Cliff Richard

TOTP 17 DEC 1999

So here it is…no, not Merry Christmas – though we are nearly there in these 1999 repeats – but my final review of a TOTP show. Yes, after nine and a half years of writing this blog, I’ve finally arrived at my last episode. Not my last post mind – I’ll still have a couple more to write tying up a few ends about 1999 specifically and the 90s in general but for actual TOTP shows, this is it as I don’t review the Christmas Day shows. However, any thoughts of going out with a bang were immediately removed when I checked the running order. It’s pretty wretched including leathery old Tom Jones with a Christmas song, some anonymous dance act, a well known dance act but it’s the Vengaboys and an awful No 1. So much for going out on a high!

Mercifully, those songs don’t feature much in my own memories of Christmas 1999 which was a positive but the down side was that it was because I was far too busy at work to have noticed most of them. The ultimate irony is, of course, that my work, at the time, was being the Assistant Manager of the Our Price store in Altrincham so I was literally surrounded by those same records. It’s not the best endorsement of their impact nor longevity. That particular Christmas was my 10th working for the chain and aged 31, they were becoming harder and harder to get through. OK, 31 doesn’t sound that old (especially to me now aged 58) but maybe it was for working in a record shop?

What was true was that I’d found the first Christmas I’d ever worked for the chain back in 1990 a bit of a buzz, exciting even. Subsequent festive trading periods would see stores being asked to navigate them on a smaller payroll budget year after year but expected to beat last year’s takings. On top of that, we were working more hours as both Sunday trading had come in as well as being open on Boxing Day. As such, I think I didn’t have a day off for nearly 10 days at one point in 1999. Certainly, in the frenzy of the final few days and up to New Year’s Eve, the only time I wasn’t at work was Christmas Day itself. I don’t mind admitting that I was nearly in tears when I woke up one morning and realised I had to go into work yet again. I’m not sure I had another one in me and so it proved as it would be my final ever retail Christmas. Within three months, I was gone not just from Our Price but from Manchester too. Both had been ‘home’ for the last decade. The times they really were a-changin’.

You’re not here for my personal life memories though – well, not exclusively – so let’s get to the music and we start with the aforementioned Tom Jones who is joined for a duet by Catatonia’s Cerys Matthews on the first even vaguely Christmas themed song we’ve heard in these 1999 TOTP repeats. And ‘vaguely’ is the word as “Baby It’s Cold Outside” doesn’t actually mention the Yuletide season in its lyrics at all. Ah, those lyrics. OK, before we get into those, a bit of context. This was a track from Tom’s “Reload” album which saw the Welsh powerhouse collaborate with 17 different artists to record (mostly) cover versions, an idea which paid off big time when the album went to No 1 and four times platinum. “Baby It’s Cold Outside” was the second single taken from it after Jones had collaborated with The Cardigans on a version of “Burning Down The House” by Talking Heads.

So, back to those lyrics. The song was written in 1944 by Frank Loesser who was a Broadway musical composer and has been recorded by many a huge star including Doris Day and Bob Hope, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan and Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark. The song’s two protagonists are a host and a guest with the former trying to convince the latter to stay for a romantic evening as the temperature outside falls. However, since 2009, its lyrics have come under scrutiny for allegedly implying coercive behaviour and sexual harassment on behalf of the host towards the guest. The line “What’s in this drink?” even led to accusations of date rape. Loesser’s daughter Susan has dismissed such allegations and suggested that the dark undertones being attributed to the song are a result of TV shows Saturday Night Live and South Park depicting it being performed by disgraced comedian and actor Bill Cosby who has served time for a sexual assault conviction. Despite this defence, the song has, in the past, been removed from radio playlists and streaming services.

No such concerns are apparent in this performance by Tom and Cerys though as the studio audience cheer their interaction enthusiastically throughout. Rather than anything sexual, there was some intertextuality in the pairing of Tim and Cerys with the latter having already duetted with Space on 1998 No 4 hit “The Ballad Of Tom Jones”. I’m not quite sure why Tom has been given the stage prop of a throne here as that seems to play into the scenario of masculine power being asserted over the female guest whilst Cerys’ dress with one sleeve being attached to the hem doesn’t seem very practical at all.

Has any UK pop group risen so high and then fallen so quickly as B*Witched? Kajagoogoo? Maybe but then they had just a solitary No 1 to their name not four. In just 18 months, Edele, Keavy, Lindsay and Sinéad had gone from that record breaking run of their first four singles debuting at the pinnacle of the charts and a Top 3, double platinum selling album to also rans. The writing had been on the wall when previous single “Jesse Hold On” had spent just one week at No 4 before sliding down the charts and that track, remember, had been the lead taster of their second album “Awake And Breathe”. To highlight their drop off in popularity, their eponymous debut album had spent nearly eight months inside the Top 40. It’s follow up clocked in at barely three.

Clearly something had to be done and that something was to release a ballad for Christmas. Perfect for the festive sales period and a shot in the arm for its parent album. To make the song – “I Shall Be There” – stand out in the Christmas rush, they roped in African male voice choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo to beef up the sound. After all, hadn’t Boyzone* had African chants on their No 1 single “A Different Beat” in 1996. If it worked for them…

*And who was the elder brother of Edele and Keavy Lynch? Yes? Boyzone’s Shane. Hmm.

Sadly for B*Witched, lightning would not strike twice. “I Shall Be There” struggled to a peak of No 13, a far cry from consecutive No 1s and an undeniable truth that their time as A-list pop stars was nearly at an end. A third single from the album would appear in 2000 and would do even worse signalling the initial break up of the group (though they would subsequently reform in 2012). So why didn’t “I Shall Be There” return B*Witched to former glories? Personally, I don’t think it’s that strong a song and the whole Lion King vibe had already been done to death. Also, judging by this performance, Ladysmith Black Mambazo don’t seem to add much sonically, being more involved in some curious, high kick dance moves than anything else. The girls themselves don’t seem to have their hearts in it either – especially Keavy, Lindsay and Sinéad who don’t have much to do apart from essentially act as Edele’s backing singers/dancers. Maybe they’d grown tired of just being there.

A classic summer time hit next which somehow only managed to find its way into the UK’s chart a week before Christmas! I’m not sure what the reason for that is and I can’t be bothered to research it but the truth was that we were late to the party with “Steal My Sunshine” by Len which had entered the American Billboard Hot 100 in the August of 1999. This Canadian group was mainly a vehicle for brother and sister duo of Marc and Sharon Constanzo who finally had that one big hit after eight years in existence. Though not a one hit wonder statistically, surely that’s what they are in the minds of most onlookers. In that regard, they’re up there with the likes of Barenaked Ladies (also Canadian), Sugar Ray, OMC and Smash Mouth. Listing those bands, it strikes me that their paucity of hits isn’t the only thing that connects them – is there an argument that musically they aren’t a million miles away from each other? I mean, I’m sure if you did a forensic investigation that generalisation not might not hold up to scrutiny but then, hey…it’s a generalisation and it isn’t supposed to withstand detailed exploration! Maybe it’s just me drawing musical ley lines between them – sometimes the synapses fire and connections are made that you just can’t shake.

Anyway, none of this psychobabble really matters. The facts are that Len took the Andrea True Connection sampling “Steal My Sunshine” to No 8 over here with its combination of pop, hip-hop, disco and rap proving as irresistible to UK audiences as it had to our American counterparts. Supposedly, Marc Constanzo had wanted to write something akin to “Don’t You Want Me” by the Human League and you can just about hear that reflected in their biggest hit. Just about. Following it up proved the harder task though and Len never really did in any meaningful way. However, after a six year hiatus in the 2000s, they reconvened and last released an album in 2012.

Around this time, I was working with a guy called Scott who, like most people in record shops (except me), had tried to get a band off the ground at one point or another. His was called Fairclough after the old Coronation Street character. I’m guessing that was because Len had already been taken then.

Oh come on! What is this nonsense? A horrible trance track based around the intro to Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” with some decidedly dodgy staging involving dancing nurses?! Well, this was Progress Presents The Boy Wunda and their hit “Everybody” and as I’m on a countdown to my final few words of reviewing artists on TOTP, I’m going to allow myself to keep this one brief. This was some nasty shit topped off by a performance that stank the studio out. I’m assuming Boy Wunda is the guy is the straight jacket whilst the nurses are there as a continuation of the mental heath facility based official video and due to the fact that “Everybody” actually contains some lines of dialogue from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. It looked like crap, it sounded like crap and it was crap. Progress Presents The Boy Wunda? More like an abscess that makes you chunder.

Oh brilliant! It’s the Vengaboys! That’s how you turn the quality control up! Dear Lord! What a final review show running order this is turning out to be. The only saving grace here is that “Kiss (When The Sun Don’t Shine)” didn’t go to No 1 like their previous two singles had despite sticking to the same bubble gum pop/dance formula of those hits. Watching this bank from a distance of 27 years, it seems totally implausible that such a sound and group image could have been so successful. Why did so many people (literally) buy into it? Was it something to do with the impending millennium and expectations of parties to end all parties? Was that passing of time milestone somehow messing with the nation’s collective mind, casting a spell or incantation over the UK record buying public that had them believing that the Vengaboys were the answer to everything including the Y2K bug? Yes, it sounds like the theory of a madman but then how do you explain Trump?

OK, let’s get back to reality and deal with the facts and one which I would like to clarify is, after Len earlier, when was the last time there were two hits on the same show that had a reference to sunshine in their titles? Answers on a postcard please for the chance to win nothing at all.

I feel like I’m losing the plot here which is not the way I wanted to go out with these TOTP reviews but just like that old football adage that you can only play the opposition in front of you, I can only comment on the acts in front of my eyes and in my ears. Sadly for me and both of my sensory organs, the next act is Artful Dodger Featuring Craig David and their garage hit “Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)”. It’s holding at No 2, fighting off the challenge of all the other chart entries that we’ve seen earlier in the show though it can’t quite eclipse the record at the top.

It’s hard to talk about this hit without mentioning Leigh Francis and his Bo‘ Selecta! TV show. I commented in the last post that Craig David’s own view of it has not always been consistent with claims that it ruined his career and was racist to admissions that he had made peace with Francis and, of course, he did actually appear on the show in person as tribute act Craig Davis.

Whatever the real truth, what we do know is that Channel 4, in agreement with the comedian and writer, took the show down from its All 4 streaming platform in 2020 following complaints of its frequent use of blackface. I have to say that, at the time, I did find it funny especially the Michael Jackson character but on reflection, it would be hard to make claims that it was any different to the offensive sketches seen in the likes of Little Britain and Fantasy Football League. In my defence, the Jacko take off was so grotesque that he almost became a non-person and that somehow made the Bo’ Selecta! characterisation more acceptable. It couldn’t be wrong to laugh at someone who wasn’t even real could it? I feel like I’m tying myself up in knots here so I should probably perform an act of escapology by saying I abhor racism in all its forms and leave it at that.

I have arrived at my final review destination and I could hardly have picked a worse place to alight. For the third consecutive week, Cliff Richard is No 1 with “The Millennium Prayer” and Lord only knows how we got here. In fact, looking at the final four songs I’ve had to review, I’m not sure I could have picked a worse quartet in my deepest nightmares. I’m literally out of words to say anymore about this one but before I go, there’s a little bit of admin to take care of. You see, Cliff wasn’t actually the Christmas No 1. No, that honour went to Westlife and their double A-side single “Seasons In The Sun / I Have A Dream” which was officially announced as the festive chart topper two days after this TOTP aired having timed the release of their Christmas offering to perfection. The next show was the Christmas jamboree on the 25th when they performed “I Have A Dream” alongside some of the year’s other big hits. The first TOTP of 2000 would see them perform “Seasons In The Sun”. Thankfully I won’t be reviewing either of them. And there we have it. I’m done…well, nearly. There will be a ‘TOTP 1999: the epilogue’ post and also one for the whole of the decade but then that will finally be it. The end is very near now…

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews	Baby It’s Cold Outside	Nope
2	B*Witched featuring Ladysmith Black Mambazo	I Shall Be There	But I won’t – no
3	Len	Steal My Sunshine	Nah
4	Progress Presents The Boy Wunda	Everybody	Never
5	Vengaboys	Kiss (When The Sun Don’t Shine)	As if
6	Artful Dodger Featuring Craig David	Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)	No
7	Cliff Richard	The Millennium Prayer	Heavens above 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/m002xks0/top-of-the-pops-17121999

TOTP 10 DEC 1999

Posted on 10 Days Ago by 80stastic

To say that Christmas was only two weeks away, the charts in December 1999 seemed very full of dance records. Where were all the cloying big ballads and sentimental schmalz that traditionally made an appearance at this time of year? Apart from the No 1, the rest of the Top 5 was wall to wall dance hits. Look at this (SPOILER ALERT!):

“The Millennium Prayer” – Cliff Richard
“Re-Rewind The Crowd Say Bo Selecta” – Artful Dodger featuring Craig David
“King Of My Castle” – Wamdue Project
“Back In My Life” – Alice Deejay
“Communication (Somebody Answer The Phone)” – Mario Piu

Blimey! We’ll be seeing and hearing two of those songs listed above in this show. Our host is Jamie Theakston and we start with…oh…a big ballad. Well, that’s not a brilliant beginning to this post’s theme is it? Thanks a bunch Whitney Houston! In all fairness, “I Learned From The Best” may have been a ballad but it was definitely not of the sentimental kind. A defiant denial of an ex-lover’s attempts to rekindle a broken relationship, it was more sass than schmalz with Whitney delivering a perfectly on point vocal to tell the tale.

This was clearly a repeat of the performance we saw the other week which itself was part of a package of performances that Whitney recorded in one sitting months before this as some kind of deal struck between her (and her people) with the BBC which I’ve discussed a few times before – well basically every time she’s appeared on the show in 1999 which was…

*counts them up*

…TEN! That was some hardball negotiating that went on from her side when that deal was agreed. Those appearances break down as:

“It’s Not Right But It’s Okay” x 5
“My Love Is Your Love” x 3
“I Learned From The Best” x 2

If I’ve talked about this subject ten times then I think that’s quite enough. We’ll move on I think…

The first of those previously mentioned dance hits now in the form of “Communication” by Mario Più (real name Mario Piperno). What was this nonsense all about?! Well, the official explanation from its Wikipedia entry is that the track was:

“…constructed from the interference caused on improperly shielded audio equipment when a GSM mobile telephone rings nearby. The Ringtone sample that can be heard is from the Motorola MicroTAC International Series of GSM Mobile Telephones”

Ah yes, that well know source of inspiration for creating pop music! WTF?! Surely that describes the antithesis of a musical muse? I’m guessing it was a bare-faced attempt to cash in on the whole technological eruption of the accessibility of the mobile phone. As Jamie Theakston says in his intro, “The mobile phone was the accessory of the 90s”. We’d seen this sort of chart tie-in before with things like the computer games in the early 90s – think “Tetris” by Doctor Spin and “Supermarioland” by Ambassadors of Funk – but the idea that this sort of exploitation was still viable years later was shocking.

