Kylie Minogue | TOTP Rewind – the 90s

TOTP 23 JAN 1992

Posted on January 17, 2022 by 80stastic

We’ve missed another show that’s been pricked by the thorn of Adrian’s Rose and so find ourselves deep into January 1992. There’s only 8 acts on tonight presumably because the Breakers section has gone missing but they are all newbies that haven’t been reviewed previously. Tonight’s presenters are Mark Franklin and Steve Anderson and there’s a slight tweak to the format immediately in that the opening camera shot is on those two and not the opening act supplemented by a voice over intro. Not sure why that may be but it’s certainly a return to a more traditional opening. It does give us more time to gaze in wonder at the peak of sartorial design that were Mark Franklin’s shirts. He’s got one of those ones with the wide vertical block down one side of his midriff. He had a similar one recently that was in red and white but this one is in black and cream. Maybe he had a sponsorship deal with whoever made them. Steve Anderson on the other hand has come dressed as…well, I have no idea what or who he has come dressed as but it looks terrible.

Anyways, on with the show and the first act tonight are 2 Unlimited with their second consecutive hit “Twilight Zone”. Their debut hit at the back end of ’91 was of course “Get Ready For This” which was predominantly just a keyboard riff with some added ‘yeahs’ and ‘y’all ready for this’ shout outs courtesy of Ray Slijngaard – I think there may be other mixes out there which featured him rapping also. My point though is that his female band mate Anita Doth was very much in the background when they performed on TOTP (despite her wearing some very revealing outfits). This time though she is front and centre as there are some actual lyrics to be sung – I’m guessing singing wasn’t really Ray’s thing. Mind you, judging by Anita’s live vocal here, I’m not too sure it was her’s either. It’s not the strongest demonstration of the art of singing it has to be said. Ray’s obviously insisted though that the inclusion of some ‘yeahs’ is obligatory so that he has something else to do other than leap around behind a keyboard.

There’s also a hell of a lot less of them than their were for “Get Ready For This” when there were at least 8 people on stage. This time it’s just 4. Who were all these other people. Obviously there’s Ray and Anita but the rest of them? Hired dancers? Their mates on a jolly? If it was the latter, it raises the very topical question of whether TOTP appearances were a party or a work event. Ahem.

“Twilight Zone” matched the success of “Get Ready For This” by peaking at No 2. They would reach the chart pinnacle the following year though with “No Limits”.

After a quick rundown of the Top 10 we’re into another studio performance from an act we’ll be seeing a lot of in the weeks to come. For now though, this was the first airing on the show for Shakespears Sister with “Stay”. Not exactly a new band as they’d first come to public attention way back in 1989 with their Top 10 hit “You’re History” but subsequent singles had failed to make the Top 40. We could have all been forgiven for thinking that was that for Siobhan Fahey and Marcella Detroit especially when the first taste of their new material, a single called “Goodbye Cruel World”, peaked at No 59 in the Autumn of 1991. We were all wrong. Monumentally wrong. They had an ace up their sleeve which was the track “Stay” written by Siobhan’s then partner Dave Stewart of Eurythmics. It would top the the UK Singles Chart for 8 consecutive weeks and was the 4th biggest selling single of 1992.

As that stretch at the top will entail me having to dig up something to write about it for weeks to come, I’m going to keep my powder dry for a while but you can’t mention this song without reference to this infamous sketch and I’m not about to break that rule…

No sign of Franklin or Anderson in the next link (maybe the producers had second thoughts about their outfits) as we go straight into a third studio performance on the bounce. This one is definitely a new artist and he goes by the name of Curtis Stigers. I like the way the young girl in the audience rushes to the front of the age but then retreats as she realises she’s wondered into a spotlight. Maybe she was being shouted at by some unseen member of the studio floor staff. Back to Curtis though and this guy seemed to come out of nowhere but he’d been kicking around the jazz clubs of New York with his sax for years before he was plucked from obscurity by Arista Records to become a mainstream pop star. And mainstream he certainly was. No jazz noodling on display in this, his debut hit “I Wonder Why”. This was a prime cut of middle of the road balladry that was as much at home on Radio 2 as it was Radio 1 back in the day. Its lowest common denominator inoffensiveness did the trick though sending him rocketing up the charts to a resting place of No 5.

He managed another Top 10 hit in the follow up “You’re All That Matters to Me” whilst his debut eponymous album also achieved that feat. It couldn’t last though and he would only have two more minor chart hits over here before returning to his roots and embarking upon a career of recording jazz albums for the Concorde Jazz label. He did manage to get a song on the all conquering The Bodyguard soundtrack album the royalties of which should have set him up for life but he did a cover instead of one of his own songs (Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding”). Doh!

I seem to recall at the time that a lot was made of the length of his locks in a point and stare type of way but like the poodle haired Michael Bolton before him, he has since shorn them all off and looks much the better for it. He’s quite a prominent figure on social media these days and comes across as a pretty decent sort of chap which is… erm..all that matters to me.

https://youtu.be/GCIJnKwBxnE

Oh Lord! It’s that Genesis video now. You know the one I mean. When the “We Can’t Dance” album was released in late ’91, it seemed like there was an inevitability that the fourth track on it, “I Can’t Dance”, would end up being released as a single. Maybe it was just that it was (almost) the title track but I seem to recall that it stood out when we had to play the album in the Our Price store I was working in (‘had’ to being the operative word). I guess it was the most radio friendly song on there? It was catchy with a goofy hook and mercifully shorter than the previous single, the 6:41 in length “No Son Of Mine” (the album version was that long anyway and didn’t TOTP allow them to perform it in full?).

Supposedly it was written as a joke in a lighthearted moment in the studio (did Genesis have light hearted studio moments?) to satirise guys who look good but can’t string two sentences together using the motif of jeans advert models. Really though, it’s all about the video. I mean hats off to the the band for sending themselves up but once you’ve seen the ‘I Can’t Dance dance’ with those stiff moves and a walking motion leading with the same arm and leg, no amount of brain bleach is going to remove it. If The Monkees TV show hadn’t been cancelled in 1968 and they’d carried on making it into the 90s, it would have looked like this. And we haven’t even mentioned the send up of Michael Jackson’s “Black And White” video by Phil Collins at the end yet! What the hell was that?! I really don’t think that the overly long set up of the joke that was Phil doing a tap dance routine was worth it.

“I Can’t Dance” peaked at No 7 in both the UK and US charts.

Now as Mark Franklin confirms in his intro, Kylie Minogue had been having hits for 4 years by this point since bursting onto the UK charts with “I Should Be So Lucky” off the back of her Neighbours profile and of those 15 hits since, 5 of them had peaked at No 2. How…erm…unlucky was that? Well, her luck wasn’t to change with “Give Me Just A Little More Time” as that would miss the top spot by one place as well. This single was the third to be released from her now almost forgotten “Let’s Get To It” album and was a cover version of the old Chairmen Of The Board 1970 hit and was, as far as I can tell, only the third cover version she had released up to that point after “The Loco-Motion” and “Tears On My Pillow”.

Now there didn’t seem to be much love on Twitter for Kylie’s vocals here after this TOTP was reshown on BBC4 the other week but I have to say that I thought 2 Unlimited’s Anita’s were worse and in any case, you could forgive her a few duff notes just for that rolling ‘R’ sound she does halfway through (if indeed that was her).

https://youtu.be/g9EyObt8ujg

“Give Me Just A Little More Time” should not be confused (as if it could be) with the 1984 Whitesnake single which has the same words in its chorus but which has a slightly different title in “Give Me More Time”. I recall listening to Mike Read on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show play this and make a comment afterwards that the song title sounded like it could be something shouted by an under fire company chairman facing demands for payment by creditors and screaming in his defence ‘Give Me More Time’. Was that Read trying to make an uncharacteristically clever pun on Chairmen Of The Board? Clever? Mike Read? Surely not.

From Kylie to Public Enemy?! That’s some leap but here are Flavor Flav, Chuck D and co in the TOTP studio with “Shut ‘Em Down”. Now there’s something rather unsettling about this performance and it’s nothing to do with it being Public Enemy who thrived on unsettling people. No, it’s the staging of it as it’s recorded as one long, continual single camera shot with no cuts whatsoever. Who’s idea was that do you suppose? The band’s? A TOTP producer trying to be creative? Judging by the way that Chuck D looks at the camera, it seems like it was suspended and sliding around the front of the stage, a bit like the spidercams that they use to cover the football on Sky Sports that are suspended from four wires – one in each corner of the ground – and which can pan 360 degrees while remaining level. Well, those Sky cameras are a bit more state-of-the-art I’m sure but you get my drift.

Anyway, “Shut ‘Em Down” was a track from the band’s fourth album “Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black” and, according to Chuck D, was “about major corporations like Nike taking profits from the black community, but not giving anything back, never opening businesses in black areas. And it’s saying that the best way to boycott a business is to start your own.”

Almost 6 months to the day after this performance, Flavor Flav walked into he Our Price shop in Manchester that I was working in as Public Enemy were in town playing a Stop Sellafield concert alongside Kraftwerk and U2 for Greenpeace to protest the nuclear factory. He looked exactly the same as he does on this TOTP and didn’t have a clue where he was or what he was doing.

“Shut ‘Em Down” peaked at No 21.

https://youtu.be/vrgd8I1L8BY

Ooh a bit of TOTP history next! As Mark Franklin says it was the first time that the show had linked up live by satellite with an artist in America for a real time performance. OK, so a few things to say about this. Firstly, the artist. Was Mariah Carey a massive deal in early 1992? She was in the US I grant you where every single she’d ever released to that point had topped the charts over there. That was five and counting as it stood. Over here though, she’d just had the one Top 10 hit. Couldn’t they have got someone who was a bigger name over here for this?

Secondly, I know this was her current single but “Can’t Let Go” hasn’t really stood the test of time as one of her best known songs has it? It sounds like an Eternal B-side. It holds the ignominy of being the song that halted her run of US No 1s when it peaked at No 2. I mean a No 2 is not to be sniffed at (erm…if you know what I mean) but it’s not what it’s remembered for (see also “Welcome To ThePleasuredome” by Frankie Goes To Hollywood”).

Thirdly, it’s a pretty dull performance. Where are all the bells and whistles? It’s just Mariah and some uniformly dressed backing singers, some drapes, some candles and a backdrop of a bank of TVs (all switched off). Was it worth all the time and effort?

Fourthly, presumably then this TOTP was broadcast live otherwise what was all the fuss about? Mark Franklin must have been bricking it in case the technology failed and he had to fill (his pants).

Finally, has Mariah’s fame come full circle in this country now. Sure, she went one to sells bucket loads of records over here eventually but did the scenario below play out across the nation with parents watching this TOTP repeat on BBC4 the other week?

Across the nation, parents are telling their kids 'she sings All I Want For Christmas Is You'. The kids say 'oh i know her'
— Sharon Hanley (@sharonlhanley) January 7, 2022

“Can’t Let Go” peaked at No 20. See? Not a big deal in the UK in January ’92!

We have a new No 1! Queen have been dethroned after 5 weeks of looking down on their chart subjects and there is a new monarch at the head of the Top 40. Who predicted that Wet Wet Wet would have a chart topper around this time in their career? You’re a liar if you answered that question with “I did” as the Wets hadn’t been anywhere near pop’s summit for ages by the time 1992 rolled around.

Having burst into the scene in 1987 with their debut album “Popped In Souled Out” and its attendant 4 hit singles, the Clydebank boys had consolidated that success with their first No 1 single in 1988, a cover of “With A Little Help From My Friends” for the ChildLine charity. And then, the dreaded second album syndrome (I’m not counting “Memphis Sessions” as a proper album). 1989’s “Holding Back The River” was not a commercial disaster by any means but it didn’t sell nearly as well as its predecessor either. The singles from it peaked at 6, 19, 31 and 30. By any metric, they weren’t ripping up the trees that they had been.

The band regrouped and we got some new material in September of 1991 but the single “Make It Tonight” only just scraped into the Top 40 at No 37. Oh. Another new track “Put The Light On” was rush released the next month but it only compounded the issue when it peaked at No 56! Oh oh. A third single was shoved out 2 days before Xmas presumably timed to miss the festive rush but hopes can’t have been high for a return to former glories. Somehow though, “Goodnight Girl” exceeded all expectations and became the first and only No 1 of the band’s career that they actually wrote themselves. As a feat of redemption it’s almost unparalleled. *The only other example that comes to mind is when Robbie Williams, his solo career hanging in the balance after his single “South Of The Border” stalled at No 14 and with record label Chrysalis wobbling, released “Angels”. The rest is history. So it was with the Wets. A No 1 single led to a No 1 album (“High On The Happy Side”) and two more Top 20 hits from it.

My wife really liked this one and asked me to get her the album using my work discount. Not the standard version though, oh no. There was a limited edition that included a whole second album of cover versions called “Cloak And Dagger” that the band had recorded under the pseudonym Maggie Pie And The Imposters. It featured their take on songs by artists like Elvis Costello, Carole King and Tom Waits, all of whom my wife loves. Unusually, the Monday the album was released was my day off that week so I had to ring work to get them to put a copy aside for me (thanks Julie!). I don’t think my wife has played it for years.

Wet Wet Wet may have not been in the show for a while but their performance here made it look like they’d only been away for a couple of weeks. A live vocal policy was no problem for Marti Pellow who also finds the camera every single time to do that smile into. They were clearly in a long hair phase though. It’s like the early 70s up there in stage. Two years on from this, they would pull a Bryan Adams with their version of “Love Is All Around” but let’s not get into that business right now.

*Oh yeah, and Shakespear Sister that were on just a few minutes earlier. That’s another good comeback example isn’t it? Doh!

https://youtu.be/h1oo0K8LBkc

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	2 Unlimited	Twilight Zone	Definitely not
2	Shakespears Sister	Stay	I didn’t
3	Curtis Stigers	I Wonder Why	Nah
4	Genesis	I Can’t Dance	Nope
5	Kylie Minogue	Give Me Just A Little More Time	No but I think my wife has it on a Best Of album
6	Public Enemy	Shut ‘Em Down	No
7	Mariah Carey	Can’t Let Go	Negative
8	Wet Wet Wet	Goodnight Girl	No but my wife had the album

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/m001349p/top-of-the-pops-23011992

TOTP 31 OCT 1991

Posted on November 10, 2021 by 80stastic

When did Halloween become such a big event in the UK? My take on it would be that this is a fairly recent change within say the last 5-10 years when it has overtaken Bonfire night in the cultural calendar. Certainly when I was a kid, there was no suggestion that we would be dressing up and going around the local streets expecting residents to be handing out sweets willy nilly. We might have done a spot of apple bobbing on occasion but that was it. Bonfire night was always the much bigger deal. Back in 1991, I was 23 and living in Manchester and we certainly didn’t have any trick or treating going on in the street where we lived. Fireworks being lobbed at you as you went about your business by the local youth possibly (you had to keep your wits about you at all times) but no kids dressed up as ghouls or werewolves etc although…we did once see a man down our street who from a distance looked like Freddie Kruger doing something suspicious with a rake – never did get the bottom of what that was all about. Anyway, the TOTP producers have decided that since they have a show falling exactly on the witching date of 31st October that they were going to play up to Halloween theme. To that end, we have a carved pumpkin graphic following the titles sequence and presenter Mark Franklin describes this edition of the show as being ‘spooky’!

