80stastic

TOTP 30 SEP 1993

Posted on October 27, 2022 by 80stastic

When Robbie Coltrane died recently, like many people, it got me thinking about his acting credits and the roles on which he made his name. Although I’ve seen many of the Harry Potter films due to my son’s influence, it won’t be Hagrid that I remember him for. Not when there’s so many other turns that I could reflect on. There’s his memorable performance as Dr Johnson, creator of A Dictionary of the English Language in Blackadder The Third for starters. Then there’s his starring role in the critically acclaimed National Treasure from 2016.

However for me, he was never better than in Cracker which first aired on ITV three days before this TOTP was broadcast. Based around the immensely complex character of criminal psychiatrist Dr Edward ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald, it ran for three series from 1993 to 1995 plus a couple of later specials in 1996 and 2006. Whilst its plots were incredibly engrossing (the Hillsborough story is the one I remember the most), there was another source of interest for me in that it was set and filmed in Manchester where I was living at the time. I think they even filmed in the area I lived called Longsight. I certainly recall walking home up my road one night and stumbling upon a whole film crew filming outside a house with many actors / extras dressed as police. I wasn’t the only person who was given a shock that night. The local drug dealer (‘Mr Dodgy’ we called him) nearly shat himself when confronted with the scene.

Talking of scares, here’s “Big Scary Animal” by Belinda Carlisle to open the show. This is the third time in consecutive weeks that this track has been featured but despite all that exposure, it couldn’t break into the Top 10 peaking just outside at No 12. Belinda’s discography tells me that she has more Greatest Hits albums to her name than studio albums which would suggest that she was all about the singles but that argument doesn’t quite stack up when you crunch her numbers. Discounting her solo debut “Belinda”, the following four albums all went Top 10 in the UK with two of them achieving platinum sales status. And yet…have you ever met somebody who owns a Belinda Carlisle studio album?

How do you follow up one of the biggest selling songs of the year which also happens to be your debut single? This was the dilemma facing Gabrielle who had shot to fame off the back of her No 1 “Dreams”. Talk about setting a high bar for yourself. Sadly and perhaps inevitably, “Going Nowhere” failed to live up to expectations. Not exactly a prophetic song title as it did make the Top 10 but it didn’t have that mercurial bit of magic that “Dreams” had courtesy of that adapted Tracy Chapman sample. It sounds like something Aretha Franklin might have recorded in the 80s. A very clunky, dated sound in a dance obsessed 1993.

Two further singles were released from her debut album “Find Your Way” and they did the opposite of that instruction by getting lost in the lower reaches of the charts, neither even making the Top 20. Was Gabrielle’s pop star career in danger of petering out? Perhaps against the odds, she would turn her fortunes around gradually over the course of the decade before peaking again triumphantly with a definitely prophetically titled song, the No 1 single “Rise” in 2000.

What’s going on here then? The pop phenomenon (and they really were) of 1984 back in the charts in 1993? Well of course it was all about record company plundering of an artist’s back catalogue to squeeze some more revenue out of their reputation. Frankie Goes To Hollywood were unavoidable in 1984. They owned the charts with three No1 records totting up fifteen weeks at the top between them. They became one of a handful of artists to command the No1 and No2 chart positions in the same week and were surrounded by controversy after the BBC banned the first of those No1 singles “Relax” due to its overtly sexual nature (Mike Read and all that). After the success came the downfall and the gap of two years between debut album “Welcome To The Pleasuredome” and follow up “Liverpool” proved insurmountable in terms of maintaining their profile and the band split in 1987 after basically imploding.

This though was all ancient history in pop terms and by 1993 record label ZTT calculated that the nine years between Frankie’s annus mirabilis and a revisiting of their story was long enough. To try and entice a new fanbase or indeed reactivate their existing one towards their amazing story once more, they released “Bang!…The Greatest Hits Of Frankie Goes To Hollywood” – it did what it said on the tin. Like Belinda Carlisle earlier, Frankie have far more compilations than studio albums to their name (a ratio of 10:2) but this one was by far the most successful going to No 4 in the charts and achieving gold status sales. To promote the album, a version of “Relax” was re-issued – the “Classic 1993 Version” to be exact – though I’m not entirely sure how different it was from the original which already had a myriad of mixes anyway.

There’s no controversy this time around with videos as the BBC is showing a live performance promo of the song directed by David Mallet. Even nearly ten years on, the notorious and banned S&M video with an obese Roman emperor and drag queens was never going to be shown before the watershed. The 1993 rerelease of “Relax” peaked at No5. Quite remarkable.

This next one is just a brilliant song in my book and a highlight from a great album that doesn’t get the praise it deserves. “Roses In The Hospital” was the third single from “Gold Against The Soul” by Manic Street Preachers and regularly trades positions in my mind with “Life Becoming A Landslide” (the follow up single) as the best track on the album.

Borrowing just ever so slightly from Bowie’s “Sound And Vision” (or is it “Sorrow”?), it’s got an unexpectedly funky backbeat allied with the hookiest (yes, that’s a word!) of choruses. Add in a wonderful coda that combines a refrain of the phrase “forever delayed”* with a knowing nod to The Clash’s “Rudie Can’t Fail” and it couldn’t…well…fail. It didn’t either when becoming the biggest hit from the album by peaking at No 15. This was the highest chart positions of any of their own compositions at the time with 1992’s No 7 “Theme From M.A.S.H (Suicide Is Painless)” obviously a cover version.

I was working in the Our Price in Stockport around this time and there were actually two Our Prices in the town, the big one on Merseyway and a much smaller one just around the corner from it. That store had a reputation for stocking classical music and I believe actually employed a ‘mature’ lady (compared to all us youngsters working for the company anyway) for a few hours a week who had great classical product knowledge. I was covering in the smaller store on the morning “Roses In The Hospital” came out and for some reason Sony sent us one 7” single despite the fact that the store didn’t stock any vinyl. Why do I remember this non-consequential crap? Oh and apparently that isn’t Nicky Wire in the Minnie Mouse mask as he was on honeymoon so his place was taken by a roadie in disguise. He wasn’t making some anti-Disney statement. Didn’t Echo and the Bunnymen do something similar when performing “Seven Seas” on the show in 1984 with a guy in a fish costume standing in for an absent Les Pattinson?

* “Forever Delayed” would be the title of the band’s first Best Of album in 2002 though curiously “Roses In The Hospital” was not included on the track listing. It did appear on the DVD version of the album and 2011 retrospective “National Treasures -The Complete Singles”.

Just the two Breakers this week starting with an act that always confuses me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I always get US3 confused with the similarly named Oui 3 who were having hits around this time. Secondly, like fellow jazz rapper Guru who was also on the show as a Breaker recently, they had an album that I remember selling loads of in Our Price but which Wikipedia tells me was not a massive commercial success. In the case of Guru that was the album “Guru’s Jazzmatazz Vol. 1” which only made No 58 in the charts whilst US3’s was “Hand On The Torch” which topped out at No 40.

“Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)” was the biggest hit from the album though it took a re-release to achieve this peak of No 23 after it bombed initially the year before. Sampling Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island”, I quite liked this though it wasn’t really my bag.

After Frankie Goes To Hollywood earlier, here’s another huge star of the 80s. Unlike Frankie though, Paul Young had managed to eke out some chart hits after his imperial phase of 83-85 had petered out and remain a semi regular visitor to the charts. In the 90s up to this point he had scored a total of four Top 40 entries (including No 4 hit “Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” with Zucchero). Just like Frankie though, he had also released a big selling Greatest Hits compilation called “From Time To Time – The Singles Collection” which had even topped the charts in 1991*.

However, Paul’s studio albums had suffered from a case of diminishing returns for a while with each one selling less than its predecessor right back to his debut “No Parlez” in 1983. By the time we got to 1993’s “The Crossing”, he was beyond the point of no return when it came to reversing that trend with it peaking at a lowly No 27. The lead single from it was a song that suggested that Paul (or his songwriters) had taken a leaf out of the ABC book of composition but instead of Smokey singing, we had Otis Redding feeling sad. I speak as a person who owns some Paul Young records and I have to say that “Now I Know What Made Otis Blue” is not his finest hour. However, it is deceptively catchy and has some powerful ear worm potential. Maybe that’s why it made an impressive chart high of No 14. Paul would visit the UK Top 40 only twice more and in a very reduced way but he remains a big draw on the live circuit.

*As with Belinda Carlisle before him, Paul has more Best Of compilations to his name than actual studio albums.

The debut now of a group who would enjoy enormous and sustained success throughout the decade despite losing a popular member Robbie Williams / Take That style. The presence in the UK charts of all female American R&B groups like En Vogue, SWV and Jade had highlighted a gap in the market for a UK version. In all honesty, apart from Bananarama, we hadn’t had many girl bands of any musical persuasion at all. Up to 1993, who else was there? Toto Coelo? Belle And The Devotions? The Reynolds Girls? The Beverley Sisters? We were seriously lagging behind. Enter Eternal – sisters Easther and Vernie Bennett and friends Kéllé Bryan and Louise Nurding. Put together by First Avenue Records using the En Vogue template, they exploded out of the gate with debut single “Stay” which made No 4 confirming consumer appetite for such a band.

Underpinning that success was the confidence of their performance here. Easther gives a strong lead vocal while the synchronised dance moves behind her are absolutely on point including some Egyptian style head slides and eye catching arm waving. Talking of eye catching, perhaps predictably, Louise Nurding got a lot of attention as the only non-black person in the group and within two years she would leave the band to pursue her own successful solo career. Had EMI always got her flagged for such a move? There was a rumour that they didn’t think they could break the band in the US as an R&B act if they had someone white in the line-up but I don’t want to pursue that particular line of thought. Suffice to say both Eternal and Louise were able to co-exist and have plenty of chart hits. The former had eight UK Top 10 hits including a No 1 post Louise who herself racked up an impressive twelve Top 20 hits half of which went Top 5. The one album they recorded as a four piece – “Always And Forever” – went four times platinum in the UK and sold four million copies worldwide paving the way for many an all female band in their wake including Spice Girls, All Saints, Girls Aloud and The Saturdays.

Host Mark Franklin informs us that Chaka Demus And Pliers were meant to be in the TOTP studio to perform “She Don’t Let Nobody” but the former wasn’t very well and they had to cancel. He probably had a sore throat having strained it doing all those ‘Baby Girl’ and ‘Number One in the World’ shout outs. Ho hum.

This next one is a curious thing. Not the performance itself which is pretty standard but the fact that it was the band’s one and only time in the TOTP studio and it was for a single that only made it to No 40 in our charts. Can’t be that many acts that have such a TOTP history. Of course, the videos for Spin Doctors previous hit singles “Two Princes” and “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” had been on the show before but this run through of “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues” was the band’s only live performance.

The third single taken from their “Pocketful Of Kryptonite” album, it was very much in the same vein as its predecessors (no shaking things up with a slushy ballad for these guys) but a much more washed out, half-hearted version. Maybe that explains its lowly chart placing. Jimmy Olsen was of course Superman’s nerdy pal who had his own DC Comic but I’d take Fitz from Cracker to solve a case over Jimmy every time.

DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince still reign supreme at No 1 with “Boom! Shake The Room”. The pair seemed to have an issues with buildings – their debut album was called “Rock The House”. Yeah, you guessed it. I’ve got nothing left to say about this one. Thankfully this is its last week at No 1 as the Take That juggernaut is coming…

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Belinda Carlisle	Big Scary Animal	Nope
2	Gabrielle	Going Nowhere	No
3	Frankie Goes To Hollywood	Relax	Not in 1993 but I did back in 1984 obviously
4	Manic Street Preachers	Roses In The Hospital	Not the single but I bought the album
5	US3	Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)	Didn’t mind it, didn’t buy it
6	Paul Young	Now I Know What Made Otis Blue	Nah
7	Eternal	Stay	I did not
8	Chaka Demus And Pliers	She Don’t Let Nobody	Certainly not
9	Spin Doctors	Jimmy Olsen’s Blues”	Negative
10	DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince	Boom! Shake The Room	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001d7qy/top-of-the-pops-30091993

TOTP 23 SEP 1993

Posted on October 25, 2022 by 80stastic

Living in the digital age is great isn’t it? Like most of us I suspect, I often find myself asking the question “How did we do [insert a commonplace task] before we had the internet?”. Life is so much easier now. Even as I type these words on my mobile phone, my wife is sat next to me turning off the TV with the remote control app on her mobile phone as she can’t be bothered to find the actual remote which has no doubt slipped down the side of the sofa again. These are the sort of everyday problems that technological advancements were created to solve. As for music consumption, we now have voice activated access to millions of songs thanks to platforms like Spotify and hardware like Amazon Echo Dot/Alexa.

Back in 1993, although the internet had been invented and the World Wide Web put into the public domain in that year, most of us didn’t have a clue what it was or how to access it. Some people who were keeping tabs on technology were, perhaps unsurprisingly given their own musical development, Depeche Mode. Three days before this TOTP aired, they were one of the first bands to utilise the internet to interact with fans in a Q&A session via AOL. As this was 1993, there were plenty of technical issues with many users (including the band themselves) not able to log onto the chat. To be fair though, our 2022 digital world isn’t trouble free either. Didn’t WhatsApp go down the other day?

Anyway, we’ll be seeing those early adopters of technology Depeche Mode later on in the show but we start with a band that we hadn’t seen in the charts for nigh on two years. The Wonder Stuff’s last Top 40 hit had been “Welcome To The Cheap Seats EP” in January of 1992 from their “Never Loved Elvis” album. Since then, I’m assuming that they had been recording their fourth studio album “Construction For The Modern Idiot”. It would be the band’s last for eleven years. The lead single from it was actually another EP. The “On The Ropes EP” would peak at No 10 and would be the band’s last ever time inside the Top 10. The only track from the EP to feature on the album was the title track performed here and I have to say that I don’t really recall it. Listening to it now though, it sounds like a much more out and out rock sound than their previous quirky, knockabout material like “Size Of A Cow” and the aforementioned “Welcome To The Cheap Seats” that made them mainstream chart stars. I think that was probably the right career move and the album made No 4 which was none too shabby but the end of the band (temporarily at least) was near. Two more Top 40 hits from the album would follow and that tour that host Tony Dortie mentions in his intro would be the band’s biggest ever including 78 dates but 1994 would see them split before, as Jarvis Cocker nearly sang, meeting up in the year 2000.

It’s those IT geeks Depeche Mode now with an EP of their own called “Condemnation”. The third single from their “Songs Of Faith And Devotion” album, the title track is a quite staggering piece of work which has me reaching for my handy book of superlatives. It’s a beautifully haunting and emotive song based around a powerful vocal from Dave Gahan with a clear and deliberate gospel feel to it. A truly striking and indeed staggering composition. Gahan is on record as saying it’s one of his favourite tracks by the band but due to his health/addiction problems, he stopped performing it live in 1994 and Martin Gore took over on vocal duties. This seems quite an apposite decision as “Condemnation” puts me in mind of their equally atmospheric ballad “Somebody” from 1984 that was also sung by Gore.

