Blur

TOTP 12 MAR 1999

At last a presenter who isn’t Jayne Middlemiss nor Jamie Theakston! Yes, we have a new presenter who is Gail Porter, someone who has had quite the life and career full of the highest highs and the lowest lows. Gail’s early CV entries included stints on various children’s TV shows before getting her big break on TOTP. She was also a model for magazines such as FHM and it was that part of her life which would result in one of the most infamous news stories and visual memories of the decade. Although it would raise her profile into the stratosphere, it would ultimately cause Porter far more harm than good. A couple of months after her TOTP debut, Gail would awake one morning in May 1999 to find her names in headlines though it wasn’t her head that the story concerned. A nude 60ft tall photograph of Porter was projected onto the Houses of Parliament organised by FHM magazine as part of a marketing campaign to promote their ‘100 sexiest women in the world’ poll. Gail had no idea what had been planned but received a backlash anyway as the perception that she was in on the stunt as a career move was propagated. The incident would lead to Gail not feeling able to leave the house and contribute to bouts of depression. She suffered from anorexia nervosa and was hospitalised before, in 2005, developing alopecia totalis which led to her losing all of her hair. Choosing to deal with her condition literally head on, she declined to wear hats or wigs and used her profile to become ambassador for the Little Princess Trust, a charity which provides wigs to children with hair loss. As if that wasn’t enough to deal with, her marriage (to Toploader guitarist Dan Hipgrave) broke down and she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and sectioned against her will for 17 days in 2011. In a painfully honest and insightful 2024 documentary called Being Gail Porter, she discussed her two decades of mental health struggles. Knowing all of the above, it’s hard to recall her as this fresh faced, young presenter. Let’s see how she did…

Well, Gail’s first line is about it being her first time and a request to please be gentle with her, a bit of sexual innuendo which feels unnecessary but possibly didn’t raise an eyebrow in the era of ‘lad culture’. We then move straight to our first performance which is…oh this is just getting silly now…a hit that was only just on last week’s show and was now coming down the charts. I know this was nothing new in the Chris Cowey era and that I’ve banged on loads about the practice of repeat showings of songs that were descending the Top 10 but this one has really pissed me off for some reason. Actually, not this one but FOUR songs that were on just seven days ago which are all back on the show. Wait a minute though, am I being unfair here? Having checked out that week’s chart on official charts.com, there’s not one song going up the charts! The whole Top 40 consists of either new entries or songs going down. What was the hell was this?! I guess it was another consequence of first week record company discounting as sales in the second week fell dramatically as the price of a single went up. OK, so were there any new entries that could have featured on the show instead of songs declining in popularity? Well yes, there were three entries inside the Top 10 which were never featured including hits from two of the biggest names in music – Madonna and George Michael! OK, they might not have been available for an in the studio appearance but were there no videos made to promote their singles? Well yes, there were – at least they are easily found on YouTube so was this Cowey’s stupid ‘no promos’ policy at work again?

For the record the first act in this TOTP is Cher with “Strong Enough” which is down from No 5 to No 8 in the charts. I’ve nothing else to say about this one other than that Cher was in the news this week for fluffing her lines at the Grammys when presenting Kendrick Lamar and SZA with an award though in her defence it didn’t seem to be all her own fault…

Gail Porter warns us that this next act’s last single stayed on the charts for three months hinting that the follow up may do the same. Did we heed Gail’s warning? No we did not as Vengaboys spent five weeks inside the Top 10 and two and a half months on the Top 40 with “We Like To Party! (The Vengabus)”. You know, the 90s have provided some awful years of music but I think 1999 might just prove to be the worst and this lot will have been one of the biggest contributing factors as to why. Using those exact same tinny, buzzing and downright annoying backing beats as featured on their first hit “Up & Down”, this was music in its most basic form. No, it wasn’t music, this was anti-music or some sort of tribal chant led opium for the masses causing the general public to lose its collective mind and taste to rush to their local record emporium to buy this colossal shit. “Pushing the boundaries of pop” says Gail by which I don’t think she meant carving out a new art form but shrinking the definition of what could reasonably be described as such. Just horrendous but worse was to come in the shape of two No 1 hits during the year for these absolute dolts. The Vengabus was indeed coming…for us all.

Now in previous posts I’ve stated how I should really explore Skunk Anansie’s back catalogue more based on some of their hits I wasn’t familiar with. However, this next one – “Charlie Big Potato” – has dulled my commitment to that endeavour as it’s far too heavy for my liking. I mean, it sounds like Metallica or someone. And it’s dark as well as heavy. The opening lyrics are “I awake from blood thick dreams” followed a bit later by “I awake, dry the scream, spit the vile breath, till my tongue bleeds”. Bloody hell! Skin’s almost demonic performance here certainly doesn’t add any levity to the whole experience with her seemingly on the verge of kicking out at the studio audience and her weird stage outfit of what seems to be a PVC jacket with dangling, massively oversized pieces of material (I’m not sure they count as sleeves) hanging from her arms. Are they meant to be wings? Is she meant to resemble a bat? The whole thing comes across as far too much for a mainstream pop music show and the aforementioned audience don’t seem to know how to react to what they are witnessing initially before adopting an ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ approach and just going mental in the really loud bits. The floor managers seem to have run with the element of danger to the whole performance with police tape barriers skirting the stage. “Charlie Big Potato” was a big hit in Iceland which makes sense as the craziness of it puts me in mind of Björk. It was also used in the soundtrack to the deeply disturbing and unpleasant movie Hollow Man starring Kevin Bacon which again makes sense.

Another song going down the charts from No 3 to No 5 is next – “It’s Not Right But It’s OK” by Whitney Houston. This is the third time in a row this performance has been on the show. Week one was an ‘exclusive’ performance before the single was released, week two reflected its debut at No 3 and week three is it descending the charts albeit still remaining in the Top 5. Are all three appearances justified? I can make a case for the first two but surely the third is overkill? Whatever your own opinion on the matter, the upshot is that I have nothing else to say about this one. As a blogger, it’s not right…but it’s OK.

We arrive at the valedictory performance for a band who had eighteen Top 40 hits including a Christmas No 1 and of which only six failed to make the Top 10. A group who courted controversy and were allocated the role of the perceived rivals to the UK’s premier boy band of the 90s. A group who looked to have lost everything but who shortened their name and made one last (partially) successful grab for chart victory. It is, of course, ~~East 17…~~erm…E-17!

Having achieved a No 2 hit against the odds as a Tony Mortimer-less trio with their past single “Each Time”, Brian, Terry and John (thanks for the name checks Gail!) followed it with “Betcha Can’t Wait” which was more of a deliberate R&B sound which they’d plotted without their former chief songwriter. However, whilst I’d unexpectedly appreciated “Each Time”, this one was pure parody. All the same soul stylings were there but the lyrics were laughable. Witness:

“I’m gonna touch you in the right spot baby….Betcha can’t wait, betcha can’t stop…Can’t stop thinking ’bout my love rock, baby come on”

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Brian Lee Harvey / Terence Mark Coldwell / John Darren Hendy / Mark Reid / Jonathon Lesley Beckford / Ivor Paul Reid
Betcha Can’t Wait lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Ltd., Strongsongs Ltd.

“Touch you in the right spot”?! “My love rock”?! This performance is almost like a Fast Show sketch but instead of ‘Jazz Club’ or ‘Indie Club’ they’d turned their attention to R&B and given us ‘Bump ‘n’ Grind Club’. And check out the other two’s (forgotten their names already – where’s Gail when you need her?) ridiculous dance moves! Like I said pure parody. Compare this nonsense to such gems as “Deep” and “It’s Alright”. There is no comparison. What a said way to bow out for the lads who were straight outta Walthamstow.

Two more hits now which were also on only last week starting with “Just Looking” by Stereophonics. As with Whitney earlier, I haven’t got much else to say about this one except to note that their bass player was recreating a look first popularised on the show by Sandie Shaw and her barefooted performances. However, if you’re wanting a band to band comparison, check out Duran Duran’s guitarist Andy Taylor in this clip of them playing “Hungry Like The Wolf”. What happened to his shoes? I don’t know but if you watch him closely, he does seem to be rather out of it like he was in another world. Planet earth to Andy…Is there something I should know?

Also just like Whitney Houston, this is the third time for Blur on the show with “Tender”. Come on Cowey, what do you think I’ve still got left to say about this one?! OK, how about a shout out to the London Community Gospel Choir who also featured on this track. Founded in 1982, look at this list of artists with whom the have either performed or recorded:

George Michael and Liza Minnelli at The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert
Madonna at Live 8 in Hyde Park
Eric Clapton in Hyde Park
Kylie Minogue in Hyde Park
Blur (again) at the 2012 BRITS
The 1975 at the 2017 and 2019 BRITS
Pink! at the 2019 BRITS
They recorded a version of the OutKast hit “Hey Ya!” with Razorlight (the B-side to their single “Vice”)
They recorded with Will Young on his debut album “From Now On”
They provided backing vocals on Erasure’s self-titled 1995 album
They featured on Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds 2005 double album “Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus”
They also performed on the songs “Don’t Get Lost in Heaven” and “Demon Days” on the Gorillaz’ “Demon Days” album
They have also recorded with
Paul McCartney, Elton John, Westlife, Elkie Brooks and Tori Amos amongst others

Blimey! Or should I say Hallelujah!

So the halting of the run of one week wonder No 1s didn’t last long did it? Britney Spears has been toppled after just fourteen days at the top of the charts by the 1999 Comic Relief single recorded that year by Boyzone. For the third time in a row we got a pretty straight run through of a song that wasn’t written with the intention of being funny nor that had extra comedic lines thrown into the mix by the performers over a well known hit. To break that down further, ever since its inception in 1986, the established choice was either a cover version played for laughs:

Cliff Richard and The Young Ones – “Living Doll”
Mel & Kim (Mel Smith & Kim Wilde) -“Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”
Bananarama & Lananeeneenoonoo – “Help!”
Mr. Bean & Smear Campaign feat. Bruce Dickinson – “(I Want to Be) Elected”

Or an original song written to be intentionally funny (I’m not sure the writers always succeeded):

Hale & Pace – “The Stonk”
Right Said Fred – “Stick It Out”
Pet Shop Boys – “Absolutely Fabulous”

Then came “Love Can Build A Bridge” by Cher, Neneh Cherry, Chrissie Hynde and Eric Clapton in 1995 which was a cover of an original song by country music duo The Judds. Two years later, no song was specifically written nor covered for the campaign but the Spice Girls agreed that all royalties for their double A-side single “Mama / “Who Do You Think You Are” would go to the charity. And then there was Boyzone who did a faithful version of Billy Ocean’s 1986 No 1 “When the Going Gets Tough” which I didn’t particularly like first time round so Ronan and the lads take on it was never going to win me over, charity record or not. Watching this back, I’m struck again by how little the guys who weren’t either Keating nor Stephen Gately actually did. In this one, they’re tasked with a bit of finger clicking and some shadow boxing to match the staging theme for the performance and that’s about it. That staging with the boxing backing dancers gives the whole thing a very 80s feel. I’m thinking of this perhaps..

P.S. A few people on line noted an unlikely link between “When the Going Gets Tough” and “We Like To Party! (The Vengabus)” by Vengaboys. Give up? They both have near identical opening lines – “I got something to tell you” in the former and “I’ve got something to tell ya” in the latter. Then in the third line they both share a similar theme – Ronan Keating sings “I’m gonna put this dream in motion” whilst whoever the Vengaboys ‘vocalist’ is gives us the line “Gonna put some wheels in motion”. Note to arresting officer – add plagiarism to the Vengaboys charge sheet for crimes against music.

As for Gail Porter, she did pretty well I think. All power to you Gail, a quite remarkable person. We’ll see plenty more of her (ahem) in future 1999 TOTP repeats.

Order of appearance	Artist	Tilte	Did I buy it?
1	Cher	Stong Enough	Nah
2	Vengaboys	We Like To Party! (The Vengabus)	Never
3	Skunk Anansie	Charlie Big Potato	No
4	Whitney Houston	It’s Not Right But It’s OK	I did not
5	E-17	Betcha Can’t Wait	Nope
6	Stereophonics	Just Looking	No but I had the album
7	Blur	Tender	See 6 above
8	Boyzone	When the Going Gets Tough	Not even for charity

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/m002qlxz/top-of-the-pops-12031999

TOTP 05 MAR 1999

Posted on 2 Days Ago by 80stastic

Three days before this TOTP aired, the singer Dusty Springfield passed away aged just 59 from breast cancer. My Dad saw her folk-pop trio The Springfields back in the early 60s but I wasn’t really aware of Dusty until I started taking a real interest in pop music around 1983. By that point, her career was totally in reverse with no Top 10 hits since 1968 and just one minor Top 40 chart entry throughout the whole of the 70s. Her 60s glory days seemed a long time ago. An attempted comeback in 1985 with the single “Sometimes Like Butterflies” (which I’d quite enjoyed) failed to restore her fortunes despite an appearance on Wogan when it peaked at No 83. And then, just two years later, enter the Pet Shop Boys and a career resurrection via her part in their No 2 hit “What Have I Done To Deserve This” and a Top 20 album of her own in the silver disc achieving “Reputation”. She would release just one more studio album in her lifetime (the commercially overlooked “A Very Fine Love”) but her profile was maintained via a couple of Best Of collections with 1994’s “Goin’ Back” making the UK Top 5. Talking of going back, let’s revisit this TOTP episode from 1999 and see if there’s any sign of a connection to Dusty…

Jamie Theakston is our host (boo!) and we start with the No 2 record “Tender” by Blur. This appears to be just a repeat showing of the ‘exclusive’ performance from the other week prior to the single’s release and we get the whole 4:30 radio edit version which seems quite generous. Expectations were that it would go straight in at the top of the charts (I fully expected it to). After all there’d been a new No 1 every week for the first nine weeks of the year so far. And it was the band’s first new material for two years and it was something of an anthem. However, the power and pull of Britney Spears and “…Baby One More Time” would not be denied a second week at the summit and Blur had to be content with the runners up spot. Apparently it was a close (ish) run thing. The two singles had been neck and neck for most of the week but Britney would pull away over the weekend and would sell 55,000 more copies than Blur in the final reckoning. Still, “Tender” did outsell just about every other No 1 up to this point in the year and, perhaps more importantly, parent album “13” would spend two consecutive weeks at the top on its way to achieving platinum level sales in the UK.

