911

TOTP 29 JAN 1999

We’re nearly through January in these 1999 TOTP repeats and the charts, with a couple of notable exceptions, have been cleansed of all those Christmas hits as those record company new release schedules kick in. For example, four of this week’s Top 5 are new entries and we’ll see three of them on this show. There no sign of any new presenters though as stalwart Jayne Middlemiss is on hosting duties again for this one. A bit of admin before we get into it. That woman stood next to Jayne with a sign saying ‘Now can I have a pay rise?’ – what was that all about? Here’s the marvellous TOTP Archive website (https://totparchive.co.uk) with the answer:

“At the beginning of the episode, Zoe Alpass, a broadcast assistant on the Radio 1 Zoe Ball breakfast show, stands next to Jayne Middlemiss holding a placard that says “Now can I have a pay rise?” Previously on Radio 1, there had been banter about her wanting a pay rise, and they challenged her to appear on TV to get one”

With that sorted, let’s get into it. We start with the No 2 song and the biggest hit of Terrorvision’s career. Said career was a model of consistency. Over a five year period up to this point, they’d had eleven Top 40 UK hit singles but only two of them made the Top 10 with eight of the other nine peaking between Nos 29 and 20. When it came to albums though, only one of their four released so far had made the Top 10 and indeed, their latest “Shaving Peaches” peaked at a lowly No 34. Their failure to command bigger commercial achievements had led to talk at record company EMI about dropping them…and then came “Tequila”. Sort of. The track that crashed into the charts at No 2 wasn’t the version on the album but a remix by Mint Royale which had been championed by Zoe Ball who had a big public profile as Radio 1’s Breakfast Show DJ and partner of Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim who himself had just had a No 1 record with “Praise You”. Radically different from the version on the album, the single release had added children’s voices and a whistles and bells feel to it which lifted it from an average rock track into a huge party anthem. This was the aforementioned Fatboy Slim effect on Cornershop’s “Brimful Of Asha” part II. Naturally, the remixed version of the single caused consternation amongst the band’s loyal fanbase* but found a whole new mainstream audience.

*A poll on which track to release from the album distributed to fan club members had resulted in a different song being voted as the favourite.

According to singer Tony Wright, its release was delayed by a week presumably so not to clash with fellow EMI act 911’s own tilt at the No 1 spot although Wright seems to misremember it as being Geri Halliwell whom they were up against. Whatever the truth, in the end, “Tequila” would come up one place short of topping the charts themselves. As the original pressing of “Shaving Peaches” didn’t feature the Mint Royale remix (later reissues did include it), this caused the usual awkward conversations between record store staff and disappointed punters who’d bought it on the strength of the single that wasn’t on it. Despite the success of “Tequila”, the band were indeed dropped by EMI shortly after follow-up single “Ill Wishes” failed to make the Top 40 and they split in 2001 although they reformed in 2007 releasing their most recent album in 2024.

As part of her outro to Terrorvision, Jayne Middlemiss is waving a bottle of tequila about. That strikes me as a tad reckless. Granted she refers to it as a “nasty, intoxicating little substance” but still. Before the watershed! It gets you drunk from the legs up Jayne! Now, for one of those notable exceptions I referred to earlier. This was the fourth time on the show for Steps and their version of “Tragedy” with the first having been aired over two months before! That’s how long the single had been knocking around the charts including one week at the very top. It was still in the Top 3 this week so I’m guessing that’s why it’s on again as executive producer Chris Cowey continued his policy of showing hits that were still selling lots of copies as opposed to those that were moving up the charts.

According to the official charts website, “Tragedy/Heartbeat” is the group’s biggest selling hit ever with combined sales of 1.4 million units. That makes sense given it was a No 1 record and spent 15 weeks inside the Top 10. However, their other No 1 single “Stomp” is only their 11th best selling single. This anomaly is further compounded by the fact that the second best selling hit for Steps is “5,6,7,8” which never got any higher than No 14 in the charts. How do you explain that?

Now this is a real rarity. I cannot think when this has happened before on the show. Last week The All Seeing I performed “Walk Like A Panther” with Tony Christie on vocals. Seven days later and they are back minus Tony (who’s gone back to Amarillo according to Jayne Middlemiss – chortle) and in his place is the guy who co-wrote the song Jarvis Cocker! A hit sung by two different people in consecutive weeks? Was that unique? Whether it was or not, it gave us the chance to compare the two versions and work out which one we liked better. So who did you prefer, Jarvis or Tony? I think I’m leaning towards the latter but then we don’t actually get the full Cocker effect as it sounds to me as if Christie’s vocals are played during the chorus in this performance. What was that about? Couldn’t Jarvis reach those notes? It memoirs me of when Tracey Ullman couldn’t do the “Bay-bee!” line in “They Don’t Know” an they had to use Kirsty MacColl’s original recording. All very odd.

Back to the Top 5 now and another new entry for someone called TQ. Jayne Middlemiss ponders whether those initials stand for “Top Quality” or maybe “Two Quid” but it was actually TerranceQuaites, an R&B singer, songwriter and producer who, for a little while at the end of the 90s and start of the millennium had a string of hits starting with “Westside”. Now, this is far from my field of expertise but I can’t work this track out. Jayne says it’s a “smooth, soulful sound” and “gangster rap”. So which one is it? Can it be both? Maybe it can as sonically it’s definitely smooth and soulful but its words do warrant a ‘parental advisory explicit lyrics’ sticker. There’s a lot of editing and silent spaces in this performance to blank out the ‘n’ and ‘f’ words and the like. It’s all very confusing for a pop kid like me.

As for the title of the track, obviously it is culturally associated with rap artists and the East Coast-West Coast rivalry and indeed, the lyrics reference Ice Cube, Ice-T and Eazy-E and is dedicated to Tupac Shakur but did any of that mean anything to the white, middle class kids buying it to try and rebel against their parents. We used to get loads of them in the Our Price store in Altrincham where I was working, flipping through our rap section, doing the ‘pimp limp’ walk with as much swagger as they could muster and saying things like “Oh man, that’s bad!”. Just tedious. I’m betting they thought “Westside” was originated by this guy…

Whose idea was this?! Well, Chris Cowey’s I’m guessing. Sebadoh though?! A lo-fi indie rock band who’d never had a hit record before but had somehow sneaked into the Top 40 for one week never to return and they deserved a slot in the TOTP running order? Really?! Yes, “Flame” was this lot’s only chart hit and you can hear why – what a racket. This was never going to motor up the charts even with the exposure of this appearance – surely it was just a week one, fanbase thing? OK, so you could make a case that, by giving the viewers at home a glimpse of something out of left field, Cowey was providing an antidote to the wall to wall coverage of acts like Steps, Boyzone and the like which I, to be fair, have been decrying. However, I refer you to my previous question – Sebadoh though? Cowey could have had…

*checks chart for that week

…Duran Duran! In at No 23 with “Electric Barbarella”! Hmm. The video for it was a bit dodgy though so unless the band were available to be in the studio…

…Whatever! I, personally, could live without this particular distraction and having to watch a lead singer who was desperately trying to recreate looking like John Lennon when The Beatles played that famous, impromptu gig on the roof of the Apple Corps headquarters at Saville Row. Get back indeed.

Despite dropping five places to No 6, last week’s No 1 is back on the show. Now, “A Little Bit More” might seem like a sweet ballad and therefore a perfect choice for 911 to cover (I said as much in a previous post) but listening to the lyrics, I’m not so sure it is. Look at some of these lines:

“When your body’s had enough of me
And I’m layin’ flat out on the floor
When you think I’ve loved you all I can
I’m gonna love you a little bit more”

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Bobby Gosh
A Little Bit More lyrics © Bygosh Music Corp.

Erm…could that not be perceived to be about the carnal act? Then there phrases like “I’ve got to be touchin’ you” and “turns me on” and “we better get it on now” – this is double entendre territory at least. To think that my Mum and Dad had the Dr Hook album with this on! Eeeewww!

This next performance couldn’t be any more current. The debut single by a fresh, new artist that the whole world was excited about if you believed what was being written about them and there were plenty of column inches. There have been a few bands down the years where the hype about them before they’d even released anything has been huge. Sadly, in nearly all of those cases, the hype has been mere hyperbole. Back in 1985, the Roaring Boys were meant to be the new aforementioned Duran Duran but it turned out that we didn’t even want the existing DD and so they sank without trace. A year later, the future of rock ‘n’ roll had arrived to save us in the form Sigue Sigue Sputnik but their publicity machine was infinitely better than their music. A decade on from them, Menswear created a buzz about themselves with their limited copies policy of their first releases and narrative as the poster boys of Britpop. They burnt brightly but briefly.

And then, as the end of the decade neared, came Gay Dad. So what was so special about them? Well, there was their headline making name but more than that, lead singer Cliff Jones was a former journalist for Mojo, The Face and Melody Maker so there was a whole narrative developed about how he’d gone from writing about pop stars to being one (though Neil Tennant had beaten him to that story by about 15 years). The there was the fact that due to an early test pressing of their track“To Earth With Love” getting into the hands of Radio 1’s Mark Radcliffe and getting airplay, a whole subplot about them being the saviours of rock ‘n’ roll without even having a record out evolved. Their label London had to rush release the single leading to even more clamour for the band. Predictably, when it finally came out, it wasn’t very good. It sounded like they were trying too hard to manufacture a composite of every successful rock/pop song of the last few years into one track. The pretentious performance here with Jones taking himself oh so seriously only upped the pomposity levels and what was with the matching Walker Brothers/Birdlamd haircuts?

Its peak of No 10 was a success on a superficial level but its quick descent down the charts (Nos 28 and 39 in the following two weeks) also suggested Gay Dad might be a short lived fad. Conversely, follow up single “Joy” was a much better song. Why hadn’t they opened their account with that instead? Debut album “Leisure Noise” was hardly a runaway success peaking at No 14 and sophomore effort “Transmission” couldn’t reverse their fortunes, not being helped by lead single “Now Always And Forever” peaking at that most unfortunate of chart positions No 41. Gay Dad would ultimately linger on until 2002 when they split.

We have a new No 1, the fifth in as many weeks and we’re not even out of January yet. This time around it’s from an unexpected source – The Offspring with “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)”. Having only ever had two UK chart entries previously (neither which made the Top 30), here were the Californian pop-punk rockers going straight in at the top! I have to say that I didn’t know much about them before this moment despite:

a) the band having released their first album in 1989

b) my having worked in record shops since 1990

I knew the ‘skeleton’ cover of their 1994 album “Smash” but that was about it. “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)” was very much of that 90s pop-punk rock sound that would make stars of the likes of Green Day, Blink-182 and Sum 41 but it was actually the aforementioned “Smash” album which broke The Offspring and precipitated a move to major label Columbia. Their first release for them “Ixnay On The Hombre” underperformed commercially but their fifth album “Americana” would sell 10 million copies worldwide and go platinum here in the UK. Did the band’s existing fanbase appreciate their new found commerciality? Maybe not but hey, deal with it.

I mentioned earlier when discussing TQ those white, middle class kids buying rap music to rebel against their parents and guess what? That’s exactly what “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)” is about! No really. Here’s @TOTPFacts to confirm:

Offspring vocalist Dexter Gordon on “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)”: “It’s really inspired by wannabe gangsters. Guys who go to malls and get the gangsta rap clothes. Guys on Ricki Lake who won’t listen to their moms.” #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) January 9, 2026

“… [Guys] from, like, Omaha, Nebraska – regular white-bread boys, but who act like they're from Compton. It's so fake and obvious that they're trying to have an identity.” #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) January 9, 2026

OK, their American counterparts but for Omaha read Altrincham. The Offspring are still together albeit with a few line up changes but front man Dexter Holland is still in the ranks and holds a PhD in molecular biology. Pretty dry for a punk guy.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Terrorvision	Tequila	No thanks
2	Steps	Tragedy	Negative
3	The All Seeing I	Walk Like A Panther	It’s a no from me
4	TQ	Westside	Nope
5	Sebadoh	Flame	Never
6	911	A Little Bit More	No
7	Gay Dad	To Earth With Love	Nah
8	The Offspring	Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)	I did not

Disclaimer

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

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

TOTP 22 JAN 1999

Posted on 21 Days Ago by 80stastic

Another day, another TOTP repeat to write about. I am worn out physically, mentally and creatively by this now nine year old blog. Who’s on this particular show then? Well, another dance track based on an old Bee Gees song, another showing of the Bryan Adams/Melanie C hit, another boy band at No 1 with a cover version and Another …Level. It’s also another stint as presenter for Jayne Middlemiss (at least she’s not Jamie Theakston!) who does another pointless ‘interview’ in the backstage area with one of the artists. Tedious.

We start with that Bee Gees inspired dance track by Blockster which is actually just a repeat of the performance from last week’s show. “You Should Be…” had actually dropped five places from its chart debut and peak position of seven days prior but that wasn’t enough reason for executive producer Chris Cowey not to show it again. He’d have probably argued that it was still in the Top 10 and so still a popular record with an audience. Added to that, there weren’t many new releases to showcase. Why couldn’t we have had another showing of the (award winning) Fatboy Slim video for “Praise You” though? As it was, we only got to see it once. Anyway, it was Blockster who got the Cowey nod and therefore another chance to see another guy fronting an old Bee Gees tune in a white suit. Why did they all have white suits? Yes, I know why – to approximate the look created for the character of Tony Manero played by John Trovalta in Saturday Night Fever. Plus the Bee Gees original of “You Should Be Dancing” was in the film’s soundtrack but I guess what I’m trying to say is it’s not very inventive is it?

