Jason Donovan

TOTP 22 JUL 1993

Posted on September 21, 2022 by 80stastic

Look, I know that TOTP producer Stanley Appel couldn’t possibly have known that twenty-nine years on from deciding the running orders for these shows that I would be writing a review of each one and that the more acts that he shoehorned into thirty minutes, the more words I would have to write but damn! These TOTP repeats are killing me. This edition has thirteen acts on it. Thirteen! Bastards! Right then. No time for an intro about what else was happening in the world to form a theme for the post. As Duckie said in Pretty In Pink, “Let’s plow”…

The voice and co-writer of “Unfinished Sympathy” begins the show as Shara Nelson starts “Down That Road” of being a solo artist. She looked fair set to become a huge star as well. With her fly Massive Attack credentials and being signed to Cooltempo Records (home of Carleen Anderson, Arrested Development, The Brand New Heavies and…erm…Kenny Thomas), she had credibility as well as a decent debut tune. She also had a Mercury Music Prize nominated album in “What Silence Knows” which would furnish her with four Top 40 hits. Yet somehow that huge career that seemed inevitable got away from her. Second album “Friendly Fire” performed poorly and then she rather disappeared for a bit before resurfacing to collaborate with the likes of producer and DJ Charles ‘Presence’ Webster.

“Down That Road” managed to combine some cool vibes with a crossover appeal that would see it gain plenty of daytime airplay. It was also one of those records that had a tiny but crucial instrumental hook that lodged itself in your brain – that little sax parp after Shara sings the word ‘road’ in the chorus (see also the final strum of Billy Duffy’s guitar in the riff to “She Sells Sanctuary”).

Something I wasn’t aware of though was that DJ Pete Tong obtained a restraining order against Shara in 2011 following her 12 month community order and community service sentence for harassment of Tong and his wife! Blimey! She really shouldn’t have gone down that road.

“Down That Road” peaked at No 19.

Roxette are next with their highest ever chart entry as “Almost Unreal” crashes into the Top 10 at No 7. It’s their first time back there since “Joyride” made No 4 two years previously but they shouldn’t have got carried away with themselves as it will also be their very last time there in the UK and the song itself was almost universally panned by critics. Even the band themselves didn’t like it stating in the liner notes to their 1995 Greatest Hits album “Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus!” that “if you wanted to make a parody of Roxette, it would probably sound something like this”. Erm, no. This is how a parody of Roxette sounds..

Anyway, “Almost Unreal” was from the film Super Mario Bros which I’ve never seen but I’m led to believe stank out every cinema it played in around the world. Just like Roxette not liking their song from it, the film’s star Bob Hoskins was even more scathing about the actual movie.

“The worst thing I ever did? Super Mario Brothers. It was a fuckin’ nightmare. The whole experience was a nightmare. It had a husband-and-wife team directing, whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks their own agent told them to get off the set! Fuckin’ nightmare. Fuckin’ idiots.”
Hattenstone, Simon (August 3, 2007). “The Method? Living it out? Cobblers!”. The Guardian.

The song was originally intended for the film Hocus Pocus hence the lyric “I love when you do that hocus pocus to me” but was pulled at the last minute and transferred to the Super Mario Bros project. The soundtrack featured an eclectic collection of artists from Megadeth to Charles and Eddie to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch via Us3 (more of whom later).

Host Mark Franklin gives what must be one of the most underwhelming introductions in TOTP history. “Here’s a song that’s done well gradually” he tells us. Gradually?! You couldn’t have gone with “Here’s a song that’s climbing the charts” or “Here’s a song that’s finally getting the recognition it deserves” Mark? Anyway, the record is “The Key The Secret” by Urban Cookie Collective.

Now to be fair to Franklin, the single did take a while to climb the charts and had quite the gestation period. It was released in its original format on the tiny Unheard Records label but when a remix of it sent clubbers rushing to their nearest dance floor, it was given a bigger push on Pulse 8. Even then, radio was resistant to its crossover appeal but when it finally entered the Top 40, they couldn’t cock a deaf ‘un (as my Dad might say) any longer. It would go on to rise as high as No 2 and become one of the biggest dance tunes of the decade.

The hanging gold key in the background to this performance has a nativity play scenery feel to it but then apparently the song was written about taking magic mushrooms so maybe it looked better if you were under the influence.

For my money, OMD have one of the best back catalogue’s of Top 40 hits out there. By 1993 though, I’d lost sight of them completely to the extent that this single – “Dream Of Me (Based On Love’s Theme)” passed me by completely. The second of three singles released from the patchy “Liberator” album, it was structured around the 1974 US No 1 “Love’s Theme” by Barry White’s The Love Unlimited Orchestra. I was only five when the original was a hit but didn’t Gary Davies use it to soundtrack ‘The Sloppy Bit’ of his Radio 1 show? I think he did.

Anyway, back to OMD and whilst I can appreciate the idea of what Andy McCluskey was trying to do with the track, I’m not entirely sure he pulls it off. Supposedly the single version is different from its album counterpart with the Barry White samples stripped out but I’m not sure that I can tell the difference having listened to both. Whichever version it is on TOTP, at least the slower bpm of the track has toned down McCluskey’s legendary wiggy dancing.

OMD would only return to the UK Top 40 one more time in 1996 with the rather lovely “Walking On The Milky Way”.

The Breakers are the reason that there’s thirteen songs on tonight’s show as there’s five of them! The first three are all dance tunes starting with “Take A Free Fall” by Dance 2 Trance.

This was the follow up to “Power Of American Natives” but I couldn’t really care less about that. What’s intriguing me about this track is the guy in the video zooming about on some sort of flying Minecraft piece. The look of it reminded me of something and I finally remembered what it was…

Go to 2:33

It’s all about the record labels tonight. After name checking Cooltempo earlier here comes an act that you can’t talk about without mentioning the legendary record label that they were on. Us3 were all about Blue Note Records the American jazz label which released recordings by everybody from Miles Davis to Art Blakey to Horace Silver (and yes I only know those names from the jazz section of every Our Price store I ever worked in). Not only were they signed to the label but their debut album “Hand On The Torch” only featured samples from tracks that were released by Blue Note. Even their name came from an album produced by Alfred Lion, the founder of Blue Note Records. They were totally committed.

“Tukka Yoot’s Riddim” was the jazz-rappers’ first chart hit when it peaked at No 34 (btw another song that Mark Franklin described using the word ‘gradually’ – “this song’s getting there gradually” he says) but I reckon most people know them for their hit “Cantaloop” which was their biggest chart placing when it was rereleased after this single and made No 23. I must admit to sometimse confusing them with the similarly named Oui 3 who were their chart peers.

And another dance tune! This one is from techno ravers N–Joi and their “The Drumstruck EP”. This was their belated follow up to “Live In Manchester EP” that was a No 12 hit in February of 1992. It all sounds like a load of bleeps to me. Much more interesting is that one of the guys in N-Joi was called Mark Franklin! How did TOTP host Mark Franklin not comment on this in his intro?!

“The Drumstruck EP” peaked at No 33.

Around 1992/93 was the time in REM’s career when they did the whole Michael Jackson thing. I don’t mean they bought a chimpanzee and called it Bubbles though. No. They were releasing loads of tracks from their latest album as singles. “Nightswimming” was the fifth of six singles to come off the “Automatic For The People” album and like its immediate predecessor “Everybody Hurts”, it was quite the melancholic number. Based around Mike Mills’s memorable piano melody and not much else, it remains a beautiful piece of music. It was recorded at the same studio where Derek And The Dominos laid down “Layla” with Mills playing the same piano that was used in its famous coda.

In my head, this was only released as a limited edition 10” but I can’t find anything to substantiate that online and in any case, that would have severely limited its chart potential so maybe I just imagined it.

“Nightswimming” peaked at No 27.

Just what we all needed. A retread of a Grease song by an ex-Neighbours soap star. We’d been in similar territory just two years before when Jason Donovan took “Any Dream Will Do” to No 1 when the single was released to promote the soundtrack to the West End version of Joseph And The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat he was starring in. In 1993, it was the turn of Jason’s Neighbours pal Craig McLachlan to advertise the West End show he was in which was Grease via the track “You’re The One That I Want” with 80s popster Debbie Gibson.

Look, one of my abiding childhood memories is that of the Summer of 1978 when the film version of Grease was everywhere and you couldn’t escape from John Travolta and Olivia Newton John so I have a great affection for the songs from it but if you were going to buy any of its music then surely you’d go for the film soundtrack and not the 1993 London Cast Recording album? From Craig and Debbie’s perspectives, it was probably a good career move as both of their time as a pop star was coming to an end and I’m sure they were great in the show but this all seemed a tad unnecessary.

After that little Grease interlude, we’re back onto the dance music as Utah Saints graduate from being a Breaker last week to appearing in the studio this with “I Want You”.

I’d liked their other singles up to this point but this one was rather lost on me possibly because it didn’t employ a vocal sample like its predecessors with the band’s Jez Willis provided the vocals instead. I can think of at least two other songs called “I Want You” I’d rather listen to. Firstly there’s the Inspiral Carpets / Mark E Smith collaboration from 1994:

Then there this wonderfully atmospheric track from Elvis Costello’s 1986 album called “Blood And Chocolate”…

OK, so this show has been dominated by dance singles of various hues but I do think that Stanley Appel’s stewardship of TOTP did try and reflect other musical genres. The other week they had The Levellers on and now here’s another band who would have been considered outside of the mainstream. So much so that this was the band’s first (and I’m guessing last) ever appearance in the TOTP studio. The Waterboys though were on a roll (for them) with a second consecutive Top 40 hit in “Glastonbury Song”.

The follow up to “The Return Of Pan”, it was the second single from their “Dream Harder” album which was seen as possessing a much harder rock sound than previously heard form them but it came at a cost causing those old musical differences to splinter the existing line up. Mike Scott was left as the only true member of the band and the album was completed with session musicians. The next logical step was for Scott to go full solo and he did do with the next two releases put out under his own name.

He certainly looks like a solo act in this performance as everything centres around him and his floppy, red hat. In fact, the headgear, the long hair and being sat permanently at his keyboards, he reminds me a bit of Gilbert O’Sullivan in his 70s heyday. The song’s not bad actually and possibly the most radio friendly since “The Whole Of The Moon”. Oh and apparently, The Waterboys have had more members than the aforementioned Mark E. Smith’s The Fall. No really.

Talking of ‘aforementioned’ people, here’s Jason Donovan. I know, I can’t believe he had another TOTP appearance in him but this really was the last knockings of his pop career. In fact, this must be his final time on the show. How do I know? Because this single “All Around The World” didn’t even make the Top 40 and he didn’t release another single until 2007 and the show finished in 2006. The song really is a stinker, just awful. Talk about going out on a low. Jason has found gainful employment though and is now fronting an advertising campaign for the People’s Postcode Lottery.

Take That still hold the No 1 spot with “Pray”. We get the video this week and it’s basically just the lads getting their pecs out with chests being bared roughly every five seconds. It was pure titillation for their army of teenage girl fans. At least they didn’t get the jelly out like they did for their very first single “Do What U Like”. Small mercies and all that.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Shara Nelson	Down That Road	No but my wife had the album
2	Roxette	Almost Unreal	No
3	Urban Cookie Collective	The Key The Secret	Nope
4	OMD	Dream Of Me (Based On Love’s Theme)	Not but I have its on a Greatest Hits album I think
5	Dance 2 Trance	Take A Free Fall	Negative
6	Us3	Tukka Yoot’s Riddim	Nah
7	N-Joi	The Drumstuck EP	Never happening
8	REM	Nightswimming	No but I had their album
9	Craig McLachlan and Debbie Gibson	You’re The One That I Want	As if
10	Utah Saints	I Want You	But I didn’t want you
11	The Waterboys	Glastonbury Song	I did not
12	Jason Donovan	All Around The World	Ha! Of course not
13	Take That	Pray	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/m001c1qs/top-of-the-pops-22071993

TOTP 26 NOV 1992

Posted on May 13, 2022 by 80stastic

Late November in 1992 was a sad time. I’m not talking about the Queen who two days before this TOTP broadcast had described the year as her annus horribilis as the Royal Family was involved in various scandals plus there was a fire at Windsor castle. Compared to the brouhaha they find themselves enveloped in today, photos of Fergie topless don’t seem such a big deal it seems to me but maybe life was a tad more innocent 30 years ago? Viewed against the daily shitshow of the 2020s, so far it does seem so. Anyway, it wasn’t the Windsors I was referring to but the fact that a major presence of British cultural life would come to an end in four days time. I speak, of course, of The Sooty Show! Yes, the original long running programme bid farewell on 30 November 1992 after 37 years on our screens. It wasn’t away for long returning just a year later as the rebranded Sooty & Co and then Sooty Heights and even today exists courtesy of Richard Cadell who bought the rights to the Sooty brand in 2008. The ending of a 37 year old TV show seems like quite a big deal though. Neighbours is ending soon after an almost identical length of run and there seems to be quite a fuss in the media about that so if it’s good enough for Scott and Charlene there it’s good enough for Sooty and Sweep. So much did Sooty permeate society that he’s responsible for this memorable spoof from my childhood:

What has this to do with TOTP? Nothing really but you find different ways to introduce a review of early 90s chart music on a twice weekly basis without resorting to such tactics!

OK, so like Sooty, EMF we’re also having problems staying as popular as they once were. Having arrived on the charts in 1990 like a bowling ball, skittling their contemporaries down and out with their irresistible “Unbelievable” single and Top 3 album “Schubert Dip”, it had been a case of diminishing returns for the Epsom Mad Funkers since. Two years on and sophomore album “Stigmata” would peak at No 19 and worse still, spend just two weeks on the charts. Its singles also underperformed. Lead track “They’re Here” barely made the Top 30 whilst follow up “It’s You” fared little better peaking at No 23 despite this TOTP appearance.

I didn’t remember how this one went at all but having listened to it back, it’s pretty good. They’ve toned down the frenetic pace of their earlier catalogue for a more (dare I say it) mature sound. This new found maturity is undermined rather by the band’s ‘slacker’ wardrobe which they are still persisting with two years on from their debut on the scene. That and the way in which the song’s chorus sounds like singer James Atkin is sneezing but I still quite like it.

Talking of maturity, the band have recently released a new album called “Go Go Sapiens” and are featured in the latest issue of Classic Pop magazine. Man, the look like any old geezers now but then, don’t we all?

It’s the video for “Yesterdays” by Guns N’ Roses next which provides the musical backdrop for the chart rundown for Nos 40 to 11. The band were in total turmoil by this point, engulfed in a trail of controversy as they straddled the planet on their Use Your Illusion tour. They’d haemorrhaged two band members in Izzy Stradlin and Steven Adler during the course of it, caused riots in St Louis and Montreal and in September guitarist Slash actually died for eight minutes after a drug overdose before being revived by paramedics.

At the time of this particular TOTP they were in Caracas, Venezuela and got caught up in a military coup which found them stranded there as airbases were seized. They eventually made it out and flew into Bogota, Columbia as the tour of carnage continued. Remember when rock star transgressions were just about fast cars and women? Talking of which…

From (literally) death defying rock to a comfy as a pair of slippers cover version. Undercover are back with their tribute to Andrew Gold’s “Never Let Her Slip Away”. For some reason the producers have dressed the stage up as if it were the deck of a Titanic style ship complete with a SS Undercover lifeboat and lifebuoy. I have no idea why. Undercover would never be as successful again as they were at this moment. Two consecutive Top 5 hits, multiple TOTP appearances – not bad for what was quite a ropey old concept really. However, the iceberg of chart failure was lurking unseen in their path and when they hit it, the journey was over almost immediately. There was time for one final Top 40 hit when their version of Gallagher and Lyle’s “I Wanna Stay With You” made No 28 but really they were just rearranging the deckchairs while the good ship Undercover sank.

To be fair, they weren’t the first to dance up some old rock pop staples for a more youthful audience nor the last. East Side Beat scored a big hit the previous year with their Eurodance version of “Ride Like The Wind” by Christopher Cross and then in 1995 Nikki French took her Hi-NRG take on Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” into the Top 5. It just all seemed like lowest common denominator music to me. What’s the least we could get away with and still bag some chart success.

I think singer John Matthews still performs using the Undercover name on the nostalgia circuit. I really hope he does those slots on cruise liners that seem to be popular for retro artists now. He’s also a massive Arsenal fan whose Champions League qualification hopes sank recently as easily as the Titanic.

Whilst Sooty, Sweep and Sue were about to experience cancel culture nearly 30 years before it was invented, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine were riding the zeitgeist in 1992. “The Impossible Dream (The Quest)” was their fourth Top 40 hit of the year whilst their “1992 – The Love Album” went to the top of the charts! It could be argued that all this success had gone to Fruitbat and Jim Bob’s heads as apparently they genuinely believed that they had a shot at the Xmas No 1 with this release. They even tried to start a fake war with the King of Xmas Cliff Richard via a poster campaign that said ‘Don’t Buy Cliff, Buy Carter’. In the end, they massively misjudged their chances and the single peaked at No 21.

The song itself has quite the history. Taken from the 1965 Broadway musical Man Of La Mancha, it has been recorded by some legendary names. Look at this list:

Frank Sinatra
Elvis Presley
Jack Jones
Jacques Brel
Shirley Bassey
Matt Monro
Andy Williams
Scott Walker
and erm…Susan Boyle

CUSM were an unlikely addition to that list for sure and I’m not entirely sure they did the song justice. Still, the staging of this performance with the windmill image in the background at least made sense unlike the SS Undercover.

If you really want a song based on a fictional character who picked fights with windmills then you could do worse than listen to this:

Just the two Breakers this week starting with…oh joy…Shabba Ranks and a little ditty he’s recorded with Johnny Gill called “Slow And Sexy”. Lovely stuff. Shabba (!) had already released a track this year called “Love Punanny Bad” which presumably influenced the comedy creation Ali G. You’d never get any of this smut with Sooty!

*checks YouTube to ensure there isn’t a blue, Rainbow style version of Sooty*

Phew! Anyway, this was just a precursor to the biggest era of Shabba’s popularity when “Mr Loverman” was rereleased in 1993 (it had been a No 23 hit earlier this year) and he became a part of that unholy ‘S’ trinity alongside Snow and Shaggy. Dear God!