Tony Dortie invites us to try and work out what the video for “Condemnation” is all about in his intro so here’s my two pennies’ worth. There’s definitely a nod to The Wicker Man in there with Gahan being led by a cowl wearing throng to a destination of what appears to be bales of hay to meet with his lover to whom he is then shackled. Are they to be sacrificed Lord Summerisle style or is it some kind of pagan wedding ceremony? The sepia tint on the film adds to its unsettling feel. “Condemnation” peaked at No 9.

Talk about making a statement! Not only have M People racked up their third Top 10 hit of 1993 with “Moving On Up” but it’s gone in at No 4 thus making it their biggest ever hit after just one week of sales! The single would eventually…ahem…move on up to a high of No 2 paving the way for the release of the “Elegant Slumming” album that would achieve the same peak in the album chart and go three times platinum in the UK. M People were no longer a club phenomenon but bona fide, mainstream pop stars.

The track was back in the news recently when it was used as blink-and-you’ll-miss-her Prime Minister Liz Truss’s walk on music at the Tory Party Conference. I was listening to James O’Brien on LBC when he was the first to speak to the band’s founder Mike Pickering for his reaction. He wasn’t pleased…

The voice behind “Unfinished Sympathy” is next but I have to say it doesn’t sound in good nick here. There’s no doubting Shara Nelson’s vocal talents just from the evidence of that Massive Attack track alone so I can only assume she was feeling under the weather for this TOTP performance. Either that or she was distracted by trying to track the close up camera revolving around her but her singing on “One Goodbye In Ten” here doesn’t sound the best. Not that it’s a great litmus test of musical quality but if she’d have been auditioning for the X Factor, she’d have had Simon Cowell grimacing. Shame.

Now I know that Haddaway had more hits than just “What Is Love” but I couldn’t have told you what they were called let alone what they sounded like. However, if I’d given it a moment’s thought (but then again why would I spend any time considering Haddaway’s back catalogue?) then I would surely have come to the conclusion that the follow up to “What Is Love” would sound pretty similar. And so it does with “Life” recycling the annoying synth riff from its predecessor.

It seems to me that writing songs just generically called “Life” is a tricky challenge. Surely the subject matter is just too big?! Look at Haddaway’s lyrics here:

Life will never be the same, life is changing
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Dee Dee Halligan / Junior Torello
Life lyrics © Hanseatic Musikverlag Gmbh & Co Kg

What tosh. Still, it’s an improvement on Des’ree’s attempt with her 1998 single of the same name…

I don’t want to see a ghost, it’s a sight that I fear the most, I’d rather have a piece of toast
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Des’ree Weekes / Prince Sampson
Life lyrics © Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd., Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Dear oh dear oh dear etc…

Excellent! Just the two Breakers this week means less writing for me and one of them was on last week so I’ve already commented on it. This shouldn’t take long and indeed why would anyone want to dwell on the first of them. Worlds Apart – remember them? They had four UK Top 40 singles of which their cover of Love Affair’s “Everlasting Love” was the second. None got any higher than No 15 and yet their bio on Wikipedia suggests that they were absolutely massive literally everywhere else in the world racking up global sales of ten million records. And get this – such was the demand for them that their licensed merchandise products totalled 138 in number including lamps, bubblegum and motorbikes! This can’t be true surely?! None of it makes any sense which is encapsulated by the very first line of that Wikipedia entry that says they are ‘an English multinational boy band of the 90s’. English and multinational? How does that work then? Well, I’m not going to delve into the subject of identity politics but…wait…are an English multinational boy band? They’re still in existence? My god they are. They split in 2002 but reformed in 2007 and are still a going concern. Their line up these days includes that bloke from Brother Beyond. This is all nonsense and is summed up perfectly by the fact that they recorded a song called “Arnold Schwarzenegger”. No really, look…

All I remember of them was that the buyers at Our Price head office ordered in loads of their album which would then sit behind the counter gathering dust for the rest of the decade. “Everlasting Love” peaked at No 20. Again I say dear oh dear oh dear etc..

Next the song that was on just last week and a quick check of the BBC4 schedule tells me is on the next show as well. Somebody at TOTP loved Belinda Carlisle and her “Big Scary Animal” single. After her studio performance last week, we get the promo video this time which seems to involve Belinda sat at the end of an enormous dinner table waiting for her date who arrives on a motorbike, spends ages trying to find the room she’s in before pushing her down a staircase on a chaise longue. Just…just…why?!

A new hit now from a new artist who would prove to be a one hit wonder but would go on to show that making quirky dance records wasn’t their only talent. Stakka Bo hailed from Sweden and brought us the No 13 hit “Here We Go” which shared its title with the first words of the chorus of that Belinda Carlisle hit from immediately before but that’s where the similarities ended. An artist who Stakka Bo did share similarities with though were Stereo MCs and they were duly made in the music press. Probably no bad thing at the time.

Stakka Bo were basically Johan Renck, a man whose later career would far outstrip his achievements in the world of pop. Right, this is actually quite weird. Me and my wife were late to the Breaking Bad party and so have been on catch up via Netflix for a while (we’re halfway through series 3 so no spoilers please!). We’d just finished watching another episode so I thought I’d do a bit more blogging and the first thing I saw when researching Stakka Bo was this:

Stakka Bo's real name is Johan Renck. He went on to become a successful TV director, helming three episodes of Breaking Bad, and winning an Emmy Award in 2019 for Chernobyl. #TOTP pic.twitter.com/ketDcZTioK
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) October 21, 2022

What?! That’s quite the career change right there. He’s also produced pop videos for everyone from Madonna to Robbie Williams to Lana Del Ray. Renck obviously directed the promo for “Here We Go” as well. As for the song itself, I quite liked it with its flute flourishes and insanely catchy hooks. It was played to death on MTV which helped to break it in just about every territory. There was a follow up – the prophetically titled “Down The Drain” – but we don’t need to concern ourselves with that here. Renck looks like he might pop up in an episode of Only Fools And Horses here whilst his mate looks like a diabolical merging together of East 17’s Brian Harvey and Frank Spencer. Ah 1993 – what were we all thinking?

So big were Take That by this point that it seemed they were just about headlining every TOTP they were on. I mean, obviously there was the No 1 song on after them here but you get my drift. Their appearance on the show was always the top of the bill moment. Their latest single wasn’t even out for another four days after this TOTP aired. That single was “Relight My Fire” featuring that dreadful woman Lulu.

I don’t think I knew at the time that it was actually a Dan Hartman song with my knowledge of his oeuvre restricted to “Instant Replay” and “I Can Dream About You”. His original was released in 1980 with Loleatta Holloway (her again) doing the female vocals that Take That’s management dragged Lulu in for. As much as I dislike her, the introduction of Lulu halfway through the song does create quite the impact in the performance here as a counterpoint to all that spinning and twirling the lads were doing. The single would go straight in at No 1 once released making them only the second artist ever to have two consecutive singles do that with Slade being the first in 1973.

Culture Beat have gone from the top spot with the new incumbents being DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince with “Boom! Shake The Room”. Will Smith was already a well established star of TV due to his titular role in The Fresh Prince Of Bel–Air at this point which was about to start its fourth season in late September back in 1993. Within two years he would be starring in the film Bad Boys and his global stardom would be confirmed. Fast forward 29 years and Smith’s career is now in serious jeopardy after he shook the room at the Oscars by slapping Chris Rock. Boom!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	The Wonder Stuff	On The Ropes EP	No
2	Depeche Mode	Condemnation EP	How did I not buy this?!
3	M People	Moving On Up	No but my wife had the album
4	Shara Nelson	One Goodbye In Ten	See 3 above
5	Haddaway	Life	Never
6	Worlds Apart	Everlasting Love	As if
7	Belinda Carlisle	Big Scary Animal	Nope
8	Stakka Bo	Here We Go	Nah
9	Take That and Lulu	Relight My Fire	I did not
10	DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince	Boom! Shake The Room	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001d7qt/top-of-the-pops-23091993

TOTP 16 SEP 1993

Posted on October 21, 2022 by 80stastic

There’s some massive tunes and stellar names on this particular TOTP starting with one of the biggest rock songs of all time. Who doesn’t know “Ace Of Spades” by Motörhead? Seriously though, who doesn’t?

Enter Motörhead fan, stage left…

MF: Alright pal. What other Motörhead songs do you know?

Me: Erm…well…there’s that one about…you know…um…ahh…Oh God! I don’t know any others!

Yes, turns out I’m not really an aficionado on Motörhead at all though I do like “Ace Of Spades” but then who doesn’t (don’t start all that again!). What I do know however is that during their early 1980s heyday I read a series of articles about the band in the Daily Mirror (our family’s choice of paper) where I learned about the classic line up of Lemmy, Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor and ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke. I also read of their tales of debauchery involving what they called ‘dodgy boilers’ who even the wet behind the ears 12 year old me knew referred to groupies who were prepared to get horizontal to meet their idols.

Sadly, all three of the classic line up have now shuffled off this mortal coil with the band officially disbanding following Lemmy’s death in 2015. Still, all us 80s kids will always have this…

The iconic tunes continue with the Pet Shop Boys treatment of The Village People classic “Go West”. This cover version had been first performed by the duo at an AIDS charity gig at the Haçienda nightclub in Manchester organised by Derek Jarman. Originally scheduled for a non-album release in 1992, it was eventually included in the track listing for their fifth studio album “Very”. I recall there being a real buzz about this single – I have a distinct memory of Simon Bates (who must have been coming to the end of his time at Radio 1) asking on air when it was going to be released. Certainly it provided a spike in sales of “Very” when it entered the chart at No 2. Somehow it never made it to that coveted top spot though.

Watching the video back now, it seems madly prophetic with Neil and Chris striding across Red Square in blue and yellow costumes which offer up images of the war in Ukraine perpetrated by Russia. This is hammered home by the intro which seems strangely redolent of the State Anthem of the Soviet Union. Obviously, nobody would have been considering any of that back in 1993 when we would probably have been marvelling at the CGI of the promo by Howard Greenhalgh which was nominated for a Grammy. I saw the Pet Shop Boys live about six months ago with a friend and this track was a stand out inducing much hugging, swaying and singing along. Chris and Neil would never have as big a hit single again.

Another huge song now as we see the TOTP debut of Radiohead. So much has been written about “Creep” let alone the band themselves so I don’t think I can add anything much to that particular canon of work. However, these are my personal thoughts and memories for what they are worth.

I’d heard of Radiohead due to their minor hit single “Anyone Can Play Guitar” from earlier in the year but hadn’t actually heard Radiohead if you see what I mean. The initial release of “Creep” from 1992 when it failed to chart hadn’t registered on my musical radar. I’d kept meaning to give their debut album “Pablo Honey” a play on the shop stereo but never got round to it. Suddenly though, there was a huge buzz around “Creep” again. Why? It had been a big hit in Israel and gained a lot of airplay on alternative rock radio stations in the US which, in a Spinal Tap “Sex Farm” has gone Top 10 in Japan style, convinced EMI to rerelease it against the band’s wishes. Their decision was rewarded with a No 7 smash hit single.

Knowing what we do now about what the band went onto do, watching this performance back seems a little surreal. Compared to even their next album “The Bends”, “Creep” has a rather unsophisticated albeit massive sound to it. Or maybe it’s just being confronted by the shock of Thom Yorke’s peroxide blonde hair that grates. That’s not to say “Creep” isn’t a good (or even great) song just that its legacy wouldn’t be being chief representative of their catalogue. Indeed, for a while it became one of those songs that becomes an albatross around an artist’s neck. The band nearly imploded from the record company expectations of writing a similar follow up and refused to play it live for years.

For all that though, you can’t underestimate the impact of the performance here on TOTP – it blew most other songs in the chart away. That ‘ch-chunk’ guitar sound from Jonny Greenwood was off the scale whilst Yorke’s tortured vocals could not be ignored. This was the performance Nirvana should have given on the show for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” instead of that comedy turn they served up. Certainly only Motörhead could compete on this particular show. “Creep” then – by no means Radiohead’s best song but it was still much more than just a slacker anthem.

That run of three choice tracks on the spin comes to an end (in my humble opinion) with yet more slick but soulless US R’n’B courtesy of Jade. A third consecutive hit for the Chicago trio, “One Woman” was a big ballad unlike their previous two, hip-hop influenced singles “Don’t Walk Away” and “I Wanna Love You” but although it’s a very accomplished sound I’m sure, it did little for me. And hadn’t we seen the choreography with a chair routine before from Janet Jackson? Or was it Madonna? Or Liza Minnelli in Cabaret? “One Woman” peaked at No 22 both here and in the US.

Another live by satellite performance now. This time it’s from Minneapolis and is by Lenny Kravitz. Is this the third time he’s been on the show doing “Heaven Help”? It feels like it and means I have very little left to say about this one…

…other than check out the hair on his backing band. The guitarist’s Afro is immense but then you see his drummer’s. Wow! If Roy Wood and the drummer from Wizzard had a love child…

Just the three Breakers this week starting with ex–Massive Attack singer Shara Nelson and “One Goodbye In Ten”. The follow up to Top 20 hit “Down That Road”, quite what we were meant to make of it after hearing just sixteen seconds of it here (I timed it) I have no idea. Sixteen seconds! What was the point?! Seriously though Stanley Appel, sixteen seconds?! Having listened to the full song on YouTube, it seems to me to be a pleasant enough ditty with a Motown-esque feel to it and some nicely inserted strings but just on the wrong side of lightweight. It would peak at No 21, two places lower than her debut hit.

What the Roxette is going on here? Marie and Per were back in the charts with “It Must Have Been Love” again? Host Mark Franklin tells us it’s because of the film it was taken from Pretty Woman having its terrestrial TV premiere recently and therefore record company EMI had rereleased it to cash in on its second wave of popularity. Yes kids, back in the day before Spotify and streaming platforms had been invented allowing continuous access to just about everything song wise, events like this would happen regularly. Off the top of my head, Berlin went back into the charts with “Take My Breath Away” four years after it was a hit initially thanks to the TV showing of Top Gun and Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes experienced a similar thing with “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life” when Dirty Dancing made it to our TV screens four years after the cinema release of the film.

I wonder what Marie and Per felt about the rerelease? It’s not as if they hadn’t recorded any other material since “It Must Have Been Love” was originally a hit in 1990. In fact, they were very consistent visitors to our charts so would they have been pleased to see that by making No 10 in 1993, it became their third biggest hit over here of the eight singles they had released in the intervening years? Maybe they just thought about the royalties cheques.

