80stastic

TOTP 25 JUL 1991

Posted on September 9, 2021 by 80stastic

It’s 1991 here at TOTP Rewind and it’s a pivotal period for the grand old show which was in its 28th year. The ‘year zero’ revamp is just around the corner and we have already seen a flurry of cosmetic changes to the programme in the weeks prior to it. Various bits of tinkering with the chart rundown had led to inconsistencies in the show’s core concept and in the last few episodes we have seen a nasty green screen backdrop employed behind the presenters. However, that now seems to have been ditched as tonight’s host Mark Goodier is seen against a background of the real set. However, they do seem to have positioned him away from the studio audience who are all facing towards the stage area and not looking at Goodier at all. This gives the whole thing a rather sparse look, as if this is the dress rehearsal rather than the actual show.

The first act on tonight are making their debut in person performance on the show (I believe) but this landmark event is shot through with tragedy. The Shamen had been building a reputation on the club scene following the release of their “En-Tact” album the previous year but mainstream success had so far eluded them (bar one Top 30 entry for the single “Hyperreal”). However, the decision to remix and releases their “Pro-Gen” track from that album and retitle it as “Move Any Mountain (Progen ’91)” would prove to be a masterstroke as it crashed into the charts at No 9 this week. All of this chart activity however had come heart breakingly late for bass and keyboards player Will Sinnott who had tragically drowned whilst on a trip to Tenerife to film a promo video for “Move Any Mountain”. Founder member Colin Angus decided to carry on under The Shamen name with rapper Mr C promoted to the position of full time band member. I have to say that I prefer the original track “Pro-Gen” where Mr C’s rapping is dialled down a bit. However, if you didn’t like either of those mixes then there were plenty of others to choose from as apparently there were as many as 35 versions of the track circulating in Europe and the band themselves released a whole album (“Progeny”) dedicated to mixes of the track – 19 remixes of “Move Any Mountain (Progen 91)” plus 16 samples and loops according to Wikipedia. Phew!

I worked with someone at Our Price in later years who had a massive crush on Mr C which took me by surprise a bit. He never struck me as the hereat throb type. “Move Any Mountain (Progen ’91)” would peak at No 4 unable to dethrone Bryan Adams but they would return a year later to claim that No 1 spot with the infamous “Ebeneezer Goode” single. Naughty, naughty!

C+C Music Factory again?! How many times is this that the video for “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…” has been on? Three? Four? How am I supposed to keep coming up with stuff to say about this one?! Oh, hang on…there’s a cover version of it you say by a band called Stooshe? Never heard of them. Well, that could be an oasis for my word count desert. Let’s have a listen then…

…well that was ghastly! Harrowing even. Who the hell are these people?

*checks Wikipedia*

So, they’re a British girl group from London formed to be an urban and soulful Spice Girls! The name is pronounced as in ‘pushy’ and originates from the word ‘stoosh’ which is urban slang for either something expensive, a girl who thinks she’s nicer than she is or being stoned! WTF?! The suffix -she was added on the end to represent female empowerment (oh you mean ‘girl power’ then?). The resulting name is pronounced like the Scottish word ‘stooshie’ which means ‘the disruption caused by a disagreement or misunderstanding’. What a load of old ‘tosh’… that’s ‘tosh’ as in ‘what a lot of old bollocks’.

C+C Music Factory’s version of “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…” peaked at No 4.

Still enjoying 1991 was Dannii Minogue who is back on TOTP with her third hit in the last four months. “Jump To The Beat” was of course a cover of the Stacy Lattisaw No 3 hit from 1980 and it completed a peculiar little pop palindrome for Dannii when it peaked at No 8 meaning her three Top 40 entries so far had achieved the following chart peaks:

8-11-8

Stacy Lattisaw was only 13 when she had her hit but Dannii was a whole six years older at 19 when she took it back into the charts. Someone who was younger than both of them was the daughter of a guest at a wedding that I attended around this time. It was the evening do of a friend from school of my wife’s and there was a little girl there who clearly loved this record and was throwing herself around the dance floor as the DJ played it. As the night drew to a close and the DJ announced there was only one song left we all begged him to play “Jump To The Beat” again for this young girl but the jobsworth refused and played “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” instead as he had clearly decided well in advance that would be his final record of the night. Instead of at least one guaranteed person on the dance floor, he got nobody as everyone walked off as soon as the first strains of Bryan Adams came over his disco speakers. Nobhead.

Having introduced themselves to UK audiences with the funk metal of “Get The Funk Out”, Extreme threw us all a curve ball when they followed it up with the spare and brittle sounding acoustic ballad “More Than Words”. Despite Mark Goodier’s warning not to be fooled by the gentle song and that they were a serious rock band, many a pop fan was duped into buying the band’s “Pornograffitti” album on the strength of “More Than Words”. Such a deception had not been put into practice since 1986 when the Doctor and the Medics album “Laughing At The Pieces” was bought by many a chart follower expecting an LP full of “Spirits In The Sky”s.

The joke was on Extreme in the end though as the song became an albatross around their necks and they became known as ‘the More Than Words guys’ (see also 4 Non Blondes and Berlin whose biggest hit was more famous than the band). It’s a pleasant enough rock ballad though I guess and went to No 1 in the US and would surely have done the same over here but for the Bryan Adams effect.

1991 wasn’t all about acts making their first breakthrough into the charts like Dannii Minogue, The Shamen and Extreme that we have seen on the show so far. It was also about this who rose phoenix like from the ashes to rekindle former glories like Feargal Sharkey and Mike and the Mechanics who both returned to the charts in this year after a big gap away from them. And this lot. OMD (who seemed to be basically Andy McCluskey at this point) were enjoying not one but two Top 10 hits in 1991 with the second being this one “Pandora’s Box”.

It was hard not to believe the band were all just about McCluskey to be fair when you watched performances like this and all you can see are his extraordinary ‘Dad Dancing’ moves which have been described as ‘a geography teacher with ants in his pants’ and ‘an epileptic windmill’. My brother-in-law looks a bit like Andy McCluskey I always think (although my wife can’t really see it). I have never witnessed him dancing though.

“Pandora’s Box” peaked at No 7.

After getting Bette Midler into the TOTP studios the other week, the producers have pulled off another coup by twisting the arm of Cher into making a visit. She’s here to promote her latest single “Love And Understanding” and as with Andy McCluskey’s dancing, all you can see in this performance is Cher’s hair. Presumably that was a wig? It’s not as shocking as Madonna’s pink fright-wig back in 1984 for her performance of ‘Like A Virgin” but it was still a bold statement.

Just like Madonna, Cher is up there all on her own with no backing singers / dancers / band which I’m kind of surprised about. You would imagine she would have a whole Mariah Carey style entourage with her. The following single release from Cher was a song called “Save Up All Your Tears” which was the opening track of the “Love Hurts” album and which I recall was also recorded by Robin Beck of “First Time” fame (that cola advert song from 1988) but which tonked when released as the follow up to her surprise No 1. They are almost exactly the same! Here’s Robin’s version…

And here’s Cher’s…

Apart from Cher’s more throaty vocals, almost indentical.

“Love And Understanding” peaked at No 10.

This next bloke is “a bit of a musical genius” according to Mark Goodier. Why? He’s only the ‘The Godfather of House Music’ that’s why! Even a dance tune dodger like me knew the name Frankie Knuckles and of his legendary status within the genre. “The Whistle Song” must be his best known tune in his own right but he has also remixed some massive chart hits like “You Are Not Alone” by Michael Jackson, “Un-Break My Heart” by Toni Braxton and “Ain’t Nobody” by Chaka Khan. Such is his influence that he even has another nickname which is ‘The Man Of The House’ which immediately makes me think of this:

Despite acknowledging his indisputable legacy, “The Whistle Song” did very little for me. A performance that included a key-tar and a flute on the same stage?! Come on! No wonder the TOTP producers got in four backing dancers in hot pants to liven things up a bit. The single peaked at No 17.

Three Breakers this week starting with “Twist And Shout” by Deacon Blue. Obviously not that “Twist And Shout”, this was the second single to be released from the band’s “Fellow Hoodlums” album and was easily the biggest hit from it. In fact, it would turn out to be the last of their only three Top 10 singles. I think there was just something simple and joyful about this song that made UK record buyers sit up and take note. The fact that it was released in the Summer also added to its appeal. There’s plenty of hooks in it as well which always helps and none more so than Lorraine McIntosh’s high pitched squeal on the word ‘upside’ in the lyric ‘turned the big world upside down’.

The single’s success, as with OMD and “Pandora’s Box” earlier in the show, would initiate a welcome spike in sales of the parent album which although a No 2 record, had failed to shift the units that its predecessor “When The World Knows Your Name” had done. The basic but colourful video enhanced the feel good factor of the song with the bond between the band obvious to see.

Despite the phenomenal success of his debut album, Seal‘s single releases were suffering from a dose of the diminishing returns. “Crazy” had been a huge hit just missing the top spot by one place but follow up “Future Love Paradise” hadn’t made the Top 10 and this one, “The Beginning”, didn’t make the Top 20. Maybe it was because so many people had splashed out on the album that had already been out for six weeks and which had gone straight to No 1 that there was little demand to buy more tracks released from it? Maybe Seal was an albums artist? His first two albums both went to No 1 after all whilst he only ever had three Top 10 hits under his own name and one of those was a re-recording of “Killer” (which was officially credited to Adamski). “The Beginning” was a pretty decent tune although were they all starting to sound just a little bit samey by this point?

I really didn’t see this next hit coming. Bomb The Bass? As in “Beat Dis” Bomb The Bass? Tim Simenon’s alias hadn’t been seen ins the charts since 1988 when they had racked up three consecutive Top 10 hits and been one of the breakout sensations of the year. Three years is a long time in the music industry though and I had just about forgotten all about Bomb The Bass. They had also been rather hamstrung to be fair when they had been caught up in the BBC / Radio 1 Gulf War censorship controversy with their band name being deemed far too politically sensitive leading to an airtime black out (see also Massive attack).

Undeterred, they released new single “Winter In July” after the conflict had ended to positive reviews. This new direction seemed much less frenetic than the likes of “Beat Dis” with a more soulful feel (surely the single’s title was a nod in the direction of Stevie Wonders’ “Hotter Than July”) and helped to return Simenon to the Top 10 where it peaked at No 7. Parent album “Unknown Territory” perfumed steadily rather than spectacularly but this would prove to be their commercial peak. Simenon would go on to produce material for the likes of Gavin Friday and Depeche Mode before taking an extended break from the music industry due to physical and mental exhaustion. He returned to the business in 2008 with his “Future Chaos” album.

We’re only into week 3 of Bryan Adams‘ 16 week reign at the top of the charts. How are we all holding up? Given the amount of projected posts that I will have to find content for about “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You”, I’m allowing myself to use one @TOTPFacts tweet a week to help me out. Here’s this week’s :

Bryan Adams had competition: Chicago's Peter Cetera also submitted a version. Michael Kamen: "In all honesty, Cetera's was too pretty. I write sweet melodies, and sometimes they need someone to deliver them with enough authority to make sure that you don't fall asleep." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 27, 2021

Well, Cetera did have a proven track record for soundtrack compositions. His 1986 hit “Glory Of Love” was featured in The Karate Kid II for which it received nominations for an Academy Award for Best Original Song, a Golden Globe in the category of Best Original Song and a Grammy Award in 1987 for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Male Artist. It was also a US No 1 and UK No 3 song. Cetera’s effort doesn’t seem to have ever seen the light of day and even in this digital age of leaks and spoilers, I can’t find a trace of it anywhere online.

In addition to “Glory Of Love”, he also had a song on the hugely successful Pretty Woman soundtrack so the guy had chops when it came to film music. It wasn’t to be but I find it hard to believe that we would have had Peter Cetera at No 1 for 16 weeks in the Summer of 1991.

The play out video is “Pregnant For The Last Time” by Morrissey. This was a non album single that I have no memory of whatsoever. It sounds quite rockabilly and actually listenable which you can’t always say about Morrissey (especially these days). Not sure if Mozza himself still likes it though as he hasn’t played it live since the 1991 Kill Uncle tour apparently.

“Pregnant For The Last Time” peaked at No 25.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	The Shamen	Move Any Mountain (Progen’91)	No but I easily could have done
2	C+C Music Factory	Things That Make You Go Hmmm	Nope
3	Dannii Minogue	Jump To The Beat	Never going to happen
4	Extreme	More Than Words	Bit too formulaic for me
5	OMD	Pandora’s Box	No but it’s on their Best Of CD that I have
6	Cher	Love And Understanding	Nah
7	Frankie Knuckles	The Whistle Song	Not for me
8	Deacon Blue	Twist And Shout	See 5 above
9	Seal	The Beginning	No but I was one of those who had the album
10	Bomb The Bass	Winter In July	No
11	Bryan Adams	(Everything I Do) I Do It For You	Negative
12	Morrissey	Pregnant For The Last Time	A final 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/m000z2j4/top-of-the-pops-25071991

TOTP 18 JUL 1991

Posted on September 2, 2021 by 80stastic

It’s mid Summer in 1991 as July stretches out before us but it’s not the consistently warm weather that is setting UK temperatures rising. No, it’s our pre-occupation with all things Robin Hood. Not only is Bryan Adams at No 1 with that song from the latest celluloid take on the legend but said film is set to open in the UK the day after this TOTP aired. In all honesty, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was just the latest in a long line of adaptations of the Robin Hood story in film and television which have engrossed us as a nation down the years. From the classic 1938 film starring Errol Flynn in the title role, through the 50s TV series starring Richard Greene with its ‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Riding through the glen‘ theme tune and onto the 1973 Walt Disney re-imagining of the tale with the lead characters as animals. It didn’t stop there though as we progressed into the 80s with the supernatural themed TV series starring not one but two different Robins and finally arriving in the 90s with the BBC sit com Maid Marian and her Merry Men with its role reversal re-writing of the story. Hell, even in 1991, the year of Robin, there was another film of the legend in addition to the Kevin Costner one starring Patrick Bergin which was a much more gritty retelling of the tale than its more commercial competitor. So, with a seemingly inexhaustible demand for tight-clad merry men and archery, I wonder if TOTP followed the trend?

Our host for tonight is Jakki Brambles who’s had her hair done like Debbie Gibson and the opening act is Cathy Dennis with her single “Just Another Dream”. This track was on its third attempt at being a hit by this point after getting no further than No 93 in 1989 and No 95 in 1990. However, as Jakki intimated in her intro, Cathy was doing the business over in the US where the song had gone Top 10 so that, allied with her recent Top 5 hit “Touch Me (All Night Long)”, meant that it was shoved out into the market place one more time where it would sell enough copies to reach No 13 in the UK. It’s pretty bland stuff though to my ears with one of those choruses that seems to have too many words in it.

There’s little evidence of a Robin Hood theme to Cathy’s outfit tonight which is more space cadet than Maid Marian, not unlike something Betty Boo would have been wearing at the time but her song is nowhere near as catchy as something that the Boo-ster would have come up with. A month after this, Cathy’s debut album “Move To This” was released and it was a huge success selling 100,000 copies in the UK and she would consolidate that success by following that well worn path of releasing a slowie after two fast tracks when sugary ballad “Too Many Walls” went Top 20.

It would be stretching it to try and make a connection between Robin Hood and the next act but I’ll give it a go. Well, for starters they both feature a gang with a leader at the head of it. Erm…that’s it. Yes for Robin Hood and his Merry Men read Heavy D And The Boyz. Their cover of “Now That We Found Love” was by far their biggest ever hit peaking at No 2 although Heavy himself did feature on hit singles by Janet Jackson (“Alright” a No 20 hit in 1990) and Michael Jackson (“Jam” a No 13 hit in 1992).

The album it was taken from (“Peaceful Journey”) has some song titles on it loaded with sexual innuendo such as “Do Me, Do Me”, “The Lover’s Got What U Need” and the C+C Music Factory soundalike “I Can Make You Go Oooh”. I’m pretty sure that Robin Hood woulds never have been so course in his wooing of Maid Marian.

Jakki Brambles goes a bit fattest in her commentary on Heavy D though when she says “Turning cellulite into success, that’s Heavy D” and then compounds the insult by saying “I like that” clearly giving away the fact that she was reading from a script. Let’s just hope she was cringing her face off if she was watching these BBC4 TOTP repeats back.

Next is an English rock band ploughing their own furrow in amongst all this dance music and doing quite nicely thank you very much. Little Angels had already racked up five Top 40 singles by this point (though none of them had progressed past No 21) and “I Ain’t Gonna Cry” kept the run going by peaking at No 26. This was the last single to be released from their third album entitled “Young Gods” and the band were just 18 months away from the pinnacle of their success when fourth album “Jam” would go to No 1. I had a freebie CD of that album (one of those advanced copies that the record companies sent out to record shops to promote ahead of its official release) and it was pretty good. Don’t know where it is now mind.

For me what set them apart from all those similar bands like Thunder, The Quireboys, The Dogs D’Amour that were around at the time was their brass section called The Big Bad Horns who would play live with the band as well as record with them. I saw Little Angels do an instore appearance at HMV in Manchester at the time of the “Jam” album and they also played a mini set and they could make a decent noise live. The band seemed to split right at the height of their success in 1994 and have only reformed briefly for a nine date UK tour in 2012 and an appearance at the download festival in 2013.

What’s this? Jakki Brambles advising that we can have a party for a group of friends at TOTP and she’ll tell us how later. What?! Really? How would that work? My friend Robin, who was in the TOTP audience by mistake earlier in this year (he thought Morrissey was appearing, he didn’t), said it was a awful experience and he was just part of a small group of people being herded around the studio and being asked to whoop and holler inanely by the floor staff now and again. Doesn’t sound like a top night out to me? Did your party get access to the legendary BBC bar as well? I think I would have wanted a full breakdown of what was included in the deal before booking!

I can’t actually work out what this next single is? “(Hammer Hammer) They Put Me in the Mix” by MC Hammer (obvs) sounds like one of those medley remix singles that the likes of Black Box, Technotronic and Snap! had released around this time but I can’t hear any of his previous hits in the mix (as it were). His discography says it was a non-album single (remix) not listed on either “Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em” or the follow up “Too Legit to Quit” so what exactly was it? Well, I have the answer for you….it was absolute shit that’s what it was.

“(Hammer Hammer) They Put Me in the Mix” peaked at No 20.

Ah… I wasn’t expecting to see Kim Appleby on the show again as I’d pretty much written off her chart career the last time she appeared. Consequently, I’ve very little left to say about this one. Kim seems so nice and her song “Mama” is so inoffensive. OK, how about this. Whilst recording tracks with Stock, Aitken and Waterman at the Hit Factory studios, Mel & Kim were prone to staying the phrase “F*****g lovely mate”. So often did they say it in their strong London accents that it inspired Pete Waterman to come up with the song “FLM” which in the press for the single stated it was an acronym for ‘Fun, Love and Money’ although the truth was a lot more base. And the link to Robin Hood? Here’s Christian Slater as Will Scarlet swearing in a very non-English sounding accent in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves…

Tenuous? Me?

