80stastic

TOTP 12 APR 1990

Posted on December 1, 2020 by 80stastic

It’s nearly Easter already in 1990 where TOTP Rewind currently resides – the day after this TOTP was broadcast was the Good Friday – but the 21 year old me doesn’t have chocolate eggs or bunnies on my mind. No, I’m more concerned with finding a job as I am in my fourth month of unemployment. What’s more, this very day (12th April) is my girlfriend (now wife)’s birthday so I would have needed to get her a present. I seem to recall that I decided for some reason that a brass ornament of a vintage style camera (one of those ones where the photographer ducked underneath a black cloth covering to take the picture) would be just the sort of thing she would like. I saw it in a shop that specialised in that sort of knick-knacker but in truth, she would rather have had my original idea which was a VHS tape of The Beatles Help! film. She really wasn’t taken by the brass camera and I’d even haggled about the price with the shop owner to get it for her! Oh well, let’s see what tunes that the charts had to offer that week – there’d better be some good stuff in stock!

Not a bad start at all! In my head, Jesus Jones didn’t appear on the charts until much later in the year but I’m clearly getting my facts skewed as here they are in mid April with “Real Real Real” which was their first Top 40 hit peaking at No 19. Very much seen as being part of that indie /dance crossover movement, they were one of the first (alongside Happy Mondays simultaneously) to make the big commercial breakthrough and opened a gate to chartdom that acts such as EMF, The Shamen and Pop Will Eat Itself would also stride through.

I think I may have heard of Jesus Jones previous to this via their nearly hit “Info Freako” from the year before but I didn’t know much about them. By the start of 1991 however, they would be genuine chart stars and the future of rock ‘n’ roll according to some. When I did my first Xmas working at Our Price in 1990 there were two albums that we were asked for all the time that hadn’t even been released yet. One was The Farm’s “Spartacus” and the other was “Doubt” by Jesus Jones. I think they were delayed possibly to heighten the clamour for them to fever pitch and when they were finally released within a month of each other in 1991, they both reached no 1 in the album chart.

I always get a bit confused about Jesus Jones’s timeline in terms of their hits, possibly because they racked up a few in quick succession over the course of a year or so. After “Real Real Real”, they scored another four Top 40 hits including “Right Here, Right Now” being released twice and peaking at No 31 on both occasions. I hadn’t realised until now that the band had also briefly been a very big deal in the US with “Real Real Real” going to No 4 over there whilst “Right Here, Right Now” peaked at No 2. I had always assumed they were a peculiarly British phenomenon.

The band are still together having gigged throughout the years when they were being referred to as residing in the “Where are They Now” files. Indeed, I recall them receiving some very derogatory press about resorting to playing corporate gigs as the entertainment for big conglomerate firm events although I’m guessing such gigs probably pay pretty well.

Like Gloria Estefan, Janet Jackson has always seemed to me to be capable of only two types of song. The big, lush soul ballad like “Let’s Wait A While” and “Come Back To Me” and the uptempo R’n’B dance tune like “What Have You Done for Me Lately” and “Miss You Much”. Completely unfair I’m sure but it’s my blog and that’s my opinion when I think of her (see what I did there? No? Oh forget it!).

“Escapade” was very much in the latter category and was one of seven (!) singles taken from her “Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814” album. As with all the other videos for her uptempo songs, it’s all about the choreographed dance routines. Whilst undoubtedly impressive as a spectacle, it always seems to me as if the tracks are written with a routine in mind rather than for any musical reasons. Yet again, this was a Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis production and they came up with the name “Escapade” as it was one of many potential song title ideas that they kept in a little notebook which sounds overly cynical and not very organic at all to me. Aside from Jam and Lewis, the track also features ‘finger snaps’ contributed by former New Edition member Johnny Gill. Finger snaps?! If you’re going to get an official credit for that, I should maybe have bigged up my triangle playing in my Junior school concert back in the day!

“Escapade” peaked at No 17 in the UK but was a No 1 song in the US.

“It’s hot in here” informs this week’s host Mark Goodier referring to the temperature in the studio – so why are you wearing a jacket, shirt and tie then Mark? I’m sure you’ve done enough shows by this point to be able to make informed wardrobe decisions surely?!

OK, the next act is Technotronic. When I was putting this post together, my wife (she of the unwanted birthday present!) remarked, “God, you haven’t got to review this have you?” referring to “This Beat Is Technotronic”. Yes, I’m afraid so. This was the third single from their “Pump Up the Jam: The Album” erm…album and saw someone called MC Eric take the mike while previously used vocalist Ya Kid K took a rest. It still sounded the same as all the rest to me though apart from perhaps even more annoying and repetitive if that were possible.

Apparently the two dancers up there on stage with him are his old school mates called Gary and julian who he plucked from being on the dole in Cardiff to come and be in Technotronic with him. If any of my old school pals are reading this, fancy joining me for another go at perfecting the triangle?

“This Beat Is Technotronic” peaked at No 14.

“It’s the way they move that makes you want to groove” remarks Goodier at the end of Technotronic’s turn in one of the cringiest segue ways ever which leads us into “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You” by Heart. Again. Really? I think this is the third time this has been on the show in recent weeks. Look, I’ve talked about the ridiculous lyrics, I’ve commented on the nasty video…what else is there left for me to say about it?

Well, it was taken from an album called “Brigade” that managed to rise all the way to No 3 in our charts but the band would only achieve chart action one more time in this country when their 1993 single “Will You Be There (In the Morning)” made No 19 from the album “Desire Walks On’ which was also their last long player to make any impression on the Top 40. There. Now please go away.

The Breakers are back after being missing in action for the last two shows and we start with David Bowie and “Fame 90”. So why was a 15 year old Bowie track being released again? It was all part of the promotion for his “Changesbowie” retrospective album that was released in March of this year which included all his biggest hits from 1969’s “Space Oddity” to 1984’s “Blue Jean”. I remember the album being a staple of the ‘Core Stock’ / ‘Best Seller’ section when I first worked for Our Price which were titles that you should never sell out of (although I’m sure we did of course).

Bowie was also embarking on a career spanning greatest hits world tour called the Sound+Vision Tour in support of the album. In what was seen at the time as quite ground breaking, fans were asked to vote for which songs should be included in the set list by phoning a number to log their votes with proceeds from the calls going to charity. In a world where telephone voting for everything from The Eurovision Song Contest to Strictly COme Dancing is second nature to us all today, this seemed like a revolutionary idea back in 1990. I’m sure there was some sort of counter campaign to rig the vote by encouraging people to vote for “The Laughing Gnome” thereby forcing Bowie to have to perform it live but I think he twigged what was going on before committing to the idea.

The video for “Fame 90” featured clips of previous Bowie promos alongside the man himself throwing some shapes with a blonde female dancer which supports the idea of the Changesbowie retrospective but seems a little short of inspiration to me.

“Fame 90” peaked at No 28, 11 places lower than its original 1975 release.

The scouse Kylie next as Sonia is back with “Counting Every Minute”. This was the fourth of five tracks released as singles from her debut album “Everybody Knows” with each one making the Top 20, a feat that made Sonia the first ever British solo female artist to achieve this. Quite how she managed to do this remains a mystery though. “Counting Every Minute” in particular is especially weak. I’ve had dumps with more substance to them.

The video is as half-hearted as the song. Just Sonia and some backing dancers going through the motions in front of a clock face back drop. How long did the video director take to come up with that concept?! You can almost hear him saying “Right then Sonia. Just smile and do that rolling shoulders move you do and we’ll fill in the rest afterwards in post production. No, don’t worry – it’ll look great. Promise. ACTION!”

Right, so quite why was “Everybody Needs Somebody To Love’ by The Blues Brothers in the charts? It seems to be because the film of the same name was re-released on VHS for its 10th anniversary by MCA/Universal Home Video. The movie has garnered cult status over the years – the movie poster was a mainstay of student room walls when I was one of at Sunderland Poly back in the 80s. However, I was surprised to discover that it was also a sizeable commercial success. It was the 10th biggest film in the US in the year of its cinema release (1980) and is the ninth-highest-grossing musical of all time.

Where The Monkees had gone before and The Commitments would follow, the film spawned a real life band who toured in support of the movie. Its celluloid stars John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd retained their roles as front men / brothers Jake and Elwood with a supporting band of established musicians from the likes of Blood, Sweat & Tears and Booker T and the M. G.’s. The whole thing had started out as a sketch on legendary US TV entertainment show Saturday Night Live and spiralled once a film based on the characters was proposed. Here’s a 1978 clip from SNL showcasing the Blues Brothers:

Despite its legendary status and the stars it made of Belusihi and Ackroyd (thanks in part to those amazing dance steps of theirs), The Blues Brothers isn’t what I will forever associate the latter with – in fact I don’t think I’ve even seem the film from start to finish. No, I will always think of my time at Sunderland Poly where I spent three years being called Dan due to my resemblance to Ackroyd at the time.

Some more bpm nonsense now as we see Bizz Nizz and their hit “Don’t Miss The Party Line”. The phrase ‘party line’ is not associated with some crappy dance tune for many people who grew up in Hull in the 70s and 80s (of whom my wife was one). No, it referred to the type of telephone service you had and in the case of a ‘party line’, it was a local telephone loop circuit that was shared by more than one subscriber. Yes kids, this meant that there was no privacy on a party line! If you were chatting with a friend, anyone on your party line could pick up their telephone and listen in! Unbelievable! Think you’ve go a problem because you want to upgrade your phone and you’re still under contract for your existing phone? Try dealing with someone listening in while you’re exchanging tales of drunken exploits with your bestie! Or, heaven forbid, on a booty call!

What? The Bizz Nizz record? Oh, that was shit as well.

Despite all the fuss over Paula Abdul in the US (four No 1 singles and a No 1 album). reaction to her in the UK had been more muted. Yes, “Straight Up” had been a Top 3 single for her over here but that was 12 months back and her only chart entry since then had been the No 24 hit “Forever Your Girl”. What was needed was a gimmick to reinstate our attention – how about her duetting with an animated cat? Purrfect! (sorry). “Opposites Attract” would become her biggest ever UK hit charging all the way to No 2 and is probably her best known song.

So this cat business? What the f**k was that all about?! Well, there had been a big reaction to the Who Framed Roger Rabbit film at the end of the 80s with its live action / animation mash up so maybe that was an influence. The cartoon cat in question was MC Skat Cat who was voiced by a duo called The Wild Pair who get the official credit on the record as the collaborators. The guy who wrote the song, Oliver Leiber (son of legendary songwriter Jerry Leiber), came up with the title after browsing a second-hand bookstore after his car broke down and he had four hours to kill. He wrote down titles of a number of pulp fiction novels like A Bloody Moon or Midnight Mistress but the one he plumped for was Opposites Attract. Hang on, didn’t we see this method of songwriting earlier with Janet Jackson’s “Escapade”? Is that all it took to come up with a song title? What have i got on my book shelves I could use to inspire me as a song writer? Hmm. Chelsea: 100 Memorable Matches is probably a little niche in all honesty.

Back to Paula though and the song is basically a play on the Gershwin tune “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” made popular by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It all seemed very calculated and lacking in any authenticity to me and I couldn’t really be doing with it at all.

Ah, good to see that The Cure were still ploughing their own particular furrow into the new decade. “Pictures Of You” wasn’t a new song as such though as it was the fourth single to be released from their “Disintegration” album and was very much immediately recognisable as a Cure song. Doomy? Sure. Dark? Yep. Quality tune? Undoubtedly. I’ve always admired the way Robert Smith has never given a shit about following trends or chasing the zeitgeist, an attitude perfectly summed up by this clip of him at the ceremony where the band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019…

“Pictures of You” peaked at No 24 and was voted No 278 on Rolling Stone magazine’s “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list in 2011.

So it took just two weeks for Madonna to hit the top spot once again with “Vogue”. I saw some online opinion criticising the lyrics of the song last week, specifically the name call section in the song’s bridge where Madonna references sixteen Hollywood stars from the 1920s to the 1950s. It seemed to be all about the ‘Harlow Jean’ line in that her name was reversed to shoe horn it into the lyrics to make a rhyming space for the following line ‘picture of a beauty queen’. I’m not sure that I agree with the negative opinions to be honest. After all, there is a precedent for this type of wordsmithery. Here’s the opening lines of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”:

“It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday
The regular crowd shuffles in
There’s an old man sitting next to me
Makin’ love to his tonic and gin”

His tonic and gin?! Have you ever gone into a bar and asked for a tonic and gin as opposed to a gin and tonic? Well, if it’s good enough for Billy…Madonna could have avoided all of this if she used Norma Jeane as in Marilyn Monroe instead of Harlow Jean but she’d already used Monroe in a previous line to rhyme with DiMaggio. Oh I give up!

After two fast hits in “Seven o’Clock” and “Hey You” came the inevitable ballad from The Quireboys in “I Don’t Love You Anymore”. I’m not sure that I remember this one. Let me have a listen…

Hmm. Pretty nondescript stuff really. Reminds me a bit of “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” by Poison. I can imagine it got lighters waving in the audience when they performed it live but it’s got as much longevity as lighter fuel.

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

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Jesus Jones	Real Real Real	Don’t think I did actually
2	Janet Jackson	Escapade	Nah
3	Technotronic	This Beat Is Technotronic	No, this beat is metronomic and dull
4	Heart	All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You	It’s a no from me
5	David Bowie	Fame 90	Not the 90 remix single but I’m sure my wife must have the original somewhere
6	Sonia	Counting Every Minute	Huge no
7	The Blues Brothers	Everbody Needs Somebody To Love	Nope
8	Bizz Nizz	Don’t Miss The Party Line	Miss it? I gave it a massive wide berth!
9	Paula Abdul	Opposites Attract	I was repelled by this though – no
10	The Cure	Pictures Of You	No
11	Madonna	Vogue	Not the single but it’s on my Immaculate Collection CD
12	The Quireboys	I Don’t Love You Anymore	…don’t think I ever did

Disclaimer

OK – here’s the thing – the TOTP episodes are only available on iPlayer for a limited amount of time so the link to the programme below only works for about another month so you’ll have to work fast if you want to catch the whole show.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000pr1x/top-of-the-pops-12041990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

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https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues

TOTP 05 APR 1990

Posted on November 26, 2020 by 80stastic

In the world of TOTP Rewind, it’s 1990 and the month of March is now behind us as we enter into April and unlike in the case of poor Julius Caesar, nobody had murder committed against them on the Ides of March…unless you count Jive Bunny committing musical murder of the charts by scoring yet another massive hit single in that month.

After weeks of such shite, this particular show starts off almost unbelievably with two of the biggest songs of the year and possibly the decade. Having seen the ‘Madchester’ movement emerge at the end of 1989, its annus mirabilis is now in full swing. After Inspiral Carpets the other week, here comes another of the baggy triumvirate with their biggest and most widely known hit – it can only be Happy Mondays and “Step On”. So much has already been written about and indeed so much is already known about this track that I don’t know where to begin really.

OK, so the basics. We now all know that “Step On” is a cover version (sort of) – the original version of the song was called “He’s Gonna Step On You Again” by South African singer and songwriter John Kongos and was retitled “Step On” by the Mondays who turned it into a baggy dance anthem. Did I know this at the time? No, of course not. What I also didn’t know until now is that the band only recorded it to keep their US label Elektra happy. They wanted their roster of artists to contribute a cover version for a compilation album called “Rubáiyát” to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the label*. The idea of the album was to have present-day Elektra artists cover songs from the label’s historical catalogue of recordings. Factory boss Tony Wilson had to convince the Mondays to do it as their initial reaction to the idea was ‘nah – fuck that!’ (probably) and so they bashed out “Step On”.

