We’re still in the early weeks of the Chris Cowey tenure of TOTP and this would seem to be the experimental stage where he’s trying things out to see what sticks. For example, we’ve gone from just seven featured songs from a couple of weeks ago to a whopping ten on this show. TEN! I better get my skates on then…Tonight’s host is Jayne Middlemiss for the second time in three weeks and hopefully she’ll have conquered those nerves which she displayed on her debut appearance. She gets an early opportunity to demonstrate that she has because, as with Jo Whiley last week, our host does a direct to camera piece before the credits have even rolled. There’s no prop for Jayne to kick over though like Jo had. Instead, there’s a shot of a studio clock and an ‘On Air’ sign and Jayne telling us it’s time to dance in front of the telly before doing that head nod thing she does – that might start to get annoying very quickly. It’s probably the nerves again.

We start though with an artist who never seems anything less than serenely confident in her own abilities. Lisa Stansfield had been having hits since the late 80s with the biggest and most well known of those arriving early on with “All Around The World”. Inspired by ‘The Walrus of Love’ Barry White, the track contained a tribute to him in its spoken word intro that was based on the album version of White’s “Let The Music Play”. Eight years on, Lisa would go into full on honour mode by recording a cover of White’s 1974 hit “Never, Never Gonna Give You Up”. In terms of topping and tailing Lisa’s chart career, it couldn’t have been more perfect as it would prove to be her final UK Top 40 hit when released as the second single from her eponymously titled 1997 album. The radio edit is a pretty faithful version but numerous remixes of it by the likes of Hani and Frankie Knuckles would propel it to the top of the US Dance Club Songs chart. The latter would receive a Grammy for the Best Remixed Recording, Non Classical category. Lisa would ultimately satisfy her Barry White fixation by duetting with him in 1999 on “The Longer We Make Love”.

I talked in the past post about not being sure that the presenter links were filmed at the same time and in the same studio as the actual performances due to the cutaway and cutback shots between the two. Well, I’m still thinking that way for this show. Curiously, last week, the only time the two were in sync was when Jo Whiley interacted with Wet Wet Wet who were the second act on and the same pattern is repeated in this show as Jayne Middlemiss is definitely in the same geographical and temporal space as this week’s artist who are second in the running order. Was something going on or am I reading too much into it? For the record, said second artist is Supergrass with their single “Sun Hits The Sky”. Similar to Skunk Anansie, I sometimes think this lot don’t get the credit they deserve. Certainly I’d forgotten or not known in the first place how many great tunes Skin and co had released and although I was more aware of the Supergrass output (I had two of their albums), it’s an easy trap to fall into to immediately think of “Alright” when you hear their name. However, they had so many more great (and better) tunes than that like “Moving”, “Pumping On Your Stereo”, “Caught By The Fuzz” and this one. “Sun Hits The Sky” is a tight, nifty indie rock tune that powers along with some force.

It was the third single taken from the album “In It For The Money” the title of which tied in quite nicely with an event that took place in April of 1996 when lead singer Gaz Coombes met the train robber Ronnie Biggs in Rio. Biggs had his own footnote in music history of course, having recorded with the Sex Pistols on two songs for The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle plus The Great Train Robbery of 1963 was the basis of the 1985 Paul Hardcastle hit “Just For Money”. “In It For The Money”? “Just For Money”? It’s close enough for a tenuous link isn’t it?

And so to the fourth and final appearance on the show by Eternal on the back of their hit with Bebe Winans, a previous chart topper, “I Wanna Be The Only One”. Fourth?! Yes, four weeks on the bounce they’ve featured but in defence of whoever’s decision it was, the single entered the charts at No 1 and then spent three consecutive weeks at No 2 so it was a very consistent seller. It’s taken until this fourth performance though to find a different way of promoting the single which they do here by doing a ‘live acoustic’ version of the track. Fair play as I think it works pretty well. Were the pure white outfits the girls are wearing a deliberate choice to project the gospel flavour this version has? If so, it’s kind of undermined by the stage they’re performing on which seems to have a leopard print design on it. Bit odd.

