possibly due to it being produced by Phil Vinall, the guy behind their first hit. I thought that I didn’t remember it but the opening lyrics of “A friend in need’s a friend indeed” was instantly recognisable. Molko gives a performance here in an observed, dispassionate state which lends itself well to the song which would become the band’s joint biggest hit single ever.

It’s another showing next of that ‘exclusive’ performance we’ve already seen from two weeks ago by Will Smith with his hit “Just The Two Of Us”. Maintaining the (re)birth theme, the video (which presumably we didn’t see because of Chris Cowey’s reluctance to include promos on the show) features Smith’s wife Jada who was pregnant with their first child Jaden. A reworking of the Grover Washington Jnr/Bill Withers classic with Smith taking on the mantle of a father trying to be a good role model for his young son, the admirable intentions of the lyrics were rather undermined by the events of March 27, 2022 when Smith left his seat at the 94th Academy Awards, walked across the stage and slapped comedian Chris Rock across the face during his presentation for Best Documentary Feature. Smith’s image as an upstanding family man of firm moral fibre and virtue were certainly put into doubt by the incident despite his aforementioned son Jaden tweeting support of his Dad “And that’s how we do it!”.

It’s the return of the Fun Lovin’ Criminals next with a brand new track – “Love Unlimited”. Having broken the UK (if not America) with their first album “Come Find Yourself”, Huey, ‘Fast’ and Steve Borgovini looked to consolidate on their success with sophomore collection “100% Colombian”. I recall there being quite a buzz around its release what with them being one of the hippest bands around with their Quentin Tarantino sampling hits and effortlessly charismatic front man Huey Morgan. But then…they came back with a song about Barry White! Now, I don’t have any objections to ‘The Walrus Of Love’ but neither am I much of a fan. I can appreciate his unique voice and the fact that he was also a songwriter, record producer and keyboard player. However, I didn’t really appreciate “Love Unlimited” that wanted to pay tribute to him on account of it being as dull as yet another old character being resurfaced on EastEnders. It really is so very pedestrian and one paced with the call and response chorus just being banal. I wonder how many of the youth in the TOTP audience shouting White’s name even knew who he was. Maybe they thought he was an EastEnders character; after all, his name sounded like one (“Awright Baz, fancy a pint in the Queen Vic?”). As poor as “Love Unlimited” was (and yes, I get the reference in its title), follow up single “Big Night Out” was brilliant and I duly bought it. Hope we get to see that one on these TOTP repeats.

Boyzone are No 1 for the second time in 1998 but this time it’s with a track written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jim Steinman no less. Yes, it’s time for that song from the Whistle Down The Wind musical. Is it fair to say that “No Matter What” is the band’s best known hit? I think it might be given that it shifted 1.4 million copies and was the fourth best selling single in the UK in 1998. This was one of those songs that was always destined to be No 1 if for no other reason than the promotion and fuss around it demanded it. Look at the way it’s presented here with both Steinman and Lloyd Webber in the TOTP studio to give it that extra push and imbue it with a sense that this was no ordinary chart topper. Except that it was…ordinary that is, to my ears at least. I could never hear why it was supposed to be so great. If I thought “Love Unlimited” before it was pedestrian then “No Matter What” was like walking my dog when he really can’t be arsed – painfully slow and with a good chance of featuring shit along the way. Apart from vocalists Stephen Gately and Roman Keating, the other three really might as well not be there. They are given almost zero to do on stage except shuffle from foot to foot with their arms behind their back, make some “ooh” and “aah” backing noises and occasionally click their fingers. Ah yer bollix ye.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1 Apollo Four FortyLost In SpaceNo
2Hinda HicksI Wanna BeYour LadyNah
3Sash! featuring Tina CousinsMysterious TimesNegative
4Solid HarmoniEI Wanna Love YouNope
5PlaceboPure MorningOK song but no
6Will SmithJust The Two Of UsI did not
7Fun Lovin’ CriminalsLove UnlimitedNo but I bought the follow up
8BoyzoneNon Matter WhatNever

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/m002kx4x/top-of-the-pops-14081998

TOTP 07 AUG 1998

Posted on by 80stastic

It’s a monumental episode of TOTP this one as it’s the last one hosted by Jo Whiley. Well, that’s not strictly true as she returned in 2006 to do a couple more shows but it’ll be the last I review in this blog that features her. So what to make of Jo? I have to admit to having held very strong negative views about her in the past. I couldn’t get along with her over enthusiasm when it came to expressing her love of music. If that sounds miserabilist or misanthropic, let me clarify. It was her professed love of all music, whatever its genre or merits which gave the impression that she would be as comfortable introducing Go West as The Go-Betweens as long as it kept her on the airwaves. However, after her campaigning on behalf of her sister who has learning disabilities during the pandemic that she and others like her should be prioritised to receive the COVID vaccine, I gained a lot of respect for her. She also does a lot of charity work for the likes of Mencap so there’s that as well. However, I just can’t shake my distrust of her proclamations and motives when it comes to music but maybe I’m just jealous of her career. As to why she left the roster of TOTP hosts at this time, I’m not sure. To focus on her Radio 1 show The Lunchtime Social? To spend more time with her family* Whatever the reason, I think, against the odds, I might actually miss her.