It’s another hit for Another Level. This one was called “I Want You For Myself” and it’s the usual R&B, bump ‘n’ grind ballad nonsense that we’d already come to expect from this lot despite only being four singles into their career. I could never see what their appeal was. From what I can work out, they were mainly a UK phenomenon with limited success elsewhere. Were they good looking? Sort of. Was there a gap in the market for an R&B boy band? Maybe. Wikipedia says their debut eponymous album never got higher in the charts than No 13 despite containing all those hits but that it was also certified platinum. Those two stats don’t seem synonymous with each other somehow. Their second and final album “Nexus” would only sell a third of the amount of copies as its predecessor meaning that it wasn’t able to take the band to…ahem…another level of success.

From the banal to the downright quirky. Sheffield electronic trio All Seeing I had bagged themselves a hit the previous year with their take on the Buddy Rich version of “Beat Goes On”, originally a hit for Sonny & Cher. For the follow up, they sought out two other sons of Sheffield from differing music eras. A chance meeting with Jarvis Cocker when Pulp appeared on an episode of TOTP the same week as All Seeing I led to Jarvis co-writing “Walk Like A Panther”. The track was put together specifically with legendary crooner Tony Christie in mind. The master of hits like “I Did What I Did For Maria” (which is referenced in “Walk Like A Panther”), “(Is This The Way To) Amarillo” and The Protectors theme tune “Avenues And Alleyways”, Christie’s career was dormant by 1999 with no chart entry since 1975. Despite the potential opportunity offered to him, Christie was originally reluctant to take up the offer until his son talked him into it. The result was a slinky, prowling track that, if nothing else, provided the charts with an antidote to all the generic dance and R&B fodder they seemed to be full of.

Despite the success of “Walk Like A Panther”, Christie’s career went back into hibernation until the intervention of comedian Peter Kay whose Phoenix Nights sitcom featured “(Is This The Way To) Amarillo” heavily promoting a renewed interest in the singer. In 2005, the track was used as the Comic Relief single for that year going to No 1 for seven weeks, the longest running chart topper since Cher’s “Believe” in 1998. A retrospective Best Of album was also a No 1. As for All Seeing I, one further minor hit with Human League’s Phil Oakey followed before they called it a day in 2002. The various members still work in the music business though with one of them having a brief cameo as one of the Weird Sisters rock band in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

P.S. This is who Tony Christie has been reminding me of…(sorry Tony)

Another 70s disco track reworked for the 90s! This time it’s Donna Summer who provides the source material (at least it’s not the Bee Gees again!) as her 1979 hit “Bad Girls” is covered by Juliet Roberts. Now, I’m not sure what the reasoning behind this release was other than the classic ‘need-a-hit-do-a-cover-version’ record company tactic but if it was all about that, then it worked taking Juliet to No 17 for what would be her final hit completely under her own name*.

*She would have a No 11 and dance chart No 1 hit in 2001 alongside David Morales.

The staging in this performance seems slightly jarring with Juliet positioned at the back on her own mini stage but behind her four backing singers who are front and centre. I know this role reversal has been done before – in their debut TOTP performance Oasis had Liam singing from the back of the stage – but I’m not sure it works that well here. All eyes are drawn to the backing singers in their bright red dresses which kind of undermines Juliet I feel. Maybe she felt more comfortable not completely in the spotlight? Maybe she could have occupied that space between the back of the stage and the front and been, you know, “caught in the middle”? Ahem.

Here’s one of those bands that I knew the name of but was fairly ignorant of how they sounded – at the time anyway. Having listened to Three Colours Red* retrospectively, it seems to me that this single was a bit of a departure from their earlier sound. Hits like “Sixty Mile Smile” and “Nuclear Holiday” were that classic indie rock sound that we’d seen from many a skinny, white boy group down the years. However, “Beautiful Day” was entering epic, rock ballad territory akin to something Muse might have come up with. Not a bad example of the genre as these things go but somehow the band couldn’t sustain and they split in 1999 despite two Top 20 albums and being signed to Creation Records. That old chestnut ‘musical differences’ was given as the reason. A reunion in 2002 would last for three years but without any further commercial success, a second permanent split followed.

*Maybe I was aware of them due to their name also being the concluding part of the Polish film director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy.

It’s time for that Bryan Adams/Melanie C track again now. It’s the fourth time “When You’re Gone” has been on the show with the first being way back on the 11th December 1998. In the intervening weeks, it had not been lower than No 8 in the charts following its No 3 peak on its debut. This particular week it was No 6 again in a run of three consecutive weeks in that position. What was it with Bryan Adams and massively lengthy chart hits?! Did all of the above make a secure enough case for all these repeated appearances? I’m not sure. From a blogging point of view, absolutely not. What am I supposed to keep saying about this one week after week?! Well, we’ll find out as there is still one final appearance to come in a couple of weeks. Bryan and Melanie – I can’t wait until when you’re gone.

Oh god! What’s this? A dance version of Roxy Music’s “More Than This”?! Of course it is! Just what the world needed! The woman tasked with fronting this carbuncle of a hit was Emma Sarah Morton-Smith who was restyled as Emmie for promotion purposes. We’ve seen some horrific dance takes on retro hits in the past such as Rage’s horrible treatment of “Run To You” by Bryan Adams and Nikki French’s woeful cover of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” but surely Roxy Music’s back catalogue should have been sacrosanct? Apparently not as Bryan Ferry himself gave his blessing to the project. Bryan! What were you thinking?! Despite a few near misses, Emmie would never have such a big hit again and would end up as a radio DJ on Heart Yorkshire and a presenter on QVC. Well, she did seem to know a thing or two about selling your soul…

P.S. Is that Duran Duran guitarist Dom Brown up there on stage with Emmie? I think it is you know.

Well, it had been coming. A relentless push over three years and eight consecutive Top 10 hits had led to this moment. 911 finally had their chart topper and it was a nasty cover version. Of course it was. They’d already covered Shalamar (“A Night To Remember”) and the ubiquitous Bee Gees (“More Than A. Woman”) so why not go for the hat-trick by turning to an old Dr. Hook number? “A Little Bit More” had been a No 2 hit in the UK in the sweltering Summer of 1976 and was a perfect choice of ballad for the three pop puppets of 911. They even got to sit down for once to sing it rather than pulling all their usual “Bodyshakin’” dance moves. It was also a horribly cynical move designed to give the trio the one thing their career had been missing. Once achieved, it was as if the spell had been broken or at least the project completed. Only two more hits would follow and a line was drawn on the career of 911, at least as chart stars – two reunions would follow and the group are nominally still together to this day. A little bit more? No, you’re alright thanks lads. As Public Enemy once told us, “911 Is a Joke”.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Blockster	You Should Be…	No
2	Another Level	I Want You For Myself	No thanks
3	All Seeing I	Walk Like A Panther	Interesting but no
4	Juliet Roberts	Bad Girls	Nah
5	Three Colours Red	Beautiful Day	Nope
6	Bryan Adams/Melanie C	When You’re Gone	I did not
7	Emmie	More Than This	Hell no!
8	911	A Little Bit More	Of course not

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002plnc/top-of-the-pops-22011999

TOTP 23 OCT 1998

Posted on December 3 by 80stastic

On the day this particular TOTP aired, Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown was sentenced to four months in prison for threatening behaviour towards an air stewardess and banging on the cockpit door on a British Airways flight from Paris. He would serve two months in Strangeways. Manchester. While he was inside, Roses bassist Gary ‘Mani’ Mounfield sent Brown a box of Maltesers and a note saying “Hope everything is OK”. It was a typically sweet gesture from Mani who passed away on the 20 November this year aged just 63. Generally regarded as one of the good guys in a sometimes dirty industry, his death was treated with shock and genuine sadness by music fans everywhere. As such, it seems timely to tell this story. For a number of years I worked in Our Price with the Stone Roses original bassist, the late, great Pete Garner and various members of the band would pop in to see Pete including Ian Brown and Mani. One time, one infamous time, Mani, who was always a down to earth gent and never played up to his rock star name, after queuing with the rest of the lunchtime punters, approached the counter with every Primal Scream album we had in stock and, with that wicked smile of his said “Gotta new band init”.* RIP Mani.

*Thanks to Paul Manina who remembers this story better than me and from whom I copied some of the details via his Facebook post.

In TOTP world back in October 1998, Jamie Theakston was out host, introducing the usual mixed bag of pop, rock and dance tunes so I guess I should get on with it. We start with 911 who we last saw on the beach at Cannes performing “More Than A Woman” on the previous show. There they were on a tiny stage with three dancers all jostling for space and screen time but in the TOTP studio, the production had been scaled up big time with a whopping ten dancers on stage with the band – four behind them and six on a lower level right at the front of the stage. It looks a slightly odd arrangement as if there’s a bit too much going on to take it all in at once. Also odd looking is Lee’s spiky hair. Didn’t Boyzone’s Ronan Keating sport that style some four years prior? C’mon Lee, keep up!

The next artist also has a legion of people up there on stage with him (well, seven* anyway). Cliff Richard had started the 90s with a No 1 in “Saviour’s Day” and he would end them with another chart topper in the very decisive “Millennium Prayer”. In between those hits though, this wasn’t his most successful decade. Stats-wise, that would seem to be a churlish statement as he racked up 19 Top 40 hits including seven Top Tenners. However, how many of them can you remember apart from those No 1s? Looking at the list, there a few cover versions, three singles from the poorly received Heathcliff musical all of which underperformed and a completely forgettable theme song from a completely forgettable BBC drama (Trainer anyone?) with lyrics written by Mike Read! We’d all be forgiven for forgetting any of these.

I was about to include this one – “Can’t Keep This Feeling In” – in the above list of forgettable Cliff hits and I’d be justified based on its completely lacklustre, nay positively dull sound but then, when reading up on it, I remembered that there was something else to this particular release, something (whisper it) almost interesting. Fed up of being blacklisted from UK radio stations airplay plans for reasons of perceived ageism, Sir Cliff released a dance version of “Can’t Keep This Feeling In” and distributed it to 240 radio stations under the name Blacklight. Response to the track was very positive and led to it being play-listed by stations such as Choice FM and Kiss 100. When it was revealed to the press who was actually behind the track, the radio stations who had championed it continued to play it and Cliff had made his point. Well played Sir!

*Yes, one of them was that bloke from Modern Romance who had been with Cliff for at least 10 years and whose mane of hair looked exactly the same as it did back then. At least Lee from 911 was only four years out of date.

What was it about 1998 and Swedish pop acts? Look at this lot…

Ace Of Base
Deetah
Eagle-Eye Cherry
Robyn
The Cardigans

Add to that list Meja who was in the charts with a song that I swear I’ve never heard in my life before. “All ‘Bout The Money” was, however, “one of the catchiest songs in the charts” according to Jamie Theakston and he wasn’t wrong. However, having a catchy hook isn’t always a clear indication of quality especially when said hook consists of the ‘lyrics’ “dum dum da da da dum”! Seriously?! She couldn’t find anything else to fit there?! It’s surely not slang for ‘money’ is it? Was it a Swedish thing? Well, there was a Swedish rapper known as Melodie MC who had a hit over Europe in 1993 called “Dum Da Dum” so maybe it was. Or perhaps Meja was adapting perhaps the most famous ‘da da da DUM’ in musical history for the basis of her song – that of the opening four note motif of Beethoven’s Symphony No 5? Listen again to the intro of “All ‘Bout The Money” – is that actually a clever manipulation of Beethoven’s work? It might just be as it reoccurred throughout the track. After all, Sweden can claim to having given the world the masters of intelligently crafted pop in ABBA…

Ay up, this is new! Theakston casually wanders into the show’s backstage area to give us plebs a look at what the rock and pop royalty get up to either pre or post performance. Surely this was a set up and not natural as we see 911 sharing a sofa with Billie and Cher whilst Phil Collins is shown deep in conversation with Cliff Richard. Now Cher and Phil Collins weren’t actually on this particular show though I’m guessing the latter was there to pre-record a performance of her single “Believe” which would *SPOILER* be at No 1 the following week. As for Collins, I’ve got nothing. He did release a single at the start of the month – a cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colours” to promote a Greatest Hits album. That only got to No 26 though and didn’t manage a TOTP appearance. Maybe he’d been recording some sort of Phil Collins special for the BBC? It’s all very unconvincing.

Anyway, someone who wasn’t backstage in person but who delivered an intro to the video for his band’s new single was REM’s Michael Stipe. After riding the peak of their commercial popularity since the dawn of the 90s beginning with “”Out Of Time”, by the middle of the decade their sales had started to wane as had my interest in them. 1996’s “New Adventures In Hi-Fi” had topped charts around the globe but it just didn’t shift the units that its predecessors had especially in the US. Given that scenario, was there a lot riding on the release of “Up”? Not according to the band themselves who said that they didn’t expect anything from sales and that they didn’t judge the quality of a record by them. Probably just as well as “Up” didn’t reverse the trend. The first album recorded without drummer Bill Berry who had left the band after suffering a cerebral aneurysm and the first since 1986’s “Life’s Rich Pageant” not to be produced by Scott Litt, it was generally well received critically but with the caveat that it was a hard listen for those with just a casual interest in the band whereas a more committed REM fan would find reward in it after repeated plays.

The track chosen as the lead single to promote the album (against the band’s wishes) was “Daysleeper”. Written about the plight of night workers and the effect on their body clocks of the hours that they keep, it had that distinctive Peter Buck guitar sound but doesn’t really have that much substance to it to my ears. Still, any song that can get the phrase “circadian rhythm” into its lyrics can’t be completely dismissed. And yes, I did quite like the stop-frame video Michael.

Nothing was going to stop Billie being in the TOTP studio this time. Not the illness that prevented her being there last week (“she’s fitter than a butcher’s dog” a rather un-PC Theakston says of the 16 year old in his intro) and certainly not the fact that she’s dropped from No 1 to No 3 in the charts thanks to executive producer Chris Cowey’s appearance policy.

Now, is it just me or does “Girlfriend” sound a bit like “Party In The U.S.A.” by Miley Cyrus? Just me? Then what about that “shooby dooby doop” intro? No, I’m not thinking of that Meja song from earlier. It’s on the top of my tongue but I can’t quite place it….