1993 saw the first new material from Kate Bush of the decade. Her last studio album had been 1989’s “The Sensual World” and apart from her version of “Rocket Man” for the Elton John /Bernie Taupin tribute album “Two Rooms”, we hadn’t heard from her since. “Rubberband Girl” was the lead single from her album “The Red Shoes” and like three of her last five singles released, would improbably peak at No 12 in the charts. Was that a good return for such a big name? I dunno. Maybe Kate was always more of an album artist and her fan base would be waiting for “The Red Shoes” itself to come out? I know my wife did.

As for the song, Kate herself dismisses it rather as:

Well, it’s a fun track […] It’s just a silly pop song really […]
Mojo magazine (UK) 2011

Other online reviews I have read say the song’s production values date it and that it feels like an outlier within the rest of the album. I don’t know about any of that but I found it engaging enough. I assume the lyrics reflect somebody bouncing back from a setback? Kate Bush does Chumbawumba? Or is it more literal than that and Kate is talking about a dancer who just wants to be supple? The album cover does depict a drawing of red ballet shoes and Kate did release a short film in conjunction with the album called The Line, The Cross And The Curve in which she played a dancer who puts on a pair of magical ballet shoes. Whatever. I thought it was OK but nowhere near the standard of some of her early career classics.

No! No! No! Not Chaka Demus And Pliers again! “Tease Me” has only just gone out of the charts and they’re immediately back in with the follow up “She Don’t Let Nobody”. I have to say I don’t recall this one despite its No 4 chart peak. “Tease Me” yeah of course and their chart topper cover of “Twist And Shout” obviously but this one? It escaped the memory bank somehow.

I wasn’t expecting much based on “Tease Me” which seemed to be full of either Chaka Demus or Pliers (I’ve no idea which) shouting “Baby Girl” or “Number One In The World” repeatedly. Having listened to it though, it could have been worse. It’s almost a proper song which I guess is not surprising seeing as it was written by soul legend Curtis Mayfield. Obviously, it’s completely ruined by the inclusion of all the rapping/toasting but you know, the template was there.

If a week is a long time in politics (and that has been proven beyond any doubt by recent events in Westminster), it is also true that a year can be an eternity in pop music. Multiply that by five and it feels like time has bent and warped and no longer exists by any temporal measures. Five years though was the real time gap between Belinda Carlisle hitting No 1 with “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” and her 1993 incarnation. By this point in her career, the hits were much smaller in the UK and non-existent in America. Her last album “Live Your Life Be Free” hadn’t yielded any Top 10 singles and neither would this, her next album, “Real” though lead single “Big Scary Animal” came close when it peaked at No 12.

I was working at the Our Price store in Stockport by now having transferred from Rochdale and the staff there were quite unforgiving of artists deemed to not be credible. Belinda came into that category and there was much mocking of the title of her latest single which I didn’t quite understand. What I did understand was that this wasn’t much of a departure from her usual fare. Pleasant song with a big hooky chorus? You betcha. Still, if it ain’t broke and all that…

The album sneaked into the Top 10 at No 9 but just a year earlier, her first Greatest Hits collection had gone to No 1 suggesting that there was an appetite for her earlier work but maybe not her new stuff. I think maybe Madonna went through a similar thing with “The Immaculate Collection” release. In 1996 though, she bucked that trend when her album “A Woman & A Man” provided her with two Top 10 UK singles.

Oh, yes. I had to watch this performance very closely to realise that the blonde haired guitarist on the left wasn’t Nick Beggs of Kajagoogoo who toured with Belinda around this time and worked with her on the aforementioned “A Woman & A Man” record.

Still at No 1 are Culture Beat with “Mr.Vain” although this will be the last of four weeks at the top. The single would end up being the 10th biggest seller of 1993 in the UK. The rest of that Top 10? Oh god it was awful. Haddaway, Shaggy, 2 Unlimited, Ace Of Base…and horror upon horror another single with the prefix ‘Mr.’…”Mr.Blobby”. “Mr…f*****g…Blobby”. I give up.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Motörhead	Ace Of Spades	I must have it on something surely?!
2	Pet Shop Boys	Go West	No but I have it on there Pop Art collection
3	Radiohead	Creep	No but I had it on one off those Best Album Ever…indie compilations
4	Jade	Oner Woman	Nah
5	Lenny Kravitz	Heaven Help	I did not
6	Shara Nelson	One Goodbye In Ten	Nope
7	Roxette	It Must Have Been Love	No
8	Kate Bush	Rubberband Girl	No but my wife had the Red Shoes album
9	Chaka Demus And Pliers	She Don’t Let Nobody	Of course not
10	Belinda Carlisle	Big Scary Animal	Negative
11	Culture Beat	Mr. Vain	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

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

TOTP 09 SEP 1993

Posted on October 18, 2022 by 80stastic

We’re well into September 1993 here at TOTP Rewind and the Top 40 continues to be completely batshit in its make up. Look at the running order for this TOTP. We’ve got Eurodance, grunge, a singer-songwriter, some Scottish rock/pop, perhaps the ultimate in bonkers artists from Iceland and f*****g Motörhead! Like I said, batshit!

We start with someone who may or may not be full on batshit but whom I have certainly found to be a curious figure at the very least. In 1993, Moby was yet to be catapulted into the celebrity stratosphere due to the ubiquity of his “Play” album but he was still a pioneering name in dance music circles and had already brought his take on it to the mainstream via 1991 Top 10 hit “Go”. A second entry into the charts had been a minor affair when “I Feel It / Thousand” scraped in at No 38. However, he would go much higher with “Move – The EP” from which this track “Move (You Make Me Feel So Good)” came.

Like Black Box and Marky Mark And The Funky Bunch before it, the track sampled “Love Sensation” by Loleatta Holloway but that isn’t what is keeping my attention in this performance. No, it’s the inverting of roles that we normally see from a dance act on TOTP. How many times have we witnessed an anonymous bloke at the back of the stage twiddling with some keyboards with a female vocalist belting out the (usually limited amount of) vocals upfront whilst trying to live thugs up with some dance moves? Well, it’s loads of times I can tell you but that template wasn’t for Moby. No, his female singer stands rigidly still with her arms behind her back for the entire performance. Meanwhile, it’s Moby who hogs the spotlight, leaping about and energetically pounding his synth drums. At one point he crouches Gollum- like on his keyboards before standing fully erect and then jumping down onto the stage! Like I said about him earlier, a bit odd.

“The Move EP” peaked at No 21.

There have been some famous princes over the years. How about Prince Charming for a start? Then there’s our new King who was Prince Charles for years (don’t mention Andrew – I said don’t mention…never mind). More recently there’s the villainous Prince Hans from Frozen and…erm…yes, Prince of course (as in the genius recording artist RIP). The best rapping Prince though? This guy must be in with a shout. I refer to The Fresh Prince (of Bel-Air), one half of the rap duo DJ Jazzy Jeff And The Fresh Prince.

The last time these two (Will Smith and Jeff Townes obviously) were in our charts was two years prior when “Summertime” went Top 10. Now they were back with the biggest hit of their career with *SPOILER* future No 1 “Boom! Shake The Room”. Seriously, who couldn’t like this hook laden platter of rap, hip-hop and a massive shout-a-long chorus? A perfect antidote to all that Eurodance nonsense – was it the record that knocked “Mr. Vain” of the top of the charts? I certainly hope so.

This was a watershed moment for Will Smith’s recording career as it just about brought the curtain down on DJ Jazzy Jeff And The Fresh Prince as a recording artist with future releases coming under his own name. I’m pretty sure that Townes continued to work with Smith on his solo artist output though. It would prove to be a commercially successful decision with Smith racking up eight Top 5 singles including the No 1 “Men In Black“. The Prince is dead, long live…erm…Will Smith?

Next to that bonkers artist from Iceland I mentioned earlier. I’m not a big Björk fan on account of her voice. I may have even gone as far as to state on occasion that she just can’t sing. I was wrong about that on reflection – she can sing it’s just that I don’t like it. Her performance here on “Venus As A Boy” being a case in point. The track itself I don’t mind. It’s got a tinkling charm to it that draws you in somehow but then Björk starts singing and it all becomes about her and that voice. Maybe I’m missing the point.

The performance here isn’t quite as out there as I would have expected with Björk giving a fairly orthodox delivery (I can’t believe she was out-bonkered by Moby!) albeit with an outfit that looked highly flammable. Here’s host Tony Dortie with an insight:

#totp there really was a big Health and safety meeting on whether Bjork cld perform with no shoes…
— Tony Dortie (@TonyDortie) October 14, 2022

But…but…you couldn’t see her feet under that outfit so what was the point?! What we could see though was her clearly Space 1999 influenced eyebrows:

Oh and what were the model ships on plinths all about? Her backing band look like they are expecting something to kick off with her at any point but then she could be volatile…

Finally a live by satellite performance that is interesting! First there’s a little to camera intro from the band and then the execution of the song is simple yet somehow bewitching. I talk, of course, of James. You can always rely on the poetic Tim Booth to provide some high brow drama.

After finally becoming a bona fide chart act with the re-release of “Sit Down” going to No 2 in 1991, the band consolidated on their success with the well received “Seven” album and its attendant four singles. Not people to rest on their laurels, they were back in 1993 with fifth studio album “Laid” of which “Sometimes (Lester Piggott)” was the lead single. I think I may have been guilty at the time of thinking that their output was starting to stick to a formula and lumped “Sometimes” in with that but it’s actually a superbly crafted song with striking imagery in its lyrics of a child facing a monsoon wanting to be hit by lightning. It deserved a higher peak than its ultimate No 18 resting place.

I really like the staging of the performance here with the band proving that all they needed was an empty space to work in to come up with something interesting. The static five band members behind Booth strumming their guitars in unison creates an hypnotic effect although the guy on the end with the long hair (sorry, not up on all the members of James) who can’t resist swaying his head along to the beat is distracting. It’s sort of like a gender-reversed Robert Palmer backing band for “Addicted To Love” but without the pouting. Meanwhile, Tim Booth dances with a Spanish looking lady dressed entirely in black. I would have expected nothing less. Almost perfect.

Oh and that Lester Piggott suffix in the song title? Here’s Tim courtesy of @TOTPFacts:

The full title of "Sometimes" is "Sometimes (Lester Piggott)" – Tim Booth explained the bit in parentheses by saying "it has a racing beat". It was produced by Brian Eno, who also provided additional vocals. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) October 14, 2022

Back in the studio we find Stone Temple Pilots performing their single “Plush”. I know I made the comparison in a previous post but this is just “Alive” by Pearl Jam isn’t it? Not that that’s a bad thing (I like “Alive”) but the similarities are quite stark.

The guitarist Dean DeLeo looked a bit like a young John Bishop on first glance but having sought out more images of him online, he actually looks like someone I used to work with at the Civil Service. And yes, I realise that comment won’t mean anything to the vast majority of you reading this but he does so there. “Plush” peaked at No 23 in the UK.

The Breakers are next starting with Guru featuring N’Dea Davenport. Now I find all this very confusing. Why? Well, while I don’t remember this single “Trust Me”, I do recall the album that it came from which was “Guru’s Jazzmatazz Vol 1 (An Experimental Fusion Of Hip-Hop And Jazz)”. So why my confusion? Wikipedia tells me that the album only got to No 58 in the UK charts and yet I remember selling loads of it in the Our Price store in Altrincham where I was working at the time. How can this be? I refuse to believe that a market town in Trafford, Greater Manchester with a population of 52,419 was/is the centre of the hip-hop/ jazz fusion world!

N’Dea Davenport was of course the on-off singer with acid jazzers the Brand New Heavies with whom Guru (real name Keith Elam) collaborated on their second album “Heavy Rhyme Experience Vol 1”. Do you think Keith nicked not only the band’s singer but also the idea for his album title off them?

In my head, Texas didn’t have any chart success between their debut single “I Don’t Want A Lover” in 1989 and their Chris Evans championed resurrection in 1997 with “Say What You Want” but that isn’t the case. I was aware that they released two whole albums in the intervening years but I erroneously thought that neither yielded any Top 40 hits. “Mother’s Heaven” supplied No 32 hit “Alone With You” in 1992 and now here was “So Called Friend” from third album “Rick’s Road” which made it to No 30*

*They also had a non-album single, a cover of Al Green’s “Tired Of Being Alone” go to No 19 in 1992.

“So Called Friend” is pleasant enough without being anywhere near approaching exceptional although it was considered special enough to be the theme tune to US sitcom Ellen from series three onwards.

Go to 5:40

WHO??!!! Zhané (pronounced Jah-Nay which was actually the title of their debut album) were a US dance duo who scored a massive hit over there with “Hey Mr. DJ” which got to No 6 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was one of those tracks that never really crossed over here where it peaked at No 26. I’m not sure why that would be when American RnB acts like Jade and SWV were having Top 10 hits over here in this year but there you go. They would have two other minor UK chart hits in the 90s before disbanding in 1999. I, obviously, don’t remember it.

YES! It’s Motörhead which means I get to tell my Lemmy story! Well, it’s not actually mine but rather my friend Robin’s who has given me clearance to use it here. This is it. A few years back whilst living in London, Robin had some friends from his student days (including my wife but not me) stay over at his gaff in Marylebone. It turned out to be a heavy night and unfortunately one of those staying was sick in the bed of one of his flat mates who was away at the time. Feeling guilty and knowing his flat mate was returning that day, the following morning he took the sick-covered duvet to the local dry cleaners. On the way there, he was approached by a man asking the way to a boozer (The Angel In The Fields on Marylebone High Street for all you London pub enthusiasts out there). That man was Lemmy. Despite the weird experience of meeting a rock legend unexpectedly whilst carrying a bag containing a sick-splattered duvet, Robin managed to keep his wits about him and say to Lemmy that he’d been to a Motörhead gig the other week and told him how great they’d been. Lemmy’s reply? “Keep The Faith”. Now that’s definitely perfect.

Why was “Ace Of Spades” back in the charts? I think it was to promote a Best Of album released by Castle Communications hence the single actually being called “Ace Of Spades – The CCN Remix 1993”.

I have posited a theory in past posts that there were clues hiding in plain sight that Siobahn Fahey was bound to leave Bananarama because she always had a slightly different outfit to Sarah and Keren when appearing on TOTP. While the other two would match sartorially, Siobahn would shake things up a bit by customising her version of the chosen ensemble. Talking of ‘the other two’ (a reference for the New Order super fans there), here are Barney, Hooky and…erm…the other two with their “World (The Price Of Love)” single.

That ‘other two’ reference isn’t the only connection to the Nanas though as I think that clothes theory is visible again. Look at Hooky with his mane of hair, his leather trousers and his ‘rock god’ posturing and compare him to the rest of them – of course he would end up leaving the band! “World (The Price Of Love)” peaked at No 13.

