80stastic

TOTP 09 MAY 1991

Posted on July 30, 2021 by 80stastic

It’s early May 1991 and UK comedian Bernie Winters (of Schnorbitz fame) has just died. During his career, he portrayed vaudeville entertainer Bud Flanagan whilst Bud’s comic partner Chesney Allen was played by Leslie Crowther…and guess what? It turns out that Chesney Hawkes is named after Chesney Allen! And that, dear reader, is one of the most tenuous links I have ever come up with to tie together the news of 1991 with the charts of that year. It’s especially tenuous as Chesney’s reign at the No 1 has just come to an end the other week and effectively also his time as a pop star. So who was in the charts then around now? Let’s find out….

Tonight’s host is Gary Davies who had been a TOTP presenter for nigh on a decade by this point. You have to give him points for longevity. However, before the year’s end, he would lose that gig as the ‘year zero’ revamp kicked in. In fact, he was the last Radio 1 DJ to host the show in its old format. Tonight’s he’s got some sort of yin and yang design top on which probably looked pretty cool in 1991. Probably.

The first act he introduces are Electronic with “Get The Message” but for some inexplicable reason, the version they choose to mime to here is a remix of the single and not the radio edit. The remix in question is a DNA Groove Mix (yes those blokes who remixed “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega in 1990) but it sounds limp next to the radio version. I’d even go as far as piss weak. Whose idea was this?! Bernard Sumner doesn’t seem to know how to deliver this version of the song so we get a lot of arms raised with a clenched fist and some really loose noodling around dance steps. He looks as unsure what to do as I did on my one and only (gets another Chesney reference in!) visit to The Haçienda.

“Get The Message” peaked at No 8 and was the first of just two Top 10 hits for the band.

One of the biggest stars of the last 12 months is up next as Seal is back in the studio with his new single “Future Love Paradise“. This was his second solo single after “Crazy” at the end of the previous year and was actually the lead track from an EP called “Future Love EP”. It was very much in the same vein as its predecessor although not quite as immediate I would suggest. Not content with sounding a bit like “Crazy”, Seal also went back to his uncredited No 1 with Adamski “Killer” for some inspiration, repurposing the line ‘Don’t you know that racism has a minimum future kids, Can only lead to no good’ for inclusion in the lyrics to “Future Love Paradise”.

Seal is still rocking his leather trousers for this performance though he has added the affectation of a guitar as well. As the song kicks in, he finally uses it as a musical instrument rather than a fashion accessory to do some fairly unimpressive fake strumming. Still, it was a pretty solid follow up I always thought. An Our Price colleague called Mark loved this, purchasing it on the day of release. No messing about for Mark. However, its sales in general were decent rather than spectacular and it shuddered to a halt outside the Top 10 at No 12. A bit of a comedown from the No 2 high of “Crazy” and, of course, that No 1 in “Killer”. Maybe punters were waiting for the album that Gary Davies plugged in his intro.

Another follow up to a recent huge hit next as Roxette attempt to repeat the success of their No 4 record “Joyride” with new single “Fading Like a Flower (Every Time You Leave)“. This one had much more of a rock ballad feel to it than the pure pop moment that was “Joyride” – almost “Listen To Your Heart Pt II” in fact. All the usual soft rock elements are present and correct including some guitar licks that sound a bit like “Wind of Change” by Scorpions and the obligatory final flourish key change. It’s all very professionally done and that but a little too formulaic maybe?

As with Seal, it couldn’t replicate the success of its predecessor and exactly like Seal, it also peaked at No 12.

*How much longer is this Top 5 albums feature going to go on for?! The premise of TOTP is that it was based around the singles chart! It’s not that hard is it?! Oh well, the Top 5 albums for April 1991 were

Eurythmics – “Greatest Hits”
Simple Minds – “Real Life”
Roxette – “Joyride”
Rod Stewart – “Vagabond Heart”
REM – “Out Of Time”

Pretty mainstream stuff I guess (if you are counting REM as part of the establishment now). Personally I had got very excited about the release of the first ever Eurythmics Best Of album though. It sold and sold throughout the year and looked nailed on to be the biggest seller of 1991 until Simply Red released “Stars” and it was pipped at the last. Bloody Hucknall! So much to answer for.

A live performance next from a new act now as Beverley Craven‘s time in the spotlight has arrived. Although she seemed to appear overnight as a fully fledged singing star, she’d actually been paying her dues for some years before this point. She’d been playing London pubs and writing songs since she was 18 (she was 27 at the time of this TOTP performance) and having finally been picked up by Epic Records, she had been sent to LA to work with some established songwriters and to learn her craft playing in bars and restaurants over there. Her first attempt at recording her debut album was with one Stewart Levine who was the man responsible for producing the Simply Red albums “Picture Book” and “A New Flame”. He was also the guy behind the aforementioned “Stars” album. Another man with so much to answer for then. A little bit of cosmic karma struck Levine though when Beverley didn’t like what he had done with her songs and with Epic also rejecting the recordings, a new producer was hired. Ha! Go on Bev!

New producer Paul Samwell-Smith met with more approval and the album, simply titled “Beverley Craven”, was released in July 1990….and nobody even noticed. Four singles were released from it and they all sank without trace. However, she had gone down well in Europe and so a British tour was arranged to capitalise. The single “Promise Me” was re-released in the wake of this and with heavy promotion behind it, the charts were finally cracked. The single went Top 3 which led to the inevitable public clamour for her album that had been ignored initially. Epic however employed that annoying practice of withdrawing it from sale before re-releasing it with a fanfare and a TV advertising campaign. Cue lots of frustrated punters.

Singing the song live on TOTP was a very clever decision though, imbuing Beverley with an immediate credibility as a singer-songwriter rather than a pop star. The piano playing also helped to establish her musicianship. For a while, Beverley was huge. A further two of those early singles were re-released both becoming hits and the album (when it was finally available again) spent nearly a year in the charts. The following year, she won The Best Newcomer award at the BRITS. However, after giving birth to her first daughter Mollie, the quick follow up album that Epic required was not forthcoming, eventually arriving a year later in 1993. Although a gold seller, “Love Scenes” didn’t perform as well as her debut and after a five-year hiatus due to giving birth to two more daughters, Beverley didn’t release a third album until the 90s were nearly over. By this point, she had almost gone back tho the same public profile she had had at the start of the decade. In later years, Craven has toured with Julia Fordham and Judie Tzuke as part of the Woman To Woman show and in 2018 had to take time out to recuperate after surgery for breast cancer.

Me? What did I think about it? Yeah, I quite liked “Promise Me” in the same way that I quite liked “Get Here” by Oleta Adams. I quite liked it – is that damning with faint praise? Sorry Bev, Didn’t meant to.

UPDATE: This bloke on Twitter says that was the last one. Hurray!

That was the final album chart on #TOTP by the way
— Gareth Windibank (@eightiespopkid) July 23, 2021

Ah bollocks! It’s the return of Michael Bolton and we all know wha that means. No, not his monstrous hair but that I have to fess up, once again, to having seen him live. I know, I know. Do I have to go over this all again in detail? I was drunk in a nightclub when I agreed to accompany my work colleague Andy to see him in Sheffield but before I could check with Andy what I had agreed to, he had purchased the tickets. Honest truth that! And yes, the support was Kenny G (or as Michael referred to him, ‘The G Man’). OK. Happy now?

Right. Well, “Love Is A Wonderful Thing” was the lead single from his “Time, Love & Tenderness” album and as I remember, Andy was quite enthralled by it. Not so enthralled were The Isley Brothers who filed a lawsuit for copyright infringement against Bolton and his record company due to the similarity between his song and their own also called “Love Is a Wonderful Thing” which had been released in 1966 and was a minor hit. Like very minor. No 110 in the charts minor. Bollers denied all knowledge of The Isley Brothers’ song but in 1994, a Los Angeles jury ruled in favour of the plaintiff and against him. Aghast at the decision, the hairy one appealed the verdict and the court fight continued for nearly seven more years but to no avail. Bolton, his co-writer and Sony Publishing were ordered to turn over more than $5 million in profits from the sales of his version of the song to The Isley Brothers.

The weird thing is, the two songs don’t really don’t sound that similar at all to me. See what you think. Here’s The Isley Brothers….

…and here’s the Bolton song…

I’m really not convinced. “Love Is A Wonderful Thing” (by Michael Bolton) peaked at No 23.

If you thought you were going to get away with out some horrible dance music on the show, think again. It was 1991 after all! Your weekly dose of crappy bpm is courtesy of somebody/thing called T99 and is called “Anasthasia”. Now according to Gary Davies, it was a somebody and his name was Olivier Abbeloos who was one half of Quadrophonia who supplied last week’s dose of crappy bpm. This isn’t him though. Here’s @TOTPFacts:

Olivier Abbeloos had no idea about this #TOTP! "They did a remix with a rapper and a vocalist, and I didn't like the vocalist, so I said to Nick [Halkes, co-founder of XL Recordings], 'Sorry, but this can't happen'. He called the vocalist back and we re-recorded the vocal…"
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 23, 2021

"I went back home. Four days later I was watching Top Of The Pops & they announced, '… his name is Olivier Abbeloos and he's live in the studio…' But I wasn't! I was in my seat at home. And there was Nick Halkes performing in my place, without letting me know anything!" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 23, 2021

Yeah, I couldn’t really care less either. The track and performance here comes over like a poor man’s KLF. Somehow though it peaked at No 14.

Still Cher at the top of the heap with “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” but what’s Gary Davies telling us in his intro? The film it’s taken from Mermaids, hadn’t even opened in the cinemas at this point? It wasn’t even due its premiere for two weeks with general release a further week away after that? So why was the song so popular? I was assuming that people had picked up on it from flocking to the cinema. Maybe it was being hammered on the radio. Well, if The Simpsons could have a No 1 song when hardly anybody in the UK had access to their TV show, then I guess Cher could have a hit from a film that wasn’t out yet. As cheesy as it is, I’d have “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” over “Do The Bartman” any day.

The play out video is “There’s No Other Way” by Blur. Now of course, the most striking thing about this video is Damon Albarn’s horrific bowl haircut. However, the rest of the band aren’t much better apart from drummer Dave Rowntree who has a sensible short style that he maintains to this day. A bit like when Peter Best didn’t get The Beatles haircut when John, Paul and George when in Hamburg. Luckily, for Dave he didn’t get kicked out of the band for not joining in like Pete did.

However, the other thing I have noted is those Japanese style blue willow plates that the meal is served on. They were everywhere in the 70s and early 80s. My Mum certainly had some (probably still does). Although it’s clearly meant to be very interesting, the rest of the video isn’t really. It’s just trying to be too clever by half. What was with the scarily huge trifle at the end and the shots of the worm? Pseuds! At least they were talked into changing the band name from Seymour to Blur.

“There’s no Other Way” peaked at No 8.

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

Order of Appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Electronic	Get The Message	No but I must have it on something surely?
2	Seal	Future Love Paradise	No but I had the album
3	Roxette	Fading Like a Flower (Every Time You Leave)	Nope
4	Beverley Craven	Promise Me	I did not
5	Michael Bolton	Love Is A Wonderful Thing	I promise you I didn’t
6	T99	Anasthasia	No
7	Cher	The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)	Yes but it was all an honest mistake!
8	Blur	There’s No Other Way	Don’t think I did

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/m000y2fg/top-of-the-pops-09051991

TOTP 02 MAY 1991

Posted on July 27, 2021 by 80stastic

We’ve made it to May 1991 here at TOTP Rewind which can only mean two things; the culmination of the football season and the Eurovision Song Contest. Football-wise, the England team was indebted to little Dennis Wise who scored one of the most undignified, scrappy goals ever witnessed at international level with this goal vs Turkey in a European Championships qualifier the day before this TOTP aired…

As I recall, the general consensus was that it went in off his backside. Still, they all count. As for Eurovision, the 1991 contest took place in Rome on the Saturday and…well more about what happened there later.

Tonight’s show is hosted by the interminably smug Simon Mayo and he promises us “The most incredible opening to TOTP ever, ever seen, I mean it…”. Wow! That’s some promise! Who could he have been referring to? Well, if it’s 1991 then it could only be The KLF and indeed it is as they had crashed into the charts at No 3 with their latest single “Last Train To Trancentral”. So, did the performance live up to Mayo’s hype? Not for me sadly. Yes, there was a crowd of people up there on stage so it had more numbers than most acts and yes they were wearing white robes with Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond also sporting a bull horn protruding from their hoods which was presumably all meant to signify something ‘other’ and ‘cultish’. Maybe a better word would be ‘unpalatable’ as the imagery reminds me of The Klu Klux Klan and some sort of satanic ritual. They don’t do much though do they apart from jog around in a circle at the end and shout ‘Woo Woo!’ or is it ‘Mu Mu!’? Apparently the lady in the Native American headdress is Cressida Cauty (Jimmy’s then wife) who now goes by the name of Cressida Bowyer and is currently at the University of Brighton’s School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences where she been doing ground-breaking research into liver cancer. Seems a hell of a lot more productive than playing silly buggers and shouting “Woo Woo!’ on TV to me.

Mayo was wrong about another thing as well. His confident proclamation that “Last Train To Trancentral” would be a No 1 proved to be false as it stalled at No 2. Ha! Take that dullard!

Whilst 1991 was undoubtedly the year of The KLF, it was also an annus mirabilis for Cathy Dennis. We’d last seen Cathy back in 1989 when she was the featured vocalist on D-Mob’s “C’mon And Get My Love” single but here she was, striding out on her own with “Touch Me (All Night Long)“. Now I had no idea until now that this wasn’t a Cathy Dennis original (which was a surprise given her career as a prolific songwriter post being a pop star) but was in fact by somebody called Fonda Rae who had a minor hit with it it 1984 (it also had a Slade style spelling as it was entitled “Tuch Me (All Night Long)”). Wanna hear it? Ok then…

I say it’s not a Cathy Dennis original but she did rewrite the verses retaining just the chorus hook. The track proved to be a winner both with pop fans and dance heads as it went to No 5 in the UK Top 40 and No 1 in the US dance chart. Is that what Mayo meant when he did another of his predictions as he says in his introduction that “Touch Me (All Night Long)” was about to be No 1 in the US? If he meant the Billboard Hot 100 chart then he was wrong again as it peaked at No 2.

Anyway, back to Cathy and the single lit the touch paper for her career as she racked up a further three Top 40 hits this calendar year, all coming from her debut solo album “Move To This” which itself was a UK No 3, gold seller. For a while she looked like she had everything – the songs, the appeal, the looks and the moves. She certainly looked a better bet for longevity than some of her peers like Dannii Minogue. Unfortunately the two years between this and her next album saw grunge happen and she lost a lot of ground and her place in the scheme of things from which she never really recovered. Her final album as a recording artist, 1997’s “Am I The Kinda Girl?”, rode the Britpop zeitgeist and was critically well received but floundered commercially peaking at No 78.

OMD are next or that should really be OMD Pt II as this is the version of the band without founding member Paul Humphreys. I like the fact that remaining original Andy McCluskey didn’t see any need to change his renowned and wonderfully awful dancing style despite the band’s new era. He explained the back story of his dancing in an interview in The Scotsman, saying that it stemmed “from the perception that we were making boring robotic intellectual music that you couldn’t dance to. I was trying to say, ‘No, no, you can dance to it, look, I’m dancing to it…”. Hmm. It was famously dubbed the ‘Trainee Teacher Dance’ by DJ, presenter and writer Stuart Maconie. At least Andy went for a leather jacket look and not a comfy cardigan with patches on the elbows.

“Sailing On The Seven Seas” peaked at No 3 whilst parent album “Sugar Tax” went platinum. Fast forward 30 years and that quip by Mayo that the album’s title was “as good a name for a tax as any” looks pretty silly doesn’t it given that just last week we heard of government plans to raise a sugar and salt tax to help to break Britain’s addiction to junk food.

OK, we arrive at the Eurovision part of the show. The UK entry for 1991 was Samantha Janus with a little ditty called “A Message To Your Heart”. The contest took place in Rome on 4th May and by this point in our history, the UK had only finished outside of the Top 10 once since 1978. Indeed, we’d finished 2nd twice on the spin at the end of the 80s and had been a respectable 6th the previous year. Twelve months on and our competing song was once again written by Paul Curtis who had penned the previous year’s entry, “Give A Little Love Back To The World” by Emma. Whereas that song had an environmental theme, “A Message To Your Heart” was all about those in the world suffering from poverty and starvation with the lyrics offering up a contrast of the have and have nots with lines referring to those who “are hungry just from being born” and those of whom “their only hunger being greed”. That was all very laudable but the sound of the song was completely at odds with its lyrics in that it was defiantly up tempo. In this TOTP performance, Janus ploughs on through it like a soft rock anthem with plenty of air grabs, fist clenches and tossing of her hair. She also does a lot of grinning, smiling and there’s that little prayer hand gesture which reminds me of Aneka of “Japanese Boy” fame. It’s not really her fault I guess – it just doesn’t make any sense in the context of the song.

Come the day of the contest itself, Janus was given the 20th singing slot out of 22 performers. I’m not sure that helped her and neither did her pink mini-dress outfit when singing about poverty and starvation…that and her dreadful out of tune singing obviously. Samantha finished 10th overall which was seen as quite the disaster back then but which would be seen as a right result these days. Janus was devastated though and thought it would spell the end of her. Fortunately for her, she recovered and went onto have a very successful acting career both on stage and on TV with her most memorable role being that of Ronnie Mitchell in Eastenders I would imagine though my personal favourite of her shows was Game On.

As for the UK ‘s relationship with Eurovision, we recovered some ground during the rest of the 90s with three 2nd place finishes building to our last win with Katrina and the Waves in 1997. Since the turn of the century though, it’s all pretty much turned to shit.

“A Message To Your Heart” peaked at No 30 in the UK charts.

I never knew Nomad had a second hit! Well, if I did I’d forgotten all about it but here is the follow up to “(I Wanna Give You) Devotion” called “Just A Groove”. Right, let’s have a listen to it then…

…my God that was awful! There’s no tune in there at all. It’s just a backing track with some bullshit lyrics about Nomad having the music. Vocalist Sharon D. Clarke went on to have a Laurence Olivier Award winning acting career and has appeared in many West End productions and also had a wide TV career appearing in shows such as Soldier Soldier, Eastenders and most recently in the eleventh series of Doctor Who. Now I don’t know if it’s that bit of info which is causing me to hear this but it when she’s singing ‘Nomad’s got the groove’ it sounds a bit like ‘Nomad’s Dr Who’.

