In the last post, as it featured Curiosity aka Curiosity Killed The Cat, I tried to fit in a few feline themed comments. Well, guess what? My research tells me that immediately after this TOTP was broadcast, we saw the last ever appearance on Eastenders of Ethel’s dog Willy on our screens before he retired. Sadly for Willy, his retirement was short lived as he passed away just two weeks into it. All of this means I can use dear old Willy as an excuse for a dog themed post. Be prepared for lots of ‘the dog’s bollocks’, ‘canine cahoonas’, ‘every dog has its day’ etc.

We start tonight with the follow up to one of the year’s biggest hits. “Stay” by Shakespear’s Sister spent eight weeks at No 1 and although the duo’s next single also went Top 10, you very rarely hear it on the radio these days such was the ubiquity of its predecessor. It’s not as if ”I Don’t Care” doesn’t have its merits either. A pop song that really bounces along yet is quirky enough to elevate it above the bog standard. I’m not wavered by accusations of sounding a bit too like “Don’t Get Me Wrong” by The Pretenders (it does) as it’s got enough of a bark (oh, here we go!) to make itself heard in its own right. In fact, it’s even got a highfalutin intellectual element to it. Here’s @TOTPFacts:

The performance here continues with the theme of Detroit and Fahey being oppositional to each other. They couldn’t be more contrasting with Marcella all sharp, angular haircut and tight control of her guitar and Siobahn… well I’m not sure what look she was going for but I’m guessing it wasn’t the one in my head which was as Aunt Sally after a night on the grog with her pal Worzel Gummidge.

“I Don’t Care” peaked at No 7.

If it’s 1992 then it must be time for another chart hit by The Wedding Present. Of the twelve “Hit Parade” singles released by the band in this calendar year, “Come Play With Me” would be the highest charting when it made it to No 10. My memory of working in a record shop whilst this project played out was that there was huge punter demand initially but that fans got fed up of it eventually, trying to track down these limited release singles or pre-ordering them every month, sometimes having to put down a deposit. This is just about borne out by the arc of the chart peaks achieved by each release:

26-20-14-14-10-16-22-19-17-17-23-25

OK, it’s not a perfect parabola but I think there’s a definite peak about half way through followed by a tailing off as the year comes to a close.

There’s no studio appearance this time presumably because the band were on tour as host Claudia Simon references so it’s the video instead. It strikes me that both the promo and indeed the song are almost The Wedding Present doing their best Beautiful South impression. No? Just me then. This was my peak The Wedding Present era. Not because I was one of those hardy souls trying to purchase every one of those limited edition singles but because this was the time I most resembled David Gedge. I was just about to be 24, I was lean and my hair didn’t have a wisp of grey in it. I may have even had something approaching cheekbones. These days…well let’s just say I have not been unaffected by the travails of middle age! Even in dog years I’d now be considered a senior.

Next a band who had been absent for the whole of 1991. Del Amitri had presumably spent the previous year recording new material and “Always The Last To Know” was the first of it that we got to hear. The lead single from their third album “Everything Changes”, this sounded to me like a distinct attempt to write a hit single and they pulled it off perfectly. A Rolling Stones-esque opening riff led into a well executed pop song that was perfect for daytime radio about the realisation that your partner has been unfaithful. Supposedly it’s one of author Stephen King’s favourite ever songs – “It’s so goddamn sad” he told Rolling Stone magazine. I wouldn’t say I was in total agreement with King – it’s not one of my favourite ever songs – but I liked it enough to buy the single. I’d liked most of their stuff that I’d heard before without ever being compelled to purchase any of it but I caved on this one.

The album would prove to be the band’s most successful going all the way to No 2 and generating four Top 40 singles of which “Always The Last To Know” was the biggest peaking at No 13. And that huge, sheepskin jacket that Justin Currie is wearing under hot studio lights? Here’s @TOTPFacts again:

If I think of the year 1992 in terms of the Top 40 singles chart, this next song always comes to mind. It wasn’t always like that. The first time I ever heard the name Kris Kross was when some young lad came up to the counter and asked if we had anything by them in stock. I thought he meant “Sailing” and “Arthur’s Theme” hitmaker Christopher Cross. This lad must have been listening to the US charts where Kris Kross were tearing it up. Their debut single “Jump” would be No 1 there for eight weeks.

Of course, there are two things that have to be mentioned when discussing Kris Kross – their ages and their jeans. Chris ‘Mac Daddy’ Kelly and Chris ‘Daddy Mac’ Smith were only 13 years of age when they had their biggest success after being discovered by record producer Jermaine Dupri in a shopping mall. Dupri wrote “Jump” for the duo which would go on to be the fastest selling single in the US for 15 years. Inevitably it would crossover to the UK market where we were unable to resist its Jackson 5 bass line and high speed raps.