The track itself is just a horrible, whiny trance beat that worked itself into a higher state of consciousness à la Josh Wink allied to that irritating, monotone voice droning “Somebody answer the phone” intercut with the occasional ring tone. The staging for the performance (if you can really call it that) is interesting in that the backing dancers are dressed in suits (of sorts). Was that a (rather outdated) nod towards the notion that mobile phones were for young business types, ‘yuppies’ if you will? If so, surely that was an 80s perception – by 1999 the whole point was that mobile phones were accessible to us all. Even I had one though mine, like all my fellow Our Price employees, was given to me as a Christmas bonus as we were part of the Virgin family by then. The truth is that this was an horrendous idea horrifically executed and at Christmas time too? Where was Cliff Richard when you needed him? Oh…yeah…

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE! Jamiroquai in song that-doesn’t-sound-exactly-the-same-as-all-the-rest shock! Finally, as I get to their final TOTP appearance that I’ll have to comment on, they come up with something that doesn’t require me to say the same thing over and over again but in a slightly different way. Oh, the irony. “King For A Day” was the fourth and final single taken from the band’s fourth studio album “Synkronised” and was perhaps the closest they ever came to a ballad. Yes, the outfit who made their name on funk-based tunes come up with a ‘slowie’ just as I’m bemoaning the prevalence of dance tracks on a chart right up against Christmas. I say again, oh, the irony.

I’ve always felt torn by Jamiroquai. When they first appeared in 1992/3, I quite liked their sound despite all the accusations of Stevie Wonder pilfering but after they stubbornly refused to diversify at all from it subsequently, I couldn’t really be doing with them as boredom took hold. Now, whilst you couldn’t mistake “King For A Day” as being by any other artist, there is something different about it. It’s decidedly downtempo and is based around a persistent, rolling piano riff which gives it a melancholic tone. Then there’s the string section that imbues it with the quality of a James Bond theme. Yep, there was definitely something curiously different about this one. It possibly deserved better than its chart peak of No 20 but then it was the fourth single from an album that had been in the shops for dix months so…

P.S. Small props to Jamie Theakston here for his intro about always being taller than Jay Kay and for the latter going along with the joke. A nice little nod to the scene in A Hard Day’s Night when Norm accuses Shake of always being taller than him.

Now, I’m certainly no fan of Celine Dion but you have to admire her rate of recording and releasing material – 27 studio albums in 45 years, more than one every two years since 1981? That’s prolific. However, 1999 would see her undertake an hiatus prompted by that punishing release schedule and her husband’s diagnosis with throat cancer. It would be nearly four years before she released a new studio album. That gap was plugged with a greatest hits album called “All The Way…A Decade Of Song” from which this single – “That’s The Way It Is” was taken. Written by Max Martin who has been responsible for hits by the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Katy Perry, it was much more of a pop sound than her trademark power ballads and probably received plenty of airplay at the time, helping that Best Of album to the top of the UK charts. However, it’s surely not one of her best known hits and would produce a good score on Pointless if the category was ‘Celine Dion singles’. When you release as many songs as Celine has, I guess they can’t all be burnt into our memories. That just the way it is.

P.S. Not sure why we only got a just under two minutes performance of a four minute song here but I’m really not complaining.

The second of those aforementioned dance hits now but it’s actually much more than that. Rarely does a hit transcend its natural chart life and boundaries to become a staple of popular culture but in the case of “Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)” by Artful Dodger featuring Craig David, it surely did.

OK, let’s start with the facts. In the subsequent years, we would all come to know who Craig David was but who was/were the Artful Dodger (and no sarky replies about Charles Dickens and Oliver Twist thank you)? Well, they were songwriters and producers Mark Hill and Pete Devereux. Hill was a student at the University of Southampton who started a jazz-funk band and set up a recording studio with fellow band member Neil Kerr. Devereux was in a grunge band and met Hill after booking time in his studio. Joining forces, they produced bootleg editions of tracks including “Dreams” by Gabrielle and “You’re Not Alone” by Olive under the Artful Dodger alias which they adopted to shield their identities from potential copyright lawsuits. They developed a love of the 2-step garage as an alternative to the ubiquitous four to the floor house music (I’ve clearly no idea what I’m talking about here) and a chance meeting with Craig David via a project with a youth centre linked to Southampton football club led to the trio working together.

“Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)” was one of the tracks to be recorded from the collaboration and what a strange concoction it was. Starting off with a smooth soul sound supported by David’s tuneful vocals, when the chorus kicks in, it suffers a crisis of identity and goes…well, bonkers but that was why it was so successful. The words ‘rewind’ and ‘selecta’ are both elongated to form a jarring but memorable hook. David restyles the former as “Re-e-wind” whilst the latter is run through some sort of vocal effect (a vocoder maybe?) to make it sound like the needle is stuck in a groove. Striking a chord with clubbers and record buyers alike, it crossed over into the mainstream spending two weeks at No 2 in the UK Top 40.

The crossover didn’t stop there though. The following year, Craig David would become a huge star with his debut album “Born To Do It” (which featured a version of the Artful Dodger hit renamed as “Rewind”) went straight to the top of the charts selling 225,000 copies in its first week thus becoming the fastest-selling debut album ever by a British male solo act, a record the album still holds. That wasn’t the end of the crossovers story however. The phrase ‘Bo Selecta’ would escape its reggae origins – it was derived from a combination of ‘selector’ or DJ and ‘Bo’, an exclamation of appreciation, often simulating the sound of a gunshot – to take its place in the cultural lexicon of the time. The biggest crossover though would come courtesy of the comedian Leigh Francis whose sketch show Bo’ Selecta! would propel the phrase into common parlance but, more than that, it would single handedly destroy the career of Craig David. Or not. Depends who you talk to. In fact, it can depend on which day of the week you talk to Craig David himself about it as his opinion has differed over the years. Probably best if you ask him on a Sunday as he’s chilling then but definitely not on a Wednesday as he’s otherwise occupied.

After his nice little interaction with Jamiroquai earlier, Jamie Theakston blots his copybook by delivering a cringey intro for the next act. “In fact, in a recent survey, 8 out of 10 cats said their owners preferred Atomic Kitten. Miaow!” Oh dear. You can only hope he didn’t write those lines himself. Anyway, ignoring Theakston, this was our first introduction to those “feisty Liverpudlian lasses” (I said to ignore Theakston!) and I, for one, have no memory of their debut hit “Right Now” at all. If I think of Atomic Kitten (which admittedly isn’t very often) the songs that come to mind are “Whole Again” (obviously) and their covers of “Eternal Flame” and “The Tide Is High” – so their three No 1s basically. As for the rest of their discography, I wouldn’t have a clue. Watching this performance back though, “Right Now” isn’t as bad as I was expecting. An uptempo track with a disco feel which the trio sell with energy to burn (you can hear them geeing up the crowd before Theakston has even finished his intro so keen were they to get to it), it kind of reminds me of “Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use)” by Sub Sub. Kind of. I also wasn’t expecting the song’s lyrics to be so suggestive of the carnal act with lines like “Do it to me slowly” and “There’s a party in my head but you should have been in bed with me now”. Blimey!

I’m not telling you anything you don’t know about the group by stating that Atomic Kitten were the pet project of OMD’s Andy McCluskey or that original member Kerry Katona was replaced by Jenny Frost but did you know that the original line up consisted of Katona, Liz McClarnon and Heidi Range who would go on to find fame in the Sugababes? No, neither did I. Were I continuing this blog into the 2000s, no doubt I would have been reviewing Atomic Kitten on a regular basis but I’m not and I won’t be. I can’t say I’ll be making a cat’s bum face about that to be honest.

Here’s Cliff Richard! He’s still No 1 for the second of three weeks with “The Millennium Prayer”. It’s also his third consecutive week on TOTP. How the BBC must have been rueing their decision to blacklist the single from the playlists of Radios 1 and 2. Now, could a song that consisted of the words to The Lord’s Prayer set to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” have been a hit anywhere but the UK? It was certainly something that occurred to me but it wasn’t true. “The Millennium Prayer” was a No 2 hit in Australia and New Zealand and also registered in the charts of Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. One in the eye for paganists everywhere then.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Whitney Houston	I Learned From The Best	Nah
2	Mario Più	Communication	Never
3	Jamiroquai	King For A Day	Negative
4	Celine Dion	That’s The Way It Is	I did not
5	Artful Dodger featuring Craig David	Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)	Nope
6	Atomic Kitten	Right Now	No
7	Cliff Richard	The Millennium Prayer	Absolutely not

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002x8mb/top-of-the-pops-10121999

TOTP 03 DEC 1999

Posted on 13 Days Ago by 80stastic

And the 1999 TOTP repeats disappoint yet again. The running order for this show looks uninspiring at best and downright dreadful at worst. Were there no other hits in this week’s chart that executive producer Chris Cowey could have slotted in instead?

*checks the official charts website*

Oh god. Not really. Of the seven acts on this episode, six were new entries between Nos 2 and 11 so Cowey could easily justify them all being featured. The only song going up was the song at No 1 which climbed one place to get there. Three hits were non-movers but they were all past chart toppers so they weren’t going to be on again (nor did I want them to be). There were another five new entries much further down the Top 40 but the only one I recognise is “Mary” by Supergrass which had already been on one of those TOTP on Tour episodes back in August. So, on this occasion, it’s not Cowey’s fault but the poor musical choices and taste of the record buying public. I suppose we’d better get on with it then…

Our host is Gail Porter and we start with the continuing story of the solo careers of the various members of the Spice Girls both past and present. This time it’s the turn of Melanie C who is onto her second solo single (not counting her collaboration with Bryan Adams on “When You’re Gone”) which is also the title track from her album “Northern Star”. Unlike her previous single “Goin’ Down” which saw her restyled as ‘Grunge Spice’, this track was much more pop. A thoughtful ballad that drew comparisons to Madonna’s “Frozen”, it’s actually another Frozen that I could imagine the song featuring in – the film of the same name. With its imagery about Northern and falling stars and lyrics like those below, that could be about Elsa couldn’t it?

“They tried to catch a falling star.
Thinking that she had gone too far.
She did but kept it hidden well.
Until she cracked and then she fell”

Writer(s): Rick Nowels, Melanie Chisholm

OK, it’s not “Let It Go” but then there the way that Mel C sings it as if she was auditioning for a role in a musical theatre show, over annunciating her words and ever so slightly over emoting her delivery. Nothing about either the song or the performance is terrible just on the wrong side of insincere. Melanie C would hit a rich vein of hits after entering the new millennium with two consecutive No 1 singles in 2000 helping her album to go three times platinum in the UK. She would never reach such commercial highs again though she remains a consistent recording artist and live performer.

It’s the highest of those aforementioned new entries now as Boyzone enter the charts at No 3 with “Everyday I Love You”. This was their 16th (!) UK Top 40 hit (including six No 1s) during the period 1994 to 1999 and their final one before the group’s nine year hiatus period that would see the various members pursue solo projects until a reunion tour in 2008. This final single release of the 90s seemed especially cynical. Nominally taken from their Best Of album “By Request”, it actually wasn’t or rather it wasn’t taken from the UK version – it was an extra track on the Asian Special Edition so presumably not available in this country? Was this a pure money grab to get the fanbase to part with even more of their pocket money? If so, they really shouldn’t have bothered as “Everyday I Love You” is a stinker of a song. So pedestrian and laboured, this was the very definition of money for old rope. Do you know, if you wanted a song about loving someone every day, I think this would, unbelievably, be a better choice…

By this point, the group’s profile was all about Ronan Keating and Stephen Gately with the other three literally reduced to the role of backing singers and barely that to be honest. You can kind of forgive them if their hearts weren’t really into performing that role. I don’t think Mikey Graham even gets one camera close up. Poor Mikey has been in the news this last couple of days following the Boyzone farewell concerts at London’s Emirates Stadium over the weekend. Billed as a full reunion of the four surviving members of the band (Stephen Gately died in 2009), Graham only featured in a handful of songs and remained seated for nearly all of them. Much has been made of his appearance with some horrible comments appearing on social media. The truth is that he’s struggled with alcoholism and his mental health which he discussed in the recent Boyzone documentary in which he also revealed he hadn’t spoken to his former band mates for five years. Given all of that, it would have been easier for him and understandable if he’d just declined to appear in the live shows at all so really he should have been praised and supported for the fact that he did instead of being on the receiving end of some vile abuse. Sadly, this is currently the way of the world we live in.

Time and time again in these TOTP repeats, we have encountered the ‘rinse and repeat’ approach to hit making – i.e. once you’ve stumbled on a winning formula, just do the exact same thing again for the follow up. Never mind that it shows a lack of creativity and an attitude of disdain towards the people who bought your first hit. Those mindless sheep will just accept any old rubbish if it’s packaged well enough. That might seem cynical in the extreme from me but what other stance can one take when comparing Alice Deejay’s first hit “Better Off Alone” with her second “Back In My Life”? There really isn’t much difference at all between the two to my non-dance culture ears. Maybe if you were a club DJ at the time you could split some hairs about bpm or something but that would have been dancing on a pinhead behaviour.

Anyway, Alice Deejay were back on the show and this time had lost Dutch producer DJ Jurgen who was credited on “Better Off Alone” (oh, is that the difference?). And yes, were is the correct word used above as Alice Deejay wasn’t just the woman on stage selling the song, they were a collective of Dutch Eurodance producers which raises the question of who was the woman out front? Well, she was Judith Anna Pronk (great name) who, after falling out of love with working within the music industry, pursued a career firstly in hair and make up and subsequently in photography with her website describing her as “A creative mind in the Netherlands”. A creative mind? Pity that the rest of the Alice Deejay people hadn’t shown the same creativity when coming up with a second hit.

There’s no upturn in quality with the next artist. In fact, it’s a definite low point not just in the show but within the whole of 1999. The success of Lolly takes some explaining and I’m not sure that I can. Three Top 10 singles in a six month period suggests she must have been doing something right but she was hopelessly in the wrong with all of them being intensely annoying bubblegum pop hits. The other day I managed to grate my index finger instead of the Red Leicester cheese I was holding – listening to a Lolly record elicited much the same painful reaction.

Her cover of the 1972 Michael Jackson hit “Rockin’ Robin”* was perhaps the worst of the lot. It’s a terrible song anyway but allied to Lolly’s pipsqueak vocals, it was downright diabolical. Who was buying this crap? I can only assume it was the weeny bopper market who probably also bought those records by Cartoons. Thankfully, just like Judith Anna Pronk, Lolly (real name Anna Shantha Kumble) had other career ambitions than being a pop star and would eventually move into the world of TV presenting and acting thus mercifully cutting short her time as a recording artist.

*”Rockin’ Robin” will always remind me of my Dad who was convinced that Michael Jackson was always older than he let on offering “Rockin’ Robin” as his evidence and stating that Jacko must have been at least 30 when it was in the charts. He was, in fact, 13 years old.

Oh God! Not another mindless, generic dance record! Yes, yes it is and it’s courtesy of “Turn Around” hitmakers Phats & Small. Unfortunately, they did have more than that one hit (four in total in fact) of which “Tonite” was the third. I can’t say I remember this one at all but, actually, having listened to it back, it’s not as bad as I would have expected. Despite the hackneyed start where the vocalist sings “Yeah, oo-oo, oo, oh yeah” and the awful descent into the “oo-oo” call and response routine with the studio audience, it’s got a very familiar, retro feel to it and reminds me of something I can’t quite put my finger on. There’s also something very comforting about the performance with all the people up on stage looking like they’re having the best time. Why did they use the American spelling of “Tonite” as the title of the track though? Was it just for conformity with the rhyming of “unite” and “white” in the lyrics?