Can I just say that Damon Albarn looks perhaps the coolest he ever did in this performance with his tousled hair, shades and Fred Perry shirt. Compare that with his look in the video for 1991’s breakthrough hit “There’s No Other Way”. Dearie me.

Dusty Springfield connection: The aforementioned Pet Shop Boys who resurrected Dusty’s career also did remixes of Blur’s 1994 hit “Girls & Boys”.

Next up is a singer who was a peer of Dusty Springfield and, rather incredibly, was still having hit singles in 1999. And not just hit singles but the biggest one in the UK in 1998. So how do you follow up such a success? Well, if you’re Cher, you just repeat the exact same formula. At least, that’s how I remembered it; that “Strong Enough” was just a carbon copy of “Believe” but listening to it now, it’s clear that rather it was more trying to be “I Will Survive Mk II”. I mean, it’s not a million miles away from being “Believe Mk II” either but “Strong Enough” had more of a disco feel to it with some definite 70s sonic stylings thrown into the mix and, of course, it had the same lyrical subject matter. Given the status of “I Will Survive” and Cher’s standing amongst the LGBTQ+ community and that “Believe” had brought her to a new audience within said community, it made perfect sense to release “Strong Enough” as the follow up single.

Watching this performance back, all the backing dancers positioned in straight lines behind Cher make it seem like a fitness video. Has Cher ever done a fitness video?

*checks internet*

Yes, she did two in the early 90s called “A New Attitude” and “Body Confidence”. Well, had she ever made a third then she could have used this routine in it. “Strong Enough” couldn’t hope to match the success of “Believe” but it was a Top Ten hit around the world and was a No 1 on the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart so not quite strong enough but not a 10 stone weakling either.

Dusty Springfield connection: Both emerged as significant female artists in the 1960s, both are celebrated as camp icons and both have recorded versions of “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me” which was a UK No 1 hit for Dusty in 1966 and appeared on Cher’s album “Chér” also from 1966.

Another performance we’ve seen before next as we get The Corrs and the rereleased “Runaway” just seven days after it was last on the show and despite the fact they it had dropped from No 2 to No 6 this week. Except…hold on…this isn’t the same performance…is it? They’ve all got the same outfits on but Caroline, the drummer, is playing the piano in the first appearance and it’s a more acoustic version of the song and in the second show she’s back on the drums. What gives? I can only assume that they recorded two versions whilst they were in the studio that day. Why did they do that? To diversify the promotion of the single? Both the Tin Tin Out remix and the album version were on the 1999 CD single release so maybe they were trying to cover all bases of appeal? Maybe the BBC wanted to stockpile their archives? Who knows? Either way, it didn’t stop the single from descending the charts albeit at a steady rate.

Dusty Springfield connection: According to Sharon Corr, her parents listened to a lot of Dusty Springfield (along with Burt Bacharach and The Carpenters) which served as the soundtrack to her early childhood. Also, Dusty’s parents were both Irish just as the Corrs family are.

Jamie Theakston can’t help himself making a comment about The Corrs (“Runaway. That’s The Corrs. You wouldn’t really would you?”) before he does that thing all the presenters were doing around this time that was clearly a new innovation by executive producer Chris Cowey – walking into the backstage area and introducing the next act who were to be found on a TV screen not on stage. Well, I mean they were on a stage but not actually sharing the same physical space as the presenter if you see what I mean. I’m guessing that many of these performances were being recorded separately from the host’s time in the studio because of scheduling issues? Having said that, there is a studio audience present so there as a certain amount of joining the dots going on. In the old days, unless a video was being shown, it seemed like one big shot jumping from presenter to artist and then back to the host to introduce the next act. This had the feel of lots of clips needing to be edited together neatly so as not to see the seams hence these rather clunky backstage segues.

Anyway, enough of the technical stuff, back to the music – who were the next artist on? Well, it’s The Cardigans and their hit “Erase/Rewind”. Now I could have sworn that this follow up to “My Favourite Game” was released much closer to its predecessor but the time elapsed between the two was four months. Presumably their record label didn’t want it swallowed up in the mad dash that was the Christmas selling period. The other thing I could have sworn was that it was better than this. I mean, I shouldn’t be complaining about it when compared to the rest of the crud in the charts but it did disappoint slightly on re-listening to it. Just ever so slightly underwhelming. It certainly helped reactivate sales of parent album “Gran Turismo” propelling it into the Top 10 after spending the first four months of its chart life outside of the Top 20. This would pretty much be the peak of commercial success for The Cardigans, in the UK anyway*. One more Top 10 hit with Tom Jones doing a cover version of “Burning Down The House” by Talking Heads would follow later in 1999 and a No 31 hit in 2003 was it for chart singles action whilst their two albums released subsequently to “Gran Turismo” gained hardly any sales traction.

*In their home country of Sweden, the band continued to rack up No 1 albums and Top 10 singles.

Dusty Springfield connection: The band’s bassist Magnus Sveningsson participated in a tribute project to Dusty Springfield around 2007, where he played in a band for a live performance featuring songs like “If You Go Away”.

This post is all about female singers what with the Dusty Springfield theme, Cher and Britney Spears. Even two of the groups featured are fronted by women. Add to that list Whitney Houston who appears on the show two weeks on the run with “It’s Not Right But It’s OK”. With the single having entered the charts at No 3, I get why it’s featured but there were other new entries this week that could have been shown instead from Shawn Mullins, Kula Shaker, Sheryl Crow and…erm…Elton John and LeAnn Rimes…OK maybe not that last one!

Anyway, it’s Whitney who got the nod and perhaps rightly so if you read about the song’s legacy. It won a Grammy for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance and in 2019 it was certified platinum for sales of over a million copies in America. It regularly features highly in the various Best Of polls and just last year it was ranked the 45th Greatest LGBTQ Anthems of All Time with Billboard comparing it to…yes, Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” just as Cher’s “Strong Enough” was. Clearly the two were duking it out for the hearts of that particular community.

Dusty Springfield connection: Cissy Houston (Whitney’s mother) was a founding member of The Sweet Inspirations, a group that provided backing vocals for several of Dusty’s records, most notably on her acclaimed 1969 album “Dusty In Memphis” and her classic hit “Son Of a Preacher Man”.

With their last single “The Bartender And The Thief”, the Stereophonics took a significant step up the ladder of commercial popularity. No longer were they a band of minor to medium sized hits but a Top 5 artist. Follow up “Just Looking” would consolidate that position by being a No 4 chart hit. More than that though, it was a great advert for their sophomore album “Performance And Cocktails” which was released the Monday after this TOTP aired. It would go to No 1 and six times platinum in the UK. These boys really were big news. It remains their second biggest selling album after “Just Enough Education To Perform” I liked it enough for it to end up in my CD collection. “Just Looking” maybe wasn’t as rollickingly riotous as “The Bartender And The Thief” but it’s still a decent track worthy of repeated plays. However, I’d have to say I prefer “Just Lookin’” by The Charlatans as a song – that missing ‘g’ clearly making all the difference.

Dusty Springfield connection: Well this is tenuous in the extreme but…the Stereophonics only No 1 single is a track called “Dakota” and in January 2024, singer-songwriter Shelby Lynne performed a set dedicated to Dusty based on her 2008 tribute album “Just A Little Lovin’” at the Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis. Don’t like that? How about that Dusty once recorded the song “The Black Hills Of Dakota” from the film Calamity Jane? Oh suit yourselves!

Britney Spears is No 1 again with “…Baby One More Time” and has therefore achieved something that we were yet to see in 1999 – a record top the charts for more than seven days. Yes, it’s taken ten weeks but finally the constant conveyor belt of a different No 1 has ground to a halt. When you consider though that this was easily the best selling single of the year in the UK, could we have expected a longer ride in pole position? The timings within release schedules probably worked against Britney as in her third week in the chart she was up against that year’s Comic Relief single courtesy of the biggest boy band in the country at the time but even so. That chart conveyor belt would spring back into action though with another 14 No 1s spending a solitary week at the top meaning 22 out of 52 weeks of the year saw a different record at the top!

As for Britney, well I haven’t the time nor space to chronicle her career and personal struggles here but suffice to say she would have two more big UK hits before 1999 was out and followed that by starting the new millennium by topping our chart twice with consecutive singles. That’s two, not one more time.

Dusty Springfield connection: Dusty’s iconic hit “Son Of A Preacher Man” featured in the film Pulp Fiction and was included on its multi platinum selling soundtrack. In 2008, the film’s director Quentin Tarantino considered casting Britney Spears as the lead character Varla in a planned remake of the 1965 cult film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! The project never materialised though.

We’re still not done with The Great British Song Contest entrants in the BBC’s quest to find a contestant to be the UK’s representative at 1999’s Eurovision but fear not for this is the last of the four finalists. Jay were a band not a singer who was one Jamie Callis seen here fronting the song “You’ve Taken My Dreams” and what an affront to musical taste it is. Dull doesn’t quite cover it – how about ‘insipid’? ‘Soulless’? ‘Banal’? I’ll go for plain old shite I think. Callis was an unemployed karaoke singer at the time of his 15 minutes of fame – I should have just used those three words as my review of this one. Jay came fourth out of four when The Great British Song Contest airedtwo days after this TOTP was broadcast.

Dusty Springfield connection: Surely there’s nothing?! OK, how about Laurie Jay who was the drummer with The Echoes who served as Dusty’s primary backing band for her live performances and several studio recordings during the peak of her early solo career from late 1963 to1966. Jay was a dedicated fan and associate of Dusty, even attempting to organize tribute events in her memory such as a star plaque in Los Angeles and a show at The Albert Hall in 2012.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Blur	Tender	No but I had the album
2	Cher	Strong Enough	No
3	The Corrs	Runaway	Negative
4	The Cardigans	Erase/Rewind	Nope
5	Whitney Houston	It’s Not Right But It’s OK	Nah
6	Stereophonics	Just Looking	See 1 above
7	Britney Spears	…Baby One More Time	I did not
8	Jay	You’ve Taken My Dreams	And pissed all over them – 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/m002qlxx/top-of-the-pops-05031999

TOTP 19 FEB 1999

Posted on 8 Days Ago by 80stastic

After the deluge of boy bands in the early 90s and then the gender switch to all girl groups in the mid to later years, suddenly, right in the death throes of the decade, another movement emerged which infiltrated both sexes – boy bands and girl groups who could play their own instruments! We get to see two examples from the first category on this particular TOTP and in many ways it was a blueprint/warning (delete as appropriate) for what was to come in the new millennium with the likes of Busted and McFly but we’ll get to all that later.

Kate Thornton is our host tonight and we start with last week’s No 1 – “Maria” by Blondie. In the first eight charts of 1999, we had eight different No 1s. This was a time when record company first week discounting and the record buying public’s awareness of the practice met dead on causing huge sales for new releases in their first seven days in the shops. The impact of this was displayed in this weekly changing of the guard at the very top of the charts. In my view, it did undermine the integrity of the charts and it also made reordering of new singles in that first week of release very tricky for those of us working in record shops at the time. Punters were wise to the fact that the CD single was only £1.99 for the first seven days and would rise to £3.99 when it entered the chart the following week and so unnatural buying patterns were created. The trick was to never sell out during the discounted period but not have loads of stock left over when its price rose. It wasn’t always that easy to pull off.

Anyway, Blondie had secured a No 1 with “Maria” before falling to No 2 and this meant that they’d had chart toppers in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Not a unique feat but impressive all the same. Debbie Harry was 53 at this point. Twenty-seven later and she is still performing live and recording with her band in 2026 aged 80! A new album called “High Noon” is scheduled for release later this year.

So to this new movement of boy bands (and girl groups) who played their own instruments…I say ‘new’ but perhaps the first example and OGs of the genre came two years before with the emergence of Hanson. The three brothers were only 11, 14 and 16 years old when they hit with the irresistibly catchy “MMMBop” and yet they actually played on the record (at least that’s what their publicity machine told us anyway). In the wake of that success, it seemed that every pop music record label was on the look out for the next Hanson and in Next Of Kin, Universal thought they’d found the UK version. This lot really were following the Hanson blueprint – three brothers who were aged 13 to 18 who played guitar, bass and drums who had a hit that was half pop song, half ear-worm. Hell, they even had the Hanson floppy hair down to a tee!

Their backstory was that they were spotted by the manager of the Musical Exchanges music shop in Birmingham who put them directly in touch with Universal who signed them immediately and whisked them off on the Smash Hits tour and then as support act for Boyzone. It can’t have been that easy can it? Their debut single was “24 Hours From You” and it was ridiculously similar to “MMMBop”. The vocals in it were almost exactly the same. Its peak of No 13 was a reasonable start to their pop career but when follow up “More Love” peaked 20 places lower, the game was up before it had even started.

An attempt at gatecrashing the pop world again was made in 2013 when they successfully auditioned for the tenth series of the X Factor but they were rejected at the Bootcamp stage. Wikipedia tells me that they are still together but have renamed themselves as Essex County (they’re from Braintree) and changed their sound to alternative country. We’ll see another instrument playing boy band later in the show but not to be outdone, the girls would show their hand later in 1999 with the likes of Hepburn and Thunderbugs seeing chart action.

“Time now for something a tad more dangerous” says Kate Thornton in her intro to the next act. Who could she mean and was she right? Well, I guess compared to Next Of Kin then Unkle featuring Ian Brown could at least be considered as unsafe; after all, Brown had not long been released from Strangeways prison for a two month stretch for that air rage incident.

