Eternal

TOTP 17 OCT 1997

The volatility of the Top 40 around this time – the advent of first week discounting meaning high chart debuts followed by a sharp decline in sales – must have been an issue for the Beeb’s grand old pop music show. Except for a few anomalies, the days of hits taking weeks to slowly climb the charts allowing for multiple TOTP appearances on the way were a thing of the past. In my teenage years, No 1s would stay at the top for at least three weeks but by 1997 we were at the stage where we were experiencing six different chart toppers in the same amount of weeks. Executive producer Chris Cowey tried to address this by allowing repeat performances of hits that had peaked and were either descending the charts slowly or remaining in the Top 10 as a non-mover. This resulted in creating a platform for songs that were still popular to feature on the show but also meant that singles entering the lower parts of the Top 40 didn’t get a look in. Another strategy was to have an ‘exclusive’ performance of a song the week before its release and then a second appearance when it actually entered the charts the following week. Neither of these measures were ever going to restore the show to its past glories and the peak viewing figures it experienced in the 70s and 80s but at least Cowey was trying.

Having said all of that, we start with a song that didn’t fall into either category I have just outlined above. “U Sexy Thing” by Clock was on the show’s running order as a new entry at No 12 and would feature again the following week after climbing one place to No 11. Morrissey once said in Smash Hits when reviewing the week’s singles releases “There are indeed worse groups than Modern Romance but can anyone seriously think of one?”. Lord knows what Mozza must have made of Clock then who make Modern Romance sound like peak REM.

I don’t remember this but apparently they started out as a typical Eurodance outfit with a sound similar to Cappella according to Wikipedia. However, around the middle of the decade, they took the decision to go overtly commercial with an out and out pop sound by doing hideously trashy cover versions. Tracks by Harold Faltermeyer and Tag Team were followed by more mainstream songs like “December 1963 (Oh What A Night)” and this – “You Sexy Thing”. Irritatingly, they would slightly rename the song titles giving the impression that they weren’t just cover versions but brand new tracks so the Four Seasons classic became simply “Oh What A Night” whilst Hot Chocolate’s well loved hit was “U Sexy Thing”. Just nasty. Actually, not just nasty but cynical too in the case of the latter. The choice to cover that particular track was surely influenced by its resurgence in popularity thanks to its use in the box office smash The Full Monty. In their defence, they weren’t the only people to have that idea – another tacky version was released at the same time by a duo called T-Shirt but it lost out to Clock when it failed to make the UK Top 40. In the end, the Hot Chocolate original was rereleased and beat both the updated takes on it by riding to No 6 in the charts. This made it the third time it had been a hit – it was a No 2 in 1975 and made it to No 10 when rereleased for the first time in 1987. As for Clock, they would continue to mine the rich seam of cover versions by having hits with KC And The Sunshine Band’s “That’s The Way (I Like It)” and “Blame it On The Boogie” by The Jacksons before having the decency to pack it all in by the end of the decade.

Next up is another hit that doesn’t conform to the appearance policy I described in the intro to this post – I’m beginning to think I might have got this all wrong! Anyway, the hit concerned is “Closed For Business” by Mansun and it’s on the show as it’s gone straight into the charts at No 10 which clearly justifies its place in tonight’s running order. However, a band like Mansun presented a different sort of consideration for Chris Cowey. A large and devoted fanbase meant large sales in week one but a quick drop off thereafter. “Closed For Business” (the lead track from the “Seven EP”) spent just a fortnight inside the Top 40 dropping a whopping 27 places in its second week. I guess Cowey’s dilemma here was balancing reflecting what was popular in that particular week without pandering to a specific section of the record buying public. Was there also an issue of scheduling in terms of being able to get the band in the TOTP studio at that exact point of optimum popularity of their single? Remember, Cowey didn’t seem keen on showing videos unless he really had to.

Enough of that though, what about the music? Well, this was one of those bridging-the-gap releases between albums that we’ve seen many times before. Debut album “Attack Of The Grey Lantern” had come out in the February of 1997 and follow up “Six” would not appear until 18 months later so some interim material was required to maintain Mansun’s profile presumably. As with their earlier work, “Closed For Business” had that wide screen feel to it that overwhelmed your senses without suffocating them. It was gloriously epic. I’d really liked that first album and yet, somehow, I’d lost interest by the time their sophomore effort arrived. As with Garbage, Roachford and Skunk Anansie before them, I really should check out their later work. However, I don’t think I’ll be venturing as far as their other release called “Closed For Business” – a 25 disc box set retrospective. Twenty-five!

P.S. The sleeves to the CD singles of “Closed For Business” featured paintings by artist and early Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe whose story I’m always fascinated by. In fact, the whole narrative of those involved in the history of The Beatles but who didn’t end up as who we know as the ‘Fab Four’ does. Sutcliffe, Pete Best, Jimmie Nicol…all people whose lives could have been so so different.

Wait…Siedah Garrett was in the Brand New Heavies? When did that happen? Well, 1997 obviously but how did it happen and where’s N’Dea Davenport? Well, apparently she’d been gone a couple of years by this point having left the band due to that old chestnut ‘irreconcilable differences’ (I have no info on whether there were of the musical variety) with Garrett replacing her. She’s an interesting character Siedah – I think I only knew her as duetting with Michael Jackson on “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” but there’s so much more to her than that. As Jayne Middlemiss hints at in her intro, she had a hit in 1984 with Dennis Edwards with “Don’t Look Any Further” (which was later covered by the Kane Gang and M People) and she also co-wrote Jackson’s hit “Man In The Mirror”. She toured with both Jacko and Madonna and wrote a Grammy award winning single for the Dreamgirls film. She co-wrote a number of tracks on Quincy Jones’ seven Grammy Awards winning album “Back On The Block” and has even presented America’s Top 10 deputising for the legend that was Casey Kasem (the original voice of Shaggy from Scooby Doo!).

Back to the Brand New Heavies though and despite them having the reputation of being pioneers of the acid jazz movement built upon two platinum selling albums, when it came to huge hit singles, there weren’t that many. Of their fifteen releases that made the Top 40, only one went Top 10 and that was this one – a cover version of Carol King’s “You’ve Got A Friend”. It seems kind of odd that a cover would be their biggest hit, as if it somehow invalidates their other work though, of course, they had already gone down that route when their version of Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight At The Oasis” went to No 13 in 1994. For what it’s worth, I don’t think they added anything much to the original – indeed, I would argue that it stripped it of its lush, warm feel. It’s not a terrible version just…unnecessary. Not even the (rather over the top) twenty strong gospel choir employed here could make it into something special.

Given that it was the fourth and final single from their “In It For The Money” album, perhaps not surprisingly, “Late In The Day” failed to maintain a run of five previous Top 10 hits for Supergrass when it peaked at No 18. For me, it’s not one of their best though it was probably better than many of its contemporary chart peers. Am I alone in thinking Gaz Coombes looked pretty cool despite his mutton chop sideburns?

Finally we have a hit that conforms to one of the appearance policies I described at the start of this post. Eternal were on the show last week with their single “Angel Of Mine” which had debuted on the chart at No 4. Despite falling a place to No 5 seven days later, it was still deemed popular enough to warrant a repeat of that performance on this show. When it comes to conversations about UK girl groups, I’m not sure that Eternal would be the first name on everyone’s lips. Girls Aloud, the Spice Girls, Little Mix and even Bananarama are more likely to be mentioned before them it seems to me and yet they had 15 consecutive hit singles and three platinum selling studio albums and one Best Of compilation. Was it that they didn’t crack America* that has lessened their legacy? Certainly the Spice Girls crossed over the Atlantic though I’m not sure if any of those other names above did although Bananarama had sporadic yet spectacular success including a US No 1 in “Venus”. Was it that they kept haemorrhaging group members that has dinted their reputation? Presumably not as pretty much all those aforementioned artists similarly shed original members from their line ups along the way. Does it just come down to the memorability of their tunes then? Despite the number of hits, how many could the average person name do you reckon? I’m guessing it would be less than almost every other name in that list depending on who you asked obviously. One last thing, is any of the above fair to Eternal? Don’t ask me, I’m just filling here for a lack of anything else to say which itself possibly does say a lot.

*Monica did have a US No 1 with her version of “Angel Of Mine”

It’s time for Sash! again (or should I say ‘encore une fois’?) who are back with their third consecutive No 2 hit called “Stay”. Now apparently this lot hold some sort of record for having the most No 2 hits (five in total) without ever having a chart topper or something. All those No 2s…insert your own (obvious) joke here *———-*. All three hits so far featured another artist – Sabine Ohmes, Rodriguez and now someone called La Trec as vocalist. To me, it was much the same as its predecessors albeit with more added vocals than usual. I’m sure it all made sense if you were frugging out on the dance floor but I could never understand anybody wanting to listen to it in their bedroom at home. How wrong was I though as not only did Sash! sell lots of singles but, unusually for a dance act, they shifted lots of units of their album as well. Their debut offering “It’s My Life” went platinum in the UK selling 300,000 copies and making it to No 6 in the charts.

It’s that weirdly over the top performance by Janet Jackson of “Got Till It’s Gone” again now which is being repeated as the single has gone back up the charts from No 9 to No 8 having peaked at No 6 in its debut week on the charts. Now, what links the aforementioned Supergrass to Janet Jackson (apart from being on the same show)? Well, apparently the former’s hit “Late In The Day” was inspired by a track from Graham Nash’s “Songs For Beginners” album. Nash, of course, was a founding member of The Hollies but left in 1968 to form the folk rock group Crosby, Stills and Nash (CSN) and subsequently Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY). He would write one of their best known songs “Our House” about a simple domestic event that occurred when he was living with his then partner in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. The name of that partner? Joni Mitchell. I don’t need to join the dots on this one any further do I?

It’s the fifth and final week at the top for “Candle In The Wind ‘97” / “Something About The Way You Look Tonight” by Elton John but clearly a decision was taken weeks ago to play the latter track as this is the third week on the spin we have got the promo for that one and not the cobbled together video for the former. Was it a decision based on taste? Was a fortnight of “Candle In The Wind ‘97” deemed a respectable amount of time for national mourning? Would any more have been seen as shoving it down the throats of the public? I don’t know the answer but what I am sure about is that these BBC4 TOTP repeats will have almost certainly been the first time we will have heard “Candle In the Wind ‘97” since they were originally broadcast. You never hear it on the radio. Like Ever.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Clock	U Sexy Thing	Never
2	Mansun	Closed For Business	No – missed this one
3	Brand New Heavies	You’ve Got A Friend	No – give me the original every time
4	Supergrass	Late In The Day	Negative
5	Eternal	Angel Of Mine	Nope
6	Sash!	Stay	No
7	Janet Jackson	Got Till It’s Gone	Nah
8	Elton John	Candle In The Wind’97 / Something About The Way You Look Tonight	I did not

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002b250/top-of-the-pops-17101997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 10 OCT 1997

Posted on April 23 by 80stastic

Three days after this TOTP broadcast, Zoe Ball and Kevin Greening hosted their first Radio 1 breakfast show having replaced Mark and Lard who were shifted to an afternoon slot. On the same day, Chris Evans, who Mark and Lard replaced, started his own breakfast show on Virgin Radio. I was never quite sure why it didn’t work out for Radcliffe and Riley in that morning slot because I used to love their afternoon show which I always used to have on in the back room of the record shop I worked in if I was in there on my own. Maybe their brand of humour didn’t sit well with people on the move in a morning? That their show wasn’t pitched at the right pace? I never used to listen to Ball and Greening so I have no opinion on whether they were any better and I can’t be bothered to look up RAJAR listener figures to compare but I’m guessing that they weren’t as big a draw as Chris Evans?

Anyway, the presenter for this TOTP also had a history of replacing Mark Radcliffe but only on a temporary basis. Mark Lamarr had sat in for Radcliffe’s late night Radio 1 show as guest presenter occasionally. Ah, so maybe that’s why he was being considered as part of the TOTP host roster at this time – he had some BBC radio credentials as well as his roles as team captain on Shooting Stars and host of Never Mind The Buzzcocks. I was wondering about that in a previous post. This was the third of fourth time that he’d hosted the show and he gets this one off to a very odd start. Having done away with any theme tune, new executive producer Chris Cowey brings it back for this one show after Lamarr seemingly takes too long learning his opening intro. A reader of this blog did alert me recently that this was coming but I wasn’t prepared for the bizarre optics we actually got – Lamarr’s face on a big bank of screens checking with someone off camera what the top of the show intro is before he then gets cut off abruptly and we get the titles and the old theme tune and then straight into the opening act. It just looks odd though I’m guessing it was meant to be an attempt at humour.