Despite being for charity, the Children In Need single had never cut through in the same way that the Comic Relief song had. Looking at the list of titles that had been released on behalf of Children In Need, there’s many I don’t recognise at all probably because they didn’t even make the Top 40. 1987’s “Boy Eyed Jog” by Ray Moore anyone? Anyway, that trend changed dramatically in 1997 when the BBC pulled together a host of music names to record Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” for a video to promote the diversity of their music offering and proved so popular with viewers that it was given a full release for Children In Need, going to No 1, selling over a million copies and raising over £2 million for the charity. It remains the biggest selling Children In Need single to date.

1998 saw Johnny Vaughan and Denise Van Outen do their Kylie and Jason impression with a version of “Especially For You” which went to No 3. Come 1999, it was the turn of Martine McCutcheon. On the face of it, she was a good choice. She had been the darling of EastEnders and had become a successful pop star with a No 1 to her name in the form of a classy big ballad. The song chosen for the charity was “Talking In Your Sleep” which I thought I didn’t know but the chorus of which brought childhood memories rushing back. My first thought on seeing the song’s title in the running order was that it was that 1983 single by US band The Romantics that Bucks Fizz covered a year later and took to No 15 but no. It was actually Crystal Gayle’s 1978 hit which had topped the American Country chart. Whilst Martine does her best with it, the production on it is all wrong and sounds clunky and mechanical next to the smoothness of the original.

Not wanting to miss an opportunity to promote McCutcheon’s album “You Me & Us”, for the Christmas period, her record label made it a double A-side with another cover version from said album. This time it was a Bee Gees track called “Love Me” which had been a hit for Yvonne Elliman in 1976. Martine performed the song at the Children in Need telethon on 26 November 1999 where she was supported by a choir of 100 children.

It’s “Talking In Your Sleep” which we get in this TOTP performance though which sees a rather jarring intro from Gail Porter who seems to be about to interview Martine judging by her proximity to her but when she fails to do that, she just ends up looking like she was invading Martine’s personal space or like the strange person on the bus who sits next to you even though there are loads of spare empty double seats. Maybe Gail had wanted to ask her about the very severe fringe Martine was sporting but lost her nerve. By peaking at No 6, “Talking In Your Sleep”/“Love Me” became the 14th highest ever charting Children In Need single.

And so to a fitting ending to this piss poor episode as the new No 1 is “The Millennium Prayer” by Cliff Richard. The song credits eight songwriters as having contributed to its composition including, and this is a bit out there but there’s a logic to it, Jesus Christ himself. It is the only single that credits Jesus as a lyricist. I don’t think anything else I could say will top that fact.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Melanie C	Northern Star	No
2	Boyzone	Everyday I Love You	Of course not
3	Alice Deejay	Back In My Life	Negative
4	Lolly	Rockin’ Robin	As if
5	Phats & Small	Tonite	Nope
6	Martine McCutcheon	Talking In Your Sleep / Love Me	Nah
7	Cliff Richard	The Millennium Prayer	Never

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002x8m8/top-of-the-pops-03121999

TOTP 26 NOV 1999

Posted on 14 Days Ago by 80stastic

As the last embers of the 90s lose their glow, we have arrived at the show that first featured perhaps the most controversial and divisive hit of the decade. Where the 60s had “Je t’aime… moi non plus”, the 70s turned up “God Save The Queen” and the 80s gave us “Relax”, the 90s delivered…well…all in good time. We’ve got a few other hits to get through before we arrive at that particular song (and I use that word very loosely).

Our host is Gail Porter and we begin, as had become TOTP tradition by this point (and a daft one at that), with last week’s No 1. Sort of. I’ve never thought of “It’s Only Us” by Robbie Williams as a chart topper – that status was reserved for the other song on the double A-side single “She’s The One” which was receiving all the airplay. However, despite that and despite the fact that it has dropped to No 3 this week, we get a performance of “It’s Only Us” to start the show. Clearly, this was recorded at the same time as the previous week’s run through of “She’s The One” but Robbie has taken off his heavy duty jacket to make it look like it’s a totally different appearance. We’re wise to you Robbie.

“It’s Only Us” didn’t originally feature on the “I’ve Been Expecting You” album but was added to it in 2000 following a lawsuit brought by Ludlow Music on behalf of London Wainwright III who claimed that the track “Jesus In A Camper Van” featured a lyric wholly based on one from Wainwright’s song “I Am The Way”. Williams claimed he’d heard the lyric “Every Son of God gets a little hard luck sometimes, especially when he goes around saying he’s ‘the way.'” whilst in rehab but that cut no ice with the judge in the case who ordered that 25% of income generated by “Jesus In A Camper Van” must go to Ludlow Music and that the track be removed from future copies of “I’ve Been Expecting You”. It was, of course, replaced by “It’s Only Us” whilst “Jesus In A Camper Van” is currently not available on any of the major streaming platforms.

Next up is another performance which, like Robbie Williams, I’m pretty sure was recorded back to back with another song by the artist in a musical version of a BOGOF offer. Unlike our opening act though, this artist was at the TOTP studio months prior to this broadcast as opposed to just the other week. Back in the May of 1999, Whitney Houston was on the show singing “My Love Is Your Love” to an appreciative studio audience. Clearly, that wasn’t the only song they were treated to that day. Just check out the YouTube thumbnail for that song below and then compare it with the one for her performance of “I Learned From The Best”…

Yep, exactly the same outfit and hairstyle. There’s no doubt that they were recorded on the same day. Whitney was also in the studio when she did a run through of “It’s Not Right But It’s OK” and although her outfit is different, I’m willing to bet that was recorded at the same time as the other two songs as well. What does all this mean? I’m not sure it means anything other than the traditional divvying out by the TOTP producers of spots on the show’s running order based on weekly chart positions was clearly being undermined by the practices employed here by Whitney and her team.

Getting back to “I Learned From The Best” though, this one seemed to be a return to the power ballad formula of old which had brought her so much success back in the 80s. Not surprising really as it was written by the Queen of the Power Ballad herself Diane Warren. However, it’s not exactly a traditional love song but a swipe at a former lover by a woman that has turned down his attempts of reconciliation by telling him that she learned how to reject him from the way he used to do it to her. Then there there’s the song’s sound which although it has the established key change in it, also has a swagger to it as it sashays around your ears. If it was a free kick in a football match, the commentator would say that the player taking it had put some swazz on it. Unlike those first two hits from her “My Love Is Your Love” album, “I Learned From The Best” wasn’t a big seller peaking at No 19 though I’m sure it helped to squeeze out a few more sales of the album from the Christmas retail period.

We have missed the third artist on tonight as it was R Kelly and so has been edited out. Why couldn’t the BBC have been doing this for all the potentially offensive acts in these repeats rather than just not broadcasting the whole show (mind you, some of these 90s TOTPs have been stinkers so maybe it was better that they didn’t). Anyway, it’s straight on to…oh…Glamma Kid. Who? It’s that bloke who had a hit with Shola Ama based around an old Sade track. Seeing as that strategy brought him a Top 10 hit, he thought he’d double down on it but this time he chose Carly Simon’s 1982 hit “Why”. I can’t recall this one at all so let me remind myself of it. Back in three minutes…

…well, that was an absolute car crash. If it was a firework it would have been called Satanic Desecration. Just head-bendingly awful. How dare he take Carly’s quite wonderful song and do that to it! It’s all bump ‘n’ grind nonsense with Glamma Kid banging on about hotspots or something. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, he encourages the audience to do that awful “ooh ooh” call and response thing before putting the turd flakes on this shit sandwich by getting them to wave their hands in the air. Away with you sir!

I’d forgotten that there was a third single from Blur’s “13” album. “Tender”? Yes, of course. “Coffee & TV”? Absolutely. “No Distance Left To Run”? Erm…that was the title of a documentary about them wasn’t it? Yes it was but it was also the closing track on the album (save for a two minute instrumental) that was released as its third and final single. It’s not an obvious choice for that role being a discordant, lo-fi song about the break up of Damon Albarn’s relationship with Justine Frischmann. Part of me thinks it should have been left alone to close out the album but alternatively, why shouldn’t the band push the boundaries and make their fanbase work a bit to appreciate all the facets of their heroes’ art?

“The quintessential 90s band” says Gail Porter in her outro. Not sure entirely what she meant by that. Yes, they’d been having hits for the whole of the decade but how could one band represent the whole of that era when so many movements and trends had come and gone in that period? In a move that suggested that Blur themselves wanted to get away from such descriptions, the band’s next release was a line-in-the-sand-drawing Best Of. Over the next 23 years though, they would release just three studio albums compared to six in eight years between 1991 and 1999. Maybe they were destined to be remembered as a 90s band?

And here it is. That most divisive of records and it came courtesy of a 59 year old man who had been having hits for five decades and who, for many, was the standard bearer for the music industry elite, a man so comfy and unthreatening that he was the antithesis of what a rock star should be. He only ever had sex once allegedly for chrissakes! And yet, as the new millennium dawned, Cliff Richard was suddenly anti-establishment and rallying against what was deemed acceptable he did it all without a trace of sex (obviously), drugs or rock ‘n’ roll.

The cause of this controversy was his hit “The Millennium Prayer” which was the words of The Lord’s Prayer set to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne”. That’s it. That’s what all the fuss was about. It seems odd in retrospect but so concerned about its lack of commercial appeal and accusations of exploiting people’s religious beliefs were Cliff’s record company EMI that they refused to release it (they had history when it came to losing their nerve in a controversy, for example their dropping of the Sex Pistols in 1977 following the Bill Grundy incident). As a result, Cliff took his bat and his ball (and “The Millennium Prayer”) and tuned up at independent label Papillon’s door and it was they who released it as a charity single with the proceeds going to Children’s Promise. The extreme reactions didn’t stop there though. George Michael no less described the song as a “heinous piece of music” and the campaign behind it as “vile”. Radio stations baulked at the track with BBC Radios 1 and 2, Capital FM’s sister station Capital Gold, and the Magic network of oldies stations all declining to put it on their playlists.

In the face of such opposition, how did it manage to debut at No 2 and spend three weeks at No 1 then? Well, you ignore Cliff’s fanbase at your peril. His legion of supporters and indeed Christian groups mobilised themselves to protest outside BBC offices and overwhelmed radio stations with requests to play it. Premier Radio, a Christian station, played “Millennium Prayer” regularly. The grassroots movement outstripped and outmanoeuvred conventional marketing strategy and the song became Cliff’s 14th chart topper of his career. The BBC in particular must have felt like they were tying themselves up in knots with its Radio stations largely ignoring it (the Top 40 chart show played it I think) but here he was on TOTP, their flagship music show, to perform the song. They even afforded him enough time for a small interview with Gail Porter who performed the whole “we’re not worthy” routine for good measure. And then there was the song, if indeed that’s what it was. Let’s have it right, George Michael nailed it. It was heinous. Abominable. Monstrously bad even. And yet who am I to tell punters they were wrong to buy it? However, does anyone listen to it now?

*checks Spotify plays*

Well, it’s been streamed 3 million times which seems like a lot but compared to his more traditional pop hits like “We Don’t Talk Anymore” (41 million plays) and “Devil Woman” (39 million)…Does it even get played on those all Christmas songs stations come December each year? Whatever its legacy, there will always be a bit of 1999 that belongs to Cliff and “The Millennium Prayer”.

It’s another case of third-single-from-the-album syndrome as, after Blur earlier, we get Texas now. “When We Are Together” was the third single lifted from fifth studio album “The Hush” and was the band’s first non Top 10 hit since “So In Love With You” struggled to a peak of No 28 in 1994. There’s no particular reason for this that I can fathom other than it was taken from an album that had been in the shops for six months by this point meaning many potential purchasers of the single could have already bought the album and have access to the track.

The song itself stuck to the formula that Texas had struck upon with the “White On Blonde” album with its Motown feel and radio friendly uptempo beat. If there were any concerns within the band’s camp that said formula was losing its potency, their next release in 2000 – their first Greatest Hits compilation – must surely have dispelled them as it topped the charts and went six times platinum. Interestingly, half the album’s 18 tracks were made up of songs from “White On Blonde” and “The Hush”.

We have yet another new No 1 this week in the form of Wamdue Project and their track “King Of My Castle”. I say ‘their’ but this was the work of one Chris Brann who sounds like a journeyman midfielder currently playing his trade in the Championship with West Brom but who was actually an American electronic music producer. “King Of My Castle” was originally released in 1997 and was a club hit without crossing over into chart action. However, a remix by Roy ‘Walterino’ Malone (I’ve no idea) saw it debut at No 1 in the UK charts and become a Top 5 smash just about everywhere else.

Now, there can’t have been too many hits that reference Sigmund Freud’s structural model of the psyche but this one did with its title referring to Freud’s comment of “the ego is not king of its own castle” when describing that the human ego is not free and is instead controlled by its own unconscious id. This was deep stuff we were talking. That being said, the track itself was pretty much the opposite of deep, to my ears anyway. A very basic house beat allied to some repetitive lyrics, it never seems to really get going and drifts about in the shallow end for its entirety. Maybe it was all to do with the bpm and you needed to be in a sweaty nightclub to appreciate it better.

There’s an amusing footnote to this particular story which is that Wamdue Project appeared on the initial nominations list for ‘Best British Newcomer’ at the 2000 Brit Awards only for embarrassed organisers to withdraw the name once they had realised that Brann is American. That must have dented their egos. Ahem.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Robbie Williams	She’s The One/Its Only Us	No
2	Whitney Houston	I Learned From The Best	Negative
3	Glamma Kid	Why	Certainly not
4	Blur	No Distance Left To Run	No but I had the album
5	Cliff Richard	The Millennium Prayer	Heavens above no!
6	Texas	When We Are Together	Nah
7	Wamdue Project	King Of My Castle	Nope

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/m002wz4f/top-of-the-pops-26111999

TOTP 23 OCT 1998

Posted on December 3 by 80stastic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ace Of Base
Deetah
Eagle-Eye Cherry
Robyn
The Cardigans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

TOTP 08 DEC 1994

Posted on June 29, 2023 by 80stastic

Christmas is coming but the charts aren’t full of facts. The Top 40 announced on the Sunday before this TOTP contained incorrect information. Apparently there were some Woolworths shops that couldn’t retrieve their sales data to send to chart compilers Millward Brown so the tech guys were deployed to extract it. This they did except it was the wrong data. They just duplicated the Friday sales figures instead of Saturday’s and by the time the mistake was noticed it was too late as the Top 40 had been published and announced on Radio 1. Millward Brown chose to style it out by retrospectively compiling the correct chart but it was never made available to the public other than by using it as the basis for the ‘last week’ positions for the following week’s chart. It must have played havoc with the minds of all the Top 40 ~~nerds~~ devotees out there. TOTP decided to go with the chart that Radio 1 had initially announced rather than the revised one but in the end, the cock up hadn’t made that much difference to many records with only minor adjustments of a place or two being required – I think the biggest was that Mariah Carey should have been at No 5 rather than No 6.