If that wasn’t weird enough, check this lot of trivia out. Having already discussed in length the 1991 Eurovision Song Contest earlier in the blog, it turns out that, in 2000, Sharon took part in the Eurovision qualifier A Song for Europe as part of Six Chix who came second to Nikki French. Now if you know your 90s chart history, that name will ring a bell as Nikki scored a No 5 hit in 1995 with a dance version of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. However, 9 years prior to that in 1986, she recored a song called “Dirty Den” released under the name Whiskey and Sofa. Dirty Den? Eastenders? The soap that Sharon appeared in? Weird no? Oh suit yourselves!

Meanwhile band member Steve McCutcheon, known professionally as Steve Mac, would go on to a hugely successful record producer and songwriter career having had a hand in 30 No 1 singles in the UK chart including four for Irish boyband Westlife. However, he was still clearly honing his skill backing 1991 as “Just a Groove” peaked at a lowly No 16 and was Nomad’s last ever UK chart hit.

Simon Mayo’s smugness gets an outing again next as he informs us all that “Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” by Paul Young and Zucchero was an old Record of the Week on his Radio 1 Breakfast Show and that it is now shooting up the charts. Yeah, whatever Simon. Presumably this wasn’t anything to do with your own musical choice but was the result of a deal brokered between the record company and the Radio 1 playlist team made up of producers, music editors etc.

Back to Zucchero and Paul though and last week, the hashtag Keith Lemon was trending on account of the Italian singer’s resemblance to Leigh Francis’ comedy character. However, somebody this week posited the theory that he looked more like Coronation Street‘s Jim MacDonald. Let’s have look then…

Nah, definitely Keith Lemon for me.

“Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” was taken from Paul’s very first Best Of collection called “From Time To Time – The Singles Collection” which was a huge seller in the UK. Since then, his record label Columbia have released a further eleven Paul Young Best Ofs under various different titles. That’s more than double the amount of studio albums he recorded for them! Talk about getting the most out of your money!

“Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” peaked at No 4.

After being a Breaker last week, Frances Nero has leapt up the charts nine places which warrants a studio performance of “Footsteps Following Me”. The title of the song sounds pretty sinister when you think about it. Having examined the lyrics, it seems to be about the need for trust between lovers with phrases like ‘I am allergic to jealousy’ and ‘love without freedom will die’. There’s also a line which is utterly banal and lazy and that line is ‘free as a bird high in the sky’. Oh come on! Primary school kids could write better than that!

“Footsteps Following Me” peaked at No 17 whilst Frances Nero sadly passed away in 2014.

Chesney is gone – toppled by the might of Cher and an old 60s song that was included on the soundtrack to her latest film Mermaids. It’s not quite how I imagined him going out really. Surely someone more ‘happening’ (as the TOTP hosts were likely to say) in 1991 like The KLF or Seal would have been expected to dethrone *Chezza? Cher though? I for one didn’t see it coming.

Within a few short weeks of “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” being at No 1, Cher released an album called “Love Hurts”. Nothing very exceptional about this of course but there are couple of little anecdotes about the album’s release that I recall. Firstly, “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” wasn’t on it. Except that it was. What am I banging on about? Well, it wasn’t included on the US release of the album as the single had not been anywhere near as popular over there where it peaked at No 33. Across Europe however, it was huge and was a No 1 in Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Norway and the UK of course. Consequently, the European version of the album did include it as a bonus track. Presumably that decision helped to send the album to No 1 in the UK where it was a three times platinum seller.

Secondly, there was the issue of its cover. When it was originally released it had some weird mirror reflection artwork going on with a banner across it proclaiming the album’s title. This was the version released in North America and also the initial worldwide copies. Once we started re-ordering it at the Our Price I worked in, the albums that arrived had an entirely different image of a red haired (and very air brushed) Cher against a plain white background. What was that all about?

*Does the nickname Chezza work for both Chesney and Cher? Just wondering.

The play out video is “Get Ready!” by Roachford. Despite having released a dozen or so albums and more than 30 singles over the course of his career, Andrew Roachford says that somebody mentions his biggest hit “Cuddly Toy” to him at least once every day which reminded me of this…

“Get Ready!” peaked at No 22.

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

Order of Appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	The KLF	Last Train To Trancentral	No
2	Cathy Dennis	Touch Me (All Night Long)	Negative
3	OMD	Sailing On The Seven Seas	Not the single but I’m sure it’s on a Best Of CD of their that I have
4	Samantha Janus	A Message To Your Heart	Of course not
5	Nomad	Just A Groove	Nah
6	Paul Young / Zucchero	Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)	No but I bought that Best Of album with it on
7	Frances Nero	Footsteps Following Me	Nope
8	Cher	The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)	Yes but it was all a big mistake honest!
9	Roachford	Get Ready!	Yes albeit from the Bargain Bin

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/m000xw3v/top-of-the-pops-02051991

TOTP 25 APR 1991

Posted on July 25, 2021 by 80stastic

The record company release schedules were very busy back in April 1991 as there are 10 songs new to the charts on this particular TOTP. Also having a busy old time of it was one David Icke who had resigned from the Green Party and then held a press conference to announce to the world that he was a son of the Godhead and that the world was going to end in 1997 after a period of tidal waves and earthquakes. Four days after this TOTP aired, he appeared on Wogan and gave an interview that was catastrophic to his career and credibility.

The following month, a crowd of youths gathered outside Icke’s home and went all Life Of Brian by chanting “We want the Messiah” and “Give us a sign, David”. Oh dear.

He resurfaced when the pandemic struck suggesting that there was a link between the COVID-19 and 5G mobile phone networks. To think he just used to be that fresh faced sports presenter on Grandstand when I was a kid. I remember the media storm surrounding Icke at this time and in particular the reptilian conspiracy theory he promoted that shapeshifting lizard like aliens control Earth by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate human societies. Didn’t he even say that the Queen was a reptile? Fast forward 30 years and we are overrun by conspiracy theories including QAnon and the anti vaccination protesters in London this weekend. Icke and his son were at the latter by the way. Have we / Icke learned nothing? Hopefully there will be no trace of a conspiracy theory or any playing of records backwards to reveal satanic messages in any of tonight’s acts…

…we start with EMF and their latest single “Children”. The third track to be taken from their “Schubert Dip” album, it was very much still in the same vein as previous hits “Unbelievable” and ‘I Believe” and maybe that was the problem. They were starting to sound a bit samey. Certainly there was a downturn in commercial fortunes with this one as it failed to make the Top 10 as its predecessors had and indeed only just scraped into the Top 20 at No 19. I mean, there was nothing wrong with it per se but watching the performance back, was there a tiny bit of melancholy in lead singer James Atkin’s eyes indicating that maybe this pop star lark wasn’t all it was cracked up to be?

A second album “Stigma” was released in 1992 but did little to reverse their decline in popularity and indeed was only in the charts for two weeks (its predecessor had charted for 19 weeks). By the time of 1995’s third album “Cha Cha Cha”, they had resorted to teaming up with another of tonight’s acts Vic Reeves for a version of The Monkees “I’m A Believer” which although a big hit (No3), failed to revive their career. Follow up single “Afro King” (which was actually fantastic) missed the charts and they disappeared before resurfacing in the new millennium for a series of reunions.

Just when I thought we’d got away without any conspiracy theory stuff, host Nicky Campbell (who seems to be on one tonight) hooks us back in with the old ‘what does EMF stand for?’ conundrum. Many a theory had been posited about this including ‘Epsom Mad Funkers’ but it was generally believed to be ‘Ecstasy Mother F*****s’. In any case it certainly wasn’t ‘Exciting New Music’ as Campbell jokes. Just lame. To be fair to Campbell, he did tweet this when the repeat was shown on BBC4 thereby demonstrating a bit of self knowledge at least:

Daughter turned it on. Torture. Watching is like the most painful therapy session ever. #totp pic.twitter.com/jVNlUmZmR6
— Nicky Campbell (@NickyAACampbell) July 16, 2021

I don’t remember this one at all …except I do. What am I talking about? Well, the track is “Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)” by De La Soul which I have no recall of but the chorus is nicked from “Name And Number” by Curiosity Killed The Cat which is still in my memory banks (some might say unfortunately). This was the lead single from their second studio album “De La Soul Is Dead” but the only single I remember from that was the next one called “A Roller Skating Jam Named “Saturdays”” and its ‘Saturday, it’s a Saturday’ chorus.

Wasn’t there some fuss about the album’s title and also its cover with its fallen over, broken flower pot and strewn flowers image? Did some critics read into it that it meant that the trio were splitting up? In actual fact, it was meant to refer to a change in musical direction and the dead imagery referred to the death (or at least a deliberate distancing from) the “D.A.I.S.Y.” (Da Inner Sound, Y’all) scene. Although the album sold pretty well (it went Top 10 in the UK), it seems to me that it is nowhere near as revered as their iconic debut “3 Feet High And Rising”. “Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)” peaked at No 10.

This is the single I was meant to buy for my wife the other week but somehow I bought her home “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” instead! How could I get Vic Reeves and Cher mixed up?!

Me not buying my wife Vic Reeves single in 1991

For two years we had all been enamoured with Vic Reeves Big Night Out on Channel 4 (at least myself and my wife had been) and I think I’m right in saying that the second and final series had just aired the week before this single came out. That single was a cover of “Born Free”, the title song from the 1966 film of the same name sung by Matt Monro (hence Nicky Campbell’s name check at the end of the performance). However, it wasn’t that track that my wife wanted but the B side which was “Oh! Mr Songwriter” with which Vic always closed each episode of Big Night Out.

Coming off the back of the success of the TV series, the single was a huge success peaking at No 6 and was followed by an album called “I Will Cure You” later in the year which would make the Top 20 and include an actual No 1 record in Vic’s collaboration with The Wonder Stuff on a cover of Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy”.

Vic can’t resist subverting the norms of a TOTP performance here by having his backing singers indulge in a plate of sandwiches half way though whilst he shows the audience a flip chart of birds. Here’s Vic on that performance via @TOTPFacts:

Vic Reeves on his first #TOTP appearance: "I sang the song and they dropped a load of tinfoil down. They didn't tell me about it, and I swallowed half of it and started gagging halfway through the song."
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 16, 2021

By the way, I did ultimately correct my error and buy the Vic Reeves single for my wife so no conspiracy there.

One of the best singles of the whole decade next? Possibly. “Get The Message” by Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner super group Electronic appeared some 18 months after their first single “Getting Away With It”. The intervening length of time and the fact that “Getting Away With It” was so dominated by the distinctive vocals of Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant made it feel like this single was almost by a new artist altogether. And what a song it was! It just sits together effortlessly, an almost perfect combination of Marr’s musicality, Sumner’s low register singing and Primal Scream vocalist Denise Johnson’s wonderful vocal talents at the song’s coda. Plus there was that incessantly catchy, swirling ‘wah-wa-wa wah’ sound effect at the end of the second chorus.

An eponymous album followed in May and I remember there being some disappointment amongst punters that the track listing didn’t include “Getting Away With It”. I think there was an import version of it that did include that track if you were prepared to pay around £18 for the CD though I’m not sure we sold many of those in the Our Price I was working in. Subsequent releases have rectified that omission. The album was a big success peaking at No 2 and selling over a million copies worldwide. “Get The Message” itself peaked at No 8.

Some Breakers and the TOTP producers are sticking with the pile ’em high strategy of the previous week as they cram 4 songs into 1 minute and 30 seconds. We start with Roachford whom we haven’t seen for nigh on two years. “Get Ready!” was the new single and also the title of their second album. I had a bit of a soft spot for Roachford – “Cuddly Toy” had been a floor filler at the Sunderland nightclub of my choice when I had been a student up in the North East – and though this track wasn’t anywhere near as immediate as their biggest ever hit, it was a bit of a grower I thought. It grew on me so much that I bought it in the end although it was from the bargain bin of our Summer sale later in the year. The album sold steadily though it was hampered by a lack of any further hit singles from it

I once saw Roachford live – it must have been about 1994 – as I got on the guest list for their gig via the Sony rep who came to our store. They were pretty good I have to say. Andrew Roachford would later join Mike + The Mechanics as their some time vocalist and also released an album as recently as 2020 called “Twice In a Lifetime” which charted at No 31 on the UK album chart – the first Roachford album to make the Top 40 for 23 years.

“Get Ready!” the single peaked at No 22.

Yet another AC/DC single! There have been a plague of them since I’ve been writing my 80s and 90s TOTP blogs. “Are You Ready” is their ninth Top 40 hit in the period I have covered and guess what? It sounds the same as all the other ones! No I don’t care, it does! Plus, the video is exactly the same as well – the band live in concert with Angus Young in his schoolboy uniform and Brian Johnson in his flat cap. Give it a rest! “Are You Ready” peaked at No 34 and was from the band’s gold selling album “The Razors Edge”.

I think I remember this next one or am I thinking of a different record altogether? Frances Nero had recorded for Motown in the 60s but her only UK Top 40 hit was “Footsteps Following Me”. Apparently it was written by Ian Levine, the man behind the UK Hi-NRG scene and who worked with a load of artists in the 80s including Pet Shop Boys, Bucks Fizz, Erasure, Kim Wilde, Bronski Beat and Bananarama. “Footsteps Following Me” peaked at No 17 and was dubbed by British DJs as ‘the soul anthem of the nineties’ (it says on Wikipedia).

What is that other tune that “Footsteps Following Me” reminds me of? Oh yeah, it’s this…

Did someone mention Bananarama earlier? Here they are doing The Doobie Brothers. I really don’t remember this but the internet tells me that their version of “Long Train Running” was the third single to be released from their “Pop Life” album and was basically only recorded to fill up the album track listing. The TOTP graphics team were at it again with this one calling it “Long Train Coming” which is probably another record altogether!

The 1973 original wasn’t a hit in the UK at the time but it was remixed in 1993 and became a Top 10 smash whilst this rather weedy sounding version by the Nanas peaked at No 30.

A bit of pop history now as the get our first national view of Blur. Hands up those watching this performance who thought this lot would become a giant figure bestriding the UK musical landscape for years to come? Yeah, me neither. I quite liked “There’s No Other Way” though I have to say. Somehow though, at the time, I didn’t feel the need to explore their debut album “Leisure” which was released a few months later. Had I done so and developed a loyalty to Blur three years before Oasis appeared, I may have been on their side in the war versus the Manc lads of 1995.

This performance though did little to convince me that they weren’t just another of those floppy fringed, indie bands like Ride but put into drug induced overdrive. Drug induced? Looks at the state fo Damon Albarn’s wide eyed stare and Alex James’s clueless leaping about. Both clearly under the influence. Don’t take my word for it though. Here’s Damon himself courtesy of @TOTPFacts:

Before playing "There's No Other Way" at the Reading Festival in 1999, Damon Albarn recounted Blur's #TOTP debut, saying "[Alex and me] both took an E before we went on stage. Before us, Vic Reeves was signing that 'Born Free' song… and he had all this glitter…"
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 16, 2021

"… And it was really nice, probably the best time I ever had at Top Of The Pops. And our record company gave us those drugs! Isn't that fucked up?" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 16, 2021

The single peaked at No 8 whilst the album also went Top 10. Even so, their elevation into the national consciousness was still a good few years off. There’s no other way of seeing it though, “There’s No Other Way” was a statement of intent.

I said the other week that I didn’t remember “Seal Our Fate” by Gloria Estefan when it was included in the Breakers section. I clearly can’t have caught this episode of the show either as who could forget Gloria performing the single in that PVC dress?! Blimey! She has a whole parade of people up there on stage backing her (The Miami Sound Machine?) but nobody is looking at them. Erm…anyway…unusually the single was a bigger hit in the UK than it was in the US peaking at No 24 over here but only No 53 across the pond.

It was used in a Pepsi advert also featuring Gloria herself which I also don’t remember but here it is:

He’s still there for a fifth week at the top and as Nicky Campbell advises us, nobody had achieved such a run at No 1 since Paul Hardcastle with “19” in 1985. Was there some sort of music industry conspiracy happening to keep Chesney Hawkes in pole position for all this time? How could such a dastardly deed be done and to what end? Had anybody thought to ask David Icke about “The One And Only”?

Despite that plea from Jakki Brambles last week, Chezza doesn’t seems have had his locks shorn at all. To be fair, his brother on the drums has an even worse haircut. Are all those shrieks from the TOTP audience genuine or were they result of the floor staff whipping them up into a false frenzy? If Chesney-mania was a thing, it was very short-lived. Just one Top 30 single was to follow and that was that. Only Sajid Javid’s time as Health Secretary before he caught COVID himself was shorter. Chesney seems at one with himself and his time as a pop star though. He now lives in Los Angeles with his American wife Kristina and their three children and occasionally performs on the nostalgia circuit.

The play out video is “Quadrophonia” by Quadrophonia and guess what? I have zero recall of this one. This seems to be happening a lot lately. Back in the 80s I seemed to know every song that made the Top 40 (and a fair few that didn’t) but the 90s is proving a horse of a different colour altogether. Maybe I was out having a life as opposed to spending all my hours sat in a room listening to Radio 1.

Apparently this lot were a Dutch/Belgian electronic music collective – like we didn’t have enough of them clogging up the charts back then – who thought it would be a clever trick to make a play on words of the title of The Who’s 1973 album and the 1979 film it inspired. The sound that they came up with was a horrible noise. The end. Cue someone riding a Vespa over a cliff top at Beachy Head.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	EMF	Children	No but I bought that Afro King single the extra tracks on which were basically a mini greatest hits including Children
2	De La Soul	“Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)”	Nope
3	Vic Reeves	Born Free	Yes for my wife (eventually!)
4	Electronic	Get The Message	Not the single but I must have it on something surely?
5	Roachford	Get Ready!	Yes (albeit it from the bargain bin)
6	AC/DC	Are You Ready?	Not for this garbage no
7	Frances Nero	Footsteps Following Me	Nah
8	Bananarama	Long Train Running	No
9	Blur	There’s No Other Way	See Electronic above
10	Gloria Estefan	Seal Our Fate	Negative
11	Chesney Hawkes	The One And Only	I did not
12	Quadrophonia	Quadrophonia	Not likely

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/m000xw3q/top-of-the-pops-25041991

TOTP 18 APR 1991

Posted on July 22, 2021 by 80stastic

Those generous TOTP producers have seen fit to cram 14 (FOURTEEN!) songs into this particular show which means lots of typing and putting my grey cells through their paces for old muggins here. They’ve shoe horned 5 Breakers in this week which is the reason for the high song count and having timed it, they are squeezed into just 1 minute and 21 seconds of screen time. That’s 16 seconds per song. What was the point of that?! OK, there weren’t too many places that you could watch a music video back in 1991 so was it a case of something was better than nothing? I’m not sure. There was The Chart Show which was a staple of Saturday morning TV by this point having moved from Channel 4 to ITV in 1989 so maybe they were trying to compete with that? There was also MTV Europe though how may of us had access to that back in the day? Whatever the reason, I hope for my sake that this was a one off and the TOTP producers showed some self control in the future.