As for Unkle, all my hip colleagues at Our Price would have been into them and DJ Shadow who was a member of the electronic outfit at one point and gets his own mention in Thornton’s intro here (although as far as I can tell he was not officially credited on the single) and, in fact, anything released on their Mo’Wax label. Guess what though (and this will come as no surprise!)? I don’t like “Be There” at all. Not one little bit. Slow and lumbering, Brown’s deadpan, monotone, low register vocals didn’t help to raise my interest levels either. Maybe if I’d been achingly hip like some of my colleagues I’d have loved it but the truth is I’ve never been even half way hip. The other truth is that I don’t actually remember it. What the Hell was I doing all day in the record shop? Certainly not listening to any music it seems. Surely, given I was living in Manchester at the time, I should have recall of a hit featuring one of the city’s more famous sons? Bah. I might as well have been selling tins of baked beans! Anyway, I’m going to own my pop sensibilities and stand up proudly for them by stating that if I want to listen to a song called “Be There”, then this is what I would choose…

It’s that second example of an instrument playing boy band now as we are introduced to Canadian group The Moffats. This lot were four brothers (why were all these bands siblings?) but making them stand out was the fact that three of them were triplets with two of them identical twins. Unlike Next Of Kin, I do remember this lot mainly because there were two school girls who used to come into the Our Price where I worked in Altrincham who were crazy about them. I remember once I was late for work due to my bus not turning up and as I was in charge that day with the keys to the shop, we opened up late. Not my fault, it happens. However, it happened to be on the Monday The Moffats were releasing a single and these two girls wanted to be the first to get their hands on it. I think they’d cut school to come and buy it and so were waiting outside, giving me down the banks for not opening up on time as per our advertised hours. It was at this point that I developed a string dislike for The Moffats!

Anyway, “Crazy” was their first and biggest of two UK Top 40 hits peaking at No 16 (those sales to those two schoolgirls must have really helped!) and it’s a slightly more robust sound than Next Of Kin (it would have been hard not to be in fairness) but it was hardly offering anything new nor original. Banal lyrics and a ‘woah woah’ chorus and generic title. In fact, they didn’t seem blessed with creativity when it came to song titles. They also released singles called “Miss You Like Crazy”, “Girl Of My Dreams” and “I’ll Be There For You” (at least two of which have been also been the titles of big hits for other artists. Then there’s their image. Just like Next Of Kin, the lead singer and drummer have both copied the Hanson, slacker dude, long hairstyle whilst the two identical twins have rather sensibly gone for a shorter crop. What was it about these guys that those two school girls just couldn’t resist?! Despite Kate Thornton’s claim that we would all be screaming for them soon, The Moffats didn’t amount too much and although they are still together, haven’t released an album in over 25 years. I have no info on whether they liked to eat curds and whey nor whether they were scared of spiders.

Staying with Canadian bands, here’s Barenaked Ladies and their hit “One Week”. Having been in existence for over a decade and having already released three major label studio albums by this point, I’m willing to bet that most of us didn’t actually know much about this lot and their brand of alternative pop or ‘geek rock’ as some of the press labeled their sound. I know I didn’t. Sure, being employed in a record shop I might have come across their name but when it came to actually listening to them…well, as I’ve already established, I clearly wasn’t doing a lot of listening to any music much whilst at work.

Suddenly though, this mad track full of skittering energy and sounding like it had too many words to fit into its structure was everywhere. How had this happened to a band which if not a cult, were definitely on the fringes of the mainstream? Well, the band had promoted “One Week” hard in America by playing a series of radio station concerts which had resulted in massive airplay and, perhaps against all odds, a US Billboard Hot 100 chart topper!* No doubt that achievement would have meant a full on marketing drive on its UK release and sure enough, it debuted at No 5 over here.

*Rather poetically it would spend just one week at the top.

So that’s how it became a massive hit but what about the ‘why?’. OK so, firstly it has a killer chorus that could have been jarring against the overly verbose verses but actually works perfectly as a way of resolving all that wordplay. Ah yes, those words. Why were they full of pop culture references and whatever did it all mean? According to the band’s Ed Robertson, he’d worked out the track’s chorus but hadn’t a clue what to do about the verses until fellow band member Steven Page told him to just “Freestyle it”. And so Robertson did which means, I guess, that it was all made up nonsense with no meaning at all? Sometimes things just work though and it all hung together in a madcap display of improvisation. You do have to acknowledge the blending of the lyrics. My favourite rhyming couplet is this I think:

“Like Harrison Ford I’m getting frantic
Like Sting I’m tantric”

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Ed Robertson
One Week lyrics © Wb Music Corp., Treat Baker Music Inc.

However, there’s loads more to admire. For example, name checking Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, German orchestra leader and easy listening legend Bert Kaempfert and American teenage singer LeAnn Rimes in the same song takes a special kind of imagination. Sadly, the live vocals in this TOTP performance don’t quite do it justice.

The final reason for its success? Well, the UK charts have always been accommodating of a single that not a novelty but a bit out there. Off the top of my head there’s “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by Crash Test Dummies, “Camouflage” by Stan Ridgeway, “O Superman” by Laurie Anderson and later on in these 1999 repeats we’ll be hearing Baz Luhrmann’s “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”. “One Week” could find a place quite comfortably in such a list. Barenaked Ladies would manage one more minor UK chart entry but are still together recording new material with their last album being 2023’s “In Flight”.

An exclusive preview of a massive song next. Literally epic. Or just overly long depending on whether you like it or not I guess. Having emerged bruised from 1995’s Battle of Britpop, Blur regrouped and came back with a platinum selling No 1 album and two of their most iconic singles in “Beetlebum” and “Song 2”. In the meantime, it was their nemesis Oasis who had suffered the brickbats and barbed criticisms of their third album “Be Here Now” and promptly disappeared for the rest of the decade. The field, therefore, was clear for Blur to unleash their sixth studio album without the omnipresence of the Gallaghers and the comparisons that had tripped them up in the past. The lead single was “Tender”, a 7:40 long lament to Damon Albarn’s broken relationship with girlfriend Justine Frischmann of Elastica. With its hopeful refrain of “Come on, come on, come on, get through it” and a gospel choir backing, it gave off heavyweight vibes literally on first hearing. And yet, it also had that lo-fi guitar opening – it was a masterclass in how to slowly build a song. I was convinced it would be the band’s third No 1 single and it would have been but for the commercial wrecking ball that was Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time”. Despite having to settle for No 2, its first week sales of 176,000 copies was more than many actual No 1 singles that year. Whatever its numbers said, it was a demonstrably braver and more interesting direction than the one taken by Oasis as the end of the 90s came into view.

Just as we started the show with an act that had just secured an unexpected No 1 single seemingly out of the blue in Blondie and “Maria”, this week’s chart topper was also a surprise – well, it blindsided me anyway. My first engagement with Lenny Kravitz came courtesy of his 1991 album “Mama Said” (I’d been blissfully unaware of his debut collection “Let Love Rule”) during my early days of working for Our Price. I’d really enjoyed that album with tracks like “Fields Of Joy”, “Stand By My Woman” and hit single “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over” all impressing me. I couldn’t really get into his next album “Are You Gonna Go My Way” mostly because I wasn’t that taken by its hit single title track and after that I completely lost sight of him. Then, in 1999, he was back and how. “Fly Away” was the third single from his fifth studio album “5” and, despite the first two singles taken from it failing to pierce the UK Top 40, it soared straight to the top of the charts in week one of its release. How had this happened? It’s not that big a mystery really – behold the everlasting power of a song being used to soundtrack a TV advert:

Yes, a car advert for the Peugeot 206 was enough to give Lenny his first and only UK No 1. Obviously it wasn’t the first time we’d seen this phenomenon in action but it sure was effective. A last minute addition to the album, Kravitz had originally thought “Fly Away” could maybe have been used as a B-side but its inclusion on that advert changed its destiny. Apart from one minor entry in 2004 with a song from the Bad Boys II soundtrack, “Fly Away” would be Lenny’s final UK chart hit.

We’re still going with this Great British Song Contest malarkey and this week it’s the turn of a duo called Sister Sway and a track called “Until You Saved My Life”. They finished third in the final (out of four) and apparently they were sisters. Here, they give an energetic performance of their very uptempo, high bpm song that was clearly trying to sound a bit like Steps. It’s very repetitive and ground my gears after not too long to the point where I couldn’t wait for it to stop. Never mind saving my life, it nearly killed my ears.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Blondie	Maria	Negative
2	Next Of Kin	24 Hours From You	Nope
3	Unkle featuring Ian Brown	Be There	No
4	The Moffats	Crazy	I did not
5	Barenaked Ladies	One Week	YES!
6	Blur	Tender	No but I had the album
7	Lenny Kravitz	Fly Away	Nah
8	Sister Sway	Until You Saved My Life	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/m002q94f/top-of-the-pops-19021999

TOTP 26 SEP 1997

Posted on April 14 by 80stastic

This particular TOTP episode is a curious mix of hits that have been hanging around the charts for ages, one that we only saw seven days ago, two dance tracks that were all about the tunes and not the artists, a mostly forgotten Robbie Williams hit that was actually a line in the sand moment and that Elton John single. Pick the bones out of that! Well, I intend to so let’s get to it…

Tonight’s host is Jo Whiley who seems to be on permanent rotation with Jayne Middlemiss and Zoe Ball (I guess we haven’t got to the Kate Thornton/Gail Porter/Jamie Theakston era yet). We start with Chumbawamba who have spent a solid six weeks in the Top 5 with “Tubthumping” and was now on the move back up the charts from No 5 to No 3 having slipped from its original peak of No 2. It seems there was a reason for this. In the wake of the death of Princess Diana, its airplay completely crashed presumably because:

It wasn’t a ballad and that was the only form of musical composition deemed required at this time
Its lyrics about being knocked down could hardly have been more inappropriate given the events in Paris of 31st August

In the week before that date it had been the most played track on radio but in the week after it almost completely disappeared from playlists. A further week on from that and it was decided that a suitable period of time had passed and it was right back up there on the airplay charts presumably helping to boost its sales once more. And they say a week is a long time in politics.

Depending on your point of view, “Sunchyme” by Dario G is either a work of genius or musical sacrilege – I fall into the latter category. Based around the wonderful “Life In A Northern Town” by The Dream Academy (which I bought back in the day), this monster of a dance tune had been in existence for months as a bootleg but hadn’t got a formal commercial release as label Eternal Records couldn’t get clearance for the samples used in it. This delay in making it available to the masses only helped to build anticipation of its release which, when it finally happened, sent the single to No 2 in the charts. Like George Michael’s “You Have Been Loved” before it, this would also surely have been a chart topper at any other time.

I guess I can hear why “Sunchyme” struck a chord with its Dream Academy sample forming the basis of a catchy hook that sounded almost gospel-esque when chopped up in that way. Allied to a distinctive Italian house piano riff, it really didn’t matter if punters didn’t know the 1985 No 15 hit source material, the track couldn’t fail. My claim that it was committing musical heresy by treating one of the best hits of the 80s (to my ears) like that meant little to the nation’s clubbers which I suppose is fair enough. Quite why this performance comes across as the stage version of The Lion King though, I’m not quite sure. Still, I suppose it makes a change from the usual anonymous, pony-tailed blokes on keyboards behind a gyrating, spandex clad dancer.

Jo Whiley gives us a smooth segue from Dario G to the aforementioned Robbie Williams when she says “from a Northern town to South of the Border”. Not bad Jo. Now I labelled this hit as mostly forgotten earlier and I stand by that description for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s almost as if Robbie himself wants to consign it to history – it did not feature on his 1999 compilation album “The Ego Has Landed” that was put together with tracks from his first two solo albums specifically for the American market. Then, it didn’t appear on his 2004 Greatest Hits which featured 19 tracks. Nor was it on the 2009 compilation “Songbook” that was given away free with the Daily Mail as part of a promotion campaign for Robbie’s “Reality Killed The Video Star” album. Such freebie albums are usually where lesser hits are to be found but it wasn’t a home for “South Of The Border”. It did make the cut for the 2010 Best Of “In And Out Of Consciousness” but that was a comprehensive, 39 tracks career retrospective. It was his only hit that failed to make the Top 10 for nine years and 20 single releases. So, pretty much forgotten.

And yet…it perhaps shouldn’t be as it demarcated a pivotal crossroads in his career. The relative failure of the single (it peaked at No 14) was seen by many as evidence that Robbie Williams the solo artist would not sustain. It was just a matter of time before he petered out completely and its this commonly held perception that made what came next all the more unexpected and revelatory. His next single, which according to legend was a make or break release, was “Angels”. And yet the story could have all played out very differently as “South Of The Border” was never intended to be a single. The plan was that “Let Me Entertain You” was going to be the third track taken from the album “Life Thru A Lens” but Robbie had a dose of the wobbles and didn’t feel confident enough to release something with such a provocative title. At the last minute, it was ditched for “South Of The Border”. Who knows whether, if the original plan had been adhered to, the Robbie Williams story would have been any different. Maybe. Maybe not.

As for “South Of The Border”, it’s probably a better song than its legacy might suggest. I think I prefer it to previous single “Lazy Days” which doesn’t get the same rap by virtue of a six place chart difference it would seem (it peaked at No 8). There’s a spoken word bit low in the mix in the middle eight that we don’t get in this performance (which isn’t great by the way) where Robbie talks about going for a night out on the town with various celebrities including Anthea Turner and Daniella Westbrook which always quite intrigued me. The turnaround of Williams career would be more compelling though.

Damn! It’s that studio performance by Tina Moore of “Never Gonna Let You Go” again! What am I supposed to say about this one…again? Well, what I have noticed is that so far is that Jo Whiley has only been in the studio at the same time as one of the four artists on the show so far, that being Dario G. Now, two of them are understandable in that they’re just re-showings of previous performances (including Tina Moore) but the Robbie Williams cut away suggests his appearance was pre-recorded and Jo’s intro was tacked on the end separately. Why would that be? A scheduling issue?