Now I’ve heard of the concept of the difficult second album. It’s a well known idea that sees a band put their creative juices into writing their debut with all their life experiences so far contributing to the songs. Said debut garners huge commercial success which instigates pressure from the record company to immediately come up with a second hit album just 12 months later. I’m also familiar with ‘third album syndrome’ where a band struggles to define their musical identity after the whirlwind of recording, promoting and touring the first two albums. But ‘fourth album complex’? Not so much.

That was what appeared to be afflicting Deacon Blue in late ‘92 though. With their fourth album “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” due for release early the following year, lead single “Your Town” was sent out into the busy Xmas market to plug it. Maybe not the best time to trail your new sound on reflection. For it was a new sound. I recall quite some coverage in the media about how this wasn’t the Deacon Blue that we had all come to know and love – well some of us anyway.

After the well crafted pop gems of the first three albums, the band seemed to decide that they needed to add a bit of a dance edge to their work to remain credible in the light of the continuing take over of the charts by that genre. Deacon Blue go dance?! Well, sort of. I mean they didn’t turn into 2 Unlimited overnight or anything like that but “Your Town” definitely sounded different. Beginning with a drawn out, repeated wail from Lorraine McKintosh, it built steadily via some shimmering blips and bleeeps until the driving backing track kicked in. Then came Ricky Ross’s vocals that sounded like they were being sung through a megaphone (or possibly a vocoder?). It was disarming but I presume deliberate. There was a song structure to it of sorts but they’d certainly played around with it. The coda for example was one, long play out with no vocals other than the return of Lorraine’s wail at the end. To be fair, it lent it a soundtrack style epic feel.

For all that, I dismissed it at the time as being experimental bollocks. The fact that the single came with various dance mixes including a Perfecto one didn’t impress me – in fact it depressed me. It was no “Dignity” that’s for sure. Listening to it now, I think that was a hasty judgement that could do with some heavy revision . The album made No 4 and achieved gold status sales. Nothing to be sniffed at but also way below the sales of their first three albums. It would prove to be their final one of the decade and their last for eight whole years.

A milestone next as after nearly five years, we have arrived at Kylie Minogue’s last ever single with PWL/ Stock, Aitken and Waterman. “Celebration” was the single in question, a cover of the Kool And The Gang hit from 1980 and the second single to be pulled from her very first Greatest Hits album. It was also her 19th UK chart hit. 19th! In five years. Just under four a year every year. Like her or loath her, she was prolific. Sadly, I don’t think her voice is really up to interpreting this disco classic. The staging for this studio performance is convincing enough though, giving off a real 70s disco vibe…despite erm…the song being sung dating from 1980. It all just makes the Undercover performance even more perplexing.

“Celebration” peaked at No 20.

From Kylie to Jason (nearly an early KLF song title there). This surely must have been a deliberate decision on the running order by the TOTP producers? It’s hard to tell if Kylie and Jason Donovan were in the studio together at the same time as there’s a weird, swirling, pixelated effect on the camera shot from the former to the latter but I don’t think it’s a retransmission of his performance from the other week as he’s wearing different clothes.

“As Time Goes By” was the single he was plugging and it stank of desperation for a big hit. The fact that it peaked at No 26 and was his last ever UK chart entry tells you everything you need to know about Jason’s decline in popularity by this point. It’s quite a moment in time. Kylie severs her ties with SAW and embarks on a career that is still going to this day and has brought her both sales and credibility. Jason meanwhile had also recently left SAW and can’t get arrested. Bye Jason. Thanks for…everything?!

Another week and another ‘exclusive’ performance which this time is live from Los Angeles and is Rod Stewart sporting a beard and continuing in his quest to convince the world that he is Tom Waits. Not content with murdering “Downtown Train”, he’s now having a hack at “Tom Traubert’s Blues”. The opening track of Tom’s 1976 album “Small Change”, it’s based on Australian folk tune and unofficial national anthem “Waltzing Matilda”. Just to make sure all us Neanderthals realised this, Rod has helpfully renamed his version “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Waltzing Matilda)”. Cheers for that Rod.

It’s an OK version I guess in that he doesn’t completely ruin it but you’d have to worry about someone who thought Rod’s was the definitive take on the song. It was clearly released with an eye on the Xmas No 1 and to be fair it gave a decent account of itself by rising to No 6. One final thing, that’s not Huey Lewis on the piano in this performance surely?

Charles And Eddie are still No 1 with “Would I Lie To You” but not for much longer. They bow out with the second live by satellite performance of the show, this time from Toronto, Canada. When these were first introduced at the start of the ‘year zero’ era, I guess they seemed different and were an attempt to shake up the old format but a year on I can’t really see the point of them. They tend to be in empty venues (possibly due to the time differences) and they generate very little in the way of excitement. There’s not even any interaction with the presenters anymore (as excruciating as that was!). I get that the artists featured are either on tour or doing promotional work and couldn’t be in the TOTP studio but just show the video instead. Really.

As for Charles And Eddie, unlike Sooty and friends, their appeal would not endure and despite winning three Ivor Novello awards for “Would I Lie To You”, they would achieve only three more minor UK hit singles before disbanding in 1995.

And finally some bonus content…

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	EMF	It’s You	Nope
2	Guns N’ Roses	Yesterdays	Not the single but I have it on a Greatest Hits CD
3	Undercover	Never Let Her Slip Away	Never happening
4	Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine	The Impossible Dream (The Quest)	I did not
5	Shabba Ranks and Johnny Gill	Slow And Sexy	As if
6	Deacon Blue	Your Town	Nah
7	Kylie Minogue	Celebration	No but my wife had that Greatest Hits album of hers
8	Jason Donovan	As Time Goes By	No
9	Rod Stewart	Tom Traubert’s Blues (Waltzing Matilda)	No but I think my wife has the Tom Waits album it’s from
10	Charles And Eddie	Would I Lie To You?	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00170d8/top-of-the-pops-26111992

TOTP 12 NOV 1992

Posted on May 5, 2022 by 80stastic

It’s the 1,500th edition of TOTP and you know what, it feels like I’ve reviewed most of them in this blog! OK, obviously I haven’t but I have done every BBC4 repeat from 1983 to 1992 and counting. That’s a whole 10 years, about 400 shows and over 1 million words written! I must be mad!

Anyway, I’m carrying on for now so its time to clear my head and free my mind…with opening act En Vogue! They’re in the studio after being on video as a Breaker last week and deliver a pumped up, provocative performance in keeping with the importance of the message in their song “Free Your Mind”. Written in response to the Rodney King riots in LA, it borrows lyrically from Funkadelic’s “Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow”. The energy that the group bring to their performance here is matched by their collective spirit that sees each of the four members taking centre stage in turn. That’s how you open a show!

Sadly, that group unity wasn’t to last and in subsequent years the band’s line up went through so many comings and goings they made Sugababes look like U2. Then there were the lawsuits and legal challenges to the use of the name En Vogue that rivalled the ridiculous Bucks Fizz name saga. Seriously, just check out the History section of their Wikipedia entry. It’s exhausting!

“Free Your Mind” peaked at No 16.

So given this is a huge anniversary for TOTP, surely this edition will be a massive celebration of the show. Well, maybe but so far there’s a very forlorn looking balloon with 1500 on it behind presenter Mark Franklin who’s opening gambit to put us in a party mood is to give us some fairly basic TOTP trivia (who needed to know or was wowed by there having been 57 presenters up to this point?!). It reminds me of those The Apprentice candidates during the task where they have to put on a corporate away day event at Silverstone or at a brewery and act as tour guides.

Anyway, Franklin has some music to get us partying in the form of the nostalgia section and for the big day the producers have chosen “Baby Love” by The Supremes. As iconic songs go, this one is right up there with it being a concurrent UK and US No 1 and therefore making The Supremes the first Motown group to achieve a chart topping record in the former territory. It’s surely one of the most well known songs in the Motown catalogue.

The group were on tour in the UK at the time of this TOTP recording therefore allowing them to appear. The black and white film somehow lends it more credence as an historic tune. The towering beehive hairdos on display are quite something. Indeed, Diana Ross’s slight frame looks hardly capable of withstanding the weight of it. Although Ross was the one who would end up as the biggest star out of the group, the lives of other founding members Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard are also major stories in themselves. Indeed, they were paid tribute to in the play and film adaptation Dreamgirls with the characters of Effie White and Lorrell Robinson being based on Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson respectively.

Bringing the party mood down a few notches is Michael Bolton who is performing his version of “To Love Somebody” to promote his “Timeless: The Classics” album. I know it’s an obvious comment but the Bollers hair really was monstrous wasn’t it? If you’re going to have long hair, at least keep it in good condition. His has the texture of straw and looks like it’s been dragged through a hedge backwards.

Michael is up there on his lonesome with just the dry ice machine for company. There’s some sort of pool structure in the middle of the stage that makes the dry ice look like it’s flooding over. It’s like that scene with the three witches from Macbeth and a cauldron. Maybe Bolton was trying to cook up a spell for some hair conditioner.

“To Love Somebody” peaked at No 16.

The camera swings and we leave Michael Bolton and his bubbling cauldron to focus on Vanessa Paradis who is back in the studio to perform “Be My Baby”. After her lacklustre showing the other week, will she be able to give a more lively turn this time? It is a party after all. Well, Vanessa has clearly tried to jazz up her outfit for the occasion but it looks like Martin Fry caught her raiding his wardrobe halfway through and she’s only managed to snaffle his trousers. She does try to move about a bit more this time but she’s still left looking like she’s only just learned the song lyrics that afternoon and therefore hadn’t had time to work out any dance moves to go with the singing.

Despite continuing to record and release music until as recently as 2019, she never had another UK Top 40 hit. I wonder if her stage presence ever got any better?

Now here’s a band to light up a party! Admittedly not any party I’d want to attend but at least they’re in the right ball park. After converting Gerry Rafferty’s soft rock classic “Baker Street” into a dance anthem for those whose only dance steps were the nerd shuffle, Undercover have turned their attention to another daytime radio staple in Andrew Gold’s “Never Let Her Slip Away”. Now I have to admit to having quite the soft spot for Andrew. “Lonely Boy” is a fab song and “Thank You For Being A Friend” reminds me of watching Golden Girls in our tiny first flat in Manchester. Plus, he was in Wax with 10cc’s Graham Gouldman who had a couple of nifty pop tunes that I liked.

As for “Never Let Her Slip Away”, it had originally been a No 5 hit for Gold in 1978 and had been described by Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters no less as “the most beautiful piece of music ever written”. Wow! As for Undercover’s version, it’s in exactly the same style as their treatment of “Baker Street” which had found a level of popularity back then so I can’t really call them out for sticking to the formula but it was as lifeless as a Vanessa Paradis gig. That didn’t stop it equalling Gold’s chart peak of No 5 though.

Of course, if you are looking for a cover version of “Never Let Her Slip Away” then there’s always this:

Ah come on! A joke’s a joke but nobody’s laughing anymore. Is this the third time on the show for Ambassadors Of Funk and “Supermarioland”? This made Undercover look like Muse. How could the producers have put this on the 1,500th show?! Away with you!

We’ve finally got there. It felt at times like a journey with no end and it’s taken four years worth of TOTP repeats but we’ve reached Jason Donovan’s final UK Top 40 hit. It’s not quite his final appearance on the show as he’s on again in a couple of weeks but “As Time Goes By” was his last chart entry. Yes, it’s that “As Time Goes By” from the classic film Casablanca. A couple of things to say about this one straight off the bat. Firstly, why was Jason Donovan covering this iconic tune? Secondly, how on earth was this a suitable tune for such a milestone show?

Well, it came from Jason’s difficult third album “All Around The World” which was his first since leaving Stock, Aitken and Waterman and came out on Polydor. So little faith did the label have in their new charge that they licensed six of his old hits to add to the track listing to drum up some interest. Donovan was not impressed supposedly but then the public weren’t impressed by the album which was a commercial failure and would be his last studio album for 15 years. OK but why cover “As Time Goes By”? There’s a theory that it could be a shameless case of opportunism as there was a successful TV series of the same name on our screens at the time starring Dame Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer that used the song as its theme tune but that could just be coincidence.

As for it being an odd choice for the 1,500th TOTP, well, as host Mark Franklin says, he was about to tour at the time so maybe there was some negotiation between Polydor and the producers to get him on the show to promote that. Also, he had been a very regular artist on the show over the past four years so maybe he was seen as a deserving choice as one of TOTP’s most prolific guests.

Clearly his new label were trying to restyle him away from his SAW puppet past and mould him into a modern day crooner. Their dastardly plan failed but perhaps watching on was a certain Simon Cowell who may just have thought that their was mileage in this idea. Two years later he would persuade actors Robson Green and Jerome Flynn to cash in in their successful roles in ITV drama Soldier Soldier and record a version of “Unchained Melody” on his S Records label via BMG. It would become the biggest selling UK single of 1995. If only Jason Donovan had remained in Neighbours and not left in 1989 he might have pulled the crooner trick off. Oh hang on. Aren’t he and Kylie making an appearance in the forthcoming last ever episode of the Aussie soap? I don’t think I could stomach a second Jason Donovan pop career.

“As Time Goes By” peaked at No 26.

The camera pans once more this time ensuring that there’s a shot of a chandelier suspended from the studio ceiling in view. Has that been there every week or had it been rapidly erected especially for the 1,500th show? Anyway, as we move away from the chandelier the focus falls on the other stage where Charles And Eddie await their cue to perform “Would I Lie To You?”. As part of his introduction, Mark Franklin gives us some rudimentary maths to work out that over the years, TOTP has delivered over 900 hours of music from acts in the studio. Hmm. The script writers not doing Mark any favours there. He’s coming across like one of those office party bores you desperately don’t want to get stuck talking to.

Meanwhile, Charles And Eddie have gone from being a Breaker last week straight to No 2. A chart topping record now seemed inevitable. Although often referred to as one hit wonders, the duo did actually have a further three UK Top 40 chart entries though none got any higher than No 29 so that misconception is understandable. I have to admit that, probably like many other people, I was confused as to which one was which. Whichever one it was with the long hair had a very distinctive look; sort of like Lou Diamond Phillips in Young Guns as Chavez y Chavez the Mexican-American outlaw. Or possibly “I Got You Babe” era Cher.

Are Charles And Eddie still with us?

*checks Wikipedia*

Well, sadly Charles Pettigrew (who was the black guy) died of cancer in 2001 aged just 37. Eddie Chacon is still alive though and after working as a photographer after the duo split, returned to making music in 2020 with the ridiculously titled song “My Mind Is Out Of Its Mind”.

Now if you’re going to have a celebration to mark the 1,500th show and have been building up to the moment for weeks with nostalgia clips from the archive, then nothing screams “PAAARTY!” like Neil Diamond singing “Morning Has Broken” I always say! God almighty what were they thinking?! Look, I don’t mind a bit of Diamond. I own his Best Of that came out in 1992. Hell, I’ve even seen him live at the KC Stadium in Hull a few years back but this?! This is excruciating! It’s brutal. It’s…just vile.

I didn’t think the producers could have made a worse choice to celebrate their anniversary than Jason Donovan but somehow they managed it. The whole thing is just wrong in every possible way. Why “Morning Has Broken”? It was taken from his “The Christmas Album” so let’s just look at that a moment. That was the best title he could come up with for a Christmas album? “The Christmas Album”?! Come on! And is “Morning Has Broken” even a Christmas song?! It’s a Christian hymn that is often sung at funeral services! What else was on this Christmas album? “Angels” by Robbie Williams? OK, having checked the rest of the tracks were Christmas songs but I stand by my point.

Then there’s Neil himself. He’s wearing an orange open neck shirt with brown slacks! For the love of God! When the camera pans over the studio audience it alights on some faces that don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Some look genuinely distressed at what is unfolding in front of their eyes.

The track was eventually released as a single and somehow made the charts peaking at No 36. It was Neil’s only UK Top 40 hit of the whole decade. It should never, ever have been allowed to happen. Ever.

In a completely underwhelming 1,500th edition of the show, it’s somehow befitting that it ends with “End Of The Road” by Boyz II Men. Where were all the party tunes?

This was the last week at No 1 for the group but by the time the record finally disappeared it would have spent 26 weeks (exactly half a year) on the charts. I had to check that figure three times to be sure. It ended 1992 as the 6th best selling single in the UK.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	En Vogue	Free Your Mind	No, liked it though
2	The Supremes	Baby Love	Sure I have it on a Motown collection somewhere
3	Michael Bolton	To Love Somebody	Not you though Bollers – no
4	Vanessa Paradis	Be My Baby	Yes this is in the singles box though I think my wife actually bought it
5	Undercover	Never Let Her Slip Away	Nah
6	Ambassadors Of Funk	Supermarioland	Hell no!
7	Jason Donovan	As Time Goes By	And pigs might fly – Never!
8	Charles And Eddie	Would I Lie To You?	Nope
9	Neil Diamond	Morning Has Broken	Of course not
10	Boyz II Men	End Of The Road	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/m0016spn/top-of-the-pops-12111992

TOTP 16 JUL 1992

Posted on March 11, 2022 by 80stastic

Right – before I get into this can I just say that the BBC4 schedule for these TOTP repeats has been relentless of late. It’s been two shows every Friday for weeks now meaning lots of content needing to be created by this blogger. Can’t the BBC slip in an impromptu Proms or something to give me a blow?! Having checked the forthcoming schedule I can see there is no abatement pending at least until the end of the month. Thanks very much BBC4.

In keeping with last week, there is only one presenter again this week; the fresh faced Mark Franklin. Unlike last week there’s been a tweak to the format which sees Franklin appear on our screens straight away rather than being a disembodied voice announcing the first act and he then proceeds to go straight into a rundown of the Top 10! It seems to be a nod back to how the show used to begin in the 70s and early 80s with a chart countdown soundtracked by “Whole Lotta Love” before we saw any of the acts.

After that we’re into the music and we start with Wet Wet Wet who, like many an artist this year, seem to be having an unexpected revival of fortunes. “Lip Service” is their third Top 40 hit in succession after chart topper “Goodnight Girl” and follow up “More Than Love”. It’s also the fifth and final track to be released as a single from their “High On The Happy Side” album. I always quite liked this – it sort of frothed and bubbled away until the hook of the chorus brought it to the boil. Marti Pellow has turned up for this performance dressed as a poker playing gunfighter from the Wild West (minus a ten gallon hat) or is it as a member of Showaddywaddy?