Tonight’s host is Jakki Brambles and for some weird reason concerning how the brain stores totally irrelevant and throw away bits of info for years, there are some parts of this show that I can really remember mainly surrounding Jakki’s to camera bits. More of that later though as we start the show with James and “Sit Down”. The boys are at No 2 by now and still have designs on that No 1 spot. *SPOILER ALERT* However, the fact that they spent three weeks there and were unable to dislodge Chesney Hawkes must have rankled with not only the band but also their army of fans. Possibly music lovers in general saw it as a monstrous injustice. Possibly.

Anyway, they’re in the studio this week and look happy enough with life especially guitarist Larry Gott who laughs and smiles his way through the performance. After leaving the band in 1995, Gott took up studying Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University, specifically furniture design. Somebody I worked with at Our Price in Stockport was also on the course with him and said he didn’t talk much about James at all preferring to just be a student with the rest of the cohort. He graduated in 2000 and won awards for his ‘reaction recliner’ design including the Allemuir Award for Industry and the Blueprint Award for Creativity. Not to be outdone, my colleague at Our Price became a successful freelance graphic designer and photographer. “Outstanding” – as Kenny Thomas might have said.

So if it wasn’t James who would dethrone Chesney, who did do the deed? In an unlikely turn of events, the honour fell to Cher who, despite her last album “Heart Of Stone” being a Top 10 success in 1989, hadn’t had a UK No1 single for 26 years when she topped the charts with “I Got You Babe” as part of Sonny & Cher. The song that rectified this for her was a cover of “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)” which had originally been a minor hit for Betty Everett in 1968. Cher’s version was taken from the soundtrack to her latest film project called Mermaids. This family comedy-drama which also stars Bob Hoskins, Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci is rarely shown on TV these days but, and I haven’t seen it since going to the cinema to catch it in 1991, is actually OK as I recall. A little too heavy on the quirkiness and I found Winona’s character a tad annoying but not bad.

The film’s soundtrack featuring original 60s tracks by the likes of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons and Smokey Robinson and The Miracles sold reasonably well off the back fo the success of “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)” but I never realised until now that there was a second Cher track on the album called “Baby I’m Yours” (another cover) which had been released as its lead single but which did bugger all in the charts.

So why did the UK go mad for the second single? I really don’t know. Was the film a massive commercial success? According to IMDB, it was ranked the 20th top film in the UK for 1991 – not too shabby but hardly a phenomenon. “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)” on the other hand was the third best selling single of the year in 1991 behind only 16 weeks at No 1 “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” by Bryan Adams and Xmas No 1 “Bohemian Rhapsody”/”These Are the Days of Our Lives” by Queen. Sadly, my purchase of it added to its popularity. Now just hold on before you all pile on. The whole thing was a mistake. Firstly, I bought it for my wife and not me. Secondly, she didn’t even want it either as I had purchased the wrong thing entirely in Cher. She had wanted a completely different single that features in next week’s TOTP. Quite how I managed to make such a mistake, I have no idea. The fact that back in 1989 I had bought another Cher single (“If I Could Turn Back Time”) had nothing to do with the whole sorry escapade at all and that is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So help me God!

Whoah! OMD? In the charts in 1991? Yes, it was true. One of the most surprising comebacks of the year (maybe even the decade) was the return of OMD but they weren’t the same beast we had last seen in the Top 40 way back in 1986 with “(Forever) Live And Die”. No, for one, founding member Paul Humphreys had done a runner and left the band! How so? Well, after reaching a commercial peak around the middle of the 80s with the huge US hit “If You Leave” from the Pretty In Pink soundtrack, things had started to unravel. Their next album “The Pacific Age” had been recorded under duress and the results were patchy. The aforementioned “(Forever) Live And Die” had been a sizeable hit but it was the only one from the album which received mixed critical reviews.

Suffering from a creative drought, a Best Of album was released in 1988 which was a huge success going three time platinum but the band were clearly trading on former glories. By 1989, Humphreys (along with two other band members ) had had enough and left to form footnote-in-electronic-music-history band The Listening Pool whilst Andy McCluskey committed to carry on under the OMD name.

“Sailing on the Seven Seas” was the first post Humphreys single and a curious thing it was too. Listening to it now, it seems quite pedestrian though I don’t recall thinking that at the time. That almost shuffling glam rock back beat allied with McCluskey’s plaintive vocals and a decidedly weird Jean Michel Jarre style keyboard solo in the middle and yet the UK record buying public lapped it up. The single would rise all the way to No 3, OMD’s highest charting hit since “Souvenir” some 10 years earlier. I don’t think either McCluskey or record label Virgin really expected that sort of success if they were being honest.

Things would get even better though as “Sailing on the Seven Seas” paved the way for the successful launch of parent album “Sugar Tax” which would go platinum in the UK and spawn a further Top 10 single in “Pandora’s Box”. Remarkable stuff really. OMD were back and how!

Seriously?! Still with Black Box?! That ship hasn’t sailed, struck an iceberg and sunk yet?! This must surely be their last TOTP appearance (please!)? Anyway, they’re here once more with “Strike It Up” and…hang on…did Jakki Brambles say “Will you welcome Black Box featuring Steps”?! Steps?! As in Steps that did “Tragedy”? As in ‘H’ from Steps? Relax, it will be a few years before that lot appear in these TOTP repeats. No, this was Stepz (with a ‘z’ see?) who was the rapper dude on the track. And who was he? Well, as far as I can ascertain, he also went by the names Stepsi and Stepski but his real name was Lee Bennett Thompson and he also worked with Quartz who did that Carole King cover with Dina Carroll. Yeah, I don’t care either. Next!

After the Levis-inspired success of “Should I Stay or Should I Go”, it was inevitable that a follow up single was released by The Clash and what more obvious candidate could there be than “Rock the Casbah“. Similarly pulled from their “Combat Rock” album, it made complete sense even though it had already been a No 30 hit in the UK 9 years previously. I certainly remember it being in the charts back in 1982 but curiously have little memory of it being an even bigger it (No 14) in the charts in 1991.

The video prompted some controversy featuring as it does a Muslim hitchhiker and a Hasidic Jew befriending each other on the road on the way to a Clash gig which, according to director Don Letts, was all “about breaking taboos”. At one point they are seen eating hamburgers in front of a Burger King restaurant whilst later on the Muslim character is seen drinking a beer. Although the track was initiated by the band’s drummer Topper Headon, that isn’t him in the video as he had been sacked for continuous drug abuse by then. That’s actually original drummer Terry Chimes on the drums that we see on screen.

Despite the recent Gulf War BBC black list, the track was chosen by Armed Forces Radio to be the first song broadcast on the service covering the area during Operation Desert Storm and to Joe Strummer’s horror, the phrase “Rock the Casbah” was written on an American bomb that was to be detonated on Iraq during the the conflict. Commercially, it was the biggest US hit that the band ever had and, alongside “Should I Stay or Should I Go”, is predominantly what The Clash are known for ever the pond in some quarters and let’s be fair, it is a f*****g tune!

It’s The Mock Turtles again with “Can You Dig It?”! Excellent! The last time they featured in this blog I rambled on and on about how they had done an instore PA at the Our Price where I was working in Manchester and that I had got on the guest list for their gig that night at The Manchester Academy and about their connection to Jude Law. This week I have dredged up my signed copy of their “Two Sides” album from that PA. I didn’t queue up to have it signed I should add. Rather it was a left over copy after they had finished and I recall having a long discussion with the Assistant Manger about how it should be treated as a promo as it was part of a promotion event. I seemed to put a lot of stock in the fact that it was signed I think rather than if it had cost the shop any money to get it in which surely was the deciding factor when it came to its promo status. For the life of me I can’t recall if it was supplied by the record company FOC or if the shop was charged fo it but the AM won and I had to cough up the readies to buy it. It’s a pretty good album with some lovely pop tunes on it but it does have an awful cover, signatures or no.

“Can You Dig It?” was a hit all over again in 2003 when it was used in that Vodafone advert featuring David Beckham who was still in his Hoxton Fin hairstyle period back then…

…but for me, they will always be a part of my 1991.

“Can You Dig It?” peaked at No 18 on its initial release and at No 19 in 2003.

It’s those pesky, high speed Breakers next, four of which were never shown on the show in full. Five write ups for me then all for the sake of 1 min and 21 seconds worth of videos. Cheers TOTP producers! We start with “My Head’s In Mississippi” by ZZ Top which I have zero recollection of. It only got to No 37 in the charts so I could be forgiven I guess. It sounds a bit like the band doing their best Johnny Cash impression from the 16 seconds we got to hear of it on TOTP – I couldn’t be bothered to root out the track in full to be honest. It was taken from an album called “Recycler” which I don’t remember either though it did have the track “Doubleback” included on it from Back to the Future Part III apparently.

ZZ Top would return the following year with a cover of the Elvis track “Viva Las Vegas” to promote a Greatest Hits album which was much more fun.

Nope, don’t remember this either. “Seal Our Fate” by Gloria Estefan was the second of four singles taken from her “Into The Light” album all of which made the UK Top 40 but none of which made the Top 20. Make of that what you will. If we saw ZZ top channelling their inner Johnny Cash before, this was like Gloria being Britney Spears some 7 years before Britney was Britney. Apparently the video was well received by her fans as if Gloria could do its choreography routine then this was proof that she had made a full recovery from her injuries sustained in a coach crash in March of 1990.

Next on the Generation Game style conveyor belt of Breakers is Silver Bullet with “Undercover Anarchist” which was the follow up to “20 Seconds To Comply”. Again I don’t remember this one at all but then that’s hardly surprising as the TOTP graphics team seemed to have forgotten what the single was called whilst it was still in the charts as their caption reads “Under Anarchist”.

It doesn’t really matter as if I’d wanted to listen to a track with the word ‘anarchist’ in the title then I would have gone for this by one Hull’s finest…

There was a definite hint of 80s chart acts making a comeback in this particular TOTP. After OMD earlier in the show here were Transvision Vamp who had been AWOL for the whole of 1990 after their last chart appearance with “Born To Be Sold ” at the end of 1989. They hadn’t been idle though as they had been recording their third album, the ludicrously entitled “Little Magnets Versus The Bubble Of Babble” and inevitably they wanted to move away from the bubble gum glam pop that had brought them fame and fortune with tunes like “I Want Your Love” and “Baby I Don’t Care”. However, record label MCA weren’t that keen on the idea of the band maturing and refused to release the album in the UK. Instead, it was given a limited world wide release with copies only available in Australia, New Zealand and Sweden. The idea was to see how it did in those territories before a UK released was sanctioned. This lead to many an import copy of the album finding its way into UK record stores. We certainly had one in the Our Price I was working in and we had a Wendy James devotee who would come in week after week to see if the UK release was out yet. I can’t recall if he was tempted by the £20 import CD that we had in stock but if he didn’t buy it then nobody would have.

The lead single from the album was “(I Just Wanna) B with U” and it was the first track that Wendy received an official co-writing credit for. Was it any good though? Well, I was underwhelmed and I’d liked a lot of the band’s previous singles. I wasn’t the only one unimpressed as it struggled to a high of No 30, the band’s last ever UK chart hit. Follow up single “If Looks Could Kill” missed the Top 40 by one place and that was that. By the time that MCA had authorised an UK release for the album, the band had split anyway. Even now, the album is not available on Spotify although its singles are on a Best Of album which can be streamed. Was it the new material that let them down or were the band just an anachronism in the new decade? Who knows but they did burn brightly during their time in the sun.

Talking of 80s pop stars making a 90s comeback, here’s Pete Wylie and he’s joined forces with fellow scousers The Farm to do a re-working of “Sinful”. Yes, despite being completely wonderful, this was the first time Pete had been in the Top 40 since “Sinful” had been a No 13 hit back in 1986. His lack of chart success really is a crime against music.

I’m not totally secure in my knowledge of the circumstances around this release. The Farm were at their commercial peak having secured two Top 10 singles in 1990 with “Groovy Train” and “Altogether Now” from their No 1 album “Spartacus” which was released in the spring of 1991. However, their commercial fall was imminent. They released a third single from the album the Monday after this TOTP aired but “Don’t Let Me Down” peaked at a disappointing No 36. This re-working of Sinful retitled “Sinful! (Scary Jiggin’ with Doctor Love)” was a non-album single but presumably it was a live favourite as showcased by the video here.

Later in the year, Wylie would release the criminally ignored album “Infamy! Or How I Didn’t Get Where I Am Today” whilst The Farm would release an album called “Love See No Colour” in 1992 which would fail to chart making them, along with the aforementioned Transvision Vamp and purveyors of blue eyed soul Johnny Hates Jazz as acts that followed up a No 1 album with an LP that failed to chart.

A terrible accident would befall Pete later in the year when he suffered a near fatal fall when a railing gave way in Upper Parliament Street, Liverpool causing him to fracture his spine and his sternum. The legend goes that when the ambulance crew turned up and did their usual checks including to ask what the injured party’s name was, Pete replied ‘You should f*****g know who I am!”. I love Pete Wylie!

“Sinful! (Scary Jiggin’ with Doctor Love)” peaked at No 28.

Next a song that was… well…just bizarre and yet it just worked. Despite no longer being the chart topper he was in the 80s, Paul Young was doing a decent job of keeping his career going into the new decade with a couple of Top 40 hits in 1990 from his “Other Voices”. By the time 1991 came around though, he had also had a couple of flops. So what do you do when your career needs a lift? Release a Best Of album of course! “From Time to Time – The Singles Collection” was a huge success going to No 1 and three time platinum in the UK off the back of an extensive TV ad campaign.

The album included three new tracks that were in fact cover versions that all ended up being released as singles. “Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” was the first of those and was actually a duet with some geezer called Zucchero. I’d never heard of him before at the time but, as Jakki Brambles says in her intro, he was a very big deal indeed in his native Italy. “Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” was actually his song and he had released it himself back in 1987. When Paul Young heard it whilst on holiday there, he approached the Z man about covering it but the reply came back ‘why don’t we do it as a duet?’. And so it came to pass that Paul Young would have his biggest hit since “Every Time You Go Away” back in 1985 stood next to a bloke who, according to the reaction on Twitter when this TOTP was re-shown the other week, looked very much like Keith Lemon. They have a point.

I think it’s the lyrics which make this record so curiously memorable. Certainly some of the lines have stayed with myself and my wife all these years. For example, ‘Look at me, I’m a flower’ and ‘You got to dig a little deeper lady’ stand out – maybe they didn’t translate too well from Italian to English. It’s the ‘even doing my own cooking’ line though that steals it. At the time, I wasn’t the most handy in the kitchen and so anything that I did produce would be met with a retort of ‘even doing my own cooking’ by my wife. I have got a lot better now! Zucchero’s inspiration for the line came from his own culinary trials…

Zucchero on "Sensa Una Donna": "At the time, I was almost divorced by my ex-wife and I was living in a small house by myself, trying to save my marriage. I was very sad and upset. I was in the kitchen and I had to cook by myself for the first time!" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 9, 2021

"So I started to cook some really terrible spaghetti, and I said, ‘I can’t live without you, because I can’t cook by myself!’ That’s why I say in the song: ‘I’m here cooking by myself.’ The song came out very quickly – music and lyrics in about half an hour." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 9, 2021

OK, just to clarify, I wasn’t that bad that I couldn’t have cooked some pasta nor was I in the process fo getting divorced!

It’s the first of Jakki’s lines that have stuck with me now as she says at the song’s end “Senza Una Donna which means Without A Woman – bare faced liars the pair of them”. Well, I’d have to say that Paul looks pretty cool with a sharp haircut but Zucchero? I can’t unsee Keith Lemon now.

Another Jakki Brambles line that for some reason has stuck in my brain these last 30 years next as she introduces Chesney Hawkes who is at No 1 for the 4th week with “The One And Only”. After starting off her intro with “What else can we say about our next man…” and listing all his ‘achievements’ which include having “a bit of a famous Dad” – Whoah! Stop right there! A bit of a famous Dad?! Len “Chip” Hawkes was the bassist in The Tremeloes it’s true but was he really that famous? It’s also true that Decca famously chose The Tremeloes over The Beatles for a recording contract back in 1962 so the band do have a place in pop music history but Hawkes wasn’t anything to do with it as he didn’t join the band until 4 years later. And yes, he did co-write some of their Top 10 hits but would anyone have really recognised him walking down the street back in 1991? Was he doing lots of TV appearances as some sort of talking head aficionado on pop music Paul Gambaccini style? I don’t think so. I suppose Jakki did say “a bit of a famous Dad” as opposed to “celebrity royalty” but even so.

Sorry, went off on a bit of a tangent there. Anyway, finally Brambles gets to her killer line as she says “All that remains for me to say is Chesney Hawkes…GET YOUR HAIRCUT!” She had a point. Chesney’s Barnet was a disgrace. He’d clearly grown it out since appearing in Buddy’s Song and it now resembled a bob. Thankfully, he no longer has said style now that he is nearly 50.

The play out video and the final of 14 songs on the show tonight is “Deep, Deep Trouble” by The Simpsons. When I was a small child, my Dad had the “Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)” single by Benny Hill. I thought it was funny at the time as I had an undeveloped sense of humour. My Dad thought it was funny because…I’m not sure why…I think it must have been the ridiculousness of the tale that Hill’s distinctive voice imparted. As I grew older (and so did my Dad), that record never got played again in our house because it was a novelty record and novelty records don’t age at all well. Suffice to say, “Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)” was a timeless classic compared to “Deep, Deep Trouble” which has rightly been consigned to the dustbin of popular culture.