1993 saw the return of Beverley Craven but nobody really noticed. I mean, judging by the chart performance of this single “Love Scenes” that seems to be true as it struggled to a peak of No 34. After the dizzy heights reached by “Promise Me” two years prior, this surely wasn’t what her record label Epic were hoping for from the lead single of a new album (also called “Love Scenes”).

But then watch Beverley’s performance here and my claim that nobody noticed her return is blown out of the water. What was going on here?! Who decided to plonk her in a chair with a microphone centre stage wearing a dress that gives a new definition to the word ‘revealing’?! My God! Sharon Stone would have been embarrassed! No wonder Beverley looks like she’s on the edge of a cliff knowing any moment a gust of wind could blow her over (or indeed up her dress)! Where was her trusty piano that she always performed with?

As for the song itself, it’s a curious thing both in its sound and as a choice of single. It kind of reminds me of the theme tune to 70s action-comedy series The Persuaders!. Beverley would never return to the UK Top 40 after this single and retired from the music industry to bring up her three daughters. She returned to the recording studio in 1999 for the largely ignored “Mixed Emotions” album before embarking on another ten year hiatus. After battling cancer she has both recorded and toured with Julia Fordham and Judie Tzuke under the Woman To Woman banner and are currently playing live at a venue near you this month with special guest Rumer.

Culture Beat are still going strong at the top of the charts with “Mr. Vain”. There are a lot of links between them and Snap! Both made Eurodance music, both had UK No 1 singles, both had a rapper in their ranks who did their US military service in Germany (Jay Supreme and Turbo B) and both had a revolving door policy for female vocalists. And they were both crap of course.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Moby	Move (You Make Me Feel So Good)	No
2	DJ Jazzy Jeff And The Fresh Prince	Boom! Shake The Room	Liked it, didn’t buy it
3	Björk	Venus As A Boy	I did not
4	James	Sometimes (Lester Pigott)	No but I have it on their Best Of album
5	Stone Temple Pilots	Plush	Nah
6	Guru featuring N’Dea Davenport	Trust Me	Negative
7	Texas	So Called Friend	Nope
8	Zhané	Hey Mr. DJ	Not likely
9	Motörhead	Ace Of Spades	I must have it on something surely?
10	New Order	World (The Price Of Love)	No
11	Beverley Craven	Love Scenes	Didn’t happen
12	Culture Beat	Mr. Vain	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001d09x/top-of-the-pops-09091993

TOTP 02 SEP 1993

Posted on October 14, 2022 by 80stastic

I commented in a recent post about the machinations that were happening at Radio 1 in the Autumn of 1993. Incoming new controller Matthew Bannister was on a mission to revitalise the station’s image that hadn’t been ‘hip for the kids’ for quite some time. The day after this TOTP was broadcast, there was another change – not as headline making as Dave Lee Travis’ recent on air rant / resignation but fairly big news all the same. Simon Mayo’s tenure at the helm of the station’s most high profile slot The Breakfast Show came to an end after five years. He’d been in place whilst I was a student, through getting married and now into full adulthood but to be honest, I wasn’t that arsed about his departure. He always came across as a bit smug to me and was single handedly responsible for making chart hits out of some awful records like “Kinky Boots” and “Donald Where’s Yer Troosers?”. He would move to the mid morning slot before leaving Radio 1 altogether in 2001. After spells at Radio 5 Live and Radio 2, he currently resides at Greatest Hits Radio I believe. He will be one of the faces that return to TOTP when the BBC4 repeats reach 1994 and the ‘year zero’ revamp changes are reversed.

Talking of faces…We start the show with 2 Unlimited and their latest single “Faces”. I’m sorry but this was just milking the formula dry. I’ve read some reviews from the time that suggest that this was a deviation from their usual blueprint with some changes of tempo evident but it sounds exactly the same as their previous single and the one before that to me. There is a bit right at the start where Anita sings the word ‘faces’ and it sounds like “Spaceman” by Babylon Zoo but then it straight into those uncultured synth riffs and some nonsense lyrics about there being different faces everywhere. Banal and pointless. This was just terrible. Somehow it still made the Top 10 just like five of their previous six hits had done.

A full outing for a Breaker from last week now as we get “Disco Inferno” by Tina Turner. Taken from the soundtrack to her biopic What’s Love Got To Do With It, the video features clips from the film alongside Tina performing the track herself. I quite enjoyed the film but apparently both Ike Turner and Tina weren’t keen claiming that there were many inaccuracies in it.

Given her legendary status, I was quite surprised that she has only released nine solo albums and of those, the first four did absolutely nothing commercially. Within her renaissance ‘rock’ era, she made five albums in fifteen years which isn’t too shabby I guess but of those, surely only “Private Dancer” and “Foreign Affair” are truly seen as super successful? Her eight times platinum in the UK Greatest Hits “Simply The Best” should maybe be included in there as well? Or maybe you can’t judge an artist’s reputation purely on sales? Talking of which, “Disco Inferno” peaked at No 12.

The chart hits in the early to mid 90s for Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine were as consistent in their regularity as they were in the eccentricity of their titles. After “Sheriff Fatman”, “Do Re Me So Far So Good” and “After The Watershed (Early Learning The Hard Way)” comes “Lean On Me I Won’t Fall Over” with a picture of a weeble on its cover.

This was their seventh consecutive Top 30 hit and the lead single from their fourth album “Post Historic Monsters”. The budget for the set for their performance here must have been vastly reduced from their last visit to the TOTP studio when they had a whole campfire with real flames laid on for them. This time there’s just Jim Bob and Fruitbat and a ton of dry ice and is it me or is the former reading the lyrics from a stage monitor? His eyes are looking down for the majority of the performance as if he hasn’t learned the words yet. Jim Bob’s hair though is truly a thing of wonder. Don’t think I’ve seen anything like it since…? The bloke from King Kurt who got tarred and feathered?

“Lean On Me I Won’t Fall Over” peaked at No 16.

Despite this No 17 hit, the time of Kenny Thomas the pop star was nearing its end. He would have only two further Top 40 entries (neither of which got any higher than No 27) so I’m guessing this could have been Kenny’s final TOTP appearance. If so, he went out on a tune called “Trippin’ On Your Love” which was nothing to do with the almost identically titled Bananarama early 90s flop but was actually a cover version of a song originally recorded by The Staple Singers. Kenny seemed to have a talent for recycling obscure songs that punters possibly didn’t realise weren’t Thomas originals. “Outstanding” was a Gap Band track, “Best Of You” was originally recorded by Booker T. Jones and “Tender Love” was a No 23 hit in 1986 for the Force MDs.

All of the above helped to make him an unlikely chart star. He looked like a telecom engineer (which indeed he had been prior to becoming a singer) and his sartorial choices weren’t always the best but the guy could sing as he displays in this performance. Farewell then Kenny. I couldn’t stand you at the time but on reflection, you had some pipes and seem like a decent guy.

I can’t find a clip of this live by satellite performance by Terence Trent D’Arby of “She Kissed Me” but if you squint a bit this could be Lenny Kravitz – both visually and sonically. Maybe it’s the rare sight of TTD playing a guitar or the driving rock riffs but seriously…this is almost a doppelgänger. Lenny Trent D’Arby? Or Terence Kravitz? The former is better phonically I think. Talking of names, if you look up his back catalogue on Spotify, it’s all listed under the name Sananda Maitreya which is the name the former Terence has gone by since 2001.

This week’s Breakers now starting with New Order and “World (Price Of Love)”. This was the third single taken from the band’s “Republic” album and caused quite the rift on Twitter as to its merits. No starker a voice was the band’s ex-member Peter Hook who had this to say (courtesy of @TOTPFacts):

Peter Hook: "I fucking hated "World (The Price Of Love)' with a passion. I hated the name, I hated the song, I hated the backing vocals, (I hated the brackets)." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) October 14, 2022

Wow! Apparently he had very little input to the recording of the track so maybe that explains his stance. The opinions of other contributors to the debate ranged from total agreement with Hooky to saying it was better than previous single “Ruined In A Day” but not as good as “Regret” to completely loving it. I think I’m with option two. The video hardly features the band but those fleeting glimpses would be the last we round see of them in a video for twelve years.

“World (The Price Of Love)” peaked at No 13.

In a musical landscape dominated by Eurodance anthems comes a recording artist with an album to blow all of that out of the water. Mary J. Blige’s 1992 debut “What’s The 411?” was widely recognised as bringing the combination of hip-hop and soul into the mainstream and conferring on her the unofficial title of ‘Queen Of Hip Hop Soul’. “Real Love” was the second single from the album and was also on its second time of release having peaked at No 68 in the UK in 1992. This 1993 remix would give her a genuine Top 40 success when it made it to No 26. I have to say though that, despite all those plaudits, it wasn’t really my bag.

A band next that were much bigger in America than over here which may explain my lack of knowledge of them. Stone Temple Pilots were very much seen as part of the grunge movement when they released their debut album “Core” but grew well beyond it during a career lasting well over thirty years barring a five year hiatus in the middle of it. I do remember the cover of “Core” from working at Our Price but couldn’t tell you what it sounded like. “Plush” was the second single from it and it was a huge hit on the US Rock charts though it only made No 23 over here and would prove to be their only UK Top 40 hit. Listening back to it now, it could be Pearl Jam so I can certainly understand why they were categorised as part of the movement of which Pearl Jam were one of its leading protagonists.

Lead singer Scott Weiland died in 2015 after years of well documented drug addiction problems. Tributes to him came in from the likes of Slash of Guns N’ Roses, Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell.

Apparently this track never got more than these few seconds of exposure on TOTP which seems extraordinary given how ubiquitous it was at the time but then it did only reached No 14 which itself almost defies explanation. “Wild Wood” was the title track of Paul Weller’s second solo album and it seemed to me at the time was an undeniable confirmation that he had re-established his credentials as the fine songwriter he had always been. I say always but the last knockings of The Style Council had been so excruciating that record label Polydor refused to release the band’s final album – the deep house experiment that was “Modernism: A New Decade”. It finally got a release a decade later.

Two albums into his solo career though and Weller was back with the “Wild Wood” single, a bold statement so early on. A mellow, reflective, mature sound, it demonstrated Weller’s restored confidence. It surely couldn’t have been written during The Jam years? Only “English Rose” from “All Mod Cons” comes close. It’s strange to consider that in a recording career of forty-five years standing, the vast majority of that time has seen Weller as a solo artist such was the impact of The Jam (and to a lesser extent The Style Council). Paul has now released sixteen solo studio albums the most recent being 2021’s “Fat Pop (Volume 1)”. Six of them have gone to No 1 and seven to No 2.

Oh not this fella again! For a man peddling such a slight (some may say shite) tune, Bitty McLean got an awful lot of screen time on TOTP. Listen to “It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes)” and tell me in all good conscience that it deserved three full studio appearances and that “Wild Wood” was only worthy of thirty seconds as a Breaker. You can’t. I’m sure Bitty is a nice bloke but his song was crud. Just awful.

What on earth was happening here?! Well, surprise surprise! It’s Cilla Black and here’s our Graham to explain what the chuff this was all about…

…actually it’s me and not Graham but I do have some details for you. We may predominantly have known Cilla for her TV work throughout the 80s and 90s but she was also a singer and pop star with a huge back catalogue. In fact, she was the most successful UK female recording artist of the 60s and, as host Mark Franklin rather generalised in his intro, had been on TOTP “loads of times”. However, she hadn’t had a major hit record since 1971 so what was she doing on the show now? The answer was that she was promoting her new album called “Through The Years”. I say new but it was a hotchpotch of tracks (autocorrect turned hotchpotch into ‘horrible’ and I was tempted to leave it!) including re-recordings of her old hits, cover versions, some new material and three duets with Cliff Richard, Barry Manilow and Dusty Springfield.

The title track was released as a single which Cilla performs here and the comments on Twitter in reaction to it were almost all negative if not out and out insults. I mean it is a terrible song, a nasty re-write of “Wind Beneath My Wings” to my ears. Incidentally, Nancy Griffiths’ “From A Distance” was one of the cover versions on the album which both Bette Midler (who had a hit with “Wind…”) and the aforementioned Cliff Richard also covered. Neither the single nor the album were hits peaking at No 54 and No 41 respectively.

And yet…Cilla wasn’t always crap. I know someone who swears by her 1968 hit “Step Inside Love” and he’s right – it’s great. Cilla sadly died in 2015 after a stroke caused her to fall at her home in Spain.

And still Culture Beat top the charts with “Mr. Vain” despite the efforts of hip-hop soul (Mary J. Blige), grunge (Stone Temple Pilots) and even Cilla Black to challenge Eurodance as the dominant music genre of 1993. I don’t think Simon Mayo had anything to do with the release of this single but it could have been written about him.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	2 Unlimited	Faces	Faeces more like – no
2	Tina Turner	Disco Inferno	Nah
3	Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine	Lean On Me I Won’t Fall Over	I did not
4	Kenny Thomas	Trippin” On Your Love	No
5	Terence Trent D’Arby	She Kissed Me	Liked it, didn’t buy it
6	New Order	World (Price Of Love)	Nope
7	Mary J. Blige	Real Love	Not really my bag
8	Stone Temple Pilots	Plush	Negative
9	Paul Weller	Wild Wood	Not the single but I had the album
10	Bitty McLean	It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes)	Never!
11	Cilla Black	Through The Years	As if
12	Culture Beat	Mr. Vain	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001crzy/top-of-the-pops-02091993

TOTP 26 AUG 1993

Posted on October 9, 2022 by 80stastic

August and indeed the Summer of 1993 is coming to an end and so is something else – my time at the Our Price store in Rochdale. After an immensely enjoyable twelve months as Assistant Manager there, the powers that be wanted to move me. In theory, I should have been pleased about this. It was a transfer to a much bigger store at Stockport which, though not a promotion, reflected well on how area management viewed me. Plus, Stockport was a much shorter commute than schleping all the way over to Rochdale. I didn’t want to go though. I really liked the team where I was and the size of the shop was manageable with a great profile in the town. The move to Stockport would prove to be a short-lived one but that’s enough about my personal circumstances; what about the music?

Well, we start with some Therapy? who someone in the TOTP production team must have really liked as they seemed to be on the show regularly in 1993. I think this is their third studio appearance already which isn’t bad going for a noisy rock band on prime time TV. This single is “Opal Mantra” which was nothing to do with those 70s sweets Opal Fruits that became Statburst but rather a pun on the name of the German sports car model Opel Manta. I didn’t pay much attention to Therapy? at the time but listening back to them what I’ve noticed is that they always seem to have too many words in their lyrics to fit in with the tune. Probably just me of course but anyway.

As far as I can tell this was a stand alone single prior to the release of their fourth studio album “Troublegum” the following year although bizarrely the two singles released before “Opel Mantra” both made it onto the album.

