Bryan Adams | TOTP Rewind – the 90s

TOTP 23 AUG 1996

Posted on October 23, 2024 by 80stastic

According to my 1996 diary, around this time I received a reward cheque for £50. What for? Well, back in the day, if a retail worker took a customer’s credit card out of circulation at the request of the card issuer, they would send you a cheque for that amount as a thank you. The way it would work is that the customer with the overspent card would try and buy something on it and when it was put through the PDQ machine, the display would show the message ‘contacting card issuer’ and you’d have to pick up the phone that was part of the machine and talk to the customer’s bank. They’d ask a couple of questions about the transaction and possibly ask to speak to them in person as well. The chances were that ultimately you would get asked to retain the card and cut it up in front of them before sending it back to the bank. The experience was both exciting (at the thought of the £50 reward) and unnerving (as to how the customer would react) at the same time. Mostly they would be sheepish and let you do what you had to do but not always. One in particular I remember went ballistic whilst talking to the bank shouting at the top of his voice “Don’t you know who I am?! I’m a knight of the f*****g realm!”. I don’t know what the person on the other end of the line said but it must have been withering as the customer gave me the phone back, said sorry and sloped off. Anyway, eventually the company I was working for (Our Price) changed their policy so that the reward cheques didn’t go to the individual but the shop (supposedly into a fund for a Xmas do or some such) but this reward must have predated that as it came directly to me. So, in honour of that and in view of the recent furore over concert ticket prices, I thought I’d play a game of £50 quid or gig with the artists on this episode of TOTP. Would I rather have pocketed the money or paid to see the artist live?*

*For the purposes of the game, I’m assuming gig prices from 1996 not nowadays.

We start with an easy one – there is no way on earth I would have preferred to see Ant & Dec doing their thing (whatever it was) live over 50 quid in my pocket. Did they even do proper gigs on an official tour? They might have supported Take That back in the day or maybe that was just a plot line in an episode of Derry Girls? This was their first single to be released under the moniker we all now know (i.e. their real names) as opposed to that of the fictional characters from Byker Grove PJ & Duncan. Quite why they persisted with calling themselves that long after they had ceased to appear in the show I’m not sure. It seems a like an oversight. The track itself – “Better Watch Out” – is an absolute stinker! Some cobblers about Ant (who gets to sing the verses) being beaten up by the brothers of a girl he’s trying it on with. The lyrics suggest he might be deserving of said punishment as he then pursues the girl’s sister before indicating he might set his sights on their mother. What a cad! It’s a nasty sentiment matched by a terrible song – I can imagine it being used to soundtrack some chase scene in 70s children’s show Here Come The Double Deckers!

£50 or gig? Cash every time

Ah, now this one is tricky because I have actually seen the artist live previously. Don’t take the piss! I know we’re talking about Bryan Adams here but this was years ago, years before this TOTP performance even. Back in 1987, whilst a student at Sunderland Poly, myself and a friend who was also a housemate, took ourselves off to the big smoke of Newcastle and caught Bryan live at the City Hall where he was supported by T’Pau (I mean it! Stop sniggering!). It was a top gig, it really was! He was promoting his “Into The Fire” album that had failed to shift many units in the UK but which I’d liked anyway. This was years before that Robin Hood song and his slow decline into a world of ever more dreary ballads and he rocked the joint. Fast forward nine years and guess what? He’s just released a dreary ballad! “Let’s Make A Night To Remember” was the second single from his “18 Til I Die” album and was a massive disappointment after its lead single, the fun-filled “The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You” which I had enjoyed. It’s so one paced and trudges along with Bry singing some lines that sound like he’d pinched them directly from the Ladybird Book of Hackneyed Lyrics. In short it was a duffer though somehow got him all the way to No 10 in our charts.

£50 or gig? If the gig was that one from 1987, I’d definitely go back in time to relive it. A 2024 concert? I’ll take the Benjamins thanks.

Another difficult one as I have seen Pet Shop Boys live and not that long ago; as recently as May 2022 in fact. It was a COVID delayed concert that should have taken place in 2020 and it was bloody marvellous! A date on the Dreamworld – The Greatest Hits Live tour, it did exactly what it said on the tin meaning that yes, they did play this track “Se a vida é (That’s The Way Life Is)”. The setlist.fm website tells me it was the ninth song of the night as part of a mini medley with “Single Bilingual”.

The second single released from the “Bilingual” album, it’s a joyously upbeat track which was well received by the music press and given a lot of radio support – it’s Summer release date (presumably planned to exploit its seasonal sound) certainly aided its playlist potential. The promo video being shot at a water theme park in Florida almost certainly had one eye on that Summer vibe as well though I can’t help thinking it would have been better if it was in colour and the single itself should possibly have been released earlier in the season.

Linguistically, the title isn’t quite correct. The English translation from the Portuguese of “Se a vida é” is “If life is…” and not “That’s the way life is…” which would be “A vida é assim”. Ah, you say tom-ay-to, I say tom-a-to. The single peaked at No 8 (it perhaps should have been higher) – they would never have a higher placing single throughout the 90s up until this day.

£50 or gig? I’m going gig every time on this one. It’s a sin not to.

This one’s going to be an easy decision as well. After the breakthrough of their first UK hit single earlier in 1996 with “Get Down (You’re The One For Me)”, the Backstreet Boys staked their claim as the next big teen sensation with follow up “We’ve Got It Goin’ On” which would debut at No 3. What a load of old toss this was. Recycling that horrible ‘ner ner ner na ner ner ner ner ner’ hook used previously by the likes of Montell Jordan and MN8 (and which Peter Andre would also adopt in a TOTP repeat coming very soon), this also made no sense grammatically. “We’ve got it goin’ on for years” the band sing but surely that should be “we’ve had it goin’ on for years”. Even if they’d got the grammar spot on it still wouldn’t have made sense as their first release came in 1995 so one year before this. That’s ‘year’ – singular. Maybe they were projecting into the future and meant “We’ll have it goin’ on for years” which would have been statistically accurate as, sadly, they continued to have hits for the rest of the 90s and into the new millennium. Clearly temporal clauses were not what they had going on.

This lot really were just New Kids On The Block revisited. An all male American group with five members making music for the female teenage market. They even had the same type of characters in the band. There’s the cute, young looking one, the taller, older one with facial hair, the street wise one etc etc. In the case of the last type, Backstreet Boy Brian Littrell literally looks like his NKOTB counterpart Donnie Wahlberg. He’s also responsible for some horrible wailing when he goes all Mariah Carey early on in the song where he over annunciates the word “go” as “go-ooh-aoow”. Deeply unnecessary and unpleasant. Horribly, we’ll be seeing lots more of these berks in future repeats.

£50 or gig? Show me the money!

After Bryan Adams earlier, we now have another dreary ballad although this one is also nonsensical. I criticised the lyrics to “Why?” by 3T and Michael Jackson the other week as being hopeless for lines like this:

Why does Monday come before Tuesday? Why do Summers start in June?

“Why Lyrics.” Lyrics.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 23 Oct. 2024.

A reader of the blog got in touch to point out that not only were the song words abysmal but also inaccurate as only half the planet has its summers start in June – the Southern Hemisphere has its summers start in December. Thank you to Essor for pointing that out.

Watching the video for this one (another one all in black and white just like the Pet Shop Boys earlier – it must have been a thing back then), I noticed that the guy from 3T with his rucksack has bought it back for the promo and he walks along a corridor with it dangling by his side. What was the point of this accessory? Did he gave a product placement deal with a rucksack manufacturer in place? Or was it just his trademark gimmick like Shades and his sunglasses in the film That Thing You Do! ?

£50 or gig? Despite a Michael Jackson concert being quite the event, I’d still take the cash especially if the support were 3T.

This is the third time in the show for OMC and “How Bizarre” and they’ll manage another brief appearance as the play out song before they’re done. It’s not surprising given how long the record spent on our charts (fourteen weeks on the Top 40 of which six were inside the Top 10). This week it was at its peak of No 5 but would spend a further three consecutive weeks holding at No 8.

As host Beerjte Van Beers says, OMC stood for Otara Millionaires Club however if you google OMC the top result is not the “How Bizarre” hitmakers but a fishing tackle and outdoor products manufacturer called One More Cast. They have a range called Terminal Tackle which includes such items as ‘Tweakers Touch Me Up’, ‘Revibed Blood Worm Tippers’ and ‘Vitabitz Ring Swivels Size 11’ which all sound like double entendres to my uneducated angling brain. As for seeing them live, surely it would descend into the sketch from The Big Train below:

£50 or gig? Cash please!

My interest in REM had started to wane by the mid 90s to the point that I had very little anticipation for the new single from their tenth studio album “New Adventures In Hi-Fi” called “E-Bow The Letter” (with Patti Smith no less on backing vocals). In fact, it just about passed me by but then that was possibly a lot of people’s experience as their first new song for a couple of years was not radio friendly. In fact, it was almost anti-playlist. That doesn’t make it a poor song though of course but by the band’s own admission, it wasn’t an obvious nor easy choice of lead single which their record company struggled with just as they had with “Drive” being the first track released from “Automatic For The People”. In fact, “E-Bow The Letter” actually sounds quite similar to “Drive” so there’s sonic as well as thematic similarities. On first listen, it does seem to be a bit all over the place and, whisper it, miserable. However, there’s beauty in misery and the overall effect is…well…quite affecting. The ‘E-Bow’ of the title is a device to induce sustained vibration in an electric guitar string whilst the ‘letter’ refers to a communication never sent by Stipe to his friend River Phoenix who had died of a drug overdose at the Viper Club in Los Angeles three years earlier whilst the band inside played a song called “Michael Stipe”. The track would become the band’s then highest charting single when it debuted at No 4 and its parent album would get to No 1 but a decline in sales for the band was clearly happening as the latter sold significantly less than either “Monster” or “Automatic For The People”.

£50 or gig? Now supposedly I passed up the chance to see REM live in 1988 on their tour in support of the “Green” album. What my enthralling other option was I could not tell you but I regret it, especially now the band have broken up so I’m going ‘gig’ on this one.

Next a song that was the first ever to achieve over one million airplays in America and yet it hardly ever seems to get played in this country… or so I thought until I heard it all the time on Magic Radio* recently. Donna Lewis is a classic one hit wonder – almost. A huge, enormous hit then nothing ever again. “I Love You Always Forever” would spend nine weeks (!) at No 2 in America behind Los Del Rio’s “Macarena” and go to No 5 here in the UK as part of a five week stay inside the Top 10.

*Yes, I know – Magic Radio – but in this scary world I sometimes need to hear something soothing.

That US success led me to believe that Donna was American but she’s actually Welsh, hailing from Cardiff with the success of her hit bringing her a BRIT award nomination in 1997 for Best British Female Artist. More success seemed inevitable but her album, though selling a million copies in the US, performed averagely everywhere else including over here where it peaked at No 52. She would have one more UK chart entry (denying her that classic one hit wonder status) with follow up single “Without Love” spending a week at No 39. She did perform a duet with Richard Marx for the 20th Century Fox animated film Anastasia in 1997 that was a hit on the Adult Contemporary Billboard chart but that really was it for chart success although Donna still records to this day with her latest album having been released this year.

So what was it about “I Love You Always Forever” that struck a chord with audiences and gold for Donna? Well, it strikes me that it has a timeless quality – it could have been a hit in the 80s as easily as it was in the 90s and Donna’s girlish voice (often compared to Cyndi Lauper) suited the almost nursery rhyme chant of the chorus perfectly. Ultimately though, it was a light, joyful song that almost seemed to bring hope to a world that so often seemed dark. One reviewer described listening to it as “catharsis” and that, presumably, is why I suddenly started hearing it on Magic radio in 2024.

£50 or gig? It’s the same scenario as the OMC gig. Sorry Donna, it’s got to be the money.

It’s a fifth week at the top for the Spice Girls and “Wannabe” so it’s probably time to talk about some of the lyrics of their debut single. First off is the elephant in the room – what the hell was “zigazig ah” all about?! Well, Marie Claire magazine reckoned they had the answer in a 2023 article:

One of Wannabe’s co-writers revealed that it was inspired by a saying on set: ‘Shit and cigars.’ Apparently, the Spice Girls shared a recording studio in Shoreditch with a famous musician and decided to give said celebrity this nickname. Why? Well the anonymous co-writer told The Sun: “There was this one eighties pop dude who hated us for encroaching on what he considered ‘his turf’ which was boy bands and girl bands. This guy had this nasty habit of taking a dump in the shared khazi while smoking a cigar, so we took to referring to him as ‘Shit and Cigars’.”

By Jamie Troy-Pride, published 20 April 2023 in News

Wonder who Mr Shit and Cigars was then? Cigars conjures up images of someone whom I don’t want to reference so let’s move on to the bit in the song where the group all get a name check. Marie Claire has the inside story on that too:

‘We’ve got Em in the place’ is likely a reference to Emma/Baby Spice who, apparently, ‘likes it in your face’. Pretty self explanatory. Then ‘we got G like MC’ (Geri and Mel C) who ‘like it on an e’ – this one really caught us off guard. Who knew that we’ve been unknowingly singing that for over twenty years? ‘Easy V’ actually gets it very easy because she doesn’t come for free – ‘she’s a real lady’, so congrats Posh. And Mel B’s is steeped in mystery as we’ll just have to see what she’s all about.

By Jamie Troy-Pride, published 1 August 2023 in Features

Not sure I needed to know that but it’s too late now. A final word about the people that the girls get up on stage with them for this TOTP performance. Do you think that was planned or spontaneous? The woman on the end in the hot pants next to Mel B looked like a bit of a ‘wannabe’ to me.

£50 or gig? Say you’ll be there? Sorry but I’ll be at home counting my 50 notes.

The play out track is “You’ll Be Mine (Party Time)” by Gloria Estefan. I don’t remember this one and have very little to say about it as a consequence so I’m going to rely on a tale I’ve told before about a friend from Poly who once asked if Emilio was Gloria’s brother having conflated the name Estevez with Estefan. In my friend’s defence, Gloria’s husband is called Emilio.

£50 or gig? Miami Sound Machine or Fifty Pound PDQ Machine? I’ll take the latter thanks.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Ant & Dec	Better Watch Out	I did and I swerved when I saw you coming – NO!
2	Bryan Adams	Let’s Make A Night To Remember	Nah
3	Pet Shop Boys	Se a vida é (That’s The Way Life Is)	No but I had it on their Pop Art compilation
4	Backstreet Boys	We’ve Got It Goin’ On	Never
5	3T / Michael Jackson	Why?	As if
6	OMC	How Bizarre	No but my wife did
7	REM	E-Bow The Letter	Negative
8	Donna Lewis	I Love You Always Forever	Nope
9	Spice Girls	Wannabe	I did not
10	Gloria Estefan	You’ll Be Mine (Party Time)	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/m0023sy0/top-of-the-pops-23081996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 30 MAY 1996

Posted on September 4, 2024 by 80stastic

Those sneaky BBC4 schedulers have done me dirty by suddenly announcing with a day’s notice that the 1996 TOTP repeats are back. I thought I had at least another week to knock out this last remaining episode for review before they’d start again! Serves me right for dragging my feet I guess. Sadly, as well as being my favourite word, procrastination is also my middle name.

Before I crack on with this particular show, I should address the fact that we’ve missed one. The 23rd May episode was not repeated with the general consensus being that it was for reasons of sensitivity. One of the artists featured was the actor John Alford who is best known for his roles in Grange Hill and London’s Burning. Alford was giving this soap star turned pop star malarkey a go – well, it had worked for loads of others before him including another ex Grange Hill pupil in Sean Maguire who, by massive coincidence, was also on the same show. Alford managed three UK chart hits in 1996 (all cover versions obviously) but subsequently disappeared after his only album tanked when peaking at No 171. In later years he has had several run ins with the law and is currently awaiting trial for alleged sex offences involving a girl aged under 16 hence the decision not to air the show he featured on presumably. I’ve had a look at the rest of the running order for that particular episode and there is little chance of FOMO raising its head in my personal opinion. In addition to the aforementioned Alford and Maguire, most of the other hits on that week we’d already seen before including those by Robert Miles, Black Grape, Tony Rich Project, Gina G and, unbelievably, Mark Morrison (again!). We did miss out on SWV and Dodgy but I can live with that.

Tonight’s hosts are funny men Jack Dee and the late Jeremy Hardy who do the whole show as if they were BBC presenters from the 50s which is fairly amusing for most of the time. We open with, I read to my astonishment when researching them, the best-selling boy band of all time!! What?! The Backstreet Boys?! That’s what Wikipedia tells me, yes. It also says that they are the first group since Led Zeppelin to have their first ten albums reach the Top 10 on the US charts. OK, so there are a couple of things to unpack here before we go any further. Firstly, the Backstreet Boys have made ten albums?! Surely not! I’m checking their discography. Wait there…

…they have! Although, one of them is a Christmas album and didn’t make the Top 10 in America. Maybe that claim included Greatest Hits compilations? Secondly, the biggest selling boy band of all time? What about New Kids On The Block or Take That or One Direction? Or even one of those K-pop groups? And what criteria are we using to define boy band? Were The Beatles* a boy band or The Jackson 5? If they qualify the. Surely they outsold Backstreet Boys?