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

Order of Appearance	Artist	Title	Did I Buy It?
1	James	Sit Down	No but I have it on their Best Of album
2	Cher	The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)	Yes but it was an honest mistake!
3	OMD	Sailing On The Seven Seas	No but I have it on their Best Of album
4	Black Box	Strike It Up	Nope
5	The Clash	Rock The Casbah	No but I must have it on something
6	The Mock Turtles	Can You Dig It?	Not the single but I bought the album (signed!)
7	ZZ Top	My Head’s In Mississippi	No
8	Gloria Estefan	Seal Our Fate	Negative
9	Silver Bullet	Undercover Anarchist	I did not
10	Tranvision Vamp	“(I Just Wanna) B with U”	No but I have it on their Best Of album
11	Pete Wylie / The Farm	Sinful! (Scary Jiggin’ with Doctor Love)	I bought the original in 1986 but not this version
12	Paul Young / Zucchero	“Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)”	No but I have it on Paul’s Best Of album
13	Chesney Hawkes	The One And Only	Nah
14	The Simpsons	Deep, Deep Trouble	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.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000xp0k/top-of-the-pops-18041991

TOTP 11 APR 1991

Posted on July 16, 2021 by 80stastic

Right, I’m starting to get behind on writing up these TOTP reviews. I’m averaging over 3,000 words per post so with two shows being shown on BBC4 a week….I could have easily written multiple books over the number of years I’ve been doing this. With that in mind, I’m going to have to whizz though some of these acts with just a cursory nod to detail and research.

Tonight’s host is Anthea Turner (groan) and we start with The Wonder Stuff who have arrived at that crossroads that most indie type bands arrive at eventually. The one where they look at the sign that points to ‘Megastardom and riches but hand your soul in at the door’ one way and ‘stay credible, critically acclaimed and penniless’ the other. A fork in the road encountered by many before and since. Spandau Ballet started out as the pin up band for the New Romantics cult but made the decision to go mainstream and be one of the biggest bands in the world when they recorded the “True” album. One year on from this TOTP broadcast, The Shamen would go from an underground indie/dance hybrid to being all over our TV screens with a No 1 single and a gurning pop star rapper in Mr C. For now though, it was the turn of Miles Hunt and the gang and they chose fame and fortune with the release of “Size Of A Cow”. The lead single from new album “Never Loved Elvis”, this was a catchy, knock about, shout-a-long tune that was much more pop than anything they had ever done before. It’s almost like a prototype for Blur’s “Country House”. It was hard not to like it though. Hunt himself throws himself into the song with a tartan suit borrowed from Andrew Ridgely and his ruffled shirt. It’s almost like an audition to be the next Dr Who (had it still been on air back then ). The album would be a huge success going Top 3 whilst “Size Of A Cow” peaked at No 5. Around this time they played a gig at Walsall’s Bescot Stadium to 18,000 fans but had they lost any of their original fan base? If they hadn’t, their loyalty may have been tested to the limit when they teamed up with Vic Reeves for a cover of “Dizzy” later in the year.

Madonna‘s only single of 1991 was “Rescue Me”. Nothing to do with the 1965 Fontella Bass single of the same name, this was the second of two new tracks from her mega selling “Immaculate Collection” Best Of album. The first had been the controversial “Justify My Love” and initially there had been no plans to release “Rescue Me” as a follow up but after extensive airplay, Sire Records changed tack and gave it an official release. The video shown here was hastily cobbled together using footage from Madonna’s 1987 Who’s That Girl World Tour. I have to say it’s not one of my favourites of hers by some distance. I wasn’t that keen on all the spoken word verses although I suppose the chorus is catchy enough. Apparently, when it debuted at No 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in March 1991, it was the highest new entry for a song since The Beatles’ “Let It Be” went straight in at No 6 in March 1970. That can’t be right can it? Whilst we’re talking about the song’s chart performance, it should also be noted that it peaked at No 3 in the UK (Madonna’s fourth of nine singles to peak at that position ) and was the 27th of her 70 UK hit singles! 70! That’s nearly one for very year she’s been alive isn’t it? Actually how old is Madonna now?

*checks Wikipedia*

She’s 62. Close enough.

A bit of a patronising intro from Anthea next as she says of Alison Limerick‘s “Where Love Lives”:

“Alison Limerick first released her debut single last year. It didn’t do so well but she’s released it again and now it’s a hit….”

It’s the tone in her voice, the small grimace on her face and the downwards motion hand gesture that seem a bit snide to me. If this was a text message it would have a sad face emoji at the end of it. Enough of Anthea though.

Alison is one of those names that have been around for ages like Ruby Turner or Beverley Knight but who surprisingly doesn’t have the number of hits that you would think they do. “Where Love Lives” is one of just six Top 40 UK hits. Actually its two of six as it was a hit again in 1996. As Anthea correctly pointed out, it was first released in 1990 when it peaked at No 87 but after extensive play in the clubs, it warranted a re-release – with the addition of the suffix (Come On In)’91 – and it was a No 27 hit. It reached its highest peak though when remixed in 1996 when it made No 9. Alison looks damn cool here as she gives a slick performance with her Grace Jones style crew cut and sharp dance moves. She has worked with acts as diverse as The Style Council, This Mortal Coil and The James Taylor Quartet and she continues to record and sing live to this day.

It’s another showing of the Gary Clail On-U Sound System performance of “Human Nature” from the other week next although I think Anthea stuffs up the intro by saying Gary Clail and the New Sound System. I’ve played it back three times now and I’m pretty sure that’s what she says. I know I sound pedantic but her job on TOTP was literally to say the names of artists and their songs. You can’t get that shit wrong, you really can’t. As for Gary, although “Human Nature” was the only hit he had that enabled a TOTP appearance, he had his eyes on the prize as way back as 1985 when he featured on an On-U Sound System track called “Half Cut For Confidence” The backing musicians on it were industrial hip-hop legends TackHead but they were credited as TOTP an acronym for The Occult Technology of Power but surely it was also a deliberate pun on the BBC music show? “Human Nature” peaked at No 10.

Not sure I remember this one. Monie Love and Adeva together? Nope it doesn’t (and yes I’m going there) ring any bells. When I saw the title of their single, I assumed it was a cover of the Anita Ward disco classic “Ring My Bell” that went to No 1 in 1979 but no, it isn’t. This was the sixth and final single to be taken from Monie Love’s “Down To Earth” album so we had heard quite a lot from her over the last year or so. The same could not be said of Adeva who had not been near the charts for nearly two years when her debut album provided her with four Top 40 hits including three that peaked at No 17. Would it be mean to suggest it was Adeva whose career needed a shot in the arm off the coat tails of Monie Love? Probably yes but it is true that “Ring My Bell” would be her last ever Top 20 hit.

The video rather predictably goes with a boxing match concept thereby including both the ringing of a bell theme and setting up a confrontation as in Monie Love vs Adeva. There’s no actual punches thrown though as all the action is done from the safety of their respective corners. This wasn’t really my cup of tea at all and I’d rather it had been a cover of Anita Ward.

Now here’s a line that you would never have expected to hear and which actually doesn’t make any sort of sense but then it is from the mouth of Anthea Turner so….

“We’ve got a real treat for you now. A stage full of expensive suits. In those suits are Mike + The Mechanics…”

A bit to unpack here. What is the big deal about some middle aged men (i.e. Mike + The Mechanics) wearing expensive suits? Were we meant to be jealous? If so, how is that a treat for us? Or were we meant to admire how good they looked in them? With the greatest respect to Paul Carrack, Mike Rutherford and Paul Young (not that one) et al, I don’t think the suits made that much difference in the looks department. “Word of Mouth” would peak at 13 whilst its parent album of the same name went silver certifying 60,000 sales.

It’s the top selling albums of the month feature next and for March 1991 they were:

1.Eurythmics – “Greatest Hits”

2. Chris Rea – “Auberge”

3. The Farm – “Spartacus”

4. REM – “Out Of Time”

5. Debbie Harry / Blondie – “The Complete Picture”

Well, that seems a bit better than recent months. Yes, two are Best Of compilations but what Best Ofs! The Eurythmics one was their first ever and I for one was certainly looking forward to it coming out. It would go on to be the second best selling album of the year after it was pipped at the post by Simply Red’s “Stars”. Although it wouldn’t stand the test of time, at least “Spartacus” was by a new, up and coming band after months of the Top 5 being populated by the likes of Elton John, Madonna and Pavarotti. Talking of time, REM’s “Out Of Time” was really starting to establish them as a world conquering band. It was only really Chris Rea that was letting the Top 5 down.

Another glimpse of patronising Anthea next as she seeks to make us all dismiss the fact that Dannii Minogue is not just Kylie’s sister by pointing out that Dannii Minogue is actually Kylie’s sister. After highlighting her genealogy, Anthea says “she’s a great little actress, she’s got a charming personality…”. No doubt Anthea thought she was being complimentary but it just doesn’t come across like that. The use of the word little seems unnecessary and the charming personality vibe indicates that there is a silent ‘though’ implied. “Love And Kisses” was her debut hit but I don’t think time has been kind to it. There’s not much of a tune in there and it seems to hinge on an energetic dance routine rather than any musical virtues.

Chesney Hawkes is still No 1 and we get the video this week although there seems to be some confusion over this as I have found two different promos for “The One And Only”. The one that TOTP shows is a straight forward performance of the song in a gig setting intercut with some scenes of Chezza arriving at the venue, being mobbed by fans and signing some autographs.

However, there is also another video that seems to have an A-ha “Take On Me” inspired plot to it. In this one, two female friends go to the cinema to watch Buddy’s Song (the film that launched Chesney and that features “The One And Only”) and Chesney steps out of the film and into the cinema auditorium to beckon one of the girls to come to a storage room with him. It’s not really a winning chat up line. There then follows some intertextuality themed escapades as Chesney gets pulled in and out of the film pursued by his father played by Roger Daltrey in hot pursuit. Eventually Chesney and cinema girl both end up in the film together before a climatic snog. Now apparently, ‘cinema girl’ is played by Saffron from Republica and if this is true, then this is the second time in a matter of weeks that I have been unaware of her presence on the show. We saw her recently as the vocalist for N-Joi on their “Anthem” single. I don’t know, a character from soap opera Families turning up in The Mock Turtles and now someone being in a Chesney Hawkes video whilst also fronting a dance act. These were strange times indeed.

Did someone mention The Shamen before? Well, here are the very fellows with “Hyperreal”. Taken from their “En-Tact” album, it achieved what previous singles “Pro-Gen” and “Make It Mine” hadn’t by becoming the band’s very first Top 40 hit. I have to say that I didn’t think it was as good as either of those but it was still pretty decent tune anyway. Tragically, this would be the last single release before band member Will Sinnott drowned whilst swimming off the coast of Canary Island La Gomera. Electing to carry on, Colin Angus pressed forward with the release of “Move Any Mountain” (which was basically a remix of “Pro-Gen” under a new title) and it would cement the band’s reputation as chart stars when it peaked at No 4 in the Summer.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	The Wonder Stuff	Size Of A Cow	I didn’t
2	Madonna	Rescue Me	No but I did have The Immaculate Collection with it on
3	Alison Limerick	Where Love Lives	Nope
4	Gary Clail / On-U Sound System	Human Nature	Liked it, didn’t buy it
5	Monie Love / Adeva	Ring My Bell	Nah
6	Mike + The Mechanics	Word Of Mouth	And the word was no
7	Dannii Minogue	Love And Kisses	Definitely not
8	Chesney Hawkes	The One And Only	It’s a no
9	The Shamen	Hyperreal	Negative

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 04 APR 1991

Posted on July 15, 2021 by 80stastic

In the last TOTP Rewind post, I was talking about sibling rivalries mainly as a device to shoehorn in a segue to Dannii Minogue who had appeared on the pop scene of 1991. I’m going to stick with that theme for this next show review and indeed extend it to cover the whole social unit of ‘families’. Now of course, there are lots and lots of examples of groups including brothers and sisters in their ranks and indeed, in some extreme cases, of the whole band consisting purely of same family members. There’s The Corrs, The Pointer Sisters, Sister Sledge, The Jackson 5, Kings Of Leon, Hanson etc. My challenge, should I wish to accept it (and I do), is to interweave the concept of family into every act on this particular TOTP. Is it possible? I’m going to give it a go. Wish me luck….

…we begin with Inspiral Carpets and their new single “Caravan”. Not the easiest of starts given that I don’t think any of the band were related to each other. I have to say I don’t really remember this stage of the band’s career at all. This track was from their sophomore album “The Beast Inside” which was released nearly a year to the day after their debut studio album “Life” and which went Top 5 so I must have sold some copies of it in the Our Price I was working in but it seems to have passed me by. I remember the next album “Revenge Of The Goldfish” and its singles “Dragging Me Down”, “Bitches Brew” etc and also their 1994 LP “Devil Hopping” which included “Saturn 5” and “I Want You” but “The Beast Inside”? Barely a flicker. Critical reception of the album was mixed from what I can tell but “Caravan” sounds pretty melodic to me whilst retaining the band’s trademark sound. Its No 30 chart peak seems a bit meagre and unjust.

Right, I can’t fail at the first hurdle on this ‘families’ theme so there is of course that well known link to Noel Gallagher’s employment with them as a roadie before he formed Oasis with his brother Liam but that’s more about Oasis than Inspiral Carpets. Look, I’ll have to play my joker card early and fall back on the ever reliable @TOTPFacts for this little gem about singer Tom Hingley’s Dad:

Inspiral Carpets frontman Tom Hingley's dad, Ronald Hingley, was a Lecturer in Russian at Oxford University. If you own an Anton Chekhov book, there's a good chance he translated it. He also wrote biographies of the likes of Boris Pasternak and Stalin. #TOTP pic.twitter.com/QfHLJcxwuK
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 2, 2021

Family value: 5/10

A less than convincing start but the next one is an open goal. “Deep, Deep Trouble” by The Simpsons. A single by an actual family! Yes, it’s a cartoon family and not a real one but you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth. This, of course, was the follow up to the No 1 single “Do The Bartman” and was equally as annoying. It seems to be a tale of how Bart messed up mowing the lawn thereby missing a family day out and finally resulting in him throwing a party while his parents were out. Ah, we’ve all done it (I haven’t actually). There are references to Mom and Dad and Bart being their S-O-N. Like I said, an open goal for the families theme which I will gladly put in the back of the net.

Thankfully, this was the second and final single by The Simpsons that would make the charts (it peaked at No 7) so after finally ridding ourselves of Jive Bunny last week, it’s a double whammy as Bart, Homer and the rest depart forever this week. By the way, It’s not that I don’t like The Simpsons (as in the TV show), it’s just that I really couldn’t be doing with / see the point of their musical offerings.

Family value: 7/10

The first of three dance acts on the show tonight are next and it’s N-Joi with “Anthem”. This was their second visit to TOTP in a matter of months after their “Adrenalin EP” had charted at No 23 but “Anthem” was the track that they would become most famous for. Not only did it break the Top 10 over here but it was also a No 2 record in the US Dance chart. As I’ve said many time I’m not and never was much of a dance head but this sounded like a retread of “You Got The Love” by The Source featuring Candi Staton to me. No doubt someone could explain that it doesn’t even have the same bpm or something.

As host Gary Davies says, the singer on the track is called Saffron but I never until this moment twigged that it was the same Saffron who would gain fame as the lead vocalist for Republica of “Ready To Go” fame later in the decade. She seems to do more dancing than singing in this performance though and when I say dancing I mean doing a pretty rigorous work out routine full of high kicks and twirling. Did she do any of that while fronting Republica? I can’t remember so I’d better check…

*checks YouTube*

Not really. There was a lot of jumping about but it was all bit free form. Her N-Joi dance moves seemed a bit more rehearsed.

In 1995, DJ Sister Bliss of Faithless selected “Anthem” as one of favourite tracks describing it thus:

“And what an anthem it is! …That whole EP is fantastic, it’s the sound of the time but it doesn’t date. It’s a reliable classic. It’s always the last tune of the night – people must be bored with me playing it. it reminds me of driving around the M25 looking for the rave and ending up in a field with 10,000 smelly people.”

10,000 smelly people? Bliss indeed!

What? How am I going to squeeze a ‘families’ theme into this one? Erm…would you accept Sister Bliss?

Family value: 2/10

Despite being only 15 months into the new decade, we had already seen a slew of hits from the 80s reappearing in the Top 40. Some had been due to terrestrial TV premieres of blockbuster films like Top Gun and Dirty Dancing leading to the likes of Berlin and Bill Medley & Jennifer Warnes having their soundtrack hits reactivated. Then there were the Best Of collections by artists being promoted by the re-release of their 80s hits. Talk Talk and Madonna were prime examples of this and also falling into this category were The Waterboys. In 1991, their collection “The Best Of The Waterboys 81–90” was released and was preceded by the re-issuing of their most famous song “The Whole Of The Moon”. I must admit to being surprised by this – not only by its existence but also by its commercial success. The album soared to No 2 in the charts yet the band had only had two Top 40 hits by this point neither of which had made the Top 20. Usually Best Of albums would be compiled to showcase a run of hit singles that an artist had racked up but this wasn’t the case with The Waterboys. Their albums though were well received and their most recent (1990’s “Room To Roam”) had peaked at No 5. They were also a very big live draw and had toured extensively over the years so they would heave reached a lot of people that way.

The band were in a state of flux come 1991 with disagreements over the band’s musical direction causing some members to leave. They would also leave their record label Ensign (an imprint of parent label Chrysalis) for whom all their back catalogue had been recorded. Ah, that’s why the Best Of album came out. A deliberate cash-in by the label to maximise the profitability of the band’s music that they owned. Anyway, “The Whole Of The Moon” smashed its previous 1985 chart high of No 26 when it went Top 3 at a stroke easily becoming their biggest ever hit. Now I’d loved this song back in ’85 and indeed my wife had the album it was from (“This Is The Sea”) but I couldn’t quite understand why it was so popular six years on. Maybe it was music fans trying to reclaim the charts from all those ghastly dance tunes that had taken up residency there?

As for the ‘families’ theme, well The Waterboys have had over 85 members through their ranks over the years including the likes of Karl Wallinger (World Party), Ian McNabb (Icicle Works) and Liam Ó Maonlaí (Hothouse Flowers) which is more than the legendary The Fall, so I think they could seriously claim to have the biggest rock family tree of all time.