The band would not release another studio album for three years so they filled the gap with their first Best Of compilation (“End Of Part One: Their Greatest Hits”) and a live set (“Live At The Royal Albert Hall”). Then came that single in the Summer of ‘94 but that’s a while off yet.

“Lip Service” peaked at No 15.

Our first glimpse of Madonna in 1992 came via her single “This Used To Be My Playground” which was from the film she was currently starring in A League Of Their Own. I say ‘starring’ in but hers was actually quite a secondary role in this account of the US women’s baseball league that was founded in 1943 to keep the sport in the public eye during WWII. I really am rather fond of this film with some great performances from Tom Hanks, Geena Davis and Lori Petty as the three major protagonists. One of those guilty pleasure films that I’ll watch if I stumble across while channel flipping. Madonna’s name was all over the promotion campaign for the film but as I say, her character isn’t one of the principal leads.

As for the song itself, it’s a bit of an outlier coming as it did in between* the provocative “Justify My Love” and the outright society baiting “Erotica” project. Very much a stand-alone single – contractual issues meant it couldn’t even be included on the film’s soundtrack – it’s an accomplished ballad but one which I have to admit I always found to be quite dull.

*I’m not counting the “Immaculate Collection” inspired re-releases of “Holiday” and “Crazy For You” in ‘91.

The video concept of a man flicking through a photo album, the pages of which have Madonna singing in various different settings, was not as original as it was made out to be. Boy George’s video for his “To Be Reborn” single of five years earlier had a very similar look. Indeed, in his autobiography George said he was furious when he first saw Madonna’s promo and renamed it “This Used To Be My Video”. He had a point – Madonna’s video is a direct rip off…

‘Furious’ may not have been the exact word George used to express his anger at the steal. Here’s TOTP presenter Tony Dortie:

#totp Bumped into Boy George not long after that Playground @Madonna song came out he had some very choice words about it consisting (insert multiple 4 letter words of your own choice)
— Tony Dortie (@TonyDortie) March 4, 2022

“This Used To Be My Playground” peaked at No 3.

Next up are The Wedding Present though you’d be forgiven for thinking it was Altern-8 given the hazmat suits and masks that the band are wearing. What was all that about? Well, apparently the outfits were from the promo video for the single “Flying Saucer” but while watching it back, I discovered something else that interested me far more. There’s a bit where there a close up of David Gedge that just shows his eyes and nose and I swear that could be me back then. Hell, it could be me now! Well, maybe.

Anyway, this was the latest in their year long odyssey to release a new single every month in ‘92. “Flying Saucer” was the seventh of such singles and would peak at No 22, the fourth lowest performing of the twelve released. I quite liked this one. Some crunchy indie guitar licks and Gedge’s usual idiosyncratic vocals made for a winning combination. I’m not sure that the band achieved whatever it was they were trying to with this performance though unless it was actually meant to be a send up of Altern-8.

Fresh from his appearance on the last ever Wogan the other week, Jason Donovan was back in the Top 40 however implausible that may have seemed in the middle of 1992. A few things had changed since his last hit though. Firstly, he had successfully sued The Face magazine for libel after he argued that the publication had implied he was a hypocrite for lying about his sexuality after suggesting he may be gay. Secondly, he had left the Stock, Aitken and Waterman family and switched labels from PWL to Polydor.

His first album for his new masters was “All Around The World” (incidentally it shared its name with a single by one of Polydor’s most famous acts The Jam) with its lead single being “Mission Of Love”. This is a truly dreadful song. It would struggle not to come last at The Eurovision Song Contest. Actually, it would struggle not to come last in A Song For Europe. I’m amazed it got to even No 26 in our charts. Polydor we’re clearly not impressed and getting cold feet about the album. In an amazing lack of faith in their charge, they licensed some of his previous hits and shoved them on the album to beef up its sales potential. In total they added six old tracks, four from his previous albums and two from the Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat cast recording. Donovan was less than impressed and when the album stiffed, he and Polydor inevitably parted ways. The era of Jason Donovan the pop star was just about over.

Ah shit! It’s time for another wretched track. Why is it that the offensiveness of a song seems to work in direct correlation to how popular it is? “Achy Breaky Heart” by Billy Ray Cyrus became the first ever single to achieve triple platinum sales in Australia and spent five weeks at the top of the US Country charts before crossing over into the mainstream and peaking at No 4 in the Billboard Hot 100. It was a hit all across the world and yet was also voted No 2 in a VH1 poll of the 50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs. The same TV network voted it in at No 87 in their 100 Greatest Songs of the 90s poll. Has there ever been a more schizophrenic hit? There are people who despise it for popularising line dancing whilst there is also a faction who credit it with breathing life into a genre of music that was dying on its arse amongst younger audiences. It’s a basket case of song. Whatever you make of it though (and it’s almost a novelty song for me), it certainly made an impression on 1992.

Cyrus is of course the father of Miley Cyrus who rose to fame as Disney character Hannah Montana and then as a pop star under her own name. Her bio on Wikipedia is absolutely massive. I was literally scrolling for about thirty seconds just to get to the bottom and I didn’t read a word of it.

“Achy Breaky Heart” was a No 3 hit in the UK which probably means we haven’t seen the last of it yet.

If Jason Donovan’s time as a pop star was coming to an end then the next act were just getting into gear as a mainstream chart stars. The Shamen had turned tragedy into triumph when they managed to carry on despite the death of band member Will Sinnott and rack up a huge hit with a Beatmasters remix of “Pro>gen” as “Move Any Mountain” in the Summer of ‘91. Fast forward a year and they were ready to take it to the next level with an album full of hit singles. That album was “Boss Drum” and the first hit from it was “LSI Love Sex Intelligence”.

With rapper Mr. C now a full time member and the face of the band, an all out charge at the charts was ready to go. All they had to do now was get their tunes out there and they began with this No 6 hit. Another crucial addition was vocalist Jhelisa Anderson who’s contribution helped make the new sound of The Shamen.

The performance here is interesting in that that the staging of it is surely what The Wedding Present should have done instead of those hazmat suits. It’s got a goddam flying saucer prop! WTF? Did Gedge and co not see this in rehearsal and think ‘oh yeah, that’s what we should have done’. It’s sort of like the Madonna/Boy George thing but in reverse. Oh I give up trying to make sense of it all!

Just two Breakers again this week starting with that old rascal Morrissey. Surely one of his more memorable song titles, “You’re The One For Me, Fatty” was the second single from his “Your Arsenal” album although it hadn’t actually been released at this point. When it did arrive at the end of July, I was still working at the Our Price store in Market Street, Manchester and I asked our Assistant Manager Pete if he’d heard “Your Arsenal” yet to which he replied that he had no interest in listening to Morrissey’s arse! To be fair to Pete, Mozza was not his cup of tea at all. As for me, I quite liked it with its robust, glam inspired guitar (well it was produced by David Bowie’s mate Mick Ronson). “You’re The One For Me, Fatty” peaked at No 19.

The second Breaker hadn’t had a UK Top 40 hit for a couple of years and indeed only had four all told. Was (Not Was) really should have had more. If Jason Donovan could have sixteen chart hits than surely to goodness these Detroit musical boundary pushers deserved a bigger haul.

I’d first come across Was (Not Was) in 1983 when “Out Come The Freaks” narrowly missed the UK Top 40 but nearly 10 years later, despite some excellent tunes, they were still mostly known for 1987 hit “Walk The Dinosaur”. They were still deemed worthy of a Best Of chart compilation by record company Polygram and “Hello Dad…I’m In Jail” was released this year. To promote it, two tracks were released as singles. A cover of INXS’s “Listen Like Thieves” seemed like an overtly commercial decision not in keeping with the band’s previous back catalogue and it was ultimately proven to be misjudged as the single stalled at No 58.

The second single released to promote the album was a different case altogether. Now I never knew this until now but “Shake Your Head” was actually an early Was (Not Was) song from 1982 that had quite an interesting back story. It always featured the vocals of Ozzy Osbourne (who re-recorded them for the ‘92 remix by Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley) but a pre-fame Madonna had also laid down some vocals for the track that were ultimately not used by the band. As possibly the most famous woman on the planet ten years on, the band approached Madonna for permission to use her original contribution but she refused (surely she didn’t hold a grudge, not Madge) so they asked actress Kim Basinger to sing on it instead. They didn’t miss Madonna at all as “Shake Your Head” provided the band with the biggest UK hit of their career when it peaked at No 4.

Meanwhile back in the studio we find Sophie B. Hawkins though you wouldn’t know it as there is no introduction for her at all. We go straight from the end of the Breakers to a camera shot of her and her rather large backing band on stage. Not even a voiceover segue from Mark Franklin. Bit odd. “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” is up to No 16 by this point and Sophie gives a pretty good performance of it here. If she watched it back afterwards though, she may have been alarmed at her achingly stylish ripped jeans. As well as the tears around the knee area, she also seemed to have a big, gaping crotch hole which the TOTP cameraman managed to find in a rather salacious camera angle late on. I hope Bob Geldof wasn’t in the studio that night after his ‘I’m just going to look at you’ comment the other week!

Jimmy Nail has hit the proverbial on the head and is at No 1 within 2 weeks of “Ain’t No Doubt” being released. How did this happen? Since his days in Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Jimmy’s lost a lot of weight and grown his hair longer but he still isn’t what you would describe as your standard looking pop star.

Nail has crafted a career out of being a professional Geordie to the point where he was used as a tool in Anglo American relations. What am I talking about? Well, my friend Robin (the one who hates every Elton John song ever) is partial to golfing holidays in America. He usually goes with some mates who are proud Geordies and keen to promote the cultural significance of The Toon. When in a bar one holiday, the woman serving them was struggling with their accents and was curious as to where they were from in the UK. When their answer of Newcastle brought a shrug of non recognition, Robin’s mates tried to explain their home by mentioning famous people associated with the city. I think the list went like this:

Ant & Dec
Spender
Alan Shearer

When the Premier League’s all time top goal scorer failed to make her understand, it prompted howls of disbelief:

“Yer dinna nar Sheara? Clive man! She dinna nar Sheara!”

“DINNA NAR SHEARA?!” etc etc…

In the end it was Cheryl Cole who was the celebrity that the woman behind the bar knew, presumably from her stint on the US version of The X Factor. Quite why they thought throwing the name of Jimmy Nail’s TV series Spender in the mix would do the trick I do not know.

In another tweak to the show’s format, the closing song video has been reintroduced. Up until this point, the ‘year zero’ revamp shows had finished on the No 1 single. They’ve gone for a big name to relaunch this in Prince (and the New Power Generation) who are back with new single “Sexy MF”. I say back but a Prince was so prolific it seemed like he’d never been away as he always had new material out. “Sexy MF” was the first single from the album “Love Symbol” or to give it its true title ‘unpronounceable symbol’ as depicted on the cover art of the album.

Now we all know what the ‘MF’ in the title referred to (no Mark Franklin not your name) so the single had to be heavily edited to allow radio airplay. So concerned were record company Warners that they released it in the UK as a double A-side with the more palatable track “Strollin’” but nobody played that. Interestingly, though a big No 4 hit over here, it only made No 66 in the US. Maybe it was that airplay issue.

Of course, any mention of “Sexy MF” has to prompt another viewing of this:

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Wet Wet Wet	Lip Service	No but my wife had the album
2	Madonna	This Used To Be My Playground	Nah
3	The Wedding Present	Flying Saucer	No
4	Jason Donovan	Mission Of Love	Hell no!
5	Billy Ray Cyrus	Achy Breaky Heart	Double Hell no!
6	The Shamen	LSI Love Sex Intelligence	Nope
7	Morrissey	You’re The One For Me Fatty	Negative
8	Was (Not Was)	Shake Your Head	Not the single but I bought that Best Of album it wads promoting
9	Sophie B. Hawkins	Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover	It’s a no
10	Jimmy Nail	Ain’t No Doubt	That’s another no
11	Prince and the New Power Generation	Sexy MF	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/m0014zvq/top-of-the-pops-16071992

TOTP 12 DEC 1991

Posted on December 20, 2021 by 80stastic

Christmas is coming! Unlike in 2021 where the certainty of what our festive period will be like is now under threat again from the pandemic (or more accurately the government’s handling of it), 30 years ago, some of the most pressing issues we were facing included whether we had enough wrapping paper and remembering to buy a Radio Times to plan our TV watching (very important in the pre-digital age). If, like me, you were working in retail at this time, another consideration was when we could fit in any Christmas shopping of our own after facilitating everybody else’s by working behind a shop counter for hours on end. Oh, and what the Christmas No 1 would be… and please let it not be Cliff Richard again this year. Well, as it turned out, Cliff didn’t really get a look in but which records were in the charts back then? Let’s find out…

We start tonight’s TOTP with one of the year’s biggest breakout stars in Cathy Dennis who is in the studio to perform her fourth Top 40 hit of 1991 and her fifth overall. “Everybody Move” was the final single to be released from her gold selling No 3 album “Move To This” and was a return to the radio friendly dance material of her earlier hits after previous single “Too Many Walls” had seen her go down the slow ballad route.

In all honesty, “Everybody Move” should probably have remained an unreleased album track. It’s pretty lightweight stuff and certainly it doesn’t require a great leap of imagination from this to the kind of stuff that Cathy would end up writing for the likes of S Club 7 and Hear’say later in the decade. Accordingly, it only made it to No 25 in the UK Top 40.

Whilst the reaction on Twitter to this performance focussed on Cathy’s Joker-esque outfit, I was more drawn to her dance move which comes over like a half-hearted Mick Channon windmill celebration…

Now I know I quite often draw on football references for this blog and that I’ve just done it again immediately above but quite why presenter Tony Dortie decides to do the same in his intro to the Top 10 countdown remains a mystery. “It’s day 12 on the Advent calendar, Hearts and Leeds are currently topping things in the football world but let’s see which musical crackers are doing the business in the Top 10” he trills. Hmm. For completions sake, I should note that Leeds Utd would indeed go onto win the old Division 1 league title come May the following year however the 1991–92 Scottish Premier Division season was won by Rangers, nine points ahead of Hearts. Dortie messes up the countdown straight away when he announces that Nirvana are at No 10 with “Smells Like Teen”. What happened to your ‘spirit’ Tony?! Unlike Boris Johnson, at least Tony owns his mistakes…

And he failed miserably x
— Tony Dortie (@TonyDortie) November 19, 2021

There’s some more curious missing word action next as we get what would probably have been described as a ‘banging’ tune’ back then called “Running Out Of Time” by Digital according to co-host Claudia Simon. That wasn’t their full name though Claudia, was it? No, that was Digital Orgasm – ooh and indeed err missus! This wasn’t anything to do with presenter error by the way as the on screen artist and title graphics confirm that Claudia hadn’t just messed up her intro. This, it would seem, was a TOTP policy decision. Presumably, the use of the word orgasm would have been seen as far too offensive pre the 9 o’clock watershed and so was dropped.

As with all of these dance tunes from this era, I have zero recall of it despite working in a record shop while it was in the charts. Listening back to it now, it sounds like it’s been concocted in a rave laboratory with the basic tune of “Insanity” by Oceanic spliced together with snippets of “Charly” by The Prodigy. Both were huge hits so I guess if that really was the formula behind “Running Out Of Time” then it was a sound one.

As for the performance, it looks as if the TOTP producers have given a bit more thought to how to portray this seemingly endless conveyor belt of dance acts. There appear to be loads more camera cuts and in quick rotation meaning we get lots of different angles of the performers which I’m guessing was meant to try and replicate a more clubby experience. There’s also some slightly different distorted visual effect for the non vocal bits – they’ve lost the Doctor Who green which never worked for me anyway. The woman doing the singing looks almost otherworldly like one of Captain Kirk’s alien love interests which kind of helps things along as well.

“Running Out Of Time” peaked at No 16.

Oh no! It’s the dreaded Cliff Richard! Oh yes though as he’s not No 1! He’s nowhere near the top of the tree actually being at No 19 and there’s only two weeks until Christmas! Talking of trees, the show’s production team have pulled out all the stops for Cliff to make the stage look like his front room at Christmas. A fully decorated tree, a mock fireplace, cards and candles – were Health and Safety informed?! – and Cliff himself in an armchair dressed in a sparkly jacket. For some reason though, they haven’t bothered with the prop of a telephone for the faux phone call part at the beginning of the record leaving Cliff to mime speaking into an imaginary one and then putting it back in its cradle. It just looks weird. I was hoping that Cliff might go full Val Doonican and sing the whole song from that armchair but he’s up on his feet in no time to look sincerely into the camera at us and do some of those wavy arm moves of his.

Does anybody really remember “We Should Be Together”? It’s surely Cliff’s forgotten Christmas single after “Mistletoe And ~~Whine~~…sorry..Wine” and “Saviour’s Day”? You never hear it played on the radio come December despite some of the commercial stations like Magic having cleared all of their playlist schedules to play exclusively Christmas tunes. Somehow it did get to No 10 in the UK Top 40 though it was never a serious contender for the top spot.

We get the video for “Too Blind To See It” by Kym Sims next. It’s introduced by Claudia Simon who says Kym is “kickin’ up a flavour” (that’s probably ‘flava’ isn’t it?) whilst all the time a youth from the studio audience gurns away behind her looking remarkably like a young Mark Ronson.

It turns out that “Too Blind To See It” is a dance record that I do remember (finally)! I think it’s that shuffling back beat and the ‘no man in the world’ sample that must have lodged in my brain. It’s a pretty nifty tune I think and yet it was written and produced by my arch nemesis Steve “Silk” Hurley /aka the man who killed music with his “Jack Your Body” No 1 in 1987. Hmm. Anyway, on reflection it has a ring of “Finally” by Ce Ce Pension to it which is probably no surprise as Kym was the co-writer on her hit “Keep On Walkin'”.

Wikipedia tells me that “Too Blind To See It” was released on the East West Records label who were responsible for a string of dance hits around this time including “Peace” by Sabrina Johnston and “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)” by En Vogue. They all had that simple yet distinctive, generic East West cover as I recall or was that only used if they’d run out of the official picture sleeve? Can’t remember now.