I don’t know about spooky but the opening act is certainly shocking. Shockingly bad that is. SL2 were, as Mark Franklin advises, DJs Slipmatt and Lime (the S and L of SL2) while the rapper is Jason ‘Jay-J’ James (see what the did there?!) and “DJs Take Control” was the first of four hits for them. I don ‘t remember this at all though. What was the big one that they had?

*checks wikipedia*

“On A Ragga Tip”! That was it. No 2 in 1992 apparently. That one sounded a bit like The Prodigy and I could just about stomach it. “DJs Take Control” is just garbage though. I mean, I’ve never been a massive dance head but there’s literally nothing to it. The rapping is so pedestrian and repetitive whilst the track itself is just some basic breakbeats and shuffled drum machine patterns slung together. The energetic windmilling actions of the two dancers up front seem to be a bit at odds with the track to me. It’s just …I don’t get it (then or now).

As an act to open the show it seems an odd choice as well. I guess the producers were still courting the rave market that they didn’t seem to really understand and which the format of the show (despite its revamp) couldn’t really accommodate. It just looks …well…jarring. Not going too well this new era of the show so far is it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpzQ7vhno3A

Oh this is just ridiculous now. From hardcore rave to…Don McLean?! How? Why? The juxtaposition is made even more striking by the fact that, like SL2, Don is actually in the TOTP studio! He’s literally on the other stage next to SL2 patiently awaiting his cue to begin. Said cue comes from presenter Tony Dortie moving through the assembled audience who look like they’re just realising that they’ve come to the shittest rave ever and literally have no idea who this old duffer on the other stage is. Even when Dortie introduces him, I bet they’re none the wiser. I’m not criticising them rather pointing out the utter absurdity of the show’s run-in order. It’s barking mad! If this had been the 70s, it would have been like the Sex Pistols segueing to Val Doonican or Des O’Connor.

Obviously, McLean is here to sing “American Pie” to promote his Greatest Hits album but even more obviously it’s a truncated version clocking in at just 3 minutes in length (the original album version is 8 and half minutes long!). Don himself seems in a hurry to sing it as if there was a TOTP producer stood in the wings pointing to a big stopwatch. Sartorially, he looks like a Tory MP in his casual gear for a Sunday stroll. It’s just all too much to take in. Interestingly, on the subject of song timings, another act later in the show are given far more screen time to perform a full length version of their latest hit which actually cuts down the amount of acts on tonight’s show to just 10. More of that later but I wonder what Don thought about that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofwqiMALPyg

After the latest egregious Top 10 rundown complete with a witch’s hat graphic at the end (Halloween and all that), we go straight into…well…what fresh hell is this?! It seems to be a woman with a giant treble clef on her head singing very, very badly. This is in fact Congress featuring Lucinda Sieger (Mrs Treble Clef herself) with “40 Miles”. As with SL2 at the top of the show, these were basically two nerdy DJ types (both called Danny coincidentally) plus vocalist -used in the loosest definition of the word- Lucinda. Right, the immediate problem here (apart from the ludicrous treble clef adornment) is that Lucinda was not a very good singer. In fact, her live vocal (as per TOTP ‘year zero’ policy) is diabolically bad. There’s just no getting around that and her performance certainly provoked the ire of many a viewer on Twitter. I think my favourite was courtesy of this gentleman…

This is dogshit on every level
— Marcus Aurelius (@Aurelius) November 5, 2021

Apparently the track uses a fair few samples taken from songs which I don’t know so I’m going straight onto the business of that treble clef. Just….why?!! To distract us from her terrible singing is the only thing I can think of. A dead cat on the table in musical form (literally) if you will. If she was a politician, Lucinda would surely be Boris Johnson. Oh hang on, my research tells me that Lucinda is a former Alternative Miss World runner-up. The Alternative Miss World? I didn’t know there was such a thing. Come to that, is the regular Miss World still a thing even? Anyway, apparently Alternative Miss World has been going (irregularly) since 1972 and was last held in 2018. According to the official website, it was established by the artist Andrew Logan and anyone can enter and everyone is judged on the same criteria as the dogs at Crufts: poise, personality and originality. Past guests, hosts and competitors including everyone from Derek Jarman, David Hockney and Zandra Rhodes to Grayson Perry, Divine, Leigh Bowery and the stars of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Now I can’t find conformation of when Lucinda took part or an image of what she wore but just google Alternative Miss World, click on images and you’ll see that actually, Lucinda (like Don McLean earlier) had dressed quite casually by comparison for her TOTP appearance.

From one horrifically bad vocal performance to…well…another. Sorry Zoë but there are definitely some bum notes in your performance of “Lightning”. To be honest, this is the third (of four) songs that I don’t remember from this show already (and I was working in a record shop for a living at the time!). In my defence, “Lightning” isn’t that memorable. Very much in the same vein as “Sunshine On A Rainy Day” but without the same hooky chorus, it didn’t get anywhere near the same success as its predecessor whose No 4 chart high was 33 paces higher than that which “Lightning” achieved. Wikipedia’s description of it as ‘another moderately popular song’ seems very generous. As for her album “Scarlet Red And Blue” that Tony Dortie bigs up here, well that only got as high as No 67 in the charts. Has a pop star ever projected their future in a song quite as clearly as Zoë does here?

“Lightning never strikes twice, maybe take some advice…”

A couple of Breakers next starting with yet another dance act that I don’t recall at all in Control with “Dance With Me (I’m Your Ecstasy)”. It’s hardly surprising as so forgettable was the whole shebang that there is very little trace of Control and their hit on the internet. I did find something on puredjs.com the said that this track (and I quote) “had the whole world buzzing”. Really?! It didn’t even make the Top 10 in the UK (peaking at No 17). Maybe it was a club thing – I wouldn’t have known as I was skint at the time and certainly had no extra cash for cutting any rug at Manchester’s hottest nightspots. Apparently it was remixed and re-released in 2006 and Control are still a going concern and appear at (again I’m quoting) “festivals, clubs, raves, parties, etc…”. And that’s your lot. God, I hope they’re not on any future TOTP repeats – I’ve nothing else to say about this at all.

*checks BBC4 TOTP repeat schedule*

Oh great, they’re on the next show. Marvellous.

One of those Pointless songs next. Not that there wasn’t any point to it you understand, just that it would possibly score you zero points if you were ever a contestant on that game show starring Richard Osman and Alexander Armstrong. “Shining Star” by INXS anyone? We’d all be forgiven for forgetting this one. A stand alone single to promote their concert album “Live Baby Live” despite the fact that it was a studio recording and not a live cut. Never quite got my head around that concept.

The track itself is very much INXS by numbers and derivative of a lot of their other material from around this period. Accordingly, it only made it to No 27 in the UK charts. The band would return the following year with possibly my favourite album of theirs, “Welcome To Wherever You Are”. For now though, they very much seemed to be treading water,

Meanwhile back in the studio, it’s that funny little bald American bloke Moby whom most of us had never actually seen before…except, he wasn’t actually bald back then and instead has what passes for (almost) a full head of hair. Yes, hard as it is to imagine, there was a time when Moby wasn’t just a cranium. Like most of us probably, the mental image that come to my mind when I think of him is of that “Play” era Moby with him shaven headed on the album’s front cover jumping about with his hairy (oh the cruel irony) chest exposed through his oversized white shirt. Maybe the emergence of comedian Harry Hill has conflated (to quote the word being used by just about every Tory MP in defence of Owen Paterson at the moment) the two. Here he is though with his first ever chart hit “Go” not looking follicly challenged.

None of this hirsute business is helping the TOTP production team manage to showcase a dance act any more effectively than they were ever able to though. For Moby, they’ve dispensed with any backing dancers and instead are reliant on the man himself just jumping around on his keyboard and shouting …erm…’Go!’ to meet the new live vocal criteria. There’s the usual deployment of the Dr Who ‘Green Death’ story visual effect as well of course (well it is a dance track) and not much else apart from the ‘Yeaaaah’ vocal sample which is courtesy of the ubiquitous Jocelyn Brown. Studio performances of dance tracks on TOTP in 1991 are still not working for me.

“Go” peaked at No 10.

As we have a humongously long song coming up soon, the schedule will only allow for about 90 seconds of the next video which is Kylie Minogue and Keith Washington with “If You Were With Me Now”. This was a curious thing, a song written by Mike Stock and Pete Waterman for their PWL label that sounded like a genuine soul standard. Not only that, it was a duet but this was no “Especially For You” (Keith could actually sing unlike Jason for one thing). I should add that Kylie herself gets a writing credit on this as well – it was her first hit single to feature her as a co-writer.

The single would reach a very respectable high of No 4 (much higher than I remembered) despite being from her “Let’s Get To It” album which is surely one of her least memorable and underperformed commercially. Apparently the vocals were recorded separately (see also Michael McDonald and Patti LaBelle’s “On My Own”) and although they were on the set together for the recording of the video, you wouldn’t actually know it as the director chose to not include any scenes of them together. It must have been an artistic licence thing. Or an oversight maybe.

Finally we arrive at this week’s ‘Exclusive’ performance and it’s that song that is massive… in length rather than stature though. Genesis are back everyone!

*everyone groans*

Phil and co hadn’t realised an album since 1986’s “Invisible Touch” before they returned in 1991 with the “We Can’t Dance” LP. That’s not to say we’d all been given five years off from Mr Collins who had been ~~torturing~~ ‘entertaining’ us in the meantime with his mahoosively successful 1989 album “…But Seriously”.

“No Son Of Mine” was the lead single from “We Can’t Dance” and it weighs in at length of 6:41 on the album version. For some reason, presumably to big it up as an exclusive, the TOTP producers allowed them just about all of that time for this performance. Was it worth it? Well, it was for the band with both the single and the album selling exceptionally well, with the former going Top 10 (No 6) – the first Genesis single to do so in the UK since 1983’s “Mama” – and the latter going to No 1 and achieving platinum sales five times over. For the credibility of TOTP though, was this really what the rave crazy kids wanted? Unbelievably Phil Collins was only 40 here (13 years younger than I am now) but he looks ancient. As for Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks…they always looked middle aged didn’t they?

Performance wise, it seems odd to have a drummer up there who isn’t Collins but apparently that’s what crowds will see when they see Genesis play live on their current tour – Phil is doing the vocals sat down out front as he is no longer able to play the drums due to nerve problems for which he underwent an operation on his spine in 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEVSwlIBteg

Some awful intro work finally from hosts Dortie and Franklin as they segue into the No 1 song. U2 have finally brought the 16 weeks reign of Bryan Adams to an end with “The Fly” but they get introduced as ‘The posse from Dublin’ and ‘The U2 boys‘. Dearie me. Given the enormous chart feat that they executed by toppling the groover from Vancouver, the reaction on Twitter to this significant moment was quite surprising with many a viewer tweeting their displeasure at Bono and co including some who wanted to see Adams back! Surely that was tongue in cheek? As well as knocking Adams off his perch, “The Fly” also prevented Right Said Fred getting to No 1 in Australia with “I’m Too Sexy” so double bubble and all that.

Whilst not their best tune by a long way in my book, it was a statement I guess of their intent coming into the new decade. They weren’t going to be churning out “The Joshua Tree” parts II, III and IV into the 90s – they were leaving U2 of the 80s firmly in their past.

U2 would only last for one week at the top as the single was deleted after three weeks to ensure the schedules weren’t clogged up Adams style thereby hindering the release of subsequent singles from the album “Achtung Baby”. Quite the different approach from their label Island as opposed to Adams’s label A&M despite them both being part of the same parent company Universal Music.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	SL2	DJs Take Control	No chance
2	Don McLean	American Pie	Nope
3	Congress featuring Lucinda Sieger	40 Miles	40 piles of shite more like
4	Zoë	Lightning	Nah
5	Control	Dance With Me (I’m Your Ecstasy)	Negative
6	INXS	Shining Star	Not the single but I have it on their Definitive INXS Best Of CD
7	Moby	Go	No
8	Kylie Minogue and Keith Washington	If You Were With Me Now	But I wasn’t – no
9	Genesis	No Son Of Mine	No purchase of mine either
10	U2	The Fly	Singles box says yes though I don’t remember doing so

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/m00116fl/top-of-the-pops-31101991

TOTP 06 SEP 1991

Posted on October 6, 2021 by 80stastic

CORRECTION: In the post relating to the TOTP broadcast on 22 Aug 1991, I mistakenly reported that this was Bruno Brookes’ last ever appearance as a host on the show as he was removed along with all the other Radio 1 DJ presenters in the ‘year zero’ revamp. I also stated that we would see valedictory appearances by Mark Goodier, Jakki Brambles, Simon Mayo, Nicky Campbell and Gary Davies in the following weeks. Whilst it was true that the above names were replaced by a batch of new presenters from Oct 1991 onwards, it has been brought to my attention that four of those six would return to the TOTP family in 1994 as the year zero revamp was reversed. Only Gary Davies and Jakki Brambles did not reappear. Consequently, my claim about the show not being presented again by Bruno Brookes, Mark Goodier, Simon Mayo and Nicky Campbell is not true although we won’t be seeing them for over two years. Thank you to Matthew James for pointing this out.

Right, now that’s cleared up, I can say that this show was Jakki Brambles final TOTP appearance. Jakki always gave off the impression to me that she was quite disinterested in all this pop music lark and I never found her that convincing as a host. She also seemed to have an issue with the temperature in the TOTP studio with many a Winter coat being worn when surely it must have been boiling under those hot studio lights. She emigrated to the US in 1994, changed the spelling of her name to ‘Jackie’ and stayed there for eleven years as a news radio morning anchor and occasional television news anchor for the CBS network. She returned to the UK in 2005 and presented Loose Women until 2009 and owns her own digital media business called Broadstance Digital Media Production. She currently works on Greatest Hits Radio which seems to be some sort of retirement home for ex Radio 1 DJs as their roster also includes, yes you guessed it, Simon Mayo and Mark Goodier alongside other ‘star’ names as Andy Crane (has no brain) and Pat Sharp.

Right on with the show as we have 14 (FOURTEEN) songs to get through in this one. We start with Oceanic and “Insanity”. I’m pretty sure that this one would have been labelled as a ‘banger’ back then (and maybe even today). A huge anthem, it started life on a short run promo 12″ sending crowds of North-West ravers erm…insane.. whenever it was played. Inevitably, it was picked up for a wider commercial release by Dead Dead Good records and would go on to spend four months on the Top 40 and three months in the Top 10 including three weeks at No 3. Could it have made it to No 1 if that Bryan Adams song had never been released? Possibly although it would probably have got stuck at No 2 behind Right Said Fred. We’ll never know. What I do know however, is that around this time, rave music seemed to be taking over the world or at least the UK anyway. Just about anything that was a ‘dance’ track seemed to attract the ‘rave’ label. Oceanic obviously came under that umbrella but there were also Bassheads (from the same neck of the woods as it happened), K-Klass, Bizarre Inc, Altern 8 etc. Predictably, the scene became homogenised when all these club anthems started to be lumped together on compilation albums like Virgin’s “The Ultimate Rave”. Was that the point where it all started to go wrong? Look, when it comes to dance music, I freely admit that I don’t really know what I’m talking about despite having spent the majority of the 90s working in record shops.