Despite its high sales and being the UK’s sixteenth best selling single of the year, it was towards the back of the queue in that list when compared to all the year’s other No 1 records. Only four chart toppers appeared below Eternal in the Top 40 of 1997 – the 1996 Christmas No 1 from the Spice Girls which is understandable but then also their 1997 festive hit which isn’t. The other two below Eternal were the dance hit “You’re Not Alone” by Olive and the Verve’s only No 1 “The Drugs Don’t Work”.

From current “I Wanna Be The Only One” hitmakers to a band whose first single to make the charts was “The Only One I Know” which peaked at No 9 in 1990. In the seven years since that breakthrough hit for The Charlatans, it hadn’t been a string of subsequent huge chart successes* since then. Of the twelve singles the band released between 1990 and 1995, none had got higher than No 12, five hadn’t cracked the Top 20 and three hadn’t even made the Top 40. Of course, high chart positions are no guarantee of song quality and the public cruelly ignored some cracking tunes. The nation finally got with it in 1996 with the release of “One To Another” which went Top 3 whilst follow up “North Country Boy” made No 4. Then came “How High” which peaked at No 6 giving the band three consecutive Top 10 hits for the first time ever. It was an impressive run of chart numbers but more importantly, they were all quality tracks and not a cover version in sight.

*It was a different story when it came to their albums with three of the five released up to this point having topped the charts.

“How High” is not only a quality tune but surely unique in referencing this TV show from my youth which made a huge impression on me and had kids up and down the country saying “Ah, grasshopper”. Not even “Kung Fu” by Ash mentions it in its lyrics.

We’ve finally arrived at the last Michael Jackson release that I’ll ever have to discuss in this blog, if not quite his final TOTP appearance. As I will be stopping at the end of the 1999 repeats, “HIStory/Ghosts” will be the last Jacko single I have to write about as he would not release another one until 2001’s “You Rock My World”. And there have been oh so many that I have had to comment on. My blogging started way back with the 1983 repeats and “Billie Jean”. Since then, the self styled ‘King of Pop’ had…

*checks Wikipedia*

32(!) UK Top 40 singles! My God! I haven’t gone back through all my posts to see if I reviewed every single one but it must be a pretty high number. So, 32 singles over 15 years (‘83-‘97) is almost exactly two a year, every year except it didn’t work like that of course. Jacko’s singles would come in gluts with the timing of them obviously based around when he had an album out which was pretty consistently every four to five years. And when an album came out, so did a bucket load of tracks released as singles from them. Seven from “Thriller”, nine from “Bad”, nine again from “Dangerous” and then five from “HIStory”. The final two of those 32 were taken from the “Blood On The Dance Floor: HIStory In The Mix” album with the very final one being this double A-side. There will be one final TOTP appearance in the 90s for Jacko with this single so I’ll devote this post to the “HIStory” track and the final one to “Ghosts”. So what can I say about “HIStory” the song? Not much apart from it’s hideous. I get that it’s a remix but seriously, Michael Jackson meets what? Italian house is that? I don’t care to find out any more. Even Chris Cowey can’t have been convinced as we get less than two minutes of the promo. There were periods in the early 90s when whole shows were structured around the screening of a video exclusive for his latest release which would command a good seven minutes of screen time.

Right then, what’s going on here? Two artists squeezed into just over a minute and a half of screen time? We’re not going back to having a ‘Breakers’ section are we? Well, no we’re not – it makes less sense than that. It seems to be essentially a plug for upcoming performances by artists on the show but here’s the thing – the clip used is just that; a minute long clip sourced from the actual performance that would be shown in full the following week. Why didn’t they just show the whole thing now? In the case of the first artist featured Blur, their single “On Your Own” had been released on the Monday before this TOTP aired as far as I can tell so why not just have played the song in full? They could have labelled it as an ‘exclusive’ if need be seeing as it hadn’t charted yet. Oh well, maybe it’s for the best given that we won’t see the full performance episode due to the Puff Daddy/P Diddy issue – a minute and a half is better than nothing at all as it’s a great track.