Anyway, none of the above is mentioned by guest presenter Neneh Cherry who is the holder of the ‘golden mic’ chalice this week. Neneh had been back in the charts of course in a big way in 1994 alongside Youssou N’Dour on “7 Seconds” but even so, I’m not sure that she had the pull that she would have had 5 years previously. Still, she had a nice delivery style and brought a certain amount of credibility to proceedings. Her first job is to introduce the opening act who is Whigfield who had the unenviable task of trying to follow up a massive selling debut single somehow. And how do you do that? As we have seen so many times in the course of these TOTP repeats, you take the original record, add a few minor changes, give it a different song title and release it all over again. Listen to the banking track on “Another Day” – exactly the same as “Saturday Night”. To try and fool the record buying public into purchasing a single they’d already bought once, the producer behind the Whigfield brand – one Larry Pignagnoli – mixed things up by stealing the groove from Mungo Jerry’s 1970 No 1 “In The Summertime” (main Mungo Ray Dorset would receive a writing credit ultimately). It’s all very unsatisfactory and underhand really but it got Whigfield a Top 10 hit just in time for the Christmas party season. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – nice work if you can get it.

Of course, party dance tunes wasn’t the only way to bag yourself a Christmas hit. A nice ballad was also a strong and proven strategy. Many an artist had pulled off the trick of coming out with a ‘slowie’ in contrast to their previous material over the years – Wet Wet Wet (“Angel Eyes”), The Christians (“Ideal World”) and Bros (“Cat Among The Pigeons”) from the late 80s spring to mind but I’m sure there’s loads more examples. Not impervious to this idea were PJ & Duncan whose previous hits had all been uptempo examples of their brand of pop rap but the fifth single from their album “Psyche” and their fourth hit of the year broke that mould. I guess with a title like “Eternal Love” we shouldn’t have been surprised. Aimed squarely at the teenage girl’s market, it’s as wet and drippy as a poor quality nappy. Do you think this was their attempt at following in LL Cool J’s footsteps when he slowed things down for his hit “I Need Love”?

At this fledgling stage of their career, there were still a few things the duo had to sort out and come to a decision on. Firstly, PJ / Ant’s hat – what was that all about?! So that we could tell them apart?! I’m not sure how long this style affectation lasted but at some point it was ditched. Another style decision that was yet to be resolved was actually more of a staging conundrum. Who should stand where. These days, the fact that Ant stands to the left and Dec the right as we look at our TV screens (in reverse for them of course) is well established but it’s the other way round in this performance and I think it has been like that for every TOTP appearance so far. I wonder when and why they changed it? Is there some sort of feng shui consultant but for people whose services you can call upon?

Next up it’s the familiar video for Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” after the The Ronnettes pastiche promo last time. Presumably it wasn’t that familiar back in 1994 though. You can’t avoid it now, so immeshed is it in our festive culture. You could just as easily make a case for a game of Mariah-geddon as Wham-a-geddon. In fact, so ubiquitous is the track that I think the fact that she did a whole album of Christmas songs is almost overlooked. Can you name any of the other tracks on that “Merry Christmas” album without either owning it or looking it up?

Apparently, there were other singles lifted from it (either for commercial release or promotional purposes) though not in the UK I believe. In other territories, “Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town” and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) both charted but I’m fairly confident in saying that if you were to hear those songs played on radio in this country it would be the Bruce Springsteen and Darlene Love versions. Despite being No 1 in certain countries, the album only managed a peak of No 32 in the UK. Still, it’s all about that song isn’t it and it’s so far generated $80 million in royalties.

The first TOTP appearance next of a boy band that would last the decade and beyond despite the most inauspicious of beginnings. Boyzone were put together by Louis Walsh (who later found fame himself as a judge on TV shows X Factor and Popstars) with the direct intention of forming an Irish Take That (who were themselves put together by Nigel Martin-Smith to be a British New Kids On The Block). After auditioning 300 hopefuls, an initial six-piece outfit was established and they appeared on Irish talk show The Late Late Show in late 1993 to do…erm…this:

So when I said inauspicious beginnings earlier, what I actually meant was perhaps the most mortifying, ignominious debacle ever witnessed on TV. Sheesh! What were they thinking?! What was Louis Walsh thinking?! Was anybody thinking?! Despite that…whatever it was…the group weren’t killed stone dead by it and somehow got signed by Polygram. There were casualties though. Two of the original line up were ditched and were replaced by Mikey Graham who joined Roman Keating, Stephen Gately, Shane Lynch and Keith Duffy for the release of their debut single, a cover of the Frankie Valli And The Four Seasons / The Spinners hit “Working My Way Back To You” which was a success on the Irish chart but nowhere else. That was all the impetus they needed though and another cover of “Love Me For A Reason” (made famous by The Osmonds) would make them bona fide chart stars when it made No 2 over Christmas in the UK singles chart.

Watching this TOTP performance back, it’s clear that some drastic styling had gone on since that turn on The Late Late Show. They’ve all been kitted out with suits and super wide collar shirts to create a sense of unity and their dancing has been stripped back to a few synchronised arm movements and sidesteps. No more freestyle workouts for these boys. It just about hangs together well enough to deliver the song. They would go on to have another fifteen hit singles before the decade was out including six No 1s and six No 2s. The time of Boyzone (not Boys’ Own Neneh) was upon us.

Gloria Estefan does U2? Of course not – it’s not the same song at all although their similar titles could cause confusion I guess. Gloria’s hit is a cover of the 50s song “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me” taken from her album of the same name. U2, on the other hand, contributed a song to the soundtrack of the movie Batman Forever called “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”. Hope that clarifies everything.

Gloria’s single did surprisingly well for her just missing out on the Top 10 by one place and thereby becoming her biggest hit since “Megamix / Miami Hit Mix” made No 8 promoting her Best Of album two years prior. You had to go back to 1989 and “Don’t Wanna Lose You” for her previous Top 10 hit. Maybe it was the Christmas factor that allowed Gloria to hit big with a familiar if not well known love song? She would never have such a high placing single in the UK charts again though she has continued to release albums up to the present day with the last being 2022’s Christmas collection. What with Gloria and Mariah both having done Christmas albums, all we need now is one from Madonna for a full set. Or maybe we don’t…need a Madonna Christmas album that is.

Now here’s EYC following the same game plan as PJ & Duncan earlier in that they’re ditching their usual high tempo mix of pop and R&B for a slow smoocher for the Christmas market. “One More Chance” was all sighs and harmonies but very little in the way substance or indeed a tune. In short, it was a stinker.

PJ & Duncan weren’t the only influence on the trio though. They must have been watching Boyzone in rehearsals with their shirts and suits and decided that they wanted a piece of that action. Are they morning suits they’re wearing?! They also seem to have pinched some of Ronan and co’s stripped back dance moves but then completely blow the whole effect by attempting to outdo them with the addition of a totally incongruous accessory. What were the white gloves all about? They look like snooker referees on the pull! Utter nonsense. Talk about “Snooker Loopy”! Brave heart though as I think this lousy lot have just one more hit single in them and then their table will have been cleared.

Cliff Richard is no stranger to a duet. He’s performed alongside the likes of Sarah Brightman, Elton John, Van Morrison, Olivia Newton John, Cilla Black and this guy – Phil Everly and not just once but twice. Back in 1983, Cliff and Phil took “She Means Nothing To Me” to No 9 in the UK charts. I didn’t mind it actually although obviously I never let anyone at school know this. Fast forward 11 years and the two were reunited for a curious collaboration. How so? Well, there was nothing particularly odd about their choice of song; “All I Have To Do Is Dream” had been a No 1 for The Everly Brothers in 1958 so it was a song Phil had been performing for over 35 years. Cliff meanwhile had his first hit “Move It” in the very same year so was a contemporary of Phil’s and would of course know the song. Cliff was promoting a Best Of collection for Christmas in 1994 called “The Hit List” which rounded up all his highest charting singles to date (those that went Top 5 or higher) but curiously also included one that only made No 15. “Miss You Nights” was a hit in 1976 but was included on “The Hit List” as it was a fan favourite.

“So what?” you may ask. Well, a remix of “Miss You Nights” was released as a single to promote the album which seems an unexpected choice of song given the nature of the album’s track listing criteria. That wasn’t all though. It was released as a double A-side single with a live version of “All I Have To Do Is Dream” which wasn’t on the album at all! OK, then maybe it was on an album by Phil Everly and it was promoting that? Not according to my research – his last solo album had been in 1983. There was a 105 track Everly Brothers box set released in 1994 but surely that would have been for super fans and completists only. I can’t believe the Cliff/Phil single was anything to do with that. So what was the rationale behind its release? Yes, obviously Christmas was on the way and Cliff had absolutely cornered the Christmas singles market in recent years but did his record company EMI really think he could garner another festive No 1 with this? In the end, it scampered up the charts to No 14 so nowhere near replicating the success of “Mistletoe And Wine” or “Saviour’s Day”. Phil never released another solo single after this whilst Cliff would return in 1995 with his musical project Heathcliff which he conceived, starred in and allowed him to release an album of songs from.

Next up is “the very attractive Jimmy Nail” according to Neneh Cherry. Jimmy’s transition from Oz in Auf Wiedersehen Pet, who was an extremely likeable character but hardly a pin up, to the sleek, some may say chiselled, pop star/actor we see here was quite a thing. Obviously he’d lost quite a bit of weight since he first appeared on our screens but was it also something to do with the more endearing roles we were seeing him perform in Spender and Crocodile Shoes? I think it’s a possibility.

Talking of roles, a reader reminded me in reply to a previous post where I wondered whatever happened to Jimmy that as well as the two shows mentioned above, he was also kept busy with a third and fourth series of Auf Wiedersehen Pet in 2002 and 2004 respectively and two hour long episodes called Au Revoir that were broadcast in the Christmas of 2004. As for “Crocodile Shoes” the single, was at its chart peak of No 4 this week; a significant success though I don’t think it ever really had a chance of being the Christmas No 1.

East 17 are No 1 with “Stay Another Day” and will remain there for 5 weeks to become the festive chart topper as well. As I recall, the Christmas chart was actually announced on the TOTP broadcast on the big day itself and I was convinced that Oasis would pip both East 17 and Mariah Carey to the crown with their standalone single “Whatever”. They seemed to have timed its release just right with it being available for the first time just the week before and with the buzz about the band reaching boiling point and judging by the amounts we were selling if it in the Our Price store in Market Street, Manchester, it seemed like a shoo-in to me. I was amazed when they were announced at No 3 and cried foul, stating something didn’t smell right. However, there were no such stories of rigging in the papers and media. I clearly was letting my Oasis tinted glasses cloud my judgement.

The Walthamstow boys were rightly crowned the Kings of Christmas and their song has gone into the great cannon of festive tunes. Although we get another studio appearance here, there were actually two promo videos made for the single though I only remember seeing one of them at the time. I assume they were made at the same time but the one I saw back in 1994 was the one of the bend seen laying down the track in a recording studio. The one that we now see every December of the band in oversized, white fur trimmed parkas shot in black and white floating about in a snow storm shocked me when I first saw it as it was many years after 1994 and I’d long since left working in record shops behind. How could I have missed seeing it in all those intervening years?

And that’s a wrap for 1994 here at TOTP Rewind. The shows broadcast on the 15th and 22nd December were pulled from the BBC4 repeats schedule as they both featured Gary Glitter. I’ve checked the running order for those shows though and we’re not missing much. Rednex, Mighty Morph’n Power Rangers, Celine Dion, Zig & Zag…it couldn’t be much worse. They did show the Christmas Day edition hosted by Take That (obviously) but it didn’t feature any hits I hadn’t already commented on and so I’m not regurgitating all that again. I will do my own review of 1994 post (the epilogue) as usual though.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Whigfield	Another Day	As if
2	PJ & Duncan	Eternal Love	Infernal racket more like! No!
3	Mariah Carey	All I Want For Christmas Is You	Nope
4	Boyzone	Love Me For A Reason	No
5	Gloria Estefan	Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me	Nah
6	EYC	One More Chance	No chance more like!
7	Cliff Richard & Phil Everly	All I Have To Do Is Dream	Didn’t happen
8	Jimmy Nail	Crocodile Shoes	I did not
9	East 17	Stay Another Day	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/m001mwfx/top-of-the-pops-08121994

TOTP 16 DEC 1993

Posted on December 11, 2022 by 80stastic

To paraphrase Frankie Valli, here at TOTP Rewind it’s mid December back in ‘93 and very much like the temperatures in 2022, I recall it being very cold. I was working in the Our Price store in Altrincham and travelling there from Manchester every day by a bus and then a tram. As such, it was an early start and I have a distinct memory of standing next to the radiator in our little flat not wanting to go outside to start the commute. The radio was playing “Babe” by Take That which didn’t help my mood as it brought to mind the song’s video which had lots of snow themed scenes including Mark Owen wandering around in what appeared to be Russia looking for his former lover in a bit of a blizzard. Aside from the cold, the work days were long and busy as this was a time before streaming where you had to physically go out to a record shop and buy a CD or cassette if you wanted an album or single. We packed so many customers into that little shop on George Street that at times it felt like the floor would collapse*.

*That did happen once when I was working in the Rochdale Our Price. A floor tile just cracked one day to reveal a gaping hole underneath. Just one of the many mishaps that occurred during my retail years including a man walking through the window which he mistook for the door, the shop’s fuse box starting to smoke, alarm call outs in the middle of the night, blocked toilets, failed central heating systems etc etc.

Despite all of the above, I was loving my time in Altrincham to the extent that me and my wife even contemplated moving there and even looked around a flat or two. Fortunately, we never made that move as in the first couple of weeks after Christmas came the word from area management that I was being moved again. I wouldn’t get back to Altrincham for five years. Enough of my personal life though, which songs were those busy shoppers snapping up as the big day approached…

If your hear the names Chaka Demus and Pliers, what immediately comes to mind? Apart from the ridiculousness of that second name obviously. For me it’s 1993 and their hit “Tease Me” and yet that No 2 (in more ways than one) was eclipsed by this single, their version of “Twist And Shout”. Somehow though, it seems to have escaped my memory banks despite it going to No 1 one in early ‘94. Maybe it’s because there have been so many different releases of this perennial song. I’m guessing most of us know it from The Beatles take on it in 1963 but it was very first recorded before them by The Top Notes. The first time it was a hit was when The Isley Brothers took it into the charts in 1962. Brian Poole and The Tremeloes had the temerity to release a version just four months after The Beatles (though they claimed they were already playing it live in shows before anybody else) and had a hit with it. It’s also been attempted by The Searchers, The Kingsmen, Bruce Springsteen and then in 1988, it was given the hip-hop treatment by Salt-N-Pepa and became a No 4 single in the UK.

Fast forward five years and here it was again courtesy of Chaka Demus and Pliers (plus Jack Radics and Taxi Gang). Maybe they were inspired by Salt-N-Pepa – if it could be hip-hopped, then maybe the song could be also be reggae-fied? Or maybe they took inspiration from ragga duo Louchie Lou and Michie One who took another song originally done by The Isley Brothers but made famous by another artist (“Shout” by Lulu) and bagged a Top 10 hit earlier in 1993 . Whatever the reason, Chaka Demus and Pliers’ version of “Twist And Shout” didn’t work for me as I could never got on board with all that toasting. Also, wasn’t this more of a Summer tune than a Christmas one? I know host Tony Dortie goes on about what a big party tune it is which could crossover into festive celebrations I guess but clearly the TOTP producers saw it as a Summer song judging by the palm trees in the set they designed for the performance here.