However, once they’d finished recording it, they liked the results so much they decided to keep “Step On’ for a UK single release and gave Elektra their version of another John Kongos song “Tokoloshe Man”. And the results of their efforts on “Step On” were remarkable. From the rush of that initial Italo House keyboard flourish to that relentless irresistible groove allied with Shaun Ryder’s idiosyncratic delivery of the lyrics, it was mesmerising. Ah yes, those lyrics. The Mondays version actually sticks pretty closely to the originals with two obvious exceptions / insertions. The phrase “You’re twistin’ my melon man, you know you talk so hip man, you’re twistin’ my melon man” was lifted by Shaun from a documentary called Steve McQueen: Man On The Edge that he had seen. Here’s @TOTPFacts with the inspiring clip:

The phrase "You're twisting my melon, man” came from Steve McQueen: Man On The Edge, a 1990 documentary that Shaun Ryder had seen: https://t.co/ShyjuITT8s #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) November 20, 2020

I had no idea about any of this until I caught the documentary when it was screened on TV years later and had a light bulb moment. I distinctly remember thinking “Hang on, did he just say ‘Your’e twisting my melon man’…but…but…that’s the lyric from ‘Step On’…Ohhhhhh”.

Then of course there is the now legendary “Call The Cops” line that Shaun added to the song’s opening. I’m not sure of the origin of this line but if we were in any doubt as to the longevity of it and indeed ‘Twistin’ My Melon’ in 2020, then check this out….

HAPPY MONDAYS FACE MASKS!!! 😷😷😷

‘Call the Cops’ & ‘You’re Twisting my Melon Man’ designs available now!!

Order yours from the online store: https://t.co/qGfdtJZzn6 #HappyMondays #FaceMask #Mask #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/MzDKGzD9ek
— Happy Mondays (@Happy_Mondays) July 28, 2020

Nothing says 2020 more than face mask. Back in 1990 though and this song seemed to be everywhere. I even recall it infiltrating into the world of Coronation Street when Steve and Andy MacDonald set up an illegal pirate radio station and play it as the first song on their show.

“Step On” peaked at No 5 and would be the forerunner of their iconic “Pills ‘n’ Thrills And Bellyaches” album.

* Ever wondered what else was on that Elektra 40th anniversary album? How about The Cure doing “Hello I Love You” by The Doors? No? OK, Tracy Chapman covering “House Of The Rising Sun” by The Animals? Still no? Right, here’s one you can’t resist surely? “Hotel California” by The Eagles as performed by The Gipsy Kings…come on!

After taking a sabbatical in 1988, Madonna retuned the following year to conquer the pop charts all over again with her mega successful “Like A Prayer” album. In 1990, she diversified with one foot in the pop world and the other in the movies. After the relative success of her role in Desperately Seeking Susan came the howling flops that were Shanghai Surprise and Who’s That Girl but that didn’t stop Madge securing the role of Breathless Mahoney in the Dick Tracy project starring Warren Beattie in the title role. I recall there was a similar buzz for this flick as there had been for Tim Burton’s Batman the year before and so dutifully trotted off to the cinema to see it when it hit these shores in July. I cannot recall one thing about it and have never seen it since. Indeed, has it ever being shown on terrestrial TV? I guess it must have been at some point? Anyway, Madonna and Beattie famously got it on off camera as well and were a Hollywood super couple for a while.

Meanwhile, Madonna was also plate spinning with her musical career and managed to, rather tenuously and in a ham-fisted manner I would suggest, merge Dick Tracy together with her latest album. “I’m Breathless: Music From And Inspired By The Film Dick Tracy” – see even the title of it reeks of shoe horning the two worlds into each other – included three songs written by Stephen Sondheim and sung by Madonna which were used in the film with the rest being made up of Madge originals that were ‘inspired by’ but not included in the film. Just to add to the confusion there were two other soundtrack albums released in conjunction with the film – one which included diverse artists from K.D.Lang and Erasure to Brenda Lee and Jerry Lee Lewis (but not Madonna) performing songs in the style of the music of the 1930s, the era in which the film is set. There was also Danny Elfman’s orchestral score.

The first single to be released from “I’m Breathless” was “Vogue” which had nothing whatsoever to do with the film. Nowt. Nada. Nothing. That said, it was also a brilliant pop/dance crossover track that had the added (and crucial) gimmick of the ‘vogue’ dance craze. With the promotion of Madonna behind it, suddenly the whole world was ‘vogue’ crazy it seemed. How had we all managed before we knew to throw our hands around our faces before framing them in a snapshot pose? Supposedly Madonna had first come across the craze at The Sound Factory nightclub in New York where it was popular amongst its gay clientele. A quick phone call to her producer Shep Pettibone later and plans were afoot for “Vogue” to be unleashed on the world.

The song would become the world’s best-selling single of 1990, selling over six million copies and will be at No 1 in the UK soon enough.

From all conquering pop to quirky, indie goofiness as we catch up with They Might Be Giants and their surprise hit single “Birdhouse In Your Soul”. The amount of online discussion about the meaning of this song is staggering. Reams of comments and posts from would be interpreters of the band’s intentions in writing it, spewing forth theories about Greek mythology (the Jason and the Argonauts reference), religious metaphors (it’s all about God really) and teenage geeks trying to establish their own identities. The band have refuted these theories saying it’s just a song about a night light – nothing else. My theory is that if so many people have been intrigued about the song and continue to be 30 years on then they must have been doing something right. Oh, and that it’s a great tune.

And guess what? By curious happenstance, They Might Be Giants were also on the aforementioned Elektra label and therefore also appeared on the “Rubáiyát” 40th anniversary compilation album. This track by US protest singer Phil Ochs is the cover they submitted for it…

By my reckoning this is the third TOTP appearance for “Mama Gave Birth To The Soul Children” by Queen Latifah and De La Soul – not bad going for a single that peaked at No 14. And it’s third time lucky for Queen Latifah’s name not being fluffed by the TOTP presenter. After both Gary Davies and Nicky Campbell proved themselves not up to the job, it fell to Anthea Turner to prove that, whatever else you said about her, at least she could pronounce a three syllable name correctly. Well done Anthea!

As with Madonna earlier, Queen Latifah has successfully juggled a career in both music and film for three decades now and at one point was so famous that she even had her own chat show. I found this almost unbelievable clip from it….

Dolly may be the queen of country, have her own theme park, inspired countless children to read with her literacy programme and now, it transpires, has donated huge amounts of money to help fund the research that produced the Moderna’s vaccine to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there is one thing she cannot do and that is rap.

Eurovision Song Contest time again next and the 1990 UK entry came from Emma with a little ditty called “Give A Little Love Back To The World”. After consecutive second place finishes in the previous two contests, hopes must have been high that the UK could go one step further (ooh nice Bardo reference!) this time around and the responsibility for this fell onto the shoulders of Emma Booth who, at an Adrian Mole style 15 and a two thirds, was the youngest ever singer to have represented the UK in the contest. Emma was from Wales and sang a song written by one Paul Curtis. Well, Mr Curtis, hang your head in shame because it is an abomination. Look at these hackneyed, junior school lyrics with an environmental theme…

We’ve come so far on this great planet
We should be proud of all the great things we’ve achieved
But in our search for life’s great knowledge
We go on takin’ out and never plant new seeds

We’ve got to stop, think of tomorrow
One day our children may have nothing left to share
Let’s do it now, then in the future
They will look back at us with pride and know we cared

Holy ozone layer! Poor Emma didn’t stand a chance having to sing such limp words. Almost set up to fail. And fail she did trailing in 6th. Too harsh? OK, she did the best with what she had and managed a creditable 6th place finish. Quite why the UK entry organisers felt she needed a single name performer identity Madonna style though, I’m not sure.

I remember this year’s contest as my girlfriend was visiting me at my parents home and being skint we stayed in on the Saturday night and watched it with my Mum and sister. As the votes came in and it became obvious Emma wasn’t going to win, they became increasingly more patriotic (dare I say jingoistic even?) and it all made for a very uncomfortable night’s viewing.

As for Emma, at least she had the satisfaction that her single was the first UK Eurovision entry to make the Top 40 (peaking at No 33) since Belle and the Devotions with “Love Games” back in 1984. “Love Games” was also written by Paul Curtis who tried his luck again the following year when he wrote “A Message To Your Heart” for our entry, a pre-Eastenders Samantha Janus. It came in 10th. Welsh female singers continued to fly the UK Eurovision flag a couple of times more with Jessica Garlick (ex-Pop Idol) in 2002 and the gravelly voiced Bonnie Tyler in 2013.

UB40 are back in the charts and its with another cover version (of course it is). “Kingston Town” was originally by Trinidad and Tobago reggae star Lord Creator but the Brummie lads recorded their own version for their “Labour Of Love II” album. Despite the album going three times platinum in the UK, the singles released from it didn’t perform that well with the exception of lead single “Homely Girl” and this one, both of which went Top 10. The other four singles taken from the album did hardly anything at all.

“Kingston Town” did very little for me I’m afraid. It all sounded a bit twee to my reggae-layperson ears. My abiding memory of this song though is that of my future mother-in-law who remarked upon hearing it played on local radio, when I was visiting my girlfriend (now wife) in Hull, whether the man on the radio was singing about Hull. That would be Kingston-Upon-Hull to give the city its full title.

“Kingston Town” peaked at No 4.

Next, a solid gold Pointless answer if you find yourself on the quiz show and are asked to name any Jason Donovan Top 40 single. “Hang On to Your Love” anyone? No, me neither. This was the second single from his “Between The Lines” album and although it was another sizeable Top 10 hit peaking at No 8, it was clear that Jason’s sheen of invincibility was starting to wane. How so? The evidence m’lud:

His previous five singles had peaked at the following chart positions:

1 – 1 – 1 – 2 – 2

No 8 just wasn’t cutting it. Worse was to follow when his next four single releases peaked at:

18 – 9 – 22 – 17

There was one final hurrah when his version of “Any Dream Will Do” from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in which he was starring hit No 1 but it was pretty much gave over after that. So badly had his popularity dipped that his third album release was a Greatest Hits compilation. His third album! What happened to our Jase then? It may have been self inflicted. Apparently he felt that he was too over exposed and that his face was everywhere and that he wanted to dip out of the limelight for a while. Bit like that other SAW poster boy Rick Astley then? Yeah, maybe except that in a Smash Hits interview around the time of “Hang On to Your Love” he was asked:

“Do you fear failure? You were on 37 TV programmes over Christmas…”

His answer was:

“It’s called promoting your record!”

Hmm, can’t have it both ways Jase.

“Hang On to Your Love” was diabolically awful by the way, just so you know where I stand.

Snap! are still No 1 with “The Power”. The genesis of the track involved a New Jersey hip hop artist called Chill Rob G and a fair amount of skullduggery. In 1989, Mr G (or Chill if you prefer) released a track called “Let the Words Flow” an a cappella version of which was illegally sampled by Snap!’s producers for inclusion on “The Power”. Snap’s rapper Turbo B added a few lines of his own including “I will attack” and in an epic show of shithousery the “copywritten lyrics so they can’t be stolen” line. Not to be outdone, Chill Rob G released his own version of “The Power” in America but it got completely outperformed by Snap!’s version due to the much bigger promotional resources of their record company Arista compared to Mr G’s small label Wild Pitch.

Supposedly Chill Rob G never got paid for the use of his source material in Snap!’s huge worldwide hit although some online commentators suggest he got a handsome out of court settlement. Whatever the truth of the matter, here’s Chill Rob G’s version which I think I actually prefer…

The play out video is “Black Velvet” by Alannah Myles. This slinky country rock song would go to No 1 in the US where it has racked up over four million radio plays and No 2 in the UK. It sold over a million copies in Myles’ home country of Canada and her LP was the fastest ever selling debut album in Canadian history. Given all of that, you would think that Alannah was set up for life. You’d be wrong as, echoing Chill Rob G’s experience above, she got shafted by her record company who got her to sign a crappy contract which meant that she had to pay $7 million in expenditures for her first three albums and she didn’t get her first ever royalty check for “Black Velvet” until 2008!

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

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Happy Mondays	Step On	Not the single but I have the album Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches it comes from
2	Madonna	Vogue	Not the single but it’s on my Immaculate Collection CD
3	They Might Be Giants	Birdhouse In Your Soul	Not the single but it’s on a Q – The Album compilation LP that I bought
4	Queen Latifah and De La Soul	Mama Gave Birth To The Soul Children	No
5	Emma	Give A Little Love Back To The World	Of course not
6	UB40	Kingston Town	Nah
7	Jason Donovan	Hang On To Your Love	I’d rather hang on to my dignity – big no
8	Snap!	The Power	Not for me thanks
9	Alannah Myles	Black Velvet	Nope

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000pjdq/top-of-the-pops-05041990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues

TOTP 29 MAR 1990

Posted on November 24, 2020 by 80stastic

Welcome to Britain 1990. The furore about the hated Poll Tax is about to erupt when 393 people get arrested after violence broke out at a 200,000 strong protest in Trafalgar Square. These events happened two days after this TOTP aired and the day after that, the Strangeways Prison riot in Manchester began and would last 25 days as prisoners protested against conditions there. It’s pretty grim stuff. Meanwhile in TOTP land, the increasingly unlikeable Nicky Campbell is in the chair for this particular show and he seems to have gone to town on the hairspray to ensure his bouffant hair remains in place for the whole 30 minutes.

Guess what we open tonight with? Yep, another unremarkable dance tune. This one is by Bizz Nizz and is called “Don’t Miss The Partyline” which I barely remember at all. Turns out they were Belgian and this annoying track was their only UK hit. It’s based round an annoying keyboard riff that allied to some rudimentary rapping reeled in enough record buyers to send it all the way to No 7 for some reason. The keyboard riff is a double whammy of irritation for both sounding like an early ringtone and being mimed in this performance on a keytar! If we thought this was the pinnacle of annoying that these pillocks could create then look out as Bizz Nizz shout ‘hold my beer’ and return in a couple of years having put together that well known antidote to quality music known as 2 Unlimited. For shame!

From an infernal racket to some excruciating lyrics next as the video for Heart‘s “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You” gets an airing for a second consecutive week. I’ve already dissected said lyrics in a previous post so let’s have a look at the video this time. Surely it can’t be as bad as those song words? Well, it’s basically a literal retelling of the song’s plot interspersed with footage of the band miming in a studio setting with the obligatory power lighting and smoke. It was directed by Andy Morahan and Mike Southon. Here’s the latter from his own website on the making of the video :

“The record company were worried about Ann Wilson’s weight. They suggested she wore black, that I’d photograph her against black and just light her face with a spotlight. I said that that would look ridiculous and that such a powerful singer and performer did not need trickery to sell her image. In the end they relented and let Andy and I do it our way.”

As misogynistic as their stance was, it seems to me that the record company still managed to get their way in the end as the promo is very heavily edited so that singer Ann Wilson doesn’t actually get much screen time at all. She is only shown for the waist up and there seems to be much more focus on her sister Nancy. Even when she is on screen, the camera only stays on her for a couple of seconds at a time. Southon still seems pleased with how it turned out though:

“It’s a pretty classic vid of its genre. Rain, downtown LA cheap motel, smoke, beams of light, beautiful couple making love. What’s not to like?”

Hmm. Give me the much pilloried “Rio” video anytime over your effort Mr. Southon. “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You” peaked at No 8 in our charts and No 2 in the US.

Back in the studio, the increasingly snidey Nicky Campbell advises us “Here’s what we’re all going to be wearing this Summer – well you maybe – dig those flares…”. You can just tell that he desperately wanted to add the word ‘plebs’ after ‘you’ and before ‘maybe’ in his intro. And who were the flares wearing act up next? Candy Flip of course with their danced up version of “Strawberry Fields Forever”.

Apart from the obvious flares that Campbell was referring to, what else was this new strand of fashion that we would all be wearing? Well, look I’ve never been any sort of fashionista but even I know something of the baggy style that the ‘Madchester’ era ushered in. Alongside the flares there were brightly coloured or tie-dye casual tops (probably bought from Joe Bloggs) and possibly a bucket hat to top the look off as per The Stone Roses drummer Reni. Is this what those Candy Flip boys are wearing here? Sort of although it’s hard to see quite how wide their flares are because of all the dry ice. They do have their own version of Bez on maracas behind them though. We’ll get to see the real thing on these repeats soon enough.

As for the actual record, it seems remarkably dull and lifeless to me listening back to it now and I can’t quite see what all the fuss was about.

