As I write this sat on a train on the 27th December, Christmas has been and gone for another year but there were still two weeks to go at the point this TOTP aired back in 1998. After a period of poor mental health resulting in five weeks off work, I was back in a record shop as Christmas approached just as I had been for the previous eight years. However, this time I was in the Our Price store in Altrincham having been transferred there as part of the plan to phase me back into work. The last three festive periods I’d been in Stockport, a much larger store with its own set of particular challenges. Altrincham was a much smaller unit and I’d already worked a Christmas there five years prior which I’d enjoyed so it was a good decision by area management to install me there. The manager was a guy called Scott who was from down south originally but had relocated ‘oop north’ and though I didn’t know him at all, he would prove to be a very important person in helping me to re-establish myself at work and recover from my mental health issues. Scott presumably wouldn’t have chosen to go into a busy Christmas with an Assistant Manager who had suffered from such problems but he was never anything less than supportive and encouraging. He took the role of being shop manager very seriously and would always wear a collar and tie to work which I’d never witnessed before but it helped to establish the standards he wanted for the shop. My re-integration wasn’t just about Scott though, the whole team at Altrincham were pretty easy to work with. First example, as I sat nervously in the staff room with Scott on that first morning back, a lovely colleague called Suzanne popped her head around the door and offered to make me a cup of tea and it was at that moment when I believed that everything was going to be OK after all.

Well, that’s enough recollections of my private life. Let’s get to the music and we start with a man having the biggest hit of his life up to this point. Jay-Z may be one of the biggest hip-hop artists of all time but back in 1998, certainly in the UK, he just had a collection of middling hits that were all collaborations with other artists to his name. Suddenly, with the release of the lead single from his third studio album, Beyoncé’s fella was debuting at No 2 in our charts. “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” was an unlikely hit, or rather, its source material was not an obvious choice. When my son was younger he loved to watch the film Annie (either the original or remake) and I’ve also seen a few theatre productions of it during the course of my job as an usher so I know the songs in it quite well including “It’s The Hard Knock Life”. I’m guessing that Jay-Z was also familiar with it but, unlike me, he had the vision to incorporate it into a massive hip-hop hit. So invested was he that 16 years later, he was a co-producer on that aforementioned movie remake.

Whenever I hear this song, I am reminded of a nice pun that I read about a footballer playing for my beloved Chelsea at the time. His name was Gus Poyet and he’d picked up an injury playing in the Boxing Day fixture which would rule him out for the next ten matches. The headline in the official Chelsea Magazine reporting on this news? ‘It’s a hard knock life for Gus’. Lovely stuff.

There’s no doubt that songwriters are influenced by either their peers or heroes. Many a story exists where an artist admits that when writing one of their hits, they were actually trying to copy a song like…*fill in your desired choice of song*. For example, when writing “Up The Junction”, Squeeze’s Chris Difford admitted he wanted the song’s title to only be sung in the final line just like “Virginia Plain” by Roxy Music. The next hit on this TOTP was another such song written in the style of another. The title of “The Everlasting” was devised by Manic Street Preachers lyricist Nicky Wire as a deliberate attempt to come up with a song with the same naming format as Blur’s “The Universal” or Joy Division’s “The Eternal”. In the end, he borrowed the title from a poem by his brother Patrick Jones. Well, tick that box but what other boxes were checked by this song? Sweeping strings? Check! Melancholy tone? Check! Slowly building anthem? Check! Commercially successful? Well, yes check but with caveats. By debuting at a peak of No 11, it ended a run of five singles that went Top 10 and as a follow up to their previous hit “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” which gave them their first chart topper then I guess maybe it was a disappointment? In truth though, the album had been in the shops for three months by this point so sales of that were bound to affect subsequently released tracks from it. All of the above makes me wonder quite why it took that amount of time to release a follow up single? Three months seems like a long time though I haven’t done any research into release schedules to be fair.

Fancy an unlikely duet? This TOTP has you covered as we are offered Bryan Adams and Melanie C with “When You’re Gone”. I say unlikely as, at this point, the only Spice Girl to have dipped her toe in the waters of a solo career was Mel B who’d released one solitary single on her own (albeit a No 1). Despite having left the organisation, Geri Halliwell was still five months away from releasing her first solo single. In other words, the era of Spice Girls operating outside of the group had yet to take hold. Within a couple of years, all five members would have solo careers of varying levels of success but in late 1998, routinely seeing any one of these household names out there on there own was not an everyday occurrence. Melanie C, who would come out of the traps fast with two No 4s and two No1s in her first four solo singles, had a trial run when she teamed up with ‘The Groover from Vancouver’ on this second track released from the latter’s “On A Day Like Today” album.

It was a mutually beneficial arrangement as the single’s peak of No 3 not only helped to establish the idea of Melanie C as an artist in her own right but it also furnished Adams with his biggest UK hit since his collaboration with Rod Stewart and Sting on “All For Love” from The Three Musketeers soundtrack. You could hear why. A slick, uptempo, radio friendly, soft rock track with a swirling organ accompaniment and some clever lyrical pacing (“even food don’t taste that good”) creating organic hooks. However, given the general perception that Mel C was in possession of the best vocals within the Spice Girls, I’m not sure that her voice is on point all the time here. Originally, Bryan wanted to record the song with Sheryl Crow but when she failed to take him up on his offer, a chance meeting with Miss Chisholm in a hotel lift in Los Angeles led to him giving the job to the Spice Girl. I think I would have preferred Sheryl to have had a go at it if I’m honest. The single proved to be extremely hardy spending ten consecutive weeks inside the Top 10 bumping around between No 5 and No 8 and not leaving the Top 40 for nearly four months.