The third single from their eponymously titled fifth studio album, it tends to get overlooked when lined up against the No 1 that was “Beetlebum” and the memorable ‘woo-hoo’ of “Song 2” but it’s a good track in its own right. Damon Albarn has described it as the first ever Gorillaz track and you can understand where he’s coming from. It might not have the whiplash energy of “Song 2” but it has its own irresistible momentum and a huge hook in the singalong chorus. I have a distinct memory of being in a Birmingham nightclub six months later (I was visiting my younger sister) and being slammed around the dance floor along with the rest of the ravers when the DJ played “Song 2” and “On Your Own” one after the other. I was approaching 30 at the time so I don’t know what I thought I was doing but my sister is five years younger than me so I guess she would have still been in her club going years?

“On Your Own” would debut and peak at No 5 maintaining a fine run of hit singles for the band. Check these numbers out:

1 – 5 – 7 – 5 – 1 – 2 – 5

Their album sales weren’t too shabby either. Blur would return in 1999 with a fourth consecutive No 1 album called “13”.

We encounter the same curious plugging strategy that was reserved for Blur also applied to the Pet Shop Boys whose version of “Somewhere” from West Side Story is given a 30 seconds slot to big up the fact that the full performance will be on the show not next week even but in two weeks time! Just play the whole thing now for chrissakes! The single was released three days after this TOTP so surely it would have helped build anticipation for its release?

Anyway, why were Neil and Chris putting their stamp on this Bernstein and Sondheim classic? Well, it was to promote their mini residency at the Savoy Theatre in London called Pet Shop Boys Somewhere (Ok, we get it guys). The single would also be added to a rerelease of their latest album “Bilingual”. Of course, the duo had some history with cover versions stretching back to their 1987 Christmas No 1 “Always On My Mind”. They followed that with a mash up of U2’s “Where The Streets Have No Name” and Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” to glorious, extravagant effect in 1991 before taking on a one of the campiest of camp disco classics in “Go West” two years later. All of these had worked out pretty well to my ears (especially “Always On My Mind”) but I don’t think they quite pulled it off with “Somewhere”. Maybe, Neil doesn’t gave the vocal chops for such a towering song and attempting to turn it into a club anthem by adding a techno beat just to suit his voice isn’t the answer. Maybe the answer would have been to leave well alone. My wife loves West Side Story but can’t stand Tennant’s singing so I’m pretty sure she was not a fan of this one. Pet Shop Boys had twenty UK hit singles in the 90s of various sizes of which “Somewhere” was the eighteenth. There’s not much further to go now my wife will be pleased to hear.

They’re not hip, they’re not cool but, as Jayne Middlemiss says in her intro, “they’re top turns” and I’ve always got room for a bit of Del Amitri when the chance arises. Often criminally overlooked and undervalued, the Scottish pop rockers have a very decent back catalogue albeit that their chart positions weren’t always a standout. The band had notched up 11 UK Top 40 hits to this point in their career but none had got any higher than No 11. And yet…in an unlikely turn of events, they had managed to go Top 10 just two years earlier in the US with the surprise hit “Roll To Me”. Did it make them happy? Not likely. In true dour Scot style, they weren’t big fans of the song (despite having written and recorded it) and considered it rather a throwaway tune. No pleasing some people.