*She has four children

I won’t be missing the opening act tonight though who are Ace Of Base though I can’t guarantee this will be the last we see of them in these 90s TOTP repeats. What I can say with some conviction is that their brand of reggae-lite Europop was just terrible, shockingly bad. No, I don’t accept the comparisons with ABBA whose complex, pop compositions were superbly crafted. Ace Of Base, by contrast, peddled simple, almost nursery rhyme-like ditties that were sickly sweet but of zero nutritional value. If ABBA were the Armani Casa of furniture then Ace Of Base were IKEA – flat-pack, flat track dull(y). “Life Is A Flower” was a typical example of their oeuvre. Hooky but schlocky. Their next single would be a cover of Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer”. Cruel indeed.

This is starting to worry me now as my poor brain cells seem to be misfiring again. How many times have I said in this blog lately that I don’t remember a song or an artist? Well, it’s happened once more. Who were/are Lucid? Well, I’m not entirely sure as there’s not a lot of information about them online. The ever reliable @TOTPFacts has come to my rescue though with this tweet:

Grateful as always but it’s pretty slim pickings. Got anything else? Oh, they have…

Excellent! Will that do for this entry? No? OK, well, they had three hits the first of which was “I Can’t Help Myself” which I assume was a big hit in the clubs judging by Jo Whiley’s intro that references Ibiza. It’s very underwhelming to my ears though. Maybe executive producer Chris Cowey was in agreement with me given the over the top staging of this performance. “A tune so dangerous we’ve been forced to restrain the lead singer” says Jo before we see singer Clare Canty in a straitjacket. It’s a daring look but surely it would have been more of an arresting image if she’d have done the whole performance under duress as it were but she releases herself from her (clearly fake) bonds halfway through which kind of undermines the whole idea. Or maybe it was, in fact, just a bad idea to have a woman restrained on stage (even if it was just for effect)? Maybe the thinking behind it wasn’t so lucid after all?

What’s this? Jo Whiley interviewing a pop star on the show? This wasn’t a regular occurrence so was Chris Cowey letting her go out with a bit of a bang? Presumably, he couldn’t get both Brandy & Monica in the TOTP studio simultaneously so the video and a brief (and cringeworthy) interview with one of them – Brandy – was deemed the next best thing. Or was it just that Cowey couldn’t ignore the hit that was “The Boy Is Mine” any longer and Jo was in the right place at the right time? This was another of those hardy hits like “How Do I Live” by LeAnne Rimes that stuck around the charts for ages having debuted at No 2 and then spent weeks hovering around the lower end of the Top 10 before it settled on a three week run at No 13. It was at this point that it was finally deemed worthy of a slot on the show which makes no sense but running orders rarely did in the Cowey era. Maybe there were some undeclared contractual issues preventing the song getting an airing until now or maybe it was just a combination of timing and Cowey’s previous stubbornness not to feature videos on the show? Whatever the truth, what was undeniable about the record is that it was a monster. If the resilience it displayed in our charts was impressive, it was nothing compared to the success it had in the US where it spent 13 weeks at No 1 and was the biggest selling single of the year. It also held a curious chart record of being the first hit to ascend to No 1 from a position outside of the Top 20 since The Beatles charged from No 27 to the top in 1964 with “Can’t Buy Me Love”.

Supposedly inspired by the Michael Jackson/Paul McCartney duet on “The Girl Is Mine” and by The Jerry Springer Show as referenced in Brandy’s chat with Whiley, it’s a mid-tempo R&B ballad that exerts a deceptive pull on the listener. Both singers’ vocals are low in the mix with a distinct lack of histrionics but rather gestate a slow but determined ear worm that burrows into your brain and sets up home there. It’s the musical equivalent of Aesop’s fable about the tortoise and the hare. Both Brandy and Monica went on to have long and successful careers in the worlds of music and acting and revisited “The Boy Is Mine” just last year featuring on a remix of the track by Ariana Grande.

Now this edition of TOTP was originally meant to be 25 minutes in length with seven songs featured which is a reduction of one from the standard eight but has been further reduced by the omission of the Puff Daddy & Jimmy Page hit “Come With Me” from the Godzilla movie for obvious reasons. However, the censors could have taken this one out for me as well on the grounds of poor quality and possibly taste as well. As with Lucid earlier, I have zero recollection of Baby Bumps and their hit “Burning” and there is precious little about them online either. Even the normally reliable @TOTPFacts can only come up with the fact that their hit sampled “Disco Inferno” by The Trammps. So who were these chumps and why were they having a hit with this awful butchering of a classic track? Well, they seem to be a female version of The Village People judging by their stage costumes and as for why they were having a hit…well, the bad taste of the record buying public strikes again. It is a dreadful treatment of “Disco Inferno” and was there something wrong with the sound as the lead woman’s singing sounded too quiet in parts. I say ‘singing’ but it was more like shouting and is it me or does she not seem able to count to four?! I’m sure she shouts “Four, two, three, four”. Twice. Apparently, they had another hit in 2000 but happily I won’t have to review it as this is a 90s blog and will finish with the 1999 repeats.