Anyway, from what I can work out this was Tina’s fifth week on the chart and she was actually climbing it having peaked at No 7. The positions for her hit in the thirteen weeks of it’s time in the Top 40 were:

7 – 11 – 9 – 12 – 9 – 11 – 11 – 17 – 15 – 23 – 21 – 28 – 35

Check those numbers out. It reversed its decline four times. Four! That’s quite a chart journey. It seems the general public weren’t gonna let Tina go for a while.

It’s the second of those two dance tracks I mentioned at the top of the post now as German group Bellini take to the stage or should that be the dance floor as all the five women on our TV screens were doing was peddling some not overly impressive dance moves. There’s a lot of leg shaking and twerking but not much else. Now, I assumed that said women were just some jobbing dancers put together for TV appearances to promote the single “Samba De Janeiro” but it seems they were full time members of the band. Sort of. Full time they may have been but permanent they were not. Bellini’s list of group members might not be quite of The Fall or The Waterboys proportions but I counted fifteen past and present names in their Wikipedia entry and that doesn’t include the guys behind their sound, the producer duo of Ramon Zenker and Gottfried Engels otherwise known as The Bellini Brothers.

As for the track itself, it pays a huge debt to Brazilian jazz percussionist Airto Moreira sampling two of his tracks from the 70s and was a Top 10 hit all around Europe. If I’d had to guess, I would have put its release date as a year later to coincide with the 1998 World Cup tournament which seemed to have loads of samba themed songs soundtracking its coverage. I wasn’t far off as it was used extensively during the 2008 Euros after every goal was scored and Norwich City has played it as ‘goal music’ for pretty much the last 20 years. Indeed, Bellini took their name as a tribute to Brazilian football legend Hilderaldo Bellini who won the World Cup in 1958 and 1962 which is quite odd as the guys behind the Bellini Brothers moniker were German but then I guess they were never going to name themselves after 80s German international footballer Horst Hrubesch whose surname was pronounced by most English commentators as ‘Rubbish’.

Sly & Robbie featuring Simply Red are the act that we already saw just a week ago but that performance of their cover of “Night Nurse” is re-shown again seven days on because the single has gone into the charts at No 13.

This does nothing for me and, in fact, I’d rather listen to Martin Freeman’s version in a toilet from Breeders…

I’d almost forgotten there was a fourth single from Blur’s eponymous fifth studio album but there was and here it is…”M.O.R” was, perhaps understandably, the smallest hit of those four singles with it being released over six months after the album when it peaked at No 15. Now if you’d forgotten how it goes but then thought that it was instantly recognisable when you watched this TOTP repeat, that’ll be the Bowie effect. We were given a clue by Jo Whiley* in her intro when she said “Now some boys who just keep swinging” as “M.O.R.” borrows from Bowie’s “Boys Keep Swinging” and “Fantastic Voyage” from his “Lodger” album. Bowie and Brian Eno had come up with the concept of composing multiple songs with the same chord progression for the album and those two songs were the ones that made the cut. So were Blur paying homage to or stealing that concept? Does it even matter? The truth is that at least Blur were trying to do something different and not just repeat the formula of past glories. Could Oasis say the same for their output at the time?

*Never one to miss an opportunity to show off her music credentials was she Jo! Dream Academy and now David Bowie references!

The video for “M.O.R.” features four stuntmen as the band members in a plot about escaping the police. The monikers given to the fictional ‘actors’ playing Blur are all genuine anagrams of the band’s actual names. Check these out:

Trevor Dewane – Dave Rowntree
Lee Jaxsam – Alex James
Morgan C. Hoax – Graham Coxon
Dan Abnormal – Damon Albarn

That last one is genius, better than Bellini anyway!

Obviously, “Candle In The Wind ‘97” by Elton John is still at the top of the charts. I’m not sure when the sales of the single started to slow down. It was No 1 for five weeks and sold 658,000 copies on its first day of release and 1.5 million in the first week. As of September 2017 it had sold 4.94 million copies in the UK. By those numbers, I’m guessing there must have been a tapering off even when it was still No 1. For context though, this TOTP aired just under a month after Princess Diana’s death and one day shy of three weeks since her funeral.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Chumbawamba	Tubthumping	YES!
2	Dario G	Sunchyme	No but I bought The Dream Academy original
3	Robbie Williams	South Of The Border	No but I had a promo copy of the album
4	Tina Moore	Never Gonna Let You Go	I did not
5	Bellini	Samba De Janeiro	Nah
6	Sly & Robbie/Simply Red	Night Nurse	Nope
7	Blur	M.O.R.	No but I had the album
8	Elton John	Candle In The Wind ’97	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/m0029lyt/top-of-the-pops-26091997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 20 JUN 1997

Posted on March 17 by 80stastic

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

TOTP 31 JAN 1997

Posted on January 21, 2025 by 80stastic

I’ve referred back to my diary again for inspiration for this post. You may remember that I rediscovered my 1996 one a while back but it carries on into 1997 and up to the month of May when I finally got fed up of it. It turns out that the day after this TOTP aired, we had a stocktake at the Our Price in Stockport where I was working. When I first joined the record retailer back in 1990, stocktakes were events that were talked about in legendary terms as to how long they took with tales of them going on well into the early hours of the morning. I would come to realise that this was the more experienced members of staff winding us newbies up. That’s not to say that they didn’t go on and on sometimes. This particular one wasn’t finished until 9.00 on a Saturday night. However, Stockport was a big store over two floors – one of the smaller shops in the area wouldn’t have taken half as long. There was a rumour once that one store completed its stocktake before it had even closed its doors and stopped trading for the day which seemed to undermine the point of the exercise to me. There were two different types of stocktake as I recall – a financial one and a unit count one. By 1997, the stock inventory had been computerised and so we had little mobile scanners to read the barcode and tell us exactly what we had in the store rather than just a number of CDs for example. These then had to be uploaded to the system once an area of the shop had been counted before they could be recalibrated and put to counting again. Someone had to be nominated to do that stock controller job who was normally a member of management so it could well have been me as Assistant Manager on this occasion. My diary tells me that we all trooped off to the pub once the stocktake was done as was tradition. Presumably all of the songs on this episode of TOTP will have been counted in that stocktake.

Tonight’s guest host is Slade legend Noddy Holder who had left the band five years previously and started on a radio and TV career – within two years he would be starring in ITV comedy/drama series The Grimleys. I served Noddy once in my early Our Price days and I was delighted that his credit card has the name N Holder emblazoned on it thinking that the ‘N’ referred to Noddy when in fact it was the initial of his actual name Neville. Doh! I’m guessing that apart from maybe a Greatest Hits CD, we wouldn’t have had any Slade albums in store to count at the stocktake.

We start tonight with Placebo and their hit “Nancy Boy”. During the course of my research on this one (I do do research – I can’t rely on my fading memory to come up with anecdotes constantly), I came across a rather sad story about the boy who was on the cover of Placebo’s debut album. His name is David Fox and he was just 12 years old when his cousin took a photo of him pulling a face one day. The next thing he knew, said cousin had licensed the photos to Placebo’s record label Virgin and his picture adorned the cover of the album, billboards, the sides of buses etc. Cool eh? Well no, actually. David suffered from bullying at school as a result of his fame and ended up being ostracised by his former mates. He eventually went through a number of different schools, didn’t take his GCSEs and ended up being unemployed. In 2012, it was reported that he was intending to sue the band for ruining his life and unpaid royalties. I’m not sure what the outcome was but a year later, he did appear on the ‘Identity Parade’ section of Never Mind The Buzzcocks pulling that same face so I’m guessing he didn’t feel as litigious as he once had. I hope he got an appearance fee at least.

Next up is perhaps the laziest and most obvious choice of single of the decade. Now I’m not a particular fan of Gabrielle but I can admire her longevity and the career that she has built off the back of what could have been one hit wonder status. After her debut hit “Dreams” shot to No 1 in 1993, there was a school of thought that said the only way from that peak was down but Gabrielle refused to conform to that stereotype and followed it with a clutch of charting singles and a Top 10 album in “Find Your Way”. An eponymous, sophomore album followed in 1996 which was certified platinum in the UK and the end of that year saw her rise to No 2 with her duet with East 17 of the Shai track “If You Ever”. Big props to her.

However, the decision by her (or more likely her record label) to then release a cover version of “Walk On By” lacked any integrity or creativity but was surely financially driven. I’m not sure if Noddy was right in what he said in his intro – that the song had been covered over 200 times – but it is surely one of the best known tunes of all time and it is certainly true that it had already been a hit a number of times before Gabrielle got to it. The original version of the Bacharach and David classic was recorded by Dionne Warwick in 1963 but since then it had been covered by Gloria Gaynor, The Stranglers, Average White Band and D-Train. Then, as recently as 1990, it had been a No 6 hit for American singer Sybil. Given all of this, did we really need another version of it courtesy of Gabrielle? This was a cynical, money for old rope move. Supposedly, the idea for her to record it came about when she’d performed it in an episode of TFI Friday on which she was a guest and which Bacharach was in the audience for. His seal of approval of Gabrielle’s version convinced record label Go!Beat to milk the cash cow that had been presented before them and wallop! It was back in the Top 10 again. Such was their desire to fleece the record buying public that it was added as an extra track (along with “If You Ever”) to her album which was rereleased. Money grabbing swines! It’s such an ordinary version of the song as well which added nothing to it at all to my ears. At least The Stranglers did something different with it.

Despite the expense of the recent festive period, January 1997 must have been a busy time for the country’s nightclubs if the UK Top 40 was any sort of gauge. The upper end of the chart was jam packed with dance tunes. Tori Amos and White Town had both been at No 1 whilst Lisa Stansfield and remix team The Dirty Rotten Scoundrels had taken the old Coldcut hit “People Hold On” to No 4. And the there was this – “Remember Me” by Blue Boy otherwise known as the ‘Ging Ginner’ song. Blue Boy was British DJ Alexis ‘Lex’ Blackmore who took a sample of a track called “Woman Of The Ghetto” by American jazz, blues and soul singer Marlena Shaw and ‘funked’ it up for want of a better word to create a memorable dance floor filler. A scat version of that sample of the original track formed the distinctive ‘ging gi-gi-gi-gi-ging’ hook. In my head, this got as high as those other dance hits I mentioned earlier but Wikipedia tells me that it peaked at No 8. Told you I had to do research and not rely on my memory!

My rediscovery of Skunk Anansie continues at pace. “Hedonism (Just Because You Feel Good)” was their fifth hit single in a twelve month period and I’ve pretty much liked them all despite only recalling “Weak” before rewatching the TOTP repeats that featured them. If the band could be said to have a gentler side then this was it. A less abrasive sound than some of their other songs albeit that Skin’s powerful vocals are still to the forefront and there’s a bit of wah-wah guitar in the middle eight.

Inevitably when you have such a striking looking female lead singer, she was always going to attract the most attention, a scenario we have seen numerous times in music history with bands such as Blondie, Toyah and No Doubt. However, in an interview with Kerrang! magazine in 2020, Skin made it clear that the reason that Skunk Anansie split in 2001 wasn’t because of any jealousy directed towards her by other members or that she felt that she had outgrown or become bigger than the band. No, she felt it was because she believed that they were about to make a bad album and that it would be harder to come back from a bad album than a break up so they chose the latter. She was proved to be right as they reformed in 2008 and are still together to this day though they have only released a few singles since their last full album in 2016 but they are touring in March and April this year.

No Mercy are back in the studio and having reviewed them and their hit “Where Do You Go” once already, I genuinely can’t think of anything else to say about them. Erm…erm…No Mercy…didn’t The Stranglers (who I mentioned earlier) have a hit called “No Mercy”?

*checks their discography *

Yes they did in 1984 – it reached No 37. Will that do? No, it won’t will it. Erm…well, the lead singer is called Marty Cintron who sounds like a character from This Is Spinal Tap. Why was I talking about Spinal Tap the other day? Oh yes, here we go. This’ll do. I currently work as a front of house usher in a theatre and me and a colleague had to take some rubbish out after a show the other day but had to use a different route to the one we normally use to get to the bins as the foyer was unusually busy. Consequently, we had to get to them via the backstage area (you know where this is going don’t you?) and, not used to this part of the theatre, we got lost. We kept wandering around corridors that led us nowhere and at one point opened a door that had us on the pavement outside (but crucially with no access to the bin area). At this point, I said to my colleague (who is much, much younger than me – he’s just started University) “This is like that scene from Spinal Tap where they can’t find the stage at a gig and they wander backstage hopelessly lost. Obviously my colleague had no idea what I was talking about so I had to explain to him the concept of Spinal Tap. I’m so old! He probably doesn’t know who No Mercy are/were either but that’s understandable given that they were a bunch of no marks anyway.

The TOTP caption for the next video informs us that the artist concerned has not appeared live on the show for 11 years. Seeing as the artist is George Michael, and that this repeat is from 1997, does that mean that George hadn’t been on the show since his Wham! days? Possibly. Anyway, this promo is for the fourth single and the title track from his “Older” album. As the first two tracks lifted from it had both been No 1s and the third a No 2, was it conceivable that the No 3 peak of this one was seen as a disappointment? Surely not. The album had been out for eight months by this point and this was the fourth single to come from it so all in all, not a bad result I would have thought.

As for the song, it’s the sort of track that had become synonymous with George by this point in his career. The sort of track that could only be described by the word ‘mature’. George’s vocals are on point as ever, but for me, it’s all just a tad dull. Apparently the trumpet part in it was played by one Steve Sidwell – I’m assuming that isn’t the ex-Reading, Chelsea and Fulham midfielder. It was released as a double A-side with the Bonnie Raitt track ”I Can’t Make You Love Me” which I think I prefer as a song (especially Bonnie’s version). George didn’t stop at four singles being released from “Older” and a further two were put out with the final one – “You Have Been Loved” – hitting the shops a good 15 months after the album did. This matched the amount of singles released from his “Faith” album.