One of those songs now that would highlight the out of kilter-ness (that’s a word right?) that sometimes exists between the UK and the US. Brandy was fast on her way to becoming a superstar around this time. Not only did she have the starring role in hit US sitcom Moesha but her singing career was also in full ascendancy off the back of her huge smash “The Boy Is Mine” with Monica which was the second best selling song of 1998 in America. Indeed, it had also been a big hit on these shores going to No 2 and being our own 18th best selling single of the year. She’d followed that with “Top Of The World” in the UK which again made No 2 but was nowhere near as big a seller as its predecessor. Her record label Atlantic chose not to release that track in the US and instead opted for the Dianne Warren penned “Have You Ever?”. Atlantic seemed to know what they were doing when this track followed “The Boy Is Mine” to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. When released in the UK though, it stalled at No 13, spending just five weeks in total in the lower reaches of the Top 40. So why the commercial differences on display here? Was it a cultural thing? I have no idea but take my lead from the young woman in the studio audience of Brandy’s performance here who is stood to the left of the screen with her arms permanently crossed, half-heartedly swaying as if to say “Is this it?”. To be fair to her, it does sound like a filler track for a Toni Braxton album.

Not that I’ve given this much thought before but the release history of LeAnn Rimes is a bit of a mess. OK, it’s not something most people would care about (and if not for writing this blog neither would I) but it is all over the place. In the UK, we’d never heard of LeAnn until she recorded that song from Con Air which would become the hit with the most longevity by becoming our sixth best selling single of the year despite never getting higher than No 7 (six seven!). Albums wise, she’d already released four studio albums to that point none of which had done anything over here. Then came “Sittin’ On Top Of The World” which didn’t originally include “How Do I Live” but which was added for the UK release thereby sending it to No 11. Two tracks that were always on the album and which were lumped together as a double A-side as the follow up to “How Do I Live” were “Looking Through Your Eyes” and “Commitment” but that single would only spend a solitary week at No 38 in the UK Top 40, unable to compete with the extraordinary ongoing sales of its predecessor which was still in the charts. Once it finally tailed off enough to allow for another single to be released, LeAnn’s record label went back to the title track of her third (but major label debut) album “Blue” that had come out two and a half years prior! Sensing this would be another big hit, they added it to “Sittin’ On Top Of The World” as an extra track just as they had done with “How Do I Live”. Keeping up? Good. However, “Blue” would debut at a chart peak of No 23 then spending three weeks at the outer reaches of our Top 40 before departing.

The song itself was originally recorded in 1958 by Bill Mack who I thought was the washed up rock singer from Love Actually who ends up having a Christmas No 1 but who was in reality an American songwriter, country artist and DJ. A very retro country & western song featuring a slide guitar, it’s been covered many times including famously by Patsy Cline and, of course, by Rimes when she was just 11 on her second studio album “All That” released independently. She re-recorded the track when she was 13 for the “Blue” album but apparently it’s the earlier version that was released for some reason. See, I told you it’s all a mess.

What was it with 1998 and Swedish pop acts? The UK charts were full of them in this year with hits from the likes of Robyn, Eagle-Eye Cherry, Ace Of Base and The Cardigans. Then came Emilia and her song “Big Big World”. Discovered by Lars Anderson, son of ABBA manager Stig Anderson, Emilia hit the ground running when her debut single went to No 1 in eight countries and made No 5 in the UK. What sounded like a very simple song with an almost nursery rhyme quality to it, was actually based on a classical piece of music – ‘Peasant Cantata’ by Johann Sebastian Bach. This made for a second big hit this year to channel the German composer after Sweetbox’s “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright” which sampled ‘Air on the G String’. It would prove to be Emilia’s only success in this country but it did allow many a lazy music journalist (and our host Jamie Theakston) to bang on about it being ‘a big, big hit’. It’s very much a ‘marmite’ song I think – you either loved it or hated it (I was in the latter category) which might account for my perception that you don’t hear it much on the radio these days. Emilia continued releasing music into the new millennium and tried out to be the Swedish entry in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2009 but failed to make the grade. Similarly, her lyrics to “Big Big World” wouldn’t have passed any exams – look at this shocking use of tenses:

But I do do feel
That I do do will
Miss you much
Miss you much

Source: LyricFind. Songwriters: Emilia Hanna Rydberg / Lars Anderson Big Big World lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

If it’s 1998, it must be time for another Robbie Williams hit. “No Regrets” was his fourth of the year and his least likeable to my ears. I don’t know why I could never get along with it but it just never pushed any buttons for me. It’s all very well constructed and all that but it just lacks that pop sensibility. Was it too worthy? Too overly earnest? Enough people liked it to send it to No 4 so maybe I was missing the point or something? Maybe, I was too overly concerned with the deliberately dramatic ending that I could never get along with? Robbie should have gone straight to “Strong” for his follow up to “Millennium” rather than mess about with “No Regrets” in my humble opinion but having said that, when he did release it a the third single from the album, it also made No 4 so maybe Robbie had no regrets on that score.

It’s the seventh and final week at the top for Cher with “Believe”. It was quite a remarkable feat given that its parent album had also been out for nearly two months and had itself gone double platinum. The follow up to “Believe” taken from the album was “Strong Enough”, an almost carbon copy of its predecessor and that got to No 5 over here. The UK really couldn’t get enough of Cher’s late 90s sound.

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/m002np2q/top-of-the-pops-11121998