Anyway, said opening act are…a bunch of 12 year olds by the look of them. Who on earth were Catch? I know I say this all the time and it’s made worse by the fact that I was working in a record shop back then but I can’t remember this lot at all. The band’s backstory is that they emerged from a previous incarnation of a group headed by singer Toby Slater called Brattish who never actually gigged nor released anything. Slater was involved in the short lived ‘Romo’ movement…hang on. The what? I have no memory of that either which apparently was based around two club nights (Club Skinny in Camden and the West End’s Arcadia). Its sound was characterised by being either art glam, Hi-NRG/Handbag House or a cross between Adam Ant, Roxy Music, Pulp and Blur depending on who you talked to. There were specific bands allied to the movement of whom I’ve never heard of any (Plastic Fantastic or DexDex Ter anyone?) but it generally seemed to be a rejection of the back-to-basics approach of Britpop. It sounds to me like it was just a re-invention of the New Romantics. According to those in the know though, Catch were more indie-pop than Romo and I guess you could describe their only UK Top 40 hit “Bingo” as that. However, it’s not your standard indie fare. It has an intriguing quality to it. The verses have a tinny sounding rhythm track that reminds me almost of something that Frank Sidebottom would have warbled along to. Slater’s vocal gives a nod to Jilted John of “Gordon is a moron” fame (aka John Shuttleworth aka Graham Fellows) before the chorus explodes into life. I can’t deny that I quite like it in a juvenile kind of way. The lyrics describe a rites-of-passage, journey of discovery by the song’s protagonist who admits he’s 17 (Slater was actually 18 at the time of this TOTP performance) and knows nothing of the world with his carnal knowledge especially weak so he goes to a red light district to…erm…enlighten himself. Slater’s youthful appearance helps to deliver the message.

“Bingo” would peak at No 23 but a follow up single just missed the Top 40. An album remained unreleased in this country and was only made available in Indonesia. In a bizarre and unwanted pop history footnote, “Bingo” was the song being played on a repeat of The Chart Show in the early hours of 31 August 1997 when the programme was interrupted by ITV to announce the death of Princess Diana. They never stood a chance did they? After splitting in 1999, Slater formed a couple more bands without commercial success and would tragically die aged just 42 in 2021.

From edgy teenagers to what many would call the definition of musical blandness. Is that discrediting of the Lighthouse Family fair? Or is it just an inevitable consequence of gaining popularity by playing a fusion of easy listening and soul music that appealed to the masses? I’m sure that back then, I would have balked at the idea of admitting even the slightest liking of them to my way cooler record shop work colleagues but was I actually at the other extreme of the spectrum holding onto a hatred of them? No, I don’t think so. I saw somebody online describe them as “offensively inoffensive” which I guess equates to someone being described as ‘nice’ (though I wouldn’t knock that description given the character of the people currently running the world).

“Raincloud” was the lead single from their second album “Postcards From Heaven” but they didn’t suffer from ‘difficult second album syndrome’ like some have in the annals of pop history (Stone Roses, ABC, The Jam) – it sailed to No 2 in the charts and went four times platinum in the UK. It seemed that there were more believers in than dissenters of their mainstream sound. Listening back to “Raincloud” though, those accusations of the band’s style lacking substance and being lightweight may not have been that wide of the mark – it’s fairly unremarkable fare. The next single was “High” which is widely regarded as their best tune (maybe). I guess we’ll be seeing that one in a BBC4 repeat soon enough. For now, I’ll leave the final word to Peep Show’s Super Hans…

The next performance is just weird. Ironically, the song being performed is completely mundane and ordinary. It’s the staging that I’m taken aback by. So, some details first. The artist is The Seahorses who are in the studio to perform their third hit single “Love Me And Leave Me”. The track was co-written by John Squire and one Liam Gallagher, a fact which Mark Lamarr has taken to run with for a cheap gag in setting up his intro as he suggests Liam’s only contribution to the song was coming up with the word “and” in its title. It’s not a very funny line and I’ve heard it done better in a self deprecating way by Andrew Ridgeley of Wham! When interviewed by Simon Bates on Radio 1 which words did he contribute to the writing of “Careless Whisper” he replied “the…and…”. Anyway, Lamarr proceeds to stroke Squire’s knee for some unfathomable reason and then hangs around on stage while the band performs for about half of the song. What was all that about? Was he channeling the spirit of that 1971 TOTP performance by the Faces when they invited John Peel on stage with them to mime playing the mandolin? If that wasn’t weird enough, why are there nearly a dozen random people dotted about the stage looking bored? Why are the band (except singer Chris Helme) all seated? Why…well, just why?

As for the song, it’s no “Love Is The Law”. In fact, it’s pretty dull which, on reflection, was a disappointing state of affairs just three singles into the band’s career. It starts off like a companion piece to John Lennon’s “God” with its lyrics about not believing in Jesus nor Jah but then just sort of drifts off into a cosmic trance with Helme singing about ‘astral bars’ and ‘heaven here on earth’. It’s all very unsatisfying which pretty much sums up The Seahorses. They would only release one more single before splitting up. John Squire would return to that writing partnership with Liam Gallagher 27 years later when they recorded an album together that would top the UK charts.

Did someone mention the Faces earlier? Yes me, obviously. Well, I’m going to mention them again because the next hit shares the same name as one of their songs (and albums). The 1997 “Ooh La La” by Coolio wasn’t anything to do with the English rockers though but rather it owed a lot to Grace Jones and her classic track “Pull Up To The Bumper” which it samples. So much of a debt did it owe to the esteemed Ms Jones that she was repaid with a writing credit on Coolio’s hit for a hit indeed it was peaking at No 14 though it would be his last in the UK. Just as well if this was an example of the direction he was going in. The lyrics to this one are just a load of sexual innuendo. “Deep in the pink”, “Stalk through the bush” and “keep it all wet all weekend” are just some of his double entendres that Viz’s Finbarr Saunders character would have found juvenile. At some points, he can’t even be bothered to disguise his filth and so we get lyrics like:

“Pull up your skirt and we can do it on the pool table…Your nipples look so tender, can I twirl ‘em in my mouth like a blender”

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Sly Dunbar / Robbie Shakespeare / Dana Manno / Artis L. Jr. Ivey
Ooh La La lyrics © Warner-tamerlane Publishing Corp., Boo Daddy Publishing, Oji Music, Chenana Music, Songs Of Polygram Int., Inc., Polygram Int. Publishing, Inc., Ixat Music, Inc.

Gulp! That last line can’t have got through the BBC censors surely? Let me watch the performance back with subtitles on…

Well, I can’t hear exactly what Coolio is rapping as it’s muffled (presumably on purpose) but the subtitles have replaced ‘nipples’ with ‘knees’ because that makes sense! I know “Pull Up To The Bumper” was also accused of having sexual innuendo hidden in its lyrics but it was surely more subtle than this twaddle?! Aside from all the nastiness, I think there’s a case for another writer credit in addition to Grace Jones as the chorus is filled with the phrase “doo-wa-diddy” as in “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” as made famous by Manfred Mann but actually written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Well, Coolio’s first album was called “It Takes A Thief”.

Andrew Roachford has had a lengthy and remarkable career in music – he’s been at it for nigh on 40 years, released twelve studio albums with his band, been in Mike + The Mechanics and, in 2019, was awarded an MBE for services to music. However, if success was judged purely on the number and size of his hit singles, it wouldn’t look so impressive. I make it eight Top 40 entries over a 36 year period and look at the peak positions for those eight:

4 – 25 – 22 – 21 – 36 – 38 – 20 – 34

The obvious ‘biggie’ is that first one which was “Cuddly Toy” from 1989. Do you think when an artist has one big hit early in their career that it becomes a millstone around their necks or are they just glad and proud to have had at least one? Anyway, the seventh of those hits was this one – “The Way I Feel” – which was the lead single from Roachford’s fourth studio album “Feel” and, against the odds, it would become his second biggest hit ever eight years after his first. It’s a pretty good tune but one I missed completely at the time. I’m pretty sure I saw him live at the Manchester Academy around 1994 but that was because the Sony rep who used to sell into the Our Price store I was working in put me on the guest list as we were both Chelsea fans!

As with Garbage and Skunk Anansie, Roachford is another artist whose back catalogue I should be better acquainted with. This scene from Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa shouldn’t be his only legacy…

After four years of constant hits including a No 1 no less with their last single release, bizarrely, the time of Eternal was almost at an end (not so eternal after all then). Maybe they (or their label or management) knew their sell by date was fast approaching as, in a not necessarily obvious move, instead of mining their “Before The Rain” album (which had only been out for six months) for more hits, they went straight to a Greatest Hits project. Now you’d usually expect that type of release if a group had formally announced that they were splitting up (as per Take That) not at the point of a commercial high. And yet, the Greatest Hits album was a success – No 2 in the charts, three times platinum selling, the highest selling hits package of the year and in 2013 was confirmed as the biggest selling best-of album by an all girl group in the UK.

To promote the Greatest Hits, a new song “Angel Of Mine” was released as a single. To my ears, it’s a serviceable R&B ballad but not much more and yet in America, where it was released by Monica, it went to No 1 and was the third best selling single of the year over there. Eternal’s version peaked at No 4 and would be their final Top 10 hit – of their fourteen singles released up to that point, only two had not made the Top 10. It was also the group’s last single as a trio as Kéllé Bryan left the group after being sacked by fax by Vernie and Easther Bennett’s solicitor with the sisters citing “a breakdown in professional relations”. The UK record buying public had little desire for an Eternal duo though and they would achieve just one more Top 20 single before bowing out of the music business. Numerous reunions have taken place over the years though never with all four original members. That holy grail line up for the fans was nearly green lit in 2023 but was nipped in the bud after Louise and Kéllé withdrew following the Bennett sisters apparent refusal to play LGBTQ Pride events.

I’ve said it before but I’m saying it again – I don’t/didn’t get the Backstreet Boys. I know I wasn’t their target audience (I was 29 at this point) but I just couldn’t see their appeal. Yes, they had some very slickly produced pop songs but they were just a poor man’s New Kids On The Block weren’t they? They weren’t even that good looking! “As Long As You Love Me” was a textbook example of their output. A mid-tempo ballad that was perfect for daytime radio playlists (I still hear it played on stations like Magic to this day) but oh so dull. No, not dull…cynical. A song concocted by an evil, mad pop scientist in the laboratory of dark and terrible music.

As with Mark Lamarr at the opening of the show, there’s something disconcerting about the set up of these performances with the artist having a backdrop of giant TV screens behind with their huge fizzogs plastered all over them whilst they run through the song on stage. It’s all a bit overbearing and, in the case of Eternal who had the same arrangement for their appearance immediately before the Backstreet Boys, disorientating as the order of the group on the screens wasn’t the same as where the girls were standing on stage (even though Kéllé and Vernie swapped positions halfway through).

Elton John remains at No 1 with “Candle In The Wind ‘97” / “Something About The Way You Look Tonight”. Despite it being the best selling single in UK chart history, it didn’t guarantee Elton’s next release being a huge hit. “Recover Your Soul”, taken from “The Big Picture” album would only manage a chart high of No 16 which, proportionally, must be one of the biggest drops in popularity between releases ever. Off the top of my head, I can think of the Bee Gees following up their chart topper “You Win Again” with the single “E.S.P.” which stalled at No 51 but the Elton scenario is next level I think.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Catch	Bingo	Nope
2	Lighthouse Family	Raincloud	I did not
3	The Seahorses	Love Me And Leave Me	Negative
4	Coolio	Ooh La La	Never
5	Roachford	The Way I Feel	It’s another no
6	Eternal	Angel Of Mine	Nah
7	Backstreet Boys	As Long As You Love Me	As if
8	Elton John	Candle In The Wind ‘97 / Something About The Way You Look Tonight	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/m0029vc0/top-of-the-pops-10101997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 20 JUN 1997

Posted on March 17 by 80stastic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*checks Wikipedia*

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

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

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

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

1 – 5 – 7 – 5 – 1 – 2 – 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0028nyj/top-of-the-pops-20061997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 13 JUN 1997

Posted on March 12 by 80stastic

There seems to be some uncertainty about quite when Chris Cowey’s tenure in charge of TOTP started. I thought it was from last week’s show (I took that info from the TOTP Archive website) but a reader of my blog has informed me that it was officially from this week. In my defence, I’ve never suggested that I’m some sort of authority on the show, curating its history as it were – just someone who used to watch it and who’s writing about it and the songs it featured but for what it’s worth, apologies if I get some dates wrong. Anyway, Cowey is playing around with the format a bit already, trying a few new tweaks out to see if they might have some legs to them. That’s ‘legs’ literally in the case of the first tweak which comes right at the start of this show as he has presenter Jo Whiley, the ‘Queen of Cool herself’ according to last weeks host Jayne Middlemiss (yeah, I’m really not sure about that either), dramatically kick over a huge No 1 figure and proclaim that TOTP is still Number One. I get that it’s a gesture, a statement of intent maybe to reassure us all that there’s still life in the old show yet and had it been one of the Spice Girls then it might have been spectacular but a high kicking Jo Whiley? Hmm. I’m not convinced but sadly there’s more ‘action’ to come from Jo later in the show…

We start with Rosie Gaines who is onto her third consecutive appearance on the show promoting her hit “Closer Than Close”. To try and shake up the format, this is a live performance and I have to say that Rosie gives one of the most memorable live vocals I’ve ever witnessed on TOTP. However, it lives in the memory for all the wrong reasons as it’s completely horrible. I mean ‘why didn’t someone stop her’ horrible as she is goes way over the top. There’s some Cleo Laine style jazz scatting to start with before she encourages the studio audience to chant the song back to her. After that she settles down a bit and does some actual singing before she suddenly breaks out into an impression of Shaggy (the (the Jamaican-American singer not Scooby Doo’s mate) in a deep register. She follows this with some more free styling again giving the subtitles guy a hell of a task to decipher what she’s banging on about before delivering the dubious lyric “funk it off on me”. And then….and then she just starts screaming mid-song; literally wailing like a banshee. It’s an horrific noise. We’re then back to scatting before inviting the studio audience to get in on this nonsense again by shouting the word ‘close’ over and over. Finally, she indulges in what appears to be primal scream therapy and mercifully brings the performance’ to an end with some grunting sounds. It’s unspeakably bad. Jo Whiley describes Rosie as “hugely talented” afterwards. You’re not even (closer than) close to the truth there Jo.