Now here’s a song that always reminds me of late Summer/ early Autumn 1993 whenever I hear it except if I was to hear the original version of it, I probably wouldn’t recognise it at all. “Right Here” was first released by SWV (Sisters With Voices) back in 1992 but only in America. Despite being a hit on the R&B chart, it made little impression on the Billboard Hot 100.

A US No 1 record later in “Weak” and the track was given another chance but this time with an added sample from another song – “Human Nature” by Michael Jackson. And so it came to pass that the version we would all come to know was rechristened as “Right Here (Human Nature Remix)”. Who’s idea was it to mash up SWV and Jacko? Well, it was credited to Teddy Riley but weren’t there some bootleg copies in existence well before the official release creating a buzz around the track?

“Human Nature” was, of course, from Jackson’s “Thriller” album and was one of the seven singles taken from it in 1983. Curiously though, it was never given a UK release back then so would it have been less well known in the UK? If true, it makes SWV’s hit even more impressive but I think it’s a difficult idea to sell that the biggest album of all time contains tracks that some countries were oblivious to. It went fifteen times platinum in the UK after all.

“Right Here (Human Nature Remix)” would rise to No 3 in the UK – easily their biggest hit over here – and would only be kept off the top spot in the US by another artist also on this TOTP.

From Sisters With Voices to The Sisters Of Mercy (do you think that was deliberate by the show’s producers?) who are in the studio with their latest single “Under The Gun”. Not only was this their latest single but as we stand in October 2022, it is also the band’s last single. Yes, incredibly, despite the band being an going concern to this day, they have not released any new material since this track which was to promote their second Greatest Hits album “A Slight Case Of Overbombing”. I think I’ve discussed this before but this situation arose out of a dispute with their label EastWest who eventually agreed to receive the final two albums owed by the band according to their contract via the Andrew Eldritch vehicle SSV (almost another link with SWV). Allegedly standing for Screw Shareholder Value, the albums were made with industrial sonic pioneers Xmas Deutschland’s Peter Bellendir and were largely unlistenable loops of Eldritch’s verbal musings. Despite being free of EastWest since 1997, no new Sisters Of Mercy product has been forthcoming.

As for “Under The Gun”, apparently that’s Terri Nunn up there with Eldritch. Yeah, the two-tone haired singer from Berlin of “Take My Breath Away” fame. She looked a bit different seven years on from that global hit but you can hear her influence all over this track. In fact it’s pretty good up until the point where Eldritch does his…’thing’ whatever that is (a Goth rap?). I’ve always considered Eldritch a bizarre yet intriguing figure and found myself wondering what he looks like today. So I Googled him. His Wikipedia picture suggests that he has now gone bald but he still retains those sunglasses that project an air of otherworldliness. I once sat on a train from Sunderland to Newcastle around 1987 next to a bald man wearing shades dressed in black who had a tape recorder with him and for the entire journey played a tape out loud that the whole carriage could hear that was of demonic chanting, blood curdling screams and general devil worship. I was too freaked out to say anything to him but he did turn it off when the guard checked his ticket only to turn it back on once he had left.

Anyway, back to Eldritch though who has tried to distance himself and the band from accusations of gothness and is on record as stating:

“I’m constantly confronted by representatives of popular culture who are far more goth than we, yet I have only to wear black socks to be stigmatised as the demon overlord.”
“Sisters – VirginNet Interview”. Thesistersofmercy.com. Archived from the original on 20 August 2001

“Under The Gun” peaked at No 19.

Next the point where it looked like Ace Of Base might not be the next big pop sensation that was suggested by their monster No 1 “All That She Wants” earlier in the year. So big was that single that it spent sixteen weeks on the charts and was still selling so well that the follow up “Wheel Of Fortune” had its release delayed. I’m guessing that their label London Records would have been hoping for and indeed maybe expecting a bigger chart hit than the No 20 peak achieved here. The outlook would get worse when the title track to their album “Happy Nation” would barely dint the Top 40 when released in November. Luckily for label and band but decidedly unluckily for music fans, that trend was reversed spectacularly in 1994 when they got to No 2 with “The Sign”.

I have to admit to not knowing how this one went and after watching this TOTP performance, I’m still not sure. The very definition of lightweight, it barely registers at all. And those nasally, whiny vocals are the musical equivalent of fingernails being scraped down a blackboard! As for the prop that was the wheel of fortune in the background…talk about lacklustre! It just has some random numbers around the edge. Why weren’t the coloured segments filled in with what you could win?! It didn’t look like it even had the flicker thing that determines which segment you’ve landed on once the spinning has stopped. Bah!

And so to that much trumpeted (by host Tony Dortie if nobody else) song by Meatloaf. Who would have thought that in a year dominated by Eurodance crud and a trend for ragga/dancehall tunes that the biggest selling single of the year would belong to the Loaf. I mean, it’s not as if he had a brilliant track record for massive hit singles in the UK. His last Top 10 hit had been “Dead Ringer For Love” in 1981 and of the eleven singles released after that until this point, only three had made the Top 40 and none of those had managed a position higher than No 17. Yes, of course “Bat Out Of Hell” was one of the biggest selling albums in history but that was already fifteen years old by 1993. A Meatloaf revival was not on the cards.

Hang on though! “Bat Out Of Hell” you say. What if we did…I don’t know…”Bat Out Of Hell II” to help revive his fortunes? Presumably that’s a close approximation of what long standing songwriting partner Jim Steinman said about Meatloaf in 1993. Yes, a return to the original hit formula (not that much of his other stuff sounded any different) was the order of the day and so it came to pass that “Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell” would make Marvin Lee Aday a huge star all over again. The first single from the project was “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” continuing a long line of ludicrous song titles that occur regularly in Meatloaf’s back catalogue. There’s something odd here though as despite this preview on TOTP on a show in August, as far as I can tell the single wasn’t released until October and after the album was released in September. That can’t be right can it?

Anyway, I think I’ll leave it there for now as this will be at No 1 soon enough and for seven (!) weeks so I’ll just leave it with RIP Meatloaf for now.

We’re back to multiple Breakers again this week after just two in the last show and we start with Lenny Kravitz and a third single from his “Are You Gonna Go My Way” album called “Heaven Help”. This is yet again another song I don’t recall even though it made the charts to the tune of No 20. Some of the music press described it as showing Kravitz’s soul influences specifically Curtis Mayfield and Isley Brothers and I can hear why. It’s got a nice feel to it and I’m guessing it got decent daytime airplay at the time. I should probably check out the album. After all, I did but his previous one “Mama Said”.

OK so I’m aware there was a rap/hip-hop outfit called Onyx but that was/is the extent of my knowledge. Until now. Hailing from Queens, New York City, they were formed by Fredro Starr (yes I had to double take on that name as well!), Sonny Seeza and Big DS. This single (“Slam”) would make No 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 – not just the R&B chart, the mainstream chart – quite remarkable for a rap record. It’s also widely regarded as being responsible for introducing slam dancing or moshing to hip-hop as per the promo video. Wait, didn’t House Of Pain already do that with “Jump Around?”

Anyway, Wikipedia tells me that they were notable for loud screaming, aggression, fighting with each other and then these two characteristics which look slightly odd in the written word…rapping with grimy voices and bald head fashion. What?! Surely grime wasn’t a musical genre back then so what were grimy voices exactly? And bald head fashion…? To be honest, if I wanted to listen to a record called “Slam” then I’d go for this…

Yes, there were two Joey Lawrence singles that charted in the UK unbelievably. After “Nothin’ My Love Can’t Fix” came “I Can’t Help Myself” – his song titles were a little egocentric. This one could easily be the template for every Backstreet Boys song ever which is fine if you like that sort of thing I guess but it obviously did nothing for me.

“I Can’t Help Myself” peaked at No 27.

Almost under the radar, Terence Trent D’arby was having quite a year in 1993 on the sly. Nothing like the impact of 1987/88 when he burst into the pop world fully formed from nowhere to both critical and commercial success but quite a year all the same. After looking like he had wrecked his musical career with the poorly received sophomore album “Neither Fish Nor Flesh”, to manage to resurrect himself as a chart act again was quite a feat. The “Symphony Or Damn” album went Top 10 and would produce four hit singles of which “She Kissed Me” was the third. Those singles peaked at:

14 – 14 – 16 – 18

Like I said, not the remarkable success of those early years but he was consistent. Given the quality of the 1993 singles, they probably should have been bigger hits, “She Kissed Me” being a case in point. Slick and with a killer chorus, it also showcased his diversity given how different it was to previous single “Delicate”. As with Lenny Kravitz earlier, maybe I should investigate the TTD back catalogue further although I don’t think I’ll start with the aforementioned “Neither Fish Nor Flesh”.

I think this is the first and only cover version on this TOTP after what seemed like an endless conveyor belt of them recently. Just like Kim Wilde’s treatment of “If I Can’t Have You” the other week, this one is also of a song from the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever. Tina Turner’s take on The Trammps’ “Disco Inferno” featured in another film also – Tina’s biopic What’s Love Got To Do With It. It certainly suits Tina’s raspy vocal and I think she does a decent job with it. I wonder though if her record company had faith in the track’s chart potential as they made the B-side “I Don’t Wanna Fight” which was her previous hit from just a few weeks before. That was a standard record company practice as I recall to try and insure against a flop record. It worked (kind of) as “Disco Inferno” made No 12.

Bit of a big deal next as we get Mariah Carey in the studio. She was already a superstar in America after a string of No 1 singles and although UK record buyers hadn’t embraced her quite as keenly, this was still a big exclusive. I’m not sure if she had her reputation as a diva at this point but if she was a bit of a nightmare off camera, I wonder how she manifested it? Her tour riders are renowned for some explicit demands like hotel rooms having temperatures of precisely 75 degrees, being festooned with eight (not seven or nine) tall leafy plants and kitted out with Joe Malone candles (and certainly none of those Gwyneth Paltrow mucky scent ones)

To be fair to Mariah, she seems quite low key in this performance of “Dreamlover” with a dress down wardrobe and a discreet trio of backing singers. She holds back on the vocals as well until the very last few notes when she gives her pipes an airing. Somehow this TOTP appearance only managed to nudge the single up one place to a high of No 9 but it went to No 1 in the US keeping the aforementioned SWV off top spot.

Freddie Mercury’s reign at the top of the charts is over and he has been replaced by Culture Beat and their “Mr. Vain” single. Was this the peak of Eurodance or its nadir? More irritating than “No Limits” by 2 Unlimited or even better than Snap!’s “Rhythm Is A Dancer”? The man behind Culture Beat was German DJ and producer Torsten Fenslau who tragically died in a car crash aged 29 barely two months after this TOTP aired.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Therapy?	Opal Mantra	No
2	SWV	Right Here (Human Nature Remix)	Nope
3	The Sisters Of Mercy	Under The Gun	I did not
4	Ace Of Base	Wheel Of Fortune	As if
5	Meatloaf	I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)	I’d do anything for music but I wouldn’t buy that
6	Lenny Kravitz	Heaven Help	Negative
7	Onyx	Slam	Nah
8	Joey Lawrence	I Can’t Help Myself	I had no such problems with restraint when it came to not buying this record
9	Terence Trent D’arby	She Kissed Me	Good song, didn’t buy it
10	Tina Turner	Disco Inferno	Disco Infer-NO
11	Mariah Carey	Dreamlover	Sorry Mariah, it’s a no
12	Culture Beat	Mr. Vain	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001crzw/top-of-the-pops-26081993

TOTP 19 AUG 1993

Posted on October 5, 2022 by 80stastic

After weeks of cramming twelve or even thirteen acts into the show’s running order, the TOTP producers have taken pity on my sorry ass and given me just ten to review for this episode and four of those have been on before. This is music to my ears as I’m running behind schedule in banging these posts out.

We start with a band not seen on the show since the 80s I’m guessing whose appearance here would be a valedictory one as far as TOTP was concerned. The Pogues had been in a state of flux for most of the decade before 1993 turned up a hit for them out of the blue. After Shane MacGowan was fired in 1991 for finally breaking the patience of the rest of the band after one too many binge drinking sessions, Joe Strummer stepped in to take over on vocals before founding member Spider Stacy took on the job full time. They released a cover of “Honky Tonk Wonen” by the Rolling Stones the following year but it failed to make the Top 40. I recall my huge Pogues fan Our Price manager at the time playing the single as soon as it came out of the delivery box on the morning of release and then being very disappointed approximately three and a half minutes later.

Spider Stacy was still in post as the band reconvened to record the “Waiting For Herb” album from which “Tuesday Morning” was the lead single. It’s a decent tune and knocks spots off most of its chart contemporaries but with the greatest will in the world, it’s no “Sally MacLennane” and Spider is no Shane.

The Pogues split in 1996 before reuniting j 2001 and disbanding for the final time in 2014.

As with one of the shows the other week, TOTP is suddenly taken over by UB40 and associates as first we get the video for their latest single “Higher Ground” which accompanies the 40-11 chart rundown and then we get their mate Bitty McLean in the studio. I’m not sure if I’m surprised or not by the chart statistic that “Higher Ground” is their first Top 10 hit written by themselves since the appropriately entitled “Sing Our Own Song” in 1986. Well, they did do a lot of cover versions you know.

The video is pretty dull stuff with the band performing against some sort of industrial wasteland intercut with clips of amongst other things a trapeze artist (higher ground?). As with most UB40 promos, the whole thing seems to be carried by Ali Campbell’s cheeky grin.

On with the nitty gritty and that little ditty from Bitty. Now I thought that Bitty Mclean‘s “It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes)” was a bit shitty (OK I’ll stop now!) but plenty disagreed with me as he was up to No 3 on his way to a peak of No 2. It was also a massive hit globally going to No 1 in the Netherlands and New Zealand where it topped the charts for seven weeks. Bitty’s dance moves were something to behold. He swayed and staggered about waving his arms as if drunk and looking like he might topple backwards at any moment. Very Shane MacGowan.

Despite his seven UK Top 40 hits, I wonder if anyone really remembers Bitty these days or has his nickname been usurped by this recurring sketch from Little Britain?

What do you get if you combine London Boys’ dance moves and Peter Andre’s sense of style? This confident looking bloke apparently who is fronting an act called Aftershock and their single “Slave To The Vibe”. I have zero recollection of either Mr. Aftershock (whoever he was) or his track but then he’s not helped in his quest for immortality by the work of the TOTP cameraman. He makes a right hash of filming his dance moves that surely would have sealed his place in musical posterity had he actually managed to capture them. Sadly, he manages to focus on everything but the front man and even when he does turn the camera on him, a studio audience member’s head totally obscures the shot! I can’t find a clip of the performance so you’ll have to take my word for it.

Apparently it was on the soundtrack to erotic thriller Sliver alongside the aforementioned UB40’s “(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You” but I’ve never seen that so there’s another reason I don’t remember it.