As for Oceanic, despite two further Top 40 hits, they were never able to move on from the success of “Insanity” but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for the band. Back in 2012, in an interview with The Liverpool Echo in a piece about the reopening of a Liverpool nightclub called The State where the band were due to play a set, singer Jorinde Williams said:

“I love getting the metaphorical rave horn out now and again and singing Insanity. It still gives me shivers to see a crowd of grinning, dancing strangers singing back these words I wrote 20 years ago, and that it means something to them.”

The metaphorical rave horn?! That either sounds like something very rude or a band that did a session for John Peel in 1993.

Talking of rave, this next lot were also one of the acts that must have featured on that “The Ultimate Rave” compilation. The Prodigy were up to No 3 by this point with their Public Information Films themed hit “Charly”. Famously sampling the 1973 cut out animation warning children of the dangers of strangers, falling in the water, matches etc via the characters of a boy called Tony and his ginger cat, I notice that the spelling of the cat’s name originally was ‘Charley’ but The Prodigy dropped an ‘e’ (ahem) for the title of their single. That must have been deliberate and an in joke within the band surely?!

Sonia was still having hits into the Autumn of 1991?! That was over two years since her Stock, Aitken and Waterman produced No 1 single “You’ll Never Stop Me Loving You”! In the intervening period she’d eked out a further six hits all of which had gone Top 20. Clearly Sonia wasn’t going to give up on this pop star lark easily. “Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy” however would break that run of Top 20 singles when it peaked just outside at No 22. Our Sonia’s got a band of seven up there on stage with her to deliver the song but no amount of hired hands can distract from the notion that this seemed so incongruous with the rest of the contemporary charts acts. A rave anthem this was not! However, it was a firm favourite amongst the Northern Soul scene – no not Sonia’s version obviously but the version by The Tams which was a minor UK hit in 1970.

Looking at Sonia’s discography (not something I would have thought I would ever be doing) I can see that she still has another three Top 40 entries stretching into 1993 to get through before her well of chart hits finally ran dry. However, two of those were more cover versions and the final one was the UK’s Eurovision entry – so much for Jakki Brambles comment about ‘self-penned tunes’ on Sonia’s second album called …erm…”Sonia” that was released a month after this TOTP appearance. Jakki also refers to her as ‘a good old girl’ at the song’s end. She was 20 when this show was broadcast!

It’s the video for “Let’s Talk About Sex” by Salt ‘N Pepa next. In a Rolling Stone magazine article in 2017, Salt (Cheryl James) made the distinction that:

“The song was about talking about sex. The song was not about sex. The song was about communication and talking about a subject that nobody wants to talk about”

Pepa (Sandra Denton) added:

“It wasn’t a dirty song. It was an enlightenment song”

So powerful was the song’s message that it was re-worked in 1992 to help promote discussions about AIDS and HIV. Here’s @TOTPFacts with the details:

At the suggestion of ABC News anchor Peter Jennings (who heard his daughter listening to the song), Salt-N-Pepa later reworked "Let’s Talk About Sex" as "Let's Talk About AIDS" for 1992 ABC special Growing Up In The Age Of AIDS. Watch it here: https://t.co/fq1Qt9wbXx #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) October 1, 2021

However, the song has also been used in a much more light hearted way. After Liverpool had secured their sixth European Cup when winning the Champions League in 2019, manager Jurgen Klopp was so overjoyed that he couldn’t help bursting into a rendition of it with the lyrics altered to reflect his club’s achievement. Someone then mixed it with the original track and….

In direct contrast to Sonia earlier with her seven piece backing band packing out the stage, here’s Zoë with with just a sole guitarist for company as she performs her hit “Sunshine On A Rainy Day”. Was Zoë’s style of dancing a thing back then? You know, feet rooted to the floor with the arms supplying all the movement? I guess Susanne and Joanne from The Human League made a 40 year career out of a similar thing.

As the track is coming to an end there’s a shot where you can see Jakki Brambles in place to do the next link in the gantry. What surprised me was that she isn’t even looking at the stage as Zoë is still performing. Look I know she had a job to do but it’s a good 20 seconds before the camera actually comes to her. Remember earlier when I said Jakki always seemed disinterested in the whole pop music thing…? “Good to see that one in the charts at long last” she tells us as she segues into the next act. Well, you didn’t see it Jakki, you weren’t even looking in the right direction! “Sunshine On A Rainy Day” peaked at No 4.

So that next act is Martika with the video for “Love…Thy Will Be Done”. As Jakki tells us, her latest album “Martika’s Kitchen” (terrible, terrible title) has four songs on it that were co-written with Prince including the current single which I think we were all meant to take on board as meaning that she was leaving her pop past behind and becoming a serious artist.

We also knew this because the accompanying video was shot in black and white, that classic trick to ensure that we understood what we were watching had some gravitas to it. No pop fluff this you know. When I was a student at Sunderland Poly we had to make a video short for one of the modules and my group employed the black and white tactic for ours. The point we wanted to make though was that black and white meant dull and boring before the film came alive with the introduction of colour. Out of our way Federico Fellini! Our video was entitled Wet Dream but it’s not what you might think. The black and white footage had a guy called Ian falling asleep in a particularly dull lecture before he went into a dream in colour where he is kidnapped and thrown into a swimming pool. As he awakes from his dream back in black and white he is soaking wet. Genius! We were all do pleased with ourselves! Ah, the folly of youth. I must get around to uploading it one day. “Love…Thy Will Be Done” peaked at No 9.

Meanwhile back in the studio we find some more ravers in Utah Saints with a guy up front on bass guitar looking like what I’m sure Boris Johnson (but not me) would describe as a ‘crusty’. Their performance of “What Can You Do For Me” illustrates perfectly the issues TOTP was facing with showcasing this new fangled rave music. There are no vocals apart from the short samples from Gwen Guthrie, Eurythmics and an intro from a Kiss concert. That leaves the four members of the band having to fill the time somehow. So we have the aforementioned bass player strutting about, a drummer, someone on keyboards and a DJ scratching like his life depending on it. No wonder the show’s producers decided to pad it out with some images from the promo video. To be fair, the track was good enough to not be undermined by the performance and would go up the charts the following week.

Jakki Brambles’ comment on Utah Saints? “They’re a good bunch of lads”. Hang on didn’t she say something similar about Sonia? Yes she did (“ a good old girl”). Presumably this was her default style of phrases she would go to to fill time. A bit like a Tory politician being asked a difficult question and replying “I don’t accept your characterisation of ***”.

Kylie Minogue is up next adding to the female pop star count for this show. We’ve already had Sonia, Zoë, Martika, Salt ‘N Pepa plus Oceanic fronted by Jorinde Williams and now here’s Kylie with her latest single “Word Is Out”. As Jakki says it was her fourteenth consecutive hit but it was also the first to fail to reach the Top 10. Were UK pop fans getting bored of her? No I don’t think so – it was just a shit song. Really weak. It was the lead single from her fourth and final album with Stock, Aitken and Waterman and she seemed to be a bit lost in this stage of her career. Maybe she was just finding her feet in the creative process (she shared song writing credits on six of the tracks). The album had a mixed reception both critically and commercially (it also failed to make the Top 10, her first album to do so). Very much a forgotten Kylie single (when was the last time you heard it on the radio?), its failure to rack up massive sales wasn’t due to a lack of effort on Kylie’s part as she gives the usual energetic performance here, crammed full of more dance moves than Zoë could wave her arms at. That would all be gone come her next single though which (psst… pass it on) was a big R’n’B ballad with Keith Washington. The word was out.

This is totally unfair! Just six minutes left of the show and they cram in another six songs in that time! My poor fingers! This is due to there being four Breakers this week starting with Mötley Crüe with a song called “Primal Scream”. What? I’d rather that sentence read Primal Scream with a song called “Motley Crue”.

This blog appears to have gone umlaut crazy. After the nonsense of the Marc Bölan story the other week and the appearance tonight of Zoë, we have the LA hair metallers with a single to promote their first Greatest Hits album. Hang on, what hits? They’d had just three Top 40 entries before this in the UK and none had hit higher than No 23. To be fair, they were more successful in the US where they’d had six including two Top 10s but I’m not about to let something like the truth get in the way of a petty swipe at them! According to the band’s Nikki Sixx, the song was written about Arthur Janov’s 1970 book The Primal Scream. Yeah, maybe or maybe they just stole the idea off Tears For Fears who named themselves after said book. “Primal Scream” the Mötley Crüe song kept their run of UK singles that failed to breach the Top 20 going when it peaked at No 26.

Another dance anthem now. Sabrina Johnston may only be known for this single “Peace” in this country but she’s not without musical pedigree. She toured with The Sugar Hill Gang in the 80s and was signed to Sugar Hill Records as part of West Street Mob so you know…respect and all. “Peace” was just a huge, uplifting chunk of positivity in the form of a gospel -ish dance track that was written during the Gulf War as an antidote to the feelings of dread and horror that conflict engendered. It was a tune! Peaking at No 8, it returned to the charts the following year as a double A-side with a remix of “Gypsy Woman” by Crystal Waters to promote the “Red, Hot + Dance” charity album.

Talking of whom….now I would have laid money on Crystal Waters having been a one hit wonder but no as here she is with the follow up to No 2 hit “Gypsy Woman” with a song called “Makin’ Happy”. I didn’t much care for her first hit and this one wasn’t going to do it for me either seeing as it was very much in the same mould – indeed it was described as ‘Gypsy Woman, Part II’ in some of the music press. Even in this short clip it just seemed so damn repetitive. Her discography tells me that she had nine Top 40 hits in this country. NINE?!! Don’t panic though, I don’t think we’ll be seeing her again until these TOTP repeats hit 1994 (assuming that they carry on that long).

Roxette complete the Breakers with the third single from their third studio album “Joyride” called “The Big L.” (no punctuation after the ‘L’ , no points). It’s a bit bland this one and it really reminds me of another song (who said anything else by Roxette?!) but I can’t put my finger on it. An ABBA song maybe?It wasn’t released in the US for some reason – not sure why their American record company wouldn’t have had faith in it given their last seven singles released there had peaked at:

1 – 14 – 1 – 2 – 1 – 1 – 2

Now, remember that guy who interviews Jurgen Klopp in that ‘Let’s Talk About Six’ video. Well, his name is Jan Åge Fjørtoft (the theme was umlauts Jan not…whatever they are) who is an ex-professional footballer who turned out for Swindon Town, Middlesbrough, Sheffield United and Barnsley in this country but that’s neither here nor there. Look at him again. He could be the guy in Roxette surely?

OK, what week are we onto now with Bryan Adams and “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You”? Nine? Ten? I’m struggling for any more content on this song now. What has @TOTPFacts got for me…

Sorry, I'm now considering this part of the show a tea break until the 16 weeks are over. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) October 1, 2021

Oh, great, thanks very much! Balls! Well, in a Smash Hits interview (Bryan was not only in the magazine but on the front cover -who’d have thought it?!) he was asked:

Are you mightily chuffed with the single then?

His reply was:

“You could say that”

Bryan Adams there with a magnificently downbeat show of being chuffed about something that has only been matched by David Batty when he was interviewed in Lee Chapmans’ house in Boroughbridge when Leeds Utd won the league in 1992. Asked how he felt about the achievement he replied:

“Well, it’s a bonus”.

Who’s this? Runrig? Oh yes, I remember them. Like a celtic Dire Straits weren’t they? Too glib? OK, well “The Hearthammer EP” was their first Top 40 hit despite having been around since 1973 and as I recall they were a very popular live draw. Indeed, there are almost as many live Runrig albums as studio albums. To prove the point, the video shows the band playing what seems to be a massive outdoor gig. The single was taken from an album called “The Big Wheel” which went gold in the UK. This really does sound like Dire Straits though.

And that’s it from Jakki Brambles. Her comment at the show’s end “Right, I’m off to the Darby and Joan Club” suggests maybe she knew she was for the bullet?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Oceanic	Insanity	I didn’t
2	The Prodigy	Charly	Nope
3	Sonia	Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy	As if
4	Salt ‘n Pepa	Let’s Talk About Sex	Liked it, didn’t buy it
5	Zoë	Sunshine On A Rainy Day	See 4 above
6	Martika	Love…Thy Will Be Done	Nope
7	Utah Saints	What Can You Do For Me	See 4 above
8	Kylie Minogue	Word Is Out	Nah
9	Mötley Crüe	Primal Scream	Never happening
10	Sabrina Johnston	Peace	See 4 above
11	Crystal Waters	Makin’ Happy	Soundin’ crappy more like – no
12	Roxette	The Big L.	F******g ‘ell more like – no
13	Bryan Adams	(Everything I Do) I Do It For You	I did not
14	Runrig	The Hearthammer EP	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/m00103fv/top-of-the-pops-06091991

TOTP 14 FEB 1991

Posted on June 18, 2021 by 80stastic

Welcome to TOTP Rewind where we by happy circumstance we find the there is a show scheduled to be broadcast on Valentine’s Day! Yes, the calendar and the stars aligned 30 years ago meaning that music could be the food of love so let’s see which beautiful ballads would have given all those lovers out there excess of it…

….hmm. Well, the title of the song is romantic I guess but “I Wanna Give You Devotion” by Nomad was hardly a traditional love song. In fact, it you check out the lyrics, there doesn’t seem to be anything about plighting one’s troth in them at all. In fact, it’s all rather dark as rapper MC Mikee Freedom (no double ‘e’ no points) bangs on about nightmares, the night creeping in and uses words such as ‘frightening’, ‘spooky’ and ‘terrorise’ to get his point across. And what was this point exactly? Well, but seems to be political as at one point he raps:

Poll tax came and up went the rise
Open your eyes and realise
I’m a truly disguise
Like hawk, the slayer, he came and courted
Maggie came, but now she’s slaughtered

I’m guessing not too many couples slow danced the night away to this one. To be fair, I’m sure it did pull in the punters onto the dance floor across the nation’s nightclubs but probably to wig out rather than canoodle.

“I Wanna Give You Devotion” peaked at No 2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRhBD2O0ke8

Talking of wigs… here comes Kylie Minogue with her video for “What Do I Have To Do?”, the one where she sports loads of different hairstyles which are, of course, mostly false hair pieces. It’s a pretty nifty little dance tune but again, hardly the stuff romantic nights in are made of. Whatever your opinion about Kylie, you can’t deny that she was prolific. This was her 12th single release in three years and she’d also released three albums in that time.