….got it! It’s this lesser known Betty Boo track…

What do I know about Dru Hill? Barely anything to the point that I thought that this single – “How Deep Is Your Love” – must have been yet another Bee Gees cover to add to the litany of them that littered the charts at this time. However, it isn’t though I’m wishing that it was. This really isn’t/wasn’t my bag and my opinion was not going to be changed by this ludicrous performance by lead singer Mark ‘SisQó’ Andrewsand yes, I didn’t know he was the SisQóof “Thong Song” fame untilIjustreaditonWikipedia. Why is he wearing a leather visor on his head and why does he have it pulled down so far down that it completely obscures his face? Still, it’s nothing compared to his flamboyant appearance of the silver hair and bright red leather jacket and strides outfit of his “Thong Song” era. Watching him here, it’s clear he wanted to be the main man out on his own – he literally leapfrogs over one of his band mates to get to the front of the stage at one point although I get the impression it was rehearsed and he lowered his back deliberately. How deep is your love? More like how low can you go?

And now to one of the more controversial pop moments of the year sparked by perhaps the most controversial moment – the video for “Outside” by George Michael. Directed by Vaughan Arnell, it was a clear retaliation to George’s arrest for engaging in a lewd act in April by an undercover sting operation in a public toilet in Beverly Hills, California. The incident led to Michael’s outing of his sexuality. Featuring various people both gay and straight engaging in kissing, foreplay or having sex all in public places (the titular “Outside”), it also has Michael himself dressed as an LAPD cop dancing in a toilet which becomes a nightclub complete with flashing lights and disco balls. There was no doubt what was going on here nor the point George was making. Just to absolutely make sure he rammed it home, there’s a scene at the video’s end where two male police officers kiss unaware that they have been caught on camera before the very final shot pops the cherry on top with a neon sign saying ‘Jesus Saves’ before the words “…all of us. All” appear on screen. Wow!

I’m surprised that they got away with some of the scenes being shown pre-watershed (there appears to be some cunnilingus going on during one shot and it did feature a couple of porn actresses!) – did Theakston’s words “It’s not quite a blue movie but it will raise a few eyebrows” in his intro have to be very tightly scripted so as to warn but not offend? I’m not sure what the reference to not being able to show the full video last night was all about but it certainly did ruffle a few feathers including those of one Marcelo Rodriguez, the police officer who had arrested Michael as he claimed the video was mocking him and sued for $10 million. Ultimately his claim was dismissed with the judgement stating that Rodriguez, as a public official, could not legally recover damages for emotional distress.

If ever there was a moment that showed the influence dance music had on the charts in the mid to late 90s, surely this was it. 911 had been predicted to be No 1 this week and was in that position in the midweek chart. However, they were overtaken by a track that was essentially the soundtrack of a keep fit class down your local gym. How did this happen and why? I can give you the back story to the first part of that question but as to the second part, I’m at a loss for an answer.

The origins of “Gym And Tonic” by Spacedust lay not with the protagonists who had a hit with the record but with someone else entirely. French record producer and DJ Christophe Le Friant aka Bob Sinclair, together with Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, came up with the track “Gymtonic” that sampled “Arms”, a workout recording by the actress Jane Fonda who forged a second career in the 80s with her Jane Fonda Workout series of keep fit videos. Once aware of the existence of Sinclair’s track, Fonda’s lawyers refused to give clearance for her vocals to be sampled. A deal was eventually reached which allowed for “Gymtonic” to be included on Sinclair’s album “Paradise” but not to be released as a single. The track had been much sought after in the UK after being played in the clubs in Europe in the Summer but the only way to get hold of it was by purchasing an import copy of the “Paradise” album. Enter British production duo Paul Glancy and Duncan Glasson to the story. Sensing there was a big hit to be had if they could only find a way past the legal straightjacket that was restraining distribution of the track, they hit upon the idea of basically doing a cover version of the Bob Sinclair original but with a session vocalist doing the Jane Fonda parts. With the copyright hurdles negotiated, a single release followed under the pseudonym of Spacedust and with a demand for the track already established, a huge hit was assured.

So, that’s the story behind the release but as for the ‘song’…well, it’s not really worthy of being described as such. Keep fit class music at No 1? How on earth did this happen? I think timing might have something to do with it – the single was the lowest selling No 1 of the year with it trailing in position No 109 in the year end chart of 1998. It can’t have been anything to do with the video which, intended as an homage to the exercise workout videos of the 80s, it was made with a budget of just £10,000 and guess what? It just ended up looking cheap. Quite who the dancers are that we see on stage for this TOTP appearance, I haven’t a clue. Specifically hired jobbing dancers? The lead dancer looks a bit like Claire from Steps. Was that intentional? Nothing about this release made any sense except for maybe that 911 were so poor that they lost out to the worst selling No 1 of the year with one of the worst videos of all time. What did that say about them?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	911	More Than A Woman	NO!
2	Cliff Richard	Can’t Keep This Feeling In	There was more chance of me having that year’s Christmas No 1
3	Meja	All ‘Bout The Money	Nah
4	REM	Daysleeper	No
5	Billie	Girlfriend	Nope
6	Dru Hill	How Deep Is Your Love	Not my bag at all
7	George Michael	Outside	I did not
8	Spacedust	Gym And Tonic	Never!

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002mggl/top-of-the-pops-23101998

TOTP 16 OCT 1998

Posted on November 29 by 80stastic

I ended the last post with the statement that pop was definitely back in 1998 having laid claim to the notion that many of artists who’d had the biggest and most hit singles that year had been almost defiantly of a pop nature. B*Witched, Billie, 911, Cleopatra and Five were just some of the names I mentioned. Well, as if they were forming an orderly queue to prove my point and say “Yes, he’s right”, three of those acts are featured in this show.

Our host is Jayne Middlemiss and we start with what was fast becoming a TOTP tradition let alone a practice – that of starting the show with last week’s No 1 which had now been deposed. I can’t comment about this anymore as I’m boring myself let alone any regular readers of the blog. All I will say is that this means we start the show with “Rollercoaster” by B*Witched who are “staying on for one more ride” says Middlemiss so that explains that executive producer policy decision then. Much is made of the group’s double denim fashion item of choice but for this single, they also employed an unlikely accessory in the form of boxing gloves which are utilised both in the promo video (which we don’t get to see) when they box a strongman in a fair’s boxing ring and on the front cover of the single. Well, they did say they fight like their da’s.

Why are we back in The Riviera again?! After Billie performed in Cannes Beach in the last show, we’re back in the exact same spot with the exact same stage seven days later. Were the BBC trying to sell TOTP to a foreign broadcaster or something at the Cannes TV festival? You know, I don’t think that’s a bad shout actually. On the Top Of The Pops Wikipedia page, it says that executive producer Chris Cowey was actively looking to export the brand overseas with localised versions of the show on air in France, Germany, Holland, Belgium and Italy by the end of his tenure in 2003.

So if that’s what the Beeb was up to, which artist had they got lined up to promote the show? A big name surely? Oh…911…is that right? 911…the trio of a Dec Donnelly lookalike and two dancers who look like bouncers or extras from Brookside? That’s who they went with? OK then. In their defence, they were in the middle of a run of ten consecutive Top 10 hits which was maintained by their cover of “More Than A Woman” which gave them their then biggest hit when it charted at No 2. Originally recorded for a Bee Gees tribute album, it would also serve as the lead single from the group’s third studio album called “There It Is”. A pretty faithful rendition of a song that was recorded by the Bee Gees and Tavares on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, it did whiff a bit of jumping on the bandwagon when you consider how many other artists had turned to that album for a hit around this time. N-Trance, Adam Garcia, Take That, Kim Wilde and Tina Turner had all gone down that route. Buoyed by the success of their decision to join them, 911 would repeat the trick for their next single which was a cover of Dr. Hook’s “A Little Bit More” which actually got them to No 1.

Watching this Cannes Beach performance, the stage looks a bit overcrowded what with the three lads and three female backing dancers all throwing some shapes in a confined space. Indeed, said backing dancers seem to determined to elbow themselves into camera shot. If the performance was meant to create a buzz around the show then an assembled crowd of eight (presumably paid) women in TOTP T-shirts huddled together in front of the stage didn’t really achieve that.

I’ve said it before but here I am saying it again – are Garbage one of the most underestimated bands of this era? Sure, they had a good run of hit singles including six inside the Top 10 and a No 1, multi platinum album but do they get the credit they deserve? Do they routinely get mentioned as one of the top bands of this era? Maybe I should be directing this question at myself as I did pretty much ignore them apart from the big hits back in the day. I really must investigate their back catalogue more. Take “Special” for example. The third single from “Version 2.0”, I don’t remember it at all but it’s a cracking track that with a retro yet up-to-date sound that even references “Talk Of The Town” by The Pretenders in its outro (they did get personal clearance from Christie Hynde for its use). Then there’s Shirley Manson who is magnificent as the lead singer but is she regularly mentioned when there’s any discussion of the best front people of a rock band? I’m not sure she is. The band themselves are still recording and releasing new material so they possibly don’t welcome being talked about in the past tense but the name of this blog is TOTP Rewind so I’m afraid they’ll have to live with that. I’m a ‘special’ interest blogger as it were.

From one female fronted band to another as The Cardigans return with brand new material and a brand new sound. After the quirky but insanely catchy singalong that was “Lovefool” the previous year, the Swedish indie-pop outfit were back with a much harder style in the form of “My Favourite Game”, lead single from their fourth studio album “Gram Turismo”. Built around a recurring two note guitar riff, it fair stomps along until it stops to draw breath whilst Nina Persson teases out the “I’m losing my favourite game, your losing your mind again” lyrics that create an unlikely hook. It almost shouldn’t work as a track as it shuns established song structure but work it does and then some. Persson looks effortlessly cool up there on stage in this performance with her peroxide blond hair backlit by the studio lights making her look more like Debbie Harry than Debbie Harry did in the late 90s. They would follow “My Favourite Game” with another strong single in “Erase/Rewind”’ paving the way for the album to sell three million copies worldwide.

After Brandy last week, it’s time for her partner in crime Monica to re-establish her solo career this time in the wake of the huge success of their duet “The Boy Is Mine”. I couldn’t be doing with Brandy’s song at all but I’m finding myself a little bit more predisposed to Monica’s. A very little bit. A tiny bit. I believe that is because “The First Night” samples Diana Ross’s marvellous “Love Hangover”. Yes, that must be it as there’s not much else to recommend it although my eyes were drawn to Monica’s two backing dancers. No, not for any salacious reasons but because of the high octane dance moves that they’re busting (or something). Maybe they’re so noticeable because Monica only half joins in with them (sometimes) or maybe it’s because the studio audience, who are crammed together in a semi circle around the small stage area, only have room to perform a half-hearted nerd shuffle behind the dancers.

Unless you’re a superfan (and I’m sure they do exist), for the wider population, Natalie Imbruglia is always going to be predominantly known for one song – “Torn”. It’s really unfair and dismissive but it’s true even though she has released six studio albums and eighteen singles over the course of her music career. One of those singles was “Smoke”, the fourth and final single to be lifted from her debut album “Left Of The Middle”. Now this potentially had a lot going for it – intriguing, dramatic and atmospheric but it takes an age to get going and when it does it has an identity crisis. There’s shades of Tori Amos to it but when the strings kick in, it seems to have Bond theme pretensions. I couldn’t really get on with the “what’s up with that?” lyric either. It strikes me that it’s more of an album track than a single.

In 2007, Natalie released a Best Of album called “Glorious: The Singles 97-07” which would seem to dispute my claim about her only being remembered for one song especially as it went Top 5 and achieved gold sales status. However, of the 15 tracks on the album, five of them were new songs which kind of undermines the point of a Best Of collection no?

The time of Fat Boy Slim is upon us. I purposely didn’t use the name Norman Cook as the time of Norman Cook had been with us since about 1986 in his various guises. The Housemartins, Beats International, Freak Power, Pizzaman, The Mighty Dub Katz and then perhaps his most famous incarnation Fat Boy Slim. Even then, that particular alias had been with us a while. There had already been one Fat Boy Slim album – 1996’s “Better Living Through Chemistry” – although it had failed to make much of an impression chart-wise. Then in June of 1998, the single “Rockefeller Skank” had gone Top 10 though I don’t remember it featuring in any TOTP shows for some reason (Chris Cowey was probably still obsessing with Five or someone). However, when “Gangster Trippin’” came out and went straight to No 3, then we all had to stand up and take note. Parent album “You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby” was released the Monday after this TOTP aired and would debut at No 2 which was impressive enough. However, it exploded early in 1999 in the wake of the “Praise You” single going to No 1 and subsequently the album would match that achievement with four consecutive weeks at the top.

Before that though we have “Gangster Trippin’”, a track immediately recognisable as Fat Boy Slim but obviously made up of lots (and lots!) of samples of other people’s work including DJ Shadow and Dust Junkys both of whom were favourites of some of my much hipper than me Our Price work colleagues. Mention must be made of the Norman Cook cameo in the introduction to the video for the track (yes, a rare actual video in the Chris Cowey era). Voicing an intro from behind a cardboard cut out of the kid from the album cover, Cook confirms my earlier suspicion that he hadn’t been on the show before under the Fat Boy Slim moniker by saying it was his first TOTP appearance. That kid from the album cover is a bit of a mystery. The iconic photograph of him was taken at the 1983 Fat People’s Festival in Danville, Virginia and provided by the Rex Features photo library. His identity though remains a mystery despite many attempts by Cook over the years to find him in order to remunerate him for the use of his image. As for the video itself, it’s essentially just a load of furniture being blown up shown from different angles and in slow motion. Well, it was directed by Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford Coppola whose many film credits include Apocalypse Now. Maybe Roman loved the smell of burning furniture in the morning.