*Obviously they weren’t but I’m playing Devil’s Advocate here

Whatever the truth behind the claim, their sales certainly didn’t start out like that. Not in the UK anyway. Their first two singles releases failed to make the Top 40 over here (though both were subsequently rereleased and became hits). Somehow the UK were initially impervious to the five piece’s charms but we finally caved when third single “Get Down (You’re The One For Me)” made it to No 14. Quite why though remains a mystery to me as it’s awful, useless, just no good. Based around that annoying swing beat riff that was prevalent about a year before and used on hits by the likes of MN8 and Montell Jordan with hackneyed, pseudo sexual lyrics, it truly stank the place out. They weren’t even that good looking were they? Maybe the pretty boy one with blonde hair but the rest? What did I know though. Their next thirteen singles went Top 10 in the UK including a No 1, two No 2s and four No 3s. It seemed that we really were getting down with the Backstreet Boys and they were indeed the ones for us.

From a boy band to a collaboration that was rather more out of left field albeit that one of the collaborators was about to become so successful that a crossover into the mainstream would be inevitable. Jamiroquai were an established chart act by this point with two hit albums and a readily identifiable sound to their name. They also had Jay Kay as their frontman who was providing the gossip columns with material as he embraced the pop star lifestyle. In 1996, their third album “Travelling Without Moving” was released and would go on to sell eight million copies worldwide, four times more than the sales of their first two combined. It also generated their three highest charting singles to date in “Virtual Insanity” (No 3), “Cosmic Girl” (No 6) and “Alright” (No 6). Before all of those though came “Do U Know Where You’re Coming From”. This was a joint project with jungle pioneer M–Beat and you might be forgiven for thinking that this was a revamp of the similarly titled Diana Ross hit “Theme From Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To)” given that M-Beat’s last hit had been a cover of another female soul singer – Anita Baker’s “Sweet Love”. It wasn’t (thank God!). What it was though, to my ears, was a track that was trying to tick too many musical boxes but ended up being a confused, mess of a song. I think there might be a decent tune in there somewhere but all those shuffling, jungle breakbeats just kept fracturing any cohesiveness it might have had.

The single did get to No 12 and was included as an extra track on “Travelling Without Moving” (albeit with a very slight title change). M-Beat (aka Marlon Hart) would not have any further UK chart hits though he did produce remixes for Soul II Soul and Roy Davis Jr. who would have minor hits with them in the late 90s. Hart himself would become homeless not long after this TOTP appearance before taking IT consultancy positions for McLaren F1 and Lloyds Bank and finally returning to music in 2022. So he did know where he was coming from after all!

Well, this is shaping up to be a show of extremes. We move from a jungle/acid jazz-funk mash up to some hard rock courtesy of Metallica. A Top 10 hit pretty much everywhere, “Until It Sleeps” was the lead single from new album “Load”. It’ll come as no surprise to anyone who’s taken even a passing interest in my blog previously that I‘m not the biggest Metallica fan. I can acknowledge the power of “Enter Sandman” but that’s the extent of my appreciation. Consequently, this track didn’t and doesn’t make my musical radar bleep.

Its video is more interesting to me though. It looks like the set of a horror movie or perhaps the darker moments of Stranger Things most of the time but its imagery is apparently inspired by the work of 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, specifically The Garden Of Earthly Delights, Haywain and Ecce Homo. I can’t say that I’m that familiar with Bosch’s work but here’s @TOTPFacts with the visual evidence:

The video for “Until It Sleeps” was inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. This bit has a basic similarity to “Ecce Homo”, for example. #TOTP pic.twitter.com/ySF60N1qPw
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 9, 2024

And this human-eating monster is a nod to “The Garden of Earthly Delights” #TOTP pic.twitter.com/gW5BapAz4t
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 9, 2024

From high art to a rancid fart of a song. That dreadful moment of the 90s is upon us – it’s time for Peter Andre and “Mysterious Girl”. Brace yourselves everyone, we’re going in! It seems an odd concept to grasp now but there was a time when Peter Andre wasn’t a part of our lives, always there in the cultural milieu, grifting away at his latest cash grab and attempting to give himself a sheen of relevance and currency. So embedded is he in our society that in the 2007 British comedy film Grow Your Own starring Eddie Marsan, at one point in its story about locals on an allotment reacting angrily when some refugees are given plots on it, one character announces “You know who I blame? Peter Andre!”.

Back in 1996 though, he was only known for one minor hit single in the UK called…erm… “Only One”. A concerted media campaign targeting teen magazines though raised his profile enough to put out a follow up. “Mysterious Girl” was actually a rerelease having peaked at No 53 in September 1995. We all dodged a bullet then but when the gun was reloaded for a second time we were hit right between the eyes with both barrels. This horrible, cod reggae, Inner Circle rip off would spend eleven consecutive weeks in the UK Top 10 mainly skittering between Nos 2 and 3. Thankfully it never made it to the top of the charts though even that silver lining would become a black cloud burst in 2004 when it got to No 1 after a concerted campaign by DJ Chris Moyles. Gee, thanks Chris. I was working in the Our Price store in Stockport in 1996 and we sold this single over and over and over again. When we’d finished doing that, we sold it some more and every time I did, the questions running around my head were “What am I doing with my life? How did it come to this?”. I’d had similar thoughts when I’d been the stand in Father Christmas in Debenhams seven years earlier whilst sat in Santa’s Grotto surrounded by soft toy reindeers and nodding penguins. Peter Andre – so much to blame him for.

It’s an Antipodean double whammy as we go from an Australian dope in Peter Andre to a song called “Australia” that’s pretty dope – I believe that can also mean ‘good’ in the modern vernacular*.

*God, I sound like the two stuffy characters Jeremy Hardy and Jack Dee are using to present the show!

Occupants of the revived ‘album’ slot are Manic Street Preachers and a track from their “Everything Must Go” album that would also turn out to be the fourth and final single released from it when it made No 7 in the charts in the December of 1996. The album had only been out for ten days at this point and with it going straight in at No 2, a place on the BBC’s flagship music show was not only deemed appropriate but also assured and deserved. Interestingly, the band shunned the chance to preview their next single, the album’s title track, that would hit the shops in July and instead opted for this song that was written as a metaphor for getting as far away from the UK and its tabloid press as possible in the wake of band member Richey Edwards’ disappearance the previous year. Also of note in this performance is the nerdy look of James Dean Bradfield including spectacles and a neat and tidy haircut. Quite the change from those early “Generation Terrorists” era TOTP appearances.

I’d seen the Manics support Oasis* at their Maine Road gigs a month before this show aired and would see them headline their own show about a year afterwards. I also had the album – I was becoming quite the fan though what I was not a fan of was the cardboard sleeves they insisted releasing their singles in at this time. Working in a record shop as I was, they were a pain to display.

*No, I didn’t get involved in the frankly shameful Oasis reunion gigs tickets fiasco. I saw them when they were at the top of their game and relevant – I have no desire to revisit the money grabbing so and so’s they seem to have become nearly thirty years later.

If it’s time for Celine Dion then it must also be time for a big, heart string pulling ballad and we do indeed get both these outcomes with “Because You Loved Me”. Released as the second single from her “Falling Into You” album, it was also included on the soundtrack to the film Up Close And Personal starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. I’ve never seen this film before but reading the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, I don’t think I’ll be seeking it out for a viewing anytime soon. A rather stodgy sounding news drama/romance that bore no resemblance to the book on which it was based? No, I’m alright thanks. Pfeiffer was making a habit though of starring in films that had a huge big hit single featured in them. Just a few months before, Coolio had conquered the globe with his Stevie Wonder channeling “Gangsta Paradise” from Dangerous Minds.

As for “Because You Loved Me”, it’s all pretty laboured and predictable to my ears but was clearly aural nectar for lots of other people’s lugholes as it went to No 1 in America and won a Grammy and was nominated for an Academy Award. And to think we’re still 18 months away from her even bigger film ballad “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic. Gulp!

Having finally scored themselves a massive hit by rereleasing their debut single “Lifted”, the Lighthouse Family have shone their spotlight onto another earlier release to secure themselves a follow up. As well, as being the title track of their debut album, “Ocean Drive” was also their second ever single and their first ever Top 40 hit when it peaked at No 34 in October ‘95. Could the old rerelease strategy work for a second time? Of course it could and not even the fact that “Ocean Drive” was almost identical to “Lifted” would stop people buying it for a second time. Harsh? Possibly but almost certainly accurate. Yes, this was more of that radio friendly, lilting groove, smooth vocal, easy listening soul/pop that they made their name on. And why not? You didn’t have to buy or listen to it if it didn’t float your boat did you eh?

So where is Ocean Drive? Well, there’s a mile long road in the South Beach neighbourhood of Miami Beach, Florida which bears that name and is famous for its Art Deco hotels, restaurants and bars. So, that must be what inspired the song then? Well, according to Wikipedia, it wasn’t as it’s about a road in the UK. A quick search of the internet reveals that there is indeed an Ocean Drive and it’s not that far from me in Hull being located in a village in the East Riding of Yorkshire called Newport. There might not be any Art Deco buildings there but google maps shows me that there is a pub called the Crown & Anchor, one called The Jolly Sailor Inn and a fish and chip shop called Johnny Haddocks so Ocean Drive kind of fits the nautical theme. Mr and Mrs Lighthouse (as name checked by Dee and Hardy in their intro) would fit right in.

After being on the show as an ‘exclusive’ two weeks prior, Bryan Adams is back again as his single “The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You” has blasted into the charts at No 6. There’s something different about this second performance though that I can’t quite put my finger on…oh yeah, that’s it…Bry’s missing a member from his band. Where’s the guitarist that was standing on his left from the last time? In an attempt to fill the space, they’ve moved the keyboard player to the front of the stage but he’s no substitute for standing back to back with Bryan and rocking out like his guitarist did. Also, the drummer looks very different. On the first appearance the guy behind the kit had huge Afro hair but that’s all gone this time around. Is it the same guy? Was he just wearing a wig the first time? If it was the latter, he clearly decided to ignore the advice of the title of the track he was drumming on and ditched it.

Listening back to this, is it me or is there a slight whiff of U2 about some of the guitar work as it comes out of the chorus? No? Nothing like The Edge? How about Bry’s bass player then? If you squint your eyes does he look a bit like Adam Clayton? OK, you got me. All this talk of drummers, Adam Clayton and U2 is me trying to tee up the show’s play out tune but more of that later. First, we have a new No 1 to deal with…

And so after weeks of anticipation and a flurry of football songs in the charts that weren’t that football song, it’s finally here and it’s gone straight in at No 1. As with Peter Andre, it’s hard to recall now that there was a time when “Three Lions (It’s Coming Home)” wasn’t a part of the national psyche, wasn’t trotted out every time England played in a football tournament and wasn’t sung on the terraces. A time when the subject of a song about the England football team would instantly bring to mind New Order’s “World In Motion” or possibly “Back Home” from 1970. All of this was trampled into the turf by Baddiel, Skinner and the Lightning Seeds in 1996. Now bearing in mind that Euro 96 hadn’t even started by this point, the promotion surrounding the release of the single must have been pretty extensive to have propelled it straight to the top of the charts on week one. Despite working in a record shop at the time, I can’t recall if there was a massive buzz around the song before a ball had been kicked in anger but we must have sold loads of it in that first week. After debuting at the very top of the charts, the following month saw it mostly at No 2 with a solitary week at No 4 before returning to No 1, with sales no doubt fuelled by the England team progressing to the semi-finals. We all know what fate befell them there sadly. That month gap between the two occasions that “Three Lions” was the UK’s best selling single saw “Killing Me Softly” by Fugees at No 1. It dropped a place as Euro 96 came to its climax and then leapfrogged back to the top for another week after it had finished. This meant that these two singles spent seven weeks swapping the No 1 position between them. There’s another less talked about twist of trivia that bonded the two together acts together and it really is quite bizarre – the single that the Lightning Seeds released before “Three Lions” was a song called “Ready Or Not” whilst the single that the Fugees released after “Killing Me Softly” was a song called…yep…”Ready Or Not”. What are the chances eh?

Quite why the FA approached Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds to write a song for the tournament I’m not sure but Broudie’s decision to get Frank Skinner and David Baddiel involved made perfect sense (ooh, see what I did there? ‘Perfect’ and ‘Sense’? Oh never mind!) what with the duo having recently finished the third and final series of Fantasy Football League for the BBC. Both comedians were by now also synonymous with the beautiful game with Skinner professing his love of WBA and Baddiel a fellow fan of my beloved Chelsea.

Like everybody in the country it seemed, I got caught up with the feel good factor that the football was bringing and “Three Lions” seemed a perfectly good soundtrack to that period. However, its repeated appearance at every football tournament since has made it almost unlistenable now. They really did flog it to death. An updated version with changed lyrics went to No 1 two years later for the 1998 World Cup and it topped the charts again as England reached the semi final in 2018 in the same competition. As far as I can tell, the only tournaments that England qualified for since the song was originally released when “Three Lions” hasn’t featured in the charts were the 2000 and 2004 Euros. My research tells me that Fat Les’s “Jerusalem” and a version of “All Together Now” were the predominant England songs for those years respectively.

The play out track is “Theme From Mission: Impossible” by Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jnr. Yes, here’s the reason for my cack handed referencing of the two members of the aforementioned U2 earlier in the post. The very first movie of the Mission: Impossible franchise was released this year and nearly 30 years later it is still going, still with Tom Cruise as the star and with the most recent outing Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (the seventh film so far) having been released in 2023. I caught the first film at the cinema in Stockport as the Our Price store there where I was working had an arrangement with the local cinema to supply them with CDs to play in the foyer. It might even have been a special preview screening that I attended as I seem to remember coming out with a press pack of still photos etc. I think I enjoyed it but I’m not sure that I’ve watched any of the sequels in their entirety. I recall watching the original 60s TV series as a small child and being confused by Leonard Nimoy being in it but not being dressed as Mr Spock!

I’m guessing that Adam and Larry were approached to record the movie’s theme tune off the back of U2’s wildly successful contribution to the previous year’s Batman Forever film. They don’t muck about with it too much though they’ve clearly danced it up a bit and explore that further with a number of remixes on the 12” and extra tracks on the CD single. At the end of the day though, it all pales in comparison to the iconic original which kind of negates the whole thing. Competing with its composer Lalo Schifrin really did prove to be an impossible mission.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Backstreet Boys	Get Down (You’re The One For Me)	As if
2	Jamiroquai / M-Beat	Do U Know Where You’re Coming From	No
3	Metallica	Until It Sleeps	I did not
4	Peter Andre	Mysterious Girl	Sir! You insult me with your impertinence!
5	Manic Street Preachers	Australia	No but I had the album
6	Celine Dion	Because You Loved Me	Never
7	Lighthouse Family	Ocean Drive	Nope
8	Bryan Adams	The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You	Negative
9	Baddiel, Skinner and the Lightning Seeds	Three Lions (It’s Coming Home)	Nah
10	Theme From Mission: Impossible”	Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jnr	Another 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/m0021s8z/top-of-the-pops-30051996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 16 MAY 1996

Posted on August 28, 2024 by 80stastic

The BBC4 TOTP repeats schedule is all over the place at the moment with some rather large gaps punctuating the 1996 episodes. As such, I’ve taken my eye off the ball somewhat but have realised that there are two shows from that year that I haven’t reviewed yet so I’m officially back to it. We pick it up in the middle of May and find footballer Ian Wright in the ‘golden mic’ slot. I think this may have been his very first shot at TV presenting which kicked off a lengthy and varied media career including game shows, panel shows, his own talk show and, of course, football punditry. Back in 1996, though coming to the end of his career, Wright was still an Arsenal player and over a year away from becoming their all time top goal scorer at the time. However, the 1995-96 season which had just finished had not been a happy one for Wrighty. He didn’t have a good relationship with dour Scottish manager Bruce Rioch leading to him putting in a transfer request (albeit that was later withdrawn). I’m guessing that Rioch wouldn’t have automatically given his blessing to one of his players hosting a pop music show (just as well that the football season had just finished) but then Wright had a natural affinity with the show having been a pop star himself (nearly) in 1993 when his single “Do The Right Thing” got to No 43 in the charts. It wasn’t totally terrible in fairness…

Anyway, TOTP executive producer Ric Blaxill showed considerable foresight giving Wright his break in TV presenting given what he went on to do in his post football media activities. I’m expecting a lot of bubbly enthusiasm from him. Let’s see how he does…

We start, confusingly though, with another footballer (sort of). Eric Cantona had risen Lazarus like from his ‘king fu’ take down of a Crystal Palace fan in 1995 and the eight month ban that followed to drive Manchester United to a second double in three seasons having just scored the winner in the FA Cup final just five days before this TOTP aired. His star would never shine so bright as it did at the culmination of the 1995/96 season. To mark his remarkable comeback from potential football oblivion, there was a song in the charts honouring his achievements. In the ‘direct to camera’ section at the very start of the show, the producers had hired a Cantona lookalike to stand in a United shirt as a camera spins around him and a football commentary plays in the background. I’m not sure it works on reflection especially as the guy doesn’t look that much like Cantona and has an expression on his face that says “Ah what you gonna do? They’re paying me for this!”

Enough of football though, to the music and we start with “There’s Nothing I Won’t Do” by JX. I really haven’t much to say about this apart from I don’t remember it obviously. Their previous single- “Son Of A Gun” – I could confidently have named unprompted, probably because it was a hit twice (No 13 in 1994 and No 6 the following year) but this one? My memory banks are emptier than Liz Truss’s head. And yet, listening back to it some 28 years later, it does sound familiar but I’m putting that down to the generic nature of its Eurodance sound. As my Dad used to say to me back in the 80s, “it all sounds the same”. With awful inevitability, I know say the exact same words to my 14 year old son when he plays his music in the car.