Going back to the video, @TOTPFacts dug out a nice behind the scenes piece about how it was filmed including a slow motion sequence which entailed the track being speeded up. I’ve watched the video back in full and I really don’t think the effect achieved was worth the effort. It was hardly up there with the reverse sequences in Danny Wilson’s “Second Summer Of Love” video when they had to mime to the vocals backwards. Also, anyone suggesting you can’t tell the difference between Kylie’s normal vocals and the speeded up ones is just cruel.

Here's a behind-the-scenes clip from the "What Do I Have To Do" video
Highlight: what it sounds like when they play the track speeded up, for the shooting of the slow motion sequence: https://t.co/x6x50Yxrvx #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) June 11, 2021

An actual song with the word ‘love’ in the title next but again it’s hardly a big, slushy Valentine’s Day number. As with Nomad earlier, “You Got The Love” was a huge dance anthem courtesy of The Source featuring Candi Staton. Though I just seemed to accept that of course she was the vocalist, in retrospect, was it quite an odd pairing? After all, Candi hadn’t had a Top 40 hit in the UK since 1982 when a version of “Suspicious Minds” made No 31 and anyway, she was surely best known for her 1976 disco classic “Young Hearts Run Free” and her cover of The Bee Gees “Nights On Broadway” the following year. Well, that’s all I knew about her anyway. Years after “You Got The Love”, I worked with a guy who swore by Candi Staton and was probably appalled by my rudimentary knowledge of her back catalogue. Looking at her discography, she has actually released 28 albums over the course of her recording career bu then she doesn’t do things by halves – she’s also been married six times.

The 1991 version of “You Got The Love” peaked at No 4.

Definitely not a Valentine’s Day tune was “In Yer Face” by 808 State. By this point, these Manc lads were getting the hang of this pop star business as “In Yer Face” was their third consecutive Top 10 hit in their own right after “Pacific State” and “Cubik” / “Olympic” and their fourth if you include “The Only Rhyme That Bites” with MC Tunes. Pretty impressive stuff from a bunch of lads whose origins lay in their shared love of a record store. To be fair, It’s a legendary record store. Eastern Bloc was where all the cool people bought their music. Situated on Oldham Street in Manchester’s historic Northern Quarter district, it was the purveyor of dance music of every hue – house, techno, drum and bass etc it was all here mostly on vinyl and a lot of it stock was imports. I think I went in once during my 10 years of living in Manchester (mainly just to say I’d been in there) and I certainly didn’t buy anything (not being, you know, cool and that). Apparently there used to be a rule that if a punter came in Eastern Bloc and didn’t know anybody behind the counter, then you wouldn’t get served! I know record shops in general could have that image of being staffed by sniffy musos behind the counter who would openly jeer at a punter’s purchase choices but that’s weapons grade pomposity!

Anyway, when owner Martin Price got together with regular customers Graham Massey and Gerald Simpson, the seeds of the group were sown and with a couple of additions to the membership in DJs Andrew Barker and Darren Partington and the departure of Simpson, the classic 808 State line up was established. “In Yer Face” was from the band’s third studio album “ex:el” (which was their biggest selling album peaking at No 4) and was about as far removed from a romantic ballad as it was possible to be. That grinding, almost sinister back beat combined with some out there samples trickery and the only vocal being a disembodied voice saying ‘In Your face’, it was quite unnerving to a pop kid like me.

Price left the band shortly after whilst Eastern Bloc relocated to Stevenson Square in Manchester City centre in 2011. Unsurprisingly, I have yet to visit it in its current location.

As host Gary Davies says, the highest climber this week is a song that was 21 years old back in 1991. So why was “Alright Now” by Free back in the Top 40 in 1991? Do you even have to ask? Inevitably, it was due to its inclusion in an advert of course, specifically this advert:

Well, it made a change from Levis I suppose. With “Alright Now” climbing the charts, Island records released a Best Of album tie-in entitled rather boringly “The Best Of Free: All Right Now” which sold surprisingly well going silver in the UK. I say surprisingly because Free only ever had five UK chart hits and two of those were “Alright Now”.

Obviously I was already acquainted with the track before its 1991 reissue as its one of those songs that has received constant radio play down the years and routinely features in those Greatest Rock Songs of all time polls. If anything, it has completely overshadowed the rest of their output and in a Songfacts interview, drummer Simon Kirke, confirmed this when he commented “It became a bit of an albatross around our necks, I have to say. Even though it elevated Free into the big leagues, it became a bit of an albatross because we couldn’t follow it.” Albatross or not, it has been covered by the likes of Rod Stewart, Mike Oldfield, Christina Aguilera, the Runaways and ..erm…Pepsi & Shirlie. No really. Look…

Oh and indeed, dear. By the way, it’s suitability as a Valentine’s Day song was very much in doubt due to the lyrics being about a man picking up a woman purely for sex and when the ‘L’ word gets mentioned, her reply is:

She said love, Lord above
Now you’re tryin’ to trick me in love

The 1991 re-release of “Alright Now” peaked at No 8 having made it all the way to No 2 in 1970.

Some nice Valentine’s themed segue work from Gary Davies next as he manages to get in a plug for World Gold Heart day raising money for the Variety Club before introducing “Every Beat Of The Heart” by The Railway Children. Finally, a love song on Valentine’s Day! Or is it? If you actually analyse the lyrics, it seems to be a break up song. Check out this opening verse:

That’s some angry sky behind me
But I don’t need you here to guide me
Identify too familiar ground
And I’ll keep away, I’ll keep away

It doesn’t get any better in the chorus when lead singer Gary Newby sings:

Every beat of the heart
Brings me closer to the start
Takes me further away from you
Brings me closer to the truth

Damn these song lyrics getting in the way of a neatly themed post!

So who were The Railway Children? Named after the film starring a young Jenny Agutter, they were actually signed initially to Factory and very much darlings of the mid 80s indie scene. However, there’s is a well told story of not wanting to be a cult band forever and seeking out bigger commercial success. A move to Virgin and touring spots supporting REM and Lloyd Cole exposed them to a larger audience and eventually they scored a bona fide No 24 chart hit with “Every Beat Of The Heart” from their third album “Native Place” when it was re-released after peaking at No 68 in 1990. It’s a great little pure pop song with an indie twang and they looked set for those bigger things they desired on the back of it. I remember there being a rush in demand for their album and not being able to get it into the store as Virgin temporarily withdrew it presumably while they decided how to promote it. I would see this record company practice a number of times over the years and it was intensely annoying for customers and record staff alike (see also Nirvana when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” broke and “Nevermind” was withdrawn).

And then….nothing. Subsequent single releases from the album failed to get anywhere near the Top 40 and they would become just what they didn’t want – a one hit wonder. Musical differences within the band then arose as they searched for a new direction and they split not long after although since 2016 the original line up has reunited to perform some festival gigs.

As with The Railway Children before him, Chris Isaak‘s new single was actually an old single having originally been released in 1987. “Blue Hotel” was taken from his eponymous second album and had tanked on its original outing peaking at No 100. However, it was crucially one of the tracks included on the rapidly compiled “Wicked Game” compilation album in early 1991 which was designed to be an introduction to Isaak’s canon of work for the newly initiated in the light of the success of the “Wicked Game” single. Hence, it was plucked from obscurity for another tilt at the Top 40 and hey presto! Another hit! It’s the very definition of moody and, to my ears, was a good choice as a more uptempo follow up to its predecessor. Again, as with The Railway Children, I recall there being a demand for his back catalogue but a lot of it was unavailable in this country but I think our shop got a few copies in on import.

Despite its yearning qualities, the lyrics (yet again) don’t imbue the song with a natural romantic quality. Instead they concern lonely highways and life not working out Chris’s way. In short, it’s mournful for a lost love rather than celebratory of a current one. I liked it though. It stuck out as an antidote to all those dance anthems and he looked as cool as f**k even in that vile suit.

“Blue Hotel” peaked at No 17 second time around.

It’s that spooky “Only You” song by Praise next. Combining electronic and world music (Wikipedia assures me the genre is called ethnic electronica), it featured the vocals of Miriam Stockley who has quite an address book full of contacts. She has provided backing vocals for tracks by the likes of Roger Daltrey, Thomas Dolby, Queen and multiple SAW artists. Oh and Nik Kershaw (ahem). As for its Valentine’s Day credentials, I think I would be a bit freaked out to say the least if I’d just entered into a romantic relationship with someone who wanted this to be our song. Plus there’s the subject of those pesky, lyrics again. Now I can’t work out what on earth Miriam is singing about but according to the internet, the opening lines are:

Whip, whip, whip
Whip, whip, whip
Whip, whip, whip
Whip like that
Whip, whip, whip
Whip
Whip like that
Whip like that
Whip like that
We suffer everyday, what is it for?

WTAF?! Surely not?

Despite Gary Davies’ assertion that it could be No 1 next week, “Only You” would speak at No 4.

Definitely not a love song is the new No 1 which is “Do The Bartman” by The Simpsons. I really can’t explain the success of this single. Yes, The Simpsons was pulling in the ratings in the US but in the UK it had only been on air a few months and even then only on Sky which the majority of the public didn’t have access to. And it isn’t even funny – surely humour is an essential ingredient of a novelty record? As I was one of those who knew little of the programme, I assumed that Bart must be the lead character but surely, in retrospect, we all agree that Homer is the true comedy heart of the show don’t we?

We arrive at the final track of the night and by my reckoning we haven’t had one single, genuine love song on a show being broadcast on Valentine’s Day. Weren’t there any suitable candidates that were going up the charts or new entries?

*checks chart rundown*

There was a new entry which actually had ‘love’ in the title! Oh hang on – it’s “Love Rears Its Ugly Head” By Living Colour. Yeah, I don’t think that title fits the bill somehow. But wait! There was a band with the word ‘Valentine” in their name! An open goal for the TOTP producers surely? Ah, it’s My Bloody Valentine. Not sure some guitar feedback from a bunch of shoe gazers who performed a half hour interlude of noise in their gigs is going to work either. How about “Get Here” by Oleta Adams then? Perfect and it’s going up the charts. What? It was on last week? Ok, I’ve got it. An unlikely saviour but it just might work. “Beautiful Love” by Julian Cope. That’ll do. He’s on next week you say? Oh forget it then!

So what do we sign off with? Well, it’s a good old rocker by Jimmy Barnes with INXS. Despite being one of the most popular and best-selling Australian music artists of all time, I have to admit to not knowing much about Barnes but I do know that this collaboration with INXS was a cover of a tune originally recorded by 60s Aussie band The Easybeats (of “Friday On My Mind” fame). “Good Times” was in the charts due to its inclusion on the soundtrack of The Lost Boys film which was shown on BBC on New Year’s Day this year hence the renewed interest in it. There was a trend for this sort of thing around this time. We’d already seen Berlin and Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes back in the charts on the back of terrestrial TV film premieres. The Lost Boys is a great film though and one of those that I pretty much will always watch if I stumble over it while channel flicking.

The Jimmy Barnes / INXS version of “Good Times” peaked at No 18.

For posterity’s sake, I include the chart run down below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw-EPZofPDo

Order of Appearance	Artist	Title	Did I Buy It?
1	Nomad	I Wanna Give You Devotion	Nope
2	Kylie Minogue	What Do I Have To Do?	No
3	The Source featuring Candi Staton	You Got The Love	Good tune but no
4	808 State	In Yer Face	Not really my bag
5	Free	Alright Now	Nah
6	The Railway Children	Every Beat Of The Heart	No but I probably should have
7	Chris Isaak	Blue Hotel	No but my wife had the Wicked Game compilation album with it on
8	Praise	Only You	No thanks
9	Do The Bartman	The Simpsons	As if
10	Jimmy Barnes / INXS	Good Times	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/m000wvlx/top-of-the-pops-14021991

TOTP 31 JAN 1991

Posted on June 10, 2021 by 80stastic

The BBC4 TOTP repeats are back in full swing now with a double header each Friday night. As such, we have already reached the end of January and it’s another short show tonight with only 8 acts on and 5 minutes lopped off the running time. I’m guessing this is due to the ongoing Gulf War conflict. As a welcome distraction from the world’s ills, my beloved Chelsea have reached the semi-finals of the League Cup (now lumbering along in the guise of its sponsor as the Rumbelows Cup). This was the first time we had reached this stage of a cup competition for 6 years and only the second time in 20 years. It felt like a big deal but it would end in defeat and disappointment and I would have to wait another 6 years before we finally won something.

Work-wise, I had just clocked up my third month at Our Price and was now a fully fledged permanent member of staff. My employment didn’t stop us from being skint all the time as my wife wasn’t working but we became experts at sniffing out freebie events. Book signings at Waterstones were a massive boon as they often included free wine and snacks as were art gallery exhibition openings. In addition to these, my Our Price store had a an arrangement with the Odeon cinema in town that we would provide them with two free CDs a week to play as background music before the films started in return for a weekly free pass that would admit two people. Whenever it was my turn for the pass, it was a huge boost to our social life! Wonder if the CDs of any of the acts on this show ended up at the Odeon Manchester?

We start with EMF who are following up their Top 3 hit “Unbelievable” with a track called “I Believe”. I couldn’t decide at the time whether this was a clever play on song titles or just dumb. I’m still not sure now. I have to say I found “I Believe” a big disappointment. It’s got roughly the same ingredients as “Unbelievable” and yet it doesn’t seem to have come out of the oven in quite the same way. Yes, it’s all very urgent sounding and exhibits a pulsating, driving rhythm but it just didn’t match up to its predecessor at all for me,. It didn’t have that huge hooky chorus and sounded like it was trying just a bit too hard. The single edit doesn’t have the 8 second intro that the album version has where keyboard player Derry Brownson threatens to trash a flat much to the consternation of his band members….

Visually, they have all the right looks of the time with that overgrown floppy fringe and garishly coloured baggy T-shirts over the top of Bermuda shorts being sported by a fair few of the band. Also the drummer has a KLF T-shirt on – I’m assuming that’s deliberate as they are on the show later. or maybe he couldn’t spell his own band’s name? For all my reservations, “I Believe” did its job by securing the boys another Top 10 hit when it peaked at No 6. For now, things were still right on track for EMF.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCsCtcoK9CU

I should point out that tonight’s host is Anthea Turner and that this show will not turn out to be her finest hour. She starts uncontroversially but just the second act in and she’s making a show of herself by introducing Ralph Tresvant as “Ralph ‘Show Us Your Chest’ Tresvant”. Now it might not seem like a major incident but if you reverse the introduction and had say Bruno Brookes introducing Belinda Carlisle as “Belinda ‘Show Us Your Chest’ Carlisle” surely all Hell would have broken loose?

Anyway, Ralph does indeed grant Anthea’s request and gets his pecs out in the video for “Sensitivity” (oh the irony of that song title) but nothing can distract from how completely dull the song is. Ralph’s only other UK chart hit of the decade would be as an afterthought on the Janet Jackson / Luther Vandross single “The Best Things In Life Are Free” on which he has a credit for being in the studio at the same time but you have to read the small print very carefully to find it.