Rivalling George in the ‘not seen round these parts for a while’ stakes were Depeche Mode who Noddy Holder informs us hadn’t been live on TOTP since 1987! They were back now but a lot had happened in the intervening 10 years. Back then, the band had not long drawn a line under their synth pop era and gone all dark with the “Black Celebration” album and had continued in that vein with subsequent albums “Violator” and “Songs Of Faith And Devotion”. Both had been massively successful commercially with “Violator” in particular being seen as the band at the peak of their creative powers too. However, it was not all good news. The mammoth Devotional Tour had taken its toll on the whole group. Martin Gore had become a borderline alcoholic, Andy Fletcher (RIP) had a mental breakdown, Alan Wilder decided to leave the band after years of feeling unappreciated and then there was Dave Gahan. Battling a serious drug addiction and after a near fatal overdose when his heart stopped beating for two minutes, Gahan went into rehab. Struggling to get their lead singer to record any new material, Martin Gore had considered breaking up the band but relented and the resulting album “Ultra” would go to No 1 in the UK selling four million copies worldwide.

The lead single was “Barrel Of A Gun” which was another slab of industrial rock the likes of which they had forged the second part of their career on and conquered America with. It’s kind of odd seeing Martin Gore up there wielding a guitar rather than behind keyboards, a drummer on stage with them and, of course, no Alan Wilder anymore. I don’t remember this one though it would furnish the band with their highest chart position since “People Are People” in 1984 when it peaked at No 4.

Listening to it now, it puts me in mind of the soundtrack to late 90s Channel 4 comedy/drama series The Young Person’s Guide To Becoming A Rock Star. That might sound like heresy to the Depeche Mode faithful but have a listen to this…

Ok, the tempo’s much faster and the tune not as industrial sounding but the structure’s similar no? Just me then.

Blur are No 1 with “Beetlebum” but as was the way at this point in the decade, it would only be for one week until the next hyped, discounted single was released that would debut at the top of the charts. Although it was the only No 1 to come from their eponymous, fifth album, I’m willing to bet that it’s not the most well known track on the album. That would be the second single taken from it, the aptly named “Song 2” (it was given its name as a working title based on its position in the album’s running order and stuck). Its memorable “woo-hoo” refrain would strike a chord with the general public and lead to it being used in many a sports stadium and computer game soundtrack. We’ll no doubt be seeing “Song 2” on a future TOTP repeat in the not too distant future. And with that, the stocktake is complete – I’ve taken stock of everything.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Placebo	Nancy Boy	No but I had it on one of those Best Album Ever compilations
2	Gabrielle	Walk On By	No, I walked on by it
3	Blue Boy	Remember Me	Yes on 12″ for my wife
4	Skunk Anansie	Hedonism (Just Because You Feel Good)	No but it is good
5	No Mercy	Where Do You Go	Never
6	George Michael	Older / I Can’t Make You Love Me	Nope
7	Depeche Mode	Barrel Of A Gun	No
8	Blur	Beetlebum	No but I had the album it came from

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/m0026qwm/top-of-the-pops-31011997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 10 JAN 1997

Posted on January 14, 2025 by 80stastic

And here we go again. I’m beginning my ninth year of blogging about TOTP and 1997 will be the fifteenth (!) year I’ve covered. I’ve committed to carrying on until I’ve completed 1999 so I reckon that’s another 18 months of blogging. The things I do for you people! So, new year, new songs as the majority of the hits in this show we haven’t seen performed before in these BBC4 repeats. However, the opening act I’ve only just talked about in my ‘1996 – the epilogue’ post when I discussed their song “Punka” so not great planning on my behalf. Anyway, this single – “In Your Car” – gave Kenickie their first Top 40 hit – no doubt some canny early January release scheduling helped it get there. It’s a decent track if a little basic – the slightly repetitive ‘yeah, yeah’ chorus being an obvious example. Lyrically, it comes over like an updated version of “Leader Of The Pack” but without the tragic ending with the narrative driven by the band shouting out questions to lead singer Lauren Laverne about how she got a lift off some bloke she knew. Yeah, it’s a bit slight but it had enough punk- pop chops to propel it along nicely. It would prove to be their biggest hit when it peaked at No 24. Why weren’t Kenickie bigger? Was it a case of the right stuff at the wrong time? Maybe they were intelligent enough to understand that the music industry was cutthroat and shallow and they ultimately wanted no part of it? Perhaps. What we do know is that they broke up in 1998 just two albums into their career.

As if Peter Andre wasn’t bad enough, here was the UK’s answer to the oiled up, walking six pack. After the demise of Take That the year before, pop puppet master Nigel Martyn-Smith looked to a solo act to get the teenage girls screaming and the cash registers ringing again. Anthony Gerard Kavanagh of Moston, Greater Manchester aka Kavana was the lucky (?) recipient of Martin-Smith’s focus whose backing garnered two minor UK hits in 1996 and a support slot on the Boyzone tour. However, to breakthrough the chart glass ceiling into the upper echelons of the Top 10 was going to require something else and, of course, that meant a cover version. The track chosen was “I Can Make You Feel Good” which was a No 7 hit in 1982 for Shalamar. It was a good choice, a super smooth R&B/pop number that was recent enough to not sound out of place in the 90s but also long enough ago for many a pop fan to potentially not realise that it was a cover and associate it purely with the new artist. Kavana delivers a pretty faithful version but then a radically different take on it wasn’t what was required here. It needed to be a bigger hit than he’d ever had and that was achieved when it missed equalling the original’s chart peak by just one place. Job done.

Having said all of that, I could never quite work out the appeal of Kavana. Yeah, he had pretty boy looks and that floppy, mid 90s hair but what else? I didn’t see enough star quality in him to think he would be anything more than a fleeting presence in the UK charts and yet he hung around for the rest of the decade racking up eight Top 40 hits including two Top 10s. I could see him as part of a five-piece boy band but out on his own? Not for me. In 2013, Kavana did become a member of a group when he joined forces with Dane Bowers of Another Level, Gareth Gates, Adam Rickitt and Kenzie from Blazin’ Squad to form 5th Story as part of the ITV show The Big Reunion. One of the songs they recorded? Yep, “I Can Make You Feel Good”.

Next to a track that would become one of the oddest No 1s of the decade. “Professional Widow” was a No 20 hit for Tori Amos in the Summer of 1996 when it was paired with “Hey Jupiter” as a double A-side. The third single from her “Boys For Pele” album, it was in and out of the UK Top 40 within three weeks so it was quite likely that, like me, you may have missed it at the time. However, it took a further six weeks to depart the Top 100 and then it reappeared in the November for another two months never getting higher than No 86. What was all that about? Well, the version released in the UK and Europe was a remix by American house DJ and producer Armand Van Helden and it was radically different to the original album version. I’m guessing that it was the 12” format that included the full 8 minutes long ‘Armand’s Star Trunk Funkin’ mix’ that was picking up those latterly sales as DJs played it in the clubs of the UK. Such was the continued buzz about the track that another release was planned by label EastWest but this time they went full on promoting the dance remix and not sharing the bill with another song. And so it came to pass that the track was reissued at the start of 1997 and retitled as “Professional Widow (It’s Got To Be Big)”. This time, released during the post Christmas sales lull, it would debut at No 2 before moving to the top of the charts for one week seven days later.

As I said, the remix didn’t sound anything like the original album version (it did get a release in America alongside the remix) which was typical Tori fare with a tortured vocal and a slow, shuffling tempo that bore no resemblance to the dance release at all. Having listened to the original, it has some appeal but then I have to admit to quite liking Tori’s quirky style anyway.

However, Armand Van Helden’s treatment does rather blow it out of the water. He basically cut it up and stuck it back together to produce something completely different yet standout; like a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces in all the wrong places but fitting together to create something wonderfully abstract and arresting. You certainly couldn’t ignore “Professional Widow (It’s Got To Be Big)” as it leapt out at you from the radio or your stereo. Undoubtedly Tori’s biggest UK hit though she’s hardly on it at at all. Like I said, all a bit odd really.

Right, who’s next? Runrig? Really?! I can’t think of anything to say about this lot! What? The song they’re doing – “The Greatest Flame” – has not only been a hit before but the band have performed on TOTP before?! What? When? May 1993? Right. That’s that sorted then. Here’s what I had to say about it back then. I’m sure my opinion won’t have changed. By the way, it was rereleased to promote the band’s Best Of compilation called “Long Distance” if you were wondering though I doubt you were.

TOTP 21 MAY 1993

Next up a hit that would have caused the TOTP producers a couple of staging problems I would have thought. Firstly, because it’s a dance act (surely nobody would quibble with me about my description of Orbital as such) and secondly because their hit was called “Satan”. Well, fortunately, an official video had been made for the single for the show to play but unfortunately it was no more than Phil and Paul Hartnoll (who were Orbital) stood miming behind some synths so basically what was effectively a studio performance with all the aforementioned incumbent visual issues on display. Yes, they were wearing some natty eyewear with lights on and there was a bit of black and white film footage thrown into the mix like a submarine and some snarling dogs but it was essentially two bald blokes banging away at some keyboards. The second issue would have been the track’s intro which went:

Daddy, yes, son
Wha-what does-what does regret mean?
Well, son, a funny thing about regret is
That it’s better to regret something you have done
Than regret something you haven’t done
By the way, if you see your mom this weekend
You shouldn’t tell her…

SATAN!

SATAN!

SATAN!….

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Paul Hartnoll / Phillip Hartnoll
Satan lyrics © Sm Publishing Uk Limited, Dlk Music Ltd, Sentric Music Publishing Ltd

The word ‘Satan’ was said almost demonically and repeated on a loop to make it especially disturbing. The fix for the show was relatively easy though – just edit out the intro which they duly did. As with Tori Amos before, I’m sure its chart placing of No 3 was at least partly enabled by its early January release date and also like “Professional Widow”, it had already been a small hit before. Originally released as a track on the “III” EP in 1991, it had peaked at No 31. Six years on, it was repackaged as “Satan Live” with two of the three versions released over three CD singles having been taken from live gigs in New York and the V96 festival in Chelmsford. 1997 would be Orbital’s most commercially successful year as the follow up – “The Saint” taken from the soundtrack to the film of the same name starring Val Kilmer – also peaked at No 3.

Tonight’s host by the way is Nicky Campbell who rather undoes the work of the producers who edited out the “Satan Live” intro by doing a passable impression of Ian Paisley shouting at the studio audience to “Repent! Repent your sins now!”. Hmm. Anyway, next up is a band who had become a model of consistency when it came to racking up chart hits. “Easy” was the tenth Top 40 single for Terrorvision in just over three years. Clearly the Bradford rockers had built up a sizeable, loyal fan base over this period who would buy anything the band put out – “Easy” was the fourth single taken from their album “Regular Urban Survivors” and yet it only just missed debuting inside the Top 10.

I have to say that this isn’t one of theirs that I’m familiar with and on first hearing it seems rather underwhelming and pedestrian. However, forget Orbital earlier as this is where there must have been some dark forces at work as after just one play, it was still in my head hours later. What black magic was this?! We’re still two years away from their chart peak though. All together now…”That’s the curse of Tequila, it makes me happy…”.

The aftermath of ‘The Battle of Britpop’ saw Blur in disarray despite having secured their first No 1 single as a result of it. Oasis did not accept the status of losers and their powers were certainly not vanquished in the skirmish. The sales of “(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?” went supernova with the band cast in the role of working class heroes whilst Blur were casually dismissed as spurious, middle class chancers. The band retreated not just to lick their wounds but also from each other. It would take a letter from guitarist Graham Coxon to Damon Albarn outlining the direction that he wanted the band to go in to get the disparate members to reconvene. Having rejected all things American after a disastrous US tour in ‘92 and an aversion to grunge rock that informed second and third albums “Modern Life Is Rubbish” and “Parklife”, the new direction championed by Coxon was exemplified by American artists like indie, lo-fi rock band Pavement and the genre straddling Beck. It may seem like quite the turnaround but Coxon is/was well known for his spare and brittle musical tendencies.

The first result of this new direction was the lead single from the band’s fifth and eponymous album – “Beetlebum”. It was about as far away from the likes of “Country House” as could be – if they were British sitcoms then the former would be Mrs Brown’s Boys and the latter The Office. The drastic change of style had their record label fearing the worst for the band’s commercial fortunes and I have to admit to not being sure about the track myself initially. It seemed slow and ponderous and lacking in structure – there was no bridge from the verse to the chorus; it was almost like it was two separate songs glued together. Like Terrorvision’s “Easy” earlier though, it was a grower, an insidious ear-worm burrowing its way into your brain. Their label should have had more faith in their charges as “Beetlebum” would go straight in at No 1 when finally released a whole ten days after this performance showing the size and loyalty of their fan base. It was also a prime example of the way the charts were heading. At the time, it set a then record for a No 1 single spending the least amount of time inside the Top 40 – just three weeks in total at positions 1, 7 and 29 then out. The writing was on the wall – for the charts not Blur.

For various reasons, this is the first time I’ve commented on the No 1 which wasn’t just any chart topper of course but the Christmas No 1. On reflection, the third single by the Spice Girls was always going to be the best selling hit of the festive period though I’m sure, at the time, the bookies would have had lots of runners and riders in the race. After two uptempo songs, the traditional route of the third being a ballad was followed and “2 Become 1” was certainly that. A lush, smooth production that could have made for a sound that was a tad too sugary, it managed to avoid that trap by working a safe sex message into the lyrics. The memorable video that’s set in Times Square, New York was actually recorded over three thousand miles away in a studio in Old Compton Street, London – it was all just green screen trickery. I always thought that the cover of the single looked a bit cheap and nasty I have to say. The image of the group used surely wasn’t the best that came out of that particular photo session?