Anyway, they were back in 1997 with a new single (which hopefully they did like as it was the lead track off new album “Some Other Sucker’s Parade”) called “Not Where It’s At”. Was it a musical demonstration of self knowledge about their image? Probably not but listening back to it now, it does prick something in my mind about identity. Is it me or is there a smidgen of a whiff of XTC about this one? I may be committing an act of musical heresy but it just came to me all of a sudden. Maybe it’s the jangly guitars, I don’t know. I was so taken with the idea though that I asked ChatGPT what “Not Where It’s At” would sound like done by XTC. The answer I received was almost instantaneous but it also showed how AI is based on assumptions that don’t always hold water. In its final reckoning it seemed to me to be saying if XTC had come up with the track, it would have been…well…better which I’m not sure is fair. Maybe my question wasn’t fair so I asked ChatGPT a control question – “Who was I?” It’s answer? That I was a former TOTP presenter! AI – it’s not where it at.

Next up is a guy you don’t hear much about these days but whom, for a while back there, was going to be the next new music superstar after winning a MOBO and a BRIT. Finley Quaye came from a musical family – his Dad was jazz and blues pianist Cab Quaye whilst his Mum would take him to see sets at Ronnie Scott’s legendary jazz club in his childhood. Almost inevitably, he moved into a career in music in his early 20s and appeared, fully formed, in 1997 with his double platinum selling album “Maverick A Strike” and a clutch of hit singles the first of which was “Sunday Shining”, a Bob Marley track from his 1978 album “Kaya”. It’s a radically different version though blending the reggae of the original with an accessible 90s soul sound that carried itself with an air of knowing conviction – or maybe that was the super confident Finley himself?

Talking of which, as with Beck, the Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth to name a few, just about all the cool kids that I worked with at Our Price loved this guy. Given this statement, it is of no surprise that my eternally ever cooler than me wife had his album and I think she caught him live as well. Can’t remember what she thought of him but at least he turned up which he failed to do whilst playing Hull (where I now live) in 2022 and, as I understand it, failed to rock up at the venue with paying customers already inside. Mind you, he has form in that area. He was booted off stage in 2015 after just 30 minutes of a gig by the promoter of a venue in Gloucestershire for being shambolically awful. Bloody mavericks! I’d strike them off.

New show director Chris Cowey is still tinkering with the format and this week has turned his attention to the chart rundown. Having already dispensed with a full run through of the Top 40 in favour of just the 20 best selling singles that week, he’s now tacked it on to the Top 10 countdown and it’s voiced by host Jayne Middlemiss. There’s no run up to this – we’re just straight into it after Finley Quaye’s performance. It’s all a bit jarring. Anyway, Hanson are still at No 1 with “MMMBop” but it’s the last of their three weeks at the top. It’s an unusual title for a song so what’s it all about? According to band member Zac Hanson in an interview with the Songfacts website in 2004, it’s about holding on to the things in life that matter and that MMMBop represents “a frame of time or the futility of life”. Mmm…(Bop). Whatever. I do recall a lady coming into the Our Price where I worked at the time to buy the single for her granddaughter and she was pretty sure that she had asked for the right thing at the counter but wanted to double check and so asked again what it was called. My colleague Jim who was serving her said, rather understandably, “It’s called MMMBop” and we both looked at each other and couldn’t help but laugh at the oddness of him saying those words out loud*.

*I should probably be absolutely clear that we were laughing at the song title not the lady buying it!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Lisa Stansfield	Never, Never Gonna Give You Up	Nope
2	Supergrass	Sun Hits The Sky	Negative
3	Eternal featuring Bebe Winans	I Wanna Be The Only One	Yes but for my wife
4	The Charlatans	How High	No but I had a Best Of with it on
5	Michael Jackson	HIStory/Ghosts	Nah
6	Blur	On Your Own	No but I had the album
7	Pet Shop Boys	Somewhere	No
8	Del Amitri	Not Where It’s At	See 4 above
9	Finley Quaye	Sunday Shining	No but my wife had the album
10	Hanson	MMMBop	Yes but for my six year old goddaughter

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/m0028nyj/top-of-the-pops-20061997?seriesId=unsliced