Just the two Breakers this week (which explains the reduced amount of acts in the show). I’m guessing there was just a lack of new entries / high climbing records this week? Anyway, the first Breaker is basically a mini- episode of Rock Family Trees. The Breeders began life as an outlet for the writings of Pixies bassist Kim Deal who was unsatisfied with the direction of the band. Whilst touring with Throwing Muses, she got their guitarist Tanya Donnelly on board with the project and they produced a demo which got them a deal with 4AD Records to whom both their current bands were already signed.

Debut album “Pod” was not commercially successful but did receive the kudos of being named by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain as one of his favourite records ever. An EP called “Safari” was then recorded before Donelly departed the project to form Belly who were also signed to 4AD and who would hit with their single “Feed The Tree”. Deal recruited her sister Kelley to replace Donelly even though she couldn’t actually play guitar at that point and they recorded the album “Last Splash” from which “Cannonball” was the lead single.

A staple of every indie nightclub DJ’s record box, I myself even cut some rug to it at Fifth Avenue in Manchester occasionally. Its blistering, staccato rhythms and distorted vocals imbued it with a full-force power that felt like it could peel the skin off your face. A truly breathtaking record in every sense. The best ever record to only achieve a peak of No 40? Quite possibly.

One of the biggest selling singles of the year in America next. Mariah Carey had always been a sales phenomenon in the US with her first five singles all going to No 1 over there. This side of the pond, we were a bit more lukewarm in our reception. The highest position achieved by any of those singles in the UK was No 9. History was to repeat itself with the release of “Dreamlover”, the lead single from her third studio album “Music Box”. Yet another No 1 in America, it would top out at No 9 over here.

It was perfect for daytime radio – light but not lightweight, bouncy but not bumpy, it also saw Mariah ease off on that (in)famous vocal range. It also allowed her to pursue her interest in hip-hop via the employment of producer Dave Hall who had worked on Mary J. Bilge’s “What’s The 411?” album. The fluffy, feel-good video was a perfect visual vehicle for the track and I always picture Mariah in her checked shirt cavorting about in a field of hay when I hear the track but that’s enough of that!

Could this be the final time we see Tasmin Archer on TOTP? Quite possibly. A superstar in the making with her No 1 “Sleeping Satellite” less than a year before, she had already been relegated to an also ran come August 1993. “Arienne” was the fourth hit from her debut album “Great Expectations” but was also the worst performing as each release peaked lower down the charts than its predecessor. I always thought this was a more obvious follow up to “Sleeping Satellite” than actual second single “In Your Care” and had record company EMI gone that route then surely it would have landed higher than its No 30 peak here.

I quite liked it but maybe that was due to its similarities to “Carrie Anne” by the marvellous Hollies – Tasmin totally nicks their phrasing for her song. Taking of that name, have you ever met anyone called Arienne before? You’re doing well if you have. Between 1880 and 2020, only 428 babies were named Arienne in the US making it the 18,714th most popular name of all time. As for Tasmin, she would return to the UK Top 40 one more time when her “Shipbuilding” EP of Elvis Costello covers just sneaked in during 1994.

To Miami Beach now for a satellite link up with the Bee Gees who are in the charts with their “Paying The Price Of Love” single. The more I listen to this one, the more excruciating it sounds. Unlike Mariah Carey who toned down her high pitched vocals for “Dreamlover”, Barry Gibb has turned the falsetto-meter up to a spine tingling, Spinal Tap-esque 11. I’m sure there were bits of it that only our dog could hear. And those outfits they were wearing! The Bee Gees made very little sense sartorially or sonically outside of the disco era.

WHO?! You may well ask. Their/his (?) name was Sinclair and the song was “Ain’t No Casanova” and that’s about all their is to know about this whole minuscule footnote of chart history. There’s very little else out there online. As with Tasmin Archer borrowing heavily from The Hollies for her hit “Arienne”, so Sinclair seemed to have revisited a previous chart hit for inspiration. Remember “Casanova” by Levert from 1987? The very first line of that song is ‘I ain’t much on Casanova’. I mean come on!

Sinclair’s record plugger must have either done a hell of a job or just got lucky to get a slot on TOTP when the record had only entered the chart at No 37. In any other week it surely would have been a Breaker? The appearance helped it to a peak of No 28 and then…nothing. Probably for the best.

Another week at the top for Freddie Mercury and “Living On My Own” and yet another artist on the show that had a remarkable vocal after Mariah Carey and Barry Gibb. Who had the biggest vocal range though? Well, Classic FM published an article this year where they compared the voices of artists from Prince to Pavarotti and Bowie to Bocelli. Freddie Mercury comes in with an impressive 4 octave F2 to E6 range with Barry Gibb just behind him on 3.4 but Mariah Carey topped them all being able to go from F2 to G7, a span of 5 octaves. Ouch! Cease is the word!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	The Pogues	Tuesday Morning	Nope
2	UB40	Higher Ground	No
3	Bitty McLean	“It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes)”	Never
4	Aftershock	Slave To The Vibe	Not my vibe at all
5	The Breeders	Cannonball	I must have it on something surely
6	Mariah Carey	Dreamlover	Nah
7	Tasmin Archer	Arienne	I did not
8	Bee Gees	Paying The Price Of Love	Wasn’t ever happening
9	Sinclair	Ain’t No Casanova	Negative
10	Freddie Mercury	Living On My Own	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001cjqx/top-of-the-pops-19081993

TOTP 12 AUG 1993

Posted on October 2, 2022 by 80stastic

If it’s mid August then it must be the start of the new football season and 1993 was no different. I didn’t have high hopes for my beloved Chelsea for the 1993/94 season after the previous year’s bucketload of mid table mediocrity but on the day this TOTP aired, we signed Gavin Peacock for 1.2 million from Newcastle United which I was excited about. Gavin would prove to be an instant hit by scoring on his debut two days later. However, Chelsea lost the game and it would prove to be another season of highs and lows characterised by our getting to the FA Cup final for the first time in 24 years and then losing it 0-4. Crushing. I wonder how many highs and lows there’ll be in this TOTP?

We start with a massive low. What the Barney Rubble was going on here?! I thought we might have managed to get away with just a short glimpse of Green Jellÿ when they appeared in the Breakers with their first and biggest hit “Three Little Pigs”. No such luck as they have made themselves available to open this show with their new single “Anarchy In The UK”. Their take on the Sex Pistols’ punk classic is, as my friend Robin would say, like pissing from the roof of a multi story car park – wrong on so many levels.

First of all, don’t arse about with “Anarchy In The UK”. Whatever you may think of the Pistols’ debut single, you can’t deny its place in (punk) rock history. Secondly, if you are going to mess with it, at least retain Johnny Rotten’s iconic (albeit phonically incorrect) phrasing. It’s “I am an anti-Christ, I am an anar-kaist”. Who are you Mr Green Jellÿ to correct Johnny Rotten? Thirdly, this whole Flintstones thing had already been done before by The Screaming Blue Messiahs with their 1988 Top 30 hit “I Wanna Be A Flintstone”. Hardly original. Fourthly, the costumes. Obviously that’s meant to be Fred and Barney but who’s the third one meant to be? Bam-Bam? Just crap. Oh and was it really wise to accessorise Barney’s costume with a skinhead look and ‘Oi’ on the side of his head given some of the links to white nationalist groups like the National Front the movement was perceived to have. Finally, it had zero musical value but worse than that even, it wasn’t funny. At all.

Rather predictably the song would make it onto the soundtrack to the 1994 live action movie The Flintstones alongside that Screaming Blue Messiahs track and “(Meet) The Flintstones” by The B-52s who renamed themselves The BC-52s for the release. How we laughed.

Another low now as we return to that horrible sub genre of dance music, the reworking of pop songs as dance floor fillers. There was a lot of this sort of nonsense around this time from the likes of Undercover and Rage and now here was Sarah Washington with a danced up version of “I Will Always Love You”. What a nasty thing this was and totally unnecessary. Whitney Houston’s version of the Dolly Parton classic had been No 1 for ten weeks between Dec ‘92 and Feb ‘93. Did we really need to hear another version of it so soon?

Apparently we did as Sarah Washington’s version made No 12. She attempted to repeat the trick with her follow up, a dance version of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” but fortunately that didn’t make the Top 40. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of this movement as 1995 saw Nicki French go Top 5 with a danced up version of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse Of The Heart”. Oh the horror.

It’s a hat-trick of lows as we get “River Of Dreams” by Billy Joel. I said last time this was on the show that it’s one of Billy’s worst ever compositions and I haven’t changed my mind in the meanwhile. Of course, that’s just my humble opinion and others may have a different take. Someone who definitely did was Peter from Spearfish, South Dakota who had this to say on the songfacts.com website:

I think God was really speaking to Billy Joel but Billy Joel decided to ignore God and it’s his own fault if he ends up in hell but you never know
https://www.songfacts.com/facts/billy-joel/the-river-of-dreams

Gulp! Well, Billy does include some biblical references in the song and he does consider himself an atheist so maybe those sorts of comments were always going to happen.

“River Of Dreams” peaked at No 3.

Dear God! I think we’ve hit the lowest of the lows as we encounter Bad Boys Inc. Inevitably, given the rise to the top of Take That, boy bands were springing up left, right and centre in the 90s. Bad Boys Inc were one of the first of these pretenders to cling onto their coat tails hitting immediately with debut single “Don’t Talk About Love”. The work of evil pop mastermind Ian Levine, who himself had produced Take That’s first three singles, they went down the same promotion route as Gary Barlow and co doing nightclub PAs to get their name out there. They also seemed to have adopted their dance moves and stage set up with the lead singer doing all the vocal lifting and the other three just…well…dancing. The song is the usual teeny bop by numbers fare but really they didn’t have anything to make them stand out and certainly nothing to rival Take That. They had one hit wonder written all over them and yet they notched up six chart hits in total including one Top 10! Even their name was terrible. Was it meant to channel some of that other boy band that were the actual rivals to Take That at the time East 17? Bad Boys Inc? Bad Boys Stink more like.

As Kevin Rowland once sang, “Let’s Get This Straight From The Start”. Yes, “Mr Vain” by Culture Beat does sound like Snap!’s “Rhythm Is A Dancer”. There are more similarities though. Both songs went to No 1 in the UK and both were made by German Eurodance acts. There always been a couple of things I never understood about “Mr. Vain” though. Who was ‘Mr. Raider’ as referenced in the lyrics and why does female vocalist Tania Evans insist on being called ‘Mr. Vain’?

Some Breakers now and we start with Ice Cube (an ice breaker?) and “Check Yo Self”. The man behind many of the lyrics on legendary NWA album “Straight Outta Compton”, Ice Cube had left the band acrimoniously in 1989 and was already onto his third solo album by this point. “The Predator” was a No 1 record in America selling 193,000 copies in its first week. This track was the third single to be released from it and gave Ice Cube his second consecutive UK Top 40 hit after “It Was A Good Day” when it peaked at No 36.

As host Tony Dortie says in his intro, the track heavily borrows from the mother of all rap tunes “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel. Widely recognised as the song that took rap into the mainstream, its influence can also be found in work by artists like Genesis (the laugh in “Mama”) and Robbie Williams (the “it’s like a jungle” line in “Millennium”).

This next one literally only exists for me on this 30 seconds clip. I can’t recall it at all from 1993 and I can’t find anything much about the act online in 2022. To be fair, their name doesn’t aid an internet search – what did I expect to find if I put Ali And Frazier into Google? Whoever they were/are, their song was a cover of the Althea And Donna 1978 classic “Uptown Top Ranking”. Not a straight cover though you understand. This was 1993 so they ragga-fied it with a rap and tried to update the sound by including that horrible sax parp from recent No 1 “All That She Wants” by Ace Of Base. There’s also a hint of “That’s The Way (I Like It)” by KC And The Sunshine Band. Just…why?

Like Althea and Donna, “Uptown Top Ranking” was Ali and Frazier’s only hit when it peaked at No 33. Unlike Althea and Donna, nobody remembers the musical version of Ali and Frazier.

Whatever you may think of Jay Kay, he was ahead of his time when it came to green issues. He was the funk version of Julian “Salt Water” Lennon. “Emergency On Planet Earth” was the title track of Jamiroquai’s debut album and also the third track to be released from it as a single. Sonically, it was very much in the same vein as it’s two predecessors but somehow I think I liked it better than those other tracks. The sci-fi themed video stands up pretty well although it’s dated by the inclusion of a public pay phone.

This would be the last time we’d see Jamiroquai for a whole year bar a re-release of debut flop single “When You Gonna Learn”. When they did return, it was with “Space Cowboy” which sounded the same as everything else they’d released.

Talking of debut singles being re-released, here’s “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” by Spin Doctors. Originally out in October of 1992, it made No 17 on the US charts but it wasn’t released over here until “Two Princes” had been a hit. I’d forgotten what a nifty tune this is. Some great slap bass playing and a searing guitar riff make for a great groove (man!). It should have been a bigger hit than its No 23 peak.

Songwriter and lead vocalist Chris Barron was initially subjected to accusations of misogyny due to the song’s lyrics (the opening line is “It’s been a whole lot easier since the bitch left town”) with many assuming it was written about an ex-girlfriend but it was actually about a toxic relationship with his stepmother. “The song is really about life being short so we should all be nice to one other” he told Sky magazine in an interview.

The track would turn up on Sesame Street in 1995 as “Little Miss Count Along”. There’s no bigger accolade.

Finally! A song on a ragga tip in 1993 that I didn’t mind! I refer to Apache Indian and his song “Boom Shack-A-Lak” which was a track from his “Nuff Vibes EP”. Inevitably, people made comparisons with it and Shaggy’s “Oh Carolina” and Apache Indian (real name Steven Kapur) himself references this in the BBC documentary Top Of The Pops – The Story Of 1993. He admits that he was influenced by the likes of the Shaggy, Chaka Demus and Pliers etc who were releasing reggae style songs with a 60s pop twist to them and so thought he’d have a brash at that himself. His breakthrough hit from earlier in the year “Arranged Marriage” had been nothing like “Boom Shack-A-Lak” (a made up word with a similar meaning to ‘Wagwan’ Kapur says in the documentary) with its Bhangra rhythms and instrumentation but he could see where the money trail was going and duly followed.

Cautious not to appear to be treading on his buddy Shaggy’s toes, he played him the track and just about asked his permission to release it. Being the magnanimous fellow he is, Shaggy wasn’t at all bothered that Kapur appeared to be “nicking his shit” (to quote Shaggy) and the rest was history. Easily Apache Indian’s biggest hit, it went to No 5 in the UK and has been used extensively in film such as the Dumb And Dumber movies and Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (surely they should have used a song by Shaggy?!). It sounds like it should have been included in one of the Austin Powers movies but as far as I can tell it wasn’t used.