Yet another dance smash next as Nomad become a part of our lives with their single “(I Wanna Give You) Devotion“. There was a rumour going around our store that our previous store manger Greg had been something to do with getting this track released but I don’t know if there was any truth in that at all and I certainly never asked him about it. There had also been a story circualting in the staff kitchen that he’d been instrumental in Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is In The Heart” becoming a hit. Thirty years on and I’m not convinced about either story. There’s very little connection between the records other than that they were both huge dance anthems – they weren’t even on the same label.

Anyway, despite it being well out of my comfort zone, I actually didn’t mind this one too much. Nomad were Damon Rochefort (Nomad is Damon spelled backwards), Steve McCutcheon and Sharon D. Clarke and the ever reliable @TOTPFacts found out loads of trivia about all three. Here’s a few tidbits:

Nomad's singer is Sharon Dee Clarke, whom Doctor Who fans will recognise from her role as Grace, Graham's late wife. We've seen her on #TOTP before – she was also the vocalist on FPI Project's "Going Back To My Roots".
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) June 4, 2021

then there’s this…

Nomad's Steve Mac (Steve McCutcheon – absent here) went on to have three top 40 hits as part of dance group Undercover (the biggest being their version of "Baker Street", a no 2 in 1992). #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) June 4, 2021

and finally…

Nomad's Damon Rochefort (with the keyboard) later went to attend a script-writing course led by Birds Of A Feather creators Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran. They "took him under their wing", and he ended up writing for the series. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) June 4, 2021

Excellent! Content sorted! Makes my life so much easier! “(I Wanna Give You) Devotion” is actually credited to Nomad featuring MC Mikee Freedom but all @TOTPFacts had on him was that he’s from Bristol and his real name is Michael Field. Boo!

Anyone remember Praise and their spooky single “Only You”? If you do, it’s probably due to this advert…

Yes, this unlikely, ethereal song was originally used in a car advert for the Fiat Tempra but got its own release a few weeks later. Would it be cynical of me to suggest that the record company wanted to cash in on the Enigma phenomenon? In truth though, wasn’t it just Clannad set to a plodding dance back beat? There’s even a bit of pan pipes in there but let’s not go down that route. Oh, and a Marvin Gaye sample possibly?

I didn’t really get this one at all and it did very little for me. Apparently the single edit was remixed by producers Andreas Georgiou (cousin of George Michael) and Peter Lorrimer….surely not the Leeds United legend and possessor of the hardest shot in football at one time? Praise indeed.

“Only You” (also nothing to do with Yazoo) peaked at No 4.

For me, Kylie Minogue was on a complete roll at this point in her career. She’d shed the ‘Charlene from Neighbours makes a catchy pop tune’ comments some time ago and had moved into wanting to be seen as an artist in her own right. Yes, she was still working with SAW but there was definitely more depth to both her music and image.

“What Do I Have To Do” was the third single to be lifted from her “Rhythm Of Love” album (although it was originally scheduled to be the second) and it did a good job of consolidating this new direction. Very much in the same vein as its predecessors “Better the Devil You Know” and “Step Back In Time”, it sounded like an accomplished dance /pop track full off enough hooks to pull you in. However, it was also her first single release not to make the UK Top 5. Would that have been of concern to her at the time? Probably not and the chart placings of her subsequent singles throughout the 90s were certainly nothing to be sniffed at but…there was a general decline over the course of the decade (she would only have 3 more Top 10 hits before the new millennium). The success of her No 1 single “Spinning Around” in 2000 was definitely seen as unexpected and ushered in the most unlikely of comebacks.

Apparently her sister Danni is in the video for this one (though I haven’t spotted her). Within a short few weeks, she would be a chart star herself when her debut single “Love and Kisses” broke into the Top 10. You have been warned.

OK – it’s that Soho performance next – the one that always comes to mind when I think of Soho and their gloriously funky song “Hippychick” – yep it’s the one with those massive kipper ties! Apparently the slogan emblazoned on them is CENSORED after the run in they had with the TOTP producers who threatened to cut them from the show the last time they were on if they wore their dresses with CND logos on them. It doesn’t quite work as a stunt though because the producers did relent and let them wear their dresses meaning they weren’t, in fact, censored after all. Still, let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good gimmick. It is a great performance though with the Cuff twins full of energy and artistic endeavour. There was one member of the band who wasn’t on top of their game though – the bass player lollops around the stage looking like he couldn’t even spell rhythm let alone possess any.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YJAhGdI-Rw

This was as good as it got for Soho. “Hippychick” was their one and only chart hit although they continued to release albums until their split in 1999. They did also though provide a song for the soundtrack of the original Scream film in 1996. I remember sitting in the cinema as the credits rolled totally taken by surprise that an Icicle Works song would feature in a huge Hollywood film – so much so that I didn’t pay any attention as to who was actually covering “Whisper to a Scream (Birds Fly)” – for all you pedants out there, note the slight title change for the US market – and now finally I have the answer.

“Hippychick” peaked at No 8.

It’s time for the new No 1 and this felt like a big deal – a genuinely edgy and subversive act topping the charts. The time of the anti-popstar was upon us and their name was The KLF. The second of their Stadium House trilogy of singles, “3am Eternal” would prove to be their only UK No 1 (if you don’t count “Doctorin’ the Tardis” under their Timelords pseudonym).

For the whole of 1991 they ruled the music world with another three Top 5 hits making them one of the biggest selling singles artists of the year. They burned so brightly but then suddenly it was all over though unlike most huge acts that suddenly fall from grace as tastes move on, The KLF were sole architects of their own demise. I say demise but it was a retirement really albeit announced in the most controversial of circumstances at the 1992 BRITS show. They were at their most caustic operating outside of the record industry but once they had pierced it to expose its shallowness, they found themselves increasingly uncomfortable being inside of it and lauded by the very people they seemed to denigrate. For the moment though, they are playing out their strategy on a grand scale and they weren’t finished yet…

…somebody who should have been finished though (certainly their career anyway) was Anthea Turner. “Congratulations to KLF who are at No 1 ands looking like the Klu Klux Klan” she trills at the end of the band’s performance. What the Holy f**k did she just say?!! The Klu Klux Klan?! Anthea – TOTP was a mainstream pop show broadcast before the watershed and aimed at a predominantly youthful audience. What were you thinking referencing the white supremacy terrorist hate group?!! None of this makes any sense, not least the fact that nobody on screen did look they had a KKK costume on did they? I always thought it was a white robe with a pointed, wizard like hood obscuring the face. All I can see were some people in red robes without any terrifying hoods with eye holes cut out. Also, the majority of the people on stage were black – so unlikely members of a white supremacy group. And yet, Anthea was not alone in her thinking. Vocalist PP Arnold was of a similar opinion. Here’s @TOTPFacts again:

PP Arnold: "I didn't wanna wear those suits – to me they were a little bit too Kurt Klux Klan… that's why you only see me at the beginning of the video and somewhere at the end." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) June 4, 2021

I’m really confused now. The whole thing’s a minefield. I’m surprised that BBC4 didn’t cut that bit out of its repeat broadcast to be honest. Adding to the confusion comes the play out video which is Vanilla Ice with “Play That Funky Music”. A cover of the 1976 Wild Cherry hit, that song was inspired by the band being heckled at a live gig at a disco club by a black audience member to “Play some funky music, white boy.” Ok, I’m leaving this subject well alone now.

Vanilla Ice’s version made no 10 in our charts thus proving categorically that he was not a one hit wonder. He might as well have been though. Who thinks of any song other than “Ice Ice Baby” when his name is mentioned?

For posterity’s sake, I include the chart run down below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMJB0rmG9lE

Order of Appearance	Artist	Title	Did I Buy it?
1	EMF	I Believe	No but I have it as an extra track on one of their later singles
2	Ralph Tresvant	Sensitivity	Nope
3	Nomad	(I Wanna Give You) Devotion	Nah
4	Praise	Only You	No
5	Kylie Minogue	What Do I Have To Do?	It’s another no
6	Soho	Hippychick	Thought maybe I had but it seems I didn’t
7	The KLF	3am Eternal	See 7 above
8	Vanilla Ice	Play That Funky Music	Actually, please don’t – 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/m000wn3f/top-of-the-pops-31011991

TOTP 01 NOV 1990

Posted on April 1, 2021 by 80stastic

It’s November 1990 and having got married just 12 days earlier, another huge moment in my life has occurred – we’ve moved to Manchester! Yes, despite knowing only two other residents of Manc land between us, my wife and I have chosen to move to that great city to begin our married life together. We arrived back from our honeymoon exactly one week after the wedding day and moved that very day to Manchester. I hadn’t even seen the rented flat we were going to be living in as my wife had sorted that out. That small studio flat would be our home for the next four years and we loved it. The big events kept coming as after the wedding, the honeymoon, moving city, moving into a flat, I then started work on the Monday at Our Price. After two days training in the offices above the Piccadilly store, I was despatched to the Market Street shop down the road. By the time this TOTP was broadcast, I would have completed two whole days there (If my dates are correct). Given that this was such a momentous time for me, I must surely remember all the songs that were on the show?

Tonight’s host is Simon Mayo who I don’t recall being so smug but that’s the exact word I would use to describe his performance here. Certainly not smug though is the opening act – if anything I would think she was the exact opposite – unsure and apprehensive. Kim Appleby was of course one half of Mel & Kim who had torn up the charts in the late 80s with their SAW dance tunes and ‘up yours’ attitude. Tragically, Mel had died of cancer-related pneumonia at the start of 1990 but Kim resolved to carry on and record some of the songs that they had been working on during her sister’s illness. “Don’t Worry” was the first of those to see the light of day but Kim’s hesitancy about going it alone was revealed in a Smash Hits interview:

“I don’t know how people are going to react to my record but all I can say is I’m doing my best.”

She needn’t have… erm…worried because “Don’t Worry” was a fantastic pop song. Was it a million miles away from her Mel & Kim era? No, of course not (even though it was not produced by SAW) but it had an added sense of maturity to it from that unexpected, gentle fade in to the uplifting lyrics promoting positivity – there was no showing out or getting fresh going on here.

If Kim was nervous about her return to the world of pop music, she disguised those anxieties with an energetic performance here although quite what she thought being dressed like Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen would add to the overall effect, I’m not sure.

“Don’t Worry” surely exceeded Kim and her record label’s expectations after being away for so long by peaking at No 2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLBC43xoNE0

Robert Palmer already had a reputation for being a musical chameleon with his back catalogue combining elements of soul, jazz, rock, pop, reggae and blues. Quite what he hoped to get credibility wise out of a collaboration with UB40 then I’m not sure. Not only that but it wasn’t even an original song that they might have cooked up between them but a cover version. “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” was a Bob Dylan song from his “John Wesley Harding” album and given how many artists have interpreted Dylan songs down the years*, was Palmer just jumping on a well ridden bandwagon? To be fair, the version he and the Brummie reggae boys came up with didn’t sound much like Dylan with its calypso lilt and jaunty rhythms. It still doesn’t explain the reason why the two acts chose to record it though. It wasn’t as if either had been languishing in the chart doldrums for a sustained period. Indeed, both had clocked up Top 10 singles within recent memory. Maybe they just knew each other and got along?

Palmer’s album “Don’t Explain” (from which “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” was the lead single) would go onto be certified Gold although the only other chart hit from it was another cover version – “Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me” whilst “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” would peak at No 6.

*The history of recorded music is littered is with Dylan covers by a multitude of artists but if you want a really out there one, how about “Subterranean Homesick Blues” by Lofty from Eastenders?

After coming over all smug and superior with his ‘look at how much I know about pop music’ tone when advising us all that “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” was actually a Bob Dylan song, Simon Mayo is at it again when introducing Black Box.

“Well, cover versions are all the thing. We’ve already had one, that was the UB40 song. Here’s another one…” he starts off. He’s like the most patronising Jackanory presenter ever. ‘Let me tell you a story about cover versions…’ he might as well have said. Git. Technically he is right of course in that “Fantasy” is the song by Earth, Wind And Fire but his tone is so condescending.

This was Black Box’s fourth consecutive UK chart hit but it would prove to be the last time that they would visit the Top 10 when it peaked at No 5. I’m not sure that their version actually adds anything at all to the original being a fairly faithful reproduction of it. Also, surely the cat must have been out of the bag by this time that the woman up there front of stage (Katrin Quinol) wasn’t the actual vocalist on any of these hits. The singer on this one was Martha Wash who did most of the vocals on their “Dreamland” album. Apparently the guys behind Black Box didn’t care a jot though and were boldly brazening it out like Boris Johnson shamelessly disregarding yet another cronyism scandal. In ‘Borisworld’, the PM would no doubt have Jennifer Arcuri up there lip syncing away whilst declaring that all her vocals had been laid down in complete propriety and that the recording sessions were all there on public record for anyone to see.

More ‘look how clever I am’ – ness from Mayo next as he references Robert Palmer / UB40’s “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” (yet again) with Whitney Houston‘s “I’m Your Baby Tonight” as the song titles sound very similar. Well done Simon, what an amazing insight you provided. In all honesty though, whilst I’m criticising Mayo, I’ve very little else to say about this one myself other than I have a memory of selling the “I’m Your Baby Tonight” album on tape whilst working at Our Price that Xmas and the shop chart cassette buyer (a guy called Steve who I am still friends with all these years later) sitting near the chart cassette filing one Saturday afternoon trying to order some more as we had almost sold out and asking me to go away and sell something else as he was nearly out of stock. Yeah, right, not sure how that was supposed to work Steve? I don’t think I had an ‘Actually, would you mind awfully buying something else otherwise the buyer’s going to have a breakdown’ in me. Oh, hang on – was it the Jimmy Somerville Best Of album now I come to think of it? Amazing insight from your blogger there I’m sure you’ll agree.

“I’m Your Baby Tonight” (the single) peaked at No 5.

Some Roxette next with a re-release of their “Dressed For Success” single. When I started at Our Price there wasn’t much of a dress code; certainly there wasn’t a staff uniform (although that would come in later years). You could pretty much wear what you wanted within reason. One woman turned up in a catsuit one day and asked me if I thought it was a bit much for work. I didn’t know where to look! I’ve no memory of what I’d chosen to wear for my first day in the shop but I do remember being mercilessly ribbed the day I decided to come in wearing a white shirt and a black waistcoat. Cue lots of comments about Ray Reardon, snooker and…erm…cues.

Back to Roxette and Mayo is still shoehorning in references to Bob Dylan b-sides (even though there is no relevance here whatsoever). Some eagle eyed viewer reckoned that this performance must have been recorded for the initial release of the single back in ’89 (you could tell by the BBC logos or something) and that does make sense as the cut to the duo clearly indicates that they were not there for the actual recording of the show. This of course raises the question of why a performance would have been recorded for a song that didn’t get in the chart on first release? I thought the show was meant to have a strict Top 40 only policy? What? They had ‘the look’ and were ‘dressed for success’ and that got them the gig? Sorry – that was lame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKY6ec7HSdg

Another song we’ve seen before recently now as Rita MacNeil sings us a tale of a “Working Man”. Although the song’s sentiments were very worthy, there was very little here to hold my attention. It was all a bit Lena Martell (who had been a favourite of my parents during my childhood) meets “Every Loser Wins” by Nick Berry. Rita never had another UK chart hit and sadly died in 2013.