It’s yet another hit from a film soundtrack next as Apollo Four Forty launch into the upper echelons of the chart with “Lost In Space”. As it’s Apollo Four Forty, of course, it’s a dance track but then, there had been a trend for dance versions of old film/TV theme tunes around this time. Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen had given us their treatment of the Mission Impossible theme whilst Orbital took on The Saint. As for Lost In Space, I did see the film starring Matt Le Blanc of Friends fame which was a big screen adaptation of the 60s TV series and, like most people who watched it, I thought it stank the cinema out. Just hopeless and not because I was looking through nostalgic glasses at the TV series as I hardly remembered that but just because it was a bad film. It pretty much did for Le Blanc’s film star aspirations. – I think he had a small part in the Charlie’s Angels reboot after this but not much else.

As for the Apollo Four Forty song, it didn’t do an awful lot for me. Apparently, it was based (loosely) on the second John Williams theme tune that he composed for the series but it’s all at breakneck speed and features some frenetic fret work (including a precursor of the Royal Blood bass guitar style possibly?) that’s all a bit much for me. Then there’s the geezer with the peroxide blonde hair and glasses giving me a headache by shouting out random phrases like “Space is the place” and “This cold war’s just got hot”. When he shouts “Can you feel it?”, he sounds like one of those blokes on the mike at a fairground exporting people to “Scream if you want to go faster!”. Like I said, headache inducing.

The Spice Girls remain at No 1 with “Viva Forever” but this will be its last week at the top. As with last week, we don’t get the stop-motion animation video but that performance recorded whilst the group were on tour. In an earlier form, the song was titled “Obrigado” which means ‘thank you’ in Portuguese and I can imagine that as it scans similarly to “Viva Forever”. Talking of titles, Viva Forever! was the name of the Spice Girls jukebox musical written by Jennifer Saunders which opened in 2012 to a very poor reception and some of the worst reviews of that year. Thankfully for the group, the song did not receive the same response as the musical.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Ace Of BaseLife Is A FlowerDefinitely not
2LucidI Can’t Help MyselfI could though – no
3Brandy & MonicaThe Boy Is MineNah
4Baby BumpsBurningNever
5Apollo Four FortyLost In SpaceNo
6Spice GirlsViva ForeverNope

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/m002kx4v/top-of-the-pops-07081998

TOTP 31 JUL 1998

Posted on by 80stastic

We’re still stuck in the Summer of 1998 here at TOTP Rewind but we’re not the only ones who are stuck as TOTP executive producer Chris Cowey is stuck in a rut of accommodating hits that have been on at least twice before within the show’s running order. I know I keep banging on about this but it seems so extreme and unnecessary. Look at the opening act in this episode for example. This was the seventh week on the chart for “Got The Feelin’” by Five and after debuting at No 3, most had seen the single descending the chart. However, in its fifth week, it had arrested that trend by climbing one place from No 14 to No 13 and they were immediately back on the show! Its next chart position saw it fall to No 20 but a two place climb to No 18 seven days later and slam dunk! – back on the show again! Patently ridiculous. We don’t even get to see a different studio performance nor the official video as it’s always just that very first appearance with the football shirts re-shown. A regular reader to this blog sent me a message asking me if I thought that, in the scenario of TOTP still being on TV in October 2025 and Cowey still being executive producer, would he still be showing “Got The Feelin’”? That’s certainly the feelin’ I’ve got.

Here’s another hit that we’ve seen twice before already but at least this one is still selling well, holding at No 3 and having spent its entire chart life inside the Top 5 to this point. We did only see it on the previous show though and again, it’s just a repeat of the last appearance for “Ghetto Superstar (That Is What You Are)” by Pras Michel featuring Ol’ Dirty Bastard and introducing Mýa. By the way, our host is Jayne Middlemiss again who is making up for lost time by making consecutive appearances after having gone missing for a month. They’re doing that super imposing thing again that they did recently with Jamie Theakston by attempting to make Jayne look like she’s in the studio with Pras et al but which just makes the whole thing look cheap and nasty. Now, is it fair to describe “Ghetto Superstar” with those same words? Is it a bit lowest common denominator? A bit dumb-downed? A bit lowbrow? Or am I being a musical snob? I can’t decide so I suppose it’s unfair to expect anyone else to know. What I do know is that it was the 9th best selling single in the UK in 1998 which must mean something mustn’t it?

Right, who’s this? Lovestation? Don’t remember them at all. Nothing to do with the high numbers on the TV guide on your remote (a direction which I won’t be pursuing further), they are a UK garage outfit who had a couple of hits most notably with this cover of “Teardrops” by Womack And Womack. Despite its almost universally rapturous legacy, I was never that fond of the 1988 original and always found it quite dull so a housed-up version for the late 90s was never going to win me over. However, I have to say this is exceptionally drab. It sounds so tinny next to the original, almost as if it’s the demo version that was released by mistake. And what is with the two over enthusiastic dancers in this performance who movements and steps seem wildly incongruous to the actual song? Lovestation seemed to only have about three songs that they kept on releasing and re-releasing according to their discography. “Teardrops” appears three times, a track called “Love Come Rescue Me” was released thrice and “Shine On Me” had a hat-trick of releases as well. Funnily enough, they did have three Top 40 hits though two were courtesy of “Teardrops” and another wasn’t either of the other songs mentioned.