“Too Blind To See It” was Kym’s biggest hit peaking at No 5 in the UK although she would have two further and smaller Top 40 hits by the end of 1992.

“Salt n’ Pepa are in the house and rockin’ the mic!” says Tony Dortie as we move back to the studio for their performance of “You Showed Me”. They’ve all come dressed in what looks like black latex jackets while their three dancers have dungarees in the same material making them look like a kinky version of Rod, Jane and Freddy.

The staging of the performance has a feel of West Side Story to it but the choreographer hasn’t really worked out what to do with DJ Spinderella who seems redundant when the rapping kicks in and is left to wander off with her allocated dance partner and act out an argument between them. At the song’s finale she retreats to the back of the stage, goes up the stairs erected there and assumes a rather risqué position by wrapping her legs around his crotch area. I take it back about Rod, Jane and Freddy – they’d have never got up to such vulgar antics! Or would they?…..

Meanwhile over on the other stage we find Right Said Fred about to perform their next hit single “Don’t Talk Just Kiss”. Before we get to the Freds though, I noticed something that I don’t believe we’ve seen before in these TOTP repeats which was the studio audience actually running across the floor to be in place for the next performance. There’s literally about a dozen people behind Tony Dortie all in a rush, vying for a view of the next pop stars on the show. I always imagined that the studio audience was shepherded around the set, the flock to the floor manager’s sheep dog. However, they all seem like they have been let off the leash to roam (or run) wherever they wish. This year zero revamp has a lot to answer for!

Anyway, I must admit that I for one thought we had heard the last of Right Said Fred when “I’m Too Sexy” finally dipped out of the Top 40 and dismissed the whole thing as a one off novelty hit. How wrong I was. “Don’t Talk Just Kiss” was not only another smash for the trio but it was (SHOCK!) a decent tune to boot! How had this happened? Well, proving that they weren’t as daft as they looked, the Fairbrass brothers (and the other one) got soul diva Jocelyn Brown in to sing on the track. Jocelyn’s vocals had already been sampled for Snap!’s 1990 No 1 hit “The Power” whilst her own 1984 hit “Somebody Else’s Guy” would form the hook for George Michael’s 1992 Top 5 hit “Too Funky”. Here though, she was actually singing on the song rather than being sampled although she didn’t actually get any credits on the record. That seems a bit weird as she’s up there front and centre on stage alongside the band for this TOTP appearance so they obviously weren’t trying to play down her contribution.

“Don’t Talk Just Kiss” would prove to be another massive hit peaking at No 3 whilst their album “Up” (released in March of the following year) would top the charts and go double platinum. Over the pond though it was a different story and the band did indeed become the one hit wonder I had thought they were destined to be. “I’m Too Sexy” had been a US No 1 but “Don’t Talk Just Kiss” stalled at No 76. Supposedly radio stations were still playing that first hit when the follow up was released and there was little interest in any Right Said Fred material that wasn’t “I’m Too Sexy”. They would have no further hits Stateside.

The camera pans around to Claudia Simon up in the gantry for the next link and she advises us of four Breakers three of which are stone cold stinkers starting with Jason Donovan and the “Joseph Megamix”. After his surprise No 1 hit earlier in the year with “Any Dream Will Do” from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, it was always on the cards that some abomination like this medley would end up being churned out to cash in. With the Christmas party season upon us, it probably seemed like a decent bet that it would be a hit but can anyone say that they’ve ever been to a party where this was put on the turntable and if so, did they not leave immediately?!

“Joseph Megamix” peaked at No 13.

Another megamix! Arte you kidding me?! What’s this one then? “The Bare Necessities Megamix” by UK Mixmasters?! Sorry? What? Pardon? And crucially, why? This was a Jungle Book medley that actually only featured two songs – “I Wanna Be Like You” and the titular “Bare Necessities”. You won’t be surprised to know that this heap of shit had Simon Cowell’s fingerprints all over it as it was released on his BMG subsidiary label IQ Records. UK Mixmasters was actually some bloke called Nigel Wright who was also responsible for the equally odious act Mirage who scored some hits in the late 80s doing medleys of house records under the umbrella title of “Jack Mix”. He also did that Saturday Night Fever medley earlier in 1991. What a talented guy!

Talking of talented guys, that’s all round entertainer Gary Wilmot up there promoting this garbage. However, when the track was performed in the TOTP studio the following week, another Gary (Martin) took over the vocalist role. I had to look this guy up but apparently he went onto make his name as an acclaimed voice over actor. We won’t get to see the TOTP with Martin as it’s one of those episodes hosted by Adrian Rose who didn’t give this consent for the repeat to be aired so we’ll miss it. So….just for you… here’s that performance below you lucky people!

Finally some proper music…even if it is U2! Only kidding I liked the “Achtung Baby” era of the band and “Mysterious Ways” was the second single to be released off that album. As a follow up to their No 1 song “The Fly” it was a strong if bold choice. There’s plenty going on in “Mysterious Ways” and most of it was maybe not what we would have expected from the band at the time. This was no po-faced, earnest rock anthem like “With Or Without You” but a groovy, exuberant tune that starts as it means to go on with that wah wah peddle guitar effect from The Edge setting the tone. It sounded so much better to me than “The Fly” and should have been a bigger hit than its No 13 placing although it did make the Top 10 in America. U2 would take this path towards dance experimentation again in 1997 with the electronic influenced No 1 single “Discothèque” but for me, “Mysterious Ways” trumps it by some considerable distance.

What?! New Kids On The Block were still in our charts in December 1991? Hadn’t that particular craze blown out long before this point? Well. yes it kind of had. This single “If You Go Away” was a final hurrah of the initial phase of their career before they briefly regrouped in 1994 for a less than glorious return. They would finally return as an entity in 2008 and are still touring to this day (I think).

“If You Go Away” is a soporific ballad that you can imagine Michael Bolton having rejected as too banal. It was included as the only new track on their first Best Of album called “H.I.T.S.” that was released for the Christmas market. I was the chart cassette buyer at the Our Price store I was working at then and have to admit to a gross over estimate of demand for that album. We hardly sold any and my over optimistic ordering left us with quite a few copies to go into the New Year sale when they again failed to sell. Ah well, ya learn.

The black and white video is meant to make us perceive them as serious artists as opposed to the unobtainable desire of teenage girls. That and the fact that they had changed their name to NKOTB was a giveaway that they were looking for a new audience. For me though, they would always be more T’KNOB than NKOTB (over ordering of their album aside).

“If You Go Away” peaked at a surprisngly high No 9 in the UK Top 40.

Oh God! I’m in “Martika’s Kitchen”! Yes, it’s time for one of the stupidest song titles of the year courtesy of…well, Martika. On reflection, is it stupid or misunderstood? I don’t think I twigged it at the time but the general consensus on the internet is that “Martika’s Kitchen” is actually filthy! How did I not pick up on this back then?! Firstly, it’s written by Prince which should have been enough evidence of its salacious nature to close the case right there and then. Exhibit B (m’lud) comes in the form of the lyrics, for example:

The table is set, the oven is hot
Baby, when we get started, we won’t ever ever stop

and:

I don’t care I’ve got the chair, if you think your butt’ll fit it
You turn me all the way up, I admit it

In my defence, I think the fact that Martika has chosen to wear some very non-revealing clothes in this performance maybe misled me. As for the sound of the song, at the time it seemed very pop-orientated compared to previous single “Love… Thy Will Be Done” (also written by Prince) but which didn’t seem like it could possibly have been written by the same person. However, on reflection, “Martika’s Kitchen” has some definite Prince hallmarks attached to it although parts of it also remind me of Janet Jackson’s “Nasty”.

This was the second single from her album of the same name and although it sold reasonably in the UK, like T’KNOB before it, I’m pretty sure we had plenty of copies left over for the New Year sale. Perhaps I wasn’t that great at being chart cassette buyer!

George Michael and Elton John are still No 1 with “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”. With two weeks to go, they must have been in the running for the festive chart topper but once “Bohemian Rhapsody” was re-released on the back of Freddie Mercury’s death, all bets were off. George would, of course, score a further No 1 with another cover version two years later, this time of Queen’s own “Somebody To Love” as part of the “Five Live EP” recorded at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert the year before. Elton meanwhile would return in 1992 with his “The One” album the title track of which really was a bit of a dirge.

As we’ve skipped the 19 December show, the next post will be the end of year review.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Cathy Dennis	Everybody Move	Nah
2	Digital Orgasm	Running Out Of Time	No chance
3	Cliff Richard	We Should Be Together	Never happening
4	Kym Sims	Too Blind To See It	Nope
5	Salt n’ Pepa	You Showed Me	No
6	Right Said Fred	Don’t Talk Just Kiss	Negative
7	Jason Donovan	Joseph Megamix	As if
8	UK Mixmasters	The Bare Necessities Megamix	Ditto
9	U2	Mysterious Ways	No but I bought the album
10	NKOTB	If You Go Away	I wish they would – No
11	Martika	Martika’s Kitchen	I did not
12	George Michael and Elton John	Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me	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/m0011myd/top-of-the-pops-12121991

TOTP 22 AUG 1991

Posted on September 29, 2021 by 80stastic

Welcome back to TOTP Rewind where I’m pretty sure we are about to witness the very last time that Bruno Brookes hosted the show. Yes, that annoying little git that seems have been hanging around forever is about to be deprived of one of his regular gigs and it’s come not a moment too soon as far as I’m concerned. I wonder if he knew this would be his last appearance at the time? Obviously it wasn’t just Bruno who was being ousted though. The great TOTP ‘Year Zero” cull that happened in October 1991 would take out all of those Radio 1 DJs that had been the inviting themselves into our sitting rooms every Thursday for years in one fell swoop. We will see valedictory appearances by Mark Goodier, Jakki Brambles, Simon Mayo, Nicky Campbell and Gary Davies in the weeks to come. I wasn’t particularly a fan of any of them but Brookes was such an irritating little runt (yes that’s ‘runt’ although it could easily have been another word ending in ‘-unt’) that I think it’s his removal that pleases me the most. Despite his TOTP dismissal, he still had his Radio 1 post that he had been in since 1984 and somehow he would survive for another four years there before new Head of Radio 1 Production Trevor Dann axed him with the infamous words “…why is Bruno on? You know, he seems to have a charmed life, because if the view was ‘we must get rid of the dinosaurs’, you know we’ve got this behemoth striding the airwaves of dawn”. Anyway, lets see if Brookes makes a decent fist of his last show or if he makes a few howlers like always…

He starts off with zero controversy (even his usually elaborate wardrobe has been toned down) as he introduces someone else making their final TOTP appearance on the show in Midge Ure. I was listening to some Ultravox on Spotify earlier and some of their Ure-period stuff was pretty good. I’m thinking about the likes of “All Stood Still”, “Hymn” and “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes” rather than the pompous “Vienna” (which I never liked that much) and the frankly ridiculous “We Came To Dance”. A lot of Midge’s solo stuff paled in comparison to his Ultravox high points. Some of it was OK but even his most successful stuff like surprise 1985 No 1 “If I Was” I found laborious and uninspiring. “Cold Cold Heart” was hardly electrifying stuff and could be filed under the category of ‘meh’.

Although he’s got rid of his horrid ponytail, Midge still has a cracking pair of sideburns on display here. Pretty bold stuff as I don’t remember them being an essential male fashion accessory back then. Of course, these days Midge is actually bald rather than bold. The rather ham fisted attempt to show off the song’s Celtic credentials at the end via the use of three tympanum drums looks a bit daft to me.

“Cold Cold Heart” peaked at No 17.

Oh h, here we go…what’s Bruno on about now? There are two records at No 21 in the chart run down? What?! For once, Brookes hasn’t made a right ricket as there were two No 21 records that week. Apparently Oceanic and Sophie Lawrence had pulled in the same amount of sales and so, after the furore the previous year surrounding the Dee-Lite / Steve Miller Band debate about who should have been No 1 after sharing the exact number of sales, Gallup had made the policy not to try and separate artists in these circumstances but would instead grant them equal chart billing.

The soundtrack to this unusual countdown was supplied by The Prodigy who were having a huge hit with their debut single “Charly”. Infamously sampling the 1970s BBC Public Information Film Charley Says, I for one did not see them becoming such huge players in the dance scene of the 90s and beyond off the back of it. That mining of vintage Childrens TV programs as source material for dance tracks would become a thing of sorts . Following in the steps of “Charly” came amongst others Smart E’s “Sesame’s Treet”, Urban Hype’s “A Trip to Trumpton” and “Roobarb & Custard” by ShaFt. This short-lived genre even had a name which I was unaware of until now which was ‘Toytown Techno’.

I would come to appreciate The Prodigy much more as the decade wore on and their Glastonbury performance of 1997 remains spectacular. For now though, I think I almost dismissed “Charly” as a novelty. Maybe I just didn’t like to be reminded of those 70s public informations films, of which none were more scary than this one:

“Rave on!” exclaims Bruno at the end of the Prodigy video sounding like he was auditioning for a part in Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights. Turd. Right, here’s somebody new even if the song had been out before. Nothing to do with Elkie Brooks (that was “Sunshine After The Rain”), this little pop nugget was called “Sunshine On A Rainy Day” and was written by legendary producer Youth for his then girlfriend Zoë but it failed to find an audience when originally released in 1990 when it peaked at No 53. However a remix by Mark “Spike” Stent earned it a second shot at the charts and this time it powered all the way to a high of No 4. Youth seemed to be preoccupied with writing songs about rain back then as he also co-wrote Blue Pearl’s 1990 hit “Naked In The Rain”.

Zoë’s hit song though seemed to capture something of the essence of 1991 it seemed to me. Was it the mix of hypnotic dance beats with a folky song structure or just that uplifting, sing-a-long chorus pre-fixed with a shout of ‘Yay!’ from Zoë that so beguiled? Or was it just that Zoë herself cut quite the pop star figure in this performance? I seem to remember a few male work colleagues being quite taken with her.

Sadly for Zoë, it never got any bigger or better than this for her as a singer. One minor Top 40 hit followed called “Lightning” but her album “Scarlet Red And Blue” disappointed commercially. She returned with a new rock sound in 1996 with a song called “Hammer” which seemed to be trying to ride on the Alanis Morissette bandwagon but nobody noticed nor cared. After its failure, she left the music business to become a sculptor and potter although she has since recorded material under the alias Hephzibah Broom.

So The Prodigy creating Toytown Techno proved to be a case of “What Can You Do For Me” and passed me by completely but an act sampling proper pop records and making them into dance anthems proved to be “Something Good” I could get behind. OK, enough for the puns but I have always had a soft spot for Utah Saints. Their ambition according to themselves was to get rock ‘n’ roll into rave and they achieved this by sampling Eurythmics’ “There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)” and Gwen Guthrie’s “Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On But The Rent” to outstanding effect. .

Originating from the Leeds club scene where they hosted their own nights, their name was nothing to do with toothy 70s boy band The Osmonds who hailed from Ogden, Utah. No, here’s @TOTPFacts with the real story behind that name:

Utah Saints' name was inspired by the Coen Brothers film Raising Arizona. Jez Willis: "Near the end of it he mentions Utah and we just thought it was quite a nice word. We put the Saints bit on to make it sound like a football team or something like that." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) September 24, 2021

So now you know. Anyway, they hit big immediately with their debut single “What Can You Do For Me” making the Top 10. Now I’ve read both Dave Stewart’s autobiography and a biography of Annie Lennox and I don’t remember anything in either about there being a dispute between Annie and Dave about allowing Utah Saints to use a sample of “There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)” as Bruno Brookes suggests there is. “Annie Lennox wanted it banned but Dave Stewart thinks it’s a smash. What duo you think?” he rambles in his intro. I can’t find any mention of it online either. In fact the only Utah Saints / Annie Lennox reference I found was that they did a remix of one of her solo singles (“Little Bird”) in 1993 so she can’t have been that pissed off with them.

Another song that made it to No 10 in the charts was this one from Jason Donovan although Brookes can’t resist one final incorrect chart prediction when he says that it’s “no doubt a future No 1”. Maybe he was basing his forecast on the fact that Jase’s last single “Any Dream Will Do” had gone to No 1. That song’s success though was backed up by Donovan performing it live twice a day all week at the London Palladium in the lead role of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. A little naive I think from Bruno to think that chucking out an unimaginative cover of “Happy Together” by The Turtles would repeat the trick. Not that there’s anything wrong with the song – I love the original version – but Donovan’s take on it brought nothing new to the table at all. It just seemed a lazy choice of song and indeed it had been cynically shoe horned onto his recent Greatest Hits album presumably with the intention of releasing it as a single all along.

Even Donovan can’t really be arsed to sell the record too much in this performance. At one point he does a Paul McCartney ‘whacky tombs aloft’ gesture for some reason and then his panicked facial expression immediately afterwards gives away that he suddenly thought what did I did that for?!

“Happy Together” was Jason’s final UK Top 10 hit.

It’s that song by Karyn White that was a Breaker last week next. It turns out that Karyn is quite the businesswoman. She started her own music label and entertainment company in 2011 called Karyn White Enterprise Inc and also runs a successful interior design and real estate business. Not content with that, she’s also tried her hand at acting and is still recording with her last release being in 2018. If only she had given video directing a shot as well – it may have livened up the video for “Romantic”. The ‘storyline’ for it as listed on the IMDB database is this:

The music video begins with Karyn White pulling up in a sports car. She sings as she wears peal necklaces against a gray background. A group of dancers strike poses throughout.

Seruously?! Did somebody pitch that as an idea and got the gig?!

“Romantic” peaked at No 23.

“Onto more rave” announces Bruno as we head into the No 21 hit (of which there are two of course this week) sound of Oceanic with “Insanity”. Now you know me, I could never be described as a dance head but after Utah Saints earlier, this is the second dance anthem of the show that I didn’t mind at all. I think it was that huge, euphoric chorus or maybe even the key change at the finale. There seemed to be much more of a traditional song structure to it than some of the other dance tracks of the time. Here’s David Harry of the band on that very subject courtesy of @TOTPFacts:

Oceanic were morally opposed to sampling other acts, and big on hooks. David Harry: "I think there are a lot of similarities between Nirvana and Oceanic. We're into the same dynamics as a way of keeping the listener's attention." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) September 24, 2021

"The best rock music, like Nirvana, is really simple. You can't miss their choruses. It's a chorus, no two ways about it, and it's usually set in a different key from the verse, which is played down to emphasise the chorus even more." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) September 24, 2021

OK, well the comparison between Oceanic and Nirvana slightly undermines the point but I think you get the gist.