Family value: 8/10

Next up, a band who I have rather a lot to say about and the first thing is that I love(d) The Mock Turtles. I had no idea who they were until they released “Can You Dig It?” but they had actually been around since 1985. It wasn’t until 1990 though what they really started to get some traction when debut album “Turtle Soup” was released on the Manchester label Imaginary Records which was also home to acts such as Cud and The Chameleons. The album included early singles “And Then She Smiles” and “Lay Me Down” the latter of which prompted interest from the majors including Virgin and they were duly signed to subsidiary label Siren Records. Siren chose “Can You Dig It?” which was originally the b-side to “Lay Me Down” as the next single to launch them on the label and, having added a pop sheen to it with some additional guitar work, it was an immediate hit. Its infectious groove and spiralling guitar riff proved irresistible and the added wah wah guitar in the middle eight worked a treat. It managed to traverse the thin line between attracting daytime air play whilst also trading off the Manchester effect which was still just about going into 1991. I fell for it hook, line and sinker.

An album was hastily recorded for Siren called “Two Sides” which included “Can You Dig It?” and a re-recorded version of “And Then She Smiles” from “Turtle Soup” but no other tracks made the switch to the new label. There’s some great pop tunes on “Two Sides” (I know because I bought it) yet it didn’t seem to do anything commercially. “And Then She Smiles” was re-released as a follow up single but just failed to make the Top 40 whilst third single “Strings And Flowers” disappeared without trace. It’s almost become a forgotten album, overshadowed by its indie predecessor. It’s not even on Spotify although “Turtle Soup” is, an expanded version of which was released by Cherry Red Records recently. Not even an in store appearance by the band at the Our Price I was working at could boost the sales of “Two Sides”. Ah yes, that in store PA. This was the first one we’d had at the shop since I’d been working there and it seemed like a big deal. As it was taking place in their hometown, a large crowd had gathered for the event. The band were smuggled in around the back and then positioned behind the counter for a signing session. We had the single blaring out on the shop PA constantly and the drama was heightened when my colleague Craig decided to switch the store lights on and off frantically to announce their appearance. There were even some whooping in the crowd. Business seemed to be brisk and the band duly signed whatever was put in front of them and it all seemed to be going quite well.

And then Jude Law turned up. Yes, the BAFTA award winning actor Jude Law. “Why?” you might well ask. Well, this was before Jude had made any films so he wasn’t that well known except to those of us who religiously tuned in to Granada soap Families in which he was starring at the time. Families was basically Aussie soap Sons And Daughters translated for a UK audience but with a twist -the plot was set in Cheshire, England and Sydney, Australia with he connection being a guy called Mark Thompson who leaves his family in the UK to be with his true love Diana Stevens in Australia. Then there’s the quite dark twist that unbeknownst to Mike, Diana had given birth to his son Andrew who ended up travelling to England where he met Mike’s daughter Amanda by his English wife and they fall in love not realising that they were half-brother and sister!

Me and my wife used to watch Families all the time when it was repeated late night on Granada. We were skint most of the time so we weren’t out partying that much and it kind of became a habit. So we’re happily watching the ongoing shenanigans which included Jude Law on screen as Mike Thompson’s son Nathan (he would have been around 18 I think) and Nathan’s brother called Mark who was played by a guy called Martin Glyn Murray. Still with me? Good. Fast forward to this episode of TOTP and we’re watching The Mock Turtles perform and we both look at each other and say “Isn’t the guitarist that bloke from Families?” We peered again and concluded it really did look like him but why would that actor bloke be in a pop band as well? So when Jude Law turned up at The Mock Turtles PA, it must have dawned on me that it was indeed ‘that bloke from Families‘ (that’s how we found things out back in the early 90s kids – no internet back then!). So Jude approaches the counter and asks me if he can nip behind it to go and see his mate to which I replied “Sorry mate, no chance”. Jude protested so I had to ask the manager if he could allow it which he did as I recall. Somewhere along the line he also managed to get a free pass for the shop staff to attend the gig that the band were playing that night at the Manchester Academy (maybe letting Jude Law behind the counter was his leverage). Excellent!

So, me and my wife popped down to The Academy that night and ended up standing close to Jude Law (though I was bored of him by now) but also Peter Hook and Caroline Aherne. They weren’t the only names there that night. Steve Coogan was also there. Oh yes, if the families theme wasn’t fulfilled by a soap opera actually called Families then there was also the fact that the lead singer of The Mock Turtles was the brother of comedian and TV star Steve Coogan. Whilst researching this post I came across a full recording of the gig posted on YouTube by Martin Coogan and at the end there are some scenes of the after show party where Steve Coogan makes an appearance. At this point he had long curly hair and somebody says to him “It’s him off Sit Down innit?” meaning Tim Booth from James. He doesn’t look too impressed. Mind you the same guy says to Jude Law (who’s managed to get himself back stage at The Academy with more ease than he did behind the counter at Our Price) “Ooh it’s him off Blue Peter“. Ha!

Well, I think that’s enough Mock Turtles stories for one day but there on again in a couple of shows time….

Family value: 10/10

Next is a song that I had completely forgotten about. Actually, it’s not that there’s nothing in the memory banks for it and more that my brain has shifted, re-edited and morphed it into another song entirely. There’s a good reason for this as well and that is that “Here We Go (Let’s Rock & Roll)” by C+C Music Factory is almost identical to their previous hit “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)”. No wonder I can’t recall it – it’s been completely subsumed by their debut hit. In my head their singles timeline went straight from “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” to “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…” but here is the evidence to the contrary.

The video looks like the set of Aliens 3 to me and what is that freaky looking thing writhing around on the floor in a gas mask at the start of it? Here’s @TOTPFacts with some info which goes a long way to explaining the whole visual imagery going on in this promo:

This C+C Music Factory video was directed by Marcus Nispel, whose credits also include the 2003 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the 2009 version of Friday The 13th. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 2, 2021

That explains that then. I’m struggling to fit a families theme into this one but….the history of C+C Music Factory is littered with lawsuits and fallings out including Martha Wash suing for a settlement on her vocals being uncredited on the chorus of “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)”. There is also the case of rapper Freedom Williams (who is credited on “Here We Go (Let’s Rock & Roll)”) who, having left the group in the mid 90s, started performing shows under the C+C Music Factory name causing founding member Robert Clivillés to denounce it as “the biggest insult in the world”. So basically they were like a typical family with loads of members feuding and holding grudges against each other!

Family value: 4/10

Host Gary Davies goes all embarrassing uncle at a wedding in the intro to the next one as he says “Some more music now for you to boogie to…” WTF?! Boogie to?! At a time when the show was struggling to accommodate and reflect the domination of the charts by dance music and indeed were struggling to remain relevant to the musical landscape, comments like that really didn’t help. And who were the boogie-meisters in question? Well it was Black Box of course with the fifth single to be released from their “Dreamland” album which came out nearly a year prior to this.

I can’t find the video for “Strike It Up” online anywhere (copyright issues again) but it features Katrin Quinol up there again miming to the vocals who were actually supplied by Martha Wash. Yes, her again! And guess what, Martha had to sue the asses off Black Box as she had with C + C Music Factory to get her due credits. She might as well have given up on singing and taken up a career as a lawyer by this point!

“Strike It Up” peaked at No 16 but Black Box would not be seen inside the UK Top 20 ever again. Hurray! As for the ‘families’ concept…erm…well…I’ll have to resort to the family feuding theme again with Martha Wash as the common link between rock family trees.

Family value: 3/10

This must be the last ever TOTP appearance for Feargal Sharkey I think. “I’ve Got News For You” was certainly his last ever Top 40 hit anyway. Gary Davies says his vocal in this performance is live which is pretty impressive. Whether you like it or loathe it, you just cannot deny that Feargal’s voice is unique. He was only 32 when he made his last album (“Songs From The Mardi Gras” from which “I’ve Got News For You” was taken). Surely he had a bit more to give musically?

After a successful career in the business side of the music industry, Feargal spends a lot of his time fishing these days and campaigning about pollution in chalk based rivers. None of this has anything to do with my families theme though so I will have to delve into Feargal’s back catalogue and reference “My Perfect Cousin” from his time with The Undertones and his very first solo single “Listen To Your Father”. Job done!

Family value: 6/10

It’s the second of five weeks at the top for Chesney Hawkes and “The One And Only”. Chesney, of course, is often referred to as a classic, nay optimum one hit wonder – one huge No 1 hit then nothing, zero, nada. Except it isn’t actually true*. There was one other Top 40 hit for young Chesney which was called “I’m a Man Not a Boy” which was the follow up to “The One And Only” and was also taken from the Buddy’s Song soundtrack. It got nowhere near to repeating the success of its predecessor when it peaked at No 27 yet it remains a bona fide chart hit and therefore legitimately negates the one hit wonder claim. I wonder if it was a huge wake up call for Chesney that this pop star lark might be a short lived thing when “I’m a Man Not a Boy” hit its chart peak? Apparently he reached the point where his phone calls were not being taken by his record label and his career was kaput within two years after the failure of second album “Get The Picture” in 1993. In truth, Chesney mania was all over well before the end of 1991 though. At least he scores high on the families theme-o-meter as his brother Jodie was the drummer in his band whilst his Dad Chip was in 60s hitmakers The Tremeloes.

*see also Doctor and the Medics, Men At Work etc

Family value: 8/10

The play out video is “Word Of Mouth” by Mike + The Mechanics who are the second act on tonight’s show after C + C Music Factory to have a plus sign in their name rather than the word ‘and’. This always seemed like a bit of an anomaly to me and not very 1991 at all. It almost has an echo of being a 70s glam rock stomper with all those singalong ‘na na na nas’ and hand claps. Also, I thought we’d seen the last of Mike Rutherford’s spin off project as it had been over two years since “The Living Years” had been a big hit when its subject matter of a son confronting his unresolved conflict with his father amidst his grief at the latter’s death tugged at the heart strings of the population. Oh, there’s my ‘families’ theme ticked off! Suddenly though they were back with a No 13 hit and the album of the same name performed reasonably well going silver and peaking at No 11. It did not produce any further hit singles though.

There are all sorts of rock family tree connections with this lot. There’s Genesis of course but also Sad Café (via vocalist Paul Young) and all sorts of acts associated to Paul Carrack including Squeeze, Ace, Roxy Music, The Pretenders and The Smiths. Not quite up there with The Waterboys but certainly worthy of a decent family value score.

Family value: 7/10

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

Order of Appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Inspiral Carpets	Caravan	Nope
2	The Simpsons	Deep Deep Trouble	Of course not
3	N-Joi	Anthem	Nah
4	The Waterboys	The Whole Of The Moon	No but my wife and the album
5	The Mock Turtles	Can U Dig It?	Not the single but I bought the album
6	C + C Music Factory	Here We Go (Let’s Rock & Roll)	No
7	Black Box	Strike It Up	Hell no
8	Feargal Sharkey	I’ve Got News For You	It’s another no
9	Chesney Hawkes	The One And Only	Negative
10	Mike + The Mechanics	Word Of Mouth	I did not

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000xh7f/top-of-the-pops-04041991

TOTP 28 MAR 1991

Posted on July 8, 2021 by 80stastic

Sibling rivalry. Healthy competition or the bringer of long lasting family fractures? I have siblings and, as a football obsessed youngster, grew up knowing that my elder brother was so much better at the game than me. I could barely get into my school team whilst he had scouts from professional clubs sniffing around. It was….character building. There are of course many examples of sporting siblings but how many of them attain an equitable level of success and fame. My theory would be that one is always more successful / well known than the other. Off the top of my head…

Serena Williams vs Venus Williams? Definitely Serena
Andy vs Jamie Murray? Andy surely
Anton vs Rio Ferdinand? Easily Rio
Gary vs Phil Neville? Hmm, I’d have to go Gary

OK, I’m sure you could all come up with anomalies to debunk my theory but I’m sticking with it. More than that, I’m going to try and extend it to musical siblings. Who have we got? Ray and Dave Davies from The Kinks, The Gibb brothers of the Bee Gees, Noel and Liam Gallagher, the three Wilson brothers in The Beach Boys, Hanson(!)… I’m beginning to see a problem with this in that these siblings were in bands together so it’s harder to make a definitive judgement. OK, some of them pursued their own solo careers so you could assess those I suppose but I’m not sure that’s a fair yardstick and yes, you could make a case for Brian Wilson over Dennis and Carl but then what about the twins Charlie and Craig Reid of The Proclaimers? They were tied to each other biologically and musically. So we’re am I going with all of this? In a very clunky and laborious way to the the first act on tonight’s TOTP who is Dannii Minogue – Kylie’s sister. And those last two words go straight back to my original point. Was Dannii always destined to be in the shadow of Kylie? Or as author Kathy Lette put it that there was always a perception that Dannii was the B-side to Kylie’s A?

It wasn’t how it started though. Dannii, despite being 4 years younger than her sister, was the most well known of the two in the beginnings of their careers as she appeared on Australian TV variety show Young Talent Time and indeed it was Dannii that got Kylie invited on the show to perform with her. After that, their careers seemed to run in tandem. Kylie became known to us in the UK as Charlene from Neighbours whilst Dannii took the role of Emma Jackson in Home And Away. Crucially though, Kylie had met Stock, Aitken and Waterman and beat her sister to chart stardom with her No 1 single “I Should Be So Lucky”. Was that the moment that their paths separated and Kylie was fused onto the nation’s consciousness ahead of Dannii?

By the time that Ms Minogue junior was releasing her “Love And Kisses” single, Kylie had already racked up 3 hit albums and 12 Top 10 singles including 4 No 1s in the UK. Dannii had a lot of catching up to do. She wasn’t helped by the fact that “Love And Kisses” wasn’t released in the UK until a whole year after its Australian release. When it finally did arrive, it performed pretty well rising to No 8 over here despite it being a fairly insubstantial, Janet Jackson style bit of pop fluff. Its parent album of the same name (it had been changed from its original “Dannii” title in Australia) also clocked up enough sales to achieve gold status and provided Dannii with a further four Top 40 singles. 1991 was Danni’s highpoint of the 90s though. The rest of the decade saw mainly dwindling sales (with the odd exception) and by around 1995/6, she was peddling her calendar that included naked shots of her. We definitely sold a few of those in the Our Price store I was working in (ahem). However, 2003’s “Neon Nights” dance album was well received and went Top 10 and she followed that up by appearing as an X Factor judge on our TVs every Saturday night from 2007 to 2010.

Did someone mention The Bee Gees before? Here are the Brothers Gibb with their “Secret Love” video. I’ve been sat here at my computer for a good five minutes now and I can’t think of anything else to say about this record other than it really wasn’t one of their finest moments. How about I just pad it out with some sales stats? Yeah? OK, well even their US record label had lost faith in them by this point and subsequently didn’t do that much promotion for the parent album ‘High Civilisation” in the States. Consequently, it didn’t chart at all over there though it did struggle to a high of No 24 in the UK. It was more popular in the rest of Europe specifically in Germany (No 2) and Switzerland (No 6). No further singles from the album were big hits anywhere on the planet. We wouldn’t see The Bee Gees in the charts for another two years.

Right, who’s this fella? He looks like a scaffolder or something rather than a pop star. What’s that Bruno Brookes? He used to be a scaffolder actually? Oh right. Presumably that’s why you’re dong this link from the studio gantry and with the camera pointing up at you to give the impression of height – not something you were ever very good at eh? This fella was, of course, Gary Clail (and his On-U Sound System) with “Human Nature”. I was never quite sure what the On-U Sound System bit was all about but it was a nod to the On-U Sound Records label which specialised in dub music. Clail himself had been releasing record since 1985 (presumably when he wasn’t atop a scaffold somewhere) and also worked with legendary hip hop artists Tackhead but I have to admit I hadn’t heard of him before 1991.

“Human Nature” though was a great track and deservedly went Top 10. Despite his dub roots, the sound on this seemed like The Shamen meets The KLF to me but then I knew very little about dub music so I was probably way off. It was the lyrics though that I noticed most – their themes of intolerance and social divisions and the inability of mankind to empathise sound as relevant today as back then which doesn’t say much for the progress of society in the last 30 years. I say it was the lyrics I noticed most but you couldn’t fail to catch an eyeful of Lana Pellay (aka Lanah P aka Alan Pillay). Wow! Now Ru Paul’s Drag Race might well be seen as mainstream these days but back then, drag queens weren’t on your TV that often. I don’t think even Lily Savage had cut through to the masses by this point so Lana’s performance seemed to imbue the whole act with an element of outrageousness it seemed to me. It may have even outraged some viewers I guess. However, Bruno Brookes seemed more taken with Clail himself as he referred to him as ‘Mr Cheeky Face’ at the end of the track. Well, I suppose he did have a glint in his eye that reminds me a bit of Robbie Williams . No? Maybe? Gary would have one further Top 40 hit in 1991 but has continued to release material as recently as 2014.

Oh please. Not again. Not another Eurodance mega mix single! After Technotronic and Black Box pulled off the same cheap stunt of releasing a single made up of all their other previous hits mixed together because…well just because they could, here were Snap! getting in on the act. Theirs was called “Mega Mix” – as opposed to Black Box’s “The Total Mix” and Technotronic’s “Megamix” – they were so imaginative with their titles weren’t they? “Mega Mix” peaked No 10 which seems remarkable given all the tracks on it had all been Top 10 hits themselves in the last 12 months (including a No 1). How did people keep falling for this shit? Was it a club DJ thing? Thankfully, we won’t see Snap! for another 12 months or so but when they do return it will be as serious as cancer.

Finally, finally James are in the TOTP studio. After having three (albeit smallish)Top 40 hits in 1990 without being invited onto the show, the producers could ignore them no longer when the re-release of “Sit Down” went straight in at No 7. Originally released on Rough Trade in 1989 when it peaked at No 77, the band were convinced by new label Fontana to re-record it with Pixies producer Gil Norton and, propelled by a major marketing campaign (which even included appearing on Wogan before the single was released), it became a huge hit spending three weeks at No 2 behind Chesney Hawkes (sorry Chesney lad but there’s no defending that).