“Mama” peaked at No 19 and was Kim’s last ever Top 40 entry.

It’s that duet from Nat ‘King’ Cole and his daughter Natalie Cole now and their virtual version of “Unforgettable”. The track won four Grammys in 1992 – Record of the Year, Traditional Pop Vocal Performance, Song of the Year and Arrangement Accompanying Vocals whilst the parent album won Album of the Year and Best Engineered – Non-Classical. OK, some of those categories sound a bit confusing and possibly made up – what’s the difference between Record of the Year and Song of the Year (no, I can’t be bothered to look it up) for example? Anyway, I guess it was a very big deal in the US and indeed went seven times platinum over there.

Oh, and a Robin Hood tie in? “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” won Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or Television grammy that same year.

Just the two Breakers this week starting with Altern 8 and “Infiltrate 202”. If I hear the name Altern 8 I don’t hear any of their tunes (which all sounded a bit the same to my non raver ears) but I do get a mental image of face masks and hazmat suits. Yes, clearly ahead of the game by 30 years, I don’t think I saw a TV appearance by this Staffordshire duo when they weren’t wearing their distinctive outfits with the ‘A’ logo on the masks.

Although I didn’t get their appeal, they were a pretty big deal for a while in the early 90s and scored two Top 10 hits in “Activ 8 (Come with Me)” and “Evapor 8”. Apparently, as well as their face masks gimmick, they also employed the trick of ensuring that just about all their tracks had the figure 8 in their title. Other singles included “Hypnotic St-8” and “Brutal-8-E”. So why didn’t they call “Infiltrate 202” “Infiltr-8 202” then?

Another dance tune now from Shades Of Rhythm who, as Jakki Brambles said, hailed from Peterborough. I remember the name but that’s about it and have no recall of “Sounds Of Eden” at all. Apparently they were signed to legendary label ZTT Records (Frankie Goes To Hollywood and all that) and they were stalwarts of dance compilation albums of the day such as “Deep Heat” and “Hard Fax” but this was never going to be my bag at all.

“Sounds Of Eden” peaked at No 35.

“The world’s most pleasant pop stars” are up now, well at least according to Jakki Brambles they are. To be fair, the general consensus seemed to be that Londonbeat were indeed an extremely amiable bunch. Their single “A Better Love” had been originally released as the direct follow up to the band’s surprising No 2 smash “I’ve Been Thinking About You” at the end of 1990 but it had failed to get above No 52 then. A cover of Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” was then sent out to restore chart fortunes in March of ’91 but failed abysmally spending just two weeks in the charts peaking at No 64. For some reason (maybe because it was a Top 20 hit in the US?), “A Better Love” was given another shot at redemption just a few months later and bingo! Another Top 40 hit and a slot on TOTP.

I’m not really sure why it didn’t take off first time around. It’s a very melodic tune with some lush vocals that wash over you making it perfect for daytime radio playlists. I have to say though that the lyrics were on the wrong side of jarring. “I’ll never find a better love not in a minute” they sang in the chorus. Well, yeah. Obviously. How would it even be possible? For a start you’d have to wake up to the fact that you weren’t happy in your relationship to begin with and that there was someone better for you out there. Then you’d have to break up with your current squeeze and got through all that. That’s before you’ve even thought about how you go about finding a new (better) love. At work? Down the pub? Online dating? All this stuff takes time and is certainly not achievable in 60 seconds!

As with many a single in 1991, its belated success caused a sudden surge of demand for the parent album (“In The Blood”) which had been released some 10 months prior meaning not many record shops had copies of it in. When more were ordered in our store, we found that the delivery note had those dreaded words ‘Temporarily Withdrawn’ against the album meaning it was going to be re-promoted but the record label wanted all the old copies still knocking around sold first before they would make it available again. I hated that practice.

As for Londonbeat, they were never as popular again and even resorted to that last chance saloon tactic of entering in the Song For Europe competition in 1995. Want to hear it? Tough, here it is…

Hmm. Not sure I have to say. Do you remember who they were beaten by to being the UK’s official entry in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest? How could you forget the year we went rap with Love City Groove? The song finished 10th leading Terry Wogan to famously comment that “the experiment has failed”.

What was it with 1991 and re-released singles?! After Cathy Dennis and Londonbeat before them came Jesus Jones with “Right Here, Right Now” a single that had not only been released once already but had actually also been a hit before! Back in October ’90, it went to No 31 in the UK charts paving the way for bigger successes in “International Bright Young Thing” and the album “Doubt” that made the band a huge deal briefly.

Their success was not restricted to just over here though. As Jakki says, they were also a doing the business in the US where “Right Here, Right Now” topped the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart and reached No 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Presumably that was why it was re-released in the UK. The US success didn’t translate over here though as it peaked at, yes you guessed it, No 31 again. Reminds me of when I retook my Maths ‘O’ level in ’84 and got the same ‘C’ grade again. Still, there’s not many song’s that can boast that it was used in not one but two US presidential election campaigns which was what happened to “Right Here, Right Now” when it was appropriated by Bill Clinton in 1992 and then again by his wife Hillary Clinton in 2008.

And so we arrive at the main protagonist of all this Robin Hood mania. Bryan Adams is No 1 for just the second of 16 weeks with “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You”. As I said earlier, the film the song was taken from, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, was released in the UK the day after this TOTP went out but was it any good? I don’t think time has been kind to it. Let’s start with its star Kevin Costner. His box office pull was not in doubt after his run of hits like The Untouchables, No Way Out, Bull Durham and Field of Dreams and that’s before we mention the Oscar winning Dances With Wolves. However, the anomaly of his accent (why didn’t he even try to do one?!) and his dreadfully wooden performance as a whole should be enough on their own to condemn the film to eternal bad reviews.

Then there was Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham. Don’t get me wrong. I love Alan Rickman’s body of work and even his monstrously over the top performance here is enjoyable but it detracted from the film. It almost made us want to root for him instead of stuffy old Robin despite the badly misjudged scene where he forces Marian’s legs apart after a coerced wedding ceremony. In fact, the whole tone of the film was incredibly dark and nothing like the Errol Flynn version of yore. It didn’t stop audiences rushing to see it though. It was the second highest grossing film of 1991 beaten only by Terminator 2: Judgment Day whilst Smash Hits magazine predictably called it “probably the best version of Robin Hood ever made”. The critics weren’t keen though and Costner won the Worst Actor Golden Raspberry Award whilst Christian Slater received a nomination for Worst Supporting Actor (that clip earlier in the post was surely enough ammunition for the nomination).

So, in answer to the question was it any good, I think my answer is a resounding no but I must have seen it multiple times as it always seems to be on the TV year in year out.

The play out video is “Monsters And Angels” by Voice Of The Beehive. Having taken a whole three years between the release of the debut album “Let It Bee” and the follow up “Honey Lingers” (yes, there was a deliberate double entendre style play on words in the title), there must have been some trepidation about whether the pop world remembered who they were and indeed if they were welcome back into it. Sisters Tracey Bryn and Melissa Brooke Belland needn’t have worried as lead single “Monsters And Angels” brought immediate chart dividends when it rose to No 17, their second highest ever Top 40 placing. The album also achieved the same chart position and their comeback was complete. However, a further five years until the next album “Sex & Misery” was a gap too far and it failed to chart at all and the band broke up soon after. Despite Tracey and Melissa now living lives outside of music, there have been a couple of reunions to play a handful of gigs in 2003 and 2017.

I took part in a recent music Twitter challenge called #PopInjustice where Twitter users posted songs that had failed to make the UK Top 40. By far the biggest reaction to any of my suggestions was for this Voice Of The Beehive track…

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Cathy Dennis	Just Another Dream	Nope
2	Heavy D And The Boyz	Now That We Found Love	No
3	Little Angels	I Ain’t Gonna Cry	Negative
4	MC Hammer	(Hammer Hammer) They Put Me in the Mix	Hell No!
5	Kim Appleby	Mama	Nah
6	Nat ‘King’ Cole / Natalie Cole	Unforgettable	Another no
7	Altern 8	Infiltrate 202	Nothing here for me
8	Shades Of Rhythm	Sounds Of Eden	See 6 above
9	Londonbeat	A Better Love	Pleasant but no
10	Jesus Jones	Right Here Right Now	No, on neither release
11	Bryan Adams	(Everything I Do) I Do It For You	I did not
12	Voice Of The Beehive	Monsters And Angels	See 9 above

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000z2j2/top-of-the-pops-18071991

TOTP 11 JUL 1991

Posted on August 24, 2021 by 80stastic

Do you ever find yourself trying to remember a time before huge events had happened and had entered the world’s consciousness and what that felt like? Is it possible to access that part of your memory or does it no longer exist as any recollections you may have had up to that point can now only be viewed through the filter of those happenings? Is that too heavy an intro for a post in a blog about 90s chart music? Too weighed down in the existential? Probably as I’m not referring to personal life changing occurrences like the birth of a child or the death of a loved one. I’m not even referring to world events like 9/11 or COVID. No, I’m talking about times before we had ever heard of a particular song or artist (well, in my defence, it is a music blog as I said earlier).

I touched on this subject the other week when we got our very first airing on TOTP of “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” by Bryan Adams before it had even got to No 1 let alone staying there for 16 weeks. I’m reminded of that theme again this week as the date of this TOTP was around the exact same time that the debut single by a group came out who the vast majority of us had never heard of but from whom it would be impossible to escape in the years to come. I refer, of course, to Take That! Yes, 30 years ago in mid July their first ever single “Do What U Like” was released to a massive shrug of indifference from the public. It made zero impression on the charts despite the efforts of the put together boy band to build a fan base by playing endless shows in schools and clubs. They even made a saucy video involving naked buttocks and jelly smearing to gain them some profile although that did seem to rather shoot them in the foot as it couldn’t be played on daytime TV. They did manage a small Top 40 hit when their next single “Promises” scrambled it’s way to No 38 but they were back pushing their faces up at the chart window again when third single “Once You’ve Tasted Love” failed to do the business. At this point they seemed destined to fall by the way side like so many other pop wannabes down the years and they couldn’t really blame their marketing and promotion teams – they had loads of press in the teen mags and were constantly being talked up as the next big thing.

At some point around this time, Gary Barlow came into the Our Price store where I worked in Manchester. We all knew who he was due to their aforementioned press coverage. As he wandered around the store, my co-worker Craig decided to follow him around mouthing behind his back “nobody buys your records, nobody buys your records”. Cruel but undeniably funny. Of course, Barlow had the last laugh as they finally hit pay dirt with their very next release “It Only Takes A Minute” and the rest was history. Hit after hit followed including eight No 1s before they called it a day in 1996. The hits and affection for the band were still there when they reformed in 2006 as they took on near national treasure status. All of this and I haven’t even mentioned the ubiquitous Robbie Williams! So, in conclusion and in answer to the question “is it possible to recall a time before household names entered our lives and how that felt?” then yes it is as a small part of me will always have a mental image of Craig following Gary Barlow around Our Price openly mocking him when I hear the words ‘Take’ and ‘That’!

Blimey! That intro was so long that I feel I should be tying up this post by now but I haven’t even got to the first act on tonight’s show which is…DJ H featuring Stefy. Oh. I think this lot had a hit earlier in the year but I’ve forgotten what it was called already. This track went by the title of “I Like It”, three words that proved beyond host Bruno Brookes who introduces it as “you need it and you love it”. WTF?! Anyway, this was just more nasty Italian House but the real dregs of the genre I would suggest. Clearly the woman up there isn’t the actual singer. At points she sounds like Martha Wash who supplied the vocals for Black Box’s ‘Ride On Time” and at others like Aretha Franklin so I’m guessing there are samples of both those singers in the mix somewhere. So boring is the performance visually (Steffi herself hardly moves at all and can’t even get her miming to the few lines she has right) that the TOTP producers include loads more shots of the studio audience than they usually would. Not only that but they are dancing! Or attempting something that approximates to dancing at least – it seems to just be jumping up and down in most cases. Right at the end of the song, it sounds like the backing track is being played on warped vinyl as it careers crazily off beat. Surely it wasn’t meant to sound like that was it? “I Like It” peaked at No 16.

It’s the Paula Abdul video for “Rush Rush” again next (the third time it’s been played I believe). This was pretty much the end fo the road for Paula as a successful pop star. She managed one more UK hit of the “Spellbound” album from which “Rush Rush” was taken and then one final solitary Top 40 entry in 1995. She only actually made three studio albums of which the final one “Head Over Heels” was a big commercial disappointment compared to her first two. That’s not to diminish her chart stats though. She did have six US No 1 singles and two No 1 albums after all and set a record for the most No 1 singles from a debut album on the Billboard Hot 100.

The four years between her second and third albums though was a lifetime in the music industry and nobody was that arsed when she finally returned. In that time she married and divorced the actor Emilio Estevez and also sought treatment for bulimia so it’s hardly surprising that she took her eye off the ball of her music career. She did however, re-invent herself as a reality TV judge working on shows like American Idol, Live to Dance and The X Factor and also was seen as a big enough draw still to undertake a Las Vegas residency from August 2019 to January 2020.

When Andy McCluskey decided to carry on the OMD name after the departure of his writing partner Paul Humphreys (plus band members Martin Cooper and Malcolm Holmes) at the end of the 80s, he surely couldn’t have imagined the success he would have had straight off the bat with the single “Sailing on the Seven Seas” and the album “Sugar Tax” with both hitting No 3 in their respective charts. So when second single “Pandora’s Box” was lifted from the album and followed its predecessor into the Top 10, he must have been tempted to do the lottery that week (had it been invented by then which it hadn’t) as his Midas touch seemed to know no bounds.

My sister’s then boyfriend was obsessed with this song apparently and bought every available version of it that was released including a limited edition collector’s CD single which came housed in a rather neat little wooden box. I’m pretty sure we had this version in the Our Price I was working in at the time.

“Pandora’s Box” seemed to be a much more straight forward type of pop song compared to its more quirky, shuffling predecessor. The verses were fairly pedestrian but the pay off of the uplifting chorus was more than worth the wait.

Inspired by silent film actress Louise Brooks and named after the 1929 film Pandora’s Box in which she starred, the single was retitled “Pandora’s Box (It’s a Long, Long Way)” for the American market but God knows why? A similar practice had been inflicted upon a single by The Icicle Works who’s song “Birds Fly (Whisper to a Scream)” was reversed for its US release as “Whisper to a Scream (Birds Fly)”. Weirdos. “Pandora’s Box” would peak at No 7 and was directly responsible for a spike in sales of the album around this time.

C+C Music Factory are up next (or CeCe Music Factory as Bruno Brookes mispronounces it) with their “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…”single, talking of which, does that bass line sound a bit like the one used so majestically in “Groove Is In The Heart” by Dee-Lite? Hmmm. Anyway, the track had plenty more hooks to it including that saxophone riff which is recycled at the end of every line. Sometimes it’s the little things like that which can make a song (see also that ringing almost tinny sounding triple strummed guitar chord in “She Sells Sanctuary” by The Cult). Oh and that lyric about ‘playing tic tac toe’? Nothing to do with noughts and crosses apparently. It refers to when you have sex with three different partners in one night according to the urban dictionary. You learn a new thing or three every day.

1991 saw the release of not only some of the biggest selling albums of the whole decade but also some of the most iconic. Look at some of these albums for a start

Artist	Title
Massive Attack	Blue Lines
Metallica	Metallica
Pearl Jam	Ten
Primal Scream	Screamadelica
Red Hot Chili Peppers	Blood Sugar Sex Magik
REM	Out Of Time
U2	Achtung Baby

All released within the calendar year of 1991. However, no such list could be compiled without including not one but two albums released in the same year by one band. That band was, of course, Guns N’ Roses and the albums were “Use Your Illusion I” and “Use Your Illusion II” both released on the same day (17th September) to much fanfare and excitement. Two albums by a huge artist on the same day! Long before the Blur vs Oasis chart battle, this was a majorly significant event in the record industry. Within six months though the practice would appear old hat as Bruce Springsteen followed suit with the “Human Touch” and “Lucky Town” albums both released on 31 March 1992.

Before that Guns N’ Roses day in September though, we had the first new material from the band of the decade (although the track “Civil War” had appeared on the charity album “Nobody’s Child: Romanian Angel Appeal” in 1990) with the single “You Could Be Mine”. Not only would it in effect be the lead single from the “Use Your Illusion II” album but it was also being used prominently in the soundtrack to one of the biggest films of the year, the much anticipated Terminator 2: Judgment Day the sequel to 1984’s Terminator. The flick was a huge success becoming the highest-grossing film of 1991, beating Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (more of which later) into the process.

“You Could Be Mine” seems a perfect fit with the film and was used during the ending credits and in the film itself in early scenes with John Connor and that’s despite it having what would normally be seen as the impediment of having a one-minute drum and guitar intro. The video is basically just a straight in concert performance intertwined with some action sequences from the film but it’s all held together by the fairly weak premise of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator himself being dispatched to assassinate the band after the gig. Somehow though despite the hokey ending as Arnie finally catches up with the band as they leave the venue and deciding that killing them would be a ‘Waste of Ammo’, it all kind of hangs together and just works; for me at least. “You Could Be Mine” would peak at No 3 and would herald a run of seven singles taken from across both “Use Your Illusion” albums stretching into 1993 when the final “Civil War EP” was released.

A rare in the studio appearance from Billy Bragg next as he performs his “Sexuality” hit single. To be honest, it’s nowhere near as much fun as the video we saw in the Breakers last week, shorn as it is of Kirsty MacColl in the background making small dick gestures behind Billy’s back plus some admirable attempts at slapstick humour from the Braggster himself.

So what was “Sexuality” all about anyway? There is a lot of online discussion about some of the lyrics references. What was the significance of an uncle who once played for Red Star Belgrade or of a nuclear submarine sinking off the coast of Sweden? I think a lot of it was just Billy playing around with word puns like rhyming ‘Sweden’ with ‘read them’ and Robert De Niro with Mitsubishi Zero (which wasn’t a car at all but a Japanese WWII fighter aircraft). My general reading of the song is that it’s a celebration of sexual freedom in whatever form that takes. I saw Billy in concert in Dublin in 2006 and in the middle of his set an extremely pissed fan got out from his seat and wondered up the aisle to the stage waiving an autograph pad. Billy handled it pretty well but you could see that it really annoyed him as he issued the withering put down “I’m working mate”. “Sexuality” peaked at No 27.

Another video from another big rock band next as after Guns N’ Roses we now get INXS with “Bitter Tears”. This was another track from their “X” album and managed to immediately see off the possibility of a run of flopped singles from the band. Despite the album having been out for 9 months by this time and “Bitter Tears” being the fourth and final single from it, another Top 40 miss (previous single “By My Side” only made No 42) was avoided when it made it to a peak of No 30.