Sticking with Jo, she follows up her high kicking action with something a bit more sedate though she warns us to brace ourselves for it anyway. Quite why hitting a symbol with a drumstick of the drum kit of Wet Wet Wet’s Tommy Cunningham was deemed worthy of a warning I don’t know. It’s all very underwhelming, not unlike “Strange”, the latest hit by Clydebank’s favourite sons. This one was only on a couple of weeks back as an ‘exclusive’ and it’s back on the show again as it has entered the charts, only at No 13 though which would be its peak. As I said about it previously, I think their sound was getting a bit tired by this point and they were starting to run out of steam. To be fair to them, they had long since outlasted some of the other bands that had made their chart debuts in 1987 alongside them like Johnny Hates Jazz, Curiosity Killed The Cat and Living In A Box.

Marti Pellow still has his peroxide blonde hair which I suggested previously might be a cry for help similar to when Robbie Williams infamously went into meltdown mode when attending Glastonbury after leaving Take That. The Wets vocalist would leave the band within two years to deal with his own alcohol and drug addictions and he does seem to be sweating a lot in this performance. It could be the heat of the studio lights of course but it is quite noticeable…

I’m starting to think a lot of these performances weren’t all filmed at the same time with Jo Whiley in the studio. Clearly the Wet Wet Wet one was because of her interaction with their drummer but the others are prefaced by abrupt cutaways and post faced by cutbacks to Jo rather than a long, corridor shot back to our host. Was this new or had it been happening for a while? We see it in operation for the next artist who is En Vogue and their single “Whatever”. Jo says in her intro that “it’s the return after maternity leave of the ‘funky divas’ themselves” so presumably one of the group had just given birth but what’s noticeable isn’t an addition to the group family but the fact they’d lost a member since their last hit “Don’t Let Go (Love)” as Dawn Robinson had left the band in the April. The remaining trio re-recorded some of the tracks from parent album “EV3” but Robinson’s backing vocals remained on “Whatever”.

I’ve said many times that R&B isn’t really my bag but that when it comes down to it, En Vogue would be my group of choice for that genre. “Whatever” wouldn’t be my go to song from them but it’s still a strong track with a “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)” vibe. The hits would dry up eventually as the new millennium arrived but En Vogue are still an ongoing entity, currently back up to the full complement of four members though Dawn Robinson, despite rejoining a couple of times over the years, is not back in the fold.

Next to a song that was previously on the show as an exclusive three weeks prior but was now back on the show having finally been released and having entered the charts at No 11. Yet again though, the artist in question – Skunk Anansie – are not in the studio with Jo Whiley as we just get a rerun of that initial appearance. It’s worth another look though as “Brazen (Weep)” is a great rock track that has contains enough idiosyncrasies of the band’s sound to make my description of it as merely ‘rock’ look inadequate. It would become Skunk Anansie’s highest peaking chart hit when it debuted at No 11.

Whiley name checks the band individually at the end of the clip including, of course, vocalist Skin (real name Deborah Dyer). Despite being an unusual nickname (given to her on account of her skinny frame), it’s not unique as there is another singer from a band called Skin though the reason why he’s called that is rather obvious. Does the name Grahame Skinner ring any bells? No? Maybe watch this then…

Chris Cowey is trying his best to pull the wool over our eyes about what is actually going on here. In the next link, he has our host positioned in the middle of a studio audience who have been instructed to face one way as if towards an off camera stage awaiting the next artist whilst Whiley looks directly into an overhead camera to introduce said artist. Guess what though? The next act aren’t in the studio and it’s just another recycled clip from a previous performance. What a swizz! Doubling down on the swizz is the fact that it’s Eternal and Bebe Winans with “I Wanna Be The Only One” again for the third consecutive week! The ex-chart topper was holding at No 2 to justify another appearance and *spoiler alert* it would get a fourth and final outing in the following week’s show! As such, I’m leaving it there for this one.

Now, whilst I know there was a second Jon Bon Jovi solo album following his soundtrack to the film Young Guns II, I could not have told you when it was released nor what it sounded like. The answer to both my queries is supplied on this TOTP as Millie Bobby Brown’s father-in-law (as I believe he’s known these days) is here with the lead single from said sophomore album. “Midnight In Chelsea” was co-written by Dave Stewart of Eurythmics who accompanies Jon on stage here and was taken from “Destination Anywhere” both of which were sizeable hits in the UK peaking at Nos 4 and 2 in our charts respectively. Conversely, although he was busy writing big hits for other artists like Shakespears Sister, Texas and Jon Bon Jovi post Eurythmics, Stewart’s own projects like The Spiritual Cowboys and his solo album “Greetings From The Gutter” failed to light up the charts.

Having read up on “Midnight In Chelsea” before re-listening to it, I’m a little bit underwhelmed as I was expecting something quite different to the sound he and his band made their name on (literally). Some critics described it as being funk/rock and having shuffling, hip-hop drum loops in it. However, it doesn’t sound like he’d strayed too far from the tree sonically to me. I think I can hear said drum loops but in the end I don’t think he would have been converting any fans of Roni Size or someone of that ilk with it. That’s not to say it wasn’t without merit. It’s got a nice ‘sha-la-la-la’ hook ( maybe Jon or Dave had been listening to Monaco’s “What Do You Want From Me” when writing it) but of more interest to me is the lyric “Ah, maybe it was just a dream, Manchester nil, Chelsea three, football fans and players scream”. What?! I’ve checked and can’t find those lines in the official lyrics anywhere online so was Jon ad-libbing about my beloved Chelsea? We had just won the FA Cup the month before but we didn’t beat either City or United in the final and this was the a close season so no other games would have been played at this time. I wonder what prompted him to sing those lines?

I find that infinitely more intriguing than wondering why Jo Whiley was banging on about Jon having waxed his chest in her intro. Was that a story in the news back then? ‘Hairy rock star waxes chest’? Maybe men waxing and shaving every bit of body hair wasn’t so ubiquitous as it seems to be today when you can now buy specific shavers for very specific body areas if you know what I mean. Body hair sculpting I believe it’s called. Erm…anyway, I reckon that was another performance that could have been recorded separately as it’s yet more cutaway and cutback shots to and from the presenter. Maybe the artists were all there and it was Jo who was absent and recorded her segues in isolation? But then there’s the Wet Wet Wet interaction…oh I don’t know!

Now this is a funk rock act! The first and only video of the show now (which allows for a rolling chart rundown of the Nos 20 – 11) comes from Red Hot Chili Peppers and their version of “Love Rollercoaster” by Ohio Players. A US No 1 in 1976, it was covered by The Peppers to be included on the soundtrack to the film Beavis And Butt–Head Do America. You may recall that this animated pair had a hit with Cher a couple of years previous to this when “I Got You Babe” was released from their comedy album “The Beavis And Butt-Head Experience”. I’ve never seen their film and, if I’m honest, could only take their TV series in very small doses viewing it as vastly inferior to the likes of The Simpsons or Family Guy.

The video depicts the band as cartoon characters on, yep, a rollercoaster alongside clips from the film. I don’t find that or the track very engaging I have to say though it would end up being their second biggest UK hit after “By The Way” and “Dani California”.

Cowey’s ‘Operation Hoodwink’ is still going on and, indeed, is upping its game as the false shot gets even tighter as he tries to create the impression that Hanson are really in the studio when in fact it’s just another previous performance recycled. By my reckoning, Jo Whiley was only in the same studio at the same time with one band. Was this a scheduling issue or a budget cut or what? Anyway, this week’s (and last week’s) chart topper…

One of my abiding memories of this song was that our then six year old goddaughter loved “MMMBop” and so we bought it for her along with a Barbie Walkman for her to play it on that she’s been wanting for ages. Plugged in with the brothers Hanson in her ears, she would wander round her house shouting “PARDON?” every time anyone tried to talk to her. Although six was possibly the average age of people who bought the record and I couldn’t stand it aged 29 back then, in retrospect, it is a marvellously constructed pop song in that traditional way that say “The One And Only” by Chesney Hawkes is. Don’t tell anyone I said that though. Oh.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Rosie Gaines	Closer Than Close	No
2	Wet Wet Wet	Strange	Nah
3	En Vogue	Whatever	Nope
4	Skunk Anansie	Brazen (Weep)	No but it’s good
5	Eternal and Bebe Winan	I Wanna Be The Only One	Yes for my wife
6	Jon Bon Jovi	Midnight In Chelsea	I did not
7	Red Hot Chili Peppers	Love Rollercoaster	Negative
8	Hanson	MMMBop	Yes for my goddaughter

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0028nyg/top-of-the-pops-13061997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 06 JUN 1997

Posted on March 9 by 80stastic

So here we go with the Chris Cowey era. Yes, the new executive producer is finally in post after a few weeks of the position being covered by some temporary names and he’s rung some changes already as we are introduced to new presenter Jayne Middlemiss. Jayne would be one of the names in the roster of regular hosts alongside the likes of Zoe Ball and Jamie Theakston. These three were recruited from BBC mini-music show The O–Zone but were promoted to the corporation’s flagship pop programme by Cowey as he got rid of the ‘golden mic’ slot. On reflection, was this anything different to the infamous ‘year zero’ revamp when a load of bright, young things were brought in to replace the ousted and ageing Radio 1 DJs? We didn’t know who any of those guys were and that break in familiarity was one of the criticisms thrown at the new regime but did we really know any of this lot much better at the time? It’s hard to recall I guess but I’m not sure I was that aware of Jayne Middlemiss before this point but she was certainly engaging with her winning North East accent – let’s see how she did…

We don’t get to see her immediately as Cowey is sticking with the start to the show which launches straight into the first song with no presenter intro. I can live with that but what I’m not sure about is this weirdness of opening the show with last week’s No 1 which is no longer No 1! Not only does it go against TOTP history of not featuring hits going down the charts but it also means we closed last week’s show and opened this week’s with the same song! In this case it’s “I Wanna Be The Only One” by Eternal and Bebe Winans. Maybe it’s me who’s got it all wrong though. Clearly this single was still selling in huge quantities as it was at No 2 in the charts so why not show a hit that was still popular with the masses? Was that not giving the people what they wanted more than featuring a new hit that’s entered the charts much lower down? Adding weight to the argument is this whole phenomenon of first week discounting of singles which was manipulating the charts at this time. We’d already seem eight songs spend just one week at the top this year and Eternal were now the ninth. Under the old appearance rules, we’d have only seen “I Wanna Be The Only One” once on the show. Was that fair on the sixteenth best selling single of the year? I don’t know – I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate I guess.

OK, so Jayne’s on our screens finally and she seems (understandably) nervous. She doesn’t fluff any lines but there’s a lot of clearly pre-rehearsed posturing and thrusting of her microphone purposefully. Amid all of that, she introduces Gina G who is in the studio to promote her fourth hit “Ti Amo”. Laudably, she’s tried to deviate from her winning Eurodance formula of her first three hits but her plan for doing so seems to have been to plagiarise Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita” from ten years earlier. It’s all flamenco guitars, castanets and Latin rhythms. The music press pointed out the obvious Madge influence but were generally favourable in their assessment. Maybe it wasn’t Madonna who had been the source of inspiration though – hadn’t Eurodance outfit No Mercy brought flamenco guitars back into the charts this year? Whatever the truth, on reflection, “Ti Amo” does seem to provide the missing link between “La Isla Bonita” and Geri Halliwell’s 1999 No 1 “Mi Chico Latino”.

Here’s another song that was only on last week though to be fair, it was an ‘exclusive’ then and is a chart new entry this so it can just about be explained. Jayne Middlemiss is struggling to control her nerves in the intro to it. Again, she’s word perfect but is speaking so quickly it’s almost garbled. Said song is “Waltz Away Dreaming” by Toby Bourke and George Michael and unlike last week, George isn’t in the studio in person to introduce it. Well, twice in two weeks after a gap of eleven years would have been pushing it. Irishman Toby Bourke would never trouble the chart compilers again with this being his only UK hit. Indeed, he didn’t even have a hit in his own country as “Waltz Away Dreaming” wasn’t released there which seems a bit odd.