We also seemed unable to resist their penchant for wearing their jeans back to front. In some cases literally. The duo were scheduled to do a PA at the Our Price store in Piccadilly, Manchester just up the road from where I worked in the Market Street store and the manager there couldn’t stop the staff from wearing their jeans Kris Kross style. My recollection is that they never turned up to the PA for some reason but I could be wrong. They called their fashion style ‘totally krossed out’ which was also the name of their debut album that topped the US charts and went four times platinum. We were only focussed on the single here though which was bought in enough quantities to send it to No 2. The album by contrast peaked at No 31.

As is often the case with child stars who found fame and celebrity so early in their lives, the Kris Kross story ended in tragedy when Chris Kelly died in 2013 at the age of just 34 after an extensive history of drug abuse.

Just a slight pause before the next act to make an observation about the staging of the show tonight. The hosts for this one are Mark Franklin and Claudia Simon but you’d be forgiven for that fact having passed you by. After we see the pair on screen after the Shakespear’s Sister performance at the top of the programme introducing the Top 10 countdown, apart from a brief glimpse of Mark as he introduces the Breakers, we only see them again at the end of the show (and even then as images on TV screens). All their segues have been voice overs and as for the link between Del Amitri and Kris Kross…there wasn’t one! Nothing. Just the camera sliding over from one stage to the other. What was that all about?

They’re still not on screen as we head into the next song which is “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)” by En Vogue. The video for this won an MTV Video Music Award for best choreography. I’m not sure if that relates to the group’s moves or those of the featured dancers one of whom appears to be in full on gimp clobber but which Wikipedia informs me is actually a zentai suit and are often used for video special effects. Talking of which, I quite like the fact that at one point in the video the group are shown against just a blue background. I’m sure today that would be a green screen with all sorts of imagery going in behind them as they strutted their stuff.

“My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)” peaked at No 4 in the UK.

Some Disney schmaltz now and our very first sighting of a singer who would come to dominate / blight (delete as appropriate) the UK charts throughout the 90s. For their 30th animated film, Disney chose the 1756 fairy tale Beauty And The Beast by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont as its source material. To promote the film, they decided to release the title track from the soundtrack as a single. Not the actual track from the soundtrack featuring the vocals of Angela ‘Murder She Wrote’ Lansbury though. No, they wanted it re-recorded for a pop audience and so settled on Canadian balladeer Celine Dion. Unsure though that she was well known enough globally to promote the song, they roped in Peabo Bryson to record it as a duet. Peabo of course is the go to guy for male/female duets. You may recall his ghastly 1983 No 2 hit “Tonight I Celebrate My Love” with Roberta Flack but he’s also collaborated with Natalie Cole and Minnie Riperton amongst others.

As the performance begins, Celine walks on stage against a backdrop showing a motif of the film. It’s not the Celine that we would get used to seeing as the decade progressed and her hits stacked up though. That massive 80s style hair! Eventually Peabo ambles on to join in but the whole thing is so anodyne that the performance has to be propped up with some video clips from the film.

Within two years Celine would be at No 1 with some proper dog shit called “Think Twice” whilst Peabo would score another Disney hit later in 1992 with “A Whole New World” from Aladdin which was, yes you guessed it, a duet with Regina Belle.

“Beauty And The Beast” peaked at No 9 in the UK and won an Academy Award for Best Song.

Three Breakers this week starting with a song that seemed to receive praise and criticism in equal measure. For some, “Everything About You” by Ugly Kid Joe was the missing link between the dumb ass joy of hair metal and the nihilism of grunge rock. For others, it was just a joke record, an opinion reinforced by its inclusion in the goofball comedy Wayne’s World. And me? I just accepted it as the knockabout fun I perceived it to be and didn’t mind it.

These Californian rockers took their name from spoofing LA glam band Pretty Boy Floyd (see what they did there?) and the inspiration for “Everything About You” from their friend Farrell T. Smith’s cynical take on life – we all know someone like that don’t we? The single was a Top 10 hit in the US but an even bigger hit over here where it went Top 3. Often thought of as a one hit wonder, they actually had a second hit the following year when their cover of Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s In The Cradle” was a UK No 7. Hang on, “Cat’s In The Cradle”? How’s that helping with my dog theme for this post? What’s that? There’s a sheepdog in the video for “Everything About You”? Oh well, that’s OK then.