Anyway, 1997 would see the Spice Girls juggernaut continue at a pace with a further three No 1 singles (including a second consecutive Christmas one) and another multi-platinum selling album. These TOTP repeats are nowhere near done with Ginger, Posh, Baby, Scary and Sporty yet.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Kenickie	In Your Car	Nope
2	Kavana	I Can Make You Feel Good	Never
3	Tori Amos	Professional Widow (It’s Got To Be Big)	Liked it, didn’t buy it
4	Runrig	The Greatest Flame	As if
5	Orbital	Satan Live	No
6	Terrorvision	Easy	Negative
7	Blur	Beetlebum	No but I had the album with it on
8	Spice Girls	2 Become 1	Nah

Disclaimer

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

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

TOTP 09 MAY 1996

Posted on August 8, 2024 by 80stastic

There’s ten hits on this episode of TOTP but we’ve seen four of them before and one of the new ones is a football song (no, not that one; not yet). We’ve also seen the presenter before and not that long ago – it’s that Beertje Van Beers woman again. I’m not sure she was any more famous than she had been the first time she hosted the show a few weeks before (despite the exposure afforded her by that appearance) so why was she back again? Was it all about how she looked? In the era of Britpop and lads mags then I suppose that was a distinct possibility.

Beertje’s first job is to introduce one of those hits we’ve seen before – it’s Suggs featuring Louchie Lou and Michie One with “Cecilia”. The last time they were on led to an infamous incident when lisping boxer Chris Eubank had to contend with a bit of a tongue twister when doing the Top 10 countdown. As A-ha’s Morten Harket once sang on “I’ve Been Losing You”, he was hissing his ‘S’s’ like a snake. Poor Chris and poor the watching British public as this was a honking cover version. I’ve said this before but Suggs’s solo career has always been completely at odds to his Madness one for me. I like Madness and have even seen them live but Suggs on his own just doesn’t compute. For some reason in the mid 90s though, his awful Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel covers won the approval of UK record buyers giving him two Top 10 hits. Parent album “The Lone Ranger” achieved silver sales status and provided Suggs with a further three smaller chart hits but by the time of his second solo album “The Three Pyramids Club” (which sounds like the title of a Richard Osman novel), this brief infatuation was over and it sank without trace. Suggs never really returned to his solo career although he did have a hit with “Blue Day” in 1997 which was the FA Cup final song for my (and his) beloved Chelsea FC (more about cup final songs later). However, just last year, he teamed up with Paul Weller for the Slade-esque spelt single “Ooh Do U Fink U R”.

I’m always very cautious when it comes to commenting on rap artists purely because I don’t know enough about their music and its culture. I’m a white man who grew up in Worcester as a pop kid. If I tried to do any kind of analysis, it would be totally inauthentic. I guess I’m still allowed an opinion on what I’m watching and hearing on these TOTP repeats though right? I can’t just skip over a rap artist appearing on the show can I? The completist in me won’t let me just swerve this so here I go. I know the name Busta Rhymes – of course I do. I spent the 90s working in record shops. Could I name any of his tracks unprompted? Not a one. Would I recognise any if I were to check out his discography? Let’s see…

*checks Busta Rhymes discography*

Oh yeah. He did “Hit ‘Em High (The Monsters Anthem)” from the Space Jam soundtrack with B-Real, Coolio, LL Cool J and Method Man. And therein lies the problem. The only Busta Rhymes hit I know is from a movie about basketball starring Bugs Bunny. I don’t have any depth of knowledge nor relevance to the world of rap. OK, I’ll have to just go for the most superficial of reviews. “Woo-Hah!! Got You All In Check” was the debut single for Busta Rhymes and would peak at No 8 in both the US and the UK. I initially thought that the BBC censor was sleeping again to have let the lines “let’s get high” and “roll some weed” get through but then I checked led out the full, explicit lyrics. Dearie me! There’s no way any of that was getting through the BBC bad language filter. Mary Whitehouse would have self combusted.

Now this is an interesting link from Beertje even though she possibly only used it for its play on words. “In Holland we have three types of people; soccer players, cheeseheads and Klubbheads” she informs us. OK, so let’s break this down. Soccer players? Well, of course the Dutch have a rich history of producing fantastic footballers. One of my mates could talk for hours about Johan Cruyff and ‘total football’. Cheeseheads? I had to do some research on this I have to admit. It’s not a term to refer to enthusiasts of Dutch cheese though that would seem legitimate. No, apparently its usage dates back to the 19th century when Holland was occupied by Napoleon’s army and Dutch cheese producers got fed up with French soldiers stealing their beloved Gouda cheese. As a form of protection when confronting said soldiers, the Dutch wore helmets made out of cheese barrels hence ‘cheeseheads’. The term actually became an insult used by the French and Belgians when referring to Dutch people. Hmm. So by making sure she shoehorned in a play on words to introduce a Dutch dance act, Beertje actually insulted her own country? Oh well.

Said dance act are a team of Dutch dance producers with more than 40 aliases for their recordings including Hi_Tack, Da Klubb Kings and my personal favourite Drunkenmunky. For this their biggest hit “Klubbhopping” however, they went by the moniker of Klubbheads. I’m not going to lie, listening back to this is just making me feel nauseous, like somebody’s taken a club to my head. Klubbheads indeed.

Finally something approaching a decent tune. Having made it big with their last single “Slight Return”, The Bluetones weren’t about to rock the boat by messing with that hit formula and so they didn’t with its follow up “Cut Some Rug” which was certainly cut from the same cloth as its predecessor. Jangly guitars, a shuffling backbeat and some acerbic lyrics (“And all the time you remind me of blitzkreig and the doodle bug, salt upon a bubbling slug”) all allied with a hummable chorus. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it was the gameplan here alright.

Having gone off on a tangent earlier when discussing the origins of the phrase ‘Cheeseheads’, let’s continue that theme with an exploration into backstory of an expression that I’ve certainly used in this blog before- ‘cut some rug’. Apparently, it dates back to the 1930s and 40s when the ‘jitterbug’ dance was popular. Owing to its high energy moves, its protagonists would leave lots of marks on the dance floor that looked like cuts in a carpet or rug. I’m not sure that ‘The Bluetones shuffle’ as demonstrated by Beerjte in her intro would inflict such damage. By the way, I might make this cultural references thing an occasional series you know! Or maybe not.

One of those nearly one hit wonders now when an artist who is only known for one big hit single but whose discography shows that they actually had a further but minor chart entry. Yeah, one of them. The Tony Rich Project was, unsurprisingly, the project of one Tony Rich (real name Antonio Jeffries), a songwriter for LaFace Records who penned compositions for the likes of Toni Braxton, Boyz II Men and TLC. He made the leap into the sphere of artist in his own right with debut single “Nobody Knows”, a tender, soulful ballad that hit big both in the US and over here. Follow up single “Like A Woman” made it to No 27 in our charts then nothing. Well, not nothing as Tony continued to record and release new material well into the new century with his last album appearing in 2017 but he would never have any other major chart success. There is no truth in the rumour that Tony’s artist name inspired the title of 1999’s supernatural horror film phenomenon The Blair Witch Project. That particular movie’s name was influenced, of course, by British soft rockers The Alan Parsons Project.

“Let’s get rocked!” as the next band once sang. Def Leppard (for it is they) hadn’t released a studio album since 1992’s “Adrenalize” filling that gap with a greatest hit and B-sides collection. When the new album finally arrived, it wasn’t quite the Def Leppard of old. There were a few reasons why, not least that the band had seen which way the wind was blowing in the arena of rock music and had understood that post grunge, the sound that had served the so well in their late 80s pomp wasn’t going to cut it in the mid 90s. Added to that was the realisation that they’d been, as described by guitarist Vivian Campbell, living in a state of arrested development singing songs about putting out the trash and that they should write more mature songs that reflected their adult experience. And there was plenty of source material – founding member Steve Clark had died in 1991, guitarist Phil Collen had got divorced, bassist Rick Savage was battling facial paralysis condition Bell’s palsy and the death of his father whilst drummer Rick Allen and lead singer Joe Elliott had been arrested for spousal abuse and assault respectively. Given all that dark and heavy material, the album’s title track and lead single “Slang” seems remarkably jaunty. I can’t say that I’ve ever listened to the rest of the album but supposedly it does see the band operating outside of their comfort zone with more industrial and electronic sounds incorporated. It garnered mixed reviews ranging from a confused mess of an album to plaudits for trying to do something new. Back to the single though and it doesn’t really go anywhere for me and sounds like a poor man’s version of “Slam” by Dan Reed Network.

The one thing that did stand out for me was Joe Elliott’s super straightened new hairdo. It put me in mind of – and this is very niche – a particular style of grooming that some owners of the Maltese breed of dog go in for. We have a Maltese dog and we make sure he has a regular trim at the dog groomers but I’ve seen owners displaying their dogs at Crufts with the fur all grown out and straight as a curtain. Poodle rock indeed.

The next three hits we have seen before on the show starting with an ex-No 1! Yes, it’s that curious TOTP phenomenon of a record having gone down the charts and either going back up or putting the blocks on its descent to such an extent of being afforded a place on the show’s running order. We saw it in an earlier 1996 show when Oasis’s “Wonderwall” got a repeat airing when it re-entered the Top 5 having dropped out of the Top 10 a few weeks earlier. Now it’s the turn of Mark Morrison whose “Return Of The Mack” is still holding at No 2 despite having been on the charts for two months. The last time Beerjte was hosting, she introduced Morrison as that week’s No 1 and he celebrated by picking her up and carrying her off at the end of the song. Thankfully, she’s put enough physical distance between them this time to ensure that doesn’t happen again. In her intro, there’s a moment where she throws a look in the direction of Morrison on the stage behind her and I’m sure you can detect something in it that says “don’t think of trying it again mister”. I hope so anyway.

I would never describe Damon Albarn as a “Charmless Man” but by his own confession, this period of Blur’s career saw him potentially as a clueless one. If that sounds harsh, look at this from Damon himself:

The following year, Damon Albarn described “Charmless Man” as “The work of someone who was severely fucked up,” adding, “Where is it coming from? It's got nothing to do with anything.” #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 5, 2024

See? I think I said in my last post when Blur were on the show performing this track in the ‘exclusive’ slot that it was a decidedly decent song and I stand by that though it’s clearly not one of their most high profile despite its chart peak of No 5. I’m sure Liam Gallagher would have dismissed it as “chimney sweep music” though. I’m not sure what drummer Dave Rowntree’s over sized drumsticks nor Graham Coxon’s shrunken guitar in this appearance were all about – presumably some band in joke. Graham’s ‘Freedom For Tooting!’ t-shirt was obviously a reference to the 70s sitcom Citizen Smith starring Robert Lindsay as hapless revolutionary Wolfie Smith. I recently listened to an interview with Lindsay and he recounted that the fame that the role brought him had its downsides including being harassed by both admiring women and jealous boyfriends on a night out and, in one extreme case, being blamed for an outbreak of football hooliganism when attending a match played by his hometown team of Ilkeston as the perpetrators had come dressed as Wolfie for the day. I’m pretty sure that Graham Coxon would never have done anything so charmless.

George Michael stays at No 1 with “Fastlove” for a second of three weeks. This track would prove to be his last hit in America, a territory that he dominated in his “Faith” era. That album provided George with six huge hit singles including four consecutive No 1s between ‘87 and ‘88. Quite phenomenal. Things started to tail off a bit with 1990’s “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1” albeit that lead single “Praying For Time” did furnish another chart topper. By the time of the “Older” album nearly a decade after his late 80s pomp, although sizeable hits, “Jesus To A Child” and “Fastlove” would peak at Nos 7 and 8 respectively whereas both hit the top spot in the UK. This was very much a role reversal of those “Faith” chart positions – of those four American No 1s, in the UK the corresponding peaks were:

2 – 11 – 8 – 13.

Although his US numbers were down, George continued to stack ‘em high over here throughout the rest of the decade. These were the chart positions of his seven single releases after “Fastlove” until the end of ‘99:

2 – 3 – 2 – 10 – 2 – 2 – 4

There may have even been cultural differences in terms of chart compilation and release strategies that explains the contrasts highlighted above but I thought they were…well…worth highlighting.

We play out with another football song but, as I said at the top of the post, it’s still not that one. This TOTP aired two days before the 1996 FA Cup final between Liverpool and Manchester United and it tuned out to be a complete damp squib of a game that was decided by a solitary goal by Eric Cantona (himself the subject of yet another football song in the Top 40 that will feature on the following TOTP repeat). Already in the charts was the cup final song by United called “Move Move Move (The Red Tribe)” which would peak at No 6. Released a week later was this effort from their ultimately defeated opponents under the name of Liverpool FC & The Boot Room Boyz. Despite losing the cup final (cream suits and all), this pile of shite actually won the chart battle when it entered the chart at No 4. With a similar title to United’s hit – “Pass & Move (It’s The Liverpool Groove)” – it also tried to capture the predominant dance sound of the time much as their rivals had. Both failed dismally. Liverpool should have just updated 1988’s “Anfield Rap” – now that was a football record with a groove.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Suggs featuring Louchie Lou and Michie One	Cecilia	Never
2	Busta Rhymes	Woo-Hah!! Got You All In Check	No
3	Klubbheads	Klubbhopping	Not likely
4	The Bluetones	Cut Some Rug	I did not
5	The Tony Rich Project	Nobody Knows	Nah
6	Def Leppard	Slang	Negative
7	Mark Morrison	Return Of The Mack	Nope
8	Blur	Charmless Man	No but I had their Great Escape album
9	George Michael	Fastlove	Another no
10	Liverpool FC & The Boot Room Boyz	Pass & Move (It’s The Liverpool Groove)	As if

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 02 MAY 1996

Posted on July 27, 2024 by 80stastic

When I write these reviews, I try and make reference to what else was going on at the time of the show’s broadcast either nationally, globally or indeed personally on occasion. Well, I’ve made a discovery on the last of those angles – I’ve found an old diary from 1996. I’d forgotten that I used to keep one from about 1991 to 1997. I can’t find the rest of them which were presumably lost in various house moves but the ‘96 one is intact. Now obviously I’m not going to reveal my inner most thoughts from back then but it might prove to be a gold mine for filling in some background details. So what was I doing on the day of this particular TOTP?