The Supernaturals are back with the lead single from their second album “A Tune A Day” called “I Wasn’t Built To Get Up”. It was also their last Top 40 entry when it peaked at No 25 meaning that all five of their hits registered between Nos 38 and 23. That sounds fairly modest but a numbers approach maybe doesn’t tell the whole story as The Supernaturals were once the darlings of the music press with their debut album “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” receiving very positive reviews whilst their song “Smile” was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award. As is the way of the press though, it wasn’t long before they were tearing the band down describing them as ‘ordinary’, ‘unambitious’ and generally lambasting them for not realising that the Britpop sound was dead in the water. One review noted of their “A Tune A Day” album that if you:

“crossed a hint of Blur’s mid 90s upbeat output with a Scottish-flavoured twist of The Beach Boys and their sunny melodies, you’d probably end up with something a bit like The Supernaturals”

“REWIND: Revisiting the Best of July 1998 + Playlist | XS Noize | Online Music Magazine”

Hmm. Then there’s @TOTPFacts who said on X rather harshly of this TOTP performance:

Ouch. Both of these got me thinking about my own comparisons and I came up with The Supernaturals being the missing link between Ash and Scouting For Girls and that this song title was like a mix of “Can’t Get Out Of Bed” by The Charlatans and “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” by Brian Wilson. Yeah, I’m not sure any of the above is helpful. Writing about music never really does anyone justice. As Frank Zappa famously said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”.

Wh-wh-what?! Who was Charli Baltimore and why was she in our charts and on our TV screens? Well, she was actually Tiffany Lane, a name which sounds like one of Charlie’s Angels but was deemed not exciting enough for launching a music career so Tiffany stole the name of the character played by Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight, a film that was a big VHS rental hit back in the day as I recall. Charli was also the partner of legendary rapper the Notorious B.I.G. at the time of his death and it was he that had encouraged Charli in her rap music ambitions. I have to be honest and say I wish he hadn’t bothered because her debut single “Money” was just a horrible noise, a monotonous and relentless horrible noise. Look, I’m no rap expert so maybe her ‘flow’ was magnificent but that doesn’t make it any more enjoyable or even listenable. And why did so many rap records back in the day all feature lines about ‘waving your arms in the air like you just don’t care’ or variations of it?! Oh I can’t be arsed to linger any longer on this one. I’d rather listen to Charli XCX and I have no idea what she sounds like at all.

One of the bands of 1998 now as Catatonia release a fourth single from their No 1 album “International Velvet”. I’m not sure I remember “Strange Glue” – it certainly didn’t leave the same impression that “Mulder And Scully” or “Road Rage” did which have lasted nigh on three decades inside my brain. Not that it’s not a good song now that I’ve re-listened to it. It’s got a strong melody and ambitions to be epic sounding but it just doesn’t seem like an obvious choice for a single. It sounds like an album closing track (which it nearly was save for the solo piano accompanied and 2:22 long “My Selfish Gene”) rather than the surefire airplay hit that its predecessors were. Maybe it would have been wiser to go with a rerelease of nearly-flop single (it reached No 40) “I Am The Mob”? There was a fifth and final single taken from “International Velvet” in “Game On” but that really was stretching it as a peak chart position of No 33 demonstrated. Maybe I was on to something with that “I Am The Mob” idea?

In a very rap heavy show, we’re not done with the genre yet as here comes a special performance by Will Smith with a track inspired by the Grover Washington Jr. / Bill Withers song “Just The Two Of Us”. Instead of treating it as a love song between a couple though, Smith subverts the traditional narrative and makes it about the love between a father and his young son. It’s an intriguing idea and well executed with Will adding layers to the father character by informing us that things didn’t work out between him and the child’s mother and that they are separated. There’s some nice touches in the lyrics with lines such as :

“It’s a full-time job to get a good Dad, you got so much more stuff than I had”

Writers: William Salter, Will Smith, Ralph MacDonald & Bill Withers

However, it’s also dated by cultural references and practices with mentions of CD-ROMs, putting CDs in PCs and hitting your kids (“but I will test that butt when you cut outta line”). There’s also a lot of unnecessary grunting for want of a better word in this performance from Smith with multiple “Ha-ha”, “uh-uh-uh” and “whoo” noises forthcoming. Overall though, it’s a decent attempt to do something different within a rap context with the father trying to be a good role model for his young son. Coincidentally or perhaps intentionally, the single’s release was in sync with the fact that Smith had become a father for the first time in real life following the birth of his son Jaden.

It’s yet another new No 1 with the Spice Girls at the summit with “Viva Forever”. Given everything that had transpired within the group over the last two months, I have to say I was surprised that they’d managed to pull this latest chart topper off. There was a school of thought that said that after the departure of Geri Halliwell from the line up, the group might implode from the fracture and the end might be nigh but it seemed that the public were happy to accept a four piece Spice Girls just as they had accepted a Robbie Williams-less Take That. It was an especially impressive return given that their last single “Stop” had been their first in eight releases not to go to No 1 so the doom merchants would have jumped on “Viva Forever” falling similarly short.