Not remembering one Eurodance hit out of a whole ocean of them in the mid 90s is one thing but not being able to bring to mind a whole artist? That’s another level but that’s what has happened with this next artist. Who is/was Horace Brown?! I would have thought that a name like Horace would have made him more memorable to me; I mean, how many Horaces are there in the history of music? There’s Horace Andy the Jamaican roots reggae singer songwriter and…erm…Horace Wimp from the ELO song? Anyway, it turns out that this Horace was an American R&B singer who had two middling sized hits in the UK whilst signed to the Motown label. This one – “One For The Money” – was the bigger of the two when it peaked at No 12.

Taking lyrical inspiration from “Blue Suede Shoes”, it sounds a bit like… well…Another Level (to use that phrase again). Whilst those 90s soul boys were all about the sass and sang about whipped cream and licking things (eeew!), Horace Brown was less salacious and more tedious singing the rather childish line “Three to get the honeys”. That’s not even the worst lyric of “One For The Money” though. At one point he sings about “living in an eight room mansion on the hill”. An eight room mansion?! Surely a mansion has more rooms than that?! I live in a mid terrace house in Hull and we have… let me see…nine! OK, we had a loft conversion done but still. Maybe he meant eight bedrooms? Details Horace, details!

It’s yet another football song now that still (still!) isn’t that one nor is it even the Eric Cantona single but instead comes courtesy of Liverpool FC & Boot Room Boyz whose “Pass & Move (It’s The Liverpool Groove)” is this week’s highest new entry.

Wrighty gives it the big ‘un about those now infamous cream suits that the Liverpool team wore as they strolled about the Wembley turf before kick off sarcastically calling them “blinding” but Ian himself hasn’t always got his fashion choices correct. Who could forget his bouncy castle puffer coat?

If this was old twitter there would be an account called Ian Wright’s big coat pic.twitter.com/NgD4GQq90f
— Cake 🍰 (@rigby113) December 3, 2023

Now here’s a mystery. Quite why did Black Grape feel the need to release this standalone single called “Fat Neck”? The usual answer would be to fill the gap between albums. There were two years and three months between the band’s debut “It’s Great When You’re Straight…Yeah” and disappointing follow up “Stupid Stupid Stupid” so a new track was an established record company strategy of maintaining their artist’s profile. Mystery solved. Except…a month after “Fat Neck” another Black Grape single came out and yes, it was another football song – “England’s Irie” for the Euro 96 tournament. Admittedly, it was a collaboration with Joe Strummer and Keith Allen but surely everyone knew it as a Black Grape song which would have done the job of keeping the band’s name in lights without the need for “Fat Neck” as well?

Added to this was the fact that back in March, they’d released the third and final single from “It’s Great When You’re Straight…Yeah” in the form of “Kelly’s Heroes” meaning that Shaun and co had three singles out in four months. Both “Fat Neck” and “England’s Irie” were released on the same label (Radioactive) and even had sequential catalogue numbers so this was clearly deliberate and not a scheduling cock up between two different labels’ calendars. So the question remains why the need for “Fat Neck” especially when it wasn’t much of a song but rather Black Grape-by-numbers. In the label’s defence both singles ended up going Top 10 so maybe they knew what they were doing after all.

As Ian informs us in his next intro, it was the Eurovision Song Contest two days after this TOTP aired so it must be time for a plug for the UK entrant Gina G with “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit”. I’ve lost count the amount of times Gina has been on the show now but it’s a lot. She secured herself one further place in the running order* by going to No 1 in the charts the week following Eurovision despite finishing an underwhelming 8th on the big night.

*BBC4 didn’t show that particular TOTP denying us one last Gina performance of her most famous tune but we’ll go into that in further detail in the next post.

Quite why Gina’s undeniably catchy song failed to garner more votes remains unsolved. It was a Top 10 hit all round Europe including Norway where the contest took place. It was suggested that perhaps Gina wasn’t actually up to doing the live singing on the big night with her credentials for doing so seeming to rest on the fact that she was the songwriter’s then girlfriend rather than her vocal talents. I’m not sure if that’s correct or fair though as she had done some singing for an Australian dance group called Bass Culture in the early 90s with a single called “Love The Life” getting a legitimate commercial release. Whatever the reasons behind her lacklustre points total, it didn’t matter when it came to being a pop star as, in addition to bagging the first UK No 1 single to originate from Eurovision since Nicole’s “A Little Peace” in 1982, she would go on to achieve four further Top 40 hits including two Top Tenners. She was a bona fide pop star for a while and how many of us can say that?

I said in a previous post that one of Gina’s backing dancers reminded me of Samantha Janus though it wasn’t actually her. This time, I’m thinking she looks like another EastEnders actress but this time Kim Medcalf who played Sam Mitchell (the second version) on two separate occasions over a period of 20 years. Again, I’m fairly sure it’s not her in reality. These are hardly ‘doof doof’ revelations are they?

Surely with deliberate planning on behalf of the producers, we now have the rarely seen/heard “Ooh Aah” segue as we switch from Gina G to 1300 Drums featuring Unjustified Ancients of M.U. and their hit “Ooh! Aah! Cantona”. Yes, it’s another football song but still not that one! What’s going on here?! Anyway, I’m guessing that this track was released to cash in on the Cantona effect. Eric was possibly at the peak of both his powers and profile at this time having successfully resurrected his image following the ‘kung fu’ incident the previous year which led to a ban of eight months from playing football. As mentioned earlier, five days before this TOTP was broadcast, he’d scored the only goal of the FA Cup final to secure Manchester United the ‘double double’. He’d almost single-handedly hunted down a Newcastle United side that held a twelve points lead over United at one point. Within a year, he would be gone, retiring at the age of 30. Following his retirement, he had both the phrase “Ooh Aah Cantona” with which his adoring fans serenaded him and his name and number from his shirt (Cantona 7) patented as commercial trademarks. If that was to prevent further records by the likes of 1300 Drums being made without his approval, then I raise my collar to you sir for this hit was missing an ‘s’. It’s just a generic Italo House backing to what I always thought was a fairly moronic chant. What a bunch of chancers! The Unjustified Ancients of M.U. were nothing to do with The KLF’s Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond as far as I’m aware but just a pathetic play on words.

The performance here is bizarre but then I’m not sure what on earth any choreographer could have done with this. Presumably, the Can Can dancers are to reflect Eric being French but it’s all a bit tenuous. Then they wheel out the aforementioned Cantona lookalike who does pretty much nothing other than stand there with a cup which, by the way, looks about as much like the FA Cup as he did like Cantona. If he does look like a footballer at all it’s Chelsea legend Dan Petrescu who himself is a dead ringer for X Files star David Duchovny. There’s a couple of guys in Cantona masks which I’m guessing were modelled on his Spitting Image puppet. In 2009, said masks were used to superb effect in the Ken Loach film Looking For Eric which is a great watch if you get the chance. Cantona himself would, of course, embark on his own career in film after leaving football appearing in multiple movies (including the Loach one as himself) and only this morning I saw him on my TV as the face of the latest William Hill bookmakers advertisement. The world has not forgotten Cantona, and you can bet on that.

The TOTP producers have missed a trick with this next artist. Judging by the cutaway from Ian Wright’s intro, this is just a repeat of the studio performance from the other week of Smashing Pumpkins doing “Tonight, Tonight”.

So what you may ask? Well, they could have shown the promo film for the single which won six awards at the 1996 MTV Music Video Awards including Video of the Year. Stylistically based on the 1902 Georges Méliès silent film A Trip To The Moon, it featured primitive special effects, backdrops and puppets which made for a piece that was at turns both charming and disturbing. The plot concerns a male and female protagonist couple making a journey to the moon on a zeppelin. On arrival, they jump off the zeppelin to fall to their destination with their descent slowed by their umbrellas. Once on the moon, creepy looking hostile aliens take them prisoner before our heroes fight them off again with their multi purpose umbrellas. Escaping in a rocket, they then encounter a sea-god type who fortunately is friendly and puts on a show for their entertainment featuring mermaids and starfish before returning them to the surface in a bubble. Lovely stuff as Alan Partridge might say. Stylus Magazine put it at No 40 in their 2006 list of the top 100 music videos of all time. I think the video might have lived in the memory longer for the TOTP audience longer than the straight studio performance they’d already seen before .

Right, let’s have a little check in with how Ian Wright is doing as host. Well, he’s been competent I would say in not fluffing his lines and has kept his Tigger-ish over exuberance in check. However, he does seem overly intent on name checking his then Arsenal teammates. We had ‘Ooh Aah’ Ray Parlour during the Gina G link and now he manages to squeeze in Tony Adams for the next artist on account of the fact that it is his namesake Bryan Adams. Somewhat surprisingly, “The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You” was his first single released from a studio album since “Do I Have To Say The Words?” in July 1992. I say ‘somewhat surprisingly’ as it wasn’t as if Bry hadn’t been seen in our charts since then. Quite the opposite in fact. Look at this lot:

“Please Forgive Me” – No 2 – 1993 – to promote a Best Of album
“All For Love” (with Sting and Rod Stewart) – No 2 – 1994 – Three Musketeers soundtrack
“Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?” – No 4 – 1995 – Don Juan DeMarco soundtrack

On top of that, he appeared on TOTP alongside Bonnie Raitt for a performance of non-hit single “Rock Steady”. It was like he’d hardly been away and yet here he was back for more with the lead single from a new album called “18 Til I Die. I couldn’t be doing with any of those stop gap, turgid ballads listed above but “The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You” was more of a return to form. He was back with some bluesy rock swagger and a memorable hook in the chorus (that tiny bit of guitar that pre-empts the words “is you” makes it). Sure, the lyrics are a bit hackneyed and the title undeniably cheesy but, for me, this was his best hit in quite some time.

We’re into the home straight now as Wrighty gets to grips with the Top 10 countdown. He goes for a straightforward, factual, no gags presentation until he gets to No 5 when he can’t resist taking the piss out of poor old Chris Eubank’s lisp from a few weeks back by pronouncing it as “Thethilia and Thuggth”. Before introducing George Michael at No 1 for a third week with “Fastlove”, he’s back on the footballer name drop game when he mentions his mate Paul Ince aka ‘The Guv’nor’. It’s a clumsily constructed reference with it only being made it so he can call George the guv’nor of the music business but otherwise I think he’s done an OK job as host. I didn’t know this until now but Ince has a solid link to pop music and no, it’s nothing to do with him appearing on any Manchester United singles. He is the uncle of ex The Saturdays star and now TV presenter Rochelle Humes. Well I never!

As for George Michael, I’m kind of surprised that “Fastlove” stayed at top of the charts for three weeks given that we were entering the era of weekly straight-in-at-No1s but looking at the charts, the competition wasn’t that strong at the time with the Top 3 stagnating rather with two hits that had been around for ages in “Return Of The Mack” and “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit”. Eventually, “Fastlove” couldn’t resist the push given to Gina G following the Eurovision Song Contest which aired two days after this TOTP.

As Wright closes the show with a massive Afro wig on for some reason, Bryan Adams wonders into shot from out of the studio audience wearing a Chelsea shirt! What?! Our host asks Bryan the question I want to know the answer to – “Are you a Chelsea fan?”. It turns out that he is and has been since about 1985 which is when he came to live in London. How did I never know that the Groover from Vancouver supported my beloved Chelsea?! Clearly I can’t have watched this particular TOTP when it aired originally.

The play out video is “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette. Like the aforementioned singles by Mark Morrison and Gina G, this was another hit that was enjoying an elongated time on the charts. Seven weeks inside the Top 40 was quite the run and this second outing on TOTP was due to it going back up the charts from No 25 to No 23 having spent the previous three weeks descending them.

As with the Smashing Pumpkins video I mentioned earlier, the promo for this one also won big at the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards collecting three gongs but losing out to Billy Corgan and co in the Video of the Year and Best Direction in a Video categories. One of those three wins was for Best Editing and you can see why with the illusion of there being four different Alanis Morissettes travelling in a car all done without any special effects. The different versions of herself are colour coded (red, green and yellow sweaters) to display different aspects of her personality. According to Alanis, the driver in the red beanie hat is the responsible one in control, yellow sweater with the braids is the quirky one, red sweater is a romantic risk taker and green sweater is the fun one who gets into trouble. To be honest though, I can’t see much to distinguish them from each other as they all just seem to spend the entire journey laughing, shouting, singing and throwing their arms about. Ok, red sweater (the risk taker) climbs out of the window and is nearly taken out by a bridge and the (responsible) driver tries to stop her but that seems a to be the only demonstration of their dominant character traits. There is a final ‘irony’ at the video’s end when the car runs out of petrol despite the start of the promo showing Alanis driving away from a petrol station. We don’t actually witness her filling up the tank though so maybe she just bought the coffee in her hand potentially confirming that “Ironic” really is the song that can’t stop not being ironic. That’s a little ironic, don’t you think?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	JX	There’s Nothing I Won’t Do	No
2	Horace Brown	One For The Money	Negative
3	Liverpool FC & Boot Room Boyz	Pass & Move (It’s The Liverpool Groove)	Never
4	Black Grape	Fat Neck	Nah
5	Gina G	Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit	Nah
6	1300 Drums featuring Unjustified Ancients of M.U.	Ooh! Aah! Cantona	As if
7	Smashing Pumpkins	Never Never	No but I probably should have
8	Bryan Adams	The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You	Nope
9	George Michael	Fastlove	I did not
10	Alanis Morissette	Ironic	No but I bought her 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/m0021s8x/top-of-the-pops-16051996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 02 NOV 1995

Posted on March 30, 2024 by 80stastic

Woah! We’re into November in these 1995 TOTP repeats – that year is nearly over already! Not that I would have been thinking like that working in a record shop with the hectic festive trading period looming. I did ten Christmases with Our Price and they seemed to get progressively harder with the passing of every year. Maybe it was just the ageing process (I was 22 when I did my first and in my early 30s at the time of the last one) that meant I found them more and more tiring. Or maybe it was that the company expected us to get through them on less and less staff each year whilst simultaneously beating last year’s sales. I’d felt energised by the hustle and bustle of my very first Christmas but that feeling had dissipated over the years and coming to work had lost its sense of fun.

Presenting this TOTP though was a man who looked like he’d had loads of fun during his career as the lead singer of Madness what with all those wacky videos throughout the early part of the 80s. Whilst the band were on one of their hiatuses, Suggs undertook an initially successful solo career in this year keeping his profile high and affording him this ‘golden mic’ opportunity and what an opportunity! He got to host the show that had Madonna on it in person in the studio for the first time in eleven years! Suggs used this chance to hone his presenting skills and went on to secure the job of host on…oh yeah…Channel 5’s karaoke show Night Fever. Oh dear. Unbelievably, that show didn’t ruin his TV career and he went on to present shows including Salvage Squad, Inside Out and Disappearing London which won three Royal Television Society awards including one for himself as ‘Presenter of the Year’. Wow! Literally a few of days ago, I was listening to Gary Davies’s Sounds of the 80s show on Radio 2 and he announced that he was being joined by Suggs as co-host next week. I then saw him on The Jonathan Ross Show performing with Madness their new single “Round We Go”. All this proves that you can’t keep a good man down.

Right, that’s quite the lengthy intro so let’s get to the music and we start with a great tune. Echobelly were really hitting their stride by this point in their career with new single “King Of The Kerb” the second hit from their Top 5 album “On”. With this, “Great Things” and “Insomniac” (from their debut album “Everyone’s Got One”), the band had come up with a really strong trio of tracks. I wasn’t the only one who thought that – Madonna had shown an interest in signing the band to her Maverick label. Do you think they had a chat about it in the green room after this show? They ultimately didn’t sign due to their existing contractual arrangements and it was a change in said arrangements that would derail the band’s career. Having signed to Rhythm King with their records released on offshoot label Fauve, when the former’s distribution deal with Sony subsidiary Epic came to an end in 1996, a new deal was signed with Arista Records of the BMG group. This had the effect of Rhythm King being essentially shut down and subsumed by Arista. The band had reservations about the change of label and decided to stay with Epic. The contractual wrangling and singer Sonya Madan’s health problems (a potentially fatal thyroid issue) meant a third album “Lustra” wasn’t released for another two years by which point the band’s shine (and indeed that of Britpop) had lost its…well…lustre. The album only made No 47 in the charts. Echobelly have had various lengthy hiatuses since but are still a going concern and indeed are on tour later this year.

Talking of commercial declines, here’s another band who were starting down the other side of their own particular hill of success. MN8 began the year with a bang and a No 2 record in “I’ve Got A Little Something For You” and followed it up with two other Top 10 hits. By the time of fourth single “Baby It’s You” though, their chart positions were more of a knoll than a mountain. And rightly so by my reckoning. Although that first hit was annoying, it was catchy. This though, well it was just bland R&B styled pop wasn’t it? Its peak of No 22 could perhaps be explained away as the natural state for a fourth single from an album that had been out for six months as could the No 25 peak of its fifth “Pathway To The Moon”. However, when the lead single from the second album could only get to No 15 the following year, the alarm bells must have been ringing. That second album – “Freaky” – was a complete sales fail peaking at No 114. There has been no new material released by MN8 since though supposedly there have been talks over the years about a reunion.

Next, another showing of the video for “Heaven For Everyone” by Queen. The promo features footage from the films A Trip To The Moon, The Impossible Voyage and The Eclipse: Courtship of the Sun and Moon all by French filmmaker Georges Méliès. This wasn’t the first time that the band had used this technique – the video for 1984’s “Radio Ga Ga” incorporated images from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Perhaps not surprising as they were both made by the same director, David Mallett. However, this isn’t the one that’s shown here. A second video directed by Simon Pummell was included on the VHS release of Made In Heaven: The Films featuring performance artist Stelarc operating a robotic hand.

The Monday after this TOTP aired, the album “Made In Heaven” was released. It went straight to the top of the charts and despite only being available for two months was the 7th best selling album in the UK in 1995. The power and pull of Freddie Mercury was still very much alive after four years after his death.