I have a memory that at the time, the only other Ugly Kid Joe product that you could buy in addition to the single was an EP called “As Ugly As They Wanna Be”. Now I seem to remember that “Everything About You” wasn’t included in its six tracks causing some disappointment to punters but Wikipedia tells me it was. Yet when I checked the EP out on Spotify it isn’t included. ‘Goofy’ or what?

Saint Etienne were achingly trendy back in 1992 it seemed to me, at least with a lot of the Our Price colleagues I worked with but being fashionable hadn’t yet translated into chart success. Even record label Heavenly weren’t overly convinced of their charges commercial potential; so much so that when the band argued for their track “People Get Real” to be their next single release, they refused without there being a much more commercial track to go with it as a double A-side.

Undaunted, the band came up with “Join Our Club”, a song written to highlight how commercially viable they could be. To that end they referenced contemporary hits in the lyrics like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and some classics like Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ‘bout A Thing” (itself soon to be a current hit courtesy of Incognito). The result was a joyous anthem perfect for the forthcoming Summer.

The single rose to a high of No 21 in the charts becoming at a single stroke their biggest hit to date at that time.

The final Breaker is one of those ‘story’ songs’ from Richard Marx. I know at least one person for whom “Hazard” is a guilty pleasure not to be widely publicly acknowledged. Marx had a shit load of huge hits (or a huge load of shit hits if you prefer) in America but in the UK, he was barking up the wrong tree (nice). His only significant chart success over here came in 1989 with “Right Here Waiting”. The chances of him bagging a huge, chart munching hit single as the 90s we’re getting under way seemed remote at best. Factor in it being about the disappearance of a young woman with the main suspect being the singer of the song and well…Ladbrokes would have struggled to work out the odds. And yet…here he was back in our Top 40 and on TOTP.

There’s no denying it, “Hazard” is a weird song and even Marx himself wasn’t convinced – he only recorded it to disprove his wife’s conviction that it would be a hit. His wife (actress Cynthia Rhodes) was right and bizarrely, after years of ignoring his music that the US lapped up, it was a bigger hit here (No 3) than over the pond (No 9). In its wake came a trickle of middling to minor hits but nothing ever came close to replicating “Hazard”.

Marx does seem to be a decent sort though. In 2016, he helped Korean Air flight attendants pacify an unruly passenger and then took on Piers Morgan in a Twitter spat over his soft interviewing of then US President Donald Trump.

Back in the studio we find Ce Ce Peniston giving an ‘exclusive’ performance of her new single “Keep On Walkin’”. I really don’t have much to say about this one. I certainly don’t remember it – surely Ce Ce is pretty much just remembered for “Finally” – and it sounds like an unremarkable pop/dance/RnB number. Indeed, so unremarkable is it that the TOTP production team felt the need to intercut Ce Ce’s turn here with snatches of the official promo… which is just Ce Ce performing the song. Yes, the video mirrors what we are actually witnessing in the studio. What was the point of that? She’s even wearing a similar style jacket in both, only the colour is different.

“Keep On Walkin’” peaked at No 20 in the UK and was a No 1 on the US Dance chart.

We arrive at the current UK chart topper via another sound only presenter segue and a panoramic camera angle. Right Said Fred have been deposed to be replaced by…KWS? Who were these guys? Well, they were a dance act from Nottingham who got lucky with their cover of KC And The Sunshine Band’s 1979 hit “Please Don’t Go”. It was one of those hits that came from out of nowhere, a real club tune that went mainstream. They got into the Top 40 on limited airplay let alone any TV appearances before rising almost unnoticed to the top of the charts in just three weeks. At that point, we finally got to see them as TOTP had to give the No 1 act its rightful exposure. They have that feel of an act who have been performing at Butlins who suddenly find themselves plucked from obscurity and thrust into stardom. They can’t believe their luck.

“Please Don’t Go” is one of those songs that feels immediately familiar even if you don’t know who made the original. That’s how it felt to me anyway the first time I heard KWS’s version. Did I know that it was originally performed by KC at the time? Not sure I did. I definitely knew their unlikely 1983 No 1 “Give It Up” and “That’s The Way (I Like It)” from Dead Or Alive’s hi-energy cover from the following year but I must have also heard “Please Don’t Go” at some point without properly registering it as a KC tune. Apparently there were some legal issues surrounding a German act who had released their own version at the same time but we’ve got a few weeks of KWS at No 1 so that story can wait for another post.

And that’s that. All the dog poo has been scooped up and it’s time to put it in the bin. OK. That’s unfair. Not all the acts on tonight’s show were excrement – I bought at least one of them – but I need to bring this dog theme to an end somehow.

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/m0014j5t/top-of-the-pops-14051992