“Strawberry Fields Forever” peaked at No 3. and was the band’s only UK hit.

Ah now then. Here’s the real deal. After the faux bagginess of Candy Flip come a bona fide ‘Madchester’ band. Inspiral Carpets are back on TOTP for a second time with their hit single “This Is How It Feels” but…hang on a minute…. apart from singer Tom Hingley’s ridiculously oversized red duffle coat complete with toggles, the rest of them look pretty nondescript; not even one ‘Cool As F**k’ T-shirt on view anywhere!

Ah yes, those T-shirts. A few month on from this I relocated to Manchester and you could hardly move down Market Street for youths in Inspiral Carpets T-Shirts with the cow logo on them. In an innovative marketing campaign, their record label arranged for a quarter of a million milk bottles in the Manchester area to be emblazoned with an advertisement for their album “Life”. Despite those initial numbers, they’re pretty rare these days but you can still pick one up online for around £30 if you are so inclined. Moo!

The band revisited the milk bottle campaign
for the promotion of their 2003 Greatest Hits album

Now supposedly when the band travelled down to London on the train for this TOTP appearance, they sat opposite some girls from Manchester who were also going to the TOTP recording to be a part of the studio audience. Crushingly for the band, the girls didn’t recognise that their fellow travellers were Inspiral Carpets but did ask them what they thought of The Stone Roses though! You should have gone more heavy with the baggy togs lads!

“This Is How It Feels” peaked at No 14 making it the band’s second biggest hit ever behind 1992’s “Dragging Me Down”.

Next up is little Jimmy Somerville with his single “Read My Lips (Enough Is Enough)”. In this performance he’s wearing an ACT UP T-shirt to promote the direct action gay rights organisation he was a member of and whose causes the song’s lyrics espouse. In a Smash Hits interview later in the year Jimmy wondered if his being so outspoken on gay rights had stopped him from becoming more commercially successful. Apparently his record company commissioned a survey to find out who liked him and why. Here’s Jimmy taking up the rest of the story:

“They found that a lot of boys between 15 and 23 like the music but won’t go and buy the records because they think people will think they’re gay. So I’m sure if I kept my mouth shut I would have higher singles. But then again, it’s also a little victory because it means these people know what I’m about. The survey said that really young school girls like what I do – they know that I’m gay and they just wish I’d shut up!”

I’m not sure that I appreciated what “Read My Lips” was about at the time although I knew Jimmy was gay and a gay rights activist. With lines like…

‘Here we are and standing our ground, and we won’t be moved by what they say‘

and…

‘Finding cures is not the only solution, and it’s not a case of sinner absolution‘

…I probably should have cottoned on earlier.

Right, it’s all dance tunes from here until the end of the show (no Breakers this week) and we start with “Ghetto Heaven” by The Family Stand. Not to be confused with JT And The Big Family who were in the charts at the same time, this lot were a trio from Brooklyn although the singer Sandra St. Victor was from Dallas originally as Nicky Campbell states in his intro. If you asked me before this repeat aired what they sounded like I wouldn’t have had a clue but hearing “Ghetto Heaven” back it does ring a few bells. Like Bizz Nizz at the top of the show, the employed a keytar player (urgh!) but unlike Bizz Nizz (whose single must have seemed dated even back in 1990), The Family Stand’s sound just about still stands up today. This single was remixed by Soul II Soul’s Jazzie B and it certainly sounds like it with that familiar ‘thumpin’ bass’ and cool groove vibe.

After splitting in 1997 they reformed in 2007 and are still a going concern to this day although St.Victor has also had a parallel solo career and has toured with the likes of Freddie Jackson and Chaka Khan. She also once recorded a song called “I’ll Never Open My Legs Again”. Blimey! And I thought Heart song was risque!

Moving on to Jam Tronik now and their unspeakable version of “Another Day In Paradise”. This was just proper dog shit, real gruesome stuff. Who the hell was dancing to this in the clubs back in the day? Having said all that, back in 2013 I went on a friend from work’s stag weekend in Leeds and after a night of drinking we all ended up in a club called The Cockpit. It was a right dive. God knows what the DJ was playing but it sounded awful. To my utter amazement the next track he ‘dropped’ (that’s what you’re meant to say these days isn’t it?) was “Easy Lover” by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey! And there were people (young people I may add) dancing to it! WTF?! Apparently they were being ironic the youngest person in our group advised me. And again I say WTF?!

Back to Jam Tronic though and the singer up front is called Nikita Warren but apparently, according to Wikipedia, like so many before her, she wasn’t the actual singer on the track! Well I never! Incidentally, in later life she would go into artist management and one of her clients was Jimmy Somerville! How weird is that as they were on the same show together back in the day? Nikita was just the front for the act but the whole Jam Tronik project was put together by one Charlie Glass. No, not the goal scoring Carlisle United keeper. That was Jimmy Glass. Who you say? This is Jimmy Glass….

Literally a schoolboy error from Nicky Campbell next as we get to the new No 1 from Snap! with “The Power”. Name checking the members of the band he says the rapper is called Turbo D when it’s actually Turbo B. Come on Campbell – it’s as easy as ABC! The other person that he mentions – Jackie Harris – wasn’t the person who did the actual singing, she just appeared in the video. That was ex Chaka Khan backing singer (another one!) Penny Ford whose musical pedigree is pretty impressive – her father produced James Brown, her brother founded Kool & the Gang, and her sister was the singer Sharon Redd. So who was Jackie Harris then? A random woman the record’s producers found at the German army base where Turbo B had been stationed for his national service in the US army. Hmm. As a back story it’s not really up there with my father produced James Brown is it?!

The Big Brother / 1984 imagery at the start of the video helps to crank up the intensity of the track I think. And if you were in any doubt of…erm… the power of “The Power” check out this anecdote that I found on the Songfacts website:

On July 5, 2011, the top 19 stories of the 39-story building housing the Gangbyeon branch of the Techno Mart shopping mall in Seoul shook violently for 10 minutes, causing the building to be evacuated for two days. Instead of an earthquake, it was found that an exercise class on the 12th floor was playing “The Power,” which happened to match the building’s resonant frequency and caused it to violently shake.

The play put video is “Mama Gave Birth To The Soul Children” by Queen Latifah and Del La Soul. In addition to his Turbo B error, Campbell also mispronounced Queen Latifah’s name as Queen La-fit-ah in the chart run down earlier. Didn’t Gary Davies make a similar mispronunciation the other week as well? How many times have I said this? “You had one job…”

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

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Bizz Nizz	Don’t Miss The Party Line	Miss it? I gave it a massive wide berth!
2	Heart	All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You	It’s a no from me
3	Candy Flip	Strawberry Fields Forever	Nope
4	Inspiral Carpets	This Is How It Feels	No but I’ve got their Greatest Hits I think
5	Jimmy Somerville	Read My Lips (Enough Is Enough)	No
6	The Family Stand	Ghetto Heaven	Nah
7	Jam Tronik	Another Day In Paradise	NOOOOOOO!!!
8	Snap!	The Power	Not for me thanks
9	Queen Latifah and De La Soul	Mama Gave Birth To The Soul Children	It’s another no

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000pjdn/top-of-the-pops-29031990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues

TOTP 22 MAR 1990

Posted on November 19, 2020 by 80stastic

It’s two thirds of the way through March in 1990. The 21 year old me is still unemployed and has been since the start of the year. My girlfriend is miles away in Hull while I languish in poverty and hopelessness back in my parents’ house in Worcester. The only highlight of this particular week was my beloved Chelsea winning an actual trophy on the Sunday after this TOTP was broadcast. Back then, Chelsea were not the trophy winning machine they are now so any cup win was a big deal. The Zenith Data Systems trophy may seem like a joke to johnny come lately fans now but winning a final at Wembley was a huge deal for us diehards back then. Unfortunately, this was 1990 and very few games were being shown live on terrestrial TV so I couldn’t witness it live but my brother’s mate who has a Sky dish taped it for me and I watched the whole thing back on a VHS the following day. Apparently Moore’s Leisure Centre in Stockton was the place to go though. There was even a fellow Chelsea fan in there…

Enough football though. This is a music blog so play on sir and after last week’s ‘TOTP in decent tunes shocker’ episode, the question now is will that continue into this week’s show?

It’s a poor start. In fact, it’s a shocking start as the opening act are those three berks collectively known as Big Fun though why anybody would derive any fun (big or otherwise) from this turd fest, I have no idea. They’re in the studio after last week’s Breakers slot to perform their hit single “Handful Of Promises” and guess what? Absolutely everything about this is dreadful. The song, the bag of a fag packet dances moves …everything. Smash Hits ran a competition to win a copy of this single and I think the question they posed says it all about Big Fun:

Which of the following is an anagram of one of the Big Fun hunks’ name?

Is it :

BIG WOBBLY NETHER REGIONS
CHEST LIP WRICK
DIPSTICK OF THREE

Heh. “Handful Of Promises” peaked at No 21.

I sometimes wonder if Erasure get the credit they deserve. Their longevity alone should be recognised (2020 is the duo’s 35th year together) whilst their creativity and productivity has been prolific. Their stats alone are amazing:

35 x Top 40 singles
16 x Top 10 singles (including 1 x No 1)
18 x studio albums
4 x No 1 studio albums
1 x No 1 Greatest Hits album
1 x Ivor Novello award for Most Performed Work
1 x BRIT award for Best British Group
1 x Mercury Music prize nomination

Despite all of the above, I wonder if they are unfairly seen now as a retro act permanently tied to the 80s and early 90s of their imperial phase. I would also put Duran Duran in that category and yet a peer like U2, who although undoubtedly having their critics and detractors, are seen as somehow more ‘credible’? Is it just a rock v (electro) pop prejudice?

Anyway, that Ivor Novello award mentioned above was actually for this single “Blue Savannah” which had a limited edition 30th anniversary re-release this year as part of Record Store Day.

One of those pesky electronic dance acts next that caused the TOTP producers so many problems with what to do with them on the show. When dance music exploded at the end of the 80s, permeated the mainstream and produced bona fide chart hits, TOTP was left with the problem of how to put them on the show. The hypnotic beats as pop songs and faceless DJs as pop stars format was TV kryptonite for a popular music TV show and so it came to pass that Orbital (brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll) served up one of the most lacklustre performances in the show’s history when they were on to promote their dance anthem “Chime”. The brothers give a wonderful interview in the TOTP – The Story of 1990 film about said performance. They pushed just about every TOTP producer button when they :

Refused to mime
Left plugs on their keyboards to show they weren’t playing live
Refused a dancer on stage with them and so when one was forced upon them, refused to acknowledge she was even there
Wore T-shirts with political slogans on them (‘No Poll Tax’) when they had been explicitly told such behaviour was outlawed

Excellent work all round lads!

I always get Orbital confused with The Orb (not being a dance head and all) which to an 80s pop fan must be the same as a clubber confusing Howard Jones with Nik Kershaw! Blasphemy!

“Chime” reached a high of No 12 and the duo would return with even bigger hits later in the decade with “Satan” and the theme tune to the The Saint film reboot.

Fed up of dance tunes yet? No? Good because here’s another from 49ers who are back in the charts with their second of two Top 20 hits in “Don’t You Love Me”. Please note that these Italo Housers from Brescia are just 49ers and not The 49ers (think Eurythmics and not The Eurythmics). This is important as there is another musical act called The 49ers who are a hip-hop duo from Newark, Delaware who consist of members Jas Mace and Marchitect (I’m not making this up).

Yeah…you got me. I’ve got nothing else to say about 49ers so I’m just filling time….

…until the Breakers! Thank God! We start with another tune that I don’t remember at all and it’s a collaboration between Queen Latifah and De La Soul with “Mama Gave Birth To The Soul Children”. Queen Latifah is one of those artists who seem to have been around forever but I’d be hard pressed to name any of her songs as demonstrated by me not knowing this one. I’d probably know her filmography better than her discography to be honest. She’s great as Motormouth Maybelle in the 2007 version of Hairspray for example.

Having listened to “Mama Gave Birth To The Soul Children” though, it’s definitely a tune and De La Soul provide that extra special ingredient to make it a potent dish. An embarrassing spoonerism from Gary Davies when he introduces the Queen as Queen La-feet-ah doesn’t take anything away from the track.

Now despite all this dance music bouncing around the charts back in 1990, somehow there was also room for some soft metal from a band that we hadn’t seen for a couple of years. Heart had staged a delayed assault on the UK charts back in 87-88 when they broke big with Top 3 hit “Alone” before belatedly finding an audience over here for their back catalogue which also made the charts when re-released off the back of that breakthrough hit. Fast forward to 1990 and here are the Wilson sisters again back with a new song in “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You” which turns out to have some of the most excruciatingly cringey lyrics ever committed to vinyl.

It’s basically one of those story songs but it’s completely ill advised. For a start there’s the plot about a woman who picks up a male hitch-hiker with the sole intent of taking him to a motel to have sex in an attempt to get pregnant. She then departs the next day leaving a note for the guy saying not to try and contact her. Inevitably they then run into each other years later with his child and she admits to him that she only did it because the man she is in love with is not able to father children. Look, I’m not making any judgements about the protagonist’s behaviour at all but is that really the best subject matter for a song? The band themselves hated it – they didn’t write it, rather it was penned by producer ‘Mutt’ Lange and they felt pressurised to record it. Here’s singer Ann Wilson from a 2017 ultimateclassicrock.com interview:

“I didn’t believe in the way the original lyrics were devaluing the man in the story. Just going, ‘Yeah, I can pick you up. We can have a night of love. We can never even know each other’s names. You can be so miraculous, and then I can just get up and leave you a note and walk out on you. Have a baby and sort of gloat about your surprise when you see the kid.’ To me, that was kind of an empty, weird, sort of hateful story.”

The song was actually banned in Ireland because the main character was a woman advocating random sex with a hitchhiker and the band didn’t play it live for years.

Then of course there are those lyrics. Here are a few of Lange’s (ahem) ‘beautiful’ words:

So we found this hotel
It was a place I knew well
We made magic that night
Oh, he did everything right

He brought the woman out of me
So many times, easily
And in the morning, when he woke
All I left him was a note

Eewww! And pray, what did the note say?

I told him I am the flower
You are the seed
We walked in the garden
We planted a tree

I mean really. It reminds me of another salacious story song – “Platinum Blonde” by Prelude.

Enough muck! Something a little more edifying please? Oh come on! What fresh hell is this? A dance version of a Phil Collins song? Talk about a double whammy of crapness! As far as I can tell, Jam Tronik were a German dance project who specialised in making naff dance versions of well known songs. There only UK hit single (peaking at No 19) was “Another Day In Paradise” – like the world really needed such a thing! Some of the other artists whose work they bastardised included The Carpenters, Meatloaf and Ben E. King.

As hateful as this is, it’s not the worst Phil Collins incident I have been witness to this week. I was watching some TV quiz show about music presented by that bloke from JLS and his partner the other day and they had AJ Pritchard on it – you know, that Strictly Come Dancing professional dancer whose now on I’m A Celebrity...Well, played the intro to “Mad World” by Tears For Fears, he had to identify who the artist was. His answer? “Is it Phil Collins?”. I despair.

Back in the studio now and it’s one of the biggest songs of the year (the 10th best selling in fact). Snap! were a German Eurodance group formed in 1989 by producers Michael Münzing and Luca Anzilotti and “The Power” would become the first of two UK No 1 singles for them. As with Black Box before them (and Milli Vanilli almost simultaneously), there was a ‘who’s the real singer?’ scandal attached to Snap! I think the female vocalist up there on stage with rapper Turbo B is one Jackie Harris who didn’t actually lay down the vocals for the track. That was Chaka Khan backing singer Penny Ford. With the Milli Vanilli lip sync scandal about to break and with Snap! being on the same record label as those two charlatans, a second miming furore was not what was required and so Penny was found pretty quickly and officially restored to the Snap! line up.

As for the song itself, it wasn’t my cup of tea at all but you certainly couldn’t ignore the blistering force of it. It fair smacked you about the face the first time you heard it. It will be No 1 soon enough.