We first saw the group performing the track on TOTP way back on the 5th June edition in the aftermath of Halliwell’s statement that she had left when executive producer Chris Cowey realised what he had on his hands with the footage including all five members. This performance saw the now slimmed down group on tour in America meaning that there was a definite decision by someone (be it Cowey, the label, management or the Spice Girls themselves) not to show the stop motion promo video featuring the group (including Geri) as fairies. Presumably the five months that it took to put it together weren’t wasted though as no doubt it featured on programmes like The Chart Show and other pop music platforms around the world.

Around this time, whilst I was working at the Our Price store in Stockport, a young man who I would now recognise as being neurodivergent, attached himself to me after I’d served him one day. His name was David and he was obsessed with the Spice Girls. He was a nice lad but took quite a lot of time serving when he came in as he would want to talk about the Spice Girls continuously. He would always ask for me which took me away from whatever I was doing which wasn’t necessarily convenient but I would always try and make the time for him if I could. When I transferred to the Altrincham branch in 1999, he followed me over there even though it was out of his way and involved multiple trips on public transport. The day that “Viva Forever” was released, we were playing it in the store just as David came in and he wondered around the shop in a sort of dream, lost in his own little world. I often think of that moment and wonder what happened to David and whether his Spice Girls obsession ever burnt itself out.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1FiveGot The Feelin’I did not
2Pras Michel featuring Ol’ Dirty Bastard and introducing MýaGhetto Superstar (That Is What You Are)Negative
3LovestationTeardropsNever
4The SupernaturalsI Wasn’t Built To Get UpNo
5Charli BaltimoreMoneyNot if you paid me
6CatatoniaStrange GlueNope
7Will SmithJust The Two Of UsNah
8Spice Girls Viva ForeverAnd 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/m002kkmz/top-of-the-pops-31071998

TOTP 24 JUL 1998

Posted on by 80stastic

I’m starting to get behind with these TOTP reviews. All it takes is one busy week in my own life and suddenly I’ve got four shows to write up in seven days to keep pace with the BBC4 schedule. I’ve tried skimping on the word count when this scenario arises but the completist in me fights hard against this strategy. Besides, nobody wants to read a couple of dozen words on each song stating whether I liked it or not do they? Our host tonight is Jayne Middlemiss who hasn’t been on the show for a month (maybe she really had been ill when they did that skit to introduce Kate Thornton the other week).

We start with Pras Michel featuring Ol’ Dirty Bastard and introducing Mýa and their hit “Ghetto Superstar (That Is What You Are)” to quote the full title which I don’t think I did in the last post (no brackets, no points!). I also failed to mention that this came from a film called Bulworth which was written and directed by and starred Warren Beatty. I was a regular cinema goer around this time but I failed to catch this movie which was a political black comedy that was well received critically but failed to put bums on seats in the cineplexes (wasn’t just me then).

The soundtrack album was popular in the US selling a million copies but that success didn’t translate across the pond in the UK. In fact, I don’t recall it being released over here at all and certainly don’t recognise the art work of the cover. The album featured some of the biggest names in hip-hop and rap including Dr. Dre, LL Cool J, Method Man, Ice Cube and Public Enemy. As for Pras, he would have two more UK hits – “Blue Angels” which was the follow up to “Ghetto Superstar” and he also featured on “Another One Bites The Dust” which was a remix of the Queen track by Fugees band mate Wyclef Jean for the soundtrack to the film Small Soldiers. Ol’ Dirty Bastard sadly passed away in 2004 from a drugs overdose whilst since 2013, Mýa has been married to herself. No, really.

Next up is the singing medical student Ultra Naté. OK, she wasn’t really but she did seem to have an obsession with medically themed song titles. After her previous hit “Found A Cure”, she was back with the follow up “New Kind Of Medicine”. It strikes me that Ultra Naté was a bit of a musical chameleon. On her biggest hit “Free” she channeled her inner Rozalla and then looked to “No More Tears” (Enough Is Enough)” by Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand for the inspiration for “Found A Cure”. Chic were her muse for “New Kind Of Medicine” and it worked well for her albeit that the single couldn’t match the chart numbers of its two predecessors.

As for that unusual name, it turns out that was her actual real name and not a stage moniker. No, really. It’s Ultra Naté Wyche. Sticking with the name theme, I note that “New Kind Of Medicine” was co-written by one Ed Baden-Powell who surely must be a relative of Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouts movement. It doesn’t stop there though – “Free” and “Found A Cure” were co-written by one Lem Springsteen though he doesn’t seem to be related to ‘The Boss’.

Still with Peter Andre?! Still?! In 1998?! Panic not though as I believe this is the last time we’ll see him on TOTP; at least the last time I’ll have to write about him anyway as he didn’t have another hit after this until 2004 with a rerelease of “Mysterious Girl” and I’m packing in this blog after the 1999 episodes have finished. I have zero recollection of “Kiss The Girl” but listening back to it, I thought it sounded like it could have been from the soundtrack to something like The Lion King. Well, blow me down but, on reading up on the song, I wasn’t a million miles away as it was from The Little Mermaid. Originally, the song was a calypso number but, as part of the film’s rerelease in 1998, the soundtrack was revisited with some of its songs being re-recorded by new artists. For some unfathomable and despicable reason, Peter Andre was one of those invited to the project and he turned it into a dismal, sappy ballad, the berk. How did this guy ever become and continue to be famous? Minuscule talent but massive pecs see seems to be the answer. I swear down, has there ever been a more useless celebrity?! Away with you sir and your overly gelled hair!