And another! That’s three of the first four songs on tonight that were only on the show seven days ago! We might as well have been watching MTV with its heavy rotation playlists! Jayne Middlemiss even seems to be proudly advertising this as she informs us that it’s two weeks running on the show for Rosie Gaines and “Closer Than Close”. This successive appearances policy is really testing my creative writing to its limits – what am I supposed to say about this one that I haven’t already said. It’s not as if I can simply effuse all over it – I didn’t like it at all. I know, check her Wikipedia entry; there must be some kernel of inspiration in that.

*scans Rosie Gaines Wikipedia details*

Erm…well, her first band back in the 80s were called The Oasis. You can see why they weren’t successful – if only they’d dropped that ‘The’!

Now what’s going on? What’s Ronan Keating doing on the show? Well, he seems to be plugging the next Boyzone single (from the Mr Bean movie) which wouldn’t be released for another six weeks! Apart from that he mentions that the band are playing Wembley that night and saying “Please God” a lot. It’s all a bit unnecessary and neither Ronan nor Jayne come out of it very well.

Back to the music and the good news is that we’ve alighted on a new song finally. The bad news is that it’s from Gary Barlow in solo artist mode. He’s been shoehorned into the running order to celebrate his album “Open Road” going to No 1 in the charts and so we get the title track even though it wouldn’t be released as a single for another five months! Makes Boyzone seem quite tardy in their promotional activities doesn’t he? Anyway, his song is a mid-tempo story of…self discovery?…Gary keeps banging on about talking to a man who it turns out is him so maybe getting in touch with your inner feelings? I don’t really know nor care much. Supposedly, there a sample of Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” in there somewhere but I can’t hear it. However, it does kind of remind me of Marc Cohn’s “Walking In Memphis”. I guess “Open Road” was an improvement on the insipid “Love Won’t Wait” but not by much. If this was the best Barlow could do then his solo career was in trouble and that’s exactly how events would play out with his second album “Twelve Months, Eleven Days” a commercial disaster and he was swept away by a deluge of Robbie Williams hits.

There seem to be more people than necessary up there on stage with him all of whom he seems intent on cosying up to. Maybe, like Ronan Keating expressed earlier, they thought that “TOTP is such a cool show”, they’d come down. On mass.

And so we arrive at the point where Radiohead set the tone not just for their own personal direction as a band but also for the future of UK rock music. Too much? Maybe but it’s no exaggeration to say that their third album “OK Computer” routinely ranks highly in the ‘Greatest Albums of All Time’ polls and has retrospectively been seen as the emerging sound as Britpop dwindled into mere vestiges of a once dominant movement. I don’t want to go into too much detail about this – there’s plenty been written about it by those more erudite than me. However, my own personal view is that whilst I owned and enjoyed “OK Computer” to an extent, I actually preferred “The Bends”. That seems to go against received wisdom and all those poll placings but, as ever, music taste is subjective and you like what you like.

The lead single from the album was “Paranoid Android” and if you created a Word Cloud from the reviews of it in the music press, I’m guessing the big word in the middle would be ‘EPIC’. Clocking in at 6:23, it dwarfed nearly everything else that they’d recorded up to that point. Jayne Middlemiss even describes the clip that we see as an ‘extract’ from a performance on Later…with Jools Holland. Composed in four distinct sections, it inevitably drew comparisons with “Bohemian Rhapsody” though a more pertinent analogy might be “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” by The Beatles. It really is a sprawling, mammoth track that took me a few listens to get into but I did get to the place called ‘Appreciation’ eventually. Not everyone did – some felt it and its parent album self indulgent including Henry Yates of the NME who said of “OK Computer” that it was the moment Radiohead stopped being ‘good’ and started being ‘important’.

Its title obviously referenced the character Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I’d watched the 1981 BBC TV series and enjoyed it but what I hadn’t realised as that two singles had been released by the character voiced by actor Stephen Moore including the one in the clip below. Take note Henry Yates, at least Radiohead didn’t release this…

We’re nearly at the No 1 song but first, after the Top 10 rundown, Jayne gathers all the artists who have been in the studio tonight (including Ronan Keating who didn’t even perform) around her to ask if they’ve had a good time. I’m not sure why or what it brought to the show but at a guess was it Chris Cowey trying to promote the idea that TOTP was still the music programme that all the stars loved and wanted to be on?

So, it’s a new chart topper and it arrives fully formed from Hanson – yes, it’s time for “MMMBop”. This was another of those hits like “Don’t Speak” by No Doubt that there had been so much buzz about that there was zero chance it wouldn’t just go straight to No 1 first week in. It would make international stars of the three Hanson brothers Isaac, Taylor and Zac who were only 16, 14 and 11 years old respectively at the time. As such, comparisons with The Osmonds and The Jackson 5 abounded, egged on by the incredibly catchy, bubble gum-pop sound of their song. However, it was a rumoured connection to a contemporary artist that was doing the rounds at the time that, although completely without any substance, seemed to be accepted without question – Hanson were related to Beck. Erm, no they weren’t/aren’t and yet even the fact that the spelling of their surnames was different (Beck Hansen with an ‘e’) didn’t dispel the myth. There was, however, a tie between the two but it wasn’t a family one. Hanson were signed to Mercury Records on the strength of an early demo which included a different, much slower version of “MMMBop” but the potential of the song prompted the label’s head of A&R to call on the production duo The Dust Brothers to sprinkle some magic over it. They had previously helped produce “Paul’s Boutique” by the Beastie Boys but it was their collaboration with another artist that would cause work on “MMMBop” to be delayed. The album was “Odelay” by, of course, Beck. And that’s the only connection between Hanson and Beck Hansen that I’m aware of. Eventually, The Dust Brothers would get back to “MMMBop” and when finished, it was unleashed on the world to devastating effect – No 1 in the US and the UK and just about everywhere in Europe besides. The three brothers will be our chart topper for another two weeks so I’ll leave their story there for now.

So, what did we make of the new era of TOTP? There were a few changes – the incongruous interview with a random pop star who wasn’t even performing on the show, the little get together of all the stars that appeared just before the end, a new presenter (hopefully she’ll get over her nerves and be better in future shows) and when did the rolling, on screen chart rundown start at No 20 and not No 40? Overarching all of this was the fact there were only seven hits on the show which surely must be the least for a while. The jury’s out for now…

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Eternal featuring Bebe Winans	I Wanna Be The Only One	Yes for my wife
2	Gina G	Ti Amo	Nah
3	George Michael and Toby Bourke	Waltz Away Dreaming	Nope
4	Rosie Gaines	Closer Than Close	Definitely not
5	Gary Barlow	Open Road	No
6	Radiohead	Paranoid Android	No but I had the album
7	Hanson	MMMbop	Yes but for my goddaughter who was six at the time

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/m0028dz1/top-of-the-pops-06061997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 30 MAY 1997

Posted on March 7 by 80stastic

We have arrived at a metaphorical line in the sand episode with these TOTP repeats as we say goodbye to the ‘golden mic’ slot whereby hosting duties were undertaken not by Radio 1 DJs but by pop stars and celebrities from the worlds of comedy, sport and showbiz. Introduced by new executive producer Ric Blaxill in March 1994, the very first incumbents were Take That’s Robbie Williams and Mark Owen heralding in a huge list of non-traditional presenters from Suggs to Skunk Anansie’s Skin and from Dennis Pennis to Gina G. Some choices really worked like the cast of The Fast Show, some really didn’t – Keith Allen as alter ego ‘Keithski’ was just plain annoying. Whether you liked it or not, at least it was an attempt to shake the format up after the ultimate failure of the ‘Year Zero’ revamp. The final ‘golden mic’ hosts are the Spice Girls which, given their profile at this time, was definitely a case of going out at the top. I have to say that, on balance, I was a fan of this particular invention and I’m not convinced that the regular roster of hosts, introduced by incoming executive producer Chris Cowey, that followed (including Jamie Theakston, Zoe Ball and Kate Thornton) will be any sort of improvement but maybe I’ll be proved wrong.

Anyway, we start with Wet Wet Wet and the time of their first incarnation was nearly at an end. It had been a good run – their debut single and hit “Wishing I Was Lucky” had been released just over ten years prior to this point and their subsequent run of 23 Top 40 singles included three No 1s. Even when their career was supposedly in the doldrums – that period between the second and third albums with the 90s in its infancy – they still only had one single that could be considered a flop (“Put The Light On” stalled at No 56 in 1991). Even then, their next release was “Goodnight Girl” which topped the charts. Having said all that, the signs were there that their conveyor belt of success was starting to slow down – three of their last four singles (including this one “Strange”) failed to go Top 10. For me, their sound had become just too safe by this point. “Strange” was perfect daytime radio fodder with its easy on the ear sound and prominent brass parts but ‘fodder’ was the significant word in that description; it was ‘filler’ not ‘killer’.

As well as sonic stagnation, the band was facing internal struggles. After the tour to support the “10” album, drummer Tommy Cunningham left over a dispute about songwriting royalties feeling he was frozen out of what had always been a four way split. Meanwhile, Marti Pellow was in the middle of fighting his alcohol and drug addictions and would also leave the band in 1999. I wonder if his peroxide blonde haircut seen in this performance was a cry for help similar to the style Robbie Williams sported at Glastonbury after leaving Take That where he was clearly under the influence of something stronger than a few light ales. As for the Wets, there was one final hit in the 90s – a cover of “Yesterday” for some reason – and that would be it for seven years until they reunited for a Greatest Hits album. They are currently touring but with bassist Graeme Clark the only* original member in the line up.

*Guitarist Graeme Duffin is also still with the band having been a touring member since the early days. He was previously reluctant to do any promotional work with the other four members partly on account of his suffering from a stammer.

Next a band who were following a similar career trajectory to our opening act but that’s about all they had in common – I’m clearly not saying Faith No More were anything like Wet Wet Wet! However, both bands were approaching hiatuses that would last for years, both were experiencing line up changes (guitarist Dean Menta had recently been fired and replaced by Jon Hudson) and both had recently released albums which seemed to demonstrate a downturn in creativity. In the case of the San Francisco rockers, their optimistically titled “Album Of The Year” proved to be anything but with reviews in the press ranging from lukewarm at best to downright caustic (if funny). Look at this:

“ ‘Album Of The Year’ leaves one feeling like waking up and finding last night’s used condom – sure, the ride was fun while it lasted but what remains is just plain icky. And you definitely don’t want it in your CD player.”

Stomberg, Jeremy. “Faith No More: Album of the Year: Pitchfork Review”. Pitchfork.

Heh and indeed eeeyeww! Anyway, the one track that did get a bit of love from the critics was lead single “Ashes To Ashes”. Absolutely nothing to do with the Bowie classic, it was a described as a “moody rocker” though I think I’d probably go with ‘doom-laden’ rather than ‘moody’. Apparently, the rumour from Ground Control was that this was more like the classic Faith No More sound but as I could only name you three of their tracks (and one of them isn’t actually theirs), I don’t feel qualified to make any sort of judgement.

As Mrs Merton would say, “It’s Hooky and the boys!”. Yes, I’d forgotten this but Monaco, Peter Hook’s side project band away from New Order, had a second hit besides the excellent “What Do You Want From Me” called “Sweet Lips” which made a respectable No 18 in the charts. However, it wasn’t Hooky and the boys in this performance but Pottsy and the boys with Hooky nowhere to be seen. Nobody seems to know why he wasn’t there but I liked the response on X from @DonOftheDead80 who said “He was playing Hooky”. Heh. Anyway, to counter his absence, we get Hooky’s parts in the song covered by the promo video which is intercut with my old Our Price colleague Pottsy doing his thing in the studio. It’s a clunky device but I guess it just about works. As for the song, it’s got much more of a dance vibe to it than its predecessor so did it counter the criticism that the band were just a pop version of New Order? Maybe but for me, it’s nowhere near as strong a single as their debut though it pisses over most of its Top 40 peers which was just as well as it was also the band’s final Top 40 hit. A third single from their debut album “Music For Pleasure” was released but it peaked at No 55. A second album just called “Monaco” was rejected by Polydor though it was eventually released on Papillon Records but lead single “I’ve Got A Feeling” was withdrawn due to sample clearance issues and a second track “See-Saw” only received a limited 12” single release. Relations between Pottsy and Hooky deteriorated to the point of the band splitting but the duo are together again performing as Peter Hook & The Light.

Right, who’s this? Oh, it’s that Rosie Gaines. Who? Yeah, I’d forgotten about her as well but she was a member of Prince’s New Power Generation and duetted with the diminutive one on “Diamonds And Pearls”. Her solo hit “Closer Than Close” is widely regarded by those who know as a club classic and an absolute banger in the cannon of house music. It goes without saying that I’m not one of those in the know. The title track of her album that was released in 1995 became a No 4 hit two years later when it was remixed after bootlegs circulating in the club scene had created an underground buzz. An official release on Big Bang Records saw it crossover into the mainstream. Wikipedia tells me that it got categorised as part of the ‘speed garage’ scene to which my response was “the what?”. Wikipedia, of course, can answer my question and tells me that the genre was characterised by a four-to-the-floor rhythm, breakbeats, warped bass lines and time-stretched vocals. Yeah, I’m still clueless. All I know is that “Closer Than Close” does next to nothing for me and I particularly did not enjoy it when Rosie does some scatting at the end.