This again?! This is the third time the video for “Lily Was Here” by Candy Dulfer and David A. Stewart has been on the show and I’m out of things to say about it now. Erm…oh yeah! I’ve got Dave Stewart’s autobiography. I wonder what he had to say about this record?

*much flicking of pages and skip reading later*

Well, he said….precisely nothing about it. I couldn’t find one mention of “Lily Was Here” or Candy Dulfer. Bit rude. I mean, I know he’s worked with just about everyone in both the music and movie worlds so it might have been hard to fit every collaboration into one tome but even so. I wouldn’t expect a Christmas card from Dave anytime soon Candy. He’s well moved on…

“Lily Was Here” peaked at No 6.

In amongst this seemingly endless ocean of generic (and frankly mostly dreadful) dance tunes, there comes the odd life raft of relief….and ‘odd’ is certainly the word for this next act. Quite how US alternative art rockers They Might Be Giants came to score a UK Top 10 hit at this time is almost as big a mystery as the lyrics to “Birdhouse In Your Soul”. This curious and beguiling piece of pop still intrigues me 30 years on. Everything about it from its peculiar song structure to its oblique lyrics screams ‘this is not a hit record’ and yet it somehow works. Ah yes, those lyrics. Making references as disparate as Jason and the Argonauts and The Longines Symphonette whilst including phrases like ‘filibuster vigilantly’ which really should have no place in a pop song, the piece is supposedly written from the perspective of a a blue nightlight shaped like a canary. As you do.

The performance here is delightfully bonkers with front man John Linnell throwing some very David Byrne-esque shapes. I also liked the follow up to this which was called “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” but it failed to make the Top 40 but they returned there again one final time in 2001 with “Boss Of Me” which was the theme tune to the US TV sit com Malcolm In The Middle.

“Birdhouse In Your Soul” flew all the way up to No 6 in the UK.

A fourth and final week at No 1 then for Beats International with “Dub Be Good To Me”. I’m guessing that they might be on TOTP at least once more as their follow up single “Won’t Talk About It” hit the Top 10 but they never appeared in the Top 40 again after that. Why did they break up? Who knows? Maybe Norman Cook was disillusioned with the project after the commercial failure of the ska/reggae influenced second album “Excursion On The Version”? Maybe he wanted to pursue a different musical direction as he did with the acid jazz inspired Freak Power? Or maybe he just wanted to widen his palette of production skills by working with lots of other artists? Whatever the reason, thank God they made “Dub Be Good To Me” with its stretch at the top of the charts that thereby deprived Jive Bunny of a fourth consecutive No 1 single.

The play out track is “Read My Lips (Enough Is Enough)” by Jimmy Somerville. This was the title track of his debut solo album and came on the back of two other hit singles taken from it in “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Comment Te Dire Adieu”. Unlike the previous two, this was a Somerville original and he wrote it to promote gay rights. Indeed, there was a definite association between the song and the ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) movement and that organisation’s ‘Read My Lips’ kiss-in events to demonstrate positive expressions of queer sexuality.

Aside from its political overtones though, it’s a bloody good disco record to boot. I like the way that Jimmy wove in the phrase ‘enough is enough’ into the song – I’m guessing it was a small homage to “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)” the 1979 disco stomper by Donna Summer and Barbara Streisand.

“Read My Lips (Enough Is Enough)” peaked at No 26.

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

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Big Fun	Handful Of Promises	…and a pocketful of shite, NO!
2	Erasure	Blue Savannah	No but It must be on their Greatest Hits collection that I own.
3	Orbital	Chime	Nah
4	49ers	Don’t You Love Me	No I don’t
5	Queen Latifah and De La Soul	Mama Gave Birth To The Soul Children	Nope
6	Heart	All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You	It’s a no from me
7	Jam Tronik	Another Day In Paradise	NOOOOOOO!!!
8	Snap!	The Power	Not for me thanks
9	David A. Stewart and Candy Dulfer	Lily Was Here	Another no
10	They Might Be Giants	Birdhouse In Your Soul	Not the single but it’s on a Q – The Album compilation LP that I bought
11	Beats International	Dub Be Good To Me	No but my wife had their album
12	Jimmy Somerville	Read My Lips (Enough Is Enough)	No

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000p9v4/top-of-the-pops-22031990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues

TOTP 15 MAR 1990

Posted on November 17, 2020 by 80stastic

After weeks of watching aghast at the state of the charts back in early 1990, there seemed to be some online optimism that we were finally embarking on a run of episodes that promised to turn the tide of disappointment. Even the usually disparaging @TOTPFacts seemed to have caught the good times vibe:

It’s a good one tonight. Set an alarm. #TOTP https://t.co/l8RVvPF0nO
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) November 13, 2020

And yet…be warned for despite the undoubted presence of some decent tunage on display tonight, there is an awful lot of shite to have to wade through first. Simon Mayo is the host for tonight’s show who is usually nondescript enough to be considered as a safe pair of hands so let’s get into it…

…hmm. Now which camp do The Mission fall into? Decent or shite? I’m going to go for the former but with the caveat that it’s a risky choice. I definitely like some of their stuff (“Stay With Me”, “Wasteland” and “Tower of Strength” for example) but there was only so much of it that I could handle in one go. “Deliverance” was the second single from their “Carved In Sand” album and I have to say it doesn’t really ring any bells with me. That may be to do with the fact that it was only in the Top 40 for three weeks and was already at its peak of No 27 by the time of this TOTP performance. If I didn’t watch this particular episode (and I’m not sure that I did) then maybe it was just in and out too quick for me to have heard it. Having caught up with it some 30 years later, it doesn’t strike me as one of their better efforts. A rousing enough chorus but the rest of it is a bit of a dirge don’t you think? Well, Norman Cook agreed with me. In a Smash Hits article reviewing the charts back then he stated of “Deliverance”:

” I hate all this macho rock business and The Mission came from a punk new wave background and they really ought to know better“

Ouch!

OK, after a debatable start to the show, I’m nailing my colours to the flag straight off the bat with this one by saying “I’ll Be Loving You Forever” by New Kids On The Block is utter excrement, a complete jobbie of a song. After two uptempo dance pop singles broke them in the UK, it was pretty obvious that they would go for a weepy ballad for their next choice of release. Not obvious enough for Simon Mayo though who declares that T’KNOB have gone “exceedingly early” for a big *hand gesture* ballad *follow up hand gesture*. What’s with the gesticulating Simon? He comes across like he’s giving a paper at some academic conference – it’s not rocket science Mayo!

The song itself is so insipid as to hardly be there at all. Jordan Knight’s reed thin vocal is barely audible (except maybe to dogs). If you want falsetto vocals allied to love songs then The Stylistics had already been there and done it (much better) in the 70s.

“I’ll Be Loving You Forever” broke their run of UK No 1 singles after “You Got It (The Right Stuff)” and “Hangin’ Tough” had scaled the summit by peaking at No 5. It was the opposite trend in the US where it was their first ever Billboard Hot 100 chart topper.

Ooh, now then. Here’s one to split the nation. After I blithely stated in a recent post that the name Candy never caught on as a popular choice for newborns despite the rise to fame of Candy Dulfer, bizarrely there was another Candy in the charts almost immediately afterwards. Candy Flip, as I recall, were briefly hailed as ‘the next big thing’ when they gave The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” the ‘rave’ treatment. This caused huge division around the duo; for some this was utter musical blasphemy while for the nation’s clubbers, it was bringing rave culture to the mainstream. In all honesty, and I say this as someone who has never been to a rave, I’m guessing that Candy Flip could have been seen by some in the rave community as betraying the whole movement by becoming pop stars off the back of it. Just a thought.

So who exactly were this pair of chancers? Well, they were Richard “Rik” Anderson- Peet and Daniel “Dizzie Dee” Spencer who had met whilst studying music and recording technology in Manchester where they moved in social circles that included the likes of A Guy Called Gerald and The Stone Roses. Clearly not ones to miss a trick when it came to burgeoning trends, they jumped on the ‘Madchester’ / ‘baggy indie’ bandwagon for their look and bingo! Ready made pop stars! They even made it onto the front cover of Smash Hits!

Apparently they did actually have some musical ability as in later life, Peet became a producer for the likes of The Charlatans and Muse whilst Spencer worked with erm…Robbie Williams…on his least well received album “Rudebox”. Yeah, maybe keep quiet about that. They also had some serious musical heritage in their locker. Here’s @TOTPFacts:

According to Smash Hits, Candy Flip singer Daniel Spencer's dad played guitar for Sandie Shaw and wrote songs for Petula Clark, while keyboard player Ric Peet's mum was in The Vernons Girls, who sang backing for the likes of Cliff Richard and… George Martin! #TOTP pic.twitter.com/OWf0mFyFjr
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) November 13, 2020

Mind blowing stuff. Talking of which they were named after ‘candyflipping’, the slang term for the practice of taking ecstasy and LSD at the same time. So definitely not Candy Dulfer then.

“Strawberry Fields Forever” peaked at No 3 and was their only chart hit. Their was an album which, gazumping Madness by two whole years, was called “Madstock…The Continuing Adventures of Bubblefish Car”. I don’t think a Candy Flip revival will be happening any time soon.

Is this the third consecutive week that “Love Shack” by The B-52s has been on the show? The TOTP producers must have loved this one. It’s the video yet again (I presume the band were too busy touring or something to pop by the studio) and as such, I’m out of comments so I’ll hand over to Homer Simpson for this one:

“Love Shack” peaked at No 2.

So the Breakers are back but at 1 min and 26 seconds to cover three whole songs, it barely seems worth it! The first of these stretches the description of ‘song’ to be fair. “Handful Of Promises” was the third hit on the bounce by Big Fun and was taken from their “Pocketful Of Dreams” album of which this song gave the album its title. Clearly it’s horrible. Nasty, cynical and lacking of any sort of tune, it somehow scrambled to a No 21 peak. Smash Hits magazine did a Big Fun v Yell battle of the bands piece which Big Fun won by 23 and a half points to 11 but it was a hollow victory – a bit like trying to work out which member of the Tory cabinet is the biggest wanker.

The good news is that I think Big Fun only have one Top 40 hit left in them before they will plague the charts and us no further.

I have to admit that Fish‘s solo career completely passed me by. “A Gentleman’s Excuse Me” is yet another of his recordings that I don’t think I have heard before now. The second of three singles taken from his “Vigil In A Wilderness Of Mirrors” album (incredibly all three were Top 40 hits) it’s actually a pretty little thing (to quote Bing Crosby from his Xmas chat with David Bowie)

It puts me in mind of “Home Thoughts From Abroad” by Clifford T. Ward. In fact, it almost seems like Fish was deliberately trying to rewrite it. In the shite v decent poll, I’m marking this one down as up to snuff.

There is a theory that Wet Wet Wet‘s second studio album (if you discount their demoes / early recordings album “The Memphis Sessions”) “Holding Back The River” should have been their third whilst their actual third album (“High On The Happy Side”) should have been their second. Confused? Don’t be because it does make sense. After their debut “Popped In Souled Out” established their blue eyed soul / pop amalgam sound, the obvious move would have been to follow it up with something very similar. What the Wets did however was to throw caution to the wind and write an album that was much more mature that dealt with more heavyweight subject matters. For example the near title track from their sophomore album “Hold Back The River” deals with alcoholism I believe.

Whilst certainly not a commercial failure (it was a No 2 and went double platinum), it didn’t perform as well as “Popped In Souled Out”. When their career was looking decidedly dodgy two year later, they returned to a more accessible sound and found their way back to the very summit of the charts with “High On The Happy Side” which also furnished them with another No 1 single in “Goodnight Girl”. Did they go for that grown up sound too early (maybe we should ask Simon Mayo – he seems to have an opinion about these things!)? I doubt it. Things worked out pretty well for the band ultimately. “Hold Back The River” remains one of their lowest charting singles though peaking at No 31 but then there is a jazz break down half way through it so what did they expect?!

OK, now we get to the big guns which all the pre-show ‘ooh this is a good one’ fuss was all about. Not just one of the biggest tunes of the 90s but one of the biggest tunes ever – it can only be “Loaded” by Primal Scream. I’m pretty sure I didn’t know anything about Bobby Gillespie and co before this point but then, I don’t think that many people did. Yes, they had been around since the early 80s and had already released two albums by 1990 but they hadn’t got anywhere near mainstream success. Enter Andy Weatherall (who sadly died in February) to alter forever not just the career of Primal Scream but also that of music culture period.

I can’t recall for sure the first time that I heard “Loaded” but I’m pretty sure I didn’t get it straight away. What were all those sampled voices at the beginning and what was with the structure of the track that seemed to be all over the place? And why did it take so long for the singer to come in? Thirty years on and hundreds of plays later, it’s hard to believe I once thought like that. I’m nothing if not consistent though. Having not immediately swooned at Morrissey’s feet as The Smiths broke and then resisted the charms of the emerging Stone Roses, this was par for the course for me. I’m glad to say that I got with the programme in time and own both “Screamadelica” and an import CD single of “Loaded” (purchased some time after the initial single release I have to admit).

For a while I was convinced that those disembodied voices at the start of the track were The Monkees but I subsequently learned that they are actually Frank Maxwell and Peter Fonda from the 1966 biker movie The Wild Angels. I’ve never seen the film but if you ever wondered what was the scene that they were sampled from, here’s the answer:

Bobby Gillespie stated in an February 2011 NME interview about the samples used in the remix:

“Imagine if we hadn’t got the Fonda one though. We wouldn’t be sat here now. I don’t know where we’d be but we would not be sat here talking to you. The gods were smiling on us that day.”

I can’t quite describe what it is that those clipped pieces of dialogue add to the track are but I totally agree with Bobby.

The original track that Weatherall remixed was of course “I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have” from the band’s second album which was on that CD single I bought as an extra track and I have to say, I think that stands up pretty well on its own merits as well…

I managed to catch Primal Scream live at an open air gig in Hull in 2017 and they were belting. Bobby Gillespie definitely has a portrait in an attic at home where he looks absolutely decrepit though.

“Loaded” peaked at No 16.

The second big gun of the evening now as the TOTP TV audience gets its first sighting of Inspiral Carpets with their hit single “This Is How It Feels”. Instead of Simon Mayo blathering on about the sporting exploits of the band’s hometown of Oldham that year, I would rather have seen the current Speaker of the House of Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle introduce the band in that game show host style that he employs to command Prime Minister Questions… “and now, we travel north to Oldham where we find Inspiral Carpets – Inspiral Carpets everyone!”.

To be fair to Mayo, Oldham Athletic had a monumental season that year (I’ve no idea about the basketball and rugby teams he also mentions). Despite finishing 8th in Division 2 and missing out on the play-offs, it was in the two domestic cup competitions that they excelled. The day before this TOTP aired, they had beaten 1st Division title hopefuls Aston Villa 3-0 to reach the FA Cup semi finals and had already secured a place in the actual League Cup Final. A guy called Frankie Bunn scored SIX goals in one game on the way to the final. I distinctly remember what a big deal all of this seemed at the time. Sadly Oldham would go onto lose that final and also the FA CUp semi final after taking Man Utd to a replay.

Back to the music though and Inspiral Carpets seemed to be promoted in the press as part of some ‘Madchester’ Holy Trinity (despite not actually being from Manchester) alongside the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays. I’m not sure if that’s how they actually saw themselves having been in existence since 1983. I didn’t know this until now but they had an almost Fall like number of personnel changes in the years leading up to this commercial breakthrough.

As for the song itself, I thought it was great with its prominent, swirling organ sound and heavyweight lyrics. Bizarrely, my elder brother and Paul Weller disciple seemed to be going through a ‘Madchester’ phase at the time and had a mix tape featuring all the aforementioned bands on it (including Inspiral Carpets) which he was fond of blasting out of our shared bedroom at the time. He was also a big Man Utd fan and had been going to the matches for a few years back then and went to all the FA Cup games that season including that semi final. Maybe his fleeting association with the ‘baggie’ was more to do with the football than the music. Incidentally, Man Utd used to serenade their Man City counterparts with a chant based on “This Is How It Feels” with the words changed to :

This is how it feels to be City, this is how it feels to be small

This is how it feels when you club wins nothing at all

I think that one got consigned to the dustbin of terrace chants sometime around 2011.