*refers to diary*

Ah excellent! It was my day off (I was working in the Our Price store in Stockport) so what did I do with it? I went into town to pay our council tax bill! The 27 year old me knew how to live back then! In my defence, I don’t think I paying bills by direct debit was commonplace in 1996 and though I was no poll tax rioter, I probably wanted some control over when I paid it on account of permanently being skint. Paying bills wasn’t the only thing I was doing though. In an unlikely push to better myself, I was doing two courses at this time. One was a First Aid class and the second was about 50s music. Get me! These days I struggle to read an online article in its entirety. I also note that on this day, Glenn Hoddle accepted the offer of becoming the next England manager and would be leaving my beloved Chelsea at the end of the season. I write this post the day after Gareth Southgate has just resigned as national team coach following England’s loss to Spain in the Euros 2024 final. Whilst it may have seemed as if the appointment had come a bit early in Hoddle’s career, he looked like Pep Guardiola compared to the current crop of names being lined up to replace Southgate. Graham Potter?! Do me a favour!

Now this is all very interesting (or not) but what about TOTP? What about the music? You’re right of course so let’s get to it and we start with “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit” by Gina G. Despite having been on the show at least twice already, she’s back on tonight in another promotion push as the UK’s 1996 Eurovision entry with the contest just over two weeks away. Due to the multiple appearances, Gina and her backing dancers were step and word perfect by this point and I have to say it all hangs together pretty well. Gina seemed to be channeling her inner Kylie with her glittery micro dress and wide, perma-smile and why not? One of her dancers (the one in the pink dress) looks a bit like ex-EastEnders actress Samantha Janus who of course represented the UK at Eurovision in 1991. It isn’t her but she had me fooled for a while or perhaps I should say just a little bit.

In a recent TOTP repeat, we witnessed the sad spectacle of Miss Diana Ross making a fool of herself by covering Gloria Gaynor’s disco classic “I Will Survive” as she searched desperately for a hit to keep her relevant in the mid 90s. I said at the time of reviewing her performance that we would be seeing and hearing another cover of the track very shortly and that time is now. Chantay Savage (nothing to do with Robbie, Lily or Doc) however took the track in a completely different direction, slowing it down so much that it was reconstructed as an R’n’B ballad. Although it did little for me, I give her full marks for creativity. Sadly, such imagination was lacking when it came to naming her album which was called “I Will Survive” (Doin’ It My Way)” – a more literal title it’s hard to conceive. Chantay would never have another UK hit single in her own right though she did co-write “We Got A Love Thang” for CeCe Peniston in 1993 which went Top 10.

I should have said that tonight’s host is the very affable Michelle Gayle who is perhaps being slightly disingenuous when she says in her intro to The Manchester United FA Cup Final Squad and their hit “Move Move Move (The Red Tribe)” that she doesn’t know if United will win the league and FA Cup double for the second time in three years. History records that the Red Devils did indeed do the ‘double double’ in 1996, a view that was obviously not available to Michelle seeing as those events were yet to happen but I’m pretty sure that they were red hot favourites to do so. Three days after this TOTP aired, Fergie took his team to Middlesbrough, easily won 3-0 and secured the Premier League title having successfully hunted down Newcastle United who led the table by 12 points in January, Kevin Keegan rants and all. Six days on from that, they were at Wembley for the FA Cup final against a Liverpool side who were no slouches but neither were they anywhere near the great teams of their 70s and 80s history. It would have been a shock (albeit a mild one) had the Scousers triumphed. As it turned out, the 1996 final was a terrible game with Eric Cantona’s late winner sparing us the misery of extra time. The fact that the final is best remembered for the Liverpool squad’s horrendous cream suits says everything.

Alex Ferguson’s United were in the middle of their 90s pomp but at least their dreadful cup final song for this season didn’t replicate the success of its 1994 counterpart “Come On You Reds” which inexplicably topped the charts. The good news is that unless they released one for the 1999 FA Cup final which formed part of their historic treble (I can’t recall if they did or not) this should be the last time I have to review any more of their singles. The bad news is that we haven’t seen the last of football related hits in 1996 by a long chalk.

Blimey! This next song is as dull as my diary! If I thought 3T’s last hit “Anything” was as drippy as the roofs of some of the stadiums at EURO 2024, I hadn’t reckoned on its follow up “24/7”. Jacko’s nephews have tried to inject a slightly more uptempo beat to it than its predecessor but it seems to just shine an even harsher light on how insipid a tune it is. The guy who dramatically flung his rucksack to the ground during performances of “Anything” (I’ve no idea which one he is out of Taj, Tyrell and TJ) seems to have lost his prop for this single – maybe the song wasn’t his bag (ahem).

I’m guessing that after being introduced by Chris Eubank the other week as “an absolute tottie’, Sleeper’s Louise Werner might have expected a less suggestive intro from a fellow female artist but Michelle Gayle can’t resist referring to her as “sexy” and lumping her in with similarly categorised pop star Louise (“she’s called Louise – aren’t they all?”). Louise and her band (now I’m at it, making it all about the female lead singer) are into the Top 10 for the first time with “Sale Of The Century” and to celebrate, she’s come in a top that is appropriately Britpop in style. In fact, what with that and her jumping and hopping stage moves, she’s coming across like a feminine version of Damon Albarn (more of whom later). At least she’s not just standing there statuesque (see what I did there?).

Louise would go on to be a successful author post Sleeper and before their reforming in 2017 writing both fiction and an account of her music career Just For One Day: Adventures In Britpop (also published as Different For Girls: My True–life Adventures In Pop). The blurb for that autobiography includes the line “eating Twiglets backstage and enviously eyeing up Damon Albarn’s plate of foreign cheeses”. Don’t cheddar tear over him Louise! It’ll ruin your mascarpone. These cheese puns are starting to grate now aren’t they?

As is the case with Erasure, there’s a list of every Pet Shop Boys single in my memory banks from 1985 to the early 90s that I’m pretty sure I could recite in its entirety. However, as is also the case with Erasure, it all starts to go a bit hazy around the mid 90s when, despite working in record shops for the entire decade, I must have taken my eyes off what both duos were up to. “Before” is a case in point. This track is definitely not anywhere to be found in my ageing grey matter cells. It was, however, the lead single from sixth studio album “Bilingual” which was actually Chris and Neil’s first since 1993’s “Very”. However, there had been Pet Shop Boys releases in the meantime in the form of the collections “Disco 2” and “Alternative” which were a remix album and B-sides compilation respectively.

“Bilingual” didn’t appear until the start of September so “Before” preceded it by four months making it feel like a stand alone single which maybe explains why I don’t remember it. I do recall second single “Se a vida é (That’s The Way Life Is)” which came out a few weeks before the album which is presumably why I would have sworn that was its lead single. Why the early release date for “Before”? I’m not sure but Wikipedia tells me that in 1995, Neil and Chris ended their contract with the American arm of EMI and singled with Atlantic who launched a renewed marketing campaign to promote the duo in the US so maybe that had something to do with it? Or maybe they wanted to consolidate on the success they had achieved with their collaboration on “Hallo Spaceboy” with David Bowie in the February and didn’t want to leave a gap of six months until their next single? Either way, I’m not sure “Before” deserves all this retrospective attention and consideration as it’s a pretty weak track in my opinion. Sure it was a Top 10 hit but the Pet Shop Boys fan base would always guarantee that for a release of brand new material. It’s not terrible it’s just not that memorable. Listening to it now, I could imagine its chorus being sung by (the horror!) Take That on one of their 90s hits. Even the video is just full of special effects and computer graphics which seems to dominate all their promos around this time and which showed a lack of foresight as they have dated so much as to appear naff now if not…erm… before.

The last time The Cure were on the show performing “The 13th” I wasn’t especially complimentary about the song. I’m not the only person who has a downer on it. A regular reader of this blog commented that the whole album it was taken from – “Wild Mood Swings” – was such a disappointment when it came out and the fact that “The 13th” was one of the better tracks on it shows how poor it was. Online forums seemed to be split in their judgement on it. Some people rate it in their Top 10 songs by The Cure whilst others state (and I quote) “The 13th is justifiably shat on by most fans” and that “it sounds like something brought up from the sewer”. On reflection, have I been too harsh? Sure, it’s a bit out there and maybe not what we might have expected but look at their back catalogue. The Cure have always innovated and reinvented themselves. Look at the difference between “The Walk” and “The Lovecats” first example – two non-album singles that were released within four months of each other in 1983 but were years apart sonically it seemed to me. If only “The 13th” could have peaked at No 13 instead of its actual high of No 15, my musical itch would have been scratched.

If asked to come up with a song by the Smashing Pumpkins then “Tonight, Tonight” would be the only track I could name with total confidence. Nothing to do with the Genesis hit which almost shared the same title (theirs had an extra ‘Tonight’ in it), there’s a reason why this one has stood tall and proud in my music recollections – it’s magnificent. A sprawling epic masterpiece, it was recorded with a 30 piece string section courtesy of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It’s one of those rare songs where the standout hook of the chorus is actually purely instrumental with no vocal, well for me it is anyway. Those swooping, descending strings allied to rousing guitars and a galloping drum riff – remarkable stuff. Somehow though it didn’t make me explore their material any further. Maybe I should do now that investigating an artist’s back catalogue is so much easier due to streaming platforms like Spotify. As for host Michelle Gayle’s claim that although it was the band’s first appearance on the show that she was sure it wouldn’t be the last, as far as I can tell, they never made it back to the TOTP studio despite having a further five UK Top 40 hits.

George Michael is straight in at No 1 with “Fastlove” just as he did with previous single “Jesus To A Child”. This was impressive stuff given it was all happening at the peak of Britpop and George’s chart toppers had been a melancholic ballad and then a funky, R&B workout. The successful streak continued when parent album “Older” was released eleven days after this TOTP aired and immediately went to No 1, going on to sell 1.8 million copies in the UK. It was quite a comeback given his last studio album had been six years earlier.

It wasn’t the first time he’d had consecutive No 1 singles. His first two solo hits “Careless Whisper” and “A Different Corner” both scaled the heights albeit two years apart and punctuated by a raft of Wham! releases. If you count his 1987 duet with Aretha Franklin “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)” then it’s three on the bounce. Similarly, if you go back to George’s involvement in the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert and his version of “Somebody To Love” on the “Five Live EP” in 1993, then there’s also a run of three No 1s including “Jesus To A Child” and “Fastlove”. However, despite a subsequent string of No 2 hits, the latter would prove to be his final UK chart topper.

Perhaps lazily, when talking about the Battle of Britpop in the Summer of 1995, the phrase ‘Blur won the battle but Oasis won the war’ is often trotted out. This translates as “Country House” beat “Roll With It” to No1 but in terms of albums, “(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?” sold loads more than “The Great Escape”. Whilst that is true with the former achieving sales equivalent to seventeen times platinum compared to the latter’s three times, Blur’s fourth studio album sometimes unfairly gets a bad rap. Yes, all the critical plaudits go to “Modern Life Is Rubbish” and “Parklife” for being musical milestones and I don’t disagree but if you apply a purely statistical analysis, “The Great Escape” is the only Blur album to furnish the band with four Top 10 hits including a No 1. 1997’s eponymous follow up album came close to matching that accomplishment but was let down by fourth single “M.O.R.” peaking at No 15. The fourth single from “The Great Escape” was “Charmless Man” which is a decidedly decent song that doesn’t have the profile it maybe deserves with TOTP not contributing to it by only showing 30 seconds of its video over the closing credits. Said video features the actor Jean-Marc Barr as the titular protagonist who would be one of the actors regularly employed by the controversial film director Lars Von Triers in his movies. In this very year of 1996, the first of his Golden Heart Trilogy of movies was released. Breaking The Waves though, is one of the most miserable films I have ever seen – truly charmless.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Gina G	Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit	I did not
2	Chantay Savage	I Will Survive	No
3	The Manchester United FA Cup Final Squad	Move Move Move (The Red Tribe)	Never!
4	3T	24/7	I’ll give you one guess…
5	Sleeper	Sale Of The Century	Nope
6	Pet Shop Boys	Before	Negative
7	The Cure	The 13th	Nah
8	Smashing Pumpkins	Tonight, Tonight	Apparently not but I really should have
9	George Michael	Fastlove	It’s another no
10	Blur	Charmless Man	No but I had The Great Escape album

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/m0020sr3/top-of-the-pops-02051996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 22 FEB 1996

Posted on June 7, 2024 by 80stastic

Welcome to another instalment of TOTP Rewind, the blog where I, a man who turned 56 yesterday, reviews past episodes of the legendary pop music show and who, despite having lived through this era and worked in record shops for nigh on the whole of the 90s, often has zero recall of some of the acts and songs featured. Don’t let that put you off though! I remember some of it – honest! To help stimulate my brain into activity, and I haven’t done this in a while, I’m going to check in on what I was up to in early 1996 in my personal life (I will get to the music eventually I promise!). Well, I was working at the Our Price store in Stockport and had been there for about a year following the closure of the Market Street, Manchester shop. Retail was hard work but the product was exciting and the staff all pretty much got on with each other (usually) so there were regular after work drinks in the town’s hostelries.