What? You want to hear about my Oceanic story? Oh OK. Well, I was once at a freebie record company do (possibly the Ricky Ross album playback) whilst I was working for Our Price and I’d arrived at the venue before any of my colleagues. I’m not great at parties anyway so I found myself mooching around feeling lost. I spotted someone else who appeared to be experiencing the same thing so I decided maybe we could help each other out by striking up a conversation. The person who I started chatting to was *that lady from Oceanic! It turned out she was feeling exactly the same as me and was glad of someone to talk to. Eventually my colleagues and her friends turned up and our time together was over – cue lots of questions from my contingent about who I had been talking to and what did we say to each other. All I remember is that she was very nice and that I learned that her friends she was at the event with were in the middle of some legal action about the songwriting credits to Gina G’s hit “Ooh Aah… Just a Little Bit”.

“Insanity” peaked at No 3 and was the best selling dance single of the year and the ninth best selling overall outselling nine No 1 records in the process. Let’s hope whoever wrote it got their just royalties.

*I should give the lady her proper name which is Jorinde Williams although to be fair to me they did call their album “That Album By Oceanic”.

Martika is back! Yes, she of “Toy Soldiers” fame back in 1989 had returned and with a credible song. How so? Well “Love… Thy Will Be Done” was written by Prince of course and much was made of that at the time I seem to remember. It didn’t strike me as an obvious collaboration I have to say but then if you think about it, he has worked with / written songs for loads of different people. There’s even a Prince family tree online which lists them all. Under the section People who recorded songs written or co-written by Prince you’ll find Martika along with Madonna, (Chaka, Chaka, Chaka) Chaka Khan, Sheena Easton, Sheila E, Paula Abdul, The Bangles, Celine Dion, Kenny Rogers and of course Sinead O’Connor. If he could write songs for Celine Dion then Martika wasn’t that big of a stretch! As for the song, I quite liked it – a much more mature sound (that’s the word all the music press used anyway). Bizarrely its drums and bass backing do not vary at all throughout the song in terms of bpm yet somehow it just works.

“Love… Thy Will Be Done” was from Martika’s second album “Martika’s Kitchen” which performed well in Europe but poorly in her native US. The title track would be issued as a single and was a return to the more poppier fare that I would have expected from her.

“Love… Thy Will Be Done” peaked at No 9 on the UK Top 40.

Yet another dance tune as we start the Breakers section with “Lift” / “Open Your Mind” by 808 State. Like previous singles “Cubik” / “Olympic” and “In Yer Face”, this was taken from the band’s third album “ex:el” but unlike those tracks which both went Top 10, the spreadsheet formulas for chart success didn’t work for “Lift” / “Open Your Mind” and it stalled at No 38. I didn’t mind this but to my untrained ear were they all starting to sound a bit the same? Maybe it didn’t matter if you were on the dance floor with chemical substances coursing through you which I wasn’t at this time.

What?! Tin Machine?! F*****g Tin Machine are on TOTP?! In my mind, Bowie’s much maligned super group project had disappeared after their first album in 1989 but having checked out their discography on Wikipedia, I do remember the cover of the second album (“Tin Machine II”) from working in Our Price. I don’t recall this track (“You Belong In Rock n’ Roll”) though. Apparently it was released in a blaze of publicity (it clearly had no effect on me) but it struggled to a chart high of just No 33. Even that paltry chart placing for the musical legend that Bowie is/was turned out to be Tin Machine’s biggest hit. The band had to change labels from EMI to Victory Music to even get that second album released as the lack of hit singles on their debut album had freaked EMI out and they got cold feet about the whole project.

Apparently there’s a studio performance in the next TOTP repeat that involves a chocolate eclair but I’ll keep my powder dry on that one until next time….

Following “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band and “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by The Clash into our charts comes the next vintage track to be reactivated for a Levi’s TV advert. “20th Century Boy” was originally a No 3 hit for T. Rex in 1973 but it was chosen to front the latest Lev’s ad campaign in 1991 and re-issued curiously as being by Marc Bolan and T.Rex.

The advert itself features a very young Brand Pitt and the single’s success in 1991 (it peaked at No 13) , just like The Clash, sparked the release of a T.Rex Best Of album called “The Ultimate Collection ” which, backed by a TV Ad campaign, went to No 4 in the album charts.

It’s a great song and as much as I had a weakness for them, is sooo much better than – “21st Century Boy” by Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

So it’s been a “healthy” chart Brookes advises us before we get to the No 1. Not sure what standards he’s applying to the nations’s pop choices there but it is still suffering from an extreme case of ‘Adamsitis’ as “(EverythingI Do) I Do It For You” by Bryan Adams is still at the summit of the Top 40 for the seventh week running. OK, what can I dredge up about this song that hasn’t already been said so far. My own personal opinion of it? Sure…

Question: Is it a terrible song?

Me: No, but it has a deservedly terrible reputation. No song should be No 1 for 16 weeks.

Question: Ah, so you like it then?

Me: It’s not up there with his best material but I didn’t mind it on first hearing. After the 10th, 20th, 100th time, it lost its appeal certainly.

Question: Did you buy it?

Me: No. I never even considered it. It was so inescapable that even if I’d really liked it, there would have been no point – you heard it all the time anyway.

The play out video is “Mind” by The Farm. It seemed as though this lot’s time in the sun was coming to an end by this point. After the glory of two consecutive Top 10 singles in 1990, impetus had been lost and subsequent singles “Sinful! (Scary Jiggin’ with Doctor Love)” with Pete Wylie and “Don’t Let Me Down” failed to crack the Top 20.

Still, not to worry, they had lots of new tunes up their sleeve and “Mind” was the first of those being the lead single from second album “Love See No Colour”. Unfortunately that also failed the Top 20 test and also the Top 30 one as well when it stalled at No 31. In truth, it’s not a great song, lacking the groove of ..erm…”Groovy Train” and the hook of “All Together Now”‘s rousing chorus. It also had some seriously terrible lyrics:

Remember all the good times that we had
Remember those days they were never sad
All our hopes and all our dreams
All our crazy mixed up schemes

I’d have been embarrassed by those in 5th form.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Midge Ure	Cold Cold Heart	Mouldy old fart more like – no
2	The Prodigy	Charly	No
3	Zoë	Sunshine On A Rainy Day	Liked it, didn’t buy it
4	Utah Saints	What Can You Do For Me	See 3 above
5	Jason Donovan	Happy Together	Hell no
6	Karyn White	Romantic	Nah
7	Oceanic	Insanity	No but I didn’t tell Jorinde that
8	Martika	Love… Thy Will Be Done	Nope
9	808 State	Lift / “Open Your Mind	Guess what? No
10	Tin Machine	You Belong In Rock n’ Roll	This belonged in the bin – no
11	Marc Bolan and T.Rex	20th Century Boy	Not the re-release but I have it on a Best Of CD
12	Bryan Adams	(EverythingI Do) I Do It For You	I think we’ve already established the answer to that question
13	The Farm	Mind	Negative

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/m000zwqz/top-of-the-pops-22081991

TOTP 04 JUL 1991

Posted on August 24, 2021 by 80stastic

Well, that’s the first 6 months of 1991’s TOTP repeats viewed, reviewed and posted. Somehow it doesn’t seem to have been quite so much of a slog as 1990 but I’ve a feeling it’s going to get a whole lot denser to wade through from hereon in. As we enter July, Steffi Graff is about to claim her third Wimbledon singles title whilst Michael Stich (remember him?) will win his one and only by defeating Boris Becker. I recall it being very hot around this time and on the day of the men’s final, myself and my wife decided to go for a Sunday afternoon stroll around nearby Whitworth Park in Manchester. The temperature wasn’t the only thing that was hotting up that day as we stumbled across a young couple getting very enamoured with each other as they canoodled under the sun’s rays whilst stretched out in the park! Bloody hell! Get a room!

I wonder if there were any hot tunes in the charts back then? Let’s see…

The show kicks off with the week’s highest climber Incognito with “Always There”. After last week’s nonsense show opener Cubic 22, this made much more sense as being first on the running order. For a start, there’s a proper singer up there belting the tune out and when I say proper I mean proper as it’s soul legend Jocelyn Brown. Added to that, the track is a genuine breezy Summer anthem with some definite feel good vibes unlike that techno crap the week before.

Despite only having 5 Top 40 singles in the course of their career, Incognito have worked with some of the biggest names in the business (according to their very swish website) and are still a going concern with a cast of previous band members that would rival The Fall and The Waterboys.

One of those names listed is Duncan McKay which if you are a football / comic fan of a certain age like me can only bring one image to mind, that of the legendary Melchester Rovers left back, he of the ferocious tackle. Duncan appeared in the Roy Of The Rovers story for 15 years and not once did he change his image of full beard, and shaggy, shoulder length hair kept in place by a headband. Eat your heart out Mark Knopfler.

“Always There” peaked at No 6.

A “spooky little record’ as host Gary Davies describes it is up next as we get the father and daughter collaboration of Nat King Cole duetting from beyond the grave with his daughter Natalie Cole on one of his best known tunes in “Unforgettable”. This virtual duet was certainly a novel idea back then but there seems to be a distinct movement for this type of thing now. Maybe it was the inevitable advancement of technology coupled with the accelerated death rate of some of the music world’s biggest stars (remember 2016?) that brought this about but there is now a definite world of departed pop stars still giving concerts after they have shuffled off this mortal coil. Whitney Houston has definitely been brought back to life in hologram form whilst my own mother has been to see her beloved Elvis ‘live’ as it were with only The King’s original touring band actually being up there on stage. I think ABBA are due some sort of virtual reunion as well? OK, the Cole family reunion wasn’t quite up to those standards but it was pretty revolutionary in 1991.

Was it any good though? Well, despite his undoubtedly smooth crooner voice and the fact that he probably helped deny Rick Astley the Xmas No 1 spot in 1987 thanks to the re-release of his version of “When I Fall In Love” pinching sales for Astley’s version, Nat King Cole wasn’t somebody who I was ever going to explore beyond his most famous songs. The fact that his daughter had re-recorded them with his vocals as a duet therefore wasn’t going to bring about any lightbulb moments for me. Yes, them as there is a whole album of Natalie and her Dad together. Entitled “Unforgettable… With Love”, it sold steadily in the UK going gold but it went through the roof in the US racking up sales that achieved 7 x platinum status!

The ultimate sadness about the project is that Natalie herself would die before her time, passing away in 2015 aged 65. Her Dad died even younger in 1965 aged just 45. “Unforgettable” the duet peaked at No 19 on the UK Top 40.

A bizarre one hit wonder next from Cola Boy and their single “7 Ways To Love”. Bizarre how? Well, it was a dance tune that had a vocalist fronting it but the only words she sings are ‘7 Ways To Love’. If you were gong to do that why not just find a sample and not bother with a singer? Oh yes, the singer is television presenter and radio DJ Janey Lee Grace best known as being part of the posse on Steve Wright in the Afternoon. What I hadn’t realised is that she had also been as a backing singer with the likes of Kim Wilde and Boy George and also toured with Wham! including their ground breaking dates in China. In a bizarre coincidence given that last fact, the bloke in Cola Boy was called Andrew Midgeley. Weird.

Another part of the Cola Boy story that I had no idea about until now is that the people behind it were actually Saint Etienne who recorded it as a white label for dance specialist shops. In a Mojo magazine interview, the band’s Bob Stanley recalled: “It was a period when you could drive around to record shops in London, give them 20 and see what might happen. It worked. We went to a party and heard Andy Weatherall playing it”. They were singed to Arista Records off the back of the track’s success in the clubs but due to contractual issues couldn’t promote it themselves hence Janey Lee Grace and Andrew Midgeley being roped in.

The single rose to No 8 which is a higher peak than any Saint Etienne single managed* which must have been annoying for the band but maybe not as annoying as not being allowed into the TOTP studio to watch their charges on this show as, according to Stanley in that Mojo interview “They wouldn’t let us in. We got to the gates- your name’s not on the list”.

*This reminds nine of Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran producing Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy” and it going to No 1 before the Duran boys themselves had achieved that feat. They rectified it weeks later when “Is There Something I Should Know” went straight into the charts at No 1.

Following on from the rather odd father and daughter virtual collaboration that was Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole, here’s another bizarre partnership as Anthrax and Public Enemy join forces for “Bring The Noise” (and not “Bring On The Noise” as Gary Davies mistakenly says twice). This, of course, was a Public Enemy track that had already been released as a single peaking at No 32 back in 1988. When thrash metallers Anthrax recorded a version and asked Chuck D to see if he would add his vocals on it, their request was refused by Def Jam label co-founder Rick Rubin so the band added Public Enemy’s vocals from the original master anyway. Once the track was finished, Rubin must have seen sense and the release was promoted by both bands leading to a joint tour.

I’ve told my Flavor Flav story before haven’t I? Oh well, it’s due another outing. A year on from this release, U2 were playing a gig at the G-Mex centre in Manchester entitled “Stop Sellafield” as part of the Greenpeace movement to protest the nuclear factory. On the bill with them were Kraftwerk and Public Enemy. On the afternoon of the gig, Flavor Flav wondered into the Our Price store on Market Street where I was working with an entourage of people with him and caused chaos as he meandered up and down the shop floor. He clearly had no idea where he was or what he was supposed to be doing. My colleague Justin who was a huge Kraftwerk fan and was going to the gig just to see them tried to establish contact with him in an ‘earth to Flav’ type of way but I don’t think he got very far. I think he might have been after an autograph as he was prone to that sort of thing. He once got Dion Dublin’s autograph when he came in the shop shortly after he had signed for Man Utd on the back of a picture of Bryan Robson.

“Bring The Noise” (the Anthrax/ Public Enemy mash up version) peaked at No 14.

Kim Appleby‘s time as a solo star was coming to an end in mid 1991. Having read some interviews with her, I think the allure of the whole thing was starting to wane anyway. She had worked up the songs for her debut eponymous album in tribute to her sister Mel with whom she had been writing and who had passed away at the beginning of 1990 as she wanted to create some sort of legacy for her. The success of the album and specifically the single “Don’t Worry” had achieved that. It sounds like she kind of lost her drive and purpose after that. “Mama” was the third single taken from that album and was the smallest fo the three hits off it peaking at No 19. It was also her last Top 40 hit. It was pleasant enough if a bit twee. The chorus had an endearing nursery rhyme quality to it but the verses were a bit slow. It was nowhere near as impressive as “Don’t Worry” which was nominated for an Ivor Novello in the best contemporary song category (it lost out to Adamski’s “Killer”). That nomination action though did lead to Kim being involved with the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers And Authors who co-ordinate the Ivor Novello awards and she chaired the judges panel for them for 15 years.

There was a second album in 1993 but it only received a limited release and the singles from it all failed to chart so it became a lost album. Kim has returned to live performing recently for the first time in over 20 years and was also seen co-presenting a three-part series on BBC Four called Smashing Hits! The 80s Pop Map of Britain and Ireland with Midge Ure.

This next song screams the summer of 1991. The dance /rap version of “Now That We Found Love” by Heavy D & the Boyz seemed inexplicably popular to me. I didn’t get it at all. It came across as so lazy, straight out of the ‘OK, let’s get an old tune that people will know, house it up a bit, write a rap for it and the masses will lap it up’ school of thought. Hadn’t we seen this all before from the likes of The Fat Boys when they covered “Wipeout” and “The Twist” in the late 80s?

I already knew the Third World version of “Now That We Found Love” though admittedly not from the original 1978 but its 1985 re-release. To say that I’m really not a big reggae fan, I’d always quite liked it. This take on it by Heavy D & the Boyz (obviously spelt with a ‘z’ as it was the early 90s!) sounded like a travesty to me. There was an album called “Peaceful Journey” that Our Price had made a Recommended Release meaning it was discounted by wasn’t actually in the charts but I don’t think it sold very well at all as people were only interested in the single which would go all the way to No 2.

Some Breakers now and we start with Queensrÿche who I knew back in 1991 were a heavy rock band but that’s about all I knew of them. Fast forward 30 years and that’s still pretty much the extent of my knowledge. I certainly couldn’t name you any of their songs but here they were back in the day with a bona fide chart hit called “Best I Can“. Checking them out on Spotify, that song isn’t even in their most listened to Top 10 tracks . However, the single released after it called “Silent Lucidity” has nearly 47 million plays. So I checked it out and it was pretty good actually and certainly not the hoary old formulaic rock I was expecting. The clip of “Best I Can’ that they play on TOTP though is exactly what I would have expected it to be and nothing that I would want to linger over.

Not that it’s a massively high bar really but “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…” is without doubt my favourite C+C Music Factory song. The third single from their “Gonna Make You Sweat” album, it fair fizzes along with an infectious rhythm and a driving rap all of which combine to propel the track into the furthest corners of your brain from which it can never be vacated. See Heavy D (and your Boyz), that’s how you do a rap pop crossover!

The lyrics concern honey traps and infidelity were not anything new per se – we’d already had “The Rain” by Oran ‘Juice’ Jones – but they would prove to be a popular subject with future songs like Shaggy’s 2000 No 1 single “It Wasn’t Me” creating a little sub genre of their own almost. The song’s title apparently came from a catchphrase used by US chat host Arsenio Hall:

The final Breaker is by a man who hadn’t had a hit in his own right since 1986. OK, if we’re being pedantic he did feature on a No 1 single no less (he contributed “She’s Leaving Home” to the Childline charity single in 1988 but everybody played the Wet Wet Wet cover of “With a Little Help from My Friends” instead). And yes, he featured on Beats International’s double A side “Won’t Talk About It” / “Blame It on the Bassline” which made the Top 40 in 1989 but I’m not counting either of those. I am of course talking of Billy Bragg who is back with “Sexuality” the lead single from his sixth studio album “Don’t Try This At Home”.