As Bruno Brookes hints at in his intro, the band were about to play a huge gig at Wembley stadium on 13 July 1991 as part of their Summer XS tour to a sold-out audience of 74,000 fans. The band would never play live to a bigger crowd. It was recorded and and filmed and would become the live album “Live Baby Live” which would be released in the November. “Bitter Tears” was included in the set list for the concert but didn’t make it onto the track listing for the album (it did however feature in the video of the gig).

The style of the promo video for “Bitter Tears” follows the well worn template that all the band’s videos seemed based on. A straight performance of the song filmed in black and white with a few cut away graphics thrown in to maintain interest. I’m not sure if they were all shot by the same director but if they were, he or she did seem to be a one trick pony.

After Guns N’ Roses sang “You Could Be Mine” earlier in the show, here were Bros being even less decisive with “Are You Mine?”. The 90’s pop career of Bros after their late 80s success could not be better summed up than by the phrase the ‘after the Lord Mayor’s show’. The biggest group in Britain at the height of Brosmania, by the time the new decade was getting into its stride, they were an afterthought at best. Seriously, who thought a third album by the Goss twins was a good idea? A third one though they did make and it was called “Changing Faces”. It struggled to a high of No 18. I knew that they were still trying to recapture their glory days back then as I was working in a record shop but I could not have told you how any of their later singles went with “Are You Mine?” a prime example. I think I have a strong defence for my lack of recall about this one though on the basis that it is absolutely dire and instantly forgettable. A complete snooze fest from start to finish. There would be one more single released before the duo went their separate ways, Matt Goss into a successful residency at Las Vegas and Luke into an acting career. 27 years later that documentary about them would appear and the rest is history…”Are You Mine?” peaked No 12.

Who’s this then? Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam? That can’t be right surely? The people that had a hit in 1985 with “I Wonder If I Take You Home”? They had another hit 6 years later? I have literally zero recall of this but for the record their second hit was called “Let the Beat Hit ‘Em” and was produced by Clivillés and Cole who we saw earlier under their other guise of C+C Music Factory. It sounds completely bland to my non dance ears but it is lauded by the likes of Pete Tong and Trevor Nelson no less the latter of whom says of it in Music Week magazine “It’s not the coolest record I’ve ever bought but it’s the most fun.” “Let the Beat Hit ‘Em” peaked at No 17 in the UK but it topped the dance and R&B charts in the US.

And here we are, the first of 16 weeks at No 1 for Bryan Adams and “Everything I Do (I Do it For You)“. How am I supposed to write about one song for so long?! On top of that, I need to be wary of just repeating the same trivia and tidbits that @TOTPFacts might serve up as he has the same problem. OK, I think I’ll allow myself to reproduce one @TOTPFacts tweet per post so here’s this week’s:

The starting point for "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" was Michael Kamen's "Maid Marian" cue for Prince Of Thieves… https://t.co/Hp58YEmMWs #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 20, 2021

Apparently Bryan and producer Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange wrote the song in just 45 minutes. I’m guessing Michael Kamen’s piece took a while longer.

In case you’re bored of the song already, here’s a 1992 cover of the song by Fatima Mansions which was released as part of a double A-side with “Suicide Is Painless” by Manic Street Preachers which was a charity single for the Spastics Society. It made No 7 but hardly received any airplay as the Manics track was predominantly the one played on radio.

The play out video is “Love And Understanding” by Cher. Coming hard on the heels of her recent No 1 with “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)”, I’m guessing much was expected by her record company of the follow up. It did pretty well making it to the Top 10 (just) in the UK and the Top 20 in the US. Its sales (plus a last minute inclusion of “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)”) helped propel parent album “Love Hurts” to No 1 in the UK where it would stay for 6 weeks and end up becoming the best selling female album of the year.

I was working at the Market Street Our Price store in Manchester at the time and around then, the company was committed to its slogan of ‘mad about music, see a specialist’ (or something like that) which meant every week day morning, we had to play music from a particular genre like Easy Listening, Folk or Classical. Once 12 o’clock came around there was a rush to put a chart album on and I recall shoving “Love Hurts” on as the first thing that came to hand after a particularly gruelling morning of folk music. The store manger happened to walk by and said to me “Time for some proper music eh?”. We should probably both have been ashamed.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	DJ H featuring Stefy	I Like It	I’d rather have bought “I Like It’ by Gerry and the Pacemakers frankly.
2	Paula Abdul	Rush Rush	No
3	OMD	Pandora’s Box	No but I have it on a Best Of CD of theirs
4	C+C Music Factory	Things That Make You Go Hmmm…	Liked it, didn’t buy it
5	Guns N’ Roses	You Could Be Mine	See 3 above
6	Billy Bragg	Sexuality	No but I bought Accident Waiting To Happen, another single from the album
7	INXS	Bitter Tears	See 3 above
8	Bros	Are You Mine?	Are you mad more like! No
9	Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam	Let the Beat Hit ‘Em	Nope
10	Bryan Adams	Everything I Do (I Do it For You)	I did not
11	Cher	Love And Understanding	Despite somehow managing to buy two recent Cher singles (one by mistake), I managed to avoid this one. Honest!

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/m000yw8k/top-of-the-pops-11071991

TOTP 04 JUL 1991

Posted on August 24, 2021 by 80stastic

Well, that’s the first 6 months of 1991’s TOTP repeats viewed, reviewed and posted. Somehow it doesn’t seem to have been quite so much of a slog as 1990 but I’ve a feeling it’s going to get a whole lot denser to wade through from hereon in. As we enter July, Steffi Graff is about to claim her third Wimbledon singles title whilst Michael Stich (remember him?) will win his one and only by defeating Boris Becker. I recall it being very hot around this time and on the day of the men’s final, myself and my wife decided to go for a Sunday afternoon stroll around nearby Whitworth Park in Manchester. The temperature wasn’t the only thing that was hotting up that day as we stumbled across a young couple getting very enamoured with each other as they canoodled under the sun’s rays whilst stretched out in the park! Bloody hell! Get a room!

I wonder if there were any hot tunes in the charts back then? Let’s see…

The show kicks off with the week’s highest climber Incognito with “Always There”. After last week’s nonsense show opener Cubic 22, this made much more sense as being first on the running order. For a start, there’s a proper singer up there belting the tune out and when I say proper I mean proper as it’s soul legend Jocelyn Brown. Added to that, the track is a genuine breezy Summer anthem with some definite feel good vibes unlike that techno crap the week before.

Despite only having 5 Top 40 singles in the course of their career, Incognito have worked with some of the biggest names in the business (according to their very swish website) and are still a going concern with a cast of previous band members that would rival The Fall and The Waterboys.

One of those names listed is Duncan McKay which if you are a football / comic fan of a certain age like me can only bring one image to mind, that of the legendary Melchester Rovers left back, he of the ferocious tackle. Duncan appeared in the Roy Of The Rovers story for 15 years and not once did he change his image of full beard, and shaggy, shoulder length hair kept in place by a headband. Eat your heart out Mark Knopfler.

“Always There” peaked at No 6.

A “spooky little record’ as host Gary Davies describes it is up next as we get the father and daughter collaboration of Nat King Cole duetting from beyond the grave with his daughter Natalie Cole on one of his best known tunes in “Unforgettable”. This virtual duet was certainly a novel idea back then but there seems to be a distinct movement for this type of thing now. Maybe it was the inevitable advancement of technology coupled with the accelerated death rate of some of the music world’s biggest stars (remember 2016?) that brought this about but there is now a definite world of departed pop stars still giving concerts after they have shuffled off this mortal coil. Whitney Houston has definitely been brought back to life in hologram form whilst my own mother has been to see her beloved Elvis ‘live’ as it were with only The King’s original touring band actually being up there on stage. I think ABBA are due some sort of virtual reunion as well? OK, the Cole family reunion wasn’t quite up to those standards but it was pretty revolutionary in 1991.

Was it any good though? Well, despite his undoubtedly smooth crooner voice and the fact that he probably helped deny Rick Astley the Xmas No 1 spot in 1987 thanks to the re-release of his version of “When I Fall In Love” pinching sales for Astley’s version, Nat King Cole wasn’t somebody who I was ever going to explore beyond his most famous songs. The fact that his daughter had re-recorded them with his vocals as a duet therefore wasn’t going to bring about any lightbulb moments for me. Yes, them as there is a whole album of Natalie and her Dad together. Entitled “Unforgettable… With Love”, it sold steadily in the UK going gold but it went through the roof in the US racking up sales that achieved 7 x platinum status!

The ultimate sadness about the project is that Natalie herself would die before her time, passing away in 2015 aged 65. Her Dad died even younger in 1965 aged just 45. “Unforgettable” the duet peaked at No 19 on the UK Top 40.

A bizarre one hit wonder next from Cola Boy and their single “7 Ways To Love”. Bizarre how? Well, it was a dance tune that had a vocalist fronting it but the only words she sings are ‘7 Ways To Love’. If you were gong to do that why not just find a sample and not bother with a singer? Oh yes, the singer is television presenter and radio DJ Janey Lee Grace best known as being part of the posse on Steve Wright in the Afternoon. What I hadn’t realised is that she had also been as a backing singer with the likes of Kim Wilde and Boy George and also toured with Wham! including their ground breaking dates in China. In a bizarre coincidence given that last fact, the bloke in Cola Boy was called Andrew Midgeley. Weird.

Another part of the Cola Boy story that I had no idea about until now is that the people behind it were actually Saint Etienne who recorded it as a white label for dance specialist shops. In a Mojo magazine interview, the band’s Bob Stanley recalled: “It was a period when you could drive around to record shops in London, give them 20 and see what might happen. It worked. We went to a party and heard Andy Weatherall playing it”. They were singed to Arista Records off the back of the track’s success in the clubs but due to contractual issues couldn’t promote it themselves hence Janey Lee Grace and Andrew Midgeley being roped in.

The single rose to No 8 which is a higher peak than any Saint Etienne single managed* which must have been annoying for the band but maybe not as annoying as not being allowed into the TOTP studio to watch their charges on this show as, according to Stanley in that Mojo interview “They wouldn’t let us in. We got to the gates- your name’s not on the list”.

*This reminds nine of Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran producing Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy” and it going to No 1 before the Duran boys themselves had achieved that feat. They rectified it weeks later when “Is There Something I Should Know” went straight into the charts at No 1.

Following on from the rather odd father and daughter virtual collaboration that was Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole, here’s another bizarre partnership as Anthrax and Public Enemy join forces for “Bring The Noise” (and not “Bring On The Noise” as Gary Davies mistakenly says twice). This, of course, was a Public Enemy track that had already been released as a single peaking at No 32 back in 1988. When thrash metallers Anthrax recorded a version and asked Chuck D to see if he would add his vocals on it, their request was refused by Def Jam label co-founder Rick Rubin so the band added Public Enemy’s vocals from the original master anyway. Once the track was finished, Rubin must have seen sense and the release was promoted by both bands leading to a joint tour.

I’ve told my Flavor Flav story before haven’t I? Oh well, it’s due another outing. A year on from this release, U2 were playing a gig at the G-Mex centre in Manchester entitled “Stop Sellafield” as part of the Greenpeace movement to protest the nuclear factory. On the bill with them were Kraftwerk and Public Enemy. On the afternoon of the gig, Flavor Flav wondered into the Our Price store on Market Street where I was working with an entourage of people with him and caused chaos as he meandered up and down the shop floor. He clearly had no idea where he was or what he was supposed to be doing. My colleague Justin who was a huge Kraftwerk fan and was going to the gig just to see them tried to establish contact with him in an ‘earth to Flav’ type of way but I don’t think he got very far. I think he might have been after an autograph as he was prone to that sort of thing. He once got Dion Dublin’s autograph when he came in the shop shortly after he had signed for Man Utd on the back of a picture of Bryan Robson.

“Bring The Noise” (the Anthrax/ Public Enemy mash up version) peaked at No 14.

Kim Appleby‘s time as a solo star was coming to an end in mid 1991. Having read some interviews with her, I think the allure of the whole thing was starting to wane anyway. She had worked up the songs for her debut eponymous album in tribute to her sister Mel with whom she had been writing and who had passed away at the beginning of 1990 as she wanted to create some sort of legacy for her. The success of the album and specifically the single “Don’t Worry” had achieved that. It sounds like she kind of lost her drive and purpose after that. “Mama” was the third single taken from that album and was the smallest fo the three hits off it peaking at No 19. It was also her last Top 40 hit. It was pleasant enough if a bit twee. The chorus had an endearing nursery rhyme quality to it but the verses were a bit slow. It was nowhere near as impressive as “Don’t Worry” which was nominated for an Ivor Novello in the best contemporary song category (it lost out to Adamski’s “Killer”). That nomination action though did lead to Kim being involved with the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers And Authors who co-ordinate the Ivor Novello awards and she chaired the judges panel for them for 15 years.

There was a second album in 1993 but it only received a limited release and the singles from it all failed to chart so it became a lost album. Kim has returned to live performing recently for the first time in over 20 years and was also seen co-presenting a three-part series on BBC Four called Smashing Hits! The 80s Pop Map of Britain and Ireland with Midge Ure.

This next song screams the summer of 1991. The dance /rap version of “Now That We Found Love” by Heavy D & the Boyz seemed inexplicably popular to me. I didn’t get it at all. It came across as so lazy, straight out of the ‘OK, let’s get an old tune that people will know, house it up a bit, write a rap for it and the masses will lap it up’ school of thought. Hadn’t we seen this all before from the likes of The Fat Boys when they covered “Wipeout” and “The Twist” in the late 80s?

I already knew the Third World version of “Now That We Found Love” though admittedly not from the original 1978 but its 1985 re-release. To say that I’m really not a big reggae fan, I’d always quite liked it. This take on it by Heavy D & the Boyz (obviously spelt with a ‘z’ as it was the early 90s!) sounded like a travesty to me. There was an album called “Peaceful Journey” that Our Price had made a Recommended Release meaning it was discounted by wasn’t actually in the charts but I don’t think it sold very well at all as people were only interested in the single which would go all the way to No 2.

Some Breakers now and we start with Queensrÿche who I knew back in 1991 were a heavy rock band but that’s about all I knew of them. Fast forward 30 years and that’s still pretty much the extent of my knowledge. I certainly couldn’t name you any of their songs but here they were back in the day with a bona fide chart hit called “Best I Can“. Checking them out on Spotify, that song isn’t even in their most listened to Top 10 tracks . However, the single released after it called “Silent Lucidity” has nearly 47 million plays. So I checked it out and it was pretty good actually and certainly not the hoary old formulaic rock I was expecting. The clip of “Best I Can’ that they play on TOTP though is exactly what I would have expected it to be and nothing that I would want to linger over.

Not that it’s a massively high bar really but “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…” is without doubt my favourite C+C Music Factory song. The third single from their “Gonna Make You Sweat” album, it fair fizzes along with an infectious rhythm and a driving rap all of which combine to propel the track into the furthest corners of your brain from which it can never be vacated. See Heavy D (and your Boyz), that’s how you do a rap pop crossover!

The lyrics concern honey traps and infidelity were not anything new per se – we’d already had “The Rain” by Oran ‘Juice’ Jones – but they would prove to be a popular subject with future songs like Shaggy’s 2000 No 1 single “It Wasn’t Me” creating a little sub genre of their own almost. The song’s title apparently came from a catchphrase used by US chat host Arsenio Hall:

The final Breaker is by a man who hadn’t had a hit in his own right since 1986. OK, if we’re being pedantic he did feature on a No 1 single no less (he contributed “She’s Leaving Home” to the Childline charity single in 1988 but everybody played the Wet Wet Wet cover of “With a Little Help from My Friends” instead). And yes, he featured on Beats International’s double A side “Won’t Talk About It” / “Blame It on the Bassline” which made the Top 40 in 1989 but I’m not counting either of those. I am of course talking of Billy Bragg who is back with “Sexuality” the lead single from his sixth studio album “Don’t Try This At Home”.

The track found Billy in a poppier vein than we might have expected but that was probably due to the influence of Johnny Marr who took Billy’s demo of the song and turned it into a brilliant pop song. As well as Marr’s undoubted talents, the song also featured Billy’s long time collaborator Kirsty MacColl on backing vocals. The lyrics are typically idiosyncratic Bragg, for example:

A nuclear submarine sinks off the coast of Sweden
Headlines give me headaches when I read them
I had an uncle who once played for Red Star Belgrade
He said some things are really best left unspoken
But I prefer it all to be out in the open

He’s not everybody’s cup of tea but I love Billy’s values and approach to life which is reflected in his music.

The video was made by yet another long time mate in Phil Jupitus who’s connection with Billy stretched back to the days of Red Wedge in the mid 80s and am I losing my mind but does The Bard of Barking have a look of Andrew Lincoln about him in it? OK, I am going mad but he looks more like The Walking Dead star than Robert De Niro as the lyrics would have us believe.

“Sexuality” peaked at No 27.

Now surely this next single was a prime contender for having been included in the Breakers section we have just seen but somehow the TOTP producers decided that it deserved a spot on it own in the running order despite only being at No 37 in the charts. “Generations Of Love” was the follow up to “Bow Down Mister” by Boy George’s side project Jesus Loves You. It had flopped on its initial release the previous year but had been given a second chance in the light of the chart performance of “Bow Down Mister”. Whilst you couldn’t call a Top 40 hit a flop, its peak of No 35 (even with is TOTP appearance) was hardly a resounding success either.

I didn’t mind it but it didn’t have the quirky, goofy appeal of its predecessor and would I call it a dance track as Gary Davies did? I don’t think so. I quite like the gallic accordion part in it and George’s vocals were as pure as ever but it didn’t really have any oomph to my ears. It would be the last chart entry for the band who broke up the following year.

Wait! Vanilla Ice had three hits?! Yes, yes he did. Well, actually he had four in total but “Rollin’ In My 5.0” was the third. This was just garbage and six months on from “Ice Ice Baby”, we all knew it as well (apart from those few, poor misguided souls that bought this in enough quantities to make it a No 27 hit of course). The titular 5.0 was Vanilla Ice’s 5.0 Liter Foxbody Mustang car and didn’t he also use that phrase in the lyrics to “Ice Ice Baby”? I think he did.

Supposedly Limp Bizkit’s 2000 chart topper “Rollin'” makes reference to “Rollin’ In My 5.0” but I’ve had a look at the lyrics to it and I can’t see any link unless it the line ‘And the people who don’t give a f**k’ as surely nobody did about Vanilla Ice at this point.