Lead singer Tom Hingley had a very striking look back then. It was sort of Mr Logic from Viz meets Red Dwarf‘s Dwayne Dibley. Most disconcerting. I’m pretty sure I saw him do a solo gig at the tiny York venue Fibbers after he subsequently left the band but I can’t recall whether he still had the same hairstyle or not. Mind you, Clint Boon’s Stooges cut isn’t much better.

“This Is How It Feels” peaked at No 14.

Oh FFS! Seriously! We hadn’t all had enough of Jive Bunny by the time that the new decade had come around?! No, we hadn’t because they racked up another four hit singles before they finally fucked off sometime around 1991. “That Sounds Good to Me” followed the same cut and paste formula that these idiots had already used to mug off the UK public three times previously and featured tracks including “Everybody Need Somebody To Love”, “Long Tall Sally” and “Roll Over Beethoven”. I’m pretty sure that the version of “Everybody Need Somebody To Love” recorded for the Blues Brothers film was re-released not long after this Jive Bunny abomination

*checks http://www.officialcharts.com*

Yes! I was right. It was released about a month or so after this and peaked at No 12. Inexplicably, Jive Bunny peaked 8 places higher at No 4!

Beats International still claim the No 1 slot with “Dub Be Good To Me”. In a Smash Hits interview entitled ‘How To Make A Hit record In Your Bedroom’, Norman Cook admitted that putting together “Dub Be Good To Me” from the initial sampling he did in his bedroom to the finished record took just three days and £400. Wow! £400 for a record that was innovative and well…pretty good actually. By those standards, Jive Bunny, using similar techniques, must have spent about 40p to produce their steaming heap of shit.

The play out track is “You Don’t Love Me” by the 49ers which was their follow up to “Touch Me” and which I don’t remember at all. Apparently it samples Jody Watley’s 1987 hit “Don’t You Want Me” which I also have zero recall of. I’m putting this one in the shite pile which means, by my reckoning, the final tally for tonight’s show is:

Shite Music 7 v 5 Decent Tunes

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

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	The Mission	Deliverance	Nah
2	New Kids On The Block	I’ll Be Loving You Forever	Good God no!
3	Candy Flip	Strawberry Fields Forever	Nope
4	B-52s	Love Shack	Couldn’t be doing with it – no
5	Big Fun	Handful Of Promises	…and a pocketful of shite, NO!
6	Fish	A Gentleman’s Excuse Me	No
7	Wet Wet Wet	Hold Back The River	No but my wife liked this one
8	Primal Scream	Loaded	Yes but some time after the event
9	Inspiral Carpets	This Is How It Feels	No but I’ve got their Greatest Hits I think
10	Jive Bunny	That Sounds Good To Me	Oh this is an open goal….That sounds shite to me..No!
11	Beats International	Dub Be Good To Me	No but my wife had their album
12	49ers	Don’t You Love Me	No I don’t

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000p9v2/top-of-the-pops-15031990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

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https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues

TOTP 08 MAR 1990

Posted on November 13, 2020 by 80stastic

Right then, here we are…again. It’s yet another TOTP review. For the record, if you combine all of the posts from my TOTP 80s blog – https://.80spop.wordpress.com – with this 90s version then this particular post is No 301! Three hundred and one!!! I have written three hundred posts up until now on this nonsense! God only knows how many hours of my life that adds up to?! Is it nonsense though? Well, yes clearly it is but it’s also something else I hope. During these dark times music can provide a glimmer of light I believe, something to briefly lift our mood. Maybe these tunes from long ago can provide some blissful retreat from the harsh realities we are all facing. Having said all that, it is 1990 so don’t hold your breath…

Tonight’s host is Bruno Brookes whose real name, apparently is Trevor. You don’t get many Trevors to the pound these days do you. In fact, how many famous Trevors can you think of period? Trevor Francis… Trevor Brooking…’Clever Trevor’….but these are all 70s references. Oooh…Trevor Bayliss (no relation) who invented the wind up radio. And there’s an ex-Aussie cricketer called Trevor Bayliss. OK, my point is though that there have never been that many. Maybe that’s why Brookes decided to change his name. Trevor wasn’t deemed ‘trendy’ enough (to quote the vernacular of the time). Nobody says ‘trendy’ any more do they? It’s all ‘on trend’ or ‘trending’. Sorry, I’m babbling…which leads me neatly into drawing a line under this courtesy of one David Paul Booth:

Thought it was Babbling.
— David Paul Booth (@DavidPaulBooth1) November 6, 2020

The first act tonight is Guru Josh with his dance anthem “Infinity (1990’s… Time for the Guru)“. Apparently this nearly wasn’t a hit at all. The legend goes that Mr Josh (real name Paul Walden) came up with the tune when a friend asked him to create a track for a club night of the same name. 500 white label copies were pressed of which 480 were thrown in the bin according to Walden because you couldn’t have a saxophone in a dance anthem. One of the 20 who didn’t was Hacienda DJ Mike Pickering who played it regularly at the venue and the rest is history.

The performance of the track here looks thoroughly bonkers. However, Bruno Brookes seemed to like it as he says at the song’s conclusion “Lots of energy, lots of theatre, that’s good”. Hmm. The music journalist Max Bell once described him as:

“He looked like a chap who didn’t go to bed very often, dragged himself through hedges backwards, and nibbled rare species of fungi not usually sold in Sainsbury’s” which seems fair comment to me.

Sadly Walden committed suicide in 2015.

Right then, here we are (woah – massive deja vu rush!) with the first video of the night from Gloria Estefan and her latest single …erm…“Here We Are”. I’ve written about this many times in previous posts but it’s as much of a constant in life as death and taxes and that is Gloria’s rigid single release schedule. It’s pretty easy to get your head around as it’s basically this:

Release a ballad
Release an uptempo number (preferably with a Latin beat)
Release a ballad
Release an uptempo number (preferably with a Latin beat)
Repeat ad finitum

With her last single being the dance song number “Get On Your Feet”, this next one had to be a ballad and indeed it is. Here we are (again) indeed.

The third single from her “Cuts Both Ways” album, it’s pretty much standard fare from Gloria if a little more laid back and less excitable than some of her other big love songs. It peaked at No 23 in the UK but went Top 10 in the US.

Here come one hit wonders JT And The Big Family next with their sample heavy track “Moments In Soul”. Having seen their video in last week’s show, we get the ‘in the flesh’ experience this week and what a visually odd bunch they were. The Jerry Sadowitz lookalike on keyboards is Mauro Ferrucci while the lanky haired guitarist doing the ‘Ah Yeah’s is Christian Hornbostel. The vocalist was known simply as Chicca while the Bez wannabe throwing some unconvincing shapes at the back is Jumbo (as in jumbo-sized twat).

In a Smash Hits interview, Ferrucci stated:

“It’s not really the words that are important, they didn’t take too long to write. They don’t mean much, there is no story“.

No shit mate! These are the lyrics (if you can call them that):

Life, life, life
Come on and
Life, life, life

Life, life, life
Come on and

One
What you’re doing back?
Two
I really mean that much to you?
Three
What’s going on? (What’s going on?)

Oh yeah

But then the song does sample The Art Of Noise’s “Moments In Love”. That’s The Art Of Noise who wrote these memorable lyrics:

That’s The Art Of Noise there making JT And The Family look like Bob Dylan. “Moments In Soul” peaked at No 7.

Three of the next four songs were all featured in last week’s show as Breakers so I may struggle to find anything else to say about them. First up are Innocence with “Natural Thing”.

These jazz funk / quiet storm / ambient chill out dudes (delete as appropriate) should not be confused with the band Innosense who were an American girl group formed in 1997 whose main claim to fame was that a young Britney Spears was one of their original members. They were managed by the mother of Justin Timberlake and listed bands such as NSYNC and Backstreet Boys as their inspirations. Wanna hear them? Nah, me neither.

Excellent! 75 words or so without really talking about Innocence at all.

Right, I wasn’t really expecting to see Marc Almond again either to be honest. How many places did he go up in the Top 40 that week?

*checks chart rundown video*

Three. Well, I guess it adheres to the TOTP rules of having to go up the charts to get on the show but even so. Maybe I’m being harsh. I read an article online recently by Paul Laird (@mildmanneredmax on Twitter) where he reviewed all the pivotal albums of 1990 as he saw them picking one for each month of the year. Marc’s “Enchanted” album, from which “A Lover Spurned” came, was chosen with Paul writing of it:

“More of the usual unusual from Almond. “Enchanted” is violently modern and defiantly retro at the same time and, often, at exactly the same moments. With an orchestra of traditional musicians and Almond’s show stopping, showtime, show me the money vocals it is a deeply layered album filled with treats and tricks“.

Well, that’s me told. I do like Marc Almond. I’ve even read his autobiography and have at least one Soft Cell CD but this one doesn’t really do it for me. Still, you can’t fault the drama in both the song and Marc’s performance here. See Brookes. That’s how you do theatre – not all that arm waving nonsense from Guru Josh earlier that you enthused over!

“A Lover Spurned” got no higher than this peak of No 29.

Oh hello – a new song. One of only three on this week’s show and it’s “Blue Savannah” by Erasure. This was the third track to be lifted from the duo’s “Wild” album and was also the biggest hit of the four singles that were ultimately released from it. Bearing in mind the album had already been out five months (including over the crucial Xmas period) by the time of “Blue Savannah”s release, its No 3 chart position is pretty impressive. It’s far more lilting and understated than the other “Wild” singles I think. Maybe that was the key to its success. Or maybe it was just a decent song in amongst a chart full of shit.

The video for it is a bit weird though. Slightly disturbing actually with that disembodied blue hand floating about before it takes a brush to Vince and Andy. It’s like that Peter Lorre horror film The Beast With Five Fingers meets the promo for The Human League’s “(Keep Feeling) Fascination” with its completely painted red ‘You are Here’ house. Odd.

Back to the name game now and following on from my musings about the popularity of the name Trevor, here we have ~~Trevor~~ Bruno Brookes pondering whether there will be a glut of baby girls being called Lily in the wake of Candy Dulfer and David A. Stewart’s hit single “Lily Was Here”. So was Bruno right? Did Lily become a really popular name for newborn girls around this time? As far as I can tell the answer is no. The most popular name back then seemed to be Jessica but certainly the rise of Lilly has been quite the phenomenon since the turn of the century. As high as No 2 around 2012, it is still in the Top 10 for 2020.

Say again? What about the song? Oh, erm…I was hoping all that name talk would have distracted you. Well, I kind of liked the oddness of it all but I was never going to buy it. As for Candy Dulfer, despite a career that spans 30 years and 12 albums, she never returned to our charts after “Lily Was Here” peaked at No 6. I’m pretty sure that there weren’t loads of newborn baby girls named ‘Candy’ in the early 90s either.

A couple of posts ago I commented on the incongruity of seeing Adam Ant in the charts in the 90s, so tied to the 80s are his glory days. I could make the same observation about Bros. I’d almost completely consigned them to the pop bin by this point but here they are, three months into 1990 with a genuine, bona fide Top 40 hit. “Madly In Love” was the fourth single lifted from their album “The Time” and, on reflection, it seems an unwise choice. Firstly, a fourth single from any album is pushing it but when it is from the second album of a teen sensation on the wane, it seems positively deluded. Secondly, for the life of me, I cannot hear a discernible tune in “Madly In Love”. It’s like some sort of jam session that got ideas above its station and all those extra bodies up there on stage with Matt and Luke just seemed to over egg the pudding. Oh, and what the heck was Matt wearing?! A jacket and tie combo topped off with a baseball cap? A fan wrote into Smash Hits to ask if Matt was going bald after seeing the video for “Madly In Love” – maybe the cap was strategically placed?

“Madly In Love” peaked at No 14, the duo’s first single to fail to reach the Top 10.

A second week at No 1 for Beats International with “Dub Be Good To Me” and this week (for the first time I think) we get the promo video instead of a studio performance. They might as well not have bothered as it’s a straight run through of the song with a sepia tint added over the top. Where did all the fun of those Housemartins videos disappear to Norman?

The play out video is “Love Shack” by The B-52s. I said last week that I found this one to be a marmite tune and judging by the online reaction to its recent airing on BBC4, I stand by that. Personally, I can’t really be doing with it – to my ears it’s the sound of a band trying too hard. I especially find the breakdown near the end of the song when the music stops and Fred Schneider asks ‘You’re what?’ especially excruciating. Ever wondered what it is that Cindy Wilson replies with? Apparently it’s ‘Tin Roof, Rusted’ and not ‘Hennnnn-ry, busted’ as I have always believed.

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

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Guru Josh	Infinity (1990’s …Time For The Guru)	Nah
2	Gloria Estefan	Here We Are	Negative
3	JT And The Family	Moments In Soul	I’d rather have to watch John Terry miss that penalty on an endless loop – that’s a no by the way
4	Innocence	Natural Thing	No
5	Marc Almond	A Lover Spurned	Not for me
6	Erasure	Blue Savannah	No but It must be on their Greatest Hits collection that I own.
7	David A. Stewart and Candy Dulfer	Lily Was Here	Nope
8	Bros	Madly In Love	Huge no
9	Beats International	Dub Be Good To Me	No but my wife had their album
10	B-52s	Love Shack	Couldn’t be doing with it – no

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000p3bp/top-of-the-pops-08031990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues

TOTP 01 MAR 1990

Posted on November 10, 2020 by 80stastic

It’s the very start of March in 1990 and apparently the UK is windswept. Well, that’s according to TOTP host Jakki Brambles anyway and I really can’t remember the weather from over 30 years ago I’m afraid so we’ll have to take her word for it. Jakki (still spelt with two ‘K’s at this point) gives credence to her claim by wearing a ginormous duffle coat while she presents the show from the BBC studio. Her choice of outfit prompted many a ‘she won’t feel the benefit’ type comments on Twitter as this repeat aired on BBC4 last Friday.

Not only was she prone to feeling the cold but Brambles was also prone to exaggeration as she declares that tonight’s first act is “a man whose had more hits than I’ve been on diets; we’re into the thousands here”. What?! Who the hell can she mean?! It is of course Shakin’ Stevens who despite Jakki’s claims was actually on his 29th of 33 Top 40 hits with this one called “I Might”. Yes, unbelievable and indeed unbearable as it may seem, Shaky was still a visitor to the charts in the 90s exactly 10 years on from his first appearance. Unlike the 80s though, this decade was not kind to the Welsh hit maker and he was reduced to farting out Xmas hits in order to maintain his status as a chart act after this single.

“I Might” was the usual toe -tapping, rock ‘n’ roll revivalist number that Shaky had made his name on. Do you think he genuinely thought at the time that he could just carry on serving up this tripe forever more? Or was he secretly terrified that the game might actually be up considering that the UK was on a massive rave tip that made Shaky look even more like the anachronism than he already (and always) was? “This Ole House” seemed like forever ago and now house music was going to put Shaky on the dole. At least he didn’t try to jump on the bandwagon – “This Ole Italo House” anyone?

“I Might” peaked at No 18.

Oh God! It’s Rod Stewart! Don’t look! He might not see us! Too late. Brambles has given the game away and here he is in full on Rod mode with his awful version of the Tom Waits song “Downtown Train”.

Look, I can’t be arsed to write anything else about this one. It doesn’t deserve any more attention. Seek out Tom’s original instead or even Everything But The Girl’s take on it from their 1992 “Acoustic” album. Infinitely superior. Apparently Ben and Tracey’s version plays over the end of the final scene in the long running US sitcom How I Met Your Mother. I’ve never seen the show but I’m guessing that the ending is much more effective with EBTG’s soothing sounds than croaky Rod honking away in the background.

More exaggeration from Jakki Brambles next as, during the chart run down, she refers to the “cast of thousands” in the lyrics of “Hello” by The Beloved. I make it 38 actually Jakki. Right, up next is a complete howler of a song. Like “Downtown Train” before it, it’s another cover version but this one makes Rod Stewart’s seem heavenly in comparison. Jamie J. Morgan is the perpetrator of this crime against music and he should be eternally ashamed for the obscenity that he inflicted upon Lou Reed’s “Walk On The Wild Side”.