The track found Billy in a poppier vein than we might have expected but that was probably due to the influence of Johnny Marr who took Billy’s demo of the song and turned it into a brilliant pop song. As well as Marr’s undoubted talents, the song also featured Billy’s long time collaborator Kirsty MacColl on backing vocals. The lyrics are typically idiosyncratic Bragg, for example:

A nuclear submarine sinks off the coast of Sweden
Headlines give me headaches when I read them
I had an uncle who once played for Red Star Belgrade
He said some things are really best left unspoken
But I prefer it all to be out in the open

He’s not everybody’s cup of tea but I love Billy’s values and approach to life which is reflected in his music.

The video was made by yet another long time mate in Phil Jupitus who’s connection with Billy stretched back to the days of Red Wedge in the mid 80s and am I losing my mind but does The Bard of Barking have a look of Andrew Lincoln about him in it? OK, I am going mad but he looks more like The Walking Dead star than Robert De Niro as the lyrics would have us believe.

“Sexuality” peaked at No 27.

Now surely this next single was a prime contender for having been included in the Breakers section we have just seen but somehow the TOTP producers decided that it deserved a spot on it own in the running order despite only being at No 37 in the charts. “Generations Of Love” was the follow up to “Bow Down Mister” by Boy George’s side project Jesus Loves You. It had flopped on its initial release the previous year but had been given a second chance in the light of the chart performance of “Bow Down Mister”. Whilst you couldn’t call a Top 40 hit a flop, its peak of No 35 (even with is TOTP appearance) was hardly a resounding success either.

I didn’t mind it but it didn’t have the quirky, goofy appeal of its predecessor and would I call it a dance track as Gary Davies did? I don’t think so. I quite like the gallic accordion part in it and George’s vocals were as pure as ever but it didn’t really have any oomph to my ears. It would be the last chart entry for the band who broke up the following year.

Wait! Vanilla Ice had three hits?! Yes, yes he did. Well, actually he had four in total but “Rollin’ In My 5.0” was the third. This was just garbage and six months on from “Ice Ice Baby”, we all knew it as well (apart from those few, poor misguided souls that bought this in enough quantities to make it a No 27 hit of course). The titular 5.0 was Vanilla Ice’s 5.0 Liter Foxbody Mustang car and didn’t he also use that phrase in the lyrics to “Ice Ice Baby”? I think he did.

Supposedly Limp Bizkit’s 2000 chart topper “Rollin'” makes reference to “Rollin’ In My 5.0” but I’ve had a look at the lyrics to it and I can’t see any link unless it the line ‘And the people who don’t give a f**k’ as surely nobody did about Vanilla Ice at this point.

Jason Donovan is still at No 1 with “Any Dream Will Do”. Now I failed to mention this last week when taking about Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine but I was reminded of it by a friend on FaceBook. So after Donovan’s stint in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, he was replaced by Philip Schofield who seemed to be everywhere at that time. One place he had definitely been was the 1991 Smash Hits Poll Winners’ Party where he was the host. CUSM were only on the show as their new label Chrysalis (them again!) had pushed for it but things started to go wrong after the duo’s performance of “After The Watershed (Early Learning The Hard Way)” had been cut short when Fruitbat had kicked a microphone stand into the audience. In response to not being able to finish the song, Fruitbat started knocking over equipment on stage which led to Schofield’s sarcastic comment about smashing things up being original behaviour for a rock band. Then….a tremendous rugby tackle on Schofield by Fruitbat. I think at the time I believed it was all a bit of knockabout fun but Fruitbat really takes him out and his partner in the band Jim Bob was really pissed off with him and fearful for the band’s future after the incident. Yeah, but it was Philip Schofield after all Jim Bob so Fruitbat does deserve some credit.

As for Jason Donovan, this would be his second and final week at No 1.

The play out video is “My Name Is Not Susan” by Whitney Houston. This confusingly titled single was actually about Whitney confronting a lover who has mistakenly called her by his ex-girlfriend’s name Susan (according to Wikipedia). Relationship mis-steps seems to be all the rage for song subject matter in 1991 after the honey trap of “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…” and now this. Sadly for Whitney, the choice of this track as a single also proved to be a mis-step as it peaked at No 29 but she would be back the following year with her gargantuan selling version of “I Will Always Love You” from The Bodyguard.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Incognito	Always There	Nope
2	Nat King Cole / Natalie Cole	Unforgettable	No
3	Cola Boy	7 Ways To Love	Negative
4	Anthrax / Public Enemy	Bring The Noise	I did not
5	Kim Appleby	Mama	Nah
6	Heavy D & The Boyz	Now That We’ve Found Love	Definitely not
7	Queensrÿche	Best I Can	Another no
8	C+C Music Factory	Things That Make You Go Hmmm…	Liked it, didn’t buy it
9	Billy Bragg	Sexuality	No but I have it on his retrospective Must I Paint You A Picture
10	Jesus Loves You	Generations Of Love	Not for me
11	Vanilla Ice	Rollin’ In My 5.0	Hell no
12	Jason Donovan	Any Dream Will Do	See 11 above
13	Whitney Houston	My Name Is Not Susan	And a final 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/m000ypcb/top-of-the-pops-04071991

TOTP 27 JUN 1991

Posted on August 20, 2021 by 80stastic

It’s 1991 and that grand old institution that was TOTP is having an identity crisis. Ratings had fallen and the show was struggling to retain its relevance to a Top 40 chart which had become increasingly dominated by dance music the stars of which were the tunes themselves rather than those making them. The programme’s traditional format and the way it delivered flamboyant pop stars into the nation’s living rooms every Thursday night functioned rather less well when its content was anonymous looking DJ types stood behind some keyboards or a mixing desk. Adding to its dilemmas was the competition it faced from other music shows. Having gone head to head with TOTP in the late 80s with its own version of the show in The Roxy, ITV had usurped that traditional format and came up with The Chart Show whose video only / no presenter format on a Saturday morning was increasingly popular. Then of course there was MTV which had been serving the UK via its MTV Europe network since 1987 although its penetration into UK homes was hardly universal. Still, its style and programming was starting to make TOTP look like a TV relic. Rallying against this, the show employed what was then cutting edge technology (presumably) in green screen backdrops for the presenters, changes to the Top 40 countdown (the show’s whole modus operandi since its inception), an ill judged Top 5 albums feature and cramming more and more videos into its 30 minutes of screen time. The 30 minutes time limit was beginning to look very restricting. I’m sure The Chart Show lasted at least an hour and of course MTV broadcast all day long.

As we approach the mid-point of the year, the show has reduced its regular hosts to a shallow pool of names, those being Gary Davies, Bruno Brookes, Jakki Brambles, Mark Goodier, Nicky Campbell and tonight’s presenter Simon Mayo. Anthea Turner had already been relieved of her duties a few weeks prior. Come the end of September, all of these names would be jettisoned in favour of new, younger and mainly unknown faces as part of the ‘Year Zero’ revamp brought in by new executive producer Stanley Appel. For now though, the show is limping along trying to convince us all that everything is fine and that there’s nothing to see here (literally true in the case of some of those pesky dance acts).

So, as stated, it’s Simon Mayo’s turn at the wheel for this particular instalment and he brings his usual smug sense of his own importance to proceedings. I’m finding Mayo especially grating in these repeats although to be fair, all of the aforementioned names had their own intrinsic foibles. If Mayo was smug then we also had Goodier (plain boring), Davies (overly chummy), Brambles (disinterested) and Brookes (just creepy). Mayo begins the show by asking the audience to name any Belgian “singing superstars” – I say ask, it’s more like he’s goading us in a ‘see I can name more than you’ way as he references The Singing Nun and Plastic Bertrand before advising us that we can “add this lot to the pile” as he introduces Cubic 22 with their hit “Night In Motion”. They’re hardly singing though are they Simon? No, because Cubic 22 were one of those dance acts meaning some faceless bods behind keyboards and a couple of dancers. The only voices you hear are some sample vocals shouting ‘Party time’ and ‘Let me hear ya!’. That really doesn’t qualify Cubic 22 as singing stars in my book Mayo. The performance here though is a prime example of the challenges TOTP faced in reflecting the nation’s dance music choices. Watch it without the track playing and the visual element is woeful. Lots of shots of hands playing keyboards and the two dancers doing some very ordinary synchronised moves. At least with a video you might get some clever graphics or distracting images. Why on earth did they have such an act in the studio open the show?!

Next, Mayo comes across like wannabe football fan David Cameron (‘call me Dave, I’m a football fan but is it Aston Villa or West Ham?) with his remarks about “Rush Rush” by Paula Abdul being an ode to Welsh striker Ian Rush. I know he’s a Spurs fan (he goes on about Terry Venables later on in the show) but did he have to try so hard to get his football credentials over?

This was the lead single from Paula’s “Spellbound” album and I’m sure we had an import CD of it in the Market Street, Manchester Our Price I was working in ahead of its UK release. I can’t believe anyone would have coughed up the £18 or whatever it was just to be able to say they had it a couple of weeks before anybody else!

Playing across the bottom of the video is the Top 40 countdown which Mayo didn’t think worthy of a mention in his intro (though of course his pathetic Ian Rush quip was) and they’ve even tweaked that as they have gone back to referencing everything in the Top 40 whereas they had previously omitted anything going down the charts. As I said earlier, identity crisis.

It may be a new decade but that didn’t put any sort of brakes on Erasure‘s imperial phase. Here they are with their first new material since 1989’s “Wild” album and “Chorus” would confirm that their popularity was a strong as ever when it went straight in at No 3 in the charts. Admittedly, it was hardly a major change of musical direction for Andy and Vince but hey, if it ain’t broke and all that. The lead single from their fifth studio album of the same name, would it have sounded out of place on any of three previous albums? I liked it though. It fair whipped along with a hooks a plenty and the most unlikely use of a word in the chorus (‘fishes’) since George Michael managed to get ‘feet’ into “Careless Whisper”. It was also perfect for any Radio 1 daytime playlist.

The album would give the duo their third consecutive No 1 when it was released later in the year. I’m pretty sure that on that day, our deliveries of new releases didn’t turn up until well into the afternoon which meant we missed out on loads of sales as everyone who wanted it on the day of release popped over the road to HMV who had racks of it. By the end of the 90s, retailers had agreed with the record companies that new releases could be delivered on the Friday before the release date to allow shops to get them ready for sale first thing Monday morning on the strict proviso that they could not be sold before then. The rule was pretty much totally observed in my experience although there must have been the odd title that slipped through the net company wide.

Back to Erasure though and what was the deal with the Vince and Andy mannequins in this performance? They weren’t a feature of the official promo video so presumably they were made just for this TOTP appearance. Seems a bit extravagant but then I guess Erasure were (well Andy anyway).

More inane attempts at wit from Mayo next when he introduces “Hey Stoopid” by Alice Cooper and tries a line about getting a thick ear if you go into a record shop and saying ‘Hey Stupid’. Well, I worked in a record shop at the time Simes and never did I have the licence to assault a customer who happened to annoy me.

As for Alice, after his unlikely monster hit “Poison” in 1989, he managed to eke out a few more in the 90s though none were as successful as “Poison”. As with Erasure before him, this lead single was also the same title of his album which featured guest contributions from some of rock’s biggest names including Slash, Ozzy Osbourne, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and Nikki Sixx. Given the deliberate mis-spelling of ‘stupid’, I’m surprised Noddy Holder wasn’t on that list.

As for the song itself, it was fairly dumb as mud stuff and not likely to oust the likes of “School’s Out”, “Elected” or indeed “Poison” as one of Alice’s most famous songs (and yes I know the first two are actually Alice Cooper the band tracks).

“Hey Stoopid” peaked at No 21 in the UK.

Now most of us may know Omar just for “There’s Nothing Like This” but there was far more to him than just that one song. He has worked with some legendary names like Stevie Wonder and Lamont Dozier and is still making music to this day. His career is actually remarkably similar to that of another British soul singer Roachford. See how their stories resemble each other:

Omar	Roachford
Grew up in musical family. His father drummed for Bob Marley, his brother is Grammy winning producer, remixer and DJ Scratch Professer and is sister is a BRIT School alumna	Grew up in a musical family and was playing in his uncle’s touring band as a teenager
Is a multi instrumentalist	Is a multi instrumentalist
Unjustly and incorrectly categorised as a one hit wonder – “There’s Nothing Like This”	Unjustly and incorrectly categorised as a one hit wonder – “Cuddly Toy”
Appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to music in 2012	Appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to music in 2019

Now I’m no soul aficionado but even I could appreciate that “There’s Nothing Like This” was slick, smooth and perfectly sung. Oh and get this from @TOTPFacts:

Not long before this #TOTP appearance, Omar had to turn down an offer of playing on Jason Donovan's tour. "They wanted me to play percussion, but I was too busy. Even though they were offering £1000 a week."
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 13, 2021

The insertion of that bit of trivia will make sense later on.

After weeks of cramming in up to four acts in the Breakers section, this week we only have two. First off is Chesney Hawkes with a song called “I’m A Man Not A Boy”. You could almost hear the music press laughing in Chesney’s face at the title. Its No 27 chart peak sounded the death knell for the poor lad’s pop star career which was over before it had even started. No 27? That was an awful attempt at following up a record that had topped the charts for five weeks. It did however do one thing which was to disprove the theory that Chesney, like the aforementioned Omar and Roachford, was not a one hit wonder.

In truth, “I’m A Man Not A Boy” was nowhere near as good a pop record as its predecessor. It was a weak tune with a risible title. Maybe there was a different track on the Buddy’s Story album that his label Chrysalis Records (them again!) could have released instead that might have done the trick? It was all too late now though. A third and final track off the album was released as a single called “Secrets Of The Heart” which was a fairly terrible ballad. It did nothing to reverse Chezza’s fortunes and it peaked at No 57.

Fast forward to 1993 and a comeback single called “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” was released but its soon became apparent that Chesney was now persona non grata in the world of pop and it couldn’t get any higher than No 63. The parent album disappeared without trace. Hawkes seems to have come to terms with his time as a pop star though and now lives happily in Los Angeles with his American wife Kristina and their three children.

Now if it hadn’t been for the next single, I could have said that Chesney’s song was ‘The One And Only’ Breaker this week but here’s Incognito with “Always There” to stop that happening (damn it!). Now I had never heard of this lot before 1991 but I turns out that they were actually part of the UK Jazz Funk movement of the early 80s with their first album released in 1981. However, it would be another 10 years before their next long player by which time, like Omar earlier in the show, they had been signed to Gilles Peterson’s newly formed acid jazz label Talkin’ Loud. Impressed by their arrangement of “Always There”, it was picked out as a single but there was a problem. The band’s vocalist was sick so the replacement was the legendary R&B singer Jocelyn Brown (of “Somebody Else’s Guy” fame). The impetus that Jocelyn gave the record turned it into a Top 10 smash.

I also hadn’t been aware that “Always There” was actually a cover version with the original having been a minor hit for an act called Side Effect in the mid 70s. Incognito would repeat the cover version trick for their next hit the following year, a version of Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ’bout A Thing”.

The increasingly tiresome Mayo indulges himself in some more dreadful attempts at humour as he introduces “It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over” by Lenny Kravitz by stating that it was inspired by some football commentary by John Motson. OK, Simon well not only was that lame but it didn’t make any sense. I presume you were trying to make a link to the legendary line from the 1966 World Cup final commentary “some people are on the pitch, they think it’s all over…it is now!” but that was, of course, by Kenneth Wolstenholme and not John Motson. This is schoolboy error stuff.

“It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over” was written by Kravitz as he attempted to save his marriage to actress Lisa Bonet (who found fame playing Denise Huxtable in The Cosby Show). Despite his attempts, the two divorced in 1993 and she would later play the role of singer Marie De Salle in the wonderful High Fidelity with John Cusack and Jack Black. If you merge those two characters together you just about get Denise La Salle who had a hit with the execrable “My Toot Toot” in 1985. You can tell I’m flagging a bit here can’t you?

“It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over” peaked at No 11.

And the moment has arrived. The moment you all dreaded. It’s the first week of Bryan Adams and “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” and he hasn’t even got to No 1 yet! It’s strange to think that as this TOTP went out with the song entering the chart at No 8 that we had no idea at that point how ingrained it would become in our psyche not just in 1991 but forever more. Taken from the soundtrack to the Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, it proved to be irresistible to UK audiences famously staying at the top of the charts for a record breaking 16 weeks.

Look, this song is going to be on show after show after show which means I’ll have to write about it a lot so I don’t propose to dump everything I have to say about it on week one. So to start with, here’s some statistics about its chart performance:

No 1 in the UK for 16 weeks from July 7 to October 27
Topped the Europe-wide sales chart for 18 continuous weeks, still an all-time record
Topped the European-wide radio airplay chart for 10 weeks
No 1 for 7 weeks in the US, Billboard Hot 100, which combines radio airplay and sales,
No 1 for 8 weeks on the US Adult Contemporary Chart ,the longest run atop that chart since 1979
No 1 for 9 weeks in Adams’s native Canada
No 1 for 11 weeks in Australia
No 1 for 12 weeks in Sweden
No 1 in 18 countries being try best sell of the year in 7 of them
Sold 15 million copies worldwide

Phew!

More gibberish from Simon Mayo next as he introduces “I Touch Myself” by Divinyls. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there’s an awful lot of touching going on; touching this, touching that, touching cameramen. I don’t know whether I approve actually. Mind you, it hasn’t done the Divinyls any good at all has it? There at No 12 this week…”. What?! No Simes, there isn’t a lot of touching going on, it’s just that there is a song in the charts with the word ‘touch’ in its title and surely you meant to say “it hasn’t done the Divinyls any harm at all has it?” to make any sort of sense of your nonsense.

This week it’s the infamous studio performance where singer Chrissy Amphlett spends a lot of time seemingly fondling her breasts. The sexual tension is added to by her guitarist playing his instrument in an erect, phallus like position. Blimey! Wilkipedia informs me that the B-side to the single was a track called “Follow Through”. Oh God! Don’t bring any toilet humour into the already overcrowded proceedings.

Despite taking “I Touch Myself” to No 10, they were unable to repeat the trick and it became their only UK chart hit. Chrissy Amphlett sadly passed away in 2013 from breast cancer but her legacy was the I Touch Myself project promoting breast cancer awareness and encouraging women to check themselves regularly.