When I think of The Cure‘s remix compilation album “Mixed Up”, the track that comes to mind is “Never Enough” which was the single chosen to promote it. I had totally forgotten that a second single was released from it. “Close to Me – Remix” was that single and of course was a remix of their 1985 track from their “The Head On The Door” album. I really cannot see the point of this 1990 version though. It sounds exactly like the original but just slowed down a bit doesn’t it? Or am I missing something? The gentle intrigue of the 1985 original gets lost in the mix for me.

It took me a little while to realise that the video for the remix single was a continuation of the original promo which I thought was very clever, playing on the theme of claustrophobia with the band performing under duress within the confines of a wardrobe. Unfortunately, the second video doesn’t really work as well. Carrying on where the first video ended with the wardrobe (and its content of band members) falling off the edge of a cliff into the sea Young Ones style. The story board of the second video had the band escaping from their potential watery grave only to be attacked by an octopus and a starfish. The 1985 video was genuinely ingenious – there didn’t seem to be much thought gone into its 1990 counterpart although I’m guessing they were both directed by the band’s long time collaborator Tim Pope. The sea creature costumes make it all look a bit Mighty Boosh but without the laughs. Actually, maybe the video was was a source of inspiration for Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt. I can imagine Fielding in particular being a big Robert Smith fan.

“Close to Me – Remix” peaked at No 13 (as did “Never Enough”) which was 11 places higher than the much better original. We would not see The Cure in the charts for another 18 months when they would return with their “Wish” album.

OK, for me, this next song is peak Kylie Minogue. I might be looking back through nostalgia-tinted glasses of a much happier and simpler time but “Step Back In Time” was a great pop-dance track and yes, I realise that means I am commending a SAW produced track! Essentially one of those tribute songs like “Nightshift” by The Commodores and… erm…”Tribute (Right On)” by The Pasadenas with its 70s disco referencing lyrics, it’s got a great hooky chorus whilst the bridges that lead into them (‘Remember the O’Jays…’) are brilliant. One of my Xmas co-workers at Our Price in 1990 was a girl called Lucy who loved this track and she was bang on the money. Also, the dance routines on show in this performance really are impressive. Say what you like about Kylie but she really was very good at jumping in time.

“Step Back In Time” was the second single from Kylie’s “Rhythm Of Love” album and peaked at No 4.

Well that didn’t take very long did it? “Unchained Melody” by The Righteous Brothers is No 1 after just two weeks! Know-it-all Mayo feels the need to once more furnish us with his pop music knowledge by giving us the details of other artists who have recorded the track by name checking Jimmy Young, Harry Secombe and Des O’Connor (all the greats then). Look Mayo, if you wanted to dazzle us with charts statistics then here’s how you do it courtesy of @TOTPFacts:

"Unchained Melody" was first a UK hit for Les Baxter in 1955, peaking at 10. The top 20 for 17-23 June 1955 included four different recordings of the song: Al Hibbler's version at 2, Jimmy Young at 3, Les Baxter at 17 and Liberace at 20 – a record! #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) March 26, 2021

Last week I mentioned that the video for this had confused me when I first saw it as there was only one person (Bobby Hatfield) singing and I wondered where the other Righteous Brother Bill Medley was. Well, Simon Mayo, the guru of pop trivia , had the answer for me in his closing link. At the song’s end, he says “the other one was in the loo or something, I don’t know”. Simon Mayo there doing his best Mike Read impression.

The play out video is George Michael with “Waiting For That Day”. Another video mystery with this one as last week I posited the notion that I didn’t think George had done a promo for this (much as he had refused to film one for previous single “Praying For Time” due to his dispute with Sony). All that I could find was a clip from The South Bank Show which showed George discussing the song’s origins in the studio. However, TOTP seemed to have secured a video which was solely a performance of the track in the said same studio. I’ve worked out what the deal was here though. If you go to the final minute of that South Bank Show clip, there is that very performance. Bit of clever editing going on there then I think by the TOTP producers.

“Waiting For That Day” peaked at No 23.

For posterity’s sake, I include the chart run down below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yvHXM9Ur5E

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Kim Appleby	Don’t Worry	Don’t think I did – great pop song though
2	Robert Palmer / UB40	I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight	No but it might be on my Robert Palmer Best Of CD
3	Black Box	Fantasy	Nope
4	Whitney Houston	I’m Your Baby Tonight	Negative
5	Roxette	Dressed For Success	Nah
6	Rita MacNeil	Working Man	No
7	The Cure	Close To Me – Remix	Another no
8	Kylie Minogue	Step Back In Time	No but I think my wife has her Greatest Hits with it on
9	The Righteous Brothers	Unchained Melody	It’s a no
10	George Michael	Waiting For That Day	No but my wife had the album

Disclaimer

OK – here’s the thing – the TOTP episodes are only available on iPlayer for a limited amount of time so the link to the programme below only works for about another month so you’ll have to work fast if you want to catch the whole show.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000th90/top-of-the-pops-01111990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

Page 1 - Smash Hits - Issue 311 - 31st October - 13th November 1990

TOTP 10 MAY 1990

Posted on December 15, 2020 by 80stastic

I haven’t done this in a while but here is a quick retread of what this blog is about. I, a 52 year old middle aged man, am reviewing each of the TOTP repeats broadcast on BBC4 whilst also trying desperately to remember what I was up to 30 odd years ago when they were originally aired. I’ve been doing this for four years since the TOTP shows got up to 1983 and we are now into 1990! The years ’83 – ’89 are covered in my blog 80spop.wordpress.com whilst ’90 onwards will all feature in this blog. Why am I doing this? I ask myself this question constantly. I guess it’s not to discover ‘new’ music although there are often songs and acts that come up that I have forgotten about or never took any notice of in the first place. I can’t think of many though that have inspired me to delve into any deeper cuts by said acts and discover new musical frontiers. I guess I must just be a sucker for nostalgia and given the state of the current world, who wouldn’t want to escape to a different era for a while to pretend 2020 isn’t happening? Come on then, let’s flee back to 1990 – I’m 21 (soon to be 22) and with my whole life ahead of me…..

Up until this point, Kylie Minogue had pretty much always been regarded as a Stock, Aitken and Waterman pop puppet, singing and dancing and smiling along to their conveyor belt of formulaic songs that they seemed to have an endless supply of. And it had served her well. Her nine single releases with The Hit Factory had yielded four No 1s, four no 2s and a No 4. Not too shabby at all. However, by 1990, following in the footsteps of many other manufactured pop stars stretching all the way back to the 60s and The Monkees, Kylie wanted to be taken more seriously. “Better The Devil You Know” is undoubtedly the starting point for that journey into credibility. Acting like a ‘year zero’ marker, it appeared fully formed out of the changing rooms of pop and said in a confident tone “What do you think?”. After getting over the ‘wow!’ factor of this performance, I think I must have been taken aback at the accomplished sound that SAW had managed to come up with for Kylie. For let’s not forget, “Better The Devil You Know” is a SAW creation in its entirety from its writing through to its production. However, the parent album “Rhythm Of Love” was the first time that Kylie was allowed more creative freedom and resulted in working with producers other than SAW on four tacks that also resulted in credits as co-writer for her. However, the four singles that were taken from the album that really solidified this new era of Kylie were all SAW productions.

Kylie is nine days older than me so, just as I was about to turn 22 and facing up to those big life decisions of what to do next, she was also making some major life choices*. She had already left Neighbours and had starred in a much more gritty vehicle in the film The Delinquents, a coming of age romantic drama. More influential than any of this though was the fact that she was now dating INXS frontman Michael Hutchence. A lot has been made and written about the corrupting effect of wild man of rock Hutchence on little girl next door Kylie but I am of the opinion that Ms Minogue had more than enough about her to be making her own career and life choices. I’m sure Hutchence was an influence but let’s face it, “Better The Devil You Know” doesn’t sound like any INXS song I know.

Generally referred to as the ‘Sexy Kylie’ era of her career, certainly this release ushered in a change of image with the video for “Better The Devil You Know” featuring Kylie recreating the replicant chase scene from Bladerunner where Deckard guns down a see through mac clad Zhora and cavorting about in a black dress with the straps constantly falling down.

“Better The Devil You Know” would peak at No 2 (kept off the No 1 spot only by Adamski with “Killer”) but the album would not sell nearly as well as her first two long players. She would complete her contract with the PWL label in 1991 with the release of “Lets Get To It” before resurfacing in 1994 as ‘Dance Kylie’ with the release of her “Confide In Me” single on Mike Pickering’s Deconstruction label.

*Obviously we took very different career paths on the back of those decisions – my time as a gay icon is yet to happen I have to admit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qycwEwZljcI

The Wonder Stuff up next with “Circle Square”. Miles Hunt and co had been making steady inroads into the business of being a chart act for a couple of years now. After their first chart breakthrough in 1988 with “It’s Yer Money I’m After Baby” which made No 40, the Stuffies had notched up a further three hit singles peaking at Nos 28, 19 and 33. “Circle Square” would continue that consolidation by topping out at No 20.

As far as I can work out, it wasn’t taken from their then current album “Hup” but rather was a stand alone single although it was included in the track listing on its 21st anniversary rerelease in 2010. I liked this and the lyric “I’ve been a long term disappointment to myself” has stuck with me these past 30 years like a personal statement (see also “I failed my own audition” from “Up Here In The North Of England” by The Icicle Works).

However the band would have to wait another year before becoming a massive commercial success when the release of their hit single “Size Of A Cow” propelled them into the Top 5 and parent album “Never Loved Elvis” into the Top 3. Their decision to hook up with Vic Reeves for a cover of Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy” in October of that year would grant them a bona fide chart topper. However, would that be the moment it all came right or the moment it all went wrong?

It’s the man known as Mantronix next alongside vocalist Wondress with a tune called “Take Your Time”. This was the follow up to their No 4 hit “Got To Have Your Love” and it did / does absolutely nothing for me. I’m not the world’s biggest electro-funk fan it has to be said but this sounds as convincing as a Boris Johnson promise.

Asked in a Smash Hits interview who he would rather go out with from a choice of Margaret Thatcher (!), Tanita Tikaram or Kylie, Kurtis Mantronix replied none of them on the basis that:

Mrs Thatch had no compassion (fair point)
Tanita was in a different frame of mind to him
He didn’t know what Kylie looked like!

Hang on, you’re on the same TOTP show as her! Weren’t you watching her perform at the top of the show Kurtis? When pressed on this by his manager Chuck (“You didn’t see her yesterday at Top Of The Pops? She’s real cute man.”) Mantronix replied “No! You guys saw her. I was back in the dressing room. She has no sensuality.” Whaaat?! No sensuality?! Kylie?!

“Take Your Time” peaked at No 10.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vU_IWxWBug

Teen sensations New Kids On The Block are back with their latest offering “Cover Girl” and if you though their previous hits like “You Got It (The Right Stuff)” and “Hangin’ Tough” were drivel, then I advise you not to watch the video below. “Cover Girl” is bubble gum pop taken to a new saccharine low. Propelled by a Wurlitzer sounding organ backing and some of the dodgiest lyrics of all time, this one not only reeks but it stinks the place out. The video is just the band performing live to an adoring audience (didn’t they do the same thing for the “Hangin’ Tough” video?) with Donnie Wahlberg taking lead vocal duties and making a right arse of himself. He absolutely honks at some points in the song and just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse he gets a pre-pubescent little girl on stage with him and sings to her that she’s his ‘cover girl”. Jeeze! Could he be anymore inappropriate?!

“Cover Girl” peaked at No 4 and be warned. New Kids On The Block are not yet done with 1990; not by a long chalk.

1990 didn’t just belong to New Kids On The Block though. Here are one of the year’s biggest break out stars Beats International back in the charts with “Won’t Talk About It”. Having hit on the perfect pop / dance formula with “Dub Be Good To Me”, could Norman Cook, Lindy Layton et al repeat the trick with this new track? I say new but it had already been released as a double A-side together with “Blame It On The Bassline” under the name of Norman Cook back in 1989. That version included Billy Bragg’s vocals alongside his guitar riff from “Levi Stubbs Tears”…

When reissued under the name of Beats International the following year, Lindy Layton and Lester Noel’s had laid down their vocals on the track instead and it sounded much more polished and chart friendly though not necessarily better in my book. To answer the question of whether they could repeat the success of “Dub Be Good To Me”, the answer was yes…and no. “Won’t Talk About It” was another chart hit and even made the Top 10 but its No 9 peak was nowhere near what its predecessor had achieved. It would also prove to be their last ever Top 40 entry before they eventually disbanded in 1992. Whilst Cook went onto massive success under various pseudonyms (most notably Fatboy Slim), Lindy Layton secured herself a solo career via a recording contract with Arista. Her first single was a cover of Janet Kaye’s “Silly Games” (which Kaye also featured on) and was a No 22 hit but it was a case of diminishing returns after that for future releases. Lindy is still in the music business as a song writer and co-runs house label Good Lucky Recordings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4zkj40jCWg

I’m being absolutely tortured by the Michael Bolton appearances in these TOTP repeats. Here he is again with “How Can We Be Lovers”. I knew he would be coming up and that I’d have to confess my Bolton concert story at some point but I wasn’t planning on having to reference it so many times. Look, it was a long time ago and it wasn’t my idea OK?!

“How Can We Be Lovers” was written by Diane Warren and Desmond Child who between them have also penned the following soft rock ‘classics’:

Cher – “Just Like Jesse James”
Bon Jovi -“You Give Love A Bad Name”
Bon Jovi – “Livin’ On A Prayer”
Aerosmith – “Dude (Looks Like A Lady)”
Aerosmith – I Don’t Want Miss A Thing”
Starship – Nothings’s Gonna Stop Us Now”

Depensing on your tastes, that’s either some track record or a charge list of crimes against music.

In 1991, when I was working at Our Price in the Market Street store in Manchester, Bolton released an album called “Time, Love And Tenderness” (the title track was written by the aforementioned Diane Warren) and the picture of him on the front cover looked remarkably like one of our Assistant Managers called Rob (if you ignored all that hair which Rob didn’t have). I’m guessing it wasn’t the most flattering thing anyone had ever said to him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVzV63dld-w

“Hold On” by En Vogue is the next song on tonight’s TOTP playlist. This was not only a No 2 hit in the US and a No 5 hit over here but also an award winning track picking up the R&B Single of the Year pot from Billboard and the Best Single by a Duo/Group title from Soul Train. Given those accolades, it’s fair to say that En Vogue very much paved the way for a slew of female R&B groups of the 90s including Brownstone, Jade, Destiny’s Child, SWV and TLC.

I could never really get on board with “Hold On” though. It really wasn’t my scene in 1990 (if indeed I had a scene) but I did go on to appreciate En Vogue more as the decade progressed with songs like “Free Your Mind” and “Whatta Man” expanding my musical horizons. Free your mind indeed.

It’s new No 1 time and as confidently predicted by Simon Mayo on last week’s show, it’s “Killer” by Adamski and Seal. It’s another studio performance and the ballet woman from the other week is back and is still doing her thing in the background. And I thought Howard Jones’s mime artist Jed was annoying!