There’s quite a back story to this next hit. “Mas Que Nada” is a song written by Brazilian Jorge Ben who originally recorded it with bandleader Zé Maria in 1962 and it was subsequently covered by other Brazilian acts such as the Tamba Trio in 1963 and Louis Carlos Vinhas the following year. However, the most commonly known version came in 1966 when Sérgio Mendes covered it with his band Brazil ‘66. Thirty-one years later, its profile was raised again when it was famously used in a Nike commercial featuring Brazilian footballers such as Ronaldo and Roberto Carlos. In 1998, it resurfaced again, I’m guessing as part of the plethora of football related songs released due to the World Cup of that year (I could be wrong on that). Not just once though but twice as the aforementioned Tamba Trio version was a Top 20 hit the week before this danced-up version by Echobeatz just pipped it by making the Top 10. I’ve no idea who Echobeatz were/are but clearly whoever was behind this version had one eye on the clubs judging by the Italian House flavoured mix they gave it. “Mas que nada” is a Portuguese expression that can mean “more than anything else in Spanish” but in Brazilian Portuguese it has a more colloquial meaning of “whatever” or “no big deal”. I wonder if Ariel got Peter Crouch to record an advert for the Brazilian market with him saying “Mas que nada”?

Just as with B*Witched and Billie recently, last week’s No 1 gets another airing despite the fact that it’s been deposed from its chart crown. In her intro to “Freak Me” by Another Level, did Jayne Middlemiss say one of them was called Bobak? Sounds more like a Croatian footballer…

*checks Wikipedia*

Oh that was Zvonimir Boban who played most of his career with AC Milan. I’m sure there was a footballer called Bobak though…

*checks Wikipedia again*

There was a Peter Bodak who played for Coventry City in the 80s…

*checks Wikipedia one last time*

Found him! Roman Bobak! A Polish right back. I can’t mean him though. He’s hardly had any sort of career at all. Maybe I was thinking of Stjepan Bobek, a Yugoslavian player in the 40s and 50s and manager in the 70s. As dull as all this is for you to read and for me to write, it is more interesting than anything Another Level ever did.

P.S. Remember the last post when I said I always get Dane Bowers mixed up with Blue’s Anthony Costa? Well, when Another Level appeared at the RnB Nation festival in 2024. Only Bowers and Mark Baron from the original line up signed up for the gig so they got two new blokes in to make up the numbers and one of them was called Greg Costa. No wonder I’m confused!

I seem to have developed a theme to this post as I’ve gone along which is that of names. Joining the 15 year old Billie (Piper) in the charts this week was another Billie – Billie Myers. This Billie was 27 years old at the time and that older age meant that her hit was a little more…mature than Ms Piper’s. Well, a lot more if you watch the official video for “Tell Me”. Set in what see seems to be some sort of bondage club, Myers is a participant in some erotic scenes which look like they could have been in Bram Stoker’s Dracula film starring Keane Reeves and Winona Ryder.

The song itself sizzles with passion and even, dare I say it, menace and is a definite lost classic of the 90s. It really should have been a much bigger hit than its No 28 peak. After its appearance on this BBC4 TOTP repeat, there was a lot of love for it declared online. Sadly, in 1998, the record buying public was more enamoured with Billie Piper than Billie Myers and it slipped thoroughly the net. Shame.

Billie Piper and stuff like this. If I was surprised that Peter Andre was still having hits in 1998, then colour me shocked that Ace Of Base were as well. Their No 1 “All That She Wants” had been as long ago as 1993 whilst their last visit to the Top 10 had been in 1994. Somehow though, they convinced us that this life-affirming slice of pop fluff that was “Life Is A Flower” made them still relevant deep into the 90s.

Apparently the favourite Ace Of Base song by the band member who wrote it (Jonas Berggren), “Life Is A Flower” was radio friendly but brain cell hostile. It would rot your mind if you listened to it too much. Its lyrics included:

“Please Mr. Agony, release them for a while,

Learn them the consequences of living without life”

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Jonas Berggren
Life Is a Flower lyrics © Megasong Publishing

“Learn them”?! Surely you mean ‘teach’ them? In an act of redemption though, after Tina Arena the other week with the title song from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Whistle Down The Wind musical, here’s another use of those words in the opening two lines to remind us of not only a great film but a great pop song too…

It’s another new No 1 and the only one of Jamiroquai’s career. “Deeper Underground” was taken from the soundtrack to the Godzilla movie of this year starring Matthew Broderick. As with the aforementioned Bulworth, I’ve never seen this film and, judging by its reviews, I’m glad I haven’t. Rated mainly as a stinker, it also underperformed commercially. Even the director never wanted to make this film apparently. However, its soundtrack album did go some good business, debuting at No 2 on the charts and achieving platinum sales in America. It mainly featured what would be defined as ‘rock’ songs, including another huge hit called “Cone With Me” by Puff Daddy and Jimmy Page which sampled the legendary Led Zeppelin track “Kashmir” but we won’t be seeing that on any BBC4 repeat due to the Puff Daddy issue. Although definitely not a rock song, “Deeper Underground” did have a harder sound than we had come to expect from Jamiroquai it seemed to me.