Hallelujah! Color Me Badd have been toppled and we have a new No 1! The bad news is it’s Jason Donovan. Yes, in some sort of twisted version of a Faustian pact, we had traded the obvious material benefit of getting rid of those berks who wanted to sex us up for our pop music souls by placing “Any Dream Will Do” at the top of the pile. Look, it’s not that I hate musicals (I don’t at all) but I can’t really be doing with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and certainly not the insipid and twee “Any Dream Will Do”. I wasn’t the only one. Look at this tweet from an actual Jase fan:

As someone who was a fan of @JDonOfficial as a kid, this song was what killed every bit of fandom I had back then. He was singing songs from school play territory & it just seemed so naff. Now I'm older I look back with fondness at the stuff before this, though..but this…cringe
— CodaQueen (@CodaQueen) August 13, 2021

Quite. No wonder Omar turned his offer of touring with him down!

The play out video is “Sheriff Fatman” by Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine and it’s finally time for my claim to fame story. This single appeared on the duo’s album “101 Damnations”. The album closes with the track “G. I. Blues” which is an anti-war song inspired by John Savage’s character in The Deer Hunter. Now, look at the personnel listed as having contributed to the making of the album in the screenshot below. See that arrow pointing to someone called Rob Sheridan? Rob was Best Man at my wedding!

This has been my go to claim to fame indie story for years. How Rob knew Jim Bob and Fruitbat I really can’t recall but knew them he did and there is his name, recorded in history for all to see. And then…during the first wave of the pandemic last year, when joining in on Tim Burgess’s Twitter Listening Party “101 Damnations”, Jim Bob tweeted this:

This piano bit is a lot harder to play than it sounds. We had to get a friend Rob to play it but he did it too well so we had to change it after he’d left the studio #TimsTwitterListeningParty
— Jim Bob (@mrjimBob) July 14, 2020

What! You mean that isn’t Rob playing on the album after all?! Noooo!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Cubic 22	Night In Motion	No chance
2	Paula Abdul	Rush Rush	I was in no rush to buy this
3	Erasure	Chorus	Don’t think I did
4	Alice Cooper	Hey Stoopid	No
5	Omar	There’s Nothing Like This	Nope
6	Chesney Hawkes	I’m A Man Not A Boy	Dearie me no
7	Incognito	Always There	Nah
8	Lenny Kravitz	It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over	No but I had the album
9	Bryan Adams	(Everything I Do) I Do It for You	Negative
10	Divinyls	I Touch Myself	Liked it, didn’t buy it
11	Jason Donovan	Any Dream Will Do	See 6 above
12	Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine	Sheriff Fatman	No but I must have it on something

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/m000ypc8/top-of-the-pops-27061991

TOTP 20 JUN 1991

Posted on August 17, 2021 by 80stastic

This is my fifth year of reviewing these BBC4 TOTP repeats. I started with the shows from 1983 and we are now up to 1991. This is my 367th post over two blogs. Thats over 825,000 words. I’m tired. I’m stuck in the house due to testing positive for COVID and I’m staring at a blank document awaiting inspiration to strike. I’m not helped by the fact that the TOTP production team were determined back then to cram in as many acts as possible into 30 minutes of screen time. This week there are 14 acts! 14! I’m not sure I can do it anymore. Look, I’ll try OK, just for you…

…OK, first song of the night and not only do I not remember it at all but it’s already giving me a headache. The cause of my distress is “Tribal Base” by Rebel MC / Tenor Fly / Barrington Levy. What that Rebel MC who did “Street Tuff” because this sounds nothing like that. Wikipedia informs me that this was from his second album which was in a ‘breakbeat hardcore’ style with some ‘reggae fusion’ thrown into the mix. I have absolutely no idea what any of those words mean. Apparently it was a precursor to the ‘jungle’ sound which then begat drum’n’bass both of which I do remember because you couldn’t escape them in the mid 90s (‘jungle ist massive’ and all that).

As for Tenor Fly, he was a leading light of the rave movement whilst Barrington Levy is a reggae and dancehall legend whose back catalogue stretches back to 1979. Now of course, it’s possible that there are some reggae fusion fans out there reading this (there might be!) that are now shouting at their devices incredulous at my lack of knowledge in this field but I can only tell it how it was and is via my own memories and knowledge. I have very little else to say about this one other than I didn’t expect to see a double neck guitar on stage for a track like this. I thought they were the preserve of prog rock.

“Tribal Base” peaked at No 20.

Presenter Nicky Campbell makes a really lame quip about the Rebel MC never stopping and being a ‘rebel without a pause’ (groan!) and then follows it up by saying that “Salt ‘n’ Pepa would have been here tonight but Salt is currently having a baby which is kicking it almost as hard as she is here…”. Surely the pun there was about pushing it Nicky as in “Push It”, one of their most well known hits? Their actual current single is “Do You Want Me” which is promotes the idea of men respecting women and not pressurising them until they are ready to have sex….or as @TOTPFacts put it:

No shagging with Salt 'N' Pepa until the third date. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 6, 2021

Yes, well…anyway. Salt ‘n’ Pepa would continue this conversation in their next single “Let’s Talk About Sex” which including these classic lyrics:

Yo, Pep, I don’t think they’re gonna play this on the radio
And why not? Everybody havin’ sex
I mean, everybody should be makin’ love
Come on, how many guys you know make love?

“Do You Want Me” peaked at No 5.

Talking of having sex (as just about every song in the charts seemed to be at this time), here is LaTour with “People Are Still Having Sex”. Campbell bravely takes on the single’s title by trying to intellectualise the subject going on about a “chilling assessment of contemporary attitudes towards an activity fraught with danger” before saying it’s great to dance to. Was it really though? Even the backing dancer up there on stage for this studio performance doesn’t seem to know what moves to do. Oh yes, that backing dancer who’s mouthing “hello lover”? General consensus on Twitter was that she was one of the Bombalurina women last seen cavorting with Timmy Mallett. She got all the good gigs didn’t she?

A stage performance of this track doesn’t really work does it? The tempo of it doesn’t really naturally make for a visually engaging spectacle whilst the main guy (Mr LaTour?) comes across as really creepy. Just nasty.

Campbell works very hard in his next link to make sure he gets the title of the song right, overly articulating the world ‘funk’ when introducing “Get The Funk Out” by Extreme. It’s the promo video but surely this performance would surely have been better suited to the TOTP studio than LaTour’s? It’s full of energy with lead singer Gary Cherone looking almost demonic with some of the weird shapes he pulls his body into.

When I first heard this, I thought Cherone was singing ‘No Robbie Nevil’s going to spoil my fun’ as in the “C’est La Vie” hit maker from the 80s as opposed to what he actually sings which is “No rotten apple gonna spoil my fun” which makes much more sense. Quite why Robbie Nevil would have been seen as a party pooper by a bunch of funk metal heads I have no idea.

“Get The Funk Out” peaked at No 19.

Meanwhile back in the studio we find Kenny Thomas having an enormous hit (I said hit!) with “Thinking About Your Love”. Kenny was one of the biggest breakout stars of 1991 with four Top 40 hits and a Top 3 album. Eventually the hits dried up and by the middle of the decade Kenny had disappeared from view altogether. However, he re-entered the public consciousness after appearing in ITV’s Hit Me Baby One More Time in 2005 although he was beaten to a place in the grand final by one of the weakest and weediest pop bands of the 90s in 911 – the shame!

Nowadays, he’s the lead singer of Living In A Box who shared the same record label in Chrysalis Records back in the day which is how they originally met. On the band’s official website, in answer to the question ‘Are you going to be singing some of your own songs at the Living In A Box shows?’, Kenny replied:

Yes, definitely! Fans coming to see The Box will hear their hits and people who want to hear some of mine will get the chance to hear those too. I think the fans will hear six Top 10 records in our set, which is quite something.

Well it would be Kenny if that were true but although ‘The Box’ (nobody calls them that surely?!) did have three Top 10 hits, you only had the one in “Thinking About Your Love” which makes a grand total of four not six.

A load of Breakers now starting with something for which the official description is, I believe, ‘techno bollocks’. Cubic 22 were a Belgian (not Italian for once) dance project whose only UK Top 40 hit was “Night In Motion”. They comprised Peter Ramson and Danny Van Wauwe the latter of whom sounds like he should be a Man Utd midfielder who was bought for a lot of money but who can’t make the team. Apparently we’ll get to see them in the studio next week. Oh joy. Cue another visually bizarre performance just like LaTour.

If the track sounds vaguely familiar, here’s @TOTPFacts with the reason why:

The piano riff from "Night In Motion" was later pinched by British dance outfit Strike for "U Sure Do", which reached 31 in 1994 and 4 in 1995: https://t.co/b639Sfosyr Borremans and Van Wauwe didn't get any money out of it. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 13, 2021

“Night In Motion” peaked at No 15.

This is more like it! Despite having been formed in 1987, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine had never achieved any mainstream success until now. Quite why was 1991 the turning point in their career? Well, it could have been that their brand of sample heavy, indie dance pop that they had been making was finally receiving national recognition with bands like EMF, Jesus Jones and Pop Will Eat Itself all having chart hits around this time. Or maybe it was just that their band name really fitted in with the sex obsessed Top 40 at this time!

“Sheriff Fatman” (possibly their most well known song though certainly not their biggest hit) was a re-release of an early single that had failed to chart though it had been a big indie hit. Like the band themselves, their timeline is a bit chaotic but as far as I can tell, it was re-released when the duo signed with Chrysalis Records (them again!) after the collapse of Rough Trade – a bit like when “Sit Down” was re-released after James has moved from Rough Trade to Fontana. Also like “Sit Down” was the fact that “Sheriff Fatman” had been on that influential ‘Madchester’ themed “Happy Daze” compilation album which I think must have been when I first heard the track.

Highlighting the dodgy practices of slum landlords via the use of some inspired wordplay in their lyrics, “Sheriff Fatman” was an absolute stomper and a mosh pit favourite for fans when played live. Indeed, those lyrics, once heard were impossible to forget.

Moving up on second base
Behind Nicholas Van Wotsisface
At six foot six and a hundred tons
The undisputed king of the slums
With more aliases than Klaus Barbie
The master butcher of Leigh-on-Sea

Those lines of course had their basis in reality. Nicholas Van Wotsisface was a reference to British businessman and convicted criminal involved in property Nicholas van Hoogstraten whilst Klaus Barbie was the German Nazi known as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’ for having personally tortured prisoners of the Gestapo. This wasn’t your average pop song – even Nicky Campbell acknowledges that in his introduction to Jim Bob and Fruitbat as “something very intriguing now…”.

All of this and I haven’t even got onto my CUSM claim to fame yet. I’ll leave that for the next post when they are on the show properly though.

“Sheriff Fatman” peaked at No 23.

Next a young man who was being talked up as the next big thing in British soul…or was it acid jazz?. Time has decreed that it was a sub genre called ‘neo soul’ actually. His name was Omar and his song was “There’s Nothing Like This”. In fact, his full name was Omar Lye-Fook (which sounds like a lyric from Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves Of London”) and he was a hugely talented musician who could play multi instruments and had a smooth, velvety voice to go with that.

Like many singles in 1991 it seems, “There’s Nothing Like This” was another re-release having originally been issued in 1990 on Kongo Records. It was re-released by the hugely influential acid jazz label Talkin’ Loud when Omar signed with them in 1991 becoming his biggest ever hit when it peaked at No 14. The bass riff gave it an instant hook that made it stand out and he looked set for superstardom. And then…nothing. There was no follow up single until the following year and that was actually the lead single from his new album. By that point, momentum appeared to have been lost. Omar didn’t have another Top 40 hit until 1997.

In my mind, I have an image of Simon Mayo saying “That was Omar and “There’s Nothing Like This”….except the rest of the album”. Maybe I made it up but it sounds like the sort of snide thing Mayo might have said.

The final Breaker sees the return of Paula Abdul with the lead single from her second album “Spellbound”. Unlike all her other hits up to this point, “Rush Rush” was a ballad and a big one at that. No uptempo dance number here. It was all very accomplished and polished and all those other words ending in ‘-ished’ but it was ever so slow and just a tad dull I thought.

In the US, it would supply Paul with her fifth consecutive No 1 single and indeed stayed top of the charts or five whole weeks. Over here, it got to No 6 which was just about the same pattern of difference between the UK and America for all her releases. And yes, clearly that’s Keanu Reeves in the video which was a play on the James Dean film Rebel Without A Cause – oh, is that what put the idea in Nicky Campbell’s ahead for his awful ‘rebel without a pause’ pun?

Talking of awful puns, here’s Driza Bone with “Real Love”. The people behind Driza Bone were producers and remixers Vincent Garcia and Billy April but it turns out they didn’t come up with the name themselves though. Here’s @TOTPFacts with the rest of the story:

Driza Bone were named after an Australian brand of oilskin raincoat. Billy April: "[Vincent Garcia] saw that name on a trip to Australia in 1990 and liked it. When we couldn’t come up with anything better we used it." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 6, 2021

As well as being an act in their own right (they employed a revolving conveyor belt of vocalists – this one was Sophie Jones), they also used their name for the remixing arm of their set up and worked with artists like Lisa Stansfield, Jody Watley, Mary J. Blige, Shanice and Duran Duran.

Sadly for Drizabone, I remembered their dreadful name more than their song which peaked at No 16.

Just when we thought that the Jason Donovan phenomenon was all over, he comes back with a massively successful hit! I have to admit I didn’t see this coming at all. I thought he was spent, done – ‘you’ve had your season in the sun now f**k off mate’ type of thing. Yet his decision to agree to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s offer to play the lead role in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (apparently he mulled it over for a whole three weeks) proved to be completely correct as his version of “Any Dream Will Do” scored him a huge No 1 single.

I’d forgotten that to went straight in at No 2 – not something that happened every week in 1991 – so the buzz around the release must have been big. It would spend two weeks at No 1 whilst the cast album of this production was also No 1 for two weeks. Donovan’s success in the role and the way it reignited his career was a beacon for others to follow in his wake with the likes of Phillip Schofield, Donny Osmond and Boyzone’s Stephen Gately all playing Joseph over the next few years. In 2007, the song gave its name to a second Lloyd Webber talent show-themed TV series as he searched for a new star to play the role in a revival of the show. The winner was Lee Mead who took a version of the song to No 2 in the charts. It was clearly one of those songs that people just couldn’t get enough of.

As for Jason, “Any Dream Will Do” would prove to be a false dawn. There would be just one further Top 10 single (a cover of The Turtles’ “Happy Together”) and an album in 1993 that his new label Polydor Records had so little faith in that they licensed several of his old hits and included them on the album much to his annoyance. It didn’t work and the album stiffed at No 27. It would be the last Jason Donovan album of the 90s.

Oh, and one final thing, what were all those Pet Shop Boys references that Nicky Campbell made in his intro about?

Some sadness attached to this next performance from Bette Midler as the artist who originally recorded “From A Distance”, Nanci Griffith, passed away literally days ago aged just 68. RIP Nanci.

Getting Bette Midler into the TOTP studio in person must have been quite the coup for the BBC and she’s come dressed as if she’s auditioning for the part of Peter Pan in that year’s Xmas pantomime at the Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury. She even adopts a Peter Pan stance when starting the song with one hand at her waist while leaning back as if surveying Neverland. All that was missing was a slap of her thigh. Come the key change at the song’s finale, she attempts a few jumps as if expecting to be lifted high into the rafters by some invisible wires but sadly for her, she can’t get off the ground. Where’s Tinker Bell with her pixie dust when you need her?

Joshing aside, I have to admire ‘The Divine Miss M’ for her very overt social media stance against the horrific presidency of Donald Trump. Good on you Bette.

“From A Distance” peaked at No 6.

Those jokers Color Me Badd are still at No 1 with “I Wanna Sex You Up”. In a Smash Hits interview, the band announced that “I Wanna Sex You Up is just a modern way of saying ‘I want to romance you'”. OK, so firstly, nobody’s opening line is ‘I want to romance you’ is it?! Secondly, the phrase ‘I Wanna Sex You Up’ definitely does not say ‘I want to romance you’ anyway!

The play out video is “The Motown Song” by Rod Stewart. In keeping with the sexually charged feel of the show, Nicky Campbell can’t resist one final risqué comment when he introduces the track thus:

You can hear the charts on Sunday 4.30 on Radio 1 FM, see them again next week on TOTP presented by Radio 1’s very own blonde bombshell Simon Mayo. We leave you tonight with a man who’s partial to a blonde bombshell…or three…it’s Rod Stewart and The Motown Song…”

So there you have it – a show featuring songs called “People Are Still Having Sex” and “I Wanna Sex You Up”, a band whose name included the word ‘sex’, a conversation about shagging with Salt ‘n’ Pepa and then we round it all off with an innuendo about threesomes (or was that a foursome?!). And we didn’t even have the song on about female masturbation!

I’ve made it through! Fourteen acts and their tracks all viewed and reviewed! Maybe I have more resolve than I gave myself credit for!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Rebel MC / Tenor Fly / Barrington Levy	Tribal Base	Nah
2	Salt ‘n’ Pepa	Do You Want Me	Nope
3	LaTour	People Are Still Having Sex	Definitely not
4	Extreme	Get The Funk Out	Not in the singles box but I think I might have it on something
5	Kenny Thomas	Thinking About Your Love	Negative
6	Cubic 22	Night In Motion	Not my bag at all
7	Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine	Sheriff Fatman	See 4 above
8	Omar	There’s Nothing Like This	No
9	Paula Abdul	Rush Rush	I was in no rush to buy this
10	Driza Bone	Real Love	Another no
11	Jason Donovan	Any Dream Will Do	Ooh no!
12	Bette Midler	From A Distance	…is where I would like to be when this song is on
13	Color Me Badd	I Wanna Sex You Up	Vile – no
14	Rod Stewart	The Motown Song	One final 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/m000yhc2/top-of-the-pops-20061991

TOTP 16 MAY 1991

Posted on August 4, 2021 by 80stastic

It’s mid May 1991 and I have been working in the Our Price store in Market Street, Manchester for about 8 months and life is OK. Except there’s one thing wrong. I haven’t yet had a Saturday off. Obviously as a Xmas temp (as I was when I started) I didn’t expect any whilst the Xmas rush was on but having secured permanent employment with the company, I have worked every Saturday since. Saturday 18 May would change all that though. How do I remember this date? Because I’d booked the Saturday off to watch the FA Cup final. Now as I have mentioned just a few times over the course of this blog, I have always been a Chelsea supporter (46 years and counting now) but I had never missed watching the Cup final regardless who was playing and 1991 wasn’t going to be any different. That year the finalists were Spurs and Nottingham Forest and I had invited some mates from out of town around to watch it. It was an eventful game but it would always be remembered as the Gazza final for all the wrong reasons…

Gazza, of course, had been a pop star less than 6 months earlier off the back of his tears at Italia ’90. His performance in the FA Cup final was more wretched even than either of his two hit singles though. Spurs and hit singles wasn’t a new phenomena restricted to just Gazza mind. The football club had released FA Cup final songs for the previous three occasions they had made the final back in the 80s, all of them with cockney rhyming slangers Chas ‘n’ Dave with the most memorable being the 1981 song “Ossie’s Dream” – ‘in the cup for Totting-ham’ and all that. 1991 was no different as “When the Year Ends in One” was released. Unlike its predecessors, it failed to make the Top 40…because it was shit. Anyway, I finally got my Saturday off to watch the game but before that was the small matter of Thursday night and TOTP. I wonder of host Bruno Brookes will mention the footy*?…

*SPOILER ALERT: He doesn’t.