Billie is No 1 this week with her second single release “Girlfriend”. She’s not in the studio because she’s not very well Jayne Middlemiss informs us so instead we get a presumably pre-recorded performance in what looks like a nightclub but without any patrons in it. Was this from her time in Cannes as well? Wasn’t there a video they could have shown? What was Chris Cowey’s aversion to promo videos anyway and why did he make an exception for Fat Boy Slim’s? “Girlfriend” would last just one week at the top but guess what? Billie will be back on the next TOTP performing it because…Cowey wanted her to?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	B*Witched	Rollercoaster	Nah
2	911	More Than A Woman	As if
3	Garbage	Special	Good song but no
4	The Cardigans	My Favourite Game	See 3 above
5	Monica	The First Night	I did not
6	Natalie Imbruglia	Smoke	Nope
7	Fat Boy Slim	Gangster Trippin’	No but my wife had the album
8	Billie	Girlfriend	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002mggj/top-of-the-pops-16101998

TOTP 03 JUL 1998

Posted on October 9 by 80stastic

This list marks a true milestone for me. This is TOTP Rewind post No 700! Yes, if you combine all the 80s and 90s shows reviews together, the total is 700. How did I get here and more importantly, was it worth it? Well, I’ll leave the second part of that question to anybody who’s taken the time to read any of the previous 699 posts to answer. As for ‘how did I get here?’ (you’ve got “Once In A Lifetime” by Talking Heads running through your mind now haven’t you?), I’ll tell you. It’s taken me nearly nine years of watching, considering and writing to get me to 700. NINE YEARS! I must be either someone who’s very dedicated to a cause or a complete narcissist.

To mark the occasion, the gods of pop music nostalgia have plotted to provide me with one of the worst running orders in TOTP history but before we get to all that, we have a brand new presenter making their debut on the show in the form of Kate Thornton. A journalist initially (she was the youngest ever editor of Smash Hits magazine aged just 21), she made the transition to TV via ITV current affairs programme Straight Up and is widely credited as the person who placed “Candle In The Wind” centre stage as part of the national grieving process for the death of Princess Diana. Apparently, her bosses wanted some music to soundtrack a photo tribute piece for Diana and Thornton was tasked with sourcing something appropriate. As the news broke on a Sunday, the record library was shut and so Kate was left with whatever she had in her car. A copy of Elton John’s Greatest Hits was on the stereo and the rest is literally history. Big history. The BBC came calling and a place in the TOTP presenter roster was offered. I like that the producers made some attempt at humour by introducing her with a skit as if she’d been pulled out of the studio audience at random to replace a poorly Jayne Middlemiss. Maybe she had, though clearly not in the manner presented. She gives a very confident and assured performance on her debut and would become the host of X Factor in 2004. I never quite understood why she was replaced by Dermot O’Leary. I believe she’s to be found on Greatest Hits Radio these days along with all the other BBC presenters deemed not hip enough anymore like Ken Bruce and Simon Mayo although to be fair, I’m not sure if either of those two were ever hip.

Anyway, we start with a new face with a shiny, new hit from a famous family. Before 1998, the phrase ‘Eagle Eyes’ would have conjured up memories of Action Man toys from my childhood but Eagle-Eye Cherry (his actual real name!) came along to change all that.

The son of American jazz artist Don Cherry and Swedish designer Moki Cherry and the half brother of Neneh Cherry, he had early career intentions to be an actor and enrolled in the High School Of Performing Arts in New York (Fame and all that) being in the same class as Jennifer Aniston. However, he would ultimately choose music as his first passion and returned to his home of Stockholm to write his debut album “Desireless”. His instincts paid off when the album sold four million copies around the world, spearheaded by lead single and opening track “Save Tonight”. Irresistible for daytime radio controllers, it’s actually quite a simple song based around the well established and familiar chord progression of Am-F-C-G that is the backbone of many a huge hit including “Hey Jude”, “Wonderwall” and “Imagine”. It’s slick and smooth though with a vocal from Cherry that has enough interest in it to keep the listener’s attention. Great things were predicted for Eagle-Eye – my wife was enamoured enough to buy “Desireless” and see him live at the Manchester Academy – but the old diminishing returns and changing tastes seem to do for him and the hits had all but dried up come the new millennium. He still recording new material though with his last album released in 2023.

Sticking with the eagle theme come Hanson whose latest hit “Thinking Of You” includes the lyric “Fly with the wings of an eagle” running throughout its length. The fifth and final single taken from their “Middle Of Nowhere” album, listening back to it, you could understand why it hadn’t appeared earlier in the release schedule. The album’s lead single had been the No 1 “MMMBop” and, to paraphrase Kate Thornton in her intro, whether you found it adorable or downright irritating, you couldn’t deny it was insanely catchy. Sadly for “Thinking Of You”, it was no “MMMBop” despite its clear aspirations to be so. However, it was MMBop-lite which sounds like a diet version of a fizzy drink but you get my drift. It seems to have all the component parts but it doesn’t have that killer hook. It’s like an early demo of their most famous song before they’d worked it into shape as the pop mega-hit it became. “Thinking Of You” would be the band’s last hit of the 90s (though they’d have three more into the new decade).

As with Hanson before them, after a couple of years of hits, Space were coming to the end of their time as Top 40 stars. Conversely, this, their penultimate hit, was called “Begin Again”. Another track lifted from their Top 3 album “Tin Planet”, it would peak at No 21, their smallest ever chart hit. Now, I’ve championed Space a bit in previous posts and my wife had their first album “Spiders” but by this point, their quirky flavoured schtick was starting to grate a bit. That eerie sound that they’d cultivated which had initially charmed was becoming predictable. “Begin Again” was another track with swooping strings and a almost mariachi feel to it with singer Tommy Scott banging on about being a man who would kill for love whilst giving his usual wild-eyed stare to the camera. Give it a rest Tommy! After leaving their label Gut Records, the band released their music to the fanbase via their website until they split in 2005. However, they did ‘begin again’ in 2011 and are still a recording and touring entity to this day.

Here’s another link back to Hanson with another boy band. 911 were on to their seventh (of ten) consecutive Top 10 hits with “How Do You Want Me To Love You” which sounds impressive but was it really? Of those ten hits, they all debuted in their peak position in week one and none of them stayed inside the Top 10 for more than two weeks. Clearly their fan base were spending their pocket money to purchase the singles as soon as they were released when they would have been heavily discounted as well to create a high entry point but when the contributing factors of fanbase and discounting were taken away, there was no substance to sustain their chart lives. This one was a prime example. Week one in at No 10, week two dropped to No 35, week three out of the Top 40 altogether. Yes, they did have a No 2 and a No 1 hit but both were cover versions of well known songs so that diminishes those achievements in my book rather. They had three albums that peaked at Nos 13, 10 and 8 selling enough copies for one gold and two silver discs. Is that impressive? Mildly at a push I’d say. Away from the numbers (as Paul Weller once sang), this was a drippy, insipid pop ballad that was forgotten as soon as the last note sounded.

Oh come on! We’ve already had two boy bands and now a third?! And this one, as Kate Thornton tells us in her intro, has toured with 911. So hang on, they were the support act for a group that themselves were almost completely lacking in any discernible merit but who topped the bill ahead of them? Have I got that right? OK so what we’re saying is that Ultra were a poor man’s 911?! Dear Lord. Can you get any worse than that?! After scoring a hit with debut single “Say You Do”, these no marks were back with a follow up called “Say It Once”. Heavens! They couldn’t even come up with two song titles that didn’t crib off each other! This is really poor stuff to mark my 700th post. The bad news is that they had a further two hits after this. Say it ain’t so.

For Pete’s sake! No, for my sake and my 700th post! This is no way to mark the occasion – Hanson, 911, Ultra and now Aaron Carter?! You’ve got to be kidding me?! This guy was the little brother of Nick Carter from the Backstreet Boys and he was just ten years old at the time of this broadcast. By comparison, the youngest Hanson brother was 12. Had we seen anything like this since Little Jimmy Osmond tormented us with “Long Hair Lover From Liverpool” in 1972? I can’t think of a similar act. What on earth was this all about and why was it happening? I’m guessing it was the most cynical act by the little blighter’s record company to cash in on the popularity of the Backstreet Boys but was it really that blunt? Well, he did support his big brother’s band on tour so maybe it was.

Apparently he’d already had three UK hit singles by this point so did we mercifully miss them or have I reviewed them and completely obliterated them from my memory banks? For the record, the fourth hit was a scandalous cover of “Surfin’ USA” by The Beach Boys. Watching the performance of it here just feels wrong. Not as bad as when Channel 4 aired the Minipops series in 1983 which was not just a dodgy idea but one of the most heinous concepts ever conceived and executed but still wrong. Oh, and the intro with Jo Whiley was absolute cringe. Why?! As is sadly often the way when fame comes to someone so young, Carter would have a traumatic and tragically short life dying in 2022 aged just 34 by accidental drowning in a bath following the taking of Xanax and difluoroethane.

TOTP Executive Producer Chris Cowey has finally relented and has allowed a video to feature on the show. Apparently, this was the first promo shown since 1st May 1998 after eight weeks of studio only appearances. I’m not sure why he introduced the policy in the first place nor why he made an exception for the Beastie Boys but in the case of the latter, I’m guessing Cowey couldn’t ignore the return of one of the biggest names in rap especially as their single crashed into the Top 5. I’ve said this before but just about everyone I ever worked with in Our Price over a 10 year period loved the Beastie Boys. Not the “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)” version but the more mature and achingly cool era of the band exemplified by “Paul’s Boutique”*, the eccentricity of “Check Your Head” and the eclectic nature of “Ill Communication”. Accordingly, when “Hello Nasty” came out in 1998 after a four year gap, it was a big deal for many of my colleagues.

“Intergalactic” was its lead single and it came out swinging with a big sound and a video that seemed epic at the time but maybe isn’t viewed as that through 2025 eyes. A tribute to the Japanese Kaiju genre of films (Godzilla and the like) and featuring a giant robot battling an octopus-headed creature (?), it won the 1999 Best Hip Hop Video at the MTV Video Music Awards. The battle scenes between the robot and the octopus thing remind me of the Power Rangers franchise which I had to endure watching when my son was a young boy and it was one of the oddest TV series I think I’ve ever seen. How it ran for 30 years is beyond me. Whatever the merits or drawbacks of the video, and certainly after the crime against music that was NYCC’s brutally bad cover version of “Fight For Your Right” earlier in 1998, it was good to have the real thing back.

*Here’s another link back to Hanson. “Thinking Of You” that was on the show earlier was produced by the Dust Brothers (Michael Simpson and John King) whose other credits include “Paul’s Boutique”.

Baddiel, Skinner and the Lightning Seeds are No 1 for a third week but any chance of the England football team winning the World Cup crown disappeared in dramatic fashion three days before this TOTP aired. They crashed out on penalties to Argentina in the Round of 16 after having had David Beckham sent off for petulantly lashing out at Diego Simeone whilst lay on the floor. For a while, Beckham was public enemy No 1 with even an effigy of him and a noose tied to a lamppost making headlines. With England out, there would be the inevitable drop off in sales of “3 Lions ‘98”. However, it would return to the charts eight times over the years when a football tournament has been played. The nation’s wait for a follow up to 1966 and all that continues however…

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Eagle-Eye Cherry	Save Tonight	No but my wife had his album
2	Hanson	Thinking Of You	Negative
3	Space	Begin Again	Nah
4	911	How Do You Want Me To Love You	As if
5	Ultra	Say It Once	Never
6	Aaron Carter	Surfin’ USA	Hell no!
7	Beastie Boys	Intergalactic	Nope
8	Baddiel, Skinner and the Lightning Seeds	3 Lions ’98	No

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002jy45/top-of-the-pops-03071998?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 03 APR 1998

Posted on August 22 by 80stastic

On this day in pop music history, we lost Rob Pilatus. If that name doesn’t mean anything to you then how about Milli Vanilli? Yes, Rob was one part of the infamous duo who were completely discredited after it was discovered that they hadn’t sung on any of their hit records and subsequently returned their Grammy Award. Despite a few attempts at a comeback, there was no way back for Milli Vanilli and Rob spent time both in prison and drug rehabilitation centres before he was ultimately found dead in a German hotel room from an alcohol and prescription drug overdose on the eve of yet another attempted comeback. It’s a tragic tale certainly but I wonder if any of the artists on this TOTP were accused of not singing or playing on any of their records?

Our host is Zoe Ball – is it fair to make an accusation of ‘cheating’ against her in that her career had a leg up due to the show business connections of her national treasure status father Johnny and that she is, in fact, a nepo baby? Some people might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment. Anyway, we start with a new act from Australia by the name of Savage Garden. I say new but they weren’t really although I think this is their first time on TOTP. They’d already had a hit in the UK the previous year when “I Want You” debuted at No 11 but it didn’t get picked up for a slot on the show and tumbled down and out of the charts within three weeks. The follow up “To The Moon And Back” missed the Top 50 altogether (though it would make the Top 3 when rereleased) but they’re finally on the show with their third single “Truly Madly Deeply”. However, despite that song entering the charts at No 4 and spending the next five weeks inside the Top 10, this was the first time it had featured on the show. So ‘new’ they weren’t and yet again I put this to the show’s executive producer…“Chris Cowey, explain yourself!”.

Anyway, as well as sharing its title with the rather wonderful 1991 film starring Alan Rickman and Juliet Stevenson (which is never on TV or streaming platforms by the way), “Truly Madly Deeply” is one of those soppy love songs that ultimately gets under your skin becoming an itch you can’t scratch, a track you desperately don’t want to like but can’t stop humming – well, that’s how it made me feel. Enough people clearly did like it as it would spend another five weeks knocking about the Top 10 making a total residency of just under three months. It was a phenomenally consistent seller evidenced by three consecutive weeks at a No 5 and its No 10 position in the UK year-end chart for 1998. The track would spearhead a period of mega-success for the duo of Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones with two triple platinum selling albums in the UK within three years whilst they were an even bigger deal in America where they achieved two No 1 singles and their debut eponymous album sold seven million copies. However, by 2001 they were gone with vocalist Hayes pursuing a solo career. My abiding memory of the duo though came from the year before. In 2000, I’d left my job working in record shops and relocated from Manchester to York to become a civil servant. One of my new colleagues had tickets to see Savage Garden play but he could no longer go and was looking to get rid of the tickets – he couldn’t give them away. Nobody seemed to even be slightly interested in the band let alone love them truly, madly and deeply.