My life was ticking along nicely then until it was rudely interrupted by me being called up for jury service. If you’ve never done it, I can say that it was both fascinating and terrifying. I don’t know if it’s still the same as I’ve not done it since but you were expected to serve for a minimum of two weeks with the courts meeting the costs of your wages. Two weeks off work might have sounded great and indeed day one was spent just sitting around waiting to be called onto a jury which I wasn’t. I remember I was reading Trainspotting by Irvine Walsh and pretty much finished the whole book that day. First thing on day two though I was selected for a jury. Watching the defence and prosecution making their cases in court was fascinating. It wasn’t until they’d finished and you had to go and discuss the case as a jury that it became real and that was the scary bit. That 17th century saying describing the make up of a jury as “twelve good men and true” was a load of bollocks I was to discover and I don’t mean the obvious flaw that women have been serving on juries since the 1920s. I vowed there and then never to get in trouble with the law because if my misdemeanour went to court, the calibre of people deciding your fate could not be guaranteed. I won’t go into any details of the case but one bloke came to his personal verdict straight away based on what the accused looked like, refused to consider any counter arguments and sat there reading his copy of The Sun for the rest of the day. As we couldn’t come to a verdict we were all agreed on by the end of play, we started to wonder what would happen. Would we have to stay overnight in a hotel like in the movies? Fearing this might be the case, The Sun reading bloke started to panic saying he was meant to be going out with the lads that night and so offered to change his mind if it would help! I was appalled! In the end, we were just told to go home and not talk about the case.

When we reconvened the following day, The Sun reader assumed his original stance and we were subsequently dismissed as a jury as we were taking to too long to come to a verdict for this type of case (an historical one brought years after the event with no physical evidence). The experience has stayed with me ever since. Back to the TOTP though and I wonder if there are any acts on tonight who should be tried for crimes against popular music?

Well, “I Wanna Be A Hippy” by Technohead must surely have some charges to face. As established in a previous post, this was an example of gabber dance music, a subgenre of hardcore techno and definitely not happy hardcore as I initially surmised. What it undoubtedly was, of course, was hideously irritating crap that, horror of horrors, also refused to shift from your brain for hours once heard.

I can think of no more of a condemnation of it than to point out that its chart peak of No 6 was actually bettered by a parody of it by The Smurfs later in the year retitled as “I’ve Got A Little Puppy” which got to No 4 despite featuring the lyric “I take it for a walk, pooper pooper scooper”. Talk about dog shit!

I seem to be getting very bogged down in definitions of dance music currently and here’s another one. After the gabber strand of Technohead comes the Dream house of Robert Miles. At least host Lisa I’Anson had the good grace to name check the sub genre in her intro meaning I didn’t have to do too much research into working out which category it belonged to. “Children” was another of those mid-90s hits like “Missing” by Everything But The Girl that stayed on the UK charts for months. Ten weeks inside the Top 10 (of which the first seven were spent at either No 2 or No 3) and sixteen in the Top 40 in total. Quite remarkable for a tune that initially was not included on Radio 1 daytime playlists. No matter though as the UK, just like the rest of Europe where it went to No 1 in twelve different countries, was unable to resist its charms. Characterised by a floating, ethereal piano riff, was it just Jean Michel Jarre for the 90s? I don’t know enough about the “Oxygène” and “Équinoxe” hitmaker to make an informed judgment but it was certainly worlds away from the headache inducing relentless beats of the likes of the aforementioned Technohead and thank god for that!

Apparently, Miles created “Children” to help combat a tragic consequence of rave culture, namely that of clubbers falling asleep at the wheel of their vehicles after a night of strenuous dancing combined with alcohol and drug use. Dubbed ‘strage del sabato sera’ (Saturday night slaughter) in Italy, Miles wanted to compose a a calming track to end a DJ set to help the crowd acclimatise before heading home. I had no idea about any of that until now. It was just that instrumental dance track that I sold over and over the counter in Our Price.

Here’s a question. How do you follow up the biggest hit of your career which knocked down barriers that had previously excluded you from a wider audience and brought you into the mainstream consciousness? Well, if you’re Björk, you turn your back on that breakthrough hit and return to your original style and principles and resume your rather experimental music career. Reading that back, it sounds rather glib and possibly inaccurate. Or is it actually correct? Let’s examine the evidence. The case for the prosecution is that surely anyone not previously familiar with Björk’s oeuvre but who loved and bought “It’s Oh So Quiet” were not going to be tempted to continue that purchasing trend by the next single “Hyperballad” were they? A skittering, jerky, bleeping track about throwing objects off a cliff in the early morning before your partner awakes to symbolise the parts of yourself you must sacrifice in order to make a relationship work, this was a return to the Björk of old wasn’t it?

The case for the defence is that the track was critically acclaimed by the music press. Look at these reviews:

“…excellent example of music meeting art”

Diver, Mike (2009). “Review of Björk – Post”. BBC. Retrieved 25 November 2020.

“…a delightful track that all fans of quality music will enjoy.”

Baltin, Steve (9 March 1996). “Pop Singles”. Cash Box. p. 7. Retrieved 14 November 2022.

“All fans of quality music” eh? Well, that’s me told. Added to that is the fact that “Hyperballad” was a UK Top 10 hit and that Björk had just won a BRIT award for International Female Solo Artist would suggest she was hardly a cult figure any longer and that she had already crossed over into the mainstream quite successfully thank you very much. The verdict? The blogger is guilty of anti-Björk bias m’lud.

Next a duo who were continually accused of committing the crime of making bland and unworthy pop music – will the Lighthouse Family please rise! In their defence, their hit “Lifted” was co-written by Martin Brammer who was the vocalist in the rather excellent 80s band The Kane Gang who knew his way around a tune and indeed is an Ivor Novello Award nominee. The prosecution would level the charges that he’s also written songs for Olly Murs and Nick Carter of Backstreet Boys. My verdict would be that though not a fan, there are much more heinous musical misdemeanours to be offended by although the claim on Smooth Radio’s website that Lighthouse Family are “one of the most popular duos of all time” may result in litigation from Simon & Garfunkel, Soft Cell, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys…

From a duo to a trio now as it’s yet another appearance on the show for 3T and their hit “Anything”. I’m so bored of this lot and their drippy ballad that the only thing that will keep me watching is to see if the one in the hat has brought his backpack with him and whether he’ll dramatically throw it down on the floor again…

*keeps watching…*

He’s definitely got it with him…

*still watching…*

Pow! He’s slam dunked it again! Now cart them all off to jail. It is beyond reasonable doubt that they are guilty of assault and battery of my ears.

It’s time for the Battle of Britpop Version 2.0 that nobody ever talks about (apart from me) probably because it wasn’t really a proper thing. We all know that Blur won said battle in the summer of 1995 but there was nearly a repeat the following year. Perhaps deliberately, Oasis and Blur missed clashing release dates of their first singles of 1996 by a week meaning there was not officially a rematch of the two bands duking it out for the No 1 spot. This was probably just as well in the case of Damon and co as they would have been stopped in the first round by their northern counterparts. “Stereotypes” was the third single released from “The Great Escape” album and its chart high of No 7 was pretty respectable. However, when “Don’t Look Back In Anger” came out seven days later, its sales dwarfed those of “Stereotypes”. Well, they did in Our Price Stockport anyway. I’m pretty sure I have these figures correct – by my memory we sold 429 CDs of the Oasis single in week one but just 13 of Blur’s. Ooof! No wonder Noel Gallagher felt cocky enough to give this message to camera at the top of the show:

“Good evening Top of the Pops. Best band in the world, live and exclusive…and it’s not Blur”

To rub salt in the wound, the TOTP producers have got both bands in the studio together tonight and are letting Oasis perform two tracks after they’d already walked off with three BRIT awards (to Blur’s zero) three days earlier but to Blur’s credit, they seem to have taken it all in good grace with Damon acting all playful around Lisa I’Anson as she introduces them. As for “Stereotypes” as a song, it’s not the band’s best work by any measure. A functional, Blur-by-numbers track to my mind but supposedly it had originally been earmarked as the lead single from the album. Now if that Battle of Britpop had been “Stereotypes” v “Don’t Look Back In Anger” instead of “Country House” v “Roll With It”, we might have had a different winner.

And so to those naughty Manc lads who, as previously mentioned, have been allotted two songs on the show which was not a regular occurrence then or at any point in TOTP history. As far as I’m aware, only The Beatles and The Jam were given that honour previously. The Fab Four’s double appearance was way before my time but I distinctly remember The Jam performing double A-side “Town Called Malice” and “Precious” in 1982 as my Weller obsessed elder brother sat watching transfixed. Fast forward 14 years and it’s self confessed Jam fan Noel Gallagher taking up the baton from his hero. “Don’t Look Back In Anger” was the second of eight No 1s for Oasis and in truth, its success was no surprise. With the album “(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?” having already been out four months and gone multiple times platinum, you might have thought that a fourth single being lifted from it was destined to not pull up any trees sales wise as so many people already had it. However, such was the buzz around this huge anthem and so long had we known that it would be coming out as a single (it was initially due out in early January but was delayed by five weeks) that there was huge anticipation for its release.

I understand the criticisms that are levelled at it (and many other Oasis tracks) that it’s so derivative and steals from other songs. There’s the “Imagine”-esque piano opening, the lyric pinch from the legendary John Lennon memoirs cassette that was stolen from the Dakota Hotel, the similarity to “All The Young Dudes” and my own personal discovery that the chords are almost the same as those of “Ralph McTell’s “Streets Of London” and yet…I still think it’s a great song, possibly their best. I think there’s a valid claim here that this song and 1996 in general was the high point of the band’s career. Sure they wouldn’t release any new material for another 18 months but this was the year of the Maine Road gigs (more of them later) plus the two nights at Knebworth House where they performed to 250,000 people but could have sold 10 times the amount of tickets. I don’t think they were ever bigger than at this point. 1997 would bring the difficult third album “Be Here Now” and the whole cringey ‘Cool Britannia’ nonsense and subsequent years would see the band change the line up though remain popular but not be the phenomenon that they once were.

I certainly recall thinking this double TOTP performance was a big deal. The way Liam goes “yeah, yeah, yeah” to the studio audience as he crosses over with Noel as if to say “settle down, of course we’re playing another and we’re the only band who can do this because we’re the best”. That second song was their cover of Slade’s “Cum On Feel The Noize” which was one of the three extra tracks featured on the CD single. For some this was a lazy, hammy choice of song to cover but I loved it especially the piss taking Black Country accents the band put in at the beginning and end of the track. Well, I was 28 years younger then and I guess my sense of humour wasn’t as mature (?) as it is (?) now. The other tracks on that CD single were “Underneath The Sky” which didn’t have that much going for it in retrospect but which I thought was perfectly fine back then and “Step Out” which was a gloriously effervescent song that unfortunately gave more credence to the claims of those who were not Oasis fans that Noel just kept stealing other people’s work when it was found to be so similar to Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” that the soul legend had to be credited on the track.

So returning to those aforementioned Maine Road gigs, I did get to the Saturday one but I nearly missed out altogether. I knew that they were going on sale from the Manchester Apollo box office and the Apollo wasn’t that far from where we were living. As it happened, the day they went on sale was one of those when I was on jury service. This was great news as it meant I didn’t have to worry about getting to work and also gave me a bit of extra time as the courts didn’t open until about 10ish. Nothing could stop me getting those Oasis tickets now…except the monstrously huge queue that I found when I arrived at the Apollo. I thought I was getting there in time for the box office to open but hadn’t banked on the number of people who had camped out overnight to be at the head of the queue. I joined the back of it and looked at my watch. The queue wasn’t moving quickly and all that time that I thought I had was now not looking like nearly enough. So couldn’t I have just stuck it out and tuned up late at court? Not an option. On a previous day I’d witnessed a fellow jury member return late from lunch by a few minutes delaying the start of the afternoon session. The judge asked him how much his lunch had cost. “Five pounds” came the reply. “Add a zero to that and that’s how much your fine is for being late back” pronounced the judge. As I got closer to the box office window, the minutes were slipping away. I got to within six or seven people from the front of the queue before time ran out and I lost my nerve. I just walked away from the queue and headed into town to do my public duty. Fortunately for me, my mate Paul (the chef from last week’s post who liked to play rap music loudly while washing his whites in our flat) was on the case and got tickets for us all so I did go to the Oasis ball after all.

The “Spaceman”’s orbit has started to decay and he’s crashing back down to earth. Yes, it’s the fifth and final week at No 1 for Babylon Zoo and what a strange ride it was. The nation lost its head over the music on a 30 seconds jeans advert causing the full track to be released. Only then did the truth come out that it wasn’t what the advert had promised but we gave a collective shrug of our shoulders and went out and bought it in our droves anyway. Jas Mann got to be the pop star who he always believed it was his destiny to be for a little while before suffering a backlash that this country always reserves for people deemed to have been too successful. We might see Babylon Zoo on TOTP again in these repeats as there were a couple of minor hit singles in the wake of their No 1 but their time in the spotlight was waning faster than a shooting star across the sky. Unlike “Starman”, “Spaceman” didn’t blow our minds, at least not for long anyway.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Technohead	I Wanna Be A Hippy	Never
2	Robert Miles	Children	No
3	Björk	Hyperballad	I did not
4	Lighthouse Family	Lifted	Nah
5	3T	Anything	Nope
6	Blur	Stereotypes	No but I had The Great Escape album with it on
7	Oasis	Don’t Look Back In Anger / Cum On Feel The Noize	Yes sir!
8	Babylon Zoo	Spaceman	I am going to admit to buying it but not for me for a friend who was obsessed with it so she could use my staff discount – honest!

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001zj0c/top-of-the-pops-22021996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP Rewind – the 90s

My memories of 90s chart music

TOTP 12 MAR 1999

Disclaimer

TOTP 05 MAR 1999

Disclaimer

TOTP 19 FEB 1999

Disclaimer

TOTP 26 SEP 1997

Disclaimer

TOTP 20 JUN 1997

Disclaimer

TOTP 31 JAN 1997

Disclaimer

TOTP 10 JAN 1997

Disclaimer

TOTP 09 MAY 1996

Disclaimer

TOTP 02 MAY 1996

Disclaimer

TOTP 22 FEB 1996

Disclaimer