Despite only having one week at the chart summit, it was a pretty hardy single spending three weeks inside the Top 10 and two months on the Top 40 in total. Is it Jamiroquai’s most famous song? I don’t know. They’re a funny act. For all their 26 hits, only nine of them went Top 10. And could you name them? I might be able to pull out two or three from the recesses of my mind and I’ve probably reviewed most of them. Have they all just morphed into one because, dare I say it, they all sound the same?

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Pras Michel featuring Ol’ Dirty Bastard and introducing MýaGhetto Superstar (That Is What You Are)I did not
2Ultra NatéNew Kind Of MedicineNegative
3Peter AndreKiss The GirlAs if
4EchobeatzMas Que NadaNah
5Another LevelFreak MeNope
6Billie MyersTell MeGreat song but no
7Ace Of BaseLife Is A FlowerNever
8JamiroquaiDeeper UndergroundNo

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/m002kkmx/top-of-the-pops-24071998

TOTP 17 JUL 1998

Posted on by 80stastic

It’s mid July 1998 and there’s two trends in evidence within the TOTP running order etiquette, one of which is possibly informing the other. The first is that, after a few records that have bucked the trend of seven days chart toppers by staying at No 1 for more than one week, we are back in a run of weekly changes to the pole position. From now until the end of the year, only four singles will manage more than one week at the top. This sequence seemed to inform the TOTP appearance policy because, as demonstrated in this show, we would get the previous week’s No 1 given another slot despite no longer being the country’s most bought single.

I’ve commented on this before making a case for both sides of the argument and my take on it remains confused. On the one hand, it was jarring that a show whose format historically was to showcase the records making the most strides in the Top 40 would be featuring singles whose sales had, if not dropped, been overtaken by other new releases. On the other, you could argue that none of this was the fault of executive producer Chris Cowey who possibly felt that he couldn’t just toss away a big hit record after just one showing because the record companies were manipulating the charts with their first week of release discount pricing. However, Cowey didn’t help himself by putting last week’s No 1 as the first act on the show the following week making a consecutive appearance segue albeit seven days apart as was the case here with Billie and her hit “Because We Want To”. Now, in my head this one stayed around the charts for ages which I suppose it did – a month inside the Top 10, two on the Top 40 altogether and yet it was constantly going down the charts. Not once did it reverse that descent as we had seen many a sustaining hit do this year. Still, a No 1 with your debut single aged just 15 was still quite the achievement. Ah yes, Billie’s age. In her first TOTP appearance, there was a lot of flesh on display what with her wearing a black singlet top. For this performance, she’s completely covered up. Do you think there had been complaints to the BBC about such a young girl wearing a top that revealed her midriff and bare shoulders? Or was it a decision made by Billie herself or her management team? Whatever the reason, it was a noticeable change of style.

And talking of changes of style…from pop song to schlock song as we get the infernal combination of Celine Dion and the Bee Gees duetting on “Immortality”. Whose idea was this?! Well, it was those dastardly Gibb brothers obviously who wrote the song for the stage musical of Saturday Night Fever and decided that Celine’s vocals were needed to complete the track. It was a terrible idea and an even worse sound though one that could easily have been predicted given the two artists involved. Don’t get me wrong, some of the Bee Gees classic catalogue is…well…classic but the 90s saw them record some desperately overwrought and whiny ballads and “Immortality” was no exception. The lyrics were vapid, rhyming ‘immortality’ with ‘eternity’ and banging on about fulfilling your destiny with the overall effect that, in keeping with its title, it seemed to go on forever. The whole thing was truly reprehensible.

Now there’s some jiggery pokery, some sleight of hand going on here as host Jamie Theakston was clearly superimposed over the Celine Dion/Bee Gees performance for his intro, as if Chris Cowey was trying to convince the watching TV audience that he was actually there but he obviously wasn’t. What was all that about? Couldn’t they have just done a voiceover or was there a clause in Theakston’s contract guaranteeing an agreed amount of screen time? Surely not.

Anyway, he’s definitely in the studio with the next artist (s) who is/are Pras Michel featuring Ol’ Dirty Bastard and introducing Mýa. Now there’s a lot to unpack here starting with who were all these people? Well, Pras Michel was, of course, a member of the Fugees who were on hiatus following the mega international success of their album “The Score” allowing its three members to pursue solo careers. Pras was the second of the three to have a hit under their own name when “Ghetto Superstar” made No 2 in the UK. Ol’ Dirty Bastard (or ODB as he was styled for pre-watershed audiences) was part of the Wu-Tang Clan whilst I had to double check who Mýa was as I mistakenly believed her initially to be the woman who had that hit with The Tamperer – I was wrong as that was someone called Maya not Mýa; Maya Days to be precise. No, Mýa, if her discography is anything to go by, is a recording artist with quite the track record – eight studio albums and sixty-three singles. So, how do I neither remember nor know of her? What I do know about her is that she was in a battle with Billie as to who had the most winning smile in pop. Wow!