It’s another performance of “Thunder” by East 17 now as they’ve landed in the charts at No 4 following their ‘exclusive’ appearance two weeks ago. Although they were hardly down the dumper at this point, for me at least, this period of the career was less than impressive. I’d liked their early singles – “Deep” was a great song- whilst you couldn’t help but take note of their scoring the previous year’s Christmas No 1. By the time of third album “Up All Night” though, the formula seemed to be failing. Sure they were still having hits and the album sold well but it did half the amount predecessor “Steam” had done. In a sure fire move that the wobbles had set in with record label London Records, their next album release was a Greatest Hits collection. Just fourteen months on from this TOTP, Brian Harvey (who looks a bit like Phil Mitchell in this performance if you squint) would give that radio interview and the band would start to implode. By the way, had they been giving fashion advice to MN8? Those big jackets looked very East 17.

P.S. The Walthamstow outfit’s erstwhile rivals Take That would release a single in 2009 called “Up All Night”. What are the chances eh?

And another band who have been on the show in recent weeks! This time it’s UB40 with their hit “Until My Dying Day” taken from their “Best Of Volume Two” album. Admittedly it’s not just second studio appearance as this time they are live by satellite from Brooklyn in the shadow of its famous bridge. As a location, it’s a step up from the university car park that Diana King performed in the other week but it’s still not great. For one thing, hasn’t this location been used by other artists before (or perhaps from the Manhattan side of the bridge?). Secondly, it’s not quite the shot of a tree we got during that Diana King performance but we do get a couple of views of just the bridge without the band on camera at all. Now some might say less of UB40 filling your TV screen was a good thing but it does seem rather odd in retrospect. These ‘satellite’ performances were really outstaying their welcome by this point.

Here’s yet another song I don’t remember at all but in my defence, there’s a good reason for that – it wasn’t a hit in the UK. Yes, it’s one of those rare occasions when the TOTP producers decided to give an ‘exclusive’ slot to a single that would fail to break into our Top 40. On reflection, giving such a platform to “Rock Steady” by Bryan Adams and Bonnie Raitt seems a strange decision. Sure Bry had become a units shifting behemoth in the 90s due to that Robin Hood song and indeed, had been at No 4 in the UK earlier in the year with “Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman” from the Don Juan DeMarco soundtrack. But Bonnie? A huge star in the States no doubt but over here, she’d only ever had one minor hit single when “You” made No 31 in 1994. In my head, she was the sort of artist whose albums would be featured in the Recommended Releases section in Our Price – not a hot enough record to guarantee sales but maybe a few could be squeezed out of it if it was discounted for a couple of weeks. The UK just didn’t really get her fusion of country/blues/rock. Look at these contrasting chart positions:

Album	Year	US Chart Peak	UK Chart Peak
Nick Of Time	1989	1	51
Luck Of The Draw	1991	2	38
Longing In Their Hearts	1994	1	26

“Rock Steady” was taken from Bonnie’s first live album “Road Tested” – yep, a live album. For an artist who had failed to set the UK charts alight with her studio albums, the idea that a live album would suddenly reverse that trend seemed an audacious strategy by her record label. Predictably, it did nothing over here.

Having spent a lot of words decrying Bonnie’s appearance on the show, I should say that my wife quite likes her. Well, she likes one of her songs to be more accurate. “Something To Talk About” featured on the soundtrack to the 1995 film of the same name starring Dennis Quaid, Julia Roberts and Kyra Sedgwick. One last thing to note here is that in his intro, Suggs depicts the duet as a ‘battle of the larynxes’ and pits Bonnie versus Bryan with a “ding ding round one” remark. Now isn’t that reminiscent of the aforementioned Night Fever show he would go on to host?

Suggs goes old skool for his next link by donning a bowler hat and sporting an umbrella – all classic props from the ‘nutty boys’ video heyday. It seems though that there may have been some sartorial collusion with the next act who are McAlmont & Butler with vocalist David matching Suggs in the chapeau department. Whatever this duo released after the towering epic that was debut single “Yes” it was destined not to match its magnificence. So it was with “You Do”. That’s not to say it wasn’t a good song – it was, it is but inevitably it felt a bit after the Lord Mayor’s show.

Their album “The Sound Of…McAlmont & Butler” appeared in late November though it was really just the two aforementioned hits and all the extra tracks from their CD singles which may explain its minor chart peak position of No 33. By then, the duo had parted ways anyway. An interview in the NME given by McAlmont about the lack of substance to his relationship with Butler plus some unfounded accusations of his homophobia hastened the split. Both pursued solo projects (Bernard’s debut album “People Move On” is a personal favourite) before a reunion in 2002 ushered in second album “Bring It Back”. Another prolonged sabbatical then occurred before the duo toured together in 2015.

And so to the big, nay HUGE exclusive performance. With her first appearance on the show in person for eleven years it’s….Madonna! I’m pretty sure this would have created some headlines back in the day. Not seen in the TOTP studio since that performance of “Like A Virgin” with that pink wig, Madonna suddenly found the time to be in the country to promote her latest single “You’ll See”. A new track written for her ballads collection “Something To Remember”, it’s a mature, emotionally charged love song who that Madge delivers competently which I think was the point of the whole project – to get people talking about her as a recording artist again , as a singer with an actual voice rather than the controversy courting, media baiting spectacle she had become. To that end, she appears here decidedly grown up in a dressed down yet stylish all black outfit and a classic, soft hairstyle. No gimmicks, no button pushing flashes of flesh – just a woman, her voice and a song to sing. And it works, though I have to say listening back to it now that it almost seems like a rehash of her 1986 ballad “Live To Tell”. It would return Madonna to the UK Top 5 whilst the album sold 10 million copies worldwide.

In 2024, is Madonna still relevant? I’m sure she still has a huge, global fanbase but is she as big a deal these days as a Taylor Swift (announced just yesterday as a billionaire!), a Miley Cyrus or even a countrified Beyoncé? I’m not sure. I think I would wish for her a more demure tail end of her career. All that Madame X stuff seemed a bit desperate. Madonna became one of the most famous people on the planet but even she’ll see that you can’t hold back the march of time.

Coolio and L.V. remain at No 1 with “Gangsta’s Paradise”. This record really was a phenomenon sales wise. Over two million copies sold in the UK alone, it would be our second best selling single of the year (only the bizarre Robson & Jerome craze prevented it from being top of the pile). Despite only being No 1 here for two weeks, it would spend the next five weeks either at No 2 or No 3. There was no quick descent down the charts for this monster. So how come it only got those two weeks at the top here? *SPOILER ALERT* Bloody Robson & Jerome again wasn’t it! Their single “I Believe” knocked it off the top spot and remained there for four weeks. Add that to their version of “Unchained Melody” (the aforementioned best selling single in the UK of 1995) and they had quite a lot to answer for this year.

Back to “Gangsta’s Paradise” though and its presence in the film Dangerous Minds meant that the movie’s soundtrack was also a massive seller topping the American album chart and going triple platinum. Despite it no longer being the UK No 1, we’ll be seeing it on TOTP twice more in the repeats to come. Like I said before, it was an absolute phenomenon.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Echobelly	King Of The Kerb	No but I had a Best of with it on
2	MN8	Baby It’s You	Never
3	Queen	Heaven For Everyone	Negative
4	East 17	Thunder	Nope
5	UB40	Until My Dying Day	No
6	Bryan Adams and Bonnie Raitt	Rock Steady	Nah
7	McAlmont & Butler	You Do	No I didn’t but I had their album
8	Madonna	You’ll See	I did not
9	Coolio / L.V.	Gangsta’s Paradise	I was one of the few that didn’t

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/m001xhz8/top-of-the-pops-02111995?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 20 APR 1995

Posted on November 2, 2023 by 80stastic

Those big BBC changes keep on coming in 1995. The day after this TOTP aired, both Bruno Brookes and Steve Wright presented their final shows on Radio 1. Brookes, of course, had hosted his last TOTP just the other week; Wright hadn’t been near the corporation’s flagship pop music show for years. Dear old Uncle Steve probably felt hard done by having been shunted from his natural habitat of Radio 1 afternoons to the Breakfast Show by new controller Matthew Bannister in the January of the previous year. The new time slot hadn’t worked out and the Monday after Wright’s departure, the era of Chris Evans commenced.

Whatever your opinion of Mr Evans, there’s no denying he created some noise around himself and his show. The first time I became aware of him was in 1992 when he presented a Sunday afternoon show on Radio 1 called Too Much Gravy and he genuinely sounded like a breath of fresh air. He had a feature where he asked listeners to suggest songs that were really long and really short in length as I recall. Later that year he would break into TV with The Big Breakfast and his fame (some may say infamy) was assured. Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush would follow (made by Evans’ own production company) before the call came from Matthew Bannister to renew his relationship with Radio 1. His breakfast show would add 600,000 new listeners possibly due to the controversy it created with innuendo-laden features and the regular questioning of a female member of his team called Holly Samos about her sex life. Over the next couple of years, Evans would become one of the biggest celebrities around aided by the rise of ‘lad culture’ and his Channel 4 show TFI Friday. This post isn’t about blowing smoke up Chris Evans’ arse though so on with the music and we start with Pato Banton and Ranking Roger and their duet “Bubbling Hot”.

Now, if like me you’re wondering why this sounds so familiar even though you weren’t aware that it even existed until it was featured on these TOTP repeats, then here’s @TOTPFacts with the reason why:

“Bubbling Hot” pinches a melody from Dave & Ansel Collins’s classic 1971 track “Double Barrel”: https://t.co/p5kVXVuuC9 #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) October 27, 2023

Roger, of course, is probably best known for his time as a member of The Beat though there is much more to his musical legacy including a band who never had a UK Top 40 hit though they did achieve some success in America. General Public were kind of a punk /ska supergroup comprising a line up of ex-members of The Specials, The Clash, Dexys Midnight Runners and the aforementioned The Beat’s Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger. Though ignored at home, three of their songs would make it into film soundtracks resulting in hits on the US charts. The John Hughes pictures Weird Science, Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off plus the Alicia Silverstone starring Clueless all feature General Public tracks of which this is probably my favourite:

Wakeling and Roger reactivated General Public in 1995 and would score another US hit from another film soundtrack (this time Threesome) with a version of the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There”. Sadly, Ranking Roger died of cancer in 2019 aged just 56.

Next up we have *checks notes* ah yes, some Eurodance. Of course we do. You couldn’t sodding avoid this soulless genre back then. Corona are this week’s exponent of the genre’s paucity of passion with their single “Baby Baby”. There are few if any redeeming features on display here. Even the singer isn’t the actual singer. Echoing Black Box’s vocalist deception, the woman fronting the whole sham here – Olga Maria de Souza – was just that, a front. The voice on the track belongs to someone called Jenny B. In fact, despite being the public face of the act throughout the 90s and beyond, Souza didn’t actually lay down her own vocals on any Corona recording until 2005! We’re talking Boris Johnson levels of building a career based on nothing but smoke and mirrors here. “Baby Baby” would somehow become a No 5 hit. The more I hear, the less I understand.

A genuinely arresting song now that would make you stop in your tracks the first time you heard it. Portishead had firmly been announced by the music press as the movement leaders of trip hop by this point though this wasn’t an image that the band themselves wished to promote. After “Glory Box” had made them bona fide Top 40 stars earlier in the year, a rerelease of their debut single “Sour Times” was deemed sensible and what a sound decision it proved to be.

After making No 57 in August of 1994, it would peak at No 13 second time around. Many a descriptor has been used to identify Portishead’s sound in general but on this track in particular, words like ‘haunting’, ‘melancholy’ and ‘cinematic’ are certainly not wide of the mark. That last one certainly rings true. “Sour Times” features a speeded up sample from a track from film composer Lalo Schifrin’s album “More Mission: Impossible”. Not only that but the video features footage from a short film made by the band themselves! I had no idea such a thing existed! Said film is called To Kill A Dead Man and a still from it formed the cover of their “Dummy” album. The theme from the film was an extra track on the CD single of “Sour Times” and gives off some serious 60s spy film vibes…

Of course, Portishead weren’t the first band to make their own feature film. ABC came out with Mantrap in 1983 and, like To Kill A Dead Man, it was a spy caper and had its own theme tune called “Theme From Mantrap”.

After that rather spine tingling interlude, we’re back to the cruddy, generic dance music. I say generic but there was something that set Real McCoy apart from their peers and that was that for some reason their particular brand of Eurodance crossed over to America. They had two No 3 hits over there with “Another Night” and “Run Away” not though with this one, “Love & Devotion”. Yes, I know the TOTP caption says “3rd UK hit and 2nd US Top 20 hit” but as far as I can tell, this isn’t true. This track wasn’t released as a single in America.

Anyway, so what was it about the Real McCoy version of Eurodance that succeeded over the pond where the genre generally didn’t prove to be popular? I think I may have said in a previous post whilst commenting on another of their hits that there seemed to be more of a classic pop song structure to their output than some of their contemporaries so was that a factor? Bizarrely, in the case of “Love & Devotion”, I could probably understand if that had been a major hit in the US (it wasn’t released there remember) as it has more than a passing resemblance to Ace Of Base whose Euro-infused cod reggae sound provided them with a No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. I’ll say it again, the more I hear the less I understand.

When it comes to songs from films, Portishead, despite having their own short film to their name, had some way to go to catch the soundtrack master Bryan Adams. The Groover From Vancouver’ first had one of his songs featured in a film in 1983 when “Heaven” appeared in the largely unknown A Night In Heaven and by 2002 he had written a whole soundtrack album by himself for the animated western Spirit: Stallion Of The Cimarron but it was the 90s when he bestrode the genre mammoth like. Starting with that Robin Hood song, he followed it up by being part of a trio with Sting and Rod Stewart on “All For Love” from The Three Musketeers and then came “Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?” from Don Juan DeMarco. Yet another ballad (all his film songs seemed to be of the love variety), the flamenco guitar gave it a differential to the others but for me it was always a bit of a damp squib. Sorry Bry but I’ve never really loved this song. Not one bit.

It’s the ‘album’ slot now but as is commonwith this feature, what we actually get is a very long preview of the artist’s next single. Wet Wet Wet’s latest album “Picture This” (as the TOTP caption says) was No 1 and had already sold 340,000 copies (it would go on to shift 900,000 units) so I guess it made sense to have the top selling artist on the show. The track they perform here is “Don’t Want To Forgive Me Now” which would end up being their next single when it was released in June. It’s an accomplished, well produced pop song but a little to formulaic and obvious for me. It would peak at No 7 when finally released.

If the track itself didn’t really intrigue me, I was struck by something about the performance of it, namely that bass player Graeme Clark and keyboardist Neil Mitchell have swapped places and instruments. Was that just some sort of band in joke or did they perhaps want to have a laugh by messing with the usual set up? Neither looks convincing in their new role. Neil hardly moves his fingers at all along the bass neck whilst Graeme literally bashes around on the keys like he was Bamm-Bamm from The Flintstones. It got me thinking though about other occasions in the show’s history where a classic band line up has been subverted. Later in the year we would get the classic Oasis performance of “Roll With It” when Noel and Liam exchanged places and didn’t Jimmy Somerville and Sarah Jane Morris mine each other’s vocal parts when performing “Don’t Leave Me This Way”? I think they did. Must be something about songs that begin with the word ‘Don’t’.

Ah, it’s Björk. Always a difficult review for me. I used to think I didn’t like Björk because she can’t sing. Then I came to the realisation that she can sing but I just don’t like her voice. Then I surprised myself when rewatching these BBC4 TOTP repeats by actually appreciating and even liking some of her material like “Venus As A Boy” and “Big Time Sensuality”. So how do I approach and revisit “Army Of Me”, the lead single of her second album “Post”? Well, I’m afraid this one doesn’t work for me. Too menacing, brooding and industrial sounding for my delicate pop sensibilities. However, even I couldn’t resist the charms of her version of “It’s Oh So Quiet” when she scored a massive hit with it over the Xmas period.

Björk is back on the show in a future repeat alongside Skunk Anansie to perform a remix of “Army Of Me”. Maybe I’ll like that version better. By the way, this was yet another song that featured on a film soundtrack – the big screen adaptation of the comic book character Tank Girl. The collection of songs was assembled by Courtney Love and included tracks by her own band Hole (of course) and the aforementioned Portishead. This is fast turning into a film soundtrack special!

Or is it a Eurovision special? With the song contest just three weeks away, the BBC was ramping up its promotion of the annual event. The UK’s official entry Love City Groove will be along shortly but right now it’s an act that came third to them in the selection competition A Song For Europe. Deuce had already had a No 11 hit with “Call It Love” earlier in the year but their Eurovision attempt “I Need You” would go one better giving them their biggest ever hit. Having listened back to this rather nasty slice of Eurodance, I can understand why it didn’t win. Deuce were like a second rate Steps prototype and nobody needed that in their lives.

Despite being well beaten at A Song For Europe by Love City Groove, Deuce did pip their victors in one chart battle – they made it to the Top 10 first. Whilst the rappers were at No 17 this week, Deuce went straight in at No 10. LCG would eventually supersede that feat by peaking at No 7 after Eurovision had aired.

Take That remain at No 1 for a third week with “Back For Good”. The black and white video of the band mooching about in the rain in slow motion in front of some classic American cars became almost iconic, perhaps because it was the last to feature Robbie Williams in the band’s first incarnation. A still from it would form the cover for their 2005 Best Of “Never Forget – The Ultimate Collection”.

And so to Love City Groove. Tacked onto the end of the show as an additional tenth track (most shows of this period had featured nine), this looked like a clear case of hype building for Eurovision by the BBC. I guess in this week in particular they could make the case that its inclusion was merited as it was the highest climber on the chart leaping from No 26 to No 17. My guess is that this won’t be the last TOTP appearance for “Love City Groove”.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Pato Banton and Ranking Roger	Bubbling Hot	Nah
2	Corona	Baby Baby	NO!
3	Portishead	Sour Times	No but my wife had the album
4	Real McCoy	Love & Devotion	Negative
5	Bryan Adams	Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?	Nope
6	Wet Wet Wet	Don’t Want To Forgive Me Now	I did not
7	Björk	Army Of Me	It’s a no
8	Deuce	I Need You	But I don’t need you or your record
9	Take That	Back For Good	No but my wife did
10	Love City Groove	Love City Groove	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001rrzj/top-of-the-pops-20041995

06 APR 1995

Posted on October 25, 2023 by 80stastic

We’ve arrived in April of 1995 here at TOTP Rewind and back then, the day before this TOTP was broadcast, came some seismic music news. The NME published a statement announcing that Stone Roses drummer Reni had left the band. Now maybe a drummer leaving any band wouldn’t normally be such a big deal but I guess the Roses weren’t just any band and Reni wasn’t just any drummer. He cut a legendary figure as part of the four musketeers of the classic line up with his wicked talent and trademark bucket hat. His departure was the removal of the foundation stone that would see the band disintegrate by 1996. It would be another seventeen years before he played with them again.

By a strange quirk of fate, Reni wouldn’t be the only drummer to leave a huge Manchester band this month. On the last day of April, Tony McCarroll was sacked from Oasis thereby definitely making him the Pete Best of the 90s. Maybe. This TOTP doesn’t feature The Stone Roses, Oasis nor The Beatles though amazingly we only missed all three by a whisker. The Stone Roses had been in the Top 40 in March with “Ten Storey Love Song”, Oasis were a month away from their first No 1 “Some Might Say” and The Beatles were actually in the charts again with the track “Baby It’s You” from the “Live At The BBC” album. So if they’re some of the artists not on the show, who were the acts that were?

We start with a dance outfit (of course we do) but who was Grace? Well, she wasn’t the woman front and centre doing the vocals for “Not Over Yet” in this performance. Her name is Patti Low. Neither was it the singer who replaced her after this single – she’s Dominique Atkins. In fact, Grace wasn’t a woman at all. Grace was a group formed by superstar DJs Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne and originally named State Of Grace until they realised that an American band had nabbed the name first. Oakenfold had already been in the charts this year with a different vehicle for his material in the form of Perfecto Allstarz but presumably that moniker wasn’t deemed suitable to promote “Not Over Yet”. A different type of dance track required a different artist name right? Anyway, Grace would go onto have a total of six Top 40 hits but none were bigger than “Not Over Yet” which peaked at No 6.

I thought I didn’t know this one but as soon as that chorus kicked in, it all came flooding back. How could I have forgotten that driving hook that persistently hammers at your brain until it’s stuck in there. As dance tunes go, and you know I’m not a big fan, I’d have to say it’s one of the best examples of trance/disco out there. Indeed, so good was it that it was a hit all over again when re-released four years later under yet another pseudonym- this time Planet Perfecto – when it made No 16. That made it three releases in total for the track if you include its original 1993 outing when it failed to chart and four if you count the 2007 cover version by Klaxons. Who knows, it may even get a future release. It still might be not over yet for this particular tune. Ahem.

I should say that the host tonight is Bruno Brookes in his last ever appearance on the show. He’d had a good run though stretching all the way back to 1984. Obviously there was a three year break during the ‘year zero’ revamp but even so. After getting permanently annoyed by him as the years rolled by, I actually thought he did a decent job when he returned in 1994 but for some reason he’s started the last show in bizarre fashion. Dressed in clergyman garb and calling himself Reverend Rock ‘n’ Roll, it all seems to be just so he can get in a cheap quip about ‘saying grace’ as he introduces opening act…yep…Grace. Not exactly dis-grace-ful but certainly lame.

And talking of lame…here come Ultimate Kaos with a really wimpy ballad called “Show A Little Love”. I could never understand the appeal of this lot or indeed quite what the deal was with them at all. A bunch of barely teenage boys and a lead singer who was only nine when they started out eliciting screams from the young girls in the studio audience? I know I wasn’t the target demographic even back then but the whole thing was decidedly icky. I suppose Michael Jackson wasn’t much older when The Jackson 5 started having hits and although that’s an obvious comparison to make, surely that’s the template that Simon Cowell was following when he put Ultimate Kaos together. “Show A Little Love” was also of an identikit nature being a sickly, bubblegum-pop-by-numbers ballad aimed directly at the hearts of teenage girls. At least it wasn’t as inappropriate as their previous hit “Hoochie Booty” but its No 23 peak meant it wouldn’t last long in the memory and rightly so.

We’re back in the world of dance with the next hit which is “The Bomb! (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind)” by Bucketheads. It’s the video for this one again which was directed by Guy Ritchie and Alex De Rakoff, both at the very start of their careers. The former would go on to direct The Calcium Kid whilst the latter would find fame with Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels and by marrying Madonna.

There’s a scene in the video where the male protagonist walks into a record shop, picks a 12” from the racks (by Bucketheads obviously) and proceeds to nip behind the counter, put the record on the shop turntable and start dancing around with the guy working there. I can honestly say that scene never happened to me once and I worked in record shops for the whole of the 90s pretty much. The only punters who made it behind the counter were those who had been caught on the rob by the security guard and were waiting in the staff kitchen for the police to arrive. Their defence? “These sounds fell into my bag by accident. Honest.”

You’d think spending eight hours a day, five days a week working in a record shop that you’d hear just about every new album that was released wouldn’t you? Wrong! There’s loads of albums that I recognise the cover of but have no idea what it sounded like. Terence Trent D’Arby’s fourth album is a prime example. The cover was striking with TTD sporting a peroxide blonde short haircut and a pair of wings – quite the angelic image. Now I thought it was called “Vibrator” but according to Wikipedia its full title is “Terence Trent D’Arby’s Vibrator* (*Batteries Included)”. Ooerr.

The lead single from it was “Holding Onto You” and I have to say that I was expecting more from it. It’s a bluesy/soul number that sort of meanders along but never really convinces. I keep waiting for the song to get started but it never does. TTD’s distinctive voice is to the fore and seems to have got deeper over the years but even that can’t save it. I’m surprised it got as high as No 20. This would prove to be the last ever UK Top 40 hit for the man who now signs his name as Sananda Maitreya and wasn’t exactly going out on a high. A far cry from the dizzy heights and expectations that met his arrival on the music scene eight years before. Shame really.

What the chuff am I supposed to write about this one seeing as “Baby Baby” by Corona sounds exactly like their previous hit “Rhythm Of The Night”? I know this was common practice around this time but why didn’t the punters see through it and not buy it?! Was it all just about the bpm on the dance floors?

Vocalist Olga Maria de Souza has gone all Bladerunner for this performance with her sartorial choices; specifically the transparent mac that the replicant Zhora is wearing as she flees from Deckard. Thankfully she hasn’t got a snake like Zhora had too. There would have been letters sent to Points Of View, I’m telling you.

Just as the ‘exclusive’ performance from Prince and NPG was recycled the other week, so is this recent appearance by Simple Minds which was also labelled as ‘exclusive’. It’s all very well repeating these clips but where does that leave me eh? I’ve already written about this one in a previous post and they’re just in the studio not at a world famous landmark like the Eiffel Tower as they were when promoting previous single “She’s A River” on the show. Follow up single “Hypnotise” wasn’t anywhere near as strong to my ears so they probably should have reversed the songs and their settings. “Hypnotise” would have benefited from the distraction of the Eiffel Tower whereas “She’s A River” was probably muscular enough to stand up to a session in the TOTP studio as it were.

“Hypnotise” would end up being the band’s penultimate UK Top 40 hit. A lack of chart success didn’t deter them though and they are now in their 47th year of existence (albeit with only Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill remaining from the original lineup) and have released 21 studio albums with the most recent being 2022’s “Direction Of The Heart”.

Nope, no memory of this one at all. Pato Banton did a single with Ranking Roger of The Beat? Pato only had that one (albeit massive) hit didn’t he? His execrable version of “Baby Come Back”. Well no, actually. He had four (or five if you count his guest rap on Sting’s “This Cowboy Song” for which he received a credit) but none of his other hits got anywhere near the success of his chart topper. This one – “Bubbling Hot” -only managed a peak of No 15. He liked a collaboration though did old Pato. As well as Ranking Roger and Sting (with whom he also had a minor hit with a cover of The Police’s “Spirits In The Material World”), “Baby Come Back” also featured Ali and Robin Campbell of UB40. In fact, that means every one of his hits was with in conjunction with other artists.

“Bubbling Hot” kind of sounds like a reggae version of Arrow’s soca classic “Hot Hot Hot” to my untutored ears which is not necessarily a bad thing but overall there doesn’t seem to be much to the track really. Still, it’s nice to see the sadly departed Ranking Roger who died of cancer in 2019 again.

If it’s the 90s and Bryan Adams then it must be a big ballad and his latest release is…kind of. “Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?” certainly was a ballad but it was not quite of the same flavour of some of his other love songs of the decade. Tracks like “Please Forgive Me”, “All For Love” (with Rod Stewart and that king of collaborations Sting), “Do I Have To Say The Words” and of course “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” were very much soft rock ballads but this one was slightly different. How? It had a flamenco guitar in it courtesy of Paco de Lucia as name checked by Bruno Brookes in his intro.

I have to admit to dismissing this song completely at the time, very possibly due to its inclusion of said guitar. Written for the soundtrack to the film Don Juan DeMarco, it peaked at No 4 showing the power that Bryan still wielded when it came to mainstream balladeering. The fact that (yet again) the song was part of a film soundtrack probably helped its success though I don’t think Don Juan De Marco cut through quite as much as something like Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. I for one didn’t catch it at the time and have never watched it ever. One person who did was my friend Susan. Whilst waiting in the queue to buy her ticket, she heard the guy in front of her ask for his by putting an extraordinary emphasis on the word ‘Juan’. It went something like this: “Two for Don WHOOAHN De Marco please”. For the record, Susan didn’t believe that the guy was Spanish either.

Rejoice for The Outhere Brothers are Top of the Pops no more. They probably were still selling enough records to have stayed at No 1 for a few weeks yet but they were no match for the unit shifting phenomenon that took their place. We have arrived at the commercial and creative peak of Take That. In some ways it was, if not unexpected, then not guaranteed given that their last two singles hadn’t quite performed as expected. “Love Ain’t Here Anymore” had broken a run of four consecutive chart toppers by only making it to No 3 whilst “Sure”, though making it to No 1, only stayed there for one week despite Gary Barlow’s belief that it was the best thing the band had ever done. I (and millions of others) would beg to disagree Gary. It’s hard to see past “Back For Good” when it comes to that accolade. The song had been unveiled in a performance at the BRIT Awards in February creating a demand for it that saw it made available to the media six weeks before you could buy it in the shops and resulting in the single’s official release being brought forward. It would sell close on 400,000 copies in its first week meaning it had sold more in seven days than any single since Band Aid in 1984. It wasn’t hard to understand why. “Back For Good” was a shimmering pop masterpiece. It’s full of melody and nicely crafted lyrics about lipstick marks and coffee cups – this one though is excellent:

In the twist of separation, you excelled at being free
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Gary Barlow
Back for Good lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

I think though it’s the harmonies of the backing vocals that seeks the deal. Such was the song’s quality that it even gave them a hit in America which had been impervious to their success at home before.

Not everything was rosy in the Take That garden though. Within three months Robbie Williams would be gone, asked to leave by at least two of his bandmates over his attitude and commitment. Are there signs of him feeling the stress here with his shaved hair which has been died a hue of red/purple? “Back For Good” will be No 1 for four weeks so the boys (including Robbie) will be back soon enough. Sadly for Bruno Brookes, well, he was gone for good.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Grace	Not Over Yet	No
2	Ultimate Kaos	Show A Little Love	Never
3	Bucketheads	The Bomb! (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind)	Negative
4	Terence Trent D’Arby	Holding Onto You	Nah
5	Corona	Baby Baby	I did not
6	Simple Minds	Hypnotise	Its a no from me
7	Pato Banton and Ranking Roger	Bubbling Hot	Not I
8	Bryan Adams	Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?	Nope
9	Take That	Back For Good	No but my wife did – on 7″ no less

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/m001rk79/top-of-the-pops-06041995

TOTP 24 FEB 1994

Posted on February 11, 2023 by 80stastic

Musical comebacks – there have been a few across the decades, some more successful than others. Take That made a remarkable return to the charts in 2006 ten years after they had disbanded with a No 1 album and single and sold out tour dates, all without the presence of Robbie Williams in their ranks (at least initially). In 1983, Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer” album would bag her four Grammy Awards following years in the commercial wilderness after finally escaping her abusive relationship with husband Ike. And what about Elvis Presley’s 1968 TV Special which would become unofficially known as ‘The ‘68 Comeback Special’, reinvigorating his career which had declined into a spiral of those awful movies he made. Even in these BBC4 TOTP repeats, we’ve seen both Meatloaf and Duran Duran rise from the ashes of their past careers to record huge sellers in 1993.

Then there’s the less well received comebacks. When Guns N’ Roses self destructed causing a massive delay of fifteen years between albums, by the time “Chinese Democracy “ finally came out, there was little appetite for Axl Rose and his new band line up. Spandau Ballet did pull off a successful reunion in 2009 with a sell out tour, an album of re-recorded versions of songs from their back catalogue and a feature length documentary biopic Soul Boys Of The Western World. However, when lead singer Tony Hadley left for good in 2017, the band tried to carry on by replacing him with relative unknown Ross William Wild. They only lasted a handful of gigs before realising that a Hadley-less Spandau wasn’t really what the people wanted. Nor did people have any room in their lives for the second coming of Vanilla Ice who attempted a comeback in 1998 with a nu-metal influenced album called “Hard To Swallow” (indeed it was). And then there was Level 42 who kick off this edition of TOTP. Was it a return to their glory days of the mid 80s or did they illicit an indifferent reaction?

The dawn of the 90s saw the band looking every bit the 80s anachronism. Their long term record label Polydor allegedly rejected their first new material of the decade (the 1991 album “Guaranteed”) which led to the band relocating to RCA but the album wasn’t well received when it finally appeared. Could they achieve an unlikely comeback three years on just as Britpop was brewing?

“Forever Now” was the title of both their tenth studio album and lead single from it. It was also the last album to feature three members of the original line up in Mark King, Mike Lindup and Phil Gould with the latter returning to the fold for the first time since 1987. It was a short lived return for Gould who refused to tour the album due to his lack of confidence in the record company. The fan base saw the album as very much a return to form but for an uncommitted observer like me, it sounded a bit directionless. They’d added a load of horns into the mix alongside King’s trademark slap bass but it just seems to meander along without really going anywhere ultimately. Maybe channeling the origins of the band’s name (with 42 being the answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything” as per The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy), the song’s lyrics seem to ponder the existential mystery of time, coming up with the conclusion that we should all just live for the moment. However, it expresses that sentiment in the most cack-handed of ways with these words:

Holy grail, holy cow

I just want to live forever now
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Frank John Musker / Mark King / Richard Simon Darbyshire
Forever Now lyrics © BMG Rights Management, Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner Chappell Music, Inc

Dear oh dear. Later in the year, another song would appear with the lyrics “live forever” in it. It was so much better than Level 42’s effort, you could see the difference in quality between them from space.

“Forever Now” the single did achieve a respectable peak of No 19 though whilst the album made the Top 10. The band would break up in the October of 1994 before reappearing with King and a new touring line up in 2001.

Level 42 weren’t the only ones in revival mode on this show as the host was also on the comeback trail. Bruno Brookes hadn’t been on the show since 1991 just before the ‘year zero’ cull but was brought back into the fold alongside Simon Mayo, Mark Goodier and Nicky Campbell by new producer Ric Blaxill. So here he was in 1994 with the same hairstyle that he had on his first TOTP appearance back in 1984. Quite remarkable. Bruno Brookes introducing Level 42 on TOTP – this really was an 80s flashback.

The next act weren’t exactly looking to make a comeback as they’d had a No 1 single less than 12 months earlier but the comparative lack of success of its follow ups had led me to believe we’d maybe already seen the last of them. How wrong I was. Ace Of Base have sold an estimated 50 million records worldwide to date making them the third best selling artist from Sweden ever behind the mighty ABBA and..ahem…Roxette. Their debut album sold 9 million copies in the US alone and it’s from that album that this track – “The Sign” – came. Sort of. As with Red Hot Chili Peppers the other week, Ace Of Base’s release history was a bit complicated. Originally entitled “Happy Nation”, it was initially released in the UK in June 1993. However, it was kept back for nearly 6 months in the US and retitled “The Sign” with that track plus two others added to it. When the title track went to No 1 over there for 6 weeks, the single was given a release in the UK whilst the “Happy Nation” album was also rereleased with those extra tracks added and retitled “Happy Nation (U.S. Version). Got all that? Good.

In my head, “The Sign” went to No 1 over here just as it had done in the US but Wikipedia assured me it was a No 2 record. Depending on your point of view it’s either incredibly catchy or intensely annoying (I’m in the latter camp) yet it many circles it is cherished. Katy Perry has acknowledged it as a big influence on her music and it regularly appears in those 50 Best Songs of the 90s polls. For me though, it was always a very slight, lowest common denominator pop song. Its Wikipedia entry refers to it as ‘techno-reggae’ whatever the hell that was. As with all of Ace Of Base’s hits, I couldn’t get along the overly nasal vocals. As for its legacy, it surely doesn’t get any bigger than Pitch Perfect?

Another comeback of sorts now as we find the rather unusual event of a record going back up the charts having already peaked once. There’s no great mystery to why this happened though. “All For Love” by Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart and Sting had entered the charts at No 7 back in mid January before making its way to a peak of No 2 and then descending the charts. However, the film it was from – The Three Musketeers – was released to UK cinemas just two weeks before this TOTP aired and so, with it playing over the end credits, people’s attention was drawn to it once more resulting in a sales spike. It’s still a shocking song though.

No comebacks here – “Stay Together” was a bit of a stop gap single though between Suede albums. Crashing straight into the charts at No 3, was this official proof that they were not just the next big thing but indeed, the current big thing? As for that by rather out there Derek Jarman reference by Bruno Brookes, here’s @TOTPFacts with the story behind it:

No, you didn't dream that, Bruno Brookes just mentioned avant garde filmmaker Derek Jarman, who died of an AIDS-related illness on 19 February 1994. Jarman directed the video for Suede's "So Young". #TOTP https://t.co/p1HxIRGrJy
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) February 3, 2023

They’ve also got the info on drummer Simon Gilbert’s 16 T-shirt:

Suede drummer Simon Gilbert's "16" t-shirt was a message in support of lowering the gay male age of consent to 16. At this point it was still 21. On 21 February 1994, the House of Commons had voted to reduce it to 18. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) February 3, 2023

Look, it takes a long time to write these reviews so sometimes I allow myself a shortcut by relying on other sources to tell the stories – OK? And anyway, Suede were only just in the TOTP studio performing “Stay Together” the other week so I’ve already said everything I wanted to say about it.

An artist next who would achieve a couple of comebacks during her time and in 1994, her career trajectory would suggest she’d be in need of one soon enough. After bursting into the charts in 1993 with a debut No 1 single in “Dreams”, Gabrielle had failed to replicate that success with the follow up singles which had peaked at Nos:

9 – 26 – 24

“Because Of You” was the last of those figures and, in its defence, it was the fourth and final track released from an album that had been out for four months already including the busy Christmas period. Even so, these were surely disappointing numbers for both artist and record company. Another reason why “Because Of You” underperformed could be that it was basically “Dreams” without the killer chorus. However, Gabrielle would pull off the first of those aforementioned comebacks two years later with a Top 5 single in “Give Me A Little More Time” and a platinum selling eponymously titled sophomore album. In 2000 she would produce an even better comeback with her chart topping “Rise” single and album.

Oh, and if you need a song called “Because Of You” in your life, there’s always this…

Here come the Breakers starting with an artist who had already made a comeback at the start of the decade after his last two albums of the 80s had seen his sales fall away dramatically. Both 1986’s “Leather Jackets” and 1988’s “Reg Strikes Back” had underperformed commercially and 1990’s “Sleeping With The Past” looked to be going the same way until a rerelease of “Sacrifice” coupled as an A-side with “Healing Hands” made Elton John relevant again by giving him his first solo UK No 1. Elton built on that success with a No 2 album in “The One” and a platinum selling “Duets” album. It was from the latter that this ghastly single was taken – a reworking of his 1976 No 1 with Kiki Dee “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” but this time fine with US drag queen and TV celebrity RuPaul.

This was just a terrible idea badly executed. Elton’s last single had been a duet with the aforementioned Kiki Dee on the Cole Porter song “True Love”. Couldn’t he have ditched that and done a revamped version of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” with her instead? The nasty, tinny sounding production on the Hi-NRG RuPaul version here does nothing for either of the protagonists’ careers. And the video is just a cringe fest. Perhaps due to its then recent performance at the BRITS, the 1994 version of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” peaked at an inexplicable No 7.

No comebacks here as this was one of the first chart hits for Soundgarden that took them from being just another grunge rock band from Seattle to global recognition. I have to admit to not knowing that much about Soundgarden. I knew there was a small, dingy club at Back Piccadilly, Manchester called Soundgarden as we had an Our Price Christmas do their once – caterer ran off with the food budget without supplying any actual grub – but the band? Not much. Did they do one called “Black Hole Sun”?

*checks their discography*

Yes, that was them and that track was the third single from their 1994 album “Superunknown”. The first though was this one – “Spoonman”. Nothing to do with Noel Gallagher’s quote about sibling Liam being “as angry as a man with a fork in a world of soup” nor Mr Spoon from Button Moon, it was actually inspired by something I did have some knowledge about – the film Singles. The plot revolves around the love lives of some Generation X’ers in Seattle including the wannabe rock star character Cliff played by Matt Dillon. Soundgarden and Pearl Jam worked on songs for the soundtrack with the latter’s bass guitarist Jeff Ament tasked with coming up with names for Cliff’s fictional rock band in the film. ‘Spoonman’ was one of his suggestions but in the end they went for ‘Citizen Dick’. Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell used the title as the basis for this track. It didn’t appear in the soundtrack album initially though a version was included on a 2017 super deluxe edition. It would peak at No 20 on the IK charts.

This next song is from a band not so much attempting a comeback as being at the centre of a rerelease campaign for their decade old back catalogue. “Two Tribes”, perhaps surprisingly, was the last of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s first four singles to get the 90s remix/rerelease treatment after “Relax”, “Welcome To The Pleasuredome” and “The Power Of Love” before it. Surprising in the respect that it was No 1 for 9 weeks in 1984, the longest running No1 record in the UK during the entire 80s. Is it their most popular/well known song though? Could a case be made for “Relax” which is, after all, the 7th best selling single in the UK of all time. Or how about “The Power Of Love” what with its festive season associations and place on many a Christmas playlist? What is not surprising is that none of the singles from Frankie’s second album “Liverpool” were deemed worthy of a second outing. “Two Tribes (Fluke’s Minimix)” achieved a peak of No 16 whilst “Bang!…The Greatest Hits Of Frankie Goes To Hollywood” made No 4.

A second helping of Sting on the show now as we go live by satellite to Sydney, Australia for a performance of his latest single “Nothing ‘Bout Me”. This exemplified new TOTP producer Ric Blaxill’s approach to these live by satellite links to have artists doing a turn in front of a famous landmark (in this case Sydney Opera House). This was the final single from the “Ten Summoner’s Tales” album which brought a nice symmetry to the tracks taken from it if you include one that originally featured on the Lethal Weapon 3 soundtrack but ended up on the Sting album. Why? Well, it was called “It’s Probably Me”. Mr Sumner was obviously keen on three word song titles where the last one was ‘me’ at this time.

It’s a fairly jaunty number and was written as Sting’s retort to all the attempts by the music press to dissect his psyche every time he released an album. It suffered from being the last single from an album that had already been out for nearly a year and got no higher than its No 32 chart position it was at here. Bruno Brookes talks about Sting having “a cast of thousands” with him in this performance and there’s certainly a fair few there with him including seven backing singers! However, even that’s not the most noticeable thing about this performance. Where did you get that outfit sir?!

So here’s a bit of a thing as UK music fans get their first look at Beck. What an interesting artist this guy is but he would probably say that the least interesting thing about him is his debut hit “Loser”. There’s so much to unpack and discuss about Beck but I’m pushed for time again this week so let’s start by dispelling a couple of myths:

He is not related to the Hanson brothers of “Mmm Bop” fame. His surname is spelt Hansen.
“Loser” is not a stoner rap or anti-establishment slacker anthem that speaks of Generation X ennui. The ‘loser’ theme is, according to Beck himself, merely a description of his lack of skill as a rapper, made up on the spot when he was writing the song.
It has nothing to do with Nirvana nor Kurt Cobain’s death a few weeks after it was a hit despite their label Sub Pop selling T-shirts emblazoned with the word ‘LOSER’ on them.

It remains, however, a great track in my humble opinion despite Beck declaring it interesting but ultimately unimpressive. It would not be indicative of his future musical direction though with many fans of the song being caught out by the rest of his material. A bit like when those people who loved “More Than Words” by Extreme being disappointed at the rest of their funk metal back catalogue perhaps?

“Loser” with its bizarre lyrics (“beefcake pantyhose” indeed!) would go Top 10 in the US though we were slightly more conservative in our liking of it over here where it peaked at No 15. By the way, I’ve no idea who these old fellas are up there on stage with Beck or why they are there but they’re great all the same.

There is a rather tragically poignant version of the song in the TV series Glee. Both the actors featured in the performance are now no longer with us. Cory Monteith died in 2013 of an accidental drug overdose whilst Mark Salling committed suicide by hanging in 2018.

No comebacks apparent in the No 1 slot as Mariah Carey holds steady for another week with “Without You”. The popularity of her version led to a surge in sales for parent album “Music Box” which had been out for six months already giving her the double whammy of a No 1 single and album simultaneously. Curiously, despite eight of her previous ten singles going to No 1 in the US, it peaked at No 3 over there. Mariah would eke out another UK Top 10 hit from “Music Box” in “Anytime You Need A Friend” before undertaking another cover of a love song when she duetted with Luther Vandross on Lionel Richie’s “Endless Love”. She would end 1994 by releasing that Christmas song.

The play out song this week gives us one final comeback and how unlikely was this one?! Anyone who had a bet on the Charleston dance craze being back in 1994 must have coined it in. “Doop” by Doop was a mash up of ragtime, the aforementioned Charleston and some house beats and would be at No 1 in the UK soon enough. Criminally, it denied Bruce Springsteen what would have been his first and so far only solo UK chart topper.

Although the bpm are completely different, it does put me in mind of this intensely creepy single that was released in 1982. A synth pop version of Irving Berlin anyone? Although UK record buyers were unable to resist the ‘charms’ of Doop in 1994, back in the 80s we had a bit more taste as this drivel bombed over here whilst going to No 4 in the US.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Level 42	Forever Now	Nah
2	Ace Of Base	The Sign	Never happening
3	Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart and Sting	All For Love	See 2 above
4	Suede	Stay Together	Could have but didn’t
5	Gabrielle	Because Of You	Nope
6	Elton John and RuPaul	Don’t Go Breaking My Heart	As if
7	Soundgarden	Spoonman	No
8	Frankie Goes To Hollywood	Two Tribes	Bought it in 1984 but not 1994
9	Sting	Nothing ‘Bout Me	I did not
10	Beck	Loser	See 4 above
11	Mariah Carey	Without You	Negative
12	Doop	Doop	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001hqvk/top-of-the-pops-24021994

TOTP 13 JAN 1994

Posted on January 20, 2023 by 80stastic

Christmas and New Year are now distant memories – not just in 2023 but in 1994 where we currently find ourselves in the BBC4 TOTP repeats schedule. The charts have pretty much evacuated from their bowels all that Christmas stodge and some new songs are cleansing the Top 40. Well, I say cleanse but there are still some rotten tunes stinking the place out. Oh well, nose pegs at the ready then as we go again..,

We start with the previous year’s Eurodance sensation Culture Beat who are back with a third consecutive hit in “Anything”. There’s no let up in the formula here – they couldn’t have mixed things up with a ballad? – as Jay Supreme performs a high speed rap workout while vocalist Tania Evans chips in with a chorus including lyrics that seem to suggest desperation to please a (potential) partner. I’d like to think such themes were not prevalent today but toxic masculinity is on the increase with hateful figures like Andrew Tate generating headlines. I’m probably reading far too much into it but seeing Tania sing those words does jar a bit. On closer examination of the lyrics online, Jay Supreme seems to be having similar relationship problems where nothing he does, says or wears is good enough for his other half but he’s rapping so fast nobody can decipher what he’s on about. “Anything” was at its chart peak of No 5 already. They would never return to the Top 10.

Get those nose pegs ready as here’s a bona fide toilet bowel dweller in the form of “All For Love” by Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart and Sting. This was proper dog shit, baked for the latest cinematic take on the Alexandre Dumas novel The Three Musketeers. I recall there being a big buzz about the film starring Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, Oliver Platt and Chris O’Donnell in the titular roles and I, myself, duly went to see it. Sadly, like its song, it was no good, without merit and, in short, a stinker. There was something very cynical about casting Sheen and Sutherland together to reunite them in some sort of 17th century cousin to their Brat Pack western Young Guns (indeed, some reviewers christened the film ‘Young Swords’). This was just one of a long list of film adaptations of the famous story – I had no idea there were that many – but I’d take the cartoon from my childhood from The Banana Splits TV show over any of them.

Back to that song though and its protagonists were probably more of an unholy trinity than they were The Three Musketeers for many. Certainly there are a fair few musical crimes that can be levelled at Adams, Stewart and Sting individually (though some of all three’s back catalogue stands up to scrutiny) but this collective effort really is a low point. It probably sounded like a good idea in theory – three massive mainstream stars (the musketeers) record a song that borrows its title from the main characters’ motto (‘All for one and one for all’) but the actual song is such a dirge that it can’t fail but to reek. Composed by Bry and his go to songwriting partner Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange, who was also responsible for that other Adams turd “Please Forgive Me”, it really is an awful record. The film did decent business though and so the single was a huge hit off the back of it going to No 1 in the US and around the world though its peak of No 2 in the UK meant it wasn’t quite a case of all for one and one for all.

“All For Love” isn’t the only Three Musketeers inspired pop song though. “You’ve Got Everything Now” from the eponymous debut album by The Smiths features the line “I’ve seen you smile but I’ve never really heard you laugh” and borrows from a narrative description of the musketeer Athos

He was very taciturn, this worthy signor. Be it understood we are speaking of Athos. During the five or six years that he had lived in the strictest intimacy with his companions, Porthos and Aramis, they could remember having often seen him smile, but had never heard him laugh.
— Chapter 7, The Interior of the Musketeers, The Three Musketeers Project Gutenberg.

Proving that it’s not a total clean sweep of new songs in the charts, here’s K7 with “Come Baby Come”. Released in mid December back in ‘93, it would spend a giant sixteen weeks on the charts peaking at No 3. Despite the single’s success, K7 didn’t sustain. Indeed, if you Google K7 these days you will find an entry for him but behind results for an independent music label, a brand of power washer and alongside anti virus software.

What’s this? A Ce Ce Peniston hit that isn’t “Finally”? Well, there’s actually a few of them but to me they all sound like inferior re-writes of “Finally” including this one called “I’m In The Mood”. Nothing to do with The Nolans’ biggest hit but the lead single from her second album called “Thought ‘Ya Knew”. According to reviews at the time, this was meant to have a bit of a jazz slant to it but I’m not sure I can hear it. The single actually did OK chart wise making No 16 but the parent album, unlike her debut “Finally” which went Top 10, floundered to a high of No 31. I have to say that I don’t recall anything of this stage of Ce Ce’s career but she carried on gamely throughout the 90s releasing two more albums before the end of the decade to little reception before scoring one final hit in 1997 with a cover of Jocelyn Brown’s “Somebody Else’s Guy”.

How can I have forgotten about this?! The The on TOTP and I’ve erased it from my memory banks?! What was going on in my life at the time to have dislodged this from a special place in my grey matter?! So many questions but surely the biggest of the lot should be why isn’t Matt Johnson routinely lauded as a national treasure?! I first became aware of his genius in 1983 when I heard “Uncertain Smile”. Then I saw the striking artwork on the single’s cover in WH Smith and, even as a 15 year old pop kid, knew something special was going on here. By the time I was a Poly student, I had the first album “Soul Mining” in pride of place in my cassette collection to make me look…well, I’d have maybe said ‘trendy’ back then but probably I meant non mainstream (even though I hopelessly was).

The album also included the singles “Perfect” and “This Is The Day” and it was the latter of those two which was chosen as the main track on the “Dis-Infected EP”. Remodelled as “That Was The Day”, it was backed up by a take on the title track of 1986 album “Infected” plus remixes of two tracks from the most recent album at the time, 1992’s “Dusk”. Presumably this EP was released to maintain profile in between albums (Johnson’s album of Hank Williams cover versions – “Hanky Panky” – didn’t appear until 1995) and its No 17 peak would make it The The’s biggest ever hit just eclipsing 1989’s “The Beat(en) Generation”.

Coming after Culture Beat, K7 and Ce Ce Peniston in the running order, this incarnation of The The looks every bit the outlier on TOTP. Matt, for all his genius, never looked like a pop star bless him whilst the minimal set up of a keyboard player and a guy on harmonica were at odds with all the synchronised dance moves, rapping and general party atmosphere of the acts before. And thank God for that.

“This Is The Day” was covered in 2011 by Manic Street Preachers to promote their third compilation album “National Treasures – The Complete Singles” thus affording Matt Johnson a sliver of that national treasure status he so richly deserves.

Three Breakers this week starting with “Everyday” by Phil Collins. I don’t remember this at all and there’s a case to be made that I just count my blessings and leave it at that. The reviewer in me won’t allow that though (Damn you!) so I’m going in for a listen – this isn’t going to end well is it?

*manages two and a half minutes before switching off*

Well, it was, as I suspected, not worth the effort. According to Wikipedia, Phil played every musical part on this track which means it was him that ripped of Bruce Hornsby for the piano intro. After that it drifts off into predictable Collins territory with a melancholic melody and lyrics so rank and hackneyed that there should be a law against this form of song composition. Phil bangs on about being knocked off his feet and the fire inside him and his life being worth nothing without the object of his affections…turn it in mate! I can imagine it being used in a lame rom com movie starring Paul Rudd and Jennifer Anniston to soundtrack the bit where the film’s couple have broken up. Nice work for Phil but all rather cynical.

The song was the second single from his “Both Sides” album and though making a respectable chart high of No 15, possibly didn’t allay record company fears after lead single “Both Sides Of The Story” underperformed.

The era of Toni Braxton is upon us. A huge star straight off the bat in the US where “Another Sad Love Song” went Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, that single stalled on initial release over here meaning that “Breathe Again” would become her first UK Top 40 hit. And what a hit! It would eventually peak at No 2 over here which seemed like a slight case of overachievement for an R&B ballad. Clearly the song had something that set it apart from the other examples of the genre we had seen. It did ebb and flow quite nicely and Braxton could clearly deliver the required vocal. Even so, I for one was slightly taken aback by its popularity.

“Another Sad Love Song” was rereleased in this country in the wake of the success of “Breathe Again” and this time was a hit making No 15. However, Toni really came into her own in 1996 when she had another No 2 hit record in “Un-break My Heart”, a single that sold and sold and sold, spending nineteen weeks in total on the charts.

The final Breaker is a cover of a glam rock hit from the 70s courtesy of Def Leppard. Having taken five years to record a follow up to the multi platinum selling “Hysteria” album, these lads were not exactly prolific. “Adrenalize” had been a success but not on the same level as its predecessor and another studio album wouldn’t arrive until 1996. So, how to fill the gap? With a compilation album of course. However, Def Leppard wanted to give something back to the fans that was not just a boring Best Of that would just mean the completists forking out for tracks they already owned so they came up with “Retro Active”, an album of touched up B-sides and unreleased recordings from the band’s vaults. There were also a couple of cover versions including Mick Ronson’s “Only After Dark” and this one, a 1975 Top 20 hit from The Sweet called “Action”. I didn’t think I knew this song but having given both versions a spin, it did ring some bells in the deepest corners of my mind.

Is it just me or do The Sweet not get the recognition they deserve? Whenever glam rock gets mentioned, it seems that the first names to crop up are T-Rex, Slade, Wizzard and even Roxy Music (nobody can talk about Gary Glitter anymore for obvious reasons). Do The Sweet get overlooked slightly? In their early 70s heyday, they tore up the charts with songs like “Ballroom Blitz”, “Teenage Rampage” and “Block Buster!” clocking up ten Top 10 hits including a No 1 and five (!) No 2s making them one of the unluckiest bands ever. By the time of “Action” though, the hits were drying up. This would be one of their last with only a change of musical direction giving them one final Top Tenner with “Love Is Like Oxygen” in 1978.

Def Leppard do a decent version of “Action” though the original is easily better. After the almost philanthropic act of the “Retro Active” release, the band went and released a proper Best Of anyway in 1995 called “Vault: Def Leppard Greatest Hits (1980-1995) which became another platinum seller. It’s all about the Benjamins at the end of the day isn’t it?

Back in the studio we find Eternal who are consolidating on the success of debut single “Stay” with another mid tempo soul/pop track called “Save Our Love”. The buzz around this lot was still very vibrant coming out of Christmas and so another hit was almost guaranteed. “Save Our Love” duly did the business going Top 10 though falling short of the No 4 peak of its predecessor by four places. For me, this follow up was nowhere near as strong as their opener. Sure it was radio friendly with a shiny production but it didn’t have the nuance of “Stay”. It all felt a bit too straightforward – Eternal by numbers. Talking of numbers, the group still had its full complement of them at this stage but by the following year, Louise Redknapp (Nurding as was) would have left the group. She, along with her band mates, were kept busy in 1994 though releasing five singles and promoting their debut album “Always And Forever”.

I’m not sure what the petrol station vibe is all about for this performance. Can’t think of many other artists who have channeled it. Billy Joel was a mechanic in a garage for “Uptown Girl” wasn’t he so not quite the same. Oh yes though – mechanics or more specifically Mike And The Mechanics who used an image of a gas pump attendant asleep on some tyres next to his pump as the cover of their Best Of album entitled “Hits” in 1996. By the way, those combat trousers that Eternal are wearing were all the rage in 1994. I think I even had some. No doubt we’ll be seeing more examples of their popularity in future repeats.

The reggae Rick Astley next as studio tape operator/ tea boy turned pop star Bitty McLean is back with another hit. After the No 2 success of his debut single “It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes)”, it looked as though Bitty’s career was over almost immediately when follow up single “Pass It On” steadfastly refused to do so and stalled at No 35. However, here he was back with another hit in “Here I Stand” that would ultimately make No 10 despite being awful. It was another cover version (originally released by Justin Hinds And The Dominoes in 1967) but Bitty makes it sound completely tuneless in his rendition. I really didn’t get the appeal of Bitty and his music but I’m sure that he’s a lovely chap all the same!

It’s a second week at the top for Chaka Demus And Pliers with their version of “Twist And Shout” despite heavy competition from D:Ream who are up to No 2 this week. Apparently, “Twist And Shout” was selling less at the top of the charts than it was when lodged at No 3 at Christmas. The vagaries of the post festive season sales slump and all that.

There are, of course, many different versions of “Twist And Shout”. Here’s one from Bruce Springsteen which segues into “La Lamba”…

I’m sure I heard a story about the recording of The Beatles’ first album in which “Twist And Shout” wasn’t going to be included on it but a journalist told them that they should record “La Bamba” as he’d heard them do it live and it sounded great. The band responded that they didn’t play “La Bamba” in concert but realised the press guy was talking about “Twist And Shout” which they did perform live and that’s how it got onto the album. This is surely the definitive version of the song…

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Culture Beat	Anything	Never happening
2	Bryan Adams / Rod Stewart / Sting	All For Love	NO!
3	K7	Come Baby Come	I did not
4	Ce Ce Peniston	I’m In The Mood	Nah
5	The The	Dis-Infected EP	No but I had the Soul Mining album which includes lead track This Is The Day
6	Phil Collins	Everyday	Double NO!
7	Toni Braxton	Breathe Again	Nope
8	Def Leppard	Action	Negative
9	Eternal	Save Our Love	It’s a no
10	Bitty McLean	Here I Stand	Never!
11	Chaka Demus And Pliers	Twist And Shout	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/m001h027/top-of-the-pops-13011994

TOTP 11 NOV 1993

Posted on November 17, 2022 by 80stastic

The 14th November 2022 saw the 70th anniversary of the UK’s official singles chart. That inaugural chart was published by the NME with the very first No 1 record being Al Martino’s “Here In My Heart”. Back in 1993 when this TOTP was broadcast, we were just three days away from the 41st birthday of the charts. Were there any celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary the year before? I can’t remember but what I do know is that as part of the 70th festivities, seven charts have been produced detailing the most streamed songs for each year of the charts’ existence. Some results were obvious – the most streamed track that was originally released in 1975 for example is “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen. Others were a little more surprising- 1990’s most streamed song is “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC. As we’re up to 1993 in these TOTP repeats, let’s check out which was the most streamed track that was released in that year…oh that’s just plain wrong! “What Is Love” by Haddaway? Ha’way and shite man! That just about sums up the terrible year that was 1993. Still, we’re nearly through it and then Britpop is just around the corner. For now though, ‘turn and face the strange’ as we navigate another thirty minutes of nostalgia…

Hang on. Captain Hollywood? I thought we were in 1993 not 1990! Didn’t this guy have a hit called “I Can’t Stand It” as the decade began?

*checks official.charts.com

Well, sort of. It was officially credited to Twenty 4 Seven featuring Captain Hollywood but I was right about the year – it was a No 7 in 1990. There was a follow up too called “Are You Dreaming” which went Top 20. At that point the good captain (real name Tony Dawson-Harrison) left the project to begin his own new…erm…project called…erm…Captain Hollywood Project. Their first single was “More And More” which, and this is now almost becoming as regular an admission as Rishi Sunak claiming he was unaware of the latest scandal to engulf one of his cabinet before he appointed them, I have no memory of at all. Listening to it now, it sounds f*****g dreadful! Was this really what the pop fans of 1993 wanted? The heated up leftovers of what was rejected from the recording sessions of Snap!’s “Rhythm Is A Dancer”?

The rapper is, I believe, the aforementioned Tony Dawson-Harrison who sounds like that voice over guy who does all those film trailers that begin with “In a world where…”. Apparently his voice was electronically modified to sound deeper. Why? Unless his true voice sounded like Joe Pasquale I don’t get why you would do that. I also don’t understand why all the guys on stage have a ponytail and are dressed like waiters at a high class restaurant. The whole thing is completely baffling, almost as baffling as how the record managed to get to No 23 in the charts.

As it’s nearly mid-November, the run up Christmas has started and that means, as host Mark Franklin points out, Best Of albums and plenty of ‘em. Artists peddling collections of their biggest hits around this time included Diana Ross, Wet Wet Wet, Soul II Soul, Bette Midler, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, The Christians and this guy – Bryan Adams. His “So Far So Good” album would end up as the sixth best selling of 1993 in the UK. This was quite astonishing when you consider that until the record breaking run at No 1 in 1991 by “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You”, Bry’s biggest UK hit was “Run To You” which peaked just outside the Top 10 at No 11. Look at the chart standings in this country for every track on “So Far So Good”

Title	Chart peak
Summer of ’69	42
Straight from the Heart	51
It’s Only Love	29
Can’t Stop This Thing We Started	12
Do I Have to Say the Words?	30
This Time	41
Run To You	11
Heaven	38
Cuts Like A Knife	Did not chart
(Everything I Do) I Do It for You	1
Somebody	35
Kids Wanna Rock	N/A album track
Heat Of The Night	50
Please Forgive Me	2

Maybe they were big airplay hits and that’s how people knew them? Remember those streaming charts I mentioned earlier? The most streamed song that was released in 1985 was “Summer Of 69”. Or maybe Bryan had always been more of an albums guy until his Robin Hood moment? Even his 1987 album which generated zero UK Top 40 hits went gold and made our Top 10. Perhaps it was just all about that No 1 song but surely enough people had bought the single to not need to buy a Greatest Hits album to own it? Was it the new song “Please Forgive Me” that reeled people in? I don’t know why that should’ve because it was a right dirge. Its promo video was no better – a right snoozefest showing Bryan and his merry band of musos laying down the track in the studio. Even his dog who’s there for no apparent reason looks bored. Somehow the single made it to No 2.

Here’s another track specifically recorded to promote a Best Of album – it’s the aforementioned Soul II Soul with “Wish”. Who was doing the singing for Jazzie B and co by 1993? Caron Wheeler had long since departed by then. Well, my research (by which I mean Wikipedia) tells me that’s the now sadly passed away Melissa Bell on stage who was actually pregnant at the time. One of her four children (not the one from this pregnancy though) would turn out to be pretty famous herself – singer and actress Alexandra Burke who won the 2008 series of The X Factor. As well as bagging herself three No 1 singles, she was also on the charity record by The X Factor Finalists who covered Mariah Carey’s “Hero” that I mentioned the other week.

Presumably Melissa’s pregnancy explains her cover-all outfit in this performance. The feathers on it reminded me of this long forgotten BBC costume drama from 1978 featuring the Welsh Robin Hood Twm Sion Cati and his rather ludicrous outfit.

Five Breakers again this week starting with Paul Weller and a third single from his “Wild Wood” album. “The Weaver EP” actually featured four tracks including Weller’s cover of Neil Young’s “Ohio” but the title track was the only song actually on the album. By this point, the rejuvenation of Paul was well under way with “The Weaver” peaking at No 18 after previous singles “Wild Wood” made No 14 and “”Sunflower” No 16. More than these solid chart performances though, it seemed to me that Weller was being accepted back into the fold of artists that meant something – it wasn’t just about nostalgia for The Jam. He was suddenly relevant again.

After The Style Council disappeared up their own arse as the 80s ended, it seemed like Weller had lost his mojo completely. Without a record contract for the first time since he was 17 he took a sabbatical for the whole of 1990 before restarting his musical career with some low key live gigs playing old Jam standards as well as some new songs before dipping his toe back into recording music with the release of No 36 single “Into Tomorrow” as The Paul Weller Movement. That paved the way for his debut, eponymous solo album in 1992 which in itself was in effect a trailer for “Wild Wood”. As for the song itself, it’s not too dissimilar to “Sunflower” with its ringing guitar licks albeit that it probably has more of a groove to it whereas “Sunflower” is a bit more strident sounding. Even the videos are alike being straightforward performance run throughs in a mixture of black and white and colour film. Both are resounding and engaging tracks however.

Ah shit! It’s Bollers time! Michael Bolton that is who’s turned up with a song the title of which suggests he’s doing his best Meatloaf impression. “Said I Loved You…But I Lied” was actually written by Bollers himself alongside Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange who also co-wrote that Bryan Adams stinker that was on earlier. And guess what? This one’s terrible too! Lange seems to be the enemy of music, constructing anti-songs that go nowhere and do nothing. He has worked with some huge names like AC/DC and Britney Spears but his biggest claim to fame is producing Shania Twain (to whom he was also married) and her “Come On Over” album which is the best selling country album of all time and the best selling of the 90s but I always hated that so…ahem…that don’t impress me much. As for Michael Bolton, as usual he had an album out for Christmas called “The One Thing” from which “Said I Loved You…But I Lied” was taken. It would peak at No15 in the UK and No 6 in the US, the last time Bolton would visit the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 10.

Next a single that I would have sworn came out at least two years later than this*. Leftfield are electronic dance duo Neil Barnes and Paul Daley who back in 1993 were about to break through into the mainstream with the release of “Open Up” which had its own secret weapon in the guest vocalist on the track, one John Lydon. Not seen in the charts for three years when PIL’s “Don’t Ask Me” made No 22 (another one of those Best Of promoting singles), Lydon’s growling vocals intertwined with some progressive house beats was an unlikely but winning combination. Anything he sings on is always installed with an instant sense of peril and brims with dread and it works a treat in this anxiety inducing track. The line ‘Burn Hollywood burn’ led to it being withdrawn from play on ITV’s The Chart Show due to an unfortunate case of timing which saw it in heavy rotation at the time of the Malibu bush fires in Los Angeles. Lydon’s own LA home was in peril at one point.

*Having checked Leftfield’s discography, I think the reason for my own case of wayward timing re: when this single was released is down to the fact that their album “Leftism” on which “Open Up” featured didn’t come out until January 1995.

Remember that awful hit “To Be With You” by a US band called Mr. Big from 1992? Well, here’s the 1993 version. Soul Asylum were the perpetrators of this year’s mournful, acoustic power ballad though they had actually been in existence for over a decade by this point. “Runaway Train” was their song and it would be the biggest hit of their career by far, going Top 5 all around Europe and in their home country of America whilst peaking at No 7 in the UK.

And then you watch the video and the song is transformed into something else altogether and your initial assessment of it is no longer valid. The decision of director Tony Kaye to use the promo as something practical rather than just aesthetic changes not just people’s perception of the song but actually changed people’s lives. Originally written by lead vocalist Dave Pirner about depression, the use of imagery in the video of children witnessing or fleeing from abuse convinced many that the song was about runaway and missing children. The disturbing scenes of domestic abuse, child prostitution and kidnapping weren’t gratuitous though as they were interspersed with stills of actual missing children with their names published alongside how long they had been missing. Pirner appears at the end of the video to advise “If you’ve seen one of these kids or are one of them, please call this number”. The children’s details were changed and tailored to whichever country the video was being shown in (i.e. UK children were featured in the video released in this country). The ultimate impact of the video which received high rotation on MTV was that twenty-six children featured in the video were found. Tragically, there were also horrific denouements to the stories of those children featured the details of which I don’t need to go into in a blog about music. Predictably, even the brief glimpse we get of the video in the Breakers has been heavily edited by the TOTP producers. As for Soul Asylum, “Runaway Train” became an albatross around the band’s neck and Pirner refused to perform it live for a while. They would have one more chart hit in 1995 with “Misery” but are still active to this day.

The final Breaker comes from The Orb and their ambient house classic “Little Fluffy Clouds”. This track seemed to have been around for ages and indeed it had having been originally released in 1990 when it was big in the clubs but not on the charts and it peaked at No 87. However, with the commercial success The Orb had received with a No 1 album in “U.F.Orb” and attendant hit singles like “Blue Room” and “Assassin”, the decision was taken to rerelease “Little Fluffy Clouds”. It proved to be the right choice as the 1993 version made it all the way to No 10.

Borrowing heavily from Ennio Morricone, and a piece by minimalist composer Steve Reich performed by Pat Metheny, its most prominent sample though was from an interview with US singer songwriter Rickie Lee Jones. Describing the sky in Arizona from her childhood, her hippy-ish tone fits perfectly with the chill-out vibes of the track. Unfortunately Rickie’s attitude to The Orb’s use of her voice on the track wasn’t so laid back. In a 2019 interview she described them as:

those fuckers
“Joy and Defiance: A Conversation with Rickie Lee Jones”. Aquarium Drunkard. 10 May 2019.

As much as I quite enjoyed “Little Fluffy Clouds” (and I did), it’s not my favourite song about the sky in Arizona. This is…

1993 was full of dance hits of all types of flavour – it felt like you couldn’t escape from them. However, if you were a dance act with a big club hit that crossed over into the mainstream charts, did that then change your identity and therefore your aspirations? If you were now a bona fide chart artist, were you then obliged to have a follow up hit and if so, was that possible? It wasn’t always. The Goodmen of “Give It Up” fame never had another hit and neither did Sub Sub after “Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use)”. Similarly, dancehall rapper Snow bagged a No 2 record in 1993 with “Informer” and then nothing ever again.

Making the case the other way though were Culture Beat who followed up on their chart topper “Mr.Vain” with two Top 5 singles in “Got To Get It” and “Anything”. And then there was this lot – Urban Cookie Collective whose “”The Key, The Secret” just missed out on being a No 1 record but, contrary to popular theory, weren’t a one hit wonder and here’s the proof. “Feels Like Heaven” may have sounded almost exactly the same as its predecessor (no really, what’s the difference?) but that didn’t stop punters buying it in enough copies to send it to No 5. They even had a further two Top 40 hits (all four came from debut album “High On A Happy Vibe”) but really, they are only remembered for “The Key, The Secret” I think it’s fair to say. To be honest, if I wanted a song called “Feels Like Heaven” I’d go for these true one hit wonders from 1984…

November and December of 1993 saw a trend for ballads that stuck around the charts for ages. There was “Hero” by Mariah Carey, “Don’t Be A Stranger” by Dina Carroll, “Please Forgive Me” by Bryan Adams, “For Whom The Bell Tolls” by The Bee Gees and this one – “Again” by Janet Jackson. The third single to be taken from her “Janet” album, it was actually written for the film Poetic Justice, Janet’s debut into the world of movies. It was the closing song in the film though it didn’t feature on the rap heavy official soundtrack. Was that a deliberate ploy on behalf of Jackson and her writers/producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to potentially build sales for her own album by ensuring fans hadn’t got access to it via the soundtrack? I’ve no idea but what I do know is that there were fourteen songs that featured in the film that didn’t appear on its soundtrack which seems like a lot.

“Again” is one of those ballads that Janet throws into the mix every so often (see also “Let’s Wait A While”, “Come Back To Me”) although it holds back on the sugary schmaltz in favour of trying to purvey a sense of real emotion. Whether Janet achieves that by appearing overcome and teary at the song’s finale is open to debate. There’s no doubting the song ebbs and flows though and Janet does a good job of the live vocals in this TOTP performance. The song clearly struck a chord with the public who bought it steadily over a prolonged period providing it with this Top 40 run:

12 – 6 – 8 – 10 – 16 – 15 – 17 – 12 – 33

Like the aforementioned “Hero” by Mariah Carey, it manages to reverse a decline in sales on two occasions to move back up the charts. Impressive stuff. Being a Jackson, Janet would release another four singles from “Janet” after “Again”, the last one coming out over 18 months after the album.

And another one! Yes, it’s another of those ballads of longevity, this time from Elton John and Kiki Dee. After the success of the “Two Rooms” tribute album of 1991, there must have been some discussion in his inner circle as to how to further plunder the Elton John brand whilst he was in between studio albums (there was a three years gap between “The One” and “Made In England”). The plan that was devised was to do a duets project resulting in an album called…erm…”Duets”. The idea was sound. Get a few of Elton’s pals round to record a mixture of standards and his own compositions and shove it out in time for the Christmas market. Bish, bash bosh!

Elton of course was not shy about recording a duet or two. A quick glance of his discography reveals collaborations with the likes of Cliff Richard, Millie Jackson, George Michael, Jennifer Rush, Aretha Franklin…However, surely the most famous and enduring of his duets was with Kiki Dee on “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”, their No 1 from 1976. So guess who was first in line to get an invite for the project and who would end up being on the lead single for the album? The song chosen for Elton and Kiki was the Cole Porter standard “True Love” from the film High Society made famous by Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly. I don’t think I knew the song back in 1993 and their version of it was never going to turn me onto it. Having played both interpretations of it this morning back to back, I definitely detected that Elton and Kiki’s take on it had pissing sleigh bells in the mix! The cynical sods! Clearly trying to stack the odds in their favour of the Christmas No 1 and indeed many bookies had it nailed on as favourite for the top spot. I kept a close eye on Elton’s face during this performance to see if I could spot any signs of smugness thinking he had the coveted crown in the bag but my powers of observation were slain by his jiggling eyebrows! WTF?! Sadly for Elton and Kiki, they underestimated the appeal of an idiot in a pink and yellow spotted costume to sell records and so never did make No 1 though they got mighty close peaking at No 2 and staying in the Top 10 for seven weeks.

It’s a fourth week out of seven at the top for Meatloaf and “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)”. It’s the video again – I don’t think Meat ever made it into the TOTP studio did he? There was a satellite performance weeks back to premiere it but after that I think it was always the promo.

The lyric ‘I’d do anything for love but I won’t do that’ was first used in a Bonnie Tyler track called “Getting So Excited” from her “Faster Than The Speed Of Night” album that Jim Steinman produced. If you can manage to listen to it in the clip below (it’s utterly dreadful), stay with it until the 1.35 mark when you get the campest utterance of a line since that bloke in The Sweet on “Blockbuster”.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Captain Hollywood Project	More And More	As if
2	Bryan Adams	Please Forgive Me	No I don’t Bry
3	Soul II Soul	Wish	No
4	Paul Weller	The Weaver EP	No but I had the Wild Wood album
5	Michael Bolton	Said I Loved You…But I Lied	Never
6	Leftfield / John Lydon	Open Up	No but I had it on one of those Best Album In The World Ever compilations
7	Soul Asylum	Runaway Train	Negative
8	The Orb	Little Fluffy Clouds	I did not
9	Urban Cookie Collective	Feels Like Heaven	Nah
10	Janet Jackson	Again	Nope
11	Elton John / Kiki Dee	True Love	Definitely not
12	Meatloaf	I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001dzyp/top-of-the-pops-11111993

TOTP 28 OCT 1993

Posted on November 9, 2022 by 80stastic

It’s late October 1993 and TOTP seems to be in the midst of an identity crisis. Almost exactly two years ago, the ‘year zero revamp’ took place, culling the Radio 1 DJs as presenters and seeking to reinvent the show as the home of music for the youth population. Noble intentions indeed but just look at the some of the artists on this show:

Bryan Adams
Phil Collins
Meatloaf
David Hasselhoff!

Sure, it was a chart based show and it could be argued that the choice of artists reflected those shifting the most units but in reply I would refer you to that list again and say David Hasselhoff!! What’s that? Wasn’t the Breakers section there to showcase the more left field tunes in the chart? Good point and there are indeed some of them in tonight’s jam packed Breakers feature like The Grid and The Good Men but when there’s five of them like tonight you literally get about twenty seconds worth of those artists. Plus, included in that section tonight are Tina Turner and a song by a character from a sit com! What was going on?! This needs a deeper look so let’s get started…

I’ve banged on about this opening song in many a previous post as its singer was everywhere in 1993 with three Top 40 hits already prior to this one being the biggest of the lot. I’m on about Dina Carroll and her single “Don’t Be A Stranger” and my search for the reason why her record label A&M kept its release back for so long. Anyway, it’s here now and up to No 4 and would spend nine weeks inside the Top 10 as follows:

10 – 4 – 4 – 3 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 8 – 8

Such was its consistent selling that I think it may still have been in the Top 10 when the follow up single “The Perfect Year” was released in the December. Enough of its chart stats though, was it any good? It’s certainly an accomplished ballad and Dina can deliver on its drama with her vocal range. Apparently it was re-recorded from the album version but the main difference seems to be the addition of a longer intro (almost an overture in classical terms) and turning those spiky strings up a bit in the mix maybe. Why did it resonate so much with the record buying public though? Well, Christmas was approaching and a love song always goes down well at that time of year. Indeed, the chart for the festive period 1993 was littered with them – “Babe” by Take That, “Hero” by Mariah Carey, “For Whom The Bell Tolls” by the Bee Gees and “True Love” by Elton John and Kiki Dee leap out after just a cursory glance at the Top 40.

In this performance, the backing track doing the ‘Don’t Be A Stranger’ part of the chorus rather than Dina singing it herself does jar slightly but otherwise she does a good job of selling the song without the need for any stage gimmicks. I’m guessing we might be seeing this one again in future TOTP repeats.

Here comes Björk to completely undermine my theory that I posited in the intro about the show being full of mainstream, rock royalty artists. Of course she does. After her first two singles as a solo artist failed to tear up the charts peaking at Nos 36 and 29, she made a much better fist of it with third release “Play Dead” though she wasn’t quite on her own for this one. British film composer David Arnold is also officially credited on the record as it was part of the soundtrack to the crime drama movie The Young Americans starring Harvey Keitel (can’t say I’ve ever seen it).

Now I’ve been critical of Björk’s voice in the past but by any measure, this is a spellbinding piece of music, full of dramatic, swooping, swirling orchestration that ally perfectly with her…distinctive voice. It really is quite a thing. Its chart peak of No 12 was well deserved and sensibly her record company included it as an extra track on international pressings of her “Debut” album. I say sensibly but it apparently caused many official complaints from fans who had already bought the initial “Play Dead” lite version of the album.

The Breakers? Already? Yes, just two songs in we get those ‘happening’ tunes causing a stir somewhere in the chart. They usually pop up after about four or five songs but they’re here early this week for whatever reason. They start with a band who, like Björk before them, are most definitely not swimming in the mainstream. The early to mid 90s saw the Levellers at their commercial peak. Their eponymous third album released in August had peaked at No 2 whilst the follow up two years later “Zeitgeist” would top the chart. “This Garden” is as the second single released from the former and would become, quite oddly, the band’s fourth hit in six releases to peak at No 12. It’s quite the tune as well with loads packed into it including jungle rhythms, a didgeridoo, squawking bird sound effects, an (almost) rap and some lyrics that I presumed were about environmental issues but seem to be discussing the state of society and its culture as a whole on closer inspection. Interesting stuff.

Another atypical act now (the more conventional stuff is coming I promise), this time electronic house explorers The Grid who were Dave Ball of Soft Cell and record producer/DJ etc Richard Norris. They’d actually been around releasing material for years but had only discovered chart gold once before earlier in 1993 when “Crystal Clear” rose to No 27. “Texas Cowboys” was the follow up and did even better peaking at No 21. I’m sure it made sense to teenagers listening to it whilst playing Sonic the Hedgehog on their Megadrive but it sounds likely to induce a migraine to me.

The Grid would release their most well known track “Swamp Thing” the following year which, after it went Top 3, caused “Texas Cowboys” to be rereleased and it duly beat its initial chart peak by four places.

OK so this isn’t exactly mainstream but was it really what the kids were buying? How do you explain this. Well, in a year when Mr. Blobby would be the Christmas No1, anything was possible and so it was that a song from a space themed sitcom performed in character (a character by the way which was a humanoid evolved from a pregnant cat over three million years) was a hit in the UK charts. Now don’t get me wrong, I like Red Dwarf I just didn’t see the need for this drippy, insipid Motown pastiche to be in the charts. I mean if you want to do a spin off from a successful comedy TV series, it surely has to be funny doesn’t it or am I missing something? If it had been something like The Young Ones and Cliff Richard doing “Living Doll” for Comic Relief I could have got on board but I just didn’t see the point of “Tongue Tied” by The Cat. Even the video directed by Danny John-Jules who played The Cat wasn’t funny.

It was actually used as part of the story in the last episode of season two called “Parallel Universe” so it wasn’t an entire anomaly construct but that episode aired in 1988 so why release it five years later? Oh, reading up on it, the reason seems to be to help promote the launch of season six which makes more sense. It turns out that Danny John-Jules had some previous in the pop star lark. He’s in the video for Wham!’s “Edge Of Heaven”…

Go to 3:10

And so the tidal wave of mainstream music begins with this little trickle in the Breakers from Tina Turner. Like Dina Carroll earlier, Tina was all over the charts in 1993. “Why Must We Wait Until Tonight” was the third single from the soundtrack album to the biopic of her life called What’s Love Got To Do With It and the third consecutive hit after “I Don’t Wanna Fight” (No 7) and “Disco Inferno” (No 12) peaking at No 16. Compared to those two songs though, this one didn’t seem to have much about it – in fact it’s a bit of a dirge. Oh and if you’re thinking it’s unfair to consider Tina mainstream then know this – “Why Must We Wait Until Tonight” was co-written by Bryan Adams.

And a final, parting shot across the bows of TOTP from those making more alternative forms of music at this time from The Good Men. Now if you’re thinking haven’t we seen this one before fairly recently then you’re right, we have. Back in August, “Give It Up” got as high as No 23 before sliding out of the charts. However, such was its banger status in the clubs it never really went away and resurfaced in the Top 40 in late October before spending four weeks in the Top 10 and settling on a peak of No 5. There have been countless examples of singles that have been rereleased and become bigger hits than they were when first out but one that had already been a middle sized hit just two months earlier? That takes some doing I think. The track’s legacy wasn’t quite as impressive being sampled two years later by Simply Red for their No 1 single “Fairground”. Give it up Hucknell.

Right, that’s your lot for anything outside of the mainstream canon. From here on in its pure establishment rock beginning with Bryan Adams who gets a whole five minutes allocated to him to perform “Please Forgive Me”. This was a new track specifically recorded to promote his first Best Of album “So Far So Good” and his first single since “Do I Have To Say The Words” fifteen months previously. Presumably this compilation was to plug the gap between Bryan’s studio albums – there was five years separating “Waking Up The Neighbours” and “18 Till I Die”.

Let’s get this out there straight away – “Please Forgive Me” is not a good song. Actually, it’s dreadful. I say this as someone who isn’t anti-Bryan Adams. I even saw him live back in 1987 and he was a great performer but this? No. No thank you. And I thought that song he wrote for Tina Turner was bad. Everyone else seemed to love it though. Crashing in to the chart at No 3, it would finally settle at No 2. What this whole saga does show us is the transformative power of a huge No 1 single. After sixteen weeks at the top with “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You”, Bry was a proper chart star with his subsequent releases of new material being a big deal. The idea of him entering the UK charts with a single at No 3 in week one back in 1987 would have been laughable. He couldn’t buy a hit back then.

The album was a huge success going to No 1 and three times platinum here and sell 13 million copies worldwide. Adams would return in 1994 as part of a trio with Sting and Rod Stewart with the equally awful “All For Love” from The Three Musketeers film.

Is there anyone more mainstream than Phil Collins? An easy target for the music press who consistently dissed him as the omni-creator of the worst type of sterile, bland music, he was also accused of turning prog-rockers Genesis into lamentable peddlers of lame pop-rock. Just as a solo artist, he dominated the 80s with four albums and fifteen hit singles – come 1993, had the public’s Collins saturation point been reached? It appeared not. His album “Both Sides” went double platinum and was a No 1. Lead single “Both Sides Of The Story” went Top 10.

Phil’s in New York to perform it on TOTP via satellite and curiously he doesn’t get a spoken intro. The show seemed to have developed this convention during the ‘year zero’ era. I’m not sure what the reasoning was behind it. The artist was so big and well known that they needed no introduction? Anyway, it’s the usual Collins turn with Phil gurning and over emoting his way through the song with a backing band that did nothing to promote TOTP’s desire to be at the heart of youth programming. The keyboards player looks like ex-Dragons Den overlord Theo Paphitis for Chrissakes!

Who do you go to after Adams and Collins? For the TOTP producers there was only one answer – ‘The Hoff’ himself, the one and only David Hasselhoff! For the love of God! What were they thinking? Yes, he had quite the singing career in mainland Europe in places like Austria and Germany but he was surely considered a joke in the UK no? Everything about this is wrong, so depth plumbingly wrong. There’s the song for starters. Were “If I Could Only Say Goodbye” a facial expression it would be a grimace at best. Look at some of these lyrics:

I remember the day you came into my life
I remember how time stood still
You were my lover, my friend, my joy
You were my life
I loved you then and I always will
How time has its way with things
And all the changes it brings, baby
If I could only say goodbye
There will always be a part of me for you
If I could find the reason why
If I could only say goodbye
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: James Barry / Michael Fallon / Peter Fallon
If I Could Only Say Goodbye lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Somebody wrote those down, read them, considered them and decided “yeah, they’re fine”! WTF?! Then there’s Hasselhoff himself in his ridiculous, sleeveless denim shirt and his barely passable crooner voice. Just no. As with Phil Collins, there were people on his backing band that caught my eye. He had two (two!) keyboard players one of which seemed to be a younger version of himself and the other was a dead ringer for host Mark Franklin. As if this whole farce wasn’t bizarre enough!

This turn has a way to go though to top Hasselhoff’s most famous performance in the bizarre stakes…

So impactful was this broadcast that ‘The Hoff’ is now synonymous in some minds with being responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union! Not quite but kudos to him for being part of one of the biggest events of 20th century world history. Despite this TOTP appearance, “If I Could Only Say Goodbye” struggled to a peak of No 35. Thirteen years later, an online campaign saw his song “Jump In My Car” go to No 3. There are no words.

There’s only one way to end this. How? With a monstrously epic soft rock ballad courtesy of Meatloaf of course. “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” remains in top spot and still has weeks to go before its reign is toppled by Mr.Blobby (1993 really was batshit).

Right, let’s address that song title. What exactly is the ‘that’ Meatloaf won’t do? Well, here’s the man himself to explain it with a blackboard and pointer…

Got it? Good. And it’s definitely not what this guy John Thundergun says it’s about OK?

I would do anything for love but I won’t do that is about up the arse isn’t it?
— John Thundergun (@Bongoharris72) November 4, 2022

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Dina Carroll	Don’t Be A Stranger	Banged on about it, never bought it
2	Björk and David Arnold	Play Dead	It’s a no
3	Levellers	This Garden	Nah
4	The Grid	Texas Cowboys	Nope
5	The Cat	Tongue Tied	Never
6	Tina Turner	Why Must We Wait Until Tonight	I did not
7	The Good Men	Give It Up	No
8	Bryan Adams	Please Forgive Me	I don’t Bryan, I really don’t
9	Phil Collins	Both Sides Of The Story	Of course not
10	David Hasselhoff	If I Could Only Say Goodbye	Hell no!
11	Meatloaf	I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)	I’d do anything for music (but I didn’t buy that)

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/m001drbn/top-of-the-pops-28101993