Did they play/sing on their records? Yes although as a duo, they also employed some session musicians to perform the bass, percussion and drums parts on tracks.

A proper music legend now but the fact that he is only on the show because of a jeans advert belies his legacy somewhat. Zoe Ball’s intro claiming that without this man there’s no ska and no Madness (nor jeans commercial) tries to do justice to his name but I’m not sure it’s entirely convincing. We are talking about Prince Buster who helped shape the history of Jamaican music in its various forms with his influence on reggae, ska and the rocksteady genres. Said influence extended to these shores with the late 70s ska revival movement spearheaded by the 2-Tone label direct beneficiaries. Madness called their first single “The Prince” after him and named themselves after his song “Madness” which was its b-side. Their second single was another cover of one of his songs – “One Step Beyond” – so Zoe was right about that I guess but she could also have mentioned The Specials and The Beat who both recorded versions of Prince Buster songs or borrowed parts of them to shape their own ‘original’ tunes. One of those tunes was “Whine And Grine” which The Beat incorporated into their anti-Thatcher anthem “Stand Down Margaret”. Eighteen years later “Whine And Grine” was back having been used to soundtrack the latest Levi’s ad campaign and it would give Prince Buster only his second ever UK Top 40 hit when it peaked at No 21.

It’s a great track and Prince Buster (real name Cecil Bustamente Campbell) looks effortlessly cool in this performance. Looking at the age of the studio audience, you can only wonder if they knew they were in the presence of a music legend and hope that they didn’t go away saying they’d seen the man who did the song from that Levi’s advert. Prince Buster died from heart problems in 2016.

Did he play/sing on his records? Are you kidding?! A true original.

Zoe Ball’s on the…well…ball again by stating that Janet Jackson has been a regular on the show. In the 90s alone, she racked up 20 UK chart hits – that’s two a year every year. It’s not a bad record. What was a bad record though (to my ears) was “I Get Lonely” which was the third single from “The Velvet Rope” album. On this one, Janet tipped the balance between R&B and pop which had characterised a lot of her hits well in favour of the former and as a pop kid at heart, it was never going to get me longing for its company.

As she couldn’t be in the studio in person, she’s sent a video message introducing her video which seems to be distracting us to the lack of any tune in the song by showcasing Janet’s cleavage. Indeed, it was nominated for the ‘Sexiest Music Video of the Year’ at the VH1 Video Music Awards. It’s all a bit obvious, showy and in your face (literally). By the way, that’s the group Blackstreet up there with Janet who were on the “TNT Remix” produced for the single release and when she rips open her top to reveal a lacy bra and that bosom again, they possibly experienced a Westlife/Mariah Carey moment from the “Against All Odds” video.

Did she sing/play on her records? Yes she did although there were those bizarre rumours that said Janet was really brother Michael in drag in which case she didn’t if you believe them.

If it’s Sash! (and it is) then their single must be at No 2 in the charts no? Erm…no actually. Yes, all their previous three dance hits had all gone to one place off the summit but “La Primavera” (the lead single from their second album) was at No 3 and would get no higher. Shock horror! Fear not though as they would be back at No 2 with their next hit “Mysterious Times” and would collect one more as the new millennium dawned to give them the record of being the act with the most No 2s without ever getting to No 1 in chart history. No sniggering at the back!

So what did “La Primavera” sound like? Well, the apple didn’t stray too far from the tree I think it’s fair to say although was it a bit less frantic than its predecessors? More like the dream trance that Robert Miles was peddling? Oh, I don’t know do I? Nor do I know why the dancers they’ve got in to promote the track look like they’re doing aqua aerobics without the water nor who the Betty Boo lookalike out front was. Life’s too short people.

Did they sing/play on their records? Clearly they didn’t sing on the records as they got a series of guest vocalists in.

As I approach the end of blogging about TOTP (I’m stopping after the 1999 repeats have finished), I’m increasingly encountering the scenario of it being the last time that I have to comment on a particular artist. Such is the case here as I believe this is the final chart hit for Louise in the 90s. The thing about the ex-Eternal member’s solo career it strikes me is that it was consistent without ever being spectacular. She has amassed twelve chart hits (eight between 1995 and 1998) of which six went Top 5 but how many of them were songs that really made a mark on the general public’s consciousness? Obviously her fan base (which is pretty loyal) could name them all but how many could your average punter reel off? I could only come up with “Naked” with certainty and I’ve reviewed most of them. “All That Matters” is a a case in point. A perfectly pleasant, radio friendly pop number if a little derivative of something I can’t quite put my finger on but it doesn’t linger in the memory for long. Still, that loyal fan base of hers sent her latest album “Confessions” into the Top 10 this year and that’s surely all that matters.

Did she sing on her records? Yes, which actually worked against her in her Eternal days when trying to break America where a white woman in the line up was seen as problematic for procuring airplay on R&B radio stations.

At this point in 1998, Ian Brown was awaiting trial for allegedly using threatening behaviour towards an air hostess on a British Airways flight in February. I seem to remember seeing lots of graffiti around Manchester where I was living at the time proclaiming Brown’s innocence. In the end, he went down for four months though actually served just two in jail due to parole.

For the moment though, he was free to perform his latest single “Corpses In Their Mouths” in the TOTP studio. Now that song’s title was pinched from a quote in Belgian situationist Raoul Vaneigem’s 1967 book The Revolution Of Everyday Life. However, that’s not where I know it from. My introduction to it came courtesy of the marvellous Pete Wylie track “The Story Of The Blues Part Two (Talkin’ Blues)”.

As for Brown’s track, it was the follow up to “My Star” which I remembered but this one? Nothing. I’m not surprised as it’s a pretty flat tune with Brown’s deadpan vocals not helping to up the ante. And what was with that miserable harmonica playing? It’s an all round grim performance but then he did have other things on his mind I guess.

Did he sing on his records? Depends what your definition of ‘singing’ is.

A quick word now on the staging of this particular show but not the performances of the artists but the positioning of Zoe Ball. Chris Cowey was obviously in an arty mood this week as he has our Zoe making use of unorthodox parts of the studio. Right from the start, she appears to walk on from off stage to do her intro which is echoey signifying she’s coming from behind the scenes. Then, when introducing Sasha!, she’s contorted herself to fit into the middle of what could be a giant polo but I’m guessing is the letter ‘O’ from the TOTP logo? Finally, she’s sprawled out on top of a piano and shot from above with the camera angle rotating madly as she introduces 911. Was Cowey trying out some new ideas or was he just trying to distract us from the very average quality of the music on the show (Prince Buster excepted)?

So 911. This trio had built themselves quite the career from small beginnings. “All I Want Is You” was their sixth consecutive Top 10 hit but like Louise earlier, could you actually name many of them? I’m going “Bodyshakin’” and didn’t they do a Dr. Hook cover at some point? The rest? I’ve probably written about them but retained any sense of what they were called or how they went I haven’t. Zoe tells us that this is a live performance from the group – is it? Well, lead singer Lee Brennan could be doing a live vocal but the other two up there with him? Well, they’re live in the respect that they’re living and breathing but that’s about their only contribution aside from some “oohing” in the background. The track itself is, again like Louise and her song earlier, a mid-tempo pop song that does a job but is pretty insubstantial. A bit like 911 really.

Did they sing on their records? As noted before, I could believe that Lee did but his two band mates? I’d need to see actual footage from the recording studio and a sworn declaration from the engineer that it was them.

As Zoe Ball says in her intro (before she attempts some embarrassing…well, how would you describe it? Jive talk? Street slang? Urban speak?), “It’s Like That” by Run–D.M.C. vs Jason Nevins is the first single of 1998 to last more than two weeks at No 1. In total it would clock up six weeks on the throne and become the third biggest selling single of the year in the UK. Somehow, despite the fact that I must have sold loads of it whilst working in the Our Price in Stockport, I’d forgotten quite how big a hit this was. Damn getting old and my failing memory. “It’s like that”? It may have been but I can’t quite remember it.

Did they rap on their records? You bet!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Savage Garden	Truly Madly Deeply	I did not
2	Prince Buster	Whine And Grine	Liked it, didn’t buy it
3	Janet Jackson	I Get Lonely	No
4	Sash!	La Primavera	Nope
5	Louise	All That Matters	Negative
6	Ian Brown	Corpses In Their Mouths	Nah
7	911	All I Want Is You	Never happening
8	Run-D.M.C. vs Jason Nevins	It’s Like That	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002h46f/top-of-the-pops-03041998?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 31 OCT 1997

Posted on May 7 by 80stastic

Although I know the name Mary Anne Hobbs, I couldn’t tell you much about her other than she’s a DJ. Well, she’s also the presenter on this particular episode of TOTP (the second of only two she hosted but we missed the first one due to the Puff Daddy issue) so a little research on her seems in order. It turns out that she’s had a career as a radio presenter, music journalist and a DJ but that doesn’t really tell her whole backstory. She left a chaotic family home in the small Lancashire village of Garstang to work for and live with a rock band from London on a bus in a coach park in Hayes, Middlesex before securing employment with Sounds and then the NME. Following that, she moved into radio broadcasting with XFM before a confrontational interview with the BBC’s Trevor Dann* brought her to the attention of Radio 1.

*Dann was head of Radio 1 Production known as ‘Dann Dann the Hatchetman’ for his role in overseeing the culling of the station’s old guard of DJs.

Having joined in January 1996, she presented a movie review show alongside Mark Kermode and the station’s rock show but perhaps she is best known for her show The Breezeblock that showcased experimental electronic music and was particularly influential in promoting music from the then little known grime and dubstep movements (Mary Anne even has the show’s name written across her stomach here). She would leave Radio 1 in 2010 before returning to the Beeb two years later via Radio 6. She has also run parallel careers as a touring DJ, a presenter of the World Superbikes series for British Eurosport and as a documentary maker producing a series about biker culture for BBC Choice. Phew! With all that in mind, it strikes me that she wasn’t the obvious choice to present such a mainstream music show as TOTP, what with her passion for experimental and leftfield genres. I wonder what she made of some of the acts she was introducing here?

Exhibit A m’lud. “Party People…Friday Night” by 911. I can’t believe that this would have been the sort of thing that Mary Anne played either publicly on the radio or in private for her personal listening pleasure. This piece of dance/pop fluff was the band’s fourth Top 5 hit of 1997 and the lead single from their sophomore album “Moving On”. Remarkably given the lack of depth of their talents, this lot were building themselves quite the pop career. Watching this performance back, I’m struck by a number of images. Firstly, the surfeit of balloons being held aloft and waved about by the studio audience. It’s as if we’ve been transported back to 1983. Maybe that was deliberate on the part of executive producer Chris Cowey? Secondly, why is lead singer Lee Brennan wearing a jacket with sleeves that don’t fit him? Look at the length of them! Wardrobe clearly didn’t think his outfit through as it made him far more vulnerable to the grabbing hands of the teenage girls in the studio audience. Finally, they seem to have given up completely on any pretence that they weren’t miming when dancer Jimmy strides forward to take over lead vocal duties. Surely that’s still Lee’s voice we can hear? What was all that about? Was there some dissent in the ranks about Lee always being the centre of attention? I’m probably overthinking it – something I never imagined myself doing given that the subject of my thoughts are 911!

Exhibit B m’lud. Surely this horrid 90s work over of Rod Stewart’s 1978 No 1 “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” can’t have been Mary Anne’s cup of tea can it? The trend for nasty dance covers of hits from yesteryear was unfathomably popular around this time. The other week we had Clock getting their hands all over Hot Chocolate’s “You Sexy Thing” and pulling it to pieces in the most disrespectful way and now here was N–Trance following a similar path. As with the aforementioned Clock, this lot had taken a clear decision to pursue a cheesy pop route after more credible dance beginnings. It’s hard to believe this is the same people who brought us “Set You Free” two years before. Since then though, they’d already released covers of oldies by the Bee Gees and Ottawan and now we had this monstrosity completing a most ignoble hat-trick. Apparently, Rod himself gave his blessing to this version to the point where he is credited as appearing on it. He must have smelt a potential big hit rather than the rancid stench of desperation that filled my nostrils. I never much liked his original to be fair though. Written as a response to the disco movement of the late 70s, it was a clever move by Stewart I guess but oh so cynical. Unbelievably, N-Trance would do a version of the Guns N’ Roses classic “Paradise City” for their next single before returning to their former glories in 2001 when they rereleased “Set You Free”.

With Mary Anne Hobbs referring to the Spice Girls as The Teletubbies in her intro, I think we can infer from that she wasn’t a fan. Talking of fans, were they beginning to lose a few what with them only being No 1 for a single week with “Spice Up Your Life”? Even if that were true, it doesn’t stop them being on the show again seven days later – this was the ‘repeat appearances’ era of executive producer Chris Cowey after all and he wasn’t going to miss out on recycling that ‘exclusive’ performance from New Delhi, India. However, that decision means we don’t get to see the Bladerunner inspired official promo video that accompanied the single. Obviously, the promo will have been used by other pop programmes throughout the world (I’m sure the UK’s own Chart Show would have shown it) but it does seem a waste somewhat that the BBC’s premier and historic music show chose not to feature it. I suppose Cowey was trying to rebuild the TOTP brand which didn’t include showing very many videos it seems. The Spice Girls would recover from the knock of their short-lived chart topper to bag the 1997 Christmas No 1 with follow up single “Too Much”. We aren’t nearly done with them yet in these BBC4 repeats.