I saw Seal live in the early 90s at the Manchester Apollo but I can’t recall much about it other than his voice was amazing. I’d forgotten that, following in the footsteps of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, his debut album was on the ZTT label and was produced by Trevor Horn. Apparently there are two versions of the album in circulation. One is a ‘premix’ version and the second and more common is the updated remix. According to Seal, the two versions exist because he and Trevor Horn had very little time to finish the first version (due to needing to get some single releases mixed and out into the market) and also because of never knowing when enough tinkering is enough or as Seal puts it “a bad habit that Trevor and myself share, the inability to let go” (thanks to http://futureloveparadise.co.uk/ for that quote).

Do you get the impression that I’m finding it easier to comment on Seal rather than Adamski?!

Despite the seemingly endless smorgasbord of dance tunes populating the charts in the 90s, there was also room for some hard rockin’ dudes and I don’t mean the established acts like Def Leppard and Whitesnake. No, these were new names that emerged within the new decade. Tearing up the Top 40 with their brand of hard but melodic rock were the likes of Little Angels, The Quireboys, Terrorvision and this lot Thunder who are back on the show with their new single “Backstreet Symphony”. This was the title track from their debut album, an album that would generate five Top 40 singles – not bad going although that statement is tempered by the fact that none of them actually made it into the Top 20. Even so, it was a pretty impressive start. With former Duran Duran guitarist Andy Taylor producing it, the album was certified gold for shifting 100,000 units. However, in a piece on the band on rock journalist Dave Ling’s website, Thunder guitarist Luke Morley says of working with Taylor:

“He’d just say, ‘Do it louder and faster, and I’ll mix the drinks’”

Hmm. A genius at work no doubt.

I didn’t mind this track although I’d preferred their previous single, T-Rex rip off “Dirty Love”. One more thing, why is it that there always seems to be at least one member of these long haired rock bands that stands out by either having a short haircut or actually being bald?

“Backstreet Symphony” (the single) peaked at No 25.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87BRGJf3wTU

For posterity’s sake, I include the chart run down below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lDfZTyCyhY

fdghjkl;

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Kylie Minogue	Better The Devil You Know	No but I think my wife has a Greatest Hits album with it on
2	The Wonder Stuff	Circle Square	Nope
3	Mantronix featuring Wondress	Take Your Time	I could take all day but I won’t change my mind about this – no
4	New Kids On The Block	Cover Girl	Away with your nonsense!
5	Beats International	Won’t Talk About It	No but my wife has their album with a version of it on
6	Michael Bolton	How Can We Be Lovers	NO!
7	En Vogue	Hold On	Nah
8	Adamski	Killer	No but I had the Seal album with his version of it on
9	Thunder	Backstreet Symphony	I did not

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000q5l5/top-of-the-pops-10051990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues

TOTP 26 JAN 1990

Posted on October 22, 2020 by 80stastic

OK, a few things about this particular TOTP show. Firstly, it was broadcast on a Friday rather than its usual Thursday slot due to the BBC’s coverage of the Commonwealth Games. I have zero recall of this festival of sporting endeavours but Wikipedia tells me that the opening ceremony had been on the Wednesday of this week but I’m not sure which specific event was deemed unmissable TV viewing on the Thursday and required that TOTP be shunted across the broadcast schedule.

Drum ‘n’ bass legend
Goldie wanted to get a kiwi bird as a pet
but couldn’t find one in the ‘jungle’. Soz!

Incidentally, the mascot for the games was called Goldie – no, not the DJ and musician of Metalheadz fame but rather a kiwi bird.

Secondly, the show is timed at 33 minutes long and includes 13 acts! Bastards! This is going to take me ages to write up! Thirdly, well here’s @TOTPFacts with the third point of note:

This was the final occasion (excluding Christmas editions) where two hosts were paired up to host a #TOTP until the “Year Zero” revamp of October 1991. Until then this presenting roster of Mayo, Brambles, Campbell, Davies, Brookes, Goodier and Turner would remain stable.
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) October 16, 2020

Well, there are pros and cons to this I feel. No duos might mean no more poorly scripted ‘comedy’ exchanges between presenters which is a good thing. However, there are at least three names on that list who I cannot abide (I’ll let you work out for yourselves who they are) and the thought of them cropping up on a regular basis for almost the whole of the next two years is a harrowing thought.

On with the show then and somewhere in a darkened laboratory, the evil professors of manufactured pop are brewing another concoction to torment the nation with. This particular experiment seemed to have combined the DNA of Big Fun with London Boys and created a two headed monster called Yell! Who on earth were these two berks?! Well, they were called Daniel James (not the Man Utd footballer clearly) and Paul Varney (not Reg’s lad surely?). Or were they? You see, Daniel James also went under the name of Colin Heywood. Oh, he was also an actor – must have been a stage name thing. Anyway, they were signed to Fanfare Records by Simon Cowell (he had to have something to do with this monstrosity didn’t he?) and they had immediate success with their cover of the Dan Hartman hit “Instant Replay”. Quite why we needed another version of this disco stomper in a cold, bleak January I’m not sure. I wonder if including the exclamation mark after their name Wham! style was Cowell’s idea?

Despite all the studio audience…erm…yelling and squealing on display here, the duo never got to be the next teen sensation they clearly hoped to be. A further two single releases (including another cover version, this time of Average White Band’s “Let’s Go Round Again”) both flopped spectacularly and Yell! disappeared into a whisper. James went back to acting whilst Varney wrote the UK’s 1999 Eurovision entry “Say It Again” by Precious which made No 6 in the chart, a whole four places higher than his own hit a decade earlier. It was also considerably more successful than his ex bandmate James’ excursion into Eurovision who came sixth in the 1986 Song For Europe competition.

Well we can slag TOTP off as much as we want (and many of us do on Twitter) but you can’t say the show wasn’t diverse. From Yell! to Public Enemy. It’s quite a leap. The second single taken from the “Fear Of A Black Planet” album, there is so much going on in this extraordinary noise that is “Welcome To The Terrodome” assaulting your senses that it’s hard to break it down. One of the things I did pick out listening back to this was the Mikey Dread sample from “Operator’s Choice” that The Soup Dragons would also use to great effect on their minor hit “Mother Universe” (which I bought) later in the year. There’s also Flavor Flav quoting bits of Al Pacino dialogue from the film Scarface and some shuddering guitar riffs – it’s a heady brew and I felt exhausted by the end if it. And that song title? Nothing to do with Frankie Goes To Hollywood nor Samuel Coleridge – here’s @TOTPFacts again with the origin story…

Chuck D on "Welcome To the Terrordome": "What does it mean? It means the 1990s are coming. If we as a people do the right thing we'll be all right, if we do the wrong thing the black situation is out of here at the end of the decade…" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) October 16, 2020

…prophetic words indeed.

“Welcome To The Terrodome” peaked at No 18.

Another of those debut performances that Simon Mayo promised us at the top of the show now as Del Amitri make their bow. I have to admit I’d never come across this lot before this point but they had actually been in existence since 1985 and had already released one unsuccessful album. Everything was to change for the band with the release of the almost ironically named single “Nothing Ever Happens” from their second album “Waking Hours” (that’s ‘waking’ not ‘working’ Jakki Brambles). Peaking at No 11 it would be their biggest ever hit which was a surprise to me given that they’ve had 15 Top 40 UK chart singles.

This gentle, folky song seemed very much at odds with the rest of the homogeneous dance tunes – infested charts to me and was probably one of the reasons that I liked it. Lead singer and group founder Justin Currie does a much better explanation of the song than I ever could in this performance of it in the brilliant BBC4 programme Songwriters’ Circle…

I recall hearing Steve Wright play the song on his then Radio 1 show and making some deeply unfunny Only Fools And Horses inspired comment about the band’s name afterwards. It went along the lines of:

“Del Amitri there. E’s alright ain’t he old Del”

According to Wikipedia, the band name is actually:

“a bastardisation of the name of a film producer who appeared in the closing credits of a film Currie saw in 1979 – “probably Dimitri-something, but we couldn’t remember… so eventually through osmosis or maybe Chinese Whispers ‘Dimitri’ became ‘Del Amitri’.”

So now you know Steve Wright. OK?

Three Breakers now starting with Lonnie Gordon and “Happenin’ All Over Again”. Question: When is a Donna Summer song not a Donna Summer song? Answer: When Donna refuses to record it because she has fallen out with its writers Stock, Aitken and Waterman and it’s given to someone else. That someone else was of course Lonnie (God I so keep wanting to type Donegan) Gordon. Listening back to it, you could really hear Donna recording this but Lonnie got the glory (it was Single of the Fortnight in Smash Hits magazine!) and took this Italo House infused S/A/W tune all the way to No 4.

It was covered eight years later by…ahem…Tracie from Coronation Street…

Who? Wreckx-n-Effect? No – rack up another score in the blogger’s- memory-fails-him-again tally. Apparently they were New Jack Swingers from Harlem and they would go onto have a No 2 record in the US with the rather quaintly entitled “Rump Shaker” (only kept off the top spot by the all conquering success of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”) but I don’t remember that one either. Anyway, that’s all a couple of years down the road. In the right here, right now (i.e. 1990) they have a middling hit with “Juicy”. I’m assuming I won’t know this either….

*clicks play on the video below*

…well part of it was familiar so I looked it up and it samples “Juicy Fruit” by M’Tume which I do remember from the charts of 1983. No wonder it sounded familiar. Wreckx-n-Effect’s version peaked at No 29 over here, five places higher than M’Tume’s original which somehow seems wrong to me.

The final Breaker this week is “The Face” by And Why Not? (try saying that band name without picturing Barry Norman sat in a chair slyly slagging off some film or other -impossible). This lot’s brand of reggae-tinged pop had them briefly hailed as the next big thing but despite three Top 40 hits (“The Face” was the biggest peaking at No 13) and support slots with UB40 and Transvision Vamp, it never quite happened for the Brummie trio. Supposedly, Wendy James fancied one of them (according to Smash Hits magazine anyway). Not sure that particular endorsement helped their cause.

You never hear them mentioned at all nowadays, not even in these nostalgia-fuelled times of reunion tours and deluxe box set album reissues. Even specialist reissue label Cherry Red hasn’t picked up the rights on their only album “Move Your Skin”. My wife had a copy back in the day – I’ll ask her if she still has it if they want to borrow it!

All of this week’s Breakers will be be back as the first three acts of next week’s TOTP.

Oh god! Double cringe moment incoming. As the camera cuts back to Jakki Brambles it catches her dancing to And Why Not? which seems to involve some sort of half-hearted, squawking chicken move. She compounds this by introducing the next act F.P.I. Project by referencing the fact that their single “Goin’ Back To My Roots” was originally a hit for Odyssey in 1981. “Here it is 1990 stylee…” she advises. Stylee?! Stylee Jakki?! God, did we really use that expression back then? Surely nobody still trots that one out today do they?

This being the third time F.P.I. Project have been on the show, I’ve run out of things to say about them. OK, look nine years on from this, they released “Goin’ Back To My Roots” again. How did it fare compared to the No 9 peak of its 1990 counterpart? It spent one week on the UK charts at No 96. I know there were a lot of ‘nines’ in those last two sentences but will that do? Who said ‘Nein’?

The F.P.I. Project performance was clearly just footage from a previous show slotted into the current one (i.e. they weren’t actually there in the studio that week) . The cut from that clip back to Simon Mayo clearly takes him by surprise and he tries to style (or is that stylee?) it out by making some snidey remark about TOTP cameramen before introducing yet another track that must have passed me by at the time. “I’ll Be Good to You” by Quincy Jones and featuring the vocal talents of Chaka Khan and Ray Charles is the track in question.

Taken from Quincy’s platinum selling and multiple grammy winning “Back On The Block” album, it was originally a hit in 1976 by R’n’B duo The Brothers Johnson with Jones on production duties. Thirteen years later, he returned to it and got Ray Charles and Chaka Khan to do the vocals. Look, I know everyone involved in this song are /were musical legends but having listened to it today, I just can’t warm to it. Completely passes me by. This fact didn’t pass me by though. Ray Charles fathered 12 children by 10 different women in his lifetime – and we thought Boris Johnson had form in this area!

Here now to hammer home the feeling of having the January blues is Phil Collins. Some might say that Phil’s presence alone would be enough to bring you down but just to make sure there’s no escape from the melancholy he’s singing a song called “I Wish It Would Rain Down”. The second single to be lifted from his ridiculously successful “…But Seriously” album, it would return Collins to the Top 10 in the UK but was even more successful across the pond where it went Top 3 in the US and was the best selling single of the year in Canada!

Phil looks as sweaty as ever under the studio lights in this performance but I’m more interested in his backing band. Jakki Brambles tells us that Eric Clapton performs guitar on the track in her intro but is that actually ‘God’ up there on stage behind Phil? After much squinting at the screen, I don’t believe it is but it seems that they deliberately got a lookalike in to fool us! Also, check out Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on bass!

I thought “I Wish It Would Rain Down” was marginally better than previous single “Another Day In Paradise” but that’s not saying much – they’re both shite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yseNilZX3_I

Who came first then? Adamski? Normski? Chelski?! Well, I think it was Normski who fronted BBC’s DEF II programming from 1988 to 1994 closely followed by Adamski with this his first hit single, “N-R-G”. The Chelski term didn’t come into existence until 2003 when my beloved Chelsea FC were taken over by Russian billionaire businessman Roman Abramovich. I still can’t stand the term to this day.

Anyway, here’s Adamski making his TOTP debut as Simon Mayo advises and according to The Story Of 1990 TOTP documentary, the girl dancers on stage with him were completely the producers idea and Adamski hated it. The rasta guy though was his flat mate (one Daddy Chester) but his dancing alone was judged to be inadequate. This highlights the problem that TOTP had with the flood of dance tunes making the charts back then. Just what did you do when it came to a studio performance of the track? The programme really struggled to showcase this new genre.

On her way to pop’s summit is Sinéad O’Connor with her Prince cover “Nothing Compares 2 U”. Despite having had a shaved head as early as 1988 when she even appeared on TOTP to perform “Mandinka” with that hairstyle, I recall there being quite a bit of press about it again in 1990. Maybe she was just more mainstream this time, reaching elements of the nation that she hadn’t previously with this huge hit thereby promoting this fascination with her looks. According to Wikipedia, her shaved head was initially an assertion against traditional views of women but having decided to grow it back years later, she lopped it all off again after being mistaken for Enya!

T’KNOB have gone! Yes, the new pretenders to pop’s throne have been deposed by Princess Kylie whose cover of “Tears On My Pillow” has risen to the top after just two weeks. It won’t last long though as she’ll be dethroned next week by Sinéad O’Connor (not sure of her status in pop’s royal family). Of the three Kylie Minogue singles released in 1990, “Tears On My Pillow” was easily the weakest but then the other two, “Better The Devil You Know” and “Step Back In Time”, are for me possibly her two greatest tunes.