It’s “Time To Say Goodbye” – no, not literally – it isn’t a very short, truncated episode of the show but Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman with their No 2 hit. With the crossover appeal it had (non-traditional record shop visitors were buying it), a prolonged stay on the chart was inevitable and it duly spent five weeks inside the Top 10 and eleven on the Top 40 aided by some heavy airplay on Radio 2.

The cover of the single includes the tagline ‘A Tribute To Henry Maske’ which I didn’t notice at the time I would have been selling it in the Our Price store in Stockport so who was/is Henry Maske? Well, he was a five times German boxing champion and one of the country’s most popular sporting figures. Fair enough but what did he have to do with “Time To Say Goodbye”? Good question. The track was performed by Andrea and Sarah at the start of Maske’s last professional fight in 1996 (Brightman had already performed another song at one of Maske’s earlier fights) and it was also played at the end to mark Maske’s exit. The track didn’t bring him any luck as he lost that final bout – the only loss of his professional career. I guess it would have at least been a poignant soundtrack for the boxer much as it was when played at the end of my hometown football club Worcester City’s final match at their St George’s Lane ground that I mentioned in my last post. Of course, there is another goodbye song that can still bring tears to the eyes if the comments on YouTube about this clip are anything to go by. Seriously, check them out…

Now, here’s a thing. This is yer actual George Michael actually in the TOTP studio for the first time since 1986 when he performed “Where Did Your Heart Go?” as part of Wham! Bizarrely though, he isn’t performing but rather has a little stilted chat with Geri Halliwell before introducing the video for “Waltz Away Dreaming”, a track written by himself and one Toby Bourke and performed by the pair as a duet. This must be one of the least remembered George Michael hits not least because it didn’t feature on any of his albums (it eventually made it onto his “Ladies & Gentlemen” Best Of but inexplicably just the cassette version). I can barely recall it and I worked in a record shop and I still couldn’t have told you how it went. As for Toby Bourke, he was/is an Irish songwriter and the first artist signed to the independent record label Aegean that George founded after his split from Sony. Their track was dedicated to George’s Mum who had died in the February of 1997. Right, that’s all the facts out of the way – I’d better listen to the thing now…

…hmm…well, the video is giving me Narnia vibes which I don’t think suits the tone of the song which is meant to be a beautiful ballad but I found it meandering and rather soporific. It just doesn’t go anywhere rather like George’s record label which folded soon after and whose roster of artists included Trigger, Primitiva and Bassey Walker. Anyone? No, me neither. However, it was the first European record label to adopt the Liquid Audio secure electronic music delivery system which allowed music streaming and music downloads. Have that Spotify!

Although extensively used in classical music, there aren’t many pop songs that feature the word ‘waltz’ in its title. “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Waltzing Matilda)”? Does that count? Oh, hang on. Hers another by that rascal Malcolm McLaren…

After nearly four years and five Top 5 placings, Eternal are finally No 1 in the singles chart with “I Wanna Be The Only One”. It was a prophetic song title as it was the group’s only chart topper and it was only in pole position for a solitary week. Still, a No 1 record is a No 1 record and not every artist can claim to have had one. This gospel-inflected, joyous pop/soul track was always more likely to do the trick for the girls than one of their more melancholy efforts like previous single “Don’t You Love Me” or their mid-tempo dance tracks like “Save Our Love” as it was another one of those songs that would cut a swathe through people’s perceptions and reach the mainstream. It was and remains a fun track. Aided on vocals by BeBe Winans (of the extended musical Winans family) it was perfect for Summer playlists and was in step with the upbeat, good feeling that the General Election result had ushered in.

I’m pretty sure that I witnessed the announcement that Eternal were No 1 in person as it was made in Albert Square, Manchester where a mini Radio 1 Roadshow was taking place. It was on a Sunday and I think that as the chart countdown got to the No 1 position, Eternal were introduced on stage to perform their hit. Yes, I’m sure that happened and I haven’t made it up. Sadly, I’d given up on my diary a few weeks before so there isn’t any confirmation of events written down. This commercial peak for Eternal was over pretty quickly. Parent album “Before The Rain” had only been out for six months before a Greatest Hits package was released for the Christmas sales rush which seemed a bit odd. Maybe it was a contractual obligation thing. Said album was a hit but within two years, their last eponymously titled album made just as a duo by the Bennett sisters was a flop. The group split soon with the inevitable reunion rumours resurfacing most recently in 2023 with the four members from the original line up but Louise Redknapp and Kéllé Bryan pulled out over the Bennetts’ refusal to appear at LGBTQ Pride events.

The play out video is “I Have Peace” by Strike. Unsurprisingly, I don’t recall this one at all – my only memory of this lot is their 1995 No 4 hit “U Sure Do” though apparently they did have three minor hits after that and before this one. Wikipedia tells me that “I Have Peace” contains a sample of Level 42’s “Leaving Me Now”. Really? Let me have a listen…

…oh yeah – there’s it is. That tinkling piano part. It’s not an obvious steal for a dance track but it just about works. Despite it being their last UK chart hit, they would continue for another ten years supporting the likes of the Backstreet Boys, Jocelyn Brown and in a nice, full circle ending to the show, the Spice Girls.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Wet Wet Wet	Strange	Nah
2	Faith No More	Ashes To Ashes	I did not
3	Monaco	Sweet Lips	I bough their first single but not this one
4	Rosie Gaines	Closer Than Close	No
5	Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman	Time To Say Goodbye	Nope
6	George Michael and Toby Bourke	Waltz Away Dreaming	Negative
7	Eternal featuring BeBe Winans	I Wanna Be The Only One	I did but for my wife who liked it
8	Strike	I Have Peace	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/m0028dyz/top-of-the-pops-30051997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 07 MAR 1997

Posted on February 5 by 80stastic

We’ve entered a new phase of TOTP history with this repeat as it marks the changing of the guard of the show’s executive producer role. Outgoing was Ric Blaxill* who been in the post for three years following the ‘Year Zero’ revamp debacle and in his place would come Chris Cowey who had worked on The Tube in the 80s and been the producer of its (sort of) 90s successor The White Room. I’m assuming that Blaxill’s rather sudden departure was due to the viewing figures for TOTP being down to two million though in fairness to Blaxill, the show being moved to a Friday night at 7.30 and going up against Coronation Street was probably the biggest factor in that outcome and that may have been a decision made way above him.

*Blaxill makes a valedictory cameo appearance at the end of the previous show when the Spice Girls are messing about with Ian Wright. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Bye TOTP Bye’

Cowey was brought in to reverse that trend and he did with viewing figures rising to five and a half million within the six year period he was executive producer. How did he do it? In his own words:

“There wasn’t any one fact why it worked. It was a million and one tiny fixes”

Sunderland Echo, Published 17th Jan 2024

One such fix was a phasing out of the ‘golden mic’ slot which saw celebrities from the world of music and showbiz taking over as presenters. Instead, a regular roster of hosts was assembled being sourced from BBC youth magazine show The O–Zone and existing Radio 1 DJs. This was no return to the ‘Smashie and Nicey’ days of the 70s and 80s though with the DJs being sourced from the cooler, edgier end of the spectrum like Jo Whiley and Zoe Ball. I know that both are no longer seen as cool or edgy in 2025 but they possibly were back in 1997. Look, they were young at least and we should all be thankful that neither was Simon Mayo – OK?! Erm… where was I? Oh yeah, Chris Cowey. Well, he was all about live performances so artists appearing on the show were encouraged to sing live and he also saw the potential to take the TOTP brand abroad which resulted in localised versions of the show being broadcast throughout Europe. He would also favour a bit of nostalgia when he reintroduced a revamped version of the classic “Whole Lotta Love” theme tune and a new logo and title sequence. All of that’s to come though as Cowey wouldn’t officially take over until the Summer of 1997* so I’m assuming there was an interim period where a caretaker producer (or series of producers) was in charge of the show. The credits for this one says the director was one John L. Spencer.

*Credit to loyal blog reader Essor for that info

As for tonight’s edition, it was the aforementioned Jo Whiley as solo host for the first time introducing Eternal as the opening artist tonight. Now you can say what you like about this lot but you can’t deny that they were prolific in their output. “Don’t You Love Me” was their twelfth consecutive UK chart hit in just over three years of which all but two went Top 10. Taken from their platinum selling “Before The Rain” album, it was (at the time) the highest charting of the lot. I recall thinking back then that this was quite classy sounding but I think I may have misjudged it. For a start it rips off the bassline from the Dennis Edwards track “Don’t Look Any Further” (which I knew from The Kane Gang version) and which M People had taken to No 9 as recently as 1993. Secondly, it’s all a bit overwrought with lyrics about homelessness and poverty completely over cooked by adding a children’s choir at the song’s climax along with a harpsichord for some reason. Then there’s all the pointy, angled choreography that accompanies this performance. The song’s subject matter is hardly something to dance along to. It just looks odd and jarring. For all my misgivings and despite the threat posed by the phenomenon of the Spice Girls, Eternal were about to score their only chart topping single with their very next release – “I Wanna Be The Only One”.

Around 1994, I started losing sight of Erasure’s output after they’d been a constant presence in my pop music life since 1985 and their first ever single “Who Needs Love Like That”. By 1997, I could hardly see them at all. “Don’t Say Your Love Is Killing Me” was their 26th UK chart hit but it was also their first not to make the Top 20. It was from their eighth studio album called “Cowboy” the title of which I didn’t recall so I looked it up and I didn’t even recognise its front cover! And I worked in a record shop! I really did have a blind spot when it came to Vince and Andy at this point.

As for this particular single, it kind of feels like it should be better than it is. Some of the trademark Erasure components are in place like a catchy chorus and a jaunty synth pop backing but it just doesn’t quite hang together right for me. Sort of like Erasure by numbers but the finished composition is a bit wonky. Bits of the electronic bleeps in the production sound like they’ve been lifted directly from their 1988 hit “Stop” whilst it goes all “Telstar” by The Tornados towards the end with what sounds like a clavioline prominent. The end effect feels like it’s all been thrown together somewhat. “Don’t Say Your Love Is Killing Me” would be Erasure’s last hit of the 90s but they would return in the new millennium with yet more new material.

The first video of the night comes courtesy of the Bee Gees and their hit “Alone”. Apparently there were two different promos shot for this single – one for the US and another for all other territories. Not sure why. Anyway, the latter features the brothers performing against a clearly green screen created background of a futuristic styled spinning room intercut with images of a woman floating in zero gravity removing her spacesuit – an obvious homage to the movie Barbarella. And that’s it. Nothing else. One single idea to base the whole video on. Wikipedia tells me that the US promo features the band in the recording studio intercut with footage of them from throughout their career and images from the UK video. Both were directed by Nick Eagan who has designed some iconic single and album covers for the likes of Dexys, The Clash, INXS and Duran Duran but he was clearly phoning this assignment in. “Alone” would peak at No 5 on the UK charts.

Any hopes that Peter Andre’s pop career might be a flash in the pan have been dashed over and over as the buffed up goon is onto his fifth UK hit in just under a year. At least this one didn’t go to No 1 like his previous two singles. I think we missed having to endure “I Feel You” which topped the chart not long before Christmas but no such luck this time around as the title track from his album “Natural” is straight in at No 6. This was more of the same nasty, knowing R&B dance pop with lyrics designed to get his female teenage fanbase dreaming of clandestine meetings with their hero. Just to ramp up the sexual tension, there’s even a bit in it that steals from another godawful hit from the 90s with carnal referencing lyrics – “I Wanna Sex You Up” by Color Me Badd. Horrible, wretched stuff. Andre’s ‘music’ really was desperate like going into the only cubicle in a public toilet that’s free when you’re dying for the loo and realising that the bloke who was in there before you has made the most unholy stench and you are left with the despairing choice of soiling yourself or breathing in that rancid air – that level of desperate. Just naff off mate.

Jo Whiley is a bit gushy introducing the next artist though I’m not surprised that she’s jumped on this particular bandwagon. “The muso’s muso. He can do no wrong” she says. Who can she be talking about? Well, it’s Beck of course. Just about everyone I ever worked with during my time in record shops were crazy about Beck. He was effortlessly cool (even when he looked geeky) and his music was a stylish antidote to all that generic dance music and seemingly endless conveyor belt of boybands. This one – “The New Pollution” – was no exception. The third single from his “Odelay” album, it was featured a syncopated (is that the right word?) take on the bass line from “Taxman” by The Beatles forming a wicked groove that pulled you in from note one. The lyrics seem a bit oblique (“She’s got a carburettor tied to the moon”) but I’m guessing it has some sort of environmental message judging by the title or is that too literal a take? A bigger Beck fan than I will put me straight I’m sure. I like all the performers on stage all dressed head to toe in white jumping about at the end like they’re in some sort of Woody Allen movie (or possibly a Madness video). “We salute the godlike genius of Beck” says Jo Whiley at the song’s end. I’m not sure I’d go that far but he was pretty cool. Far too cool for the likes of me though not my record shop colleagues nor my wife who bought the album.