When we saw the video for this in last week’s show as one of the Breakers, I made the comment that this track was almost a parody and that it could be Sacha Baron Cohen performing it. It seems I wasn’t alone in my thinking for when the Twitterati got a load of this studio performance, they made the same connection. Here’s @TOTPFacts:

Expecting Sacha Baron-Cohen to trend, judging by the #TOTP timeline.
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) November 6, 2020

Oh and the two versions of “Walk On The Wild Side” that were out at the same time that Jakki references? Well, I tracked the other one down and it was this by Beat System. Still nowhere near as good as the original but infinitely preferable to Jamie J. Morgan for me. It spent three weeks in chart peaking at No 63.

To put the final nail in the coffin of this sad state of affairs, Brambles reckons that “Lou Reed should be a very proud man”! Ye gods woman! Nobody could be proud of that, not even Jamie J. Morgan’s mother!

Some Breakers next starting with Innocence and “Natural Thing”. Anybody remember this lot? They were kind of like a chilled out Soul II Soul and were briefly the height of sophistication as I recall. They racked up six Top 40 singles over their short career (1990–1992) with “Natural Thing” being their biggest hit at No 16. They also released two albums in that time with the first one (“Belief”) making it to No 24 in the charts.

It all sounded a little bit insubstantial to me although I did quite like their “A Matter of Fact” single from later on in 1990.

After his surprise return to the top of the charts with his duet with Gene Pitney on “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart” as the 80s came to an end, Marc Almond returned to his day job of cultish solo artist as the 90s began. “A Lover Spurned” was his first release of the new decade taken from his album “Enchanted” which was already his sixth solo album in six years. Excluding the aforementioned No 1, the single was his fourteenth of his solo career but only the fourth to make the Top 40 after. Cultish indeed.

I have zero recall of this one but it seems quite brooding and foreboding and spiky of intent. Marc’s solo output always mined this dark seam to my ears and some of his song titles support this opinion. Here are just a few of them:

“Melancholy Rose”
“Tenderness Is A Weakness”
“Tears Run Rings”
“Bitter Sweet”
“The House Is Haunted By The Echo Of Your Last Goodbye”

Wow! That last title! Cheery soul Marc isn’t he? “A Lover Spurned” peaked at No 29.

The next Breaker seems to be a marmite song and certainly split the opinion of the Twitterati the other day. Where do you stand on “Love Shack” by the B-52s? Me? I can’t really be doing with it. It’s just so….joyful and upbeat that it comes across as insincere. Lots of people both agree and disagree it seems. Taken from their “Cosmic Thing” album, it is easily their most well known and commercially successful song but I always preferred the follow up single “Roam” which was much more classy I thought.

“Love Shack” brought the band to a mainstream audience, many of whom had never heard of them before. I have to say I had only limited knowledge pretty much only knowing “Rock Lobster” and “Planet Claire” at that point from the double A-side re-release in 1986. My way cooler wife had one of their early albums I think.

In a nice bit of serendipity, it turns out that the horns on “Love Shack” were provided by The Uptown Horns, a New York-based section that played on Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs album which includes the track “Downtown Train” that we saw Rod Stewart murder earlier in the show.

“Love Shack” peaked at No 2 in the UK and No 3 in the US.

Something sultry and atmospheric now as the charts welcomes that rarest of commodities into its arms; an instrumental. I have to admit I’d never heard of Candy Dulfer before “Lily Was Here” but she had already performed as the support act for live shows by Madonna and been on stage with the likes of Prince and Pink Floyd by this point. The daughter of a Dutch jazz saxophonist, she hadn’t actually released any of her music commercially until this collaboration with Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart or David A. Stewart as he is credited here. The song was included on the soundtrack for a Dutch crime thriller flick of the same name and shot Dulfer to stardom off the back of it . The single was No 1 in the Netherlands for five straight weeks and a No 6 hit over here. It even broke the American market peaking at No 11.

I seem to recall there was a lot of fuss about Candy’s looks as much as her musical ability at the time (see also British violinist Vanessa-Mae) perhaps not helped by the fact that her debut album was called “Saxuality”. Incidentally, the single didn’t feature on that album in some territories including I think the UK. Cue lots of disgruntled customers returning it for a refund because they didn’t read the track listing.

Meanwhile back in the studio, we find Electribe 101 performing “Talking With Myself”. Is it just me or do singer Billie Ray Martin’s dance moves not seem to fit the song? It’s quite a downbeat, low key smooth sound and Billie’s all rotating arms, gyrating hips and 70s disco finger pointing. It’s like she ‘s got a Jane Fonda workout video playing in her mind’s eye. There’s even a bit of twerking going on.

Maybe she took her inspiration from the dance moves of another famous Billie…

Later in the decade another Billie appeared who also seemed to have been similarly inspired…

OK, enough of the Billies as we move onto…something called The Brits 1990 Dance Medley which took some of the biggest dance hits of recent times and slung them all together into one continuous mix. The video shown on TOTP includes footage from the actual performance of this heap of shit from the 1990 BRIT awards show which took place at the Dominion Theatre in London the previous month.

That video is bad enough but if you watch the live performance from the actual awards show it looks even worse…

Maybe we all just have choreographed dance routine fatigue now after having had our eyeballs blasted in the intervening years with every type of production imaginable. Maybe we’re all tuned in to the slickness of Strictly Come Dancing? Whatever it is, that just looked shit. And what was the point of having The Cookie Crew come on for 10 seconds right at the end?

If you were counting, then the tracks featured are:

Double Trouble & Rebel MC – “Street Tuff”
A Guy Called Gerald – “Voodoo Ray”
S’Express – “Theme From S’Express”
Beatmasters – “Hey DJ I Can’t Dance”
Jeff Wayne – “Eve Of The War (Ben Liebrand Mix)”
808 State – ” Pacific State”
D Mob – “We Call It Acieed”
Cookie Crew – “Got To Keep On”

At least two of the tracks featured were hits in 1988! How is that anything to do with The Brits 1990?! As for the show itself, if I tell you that Phil Collins won Best British Single of the Year and Best Male Solo Artist then I think that tells you all you need to know.

The Brits 1990 Dance Medley single (because let’s not forget that’s what it was, something you could actually buy and not just a performance on TV) peaked at No 2. No 2!

After all that frantic dancing, here comes Michael Bolton to calm us down with his soporific ballad “How Am I Supposed To Live Without You?”. I’ve already spilled my shaming Michael Bolton story the other week so I have no intention of going there again so what else to say about old Bollers? The hair! Of course the hair! I mean, just look at it! If you google ‘Michael Bolton’s hair’, there are so many articles, posts and interviews about his monstrous locks that it’s almost as if they had a life of their own. Well, maybe they do because there is a Michael Bolton’s Hair twitter account. It only has 36 followers and hasn’t posted since 2017 but it’s there. Here are some example tweets:

I have this fear of loosing my keys. I dread locks. #michaelbolton #hair
— Michael Boltons Hair (@BoltonsHair) May 8, 2014

How about?

How can we be lovers if we have split ends? #michaelbolton #hair
— Michael Boltons Hair (@BoltonsHair) May 3, 2014

And inevitably…

I can't believe he cut me off. What will I do with my life now. I guess I'll have to mullet over. #MichaelBolton
— Michael Boltons Hair (@BoltonsHair) April 30, 2014

Yes they’re painful but so is watching Michael perform here on TOTP and I had to do that for this blog so think yourselves lucky.

There’s a new No 1 as Beats International topple Sinéad O’Connor after four weeks with “Dub Be Good To Me”. Do Beats International get the retrospective credit they deserve? OK, sure the whole project was overshadowed by the reach and success of another Cook alter ego Fatboy Slim later in the decade and yes they are mainly only remembered for this one song but for me, it was a glimmer of light in a sea of hopeless No1 records in 1990.

*Spoiler alert*

Elton John? Awful song. Cliff Richard? More Xmas ghastliness. A song about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? WTF?! Bombalurina aka Timmy Mallett? Aagghhhh!

Come on, given that cesspit of shite for company, “Dub Be Good To Me” was solid gold and I for one will always think fondly of it.

Right, what’s this we’ve got to close the show? JT And The Big Family? Who? There’s only one JT in my book and that’s Chelsea legend John Terry! Well, it turns out this JT were Italian house DJs Mauro Ferrucci and Christian Hornbostel and they were the JT part of the equation as JT stood for ‘Jockers Team’ – at that time, DJs in Italy were referred to as ‘jockers’. Hmm. ‘The Family’ were a female singer called Chicca and a dancer called Jumbo. Look , I’m not making any of this up! The whole thing was meant to be a ‘fluid concept’, a collective if you like. Basically they were the Italian Beats International if that makes things easier! Their only hit was “Moments In Soul” which sampled amongst many other things the melody from Art Of Noise’s “Moments In Love” and the drums from “Back To Life” by Soul II Soul.

I don’t really remember this one at all. I don’t think I missed much.

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

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Shakin’ Stevens	I Might	There was no might about it – a big NO
2	Rod Stewart	Downtown Train	God no
3	Jamie J. Morgan	Walk On The Wild Side	Negative
4	Innocence	Natural Thing	Nah
5	Marc Almond	A Lover Spurned	Not for me
6	B-52s	Love Shack	Couldn’t be doing with it – no
7	David A. Stewart and Candy Dulfer	Lily Was Here	Nope
8	Electribe 101	Talking With Myself	I did not
9	Various Artists	The Brits 1990 Dance Medley	Definitely not
10	Michael Bolton	How Am I Supposed To Live Without You	Quite easily Michael…oh except I saw you in concert. Oh God the shame!
11	Beats International	Dub Be Good To Me	No but my wife had their album
12	JT And The Family	Moments In Soul	I’d rather have to watch John Terry miss that penalty on an endless loop – that’s a no by the way

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000p3bl/top-of-the-pops-01031990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

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https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues

TOTP 22 FEB 1990

Posted on November 6, 2020 by 80stastic

Welcome to TOTP Rewind where in February 1990, the charts seem to be a curious mixture of ~~old fogeys~~ established stars and fresh out of the box new acts (mainly peddling dance tunes). I have to say that despite its stuffy BBC image, TOTP does try and reflect this in its chosen turns for this particular show. Mark Goodier is our guide through this week’s wares and we start with Tina Turner and her single “Steamy Windows” which was also the single that closed the previous week’s broadcast. This seems to be have been an established practice at this point in the year with the likes of FPI Project and Halo James having done the same thing. Unlike last week though we get Tina in the flesh this time as opposed to the video.

I’m thinking Tina deigning the UK with her presence would still have been a big deal at this time – Goodier seems excited enough proclaiming her the “first lady of rock ‘n’ roll”. Certainly her commercial trajectory was in the ascendancy with her “Foreign Affair” album being a No 1 hit in this country and eventually going five times platinum whilst one year later her “Simply The Best” collection album would go eight times platinum! Given all that, the show’s producers do seem to have rather thrown her performance away right at the top of the show. Maybe they wanted a crash bang wallop beginning but I would have thought they might have built up to it a bit more and put it in the middle somewhere.

Here, Tina seemed to have toned down a notch the jerky strutting style she employed although she does get in a high kick or two. I would have expected her to have really gone for it considering the nature of the lyrics she was singing …and if we’re going to get a bit smutty, I am reliably informed by a friend that there is a clip of Tina and David Bowie performing on stage together where Bowie whispers to Ms Turner “You broke my cock”. I think it might be this clip below around 3.15 where Tina throws her head back in laughter…

Moving away from filth and innuendo to something much more wholesome…death. The back story to Chris Rea‘s song “Tell Me There’s A Heaven” includes some horrific details. Here’s @TOTPFacts:

Chris Rea was inspired to write "Tell Me There's a Heaven" after his six-year-old daughter saw news footage of a riot in South Africa, which showed "this horrible thing of throwing lighted tyres over people" and "one guy burning to death". #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) October 30, 2020

Rea’s daughter’s Grandfather (Rea’s father- in- law) didn’t know how to explain to the child what she had witnessed on screen so he just said ‘That man has gone to heaven’. When Rea checked on his sleeping daughter later he said to himself ‘Grandad told you there’s a heaven, I’d like someone to tell me there’s a heaven, too’.

The actual song itself is very affecting I think. The heavy strings backing gives it a cinematic quality – I could imagine it turning up as the soundtrack to a emotionally drenched scene in a Spielberg flick – while Rea’s gravelly voice imbues a solemn and reflective timbre.

Anyway, all of that didn’t cut that much mustard with the UK record buying public and the single peaked at No 24.

On their way to No1 we find Beats International with their mash up tune “Dub Be Good To Me”. Of course, nobody called it a ‘mash-up’ back then so what did they call it? From my admittedly limited research, it seemed to be referred to just as a cover version (of SOS Band’s “Just Be Good To Me”) that they renamed. Norman Cook revealed at the time that he thought that vocalist Lindy Layton was destined to be the ‘British Madonna’ – a prediction that proved to be wide of the mark. Lindy did ultimately go solo but despite a debut hit single with a cover of Janet Kaye’s “Silly Games”, it was a case of diminishing returns after that. Even a short spell signed to PWL didn’t restore her chart fortunes to any great extent. She continued to work in the music industry though with the likes of Hardknox and (with a certain amount of symmetry) Dub Pistols.

Lindy already had a showbiz career before she found herself in Beats International of course. There were appearances in Grange Hill and Casualty and erm…this memorable advert:

Right, I have no recollection of this next song at all. Cliff Richard with “Stronger Than That” anyone? Well, according to Mark Goodier, it has some ‘brilliant choreography’ in the video! Yeah, never a good sign that is it when a single is introduced with more fanfare about the dancing than the actual song. The bad omens prove to be true as “Stronger Than That ” is a stinker, a total turd of a record. Yes, the dancing is very in sync (apart from when Cliff sneaks in his trademark swaying arms movement into the routine) but once you’ve said that, well….Goodier reckons that it will be a Top 5 record but it actually peaked at No 14 which is staggering for a song so antiseptically banal.

Incidentally, I’m pretty sure the long haired, blonde guy on Chapman stick in the background is ex-Kajagoogoo bassist Nick Beggs. Well, it was a paying gig I suppose.

Right, after three very established artists in Tina Turner, Chris Rea and (god help us) Cliff Richard, we get four Breakers that are all new acts, two of which I don’t remember at all. First up are Thunder who were a bunch of London hard rockers who carved out a decent career for themselves in the 90s with a run of fourteen consecutive Top 40 chart hits (though none of them got any higher than No 18).

“Dirty Love” was the first of those and always seemed to me to be very heavily modelled on T Rex’s “Get It On” (which itself was Marc Bolan’s attempt to re-write Chuck Berry’s Little Queenie”). I think it’s that guitar riff that ends every chorus. To be fair to Thunder, they’re not the only ones to have tried it on for size. By my reckoning, you’ve also got Oasis (on “Cigarettes And Alcohol” and “Some Might Say”), Robbie WIlliams (“Old Before I Die”) and Andy Taylor of Duran Duran (“Take It Easy”). Taylor seemed particularly obsessed with recreating “Get It On”. He recorded a cover version of it with Power Station and was also the producer on “Dirty Love”. Listen to “Take It Easy” below and you’ll clearly hear his influence on Thunder’s track. He may have even had an influence on the band’s name as his debut album in 1987 was called “Thunder” and the band chose that as the name for their new group after disbanding Terraplane in 1989 before recording some demos with Taylor later in the year.

I saw Andy Taylor live in 1990 (no really). I had just moved to Manchester and he was playing The International 2 venue just around from our flat. It was an odd gig. Andy was determined to come over as a rock god but the audience kept asking him to play “Hungry Like The Wolf”. He wasn’t amused.

Back to Thunder and for a while there they seemed on the cusp of massive commercial success. Their “Laughing on Judgement Day” album debuted at No 2 on the chart and was subsequently certified gold. They eventually called it a day in 1999 before reforming in 2002 and have been sporadically active ever since. Their latest album was released as recently as 2019.