I’m guessing hopes were high in the offices of Aswad and Yazz’s record labels for the rejuvenating powers of this cover version of Ace’s “How Long”. With both artists’ careers in need of a shot in the arm, surely a reggaed-up take on an airplay classic would do the trick? ‘No!’ was the resounding answer from the record buying public as despite this TOTP appearance, it got no higher than its peak this week of No 31. Yazz looks pretty different to her “The Only Way Is Up” heyday with her short peroxide blonde cut replaced by a longer hairdo tied up at the back. When she went to get that short crop, her hairdresser looked at her cascading tresses and said ‘How long?’. I’ll get me coat.

Take That are dethroned at the top of the charts as Freddie Mercury takes over with “Living On My Own”. I just didn’t get this. To me, it’s a nothing song that probably deserved no more than its chart high of No 50 when originally released in 1985. OK, you could make a case for a surge in record sales when an artist dies but in Freddie’s case that was back in 1991, one year and 263 days before this song made it to No 1. There had already been two Freddie solo singles released posthumously and neither got anywhere near the top of the charts so why this one? Was it to do with the No More Brothers remix? Well, whatever the record had, it would turn out to be the last ever entry for Freddie as a solo artist in the UK Top 40 singles chart.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Green Jellÿ	Anarchy In The UK	Never!
2	Sarah Washington	I Will Always Love You	No chance
3	Billy Joel	River Of Dreams	Not likely
4	Bad Boys Inc	Don’t Talk About Love	NO!
5	Culture Beat	Mr. Vain	I did not
6	Ice Cube	Check Yo Self	No
7	Ali And Frazier	Uptown Top Ranking	I’d rather get punched in the face
8	Jamiroquai	Emergency On Planet Earth	No but my wife had the album
9	Spin Doctors	Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong	No but maybe I should have
10	Apache Indian	Boom Shack-A-Lak	It was fun but no
11	Aswad / Yazz	How Long	Too long – no
12	Freddie Mercury	Living On My Own	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001cjqv/top-of-the-pops-12081993

TOTP 05 AUG 1993

Posted on September 28, 2022 by 80stastic

I started the previous post talking about the poor state of the BBC’s musical output in 1993 and the landscape altering changes that were coming to both Radio 1 and TOTP. Well, one of them has just happened ahead of schedule. Radio 1 DJ and pretty much the embodiment of the comedy characters Smashie and Nicey Dave Lee Travis resigned on air three days after this TOTP aired. Apparently he was due to leave the station in ten weeks time anyway when his contract ran out but so irate was the ‘Hairy Cornflake’ about what was going on in the corridors of power at the station that he chose to have his own little private or rather very public moment of venting.

“…and I really want to put the record straight at this point and I thought you ought to know – changes are being made here which go against my principles and I just cannot agree with them”
“Profile: Dave Lee Travis”. Aircheck Tracker. Archived from the original on 22 October 2009. Retrieved 13 November 2008.

DLT was referring to the changes being ushered in by new controller in waiting Matthew Bannister that would lead to a massive overhaul of the station and its presenters. Simon Bates, Gary Davies, Alan Freeman, Bob Harris and Paul Gambaccini would follow him out of the door soon after. Eventually even Steve Wright whom Bannister had put on the breakfast show slot would resign* ushering in the era of the self styled saviour of Radio 1 Chris Evans. Heaven help us.

*Writing this coincidentally on the day of Steve Wright’s last ever afternoon show on Radio 2

TOTP would undergo its own major transformation a few months on from the comings and goings at Radio 1 but for the moment it was business as usual. Let’s see who was doing the rounds this week…

Well, there’s Juliet Roberts opening the show with her single “Caught In The Middle” for starters. Long before this hit, Juliet had a gig on a TV show called Rockschool. Nothing to do with Jack Black, it was a BBC programme that ran for four years and showed viewers techniques for making rock and pop music using guitar, keyboards, bass, drums etc.

I don’t remember this at all but by the comments against some of the clips on YouTube, the 80s kids loved it. It did have some pretty big names appear on the show such as Gary Moore, Vince Clarke, The Communards and Midge Ure. The presenters were pretty wooden but they were good musicians. Guitarist Deirdre Cartwright in the thumbnail below had been in a band called Painted Lady who would go on to become Girlschool. Play the opening song in the clip below. It sounds like prog-poppers It Bites who knew their way around a tune or two…

The clip below features Juliet (1:56) talking about singing styles. She also co-hosted a Channel 4 show called Solid Soul that was basically a retooling of America’s Soul Train.

All that work in front of the camera should have made her TOTP appearance here a doddle. She looks pretty confident for sure and nice to see an almost totally female backing band behind her (I think the drummer is a bloke). The 1993 trend of the tall hat started by Linda Perry of 4 Non Blondes carries on with Juliet’s choice of headgear. Top (hat) stuff.

What on earth is going on here?! Daniel O’Donnell on TOTP?! At a time when Matthew Bannister was lurking the corridors of Radio 1 on a dinosaur hunt to turn the station back to its original raison d’être of being for ‘young listeners’, what was the natural successor to Val Doonican doing on the BBC’s prime time pop music show?! Bizarre doesn’t begin to cover it. Even host Mark Franklin sounds surprised when he introduces him.

Look, I know Daniel O’Donnell has a massively loyal fan base who swear by him and he wasn’t doing any harm by giving them what they wanted to hear but in terms of the symbiosis between the BBC’s two main musical arms, it seemed like an outlier at best. To put it into context, it wouldn’t be long before Radio 1 Head of Production Trevor Dann would ban Status Quo records from being played on the station.

“Whatever Happened To Old Fashioned Love” was only O’Donnell’s fourth single release and he would only ever release eighteen in a fourteen year period fifteen of which would make the UK Top 40. Albums were a different matter altogether. Check out these numbers:

Studio albums: 38
Compilation albums: 13
Live albums: 4

Wow! That’s a lot of Daniel O’Donnell! Big props by the way to the floor managers for this show for getting the studio audience to scream at Daniel as if he was a member of Take That.

The Madonna video for “Rain” again?! This is the third time in four weeks! And it was a non-mover this week (albeit within the Top 10)! Overkill much? It would get no higher despite all this exposure. I said in a recent post that you only had to look at the fact that all five singles from the “Erotica” album made the Top 10 in the UK as evidence that she was still current, popular and relevant at this time. However, what I didn’t say was that four of them (the four consecutive releases after the title track) failed to make the Top 5, the first time that had ever happened. She wouldn’t have another No 1 record until “Frozen” five years later.

One place higher than Madonna we find Urban Cookie Collective with “The Key The Secret” and unlike her Madgesty, they are on the up. Their ride up the charts so far has been as follows:

40 – 29 – 20 – 11 – 6

They would rise to No 2 the following week where they would stay for two weeks kept off the top spot by Freddie Mercury. It would then spend the next three weeks inside the Top 10 and a further three inside the Top 40 before finally dropping out.

The other day the tweet below appeared on my timeline:

Mental note to oneself – when in office don’t randomly pipe up ‘I’ve got the secret’ when someone says, ‘I’ve got the key.’ It leads to confused looks and questions about what secret you know. Not everyone has song lyrics from 1993 still playing in their head.
— Lucy Mitchell (@LucyMitchAuth) September 27, 2022

The replies to Lucy’s tweet showed that there were loads of us with similar lines from songs that we pull out automatically given the correct prompt. Mine and my wife’s include “(Hey You) The Rock Steady Crew” by Rock Steady Crew and “Fresh” by Kool And The Gang. Within the replies to Lucy’s tweet, someone managed to get in another 1993 reference:

At a wedding once and a bridesmaid stands to do a reading entitled ‘What is Love?’ To which my husband whispers ‘baby don’t hurt me’ I don’t think our row heard any of the reading
— Bronagh (@BristowBronagh) September 28, 2022

The well worn tale of soap star to pop idol has another chapter. How many had already made that transformation by August 1993? Well, off the top of my head there’s Kylie and Jason obviously, Kylie’s sister Dannii, Craig McLachlan, Stefan Dennis (!) and that’s just from Neighbours. If we look closer to home, we find perhaps where this whole phenomenon began with another resident of the aforementioned Albert Square. Seven years prior to this, Anita Dobson took “Anyone Can Fall In Love” into the Top 5 starting a flurry of EastEnders chancing their arms as pop sensations. Nick Berry, Letitia Dean and Paul Medford, Sophie Lawrence all had hits of varying size whilst there were also some feeble failures from the likes of Tom Watt and Peter Dean. None of them though seemed to have the credibility that Michelle Gayle had.

She’d been on our screens as Hattie Tavernier for over three years by this point but left Albert Square to pursue a pop career full time. Her debut single was “Looking Up” and it was no crappy cover version designed to deliver a one-off hit. I could imagine someone like Dina Carroll, Kim Appleby or even Louise post Eternal performing it. An uplifting, catchy chorus aligned with a well placed one word sample (‘Rejoice!’), it sounded current and relevant and well…on the money for 1993. Michelle herself displays no signs of imposter syndrome in her confident TOTP turn but then this wasn’t her debut musical performance…

Go to 18:25

Fresh ‘n’ Fly there wrekkin’ the mike (PSYCHE!). “Looking Up” made No 11 (not quite the Top 3 that host Mark Franklin predicted then) and its success was enough to convince Michelle and her label RCA that she should quit EastEnders to be a full time pop star. She would go on to have seven Top 40 hits (including her most well known tune “Sweetness”) and recorded two albums before leaving RCA to sign with EMI where she was the victim of an artist rostering reshuffle and never released any recordings with them. She has returned to music periodically with a second place finish in 2003’s Reborn In The USA retro music contest and even had a go at Eurovision in 2008.

They’ve dropped the number of Breakers from five to four this week (thank god!) and we start with a collaboration between two artists at either end of the alphabet. Aswad and Yazz were at school together Mark Franklin tells us and they looked each other up again to record a cover of Ace’s 1975 hit “How Long”. We’ve seen the cover version as career revitaliser strategy countless times before but both Aswad and Yazz’s fortunes certainly needed a tonic in 1993. Neither had managed a hit in three years and in the case of Yazz especiall, her career was a mess. After the huge success of “The Only Way Is Up” and the “Wanted” album at the end of the 80s, she’d record two albums for two different labels neither of which was released. “How Long” was the lead single from her third LP attempt that did see the light of day but “One On One” disappeared without trace leaving only that Ace cover to remind us of Yazz’s name. It would be her final chart hit when it peaked at No 31. Aswad though would score a Top 5 hit with “Shine” the following year. They were in the news for tragic reasons recently when founding member Drummie Zeb died aged just 62.

Next a huge dance hit from The Goodmen or is it The Good Men or is it Chocolate Puma or even Zki & Dobre? Confused? Well, these were just a few of the names that Dutch DJ and production duo René ter Horst and Gaston Steenkist went by. Not names that roll off the tongue naturally – that may explain the aliases. If their real names aren’t familiar then their tune “Give It Up” surely is to anybody frequenting the club scene around this time as it was huge. An African rhythm combined with that regimented drum sound was ubiquitous and led to it being a global hit especially in the US where it topped the dance chart. So massive was it that it crossed over into the mainstream and became a No 5 hit on the UK Top 40. Given its success, it’s rather surprising that it was never shown on TOTP again. Maybe they didn’t know what to do with it. Its impact led to it being sampled two years later by Simply Red for their No 1 hit “Fairground” but let’s not go there eh?

Talking of No 1 records, here comes a future one courtesy of Culture Beat and “Mr Vain”. This lot were yet more Eurodance chart botherers and as they will be chart toppers shortly, I’ll keep my comments about them in this brief Breakers appearance…well…brief. Here’s a nice little bit of pop trivia for now though. “Mr Vain” was the first record to got o No 1 in the UK that wasn’t released on 7’’ vinyl.

Bon Jovi complete this week’s Breakers with the fourth single from their “Keep The Faith” album. Was “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” just a rewrite of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”? Bit harsh but then the band have incorporated the Stones song into their composition when performing it live so there must be some similarities structure wise. The black and white promo video features a number of scenes clearly meant as a tribute to / stolen directly from A Hard Day’s Night and also Jim Morrison’s grave in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. I went there once and there are some incredible figures from history buried within it. Chopin, Edith Piaf, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde…and yet all anybody seemed interested in was the singer of The Doors. I saw many hand made signs saying ‘This way to Jim’ and at his actual grave, someone had laid not flowers but a nicely rolled joint. It’s what he would have wanted.

“I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” peaked at No 17.

This week’s live by satellite performance is by UB40 and comes from the Garden State Arts Centre, New Jersey. It’s another pointless exercise as the only camera angle we get is of the band performing “Higher Ground” on a two level stage. Completely dull. Also completely dull was their song which was the second single from the “Promises And Lies” album.

This was a very commercially successful time for UB40. As Mark Franklin says, they’d just had a No 1 single in “(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You” and the album was also a chart topper. By my reckoning, this was also the last really successful era of the band. There had been a few during their career – the heady days of their politically powerful first hits like “One In Ten”, their covers period of “Labour Of Love” and “Red Red Wine”, the chart topping collaboration with Chrissie Hynde on “I’ve Got You Babe” and then this 1993 spell. “Higher Ground” was a bit of a stinker though.

This episode of TOTP became ‘The UB40 Show’ by be end of it with Ali Campbell introducing the next act who was actually one of their mates. Bitty McLean was a tape operator at the band’s recording studio originally – the reggae Rick Astley then – before being promoted to co-producer and engineer for them. He even provided backing vocals for some of the “Promises And Lies” album. His debut single was a cover of a 1961 Fats Domino tune “It Keeps Rainin” which he retitled “It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes)” presumably much to the annoyance of the TOTP graphics team.

I hated this as it was just more evidence to me of what a terrible year for music 1993 was turning out to be. Plastic reggae with a ragga style shout out at the start of it just to jump on that bandwagon. Horrible. As always, I was in the minority and the record soared to No 2 in the charts. Bitty would have a total of seven UK Top 40 hits.

A fourth and final week at the top of the heap for Take That with “Pray”. They needn’t have worried though as it was the first of eight No 1 singles in the first part of their career. They will be back in a few weeks with “Relight My Fire” accompanied by the dreadful Lulu.

dsfghjk

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Juliet Roberts	Caught In The Middle	Nope
2	Daniel O’Donnell	Whatever Happened To Old Fashioned Love	As if
3	Madonna	Rain	No
4	Urban Cookie Collective	The Key The Secret	I did not
5	Michelle Gayle	Looking Up	Negative
6	Aswad and Yazz	How Long	Nah
7	The Goodmen	Give It Up	No thanks
8	Culture Beat	Mr Vain	Never happening
9	Bon Jovi	I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead	No but I had a promo copy of the Keep The Faith album
10	UB40	Higher Ground	I did not
11	Bitty McLean	It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes)	Just awful – no
12	Take That	Pray	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001c94b/top-of-the-pops-05081993

TOTP 29 JUL 1993

Posted on September 24, 2022 by 80stastic

It’s late July 1993 and the BBC’s musical output has gone stale. The seismic changes of the TOTP ‘year zero’ revamp happened twenty-two months ago and many are no longer with us most obviously the majority of the slew of new presenters that were introduced. In fact, the only two remaining are Mark Franklin and Tony Dortie who have been presenting solo on alternate weeks since October 1992. The show’s audience has plateaued at a level of 6.5 million which was less than it was attracting pre the revamp.

Meanwhile, over at Radio 1, whilst it seems like the ‘Smashie And Nicey’ image propagated by the likes of Simon Bates, Dave Lee Travis and Gary Davies will carry on forever, change is a-comin’. The era of Matthew Bannister as controller of Radio 1 is nearly upon us and he will action a root and branch transformation that will strip away the old, rotting wood. The culture of change would prove to be contagious. Within months, TOTP would also change head producer and the incoming Ric Blaxill would reverse most of the ‘year zero’ changes. For now though, it was the calm before the storm. Let’s see who was afloat before the sea of change appeared over the horizon…

We start with an act that was having some success under the current regime but who would flourish under the new. “Unforgiven” was D:Ream’s third of four consecutive Top 40 hits in 1993 though none would get any higher than No 19. Solid but not spectacular. Come early 1994 though they would go off like a rocket with the re-release of “Things Can Only Get Better” soaring to No 1.

Like most people I’m guessing, I don’t remember “Unforgiven” but on listening back to it, I was pleasantly surprised. It’s OK. A bit more grit to it than their most famous tune, the most impressive part of it is the bridge into the chorus which Peter Cunnah almost growls – quite the feat in a dance record. Linda Perry from 4 Non Blondes seems to have started a trend for tall hat wearing given the millinery of one of the backing singers. Where will it all end? Well, I’ll tell you where it won’t end – with me making the almost obligatory reference to Professor Brian Cox on keyboards…oh shit.

“Unforgiven” peaked at No 29.

“Show Me Love” by Robin S was not just one of the biggest dance tunes of 1993 but of the whole decade and beyond. How do you follow a hit line that? Easy! Just release virtually the same song again but change its title. “Luv 4 Luv” is “Show Me Love”, not just sonically but linguistically with the same three syllable title and chorus but with a slight change of spelling. Money for old rope? This was, to reference the film maker Stanley Kubrick, money for pieces of string too short to be useful*. Even Tony Dortie can’t resist a jibe by stating tongue-in-cheek that it’s “nothing like her first single”.

*Kubrick was a massive hoarder and when his family were sorting through his estate after his death, they found a box labelled ‘pieces of string too short to be useful’. His archives now reside at the London College of Communication .

Amazingly, enough people bought the single to send it to No 11 in the UK charts. I don’t get this. Presumably if a punter liked it enough to buy “Luv 4 Luv” then said punter must have felt the same about “Show Me Love” and also bought that so essentially you have the same record twice. Surely there can’t have been people who only bought “Luv 4 Luv”?! “I wasn’t bothered about “Show Me Love” but this new one by Robin S is great and I must have it”…said no-one ever.

When Freddie Mercury died in November 1991, Queen’s most iconic song “Bohemian Rhapsody” was rereleased and almost inevitably became that year’s Xmas No 1. Four months later, The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness took place at Wembley Stadium with the remaining members of Queen all involved. Such was Freddie’s popularity though, there was still a clamour for his recordings and so the band’s label raided his back catalogue as a solo artist. For a name as big as Freddie’s, there wasn’t actually that much solo work to raid. He only recorded two studio albums (and one of those was the “Barcelona” collaboration with Montserrat Caballé) plus the standalone single “The Great Pretender”, a couple of tracks for the Dave Clark musical Time and “Love Kills” from Giorgio Moroder’s restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. That didn’t stop Parlophone coming up with the unimaginatively titled “The Freddie Mercury Album” compilation in 1992 which included elements of all those recording projects. That album had already seen the release of “In My Defence” from Time and a rerelease for the aforementioned “The Great Pretender” which had both charted.

What came next though, nearly two years after Freddie’s death, was a surprise. A posthumous No1 record with a single that had stumbled to a peak of No 50 when originally released eight years prior? How did that happen? Well, it was all down to a team of remixers called The No More Brothers who took the track “Living On My Own” which had been on Freddie’s 1985 solo debut album “Mr Bad Guy” and that 1992 compilation and turned it into a dance hit. A chart topper all over Europe including the UK, it was a sales sensation. Me though, I didn’t get it. I hadn’t been aware of the 1985 original but this 1993 version didn’t make me want to seek it out. It just sounded so bland and I hated the lines ‘Dee do de de, Dee do de de, I don’t have no time for no monkey business”. What?! Written down, the first part looks like a script for a Harry Enfield’s The Scousers sketch whilst the monkey business bit was just hackneyed. How was this a No 1 record? The video is the same one used for the 1985 release and uses footage of Freddie’s 39th birthday party in Munich where he recorded the “Mr Bad Guy” album.

The general perception amongst the fanbase of Manic Street Preachers is that their second album “Gold Against The Soul” is also their worst. There is also an agreed opinion that the one stand out track on it is “La Tristesse Durera” which was released as its second single. I disagree on both counts. I love this album and though “La Tristesse Durera” is a fabulous track, it’s not my favourite from it. That honour switches between “Roses In The Hospital” and “Life Becoming A Landslide” on a regular basis.

Actually, I need to correct myself here and give the song its full title which is “La Tristesse Durera (Scream To A Sigh)”. No brackets, no points. I make this clarification not just for the sake of accuracy nor to be a pedant but to highlight a peculiar oddity about the track that has a tie in with another song I love that has brackets in the title. For some reason, when released in the US, the the song’s title was changed to “Scream To Sigh (La Tristesse Durera)”. Why? I have no idea but nearly a decade earlier, The Icicle Works’ single “Birds Fly (Whisper To A Scream)” had its title changed to “Whisper To A Scream (Birds Fly)” for the US market. What was it about US record labels and brackets and the word ‘scream’?

As for the performance here, would there have been outrage at Nicky Wire wearing a dress? There shouldn’t have been. It’s not as if we hadn’t seen it before. There was Bowie on the cover of his “The Man Who Sold The World” album and that bloke from Mud who wore one on the actual show.

“La Tristesse Durera (Whisper To A Scream)” peaked at No 22.

“Live from the Dominion Theatre in London’s West End…” Don’t get too excited it’s just Craig McLachlan in a revival of Grease the Musical and I have to say that, based on this short clip of “You’re The One That I Want” he doesn’t seem too convincing as Danny Zuko. Maybe it’s his curly hair, or his average singing voice or maybe it’s just that he’s not John Travolta which is not his fault of course. Debbie Gibson on the other hand belts it out and wears that iconic leather outfit well.

As Tony Dortie says, the cast included Shane Richie who played the role of Kenickie but as for him being “very funny” – if he performed anything like he did when on 3–2–1 in 1987…Perhaps he should have changed his name to Shame Richie…

Five Breakers again this week (bastards!) starting with Juliet Roberts and “Caught In The Middle”. I had no idea at the time but this wasn’t Juliet’s first Top 40 record – she was the vocalist on “It’s Over” by Funk Masters way back in 1983. She then joined smooth jazzers Working Week whose single “I Thought I’d Never See You Again” I quite liked though nobody else seemed to much when it peaked at No 80. Fast forward eight years and Juliet finally had a hit in her own right.

There’s a couple of parallels between Juliet and Shara Nelson who was on the show the other week. Both were having success under their own names after supplying the vocals for other artists (Shara sang on Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy”) and both were on the Cooltempo label. Also like Shara, Juliet’s solo career seemed to peter out rather. “Caught In The Middle” made No 24 though a David Morales remix the following year peaked ten places higher. A couple more Top 20 singles followed before the decade was out but that didn’t translate into album sales with her debut long player “Natural Thing” only making No 65. She continues to be in demand as a backing singer though.

The first of two huge stars now who are experiencing a drop off in singles sales as their latest offerings fail to tempt UK record buyers. After her last single “That’s The Way Love Goes” went to No 2 over here, Janet Jackson might have expected the follow up to perform similarly. It didn’t. “If” was the second single from her “Janet” album which I thought was meant to be a more smooth, sensual sounding soul record but this single could have been on the more strident previous album “Rhythm Nation 1814” with its hard beats and rock guitar riff. Yes, the lyrics aligned with the album’s sexual theme touching on fantasy and voyeurism but sonically it was nothing like the previous single.

The video plays on the voyeurism subject with scenes involving touch screen monitors and web cams, seemingly jumping on the bandwagon of Sliver, the erotic thriller starring Sharon Stone that was popular at the time. Maybe the racy video worked against the single’s commercial potential – was it too racy for anything other than a short Breaker spot on TOTP? Whatever the reason, “If” only made it to No 14 in the UK.

Oh crap! It’s “River Of Dreams” by Billy Joel. Now I like Billy and some of his back catalogue (especially the earlier stuff) is great. Even his last album prior to this (“Storm Front”) had some good singles on it. This track though rivalled “Uptown Girl” for sheer, undiluted awfulness. The title track off his only studio album of the 90s and the last to be comprised of pop songs*, it was and remains shockingly bad.

*His 2001 set “Fantasies & Delusions” contained only classical compositions.

Not everyone agreed with my assessment though. It was a huge global hit and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Record of the Year for 1994 losing out to, by coincidence, the next artist to feature on the Breakers. Why couldn’t I stand it? It was just so twee and I hated that harmonised intro that goes “In the middle of the…I go walking in the…”. I think ultimately though it reminds me of a time when I wasn’t that happy at work but that’s for a post in the near future.

Long after I’d finished working in record shops and stopped listening to Radio 1, I found myself at the radio home for the newly middle aged and listening to Terry Wogan’s breakfast show and he used to play this constantly. It nearly broke me.

“River Of Dreams” peaked at No 3.

Now to that second artist (alongside Janet Jackson) suffering an unexpected downturn in sales of their latest single and also the winner of that 1994 Grammy for Record of the Year. “Run To You” was the fourth single released by Whitney Houston from The Bodyguard soundtrack and was basically a retread of the third single “I Have Nothing” in that they were both towering ballads executed with precision by Whitney over a shiny production. So similar were they that Natalie Cole performed a medley of them at the 1993 Academy Awards (I’m guessing Whitney was indisposed).

Presumably due to the fact that the so many people already had the song due to buying the soundtrack album, “Run To You” failed to work itself into a sprint up the charts peaking at No 15 in the UK and No 31 in the US.

The video looks a bit crap by today’s high CGI standards with Whitney running against a backdrop of clouds although maybe it was a homage to the film of the aforementioned Grease when Danny and Sandy’s car takes off into the sky and they fly off into the clouds?

Neither “Run To You” nor Janet Jackson’s “If” were shown in full on TOTP which you maybe wouldn’t have expected for two such huge names.

Another huge name who had already had her video shown in full on the show is the final Breaker this week. Madonna is up to No 7 with “Rain” from her “Erotica” album. The tickets Tony Dortie refers to are for the two concert dates in September that Madonna played at Wembley Stadium as part of her The Girlie Show world tour.

“Rain” ended the first act of the show and was interspersed with “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)” by The Temptations and “Singin’ In The Rain”. Want to hear it? Here you go but having sat through the whole thing myself, I must warn you that you won’t get these 9 minutes and 48 seconds of your life back…

Back in the studio we find Dannii Minogue performing her rendition of Melba Moore’s “This Is It”. You know I said earlier about Juliet Roberts being an in demand backing singer after her solo career ended? Well, she must have been moonlighting back in 1993 as she provided backing vocals on Dannii’s previous single to “This Is It” which was called “Love’s On Every Corner”.

Twenty years after she had a hit with “This Is It”, the track supplied the title for a Best Of Dannii album which included a duet with sister Kylie of the ABBA standard “The Winner Takes It All” – I wonder which of the two of them that was then?

“This Is It” peaked at No 10.

There’s only one Bee Gees song I remember from 1993 and it ain’t this one. “For Whom The Bell Tolls” was a surprise Top 5 hit over Xmas that year that just seemed to keep on selling even when you thought it must have run out of steam. “Paying The Price Of Love” though? Nah, I’ve got nothing. Their previous hit to this had been the shameless rewrite of “Chain Reaction” that was “Secret Love” in 1991. Did this one sound like any of their other songs? A slight hint of “You Win Again” maybe? Maybe not.

Barry Gibbs’ falsetto here is quite remarkable. That’s not a compliment though – a better descriptor would be ridiculous. I know it works somehow on most of their back catalogue especially their disco era peak but taken in isolation it’s quite mad. If he turned up on a talent show like The Voice for example and did that, would the judges turn around or would they look at each other and break out into a fit of uncontrollable giggling? What if they did turn around and then saw his mane of hair?! I can only really think of Barry Gibb and Queen’s Brian May that have always maintained the same hairstyle throughout their careers. Honourable mentions should also go to Rod Stewart and Paul Weller for sustaining comedy haircuts but they have tweaked them down the years.

“Paying The Price Of Love” peaked at No 23.

You can’t really argue with Tony Dortie’s assessment that Take That were “simply the biggest pop band in the UK” at this time as “Pray” notches up a third week at No 1. The boys are back in the studio this week and what I’m noticing from this performance is the clear division of hairstyles between them (and yes, I know I seem to be obsessed with pop star barnets yet again this week). Mark, Howard and Robbie all have that classic mid 90s long at the the sides curtains style while Jason and Gary have a more classic crew cut. I think I know which has aged the better.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	D:Ream	Unforgiven	Nope
2	Robin S	Luv 4 Luv	Never
3	Freddie Mercury	Living On My Own	I did not
4	Manic Street Preachers	La Tristesse Durera (Scream To A Sigh)	Not the single but I had the album
5	Craig McLachlan and Debbie Gibson	You’re The One That I Want	No
6	Juliet Roberts	Caught In the Middle	Negative
7	Janet Jackson	If	Nah
8	Billy Joel	River Of Dreams	Hell no!
9	Whitney Houston	Run To You	No thanks
10	Madonna	Rain	It’s a no
11	Dannii Minogue	This Is It	No it isn’t
12	Bee Gees	Paying The Price Of Love	I didn’t pay the price
13	Take That	Pray	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001c948/top-of-the-pops-29071993

TOTP Rewind – the 90s

My memories of 90s chart music

Author: 80stastic

TOTP 30 SEP 1993

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TOTP 23 SEP 1993

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TOTP 16 SEP 1993

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TOTP 09 SEP 1993

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TOTP 02 SEP 1993

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TOTP 26 AUG 1993

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TOTP 19 AUG 1993

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TOTP 12 AUG 1993

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TOTP 29 JUL 1993

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