Some smooth, R&B soul next courtesy of Babyface. Given that nickname by funk legend Bootsy Collins on account of his youthful looks (his real name is Kenneth Edmonds), it made me wonder how many other people were given that moniker. Well, there’s ‘Baby Face’ Nelson, the 1930s gangster and Ole Gunnar Solskjær, the ex-Manchester United player and manager who was nicknamed ‘The Baby Faced Assassin’. And that’s where the well runs dry. There’s plenty of people who were known as ‘Baby’ – Emma Bunton was ‘Baby Spice’ for example – but ‘Baby Face’ or indeed ‘Babyface’? I’m not so sure. It appears that not only are there not that many who go by the name of Babyface but even those that do are not that well known to some people. At the 2025 Grammy Awards that took place a few days ago, Babyface was being interviewed on the red carpet when hot new star Chappell Roan walked past. The Associated Press reporters immediately forgot they were interviewing the 13 times Grammy winning producer and recording artist and shouted out “Chappell” clearly smelling a much bigger interview in their eyes. Babyface was extremely magnanimous by allowing the reporters to pursue Roan without taking offence. The fallout from the incident showed that others had taken offence though including Dionne Warwick who tweeted her disgust at the incident and the panel on US talk show The View who balked the disrespect shown to Babyface and the apparent lack of knowledge as to his accomplishments…

Quite right too. Well said. His 1997 hit “Every Time I Close My Eyes” however was never going to inspire me to interview Babyface if I’m honest. Just not my thing and the presence of Mariah Carey on backing vocals and Kenny G* on sax wasn’t going to sway me either.

*No I’m not going to go into my Kenny G story again! It’s in the blog archives if you must relive it!

Despite their longevity, this was only the second ever TOTP studio appearance by Aerosmith. Surprising? Maybe not. Up to this point, they had only achieved seven UK Top 40 hits of which none had gone higher than number 13 and they were still over a year away from Top 5 international smash “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing”. However, an eighth in “Falling In Love (Is Hard On The Knees)” earned them another not just a No 22 chart placing but a visit to the BBC Elstree Centre in Borehamwood. The pop kid that I was, Aerosmith had not been a band that had crossed my path in my youth with my first engagement with them coming via their 1986 collaboration with Run DMC on “Walk This Way”. After that, they occasionally piqued my interest with tracks like “Dude (Looks Like A Lady)” and “Cryin’” but I was hardly a huge fan. Such was my lack of commitment that I don’t even remember this one at all but listening to it now, it’s not a million away from the aforementioned “Dude (Looks Like A Lady)”, being that bluesy yet camped up rock n’ roll sound that they made their name on. As to what the song was about, well, it’s not so hard to work out is it?! No, he wasn’t singing about proposing!

“When I grow up, I want to be a rock chic!” trills Jo Whiley after that Aerosmith performance. Hmm. Anyway, No Doubt are No 1 for the last of three weeks with “Don’t Speak”. What’s the link between this song and the artist we’ve just seen Aerosmith? Listen to the intro to this and see if it reminds you of something…

Yep, very similar. Anyway this week we get the promo video for “Don’t Speak” with its plot about the media focus on singer Gwen Stefani whilst the rest of the band are ignored. This wasn’t a narrative of pure fiction though. Tensions in the band had been riding high perhaps not helped by bassist Tony Kanal and Stefani’s romantic relationship breaking down. That wasn’t the only relationship breakdown in the camp though. Legend has it that the band were on the verge of splitting at the time of shooting the video but they decided to go through with it as a sort of healing treatment – group therapy if you will. I’m guessing it worked as the band carried on until 2005 and are back together today after a couple of sabbaticals.

As Comic Relief was only one week away, we end the show with the official song for that year’s campaign – “Who Do You Think You Are” by the Spice Girls. For the promotion of the song and the event, a video was shot which harked back to 1989’s Comic Relief. I say ‘harked back’ but I mean totally pinched the idea from. I refer to the appearance of Kathy Burke, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. Back in 1989, Bananarama were tasked with delivering the charity’s single – a cover of “Help” by The Beatles – which was credited as being by Bananarama and Lananeeneenoonoo who were a spoof group made up of…yep…Kathy Burke, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. The concept was revisited in 1997. As the Spice Girls had five members, two other celebrities were drafted in namely Lulu and actress, comedian and writer Llewella Gideon. For Lananeeneenoonoo read the Sugar Lumps (a name which would have made more sense if the Sugababes had been around then). I didn’t find this skit funny back in 1989 and was even less enamoured of its 1997 counterpart but hey – it was for charity.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Eternal	Don’t You Love Me	Negative
2	Erasure	Don’t Say Your Love Is Killing Me	Nope
3	Bee Gees	Alone	I did not
4	Peter Andre	Natural	As if
5	Beck	The New Pollution	No but my wife and the album
6	Babyface	Every Time I Close My Eyes	Not my bag at all
7	Aerosmith	Falling In Love (Is Hard On The Knees)	Nah
8	No Doubt	Don’t Speak	Good tune but no
9	Spice Girls	Who Do You Think You Are	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/m0027fvx/top-of-the-pops-07031997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 16 AUG 1996

Posted on October 18, 2024 by 80stastic

After a couple of weeks of ‘golden mic’ guest presenters, we’re back with the Radio 1 DJ crowd and this week it’s the turn of Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley. As I write this, I note that tomorrow is Lamacq’s 60th birthday. Imagine that! One of the biggest names in indie music and natural successor to John Peel 60 years old! Is it such a big deal? I mean Peel was 65 when he died and still broadcasting right till the end. My own next birthday milestone will be 60 (though I have a few years to go yet) so am I supposed to just forget about music once I get to it and leave it to the youth?

Talking of which, the opening artist tonight maybe should have considered leaving it up to the kids back in 1996 when she was 50 years old if this was the best she could come up with. The 90s had been a mixed bag for Cher – two No 1 singles (albeit one was a charity record) sat alongside minor hits and complete flops. By 1996, she had resorted to releasing cover versions with three of the four singles taken from her album “It’s A Man’s World” being so. The last was “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”, the old Frankie Valli song made famous by The Walker Brothers. Now on one hand, I can just about understand the song choice here. Scott Walker had a very deep, resounding voice and Cher also has that low register tone so it does suit her vocally. On the other hand, why would you want any other version of the track than The Walker Brothers? OK you might want to investigate the Frankie Valli original if you’d never heard it but did you really need to listen to Cher have a crack at it, let alone buy her single?

Watching her performance here, there’s some technical jiggery pokery going on as Cher manages to harmonise with herself as the song reaches its climax – she even has her face inset over the top of the regular camera angle as she does so. Wouldn’t that have had to be recorded before hand? If so, does that speak of Cher being ever so slightly diva-ish about her appearance? Although her version of “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” would peak at a paltry No 26, within two years, she would have worked out what the kids (or at least the record buying public) wanted when she came up with the best selling single for 1998 in the UK with “Believe”.

Next up is “How Bizarre” by OMC. In an uncannily prescient move, Steve Lamacq foretells what the song will become known for by the TikTok generation in his intro with a stylised pronunciation of its title. Yes, a quarter of a century after it was a hit, “How Bizarre” was claimed by TikTok users as an audio meme to soundtrack all their interminably unfunny shorts on the world’s most pointless platform. I really don’t get TikTok. My teenage son shows me stuff on it and my reaction is inevitably this…

You can probably tell that I’m out of my comfort zone talking about stuff like this but then I am 56. I bet Steve Lamacq doesn’t get TikTok either. Don’t let me down Lammo!

Is the “Macarena” an audio meme? Probably. Back in 1996, it was just a dance craze and a song that you could buy. Ina shop. They were simpler times. We get the video for Los Del Rio’s hit this time which despite being basic is still memorable. It’s just ten women dancing set against a completely white background whilst the two old fellas sing into suspended old style microphones in a completely different shot but it kind of works. The promo showcases the “Macarena” dance led by choreographer and lead dancer here Mia Frye who’s also had a minor film career with small roles in movies by the likes of Luc Besson and Brian De Palma. If that video was remade today, I can’t believe all that white space in the backdrop wouldn’t be green screened with all sorts happening behind the promo’s protagonists. Like I said before, they were simpler times.

Have the music press ever turned on a band quicker than in the case of Kula Shaker? Seemingly an overnight success (they weren’t but most bands aren’t are they?), they swooped to No 1 in the charts with their debut album “K” which would go double platinum in the UK. Add to that three big hit singles in 1996 (including this one “Hey Dude”) and they were set to conquer the world with their fusion of traditional rock and Eastern mysticism. But then something happened. The tide turned. They lost the support of the music press. The reason? Well, the main cause seems to be that they were middle class white boys one of whom came from an acting family dynasty and was called Crispian! The horror! Who did they think they were with their songs informed by an idiots guide to Eastern culture?! That was wholly the reserve of The Beatles and you’re certainly not them! One of their songs was even sung wholly in Sanskrit!

However, not only did the band suffer a class backlash but they suffered from a case of inertia. 1997 saw them release just one single – a cover of Deep Purple’s “Hush”. Momentum was being lost. 1998 brought another false start – “Sound Of Drums” was the only song they released in that calendar year. The lead single from second album “Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts”, we had to wait another twelve months for the actual album to appear. By the time it did arrive in record shops, the band found themselves engulfed by another crisis as Mills had to repel accusations of Nazism following ill judged comments he’d made in Melody Maker and the NME praising the imagery of the swastika. Explaining that it had its origins in Indian culture, he accepted that he it was now irreversibly linked with Nazism and apologised for his naivety. The controversy affected the release of “Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts” with it selling only reasonably as opposed to exceptionally – six times less than its predecessor and only just scraped into the Top 10. Shaken, the band split in 1999 only to reform in 2004 since when they have released five further albums not that most people probably noticed. Like another 90s band Jesus Jones who experienced a similar trajectory, they are still active to this day with their most recent album “Natural Magick” having been released in February of this year.

As for me, I quite liked them. I had a free CD sampler of the album that the Our Price I was working in had been sent to plug in store and it sounded pretty good to me. I particularly liked the track “Start All Over”. Also, were they the instigators of the brief fascination with the letter ‘K’ a few years back. Their band name starts with a ‘K’, their debut album was called “K”, their Best Of was called “Kollected”…oh no that was Wayne Rooney wasn’t it? Well, he did call his kids Kai, Klay and Kit.

Excellent! First OMC and now OMD on the same show! How did Steve Lamacq not use this in his intro? It’s an open goal! How bizarre! Anyway, this marvellous event nearly didn’t happen as “Walking On The Milky Way” was the final UK Top 40 hit for OMD meaning this is the last time we’ll see them in these TOTP repeats. It’s a great tune to bow out with – a classic pop melody allied to an anthemic chorus. Apparently Andy McCluskey put his heart and soul into writing it only to find that Radio 1 wouldn’t playlist it due to their perception that it did not meet their target audience’s tastes and that Woolworths subsequently wouldn’t stock it. The single’s failure to get higher than No 17 would lead to McCluskey retiring the OMD name leaving him free to go and write songs for Atomic Kitten. Hmm. After a ten year hiatus, he would reunite with Paul Humphreys to reactivate OMD and they have since released a further four albums though rumour has it that they might be about to call it a day for good soon. If true, they leave behind one hell of a legacy.

It’s a third massive hit on the spin for George Michael as “Spinning The Wheel” will enter the chart and peak at No 2 when released the Monday after this TOTP aired. Sadly for George, those pesky Spice Girls would prevent him from scoring a hat trick of No 1s though after the the first two tracks taken from his third album “Older” (“Jesus To A Child” and “Fastlove”) both topped the charts. Although I could appreciate the appeal of those two singles, “Spinning The Wheel” left me rather cold. Telling the tale of a promiscuous partner at the height of AIDS, it’s seems to be neither ballad nor dance track nor pop song. I understand the CD single included some dance remixes that boosted its popularity with clubbers but the radio edit is (whisper it) a bit dull. One reviewer’s take was that the track:

“…achieves a light jazz feel (on the song) that also makes for good background music”

Gardner, Elysa (25 May 1996). “Music Reviews: “Older””. Lakeland Ledger.

I’m not sure that’s the endorsement the reviewer intended. The words ‘jazz’ and ‘background music’ would send shudders down the spine of many including myself. George would release three further singles from “Older” that would peak at either No 2 or No 3 giving the album six singles with the following chart positions:

1 – 1 – 2 – 3 – 2 – 2

Are there any other albums that can compete with those stats?