Now this might have been more to Mary Anne’s taste – the latest offering from Dannii Minogue…erm…sorry…it was just Dannii by this point wasn’t it? Having made a successful comeback with her last single “All I Wanna Do” going to No 4, the youngest Minogue sister was rivalling Kylie in the popularity stakes who was struggling to get the public to buy into her ‘indie Kylie’ phase. Dannii’s follow up single was “Everything I Wanted” and it rather cleverly combined a pop melody with a shuffling drum & bass style backbeat – at least that’s what it sounds like to my unsophisticated ears. Was she going for a sound similar to the likes of Baby D or Dubstar that had garnered commercial sales as well as critical acclaim? If I’m being super critical I would say that I’m not sure about the quality of her vocals but she sells the track pretty well with a more restrained, dressed down image than previously. A tour and a role in Grease: The Arena Spectacular as the character of Rizzo would follow before she returned to music with perhaps her best received album “Neon Lights” in 2003.

Surely Mary Anne Hobbs would have approved of this one? A ‘speed garage’ anthem which was emblematic of a scene that was big in London at the time – this was just the sort of thing she’d have plugged on her The Breezeblock radio show. I’m guessing here as I never actually listened to said show obviously and that seems like a good decision if indeed “Ripgroove” by Double 99 was the sort of thing that got played on it. What a racket! Is this what speed garage sounded like? Lordy! Double 99 were duo Tim Deluxe and Omar Adimora who also recorded under the pseudonyms R.I.P Productions and 10° Below but they are best known for this track which was released twice in 1997 peaking at No 31 initially but 17 places higher the second time around. The rerelease featured the vocals of MC Top Cat though what he is actually banging on about I’m not entirely sure. Something about “bruk whine”?

*googles “bruk whine”*

Well, AI Overview tells me that it’s Jamaican patois meaning a dance move that is a twist on the traditional ‘whine’ or circular hip movements/gyrations with ‘bruk’ meaning ‘broken’ or ‘out of order’. That’s that solved then. It doesn’t change my opinion about the track though. It reminds me of that hit “Incredible” by M-Beat but Wikipedia tells me that was ragga jungle rather than speed garage. Despite working in record shops throughout the 90s and despite all these years of blogging about TOTP and all the dance tunes I’ve listened to, my knowledge of dance and all its genres and sub genres hardly seems to have improved at all. I guess that’s why ‘Dance Collections’ was always the scariest section of those record shops for me. I’m not sure me and Mary Anne Hobbs would have much to talk about in terms of music were we ever to meet.

Now, apparently we’re missing a performance from this repeat – Puff Daddy and his hit “Been Around The World” which has been edited out for obvious reasons. So why couldn’t that approach have been applied to all those shows featuring his chart topper “I’ll Be Missing You”? My guess would be that it was precisely because his hit was a No 1 and to have removed it would have wrecked the natural flow of the show as it worked its way up to the best selling hit of the week. Its place in the running order would have made editing it out look odd and incongruous.

With the offending Puff Daddy removed, we find ourselves in the company of The Charlatans. I’d forgotten that they released the title track of their album “Tellin’ Stories” but release it they did as the fourth and final single to be taken from it. It doesn’t veer too far from the style of its predecessors but there’s a definite tinge of soul in there. However, it does have a bit of a stop-start feel to it, as if it’s really going to swing into something anthemic but then it pulls itself back. Probably just me. We didn’t have to wait an age for another Charlatans album which would appear in 1999 with the intermediate gap plugged by the Best Of album “Melting Pot” which I duly bought.

As for this performance, are my eyes deceiving me or did the TOTP cameras briefly catch an attempted stage invasion that was thwarted by studio floor staff? Could be as Tim Burgess seems momentarily distracted by something going on to his left. After Oasis and Stereophonics both experienced members of the studio audience breaching the consecrated safety of the stage this year, at least BBC security seemed to have got themselves organised finally.

And so to the song that deposed the Spice Girls at the top of the charts after just one week – it’s “Barbie Girl” by Aqua. So, let’s address the controversy attached to this hit which was the litigation brought by toy manufacturer Mattel against Aqua and their record label MCA for impinging upon their trademark and copyrights for the Barbie doll. In a counter move, MCA sued Mattel for defamation. In the end, both cases were thrown out by the courts with a ruling advising both parties to ‘“chill”.

Heh. Sounds like the judge in the case was John Cusack’s character Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Just watch this…

As for Mary Anne Hobbs, this would be her last time as a TOTP presenter which is probably just as well as she didn’t really look comfortable in the role. A mainstream platform in a peak viewing time slot was really taking her out of her late night comfort zone.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	911	Party People…Friday Night	Negative
2	N-Trance / Rod Stewart	Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?	As if
3	Spice Girls	Spice Up Your Life	Nope
4	Dannii Minogue	Everything I Wanted	Nah
5	Double 99	Ripgroove	No
6	The Charlatans	Tellin’ Stories	I did not
7	Aqua	Barbie Girl	Never

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002blmk/top-of-the-pops-31101997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 09 MAY 1997

Posted on February 23 by 80stastic

It’s the 9th May 1997 and I’m in China! Yes, Beijing to be exact visiting my old school pal Rob who is living and studying out there. According to my diary, this date was our second day there (I’d travelled with Rob’s brother Chris) and we’d so far been to Tiananmen Square, Ritan Park and spent a mad night in a karaoke bar. However, one of my abiding memories is that on our plane there had been a French youth orchestra who were going to play some concerts in China and as we flew over rice fields on the approach to Beijing airport, one of their number looked out of the window and exclaimed “Ah, le chinois!”. With my location confirmed, I can categorically say that I would not have watched this episode of TOTP. I wonder what I missed…

…not much if the opening act is anything to go by as it’s the same one that closed the last episode! I guess it’s understandable as Katrina And The Waves had won Eurovision for the UK the weekend before for the first time in 16 years so they probably deserved their moment in the limelight. “Love Shine A Light” was the track that brought the trophy home and although it was a deserved winner on the night, it didn’t live long in the memory. Katrina (Leskanich) herself has explained that the reason the band had never recorded it before was due to the fact that it was “too cheesy, too ABBA, too Eurovision”. Even the guy who wrote it, guitarist Kimberley Rew, didn’t want anything to do with it and Eurovision and didn’t join his band mates for their performance of it on the big night. According to Katrina, the song (and subsequently the band) didn’t endure because they didn’t have a gimmick like Bucks Fizz. What it did have though was an anthemic quality and a feel good vibe that clearly won the voters over at least temporarily. In 2020, it created its own legacy of sorts as its title was used as the inspiration for a show called Eurovision: Europe Shine A Light which was a live, two hour show arranged to replace the full Eurovision Song Contest which was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Love Shine A Light” was performed by the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra before also being reprised at the show’s finale by all the artists meant to have been in the official show with Katrina herself joining those on stage.

I should have said that Jo Whiley is tonight’s presenter and she’s positively effusive about the next artist who have a great track to be fair to them. There was always going to be in huge interest in what the members of the Stone Roses did next after the band was dissolved in October 1996. Mani* would join Primal Scream, Ian Brown embarked on a solo career to varying degrees of success and Reni went into hiatus hibernation.

*He came into the Our Price in Stockport where I worked one day and bought our entire stock of Primal Scream albums to learn the bass parts.

As for John Squire, he was first out of the traps with a new project in the form of The Seahorses. Unlike the Roses who couldn’t have been more Manc, Squire’s band were York-centric with lead singer Chris Helme having been infamously recruited after being spotted busking outside the city’s Woolworths store. Another feature of The Seahorses story that was being played out in the music press was that the band’s name was an anagram of ‘He Hates Roses’ or alternatively ‘The Rose Ashes’. Squire denied this as pure coincidence and speculation.

Anyway, their debut single was “Love Is The Law” and it was a banger. Recorded with Bowie and T-Rex producer Tony Visconti and naturally featuring Squire’s immense guitar work to the fore, it was an exuberant, indie rock song that had an immediacy that made it sound familiar from the get go. The lyrics though – well, they seemed to go under the censor radar…

“She was a rum old slapper and we always tried to get her pants off when she phoned…

Strap-on Sally chased us down the alley, we feared for our behinds”

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: John Squire
Love Is the Law lyrics © Polygram Music Publishing Ltd. Gb

Hmm. Anyway, in this performance, Squire has decided to come as a member of Mansun whilst Chris Helme looks like a cross between 60s era David Essex and Danny Macnamara from Embrace. The Seahorses would go on to have three further hit singles and a No 2 album in “Do It Yourself” but would split in 1999 after increasing tensions between Squire and Helme (who wished to pursue a solo career in tandem with the band) boiled over. Squire would eventually release two solo albums before the Stone Roses second coming in 2011 and just last year had a No 1 album with Liam Gallagher called…erm…”Liam Gallagher John Squire”. I don’t think that’s an anagram of anything but according to one user on Twitter, said album contains the track “Just Another Rainbow” which is an anagram of ‘Just to hear Ian Brown’!

Four days short of the one year anniversary of the release of his “Older” album, George Michael was still releasing tracks from it as singles. “Star People ‘97” was the fifth of those (and there would even be one more after that) and it kept up the remarkable record of them all peaking within the Top 3 chart positions when it debuted at No 2. And people talked about all the singles released from “Faith”!

This one was re-recorded (hence the ‘97 suffix) from the original album track to make it a bit more funked up and danceable. I’m guessing this performance was from the MTV Unplugged set that was recorded in 1996 where he also did a version of Wham!’s “Everything She Wants” which was released as an extra track on the “Star People ‘97” single. Want to hear it? Yeah you do…

In May ‘97, Mansun were still at the top of their game with “Taxloss” (or “Taxlo$$” as it’s stylised on the single’s cover) being their fourth consecutive Top 20 hit with all of them taken from debut No 1 album “Attack Of The Grey Lantern”. There was something different about this one though – not sonically as it was still that guitar-driven, epic soundscape that characterised the album. No, it was in its naming. All their other releases had been titled sequentially as EPs – hence “One EP”, “Two EP” etc with the last having been “Five EP” (though each was headlined by a lead track). However, for “Taxloss” it was just called…well…”Taxloss”. No reason has ever been forthcoming.

I said earlier that John Squire had turned up looking like a member of Mansun and blow me down, one song later here was the real thing and singer Paul Draper (bless him) confirms my observation by wearing his Army Surplus Store outfit front and centre. Something else about this TOTP performance was that, for a moment, I thought that The Seahorses drummer and the guy on the sticks for Mansun were the same person. I think though it’s just that they both had a goaty beard. I think. Oh and that video that Jo Whiley mentions, that really did happen. Not quite up there with The KLF burning a million quid but still…

As Jo Whiley says in her intro, it’s time to throw your pants at the screen as 911 get another outing for their single “Bodyshakin’” even though it’s dropped from No 3 to No 10 this week – I just can’t get along with these new TOTP appearance rules.

I’ve nothing else to say about this one except what was the deal with those tops they were wearing?! I’m no fashionista but they’re gross. As bad as they are though, nothing beats the legendary Carlisle United away kit from the mid 90s that was labelled ‘the deckchair’ due to its garishness. Why am I randomly talking about Carlisle United? Because it’s not random – 911 lead singer Lee Brennan was born in Carlisle and captained their football clubs under-14 and under-16 teams but was turned down for a professional contract on account of him being too short. A career as a pop star clothes horse awaited…

Jo Whiley goes all Blue Peter presenter in her next intro as she says that Jay Kay of Jamiroquai can’t be in the studio as his band are on tour “so here’s something they prepared earlier” as we get the video for “Alright”. That old cliche could also be applied to Jamiroquai as this track was almost an identikit replica of all their other hits it seemed to my uncultured ears. People who knew more about it (basically the music press so that might be a misnomer) reckoned it was the best track on parent album “Travelling Without Moving” with one Sam Taylor of The Observer commenting on its “effortless swank”. Yeah, he could have lost an ‘s’ there for me. “Alright” peaked at No 6.

Wait…Blackstreet had more hits than just “No Diggity”? Yes, yes they did including a further three Top 10 hits one of which was this – “Don’t Leave Me”. Now, if it sounds a bit like a 2Pac song that’s because it features the same sample used in the rap legend’s track “I Ain’t Mad Atcha” but said sample is from an unlikely source – DeBarge. The “Rhythm Of The Night” hitmakers from the mid 80s? The very same though the track in question is called “A Dream” from 1983. How do I know all this? I looked it up obviously. My R&B/rap knowledge doesn’t extend to those levels of detail. As such, it’s no surprise then that this song means very little to me and in fact, my apathy turned to displeasure when one of the group introduced it by saying “This song goes out to all the ladies in the house tonight”. Eeeww!

Gary Barlow has this week’s No 1 record with a song that wasn’t even his. “Love Won’t Wait” came out of the writing sessions for Madonna’s “Bedtime Stories” album and was a collaboration between Madge and prolific producer and songwriter Shep Pettibone. After all the flak I gave Robbie Williams initially for starting his solo career with a cover version (George Michael’s “Freedom’90”), blow me if Barlow’s second release under his own name wasn’t even one of his own compositions but a Madonna reject! You can hear why it didn’t make the cut – it’s a perfectly serviceable but oh so unremarkable dance/pop tune that isn’t as good as some of Take That’s best work which raises the question of why did Barlow record it? Was he having doubts about his ability to be a solo artist? After all, it had been over nine months since his debut single “Forever Love” which suggests that he didn’t have confidence in the songs he had already got together. Despite my questioning attitude, Gary still had a fanbase large enough to send him to No 1 for the second successive time in his solo career. As the performance starts you can clearly hear someone in the audience screaming “Gaaarrry!”. However, the writing was on the wall as follow up single “So Help Me Girl” would fail to make the Top 10 and within a year he wouldn’t be able to give his records away as Robbie Williams cemented his place as Barlow’s personal nemesis. Still, it all worked out pretty well for Gary in the end didn’t it?