What on earth is he wearing?! That clobber he’s got on makes him look like a member of a Formula 1 track side race team, ready to speed change a tyre when the driver pulls in for a pit stop. Just ludicrous! Stood next to him is a kid with floppy ‘Madchester’ hair wearing a Revenge T-shirt , Revenge being New Order’s Peter Hooks’s side project band in the early 90s. The contrast is startling. Not sure that the kid’s enthusiastic clapping for acts on tonights’s show that include Danni Minogue, Jason Donovan and Cher is that sincere given his choice of T-shirt. I suspect opening act New Kids On The Block wouldn’t have been one of his faves either. Now don’t be fooled by any the studio audience whoops and hollering, by this point in their career, the band’s popularity was not at the heights it had scaled previously. In short, the wheels were coming off and they were heading down the dumper. To arrest this slide, Donnie Wahlberg convinced them to pursue a new musical direction that was more urban. “Call It What You Want” was the first offering of their new style and came from a something called “No More Games: The Remix Album” which did what it said on the tin and featured hip-hop-upped versions of their previous hits. In the history of very bad ideas, this was surely in the Top 10. I get they were trying to grow and change with their pre-teen audience as they themselves grew older but surely those kids wanted grunge not dirge. The album sold moderately but didn’t really halt the band’s decline.

Apparently this was their one and only TOTP studio appearance. As such, they’ve decided to try and make it a bit special by performing the vocals live. Big mistake. Wahlberg raps adequately but Jordan Knight’s vocals, never that convincing, sound exposed and flat. Give them their due though, they could dance in sync very well.

“Call It What You Want” peaked at No 12.

One of the best known songs of the 80s making a comeback in the 90s now as we see “Tainted Love ’91” by Soft Cell re-released and back in the charts. Why? Well, there was a Best Of album released by record label Mercury called “Memorabilia – The Singles” and “Tainted Love” was back out to promote it. It was actually a re-recorded version of the song as were all but two of the eleven tracks on the album. There had already been a Soft Cell Best Of album released in 1986 simple entitled “The Singles” but it had got swallowed up in the Xmas rush and scraped to a lowly No 58 in the charts. Fast forward five years and it was deemed the right time for another compilation to boldly go where its predecessor hadn’t. Advertised as a Soft Cell / Marc Almond album, it only actually included two Almond solo originals plus his 1989 No 1 with Gene Pitney “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart” and his collaboration with Bronski Beat on 1985’s “I Feel Love (Medley)”. You can imagine a conversation at Mercury about the crucial need to include “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart” in the track listing but that would mean marketing it as a Soft Cell/ Marc Almond combined project. It worked though as the album went Top 10 and the single Top 5.

For many years, I couldn’t listen to “Tainted Love” due to the amount of times I had already heard it played on radio. It got hammered at the time and is regularly given a spin whenever anything vaguely to do with the 80s is broadcast. I had reached saturation point (see also “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen). I think I might just be coming out of that phase now though.

I can’t hear that much difference between the original recording and this 1991 version – maybe a slight difference in the emphasis Marc puts on some of his phrasing and a slightly less lush production? Right until this very minute I had always believed that “Tainted Love” was the best selling single of 1981 but Wikipedia tells me that the Official Charts Company recalculated the data in 2021 giving the title to “Don’t You Want Me” by The Human League. What?! Why did they feel the need to do that 40 years on? One of the great chart swizzes ever surely?

The other week Simon Mayo was telling us how Cathy Dennis was going to be No 1 in the US with “Touch Me (All Night Long)” and now here’s Bruno Brookes saying that she is No1 in the US. Slightly disingenuous as she was actually No 2 in the Billboard Hot 100 chart (their equivalent of out Top 40) but she was No 1 in the US Dance Club Songs chart. I’m being pedantic of course. Suffice to say she was doing very well commercially.

Now, is that a catsuit she’s wearing in this performance? I do believe it is. I’ve told my woman in a catsuit story before haven’t I? OK, here it is again. In my early days at Our Price, there was a woman in our shop called Natalie who also did some modelling on the side I think. Anyway, one day she turned up for work in a catsuit and asked me if I thought it was a bit too much. Suffice to say I didn’t know where to look. One day Mick Hucknall rang the shop asking to speak to Natalie (I think she met him on a night out and he was quite enamoured). I answered the phone and when I asked who it was asking for Natalie he replied ‘Mick’. I knew it was Hucknall as Natalie had told us all that he was interested in her but she wasn’t sure what to do about it. As a claim to fame, it’s pretty poor I admit.

“Touch Me (All Night Long)” peaked at No 5 in the UK.

When I saw in the running order that Dannii Minogue was on this show, I assumed it was to perform her “Love And Kisses” single but it seems I’ve written so many of these reviews that I’ve lost tracks of the weeks. “Love And Kisses” has been and gone and we are now on to Dannii’s follow up single called “Success”. Wikipedia tells me it was also known as “$ucce$$” which was a really naff idea if true.

Like its predecessor, this was lifted from her debut album and was about the trappings of celebrity (probably). It’s got a bit more a of a heavier beat to it than the much lighter “Love And Kisses” but it’s still pretty anonymous. Dannii clearly tries to deliver the song’s harder edge with a sassier performance as she take off her jacket early doors to reveal a tattoo on her right arm which appears to be an elephant (?) and a dress with the straps dangling so perilously low as to run the risk of dropping altogether potentially causing a Janet Jackson style wardrobe malfunction. Even Bruno declared that he had been concerned (well it was pre-watershed I suppose). Also, whoever styled Dannii’s hair, what was the deal with the long straggly bit covering the left side of her face? It didn’t look practical at all. The whole thing looks like she’d just dashed out fo the back of a taxi at the last second before taking to the stage.

Talking of taxis, apparently when recording her album in Brooklyn, there has been some shootings near the studio meaning taxicab drivers were reluctant to take Dannii’s fare for the journey there. She supposedly found the recording experience in New York City both “awesome” and “terrifying”. Also potentially terrifying was the prospect of Dannii repeating that TOTP performance, droopy shoulder straps and all, before the Queen at the The Royal Variety Show that year. Thankfully, I can report that although there was a fair amount of flesh on display (especially from her backing dancers), Dannii kept her modesty intact at all times (unlike when she did those nude calendars back in the mid 90s).

“Success” did a good job of consolidating the success of “Love And Kisses” by peaking at No 11 where it stayed for three weeks.

More breakneck speed Breakers again this week as we get four songs crammed into in 1 min and 20 seconds. I’m sure the TOTP producers were beginning to worry about the competition from ITV’s The Chart Show with its video only show format and were trying to redress the balance. We start with “Shiny Happy People” by REM who Bruno reckons have got a ‘massive cult following’ in the UK. I think they may have surpassed that particular status by this point with the release of the “Out Of Time”album but the arrival of this single certainly left any remnants of being a cult way behind them. Very much the band’s marmite moment, it surely can’t be denied that “Shiny Happy People” brought them to the attention of people that had never heard of them before. We sold copy after copy after copy of the album in the Our Price store I worked in off the back of this song.

Apparently written ironically with the title and chorus being based on a Chinese propaganda poster, Michael Stipe however disputes this theory. Here’s @TOTPFacts:

"Shiny Happy People" is "not meant to be ironic at all", Michael Stipe says. "We wrote it because we were challenging ourselves. I grew up a child of the '60s listening to The Monkees and the Archies and The Banana Splits…" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 30, 2021

"… The guys threw me the stupidest song that sounded so buoyant and weird and I was like, 'Okay, I accept the challenge.' So it was bubblegum music made for kids." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 30, 2021

Of course, you can’t mention “Shiny Happy People” without referring to Kate Pierson from the B-52s whose vocals on this really did add something to it. Kate’s band were enjoying a commercial renaissance themselves after the success of 1990’s “Cosmic Thing” album so that, allied with the fact that both band’s were from Athens, Georgia made the fit between them kind of inevitable.

Not convinced that this was the song that made mainstream superstars of REM? How about this evidence then. “Shiny Happy People” was used as the theme song to the unaired pilot for the sitcom Friends, known at that time as Friends Like Us.

Still not having it? Well how about this then? REM singing a version of it called “Happy Furry Monsters” on Sesame Street. Come on. Is there a safer TV show in the history of television?

“Shiny Happy People” peaked at No 6 in the UK, easily their biggest hit at the time and still their joint third highest charting UK single to this day.

“A new name to us all” next (according to Bruno Brookes) as Flowered Up breach the Top 40 for the first time. So were they a new name? Well, they had formed two years earlier and had released two singles in 1990 which made Nos 54 and 75 so not totally unknown I would wager Bruno. In fairness to Brookes, had I heard of them before “Take It” was a hit? I really can’t remember but I do recall talk of them being ‘the next Happy Mondays’ at the time. That may have been less due to their sound and more to do with them having a Bez like dancer figure in their ranks, the brilliantly named Barry Mooncult who actually looked more like Peter Gabriel (in his Genesis days) on stage with his flower petal costume.

Their chart breakthrough coincided with a move from indie label Heavenly Records to major London Records so that may explain why it happened (major label promotion budget etc). Debut (and only) album “A Life With Brian” was released later in the year and the band had already appeared on the front covers of both Melody Maker and NME before then. I think they were quite well known in the end then Bruno.

Flowered Up will perhaps forever be mostly associated with their biggest hit “Weekender”, the massively epic 12 minute long single that made the Top 20 in 1992 and which the band steadfastly refused got edit for airplay reasons. Hopefully we’ll get to see that in future TOTP repeats. In the meantime, “Take It” peaked at No 34.

Giving Dannii Minogue a run for her money in the strappy top stakes is Carol Decker of T’Pau who are back in the charts with “Whenever You Need Me“. No really. Going against all known logic, 80s popsters T’Pau were somehow still having hits into the 90s. It really did rally against the status quo as when they returned two years after their last Top 40 hit, they sounded exactly the same. Now I’d had a soft spot for this lot back in their 80s heyday but even I couldn’t have cared less about them come 1991.

“Whenever You Need Me” was the lead single from their third album “The Promise”. I remember we had lots of it in stock in our store and hardly sold a copy. Somehow it made No 10 in the charts whilst the single made No 16 (although it was their last ever trip to the Top 40). Thinking back now, I wonder if there was some chart manipulation going on from the record label with lots of FOC stock being given to chart return stores in return for a few beeps of the album barcode on the Gallup scanner. That might well be a scandalous claim, it’s just that we really didn’t sell many at all.

Whatever was going on, it didn’t really work as the band called it a day after “The Promise” (two further singles released from it did nothing at all chart-wise) although there have been reunions and sporadic gigging since then. I saw Carol Decker on the bottom of the bill on one of hose Here And Now tours about 20 tears ago and she still turns up on the music TV channels every now and again presenting things like Carol Deckers 40 Ultimate Rock Chicks or something.

After getting a little too overexcited about Dannii Minogue’s dress straps, Bruno Brookes now starts getting himself in bother over a “threesome of girls”. A threesome Bruno?! You couldn’t have just said ‘trio’?! Anyway, It’s Wilson Phillips that he’s referring to and the rest of his intro makes little sense either as he says they have had No 1 success in America and are now making it big in the UK. Whilst all of that is true – “You’re in Love” was their third single taken from their debut album to top the US charts – Bruno makes it sound as if they are only just starting to make waves in the UK. Actually, they had a Top 10 hit over here the previous year with “Hold On”. Had he forgotten that already? The UK had kind of lost interest in Wilson Phillips already though. “You’re in Love” peaked at No 29 this side of the pond and they would score just a further two hit singles on our shores, neither of which was especially big.

The highest new entry next and it’s a big one. A single going straight in at No 3 wasn’t something that happened every week back in the early 90s (especially by a new, unknown act) so there must have been a big buzz around Crystal Waters and her song “Gypsy Woman (La Da Dee)”. So unusual was it that, at the time, it meant that she was the highest debuting female artist ever*.

The song is actually about homelessness (it was released as “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)” in some territories) but for me, it almost bordered on novelty status with that incessant and extremely annoying ‘La-da-dee/la-dee-da’ hook. Apparently though, it was very much seen as a house music classic and, more than that, it was a trailblazer of the genre in that it combined social conscience with beats. It routinely appears in music polls as one of the greatest dance tunes of the 90s! I had no idea! Maybe I should have guessed at its house music reputation judging by the dance moves Crystal gives in this performance – she performs the song as if she’s busting some moves in a club rather than in front of an audience of millions on the UK’s premier pop music show.

The track is of course nothing to do with the country singer Don Williams’ song “I Recall a Gypsy Woman” which my Dad does a pretty good version of.

*She was subsequently relieved of that title by Gabrielle in 1993 when “Dreams” debuted at No 2 who was in turn usurped by Whigfield a year later when “Saturday Night” went straight in at No 1. Crystal Waters didn’t quite top the charts as Bruno suggested she might, peaking instead at No 2.

Talking of novelties, here was something you didn’t see that often – a contemporary Christian music (CCM) artist breaking through to have a monster hit in the mainstream charts. Amy Grant is known as ‘The Queen of Christian Pop’ but here she was back in 1991 with yet another song that had been a US No 1. How many has that been just on this TOTP? Three? If you include Cathy Dennis’s dance chart topper? “Baby Baby” was one of those radio friendly, feel-good pop songs that you found yourself humming along to even though you didn’t particularly like it. Now my wife really did like this one to be fair and even today she can sometimes be heard humming it absent-mindedly.

The heart-warmingly sweet / nausea inducing (delete as appropriate) video received a nomination for Best Female Video at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards. Totally lacking in special effects but just portraying Amy and her on screen love interest doing luv’d up things seemed to appeal to a simpler sense of what life should all be about. Love, friendship, fun…and rolling oranges back and forth to each other apparently.

I’m trying to think of any other Christian Music artists that I know of. Stryper? Were they a CCM artist?

*checks Wikipedia*

Yes! They are Christian metal band! Two things here. How did I dredge that up from my memory banks and what the Hell is Christian Rock?!

“Baby Baby” peaked at No 2 in the UK.

When I think of Jason Donovan and 1991, only one thing comes immediately to mind – Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and his No 1 record “Any Dream Will Do”. Despite Bruno advising us that the show starring Donovan is opening in June, Jase isn’t here with that song. No, it’s a little ditty called “RSVP”, a single that’s so forgettable, nobody ever did reply to him. Apparently it was a ‘not released before’ track from his forthcoming Greatest Hits album but top points to anyone who remembered this bilge.

In line with his recent chart track record, it wasn’t a major hit peaking at No 17. Not even Jason’s guitar playing and some leather trousers could save this one.

Cher is still at the top of the pile with “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)”. Now as its the third week of its reign at the top and I have nothing else to say about it, I dug about for some tenuous links between Cher and other artists on this TOTP and I found one! “Baby Baby” wasn’t Amy Grant’s first US No 1. That came in 1986 when her duet with Peter Cetera “The Next Time I Fall” hit the top. And wholes has had a massive hit duetting with the ex-Chicago man? Yes, Cher of course whose “After All” went Top 10 in the US in 1989. Small world and all that.

To finish off, we have a forthcoming No 1 record by perhaps one of the most useless bands in the whole of the decade (in my humble opinion). Color Me Badd were an R’n’B four piece who briefly threatened global dominance after their “I Wanna Sex You Up” single became a hit all around the world. The group described their style as ‘hip-hop doo-wop’ although I seem to recall a lot of talk of them being part of this new jack swing movement but maybe that was purely because of the song’s inclusion on the soundtrack to the film New Jack City. For the record, I described Color Me Badd as atrocious shit and yet the UK seemed unable to resist their …erm…charms and sent it to No 1. Was it just that it had the word sex in the title and chorus? I can just imagine loads of beered up young men sidling up to women on the dance floor in clubs up and down the country crooning “I Wanna Sex You Up” to them. Ugh!

As for Color Me Badd themselves, I have to say that the word sex wasn’t what came to mind when looking at them. If you were trying to put a hip hop boy band together, I don’t think I’d have included a Kenny G lookalike and someone trying (and failing) to look like “Faith” era George Michael but with a long bob haircut in their ranks.

For the sake of posterity, I include the chart rundown below:

Order of Appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	New Kids On The Block	Call It What You Want	Ok, I will. It was shit
2	Soft Cell / Marc Almond	Tainted Love ’91	Nope
3	Cathy Dennis	Touch Me (All Night Long)	Nah
4	Danny Minogue	Success	Failure – no
5	REM	Shiny Happy People	I didn’t
6	Flowered Up	Take It	No
7	T’Pau	Whenever You Need Me	Negative
8	Wilson Phillips	You’re In Love	But not with this song – no
9	Crystal Waters	Gypsy Woman (La Da Dee)	I’d have rather listened to Crystal Tips and Alistair sing
10	Amy Grant	Baby Baby	I didn’t. Not sure if my wife did or not
11	Jason Donovan	RSVP	Dear Jason, this is a shit song – no
12	Cher	The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)	Yes but it was all a genuine mistake
13	Color Me Badd	I Wanna Sex You Up	Hell 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/m000y2fl/top-of-the-pops-16051991

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