This post started with a theme about the passage of time and growing old and looking at the running order for this particular TOTP, there was a definite tendency towards the more mature artist. Look at the ages of these performers at the time the show aired:

Cher – 50
Los Del Rio – 56 and 58
Andy McCluskey (OMD) – 37
George Michael – 33

Add to that list the next artist Paul Weller who was 38 when he did this performance of “Peacock Suit” in the TOTP studio. Where were all the young, hip bands? What? Kula Shaker? Ok, apart from them. I’ve already reviewed this once fairly recently when Weller was on that brief doubleheader feature that saw an artist perform two songs at the end of the show after the No 1 record. As such, I haven’t anything else to say about it so if you want to read what I wrote first time around, here’s the link:

TOTP 14 JUN 1996

After all the talk of oldies, we suddenly get two young girl groups one after the other beginning with Eternal. Three years prior, this lot must have thought they would be the UK’s next big all female act and they were…sort of. However, after ditching Louise (or vice versa depending on which version of the story you believe), they went off in a more pronounced R&B direction and the door was left open for a bunch of wannabes (ahem) to come charging through it to be the new pop darlings and subverting the boy band norm in the process.

Despite being outgunned by the Spice Girls in terms of sales and size of hits, that’s not to say Eternal didn’t continue to have success and then some. They were still a year away from their only No 1 single whilst “Someday” would peak at No 4. I’m not sure about the white, reflective jackets they’re wearing here – they’re almost giving me snow blindness. I din’t think I would have preferred the video either though. The guy who plays a jester looks like Mr Claypole from Rentaghost. Spooky!

So here they are again with a fourth week at No 1. Yes, the Spice Girls were immovable with their debut single “Wannabe”. We are all familiar with the individual nicknames given to the five members but have you ever wondered why they were called the Spice Girls at all? A quick google suggests a number of possibilities from its AI overview summary including:

An allusion to nursery rhymes specifically What are little girls made of? – sugar and spice and all things nice etc
Association with far off places – far East and India where spices originate
Variety is the spice of life – the Spice Girls were individuals as well as a group
Metaphorical reading – names suggest a fiery, uncontrolled Girl Power nature

Yeah, not sure any of that holds water with me, about as much as those individual nicknames which apparently only came about when a lazy journalist coined them as he couldn’t remember their actual names. So, in a parallel universe, they could have been Speedy Spice, Sloaney Spice, Spooky Spice, Sprog Spice and Carrot Top Spice.

The play out video is a bit out of left field for TOTP – “Ratamahatta” by Sepultura. Obviously, the “hardcore metal meisters” (© Steve Lamacq) weren’t my cup of tea at all. However, in the dark recesses of my mind there lingers a faded (and possibly totally inaccurate) memory that the Brazilian band’s fan club used to hold their annual convention in a hotel in Manchester which struck me as a bit odd. I clearly didn’t appreciate the international reach of the band but in my defence, they only ever had two UK hit singles neither getting higher than No 19. In Finland, which is home to loads of rock bands like Lordi and Hanoi Rocks, they had a No 2 hit so wouldn’t that have been a better country to host such an event?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Cher	The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore	As if
2	OMC	How Bizarre	No but my wife did
3	Los Del Rio	Macarena	Never
4	Kula Shaker	Hey Dude	No but I had that album sampler
5	OMD	Walking On The Milky Way	No but I had it on a Best Of compilation
6	George Michael	Spinning The Wheel	I did not
7	Paul Weller	Peacock Suit	Nope
8	Eternal	Someday	Nah
9	Spice Girls	Wannabe	No
10	Sepultura	Ratamahatta	Of course not

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0023sxy/top-of-the-pops-16081996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 02 AUG 1996

Posted on October 10, 2024 by 80stastic

We’re still in the Summer of 1996 with these TOTP repeats and we have another guest host in the ‘golden mic’ slot. In any other year, Jas Mann of Babylon Zoo would have got nowhere near this gig but this was the year of “Spaceman” and the stardust of that No 1 hit was still just about glittering over him enough to allow this appearance. It wouldn’t last much longer.

We start though with another guy who, by my reckoning, was also still very fortunate to be appearing on the show. Why was Sean Maguire still having hits two years on from his first one?! “Don’t Pull Your Love” was his seventh of eight in total ranging in size from No 27 to No 12. How could this be true? He couldn’t give away either of his albums which both sank without trace but somehow he managed to keep churning out a string of reasonably successful singles. How? Why? Yeah, he’d been in EastEnders so he was a familiar face and he didn’t look like the back end of a bus but I would have thought he’d have one, maybe two hits at most before the novelty wore off. He was quite the anomaly.

It can’t have been that the quality of the songs he was being given were irresistible to the record buying public can it? Surely not. Listening to this one, it sounds like something The Osmonds might have recorded back in the day. It wasn’t was it?

*checks internet*

No but it was a hit in the 70s by an act called Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds who took it to No 4 in the US selling over a million copies. I knew I was in the right ballpark.

I’ve never heard of them until this moment but apparently they also had an American No 1 called “Fallin’ In Love” and get this, it was covered in 1995 by German Eurodance outfit La Bouche. Wait, I didn’t review it in this blog did I?

*checks internet again*

No, it wasn’t a hit over here so it wouldn’t have been on TOTP. However, the song was in the news again in 2009 when it was sampled by the rapper Drake for his track “Best I Ever Had” which led to a lawsuit being brought against him by Playboy Enterprises who owned the rights to “Fallin’ In Love” as Drake hadn’t sought clearance for the sample. What has any of this to do with Sean Maguire? Not much but it’s surely more interesting than his pop career no?

Rivalling Jas Mann in the famous for 15 minutes stakes were the next act OMC. Yes, the difference between being a one hit wonder and a legendary electronic band who are still going 44 years after their first hit is just one letter apparently. However, whereas the name Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark didn’t mean anything and was chosen by Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys to ensure they weren’t mistaken for a punk band, OMC was an acronym for Otara Millionaires Club and was a tongue-in-cheek reference to Otara’s status as one of the poorest suburbs in Auckland, New Zealand. Their hit was “How Bizarre” which lived up to its name by being a strange concoction of mariachi guitars, tejano trumpets, almost spoken word verses (I’m not sure it qualifies as rapping) and harmonised backing vocals.

What was also atypical about the single was the amount of time it took to become a hit and its chart positions when it finally made it. It took five weeks to break into the Top 10 (including two consecutive weeks at No 19) and then spent six weeks there four of which were at No 8. It would eventually sell 400,000 copies in the UK despite never getting higher than No 5. Not surprisingly though, it topped the charts in Australia and New Zealand. Why was it such a sleeper hit? Maybe it didn’t attract enough airplay initially but when radio finally caught on to it, they realised it was perfect for summertime playlists. My wife loved this and indeed bought the CD single which might still be knocking about somewhere. Though the idea in today’s world of searching it out to put in a CD player when you could just say “Alexa play OMC” does indeed seem bizarre.

If 1996 was Jas Mann’s season in the sun, it was an annus mirabilis for Alanis Morissette. Her “Jagged Little Pill” album was No 1 for weeks and she had three hit singles, each of which charted higher than the one before. “Head Over Feet” was the biggest of those peaking at No 7. Given that so many people were buying the album and therefore already had access to those tracks, that was quite a feat. This particular single seemed almost laid back compared to some of its predecessors like “You Oughta Know” and “Ironic” which had themes of anger and dissatisfaction. By contrast, “Head Over Feet” contained lyrics that talked about falling in love with your best friend. That didn’t mean it was lacking a punch though – it was still in the heavyweight class.

Curiously, there were two videos for the song – the ‘head’ version does what it says on the tin with a camera permanently fixed on a close up of Alanis’s face as she sings whilst the ‘feet’ promo for the European market that we see here is in black and white and has her sat around a camp fire in what looks like a building site with her band, sat cross legged, all strumming guitars. I think I prefer the ‘head’ one as its more affecting. Could it also have been the inspiration for Radiohead’s “No Surprises” which saw Thom Yorke singing under duress in a see through helmet as it filled with water?

Despite all of Alanis’s success in 1996, she would finish the year with a flop single when “All I Really Want” failed to make the Top 40. It seemed six singles from the same album was going too far even for Morissette’s growing army of fans.

Noel Gallagher once said that there was a time in Oasis’s career when everything the band released sounded like “Get It On” by T-Rex. Well, in 1996, was everything starting to sound a bit like Alanis Morissette? OK, Alisha’s Attic were hardly a carbon copy but could their hit “I Am, I Feel” be described as a poppier version of the Canadian singer? Maybe it’s just because they followed Alanis on this particular show that they somehow fused together in my head or maybe it’s to do with that aforementioned anger that is present in their lyrics? I mean, these are fairly dark:

“Like I wanna bite his head off, yeah, that’d be fun, cause I sure got an appetite“

Writer(s): Karen Poole, Michelle Poole, Terence Martin

If I’m being truthful though, Alisha’s Attic weren’t following where Alanis Morissette had walked but in the footsteps of a long line of female pop duos stretching back to the 80s with Mel & Kim and Pepsie and Shirley and on into the 90s with Shakespears Sister, Shampoo and perhaps the couple most like them Scarlet. That lineage would continue into the new millennium with t.A.t.u. and…erm…Daphne and Celeste? Or perhaps they modelled themselves after a trio. I’m thinking Wilson Phillips who consisted of Carnie and Wendy Wilson who were the daughters of The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson and Chynna Phillips who was the offspring of John and Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & The Papas. So what you may ask? Well, sisters Shelly and Karen Poole were themselves from a pop background with their Dad being Brian Poole of *Brian Poole and the Tremeloes fame.

*Their bass player was Len ‘Chip’ Hawkes father of Chesney.

Anyway, I quite liked Alisha’s Attic and their quirky pop tunes of which eight were Top 40 hits. None got higher than No 12 (which was actually the peak position for three of their singles) and “I Am, I Feel” itself would spend three weeks at No 15 plus two at No 18 and for all the No 1 artist’s posturing about ‘girl power’, surely was a better feminist anthem than “Wannabe”.

And talking of feminist anthems, here’s Neneh Cherry with “Woman”. I say ‘feminist anthems’ but I’m not sure that’s the correct terminology anymore. It conjures up images of Viz character Millie Tant and the world is certainly more nuanced than that. Look, just to be clear, I believe in equality of the sexes and hate all the ‘lads, lads, lads’ culture (groups of men can be such pricks) so if I misuse a phrase then please accept my apologies in advance.

Right, with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get back to Neneh Cherry. She was on The Graham Norton Show last week promoting her memoir A Thousand Threads which was published just a few days ago. It seems to be quite comprehensive and not just a retread of her discography – apparently she doesn’t get to that iconic TOTP appearance when she was seven months pregnant until three quarters of the way through the book. Sounds like an interesting read to be fair. In her interview with Graham we found out that the first record she ever bought was by Donny Osmond and that she’s now a grandmother – quite possibly the coolest grandmother ever but still a grandmother. Yeah, you feel old now don’t you. Me too.

From Neneh Cherry to the Manic Street Preachers via Bernard Butler. In the last post, I talked about how Suede recovered from the departure of their guitarist and song writer to return with their most commercial album ever. Butler, of course, is up there on stage with Neneh for this performance. And the Manics? Well, like Suede, they also lost a founding member from their line up around this time albeit in totally different circumstances with the disappearance of Richey Edwards. As with Suede, they bounced back with their biggest selling album ever in “Everything Must Go” the title track of which was released as the second single from it. I always preferred this to “A Design For Life” though I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it was that huge, orchestral swathe in the mix that they managed to produce that many in the music press compared to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. Apparently the song was written as an acknowledgment that since Edwards was no longer giving his input to the band, inevitably their identity and music had to change with the lyric “and I just hope that you can forgive us” a direct plea to the fans.

Despite the hopping around on one leg antics of James Dean Bradfield in this performance, I’m more drawn to the static drummer Sean Moore. It might be because he is stood up throughout as opposed to sat at a drum kit or it could very well be that his look here reminds me of the character of Garland Greene from 1997 film Con Air.

With this single, Eternal set a new record as the first all female group to score ten consecutive Top 20 hits in the UK. What a stinker of a song to do it with though. “Someday” was recorded for the Disney film The Hunchback Of Notre Dame though it only features as an instrumental with the full song having been discarded at the storyboarding stage. You can understand why. It’s a dreary, jaded, love-song- by-numbers snoozefest. In fact, I’d have been more entertained if Eternal had stood there on stage and spent three minutes making snoring noises. Apparently, “I Swear” hitmakers All-4-One recorded “Someday” as well and it’s their take that’s on the US version of the soundtrack. So why were Eternal asked to record it for the European soundtrack? I don’t get it. In an unusual disruption to their timeline, the group’s next single release was from their “Power Of A Woman” album but “Someday” would turn up on their 1997 studio album “Before The Rain” making a right mess of the chronology of their discography. Tsk.

The final three songs on the show have all been on before so I might whip through these at speed. We start with “Macarena” by Los Del Rio and can I get away with just signposting you to other versions of the song rather than thinking of something witty to say about it? I can? Marvellous!