The play out video is “Lovefool” by The Cardigans who spend a second week at No 4. Looking at the singles ahead of them at No 1 on those occasions – by Michael Jackson and Gary Barlow – it does seem somewhat of a travesty that “Lovefool” couldn’t quite get to the top (it peaked at No 2). Being up against new release singles that would have been heavily discounted when your’s had reverted to full price maybe had a part to play. Hits by the likes of No Doubt, R Kelly and Puff Daddy all had extended stays at the top of the charts which would seem to debunk that theory but what is true is that there had been five different hits at No 1 in five weeks earlier in 1997.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Katrina And The Waves	Love Shine A Light	Nope
2	The Seahorses	Love Is The Law	Thought I might have but its not in the singles box
3	George Michael	Star People ’97	Nah
4	Mansun	Taxloss	No but I had the album
5	911	Bodyshakin’	As if
6	Jamiroquai	Alright	All wrong – no
7	Blackstreet	Don’t Leave Me Now	No
8	Gary Barlow	Love Won’t Wait	Three guesses?
9	The Cardigans	Lovefool	No but my wife had the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack with it on

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0027xn2/top-of-the-pops-09051997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 02 MAY 1997

Posted on February 20 by 80stastic

We’ve skipped a month due to the R Kelly issue and find ourselves at the start of May and what a time it was to be alive! Labour have won the 1997 General Election and the Tories have been booted out of power after 18 long years. Hurray! I was on holiday so I could stay up watching the election results come in and I remember waking up in the morning feeling that there was finally some good news and that hope had returned. As I walked into town, I recall that it was a beautifully sunny morning and contemplated that everything had aligned including the weather. Obviously, with the hindsight of 28 years, the promise of New Labour didn’t completely pan out but I hadn’t known anything but Conservative rule for my entire adult life and I was nearly 29 by this point so I was allowed to let myself get carried away a little. It was an exciting time and not just politically – in four days time I would be embarking on a visit to China to see my old mate Rob who was studying out there. I had arranged for someone to cover me at the Our Price store where I worked (we still didn’t have a new manager in place so I was effectively the acting manager) and I would be off for a couple of weeks. I was excited and desperate for a break but a little daunted at such a big trip.

For now though, it was time to kick back and enjoy the good vibes. This TOTP was broadcast at the earlier time of 6.25 and on BBC2 as, understandably, BBC1 was concentrating its content on the General Election aftermath. Whether I would have watched the latest chart tunes or the news coverage I’m not sure but probably the latter not that you could get away for the politics by watching TOTP as we start with D:Ream and “Things Can Only Get Better”. Now you don’t need me to tell you why this was back in the charts but I’m going to anyway. The Labour Party had co-opted it to spearhead their campaign for the election and if the landslide victory was anything to go by then it certainly had a positive impact. It presumably had a positive impact on D:Ream’s career as well which was pretty much in the dirt by 1997. Their 1995 album “World” had sold only a fifth of their debut “D:Ream On Vol. 1” and their last single had peaked at No 40. Step forward Tony Blair and suddenly they were back in the charts, back on TV and with a Best Of album released. Main man Peter Cunnah has lost the yellow and black checked suit this time around and also Professor Brian Cox who was presumably off doing something with the Large Hadron Collider or something. Cunnah also seems to have a little bit less hair. The band’s time back in the spotlight was fleeting though. The rerelease of “Things Can Only Get Better” only made No 19 this time around and their Best Of album flopped and the band split up. They reformed in 2008 and have released new material subsequently but it’s surely this song that they will always be synonymous with. I wonder if Howard Jones ever thinks “if only” when he sees Tony Blair in the news?

I should say that tonight’s host is Cathy Dennis who seems an unlikely choice in retrospect given her profile at this time. Yes, she’s had a hit with her cover of “Waterloo Sunset” this year but her next single released a month or so after this TOTP failed to make the Top 40 which effectively brought the curtain down on her career as a pop star before she became hugely successful writing hits for other people in the new millennium. Anyway, she introduces Robbie Williams as the next act despite the fact that he’s only just been on the previous week and had now dropped down the charts from No 2 to No 8 with “Old Before I Die”. That didn’t matter in this post Ric Blaxill TOTP universe though when songs sliding down the charts were still afforded exposure on the show. Cathy Dennis is given and gives us a line about it being Robbie’s second week inside the Top 10 as a reason for his successive appearance.

As for the song itself, although perhaps not his most celebrated or well known tune, for me it was the one that made me think perhaps Williams might just make a go of being a solo star. Now, the success of “Angels” is widely regarded as being that moment but “Old Before I Die” beat it to it in terms of being a decent rock/pop song. Sure, it drew accusations of being a rip off of his best new mates Oasis but importantly it wasn’t a cover version which his first single “Freedom” had been. That and the fact that one of the extra tracks on his debut as a solo artist had been an interview led me to ask the question “where are your songs mate?” but he answered me with “Old Before I Die”. I liked the play on words inspired by The Who classic “My Generation” and even the rather clunky and childish lyric about the pope getting high. It all hung together quite cohesively. Follow up singles “Lazy Days” and “South Of The Border” would prove to be missteps before “Angels” swooped in and saved the day and Robbie’s career. For now though, he seemed to be doing fine.

Another defining pop career moment next as this was the point when I realised “Shit! This lot aren’t going away!” as a mercifully short chart life is what I had predicted for 911. Alas, “Bodyshakin’” became their then biggest hit when it rattled its way into No 3. My underestimating of their hit potential clearly spilled over into my work life as I’m sure we sold out of this single in its first week of release – a heinous crime for a mainstream record shop but who knew that a Declan Donnelly lookalike, two dancers from The Hitman And Her and a song that recycled that ‘ner nah nah naaa ner nah nah’ riff could be such a big success. Not me clearly. Still, they were very good at synchronised dancing – I’ll give them that.

Next up is a song that has been described as pure pop perfection and who’s to say that’s not 100% true? Not me certainly. “Lovefool” by The Cardigans was originally a medium sized hit in September of 1996 peaking at No 21 but its inclusion on the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann’s treatment of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet movie and the success of that film warranted a second stab at the charts and this time it rose all the way to No 2 – I’d forgotten it had peaked so high to be honest. I shouldn’t have been surprised though as it is a brilliant pop song. I must have also not remembered how big a success Romeo + Juliet was and, by association, its soundtrack. I saw the film and enjoyed it and years later, my son would watch it at school as a way of making Shakespeare more accessible to children studying the Bard. As for the soundtrack, my wife liked the music in the film so much she bought the CD which, as well as The Cardigans, featured such artists as Garbage, Radiohead, Des’ree and Kym Mazelle doing a cover of Candi Staton’s “Young Hearts Run Free”. It went to No 3 in the UK charts selling 300,000 copies and affording it gold status. It was even bigger in America and Australia where it sold over 3 million copies in the former and was the second bestselling album of the year in the latter. A choral version of Rozalla’s “Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good)” which was also on the soundtrack would form the basis of a rather bizarre UK No 1 two years later when Baz Luhrmann himself released a single titled “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” which was essentially a spoken word track voiced by actor Lee Perry of an article published in the Chicago Tribune by columnist Mary Schmich on how to live a happier life. As I said, all rather bizarre.

Anyway, back to The Cardigans and “Lovefool”. The success of the single with its shimmering, seamless pop production full of hooks but with a nod to disco helped parent album “First Band On The Moon” to gold status in the UK. The band were tipped to be on the verge of greatness with the impossibly beautiful Nina Persson dominating their public image (much in the same way Gwen Stefani was for fellow chart stars No Doubt). Someone I worked with was so taken with them that she bought up their earlier back catalogue as well. “First Band On The Moon” wouldn’t provide any further massive hit singles but did pave the way for 1998’s “Gran Turismo” which contained the hits “My Favourite Game”, “Erase/Rewind” and “Hanging Around” helping the album to achieve platinum sales status in the UK and 3 million copies being sold worldwide. The Cardigans split in 2006 but reunited in 2012 as a touring entity only.

“It’s been a great few weeks for DJ Quicksilver. He’s replaced Sasha’s “Encore Une Fois” as the club floor filler that won’t go away. Here he is at No 5 with “Bellissima”

So says Cathy Dennis in her intro to the next act and you know what, that will do for this blogger’s comments about this one because I can assure you that anything else I would say would not be as kind as that.

Next to a young artist who was very much touted as being the next new UK R&B superstar and she won a BRIT and two MOBO awards to back that claim up. Shola Ama was just 18 years old when she burst into the charts with her cover of the Randy Crawford hit “You Might Need Somebody” and it would be another of those singles that defied the ‘debut very high, exit very quickly’ trend of many a chart hit at this time by spending seven weeks inside the Top 10 with five of them at lucky No 7. How did Shola do this? Well, the song that was chosen for her to cover was very radio friendly and also old enough for some young music fans to possibly be unaware of Randy Crawford’s hit with it from 1981. I myself only knew it because my wife had Randy’s “Secret Combination” album that it was taken from. Of course, appearing on TOTP three weeks on the trot probably didn’t hinder the single’s chances (although we missed the first two due to the R Kelly issue). Apparently Shola got so fed up of people not believing that she was singing live on the show that in the third appearance she missed a bit out to prove it was real. Having watched this third appearance back, I’m not sure I can spot this though I think there’s a moment when she appears to go towards the microphone but doesn’t sing. Is that it? Personally, I couldn’t hear what all the fuss was about and that she would disappear once “You Might Need Somebody” finally dropped out of the charts. She didn’t – her debut album “Much Love” made No 6 selling 100,000 copies and included three more hit singles. However, second album syndrome struck despite her working with a host of producers and writers including D-Influence and Babyface and Shola’s time in the spotlight was over within two years. She has carried on recording and has collaborated with artists such as Miss Dynamite and Frisco.

To say they only had four Top 40 hits of which none got higher than No 24, Kenickie’s strike rate for appearing on TOTP was pretty good. This was their second time on the show and I’d forgotten that not all of their songs featured lead vocals from Lauren Laverne. This one – “Nightlife” – sees Marie du Santiago doing the singing heavy lifting and I think I prefer her voice to Lauren’s. This track is a spiky little number that strides along wearing its attitude on its sleeve with pride like a hickey from a certain Grease character. You know, I probably should check out their back catalogue in more detail than I currently possess. After all it’s only two albums deep, coincidentally the same amount of Grease films that there are which reminds me that I used to work with someone who prefers Grease 2 to the original! I know! How do you even begin to explain that?!

I have to say that Cathy Dennis is not very good at this presenting lark – very lacking in any presence but then why should she have been any good at it? She’s made her mark as a pop star then as a songwriter – two successful careers is more than most of us manage. Anyway, Republica are on next with their biggest ever hit “Drop Dead Gorgeous”. Watching it back, I’m struck by what a strange song this is, especially in the verses where Saffron almost speaks the abrupt lyrics which are often just two words at the start. Eventually the chorus kicks in and that point, it sounds like it could have been a hit for Toyah back in the day. It can’t be just me surely? Something in the inflections in Saffron’s phrasing as she almost yelps the words out? No?

Anyway, at this point it seemed, as with No Doubt and The Cardigans, that Republica with their photogenic lead singer were set to conquer the world. What happened next was a complete collapse of their momentum. Second album “Speed Ballads” underperformed so much to the extent that most people didn’t realise that it had been released – indeed it wasn’t in the US after their label Deconstruction Records folded. The band would go into a state of stasis and split in 2001 before reuniting in 2008. Their first album since “Speed Ballads” 27 years ago is due for release in the Spring of 2025.

I know I was busy with preparations for my China trip and distracted by the General Election but how did I not notice what was No 1 this week? I did work in a record shop after all. I have zero recollection of this chart topper from Michael Jackson but maybe that’s a good thing as “Blood On The Dance Floor” is a stinker of the foulest stench. Taken from the remix album “Blood On The Dance Floor: HIStory In The Mix”, it’s just a funky backbeat that goes nowhere and is fleshed out by the usual Jacko yelps and screams as he bangs on about some woman called Susie. Apparently it was initially recorded for the 1991 “Dangerous” album but never made the cut which speaks volumes for its quality. Even the usually impeccable production on Jackson’s output is not up to scratch it seems to me as his vocals are really low in the mix at some points meaning you can’t actually hear him much. Perhaps that was intentional but either way, maybe we should just be grateful for small mercies.

Wikipedia tells me that the album went to No 1 in the UK, achieved platinum status and is the biggest selling remix album in the world EVER! Hmm. When I looked at the front cover of the album, it did bring back one memory which was of massive stocks of the album that we couldn’t give away so its sales figures are surprising to say the least. In conclusion, I say “Blood On The Dance Floor”? Nah, give me “Murder On The Dance Floor” any day. The director of Saltburn agrees with me at least.

We end with a plug for the UK entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest which this year was Katrina And The Waves. I know! Who’d have thought it! Well, Katrina And The Waves presumably as they submitted their entry “Love Shine A Light” (plus a £250 fee) to The Great British Song Contest which was the selection process that year to determine the UK entry. There are also rumours though that Jonathan King contacted the band to see if they had a song that was appropriate so take your pick. Predominantly known for the marvellously upbeat hit “Walking On Sunshine”, the band hadn’t been anywhere near the charts since 1986 when “Sun Street” rather unexpectedly made No 22. Pretty much nothing had been heard of them since but suddenly they were back!…albeit via the much maligned Eurovision Song Contest. I recall thinking that they were bound to win, somehow linking it with the General Election and the new government – if the Tories could be toppled after 18 years of rule, surely the UK could break our 16 year hoodoo and win Eurovision for the first time since Bucks Fizz. In reality, my confidence was probably down to hearing the bookies and media saying all week how Katrina And The Waves were odds on to win. And win they did and like the Labour Party two days earlier, it was by a landslide. Predictably, new Prime Minister Tony Blair was quick to congratulate the band on their victory as he sought to keep the good feeling vibe going. What was New Labour’s legacy ultimately? I’ll leave that for your own private thoughts – this is a music blog after all. As for Katrina And The Waves, “Love Shine A Light” surged to No 3 in the charts off the back of Eurovision though was nowhere near as durable as Gina G’s effort from a year earlier despite it coming nowhere in the contest.