You’d be hard pressed to find a more blatant example of record company cashing in than this. Not having had Meatloaf as their artist for a decade by this point didn’t matter at all to CBS when it came to exploiting the back catalogue of their previous charge. With “Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell” and its single “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” tearing up the charts everywhere on the planet, of course CBS we’re going to rerelease probably his most famous song. So it came to pass the Meatloaf managed to be in possession of two UK Top 20 hits simultaneously in 1993 when “Bat Out Of Hell” got to No 8 beating its original 1979 peak by seven places. Who was buying it though? The parent album is one of the best selling in history so many, many people would surely already own the song so that leaves two options to my mind. One, Meatloaf completists or two, young music fans who’d only just discovered him via his latest success and either thought this was his latest/new single or wanted to explore his older stuff.

All of this just goes to show how perceptions can change in the wake of a huge success. Two years prior to this, “Bat Out Of Hell: Re-vamped” was released -basically a straight reissue but with “Dead Ringer For Love” added – and to promote it “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad” was rereleased. It peaked at No 69.

You know that debate that rages about this time of year about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie or not? Well, there’s surely a musical equivalent to that argument about whether “Stay Another Day” by East 17 is a Christmas song isn’t there? Why am I going on about a track that is twelve months away from being the festive No 1? I guess because looking at their performance here of “It’s Alright”, it’s clear that they weren’t averse to pushing a Christmas agenda if it suited which it did literally here as all four members are Santa suited-up. I actually beat East 17 to it by four years. In Christmas 1989, I was working in the toy department at Debenhams and used to stand in for the guy playing Father Christmas in the grotto on his breaks. That suit stank to high heaven. The store had a fire alarm go off whilst I was in it and we all had to evacuate the building. I got a few comments from the rest of the employees whilst stood outside waiting to be allowed back in.

Back to East 17 though and Tony Dortie says two things that peaked my interest in his links. Firstly that Brian Harvey was “flu affected”. We’ve been here before just the other week when Gabrielle appeared on the show in person to say she couldn’t perform her single as she had flu. Harvey goes one better by having flu but still managing to sing and jig about on stage. Flu my arse! Secondly, Dortie announces that he’s off on tour with East 17 shortly. On tour? Doing what exactly? They already had two guys in the band who appeared to do not very much at all. Surely they didn’t need a third?! Was Dortie just going to introduce them on stage each night? Was that all? Nice work if you can get it. It’s alright indeed.

In Christmas 1993, Diana Ross had a Best Of album out called “One Woman: The Ultimate Collection” which was a huge seller over the festive season going four times platinum and selling 1.2 million copies in the UK. We sold loads of it in that Altrincham Our Price where I was working but we had to go against company policy to do so. The CD was officially priced at something like £11.99 but all the other outlets in Altrincham (Boots, Woolies etc) were selling it for £9.99. Myself and the manager Cathy came to the conclusion that we wouldn’t sell any at £11.99 and so price matched. We didn’t ask permission or tell any other stores, we just did it and it worked – we sold loads and maintained a decent market share on the album. However, when the Area Manager turned up unexpectedly for a store visit we nearly shat ourselves thinking he would notice. He had this thing he did at Christmas where he would help out serving customers and so we were sure we would get busted as somebody in the queue would have the Diana Ross CD. Myself and Cathy joined in serving trying to spot anyone in the queue who would give the game away and head them off at the pass by jumping in and getting to them first. Somehow we got away with it. Phew!

Diana did an extensive tour to help promote the album an Our Price colleague went to see her on one of her dates. When I asked him how it had been the next day, he’d convinced himself that he was Ms Ross’s long lost, illegitimate child so consumed by the experience was he. I’m assuming she performed the single “Your Love” which was a new track added to the album to help promote it but it was hardly up there with some of her classic recordings for me. It peaked at No 14.

WTF?! Eight Breakers?! EIGHT?! You have to be kidding me?! That must be a record! Five is pretty much maximum capacity usually. Presumably the TOTP producers have done this because the chart at Christmas are usually clogged up with new records strategically released to cash in on the extra sales at this time of year. Even so. Eight Breakers means a whopping grand total of fourteen songs on this show! Tossers! Don’t they realise how much work this is for me?

We start with another boy band, this time of the American variety who time would surely have forgotten if not for a gimmick surrounding their name. EYC (it stood for Express Yourself Clearly) had this annoying habit of signing off from any promotional appearances by saying “E Y See ya”. Ugh! Somehow this trio of ex-New Kids On The Block backing dancers (no, that’s literally what they were) somehow managed to bag themselves six UK Top 40 hits the first of which was “Feelin’ Alright”. It had a sub House Of Pain vibe to it tailored for the teen market but it was pretty lame all the same.

My main memory of this lot came the following year. I was now working in the Our Price in Market Street, Manchester where I first started three years previously. I was on the counter with the manager and he served a young girl with one of their singles. As he went behind the shelving to get it (the stock wasn’t in the racks live at this point) he said to me in a really loud voice which the customer must have heard, “This is crap isn’t it?”. How I cringed.

Next up a tune so intensely and annoyingly catchy it’s still in my head nearly thirty years on. I would have said that “Come Baby Come” by K7 was from 1994 not 1993. I’m kind of right. It reached its peak of No 3 in the January of ‘94 but was actually released in December ‘93. K7 was essentially US all rounder Louis Sharpe. A rapper, songwriter, record producer, he also went by the name of Kayel. He’s only really known over here though for this single. Employing that call and answer style of rap (is it meant to be him and his homies who he’s hangin’ with?), it kind of reminds me of that drill instructor song from the late 80s. What was it called again?

*googles ‘drill instructor song’

That’s it! “Full Metal Jacket (I Wanna Be Your Drill Instructor)” by Abigail Mead and Nigel Goulding…

Anyway, it also had that drive-you- insane shouty chorus that once heard is never forgotten*. Maybe it was just meant to distract you from those innuendo loaded lyrics which were actually pretty filthy. I guess the clue was in the song title but check these out:

Better move it fast so you can pump it (pump it)
Two balls and a bat (hoo), a pitcher with a hat (ha)
Slidin’ into home base, tryin’ to hit a home run
Swing batta batta batta batta batta swing
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Louis Sharpe / Joey Gardner
Come Baby Come lyrics © Universal Music – Z Songs, Warner-tamerlane Publishing Corp., Blue Ink Music, Third And Lex Music

You don’t have to be Finbarr Saunders to work out what’s going on here! I’m sure we’ll be seeing and hearing more of K7 in future TOTP repeats. For those of a delicate nature, you have been warned!

*Such an ear worm is it that thirty years later, when I want my dog called Benji to come to me, I often say “Come Benji come, Benji, Benji come come”.

Ah now, talking of delicate…how to approach this one? OK well, the facts around the record are that “Gone Too Soon” was the ninth and final single taken from Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” album (the first – “Black And White” – had been released an incredible 25 months earlier). As the ninth single from an album that had been out for two years, even Jackson couldn’t eke out a big hit from it and it stalled at No 33. This was his lowest UK chart placing since a rerelease of “Girl Your So Together” in 1984.

Jackson recorded the track as a tribute to Ryan White, a US teenager who was haemophiliac and became infected with the HIV virus from a contaminated blood treatment. This was the dark ages of 1984 and Ryan was subsequently barred by his school from attending due to concerns from other parents that he would spread the virus. Given just six months to live, Ryan lived on for another five years in which time he became a high profile figure for HIV/AIDS research and public education attracting the attention of Jackson.

Unfortunately for the singer (and this is where the delicate bit comes in) the release of the song coincided with allegations of child sexual abuse against him made by the then thirteen years old Jordan Chandler. I’m guessing the single’s cover with a picture of Jackson walking around his Neverland ranch with Ryan maybe didn’t do the King of Pop any favours in the eyes of anyone who wanted to believe the allegations. The case was eventually settled out of court with the plaintiff reportedly receiving $23 million. Speculation about Jackson’s private life (already a media frenzy) had gone onto another, darker level. The scrutiny and effects of the accusations would never leave him and indeed resurfaced in 2003 with a second set of allegations. Jackson was acquitted on all counts in 2005. Four years later, he would be dead himself from cardiac arrest. At the memorial service, Usher performed “Gone Too Soon” and the circle was complete.

After being on the show last time, Cliff Richard is into the charts but it’s more with a loud fart than a bang at a lowly No 27 with “Healing Love”. The single would struggle on gamely to a high of No 19 but it was a far cry from the massive Christmas hits of “Mistletoe And Wine” and “Saviour’s Day”.

I can’t even find the official promo video for the single online so unloved is the song but from the few seconds we see here there seems to be a lot of billowing drapes behind Cliff as he sings. Haven’t seen as much material being wafted about since Spandau Ballet and “Only When You Leave” in 1984.

Next up a duet featuring a man who, despite being around since the time of disco, is only known in the UK for three songs, all of them collaborations with a female singer. Peabo Bryson first had a – no wait! You’re right. Let’s address that name of his before anything else. Peabo…you don’t get many of them to the pound do you? I’ve never heard anyone calling out “Peabo, come here now!” or “Have you seen our Peabo?”. However, I do know someone who once heard these immortal words come out of the mouth of a tired and frustrated mother:

“Oi! Cleopatra! Pack it in or I’ll twat ya!”
Hessle Road, Hull sometime around 2010

Only in Hull. Anyway, Peabo isn’t his real name. No, of course it isn’t! Sadly his real name is worse if anything – Robert Peapo Bryson. Peapo! That’s what you say when playing with a baby! As I was saying though, he first had a hit in the UK in 1983 with “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love For You”, an horrendously schmaltzy ballad that went all the way to No 2. There then followed an eight year gap until he returned with the title song from the Disney animation Beauty And The Beast alongside Celine Dion which bagged them a Top 10 hit. Clearly onto a good thing, he returned in 1993 with another Disney film song. This time it was “A Whole New World” which was from Aladdin and was, of course, another duet. The lucky lady this time was US singer songwriter Regina Belle who had been releasing records since 1987 without much commercial success. That was rectified and then some by “A Whole New World”. Not only was it an American No 1, it also is noteworthy for being the record that finally knocked Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” off the top spot after fourteen weeks over there. The reception to the record was a bit more lukewarm in the UK where it peaked at No 12.

It’s been covered a few times including by ex- One Direction member Zayn Malik (alongside Zhavia Ward) but the one that really stands out is the version by the god awful Peter Andre and his then wife Katie Price who included it on their album of covers also called “A Whole New World”. The track listing includes their takes on “Islands In The Stream” and the aforementioned “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love For You”. Hell’s teeth! That’s a whole new world of pain more like!

Next another of those rappers that the white middle class kids of Altrincham, Cheshire would fawn over. Ice T had a reputation for controversy that far outweighed any commercial success he achieved, certainly in this country. By 1993, he’d already released five albums but had never had a UK Top 40 hit…until “That’s How I’m Livin’”. We kind of knew already how he was living (that’s with a ‘g’ rather than as a ‘G’) and that was tendentiously. He’d provoked the ire of the POTUS George Bush no less with the release of “Cop Killer” by Body Count a track he wrote and a band he was a member of. He is also recognised as one of the defining influences of gangster rap and had well publicised disputes with fellow rappers like LL Cool J. However, Ice T was also savvy enough to diversify and forged an acting career for himself, starring in dozens of films and TV shows like New Jack City and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. “That’s How I’m Livin’” was taken from his album “Home Invasion” and peaked at No 21.

We didn’t know it at the time but the “Spooky” single would be the last material released by New Order (barring Best Ofs and rereleased singles) for eight years. For five of those years, the band didn’t see each other at all whilst the concentrated on personal projects. Yet again I have zero recall of this track. New Order singles of 1993? “Regret” of course. “Ruined In A Day”? Yeah. “World (The Price Of Love)”? Just about. This one though? I’ve got nothing, zero, nada. Like I’ve never heard it before. Why put out a fourth single from an album that been out for months during the Christmas rush? Consequently, “Spooky” only made No 22 which is actually higher than I would have expected. Maybe they just wanted to set a personal band record. This was the first time that New Order ever achieved four hits from the same album.

Tellingly, Tony Dortie says he doesn’t think the band have ever made a bad video. A bad video? Is that what they’d become reduced to by this point? What about the music? There were worst times ahead though with Peter Hook leaving under very acrimonious circumstances. Oh dear.

The final Breaker is a song that had already almost been the Christmas No 1 once and was rush released in 1993 to try again. Back in 1984, the whole of the UK record buying public seemed to be enthralled by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Two No 1 singles clocking up fifteen weeks at the top between them meant that when it came to the runners and riders for the festive chart topper, they were the bookies favourite. They had an epic, bowl-you-over ballad that was perfect for Christmas. They even had a nativity themed promo video. “The Power Of Love” duly went to No 1 on its first week of release. What hadn’t been figured into the odds was Bob Geldof and Band Aid which, when the list of high profile pop star contributors to the record became known, was always going to be the Christmas chart topper. Frankie were dethroned after just one week. Could the 1993 rerelease do what the 1984 original couldn’t and be No 1 for Yuletide? For Bob Geldof read Mr Blobby. They never stood a chance though “The Power Of Love” remains a firm favourite on Christmas playlists to this day. Mr Blobby on the other hand…

One of the success stories of 1993 now (and it pains me to say it) as we catch up with Haddaway in Disney World, Florida. Didn’t we see PM Dawn and Boy George there this year as well? Did TOTP have some sort of arrangement with Disney? Anyway, after No 2 and No 6 hits in the UK charts, the big question for Haddaway wasn’t “What Is Love?” but “how do I get a third hit? Well, one of the biggest lessons we’ve learned from these hundreds of TOTP repeats is that if you’re a new act with a shiny, uptempo pop song, you can replicate that formula for the follow up but you need something different for the third release and what is more different than a ballad? Haddaway clearly knew the rules and his third release was indeed a slow, romantic number called “I Miss You”. Sadly though, it’s not only slow but completely laboured and ponderous. It literally never gets out of first gear. Just dreadful. The lyrics sound like they came out of a one minute brainstorming session about the most obvious themes of love and regret.

I miss you, oh I miss you
I’m gonna need you more and more each day
I miss you, more than words can say
More than words can ever say
Copyright © 2000-2022 AZLyrics.com

Dreadful stuff. Somehow though, this nonsense got to No 9 to give Haddaway his third consecutive Top 10 hit. 1993 really had a lot to answer for.

Take That have gone straight into the charts at No 1 for the third consecutive time with “Babe”. No other act had done this at the time. Not the aforementioned Frankie, not The Jam (they managed two) not anyone. It really was quite the rise when you consider that eighteen months earlier, their biggest hit to date had been the No 38 single “Promises”. By Christmas 1993, they were the undisputed heroes for a generation of teenage girls. Of course, it’s not like we hadn’t seen bands being screamed at before. Bay City Rollers, Duran Duran, Bros…and yet none of them attained this particular chart achievement.