In a way, the song is the total antithesis of Gary Clail’s “Human Nature”, reassuring us that we are not all alone in the world with our worries and anxieties and to reach out (sorry, hate that phrase) to our fellow human beings and sit down next to each other to succour some comfort. When played live in Paris before it was released, the Mancunian element of the audience spontaneously sat down on the floor eventually triggering the whole 1000 strong crowd to do the same. This communal sitting down was repeated at a show at the G-Mex, Manchester in December 1990 thereby setting a trend tho be repeated at every show for the last 30 odd years. And yes, I’ve seen James live and sat down with them. “Sit Down” success would pave the way for the band to become a huge mainstream success. The time of James had arrived.

It’s Scritti Politti and Shabba Ranks up next with their horrendous treatment of The Beatles song “She’s A Woman”. Having watched it back, quite what is it that Shabba Ranks adds to the record? There’s a mini rap breakdown towards the middle of it when he blathers on about ‘crazy music lovers’ or something but it only lasts a few seconds. Other than that he seems to be making some indecipherable noises in the background throughout -presumably he was extorting us to ‘wind it up’ or some other such nonsense.

I’ve always sided with Mark Lamarr when it comes to Shabba Ranks. Apart from his repulsive views, I’ve always viewed him as ridiculous for his tendency to shout out ‘Shabba’ in what felt like all his records which was beautifully lampooned in Phoenix Nights…

…Ray Von there who, like James before him, was also asking for people to “Sit Down”. “She’s A Woman” peaked at No 20.

Now then, Bruno Brookes in a half way decent segue shock now as he finds a way to bridge the gap between Shabba Ranks and the next act Definition Of Sound. “Shabba Ranks who once said of himself I’m not a star, I’m a galaxy. There you are that’s the definition of self confidence…” I don’t need to join the dots for what comes next do I?

Definition Of Sound were Kevin Clark and Don Weekes although they went by the monikers of Kevwon and The Don. That’s Kevwon not Rayvon. As well as the single “Wear Your Love Like Heaven”, they also had an album out called “Love And Life: A Journey With The Chameleons” which was a bit confusing as there was also the Manchester band called The Chameleons. Anyway, I looked up the album on Amazon and saw some customer reviews of it. One was positively brimming with enthusiasm for it:

“There is not one bad track on this excellent album. It sounds as fresh today as it did back in the early nineties and is a real feel good collection of songs”

There was also this courtesy of marinegirl who simply said:

“Dreadful”

Well, you can’t please everyone.

I’m guessing that the lucky number seven the chorus is linked in with the title of the track given its significance and the regular occurrence of it in the New Testament. There’s also some nicely squeezed in reference to drug taking in the lyrics:

“Oi, I change my angle and my point
(Oooh) In fact it’s time to roll up a joint.. venture”

There also seems to be a lot of talk about women and the pursuit of them and yet Kevwon told Smash Hits magazine that he was “as sexy as a wet stamp”. Well, if you’re a philatelist …wet stamps…just saying.

The start of the 90s had seen The Rolling Stones on the road with their Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle Tour but recordings wise, they would not release an album of new material until 1994’s “Voodoo Lounge”. To fill the gap between that and 1989’s “Steel Wheels”, a live album of the tour was released. Entitled “Flashpoint”, it featured 15 live tracks and two new studio recordings one of which was the single “Highwire”. Supposedly written about the international arms trade and the events that led to the first US war with Iraq, I have no recollection of this at all but I don’t mind it actually but then I’m hardly a Stones aficionado. The song’s first line (“We sell them missiles, we sell them tanks, we give them credit, you can call up the bank”) was considered far too politically sensitive by the BBC and duly the video shown on TOTP begins with the second verse. However, it wasn’t on their list of banned songs presumably because it was released after the conflict had ended. “Highwire” peaked at No 29.

He’s done it! Chesney Hawkes is No 1! Yes, Chesney mania is in full swing as people can’t seem to get enough of his “The One And Only” single. He’s back in the studio tonight with his band although, they’re not quite the same people that adorned all the covers of the pop press. By the end of its five week run at the top, the band line up had changed to include that guy who looked a bit like Lou Diamond Phillips on bass and the black guy on keyboards who gets very over excited during this performance had been replaced by a white dude. Also, the drummer has been changed so that it’s Chesney’s brother Jodie up there on the sticks.

Ah yes, Chesney’s drummer. I promised you a boring Chesney story last time and here it is. I was once in the same room as Chesney’s drummer! It was for an album playback event at a bar in Manchester (I think it was for Ricky Ross) and the record company rep had got a load of us from the Our Price store I was working in on the guest list. It was a free bar and a very messy do. I didn’t speak to Chesney’s brother though I did manage to grab a few words with Ricky. That’s it. Thats’ my Chesney story… …ooh, and I’ve found another example to support my musical sibling rivalry theory that I posited at the start of the post. Whatever you might think about Chesney (and James fans clearly hate him) he was, is and will always remain more famous than his brother.

See, this post should really be over now what with that final bit of sibling theme tying it altogether nicely but sadly, there is still one ‘song’ left. The play out video is “Over To You John” by Jive Bunny. FOR F***’S SAKE! The end of March 1991 and these pillocks are still in the charts. Thankfully it is the last time we shall ever see them. Yes, it is finally all over.

“Over To You John” reminds me of the 1983 single by Pink Floyd called “Not Now John”. Thankfully, there isn’t a Jive Bunny style Pink Floyd mega mix. Or is there…..yikes!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Dannii Minogue	Love And Kisses	Not likely
2	The Bee Gees	Secret Love	If I’d wanted Chain Reaction (which I didn’t), I’d have bought back in 1986
3	Gary Clail and O-Nu Sound System	Human Nature	No but I easily could have
4	Snap!	Mega Mix	Hell no
5	James	Sit Down	Not the single but I have their first Best Of album with it on
6	Scritti Politti and Shabba Ranks	She’s A Woman	Horrendous stuff – no
7	Definition Of Sound	Wear Your Love Like Heaven	No but I think I downloaded it off iTunes years later
8	The Rolling Stones	Highwire	Nah
9	Chesney Hawkes	The One And Only	Nope
10	Jive Bunny	Over To You John	Now please f**k off John and never come back

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 21 MAR 1991

Posted on July 6, 2021 by 80stastic

Talent. It’s just a six letter word but it can mean so many things. What does it conjure up in your mind’s eye? There’s the obvious meaning of an individual imbued with a natural aptitude or skill (e.g. Gazza was a footballer of great talent). Or, if you’re a fan of the wonderful Monty Python film Life Of Brian, you may think of it as a unit of currency used by the ancient Romans and Greeks. Back in the 80s, if you were a young, amorous male, you might have used the expression ‘sharking for talent’ meaning that you were looking for potential sexual partners. Do the current generation still use that expression? For tonight’s TOTP host Anthea Turner, it means musical artistry. How do we know this? Because she introduces the show by saying “Tonight, the emphasis is on talent” which strikes me as a peculiar thing to say as it implies that, on other shows, there is no particular emphasis on talent or rather that the emphasis of the BBC’s prime time music show could well be on something other than talent. Like what Anthea? Crapness? Judging by some of the acts we’ve seen that could well have been the case.

Well, let’s see if the acts on tonight all pass the talent test. I’m the judge by the way so it will all be fair and above board. Ahem. We start with a returning Boy George who has not been the Top 40 side of the chart boundary for nigh on four years. I say Boy George but it’s actually his band Jesus Loves You. An interesting, intermediary project between his successful but very brief solo star period in the late 80s (“Everything I Own” and all that) and his rebirth as a high profile club DJ, this collective had already released three singles before they finally got themselves a hit. I had never heard of them though before “Bow Down Mister”. This gloriously uplifting pop song was inspired by the experiences George had encountered whilst travelling through India and embracing the Hindu religion and specifically the Hare Krishna movement. When I was a kid growing up in Worcester, I would regularly see a small, chanting procession of Hare Krishna devotees slinking down the high street on a Saturday afternoon. People would point and laugh at the ‘Harrys’ as they were known and in my own youthful ignorance (I was probably only about 10 or so) I probably dismissed them in a similar fashion. Fast forward a decade or so and their movement is enshrined in popular music history courtesy of Boy George.

Supposedly George was interested in becoming a practicing Hare Krishna but it never quite happened. The most recent issue of Classic Pop magazine includes an interview with George to celebrate his recent 60th birthday and in it he states that:

When I released “Bow Down Mister” in the 90s, I thought, ‘Aha, I’ve got the elixir of truth!’ Then a thunder crash came out of nowhere and put paid to that idea”.

So what was that thunder crash? Could it be this explanation from X Ray Spex singer Poly Styrene via @TOTPFacts:

X Ray Spex singer Poly Styrene (a Krishna convert) recalled him visiting her at Bhaktivedanta Manor, the temple where she was living. “George never became a practising Hare Krishna. He was interested but they told him he couldn’t also be a practising homosexual." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) June 25, 2021

"The International Society for Krishna Consciousness accepts gay people but they have to practise celibacy or get married to a woman and have Krishna-following children. I did see George afterwards and he was pretty upset…" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) June 25, 2021

The Hare Krishna movement weren’t the only ones who had an issue with George as his US record label refused to release any material under the name Jesus Loves You. Presumably they were wary of a backlash from the Christian lobby and so instead they credited all their songs simply to Boy George. They also declined to release “Bow Down Mister” as a US single. Their loss. The UK release was on George’s own record label More Protein which he had founded to enable the release of “Everything Starts With an E” by E-Zee Possee (actually George, his old pal and one time Haysi Fantayzee member Jeremy Healy and rapper MC Kinky) when Virgin had refused to release it.

As for the tune itself, for me it was a brilliantly quirky and out there pop song and I loved the instrumentation in the middle eight bit complete with Asha Bhosle* vocals that elevated it into the Krishna chanting / gospel choir mash up coda. Inevitably there were comparisons with “My Sweet Lord” by that other musical George Mr Harrison but my reference point was probably “Ever So Lonely” by Monsoon from 1982.

The performance here is utterly joyful including the exuberant jumping up and down form George’s ‘devotees’ in the background one of whom looks a bit like Norman Pace of Hale & Pace. But if we’re talking doppelgängers, is that The Mission’s Wayne Hussey up there with George on guitar? I really hope so.

“Bow Down Mister” was a big favourite of an Our Price colleague at then time so I heard this a lot. It would peak at No 27 and a re-release fo “Generations of Love” as a follow up would give Jesus Loves You their second and final Top 40 hit when it peaked at No 35.

*Yes that Aha Bhosle who was name checked by Cornershop in the equally unlikely pop hit “Brimful Of Asha”.

From the kooky to the defiantly mainstream where we find Simple Minds treading very familiar ground with their “Let There Be Love” single. Since their double platinum No 1 album “Street Fighting Years” in 1989, they had spent the early stages of the new decade retreading their back catalogue with four volumes of a rolling Greatest Hits project entitled “Themes” covering the various eras of their career to that point.

By 1991 they had caught up with themselves so an album of new material was required which arrived in the form of ninth studio album “Real Life”. Lead single “Let There Be Love” did the job expected of it by becoming a Top 10 hit around Europe (No 6 in the UK and No 1 in Italy) whilst the album itself would be a No 2 chart smash. All well and good except that the new songs seemed so very safe and calculating to me. Yes, they were melodic but there wasn’t any new ground being broken. The band retained the Celtic feel of their unexpected No 1 single “Belfast Child” with the penny whistle melody line but if I had been a massive disciple of the band, I would have been disappointed I think. Even the video seems half hearted being basically the band doing a performance promo of the song with loads of dry ice billowing around them for effect. Talk about blowing smoke up your arse.

This single was the first without keyboardist and original band member Mick MacNeil who had left the group after the completion of their previous world tour in 1990. Was this a pivotal moment in the band’s career? Although drummer Mel Gaynor was still there, his 10 year tenure with the band would come to an end the following year leaving the group to basically become a duo comprising Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill. Still, for the moment, Simple Minds could still substantiate a claim to be a big name in the rock fraternity.

By the way, if you want a less bombastic take on the song, try Icehouse’s 1995 version from their covers album “The Berlin Tapes”…

From the well established in Simple Minds to a brand band next. Banderas evolved out of the break up of The Communards – Sally Herbert and Caroline Buckley had both played with Jimmy Somerville’s hitmakers – and “This Is Your Life” (nothing to do with The Blow Monkeys track of the same title) was their debut single. Pretty good it was too. And so it should have been given that it featured Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner on it as well as the aforementioned Somerville on backing vocals.

Around this time, a woman called Trina transferred across to the Our Price store I was working in and she loved Banderas. Consequently I got to hear quite a bit of their only album “Ripe” which was also sounded pretty good. Sadly for them, they were unable to repeat the success of “This Is Your Life” (follow up single “She Sells” peaked at that most unfortunate and unwanted chart position of No 41) and they were gone by the end of the year.

In my head I always equate them with Trina and chart contemporaries Soho, probably as they were both fronted by women with striking images, both only had one hit and both deserved a better fate.

P.S. A little shout out for whoever came up with the Eamon Andrews style red book graphic that introduced “This Is Your Life” which peaked at No 16. Genius!

Stop the clock! Ah, too late! It’s Quartz featuring Dina Carroll yet again and for the third time now on the show I think with …erm…“It’s Too Late”. It’s not even a new performance but just a re-showing of a previous appearance. What am I supposed to say about this that I haven’t already?!

Well I’m not going to say anything. Instead I offer you a different take on the Carole King classic courtesy of the rather lovely China Crisis who recorded it for a project called “80’s Re:Covered – Your Songs With The 80’s Sound”. Excellent! The album also features the likes of ABC taking on Radiohead and Wang Chung covering Blur. What’s not to like?

Incidentally, China Crisis have also recorded a song called “It’s Never Too Late” which was an extra track on the 12″ of their 1985 hit “Black Man Ray”. Make your minds up fellas!

Now, talking of cover versions…here’s Pet Shop Boys with two for the price of one! There’s an awful lot to unpack about “Where the Streets Have No Name (I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You)”. Firstly, why? Why did Neil and Chris do a mash up of a 1987 U2 song with that cheesy Boystown Gang disco hit. Yes, I know “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” was originally a hit by Frankie Valli but there’s no doubt that it was the 1982 cover that inspired the duo on this. Supposedly it was a swipe at the overly inflated egos of rock stars such as Bono and Sting. Here’s Tennant on this very subject via @TOTPFacts:

Neil Tennant: "There's an assumption that if you're writing pop music it's not an important kind of music, whereas rock music is perceived as being an important kind of music… I don't really like the idea of people projecting themselves as important humanitarian figures" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) June 25, 2021

Just in case Bono didn’t get the joke, they made “Where the Streets Have No Name (I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You)” a double A-side with a track from their “Behaviour” album called “How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?”. Eventually, U2 issued a statement saying “What have we done to deserve this?” which was a pretty clever and semi-diplomatic response I think.

That double A-side re-promoted the “Behaviour” album but also caused headaches for record shop staff (like me) when customers came in wanting to buy the album with that disco U2 song on it when it wasn’t on the actual album. “No, it’s the other A-side that’s on the album not Where the Streets Have No Name” would be the explanation from behind the counter. “What other A-side?” would come the reply as let’s be fair, radio weren’t playing “How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?”. I don’t think the album was re-issued with it on at the time. Presumably it has subsequently been added as an extra track in a super deluxe reissue years later.

Neil and Chris were on slightly dodgy ground with all this rock star ego poking / cover version business. Back in 1987, as “It’s A Sin” became their first No 1, DJ Jonathan King accused them of pinching the melody from “Wild World” by Cat Stevens for their chart topper in his Sun newspaper column. He even released his own cover version of “Wild World” as a single constructed to sound very similar to “It’s a Sin” to prove his point. The duo sued King winning out-of-court damages which they donated to charity. OK, so I guess in a ‘who’s the dodgiest?’ contest between Pet Shop Boys and Jonathan King there’s only one winner and in fact charity was the real winner in this spat but even so, I think Bono’s response was a bit classier.

The double A-side “Where the Streets Have No Name (I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You)” / “How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?” peaked at No 4 and must also be one of the longest ever song titles to trouble the chart compilers albeit that it was double -barrelled.

Some Breakers next and we start with “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” by Definition Of Sound. Now, I had no idea about the original of this single’s song title until just now but apparently it was half inched from a track by 60s hippy folk rocker Donovan. It’s actually rather nice…

Anyway, Definition Of Sound’s single was nothing like that not being a cover version and all. No, their’s was a kick ass dance tune which put me in mind of “Groove Is In The Heart” by Deee-Lite a bit. But who were these guys anyway? Well, they were rappers Kevin Clark and Don Weekes from London (I’d always assumed they were American) who used a track called “Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out)” by The Hombres who were an American 60s garage rock band to construct their biggest hit. Not only did they steal the riff but also the spoken word intro that goes:

I preach my dear friend
You’re about to receive Long John Barleycorn
Nicotine and the temptation of Eve….

The first time I heard that intro I had to do a double take to check that I hadn’t heard the ‘n’ word in there. Fortunately it was the word ‘nicotine’. By bizarre coincidence, the aforementioned Jonathan King had a hit with “Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out)” in 1970 and I promise I won’t mention his name again.

Back to Definition Of Sound though and it seems that they stole the song title from one source and then nicked the riff and some lyrics from another. It doesn’t sound like a good defence of their own creativity but in fact what they came up with was brilliant. The rapping is on point and the chorus is irresistibly catchy. It probably should have been a bigger hit than its No 17 peak. They followed this up with a very similar sounding single called “Moira Jane’s Café” which I don’t recall but which just scraped into the UK Top 40 but was a bigger deal over the pond where it became the first UK Rap record to become number 1 on the Billboard Dance Charts.

They released three albums in total before Clark went on to work in A&R and music publishing whilst Weekes released a solo album before leaving the music industry altogether.

What is this?! Scritti Politti and Shabba Ranks? Together? As with Pet Shop Boys and their “Where the Streets Have No Name (I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You)” mash up single, the question that comes to mind is why? I guess I’m asking this question retrospectively though as I had no clue who Shabba Ranks was back in 1991. Indeed it would be another two years before he became a household name with a re-release of his “Mr Loverman” single when you couldn’t mention him without exclaiming ‘Shabba!’. Even so, it does seem an unlikely alliance Green Gartside’s voice is so fey that a pairing with a dancehall rapper really didn’t seem logical. And it doesn’t really work does it? The fact that they chose a Beatles song to desecrate doesn’t help their case for me – “She’s A Woman” was the B-side to the Fab Four’s 1964 chart topper “I Feel Fine”. Quite how it got to No 20 is a mystery to me. And what is Green wearing in the video?! This would prove to be Scritti Politti’s last ever Top 40 hit and also heralded an eight year hiatus for Gartside.

Despite having formed in 1985, I don’t think I know any song by Jane’s Addiction other than “Been Caught Stealing”. Although very much one of the first funk metal acts to gain mainstream exposure it was their fellow LA contemporaries Red Hot Chili Peppers that I would come to appreciate more.

“Been Caught Stealing” was from their “Ritual De Lo Habitual” which went platinum in the US and Gold in the UK but I have to admit that I knew its sleeve art more than its contents. I’m not sure what the clip is that TOTP were showing but it’s not the infamous official video for the single which won Best Alternative Video at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards and was voted No. 47 on VH1’s 100 Greatest Videos. Maybe it was deemed too controversial for pre-watershed audiences? All that shoplifting plus there is some twerking and a false arse also features.

This was the band’s first ever UK Top 40 hit peaking at No 34 and they wouldn’t have another for 12 years.

Anthea is back on her musical talent theme in the intro to the next act who you would not have predicted being in the charts around now. Not that he didn’t have any talent – he had one of the most unique and distinctive voices ever. It was just that he hadn’t been anywhere near the Top 40 for five whole years. Suddenly though, Feargal Sharkey was back! After the heady, chart topping days of “A Good Heart” and all that, Feargal’s career took a stumble when second album ‘Wish” was a commercial failure and critically panned.

Fast forward three years and here he was bagging himself a No 12 hit though “I’ve Got News For You” wasn’t really what any of us could have expected. A warm, smooth, slowly building ballad in a blues style? This was no “Teenage Kicks”. I could imagine it being used to soundtrack a particularly tender and poignant scene in a rom-com film. The parent album “Songs From The Mardi Gras” sold if not spectacularly then solidly and included a version of the traditional Irish folk song “She Moved Through the Fair”. And who else that appeared earlier in the show used that song to score themselves a No 1? Yep, Simple Minds whose “Belfast Child” incorporated its melody. I don’t just throw this blog together you know!

It also included a track by Maria McKee who had famously written “A Good Heart” for Feargal. This wasn’t written to request though; “To Miss Someone” was from her self-titled solo debut which Sharkey just chose to cover. “I’ve Got News For You” was to be his swansong however. He quit recording and performing after this to become a big name within the music industry as CEO of British Music Rights and head of UK Music.

Oh and yes, back in 1991, he still had that floppy hair as well as a few facial whiskers.

There’s an article in the current edition of Classic Pop magazine about all the artists to have come out of Scandinavia. There’s more than you might imagine. There’s A-ha , Röyksopp and Lene Marlin from Norway whilst Denmark are represented by…erm..”Barbie Girl” hitmakers Aqua. But it’s Sweden who are the region’s big hitters. Yes, obviously we could all name Abba but there’s also The Cardigans, Ace Of Base, Europe, Avicii and of course Roxette. How do they compare to all those other names? Well, nobody will ever oust Abba from the forefront of the world’s consciousness but Marie Fredriksson and Per Gessle were phenomenally successful with a run of four US No 1 singles including “Joyride”.

That said, I don’t think it ever got any bigger or better for Roxette after this point in time. The “Joyride” LP sold 11 million copies worldwide but not one of their subsequent album releases got anywhere near that figure as that old enemy of the pop star diminishing returns set in. They remained a big deal in Europe throughout the rest of the decade but their US success disappeared quickly when interest in them dwindled. Here in the UK, the duo retained a fairly loyal fanbase for most fo the decade (both albums after “Joyride” also went Top 3 ) but by 1999’s “Have A Nice Day”, we had also moved on as it peaked at No 28. Their next three albums missed the Top 100 (that’s not a typo that’s one hundred!) altogether.

So, to return to Anthea Turner’s talent watch, did Roxette have talent? Absolutely. Did they always have the public’s ear? No. Were they ever fashionable? Never.

After last Friday’s Comic Relief Day event, it was inevitable that the official song by Hale & Pace would go to No 1. “The Stonk” really was dreadful though. It starts off a bit like the theme to Only Fools And Horses and then turns into a horribly naff Status Quo by numbers boogiewoogie track. Just vile.

I saw Norman Pace in Costa Coffee in Hull once learning his lines for a production at one of the theatres here as he supped on a cappuccino. He looked considerably older than he does here probably because he was considerably older. Therein ends my Hale & Pace anecdote. Also, they kind of undermine Anthea’s musical talent promise don’t you think?

The play out video is “Hangar 18” by Megadeth. Now all this trash metal nonsense normally leaves me cold but this one does at least have some relevance to the present day. How so? Well, it’s all about the conspiracy theory that alien bodies were taken to a facility called Hangar 18 in Dayton, Ohio when a UFO supposedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. The remains were later taken to Area 51 in Nevada or so the theory goes. Fast forward 74 years and the Pentagon’s UFO report that was published in June this year which basically no longer rules out the possibility of alien spacecraft as a possible explanation for unexplained sightings. There was not a full committal to the idea either though. In fact, the only confirmation from the report was that the acronym UFO should no longer be used and we should instead call them UAPs instead which stands for ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’. Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to fly (ahem).

“Hangar 18” peaked at No 26 and was taken from their Top 10 album “Rust In Peace”.

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

Order of Appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Jesus Loves You	Bow Down Mister	No but my wife has it on a Culture Club / Boy George Best Of album
2	Simple Minds	Let There Be Love	No but again I have it on a Best Of I think
3	Banderas	This Is Your Life	No
4	Quartz featuring Dina Carroll	It’s Too Late	Nope
5	Pet Shop Boys	Where the Streets Have No Name (I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You)	No the single but it will be on their Pop Art Best Of that I have
6	Definition Of Sound	Where Your Love Like Heaven	Not at the time but I think I may have downloaded it from iTunes years later
7	Scritti Politti and Shabba Ranks	She’s A Woman	No – its was awful
8	Jane’s Addiction	Been Caught Stealing	I did not
9	Feargal Sharkey	I’ve Got News For You	Nice song but no
10	Roxette	Joyride	Nah
11	Hale & Pace	The Stonk	The Stink more like! No, not even for charity!
12	Megadeth	Hangar 18	Negative

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/m000x8pb/top-of-the-pops-21031991

TOTP 14 MAR 1991

Posted on July 1, 2021 by 80stastic

Right, we’re about 10 weeks into reviewing the year that was 1991 here at TOTP Rewind so how’s it going do we think? Personally, I think it’s been a bit all over the place. We’ve had a No 1 from Iron Maiden, some years old hits back in the charts from the likes of The Clash, Madonna and Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes, some truly vile Grease and Bee Gees themed mega-mixes, some TV show cartoon characters topping the charts in the form of The Simpsons, some non mainstream acts sneaking into the charts like Pop Will Eat Itself, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and The Railway Children, established rock and pop royalty still surviving into the 90s like Queen and Sting, some monks chanting their way to No 1, some classy dance tunes from the likes of Massive Attack and The Source and most unbelievably of all, a second hit for Gazza. Phew! Totally bonkers! The Top 40 was off its head!

And now a young man entered the fray who would add yet another unexpected element to the musical meting pot. Who saw Chesney Hawkes coming?! Well, if you had watched the film Buddy’s Song then maybe you did predict Ches-mania. This comedy-drama flick told the story of one Buddy Clark and his struggles to make it as a pop star whilst dealing with the issues of entering adulthood, separated parents and a burgeoning romance. Hawkes was, of course, the titular Buddy whilst The Who frontman Roger Daltrey played his Dad. I’m sure I’ve seen this but I don’t think it was at the cinema. Maybe it was shown on TV subsequently. It was pretty insubstantial as I recall but it was a perfect vehicle to launch Chesney’s real life pop star career. It was kind of like The Monkees all over again when the fictitious pop band from a TV show become actual pop stars or as Micky Dolenz famously said ‘like Leonard Nimoy becoming a real life Vulcan’. Cleverly, the film featured 11 songs performed by Chesney which were then released on a soundtrack album which could then be marketed basically as a Chesney Hawkes solo album. Added to all of this promotion, Hawkes even had a pop music back story as his Dad was Chip Hawkes from 60s hitmakers The Tremeloes.

Despite all this and Hawkes’ clean cut, pretty boy pop star looks, his rise to stardom still didn’t seem a given. Firstly, teenage girls already had a clutch of pop pin ups to scream at in the shape of New Kids On The Block. Secondly, there was his song. “The One And Only” had been written for him by faded 80s pop star Nik Kershaw whose last chart hit had been back in 1985 and was surely now unknown to 90s pop fans but it was, nevertheless, plucked from the album to be Hawkes’ debut single. Now here’s the thing for me about “The One And Only”; yes it sounded a bit dated (being written by a pop star from an earlier decade and all) and it had some cheesy, 6th form style lyrics but…but…it was and remains a bloody good pop song! No f**k you, it is! Whatever you may think about Kershaw, that’s what his strength was – writing decent pop genre songs. He knew how to do that. What he wasn’t so comfortable with was actually being the pop star which he always struggled with. This was an almost perfect arrangement for him. He gets all the royalties and kudos from a chart hit but he doesn’t have to front or promote it. Once more there was a tie in with The Monkees story as when music publisher Don Kirshner was asked to provide hit songs for the group and he presented them with the song “Sugar, Sugar”, they hated it and rejected it out of hand at a tense meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Kirshner took his song and got some session musicians to record it and put it out under the name of The Archies who were a fictional band that featured in the animated TV series The Archie Show knowing that a bunch of cartoon characters couldn’t give him any grief. For Nik Kershaw see Don Kirshner (sort of). OK, the analogy doesn’t quite hold as a parallel to the Kershaw/Chesney story but you get my drift.

This TOTP performance helped propel Chesney to the top of the charts within a matter of weeks and for a while he was everywhere. I have my own (not especially interesting) Chesney Hawkes story but I’ll keep that back for another post as he will be at No 1 for FIVE weeks!

Next the sound of a band transitioning from being critically acclaimed and with a sizeable devoted fanbase to probably the biggest band in the world at the time; all courtesy of one unusual song. REM were certainly not a secret by the time 1991 rolled around. Their last album “Green” had sold a few million copies world wide and they had undertaken their biggest ever tour to support it. I was certainly aware of them having been introduced to their work by a pal at Polytechnic and had loved their “Stand” single. Yet, I wouldn’t have said they were up there with the ridiculously famous bands like, I don’t know, U2 or Queen or The Police.

“Losing My Religion” changed all that and brought them into the world of mainstream, global success. The lead single from their seventh studio album “Out Of Time” (yes seventh, they were hardly an overnight success), it wasn’t your typical rock/pop song featuring as it did a mandolin as the principal instrument and no recognisable chorus. Record company Warner Bros had some reservations about the band choosing it to promote the album but it would prove to be the biggest hit of their career. I say that but UK audiences didn’t quite embrace it in the same way as the rest of the world. A No 4 in the US and Top 10 just about everywhere else, it only made it to No 19 in the UK charts. However, sales of “Out Of Time” in this country were off the scale. It went to No 1, was the sixth best selling album of the year and would go five times platinum here. We sold that album in the Our Price store I worked in again and again and again. And they we sold it some more. By comparison, it sold five times more than previous album “Green”.

There’s loads of stuff online about the video for “Losing My Religion” in terms of the director, the concept behind it etc so you can look all that stuff up yourself if you like but here are the things that I have noticed about it:

Is the actor with the bald head and white beard who takes the wig off the angel character the same bloke who played Socrates (So-Crates) in Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure?
Supposedly Michael Stipe’s chaotic dancing style is based on a mash up of Sinead O’Connor’s moves in her “The Emperor’s New Clothes” video and David Byrne’s “Once In A Lifetime” freaky cavorting. However, to me, it looks more like Roland Orzabal wigging out in the Tears For Fears video for “Mad World”.
Michael Stipe has hair!

Seeing as REM were making a bid for global domination, it fell to Oxford’s Ride to be this week’s non-mainstream artist on the show. Apparently this was their TOTP debut but I think we had seen some of their videos on before (probably in the Breakers section). “Unfamiliar” was actually just one of four songs on an EP called “Today Forever” Indeed all of their previous chart entries had actually been tracks from an over arching EP – I don’t know, those indie bands and their EPs!

Ride seemed to gain a lot of critical appreciation and indeed commercial success very quickly after their formation as the poster boys for the ‘shoe gazing’ movement. The following year would see them at the pinnacle of their powers as they would score a Top 10 single in “Leave Them All Behind” and a Top 5 album in “Going Blank Again”. My particular fave of theirs from that time was “Twisterella” so I hope we get to see that on a future TOTP repeat.

As brightly as they burned, their flame was also quickly extinguished and by 1995 they were in crisis following the recording of the “Tarantula” album and broke up quickly afterwards. However, they reformed in 2014 and have released two successful albums since then.

The “Today Forever EP” peaked at No 14.

After seeing their 70s canon bastardised into an horrific megamix by The UK Mixmasters a couple of weeks earlier, The Bee Gees themselves were back for real with some new material. Despite their incredible run of success in the 70s, the 80s had been a much quieter time for The Bee Gees apart from one notable exception. Their surprise No 1 single “You Win Again” in 1987 was their only Top 40 entry of the entire decade. In an attempt to reverse this trend, they pulled off a trick most commonly known as money for old rope. Yes, they just took one of their old songs, made a few tweaks and shoved that out into the marketplace. So not really new material at all then. The song that they refashioned was “Chain Reaction” which had been a No 1 for Diana Ross back in 1986 and it re-emerged in 1991 as “Secret Love”. It proved a simple act to deceive the UK record buying public as they sent it all the way to No 5. However, the album it was taken from called “High Civilization” severely underperformed.

They appeared to expend as little effort on the video as they had done on the song. This was stultifyingly dull following very much in the footsteps of the promo for “You Win Again”. They could have at least pulled out some Travolta -esque Saturday Night Fever moves.

What can only be described as a poignant video next. Due to his worsening condition caused by advanced AIDS, Freddie Mercury was in very poor health come 1991. He had wanted to keep working as long as possible which allowed for one final Queen album to be released before his death in “Innuendo”. “I’m Going Slightly Mad” was the second single to be released from it following the title track and was also the last promo in which he contributed significantly to the creative process. By this point, stories of his ill health were rife in the press and so as not to fuel the rumours, he wore heavy make up to his the blotches on his face and a big coat to disguise the heavy weight loss his condition had induced. An over the top wig was also in play to cover up his receding hairline. The fact that it was almost entirely shot in black and white may also have been designed to throw people off the scent. That and the penguins. Definitely designed to throw people off the scent was the gorilla suit which allegedly housed one Elton Hercules John.

After the full on bonkers “Innuendo”, “I’m Going Slightly Mad” did little to return the band to the Queen sound that had served them so well for the previous two decades. Very understated with some truly daft lyrics (“I think I’m a banana tree”), it never seemed to get going to me. Maybe that wasn’t the point though. Many an online theory suggests that the lyrics reflect the mental decline Mercury was experiencing as one of the effects of AIDS. It didn’t seem to strike an emphatic chord with the fans as after the album’s title track had gone straight in at No 1, “I’m Going Slightly Mad” peaked at No 22.

By late November, Freddie would be dead but his end would usher in a posthumous No 1 when a re-release of “Bohemian Rhapsody” backed with another “Innuendo” track “These Are the Days of Our Lives” claimed the Xmas No 1 spot.

After a brief cameo from Lenny Henry to plug Red Nose Day which was happening the following evening, we have another showing of the Massive Attack studio performance for “Unfinished Sympathy”. So what was the story behind that pithy song title? Here’s @TOTPFacts with the answer:

The title's a pun on Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. 3D: "[It] came up as a joke, but it fitted the song & the arrangements so perfectly, we had to use it." Shara Nelson: "My working title was something like 'Really Hurt You Baby', but they wanted something more abstract" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) June 25, 2021

Shara Nelson would go onto have a clutch of hit singles in the mid 90s as a solo artist and she gives a heart felt performance here but the TOTP cameraman seems more interested in the guy in the backing orchestra with the pronounced comb over giving 70s footballer Ralph Coates a run for his money. Who was Ralph Coates? This was Ralph Coates…

A hat trick of rock and pop legends on the same show is completed. Following Queen and The Bee Gees earlier is Rod Stewart whose “Rhythm Of My Heart” single was the first from his “Vagabond Heart” album. That album would perform very solidly commercially(exceeding expectations even) and gave Rod the Mod his highest charting long player since 1976’s “A Night On The Town”. The single also did well for him peaking at No 3 at a stroke becoming his biggest hit since 1986’s “Every Beat of My Heart”.

If “Rhythm Of My Heart” sounded just a teeny bit Scottish in flavour, then there was a good reason for that. The melody is an adaptation of centuries old Scottish folk song “The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond”. Yes you do know it; it’s the one that goes:

O ye’ll tak’ the high road, and I’ll tak’ the low road,
And I’ll be in Scotland a’fore ye

Yes, that one. Rod’s pride in his Scottish ancestry is well known of course (although he was born in England and his Mother was English, his Dad was Scottish) so I suppose we shouldn’t have been surprised about him mining it for a hit record.

On June the 7th of this year, as part of his world tour in support of the “Vagabond Heart” album, Stewart played Old Trafford football stadium and, as core stock CD buyer at the time (oh the responsibility), I had my eyes on the ball for this happening. Predicting a spike in interest, I ordered in a load of his 1989 Best Of album which sold like billy-o’ the day after the gig which happened to be a Saturday. Or was it my manager (a big Rod fan) who told me to order them in? In the face-off a lack of definitive evidence, I’m going to take the credit for this one.

Host Simon Mayo blows his own trumpet (he did that quite a bit I’ve noticed) when introducing Happy Mondays and their latest single by saying it was a chart beater on his Radio 1 Breakfast Show and that he was playing it everyday. “Ooh check me out with my hip tastes; I’m no brainless DJ like Steve Wright, I’m into the music” you can imagine is what he really means.

“Loose Fit” was the third and final single to be lifted from the “Pills ‘n’ Thrills And Bellyaches” album and I recall our store having loads of it in stock but although it sold steadily peaking at No 17, it didn’t reach the heights of the first two singles “Step On” and “Kinky Afro” which both made it to No 5. Like many I think, I always thought it was something to do with Madchester fashion and all those baggy flare jeans but it wasn’t. Here’s Shaun Ryder courtesy of @TOTPFacts:

“It’s about your approach to life, how you approach everything: from your work, or whatever you do to make money, to relationships. For me, particularly back then, it had to be a loose fit.” #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) June 25, 2021

Oh OK but the lyrics did include this rhyming couplet…

Don’t need no skin tights in my wardrobe today
Fold them all up and put them all away

…so, as with the Rod Stewart Best Of story, I’m going to give myself the benefit fo the doubt on this one.

Watching this performance back, it’s hard to remember that Shaun used to look like this. Still, I guess we all look a bit different to how we did 30 years ago… apart from Sinitta of course who doesn’t look much different from her “So Macho” days.

It’s a second and final week at the top for The Clash and “Should I Stay Or Should I Go”. Given the renewed interest in the band, record label Epic went to work on raiding their back catalogue to try and spin to out some more hits. They released a Best Of album called simply “The Singles” despite their already being a superior collection called “The Story Of The Clash” from just three years earlier. The public weren’t taken in by that and it struggled to a high of No 68. They had better luck with a re-release of ‘Rock The Casbah” (like “Should I Stay Or Should I Go”, also from the “Combat Rock” LP) which went to No 15 in the singles chart. However, a second re-release of “London Calling” (it had already been re-released once in 1988) missed the Top 40 altogether and brought the whole early 90s revisiting The Clash project to a close.

The play out song is “Who? Where? Why?” by Jesus Jones. It’s not the official promo video though but rather a re-showing of their studio performance from the other week. If you google Jesus Jones, the first result that comes up is a link to their official website (good work from their website creator) and the link says ‘Jesus Jones. No, we didn’t split up’. Yes, in spite of everything, the music press backlash, the decline in their popularity, being dropped by EMI, the band remained together and are still touring and releasing new material to this day. Apart from a spell when original drummer Gen was replaced by Tony Arthy before rejoining the fold in 2014, thew original line up has remained intact. Quite the achievement.

“Who? Where? Why?” peaked at No 21.

For the sake of posterity, I include the chart rundown below:

Order of Appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Chesney Hawkes	The One And Only	I did not
2	REM	Losing My Religion	Not the single but I must have it on something
3	Ride	Today Forever EP	Nah
4	The Bee Gees	Secret Love	Definitely not
5	Queen	I’m Going Slightly Mad	Negative
6	Massive Attack	Unfinished Sympathy	No but I had the album Blue Lines
7	Rod Stewart	Rhythm Of My Heart	And no
8	Happy Mondays	Loose Fit	No but I had the Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches album
9	The Clash	Should I Stay Or Should I Go	Not the re-release but I have it on something surely?
10	Jesus Jones	Who? Where? Why?	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/m000x8p7/top-of-the-pops-14031991

TOTP 07 MAR 1991

Posted on June 28, 2021 by 80stastic

Welcome back to TOTP Rewind where I am reviewing a time so long ago that in this week back in 1991, Ryan Giggs made his firtst team debut for Manchester United. He was 17 at the time and when he finally hung up his boots, he was 40! And just to hammer home how old that makes those of us who remember it feel, even that retirement was 7 years ago! Anyway, probably best to dismiss those thoughts from our minds (and certainly the subject of Ryan Giggs given the current state of his private life and what he has been accused of). Instead, let us glory in the tunes of March 1991. Our host is Nicky Campbell (watch out for the snidey remarks) and we begin with….

….FFS! Yes, 1991 saw the return of the Comic Relief single after the fallow year of 1990. Now a deeply embedded part of UK culture, at this point in history there had only ever been three Comic Relief singles in existence before Hale & Pace were recruited to be the public face of this year’s campaign courtesy of their song “The Stonk”. I say Hale & Pace but the record is actually credited to ‘Hale & Pace and the Stonkers’. Why Hale & Pace? Well, hard as it may seem to believe, these two were once very much seen as amongst the biggest names in UK comedy. They had just come off the back of a third ITV series series of their own and their characters like ‘The Two Rons’ and ‘Billy & Johnny’ had bumped up their profile significantly. Did I watch their show? I think I probably did – there wasn’t that much choice back then with there being just the four channels and all – but I never found ‘The Two Rons’ very funny at all although ‘Billy & Johnny’ did raise a smile. They were probably more controversial and cutting edge than I remember (they did start their career with appearances in the very funny and very anarchic The Young Ones after all) with sketches that included full frontal nudity and of course the microwaved cat. Yet they were perceived by the Comic Relief charity as lovable and establishment enough to front up their 1991 song.

Ah yes, the actual ‘song’. I would go as far as to say that “The Stonk” is in with a good shout at being the worst ever Comic Relief single. Too harsh? Let’s examine the competition. The very first example of this genre was “Living Doll” by Cliff Richard and The Young Ones. Now the Cliff original is crap admittedly but Rick, Vivian, Neil and Mike were great enough comedy creations to make the joke work (even Cliff plays along well enough). Plus it was the first. We hadn’t seen this before and so it was a novelty in more than one sense. The second single was “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” by Mel & Kim (aka Mel Smith and Kim Wilde). It’s tragically awful and as Kim sings so corny but it has become accepted as part of the Christmas song canon so I suggest it just about gets away with it. Next was “Help” by Bananarama and Lananeeneenoonoo. Again, not especially funny but it is rescued for me by the lampooning of new ‘nana Jacquie O’Sullivan by the wonderful Kathy Burke. In the years after “The Stonk”, the charity turned to artists doing straight up versions of proper pop songs without the comic attachment such as Cher, Chrissie Hynde and Neneh Cherry doing “Love Can Build a Bridge” and The Spice Girls allowing their fourth single “Mama” / “Who Do You Think You Are” to be adopted as the official song. Then there were the boy band doing cover versions years – Boyzone and “When the Going Gets Tough”, Westlife and “Uptown Girl” and One Direction and “One Way Or Another (Teenage Kicks)” – before Peter Kay took on the mantle for a few years.

So where does “The Stonk” come in this list? It’s got to be pretty near the bottom surely? I think it’s the way Hale & Pace perform it semi seriously that grates. That and the dancing. Oh God, the dancing. The song actually had some heavyweight musicians behind it including Queen’s Brian May (who produced it) and Roger Taylor plus Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour, Nick Lowe and Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi. I’m surprised not to see Status Quo’s name in there as well as their boogie woogie rock style seems to have been appropriated for “The Stonk”.

For all its many faults, “The Stonk” did the job it was meant to by going to No 1 and raising lots of money for charity. It was, and remains, awful though.

It’s that bloody Rocky V song again next. Is this the third time it’s been on the show? Seems a lot for a song that got no further in the charts than No 20. Nicky Campbell, having not really been able to go to town with the snide remarks seeing as the first song was for charity, makes up for lost time by stating “Rocky V is about to be released, the last among sequels, they promise, and we sincerely hope…” – boxing clever with his insults as ever.

As with the film itself, does anybody really recall “Go For It” by Joey B Ellis AKA MC Breeze and Tynetta Hare with any fondness? Has anyone even heard it played on the radio since it was in the charts 30 years ago? By contrast, how many times do you hear “Eye Of The Tiger” played on one of the nostalgia radio stations? The film is similarly held in low esteem. Surely the least liked entry in the entire franchise, the film tanked at the box office. Had it stuck to its original ending which saw Rocky die after having taken a beating from his ex- protégé Tommy Gunn in a car park street brawl, maybe it would have benefited from being the ultimate final act of the story. Supposedly the studio changed its mind though declaring, according to director John Avildsen in an Ultimate Classic Rock interview:

‘Oh, by the way, Rocky’s not going to die. Batman doesn’t die. Superman, James Bond – these people don’t die’.”

I’m not really sure those are valid comparisons and anyway *SPOILER* Iron Man dies at the end of Avengers: Endgame.

Although Rocky didn’t die, it was the end of the road for Joey B Ellis and Tynetta Hare who never had another UK chart hit.

It’s that cover of Carole King’s “It’s Too Late” by Quartz featuring Dina Carroll next. Given an innocent verdict in Miranda Sawyer’s kangaroo court article about the “great dance swizze up” in Smash Hits at the time on account of the fact that Dina does actually sing on the record, I still couldn’t be doing with this. I loved the Carole King original but the lameness of this dance version is exemplified by the Spanish guitar break in the middle eight which is actually played on a synthesiser. So taken aback at the synthetic nature of this is Dina that she misses her cue to come back in thereby adding to the while fakery by making a sham of the performance as well as the song.

Quartz did released an album with “It’s Too Late” on. Having looked it up, I do remember the cover but I’m pretty sure it didn’t sell well and we never heard from Quartz again. Dina Carroll on the other hand….

“It’s Too Late” peaked at No 8.

It’s the video for Living Colour and their “Love Rears Its Ugly Head” single next and whoever was responsible for the text on the chart run down graphics clearly didn’t know the difference between it’s and its as they add an unwanted apostrophe into the song title. Standards and all that.

Wikipedia informs me that the band’s drummer is called Will Calhoun. Will Calhoun? Why is that name stirring embers in the ashes of my memory? Will Calhoun? Come on man, think! Yes! Of course. Will Calhoun was a recurring character in The Adventures Of Champion The Wonder Horse. No, if you are anywhere near Amy age (53 as it happens) then you do remember The Adventures Of Champion The Wonder Horse. Listen to this….

…see, told you. In the show, Will Calhoun was a cowardly old timer cowboy who told some tall tales of his supposed escapades to gullible 12 year old Ricky. None of this has anything at all to do with Living Colour but I’ve got to fill out this post somehow and I used up all my meagre Living Colour knowledge the first time they were on TOTP. OK, anything else I can dredge up? How about I give some credit to Nicky Campbell who has clearly done his research for his intro to this one. “They’re candid, they’re lurid, they’re vivid and livid…” he says which in itself doesn’t make much sense but it does name check the title of their first album “Vivid” which must have been deliberate surely other wise it’s just word salad.

“Love Rears Its Ugly Head” peaked at No 12.

Now here’s act we haven’t seen before on TOTP but you would be forgiven for thinking you had. Although I mistakenly thought that they were a part of the ‘Madchester’ scene when I first heard about them, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin were actually one of the trinity of acts that came out of Stourbridge, West Midlands alongside The Wonder Stuff and Pop Will Eat Itself and wouldn’t you just know it looking at their image. All that crimped hair, shorts and slogan emblazoned T-shirts, jumping around on stage like kids at a playground. This look wasn’t restricted to bands from Stourbridge either. You could also add EMF and Jesus Jones to the list as well. The T-shirts, much like with James and Insprial Carpets, were quite a thing with The Ned’s (as their fans referred to them). They reportedly produced 86 of their own band designs within a three year period. Pretty sure we stocked some of them in the basement of the Our Price Store I was working in.

It wasn’t all about image and clothes though; they did make some music as well. “Happiness” was their first Top 40 hit after two earlier singles “Kill Your Television” and “Until You Find Out” had just missed out on that accolade and, for me, its fuzzy pop sound certainly didn’t seem out of place in the company of The Wonder Stuff, Jesus Jones et al. Maybe not quite as slick though. A bit The Wedding Present -esque even. Parent album “God Fodder” was a big success rising as high as No 4 in the charts and even making some waves across the pond in the US. As of 2013, “God Fodder” has sold around 500,000 copies worldwide. Despite splitting in 1995, the original line up reformed in 2008 to play some live shows and they retain a loyal fan base around the world. That’s not the only thing they retained though. Lead singer Jonn Penney still has that lopsided hairstyle..

Hat doffed to Jonn Penney, who is still rocking the long-on-one-side haircut. That's commitment. Could still be crimped, though, Jonn. (Tuts) #TOTP pic.twitter.com/qgugQg8OVk
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) June 18, 2021

The TOTP producers are still persisting with this pointless Top 5 selling albums feature. For the record then, these were the biggest albums in February 1991:

1. Queen – “Innuendo”

2. Gloria Estefan – “Into The Light”

3. Chris Isaak – “Wicked Game”

4. Elton John – “The Very Best Of Elton John”

5. George Michael – “Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1”

Blimey. You might get a non mainstream act like Ned’s Atomic Dustbin in the singles chart but the albums chart was another matter altogether! Apart from Chris Isaak maybe, the rest are all very established rock and pop royalty.

Back to the music and next we have Xpansions with their dance track “Move Your Body (Elevation)”. A couple of posts ago, I talked about how my mate Robin had found himself in the TOTP studio audience by mistake as he and his mate had believed Morrissey was going to be on the show. When Mozza wasn’t, they were trapped in a world of terrible pop stars and songs. Determined to avoid the camera at all costs, Robin thought he had saved himself from embarrassment…until this repeat was shown 30 years later and he spotted the back of his head in amongst the throng…and he was clapping along to Xpansions! I’ve watched this back a couple of times but can’t spot him (shame). If only it had been this show that he’d attended then he would have at least have seen Ned’s Atomic Dustbin who I know he liked and ..erm..oh yeah, Hale & Pace.

As for Xpansions, in that aforementioned Miranda Sawyer Smash Hits article, they get exposed as the charlatans they were as the vocalist we see on stage – Sally Ann Marsh – didn’t actually sing on the record. No, that was a 16 year old called Lizzie D who didn’t get any credit nor repayment for her vocals. A “swizze up” indeed!

Having achieved a huge triumph with “It Must Have Been Love” from the Pretty Woman soundtrack the previous Summer, Roxette‘s record company EMI had sensibly been hurriedly re-issuing tracks from their back catalogue that had flopped initially to consolidate on this. However, that practice could only sustain for so long before new material was needed from the duo. In that context, “Joyride” (the single and album) needed to succeed. Both did in spades.

There wasn’t much in the way of musical progression with this new material but why fix something that wasn’t broke? The song “Joyride” was pure, unabashed, unashamed out and out pop. Probably inevitably so; did Roxette know how to do anything else? The opening guitar chords must surely have been pinched by The Rembrandts for their theme from Friends hit “I’ll Be There For You” whilst Per Gessle himself seems to have been guilty of being very influenced by The Doors track “Hello I Love You” in the chorus. In his defence, he says he was inspired by a note his girlfriend (now wife) left on his piano, which read: “Hej, din tok, jag älskar dig” (“Hello, you fool, I love you”). In fact, Per was all over this one – it’s him doing the majority of the vocals whereas it had been Marie Fredriksson on their recent chart hits like “Listen To Your Heart” and the ubiquitous “It Must Have Been Love” and it was his decision to include the whistling bits. Supposedly, he got the idea after watching Monty Python’s Life of Brian and its song “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life”.

The “Joyride” album would go 2× Platinum in the UK and sell 11 million copies worldwide spawning 5 hit singles along the way. “Joyride” the single would be a US No 1 (their fourth) and peak at No 4 in the UK. And yet for all this success, for some, “Joyride” was everything that was wrong with Roxette encapsulated in one song. Bland, formulaic, plastic were some of the accusations thrown at it and it was certainly sneered at by the majority of the staff in the Our Price I was working in. I’m sure Per and Marie couldn’t have cared less.

And finally The Simpsons have been toppled as we have a new No 1! Not only was “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” the only UK chart topper of The Clash‘s career, it was also their only ever entry into the Top 10. Unbelievable but true. Had I been more on the ball with writing this post, I could have made a rather obvious reference to Matt Hancock after Friday morning’s revelations in The Sun. As it’s 3 days on from that and the weaselly little twerp has already resigned, I can’t. Instead, I’ll have to call on @TOTPFacts for this Tories / The Clash mash up:

Mick Jones is the cousin of Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapps. Shapps: "I'm always saying to Mick, 'I know it's incredibly embarrassing for you having a Tory minister as a cousin, I'm so sorry to have ruined your cred.'" #TOTP pic.twitter.com/K0ppKzwdOY
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) June 18, 2021

WTAF?! Again I say, unbelievable but true.

Presumably, The Clash were happy to receive the royalties from the song being a hit all over again but the shrieks from the show’s audience that you can hear as the video is shown (presumably there was some playback of the track in the studio) don’t seem to sit comfortably to me for a band who famously boycotted TOTP.

Like its 1982 original, this 1991 Levis advert inspired re-release was actually a double A side but you’d be forgiven for not knowing what the other track was. It’s “Rush” by Big Audio Dynamite II, Mick Jones’s post The Clash creation. By remarkable coincidence, the show’s opening number “The Stonk” was also a double A side but again, this is very little known. The flip to the Hale & Pace track was “The Smile Song’ by Victoria Wood but there’s hardly any reference made to it in chart archives.

The play out video is “Over Rising” by The Charlatans (the proper ones and not Xpansions!). This was actually an EP and didn’t feature on any of the band’s studio albums (although it is on their “Melting Pot” Best Of). Supposedly, the track “Happen To Die” was meant to be the lead song from the EP but The Gulf War effect meant it faced a potential radio ban and the decision was taken to promote “Over Rising”. It’s a nifty enough tune but not one of my favourites of theirs. It peaked at No 15.

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

Order of Appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Hale & Pace	The Stonk	The Stonk? Bloody big stink more like. Not even for charity. No!
2	Joey B Ellis AKA MC Breeze and Tynetta Hare	Go For It	Not likely
3	Quartz featuring Dina Carroll	It’s Too Late	Nah
4	Living Colour	Love Rears Its Ugly Head	No but it was on that Q Magazine compilation album I bought
5	Ned’s Atomic Dustbin	Happiness	I did not
6	Xpansions	Move Your Body (Elevation)	Hell no
7	Roxette	Joyride	No, I observed the rules of the road and did not
8	The Clash	Should I Stay Or Should I Go	Not the single but I have it on something I’m sure
9	The Charlatans	Over Rising	No but I have that Melting Pot Best Of

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/m000x2h3/top-of-the-pops-07031991

TOTP Rewind – the 90s

My memories of 90s chart music

Author: 80stastic

TOTP 09 MAY 1991

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TOTP 02 MAY 1991

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TOTP 25 APR 1991

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TOTP 18 APR 1991

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TOTP 11 APR 1991

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TOTP 04 APR 1991

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TOTP 28 MAR 1991

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TOTP 21 MAR 1991

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TOTP 14 MAR 1991

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TOTP 07 MAR 1991

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