Erm…anyway, as we all know (even Jamie Theakston did), “Ghetto Superstar” interpolates the 1983 hit “Islands In The Stream” by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers that was written by the aforementioned Bee Gees. In my 80s TOTP blog, when reviewing that hit, I said it might as well have been called “Islands In The Mainstream” so middle-of-the-road was it. Turns out I was wrong about that as well as it was identified as the template for a hit by a member of one of the coolest acts of the decade and a man whose chosen professional name included an actual swear word. It shouldn’t work really but it did becoming the ninth best selling single of 1998 in the UK. Mind, we did have a track record for being susceptible to this sort of thing – “Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio springs to mind.

My abiding memory of this song though involves a bus driver. Stay with me. I was living in Manchester when it was a hit and one Sunday, my wife and I were heading into town to do something (can’t remember what) so we hopped on a bus to save our legs. Once onboard, we quickly realised that this wasn’t your standard bus. The driver wasn’t wearing a uniform and he didn’t have a machine to issue passengers with any kind of ticket. He also didn’t seem to know what prices he should be charging but rather was making it up as he went/drove along. Who was this guy and how had he got hold of a bus? Had he hired one for the day? Had he stolen it? The clincher though that this wasn’t a regular bus service was that he had music blaring out which he was singing along to. The song that was playing when we boarded? Yep, “Ghetto Superstar”.

It’s Eagle-Eye Cherry again but his third consecutive appearance on the show can be justified I guess as it’s three weeks on the spin at No 6 for “Save Tonight”. This was a remarkably hardy hit spending six weeks inside the Top 10 and just under three months on the Top 40. That’s the power of a very radio friendly single, I guess.

In an attempt to distinguish this performance from his previous two, Eagle-Eye does an acoustic version of the track alongside two other guitarists and two blokes on either end of the line, one adding backing vocals and the other playing the most vigorous and energetic tambourine I think I’ve ever seen. It all hangs together pretty well though and makes for a memorable performance. Maybe Chris Cowey should have looked into doing more of these kind of slots but then not every single on the show would have lent itself to such a version so well. An acoustic “Ghetto Superstar” anyone? I think this guy proves my point..

Another two songs we’ve seen on the show before already now beginning with “Got The Feelin’” by Five. Whilst I could make a case for Eagle-Eye Cherry’s repeated appearances, this was preposterous. After debuting at No 3, this single had slipped every week since to No 5 then No 8 and eventually No 14. However, a rise of a solitary place to No 13 in week five on the charts was enough reason for Chris Cowey to show their initial performance (the one with the football shirts) again. However, according to official charts.com, “Got The Feelin’” is Five’s second biggest selling single ever, shifting half a million copies and clocking up 12 million streams and counting in the UK so does that add some credibility to Cowey’s decision? Oh I don’t know anymore!

Hell’s teeth! Cowey’s done it again with the very next song only this one is worse! I know I’m banging on about this but why are we watching Mousse T featuring Hot N’ Juicy when they are at No 11 in the charts with “Horny” having dropped a place from last week’s No 10? And what on earth is going on with those face-to-face graphics on either side of the screen?! It’s the same technology used to impose Jamie Theakston’s fizzog against a backdrop of the previously shown performance clip but this time features the women from Hot N’ Juicy. Why? Why do that? It looks cheap and nasty and adds very little in terms of impact. Make it make sense somebody. Please!!

No confusion as to why this next hit is on the show – crashing into the charts at No 9 are Garbage with the second single from their sophomore album “Version 2.0” called “I Think I’m Paranoid”. Now this is a tune! A deceptively sparse intro and simplistic verse leads immediately into a crunching power chord and Shirley Manson snarling the song title before coming back with an unexpected second part to the chorus with the “bend me, break me” refrain which would get them into trouble copyright wise with music publisher Helios Music Corporation. They claimed it infringed upon significant elements of the Scott English and Larry Weiss composition “Bend Me, Shape Me” which had been a hit for The American Breed in the US and Amen Corner in the UK. Yes, the words in that phrase are the same but there’s not much else to link the two songs to my ears. As for the performance here, you can’t take your eyes off Shirley who looks fantastic throughout in that polka dot dress. Erm…(again)… time to move on I think…

It’s another new No 1 that will only spend a solitary week at the top. Another Level would never return to the chart summit but they scaled it with “Freak Me”, a cover of an American No 1 by Silk from 1993 which never even cracked the UK Top 40 so it was possible to pass it off as their own song. Maybe. Anyway, it’s pure filth with lyrics about whipped cream and licking their baby up and down! Seriously though, I’m surprised the ‘whipped cream’ line got past the BBC sensors especially as there was a toned down version that the band performed on the promo video and for TV appearances though clearly not this one. I could never see (or hear) the appeal of this lot but judging by the screams from the studio audience, they were hot property for a while. I always get Dane Bowers from the band confused with Anthony Costa from similarly unremarkable outfit Blue. Anybody else have that problem?

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1BillieBecause We Want ToNo
2Celine Dion / Bee Gees ImmortalityHeavens no!
3Pras Michel featuring Ol’ Dirty Bastard and introducing MýaGhetto SuperstarNope
4Eagle-Eye CherrySave TonightNo but my wife had his album
5FiveGot The Feelin’Nah
6Mousse T featuring Hot N’ JuicyHornyI did not
7GarbageI Think I’m ParanoidGreat track but no
8Another LevelFreak MeNO!

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/m002k7yz/top-of-the-pops-17071998?seriesId=unsliced