I recall Katrina saying in an interview years later that once they had a hit again, she’d assumed that their career was sorted and they’d no need to worry about that anymore but they were unable to produce a successful follow up and they would split acrimoniously after their credibility as a rock band was tainted by their brush with Eurovision. Katrina herself has maintained ties with the competition though appearing in anniversary shows and even participating in the Swedish national final in 2005.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	D:Ream	Things Can Only Get Better	Not in 1994 and not this time either
2	Robbie Williams	Old Before I Die	No but I had a promo copy of his Life Thru A Lens album
3	911	Bodyshakin’	Of course not
4	The Cardigans	Lovefool	No but my wife had there Romeo + Juliet soundtrack
5	DJ Quicksilver	Bellissima	No
6	Shola Ama	You Might Need Somebody	Nope
7	Kenickie	Nightlife	Negative
8	Republica	Drop Dead Gorgeous	Nah
9	Michael Jackson	Blood On The Dance Floor	Never
10	Katrina And The Waves	Love Shine A Light	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0027xn0/top-of-the-pops-02051997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 21 FEB 1997

Posted on January 29, 2025 by 80stastic

A day after this TOTP aired, scientists at Roslin Institute, Midlothian announced the birth of a cloned sheep called Dolly seven months after the event. Dolly was named after country legend Dolly Parton apparently. Anyway, it’s kind of apt that this story about cloning was in the news back then because tonight’s show is co-hosted by Ant & Dec who in the early years of their career were subject to the claim that people couldn’t tell them apart! Ba dum tss! Alright, alright. It’s a poor start to the post from me. Things can only get better right? And no, that doesn’t mean D:Ream are on the show.

Things are looking up immediately though as the show is opened by James and one of their best known hits “She’s A Star”. As the caption says, this was the band’s first hit for three years and first new material since the double album project of “Laid” and “Wah Wah” in 1993 and 1994 respectively. In the meantime, there had been some significant events and shifts within the group. Firstly, guitarist Larry Gott had left to become a designer and spend more time with his family (although he still contributed to the writing and recording of 1997 album “Whiplash ”). Lead singer Tim Booth had wandered off to do a side project titled Booth and the Badman with Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti whilst the band’s manager Martine McDonagh resigned. The band also discovered that they owed a £250,000 tax bill. Against that background, they still had to keep delivering the goods and they duly did with the lead single from the aforementioned “Whiplash” album. “She’s A Star” is a monster of a tune – one of those that is familiar from the very first moment you hear it even though you know that can’t be possible. Superbly crafted with that huge, elongated chorus delivered by Booth’s falsetto vocals, for me though, it’s the bridge into that chorus which is the best part. The whole thing just soars – a complete anthem from the first note to the last. Now, some of the observant of you might say “Hang on, the last time you banged on about an elongated chorus it was slagging off Mark Owen for having one in his hit “Clemente” so what’s the difference, hypocrite?”. Well, I guess it’s that, to me (and it’s just my opinion) the chorus was all “Clementine” had whereas “She’s A Star” was a much more complete song hence my comment about the bridge part.

The fright masks and freaky wigs displayed on mannequins on stage with the band were from the cover of the single and were designed by a friend of Tim Booth’s and photographed for the artwork in the infamous Chelsea Hotel in New York. Is it me or do they look a bit like Sid Vicious and if so, presumably the photoshoot location was intentional given Sid’s history with that place? The video featured a young Keeley Hawes who would find fame in Ashes To Ashes, Tipping The Velvet and Spooks to name just a few TV series. She was also in the promo for Suede’s “Saturday Night” a performance of which we saw on TOTP just the other week. Sadly for Keeley, neither video were played on the show.

Who on earth is/was this?! DJ Kool? Seriously?! That was his stage name? DJ Kool?! I don’t remember him at all. What was his hit called? “Let Me Clear My Throat”?! Is this a wind up? Have I slipped through a time portal entered a parallel universe or something? None of this really happened did it?! Right, let me listen to the track…

…hang on! I do know this or at least I know the sample it’s based around. That’s “Hear The Drummer Get Wicked” by Chad Jackson. Except it isn’t as that track used a sample as well. So what’s the original sample? My research pointed me in the direction of this…

…but even that’s not the original which as far as I can tell is this…

Mystery solved. As for DJ Kool, what a load of old tripe. He displays a distinct lack of creativity in his choice of sample and then just shouts a load of disjointed, cliched phrases over it before descending into call and response, lowest common denominator behaviour. He even nicked the track’s title from a Beastie Boys song called “The New Style”. Thank heavens we never heard from him again because he was as welcome as…cough, cough, splutter, splutter…phlegm.

Next to a case of art imitating life imitating art or something as we have the song from a soundtrack to a film about a fictional mid 60s band who shoot to fame off the back of a hit song that actually becomes a hit in real life. The film is That Thing You Do! and was the writing and directorial debut of Tom Hanks (whose name Ant & Dec manage to turn into a double entendre in their intro). The movie tells the story of The Wonders from Erie, Pennsylvania who win a local talent contest when their newly recruited drummer Guy speeds up the tempo of their self penned song and wins them a shot at the big time when they are picked up by major label Play-Tone Records. The film charts the band’s rise to prominence in parallel with their song rising the charts with each stage showing their fame getting bigger and bigger until they find themselves performing to the whole of America on The Hollywood Television Showcase. Inevitably, it all ends in disappointment with the band imploding though there is a happy ending.

At the time, I thought that Tom Hanks had also written the song “That Thing You Do!” but he didn’t (though he did contribute to two songs on the soundtrack album). That was written by Adam Schlesinger, one time member of Fountains Of Wayne about whom I know very little except the song “Stacy’s Mom” from 2003. Anyway, the title track is an exceptional example of a perfect pop song that would also fit easily into a 60s compilation album without anyone realising that it was written three decades later. It’s just as well that the song works as you get to hear it over and over in the film in various different performances and guises yet it’s a tribute to Schlesinger that you never tire of to – well, I don’t anyway. I think its ubiquity is rendered less dominant by the dedication of the actors who apparently spent weeks in rehearsal learning their instruments so that when it came to miming the song for the shooting of the film, they looked and played liked authentic musicians.

You might have guessed already that I am a fan of this film but then I am a sucker for a music based narrative which shows the progression from early beginnings to fame. Some of my favourite films and books include That’ll Be The Day and its sequel Stardust starring David Essex and the novel Espedair Street by Iain Banks which all fit into this category. Despite not being a massive commercial hit at the time, the film That Thing You Do! has become a bit of a cult hit with fans to the extent that in 2021, a Wonders Night was staged in Erie where the film was partially set with cast members attending and participating in a panel discussion, autograph session and auction. As a result of funds collected from the event, raised $25,500 for Notice Ability, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to helping students with dyslexia.

As for the song “That Thing You Do!”, it didn’t match the chart high of its fictional counterpart peaking at No 41 in America and No 22 in the UK. As for art imitating life imitating art, Tom Hanks established a film and television production company named Playtone based on the record label in the film and a music arm of the operation is actually called Playtone Records label. Playtone has had an exclusive television development deal with HBO since the company was formed. Playtone’s projects for HBO have won 46 Emmy Awards while garnering 113 Emmy Award nominations.

Unlikely chart heroes Space were really getting the hang of this pop star lark by 1997. “Dark Clouds” was their fourth consecutive Top 20 hit all taken from their debut album “Spiders”. Although it’s made of much the same stuff as their previous hits, it’s perhaps a little more mellow than its predecessors. Actually, listening to it now for the first time in years, there’s something about it that is giving me Summer of 1983 vibes. Why would that be? Well, I think that it’s putting me in mind of “Long Hot Summer” by The Style Council. Can you hear it? No? You might have to wait for the dark clouds to drift away to reveal the sunshine.

This trend for rap artists remaking old hits around this time is becoming tedious. There was Coolio who topped the charts with a treatment of Stevie Wonder’s “Pastime Paradise” and just the other week we had LL Cool J at No 1 with his version of the old Rufus and Chaka Khan hit “Ain’t Nobody”. Now here was Warren G who himself had already gone down that route with his take on Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got To Do With It” a few weeks prior. With that going to No 2, he clearly thought another attempt on going one better was justified using the same formula hence we got “I Shot The Sheriff”, the Bob Marley classic that Eric Clapton also had a hit with.

Picking up the protest song theme of the original, Warren G added some lyrics about police brutality and institutional racism. Sadly, despite this being 1997, these issues would continue to raise their ugly heads in the years to come both in America and the UK. The poignancy of the track didn’t make it any more listenable for me though with Warren’s flat vocals on the song’s title phrase especially off putting. Despite my reservations, the single would be a massive hit but it still missed out on a No 1 by a single place just like its predecessor.

And now to one of the most revered dance tracks of all time made by one of the most influential dance artists of all time. Despite the superlatives in that statement, Daft Punk weren’t that well known back in early 1997. Well, not to the non-dance heads in the mainstream like…well…me. That would all change with seminal track “Da Funk”. Having originally been released in a limited run pressing on 12” only via independent label Soma back in 1995, the track was reactivated after endorsement by The Chemical Brothers and Radio 1 DJ Annie Nightingale. A bidding war ensued between the majors with the French duo (Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homer-Christo) signing with Virgin ultimately. Their new label were keen to rerelease “Da Funk” and with their backing and promotional budget, it would go Top 10. Combining house, funk and EDM, it had the music press salivating at its bass and beats. Even I could appreciate this one as being something special.

Its accompanying, Spike Jonze directed video was equally groundbreaking. The plot of Charles the Dog Boy with his leg in a cast and hobbling on a crutch around New York has the feel of an indie, art house short film. All very intriguing though I was left wondering if it was the best way to promote the single with the track low down in the mix to allow the characters in the video to speak their lines and interact. Having said that, it was certainly ahead of its time and must surely have been an influence on the 2024 Robbie Williams biopic Better Man which sees Williams portrayed as an anthropomorphic chimpanzee with no other characters in the movie reacting to his appearance (meant to portray his state of mind) just as in the “Da Funk” promo and its protagonist Charles.

From one Spike (Jonze) to another Spike (Dawbarn) as the latter is name checked by Ant & Dec alongside his band mates in their intro to 911. It’s not Spike that I’m focussing on here though but lead singer Lee Brennan as we return to the theme of Dolly the sheep and cloning. Look at Lee and then look at Dec. If they’re not a case of cloning then they were surely separated at birth! Anyway, Lee, Spike and Jimmy are here to perform their latest hit “The Day We Find Love” and what a wimpy, feeble track it was. However, the strategy of releasing a ballad around Valentine’s Day certainly paid off when it debuted at No 4, the band’s biggest chart hit to date at that point. Watching them perform it though, their stage choreography (especially from Spike and Jimmy!) seem incongruous to the song. All jerky arm movements and shrugging shoulders like someone shoved ice cubes down their back. “The Day We Find Love”? Nah, Give me “The Day We Caught The Train” any day.

It’s a seventh different No 1 in seven weeks as No Doubt debut at the top of the charts with “Don’t Speak”. Now, as I recall, there was a huge buzz about this one due to its massive airplay – it was the most played song on American radio up to this point in 1997. I’m sure that a communication came from Our Price Head Office informing stores that due to unprecedented demand for the single, an unusually large order of initial stock of it had been placed for the chain. I don’t think we’d ever had anything like that from the company before. It would happen again the following year though when Britney Spears appeared from nowhere with her “…Baby One More Time” single. Anyway, back to No Doubt and I can’t say that they’d been on my radar despite working in a record shop and despite the fact that they’d already appeared in the UK Top 40 (albeit briefly) when their single “Just A Girl” spent one week at No 38 in October of 1996. However, we all knew about them a few months later when this monster track was unleashed. It would break the sequence of consecutive different UK No 1s by staying at the top for three weeks and would go on to be our seventh best selling single of the year. Actually, I would have thought it would have been higher. What was above it?

*checks list*

Ah, well. It was never going to top “Candle In The Wind ‘97” but “Barbie Girl” and The Teletubbies?! What was going on?! Anyway, “Don’t Speak” is a very accomplished rock/pop power ballad but not in the vein of something from Cher or Celine Dion. It had more credibility than anything by those two. Maybe it was the band’s ska punk beginnings or Gwen Stefani’s unconventional vocals that lent them that. However, the song’s success undoubtedly brought the band into the mainstream with parent album “Tragic Kingdom” selling 16 million copies worldwide. The success of “Don’t Speak” would usher in a rerelease for “Just A Girl” which would go Top 3 the second time around. For a while, No Doubt was the bomb. And then…well…as noted many a time before, a band with a female lead singer and an otherwise all male line up was always going to have its publicity centred around the vocalist and Stefani certainly was who the press were interested in. With her looks compared to Madonna’s and much attention paid to her midriff, tensions within the band were high but that’s a discussion for a future post.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	James	She’s A Star	No but I had the album
2	DJ Kool	Let Me Clear My Throat	No
3	The Wonders	That Thing You Do!	Great track but its a no
4	Space	Dark Clouds	Nah
5	Warren G	I Shot The Sheriff	Nope
6	Daft Punk	Da Funk	See 3 above
7	911	The Day We Find Love	Never
8	No Doubt	Don’t Speak	See 3 above

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0027791/top-of-the-pops-21021997?seriesId=unsliced

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My memories of 90s chart music

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TOTP 31 OCT 1997

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TOTP 21 FEB 1997

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