Jason Donovan is still at No 1 with “Any Dream Will Do”. Now I failed to mention this last week when taking about Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine but I was reminded of it by a friend on FaceBook. So after Donovan’s stint in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, he was replaced by Philip Schofield who seemed to be everywhere at that time. One place he had definitely been was the 1991 Smash Hits Poll Winners’ Party where he was the host. CUSM were only on the show as their new label Chrysalis (them again!) had pushed for it but things started to go wrong after the duo’s performance of “After The Watershed (Early Learning The Hard Way)” had been cut short when Fruitbat had kicked a microphone stand into the audience. In response to not being able to finish the song, Fruitbat started knocking over equipment on stage which led to Schofield’s sarcastic comment about smashing things up being original behaviour for a rock band. Then….a tremendous rugby tackle on Schofield by Fruitbat. I think at the time I believed it was all a bit of knockabout fun but Fruitbat really takes him out and his partner in the band Jim Bob was really pissed off with him and fearful for the band’s future after the incident. Yeah, but it was Philip Schofield after all Jim Bob so Fruitbat does deserve some credit.

As for Jason Donovan, this would be his second and final week at No 1.

The play out video is “My Name Is Not Susan” by Whitney Houston. This confusingly titled single was actually about Whitney confronting a lover who has mistakenly called her by his ex-girlfriend’s name Susan (according to Wikipedia). Relationship mis-steps seems to be all the rage for song subject matter in 1991 after the honey trap of “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…” and now this. Sadly for Whitney, the choice of this track as a single also proved to be a mis-step as it peaked at No 29 but she would be back the following year with her gargantuan selling version of “I Will Always Love You” from The Bodyguard.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Incognito	Always There	Nope
2	Nat King Cole / Natalie Cole	Unforgettable	No
3	Cola Boy	7 Ways To Love	Negative
4	Anthrax / Public Enemy	Bring The Noise	I did not
5	Kim Appleby	Mama	Nah
6	Heavy D & The Boyz	Now That We’ve Found Love	Definitely not
7	Queensrÿche	Best I Can	Another no
8	C+C Music Factory	Things That Make You Go Hmmm…	Liked it, didn’t buy it
9	Billy Bragg	Sexuality	No but I have it on his retrospective Must I Paint You A Picture
10	Jesus Loves You	Generations Of Love	Not for me
11	Vanilla Ice	Rollin’ In My 5.0	Hell no
12	Jason Donovan	Any Dream Will Do	See 11 above
13	Whitney Houston	My Name Is Not Susan	And a final 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/m000ypcb/top-of-the-pops-04071991

TOTP 27 JUN 1991

Posted on August 20, 2021 by 80stastic

It’s 1991 and that grand old institution that was TOTP is having an identity crisis. Ratings had fallen and the show was struggling to retain its relevance to a Top 40 chart which had become increasingly dominated by dance music the stars of which were the tunes themselves rather than those making them. The programme’s traditional format and the way it delivered flamboyant pop stars into the nation’s living rooms every Thursday night functioned rather less well when its content was anonymous looking DJ types stood behind some keyboards or a mixing desk. Adding to its dilemmas was the competition it faced from other music shows. Having gone head to head with TOTP in the late 80s with its own version of the show in The Roxy, ITV had usurped that traditional format and came up with The Chart Show whose video only / no presenter format on a Saturday morning was increasingly popular. Then of course there was MTV which had been serving the UK via its MTV Europe network since 1987 although its penetration into UK homes was hardly universal. Still, its style and programming was starting to make TOTP look like a TV relic. Rallying against this, the show employed what was then cutting edge technology (presumably) in green screen backdrops for the presenters, changes to the Top 40 countdown (the show’s whole modus operandi since its inception), an ill judged Top 5 albums feature and cramming more and more videos into its 30 minutes of screen time. The 30 minutes time limit was beginning to look very restricting. I’m sure The Chart Show lasted at least an hour and of course MTV broadcast all day long.

As we approach the mid-point of the year, the show has reduced its regular hosts to a shallow pool of names, those being Gary Davies, Bruno Brookes, Jakki Brambles, Mark Goodier, Nicky Campbell and tonight’s presenter Simon Mayo. Anthea Turner had already been relieved of her duties a few weeks prior. Come the end of September, all of these names would be jettisoned in favour of new, younger and mainly unknown faces as part of the ‘Year Zero’ revamp brought in by new executive producer Stanley Appel. For now though, the show is limping along trying to convince us all that everything is fine and that there’s nothing to see here (literally true in the case of some of those pesky dance acts).

So, as stated, it’s Simon Mayo’s turn at the wheel for this particular instalment and he brings his usual smug sense of his own importance to proceedings. I’m finding Mayo especially grating in these repeats although to be fair, all of the aforementioned names had their own intrinsic foibles. If Mayo was smug then we also had Goodier (plain boring), Davies (overly chummy), Brambles (disinterested) and Brookes (just creepy). Mayo begins the show by asking the audience to name any Belgian “singing superstars” – I say ask, it’s more like he’s goading us in a ‘see I can name more than you’ way as he references The Singing Nun and Plastic Bertrand before advising us that we can “add this lot to the pile” as he introduces Cubic 22 with their hit “Night In Motion”. They’re hardly singing though are they Simon? No, because Cubic 22 were one of those dance acts meaning some faceless bods behind keyboards and a couple of dancers. The only voices you hear are some sample vocals shouting ‘Party time’ and ‘Let me hear ya!’. That really doesn’t qualify Cubic 22 as singing stars in my book Mayo. The performance here though is a prime example of the challenges TOTP faced in reflecting the nation’s dance music choices. Watch it without the track playing and the visual element is woeful. Lots of shots of hands playing keyboards and the two dancers doing some very ordinary synchronised moves. At least with a video you might get some clever graphics or distracting images. Why on earth did they have such an act in the studio open the show?!

Next, Mayo comes across like wannabe football fan David Cameron (‘call me Dave, I’m a football fan but is it Aston Villa or West Ham?) with his remarks about “Rush Rush” by Paula Abdul being an ode to Welsh striker Ian Rush. I know he’s a Spurs fan (he goes on about Terry Venables later on in the show) but did he have to try so hard to get his football credentials over?

This was the lead single from Paula’s “Spellbound” album and I’m sure we had an import CD of it in the Market Street, Manchester Our Price I was working in ahead of its UK release. I can’t believe anyone would have coughed up the £18 or whatever it was just to be able to say they had it a couple of weeks before anybody else!

Playing across the bottom of the video is the Top 40 countdown which Mayo didn’t think worthy of a mention in his intro (though of course his pathetic Ian Rush quip was) and they’ve even tweaked that as they have gone back to referencing everything in the Top 40 whereas they had previously omitted anything going down the charts. As I said earlier, identity crisis.

It may be a new decade but that didn’t put any sort of brakes on Erasure‘s imperial phase. Here they are with their first new material since 1989’s “Wild” album and “Chorus” would confirm that their popularity was a strong as ever when it went straight in at No 3 in the charts. Admittedly, it was hardly a major change of musical direction for Andy and Vince but hey, if it ain’t broke and all that. The lead single from their fifth studio album of the same name, would it have sounded out of place on any of three previous albums? I liked it though. It fair whipped along with a hooks a plenty and the most unlikely use of a word in the chorus (‘fishes’) since George Michael managed to get ‘feet’ into “Careless Whisper”. It was also perfect for any Radio 1 daytime playlist.

The album would give the duo their third consecutive No 1 when it was released later in the year. I’m pretty sure that on that day, our deliveries of new releases didn’t turn up until well into the afternoon which meant we missed out on loads of sales as everyone who wanted it on the day of release popped over the road to HMV who had racks of it. By the end of the 90s, retailers had agreed with the record companies that new releases could be delivered on the Friday before the release date to allow shops to get them ready for sale first thing Monday morning on the strict proviso that they could not be sold before then. The rule was pretty much totally observed in my experience although there must have been the odd title that slipped through the net company wide.

Back to Erasure though and what was the deal with the Vince and Andy mannequins in this performance? They weren’t a feature of the official promo video so presumably they were made just for this TOTP appearance. Seems a bit extravagant but then I guess Erasure were (well Andy anyway).

More inane attempts at wit from Mayo next when he introduces “Hey Stoopid” by Alice Cooper and tries a line about getting a thick ear if you go into a record shop and saying ‘Hey Stupid’. Well, I worked in a record shop at the time Simes and never did I have the licence to assault a customer who happened to annoy me.

As for Alice, after his unlikely monster hit “Poison” in 1989, he managed to eke out a few more in the 90s though none were as successful as “Poison”. As with Erasure before him, this lead single was also the same title of his album which featured guest contributions from some of rock’s biggest names including Slash, Ozzy Osbourne, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and Nikki Sixx. Given the deliberate mis-spelling of ‘stupid’, I’m surprised Noddy Holder wasn’t on that list.

As for the song itself, it was fairly dumb as mud stuff and not likely to oust the likes of “School’s Out”, “Elected” or indeed “Poison” as one of Alice’s most famous songs (and yes I know the first two are actually Alice Cooper the band tracks).

“Hey Stoopid” peaked at No 21 in the UK.

Now most of us may know Omar just for “There’s Nothing Like This” but there was far more to him than just that one song. He has worked with some legendary names like Stevie Wonder and Lamont Dozier and is still making music to this day. His career is actually remarkably similar to that of another British soul singer Roachford. See how their stories resemble each other:

Omar	Roachford
Grew up in musical family. His father drummed for Bob Marley, his brother is Grammy winning producer, remixer and DJ Scratch Professer and is sister is a BRIT School alumna	Grew up in a musical family and was playing in his uncle’s touring band as a teenager
Is a multi instrumentalist	Is a multi instrumentalist
Unjustly and incorrectly categorised as a one hit wonder – “There’s Nothing Like This”	Unjustly and incorrectly categorised as a one hit wonder – “Cuddly Toy”
Appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to music in 2012	Appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to music in 2019

Now I’m no soul aficionado but even I could appreciate that “There’s Nothing Like This” was slick, smooth and perfectly sung. Oh and get this from @TOTPFacts:

Not long before this #TOTP appearance, Omar had to turn down an offer of playing on Jason Donovan's tour. "They wanted me to play percussion, but I was too busy. Even though they were offering £1000 a week."
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 13, 2021

The insertion of that bit of trivia will make sense later on.

After weeks of cramming in up to four acts in the Breakers section, this week we only have two. First off is Chesney Hawkes with a song called “I’m A Man Not A Boy”. You could almost hear the music press laughing in Chesney’s face at the title. Its No 27 chart peak sounded the death knell for the poor lad’s pop star career which was over before it had even started. No 27? That was an awful attempt at following up a record that had topped the charts for five weeks. It did however do one thing which was to disprove the theory that Chesney, like the aforementioned Omar and Roachford, was not a one hit wonder.

In truth, “I’m A Man Not A Boy” was nowhere near as good a pop record as its predecessor. It was a weak tune with a risible title. Maybe there was a different track on the Buddy’s Story album that his label Chrysalis Records (them again!) could have released instead that might have done the trick? It was all too late now though. A third and final track off the album was released as a single called “Secrets Of The Heart” which was a fairly terrible ballad. It did nothing to reverse Chezza’s fortunes and it peaked at No 57.

Fast forward to 1993 and a comeback single called “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” was released but its soon became apparent that Chesney was now persona non grata in the world of pop and it couldn’t get any higher than No 63. The parent album disappeared without trace. Hawkes seems to have come to terms with his time as a pop star though and now lives happily in Los Angeles with his American wife Kristina and their three children.

Now if it hadn’t been for the next single, I could have said that Chesney’s song was ‘The One And Only’ Breaker this week but here’s Incognito with “Always There” to stop that happening (damn it!). Now I had never heard of this lot before 1991 but I turns out that they were actually part of the UK Jazz Funk movement of the early 80s with their first album released in 1981. However, it would be another 10 years before their next long player by which time, like Omar earlier in the show, they had been signed to Gilles Peterson’s newly formed acid jazz label Talkin’ Loud. Impressed by their arrangement of “Always There”, it was picked out as a single but there was a problem. The band’s vocalist was sick so the replacement was the legendary R&B singer Jocelyn Brown (of “Somebody Else’s Guy” fame). The impetus that Jocelyn gave the record turned it into a Top 10 smash.

I also hadn’t been aware that “Always There” was actually a cover version with the original having been a minor hit for an act called Side Effect in the mid 70s. Incognito would repeat the cover version trick for their next hit the following year, a version of Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ’bout A Thing”.

The increasingly tiresome Mayo indulges himself in some more dreadful attempts at humour as he introduces “It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over” by Lenny Kravitz by stating that it was inspired by some football commentary by John Motson. OK, Simon well not only was that lame but it didn’t make any sense. I presume you were trying to make a link to the legendary line from the 1966 World Cup final commentary “some people are on the pitch, they think it’s all over…it is now!” but that was, of course, by Kenneth Wolstenholme and not John Motson. This is schoolboy error stuff.

“It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over” was written by Kravitz as he attempted to save his marriage to actress Lisa Bonet (who found fame playing Denise Huxtable in The Cosby Show). Despite his attempts, the two divorced in 1993 and she would later play the role of singer Marie De Salle in the wonderful High Fidelity with John Cusack and Jack Black. If you merge those two characters together you just about get Denise La Salle who had a hit with the execrable “My Toot Toot” in 1985. You can tell I’m flagging a bit here can’t you?

“It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over” peaked at No 11.

And the moment has arrived. The moment you all dreaded. It’s the first week of Bryan Adams and “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” and he hasn’t even got to No 1 yet! It’s strange to think that as this TOTP went out with the song entering the chart at No 8 that we had no idea at that point how ingrained it would become in our psyche not just in 1991 but forever more. Taken from the soundtrack to the Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, it proved to be irresistible to UK audiences famously staying at the top of the charts for a record breaking 16 weeks.

Look, this song is going to be on show after show after show which means I’ll have to write about it a lot so I don’t propose to dump everything I have to say about it on week one. So to start with, here’s some statistics about its chart performance:

No 1 in the UK for 16 weeks from July 7 to October 27
Topped the Europe-wide sales chart for 18 continuous weeks, still an all-time record
Topped the European-wide radio airplay chart for 10 weeks
No 1 for 7 weeks in the US, Billboard Hot 100, which combines radio airplay and sales,
No 1 for 8 weeks on the US Adult Contemporary Chart ,the longest run atop that chart since 1979
No 1 for 9 weeks in Adams’s native Canada
No 1 for 11 weeks in Australia
No 1 for 12 weeks in Sweden
No 1 in 18 countries being try best sell of the year in 7 of them
Sold 15 million copies worldwide

Phew!

More gibberish from Simon Mayo next as he introduces “I Touch Myself” by Divinyls. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there’s an awful lot of touching going on; touching this, touching that, touching cameramen. I don’t know whether I approve actually. Mind you, it hasn’t done the Divinyls any good at all has it? There at No 12 this week…”. What?! No Simes, there isn’t a lot of touching going on, it’s just that there is a song in the charts with the word ‘touch’ in its title and surely you meant to say “it hasn’t done the Divinyls any harm at all has it?” to make any sort of sense of your nonsense.

This week it’s the infamous studio performance where singer Chrissy Amphlett spends a lot of time seemingly fondling her breasts. The sexual tension is added to by her guitarist playing his instrument in an erect, phallus like position. Blimey! Wilkipedia informs me that the B-side to the single was a track called “Follow Through”. Oh God! Don’t bring any toilet humour into the already overcrowded proceedings.

Despite taking “I Touch Myself” to No 10, they were unable to repeat the trick and it became their only UK chart hit. Chrissy Amphlett sadly passed away in 2013 from breast cancer but her legacy was the I Touch Myself project promoting breast cancer awareness and encouraging women to check themselves regularly.

Hallelujah! Color Me Badd have been toppled and we have a new No 1! The bad news is it’s Jason Donovan. Yes, in some sort of twisted version of a Faustian pact, we had traded the obvious material benefit of getting rid of those berks who wanted to sex us up for our pop music souls by placing “Any Dream Will Do” at the top of the pile. Look, it’s not that I hate musicals (I don’t at all) but I can’t really be doing with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and certainly not the insipid and twee “Any Dream Will Do”. I wasn’t the only one. Look at this tweet from an actual Jase fan:

As someone who was a fan of @JDonOfficial as a kid, this song was what killed every bit of fandom I had back then. He was singing songs from school play territory & it just seemed so naff. Now I'm older I look back with fondness at the stuff before this, though..but this…cringe
— CodaQueen (@CodaQueen) August 13, 2021

Quite. No wonder Omar turned his offer of touring with him down!

The play out video is “Sheriff Fatman” by Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine and it’s finally time for my claim to fame story. This single appeared on the duo’s album “101 Damnations”. The album closes with the track “G. I. Blues” which is an anti-war song inspired by John Savage’s character in The Deer Hunter. Now, look at the personnel listed as having contributed to the making of the album in the screenshot below. See that arrow pointing to someone called Rob Sheridan? Rob was Best Man at my wedding!

This has been my go to claim to fame indie story for years. How Rob knew Jim Bob and Fruitbat I really can’t recall but knew them he did and there is his name, recorded in history for all to see. And then…during the first wave of the pandemic last year, when joining in on Tim Burgess’s Twitter Listening Party “101 Damnations”, Jim Bob tweeted this:

This piano bit is a lot harder to play than it sounds. We had to get a friend Rob to play it but he did it too well so we had to change it after he’d left the studio #TimsTwitterListeningParty
— Jim Bob (@mrjimBob) July 14, 2020

What! You mean that isn’t Rob playing on the album after all?! Noooo!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Cubic 22	Night In Motion	No chance
2	Paula Abdul	Rush Rush	I was in no rush to buy this
3	Erasure	Chorus	Don’t think I did
4	Alice Cooper	Hey Stoopid	No
5	Omar	There’s Nothing Like This	Nope
6	Chesney Hawkes	I’m A Man Not A Boy	Dearie me no
7	Incognito	Always There	Nah
8	Lenny Kravitz	It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over	No but I had the album
9	Bryan Adams	(Everything I Do) I Do It for You	Negative
10	Divinyls	I Touch Myself	Liked it, didn’t buy it
11	Jason Donovan	Any Dream Will Do	See 6 above
12	Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine	Sheriff Fatman	No but I must have it on something

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/m000ypc8/top-of-the-pops-27061991

TOTP 20 JUN 1991

Posted on August 17, 2021 by 80stastic

This is my fifth year of reviewing these BBC4 TOTP repeats. I started with the shows from 1983 and we are now up to 1991. This is my 367th post over two blogs. Thats over 825,000 words. I’m tired. I’m stuck in the house due to testing positive for COVID and I’m staring at a blank document awaiting inspiration to strike. I’m not helped by the fact that the TOTP production team were determined back then to cram in as many acts as possible into 30 minutes of screen time. This week there are 14 acts! 14! I’m not sure I can do it anymore. Look, I’ll try OK, just for you…

…OK, first song of the night and not only do I not remember it at all but it’s already giving me a headache. The cause of my distress is “Tribal Base” by Rebel MC / Tenor Fly / Barrington Levy. What that Rebel MC who did “Street Tuff” because this sounds nothing like that. Wikipedia informs me that this was from his second album which was in a ‘breakbeat hardcore’ style with some ‘reggae fusion’ thrown into the mix. I have absolutely no idea what any of those words mean. Apparently it was a precursor to the ‘jungle’ sound which then begat drum’n’bass both of which I do remember because you couldn’t escape them in the mid 90s (‘jungle ist massive’ and all that).