Next up are Electribe 101 with “Talking With Myself” which was their very first single release when it came out independently in 1988. Having signed to major label Mercury, it was re-released as a follow up to “Tell Me When the Fever Ended” and peaked at No 23 thereby becoming their highest ever charting single. It was very much in the same vein as its predecessor I thought – not an unpleasant sound but I couldn’t get worked up about it either. When I first started work at Our Price later in 1990, just about everyone else on the staff seemed to adore Electribe 101. I was never in the ‘in crowd’!

When singer Billie Ray Martin was young she was obsessed with The Beatles and had four teddy bears called John, Paul, George and Ringo. Apparently Paul’s head fell off one day after Billie had been smooching with him excessively. Blimey! Don’t tell the ‘Paul is dead’ conspiracy theorists!

OK, this happens to me occasionally – that state of affairs of having zero recall of one of the artists featured on these TOTP repeats. Here’s another in Jamie J. Morgan. I read up about this guy and it seems he wasn’t your standard lame chancer, one hit wonder at all. He was a photographer shooting covers for The Face, advertising for Levi’s and album covers for Culture Club, Soul II Soul, Sade and Neneh Cherry for whom he helped write her hit ‘Buffalo Stance’. He also dabbled in video-directing producing the promo for “Swallowed” by Bush. He continues to work within the music and fashion industries and his work was showcased in a book and an exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 2000. Impressive stuff. However….

…his vile version of the Lou Reed classic “Walk On The Wild Side” is, well…just that, vile. Given a nasty, generic dance treatment it sounds like a parody and Morgan’s nasal vocals do nothing to dispel that image. It could be Sacha Baron Cohen up there doing one of his comedy characters. The Salt ‘N’ Pepa style rapping bits in the middle can’t rescue this complete mess of a track. Somehow it rose all the way to No 27. Sometimes it’s best to stick to what you’re good at – diversifying isn’t always the way to go.

The second of the Breakers that I can’t recall now. “Probably A Robbery” was the only Top 40 hit for electronic pioneers Renegade Soundwave but, having researched them, it seems that their legacy far outweighs their commercial achievements. Combining dance beats with samples and electro-industrial noise, they created a buzz in the clubs with tunes such as “The Phantom” and “Ozone Breakdown”. Both tracks featured samples with the former using a loop from The Clash’s “White Riot” and the latter taking from the film The Warriors. So they were kind of Big Audio Dynamite meets Beats International then? Not really as their influence would extend to artists such as The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers and Grooverider. Actually, I quite like this having listened to it back.

“Probably A Robbery” peaked at No 38.

There then follows a very lame attempt at humour made by Mark Goodier when he introduces the next act. Comparing the name Guru Josh to a curry – presumably he was referring to a Rogan Josh? On a sliding curry scale of hilarity with a phaal being shit your pants funny it would be a korma. “Infinity (1990’s… Time for the Guru)” was their track and, even at the time, it seemed a poor choice of title to me. Why include a specific year allied with a defining clause that states this is your time? Surely this was counter productive to future sales / plays?

The performance here is pretty weird and showcases the issues that TOTP had with these non vocal dance tunes. How do you curtail a dance floor anthem into a visual, three minute studio performance for a time restricted main stream popular music show? The short answer is ‘not without difficulty’. The powers that be employed some dancers to mime playing violins before going full on dance mode in the background whilst Mr Josh (real name Paul Walden) did some crowd baiting egotistical nonsense upfront. It’s not a good or convincing look.

“Infinity (1990’s… Time for the Guru)” sounded like a piss weak version of an 808 State tune to me and I let it pass me by without the need for further investigation.

Sadly, Paul Walden took his own life on 28 December 2015 at the age of 51.

Not content with his curry joke in his intro, Goodier has another crack at humour as the song finishes by making a quip about Guru Josh seemingly wearing their pyjamas in the performance we have just seen. Mark, mate – have you clocked the shirt you’re wearing?

The next act is…wait…what? Adam Ant? In the 90s? Yes indeed. Hardly seen since his ill advised Live Aid performance of his then new single “Viva La Rock” in ’85, Adam had actually been trying his luck at acting over the pond in the US since then. Adam the actor hadn’t really worked out for him though and he slipped into a period of depression. In his autobiography Stand And Deliver, he quotes a diary entry from 1989:

“I’m disgusted at my chronic jealousy of others less talented than myself on MTV or in films. So like some bitchy brat I cry + kick + scream for attention. ‘Love me – I’m great’ is my demand from everyone. It’s terrible, disgusting. But it drives me on…….I can’t accept defeat the way I suspect many feel I should after the decline of Vive Le Rock. I’m not an actor or a rock ‘n’ roll star. I’m Adam Ant. Whatever that may be.”

‘Whatever that may be’ turned out to actually be a damned good pop star and he made an unexpectedly successful return to the Top 40 with his single “Room At The Top”. The lead single from his “Manners & Physique” album and lending its title from the John Braine novel, listening back to it now, it sounds quite the anachronism against the rest of the charts back then but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The track was produced by ex Prince bassist André Cymone and I think you can hear a little bit of the purple one’s influence on it though it doesn’t overshadow Adam’s trademark style.

Adam was 35 at the time of this appearance, he is now in his mid 60s which prompted this tweet when BBC4 repeated the TOTP broadcast….

Adam Ant will be 66 on Tuesday, which means he now qualifies for THIS year’s old age pension. #totp
— Mark Gillies (@5goalthriller) October 30, 2020

Gold standard stuff. I didn’t mind “Room At The Top” but actually preferred his follow up single “Can’t Set Rules About Love” which I came close to buying but I didn’t quite follow through on that particular commitment. It seems many others did the same as it stalled at No 47. Adam would return to the UK Top 40 for the final time in 1995 with his single “Wonderful”.

Back to Goodier who rounds off a pretty dismal presenting stint by fluffing his lines when announcing the name of Sinéad O’Connor ‘s new album. It’s the final week at No 1 for Sinéad with “Nothing Compares 2 U” and whilst I suggested in my last post that the BBC seemed to be getting bored with her reign at the top as they only showed two minutes of her in the previous show, I’ve had to revise my stance as they have got her back in the studio for another performance. They had been relying on re-showing the first one she’d done weeks before.

Say what you like about Sinéad (and many people certainly have done over the years) but “Nothing Compares 2 U” remains one of the stand out songs of the 90s.

The play out video is “Dude (Looks Like A Lady)” by Aerosmith. I already knew this song as it had been out before back in ’87 when it had got a fair amount of airplay but just missed the UK Top 40. Why was it re-released in 1990? I’m not sure. Was it to do with being used in that infamous scene in the Mrs Doubtfire film?

*checks internet*

Nope. That movie didn’t come out until 1993. I give up then. It was definitely written with the ubiquitous Desmond Child though (the man responsible for huge hits for Michael Bolton, Bon Jovi and Alice Cooper). Persistent accusations that the song is transphobic have always been refuted by Childs who describes the song as “accepting” because of the lyric ‘never judge a book by its cover, or who you’re going to love by your lover’. The band themselves had feared repercussions with Joe Perry saying ‘I don’t want to insult the gay community.’ Childs’ response was ‘Okay, I’m gay, and I’m not insulted. Let’s write this song.’

I don’t see it as transphobic I have to say but find it a fun (if slightly dumb) kick ass rock tune. The re-release of “Dude (Looks Like A Lady)” peaked at No 20.

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

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Tina Turner	Steamy Windows	Nope
2	Chris Rea	Tell Me There’s A Heaven	No
3	Beats International	Dub Be Good To Me	No but my wife had their album
4	Cliff Richard	Stronger Than That	I’d have rather shat myself
5	Thunder	Dirty Love	Not at the time but I may have it on iTunes now
6	Electribe 101	Talking With Myself	I did not
7	Jamie J. Morgan	Walk On The Wild Side	Negative
8	Renegade Soundwave	Probably A Robbery	It’s a no
9	Guru Josh	Infinity (1990’s …Time For The Guru)	Nah
10	Adam Ant	Room At The Top	No but I nearly bought the follow up
11	Sinéad O’Connor	Nothing Compares 2 U	Don’t think so
12	Aerosmith	Dude (Looks Like A Lady)	No

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000nwtf/top-of-the-pops-22021990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues

TOTP 15 FEB 1990

Posted on November 3, 2020 by 80stastic

OK, we’ve just had Valentine’s Day in 1990 but much more important than that is the fact that four days prior to this TOTP broadcast, the world saw Nelson Mandela released from incarceration after 27 years. A world changing event of immense political importance…or so you would have thought. I clearly recall there being complaints from viewers to the BBC about their coverage of this historic event interrupting their enjoyment of Antiques Roadshow! Some simple research of the internet confirmed that they received 500 (!) such complaints! If that wasn’t bad enough, 23 years later, they received about 850 complaints about the extent of its coverage of Mandela’s death, including its decision to interrupt a repeat of sitcom Mrs Brown’s Boys on BBC1 to bring viewers news of his death. Mrs. Fucking. Brown’s Boys.

Anyway, enough of world events, back to the music and tonight’s show is hosted by Anthea Turner who has just got married to her manager and ex- Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell. Peter, of course, went out with fellow Radio 1 DJ Janice Long between ’84 and’85. It was a complicated web of relationships at Radio 1 back in the day. Anthea has ditched all that rock chick, back combed hair (for the wedding presumably) and the first act she introduces tonight are Black Box with “I Don’t Know Anybody Else”. This was the follow up to their huge No 1 “Ride On Time” which was the best selling single in the UK of the previous year so this track had a lot to live up to. Despite early encouraging signs (it crashed into this week’s chart as the highest new entry at No 5), it ultimately fell short of emulating its predecessor when it peaked at just one place higher the following week.

It always sounded like a pound shop version of “Ride On Time” to me – looks / sounds the same but isn’t quite as good. My overriding memory of this track though relates to a visit to see my girlfriend around this time whilst we were geographically separated (I was in Worcester and she in Hull). I’d saved up my dole money and traversed north to stay with her for a few days. One night, we ventured out into town and ended up in a bar called The Mint who were having a music quiz night. Fancying my chances, we entered and found ourselves in a tie break situation for first place. The winner was to be decided by the team that was the first to spot a current chart hit but played backwards. To my elation then (and shame now) I was first up off my seat to correctly identify Black Box and “I Don’t Know Anybody Else”. We won a cheap bottle of bubbly but in the bleak, unemployed Winter of 1990 it felt like gold.

Oh blimey it’s Cher again with her “Just Like Jesse James” video. On reflection, this is just Cher doing her version of Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead Or Alive” (indeed Jon Bon Jovi himself would come as close as dammit to covering his band’s own song for his almost identical solo hit “Blaze Of Glory” later in the year). This isn’t that surprising given that “Just Like Jesse James” was co-written by Desmond Childs who was responsible for the Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer”, “Bad Medicine” and “Born To Be My Baby”. By pure coincidence (or was it?), he also wrote “How Can We Be Lovers?” for Michael Bolton who will make his TOTP debut later in the show (gulp!).

This was Cher’s first hit of the 90s in the UK but she wouldn’t stop there. Oh no – she released 21 further singles over the course of the decade resulting in 16 Top 40 hits of which 6 went Top 10 and 3 were No 1s (if you include a charity single she featured on in “Love Can Build a Bridge”). Say what you like about her, she could spin a modicum of musical talent an awful long way.

After, Eric Clapton contributed guitar to Phil Collins current hit “I Wish It Would Rain Down” the other week, Phil returns the favour now by supplying the drums on Clapton’s new single “Bad Love”. Now this always sounded like Clapton had just re-written “Layla” to me and guess what? He had! Here’s @TOTPFacts:

Eric Clapton on "Bad Love": "Warner Bros wanted another 'Layla'. I thought, 'Well, if you sit down and write a song in a formatted way, it's not so hard. You think, 'What was 'Layla?' comprised of? A fiery intro modulated into the first verse & chorus with a riff around it" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) October 30, 2020

It really is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster of a record with the bridge part of it basically stolen from “Badge” by Cream which Clapton also wrote of course. Apparently that was the idea of one Mick Jones – no not the lead guitarist with The Clash but the one from AOR dinosaurs Foreigner (boo!). For all its calculated and knowing composition, I didn’t mind it – at least Clapton was just stealing from himself and wasn’t trying to jump on the latest bandwagon. An Italo House Clapton anyone?

“Bad Love” peaked at No 25.

Despite the proliferation of dance tunes that seemed to dominate the charts (and therefore TOTP as well) around this time, we’ve actually seen some undeniably indie bands feature on the show in recent weeks as well. We’ve had peroxide blonde Brummies Birdland and psychedelic doomsters The House Of Love on the same show previously and now we get one of the biggest names of all indiedom in The Wedding Present. Now my mate Robin had been well into this lot back in Poly but I hadn’t really got on board in the same way. I knew their single “Why Are You Being So Reasonable Now?” from a couple of years before which had just missed the Top 40 and also “Kennedy” their bona fide chart hit from ’89 and of course the iconic sleeve for their indie label debut album “George Best” but that was probably about it.

This single “Brassneck” was taken from their first major label album release “Bizarro” (albeit in a beefed up production form compared to the album version) and was a shot across the bows of the then prevalent mainstream chart music. Uncompromising is the word I would use and that can also certainly be applied to main man David Gedge’s performance of the song here. No cheeky grins and jumping about from the Gedge here. His look of disinterest is almost defiant. Apparently it wasn’t deliberately conceived but more rather grew organically. Here’s Dave himself with the story during an interview with https://gedgesongs.wordpress.com:

“I was just following an old tradition established by some of my heroes… those punk bands who didn’t take Top Of The Pops seriously and who took the mickey out of the whole ‘miming’ thing. I started doing it during the TV rehearsals, fully expecting a producer or director to tell me to stop messing about but no one did. So with each run-through it became a little more… extreme, ha, ha”.

Some 10 months or so on from this broadcast I was working at Our Price In Manchester and went out for a drink after work with some colleagues (possibly in the pre-IRA bomb version of Sinclair’s Oyster Bar or maybe the Old Wellington for the Manc pedants out there) and our table was joined by a woman who turned out to be one of Mark E Smith’s sisters. She turned to me and asked me to sing some Wedding Present songs as I was the spitting image of David Gedge! And it turned out I was back then…well sort of. She also told me that Gedge was a ‘sex god’ to use her phrase which immediately turned my complexion bright red. There’s a clip of The Wedding Present doing a cover of “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)” on TOTP where I swear it’s me up there doing the vocals. Obviously the middle aged me doesn’t look like him now of course (to be fair Gedge doesn’t look like Gedge anymore) but as a skinny 22 year old I could pass for him. In my 80s blog I revealed how I spent three years being called ‘Dan’ at Sunderland Poly due to my resemblance to the actor Dan Ackroyd so Dave Gedge was a step up! Sadly I look more like Sam Allardyce these days. Bah!

“Brassneck” peaked at No 24.

Talking of cover versions, here’s Rod Stewart doing his best to murder the Tom Waits track “Downtown Train”. Rod included his version on his 1989 “Best Of” album and it just sounds so sanitised compared to Tom’s original. Stewart somehow manages to purge all the earthiness from the song.

Not content with ruining one Waits composition he repeated the crime again two years later when he covered Tom Traubert’s Blues”. You know what, I do like some Rod Stewart stuff – “The Killing of Georgie (Part I and II)” for example is fabulous – but he’s also done a lot of crap and I get the impression that he’s not that nice a character either.

“Downtown Train” peaked at No 10 over here and No 3 in the US.

‘Sybil!!!!’ When the singer Sybil (full name Sybil Lynch) was in the charts I never made any connection (subconscious or other wise) with Basil Fawlty’s wife but every time I hear her name mentioned now I can’t get the Fawlty Towers character so superbly played by Prunella Scales out of my head!

Sybil the singer’s cover of “Walk On By” peaked at No 6 but she would continue to release cover versions in her later career including treatments of Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day”, Al Greens’s “So Tired Of Being Alone” and Carole King’s “It’s Too Late”. None of them made the UK Top 40. Despite her reliance on other artists for the majority of her hits, she went on to work in education, at one point teaching lyric & songwriting composition and creative writing. Who said ‘I know nothing’?!