Tony Dortie joins the band on stage at the song’s end for a cosy chat about how well they’re doing and so high on success are they that they take the piss out of dethroned No 1 Mr Blobby by doing some Blobby impressions (led by Robbie Williams naturally). The pink and yellow dotted buffoon would have his revenge a week later when, rather improbably, he returned to the top of the charts to bag the Christmas No 1. I remember thinking that this was nuts and how had it happened? I was no Take That fan obviously but at least “Babe” was a proper song. Somebody who was a fan was my younger sister and years later she went to see a Robbie Williams tribute act where, in an unlikely turn of events, the worlds of Mr Blobby and Take That collided once more. The impersonator was a rather rotund figure and so his stage name was Blobby Williams and he was part of Take Fat. Marvellous.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Chaka Demus and Pliers	Twist And Shout	Nope
2	Meatloaf	Bat Out Of Hell	No
3	East 17	It’s Alright	Yes, yes I did
4	Diana Ross	Your Love	Never happening
5	EYC	Feelin’ Alright	As if
6	K7	Come Baby Come	I did not
7	Michael Jackson	Gone Too Soon	Nah
8	Cliff Richard	Healing Love	Of course not
9	Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle	A Whole New World	Noi chance
10	Ice T	That’s How I’m Livin	Not my bag
11	New Order	Spooky	Negative
12	Frankie Goes To Hollywood	The Power Of Love	Not in 1984 nor 1993
13	Haddaway	I Miss You	Awful – no
14	Take That	Babe	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/m001fy5t/top-of-the-pops-16121993

TOTP 09 DEC 1993

Posted on December 7, 2022 by 80stastic

In the last post I made a claim that the No 1 was a bit of an anticlimax on the grounds that it followed the biggest boy band around who performed in the studio against a backdrop of 3D images (ooh!). By comparison, the No 1 was in its seventh week at the top and we were surely all getting a bit fed up of its video. It doesn’t seem right though does it? TOTP was always a chart based show highlighting which songs were the most popular in a chronological way via the chart countdown. Despite the use of such a linear tool, the implication is that the excitement heightens as we get to the nation’s favourite song. But what if said record doesn’t deserve such a reception? I realise this leaves me open to accusations of musical snobbery but if the No 1 is so heinous, what’s the plan? The question is especially relevant to this particular TOTP as, like a Tory minister doubling down on a failed economic policy, the ending of this show has two terrible songs.

Having said all of the above, the start of the show is pretty ropey as well. Bad Boys Inc were one of the many awful boy bands that appeared in the wake of Take That during the 90s. The whole thing reeked of cynicism with no more of a bigger example than this slushy ballad aimed at the Christmas market. After, two uptempo pop singles had made them bona fide chart stars (albeit in quite a minor way), they took that well worn path of releasing a slowie as their third single to, you know, showcase their diversity. The fact that it was shoved out into the marketplace as Christmas approached was surely just coincidence no? “Walking On Air” (note the similarity of title to established festive tune “Walking In The Air” from The Snowman) was ghastly whilst the performance here (I can’t find it in YouTube as nobody seems interested in recording it for posterity) is just as dire. The lead singer out front forever putting his hand to his heart to show his sincerity backed by three twirling, sliding goons all performing on a bed of dry ice. What a shower!

Disregarding the Bee Gees, I haven’t heard such high pitched vocals since Modern Romance did their ballad “Walking In The Rain” a decade earlier. What is it with ballads and the word ‘walking’? “Walking In Air”, “Walking In The Rain”, “Walking In Memphis” and of course who could forget George Michael’s ‘guilty feet’ in “Careless Whisper”. The record buying public showed their lack of affection for Bad Boys Inc with their own feet by walking past their local record shop and therefore not buying their single. It peaked at No 24.

Now here’s a very old track (even in 1993) which was suddenly and maybe surprisingly a very big hit. Sudden because it’s gone straight into the chart at No 5 and surprising because when it was first released in 1981 it did nothing at all sales wise. There is a reason for its explosion of popularity though and as usual it’s to do with record company promotional activities. “Controversy” was the title track from Prince’s fourth studio album and by 1993 he’d added another ten to that number so why was it plucked for single release at this point in his career? To advertise a Best Of album of course. “The Hits 1”, “The Hits 2” and “The Hits / The B sides” was a triple headed beast of a release documenting The Purple One’s best/most well known/biggest (delete as applicable) songs so far. Previous single “Peach” was released in the October to promote the set but that was a brand new composition I think. To give the Best Ofs an extra push for Christmas, another single was required and “Controversy” was selected for the job. Did I know this track? Don’t think I did. I only cottoned onto Prince from about 1983 when conversely “1999” was in the charts the first time around. Did I like it? Not that much. Was I surprised that it was such a big hit? Yes I was. As with “Peach” though, the two CD singles contained hits that weren’t included on the Hits albums plus there was a William Orbit remix of “The Future” so maybe that was it?

We’re back to this trend of the TOTP hosts telling us that an artist should have been on the show but can’t be because they’re ill/indisposed etc. I asked the other week why they bothered with this practice as they could have just shown the video without saying anything and we wouldn’t have known any better. This week, they’ve doubled down like…ah I’ve been here before haven’t I? They have made a complete spectacle of this issue though with Gabrielle. According to presenter Mark Franklin she can’t perform in the studio tonight and the reason is…Well, let’s ask Gabrielle herself because she’s in the actual studio! What?! Mark asks her if she’s OK and Gabrielle days “Not at the moment because I’ve got flu”. Got flu?! Got flu?! Why aren’t you in bed Gabrielle?! This is madness! Look, when I’ve had flu I’ve had to crawl to the bathroom if I needed the loo on my hands and knees. The idea that I could have got myself into a TV studio and been interviewed in front of a TV audience of millions is just unconscionable. I don’t wish to doubt her but really?!

Anyway, enough of the health issues, what about the music? Well, I’m guessing that Gabrielle’s record label were ever so slightly uncomfortable at this point. After the euphoria of a No 1 single with her debut single “Dreams”, might they have been expecting a bigger follow up hit than the No 9 that the unfortunately entitled “Going Nowhere” supplied? If so, then a lot must have been riding on “I Wish”. Sadly, it wasn’t really up to the task being a fairly average piece of soul/pop and it peaked at No 26. Maybe it just got lost in the Christmas rush. Gabrielle would recover to bag a further eight Top 10 hits including No 1 “Rise” in 2000. Seems like Gabrielle’s wish came true.

The Bee Gees are up to No 6 in an unexpected tilt at the Christmas No 1 spot with “For Whom The Bell Tolls”. To mark the event we get a live by satellite performance from New York. As with the vast majority of these satellite specials, it’s a total let down. Maybe I’m viewing them through 2022 eyes and in 1993 it may have been a major event but I can’t help but think it’s totally lame. A completely uneventful run through of the song performed underneath Brooklyn Bridge is interlaced with some totally non related shots of ice skating at the Rockefeller Center. And that’s it. Yes, it’s a cinematic backdrop I guess with the Statue of Liberty visible in the background and a helicopter comes into view at one point but I was more fascinated by who the fourth Bee Gee was up there with Barry, Maurice and Robin.

There’s an easy line to be written here about the next artist and the title of her latest single but I’m not that obvious. All I’ll say is that 1993 is surely a year that Dina Carroll would never forget. Five hit singles and an album that was the highest selling debut by a British female artist in UK chart history at the time? It was the stuff of dreams. The last of those five hits was “The Perfect Year” which was from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Sunset Boulevard. It seemed a bit of an anomaly to me at the time. Firstly, it wasn’t on the aforementioned album (“So Close”) which confused and upset a few punters in the Our Price store I was working in and wouldn’t appear on an album until Dina’s sophomore effort “Only Human” appeared a whole three years later.

Secondly, the schedule for its release had clearly been set to cash in on the Christmas holidays market with the lyrics even referencing New Year’s Eve but it was hampered by the extended success of previous single “Don’t Be A Stranger”. So well received had it been that it was still in the Top 10 and outsold “The Perfect Year” on the latter’s first week of release. Clearly, record label A&M would not have wanted her previous hit to be splitting sales of her new one but because of the latter’s Christmas theme, they couldn’t keep it back any later. Dina having two simultaneous hits added to the customer confusion in store:

Customer: Do you have the Dina Carroll single?

Me: Which one? There’s two

Customer: The one that’s in the charts

Me: They both are

Customer: The one that’s a big ballad

Me: They both are

Customer: Well, I’ll get her album then I’m covered

Me: Her album doesn’t have both singles on it

Customer: Are you having a laugh?

Me: Not really, no

Dina’s performance here is very professional but then she’d had plenty of practice at being on TOTP that year. It felt like she was on the show every other week. Her black and white outfit is very effective against the Wintery backdrop though those impractical, oversized sleeves must have been a nightmare at the dinner table. Also, why did they feel the need to insert some clips (presumably) from the video while Dina was singing? They looked so incongruous. Children running across a field and then staring at the camera motionless – why? Then there’s the old fella. The expression he had on his face reminded me of something and it’s this. My sadly departed mother-in-law used to work as a receptionist in a doctor’s surgery and would sometimes bring home freebies from the pharmaceutical companies like mugs. She had one that was just an old man grinning on it. The first time I saw it I couldn’t understand why anyone would have that image on a mug and then I turned it around and saw the drug it was advertising – it was a brand of laxative. Aaah…

“The Perfect Year” had to settle for a chart peak of No 5, two places lower than “Don’t Be A Stranger”.

Four Breakers now starting with UB40 whose single “Bring Me Your Cup” I don’t recall at all. It was the third track lifted from their “Promises And Lies” album and listening to it now, it’s actually a lot better than I was expecting. It starts out very understated but forms an unexpected ear worm very quickly with its lilting rhythm allied to Ali Campbell’s soothing vocals. Should probably have been a bigger hit than No 24 but then the album had been out for over four months by then so maybe it was to be expected. Not a bad effort though.

In amongst the endless diet of Eurodance bollocks that 1993 served up there were the occasional morsels of unexpected taste. Songs that would appear for no apparent reason and then the artist would pretty much disappear again. Off the top of my head I’m thinking Spin Doctors, The Frank and Walters and this lot – Blind Melon. These US psychedelic rockers reminded me of fellow countrymen Jellyfish who similarly are known in this country for one hit and not much else despite there being so much more to them. Blind Melon’s contribution to the story of 1993 was “No Rain”, a hippy, trippy, winsome tune with some Beatles influences thrown in for good measure. It sounded like an antidote to some of the god awfulness populating the charts and yet again a complete outlier.

Helping to promote the song was the video featuring the ‘bee girl’, a tap dancer in a bee costume and large glasses who gets laughed off stage and then spends the rest of the film trying to dance for anyone who will let her. She eventually finds an unlikely outlet for her routine – a field of similarly dressed people all dancing together. The girl playing the character would become a bit of a star, hobnobbing with the likes of Madonna at the MTV awards before having a career as an actress appearing in two episodes of US medical drama ER. Blind Melon themselves would have two further very minor UK chart hits before disbanding in 1999. They have reformed a couple of times since despite the drugs overdose death of vocalist Shannon Hoon.

Name a Pet Shop Boys single released in 1993? “Go West” right? Has to be. No? “Can You Forgive Her” then? Still not the one you’re thinking of? “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing” – well, no I don’t habitually spend hours trying to remember the titles of Pet Shop Boys singles but…oh, of course! That was the third track released from their “Very” album and in many ways is the quintessential PSB song. Eccentric title? Check! Swirly synth back beat? Check! Gloriously catchy, camp melody? Check! Typically deadpan vocals from Neil Tennant? Check! This was what they did best. Sadly, I think it got caught up in the Christmas rush and didn’t even make the Top 10, peaking at No 13.

The kaleidoscopic video features Chris and Neil in daft wigs that make the former look like Mike Flowers of Mike Flowers Pops (two years before anybody knew who he was) and the latter like Louis Balfour, host of The Fast Show’s Jazz Club. Nice!

The final Breaker comes from “the most successful rap group of 1993” according to host Mark Franklin. Were Cypress Hill that big?

*checks their bio*

Seems they were. The band have sold 20 million albums worldwide and in 1993 their second album “Black Sunday” went straight into the US charts at No 1 selling 261,000 copies in its first week. Their eponymous debut album was also still on the charts at the same time and they became the first hip hop artist to have two albums in the Top 10 simultaneously.

From “Black Sunday” came this third single “I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That”. I’d liked the House Of Pain sounding “Insane In The Brain” (who couldn’t?) but by this one I’d probably lost interest. Maybe I had a beef with them as the album was one of those that always needed a temporary inlay card to display it otherwise the real CD cover would get nicked especially as the booklet contained 19 facts about the history of hemp and the positive attributes of cannabis. The middle class, white kids in Altrincham where I was working loved all of that stuff and especially those T-shirts and posters with the image of an alien on them with a massive reefer blazing up bearing the legend ‘Take me to your dealer’. Laughed their arses off at that every time.

“I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That” peaked at No 15.

We have arrived at the first of those two terrible songs that end the show. By 1993, Cliff Richard was absolutely synonymous with Christmas. Not only had he claimed the festive No 1 twice since 1988 (thrice if you count his contribution to Band Aid II) but he seemed to have a tilt at it every year. “We Should Be Together” was his offering in 1991 peaking at No 10 and “I Still Believe In You” was strategically released in late November the following year to try and capture those Christmas sales making it to No 7. Come 1993 and Cliff was chancing his arm once more with “Healing Love”. Not a specifically Christmas themed song for once, it was actually the last of five singles released from his “The Album”…erm…album. It was co-written by Nik Kershaw who knows his way around a decent pop tune but this definitely wasn’t one of them. It’s not just that it’s a sluggish, turgid, completely unexceptional tune but the lyrics are dreadful. Really hackneyed stuff about losing the battle but winning the war and how about this for a line a seven year old could have written…

“Now I can see that you’re feeling sad…”

Come on! For this performance, Cliff has turned up in a jacket and tie and looks like he’s got his schedule wrong and was expecting to be on Wogan and not TOTP. As ever, he’s brought with him that guy from the aforementioned Modern Romance as one of his backing singers who’s been with him since “Mistletoe And Wine”.

“Healing Love” never hit a sniff at topping the charts peaking at No 19 but Cliff never really gave up on his quest for another Christmas No 1. The following year, he teamed up with his old pal Phil Everly for a double A-side of “All I Have To Do Is Dream” and a remix of his old hit “Miss You Nights” but it topped out at No 14. He couldn’t have come any closer in 1999 with the divisive “The Millennium Prayer” which actually went to No 1 and was still top of the pile with just one week to go before being toppled by Westlife. Undeterred, he went again in 2003 (“Santa’s List” – No 5) and 2006 (“21st Century Christmas” – No 2) and this year he has released a Christmas album. Cliff was 82 in October. You have to admire his longevity if not his music.

Just…just…f*****g WHY?! What were people thinking?! Oh, yeah. Of course. There was no thinking happening at all. A complete lack of brain activity. How else can you explain this total failure of any sense of taste on such a widespread scale? This monumental aberration. Nothing about “Mr Blobby” by Mr Blobby deserved anything but our complete contempt. So why was it f*****g No 1? Were 5 year olds (or their parents) buying it? When The Teletubbies became a phenomenon a few years later with the pre school population and released a record, I could just about understand parents doing just that but Mr Blobby wasn’t quite the same type of character. His beginnings weren’t on children’s TV but an early evening light entertainment show presumably not being watched by toddlers so who was his single appealing to? It certainly wasn’t funny and neither was its accompanying video which featured a number of celebrity cameos. Obviously, Edmonds was there being responsible for the whole debacle but there’s also a very young looking Jeremy Clarkson as Mr Blobby’s limo driver, Carole Vorderman, Wayne Sleep and bizarrely ex-footballer and pundit Garth Crooks. Mr Blobby is seen in various scenes where he inevitably falls over destroying everything in his path which includes parodies of four well known recent pop promos – “Addicted To Love” by Robert Palmer, “Rhythm Is A Dancer” by Snap!, “I Can’t Dance” by Genesis and “Stay” by Shakespear’s Sister. The last one particularly grinds my gears for the pure reason that it uses actual footage of the original in the parody – why? We all knew which video it was lampooning when the camera switched to the lookalike Marcella Detroit so why try and install some credibility by using images of the real one? I don’t know why this especially offends me but it does. Anyway, this madness will all be over soon as Take That will be top of the charts next week and surely also the Christmas No 1 won’t it? Won’t it?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Bad Boys Inc	Walking On Air	Of course not
2	Prince	Controversy	No
3	Gabrielle	I Wish	Nope
4	Bee Gees	For Whom The Bell Tolls	I did not
5	Dina Carroll	The Perfect Year	Nah
6	UB40	Bring Me Your Cup	Negative
7	Blind Melon	No Rain	No but maybe should have
8	Pet Shop Boys	I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing	No but I assume it’s on their Pop Art Best Of which I have
9	Cypress Hill	I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That	It’s another no
10	Cliff Richard	Healing Love	Never happening
11	Mr Blobby	Mr Blobby	What do you think?

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/m001frnn/top-of-the-pops-09121993

TOTP 10 JUN 1993

Posted on September 3, 2022 by 80stastic

June 1993 saw the demise of two big names in the world of comedy – one a performer and one a TV show. The former was comedian Les Dawson who died on the same day this TOTP aired aged just 62. The latter was US sitcom Cheers which ended this year after 275 episodes over 11 seasons. Channel 4 broadcast the final three shows over the weekend following this TOTP. Both had a musical element to them. Dawson included his wonky piano playing in his act whilst Cheers had one of the greatest theme tunes of all time…

Let’s see if any of the tunes on this TOTP are anywhere near as good as Gary Portnoy’s famous song…

Certainly not this one! As I said in the last post when confronted by Eurodance merchant Haddaway opening the show, I’d totally had enough of that particular genre of music by this point. This time it’s the turn of Snap! to be the first act on with their new single “Do You See The Light (Looking For)”. The TOTP producers often seemed to top the show’s running order with a dance act. In recent weeks we’ve had Stereo MCs, Felix and 2 Unlimited in addition to Haddaway. I guess it made sense to try and begin proceedings with a bang. The year zero revamp hadn’t quite let go of the party atmosphere era of Michael Hurll. Having said that, the performance here of Snap! featuring Niki Harris seems to suggest a soirée rather than a massive rave-up. I have to say that as objectionable as his views were, the group seemed to lose something when rapper Turbo B left. The performance here seems very lacklustre. Maybe if the set hadn’t been so sparse it might have sparked things into life a bit. And why do the backing singers resemble water nymphs?

This track was taken from “The Madman’s Return” album and the album version of it is quite different with vocals by Thea Austin instead of Niki Harris, a rap by the aforementioned Turbo B and even a (slightly) different title in “See The Light”. The single version peaked at No 10 and No 14 in 2002 when it was remixed and rereleased.

Spin Doctors are still going up the charts? Checking its stats, “Two Princes” remained on the chart for 18 weeks so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s a pretty nifty tune all said and done and there was a brief moment in time when the band seemed to be the next big thing. Parent album “Pocketful Of Kryptonite” went to No 2 and achieved platinum sales in Europe and yet somehow it all seemed to stall and fall away on both sides of the Atlantic.

If I’m honest, the follow up singles just weren’t as good. “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” and “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues” just didn’t capture the imagination in the same way as “Two Princes” although in the case of the latter, in a three way race of Superman themed singles, they definitely finish above Laurie Anderson and Black Lace.

“Two Princes” peaked at No 3 in the UK.

A proper pop moment next as TOTP brings us the return of Pet Shop Boys. Neil and Chris had been away for only 18 months or so but their last release had been their first official Best Of album “Discography” which on reflection felt like a line in the sand drawing to a close the first part of their career. What would the first material of their next phase be like? Well, not too dissimilar to their previous work to be fair. “Can You Forgive Her” didn’t feel like a massive departure from what had gone before but then Neil Tennant’s voice is so distinctive that it overrides sometimes any potential musical deviation on their behalf. Not always of course. For example, something like “Jealousy” or “Se A Vida É” sound nothing like “West End Girls” but in the case of “Can You Forgive Her”, it didn’t seem, to me anyway, like a radical new sound. Not that it wasn’t any good either though. It had a strident feel to it, enabled by a punchy chorus that demanded to be heard. And heard it was as it gave the duo their first Top 10 hit in two years after their previous three singles all failed to make that achievement.

Somehow though it always feels overshadowed by the second single to be lifted from parent album “Very” which was the enormous hit that was the cover of Village People’s “Go West”. Initial copies of the album came in an orange CD jewel case featuring raised bumps which resembled Lego. In those days, the Our Price chain I worked for didn’t use security tagging and so the CDs we sold weren’t ‘live’ on the shelves as it were. The actual CDs were filed away behind the counter so the cases were empty. However, the manager of the store I was working in when the album came out thought the Lego case so nickable that we kept those behind the counter as well and had a dummy case on display that used the inner back sleeve to say what it was. Genius! Except it was a pain in the arse to put together when selling it to a customer and we also had a few people ask if our dummy sleeve was somehow a different version of the album. It would be another five years before I worked in an Our Price that displayed CDs live.

Anyway, back to the show and this performance really does give us the pop moment I referred to earlier. There’s so much to unpack here. The over exaggerated pointy dunce hats, Neil Tennant in a high chair, the cricket bat wielding space cadet backing dancers, a huge egg on stage for no reason but most of all there was Chris Lowe. The perennially motionless man moved more in that one performance than in all his previous ones added together. What had got into him? There were even what passed for dance moves! Maybe I was wrong. Perhaps this really was a different Pet Shop Boys to what had gone before.

1993 really was the year ragga/dancehall took over the charts. After Shaggy, Shabba and Snow came the ludicrously named Chaka Demus And Pliers. Opening themselves up to all sorts of tool related jibes, this pair of toasters joined forces in 1991 and released “Murder She Wrote” the following year in America to great acclaim. The follow up was “Tease Me” and the hordes lapped it up sending it to No 3 in the UK Top 40. The lyrics were fairly clear about the song’s subject matter with references to ‘reaching climax’ and its title of course. There’s also that shout out line which seemed to encapsulate the whole movement – “Number One In The World”. I’m sure that seemed to feature on every song of this type after that.

Chaka Demus and Pliers have bought all their mates with them to the TOTP studio for a jolly up whilst the camera man seemed very intent on giving us multiple views of the gyrating female backing dancers. Ahem. We’ll also be seeing lots more of CD and P before 1993 is out.

And the fascination with all things erotic thriller continues. I’m guessing Indecent Proposal must have been performing well at the box office to generate this much of a profile. It’s another outing for “Ordinary Love” by Sade which was featured heavily in the film but was not actually on the soundtrack. After last week’s glimpse of the mermaid promo video, we get a live by satellite performance from New York this time. Sade Adu looks stunning as ever but it’s the two guitarists in the background who have caught my eye. They spend the first half of the performance not even bothering to mime playing their instruments but doing the nerd shuffle together whilst clicking their fingers in unison. It doesn’t really seem appropriate for an artist as sophisticated as Sade. Bet they got a bollocking when the cameras were turned off.

Therapy? were enjoying a huge breakthrough year in 1993. After the “Shortsharpshock EP” featuring lead track “Screamager” made the Irish rockers bona fide Top 10 artists in March, the follow up was also an EP. “Face The Strange” featured four tracks of which “Turn” was chosen to promote it. Clearly the EP’s title is a David Bowie reference being a lyric from his song “Changes”. I learned recently that I know someone who met Bowie and not just met but took him out for a drink around about 1972 just as he was launching his Ziggy Stardust era. I know! There’s a few Bowie super fans that I know who would be blown away by my friend’s recollections. What’s that? The Therapy? song? Oh, I didn’t like it much. Sorry.

The Breakers are their usual eclectic/bonkers mix of artists starting with the evergreen Cliff Richard. Despite being 52 at the time and having had his first hit 25 years ago, Cliff was showing no signs of slowing down in 1993. In fact, the decade was going pretty well for him so far. He’d already clocked up a No 1 in “Saviour’s Day” and four other Top 10 hits. Also having a fine old time of it around now was Maxi Priest who’d had a hit twice with Shabba Ranks (albeit with the same song in both cases) and who’d supplied the ‘Shabba!’ sample for the massive selling “Mr Loverman” single. To add to his collection of chart connections came “Human Work Of Art”. You see, Maxi had released this as a single from his “Bonafide” album three years prior but it had failed to chart.

It was recycled for Cliff’s 1993 album called…erm…”The Album” and this time made No 24. It sounds every inch a Cliff record and you’d be hard pressed to guess at its reggae-fied earlier incarnation. It’s also utterly awful under his guardianship. Yes, it’s a polished production but then you can polish a turd of course.

I can’t find the official video online so here’s it being performed on Surprise Surprise.

From the despair of another banal Cliff record to…where? Well, fortunately it’s Manic Street Preachers with their new single “From Despair To Where” (ahem). OK, firstly weren’t they have meant to have split up by now? Wasn’t that their mission statement to make one blow your socks off, anarchistic album then dissolve the band? Clearly that was just bravado then. What they actually did was to record second album “Gold Against The Soul” which I liked enough to buy but which the fan base has always dissed as the worst album in their back catalogue. I’m sure I heard an interview with James Dean Bradfield once where he was asked to rank the band’s albums in order of merit and even he put it bottom of the list.

Maybe debut “Generation Terrorists” had raised the bar and expectations too high but the music press gave it mixed reviews at best. Maybe fan favourite and third album “The Holy Bible” would have been a more acceptable choice with its themes of human suffering and bleakness. Was “Gold Against The Soul” seen as too radio friendly, too (gulp) corporate rock? It sounded alright to my ears with the lead single ticking all my aural boxes. It swoops and soars but bites as well with lines like ‘there’s nothing nice in my head’. It had all of that and yet wasn’t even the best track on the album for me. I liked this version of the band a lot but then I’m not a paid up member of the Manics army who could shoot my opinion down in flames I’m sure.

What I’m not sure about is the video which is basically some moody shots of the band (Richie looks especially cool) intertwined with some sepia tinted clips which seem to suggest a sci-fi /horror film but it’s all a bit blurry to make a clear judgement although that look like an alien autopsy in the thumbnail below.

The Manics of course did do a TV show theme tune when they covered “Suicide Is Painless” – the theme tune from M*A*S*H. Better than the theme to Cheers? It’s a tough call but yes possibly.

The Sister Sledge revival bandwagon continues apace with a rerelease of their 1984 hit “Thinking Of You”. Remixed as the (RAMP Radio Mix), it was the last of three singles taken from the Greatest Hits compilation “The Very Best Of Sister Sledge 1973-93” following “We Are Family” and “Lost In Music”. It would peak at No 17 just six places lower than its 1984 counterpart. However the song dated back to 1979 when it was a track on the “We Are Family” album and issued as the B-side to the initial release of “Lost In Music”.

Reading that paragraph back it seems like the group made a 40+ year career based around just three songs that have been recycled over and over again. Lead singer Kathy Sledge even did her own cover version of “Thinking Of You” with house duo Aristofreeks in 2015. OK look, I know there’s also “He’s The Greatest Dancer” and “Frankie” in their repertoire but the former is very similar to the “Family/Lost/Thinking” trilogy and the latter is one of the worst recordings of all time (and I’ve just had to listen to Cliff Richard’s “Human Work Of Art”). I doubt even the Sledge sisters want to be remembered for that one.

Sister Sledge have only released one more single since this. And guess what? It was a rerelease of “We Are Family” in 2004 which made No 93 on our charts.

Who? The Time Frequency? Sounds like a phrase Dr Who might say. Have we seen this lot before? Can’t remember now. So many of these dance acts about. Anyway, “The Ultimate High” was a track off their “Power Zone EP” and sounds very much like a knock off version of “Insanity” by Oceanic to me but then, as I’ve said many times before, I’m no dance music aficionado.

The Time Frequency were from Scotland so I wonder if they knew fellow Scottish dance acts Primal Scream and The Shamen or is that a bit like an American, who on meeting someone from London, asks them if they know their cousin who lives in Notting Hill?

Lisa Stansfield? Again? It can’t be! She seems to be on every week at the moment. Given the high level of exposure it got, I’m surprised that “In All The Right Places” didn’t get higher than its No 8 peak. She’s back in the studio this time and has gone full on Louise Brooks with her haircut. No messing about like the other week with that half hearted Brett Anderson-esque wedge style. The way the stage has been set up with her first name and first name only in lights gives it a feel of a residency at Las Vegas. In fact, I could just imagine Liza Minnelli up there belting this one out.

Lisa will be back in October with her “So Natural” album and single.

UB40 have made it to the top spot deposing Ace Of Base in the process. Were they on tour at this time as it’s the video for “(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You” yet again this week? I’m guessing that the director got the band to perform emerging into a tight corridor to link in with the themes of claustrophobia and paranoia that the film it was taken from (Sliver) clearly was based around. Ironically, a few years down the line, the band fractured into two different identities due to internal arguments and there’s no way that Ali and Robin Campbell would ever be in such close proximity to each other like that again.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Snap!	Do You See The Light (Looking For)	Never happening
2	Spin Doctors	Two Princes	Liked it, didn’t buy it
3	Pet Shop Boys	Can You Forgive Her	No but I have it on their Pop Art Best Of
4	Chaka Demus And Pliers	Tease Me	As if
5	Sade	No Ordinary Love	Nope
6	Therapy?	Face The Strange EP	Nah
7	Cliff Richard	Human Work Of Art	Of course not
8	Manic Street Preachers	From Despair To Where	No but I bought the album
9	Sister Sledge	Thinking Of You	No
10	The Time Frequency	Power Zone EP	Not likely
11	Lisa Stansfield	In All The Right Places	Negative
12	UB40	(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You	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/m001bdx3/top-of-the-pops-10061993

TOTP 25 MAR 1993

Posted on July 16, 2022 by 80stastic

I’ve spent a lot of time recently banging on about the unholy trinity of the three S’s of Shaggy, Shabba Ranks and Snow dominating the charts. Well, guess what? I’m still doing it in this post as two of them are on the show again this week. It’s come to my attention though that they weren’t the only members of the ‘S’ brigade. This week’s show is jam packed with them and no I didn’t like a single one!

We start with an ‘S’ and it’s ‘S’ for Sybil, she of the hit “When I’m Good And Ready”. Sybil was never as popular again as she was at this moment in terms of sales. Her run of two consecutive big hits comprising this single and previous No 3 smash “The Love I Lost” with West End was brought to an abrupt halt when the next single “Beyond Your Wildest Dreams” peaked outside of the Top 40 at that most unfortunate of places No 41. It wasn’t for the want of trying though. She even did two different versions of the song- a pop ballad version for the UK market…

And a hip-hop remix with a rap in the middle for the US territories…

It made no difference as neither version was a hit. Off the top of my head I can only think of Climie Fisher also doing a similar thing where there was a straight ballad version of their single “Rise To The Occasion” and a hip-hop remix complete with the ubiquitous and annoying ‘aaah yeaaah’ sample.