As for Tenor Fly, he was a leading light of the rave movement whilst Barrington Levy is a reggae and dancehall legend whose back catalogue stretches back to 1979. Now of course, it’s possible that there are some reggae fusion fans out there reading this (there might be!) that are now shouting at their devices incredulous at my lack of knowledge in this field but I can only tell it how it was and is via my own memories and knowledge. I have very little else to say about this one other than I didn’t expect to see a double neck guitar on stage for a track like this. I thought they were the preserve of prog rock.

“Tribal Base” peaked at No 20.

Presenter Nicky Campbell makes a really lame quip about the Rebel MC never stopping and being a ‘rebel without a pause’ (groan!) and then follows it up by saying that “Salt ‘n’ Pepa would have been here tonight but Salt is currently having a baby which is kicking it almost as hard as she is here…”. Surely the pun there was about pushing it Nicky as in “Push It”, one of their most well known hits? Their actual current single is “Do You Want Me” which is promotes the idea of men respecting women and not pressurising them until they are ready to have sex….or as @TOTPFacts put it:

No shagging with Salt 'N' Pepa until the third date. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 6, 2021

Yes, well…anyway. Salt ‘n’ Pepa would continue this conversation in their next single “Let’s Talk About Sex” which including these classic lyrics:

Yo, Pep, I don’t think they’re gonna play this on the radio
And why not? Everybody havin’ sex
I mean, everybody should be makin’ love
Come on, how many guys you know make love?

“Do You Want Me” peaked at No 5.

Talking of having sex (as just about every song in the charts seemed to be at this time), here is LaTour with “People Are Still Having Sex”. Campbell bravely takes on the single’s title by trying to intellectualise the subject going on about a “chilling assessment of contemporary attitudes towards an activity fraught with danger” before saying it’s great to dance to. Was it really though? Even the backing dancer up there on stage for this studio performance doesn’t seem to know what moves to do. Oh yes, that backing dancer who’s mouthing “hello lover”? General consensus on Twitter was that she was one of the Bombalurina women last seen cavorting with Timmy Mallett. She got all the good gigs didn’t she?

A stage performance of this track doesn’t really work does it? The tempo of it doesn’t really naturally make for a visually engaging spectacle whilst the main guy (Mr LaTour?) comes across as really creepy. Just nasty.

Campbell works very hard in his next link to make sure he gets the title of the song right, overly articulating the world ‘funk’ when introducing “Get The Funk Out” by Extreme. It’s the promo video but surely this performance would surely have been better suited to the TOTP studio than LaTour’s? It’s full of energy with lead singer Gary Cherone looking almost demonic with some of the weird shapes he pulls his body into.

When I first heard this, I thought Cherone was singing ‘No Robbie Nevil’s going to spoil my fun’ as in the “C’est La Vie” hit maker from the 80s as opposed to what he actually sings which is “No rotten apple gonna spoil my fun” which makes much more sense. Quite why Robbie Nevil would have been seen as a party pooper by a bunch of funk metal heads I have no idea.

“Get The Funk Out” peaked at No 19.

Meanwhile back in the studio we find Kenny Thomas having an enormous hit (I said hit!) with “Thinking About Your Love”. Kenny was one of the biggest breakout stars of 1991 with four Top 40 hits and a Top 3 album. Eventually the hits dried up and by the middle of the decade Kenny had disappeared from view altogether. However, he re-entered the public consciousness after appearing in ITV’s Hit Me Baby One More Time in 2005 although he was beaten to a place in the grand final by one of the weakest and weediest pop bands of the 90s in 911 – the shame!

Nowadays, he’s the lead singer of Living In A Box who shared the same record label in Chrysalis Records back in the day which is how they originally met. On the band’s official website, in answer to the question ‘Are you going to be singing some of your own songs at the Living In A Box shows?’, Kenny replied:

Yes, definitely! Fans coming to see The Box will hear their hits and people who want to hear some of mine will get the chance to hear those too. I think the fans will hear six Top 10 records in our set, which is quite something.

Well it would be Kenny if that were true but although ‘The Box’ (nobody calls them that surely?!) did have three Top 10 hits, you only had the one in “Thinking About Your Love” which makes a grand total of four not six.

A load of Breakers now starting with something for which the official description is, I believe, ‘techno bollocks’. Cubic 22 were a Belgian (not Italian for once) dance project whose only UK Top 40 hit was “Night In Motion”. They comprised Peter Ramson and Danny Van Wauwe the latter of whom sounds like he should be a Man Utd midfielder who was bought for a lot of money but who can’t make the team. Apparently we’ll get to see them in the studio next week. Oh joy. Cue another visually bizarre performance just like LaTour.

If the track sounds vaguely familiar, here’s @TOTPFacts with the reason why:

The piano riff from "Night In Motion" was later pinched by British dance outfit Strike for "U Sure Do", which reached 31 in 1994 and 4 in 1995: https://t.co/b639Sfosyr Borremans and Van Wauwe didn't get any money out of it. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 13, 2021

“Night In Motion” peaked at No 15.

This is more like it! Despite having been formed in 1987, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine had never achieved any mainstream success until now. Quite why was 1991 the turning point in their career? Well, it could have been that their brand of sample heavy, indie dance pop that they had been making was finally receiving national recognition with bands like EMF, Jesus Jones and Pop Will Eat Itself all having chart hits around this time. Or maybe it was just that their band name really fitted in with the sex obsessed Top 40 at this time!

“Sheriff Fatman” (possibly their most well known song though certainly not their biggest hit) was a re-release of an early single that had failed to chart though it had been a big indie hit. Like the band themselves, their timeline is a bit chaotic but as far as I can tell, it was re-released when the duo signed with Chrysalis Records (them again!) after the collapse of Rough Trade – a bit like when “Sit Down” was re-released after James has moved from Rough Trade to Fontana. Also like “Sit Down” was the fact that “Sheriff Fatman” had been on that influential ‘Madchester’ themed “Happy Daze” compilation album which I think must have been when I first heard the track.

Highlighting the dodgy practices of slum landlords via the use of some inspired wordplay in their lyrics, “Sheriff Fatman” was an absolute stomper and a mosh pit favourite for fans when played live. Indeed, those lyrics, once heard were impossible to forget.

Moving up on second base
Behind Nicholas Van Wotsisface
At six foot six and a hundred tons
The undisputed king of the slums
With more aliases than Klaus Barbie
The master butcher of Leigh-on-Sea

Those lines of course had their basis in reality. Nicholas Van Wotsisface was a reference to British businessman and convicted criminal involved in property Nicholas van Hoogstraten whilst Klaus Barbie was the German Nazi known as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’ for having personally tortured prisoners of the Gestapo. This wasn’t your average pop song – even Nicky Campbell acknowledges that in his introduction to Jim Bob and Fruitbat as “something very intriguing now…”.

All of this and I haven’t even got onto my CUSM claim to fame yet. I’ll leave that for the next post when they are on the show properly though.

“Sheriff Fatman” peaked at No 23.

Next a young man who was being talked up as the next big thing in British soul…or was it acid jazz?. Time has decreed that it was a sub genre called ‘neo soul’ actually. His name was Omar and his song was “There’s Nothing Like This”. In fact, his full name was Omar Lye-Fook (which sounds like a lyric from Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves Of London”) and he was a hugely talented musician who could play multi instruments and had a smooth, velvety voice to go with that.

Like many singles in 1991 it seems, “There’s Nothing Like This” was another re-release having originally been issued in 1990 on Kongo Records. It was re-released by the hugely influential acid jazz label Talkin’ Loud when Omar signed with them in 1991 becoming his biggest ever hit when it peaked at No 14. The bass riff gave it an instant hook that made it stand out and he looked set for superstardom. And then…nothing. There was no follow up single until the following year and that was actually the lead single from his new album. By that point, momentum appeared to have been lost. Omar didn’t have another Top 40 hit until 1997.

In my mind, I have an image of Simon Mayo saying “That was Omar and “There’s Nothing Like This”….except the rest of the album”. Maybe I made it up but it sounds like the sort of snide thing Mayo might have said.

The final Breaker sees the return of Paula Abdul with the lead single from her second album “Spellbound”. Unlike all her other hits up to this point, “Rush Rush” was a ballad and a big one at that. No uptempo dance number here. It was all very accomplished and polished and all those other words ending in ‘-ished’ but it was ever so slow and just a tad dull I thought.

In the US, it would supply Paul with her fifth consecutive No 1 single and indeed stayed top of the charts or five whole weeks. Over here, it got to No 6 which was just about the same pattern of difference between the UK and America for all her releases. And yes, clearly that’s Keanu Reeves in the video which was a play on the James Dean film Rebel Without A Cause – oh, is that what put the idea in Nicky Campbell’s ahead for his awful ‘rebel without a pause’ pun?

Talking of awful puns, here’s Driza Bone with “Real Love”. The people behind Driza Bone were producers and remixers Vincent Garcia and Billy April but it turns out they didn’t come up with the name themselves though. Here’s @TOTPFacts with the rest of the story:

Driza Bone were named after an Australian brand of oilskin raincoat. Billy April: "[Vincent Garcia] saw that name on a trip to Australia in 1990 and liked it. When we couldn’t come up with anything better we used it." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 6, 2021

As well as being an act in their own right (they employed a revolving conveyor belt of vocalists – this one was Sophie Jones), they also used their name for the remixing arm of their set up and worked with artists like Lisa Stansfield, Jody Watley, Mary J. Blige, Shanice and Duran Duran.

Sadly for Drizabone, I remembered their dreadful name more than their song which peaked at No 16.

Just when we thought that the Jason Donovan phenomenon was all over, he comes back with a massively successful hit! I have to admit I didn’t see this coming at all. I thought he was spent, done – ‘you’ve had your season in the sun now f**k off mate’ type of thing. Yet his decision to agree to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s offer to play the lead role in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (apparently he mulled it over for a whole three weeks) proved to be completely correct as his version of “Any Dream Will Do” scored him a huge No 1 single.

I’d forgotten that to went straight in at No 2 – not something that happened every week in 1991 – so the buzz around the release must have been big. It would spend two weeks at No 1 whilst the cast album of this production was also No 1 for two weeks. Donovan’s success in the role and the way it reignited his career was a beacon for others to follow in his wake with the likes of Phillip Schofield, Donny Osmond and Boyzone’s Stephen Gately all playing Joseph over the next few years. In 2007, the song gave its name to a second Lloyd Webber talent show-themed TV series as he searched for a new star to play the role in a revival of the show. The winner was Lee Mead who took a version of the song to No 2 in the charts. It was clearly one of those songs that people just couldn’t get enough of.

As for Jason, “Any Dream Will Do” would prove to be a false dawn. There would be just one further Top 10 single (a cover of The Turtles’ “Happy Together”) and an album in 1993 that his new label Polydor Records had so little faith in that they licensed several of his old hits and included them on the album much to his annoyance. It didn’t work and the album stiffed at No 27. It would be the last Jason Donovan album of the 90s.

Oh, and one final thing, what were all those Pet Shop Boys references that Nicky Campbell made in his intro about?

Some sadness attached to this next performance from Bette Midler as the artist who originally recorded “From A Distance”, Nanci Griffith, passed away literally days ago aged just 68. RIP Nanci.

Getting Bette Midler into the TOTP studio in person must have been quite the coup for the BBC and she’s come dressed as if she’s auditioning for the part of Peter Pan in that year’s Xmas pantomime at the Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury. She even adopts a Peter Pan stance when starting the song with one hand at her waist while leaning back as if surveying Neverland. All that was missing was a slap of her thigh. Come the key change at the song’s finale, she attempts a few jumps as if expecting to be lifted high into the rafters by some invisible wires but sadly for her, she can’t get off the ground. Where’s Tinker Bell with her pixie dust when you need her?

Joshing aside, I have to admire ‘The Divine Miss M’ for her very overt social media stance against the horrific presidency of Donald Trump. Good on you Bette.

“From A Distance” peaked at No 6.

Those jokers Color Me Badd are still at No 1 with “I Wanna Sex You Up”. In a Smash Hits interview, the band announced that “I Wanna Sex You Up is just a modern way of saying ‘I want to romance you'”. OK, so firstly, nobody’s opening line is ‘I want to romance you’ is it?! Secondly, the phrase ‘I Wanna Sex You Up’ definitely does not say ‘I want to romance you’ anyway!

The play out video is “The Motown Song” by Rod Stewart. In keeping with the sexually charged feel of the show, Nicky Campbell can’t resist one final risqué comment when he introduces the track thus:

You can hear the charts on Sunday 4.30 on Radio 1 FM, see them again next week on TOTP presented by Radio 1’s very own blonde bombshell Simon Mayo. We leave you tonight with a man who’s partial to a blonde bombshell…or three…it’s Rod Stewart and The Motown Song…”

So there you have it – a show featuring songs called “People Are Still Having Sex” and “I Wanna Sex You Up”, a band whose name included the word ‘sex’, a conversation about shagging with Salt ‘n’ Pepa and then we round it all off with an innuendo about threesomes (or was that a foursome?!). And we didn’t even have the song on about female masturbation!

I’ve made it through! Fourteen acts and their tracks all viewed and reviewed! Maybe I have more resolve than I gave myself credit for!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Rebel MC / Tenor Fly / Barrington Levy	Tribal Base	Nah
2	Salt ‘n’ Pepa	Do You Want Me	Nope
3	LaTour	People Are Still Having Sex	Definitely not
4	Extreme	Get The Funk Out	Not in the singles box but I think I might have it on something
5	Kenny Thomas	Thinking About Your Love	Negative
6	Cubic 22	Night In Motion	Not my bag at all
7	Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine	Sheriff Fatman	See 4 above
8	Omar	There’s Nothing Like This	No
9	Paula Abdul	Rush Rush	I was in no rush to buy this
10	Driza Bone	Real Love	Another no
11	Jason Donovan	Any Dream Will Do	Ooh no!
12	Bette Midler	From A Distance	…is where I would like to be when this song is on
13	Color Me Badd	I Wanna Sex You Up	Vile – no
14	Rod Stewart	The Motown Song	One final 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/m000yhc2/top-of-the-pops-20061991

TOTP 13 JUN 1991

Posted on August 13, 2021 by 80stastic

We’re just about slap bang in the middle of 1991 here at TOTP Rewind and I have just had my 23rd birthday. I’ve been married for just over 8 months and am working at Our Price in Manchester (the Market Street store). Life has settled down into a routine after the huge changes of matrimony and moving to a new city. However, things are about to get a little nerve racking as around about this time (I could be wrong on the exact timings as its 30 years ago) the staff were all called into a early meeting one Saturday morning and we were told that the company were looking to sell the shop off. Oh shit! What did that mean? Was the company in trouble? What would happen to all us guys and gals that worked there? FFS! I’d not expected anything like this when we were told the Area Manager would be coming to inform us of something. I gullibly thought it would be about some new promotion or other (though why that would have required Area Manager’s input I don’t know).

From the little info that we were given that morning about potential redundancies, I had worked out that I might just be safe by virtue of having joined a week before the other Xmas temps that were kept on. It was a precarious position which could change at any moment but obviously there were people who I worked with in a worse position than me. However, our finances were threadbare and we were living month to month with just enough to pay the rent on our flat but precious little else to cover for anything going wrong that would have financial implications let alone a budget for a social life. As I remember this threat of store closure hung over us for sometime and obviously was all the staff could talk about for a while. It didn’t make for a happy atmosphere. In the end, the company couldn’t find a buyer and the decision was taken to keep the store trading which it did for another four years before it was finally sold off and became a travel agents (I think). For now though, these were scary times so I hope that the music in the charts and on TOTP would have given me a lift.

Tonight’s host is Jakki Brambles and she gives a strange intro to the first act on tonight.

“We have probably the only ever artist to score five Top 20 singles off her debut album and still got dropped by her record label. You can’t keep a good woman down, here’s Sonia…”

That all seemed a bit personal and unnecessary Jakki. A case of damning with faint praise even. It was true though. After becoming the first female UK artist to achieve five top 20 hit singles from one album, she did leave Chrysalis Records and moved on from Stock, Aitken and Waterman though the reason why doesn’t seem clear. Maybe she felt sidelined by Kylie and Jason? Anyway, Sonia proved to be more resilient than we might have suspected and returned to the charts with new record label IQ Records and a new single called “Only Fools (Never Fall In Love)”. Supposedly written for Diana Ross (it’s close to being exactly the same title as her 1981 cover of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” by Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers!), it was pinched for Sonia by her A&R man, one Simon Cowell. And guess what, it was a horrible Motown pastiche! What a surprise! Still, the UK’s pop fans decided that the hadn’t had enough of Sonia yet and sent it to No 10 in the charts. Have that Pete Waterman!

I was at Polytechnic with someone who was bit like Sonia, except that she didn’t have red hair, wasn’t Scouse and wasn’t annoying so nothing like her at all really!

They’ve messed round with the chart run down again! Why?! They’ve gone back to having it run along the bottom of the screen rolling news ticker style whilst a video plays. I’m sure they tried this at some point back in the 80s and gave it up as a bad job. I bet they went back to it to try and fit in more videos because they were worried about the competition provided by ITV’s The Chart Show. Jakki gamely tries to promote this new convention as “incredible value for money, two for the price of one. Yes, not only do we give you the sight and sound of Amy Grant, we also reveal in vision only, the UK Top 40”. What a crock of shit! Maybe the producers thought that the traditional countdown with the stills of the artists set against the TOTP theme tune was a bit old hat going into the 90s and so needed a revamp complete with that green screen presenter effect. Maybe it did look cutting edge back then but it looks awful now.

Anyway, as for Amy Grant, she was up to No 2 with “Baby Baby” although the TOTP graphics team have it down as a new entry. Maybe it was teething troubles with all this new technology? A more wholesome song and performer it would have been hard to imagine as Amy was ‘The Queen of Christian Pop’ whilst “Baby Baby” was inspired by her then six week old daughter Millie’s face. By way of contrast, we’ll be seeing a few songs about the sexual act and even masturbation later on. Ahem.

Nothing unsavoury here though as the squeaky clean Gloria Estefan brings us “Remember Me With Love”. I recall reading an article in the early 90s about an obsessive Madonna fan who bought anything and everything to do with Madge but when she released her “Erotica” album and that ‘Sex’ book with the nude photos and simulations of sexual acts…well, it was all to much for him and he turned his back on Madonna and instead turned his attentions to someone much purer. Yes, of course, he chose to devote himself to Gloria Estefan. Not that the dichotomy of pop stars and their sexual image hasn’t been around before this. There was Michael Jackson v Prince, The Beatles v The Rolling Stones and maybe even Paul McCartney v John Lennon?

“Remember Me With Love”peaked at No 22.

Blimey! I thought we’d done with All About Eve back at the end of the 80s but here they are with yet another Top 40 single in “Farewell Mr. Sorrow”. Julianne Regan and co have one of the more bizarre chart histories going – 9 Top 40 singles but only one of them got any higher than No 29 which of course was the infamous “Martha’s Harbour” which peaked at No 10.

This one was their 8th consecutive chart hit and quite a pleasant little ditty it is too – most unlike a lot of their other work. It was taken from their third studio album “Touched By Jesus” which was their first recording without guitarist and sometime Mr Regan Tim Bricheno and it didn’t do nearly as well as their first two albums leading to the band leaving record label Vertigo and signing with MCA for their last album “Ultraviolet” by which time nobody was interested anymore. I always quite liked them though.

Some of that smut next with a band who Jakki Brambles tells us have never had a hit not even in their native Australia. Really Jakki? Is that actually true? We are of course talking about Divinyls and their hit “I Touch Myself” and handily, someone on Twitter has already checked this claim out and debunked it:

pic.twitter.com/UaEjNUhTUY
— Will Roney (@WillRoney98) August 8, 2021

Oh dear Jakki. Anyway, this is that masturbation song which is obviously what it’s about. Or is it? Well, yes it is. Here singer Chrissy Amphlett from a 2013 Cosmopolitan interview:

“In a world where female sexuality and masturbation is still widely feared and demonized, we need to pay some major respect to the brave women who empower us. ‘I Touch Myself’ is not just a party song, but also an emboldened call-to-action. Amphlett reminded us that we are in control of our own bodies and pleasure, and there is no shame in that game.”

Well quite. Now I didn’t know this until a friend told me years after the event but “I Touch Myself” wasn’t the first song on the subject of female masturbation. No, that was Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop” from 1984. Well, the lyrics are stacked with innuendo to be fair:

Do I want to go out with a lion’s roar
Huh, yea, I want to go south n get me some more
Hey, they say that a stitch in time saves nine
They say I better stop – or I’ll go blind

Hey, hey – they say I better get a chaperone
Because I can’t stop messin’ with the danger zone
No, I won’t worry, and I won’t fret –
Ain’t no law against it yet

Gulp! So indecent was it deemed to be that it earned a place on the Parents Music Resource Center’s Filthy Fifteen list which led to the creation of the Parental Advisory sticker. Most of the songs on that list were by hard rock bands like Judas Priest, AC/DC and Black Sabbath. Oh and W.A.S.P. but then if you call a song “Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)” then what do you expect. Obviously the aforementioned Madonna was also on the list for 1985’s “Dress You Up” but that guy who was the obsessive fan who rejected her for Gloria Estefan must have missed that news story.

At the time, the name Lenny Kravitz was new to me but he had already released one album back in 1989 called “Let Love Rule” but it had completely passed me by. Fast forward two years and he was back with another collection of songs called “Mama Said” from which this single, “It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over” was taken. This was the second track to be lifted from the album after lead single “Always on the Run” had just missed out on being a hit by peaking at that most unfortunate of chart positions No 41. Its follow up though did the trick. Dripping with Motown and Philadelphia soul vibes, it went all the way to No 11 in the UK and just missed the top spot in the US where it peaked at No 2.

The album was pretty good too. How did I know? Well because around this time I was taking part in my first ever Our Price stocktake. I’d been warned about these mythical events that might go on until past midnight where all the staff took part and had to count at price point every single item in the shop. I’d warned my wife on the big day that I could well be home late but I think we were all done reasonably early at 9ish. Whilst counting, and possibly to stop us all gossiping about the impending shop closure, we were allowed to put music on the shop stereo and someone out on “Mama Said”. That album stayed on most of the night I think as we just kept pressing repeat so as not to waste time looking for/arguing over what the next album for playing should be and who got to choose it. I liked what I heard enough to buy the album and especially liked opening track “Fields Of Joy”:

A huge tune next as Massive Attack (now allowed to have the second word of their name included as the Gulf War had needed) return with “Safe From Harm”. After the mesmerising “Unfinished Sympathy”, surely they couldn’t pull another corker from out of their hat but yes they could. Inspired by the film Taxi Driver, this was equally as hypnotic as its predecessor with Shara Nelson’s vocals to the fore and rapping from 3D that managed that difficult feat of not being intrusive but understated and yet integral to the track.

Like “Unfinished Sympathy” and indeed the “Blue Lines’ album itself, “Safe From Harm” wasn’t as big a hit as you remember or indeed it deserved, peaking at just No 25.

Just when you thought they wouldn’t shoehorn in any Breakers this week, here they are with only *10 minutes of the show remaining. We start with Rod Stewart and “The Motown Song” which was the third single to be released from his “Vagabond Heart” album. This really did seem like money for old rope to me. He’s already done a version of “It Takes Two” with Tina Turner on that album and this seemed like more of the same corny, obvious shite. A bit like when The Rolling Stones finally released a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” in the mid 90s. As with “It Takes Two”, Rod collaborated with a legendary act in The Temptations for this one but even their presence couldn’t save it from being a steaming pool of pish.

If anything, the animated video for it makes it even more corny. Made by the same company responsible for “Dear Jessie” by Madonna, it features some ‘hilarious’ comic mishaps befalling cartoon versions of stars like Vanilla Ice (who gets buried under a truckload of ice cubes) and Sinéad O’Connor (who slips while shaving her head and has to wear plasters over the resulting nicks). Like I said, hilarious. Rod himself appears in the video both in human and cartoon form of which the latter looks more like him than the real thing.

“The Motown Song” made No 10 both in the UK and US singles charts.

*Plus the repeat edited out a video of “Light My Fire” by The Doors for copyright reasons.

Some funk/glam/metal rock or something next as Extreme make their first appearance on the show. Despite having been around since 1985, I’d certainly never heard of this lot before but suddenly there was huge interest in them thanks to their “Get The Funk Out” single. This energetic workout of a track was getting a lot of airplay on MTV (I think) and suddenly we were getting lots of enquiries about their second album “Extreme II: Pornograffitti” from which the single was taken. That title caused quite bit of confusion with many people (me included) thinking the band were actually called Extreme II. It didn’t help that Extreme II was what a member of staff had written on the master bag for the band’s name. The record company (and this seemed to happen a lot in 1991) immediately withdrew the album which had been out nearly a while year by this point so that they could re-release it later on when the single had peaked with some extra advertising for it.

Guitarist Nuno Bettencourt was getting a lot of press attention at the time not just as the latest guitar noodling prodigy but also as a bit of a heartthrob. To be fair, their lead singer (and normally the visual focus of a band) lead singer Gary Cherone was a bit more….erm…awkward looking. The album would spawn another four UK Top 40 singles including the the soft rock ballad “More Than Words” that made No 2 over here and No 1 in the US. For a while, Extreme looked like they could be the next big rock act.

Next a song that had been a hit just 8 months earlier albeit performed by a completely different artist. “From A Distance” was originally recorded by country legend Nanci Griffith (though she didn’t write it) for her 1987 album “Lone Star State of Mind”. Despite being many people’s definitive version of the song, it failed to chart. Then, in 1990, it was recorded and released as a single by both Cliff Richard (his was a live version and was also that which was a UK hit) and Bette Midler whose take on it lost out to Sir Cliff and finished up outside the Top 40 at No 45. However, in the US, Bette’s version was a huge success and won a Grammy for Song of the Year in 1991. Presumably that was why it was re-released over here. As with Extreme, there was suddenly a big demand from punters for their album that it featured on (“Some People’s Lives”) but yet again it was withdrawn by the record company so that it could be re-released and re-promoted. I was getting truly sick of explaining this phenomenon to customers by now.

I could see why Midler had chosen to record it. It was in the same ball park as her recent US No 1 “Wind Beneath My Wings” and indeed scored her a No 2 hit in there home country. In the UK, it would peak at No 6.

Some more filth now as we get “People Are Still Having Sex” by LaTour. This was like “Kissing With Confidence” by Will Powers meets “French Kiss” by Lil’ Louis. It originally included the lyric ‘This AIDS thing’s not working’ but was changed to ‘This safe thing’s not working’ to ensure it got some radio play.

I couldn’t really be doing with this at all – the track that is not sex per se. It just seemed sensationalist for the sake of getting some press. It was a minor hit globally peaking at No 15 in the UK.

And to round off this episode of smut and obscenity, the No 1 record is still “I Wanna Sex You Up” by Color Me Badd. So that’s two records with ‘sex’ in the title and one about masturbation on the same show. Mary Whitehouse must have been apoplectic. Just to crank up the sex-o-meter, the band are in the studio in person! Everything about this performance is so wrong. From the suits to the dancing (the three lads at the back seem to be doing ‘ring a ring a roses’ at one point) to the actual song.

Despite their success, Smash Hits magazine only had Color Me Badd on their front cover once throughout the whole of 1991. In comparison, Chesney Hawkes was on three times as was Dannii Minogue. Even The Farm, Philip Schofield and those twin sisters from Neighbours got a front cover!

The play out video is “Monkey Business” by Skid Row. I get really confused by all these metal bands. Skid Row, Mötley Crüe, Anthrax, Megadeth… I couldn’t really tell you the difference between any of them. To differentiate this lot from the pack, their lead singer called himself Sebastian Bach though his real name is Sebastian Philip Bierk. The latter seems more appropriate.

Normally I include the chart rundown here but due to the new format, there is no clip I can include. Sorry.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Sonia	Only Fools (Never Fall In Love)	Only a fool would have bought this
2	Amy Grant	Baby Baby	No but my wife liked it
3	Gloria Estefan	Remember Me With Love	Nah
4	All About Eve	Farewell Mr. Sorrow	I did not
5	Divinyls	I Touch Myself	Thought I might have but the singles box says no
6	Lenny Kravitz	It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over	No but I had the album
7	Massive Attack	Safe From Harm	See 6 above
8	Rod Stewart	The Motown Song	No thanks
9	Extreme	Get The Funk Out	Not the single but I have it on something I think
10	Bette Midler	From A Distance	Nope
11	LaTour	People Are Still Having Sex	No
12	Color Me Badd	I Wanna Sex You Up	I should coco
13	Skid Row	Monkey Business	I’d rather watch a monkey defecate

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/m000yhc0/top-of-the-pops-13061991

TOTP 06 JUN 1991

Posted on August 11, 2021 by 80stastic

When I started out reviewing all these TOTP shows beginning with the 1983 repeats, quite often a show would not be re-broadcast due to the consequences of Operation Yewtree. As the old brigade of presenters began to be weeded out, the unacceptable elements we’re also part of the cull and so the shows that were omitted from the BBC4 schedules began to get less and less. As we pushed on into the 90s, every single TOTP was shown again….until now. Yes, we are missing out the 30 May 1991 edition but it’s nothing to do with any forces of darkness. This is the first episode not to be repeated since 23 June 1988 and the reason is…well, it could be a couple of things. Firstly, the quality of the existing video isn’t up to broadcast standards or secondly, and this is the theory that Twitter seems to suggest was the true reason, oh I’ll let @TOTPFacts fill you in:

This will be due to ongoing licensing issues re: using The Doors' catalogue on TV. (The video for "Light My Fire" plays over the end credits, making it hard to edit out) #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 30, 2021

The Doors?! You might well wonder why they were on a TOTP in 1991 and it was nothing to do with an advert this time. No, it was all to do with the Oliver Stone Doors biopic that was released that year starring Val Kilmer. As part of the film’s promotion, a soundtrack album was released (featuring the original versions of the songs and not Kilmer’s vocals which were used in the actual film) and “Light My Fire” was re-released as a single to publicise it. OK, so that explains why Jim and co were back in the charts in 1991 but why can’t the BBC broadcast a show that includes their music 30 year later? It’s because The Doors and their estate have withdrawn from the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS), no longer wishing to accept the society’s licensing agreements. This means that the BBC would have to negotiate a deal directly with the artist to play their music and as the corporation is sticking with its policy of single blanket collective licensing, that rules out The Doors from any BBC playlists. The Doors aren’t the only artists to have left the MCPS – Neil Young, Bonnie Raitt and Journey have also done so. I’ll leave you to make up your own minds as to whether this is a good or bad thing.

So are we finished with the whole Doors thing now? Not quite. In orders to maximise the revived interest in the band’s music, their record company Warners withdrew all their back catalogue from sale, presumably to force punters to buy the soundtrack album. Then, when the fuss surrounding the film had died down, they made them available again. Great for Warners, not so good for those of us working in record shops trying to explain tis marketing strategy to customers. Off the back of this comes one of my claims to fame. I indeed did have to explain this to none other than the Rochdale Cowboy himself Mike Harding. Yes, the singer, songwriter and comedian who seemed to be on the TV all the time when I was growing up came in to buy some Doors albums but was dismayed by our poor stockholding. Luckily for Mike, we still had a one copy left of the 1985 Doors Best Of (the double CD with the iconic ‘Lizard King’ photo of Jim on the front cover) so I sold him that instead of the soundtrack album as it was more comprehensive (as I recall the latter didn’t have “Hello, I Love You” on it).

As for the film itself, I wasn’t sure about it when iI first saw it at the cinema. It was 2 hours and 21 mins long for a start (which was very long for a film back then). They even had an intermission in the screening I was at cutting the film into two parts. I watched it again a couple of years ago and found it more likeable.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is a non repeated TOTP. Fortunately, the whole show is on YouTube if you really need to see it but I am already behind in may reviews so I’ll be given that one a miss. For the record, these are the artists that were featured:

Technotronic
MC Hammer
Pop Will Eat Itself
Sonia
Kraftwerk
Siouxie and the Banshees
Amy Grant
Kylie Minogue
Cher
The Doors

If you’re annoyed about missing out on seeing any of the names listed above, take solace in the fact that you have also missed out on having to endure Anthea Turner presenting and get this….it was her last ever TOTP appearance! Hurray!

The decision to axe Anthea would be the tip of the iceberg in terms of changes to the show in 1991. The ‘year zero’ revamp was coming but before then even, some changes were afoot. We’ve already had the truncated chart rundown which doesn’t include records going down, the compressed Breakers section with up to five acts concertinaed into under a minute and a half and now another change that would have been heresy back in the programme’s 80s heyday. A record that isn’t even in the Top 40 opening the show! Apparently this was a regular practice in the 70s but since 1980 the criteria for appearing on the show had been inflexible one of which was your record had to be in the Top 40. Suddenly though, in June 1991, that didn’t matter as here were Northside with a very clear graphic announcing that their single “Take 5” was at No 41 in the charts. None of this made any sense. Even host Mark Goodier doesn’t seem to have got the policy change memo as he says in his intro…

“Good evening and welcome to TOTP featuring the world’s most exciting chart – the BBC UK Top 40”

…and then he introduces an act whose single is outside of that ‘most exciting chart’. Just weird. Who knows what negotiations and deals went down behind closed doors to make this happen but it didn’t really do Northside much good as the single would only rise one place in next week’s chart before falling away completely. At least they could say it was a bona fide Top 40 hit I guess. Of course, the band already one of these to their name as “My Rising Star” had made it all the way to the giddy heights of No 32 the previous year.

The band were part of the Factory Records roster of artists and did indeed hail from Manchester (Moston to be precise) and I remember there being some fuss about them when their only album “Chicken Rhythms” was released later in June. It did quite well as I recall (Wikipedia tells me it got to No 19 in the album chart) whilst “Take 5” was a pretty funky tune to be fair. I like that, despite the privilege of being on TOTP without a Top 40 hit, the band had a dress down Thursday approach to being on TOTP in their choice of outfits. On the other end of the spectrum and also on this show were Marillion and that led to this little Twitter spat when the repeat went out on BBC4:

Always the professionals you know…and who are Northside?😄#totp #marillion
— Marillion (@MarillionOnline) July 30, 2021

Come on lads. Play nicely.

Oh, by the way, before we get any further, this TOTP was originally broadcast on my 23rd birthday so Happy Birthday to me! I am now 53. This can’t be right surely? Something else which wasn’t right was the fact that rather than doing all his links in and amongst the studio audience, for some of them (those for promo videos and not studio performances) Mark Goodier seems to have been green screened! In this intro to “Jealousy” by Pet Shop Boys he does it against a backdrop of Neil and Chris before being zapped off screen Star Trek like. Not another new innovation?

This was the fourth and final single to be released from the duo’s album “Behaviour” and for me was the best at the time (I may have been swayed by “Being Boring” in later life though). A huge, sweeping, epic ballad with an orchestral outro which was perfectly at odds with Tennant’s dead pan vocals, it should have been a much bigger hit than its No 12 peak. Maybe if it hadn’t been the last track to be released as a single? Apparently it was the first proper song that Neil and Chris wrote together but they waited for years before recording it for an album as they wanted Ennio Morricone to score the orchestral part but they had to settle for Harold “Axel F” Faltermeyer in the end.

I seem to recall there was a guy working at our shop around this time who was going through some relationship problems with his boyfriend and who would play this track a lot on the store stereo. I’m not sure that helped to be honest.

The aforementioned Marillion next though it was a Fish-less version of the band by now. “Cover My Eyes (Pain and Heaven)” was the lead single from their sixth studio album “Holidays In Eden” and guess what? It wasn’t in the Top 40 at the time either! Yes, like Northside earlier, the TOTP producers gave the band a slot anyway. What was going on?! Makes their snarky tweet about who were Northside seem a bit lacking in credibility seeing as they were benefitting from an unusual TOTP appearance just like them. And they were even further down the charts at No 42 that week. In fairness, it did make it all the way to No 34 in the end but even so.

So who was it that took over from Fish? Well it was Steve Hogarth of course though I had to do a double take to make sure that wasn’t cockney comedian Micky Flannagan up there at first. As for the song, I don’t remember it at all but that’s hardly surprising as it meanders along going nowhere for its entire length.

Goodier is back with his Star Trek transported trick again next as he introduces Salt ‘N’ Pepa with “Do You Want Me”. His intro is not quite factually correct though:

“Do you remember the 1988 hit “Push It” by Salt ‘N’ Pepa. Well in fact they haven’t really been in the charts for about three years now they’re back though…”

Well actually Mark, since “Push It” they’d had three Top 40 hits the last of which was “Expression” in April 1990 so not really three years then. OK, “Expression” only just sneaked in at No 40 but as we have seen tonight, you could get on TOTP with less of a hit in 1991.

“Do You Want Me” would go all the way to No 5 but I have to say I don’t really remember it. If I think about Salt ‘N’ Pepa and 1991, the only single that comes to mind is “Let’s Talk About Sex” which was a No 2 hit later in the year. Both tracks were from their “Blacks’ Magic” album which despite the success of its singles was largely ignored in the UK. That was largely due to the fact that their record label released a Greatest Hits album in October which was a healthy seller peaking at No 6.

Another Madonna re-release next as, off the back of her whopper of a seller Best Of album “The Immaculate Collection”, “Holiday” was back in the charts. Unbelievably, this was the third time the song had been a hit in the UK! Originally it made No 6 in 1984, then No 2 when re-released in 1985 (kept off the top by her own “Into The Groove” single) and finally in 1991 when it peaked at No 5. So, at the risk of sounding like Craig David, does that make the 1991 entry a re-re-release?

Look, I’ll have covered this song twice before in my 80s blog (https://80spop.wordpress.com) so I don’t propose to spend too long on this one but I have to say I don’t really understand why record buyers would have forked out for this one for a third time especially as so many people had already bough the “The Immaculate Collection” album with it on over Xmas. Was it a rare mix of it? Or were there loads of Madonna completists out there? Or could it have been for this reason courtesy of @TOTPFacts:

This third issue of "Holiday" was released to tie-in with compilation "The Immaculate Collection". As well as the 7" you could also buy CD EP "The Holiday Collection", which included 3 Madonna hits left off the LP: "True Blue". "Who's That Girl" and "Causing A Commotion". #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 30, 2021

You’d have to be a real obsessive super fan to buy it just for that though surely?

It’s that nice Kenny Thomas now with his second and biggest ever hit “Thinking About Your Love”. I’ve said in previous posts that back in 1991, I really had a problem with Kenny and it seems irrational to me now. Yes, I thought this music was a bit on the bland side but there have been loads of artists down the years that have fallen on deaf ears with me and I didn’t despise them nearly as much as I did Kenny. From what I can make out he seems a thoroughly decent chap as well but boy did he get up my nose back then. Let me watch this performance again and see if it triggers some of those feelings of loathing…

…nope. Nothing there to cause such an extreme reaction in me. His backing vocalist looks a bit like TV presenter June Sarpong. Can’t be can it?

“Thinking About Your Love” peaked at No 4.

Some Breakers now starting with the first of two bands on tonight with the US spelling of the word ‘colour’ in their name. “Solace Of You” by Living Color is another one I don’t recall but listening to it now, it has a world music feel to it and a different sound altogether to hear previous hit “Love Rears Its Ugly Head”. Sort of like Paul Simon meets Eagle-Eye Cherry? Maybe not. Presumably they had to make do with a Breakers slot on the show rather than a studio performance despite being 1 and 2 places higher in the charts than Northside and Marillion respectively due to their touring commitments that Mark Goodier outlines. They had the last laugh though as “Solace Of You” was a bigger hit than either “Take 5” or “Cover My Eyes (Pain and Heaven)” when it peaked at No 33.

Another Gloria Estefan single! Wasn’t she just on the other week with a song called “Seal Our Fate”? Well, she’s back again with another track from her “Into The Light” album called “Remember Me With Love”. I really couldn’t tell you how this one went and even after watching it on this TOTP I can’t as the clip cuts off before she’s even got to the chorus! This compressed Breakers section really was pointless, talking of which this single would surely be a jackpot winning answer on Pointless if the subject was Gloria Estefan Singles.

“Remember Me with Love” peaked at No 22.

While Michael Bublé was learning to shave, Harry Connick Jr was the guy being talked of as the natural successor to Frank Sinatra in the crooning stakes. He came to global recognition back in 1990 when his album “We Are In Love” tore down the traditional musical genre walls and became a mainstream hit despite essentially being a jazz album. My wife was quite taken with him at the time and had that album. Around the same time he had recorded the music for the Billy Crystal /Meg Ryan film When Harry Met Sally from which this single “It Had To Be You” was taken. The soundtrack album was a also a massive success and earned Connick a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Male Vocal Performance.

There was such a rush of material from Harry at this time that it all got a bit confusing. In September of 1991 he released “Blue Light, Red Light” which was a big band album and was also a sizeable success whilst he also contributed a song to the soundtrack of The Godfather Part III. The albums kept on coming with one released every year throughout the 90s pretty much although that initial buzz about him was never really recovered. Effortlessly cool, Connick Jr ran a career in acting parallel to his music making appearing in more than 20 films but I think I liked him best as tail gunner Clay in Memphis Belle. Eat your heart out Bublé.

Innuendo songs – it’s a niche genre but it does exist. I’m thinking “Love Resurrection”. by Alison Moyet and of course “Turning Japanese” by The Vapours but perhaps the biggest of them all was “I Touch Myself” by Divinyls (as with Eurythmics, there was no ‘The’). Largely unknown outside of their native Australia (where they were a much bigger deal), their only song to make any inroads anywhere else in the world was their homage to masturbation. It was written by Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg who had form when it came to provocative pop songs – they also wrote “Like A Virgin” for Madonna.

I thought this was a great pop song. Immediately catchy but also having an angle with a great vocal delivery from Christina Amphlett. One of the best one hit wonders of the decade. Sadly Christina died in 2013 of breast cancer but her legacy lived on with the founding of the I Touch Myself Project which was created in her honour with a mission to create educational forums to remind women to check their breasts regularly.

“I Touch Myself” peaked at No 10 in the UK and No 4 in the US.

Ah, the very wonderful Kirsty MacColl is back in the charts. Last seen exactly two years prior to this with her version of “Days” by The Kinks, this would turn out to be her last ever Top 40 hit if you discount all of the re-releases of “Fairytale of New York”. Her lack of chart success remains a mystery and travesty. “Walking Down Madison” was the lead single from her “Electric Landlady” album (see what she did there?) and was seen as a change in direction for Kirsty with its hip/hop feel and extensive use of rapping in it. The guitar part in it reminds me of Happy Mondays and that influence would make sense as Kirsty supplied backing vocals for their hit “Hallelujah”. However, it was actually written by Johnny Marr and was one of the first songs that he wrote after the break up of The Smiths. Despite the multitude on stage here with Kirsty, I don’t think Johnny was one of them but is that Roland Rivron on bongos?

When Kirsty died in 2001, I was on a Xmas night out from work and recall seeing her face on the news on a TV screen in an electrical shop window as I walked past. I remember thinking why is Kirsty MacColl on the news? It was tragic news.

Oh and by the way TOTP graphics team, you spell her surname MacColl not McColl. Show some respect.

A brand new No 1! Cher has finally gone after what seems like ages (mind you if we thought her time at the top was a long one, watch out for Bryan Adams in a few weeks time!). The ‘Badd’ news is that it’s been replaced by that horrible “I Wanna Sex You Up” song by Color Me Badd.

The other week I commented on the fact that two of the guys in the band looked like George Michael and Kenny G. I wasn’t the only one. Here’s Beavis and Butthead making the same connection (maybe I was just regurgitating their take on it subliminally) and they’ve added another name too…

The play out video is “Shiny Happy People” by REM again. I think it’s the third time it’s been on the show and it’s that level of overkill that quickly turned a lot of people off it. I was one of them. Parent album “Out Of Time” was played to death in the Our Price I worked in and “Shiny Happy People” was never off the radio. It became one of those songs that you couldn’t listen to any more after having already reached saturation point. Other songs that triggered me like this would be “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen and “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell (which was also back in the charts in 1991!). Even the band themselves tired of it quickly and avoided playing it live whilst it was not included in the track listing for their 2003 Warner Brothers greatest hits “In Time: The Best Of REM”.

It’s not that REM were always suffering for their art with sombre, melancholic songs though. “Stand” from 1989’s “Green” album is a great pop tune full of hooks whilst 1986’s “Fall On Me” has a wonderful pop structure and melody. And yet somehow, for many of us, “Shiny Happy People” seemed to cross a line. Maybe it’s due a bit of a revisit.

For posterity’s sake, I include the chart run down below:

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Northside	Take 5	No but a pretty nifty tune all the same
2	Pet Shop Boys	Jealousy	No but it’s on my Pop Art Best Of CD of theirs
3	Marillion	Cover My Eyes (Pain and Heaven)	Cover My Ears (Pain and Hell) more like – no
4	Salt ‘N’ Pepa	Do You Want Me	Nope
5	Madonna	Holiday	No but it’s on my Immaculate Collection CD
6	Kenny Thomas	Thinking About You	No
7	Living Color	Solace Of You	Negative
8	Gloria Estefan	Remember Me With Love	Uh-uh
9	Harry Connick Jr	It Had To Be You	No but my wife had his We Are In Love album
10	Divinyls	I Touch Myself	No but I easily could have done
11	Kirsty MacColl	Walking Down Madison	This one is on the singles box though I think my wife bought it
12	Color Me Badd	I Wanna Sex You Up	Away with you!
13	REM	Shiny Happy People	Nah

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000y8wx/top-of-the-pops-06061991

TOTP 23 MAY 1991

Posted on August 6, 2021 by 80stastic

To say we were still in the grip of dance music in mid 1991, this particular TOTP seems to be pretty conventional indeed featuring some very established acts, a couple of previously indie bands plotting a course for the mainstream with a more commercial sound and a new name but very much in the traditional singer-songwriter mould. There’s only two acts that would have qualified as dance music and one of them was Color Me Badd so I’m not sure they count.

Gary ‘Safe Pair of Hands’ Davies is the host and we start with a band desperately trying to convince us that they were still relevant in the new decade despite having made their fame and fortune very much as an 80s group. T’Pau hadn’t released an album for nearly three years by this point. Could they really roll back the clock and reclaim their former glories with a new one called “The Promise”? It seemed like a big ask at the time and so it would prove to be. The first taster of the songs they had been working on was lead single “Whenever You Need Me” and it offered very little in terms of a new musical direction. In short, they hadn’t developed their sound at all. Sure, it chugged along like a good ‘un in a power ballad by numbers fashion but it felt like the band had just decided to play it safe. They call it a ‘lay up’ shot in golf.

Reaction to the band’s return was mixed at best and awful at worst. Adam Sweeting of The Guardian had this to say about the album:

“This melodramatic and syrupy concoction would comfortably have earned the band the Barbara Dickson slot on The Two Ronnies. Consider the first single, “Whenever You Need Me”, a Eurovision fourth-placer if ever there was one. Here, as elsewhere, Carol Decker’s masonry-toppling vocals are piled up in layers like a particularly indigestible aural lasagne.”

Ouch! Carol Decker still looked great and delivered the song as best she could but the rest of the band seemed to have decided that they were, in fact, serious rockers and not faded pop stars after all as they have all sprouted long hair. One of them really looks like ex- Duran Duran guitarist Andy Taylor. It isn’t but Andy’s shaggy locks look had clearly influenced him. I hope he had a good time up there on stage because I’m pretty sure this was T’Pau’s final ever TOTP appearance. “Whenever You Need Me” peaked at No 16.

OK, we might as well get this one out of the way early. As indicated earlier, Color Me Badd are on the show.

*sighs*

Quite how this lot got to become a record selling phenomenon in 1991 is beyond me. They had a shitty song and as poster boys for the new jack swing genre, they were totally unconvincing. They weren’t even that good looking. At least New Kids On The Block had that on their side (well some of them anyway). Regardless, “I Wanna Sex You Up” is headed for the top and is up to No 7 already. Apparently, it had already been offered to and turned down by the likes of Bell Biv DeVoe and Keith Sweat. Not quite up there with Decca turning down The Beatles but still a big mistake on there behalves. The track went double platinum in the US and was the 10th best selling single of the year in the UK.

The band are still going to this day (sort of) although the line up has changed a few times. Original members Bryan Abrams and Mark Calderon were still giving it there all on stage as recently as 2018 but unfortunately Abrams gave it a bit too much at this performance in New York….

…I like the Wikipedia description of the incident:

“Abrams allegedly screamed, “I’m motherfucking Color Me Badd!” as he pushed Calderon to the floor. Officers stated that alcohol may have been a factor.”

‘Alcohol may have been a factor‘ – d’ya think?!

One of those established acts next as Simple Minds are back in the TOTP studio with latest single “See The Lights” which was the second single from their No 2 platinum selling album ‘Real Life”. Like T’Pau earlier, the band were hardly breaking new ground here. It felt like they were treading water to me. There had been a big line up change around this time as the album was made without keyboardist and original band member Mick MacNeil so maybe the band were trying to show their fans that the show would be going on as usual. More changes were a foot as drummer Mel Gaynor would also depart after this album when the band went on hiatus to reassess their options. The only album they released over the next four years was their first Best Of called “Glittering Prize 81/92”. These were uncertain times.

As with the Cher album “Love Hurts” that I talked about in a recent post, “Real Life” also swapped the cover art during its sales life. The album initially sported the minimalist and arty image on the left below before re-orders came with the shot of the band on the right which was actually the original rear cover – all very confusing. Maybe the band’s management wanted to reinforce the idea that tight were essentially a trio of permanent members now.

“See The Lights” peaked at No 20.

That singer-songwriter is up next and it can only be Beverley Craven of course with her rather affecting ballad “Promise Me”. I’m assuming her off white trouser suit and white piano in this performance are an homage to John Lennon and “Imagine”. I don’t know enough about pianos to be sure whether it is a Steinway like Lennon’s. Somebody who does know about musical instruments though is one of my wife’s best friends who is a classical musician and who, like us, was also living in Manchester in 1991 and around this time she got offered a place as part of the band for Beverley’s tour which I think included European dates. However, she turned the chance down as she had already booked a holiday with her then boyfriend and the dates overlapped. They finished not long after. I think she asked Beverley to “promise me you’ll wait for me” but she didn’t. Ahem. I’ll get my coat.

It’s that REM song next. “Shiny Happy People” may sound like a gloriously uplifting breath of fresh air pop breeze but supposedly the story behind it is a lot darker. Written about the Chinese propaganda machine spreading lies about what was really going on in the country post the Tiananmen Square uprising, Michael Stipe became concerned that rather than highlighting the propaganda, the song was actually modelling it with music fans accepting wholesale that it was just a happy, piece of bubble gum pop with no other levels to it. He may have been right. Off the top of my head, other examples of songs where their sound is at odds with their subject matter would be “Luka” by Suzanne Vega and “Born In The USA” by Bruce Springsteen. I’m sure there are more. “Shiny Happy People” peaked at No 6.

Impromptu gigs – they have quite the history don’t they. All the way back in the early 60s when those Cliff Richard films like Summer Holiday and The Young Ones always seemed to have a “let’s do the show right here” scene in them through to The Beatles unannounced concert from the rooftop of their Apple Corps headquarters at Savile Row in 1969 and into the 80s with U2 performing on the roof of a liquor store at the corner of 7th St and S. Main St, LA as part of the video shoot for “Where the Streets Have No Name”. Even in 1991, the practice was still alive and well as James played an impromptu gig on the roof of Manchester’s Piccadilly Hotel on 30 January. Add to that list The Wonder Stuff whose video for “Caught In My Shadow” was filmed in the grounds of St Philip’s Cathedral (otherwise known as Pigeon Park), Birmingham. Not quite a pure impromptu event though as the band had to get permission from the local council and the police had to be consulted so news of its happening had been leaked meaning that 200 indie pop kids turned up on 20 April to watch the band perform an acoustic gig.

It looked like it was great fun and that everybody had a good time (except maybe the guy in the orange top whose hands seemed surgically sewn into his pockets). The closest I ever got to an event like that was when I was on holiday in New York in 1998 and me and my mate Robin happened to stumble upon a live outside broadcast for the 1000th Ricki Lake show. I presume there’s some footage out there somewhere of me and Robin peering at the back of a crowd trying to see who everyone there was crowding round. My wife and another friend had gone off in another direction that day and saw Donald Trump coming out of Trump Tower. When we met up with them, they excitedly told us of their day and about Trump but Robin and I felt that we eclipsed then with our Ricki Lake story. I’m not sure we did given everything that has happened since. “Caught In My Shadow” peaked at No 18.

Like T’Pau earlier, here are another band who made their name in the 80s returning with new material for the new decade. The only release that Deacon Blue had made in the 90s up to this point had been their “Four Bacharach & David Songs” EP and an album of B-sides and unreleased tracks called “Ooh Las Vegas” the previous year. “Your Swaying Arms” was their first new material since their album “When The World Knows Your Name” had, indeed, made their name and brought them huge commercial success. Unfortunately for the band, the follow up album “Fellow Hoodlums” didn’t do anywhere near the same business as its predecessor (which had knocked Madonna off the top of the charts) and was generally seen as a mis-step. Yes, it did reach No 2 in the charts thanks to a sizeable loyal fanbase but I would wager that only second single “Twist And Shout” is remembered and indeed memorable from this era of the band. “Your Swaying Arms” was a case in point. A nice enough track that lilts along but it didn’t really go anywhere.

Ricky Ross had got himself an edgy, short haircut for this performance and the young man that I was at the time would have been always pleased to see Lorraine McIntosh strutting her stuff. Lorraine and Carol Decker on the same show! I was spoilt that week! “Your Swaying Arms” peaked at No 23.

After the “Innuendo” and “I’m Going Slightly Mad” singles, “Headlong” was much more of a traditional sounding Queen song. Very much in the style of something like “Hammer To Fall” or “One Vision” but not as accomplished. I don’t think lyrics like ‘Hoop-diddy-diddy, hoop-diddy-do’ did it any favours to be honest. The video was shot in November and December of 1990. Within 12 months Freddie Mercury would be dead having succumbed to AIDS. His yellow top in the video here conjures up images of him in a similarly coloured jacket whipping up the crowd into a frenzy at Wembley stadium. Meanwhile, we can assume that Brian May, unlike most of the rest of us, did have access to The Simpsons TV show judging by his T-shirt. “Headlong” peaked at No 14.

Acting as the cheerleader of the established acts on tonight’s show comes Cher who is still at No 1 with “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)”, now in its fourth week at the top. I guess it was one of those songs that maybe appealed to people who traditionally didn’t buy much music and maybe only found themselves in a record shop once or twice a year? In today’s political vocabulary, ‘it cut through’. According to Wikipedia, her follow up single “Love And Understanding” was released this week back in 1991 even as she was still top of the pile with her previous one. Talk about striking while the iron’s hot!

Probably the only true dance act on this TOTP is the play out video. Technotronic had been having hits for a couple of year by this point but the game was nearly up come 1991. “Move That Body” was a Top 20 hit but it would be their final one and the album it was from “Body To Body” peaked at No 27 whilst debut album “Pump Up The Jam” had been a No 2 hit. Quite the contrast. I shan’t mourn their passing I have to say.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	T’Pau	Whenever You Need Me	Nah
2	Color Me Badd	I Wanna Sex You Up	Are you shitting me?!
3	Simple Minds	See The Lights	Nope
4	Beverley Craven	Promise Me	No but why wife’s friend who turned down the tour with Beverley bought the album just to torture herself some more
5	REM	Shiny Happy People	I did not
6	The Wonder Stuff	Caught In My Shadow	No
7	Deacon Blue	Your Swaying Arms	Negative
8	Queen	Headlong	Another no
9	Cher	The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)	Yes but it was all an honest mistake!
10	Technotronic	Move That Body	Do you have to ask?

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/m000y8wv/top-of-the-pops-23051991

TOTP 16 MAY 1991

Posted on August 4, 2021 by 80stastic

It’s mid May 1991 and I have been working in the Our Price store in Market Street, Manchester for about 8 months and life is OK. Except there’s one thing wrong. I haven’t yet had a Saturday off. Obviously as a Xmas temp (as I was when I started) I didn’t expect any whilst the Xmas rush was on but having secured permanent employment with the company, I have worked every Saturday since. Saturday 18 May would change all that though. How do I remember this date? Because I’d booked the Saturday off to watch the FA Cup final. Now as I have mentioned just a few times over the course of this blog, I have always been a Chelsea supporter (46 years and counting now) but I had never missed watching the Cup final regardless who was playing and 1991 wasn’t going to be any different. That year the finalists were Spurs and Nottingham Forest and I had invited some mates from out of town around to watch it. It was an eventful game but it would always be remembered as the Gazza final for all the wrong reasons…

Gazza, of course, had been a pop star less than 6 months earlier off the back of his tears at Italia ’90. His performance in the FA Cup final was more wretched even than either of his two hit singles though. Spurs and hit singles wasn’t a new phenomena restricted to just Gazza mind. The football club had released FA Cup final songs for the previous three occasions they had made the final back in the 80s, all of them with cockney rhyming slangers Chas ‘n’ Dave with the most memorable being the 1981 song “Ossie’s Dream” – ‘in the cup for Totting-ham’ and all that. 1991 was no different as “When the Year Ends in One” was released. Unlike its predecessors, it failed to make the Top 40…because it was shit. Anyway, I finally got my Saturday off to watch the game but before that was the small matter of Thursday night and TOTP. I wonder of host Bruno Brookes will mention the footy*?…

*SPOILER ALERT: He doesn’t.

What on earth is he wearing?! That clobber he’s got on makes him look like a member of a Formula 1 track side race team, ready to speed change a tyre when the driver pulls in for a pit stop. Just ludicrous! Stood next to him is a kid with floppy ‘Madchester’ hair wearing a Revenge T-shirt , Revenge being New Order’s Peter Hook’s side project band in the early 90s. The contrast is startling. Not sure that the kid’s enthusiastic clapping for acts on tonights’s show that include Danni Minogue, Jason Donovan and Cher is that sincere given his choice of T-shirt. I suspect opening act New Kids On The Block wouldn’t have been one of his faves either. Now don’t be fooled by any the studio audience whoops and hollering, by this point in their career, the band’s popularity was not at the heights it had scaled previously. In short, the wheels were coming off and they were heading down the dumper. To arrest this slide, Donnie Wahlberg convinced them to pursue a new musical direction that was more urban. “Call It What You Want” was the first offering of their new style and came from something called “No More Games: The Remix Album” which did what it said on the tin and featured hip-hop-upped versions of their previous hits. In the history of very bad ideas, this was surely in the Top 10. I get they were trying to grow and change with their pre-teen audience as they themselves grew older but surely those kids wanted grunge not dirge. The album sold moderately but didn’t really halt the band’s decline.

Apparently this was their one and only TOTP studio appearance. As such, they’ve decided to try and make it a bit special by performing the vocals live. Big mistake. Wahlberg raps adequately but Jordan Knight’s vocals, never that convincing, sound exposed and flat. Give them their due though, they could dance in sync very well. “Call It What You Want” peaked at No 12.

One of the best known songs of the 80s making a comeback in the 90s now as we see “Tainted Love ’91” by Soft Cell re-released and back in the charts. Why? Well, there was a Best Of album released by record label Mercury called “Memorabilia – The Singles” and “Tainted Love” was back out to promote it. It was actually a re-recorded version of the song as were all but two of the eleven tracks on the album. There had already been a Soft Cell Best Of album released in 1986 simply entitled “The Singles” but it had got swallowed up in the Xmas rush and scraped to a lowly No 58 in the charts. Fast forward five years and it was deemed the right time for another compilation to boldly go where its predecessor hadn’t. Advertised as a Soft Cell / Marc Almond album, it only actually included two Almond solo originals plus his 1989 No 1 with Gene Pitney “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart” and his collaboration with Bronski Beat on 1985’s “I Feel Love (Medley)”. You can imagine a conversation at Mercury about the crucial need to include “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart” in the track listing but that would mean marketing it as a Soft Cell/ Marc Almond combined project. It worked though as the album went Top 10 and the single Top 5.

For many years, I couldn’t listen to “Tainted Love” due to the amount of times I had already heard it played on radio. It got hammered at the time and is regularly given a spin whenever anything vaguely to do with the 80s is broadcast. I had reached saturation point (see also “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen). I think I might just be coming out of that phase now though. I can’t hear that much difference between the original recording and this 1991 version – maybe a slight difference in the emphasis Marc puts on some of his phrasing and a slightly less lush production? Right until this very minute I had always believed that “Tainted Love” was the best selling single of 1981 but Wikipedia tells me that the Official Charts Company recalculated the data in 2021 giving the title to “Don’t You Want Me” by The Human League. What?! Why did they feel the need to do that 40 years on? One of the great chart swizzes ever surely?

The other week Simon Mayo was telling us how Cathy Dennis was going to be No 1 in the US with “Touch Me (All Night Long)” and now here’s Bruno Brookes saying that she is No1 in the US. Slightly disingenuous as she was actually No 2 in the Billboard Hot 100 chart (their equivalent of our Top 40) but she was No 1 in the US Dance Club Songs chart. I’m being pedantic of course. Suffice to say she was doing very well commercially.

Now, is that a catsuit she’s wearing in this performance? I do believe it is. I’ve told my woman in a catsuit story before haven’t I? OK, here it is again. In my early days at Our Price, there was a woman in our shop called Natalie who also did some modelling on the side I think. Anyway, one day she turned up for work in a catsuit and asked me if I thought it was a bit too much. Suffice to say I didn’t know where to look. One day Mick Hucknall rang the shop asking to speak to Natalie (I think she met him on a night out and he was quite enamoured). I answered the phone and when I asked who it was asking for Natalie he replied ‘Mick’. I knew it was Hucknall as Natalie had told us all that he was interested in her but she wasn’t sure what to do about it. As a claim to fame, it’s pretty poor I admit.

“Touch Me (All Night Long)” peaked at No 5 in the UK.

When I saw in the running order that Dannii Minogue was on this show, I assumed it was to perform her “Love And Kisses” single but it seems I’ve written so many of these reviews that I’ve lost tracks of the weeks. “Love And Kisses” has been and gone and we are now on to Dannii’s follow up single called “Success”. Wikipedia tells me it was also known as “$ucce$$” which was a really naff idea if true.

Like its predecessor, this was lifted from her debut album and was about the trappings of celebrity (probably). It’s got a bit more of a heavier beat to it than the much lighter “Love And Kisses” but it’s still pretty anonymous. Dannii clearly tries to deliver the song’s harder edge with a sassier performance as she takes off her jacket early doors to reveal a tattoo on her right arm which appears to be an elephant (?) and a dress with the straps dangling so perilously low as to run the risk of dropping altogether potentially causing a Janet Jackson style wardrobe malfunction. Even Bruno declared that he had been concerned (well it was pre-watershed I suppose). Also, whoever styled Dannii’s hair, what was the deal with the long straggly bit covering the left side of her face? It didn’t look practical at all. The whole thing looks like she’d just dashed out fo the back of a taxi at the last second before taking to the stage.

Talking of taxis, apparently when recording her album in Brooklyn, there has been some shootings near the studio meaning taxicab drivers were reluctant to take Dannii’s fare for the journey there. She supposedly found the recording experience in New York City both “awesome” and “terrifying”. Also potentially terrifying was the prospect of Dannii repeating that TOTP performance, droopy shoulder straps and all, before the Queen at the The Royal Variety Show that year. Thankfully, I can report that although there was a fair amount of flesh on display (especially from her backing dancers), Dannii kept her modesty intact at all times (unlike when she did those nude calendars back in the mid 90s).

“Success” did a good job of consolidating the success of “Love And Kisses” by peaking at No 11 where it stayed for three weeks.

More breakneck speed Breakers again this week as we get four songs crammed into in 1 min and 20 seconds. I’m sure the TOTP producers were beginning to worry about the competition from ITV’s The Chart Show with its video only show format and were trying to redress the balance. We start with “Shiny Happy People” by REM who Bruno reckons have got a ‘massive cult following’ in the UK. I think they may have surpassed that particular status by this point with the release of the “Out Of Time” album but the arrival of this single certainly left any remnants of being a cult way behind them. Very much the band’s marmite moment, it surely can’t be denied that “Shiny Happy People” brought them to the attention of people that had never heard of them before. We sold copy after copy after copy of the album in the Our Price store I worked in off the back of this song.

Apparently written ironically with the title and chorus being based on a Chinese propaganda poster, Michael Stipe however disputes this theory. Here’s @TOTPFacts:

"Shiny Happy People" is "not meant to be ironic at all", Michael Stipe says. "We wrote it because we were challenging ourselves. I grew up a child of the '60s listening to The Monkees and the Archies and The Banana Splits…" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 30, 2021

"… The guys threw me the stupidest song that sounded so buoyant and weird and I was like, 'Okay, I accept the challenge.' So it was bubblegum music made for kids." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 30, 2021

Of course, you can’t mention “Shiny Happy People” without referring to Kate Pierson from the B-52s whose vocals on this really did add something to it. Kate’s band were enjoying a commercial renaissance themselves after the success of 1990’s “Cosmic Thing” album so that, allied with the fact that both band’s were from Athens, Georgia made the fit between them kind of inevitable.

Not convinced that this was the song that made mainstream superstars of REM? How about this evidence then. “Shiny Happy People” was used as the theme song to the unaired pilot for the sitcom Friends, known at that time as Friends Like Us.

Still not having it? Well how about this then? REM singing a version of it called “Happy Furry Monsters” on Sesame Street. Come on. Is there a safer TV show in the history of television?

“Shiny Happy People” peaked at No 6 in the UK, easily their biggest hit at the time and still their joint third highest charting UK single to this day.

“A new name to us all” next (according to Bruno Brookes) as Flowered Up breach the Top 40 for the first time. So were they a new name? Well, they had formed two years earlier and had released two singles in 1990 which made Nos 54 and 75 so not totally unknown I would wager Bruno. In fairness to Brookes, had I heard of them before “Take It” was a hit? I really can’t remember but I do recall talk of them being ‘the next Happy Mondays’ at the time. That may have been less due to their sound and more to do with them having a Bez like dancer figure in their ranks, the brilliantly named Barry Mooncult who actually looked more like Peter Gabriel (in his Genesis days) on stage with his flower petal costume.

Their chart breakthrough coincided with a move from indie label Heavenly Records to major London Records so that may explain why it happened (major label promotion budget etc). Debut (and only) album “A Life With Brian” was released later in the year and the band had already appeared on the front covers of both Melody Maker and NME before then. I think they were quite well known in the end then Bruno. Flowered Up will perhaps forever be mostly associated with their biggest hit “Weekender”, the massively epic 12 minute long single that made the Top 20 in 1992 and which the band steadfastly refused to edit for airplay reasons. Hopefully we’ll get to see that in future TOTP repeats. In the meantime, “Take It” peaked at No 34.

Giving Dannii Minogue a run for her money in the strappy top stakes is Carol Decker of T’Pau who are back in the charts with “Whenever You Need Me“. No, really. Going against all known logic, 80s popsters T’Pau were somehow still having hits into the 90s. It really did rally against the status quo as when they returned two years after their last Top 40 hit, they sounded exactly the same. Now I’d had a soft spot for this lot back in their 80s heyday but even I couldn’t have cared less about them come 1991.

“Whenever You Need Me” was the lead single from their third album “The Promise”. I remember we had lots of it in stock in our store and hardly sold a copy. Somehow it made No 10 in the charts whilst the single made No 16 (although it was their last ever trip to the Top 40). Thinking back now, I wonder if there was some chart manipulation going on from the record label with lots of FOC stock being given to chart return stores in return for a few beeps of the album barcode on the Gallup scanner. That might well be a scandalous claim, it’s just that we really didn’t sell many at all. Whatever was going on, it didn’t really work as the band called it a day after “The Promise” (two further singles released from it did nothing at all chart-wise) although there have been reunions and sporadic gigging since then. I saw Carol Decker on the bottom of the bill on one of hose Here And Now tours about 20 tears ago and she still turns up on the music TV channels every now and again presenting things like Carol Deckers 40 Ultimate Rock Chicks or something.

After getting a little too overexcited about Dannii Minogue’s dress straps, Bruno Brookes now starts getting himself in bother over a “threesome of girls”. A threesome Bruno?! You couldn’t have just said ‘trio’?! Anyway, It’s Wilson Phillips that he’s referring to and the rest of his intro makes little sense either as he says they have had No 1 success in America and are now making it big in the UK. Whilst all of that is true – “You’re in Love” was their third single taken from their debut album to top the US charts – Bruno makes it sound as if they are only just starting to make waves in the UK. Actually, they had a Top 10 hit over here the previous year with “Hold On”. Had he forgotten that already? The UK had kind of lost interest in Wilson Phillips already though. “You’re in Love” peaked at No 29 this side of the pond and they would score just a further two hit singles on our shores, neither of which was especially big.

The highest new entry next and it’s a big one. A single going straight in at No 3 wasn’t something that happened every week back in the early 90s (especially by a new, unknown act) so there must have been a big buzz around Crystal Waters and her song “Gypsy Woman (La Da Dee)”. So unusual was it that, at the time, it meant that she was the highest debuting female artist ever*.

*She was subsequently relieved of that title by Gabrielle in 1993 when “Dreams” debuted at No 2 who was in turn usurped by Whigfield a year later when “Saturday Night” went straight in at No 1. Crystal Waters didn’t quite top the charts as Bruno suggested she might, peaking instead at No 2.

The song is actually about homelessness (it was released as “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)” in some territories) but for me, it almost bordered on novelty status with that incessant and extremely annoying ‘La-da-dee/la-dee-da’ hook. Apparently though, it was very much seen as a house music classic and, more than that, it was a trailblazer of the genre in that it combined social conscience with beats. It routinely appears in music polls as one of the greatest dance tunes of the 90s! I had no idea! Maybe I should have guessed at its house music reputation judging by the dance moves Crystal gives in this performance – she performs the song as if she’s busting some moves in a club rather than in front of an audience of millions on the UK’s premier pop music show. The track is of course nothing to do with the country singer Don Williams’ song “I Recall a Gypsy Woman” which my Dad does a pretty good version of.

Talking of novelties, here was something you didn’t see that often – a contemporary Christian music (CCM) artist breaking through to have a monster hit in the mainstream charts. Amy Grant is known as ‘The Queen of Christian Pop’ but here she was back in 1991 with yet another song that had been a US No 1. How many has that been just on this TOTP? Three? If you include Cathy Dennis’s dance chart topper? “Baby Baby” was one of those radio friendly, feel-good pop songs that you found yourself humming along to even though you didn’t particularly like it. Now my wife really did like this one to be fair and even today she can sometimes be heard humming it absent-mindedly.

The heart-warmingly sweet / nausea inducing (delete as appropriate) video received a nomination for Best Female Video at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards. Totally lacking in special effects but just portraying Amy and her on screen love interest doing luv’d up things seemed to appeal to a simpler sense of what life should all be about. Love, friendship, fun…and rolling oranges back and forth to each other apparently. I’m trying to think of any other Christian Music artists that I know of. Stryper? Were they a CCM artist?

*checks Wikipedia*

Yes! They are Christian Rock band! Two things here. How did I dredge that up from my memory banks and what the Hell is Christian Rock?! “Baby Baby” peaked at No 2 in the UK.

When I think of Jason Donovan and 1991, only one thing comes immediately to mind – Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and his No 1 record “Any Dream Will Do”. Despite Bruno advising us that the show starring Donovan is opening in June, Jase isn’t here with that song. No, it’s a little ditty called “RSVP”, a single that’s so forgettable, nobody ever did reply to him. Apparently it was a ‘not released before’ track from his forthcoming Greatest Hits album but top points to anyone who remembered this bilge. In line with his recent chart track record, it wasn’t a major hit peaking at No 17. Not even Jason’s guitar playing and some leather trousers could save this one.

Cher is still at the top of the pile with “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)”. Now as its the third week of its reign at the top and I have nothing else to say about it, I dug about for some tenuous links between Cher and other artists on this TOTP and I found one! “Baby Baby” wasn’t Amy Grant’s first US No 1. That came in 1986 when her duet with Peter Cetera “The Next Time I Fall” hit the top. And who has had a massive hit duetting with the ex-Chicago man? Yes, Cher of course whose “After All” went Top 10 in the US in 1989. Small world and all that.

To finish off, we have a forthcoming No 1 record by perhaps one of the most useless bands in the whole of the decade (in my humble opinion). Color Me Badd were an R’n’B four piece who briefly threatened global dominance after their “I Wanna Sex You Up” single became a hit all around the world. The group described their style as ‘hip-hop doo-wop’ although I seem to recall a lot of talk of them being part of this new jack swing movement but maybe that was purely because of the song’s inclusion on the soundtrack to the film New Jack City. For the record, I described Color Me Badd as atrocious shit and yet the UK seemed unable to resist their …erm…charms and sent it to No 1. Was it just that it had the word sex in the title and chorus? I can just imagine loads of beered up young men sidling up to women on the dance floor in clubs up and down the country crooning “I Wanna Sex You Up” to them. Ugh!

As for Color Me Badd themselves, I have to say that the word sex wasn’t what came to mind when looking at them. If you were trying to put a hip hop boy band together, I don’t think I’d have included a Kenny G lookalike and someone trying (and failing) to look like “Faith” era George Michael but with a long bob haircut in their ranks.

Order of Appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	New Kids On The Block	Call It What You Want	Ok, I will. It was shit
2	Soft Cell / Marc Almond	Tainted Love ’91	Nope
3	Cathy Dennis	Touch Me (All Night Long)	Nah
4	Danny Minogue	Success	Failure – no
5	REM	Shiny Happy People	I didn’t
6	Flowered Up	Take It	No
7	T’Pau	Whenever You Need Me	Negative
8	Wilson Phillips	You’re In Love	But not with this song – no
9	Crystal Waters	Gypsy Woman (La Da Dee)	I’d have rather listened to Crystal Tips and Alistair sing
10	Amy Grant	Baby Baby	I didn’t. Not sure if my wife did or not
11	Jason Donovan	RSVP	Dear Jason, this is a shit song – no
12	Cher	The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)	Yes but it was all a genuine mistake
13	Color Me Badd	I Wanna Sex You Up	Hell 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 Rewind – the 90s

My memories of 90s chart music

Author: 80stastic

TOTP 25 JUL 1991

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TOTP 18 JUL 1991

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TOTP 11 JUL 1991

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TOTP 04 JUL 1991

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TOTP 27 JUN 1991

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TOTP 20 JUN 1991

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TOTP 13 JUN 1991

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TOTP 06 JUN 1991

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TOTP 23 MAY 1991

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TOTP 16 MAY 1991

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