Stand well back! The career of Depeche Mode is about to rocket into the stratosphere! In March 1990, the band released their “Violator” album and their world was never the same again. It went triple platinum in the US selling 3 million copies and propelled the band into playing gigs in huge super size stadiums – an estimated 1.2 million fans across the planet saw the World Violation Tour. Such was the extent of Mode mania in the US that when the band held an in-store autograph signing at Wherehouse Entertainment in Los Angeles to promote the album, some 20,000 fans turned up with a near riot ensuing. Not that the band had been small fry by anyone’s description before then but this was next level stuff.

“Enjoy The Silence” was the second single to be taken from the album (following the excellent “Personal Jesus” ) and I’m going to say that it is perhaps the band’s most well respected and important of their career. It won Best British Single at the 1991 BRIT Awards and went Top 10 both in the US and here. Indeed, it was the first time the band had visited the UK Top 10 since “Master And Servant” six years previously. In a Q Magazine interview in 2008, Dave Gahan said of the track:

“It really made the album cross over into another cosmos. It had been a constant climb over the previous 10 years, but I don’t think we were prepared for what was about to come. The album was a worldwide success and suddenly these huge royalty checks started coming in and you were able to do whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted – the velvet rope was always open.“

It really is an excellent song and the iconic video with its King Midas imagery (a man who has everything but just wants a quiet place to sit down) cements its reputation. Songwriter Martin Gore seemed to like songs that included the word ‘silence’ as much as Sybil liked cover versions – they had a 1982 hit song with “Leave in Silence” of course.

Oh bloody hell! It’s Michael Bolton! And you know what this means…my Michael Bolton story! OK, I’ve told this one before in my 80s TOTP blog when a certain Kenny G* featured on the show but here it is again. In 1993, I went to see Michael Bolton in concert! Oh God, even just typing the words out looks wrong! There are mitigating circumstances I swear!

I was working in Our Price at the time and was on a works’ night out that ended up at a nightclub where I was well and truly off my tits. A guy I worked with called Andy was also there. Andy loved his mainstream pop music and was quite a character. He named his car Jason after Jason Donovan and just about shoved me out of the way one day so he could get to serve Barbara Knox (Corrie’s Rita Fairclough) in the shop. He also loved Michael Bolton and asked me, whilst I was under the influence in the nightclub, if I would go with him to see the poodle haired one in concert in Sheffield. And I said yes. Now remember, I was blotto – that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Andy bought the tickets the next day before I could back out and so I found myself travelling to Sheffield a few weeks later to see Michael Bolton. I seem to have blacked out anything that I witnessed that evening from my memory but my impression is that Andy enjoyed it rather more than I did. Still, it’s a good story.

*And what has this to do with Kenny G? Well, Kenny was the support act. Yes, just when I though it couldn’t be any more of a surreal experience, it turned out that ‘the G man’ (as Bolton referred to him) was on the same bill!

For the purposes of factual acknowledgement, “How Am I Supposed To Live with Out You” was Bolton’s first (and biggest) UK hit peaking at No3. It was a US No 1 despite the fact that Laura Branigan (of “Gloria” fame) had already had a Top 20 hit with it in 1983.

The Stranglers‘ run of 80s chart hits had started to peter out by the middle of the decade and so to arrest that trend they used the old cover trick to beef up their profile by releasing a version of “All Day And All Of The Night” by The Kinks. It worked, returning them to the Top 10 in ’88 for the first time in five years.

Needing another fillip to start the new decade they repeated the exercise by releasing “96 Tears” which had been a US No 1 in 1966 for ? and the Mysterians. Nothing to do with Captain Scarlet (that was the Mysterions), they were a garage rock band from Michigan but you could be forgiven that “96 Tears” was a Stranglers original so easily does it fit their trademark sound. The distinctive organ riff that runs thorughout puts me in mind of those Oldham baggy stars Inspiral Carpets and guess what they also did a version of it…

Back to The Stranglers and their version would peak at No 17 and they would enjoy a brief renaissance in 1991 when their “Greatest Hits 1977–1990” collection album went all the way to No 4 in the album charts off the back of a successful TV ad campaign.

Sinéad O’Connor is still at No 1 with “Nothing Compares 2 U”. It’s the third of four weeks at the top spot and if the UK record buying audience hadn’t tired of it already, it seems the TOTP producers were starting to. We get just over two minutes of the song in this clip. The single sold three and a half million copies worldwide and was the second biggest selling single in the UK in 1990. That’s how you do a cover version Rod Stewart!

We close with “Steamy Windows” by Tina Turner. The third single from her “Foreign Affair” album, it peaked at No 13 in the UK.

The song was written by blues rock guitarist Tony Joe White who wrote “Polk Salad Annie” famously recorded by Elvis Presley. Tony was one of those artists that would get played during one of our specialist music mornings when when I worked for Our Price. You were only allowed to play music of a certain genre like easy listening, jazz or blues. Here’s his version of the track which I think I prefer to Tina’s histrionic take on it…

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

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Black Box	I Don’t Know Anybody Else	It helped win me a bottle of bubbly but I didn’t celebrate by buying the single – no
2	Cher	Just Like Jesse James	No – phew!
3	Eric Clapton	Bad Love	Nah
4	The Wedding Present	Brassneck	I may have looked like Gedge but I didn’t feel the need to buy his single
5	Rod Stewart	Downtown Train	God no
6	Sybil	Walk On By	No
7	Depeche Mode	Enjoy The Silence	It seems I did enjoy the silence as it’s not in my singles collection. WTF?
8	Michael Bolton	How Am I Supposed To Live Without You	Quite easily Michael…oh except I saw you in concert. Oh God the shame!
9	The Stranglers	96 Tears	It’s a no
10	Sinéad O’Connor	Nothing Compares 2 U	Don’t think so
11	Tina Turner	Steamy Windows	Nope

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000nwtc/top-of-the-pops-15021990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues

TOTP 08 FEB 1990

Posted on October 30, 2020 by 80stastic

After a raft of new acts and songs in the last couple of TOTP shows, the charts of early 1990 seem to have slowed down a bit with only three of the performances tonight not having featured before. Also, there’s only ten artists in total as opposed to the thirteen that have been crammed into the last couple of broadcasts which means less writing for your truly. Thank f**k for that!

Tonight’s presenter is Gary ‘safe pair of hands’ Davies and opening the show are Yell! with their version of “Instant Replay”. Now these two were definitely not a couple of talentless bimbos. Says who? Erm…those two talentless bimbos up there on stage. Yes in a rather tetchy Smash Hits interview, Yell! rejected all accusations of a dearth of perceivable musical ability in their camp:

“We’re not a couple of talentless bimbos”

Well, that clears that up then. Anything else you want to say for the record:

“People tend to think if you’re doing something like this you don’t have any brains…’cause we lift our arms and go ‘Instant Replay!!!’…’cause we click our fingers at the same time…’cause we’re doing a cover…We’re saying ‘this is for now!’, let’s have a good time and get serious later…”

Hmm… bit of protesting too much going on there I think. So did Yell! ‘get serious later’? Well, they released another cover version of a dance tune (Average White Band’s “Let’s Go Round Again”) and erm…this. *Does this count as getting serious?

*No, no it really doesn’t.

Right, what’s with the guys in hard hats in the studio audience crowding around Gary Davies? I don’t get it. Bob the Builder wouldn’t become a chart sensation for a further ten years so it can’t be anything to do with that. Just weird.

On with the music though and here’s Janet Jackson with a song I don’t recall at all in “Come Back To Me”. Taken from her “Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814” album, it sounds very much like one of her earlier singles “Let’s Wait A While” to me. Like brother Michael, Janet wasn’t adverse to releasing multiple tracks of her albums as singles. There were seven off this album alone none of which got any higher than No 15 over here. Contrast that to their performance in the US where she clocked up four No1s, two No 2’s (including “Come Back To Me”) and a No 4. Cross-Atlantic differences and all that.

A huge record up now and indeed a future No 1 from the latest incarnation of a post Housemartins Norman Cook. Having already released two singles under his own name the previous year in “Blame It on the Bassline” and “For Spacious Lies” (albeit aided by MC Wildski and Lester respectively), he decided to formalise his collaborations under the banner of Beats International (which on reflection is a pretty crappy name). More of a collective than a stable band including singers, musicians, rappers and dancers, their first single “Dub Be Good to Me” was a huge hit straight off the bat. Mashing up The Clash’s “Guns Of Brixton” and SOS Band’s “Just Be Good To Me” proved to be a genius idea which was then expanded by lacing it with other samples from Ennio Morricone and Johnny Dynell (the “Tank fly boss walk jam nitty gritty, you’re listening to the boy from the big bad city, this is jam hot” rap at the start of the track). Featuring the lead vocals of an unknown Lindy Layton, there was just something about this almighty groove that captured the public’s attention and affection and it was soon a chart topper.

Parent album “Let Them Eat Bingo” however was only a moderate seller and generally perceived by the critics as a bit of a curate’s egg (my wife bought it though and second album “Excursion On The Version”). Cook called time on the project after that, moving onto form Freak Power and then assume the FatBoy Slim alter ego before the decade was out.

It’s those deadly serious looking Scottish lads Del Amitri next with their folk pop dirge of tune “Nothing Ever Happens”. Folk pop dirge? Look, they’re not my words but only those of lead singer Justin Currie himself who tweeted along to this performance as the BBC4 TOTP repeat went out. See…

Not very good clappers in the crowd this week. Probably traumatised by having to stand through our folk pop dirge.
— justin currie (@thejustincurrie) October 16, 2020

I loved the fact that Currie is very self deprecating in his tweets with this one being my favourite:

Oooh, angry look to camera 1 in last verse. Very effective. You tit.
— justin currie (@thejustincurrie) October 16, 2020

Despite this being the second time the band appeared on TOTP, the producers just reused their original performance clip for this show (there’s an abrupt cut away from Gary Davies to the band with no long, lead in shot) so this was their debut. In keeping with the acoustic nature of the song, it’s a very downbeat performance, almost as if they’re busking. It must have been a strange experience for the rest of the band. Finally, after years of trying they have a genuine chart hit and have made it onto the legendary show that was TOTP where careers are made or broken. The next three and a half minutes were vital to their career and what are they doing as the camera turns to them and they beam direct into the watching nation’s sitting rooms? They’re sat down with their arms draped over their guitars, not knowing where to look. After what must have seemed like an age whilst Justin Currie sings the unaccompanied intro, the rest of the song kicks in and they can mime along. Meanwhile, the normally excitable studio audience just sort of stand there, no clapping, no cheering and certainly no dancing.

They did go onto sell six million albums worldwide after this (and got to meet Sinéad O’Connor in the BBC bar afterwards!) so it all turned out alright in the end. Nothing ever happens indeed!

The last of the ‘new’ tunes next as Lisa Stansfield attempts to follow up her huge No 1 hit “All Around The World” with her new single “Live Together”. I was never much of a fan of the former and much preferred this one. The orchestral strings in the mix gave it a fuller, more lush sound that that of its predecessor. However, when you get such a big seller that early in your career, trying to emulate its success is never going to be easy and although achieving a very respectable No 10 peak, “Live Together” never looked likely to bring Lisa the same returns.

Lisa’s image in the video reminded me of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon character Dick Dastardly but instead of his twirly moustache, she’s got twirly kiss curls. Despite working in the Our Price store in Rochdale (Lisa’s hometown) for a year in the early 90s, I never saw her in the shop once. The one time she finally did come in, I was on my day off! Drat and double drat!

After appearing in last week’s Breakers section, The Beloved have moved up sufficient places in the Top 40 to warrant a studio appearance this time around to perform their single “Hello”. I loved this quirky dance / pop crossover tune and despite being on the dole, purchased the cassette single from my local record emporium.

I really like Jon Marsh’s dancing in this with his finger pointing hand guns and swishing poncho. Sadly, the song gets cut short before we get to the Jeffrey Archer name drop. I would have liked to see if Jon would have incorporated his ‘wanker’ gesture from the promo video into the studio performance. As fate would have it, I write this post on the day after one of the celebrities that we do get to hear name checked in the lyrics, comedian Bobby Ball, died. RIP Bobby and Rock On.

Those hard hat guys are back again as Gary Davies introduces the next act. There are also two young girls with matching Deirdre Barlow spectacles and frizzy perms in shot! Quite extraordinary! Very much the opposite of extraordinary though is the artist that Gary is introducing as it’s Phil Collins who plods his way through latest single “I Wish It Would Rain Down“. I’m sure I’ve told this story before but as Phil is so boring, I have no other recourse than to wheel it out again…

I once attended a wedding where the music that was played in the registry office as we waited for the bride to arrive appeared to be a Phil Collins Greatest Hits CD. As such, the three songs that were played one after the other before she arrived were:

“I Wish It Would Rain Down” (surely not on your wedding day?)
“Against All Odds” (with its lyric ‘you coming back to me is against all odds’)
“Separate Lives” (perhaps not the best song to celebrate the union of two people in matrimony)

“I Wish It Would Rain Down” peaked at No 7.

Skid Row‘s video for their “18 And Life” single is the next thing we get to see on the show despite it only being on just last week. Its rise of 11 places to No 12 though was deemed justification enough by the TOTP production team to reshow it. Written about the plight of an 18 year old who received a life sentence for the murder of his friend with a gun he thought was not loaded, the full version of the video incorporates this element of the song with many scenes showing the use of a firearm. Uncomfortable with this, MTV refused to air the video.

Comparing the full video below with the version shown on TOTP, it’s clear that the BBC had similar concerns and all of the images involving a gun have been edited out. They even removed the scene where the protagonist’s father chucks him out of the house threw a plate glass window. Well, it was before the watershed and Mary Whitehouse was still in post as President of the National Viewers and Listeners Association to be fair.

Sinéad O’Connor is still at No 1 with “Nothing Compares 2 U” and this week it’s the video that TOTP uses rather than her in studio performance. The promo won three Moonmen at the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards for Video of the Year (O’Connor became the first female artist to be awarded with it), Best Female Video and Best Post-Modern Video.

With all the accolades though inevitably came the piss takes. This one is courtesy of Gina Riley on Australian comedy show Fast Forward…

The play out song this week is “The King And Queen Of America” by Eurythmics. I’m kind of surprised this video got a second airing considering it peaked at a lowly No 29 and had already been shown last week but it did go up five places in the Top 40 that week which seemed to be the criteria for inclusion on the show at the time (see also Skid Row and The Beloved earlier).

Apparently, the 7″ single was issued in an incorrect sleeve initially and had to be withdrawn on the day it went on sale. Those copies that slipped through the net have become one of the most collectable Eurythmics items and command around £1000 resell price. Sort of their version of the A&M release of The Sex Pistols’ “God Save The Queen” though not quite as desirable – a copy of that collectible sold for £13,000 at auction in 2019.

For posterity’s sake I include the chart rundown below:

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Yell!	Instant Replay	NO!
2	Janet Jackson	Come Back To Me	Nah
3	Beats International	Dub Be Good To Me	No but my wife had their album
4	Del Amitri	Nothing Ever Happens	No but it’s on a Q magazine compilation album I bought
5	Lisa Stansfield	Live Together	Nope
6	The Beloved	Hello	Yes! I did buy this one! The cassette single no less!
7	Phil Collins	I Wish It Would Rain Down	As if
8	Skid Row	18 And Life	Haddaway and shite
9	Sinéad’ O’Connor	Nothing Compares 2 U	Don’t think so
10	Eurythmics	The King And Queen Of America	That’s a no

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000nnyn/top-of-the-pops-08021990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues

TOTP Rewind – the 90s

My memories of 90s chart music

Author: 80stastic

TOTP 12 APR 1990

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TOTP 05 APR 1990

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TOTP 29 MAR 1990

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TOTP 22 MAR 1990

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TOTP 15 MAR 1990

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TOTP 08 MAR 1990

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TOTP 01 MAR 1990

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TOTP 22 FEB 1990

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TOTP 15 FEB 1990

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TOTP 08 FEB 1990

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