The track had also previously been recorded by Lonnie Gordon and released as a follow up to her “Happenin’ All Over Again” hit but had also missed the chart peaking at No 48. All of this despite the claim by writers Stock, Aitken and Waterman that it is one of the best songs they ever penned. And if you thought the chart performance of “Beyond Your Wildest Dreams” was unlucky, Sybil followed up taking it to No 41 in the charts by releasing another single from her “Good ‘N’ Ready” album called “Stronger Together” and that peaked at…yep…No 41.

No S’s in sight next as we once again witness the power of an advert to make us buy a song that had already been a hit once all over again. This time the product being soundtracked by an old hit was the Volkswagen Golf and the song that benefited from it “Young At Heart” by The Bluebells. Normally I don’t go back and see what I’ve already written about a chart hit that I’ve reviewed in a previous blog post for fear of just regurgitating the same words but I did in this case. I think it’s because I view their chart histories separated by nine years as almost completely different entities, relating to two disparate records.

Originally a hit in the Summer of 1984 when I had not long turned 16, “Young At Heart” was never off the airwaves. Radio 1 seemed to play it four or five times a day at least which was not good for me as I couldn’t stand it. In my post on the track in my 80s TOTP blog, I made a point of saying I liked the band but hated this song and I stand by that. I still have a soft spot for The Bluebells but their most well known song is also their worst to my ears. Back in 1984, they followed up “Young At Heart” with the wonderful “Cath” but it only just scraped into the charts at No 38. A final single called “All I Am (Is Loving You)” was released which missed the charts completely and the band fizzled out.

The song’s second coming seemed nothing to do with the band and indeed it wasn’t. They weren’t actually even together in 1993 and hadn’t been for some years. I think I’m right in saying that the story behind its 1993 reactivation was that the person working for the ad agency that was looking after the Volkswagen account had come up with a song for the advert but that there were some issues with copyright and it couldn’t be used and so she had to come up with another song fast. Thinking back to her childhood, she remembered that jolly song that she used to hear on the radio. The rights owners were sought out and contacted and the rest is history.

For many record buyers though, they may not have known anything of the record’s past or the career of the band who made it. They just knew it as the song from that car advert with the twist at the end when instead of getting married, it turns out that the ‘bride’ is actually celebrating getting divorced. The single’s cover was just a still of said actress from the advert reinforcing this new identity for the song as something separate and somehow itself divorced as it were from the band. It even has the Volkswagen logo in the corner. It was corporate and false and in some way, it devalued the original even though I hadn’t liked it.

On hearing of the success of the rerelease (it outstripped the original’s chart peak easily in the first week) the members of The Bluebells reconvened and agreed to reform to promote the single with appearances like this one on TOTP. They look like they’re treating it as a laugh which is probably the correct attitude to have taken. They weren’t under any record company pressure to maximise sales presumably. Whatever it did commercially was a bonus. Subsequent performances would be taken even less seriously as the band struggled to come to terms with this unexpected turn of events. “Young At Heart” would go to No 1 for four weeks and be the twelfth best selling single of the year in the UK in 1993.

We’re back with the S’s now and it’s the most hateful of the lot – Shabba Ranks with “Mr Loverman”. I could never understand the appeal of this record. I mean, I didn’t like Shaggy nor Snow’s songs either but I could just about appreciate why they were successful. “Mr Loverman” though? Nah, that was just nasty. Aside from Ranks’s own despicable views which were enough to put any sane thinking person off anyway, I just couldn’t take the song seriously with all those ridiculous ‘Shabba!’ shout outs. Now I learn it’s not even Ranks name checking himself but Maxi Priest sampled from their “Housecall” single.

The whole stupid business was parodied in a sketch by the team behind the US comedy TV series In Living Color to whom I shall leave the last word…

All female US R&B groups seemed to be everywhere in the 90s. At the start of the decade we had En Vogue and then as the years passed we saw the likes of SWV, TLC and Brownstone right up to the titans of the genre Destiny’s Child. And those were only the ones that crossed over to the UK. Back in America there were groups who never managed to translate acclaim at home into huge overseas success. I’m thinking of Xscape, 702 and Total. Here’s one for you that did manage to straddle the pond as it were but who rarely get talked about anymore.

Jade were Joi Marshall, Tonya Kelly and Di Reed from Chicago who are best remembered for their hit “Don’t Walk Away” though they did have a few others. In 1993 they were always going to be compared to En Vogue who were having transatlantic hits at the time and I guess their sound wasn’t too dissimilar. “Don’t Walk Away” was a radio friendly piece of sassy R&B that enabled the trio to pull out some slinky dance moves when performing it. It rose to a lofty No 7 position in the UK charts and an even higher peak of No 4 in the US selling 2.5 million copies worldwide. Their album “Jade To The Max” racked up substantial numbers and a lengthy tour had them looking fair set for superstardom. They appeared in both film (The Inkwell) and TV (Beverly Hills 90210) and contributed tracks to a couple of soundtracks as well. A second album followed in 1994 and then…nothing. Everything just seemed to stop. Were they dropped from their label? Did they just decide themselves to jack it all in?

I think they all stayed in music one way or another and two of them reunited in 2021 with the improbably named Myracle Holloway (a finalist on The Voice). The curious tale of Jade – a gemstone amongst the Brownstones.

We’re back amongst the S’s now and it’s another stone related artist – Robin Stone better known as Robin S. This New York singer songwriter’s legacy would be formed upon and based around this one track, the house anthem “Show Me Love”. We sold loads and loads of this in the Our Price store in Rochdale where I was working. And then we went home, had a sleep, came back to work and sold some more of it the next day. I’m surprised that it wasn’t a bigger hit than its final chart placing of No 6 though it did return to the Top 40 a further two times as remixes. In fact, it seems to have been released eight times in total. See what I mean about Robin’s legacy being totally built around this one track? I’m sure there are some Robin S super fans out there who would dispute that claim but it’s true. And there’s many would say that being known for “Show Me Love” would be recognition enough. It regularly appears in lists of the best dance tunes of all time and its influence is still felt today in the music of the likes of Clean Bandit and is sampled in Beyoncé’s latest single “Break My Soul”.

Interesting to note the difference here between Sybil’s performance at the top of the show with her three backing singers and Robin’s with nothing but some dry ice for company while she belts her tune out. I recall the cover of the single was just a very basic generic design in green with a cream header with the label’s name (Champion) repeated in lines all over it. Very poor. Maybe they didn’t expect it to be a big hit outside of the clubs and so didn’t bother designing a cover to be shipped in huge quantities to retailers?

Oh Hell! Cliff’s back again. Yes, despite the charts being jam packed with dance tunes of every hue and genre, a little corner of them was still reserved for Cliff Richard and whatever piece of garbage song he was peddling in 1993. “Peace In Our Time” was the offending article this time and it was at its peak of No 8. This is just a horrible tune with its backing that sounds like a speeded up version of “The Living Years” by Mike And The Mechanics and its insipid lyrics but it’s Cliff’s performance which really grabs the attention.

As with his last time on the show the other week, I can’t find a clip of it on YouTube. Unlike then, Cliff has ditched all his entourage of backing singers and has done a Robin S and gone solo albeit that he still has the remnants of the Sting set from the other month with him for company. It’s Cliff’s movements that are so spellbinding though – spellbindingly awful that is. They’re just so weird and unnatural. Plus he’s turned up in the bloke from Runrig’s leather jacket and trainers combo. It looks…completely unconvincing and actually very safe. In the 50s he would have been seen as a danger to the moral well being of the nation’s youth in that get up but in 1993, he just looked lame. The 90s weren’t kind to Cliff. Yes, he had two Xmas No 1s at the start and end of the decade but they were both gut wrenchingly awful and the intervening years were populated by instantly forgettable singles like this one. Those great airplay hits of the late 70s and early 80s like “We Don’t Talk Anymore”, “Carrie” and “Wired For Sound” seemed like a life time ago even then.

And onto the Breakers and I’ve realised that we have arrived at a rather poignant moment as this blink and you miss it moment is the last we’ll see of Bananarama on TOTP for twelve years! Regulars on the BBC show since their first hits in 1982, this was, by my calculations (I make host Tony Dortie wrong with his figure of thirty-one) their twenty-third Top 40 hit, ten of them being Top 10 hits. None of those Top Tenners had been in the 90s though and their commercial appeal was definitely on the wane. The decision to leave the Stock, Aitken and Waterman stable to make records with hip producer Youth had not resulted in healthy sales of the “Pop Life” album and so a revamp was required for next album “Please Yourself”.

That revamp took the form of jettisoning ‘new girl’ Jacquie O’Sullivan (who had actually been in the group since 1988) and re branding themselves as a duo. To quote one of their previous album titles, wow! Would it work, could it work and indeed should it work? To give themselves some extra insurance on this bold move, Sara and Keren returned to their previous producers who were now a duo themselves, Stock and Waterman. It was the latter who came up with the theme that the album should promote a new hybrid sound of ‘ABBA -Banana’. It would turn out to be a good idea but not for Bananarama.

The album was poorly received and limped to a chart peak of No 46. It produced just two hits, a pair of No 24s, in “Movin’ On” and this one, a cover of the Andrea True Connection song “More More More”. I’m guessing this was released as previous single “Last Thing On My Mind” had missed the charts completely and as we all know, if you find yourself in need of a hit, what do you do? Altogether now… you release a cover version! It’s a pretty faithful take on the disco classic and probably made sense as a choice of single given the resurgence of disco songs in the charts at that time from the likes of Boney M and Sister Sledge. In fact, the Bananas would maybe have done better with a whole disco themed album than an ABBA one. Maybe the ABBA revival had been sooo 1992? Either way, it gave them a chart hit, the last they would have for twelve years by which time TOTP itself was on its last legs.

As Bananarama seemed to be slipping into pop oblivion, Pete Waterman looked for another vehicle for his ‘ABBA-Banana’ concept – thankfully though the era of Steps was still four years off. As for the Nanas, they would continue to perform live as a duo before pulling off the event that their fans had almost never dared to hope could happen- a reunion tour with Siobahn Fahey in 2017. The tour was a huge success and led to Keren and Sara being revitalised to write and record new material. “In Stereo” was well received on its release in 2019 and they have a new album called “Masquerade” due out literally in a few days time.

Another ‘S’ now as the band called Sunscreem are on the show with yet another hit. Sunscreem are becoming quite the curiosity for me. I was always aware that there was a band called Sunscreem because they were a chart act and I worked in a mainstream record shop and we stocked their music. I could even tell you that they were a Sony artist. What they sounded like though was a different matter. I haven’t recognised any of their tunes that have featured in these TOTP repeats so far and “Pressure US” is no different. Apparently this was a remix of the band’s debut single which had been a No 1 hit on the US Dance chart. Given its success across the pond, it was rereleased in the UK with the ‘US’ suffix added to make it clear it was a remix.

In the nicest possible way, Sunscreem were my ghost poo*. You know when you know you’ve had a poo but there is absolutely no evidence on the toilet paper or in the toilet bowl that anything actually took place. So it was for me with Sunscreem. I knew they existed but my memory banks have zero evidence about what they sounded like.

“Pressure US” would peak at No 19, a whole forty-one places higher than the original version from 1991.

*There is no nicest possible way is there?

Now I might have been pushing it earlier to suggest the existence of Robin S super fans but I know for a fact the next artist has a multitude of them so I need to tread carefully here. David Bowie spent much of the very early 90s dicking around with (no, think of the fanbase – definitely not dicking around, think of something else) ‘experimenting’ with his side project rock band Tin Machine the results of which had failed to convince many of their merits. However, 1993 saw the first proper Bowie album for six years with the last being the poorly received “Never Let Me Down”. Expectations were high for a return to form though with “Black Tie White Noise” and it duly went to No 1 though it got a mixed reception in the press.

Lead single “Jump They Say” though was pretty good I thought and it would provide Bowie, rather unbelievably, with his first Top 10 hit since “Absolute Beginners” in 1986. Inspired by the tragic story of his half brother Terry who committed suicide in 1985 by walking out in front of a train, it also had a powerful video that has been described by some critics as Bowie’s finest hour as an actor in a music promo. Bowie’s acting credentials though are a mixed bag. Brilliant in The Man Who Fell To Earth but hammy in Labyrinth and downright awful in Jazzin’ For Blue Jean (Shush! Remember the fan base!). “Jump They Say” was easily the biggest hit of the three singles released from the album but my favourite of his in 1993 was none of those but the theme song he wrote for the TV adaption of Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha Of Suburbia novel.

In a post a few weeks back, I admitted to my complete dislike of Lulu. Imagine my delight then when I read the running order for tonight’s show and saw that she’s on again. I remembered her single “Independence” that she performed then but I really thought we were shot of her until much later in the year when she would pop up on Take That’s “Relight My Fire” single. I was wrong as she literally sings “I’m Back For More” on her duet with Bobby Womack. I have zero memory of this song probably because it is so unmemorable. A complete drag. Don’t get me wrong, Bobby’s vocals are as great as you’d expect them to be but Lulu’s scratchy, annoying voice really grates.

Of much more interest are the dance moves of the studio audience members positioned behind the pair. I’m especially drawn to the guy extreme right of the screen who’s turned up in clobber as if he’s expecting a call up to be the sixth member of the aforementioned Take That. That ‘curtains’ haircut and waistcoat combination is oh so early 90s.

“I’m Back For More” peaked at No 27. The parent album “Independence” stalled at No 67. It was Lulu’s only studio album of the decade and yet bizarrely her record label saw fit to release a collection album in 1999 called “I’m Back For More: The Very Best Of Her Nineties Recordings”. Eh? Isn’t that just the “Independence” album then? Well (or rather ‘wellllllllll’) I checked and yes, it pretty much is. If she could sell that then maybe she was the woman who sold the world.

It’s a final week of two at the top for the final ‘S’ of the night – Shaggy and his “Oh Carolina” single. I’d forgotten that the track appeared on the soundtrack to the film Sliver, a erotic thriller starring Sharon Stone (wait, add another three S’s to the tally!). That soundtrack would also feature another No 1 song which would become the second biggest seller in the UK of 1993 – UB40’s version of “Can’t Help Falling In Love”.

As it’s the final week for Shaggy, I’m going to shoehorn in another and much more tenuous link between “Oh Carolina” and Sliver. Shaggy of course was also the name of a character in the legendary cartoon Scooby Doo the theme tune of which includes these lyrics:

Come on Scooby Doo, I see you pretending you got a sliver

But you’re not fooling me ‘cause I can see the way you shake and shiver

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Sybil	When I’m Good And Ready	Nah
2	The Bluebells	Young At Heart	Not in 1984 and not in 1993 either
3	Shabba Ranks	Mr Loverman	Mr Dickhead more like – NO!
4	Jade	Don’t Walk Away	Nope
5	Robin S	Show Me Love	Not my thing
6	Cliff Richard	Peace In Our Time	As if
7	Bananarama	More More More	No No No
8	Sunscreem	Pressure US	Nope
9	David Bowie	Jump They Say	I didn’t…jump or buy it
10	Lulu and Bobby Womack	I’m Back For More	No
11	Shaggy	Oh Carolina	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/m00196dt/top-of-the-pops-25031993

TOTP Rewind – the 90s

My memories of 90s chart music

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TOTP 25 MAR 1993

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