OK, here’s the original 1993 version that sounds very different to the hit we all know and loathe that was The Bayside Boys remix:

Then there’s the Los Del Mar take on it which was out at the same time. Despite it being sung without any English lyrics, this lot were actually from Canada and it was their cover that was a big hit over there. That absence of English lyrics is pretty much the only difference to the Bayside Boys remix and yet amazingly, in Australia, they were both in the chart at the same time with Los Del Rio at No 1 and Los Del Mar at No 2. Just how do you explain that? Fortunately for the UK, the Los Del Mar version peaked at a lowly No 43.

There are loads of other versions including a country version by The GrooveGrass Boyz, a rap version by US rapper Tyga, an Italian version by Los Locos and even a take on it by Los Del Chipmunks (!). Finally, for those that really can’t stand the “Macarena”, there’s this…

Without wishing to discredit the aforementioned achievement of Eternal, I fear it was totally undermined, nay blown out of the water, by the chart feats of the Spice Girls. They are in the TOTP studio for the first time this week I think after two appearances from Japan and though the stage and space in which they have to work are much reduced, they give an energetic performance with Mel C even managing to get in her trademark backflip. “Wannabe” is into its second of seven weeks at No 1 and would be the second best selling single in 1996 in the UK after “Killing Me Softly” by the Fugees. That was literally just the start though. Of the eleven singles released during their career, nine would top the chart. They would sell 100 million records in total being both the best selling British act of the 90s and the best selling girl group of all time. Take that Eternal.

The play out video is “Freedom” by Robbie Williams. Now, if we’re talking chart records as we were Eternal and the Spice Girls, then we can’t ignore this man (whether you really want to or not). He has notched up seven No 1 singles and sold 77 million records worldwide. By 2008, he’d sold more albums in the UK than any other British solo artist in history. And yet somehow, it all started with this fairly straight cover of a George Michael song. Given that Robbie wouldn’t release anything else until “Old Before I Die” nine months later, I think “Freedom” could almost be a forgotten Williams single, like a false start. Indeed, it did not feature on either his 1999 compilation “The Ego Has Landed” that was initially released for the US and Australia markets nor his first official “Greatest Hits” album in 2004. However it was included on No the 2010 collection “In And Out Of Consciousness”.

Apparently, Williams was in a bad way when he filmed the video for “Freedom” struggling with an alcohol addiction and he certainly looks wild eyed in the promo – are his pupils dilated in some shots? He claims to have mimed to the original George Michael track as he hadn’t recorded his version before the video was filmed. Is that likely? Is that how it worked? Anyway, we’ll be seeing lots more of Mr Williams on TOTP in future repeats. As for Jas Mann, I’m not sure we will be seeing him again as he never presented the show after this (he was pretty shit to be fair) and he would only have one more UK hit when “The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes” made No 32. The odds on either him or Robbie becoming pop music superstars were probably evenly matched and low back then. Funny that.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Sean Maguire	Don’t Pull Your Love	Never
2	OMC	How Bizarre	No but my wife did
3	Alanis Morissette	Head Over Feet	No but I had the album
4	Alisha’s Attic	I Am, I Feel	Nope
5	Neneh Cherry	Woman	No but my wife had the album
6	Manic Street Preachers	Everything Must Go	See 3 above
7	Eternal	Someday	Negative
8	Los Del Rio	Macarena	As if
9	Spice Girls	Wannabe	No
10	Robbie Williams	Freedom	Nah

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0023k99/top-of-the-pops-02081996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 07 MAR 1996

Posted on June 14, 2024 by 80stastic

After Justine Frischmann the other week, now we get the other of the two biggest female names of the Britpop movement in the TOTP ‘golden mic’ slot. Louise Werner was/is, of course, the lead singer of Sleeper and as such the connection to and similarities with her Elastica counterpart were always going to be highlighted by a lazy music press. In March 1996, Sleeper were just about to reach the peak of their popularity with the release of sophomore album “The It Girl” just two months away. Said album would go platinum in the UK and harbour four hit singles. I caught Sleeper around this time at the Manchester Academy and they were pretty good as I remember. I always preferred Louise to Justine as she seemed the less intimidating of the two and, if I’m brutally honest, I fancied her more. There, I said it. Neither though seemed particularly at ease with the role of TOTP host and both came across as a bit awkward. Well, you can’t be good at everything I suppose (says the man who isn’t good at anything). As well as being singers in successful bands, both Justine and Louise had subsequent creative careers as an artist and author respectively.

Anyway, ready or not, it’s time for the music and we begin with a song called…erm…”Ready Or Not” by The Lightning Seeds. This was the lead single from their fourth album “Dizzy Heights” and was very much in the same vein as pretty much everything else they’d ever done – a jaunty, catchy, uplifting pop tune high on hooks but low on substance. Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite partial to the odd Lightning Seeds tune but even Ian Broudie would surely admit that his band were hardly Radiohead. This one though is perhaps a bit more lightweight than usual with lots of “La la la la’s” thrown into the mix including the whole of the outro. That’s maybe appropriate though given that the band’s drummer Chris Sharrock once played with The La’s as well as The Icicle Works and later Robbie Williams, Beady Eye and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds.

The song would share its title with a No 1 hit by The Fugees from later in the year but that’s not the only link between the two. As Euro 96 fever took hold of the country and “Three Lions” topped the charts, it traded places at No 1 that Summer with The Fugees’ cover of “Killing Me Softly” with both songs reaching the top of the charts on two separate occasions. Oh yes…”Three Lions”. I’m afraid it’s coming soon to these TOTP repeats. Oh, and the lyric in “Ready Or Not” that goes “It’s like the tipper most topper most high”? It was surely inspired by this John Lennon line:

Who are these people and what on earth are they doing? Well, the artist was Sasha & Maria but they’re not the two berks making tits of themselves messing around with what looks like a bedsheet. I think this tweet sums up my thoughts on the matter:

I was expecting Derek Smalls to come out of it tbh pic.twitter.com/b9ICqmeUwp
— George McIntosh (@georgemcintosh) May 31, 2024

Sasha was the Welsh DJ and record producer of Sasha and John Digweed fame whilst Maria was Maria Nayler who was a member of Ultraviolet in the early 90s and who would go on to guest on the Robert Miles hit “One And One” later in 1996. Here though, she was supplying the vocals for this, the similarly titled “Be As One”. Apparently, the track had been flooded into record shops via unlicensed white labels which led to Deconstruction Records contacting the BPI anti-piracy unit and taking out full page ads in the trade press to warn people off the illegal copies. Obviously, the track did/does nothing for me and watching it now it’s giving off strong Eurovision vibes but was clearly big in the clubs and made No 17 on the UK singles chart.

Louise Werner tries to loosen up a bit with an amusing reference in her next intro about Sleeper producer Stephen Street being called Jon Bum Bogey on account of his once big hair. OK, amusing might be pushing it but at least she’s trying. I’ve said it before but Bon Jovi were on a commercial role in this country in the mid 90s. Between 1993 and 1996 they racked up thirteen Top 40 hits including nine Top 10 entries. “These Days” was the penultimate of these and the title track of their 1995 album. A long way from the bluster of their poodle rock era, this was definitely showcasing their melancholy side – more “Save A Prayer” than “Livin’ On A Prayer” you might say. After one more hit, the band would take a pre-agreed four year hiatus before returning in 2000 with the “Crush” album. Whilst still a big name, I wonder though if the youth will know Jon as the father-in-law of Millie Bobby Brown rather than being the singer of one of the most successful rock bands of all time?

Next, we have one of those pointless hits. I don’t mean ‘pointless’ as in “what was the point of releasing that?” but rather Pointless as in the TV show. Asked to name an obscure Eternal single, an answer of “Good Thing” would definitely impress Alexander Armstrong. The third single from second album “Power Of A Woman”, it maybe wasn’t what we’d come to expect from the group. This was more of an – dare I use the word? – urban style rather than the slick, R&B/pop hybrid they’d been so successful with. Was it conceivable that the members of All Saints were set at home watching this performance and thought “Aye aye, we could do that but in cargo pants and crop tops”?

An interesting side plot to this hit is that the following week, ex-member Louise would release her second solo single “In Walked Love” which would peak at No 17 whereas “Good Thing” got to No 8. Chalk one up to Eternal but who was the ultimate winner in this battle do you reckon?

I’m getting really bogged down in all these dance tunes that have been on the show of late. Here’s another one. Gat Decor were, according to Wikipedia, one of the earliest exponents of ‘progressive house’ music. I’ve neither the time nor inclination to investigate what that particular strand of dance music was all about but having watched this performance of “Passion”, my uneducated view is that it’s yet another tune that resembles “Show Me Love” by Robin S. As for the track’s personal history, as Louise Werner says, it was originally a minor hit in 1992 as an instrumental but it was mashed up with “Do You Want It Right Now “ by Degrees Of Motion by an East London DJ who put out some DJ only copies of it turning it into an underground club sensation. Properly licensed and with vocals sung by Beverley Skeete, this 1996 version would peak at No 6.

After the bedsheet debacle of Sasha & Maria earlier, the now ubiquitous staging distraction for this dance hit was a guy behind Beverley giving off some strong Live And Let Die vibes.

Our host really tries to liven things up in her next intro which would no doubt be seen as inappropriate at the very least and possibly as racist now. Teeing up Boyzone who are live by satellite link from Korea, Louise says “I hope they’re not eating puppies or anything”. Gulp! Well, the lads definitely aren’t doing that as they’re too busy performing an especially lame song called “Coming Home Now”. This was their only single to be written solely by the five of them without any input from outside co-writers and it shows. There’s nothing really to this wisp of pop fluff that drifts aimlessly along to destination nowhere. It would be their only hit not to make the UK Top 3 in the first part of their career before their initial split in 2000. Interesting to note that Shane Lynch and Keith Duffy are only allowed to do the short, spoken word parts rather than a spotlight vocal like Ronan Keating and Stephen Gately get to do. As for poor old Mikey Graham, he’s not allowed to do anything except be in the background which was pretty much his only contribution to Boyzone ever. Talking of splits, they must have been thinking “we’re in here” when the news of Take That’s forthcoming break up hit the headlines. Indeed they were as their next two singles of 1996 would both go to No 1. The King is dead, long live The King!

The Women of Britpop theme continues now with Louise Werner introducing Camden drinking buddies Lush who are in the studio to perform their single “Ladykillers”. Probably the band’s most well known song, it was deliberately written by lead singer Miki Berenyi to be a hit with her admitting it was her attempt to give the press what they wanted, an affirmation of the band’s Britpop credentials. This may explain why it sounds like “Waking Up” by Elastica which itself lent heavily from “No More Heroes” by The Stranglers. The song has been taken up as a feminist statement due to its lyrics that lampoon the sexual bravado of men towards women. A few months later the Spice Girls would take up the baton and go global with their ‘Girl Power’ slogan. I suspect that Lush would have preferred another drink down the Good Mixer, Camden Town than all that world domination business though.

It’s Britpop overload as the next act on are Supergrass with their “Going Out” hit. When they performed this as an ‘exclusive’ the other week, did they have the brass trio with them? I’m sure I would have remembered three guys who looked like Tom Petty, Bill Bailey and Mike Barson from Madness (it isn’t him is it?). I saw Supergrass live in York in the early 2000s and they refused to play “Alright”. That’s the last time I spend an evening ‘going out’ with them.

Take That have predictably gone straight in at No 1 with their ‘final’ single “How Deep Is Your Love”. Their run of success was quite remarkable with eight of their last nine singles topping the chart. In my head, they absolutely were a singles band with their albums not as successful but a quick check of their discography shows that the three albums of the first part of their career all sold well with the biggest being “Everything Changes” which shifted 1.3 million copies in the UK alone. I think it was the fact that they’d released more videos than albums (six to three) by this point that made me undervalue them. A few years later I was living in York and hosted a pub quiz as the regular guy was on holiday. I included a question about Take That and made the mistake of making a derisive comment about them (this was before their wildly successful comeback in 2006) and was perhaps rightfully rounded on by the assembled throng of quizzers. Take that indeed!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	The Lightning Seeds	Ready Or Not	Not
2	Sasha & Maria	Be As One	No chance
3	Bon Jovi	These Days	Nah
4	Eternal	Good Thing	No
5	Gat Decor	Passion	As if
6	Boyzone	Coming Home Now	Never
7	Lush	Ladykillers	Nope
8	Supergrass	Going Out	I did not
9	Take That	How Deep Is Your Love	No but my wife had their Greatest Hits CD

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/m001zqtv/top-of-the-pops-07031996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP Rewind – the 90s

My memories of 90s chart music

TOTP 17 OCT 1997

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TOTP 10 OCT 1997

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TOTP 20 JUN 1997

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TOTP 13 JUN 1997

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TOTP 06 JUN 1997

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TOTP 30 MAY 1997

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TOTP 07 MAR 1997

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TOTP 16 AUG 1996

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TOTP 02 AUG 1996

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TOTP 07 MAR 1996

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