“Tears On My Pillow” was included on the soundtrack to The Delinquents in which Kylie starred and which was the most successful Australian film of 1990 in Australia. Reading that statement back, was that much of an achievement? By comparison, it was the 17th highest grossing film of the year in the UK. Draw your own conclusions.

Finally we get to the thirteenth and final song of the night and guess what? It’s another dance track I can’t recall at all. Gino Latino anyone? Not an Italian TV chef but a DJ (real name Lorenzo Cherubini), “Welcome” was his only UK Top 40 hit (as far as I can tell) and it peaked at No 17. Check this out though. He also went under the pseudonym of Jovanotti and look at this tweet I found on a @TOTPFacts thread:

Cherubini also worked in TV as Jovanotti and was a presenter on the Janet Street-Porter masterminded DEF II strand on BBC2 (New Order composed the closing music for DEF II magazine show Reportage – which they later used for ‘World In Motion’)
— Angus Teee (@AngusTeee) October 16, 2020

I promise you I had no idea about any of this when I started going on about Normski earlier!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w9CaYcjnJ4

For posterity’s sake, I include the chart run down below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBrgIoMg0Z4

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Yell!	Instant Replay	NO!
2	Public Enemy	Welcome To The Terrordome	I did not
3	Del Amitri	Nothing Ever Happens	Not the single but it’s on my Greatest Hits CD of theirs
4	Lonnie Gordon	Happenin’ All Over Again	Nah
5	Wreckx-n-Effect	Juicy	Nope
6	And Why Not?	The Face	No but my wife had their album
7	The FPI Project	Going Back To My Roots	No
8	Quincy Jones featuring Chaka Khan and Ray Charles	I’ll Be Good To You	Buy it? I didn’t even remember it
9	Phil Collins	I Wish It Would Rain Down	As if
10	Adamski	N-R-G	N-O-P-E
11	Sinéad’ O’Connor	Nothing Compares 2 U	Don’t think so
12	Kylie Minogue	Tears On My Pillow	No
13	Gina Latino	Welcome	Goodbye more like – no

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000ng7c/top-of-the-pops-26011990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues

TOTP 18 JAN 1990

Posted on October 20, 2020 by 80stastic

We’re three weeks into 1990 and I have the deep January blues. I am unemployed, living back at my family home in Worcester and my girlfriend lives 170 miles away in Hull. I haven’t worked since my temporary retail job at Debenhams finished on Christmas Eve so I have no money and my social life is non existent. In terms of things to look forward to, it’s confined to watching my beloved Chelsea make a rare TV appearance (they weren’t considered one of the big six clubs back then) in a live match* screened on ITV some four days earlier. I have no career plans, I am signing on and having to go to the DSS Job Club to be able to make use of free stamps to make applications for positions I don’t want and won’t get anyway. I am floundering.

* We scraped a 1-1 draw with Sheffield Wednesday. It wasn’t great.

I’m guessing that I must have been relying heavily on music at the time to keep me going and give me a lift. No doubt TOTP would have been part of my weekly musical intake. This particular show have better been good…

…as with last week’s TOTP, the opening act on the show were also the closing turn on the previous episode. I wrote in the last post that I wasn’t sure that had ever happened before and yet here is the same phenomenon the very next week! Said opening act are Halo James who host Nicky Campbell describes as a “potent mix of teen appeal and genuine talent”. As ever with the snarky Campbell, you can’t quite tell if he’s taking the piss royally or on the level.

“Could Have Told You So” was the band’s only hit despite being tipped for greatness at the time and I also commented in the last post that they were no better than the likes of Breathe (of “Hands To Heaven” fame) to my ears with their brand of sophisto -pop. Since writing that, I have discovered that their one and only album (“Witness”) was produced by respected record producer Bob Sargeant – whose credits include Haircut 100, The Beat, The Buzzcocks, Motorhead, Dexys Midnight Runners and….yep….Breathe. QED!

Lead singer Christian James clearly decided to mark his debut TOTP performance here by wearing the most god awful multi coloured jacket that reminds me of one of Irish easy listening crooner Val Doonican’s comfy sweaters. Just vile.

Halo James were destined to be one hit wonders, cursed by being a band out of time (their brand of sophisto -pop had long since bitten the dust) and simultaneously a marketing dilemma. Were they a teen band or a credible artist? Indeed Campbell’s intro seems to hint at this dichotomy. However, if “Could Have Told You So” still floats your boat then, as with seemingly every album ever released these days, there is a special edition of “Witness” available including eight (!) bonus tracks.

Asked to name a hit by Lil’ Louis I would be able to respond confidently with “French Kiss” but prodded for a second….I’d dry up completely. And yet there was a second hit and here it is in “I Called U (But You Weren’t There)” and despite my initial lack of recollection, on hearing this back the titular spoken line, in that weird, strung out drawl was instantly familiar. It’s actually almost a reverse of the old Oran ‘Juice’ Jones song “The Rain” except this time the protagonist is the woman who follows Louis in her blue car to see what the bounder was up to.

For this track Louis (real name Marvin Burns) rebranded himself as Lil Louis & the World and the single reached No 16. In fact, it turns out that there was a third hit for Lil’ (as his mum calls him) when fellow US DJ and producer Josh Wink released a track called “How’s Your Evening So Far?” which heavily sampled “French Kiss” in 2000 and took it to No 23 in the UK charts. On a side note, Josh Wink made one of the few tracks that actually give me the jitters and makes me feel anxious and sweaty every time I hear it in “Higher State of Consciousness”. The times the staff in Our Price Stockport used to put this over the shop stereo back in the mid 90s just to see my reaction. Cruel it was.

Martika is up next with a song I really don’t recall at all called “More Than You Know”. This was the third single released from her debut LP following the success of “Toy Soldiers” and “I Feel The Earth Move” and it’s easily the weakest of the three. Apparently it was actually her first single released in the US where it became a No 18 Billboard Hot 100 hit so it was deemed worthy of a run out over here. Her record label Sony really shouldn’t have bothered. It sounds like something Debbie Gibson might have dashed off sat on the toilet during a particularly lengthy shit. Martika even pinches Debbie’s ‘aah, aah’ sighs from “Only In My Dreams”.

Somehow “More Than You Know” scrambled all the way to No 15 in the UK and Martika would return to our charts some eighteen months later with a much more mature sound following her collaboration with Prince on “Love… Thy Will Be Done”.

Back to Nicky Campbell who furnishes us with the lamest of jokes about house booms before introducing one of the seemingly never ending conveyor belt of Italian house acts on the scene at the time in the 49ers.

We’ve already seen this one on the show before and I have very little else left to say about it…except this. Ever wondered what it is the vocalist is actually singing in the chorus to “Touch Me”? It always sounded like ‘Pick a pear and a planet’ to me but apparently the lyrics are actually ‘People can’t understand it’. If you want to know more about the composition of “Touch Me”, here’s @TOTPFacts but word of warning, the Aretha Franklin video is a bit creepy….

Large parts of the vocals in 49ers' "Touch Me" are sampled from "Rock-A-Lott" by Aretha Franklin https://t.co/XFx2ZwNs2q, while the chorus line is sampled from "Touch Me" by Alisha Warren https://t.co/lzujiTMVtM. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) October 16, 2020

At the end of the 49ers video, we cut back to Campbell in the studio and there’s what appears to be a very young Martine McCutcheon stood behind him as he links to the next act. She’s got a big frizzy perm but it doesn’t half look like her. It couldn’t be could it?

For the love of God….I’m never not dumbfounded by the amount of useless heavy metal acts that seemed to get so much chart action in these TOTP repeats. From Anthrax all the way through to W.A.S.P via Mötley Crüe, all horrible and here’s another bunch of berks in Megadeth. Somehow these LA thrash metalloids racked up seven hit singles in the UK Top 40 between 1990 and 1994 and “No More Mr Nice Guy” was the first. This one wasn’t even their own song but a cover of the old Alice Cooper track which they recorded for the soundtrack of the Wes Craven slasher flick Shocker.

Looking through the band’s discography, I recognise some of their album titles (and indeed covers) from my years at Our Price but mainly for how dumb they sound. The evidence m’lud…

“Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying?”
“Rust in Peace”
“So Far, So Good… So What!”

All the band members seem to have Spinal Tap names as well like Dave Mustaine, David Ellefson, Dirk Verbeuren and Kiko Loureiro. Incredibly, they do seem be genuine and not stage names. Look, I’m sure all of these types of bands have very loyal fan bases who swear by them but …sod it…it’s my blog so “No More Mr Nice Guy” from me… I say they’re shite.

The Breakers are back! Yes, after being ditched in the first two shows of the new decade and seemingly consigned to the TOTP dustbin, the section is back albeit with only two entries in it. The first is “Inner City Mama” by Neneh Cherry. I’d completely forgotten (if indeed I ever knew at all) that there was a fourth single released from Neneh’s “Raw Like Sushi” album but here it is. Apparently it was only released in Europe and New Zealand with the track “Heart” chosen for the US and Australian territories. Why would you need two different tracks to be released in Australia and New Zealand? Seems a bit odd to me that.

I don’t recall this one at all but it has that Massive Attack back beat to it which is hardly a surprise considering Neneh was involved in the Bristol hip hop scene and helped as an arranger on Massive Attack’s seminal “Blue Lines” album. Indeed, the band’s Robert Del Naja co-wrote “Manchild” with her.

“Inner City Mama” fizzled out at No 31.

The second Breaker hardly needs an introduction at all. Easily one of the most recognised songs of the whole decade let alone the year, it would become a stand out moment in musical history thanks to the unnerving performance and vocals of Sinéad O’Connor. We all know that “Nothing Compares 2 U” is actually a Prince song but for me it’s easily the best treatments of one of his compositions especially (ahem) compared to the likes of “I Feel For You” by Chaka Khan (I could never understand the appeal of that one) or the execrable version of “Kiss” by Tom Jones.

The power of the song was completely entwined with the visuals of the video with its almost constant close up on Sinéad’s face and the reportedly natural tears that she sheds at the song’s end.

“Nothing Compares 2 U” will be at No 1 soon enough and also around the globe including the US, Australia and pretty much everywhere in Europe. It became the third best-selling single of 1990, the 82nd best-selling single of the whole decade and was certified platinum. We’ll be seeing loads more of it in the weeks to come so I’ll leave it there for now.

Meanwhile back in the TOTP studio we find The Quireboys who have returned for a second performance of their hit “Hey You”. I didn’t notice this before but what’s with the bulk load of flowers that are spread around the stage, most prominently on the piano? It immediately put me in mind of the cover to the Oasis single “Don’t Look Back In Anger”. That iconic image couldn’t have been inspired by The Quireboys surely?!

Liam went a bit over the top with the
conciliatory flowers he sent to Noel

Often talked of in the same breath as fellow blues rockers Dogs D’Amour, lead singer Spike would ultimately (and perhaps inevitably) collaborate with two members of the Dogs on two separate projects in the 90s.

The Quireboys are still together to this day playing live and releasing new material (their last album was as recent as 2019) albeit with only two original members but including the aforementioned Spike.

Back to Nicky Campbell now for some more stilted audience interaction – he comes across as the archetypal middle aged uncle who thinks he’s still down with the kids. His Top 10 rundown gets increasingly histrionic until he introduces the video for Kylie Minogue’s new hit “Tears On My Pillow” at which point he resorts to the catty behaviour we have seen from him before. Witness:

“And that means that Kylie Minogue has gone straight in at No 2 with the old Imperials song. It appears in the closing credits of the film The Delinquents if you manage to stay in the cinema that long…“

Turn it in Campbell. You’re just making yourself look like a petty, vindictive goon.

Anyway, as for Kylie this would be her fourth No 1 single (albeit only for one week) and would be her last for a decade. I never knew that it was actually on her ‘Enjoy Yourself” album – I always assumed it had been recorded specifically for the soundtrack of The Delinquents film. I did actually catch the movie at the cinema at the time (must have been cheap ticket Thursday or something) and it was ….underwhelming. So underwhelming that I can’t recall what happens in it other than Kylie’s character bleaches her hair blond and goes to prison at one point I think. I’ve never seen the film shown on terrestrial TV since. Wasn’t the male lead meant to be the new Sean Penn or something? Can’t even recall his name now…

*checks internet*

Charlie Schlatter! That was him. Apparently he stayed in acting and is best known for his role as Dr. Jesse Travis in Diagnosis Murder with Dick Van Dyke according to Wikipedia. Hmmm. Kylie meanwhile…

“Tears On My Pillow” was included in the film Grease of course although it’s hardly remembered as one of the big tunes on that soundtrack.

New Kids On The Block still reign at the top of the charts with “Hangin’ Tough”. As with Halo James earlier, there is a deluxe version of their album of the same name that came out this year for the 30th anniversary. In the customer reviews for the album on Amazon I found this one

“Amazing album for anyone who is a blockhead”

I genuinely thought it was someone talking the piss until I realised that ‘blockhead’ must be the collective term given to fans of the band! And then I dug a bit deeper and found that a fan had set up a Facebook page called Blockheads Unite and designed her own logo for it. Unfortunately she seemed to have come up with a idea that was a direct rip off of the design created by Barney Bubbles who did the logo for Ian Dury and The Blockheads that was used in their advertising and promotion. The NKOTB fan was forced to take it down and issue an apology which included the line:

“I had never heard of Ian Drury and The Blockheads”

No, I’ve never heard of Ian Drury either! Cringe!

Thankfully this is the last week that “Hangin’ Tough” is at the No 1 spot but we’ll be seeing plenty more of them in future repeats. Gulp!

The play out video is “N-R-G” by Adamski. Now I’m no dance head but I had actually heard of Adamski before this as he’d appeared on a free 4-track 7″ vinyl single given away with Record Mirror in 1989. I bought said issue and guess what? It’s still in my singles box! I am sorry to say I have never, ever played it.

It featured his track “I Dream of You” which was included on his album “Live And Direct” which had made the charts when released in December 1989. That album also included a live version of “N-R-G” and the track was edited and given a single release the following month. I have to say it never did anything for me (it’s just a load of blips and bleeps to my ears) but I once worked with a girl called Sarah in Our Price who absolutely loved Adamski.

Mr Ski (real name Adam Tinley) took “N-R-G” to No 12 and will be back soon enough later on in 1990 as a fully fledged pop star alongside Seal for one of the sensations of the year in “Killer”.

For posterity’s sake I include the chart run down below:

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Halo James	Could Have Told You So	Could have told you No more like
2	Lil’ Loui & The World	I Called U (But You Weren’t There)	Emphatic no
3	Martika	More Than You Know	More than you NO more like
4	49ers	Touch Me	Nah
5	Megadeth	No More Mr Nice Guy	A thousand times NO!
6	Neneh Cherry	Inner City Mama	No but my wife had the album
7	Sinéad’ O’Connor	Nothing Compares 2 U	Don’t think so
8	The Quireboys	Hey You	No but a Q Album compilation that I bought
9	Kylie Minogue	Tears On My Pillow	No
10	New Kids On The Block	Hangin’ Tough	No but I think my younger sister may have been into them and bough it
11	Adamski	N-R-G	N-O-P-E

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000ng79/top-of-the-pops-18011990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues