We’ve got through the October TOTP repeats and the end of the year is finally appearing upon the horizon and not a moment too soon – 1998 has been a real slog. Our host is Kate Thornton who seems to have styled her hair on Billie’s barnet but more of her later. We start though with Alanis Morissette whose video for her hit “Thank U” we saw on the previous show. There was no way the BBC would have let her recreate her look from that promo what with her being naked and all so she’s gone for pigtails and…well…clothes for this appearance. I have to say that her song’s lyrics includes some of the most eloquent words ever to appear in a hit record. Look at these:
Disillusionment
Frailty
Consequence
Masochistic
Divinity
Unabashedly
However, my favourite lyric is “transparent dangling carrots” which could also be a description of those pigtails of hers. However, she then spoils it all by wailing the following in the outro…
Ah, it’s the aforementioned Billie and she does indeed have hair that looks like Kate Thornton’s or is it the other way around? Billie is here to perform her former No 1 single “Girlfriend” and when I say former I mean literally about a month ago. So why is she back on the show now that she’s at No 10 in the charts? I can only assume it’s because her single has remained at No 10 for two consecutive weeks. “Do you have a minute?” Billie sings. No, not really. Not after all this time. I can’t give you one minute more. Sorry. Next!
If I thought Billie was in overkill territory, how do I describe the decision to feature “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” by Aerosmith again?! Excessive? Or just plain ridiculous? By my reckoning, this was its ninth week on the chart and it had just dropped from No 7 to No 8 having been as high as No 4 a month before. In terms of its appearances on TOTP, this was its fourth of five meaning yes, executive producer Chris Cowey wasn’t done with the song yet. Once more it’s that satellite performance that is shown presumably because of all the TOTP branding that can be seen all over the stage – Cowey was trying to sell the show into other territories around this time. As for our theme of female hairstyles, has any male rock star’s locks looked more like a woman’s than Steven Tyler?
What on earth is going on here?! Kate Thornton has just propositioned a young woman to go to bed with her! WTF?! Well, yes, precisely. It’s all to do with the next hit song in the show which is “Would You…?” by TouchAndGo. The story behind this one is that Touch And Go were a jazz pop ensemble led by one David Lowe who would go on to forge a career composing music for television, radio and commercials including the theme tune to the BBC News and has worked on such shows as TheOneShow, Panorama, CashInTheAttic and GrandDesigns. In 1998 though, he was behind this almost novelty single which took a Herb Alpert trumpet solo and added the flat toned voice of a woman speaking the lines “I’ve noticed you around / I find you very attractive / Would you go to bed with me?”, hence the intro from Kate Thornton. It’s all rather bizarre but the sort of strange curio that could often flummox the UK record buying public into shelling out its hard earned cash to purchase it. And buy it they did, 200,000 copies worth to send it to No 3. Designed to be the ultimate icebreaker for supposedly reserved and tongue-twisted types in nightclubs (surely not!), its lyrics were inspired by a 1978 psychological study. If that’s piqued your interest, then here’s @TOTPFacts with the story behind the statement:
The lyrics of “Would You…?” echo questions from a psychological study first conducted in 1978 by psychologist Elaine Hatfield, designed to test how receptive men and women are to sexual invitations. #TOTP
Women and men approached other students on campus, opening by saying, “I have been noticing you around campus. I found you to be very attractive.”…” #TOTP
… They then proceeded to ask one of three questions: “Would you go out with me tonight?” “Would you come over to my apartment tonight?” “Would you go to bed with me tonight? #TOTP
When women asked men, the “Yes” results were 50% (go out with me)/69% (come over)/75% (go to bed with me). When men asked women, the “Yes” results were 56% (go out with me)/6% (come over)/0% (go to bed with me). #TOTP
Those results remind me of an interview with Paddy McGuinness who said of the game show TakeMeOut which he presented that they had to have women picking a man as if it had been the other way round, all the men would have just kept their lights on permanently.
It might have escaped your attention with everything else going on in the world (it did mine) but just last month one Prakazrel Samuel Michel was sentenced to 14 years in prison. Well, put like that it might not ring any bells but what if I said Pras of hip hop group the Fugees was sent down on criminal conspiracy charges for alleged illegal donations to President Barack Obama 2012 presidential re-election campaign? Yep, that’s the attention grabbing headline. Back in 1998 though, Pras was onto his second solo hit after the hugely successful “Ghetto Superstar” (That Is What You Are)”. After interpolating “Islands In The Stream” for that track, he once again used some very familiar source material as the basis for “Blue Angels” by sampling “Grease” by Frankie Valli. For me, this didn’t work nearly as well as its predecessor. It just didn’t have that immediate hook that pulled in pop and rap fans alike. There’s some very verbose rapping going in which somehow manages to reference the Bosley character from the Charlie’sAngels TV series which must be a first. However, by the end, as so often happens with these rap performances on the show, it descends into the artist shouting “wave your hands in the air like you just don’t care”. I bet Pras dreams of being so carefree in his current situation.
For me, one of the more surprising success stories of 1998 was AnotherLevel. Yes, you could argue that although we’d had loads of boy bands in the UK during the 90s, we hadn’t had many with an R’n’B slant so maybe there was a gap in the market? On the other hand, there had been many a US R’n’B boy band in our charts and, indeed, we had one British example of the genre in Damage so was there room for another one? There proved to be at least another level needed on the UK R’n’B boy band car park and it was taken by…erm…those Another Level boys. Having already had two big hits this year (including the No 1 “Freak Me” no less), a third was always on the cards and so, just in time for the Christmas market, a ballad was released. Cynical? Maybe. Guaranteed sales? Certainly. Having said that, “Guess I Was A Fool” only spent four weeks on the Top 40 and just one inside the Top 10. Maybe that was because we’d seen the likes of this track all before done much better by groups like Boyz II Men whom Another Level seemed to be doing their best impression of here. A handful of hits would follow in 1999 for the AL boys but the game was up by the new millennium as they failed to progress to the next level (I’ll stop now).
The era of M People is nearly through but unlike the near title of that book by Edgar Rice Burroughs and subsequent 1977 film, I don’t think it has been a case of ‘The M People That Time Forgot’ (ahem). Nineteen charting singles in seven years plus three Top 3 albums is a pretty decent legacy to leave behind. Sure, not every one of those nineteen hits was a top drawer banger (anyone for their cover of “Itchycoo Park”? Thought not) but some of them were the most memorable hits of the whole decade. I’m thinking “One Night In Heaven”, “Moving On Up”, “Search For The Hero” etc but by the end of their run, some of the hits didn’t quite match up to their predecessors. Take “Testify” for example. Released as a new track to promote their first Best Of album, it’s not terrible but it’s not terrific either. My sixteen year old son would describe it as “meh” or “mid” I’m sure. I’m not sure that the title being a legal term and all is particularly suitable for a ballad or maybe it is. After all, a couple getting married to prove their love to each other also creates a legal contract in law between them. Maybe I’m just remembering it being used by SmashHits magazine to describe the likes of Billy Idol pulling a fist clench move in concert and describing it as “testifying on stage”. “Testify” was the 18th of those 19 hits peaking at No 12 meaning that there might just be one final appearance for the group to come.
P. S. Whilst we’re talking about women’s hairstyles (as we were), mention must go to Heather Small and her various (mostly towering) looks that she has spotted down the years. Quite remarkable.
Cher is No 1 for a second week of seven with “Believe”. So, I guess we should address the issue of her vocals. Much was made in the press at the time that it was due to a vocoder which was a reasonable claim given its previous usage in music production. As far back as 1969, Sly and the Family Stone used it on a song on the album “Strand!” before electronic pioneers Kraftwerk took up the mantle alongside experimental jazz fusionist Herbie Hancock. Come the 90s, French electronic music duo Daft Punk consistently used the vocoder in their work so it didn’t seem too much of a stretch that it could feature on a global smash albeit from an unlikely source in Cher. However, that wasn’t actually true. The vocal effect had been achieved using the extreme settings of Antares Autotune, pitch correction software designed to correct sharp or flat notes in vocal performances. Keen to keep their technological discovery to themselves, the produces made the vocoder claim. However, the manual for subsequent releases of the software refer to that use of it as ‘The Cher Effect’.
After last weeks host Jamie Theakston referred to Cher as being no spring chicken but remaining a game old bird (or something like that), Kate Thornton doubles down on the ageist remarks by pointing out that the singer (no stranger to a variety of hairstyles herself down the years) was still two years older than her Mum. Was there meant to be a compliment in there Kate? If so, I’m not sure that there was.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Alanis Morissette
Thank U
No
2
Billie
Girlfriend
It’s a no
3
Aerosmith
I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing
I did not
4
Touch And Go
Would You…?”
No thanks
5
Pras
Blue Angels
Nope
6
Another Level
Guess I Was A Fool
Never
7
M People
Testify
Nah
8
Cher
Believe
And no
Disclaimer
I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).
All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree
Despite attempts during the ‘year zero’ revamp to fiddle with the format, TOTP was pretty much always* centred around hit songs and the Top 40 singles chart. During those early 90s years, the show dipped its toes into albums with an album chart slot but it never really worked and like everything and everyone associated with that period, was ultimately rejected.
*I stopped watching around 2000 after I left my job in record shops that I’d had for 10 years so maybe they revisited the album idea after that? I’ve no interest in finding out.
However, just to freshen things up a bit, I’m going to dip my own toes into the corresponding album chart for this show’s post and beyond to see what was happening back in 1998. Here’s hoping I don’t regret this…
OK, so Jamie Theakston is our host and we begin with…Celine Dion? Again?! Yes, she was only on the show (justifiably) two weeks ago when, for the second non-consecutive time, she was No 1 with “My Heart Will Go On” but she’s back as, having slipped to No 3 the following week, she’s actually gone back up the charts to No 2. OK so, whilst her single was yo-yo-ing around the very top of the charts, her album “Let’s Talk About Love” was also shifting units-a-plenty by being this week’s best selling title. I suppose that’s not too much of a surprise given that “My Heart Will Go On” was included on it* though clearly its sales had been boosted by the success of both the Titanic film and single. After spending four of its first five weeks on the chart at No 1 at the end of 1997, this was the first time it had been back to the top spot in three months.
*Was it always on it or was it added to it after its global success?
What perhaps is more surprising is that the Titanic soundtrack album’s chart stats up to this point read as follows:
29 – 5 – 1 – 2 – 1 – 1 – 2 – 2 – 2
For an album of nearly entirely orchestral pieces (Celine’s single was on there as well), this was phenomenal. Indeed, Wikipedia tells me that it is the highest selling primarily orchestral soundtrack ever! I probably shouldn’t be taken aback at the sales of the Titanic soundtrack given…
a) the record busting-success of the film
b) the fact that presumably I must have sold a few copies over the counter myself seeing as I was working for Our Price at the time
…and yet I am. The only other similar title I can think of that was a consistent seller during my time working in record shops is The Mission OST. Maybe this post’s albums angle might be enlightening.
Here’s an unconventional hit. – “This Is Hardcore” by Pulp. The title track from their sixth studio album, it was quite obviously about porn. Or was it? Jarvis Cocker has explained that it was actually about the entertainment industry and how people get burned out and used up in the same way that he perceived those making porn films did. Yeah, maybe though he also admitted to watching a lot of porn in hotels on tour and the song’s lyrics, while not explicitly graphic, were certainly risqué – “you make me hard”, “teenage wet dream”, me on top of you” and “what men in stained raincoats pay for” were just some of Cocker’s chosen words. I wonder if the BBC censors has anything to say about them?
If the lyrics were an unlikely component of a hit single then so was its sound. Online comments have compared it to a Bond theme due to its cinematic strings though it puts me more in mind of a 60s film noir soundtrack. Ultimately, the track is imbued with a sense of the seedier side of life. On the one hand, Jarvis is the perfect person to deliver such a song but on the other, it reeks of that tedious trap that artists fall into after a period of initial success of writing about that success as a follow up. Which brings me onto “This Is Hardcore” the album. On a purely commercial level, it was almost disastrous when compared to the achievements of its predecessor. Whilst it did debut at No 1, it spent just two weeks inside the Top 10. In contrast, “Different Class” spent six months there and has sold 1.3 million copies in the UK. The sales of “This Is Hardcore” are a tenth of that. What I remember most about it though is the final track “The Day After The Revolution” which has the longest fade out of all time and clocks in at a shade under 15 minutes in length.
I wonder how many people in this episode’s studio audience realised that they were in the presence of a future superstar. Yes, it’s our first viewing of Beyoncé Knowles before she was a solo artist and was so famous she no longer needed a surname. Now, when I think of Destiny’sChild, my mind turns to all those hits around the very end of the 90s and start of the new millennium like “Bills, Bills, Bills”, “Say My Name”, “Independent Women”, “Survivor” and “Bootylicious”. It certainly didn’t go to March 1998 and a song called “No, No, No”. I have not even the most fleeting recall of this song. It seems a fairly average R&B track to me with a very repetitive and basic chorus and nothing like a track that would mark the group out for the success they would go on to experience. What do I know though? It was a No 3 hit in the US and No 5 over here. Now, if it wasn’t completely obvious from the interjections by Wyclef Jean of Fugees fame that you can hear, this was the REMIX version that he produced. Yes, Wyclef – we got it the first time you said it! How different it is from the original version I know not and care less but both versions are on their eponymous debut album if you wish to investigate.
Said album wouldn’t make a huge impression on the UK charts peaking at No 45 but by 2001, the “Survivor” album would spend four weeks at No 1 and sixteen inside the Top 10. Then came the Beyoncé solo career and the dropping of her surname. Now, of course, there was a song about another Knowles which referred to him just by his first name. This is Cockerel Chorus and their tribute to 1970s Spurs left back Cyril Knowles…
We’re getting ever closer to the end of MPeople intheseTOTPrepeats. “Angel Street” was the final single lifted from their final studio album “Fresco”. All that’s left now is a Best Of album and the two new tracks that were released as singles from it. To date, there has been no new M People album since 1997 and no new single since 1999 though they have toured sporadically. That remaining touring element to their story belied the idea that they’d ‘split up’ and promoted the theory that they were, in fact, on an elongated hiatus with no stories of the band falling out but rather coming to a natural break in activities. Incidentally, M People was originally conceived by Mike Pickering as a fluid collective arrangement rather than a traditional group with floating singers (though once Heather Small and her powerhouse vocals was discovered, that plan was dropped) so maybe an official break up was never on the cards? That said, was the writing on the wall that an extended break was on the cards? Small had recently given birth to her first child and the Deconstruction label which had been the band’s home since the beginning had closed necessitating them to release “Fresco” on their own record label. The album had sold well, debuting at No 2 and spending twenty weeks inside the Top 20. And yet, it couldn’t match the success of predecessor “Bizarre Fruit” achieving roughly half of its sales. The three singles taken from it weren’t the massive hits that those of “Bizarre Fruit” or Mercury Prize winning “Elegant Slumming” had been with middle release “Fantasy Island” peaking at a worrying No 33. “Angel Street” looked to have reversed that trend by peaking at No 8 but one week inside the Top 10 wasn’t the stuff of mega-hits. In truth, it wasn’t one of their strongest songs being almost as if generated by AI as a typical M People track (had AI existed back then).
I was intrigued to read though that the sax player here is one Snake Davis, an unofficial band member, who has played with just about every one you can think of. His website says he has recorded more than 400 tracks with over 60 artists and toured with the likes of Lisa Stansfield and Eurythmics. I mention him for three reasons. One is that he played a gig recently at the theatre where I work which was a sell out of dedicated fans. The second is that, if you watch him here, he doesn’t play his sax at all and just stands there trying to blend in with what is happening on stage. What was that all about? I’m guessing that they must have edited him out as the performance looks pre-recorded and seems to finish before the song should do. Finally, how tall did he look here? Snake certainly didn’t need a ladder with him. Yeah, you’re right – I shoehorned that last one in and it’s not even that funny is it?
Right, who’s this? TheAllSeeingI? Didn’t they have a hit with Tony Christie? Something about a panther? I’m sure they did but before that came this one – “Beat Goes On” which samples a Buddy Rich take on the Sonny & Cher hit from 1967. As Jamie Theakston alludes to in his intro, this lot were an electronic outfit from Sheffield and seemed very tied to their home city working with the likes of the aforementioned Tony Christie, Jarvis Cocker, Phil Oakey and Babybird. Again, I thought I couldn’t remember this one but the track was immediately familiar as soon as it started.
I liked the staging on display in this performance with the vocal parts being undertaken by a monitor on a plinth showing a close up of an eyeball and a big pair of RockyHorrorPictureShow style red lips. In the early 90s when I was first working for Our Price, the VHS of that film was released to retail and to promote it, we had lots of in store posters of the infamous, disembodied smackers that open the movie. I took one home and put it in the wall of our small flat in Manchester. It was an odd move on my behalf but it seemed to make perfect sense at the time. Anyway, back to The All Seeing I and this performance is reminding me of two other songs from the early 80s. The first is “Da Da Da” by Trio. I’m not sure why – maybe it’s the fact both featured a creepy looking drummer. The second song is “Kissing With Confidence” by Will Powers for the obvious tie in with the lips motif. The lyrics to this one included the line “Do you have spinach on your teeth?”. In the case of The All Seeing I lips, there’s no spinach but there’s definitely some stray lipstick marks. Less a case of ‘the beat goes on’ and more of ‘the lippie goes on…and on…’
What’s that? What about an album story? Well, they did have one which had one of the worst titles in pop music history – “Pickled Eggs And Sherbet” – which failed to do any serious business at the shops peaking at No 45 on the album chart. And that’s where that particular story ends. Talking of which…
Now, I always get confused about this one as it is all rather confusing. The name of this hit is “Here’s Where The Story Ends” and it’s by Tin Tin Out (who, confusingly, are nothing to do with Hergé’s comic book character) but the story behind this one needs telling from the beginning. The duo of Darren Stokes and Lindsay Edwards were known as remixers working with the likes of Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, Olive and TLC. However, they also released records in their own right and had accrued a small collection of minor hits to this point. However, this one, which would become their second biggest hit ever, wasn’t actually their song but was originally recorded by dream pop outfit The Sundays though it was never released as a single due to the collapse of the band’s then record label. However, it was at No 36 in John Peel’s FestiveFifty for 1990. Still with me? Good.
Tin Tin Out got hold of it, gave it a dance vibe and recruited one S. Nelson to sing it. It wasn’t Shara Nelson of Massive Attack fame though. No, this was Shelley Nelson (not to be confused with one time Bucks Fizz member Shelley Preston). The masses liked this version so much that it went Top 10, something The Sundays never achieved with any single they ever released. To rub salt in the wound, the Tin Tin Out version won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Contemporary Song in 1999! How does that work?! Well, it worked so well that they repeated the formula of working with a female vocalist and covering someone else’s song later that very year when they teamed up with Spice Girl Emma Bunton on a version of 1988 hit “What I Am” by Eddie Brickell & The New Bohemians. The song placed at No 2 being pipped to the top spot by Geri Halliwell’s “Lift Me Up” in what was termed ‘The Battle of the Spice Girls’ (actually I may have made that up).
There’s a lot to unpack there (though not an album worth talking about) so I’m just going to finish off by saying that I add to my own confusion by mixing up “Here’s Where The Story Ends” with this late 80s dance hit by Electribe 101…
And just like that, the downward trajectory of the career of Robbie Williams was reversed and the rest is history. Yes, we all know that it was “Angels” that saved him from the dumper but in a way, it was what he did immediately afterwards that was just as important. Had he failed to consolidate on that success, thus making “Angels” be regarded as a one-off fluke, might things have panned out differently?
“Let Me Entertain You” was an almost perfect choice for a follow up. Bounding out of the traps, it said “I’m here and you’re all coming with me” and off we all jolly well popped. Infamously, it had been scheduled for release as the third single from the “Life Thru A Lens” album but Robbie supposedly got cold feet about releasing a song which such a bold and confrontational title and so “South Of The Border” replaced it ushering in claims that Williams was all washed up. Emboldened by the success of “Angels” though, the ex-Take That man felt comfortable enough to promote “Let Me Entertain You” and instead of being a pleading offer, it was now a cast-iron guarantee. For me, it is a great pop song, probably one of his best ever tunes with its sliding guitar riffs and explosive chorus backed with jangly keyboards and brass play out. It took Robbie to the next level and put him clearly ahead of his ex-band mates’ solo careers. In short, this was the moment he won.
Despite the renewal of his pop star worth, Robbie doesn’t seem reassured in this performance though. He’s very over exuberant, jumping up and down constantly and draping himself around his bass player David Bowie/Mick Ronson/Starman style for support. His sharp, buzz cut that he modelled for the promotion of “Angels” has been replaced by a backward step to the peroxide blonde/tracksuit look that he adopted in his darkest moments immediately post-Take That at Glastonbury ‘95. It wasn’t a good sign. Twenty-seven years later though and he’s completely come to terms with that period of his life as he prepares to release the thirteenth studio album of his career titled “Britpop” with a picture of him from Glastonbury as the album cover. Thirteen! Many of us doubters could never have imagined such a career of longevity back in 1996/97. Theakston lets Robbie know just before the start of his performance that his debut album had gone double platinum. A look at the its chart stats reveal the evidence of what we all knew anyway. Released it the October of ‘97, it debuted at No 11 before sliding out of the Top 40 within three weeks. It then spent over a month absolutely nowhere before the “Angels” effect kicked in. Look at these numbers:
It would spend a total of 44 weeks inside the Top 10 and has been certified a further six times platinum since Jamie Theakston’s announcement in this show to total 2.4 million copies sold in the UK alone.
Run–D.M.C. vsJason Nevins remain at the top with “It’s Like That”. Despite the fact that rap and hip-hop were well established music genres by this point and hits with rapping in them were not uncommon events, the size of this hit was unexpected I would argue. After all, despite their reputation and profile as hip-hop legends, Run-D.M.C. weren’t renowned for massive hit singles in the UK. Indeed, they’d only visited our Top 40 three times before this – the marvellous collaboration with Aerosmith on “Walk This Way” in 1986 (No 8), follow up “It’s Tricky” in 1987 (No 16) and “Run’s House” in 1988 (No 37). They would have only one more UK hit after “It’s Like That” – a remix of the aforementioned “It’s Tricky” in 2003 which peaked at No 20. The story isn’t very different when it comes to albums. By far their highest charting album was 1988’s “Tougher Than Leather” which made No 13. In a move Dick Dastardly would have baulked at, their Best Of album “Together Forever: Greatest Hits 83-91” was rereleased with the Jason Nevins remix of “It’s Like That” added to it and renamed “Greatest Hits 83-98”. It peaked at No 31.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Celine Dion
My Heart Will Go On
Never
2
Pulp
This Is Hardcore
I did not
3
Destiny’s Child
No, No, No
Erm…No
4
M People
Angel Street
No thanks
5
The All Seeing I
Beat Goes On
Nah
6
Tin Tin Out
Here’s Where The Story Ends
Nope
7
Robbie Williams
Let Me Entertain You
No but I had a promo copy of the album
8
Run-D.M.C. vs Jason Nevins
It’s Like That
And no
Disclaimer
I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).
All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.
We’ve entered December of 1997 with these TOTP repeats which can only mean one thing – Christmas is coming! By this point, with me working in the Our Price store in Stockport, I would have been in full-on hectic work mode with Christmas temps, queues of customers and long days of trading the norm. And what were the great British public buying their loved ones for Christmas? Well, the record companies had long since shuffled their pack of cards and got their dominoes in order (not sure where I’m going with this metaphor) to finalise their release schedules for optimum festive sales. A quick scan of the December album charts shows that, unsurprisingly, the Spice Girls were at No 1 with their sophomore album “Spiceworld” with Celine Dion showing strong sales of her “Let’s Talk About Love” album just behind. So far, so mainstream. The rest of the Top 10 is made up of four Best Ofs from Eternal, Enya, Lightning Seeds and, in a blast from the past, Wham! All Saints were on the climb with their recently released eponymous debut album whilst one of the year’s consistent big sellers – “White On Blonde” by Texas – was still shifting major numbers despite 44 weeks on the chart already. Grimly, the Backstreet Boys were in there but perhaps the biggest surprise and certainly the least mainstream artist inside the Top 10 were The Verve whose “Urban Hymns” album would ultimately go eleven times platinum in the UK but more of them later.
Jayne ‘pouty mouth’ Middlemiss is our host for tonight and we start with M People and their single “Fantasy Island”. Nothing to do with the TV series starring Ricardo Montalban and Hervé Villechaize (“De plane! De plane!”) nor (thankfully) the 1982 Top 5 hit for Tight Fit, this was the second track take from the band’s “Fresco” album. I don’t recall this one at all but that’s probably because it only spent one week on the Top 40 peaking at a lowly No 33 making it quite the outlier in the band’s discography. Not since “Someday” five years earlier had they experienced such a low charting single.
So what happened here? The other two singles from the album both peaked at No 8 either side of “Fantasy Island” so what was it about that track that should have caused such a fluctuation. I don’t believe it was a sudden drop in the band’s popularity. Although they weren’t quite hitting the heights of their commercial heyday when “Elegant Slumming” and “Bizarre Fruit” sold 2.5 million copies between them in the UK alone, “Fresco” was still a platinum selling album. So was there a dip in quality for this particular song? Well, musical taste is subjective of course so I can’t really make any definitive judgement on that score but “Fantasy Island” seemed to hark back to the template of those earlier hits so was the formula becoming a bit tired. It couldn’t have been the Samson-effect surely that saw Heather Small’s vocal power reduced by the removal of her usual towering hairdo? No, of course not. Possibly it was just that it got caught up in the Christmas rush (15 of the Top 40 songs that week were new releases) – that seems the most plausible explanation. What was sure was that the time of M People was coming to an end. The only albums released since “Fresco” have been Best Of compilations and box set retrospectives as Heather Small launched her solo career and Mike Pickering pursued a career in A&R.
Also experiencing some commercial difficulties around this time was Kylie Minogue. Her first single in nearly two years – “Some Kind Of Bliss” – had been her first ever release not to make the UK Top 20 (all of her previous 23 singles up to that point had achieved this). Presumably spooked by this, her record label Deconstruction delayed the release of its parent album. Originally scheduled to be called “Impossible Princess”, it had already been postponed once and when Princess Diana died at the end of August, the reason given for its second shelving was issues of sensitivity surrounding its title. On reflection, that seems quite a convenient smoke screen. A second single was lined up to test the waters further in an attempt to divine public opinion about Kylie’s new direction. “Did It Again” was heavily promoted (including a CD-Rom of the promo video on some versions of the single) and it duly improved upon its predecessors chart position by peaking at No 14.
However, it was a temporary and not altogether substantial reprieve. When the album did finally come out, it underperformed. A third single from it could only replicate the chart high of “Did It Again” creating a hat-trick of singles that didn’t make the Top 10. Additionally, the British press seemed to have fallen out of love with Kylie around this time. Accusations of anorexia and a belittling of her ‘IndieKylie’ persona (that itself was a creation by the media and not something encouraged by Kylie herself) dogged her whilst the three year gap between albums and a perceived lack of promotion from Deconstruction were seen as contributing factors to a downturn in her popularity. By the time the 90s had ended, Kylie seemed like she was a chart dinosaur but somehow survived pop music extinction to capture the hearts of the public and a No 1 record with “Spinning Around” in 2000. She’s not really looked back since.
As for “Did It Again”, her vocals here are a bit ropey and I’m not sure that the drag queens on stage with her really add anything to the performance ( yes, I get that they are recreations of the various Kylie personas from the video) but it’s OK. Also, is it in my imagination or does it sound a bit like Garbage (the band!) at the start? After that though, there is no complication as it displays a definite eastern vibe before there is no hesitation as it propels headlong into a catchy chorus. Maybe Kylie should consider herself so unlucky that it wasn’t a bigger hit. Ahem.
Next up, a song that may not be the most well known or highest charting of this particular band’s career but has been singled out by the man behind it as the favourite of his that he’s ever written (so far). That man is Richard Ashcroft, the band is TheVerve and the song is “Lucky Man”. The third single released from their aforementioned classic “Urban Hymns” album, it’s a widescreen, epic sonic soundscape of a track though it’s actually got a very basic chord structure that even a lazy strummer like me could handle. Maybe that’s the secret to its power and allure – its simplicity. Of course, the recorded version that we all know is multi layered so that it sounds almost sprawling but as with its chords, it has a simple and pure message in its lyrics – that of the “raw nature of yourselves”, as Ashcroft himself puts it, that is allowed to be displayed between a couple in a committed relationship and the beauty within that ease of being. Yes, it’s anthemic but there’s no bombast to it. I think it’s probably my favourite song by The Verve as well Mr. Ashcroft.
As Jayne Middlemiss says in her intro, this performance was taken from the band’s appearance on Later…withJools Holland which was broadcast on 10th November 1997 and the orchestral string backing really elevates it to a higher plane sonically. The other artists on that particular show were Rickie Lee Jones, UB40, Roni Size and Jewel. With respect to those names, I consider myself to be a lucky man not to be reviewing that show as well.
Sometimes I really cannot dredge up anything from the recesses of my poor, overworked brain to comment on about a past hit relived on these TOTP repeats. It may be because I can’t recall it at all or that it’s from a genre of music that didn’t speak to me and therefore I have nothing to say about it. In the case of “It’s Over Love” by Todd Terry it’s both. Obviously I do know the name Todd Terry and that he’s a house music legend but apart from that I couldn’t tell you much about his canon of work other than his involvement in the remix of Everything But The Girl’s “Missing”. His discography lists two other UK Top 10 hits that he had with Martha Wash and Jocelyn Brown in 1996 and 1997 and I can’t even remember them! Did I review them for this blog?!
My blushes are spared though by the featured vocalist in this track who is Shannon whom I definitely do recall. Back in 1984 she had three bona fide chart hits in “Sweet Somebody”, “Give Me Tonight” and the biggest of the lot “Let The Music Play”. Thirteen years later and she was back in the TOTP studio and she doesn’t look that much older to me. Am I misremembering? Make your own minds up…
By 1997, I’d started to lose sight of Paul Weller’s solo career. After he’d re-emerged from the wilderness with his 1992 eponymous album, he cemented his position as a respected elder statesman of British guitar rock (even though he was only 35 at the time) with the following year’s “Wild Wood”. By the time that 1995’s “Stanley Road” had gone four times platinum, Weller was the ‘The Modfather’, or even ‘The Godfather of Britpop’ (along with a few other candidates for the title). However, just as Britpop couldn’t and didn’t sustain, neither did Weller’s solo career sales. His fourth solo album ”Heavy Soul” arrived two years on from “Stanley Road” and though a healthy seller, it didn’t come anywhere near the numbers of its predecessor. It felt like he was appealing to his (admittedly large) fanbase still but that crossover into a larger audience that we saw with “Stanley Road” was no longer there.
I think I must have been one of those that fell by the wayside. Both “Wild Wood” and “Stanley Road” CDs were to be found in our flat in Manchester but “Heavy Soul” was noticeably absent. Its lead single “Peacock Suit” was OK but beyond that, I hadn’t felt the need to investigate further. As such, I don’t really remember the fourth and final single lifted from the album called “Mermaids”. Having watched this performance back, it’s a decent tune though a bit Weller-by-numbers. The “sha-la-la-la” hook has me wondering if Mr Weller had been listening to “Sha-La-La-La-Lee” by the Small Faces or even “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison. Whatever the truth, there seemed to be a trend for records using that lyrical refrain in 1997. Remember “What Do You Want From Me?” by Monaco?
P.S. That tank top Paul! Dearie me!
Somebody who was never going to be found in the Top 10 of the album chart I talked about at the start of the post is Gala. Not in the UK at least. In the rest of Europe she shifted a fair few copies of her album “Cone Into My Life” (nothing to do with the Joyce Sims hit of the same name) but over here she was a singles artist. In fact, she was known for one single in particular and it wasn’t this one. Whilst “Freed From Desire” continues to have a life of its own thanks to its adoption as a football chant, does anybody remember “Let A Boy Cry”? Well, you might if you’re Italian, Belgian, Spanish or French as it went to No 1 in all those countries but one week at No 11 was all it could muster in the UK. To my ears, it sounds very similar to its predecessor but…well…just not as good. Its subject matter about encouraging male sensitivity and emotional intelligence is laudable but it’s just not that memorable. Gala’s shaky vocals in this performance didn’t help its chances. A third UK Top 40 hit would arrive in the form of the album’s title track the following August but a high of No 38 was hardly likely to add longevity of her pop career. The longevity of “Freed From Desire” on the other hand…
With Take That now out of the way and despite the increasing claims of the Backstreet Boys, Boyzone continued to be the premier boy band of this era of the 90s. Their cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Baby Can I Hold You” was the group’s tenth consecutive UK hit of which only one didn’t at least make the Top 3. Of those though, a whopping 40% were cover versions. Hmm. Is that cynical or clever song selection at work? As with their other covers, this was another ballad but unlike its predecessors, it was brutally ignored despite the high profile it enjoys to this day when originally released in 1988 when it made No 94 on the UK chart. No 94! It’s not the only example of this phenomenon. Off the top of my head there’s “Summer Of ‘69” by Bryan Adams (No 42 in the UK) and “Rhiannon” by Fleetwood Mac (a UK No 46). They’ll be many more I’m sure. There would also be many more actual hits for Boyzone (another 10 to be precise including four No 1s) but beware lads as you won’t have it all your own way in the boy band stakes for too much longer – Westlife will be racking up the chart toppers as well before the decade is out.
It’s another cover version still riding high at the top of the charts as “Perfect Day” by VariousArtists resists the challenge of *Boyzone to remain at No 1.
*Ronan and co do, of course, feature on “Perfect Day” as does M People’s Heather Small who opened the show thus top and tailing it nicely.
Watching the video back, I’m struck by how many of the contributing artists are no longer with us. Look at this list…
David Bowie
Stephen Gately (Boyzone)
Tammy Wynette
Shane MacGowan
Dr. John
Andrew Davis (conductor)
And, of course, Lou Reed himself
I suppose it’s to be expected that not every artist would still be alive 28 years later but still.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it ?
1
M People
Fantasy Island
No
2
Kylie Minogue
Did It Again
Negative
3
The Verve
Lucky Man
No but I had the Urban Hymns album
4
Todd Terry featuring Shannon
It’s Over Love
Not my bag at all
5
Paul Weller
Mermaids
Nope
6
Gala
Let A Boy Cry
Nah
7
Boyzone
Baby Can I Hold You
I did not
8
Various Artists
Perfect Day
And no
Disclaimer
I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).
All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.
I said in the last post that we hadn’t yet reached the Kate Thornton/Gail Porter/Jamie Theakston era of TOTP presenters and yet here was the last of those three names on our screens just the following week. Was I mistaken in my claim then? Not really. It turns out that Theakston’s appearance here was as a ‘guest presenter’ and he wouldn’t become a part of the regular roster of hosts until 1998. So kind of like an audition then, similar to what happened with Sarah Cawood the other week? Probably not as he was already an established BBC presenter being onto his second series of co-hosting Saturday morning kids TV show Live &Kicking alongside TOTP regular Zoe Ball so I’m guessing he was just filling in as no-one else was available? These days, Theakston hosts the Heart radio breakfast show with Amanda Holden though my first thought when his name is mentioned is that, like Angus Deayton, he was exposed by a tabloid newspaper for visiting a brothel and snorting cocaine in 2002. Two BBC presenters making the same misdemeanour in the same year. The Beeb was having a public relations nightmare!
Anyway, let’s see how Theakston did on his TOTP debut. We start with Oasis who are in the studio to promote their single “Stand By Me”. The second track taken from their “Be Here Now” album, it would peak at No 2 thus becoming another of those songs denied being a chart topper by the Elton John phenomenon. At the time, the album received mostly positive (and even gushing) reviews in the music press but, in retrospect, has come to be seen as the point where it all started to go wrong for the band. Criticisms of it being overproduced and bloated were given credence by the length of some of its songs. Ignoring the “All Around The World (Reprise)” outro, only two of the eleven tracks clocked in at under the five minutes mark. “Stand By Me” itself has a running time of five seconds off six minutes and we get nearly all of that 5:55 length in this performance. Was that a mark of the power and influence that Oasis held at that time? That they could command such an exposure on the BBC’s prime time music show? After all, “Be Here Now” was the best selling British album of 1997 and the fastest selling of all time in the UK.
Anyway, with some temporal distance and the revisiting of the album, although history hasn’t been too kind to it, people have generally… well…stood by “Stand By Me” which has been regarded as one of its standout tracks. I can hear why. It’s a bloody good song though it hardly broke any new ground and indeed, always reminded me of Mott The Hoople’s “All The Young Dudes” – that ascending scale at the end of the chorus? I’m not the only one who thinks that. Noel Gallagher was asked in a QMagazine interview if he’d pinched the riff from the Bowie penned song and he admitted that he had! Not only that but that he’d used it for “Don’t Look Back In Anger” as well (though the chords for that are almost identical to “Streets Of London” by Ralph McTell). It’ll be interesting to see how many songs from “Be Here Now” that Oasis play in their 2025 reunion tour. I’m guessing not many but if there’s to be just one, my money would be on “Stand By Me”.
Theakston goes a bit un-PC in his intro for the next artist who is Louise giving it the whole Sid James steam-coming-out-of-his-ears look. Well, it was the era of ‘lads mags’ I guess so it was probably more acceptable back then. Now, continuing with the theme of pinching song ideas which we started with Oasis, Louise seems to have done a bit of appropriating herself as new single “Arms Around The World” sounds an awful lot like Janet Jackson’s “Runaway”. No, I mean like really an awful lot…
See? Anyway, “Arms Around The World” was the lead single from Louise’s second album “Women In Me” and would become her then biggest hit when it peaked at No 4 meaning five of her first six solo outings into the charts had gone Top 10. Not quite reaching the recent No 1 heights of her old band Eternal but pretty impressive all the same. There’s another (albeit more tenuous) link with the aforementioned Oasis whose next single would be “All Around The World”. “Arms Around The World”? “All Around The World”. As Sid James might have said “Cor, blimey! You lot are hard work!”.
We stay in the studio – there was a definite preference for studio performances under executive producer Chris Cowey – with NoDoubt whose name allows Theakston to deliver the most woeful, lame and obvious line imaginable his intro. Like most people I’m guessing, my first encounter with Gwen Stefani and co was via super-hit “Don’t Speak”. What stands out to me about their subsequent releases is how they sounded so very little like that global No 1. “Just A Girl” and this one – “Spiderwebs” – were much more of that ska punk/pop fusion sound that characterised their origins. Of course, I’m not familiar with those origins – it’s just what I’ve read – as, despite working in a record shop, I’d barely heard the band’s “Tragic Kingdom” album from which the hits came. I did know said hits though and “Don’t Speak” seemed to me to bear little resemblance to what followed. Was it a deliberate attempt to go more mainstream or just a song that came about organically and ended up with a more wide reaching sound?
As for “Spiderwebs”, it’s a pretty cool track although it’s subject matter about Gwen Stefani receiving unwanted attention from a smitten suitor isn’t the most obviously appealing source material. Still, similar to No Doubt, there was another band who based their career on a post-punk/ reggae fusion sound and who scored the biggest hit of their career with a song about stalking so who am I to be the songwriting…ahem…police?
Now here’s a curious thing and I’m not just talking about the artist for whom the adjective ‘curious’ could always be applied. No, I’m referring to the fact that Chis Cowey found a place in the running order for Björk whose release “Jóga” was never going to make the Top 40. Why? Because it broke the chart regulation of being released in more than three formats. The lead track for third album “Homogenic”, it was only made available in the shops as a three CD and VHS Box Set, hence in four formats. It seems a curious (there’s that word again) marketing strategy to launch your artist’s next collection of new material – releasing the very first example of it in a format that broke chart rules. Did her record label One Little Indian not understand these rules and so it was a massive error on their part? Maybe so as Wikipedia says that they tried to argue that the VHS was bundled for free and so the release didn’t contravene the Official Chart Company’s three format restriction but the OCC weren’t having any of it. Host Jamie Theakston says in his segue that “Jóga” wouldn’t chart as only 3,000 copies of it had been made. Was that true? Or was that One Little Indian retrospectively trying to cover their backs? As I say, the whole thing is very curious.
As for what “Jóga” soundedlike, well, I’ve had to revise my opinion about Björk in this blog many times from my initially derogative stance as I’ve leaned to appreciate her craft more but I’m going old school on this one – what a racket! Supposedly a love letter both to her best friend called Jóga and her native country Iceland, the story goes that Björk gave the concept of the track to her engineer Markus Dravs who then came up with a rhythm track that she felt was too abstract. Then producer Mark Bell took said track and added “some noises” which just about sums the whole thing up – a noise. No amount of strings can polish it up for me and Björk wailing away about being in a “state of emergency” wasn’t going to convince me otherwise.
Although MPeople hadn’t released anything since their cover of the Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park” in 1995, their absence hadn’t been as pronounced as it might have been due to the use of their “Search For A Hero” song to soundtrack a series of TV adverts for Peugeot during 1996. Despite its exposure causing a clamour for the song all over again (it had already been a No 9 hit), the band resisted all calls to rerelease it. Working in a record shop in pre-digital times, it really used to annoy me when this sort of thing happened. An artificial demand for a track caused by an advert or a radio station deciding to add it to their playlists which wasn’t actually available as a single to buy. Another example was when a Manchester radio station started playing “Acquiesce” by Oasis* despite it not being officially released as a single. We had loads of people ask for that convinced it was their new single. Fortunately, in that case, we could flog them the “Some Might Say” CD single as it was an extra track on that and we always kept all the Oasis singles in stock at all times what with us being in Stockport. Another example where there was no simple solution though was when the film Mannequin was first shown on TV in the early 90s and the next day, we had a procession of people come in asking for “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” by Starship which had been a hit in 1987! None of this will mean anything to people that have grown up in the era of streaming platforms and digital music but those who were there will recognise my pain!
*”Stand By Me” itself would be used for a series of adverts for the Halifax bank between 2021 and 2023.
Anyway, back to M People and they finally did release a single (of new material no less) in “Just For You” from their fourth and final album “Fresco” in 1997 and although not one of their most instantly recognisable tracks, it’s a very pleasant sound all the same. Gone was that rather clunky production that characterised their early hits and in its place was a much more smooth soul sound. It was perfect for daytime radio scheduling but perhaps they missed a trick by not releasing it a couple of months earlier as it had a great Summer vibe to it. However, its chart peak at No 8 would be their penultimate Top 10 hit. The time of M People was coming to an end.
The aforementioned Janet Jackson now with, for the third artist in a row, a lead single from a new album. Having signed the then biggest record deal in history with Virgin Records, our first taste of the fruits of that deal was “Got ‘Til It’s Gone” from “The Velvet Rope” album. As indicated by its title, the track took inspiration the Joni Mitchell song “Big Yellow Taxi” with the copyright cleared sample running throughout it so majorly that it a credit was given to Joni on the song. Also featuring was Q-Tip (no, not Paul Young’s old band) from A Tribe Called Quest. I can’t say that it did much for me and I much preferred the original (excruciating laugh and all). I also didn’t think much to the over the top staging of this performance with Ms Jackson not being revealed from her backwards facing throne until nearly a minute in. Get over yourself Janet!
Now, just as Louise seemed to have stolen from Jackson’s “Runaway”, so Janet seems guilty of some musical thievery as she was on the end of litigation from UK soul singer Des’ree who claimed that “Got ‘Til It’s Gone” was very (meaning too) similar to her hit “Feel So High”. In 1998, she was awarded an out of court settlement of 25% of the publishing royalties equating to about £2 million. You can hear why she won…
Clearly it was felt that they’d been enough wailing and wringing of hands caused by the death of Princess Diana by this point and so we don’t get “Candle In The Wind ‘97” this week but the other song on the Elton John single. Yes, it was a double A-side single though that fact has been mostly forgotten now. The ‘other song’ was “Something About The Way You Look Tonight” and was essentially the lead single from his album “The Big Picture”. Wikipedia tells me that the track was released on its own without “Candle In The Wind ‘97” five days before the double A-side but I don’t remember that at all. Indeed, the official charts website makes no reference to this. Is it possible that it was just a case of bad timing and the single was all ready to go before the tragic car crash in Paris on 31 August and its release was just overtaken by events?
Whatever the truth, the song itself was a typical 90s Elton ballad which sounded like it could have been on the LionKing soundtrack to me. It wasn’t though and another song that wasn’t on an album was “Candle In The Wind ‘97” which did not feature on “The Big Picture”. I wonder how many people bought it thinking it was?
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Oasis
Stand By Me
No, I’d given up on buying their singles by this point
2
Louise
Arms Around The World
Nope
3
No Doubt
Spiderwebs
Nah
4
Björk
Jóga
Definite no
5
M People
Just For You
Negative
6
Janet Jackson
Got ‘Til It’s Gone
I did not
7
Elton John
Something About The Way You Look Tonight / Candle In The Wind ’97
And no
Disclaimer
I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).
All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.
It’s all about ‘new’ songs on this episode of TOTP. To clarify, I mean songs we haven’t seen on these BBC4 repeats before (obviously). Of the ten hits on the show, only three have featured previously and of the new songs, one is a very big deal indeed. Yes, late November back in ‘95 was a very special time if you were a Beatles fan. Not only was there a single being released of new material under the name of The Beatles for the first time since 1970, not only had the compilation album “Anthology I” just been released containing rarities, outtakes and live performances from the period 1958-64 but the first episode of the documentary series The Beatles Anthology was about to air the Sunday after this TOTP was broadcast. We’ll see the video for the single at the end of the show. Before then though, there’s lots to get through so let’s get into it.
By the way, this week’s host is Nicky Campbell who seems to have toned down his barely concealed spite for everyone and everything on the show since returning to presenting duties after the ‘year zero’ experiment was officially shut down. He seems much more affable and blissed out as is shown by his intro to the opening act which is MPeople with their version of “Itchycoo Park” by Small Faces. By any measure, this didn’t seem like a good idea and indeed it wasn’t. ‘Why?’ is the word that springs to mind. Well, it all seems rather cynical when you look into it. Having bled five times platinum selling album “Bizarre Fruit” dry and with no new material on the horizon (next studio album “Fresco” wouldn’t be released until 1997), presumably someone at record label Deconstruction looked at the onrushing festive ‘95 sales period and thought “Hang on, we haven’t got a new M People album out for the punters to buy for Christmas. What are we going to do?”. The solution was to repackage “Bizarre Fruit”, tweak the track listing slightly, bundle it up with an extra disc of remixes and live versions and sell it to those same punters who had bought the original album just twelve months previously. On reflection, it seems fairly shameful though I don’t recall being outraged at the time.
To promote the misleadingly titled “Bizarre Fruit II”, a new track was required as its lead single. Enter the band’s version of “Itchycoo Patk”. It seems to me that some songs should just be left alone period. This is one of them. A No 3 hit for Small Faces in the Summer of Love that was 1967, its sound and groove (both enhanced by the then cutting edge technology of flanging) made for a perfect time piece of the period. I, for one, did not think the world needed another take on it and certainly not M People’s. It just doesn’t suit Heather Small’s powerhouse voice and the mid 90s production on it sounds so clunky now. I’m wondering if it’s chart high of No 11 was a slight disappointment to the band and label. Eight of their previous nine hits had gone Top 10 (only “Love Rendezvous”, the final single from the original “Bizarre Fruit” album spoilt that run). Though there were more hit singles and albums to come before they split (initially) in 1999, for me, “Itchycoo Park” was a line in the sand that signified the end of M People’s imperial phase.
After looking as though they might be seen as hoary old rockers who should have been locked in a cupboard labelled ‘The 80s’ as the new decade began, Bon Jovi had so successfully remodelled themselves that by 1995, especially in the UK, they were flying. On the back of that success, they had (ahem) flown into the UK to do a studio performance for TOTP of their new single “Lie To Me”. The third single from their 10 million selling album “These Days”, it would be the band’s seventh of eight Top 10 hits on the spin in the UK at this time. I have to stay that I don’t remember this one at all but listening to it now, it seems in keeping with this era of the band’s sound. They’d dialled back on the bombast and bluster of those stadium anthems that characterised their ‘poodle rock’ phase and gone with a more, toned down reflective type of rock ballad. Not bad but not destined to be one of their most well known tunes to the uncommitted or casual fan. The studio audience seem genuinely excited about the band (or more specifically Jon Bon Jovi) being before them in person or is it the work of a floor manager prompting the crowd with a sign with the words ‘scream now’ on it?
As highlighted by Nicky Campbell, five of tonight’s ten acts have names that begin with ‘B’. Four of them debut inside the Top 10 with The Beatles not joining that group only because their single wasn’t yet released. So, after Bon Jovi, we now get Blur who are attempting to follow up that No 1 with the second single from their album “The Great Escape”. Ultimately they would fail with “The Universal” getting no higher than its position here of No 5. It’s such a better song than its predecessor though. A wondrous, sweeping, panoramic track that showcased a maturity to the band that was sadly nowhere to be heard (or seen in the case of the respective videos) on “Country House”. It really is quite stunning. Ah yes, the video. Clearly an homage to AClockworkOrange with the band styled as Droogs, Damon Albarn looks positively unsettling with his Alex DeLarge eyeliner.
It’s worth noting that, in the aftermath of The Battle of Britpop, Oasis, despite moving down the chart from No 2 to No 3 with “Wonderwall”, they were still outselling the Blur single. Also worth noting, just for its complete randomness, is that the golf ball speaker featured in the video for “The Universal” was bought at a charity auction by ex-footballer and now pundit Garth Crooks! What?! I mean, if it had been country singer Garth Brooks it might have made some sense but Garth Crooks?!
Nicky Campbell is totting up the Beatles references in his segues. We’ve already had “The Long And Winding Road” and now we get the use of the word ‘anthology’ when he jokingly predicts that Blur will have their own such collection out in 25 years time. Obviously, none of us knew then how long Blur would go on for back then but I don’t suppose many would have believed that they would be an ongoing entity to this day albeit with some lengthy sabbaticals in amongst their timeline. Campbell’s comment made me wonder if such a Blur product existed so I checked. There’s nothing called an ‘anthology’ but there are a couple of box sets – one is called (in a rather linear way) “The 10 Year Limited Edition Anniversary Box Set” which collected all the singles (plus extra tracks) from their first six studio albums. The second is “Blur 21” released in 2012 commemorating 21 years since the release of debut album “Leisure” and including everything the band had recorded to that point including a disc of bonus material for each album plus three DVDs, a book and a 7” single from when the band went by the name of Seymour. Although neither box set was released in 2020 (the 25 years mark pinpointed by Campbell), their existence does rather piss all over the intended humour of his remark.
EverythingButTheGirl have made it to No 3 in the charts equalling their biggest ever hit, their cover of “I Don’t Want To Talk About It” in 1988. However, “Missing” would prove to be much more enduring. Fourteen weeks on the Top 10 and nineteen inside the Top 40 and selling over a million copies in the UK. I think it’s only right that (presumably) “Missing” is the duo’s most well known song and not a bloody Rod Stewart cover (though they wear it well) as that would seem to be a complete misnomer as a calling card for them.
I certainly wouldn’t describe myself as a superfan but I’ve always felt an affinity for Everything But The Girl what with Ben and Tracey meeting and forming the band at university in Hull – my wife is from Hull and I have lived there for twenty years now. I also used to work at the university and suggested Tracey as being a suitable person to officially open the refurbished library building in 2015 but they went with then poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy (who was very good in fairness).
Just as they scored their first UK hit single with a ballad from the 70s at Christmas time, Boyzone repeated the trick just twelve months later but for The Osmonds read Cat Stevens (now known as Yusuf). Like “Missing” before it, “Father And Son” would prove to very chart durable spending a solid ten weeks in the Top 10 including three at No 2. It was certainly a contender for the Christmas No 1 before ultimately losing out to Jacko. They would finally get that first UK chart topper the following year with, you guessed it, another cover; this time of the Bee Gees classic “Words”.
This appearance is all about Ronan Keating as it was the last time they were on the BBC show performing “Father And Son”. What’s that you say? They’ve done this one on TOTP before? Yes, yes they have. How is this possible when this is the single’s first week in the Top 40? Ah well, they were on about three months back when Dale Winton hosted the show and they sneaked onto the running order via the album chart slot to promote their debut long player “Said And Done”. Back then, Ronan broke away from his singing mid performance to say to the audience “Boyzone live on Top of the Pops…ah”. He does the same thing during this second visit to the studio but this time says “Boyzone back on Top of the Pops…” and then cackles to himself. Was this really necessary? Weren’t they an established pop act by this point. Surely Keating didn’t need another ‘pinch himself moment’ as if to say “How did I get here?”. It was hardly Bob Geldof stopping in his tracks at Live Aid when singing the line “and the lesson today is how to die…” and then repeating that moment 20 years later at Live 8 was it?! Unlike their first appearance performing “Father And Son” when the group were all sat down on stools, they’re stood up this time. Not sure if this is significant but clearly a young version of Westlife sat at home watching preferred the stools version.
Back to Ronan though, and this was the time when he started doing something odd with his hair with it styled into punk-like spikes almost. Most peculiar. I think this might have also been the song that caused some of my Our Price colleagues to start doing Keating impressions by hitting themselves repeatedly in the throat with the sides of their hands to create his distinctive tremble. I think it was a technique also used for Belinda Carlisle impersonations. Work days must have been very long back then.
Now to one of the most poignant songs of the year and tragically its subject matter of the absurdity of war is still as prevalent and relevant today. The Siege of Sarajevo, as part of the Bosnian War following the break up of Yugoslavia, would last 1,425 days, the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. The heavy shelling of the city would lead to mass killings of civilians and a life of suffering and fear for those who lived with no access to transport, water, gas or electricity. American journalist Bill Carter travelled to Sarajevo in 1993 to help the humanitarian aid effort and having seen the cost of the conflict to human life and feeling that western media were ignoring the war, contacted U2 who arranged satellite link ups on their ZooTVTour to give a platform to the population of Sarajevo to the outside world. This relationship led to Bono agreeing to direct a documentary made by Carter about life during the siege and a collaboration between U2, producer Brian Eno and Luciano Pavarotti that resulted in the track “Miss Sarajevo”.
Inspired by the story of a beauty pageant organised by Bosnian women as an act of defiance of the war, the surreal nature of the act spoke to Bono and inspired the writing of the song. Considered a side project by the band and so released under the pseudonym of Passengers, the song is undeniably affecting. Epic yet understated, quintessentially U2 but with a vocal by opera giant Luciano Pavarotti woven in seamlessly with not a trace of incongruity, it towered above just about everything else on the chart. In my humble opinion, this would have been a much more worthy Christmas No 1 than Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song” in spite of the latter’s laudable green credentials. A simple ‘list’ style lyric structured around the question “Is there a time…?”, the stand out line was “A time for East 17”. I’m guessing that most of us on first hearing the song did a double take and asked ourselves “Did Bono just sing East 17?”. Now there was an incongruity in the song but I read it as Bono highlighting the contrast between the horrors of war happening under our noses but possibly being more aware of something as trivial as a pop band. I could be wrong of course.
The video we see here is a mixture of clips from Bill Carter’s documentary, the performance of the song at the traditional Pavarotti & Friends concert in Modena, Italy and images of the aforementioned beauty pageant described in the song. A superficial detail given the gravitas of the song is that The Edge performs without his usual headwear leaving it to Bono to uphold that particular tradition.
Another song now that looked like it had a shot at Christmas No 1 at one point and it came from the most unlikely source. Björk had made her name first as part of Icelandic indie band The Sugarcubes before going solo and releasing her eclectic debut album…erm…”Debut” to critical praise and substantial commercial popularity. Follow up album “Post” continued her pursuit of diversity with techno, trip hop, house and ambient dance genres all in the mix. However, the third single released from it, despite the smorgasbord of styles that was the album, still managed to surprise most of us. “It’s Oh So Quiet” – a cover of a 1951 tune originally recorded by American singer and actor Betty Hutton (whom was unknown to the majority of people including Nicky Campbell judging by his “No idea” facial expression in his intro) – was so out there as to almost seem like a novelty. Adding to the bonkers-ness of it all is this performance with the pantomime-esque costumed backing entourage.
None of this stopped it from crossing over into the mainstream causing people who’d never heard of Björk before to not just become aware of her but actively seek out her single to buy. Anyway, whatever it was about the extreme styles in the song – hushed, whispered tones and idiosyncratic little yelps and squeals give way to that huge big band chorus – “It’s Oh So Quiet” would become not just her highest charting and biggest selling single in the UK (it has been certified gold for 400,000 sales) but also her most well known. I wonder if that annoys Björk at all? If not, then maybe this…erm…tribute from Coronation Street actor Vicky Entwhistle from 2001 on StarsInTheirEyes does?
I’m guessing some thought went into the running order of this show as we go from one Nordic act to another with Swedish band Whale following the Icelandic avant-garde artist that is Björk. Yes, it’s a second trip to the TOTP studio for the “Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe” hitmakers which is not bad going for a single that only made No 15 in the charts. For this second performance, singer Cia Berg seems to have donned a platinum blonde wig since we last saw her. Maybe, inspired by Björk, she was channeling her inner Betty Hutton who had the image of what they used to describe I believe as a ‘blonde bombshell’ back in the day. There are other similarities with Björk like the quirky vocals and the over the top props of the band behind her (feather boas and Max Wall style wigs) but whereas her career as a recording artist is still ongoing today (her last album was 2022’s “Fossora”), Whale would be done by the end of the 90s.
The nation is still under the spell of Robson&Jerome whose “I Believe” single is No 1 for a third of four weeks. Doubling down on this inexplicable phenomenon, the British public also bought the duo’s album that was released this week in enough quantities to send that to No 1 as well. As the recently tragically departed Karl Wallinger once sang on the World Party hit “Is It Like Today?”, ‘How did it come to this?’
And so to the main event. As it’s TheBeatles, despite being the play out video, we get nearly three minutes of “Free As A Bird” as opposed to the usual sixty seconds the closing song is quite often allocated. I guess the first thing to say about it is that it’s not very good is it? I wasn’t the only person who thought that; reviews were mixed to say the least. Most of the criticisms seemed to be about the fact that it sounded more like ELO or possibly The Travelling Wilburys than The Beatles but then it was produced by Jeff Lynne so what did people expect?
More of an issue for me was that it was a mechanical plodder devoid of any of the artistry and creativity that was prevalent in the Fab Four’s back catalogue. Based on a demo of a song John Lennon wrote in 1977 and donated to the ‘Anthology’ project by Yoko Ono, I wonder if he would have envisaged the studio recording turning out like this had he lived to see it finished? I understand that there was still a massive appetite amongst the fanbase for any new material but let’s be honest, it just didn’t stand up to any type of comparison. Put it this way, if you were on a blind date and the conversation turned to The Beatles and in answer to the question what’s your favourite song of theirs your date said “I think I’d have to say Free As A Bird”, you’d want to be sure that your tracker on your mobile phone was active, that’s all I’m saying. I think the definitive view on the track though comes from the record buying public. After weeks of press and buzz about the single (it wasn’t even released until the 4th December, eleven days after this TOTP aired), it was widely expected to go straight to No 1. After all, this was a first new single for twenty-five years by the biggest band the world has ever seen, something that perhaps we thought would never happen – how could it not top the charts? And yet it didn’t, entering the chart at No 2 but getting no further, it was unable to shift “Earth Song” by Michael Jackson from the throne. Ironically, Jackson had purchased the publishing rights to The Beatles catalogue ten years before.
As for the video that was made to promote the single, it was directed by Joe Pytka who, in another link to Michael Jackson, had already directed music videos for the King of Pop such as “The Way You Make Me Feel”, “Dirty Diana” and “Heal The World”. The sepia tint gives it a grainy feel which I’m guessing was to tie it into the 60s? Apparently there are over 80 visual references to the band’s songs, lyrics and story inserted into the promo for Beatles fanatics to pore over. I would describe myself as a fan rather than a fanatic so when I saw the car crash scene, I thought it was a reference to Paul McCartney’s RTA in 1966 that was the basis for the whole ‘Paul Is Dead’ conspiracy theory but it actually relates to the lyrics of “A Day In The Life”. That song references the death of John and Paul’s friend Tara Browne who was heir to the Guinness fortune. Maybe putting in a ‘Paul Is Dead’ reference would have poured to much petrol on the fire of that particular rumour? Watching the video back now, it doesn’t have the same impact as it did back in 1995 but it still stands up I think.
A second single called “Real Love” also based on a Lennon home demo and taken from the “Anthology 2” album was released in 1996 peaking at No 4 in the UK before the final ever Beatles single – based on yet another Lennon 70s home demo called “Now And Then” – was released in November 2023 which though making it to No 1, seemed to be less well received even than “Free As A Bird”.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
M People
Itchycoo Park
Nope
2
Bon Jovi
Lie To Me
Nah
3
Blur
The Universal
No but I had The Great Escape album with it on
4
Everything But The Girl
Missing
No but I must have it on something surely?
5
Boyzone
Farther And Son
Never happening
6
Passengers
Miss Sarajevo
No but could /should have
7
Björk
It’s Oh So Quiet
No
8
Whale
Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe
Liked it, didn’t buy it
9
Robson & Jerome
I Believe
As if
10
The Beatles
Free As A Bird
I did not
Disclaimer
I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).
All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.
These mid 90s TOTPs were all over the place musically. I’m looking for some sort of thread that links the acts on this particular show together and apart from an over arching theme of dance music, I can’t really detect one – it’s all a bit…not exactly eclectic but more…well…haphazard. There’s Britpop, soft rock, cover versions, a novelty record…and Mike And The Mechanics. If the running order is unpredictable one thing that is completely, absolutely unequivocally guaranteed is that host Simon ‘Smug’ Mayo will trot out a string of lame lines that he thinks are shit-your-pants funny. What a plank.
1995 really was in the midst of an identity crisis. Look at the opening act – the prince of Eurodance Haddaway had somehow managed to secure himself four consecutive Top 10 hits between 1993 and early 1994 but the wheels had pretty much come off by this point. His second album “The Drive” did nothing in the UK (I’m not sure we even stocked it in Our Price as I don’t know it’s cover art at all) but somehow its lead single “Fly Away” propelled him into our charts one more time despite everybody knowing (including himself surely) that he was living on borrowed time. Being a resourceful lad, he’s decided the best way to extend his shelf life was to do his best 2 Unlimited impression complete with bringing in a female vocalist to accompany him just to hammer home the Ray and Anita comparison. I guess it worked as “Fly Away” made it to No 20 but this track surely didn’t live long in anyone’s memory.
It’s the aforementioned Mike+TheMechanics next with the title track from their latest album “Beggar On A Beach Of Gold” though curiously they’ve added an ‘A’ to the title of the single. “A Beggar On A Beach Of Gold” was the follow up to “Over My Shoulder” which performed well reaching No 12 in the charts. Its successor couldn’t repeat that though peaking at No 33. Was there a reason for this? Well, this track has Paul Young (not that one) on lead vocals whereas “Over My Shoulder” saw Paul Carrack doing the heaving lifting when it came to the singing. Now, wasn’t their biggest hit “The Living Years” also sung by Carrack so is there a pattern emerging here?
*checks Mike + The Mechanics discography*
Hmm. Not really. Paul Young was the vocalist on “Word Of Mouth”, “Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground)” and “All I Need Is A Miracle” which were all UK Top 40 hits. I’m sure OMD went through a small phase in the mid 80s where their singles sung by Paul Humphreys were hits but those that had Andy McCluskey on the microphone didn’t though. The only other band that comes to mind where the vocals were shared is Tears For Fears but they had big hits with songs sung by both Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal. I seem to be looking at a theory that doesn’t hold water so I’ll move on.
The sadly departed Paul Young (still not that one) was also the singer in Sad Café best known for the hits “My Oh My” (not the Slade song!) and “Everyday Hurts” though I have to say that watching Paul here, I’m not reminded of those hits but taken aback by his resemblance to the actor, screenwriter and novelist Mark Gatiss or rather Mark Gatiss as a League Of Gentlemen character. Perhaps Les McQueen of Crème Brulée?
We’re back to the dance music now with another airing of the video for “(Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime) I Need Your Loving” by BabyD. A take on The Korgis’ hit of the same name (almost), it was at its chart peak of No 3 this week so not quite equalling the success of their chart topper “Let Me Be Your Fantasy”. Baby D herself was one Dee Fearon and if that surname sounds familiar then it could be due to this guy…
Yes, Dee is married to Phil Fearon of Galaxy fame. You may recall him having a clutch of jaunty pop hits in the mid 80s. A little known fact is that Phil also had a song with the word ‘fantasy’ in it that also got to the top of a chart – sadly for Phil it was the Best of the Rest chart as his single “Fantasy Real” peaked at that most unfortunate of chart positions No 41 in 1983. Yes, Phil’s fantasy of a No 1 record wasn’t real. He should have asked his wife about how to bag a chart topper. “What Do I Do?” indeed.
As predictable as a controversial VAR decision every weekend, here comes Simon Mayo with some inappropriate reference during his link to the next act. Introducing “Shoot Me With Your Love” by D:Ream, he makes some asinine comment about selling bullets to Iran which I’m assuming was his attempt at being topical as the US imposed oil and trade sanctions on Iran over their sponsorship of terrorism, pursuit of nuclear weapons and hostility to the Israeli – Palestinian peace process in this year. Yeah, nice one Mayo. Nothing was off limits to you was it in your pursuit of a cheap gag. What a prick! And look at what he’s wearing to present a music programme reflecting current trends – a shirt and tie! He was only three months away from his 37th birthday at the time of this broadcast – not exactly down with the kids was he?
As for D:Ream, this was the lead single from their second album “World” and the majority of the online reaction to it after this TOTP repeat aired on BBC4 recently went along the lines of “Bloody Hell! Robbie Williams nicked this tune for ‘Let Me Entertain You’!”. I have to say I concur. The chorus hook of both songs is interchangeable. I didn’t I notice this at the time, probably because:
Robbie’s song wasn’t released until nearly three years after D:Ream’s single
“Shoot Me With Your Love” was hardly that memorable a tune in the first place. Come on, D:Ream are remembered for one song and one song only by the vast majority of people!
Anyway, it did reach No 7 which isn’t to be sniffed at (“Let Me Entertain You” peaked at No 3) whilst parent album “World” also did pretty well with a chart high of No 5 though it sold five times less copies than its predecessor “D:Ream On Vol 1”.
More identity crisis stuff now. A big ballad from a dance act? Maybe it’s more of an anthem than a ballad but even so. Despite being one of MPeople’s best known songs, “Search For The Hero” is not one of the band’s biggest hits. The third single from their “Bizarre Fruit” album, it did stretch their run of consecutive Top 10 hits to eight but I would have thought it peaked much higher than No 9. Not so. Its status might be due to the fact that its profile was raised not once but twice by external factors. Firstly, a year after its release, it was used as the music for a Peugeot 406 car advert and then, on 29 June 1996, M People performed it at a celebratory concert at Old Trafford to mark the final match of the Euro 96 football tournament. Heather Small was so attached to the idea of the song that she basically rewrote it as her first solo single in 2000 and called it “Proud”. Again, it was latched upon for a sporting purpose becoming the official theme for the London 2012 Olympic bid and, of course, was used as a running gag throughout the BBC sit com Miranda.
It wasn’t just Heather Small who liked to recycle though (as she did by taking “Search For The Hero” and turning it into “Proud”). M People’s record label Deconstruction reused the whole “Bizarre Fruit” album by rereleasing it as “Bizarre Fruit II” just a year later with the radio edits of “Search For The Hero” and “Love Rendezvous” replacing the original album versions plus the band’s version of “Itchycoo Park” by Small Faces added to the track listing. Cheeky blighters.
And now, perhaps one of the most pointless cover versions of all time – Amy Grant’s take on Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”. Why? Just…why? Well, to get a hit obviously but sheesh, this is totally without merit. A sanitised, horribly 90s version of a song when the original is so well known? No thanks. Amy doesn’t even do the infamous high/low vocal followed by the cringy laugh at the end. Maybe she thought that was a step too far? Maybe she thought that would be disrespectful to Joni? Maybe she thought she was being respectful by not doing it?
For whatever reason, enough punters bought this to send it to No 20 in the UK singles chart, Amy’s biggest hit since “Baby Baby” made No 2 in 1991. Surely it isn’t possible that people didn’t know the 1970 original? Or maybe they were reminded of it but in the pre-streaming days of 1995, the closest thing to having access to Joni’s song (unless you shelled out for the “Ladies Of The Canyon” album it was on) was to buy the Amy Grant version? Not everything was simpler back in the day I guess.
It’s the kings of the TOTP exclusive next as, for what seems like the umpteenth time, Bon Jovi are here with, yep, another ‘exclusive performance’. This time it’s to promote their new album “These Days” which was released the week after this show aired and which would knock Michael Jackson’s “HIStory” Best Of off the top of the charts. There’s no Niagara Falls or American Football stadium location tonight though as they are in the TOTP studio in person. The song they perform here is the album’s title track and, for what it’s worth, it’s pretty good I think. Now I have been known in the past to not be immune to the guilty pleasure that is the Jovi – I once refused to leave a nightclub in Sunderland until I’d danced to them despite being legless through drink – so I may be a little biased but still, I think the song holds up. More reflective and mature than some of their earlier, bombastic stadium rock.
Jon seems to have grown out that shorter haircut he was sporting for the “Always” single back in the Autumn of 1994 and there’s also a change in the band line up as original bass player Alex John Such has been replaced by Hugh McDonald. This track would eventually be released as the fourth single from the album in February 1996 so we may see it again when the BBC4 repeats get to that point in time.
Simon Mayo has another one of his ludicrous non sequiturs for us next as he states that Bon Jovi had recently picked up two Kerrang! awards and a Kerplunk award. For God’s sake man, please just stop!
Right, on with the music and what’s going on here then? Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer teaming up with EMF to do a cover of “I’m A Believer”? Well, it seems to me that in the case of Vic and Bob, they had a history both with this song (it was performed by Vic on the first ever TV show of Vic Reeves’ BigNightOut) and with teaming up with indie rock bands to do cover versions (they, of course, collaborated with The Wonderstuff to take Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy” to No 1 in 1991). As for EMF, it looks to me like a desperate attempt to restart their career which had exploded with UK No 3 and US No 1 “Unbelievable” in 1990. The success of that single and parent album “Schubert Dip” hadn’t sustained and their latest album “Cha Cha Cha” (released in March 1995) had peaked at No 30 and yielded just one minor hit single. By comparison, Vic and Bob were flying with a second series of TheSmell Of Reeves And Mortimer having just finished airing. It made sense to associate yourself with a successful act when you’re trying to regain your own popularity and if the plan was to bag themselves a massive seller then it was a case of mission accomplished as “I’m A Believer” peaked at No 3. However, this would prove to be a temporary return to glories. One final throw of the dice in the form of the wonderful follow up single “Afro King” failed to make the Top 40. The band split not long after though have reformed at various points down the years and are currently a functioning entity.
I read Bob Mortimer’s autobiography recently and he comes across as a very humble, vulnerable and warm human being. He was actually very shy as a school kid which looks at odds with his exuberant performance here. One last thing, what was the deal with EMF and songs with the word ‘believe’ in them? “Unbelievable”, “I Believe”, “I’m A Believer”…I would liked to have heard them take on Bucks Fizz’s “Land Of Make Believe” – now that really would make for an interesting cover version!
Six weeks now for Robson&Jerome at No 1 with “Unchained Melody”. SIX WEEKS! I never watched SoldierSoldier, the TV series that spawned this duo so I dug out the infamous clip on YouTube. Here it is…
Hmm. I can’t really see why this scene would have ignited a clamour to be able to buy and own a copy of these two actors doing “Unchained Melody” if I’m honest. If only YouTube had been around back then, maybe all those people who bought the record would have been satiated by being able to watch this clip over and over again instead and we wouldn’t have had to endure Robson & Jerome at all!
The play out track is “Daydreamer” by Menswear but they will be in the studio on the next episode of the show so I’ll keep this short. This was the band’s second single release but their first to be made available extensively after debut “I’ll Manage Somehow” was only printed in very limited quantities meaning that it couldn’t sell enough copies to get in the charts. “Daydreamer” therefore became the band’s first Top 40 hit when it peaked at No 14, also its debut entry position.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Haddaway
Fly Away
Never happening
2
Mike + The Mechanics
A Beggar On A Beach Of Gold
Nope
3
Baby D
(Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime) I Need Your Loving
No thanks
4
D:Ream
Shoot Me With Your Love
Nah
5
M People
Search For The Hero
No
6
Amy Grant
Big Yellow Taxi
Negative
7
Bon Jovi
These Days
I did not
8
Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer / EMF
I’m A Believer
I wasn’t – no
9
Robson & Jerome
Unchained Melody
As if
10
Menswear
Daydreamer
And no
Disclaimer
I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).
All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree
OK, we’re moving into a new era of TOTP with this particular edition. It’s taken a whole year but executive producer Ric Blaxill has finally turned his attention to the show’s logo, theme tune, titles and set. The much ridiculed ‘weather vane’ title graphics are gone and replaced by just seven seconds of some golden hued torsos indulging in vaguely musical activities involving a microphone and headphones and finally holding up a plaque with the new logo on it. It’s all very underwhelming. The logo itself was soft launched on the retro archive spin off show TopofthePops2 five months previously and is a much more basic design than its immediate predecessor with the ‘of’ and ‘the’ rather oddly highlighted within a blue box. As for the theme tune – “Red Hot Pop” composed by Erasure’s Vince Clarke – it’s main riff reminds me of something I can quite put my finger on…give me a moment…got it! The intro to “Rasputin” by Boney M! No really! It does! Blaxill hasn’t chucked everything out though. He’s retained the increasingly pointless artist to camera piece at the very top of the show (this week it’s Luther Vandross telling us Stingray like ‘not to go anywhere for the next half hour’) as well as the ‘golden mic’ presenter feature. As it’s a special week, he’s got a big name in to do the honours – it’s Kylie Minogue in a scorching hot, red latex dress! Blimey!
We hardly have time to take that image in before we’re into the first act though who are MPeople with “Open Your Heart”. This would turn out to be the band’s seventh in a run of eight consecutive Top 10 hits and was the second single release from their “Bizarre Fruit” album. Given those numbers, clearly the record buying public hadn’t had enough of the M People formula just yet though they were arguably teetering at the top of the hill named success and about to start coming down the other side.
“Open Your Heart” ticked all the usual boxes – perky backing, uplifting chorus, powerhouse Heather Small vocals, parping sax courtesy of Mike Pickering and yet I don’t remember this one at all which suggests to me that I, at least, was tiring of M People. Their next single release was “Search For The Hero” which would deviate from the template rather and remains one of their most well known tunes. Could it be that even the band themselves had got a little bored with their sound?
Ah, now then. It’s time for that weird period of 90s pop when there were a flurry of hits that were all based around a riff that went ‘nah, ne, ne, nah, ne, ne, ne, nah, ne’. This example comes from MN8 whose debut single “I’ve Got A Little Something For You” went all the way to No 2 and was the first of seven UK chart hits.
Off the top of my head there’s “This Is How We Do It” by Montell Jordan which was a hit in the early Summer of 1995…
Then a year later the abysmal Peter Andre recycled the riff to score a No 1 no less (no really) with “Flava”…
There’s possibly more examples but anyway, back to MN8 who…erm…emanated from Surrey and comprised of KG, G-Man, Kule T and Dee Tails (I’ve no idea what there real names were but I bet they are along the lines of Kevin, Keith, Gordon and Dean). Coming on like Ultimate Kaos’ hormone filled, elder brothers (the six pack exposing strip in this performance was a bit gratuitous lads), this lot briefly threatened to be a big deal. Tour support slots with Boyzone, East 17 and even Janet Jackson only strengthened the notion. However, after their deal with Sony expired, the band concentrated on live shows and then took time out to decide what they wanted to do next. We weren’t talking a few weeks here though – the lads’ sabbatical is now at 25 years and counting. Apparently they did reconvene in 2013 to record an album that remains unreleased.
This inactivity hasn’t affected the band’s ego though. Also in 2013, G-Man declared in an interview on BBC1 Xtra of MN8’s legacy, “How are you going to write a story about the best acts of the past fifteen years and not mention us”. G-Man’s confidence clearly wasn’t matched by his ability to count – at the time of the interview, MN8 hadn’t released any new material for sixteen years. Ah.
Here’s another ‘Na-na-na-nah’ song and it’s a third outing on the show for the video for “Here Comes The Hotstepper” by Ini Kamoze next. Although there is an obvious emphasis on the word ‘Hotstepper’ given its appearance in the song’s title and chorus (it’s patois slang for someone on the run from the police), there’s also the reappearance later in the lyrics of a phrase that I only knew from Kris Kross and their 1992 hit “Jump”. I refer to ‘Mack Daddy’ (or is it ‘Daddy Mack’?). So what did this one mean? Well, apparently it’s another patois term and means ‘a conspicuously successful pimp’! Did Kris Kross’s parents know what they were rapping about?!
In the ocean of mainly sub standard dance tunes that was the UK Top 40 at this time, here’s a life buoy of a tune that I have a particular connection to. Scarlet were Cheryl Parker and Jo Youle who met at Wolfreton school in Hull. Now Hull, of course, is where I have been living for the past twenty years but that’s not the connection I was talking about (obvious though it is). No, it’s that my wife (who is also from Hull)…no, she doesn’t know Cheryl or Jo (that really would be obvious)…no, it’s that my wife had heard of them well before “Independent Love Song” was a hit.
I’m not sure where but she’d heard one of their early singles released on indie label Haven Records “Shine On Me Now” and liked it so much she asked me to try and find out about it/them what with me working in a record shop and all. Clearly my research skills weren’t up to the job as we don’t own that single. However, I did try honest. Look, here’s the note that I made of it in my Filofax (yes, I had one!).
Anyway, three years later, Scarlet were signed to WEA and their second major label single release (the first was “I Really Like The Idea” recorded with third member Joanne Fox who left before success hit) propelled them into the charts. And what a song! It swoops and soars, ebbs and flows and has an epic chorus. It stood out like a firework against the dark night sky to me. It really should have got higher up the charts than No 12. In fact, Scarlet should have had a much bigger career but they only had one more chart hit after “Independent Love Song” – the follow up single “I Wanna Be Free (To Be With Him)” which made it to No 21. They released two albums “Naked” and “Chemistry” – the former made No 59 whilst the latter disappeared without trace. Jo Youle is now chief executive of Missing Persons, a charity that gives support to those searching for lost loved ones whilst Cheryl Parker started SongwritersWorldwide, a website for new acts to find songs.
By the way, I finally found “Shine On Me Now” (if only YouTube had been around back then). A version of it appeared on “Naked” retitled as just “Shine”.
It’s time for Luther Vandross now who, as previously mentioned, did the message to camera piece at the top of the show earlier. He’s here to perform the latest single from his covers project “Songs” which had been a No 1 album and had already given him a Top 3 single courtesy of his duet with Mariah Carey on “Endless Love”. The track chosen as the follow up was “Always And Forever”. Nothing to do with the debut album of last week’s hosts Eternal* but a hit for Heatwave in 1977.
*The Eternal fall out story broke just after I’d published hence why I didn’t comment on it in the post
It’s a bit of a dirge to be fair and Luther’s straight down the middle version doesn’t do anything to alter my opinion. It was written by Rod Temperton who hailed from Cleethorpes (just down the East coast from Hull) who also wrote “Thriller”, “Off The Wall” and “Rock With You” for Michael Jackson! However, for me his masterpiece remains Heatwave’s “Boogie Nights” which has one of the best intros ever…
I’ve been critical in the past of the live by satellite exclusive performances that TOTP promoted going all the way back to the 1991 ‘year zero’ reboot I believe. My main issue with them was that there wasn’t anything very…well…‘exclusive’ about them with the majority being filmed in empty theatres and concert venues (presumably in the middle of the night due to time differences) that could have been from anywhere and were certainly no better than a turn in the TOTP studio. I get that it was a way for the artist to appear on the show if they couldn’t be there in person due to touring or promotional commitments but surely these satellite slots weren’t even as good as an expensively produced video were they?
Well, I can’t accuse this particular satellite performance of being anaemic but I’m not sure it’s entertaining either. It’s just…well, bonkers. Beaming in from Japan, are REM performing “Crushed By Eyeliner” on a stage along with a crowd of extras some of whom are dancing on a podium. Having watched the official promo video, perhaps they are trying to recreate it on stage. Perhaps. But the three stooges in bear costumes?! What the f**k was that about? It all just smacks a bit of “look at us being so zany and subverting the mainstream”; so much so that rather than promote the single, it distracts from it. Still, Blaxill didn’t miss the chance to promote the TOTP brand by emblazoning the new logo on the arse of one of the bears!
“Crushed By Eyeliner” was the third single from the band’s “Monster” album and it was probably the last one of theirs that I took any real notice of. I kind of lost sight of REM after this. Their final two albums of the 90s – “New Adventures In Hi-Fi” and “Up” – passed me by completely. This track is still a winner though and its No 23 peak probably doesn’t do it justice.
“How many of you remember the original?” asks Kylie and the end of this next track. Me Kylie! Me! And it was better than this bastardised version! Back in 1982, Pigbag went all the way to No 3 with “Papa’s Got A Brand New Pigbag”, an instrumental with a genuinely once heard never forgotten brass riff. The success and legacy of the track (its distinctive refrain was even adopted as a football terrace chant especially by QPR fans) meant though that Pigbag became one of those artists where the song became bigger than the band. In fairness, they did their best to make sure that fate didn’t become them when they pushed their post punk anarchist agenda by being escorted out of the TOTP studio after one of the band performed steaming drunk on a live show and swore at a BBC producer after the cameras stopped rolling. Pigbag split in 1983 but their hit refused to go away.
Fast forward to 1995 and here it is again remodelled by Perfecto Allstarz as “Reach Up (Papa’s Got A Brand New Pigbag)”. Whereas Pigbag struggled to be known as a band and not a song, Perfecto Allstarz weren’t a band at all but rather a vehicle for Paul Oakenfold and his Perfecto brand. The trance DJ and record producer would dominate the 90s dance world and work with everyone from Moby to The Rolling Stones via his Perfecto remix team and record label. His remix of U2’s “Even Better Than The Real Thing” was the first time I heard the name Perfecto and a fine remix it was too. “Reach Up” though was awful. The original was a classic that I would argue couldn’t be improved upon and certainly not by adding a strangulated house style vocal imploring us to ‘Reach Up’ to it. And what was with the skeleton costumes? Maybe Blaxill had watched LiveAndLetDie that week and run with the idea…
I feel as if I should make more of a big deal of Celine Dion finally making it to No 1 with “Think Twice” after twelve weeks on the Top 40 including three consecutive at No 2 but seeing as it’s going to be the UK’s chart topper for the six more after this, I can’t really be bothered.
OK, this is new (sort of). Instead of playing out with the No 1 record we’ve got a preview of a new song that wasn’t even released until the Monday following this broadcast. Annie Lennox (or Annie Lenn-ox as Kylie curiously pronounces her surname) had been away from the charts for two years since the runaway success of her debut solo album “Diva” and with no sign of Eurythmics getting back together she moved onto a follow up. Nothing out of the ordinary there except that as her sophomore effort, she chose to record a set of cover versions. Wasn’t that the sort of thing an artist would do to fulfil a contractual obligation with a record company? Whatever reason was behind the decision, Annie chose to cover songs from the likes of Paul Simon, Bob Marley, Neil Young and, in an act of musical heresy, The Clash. Entitled “Medusa”, it received mixed reviews in the music press though just about everyone agreed that the lead single was actually rather good. Given the stellar names of the other artists whose work Annie covered, the choice of taking on obscure 80s act The Lover Speaks was straight out of left field. Or was it? The Lover Speaks were the duo David Freeman and Joseph Hughes who sent a demo tape to Dave Stewart of Eurythmics who signed them to his publishing house. He sent their demo to Chryssie Hynde who sent it to producer Jimmy Iovine who got them signed to A&M. You don’t even need all six steps of separation to draw a line back to Annie.
Now then, back in the Summer of 1986, big things were being predicted for The Lover Speaks. They were being touted as The Walker Brothers of the 80s and their debut single “No More ‘I Love You’s’” was attracting lots of airplay. I think I first heard it on the Gary Davies show on Radio 1 as he seemed to play it everyday and what a glorious thing it was. My friend Robin described it as “a poppy Cocteau Twins” and I think he’s spot on. A shimmering diamond of a song that was full of melody and drama that pulled at your heartstrings every time you heard it (well, mine at least). I was so impressed I bought their album but in truth, a bit like Annie’s “Medusa”, nothing else on it matched its quality. As with many a single that I adored in the 80s though, “No More ‘I Love You’s’” didn’t even make the Top 40 peaking at No 58.
Given all of this, despite Annie’s version not being anything near as good as the original, I was pleased when it became a huge hit peaking at No 2. A song that good deserved to be heard by a wider audience. I’d had similar thoughts back in 1987 when Alison Moyet released a very poor version of “Weak In The Presence Of Beauty”, a wonderful song which was originally released by Floy Joy also in 1986 and which also failed to become the huge hit it deserved to be when it peaked at a lowly No 85. And guess what? It turns out that The Lover Speaks collaborated with Alison on her album “Raindancing” from which “Weak In The Presence Of Beauty” came. Kevin Bacon’s got nothing on The Lover Speaks!
Now, as I recall, there was quite a bit of reaction to Annie’s performance on this TOTP but then I guess that’s what she wanted. I mean, you don’t take to the stage with four drag queen ballerinas by accident do you? Annie herself though is rather out there as well. The extravagant headwear that made her look like Minnie Mouse and the weird performing as if under duress when being buffeted by the ballerinas towards the end? All very strange but at least it made for a memorable appearance.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
M People
Open Your Heart
No
2
MN8
I’ve Got A Little Something For You
As if
3
Ini Kamoze
Here Comes The Hotstepper
No but I think my wife did
4
Scarlet
Independent Love Song
Call the fuzz! Where’s my copy of this gone?!
5
Luther Vandross
Always And Forever
Nope
6
REM
Crushed By Eyeliner
Nah
7
Perfecto Allstarz
Reach Up (Papa’s Got A Brand New Pigbag)
NO!
8
Celine Dion
Think Twice
I did not
9
Annie Lennox
No More ‘I Love You’s’
No but I had The Lover Speaks album with the original on
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
Woah! Hold on a minute! What happened to November?! Yes, we’ve time jumped and missed the shows broadcast on the 3rd and 10th of that month. Why? Well, they feature R.Kelly and Gary Glitter who, given the charges brought against them and subsequent convictions in later years, have been removed from the schedules on the grounds of sensitivity. I’ve checked online archives to see what we missed and can report that they were presented by Kylie Minogue (dammit!) and Bruno Brookes (meh) and featured a fair few hits that we’d already seen so no loss there but also performances by the likes of Terrorvision (“Alice, What’s The Matter”), Eternal (“Oh Baby I”) and The Beautiful South (“One Last Love Song”). I guess we’ll all have our opinions on whether missing these is a shame or a relief.
There was certainly relief in my work life at this time. After spending five months working at the Our Price store in Piccadilly, Manchester where I’d pretty much hated every minute, I’d got a return move back down the road to the Market Street store from where I’d come. I think I’d made it clear to area management that I wasn’t happy a few times and they finally took pity on me and arranged a transfer for me. I can’t remember the exact details of the move in terms of who went where on the managerial merry-go-round but what I do recall is that the Sunday before I started back at Market Street on the Monday morning, me and my wife went to see an Elvis Costello gig at the Manchester Opera House which was a great distraction from my nerves of starting over again at Market Street. Yes, I’d pushed for a move and yes I knew the store as this would be my third time working there but I was moving right up against Christmas and I hadn’t done one there since I was a sales assistant in 1991. I needn’t have worried – it would turn out to be one of the smoothest Christmases I ever worked. However, I would be on my travels again in the new year as the store closed down and was sold.
In more nationwide news, on the Saturday after this TOTP aired, the UK’s first National Lottery draw took place. Years behind other countries who’d had such a scheme in place for years, it seems strange now to imagine that there was a time when the UK didn’t. These days, of course, there all sorts of different draws and games for us to pursue the dream of phenomenal wealth but in 1994, this was a huge deal. As I recall there was a deluge of advertising and promotion for the lottery and it seemed like everyone you knew was going to buy a ticket. It became a national obsession. I remember a work colleague being absolutely convinced that the number 1 would come up and so was definitely going to choose it as one of his six numbers (it didn’t come up). I’m pretty sure my wife and I bought a ticket and like everyone else – except the seven lucky winners who shared a jackpot of just under £6 million – won bugger all.
The fact that most of us are never going to win a substantial amount didn’t stop the notion of the lottery from becoming completely embedded in our culture. Workplace syndicates became commonplace. Certainly at one of the Our Prices that I worked in, someone was always allotted the task of doing the lottery for the whole shop. It was a horrible responsibility; there would always be a somebody who didn’t have the money to chip in their pound so then you were into the issue of whether another person would put in for them and keeping a tally of who had paid and who still owed. The real dilemma though was the idealogical one of what would happen if the syndicate won; should the person who hadn’t put in that week and technically hadn’t bought a ticket share in the spoils? One of my managers used to refer to putting into the lottery syndicate as ‘sanity money’ – what if you were the only member of staff who hadn’t bothered and then the syndicate won big and all gave up working at the shop and you were the only person there on Monday morning? It was a persuasive argument.
That’s quite a lengthy intro and I haven’t even started on the music yet! Tonight’s ‘golden mic’ host is Michelle Gayle who just the other week was performing her hit “Sweetness” on the show. That’s some clever diversifying right there. Opening tonight are MPeople who are still in their imperial phase with new single “Sight For Sore Eyes” being the sixth of eight consecutive Top 10 hits for the group. It was also the lead single from their third album “Bizarre Fruit” which had been released on the Monday before this TOTP aired. In fact, so confident were they in their success continuing that they would re-issue the album with a slight re-jigging of the tracks (their version of “Itchycoo Park by the Small Faces was added) and doubled it up with an extra CD of live versions and remixes, called it “Bizarre Fruit II” and sold it all over again! “Sight For Sore Eyes” was the opening track on both albums though and you can hear why. It’s a strong song even if it sticks to the successful M People template a tad too much – parts of it sound like they’d just rewritten “Moving On Up” – with Heather Small’s powerhouse vocals to the fore. Has there ever been a singer with such a misnomer as Heather who possesses one of the biggest voices around.
Now I wasn’t the only one moving on around this time and like my transfer to Market Street, Suede’s was also born out of a period of unhappiness. After the breakdown of the working relationship between Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler had resulted in the latter’s departure earlier in the year, the band had moved quickly to recruit 17 year old Richard Oakes to help take the band forward. Their sophomore album “Dog Man Star” was released in the October and it’s perhaps no surprise that, given its difficult gestation (aside from the issues within the Anderson/Butler axis, Brett was also deep into a drug habit) that it was a heavy, dark record with themes of tragedy and self loathing. And yet, in amongst the gloom was the song that Brett regards as Suede’s best ever. “The Wild Ones” was the second single taken from the album and really should have been a bigger hit than its No 18 peak. Maybe it just got caught up in the busy pre-Christmas release schedules? An epic ballad recounting the tale of a withering romance, it was at turns dramatic yet not histrionic and full of passion and melody. Brett says he’d been listening to artists like Scott Walker and Jacques Brel at the time of writing it and was named after the Marlon Brando film TheWildOne. Yet for all those stated influences, the very first line of the lyrics is straight out of the Roxy Music songbook:
Again, change one word and it’s the hook from “Suburbia”. I’m not criticising – surely there’s an element of soaking up influences (either consciously or subconsciously) attached to every songwriter but those two lines did leap out at me.
Suede would release just one single in 1995 (a third from “Dog Man Star” called “New Generation”) and then they would retreat and regroup for 18 months before returning in 1996 with the massive selling and much more mainstream album “Trash”.
Ah, it’s another of those dance floor bangers (or something). We started 1994 with a rerelease of a dance track that would shoot to No 1 and we end the year (just about) with another one. “Let Me Be Your Fantasy” by BabyD was originally released in 1992 when it peaked at a lowly No 76. It remained popular in the clubs though and a rerelease saw it catapulted to the top of the charts for two weeks in November 1994. Now, I certainly had no idea about this at the time but my reaction had I known this bit of music trivia would have been the same as it is now that I do know and that is “No f*****g way!”. What am I talking about? The fact that Baby D was formed by Production House Records which itself was set up by one Phil Fearon who, if you know your 80s music, you will remember as fronting Galaxy who had hits with “Dancing Tight”, “What Do I Do”, “Everybody’s Laughing” and “I Can Prove It”. Yeah, that Phil Fearon! I know! Who would have thought the man behind those fairly lame pop hits would be responsible for what is widely regarded as one of biggest dance anthems ever. Indeed, one of the reasons “Let Me Be Your Fantasy” was even rereleased was because a poll of listeners to Kiss FM ranked it as their favourite tune of all time. Baby D herself (as in the vocalist) was Phil Fearon’s wife Dee Galdes-Fearon who had been one of the two women in Galaxy with him. Talk about keeping it in the family!
The track was presumably recorded with one eye on crossing over into the mainstream – that would explain the huge shout-a-long chorus that made it stand out from every other break beat house tune. I can imagine many a clubber hollering it at the top of their voices on the dance floor at the time (though not myself of course). One person who did give a rousing rendition of said chorus was a guy called Al who was the housemate of my friend Robin. They lived together for a while in Ruislip Manor in the London Borough of Hillingdon, West London. It’s towards the end of the Metropolitan line, zone 6 – miles from central London and a bugger to get back to from basically anywhere. One night, Al had been out on the lash and had managed to find his way home in the early hours of the morning. He crashed in through the front door waking Robin up in the process who came to the top of the stairs to see what was going on. The sight that met his eyes was Al, off his tits, shouting “Let Me Be Your Fantasy” before passing out and collapsing onto the hall floor. I think Robin’s comment was “Good work, sir” and indeed, it was a fine effort by Al, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Baby D will be at No 1 soon enough and for two weeks but, even with just a short amount of time to go until Christmas, it was never going to hold on to claim the position of festive chart topper.
Just as “The Wild Ones” is Brett Anderson’s favourite Suede song then “End Of A Century” has a shot at being one of my favourite tracks by Blur. I think they were really getting into their stride with this one. More melodic and subtle than the brashness of the in-yer-face “Parklife”, it was the fourth and final single from that album. Damon Albarn is on record as saying it was the wrong choice of track for a single and they should have opted for “This Is A Low” instead. However, as much as I like that song (and it is superior in nearly every way), in terms of radio play, I think “End Of A Century” is much more suited as a single. Just my opinion.
I think I was won over with this one from the opening two lines:
She says, “There’s ants in the carpet” The dirty little monsters, eating all the morsels, just pickin’ up the rubbish
Excellent stuff. As far as I can work out, the rest of the song seems to be about how a relationship can fall into a malaise when routine and the mundane are allowed to dominate and that even an event like the then forthcoming new millennium won’t make any difference just because said relationship is now in a new century. I think.
I’m guessing the brass player dressed as a pearly king was a tongue in cheek addition by the band, playing up to their Britishness which the album (and its success) was perceived to be based upon. I think The Jam may have beaten them to it by a few years though:
Never mind that Four Weddings And A Funeral was the top grossing film in the UK in 1994, surely one of the most significant of the year (Schindler’sList aside) was PulpFiction. Quentin Tarantino’s highly stylised crime story set new standards for the use of the phrase ‘cultural phenomenon’. Its lines of dialogue have passed into common vernacular and its disruption of the convention of narrative showed that storytelling doesn’t have to be linear (it surely influenced the Christopher Nolan directed Memento from 2000).
Then there was its soundtrack which would go three times platinum in the UK. Breaking with tradition, the film didn’t have a conventional score but instead featured songs from genres such as rock ‘n’ roll, surf music, pop and soul. One of those tracks was a cover of Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon” by American alternative rockers Urge Overkill. Formed in Chicago in 1986, their contribution to Tarantino’s soundtrack was surely their defining moment. Did I know this was originally by Neil Diamond at the time? No but it sounded so familiar even after just the first listen that I was pretty sure it wasn’t an original composition. To appreciate Urge Overkill’s version though, I think you need to listen to Neil Diamond’s. Now, they’re not a million miles apart but there’s something eerie and haunting about Urge Overkill’s interpretation that’s actually quite affecting. However, despite this TOTP appearance, they never got any higher than this week’s peak of No 37.
Looking at their Wikipedia entry, their roll call of band members is quite astonishing; not just because of how many names there are on it but also the nature of said names. Admittedly, some look like nicknames but check out some of these nomenclatures:
Nash Kato
Nils St. Cyr
Chris Frantisak
Grumpy “Crabnar”
Carnitas
Watt
Jack ‘The Jaguar’
Kriss Bataille
Onassis Rowan
Chuck Treece
Burf ‘Sandbag’ Agnew (my favourite)
However, watching this performance, if the lead singer had shown his hippy hair to be a wig and revealed himself as Christopher Walken, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
As we near Christmas (in 1994), there’s the inevitable glut of Best Of / Greatest Hits albums being released. Look at this list of artists that had such a product out around this time:
INXS
Bon Jovi
Chris Rea
Sade
Aerosmith
Sting
The Beautiful South
You can add to that NewOrder whose Best Of album was perhaps the most obvious of the year. Why? Well, they’d only recorded one album for new label London Records (1993’s “Republic”) and yet there were already stories emanating from within the band’s camp that relations were faltering and that there was no sign of them recording together again any time soon. Given that, it’s understandable that London wanted to do something with their new charges back catalogue and so a compilation album was always likely. However, there already was such an album in existence. 1987 had seen the band release their retrospective “Substance”, spearheaded by a new track called “True Faith”. Both the album and single were big successes with the former going platinum and the latter becoming their then highest charting single at No 4. I don’t suppose that was going to dissuade London from maximising profit on their act though and so a second Best Of was released four days after this TOTP aired.
Curiously titled “(the best of)” – no brackets, no points- and with the band’s name styled as NewOrder (all one word), its chart peak of No 4 showed there was still lots of appetite for the band out there. Like “Substance”, it was promoted by “True Faith” (albeit a remix officially titled “True Faith -94”). Unlike “Substance”, its track listing had some omissions. Where was “Temptation” and “Confusion” and why had they gone with the 1988 remix of “Blue Monday” instead of the original? I’m guessing it was the band’s decision rather than the label’s as, owing to never having signed a formal contract with Factory Records, they owned the rights to their songs and not Factory so when the latter went bankrupt nothing really changed copyright wise? Oh, I don’t know I’m not a music industry lawyer. What I do know is that the ‘94 version of “True Faith” peaked at No 9, that I can’t really tell the difference between that and its 1987 counterpart and that the accompanying video still looked great seven years on. The following year, a collection of remixes was released called “The Rest Of New Order” that did include versions of “Temptation” and “Confusion” and that was pretty much it from the band until the new millennium dawned.
Here’s a first view of an artist that I must admit a fondness for and although she has sold 50 million albums worldwide, won nine Grammys and was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame just this year, I’m never quite sure that she gets the credit she deserves. I suppose she must be respected by the industry given the final accolade on that list.
I’m talking about Sheryl Crow who is really the musical equivalent of Jamie Vardy in that success came to her at a relatively late age in the same way that Vardy’s elite football career did (he didn’t play in the Premier League until he was 27). Crow was even older at 32 when this single – “All I Wanna Do” was a hit. She’d been at it for years before this breakthrough though. She’d sang on commercial jingles for McDonalds and then toured as a backing vocalist for Michael Jackson no less on his Bad tour as well as recording backing vocals for Stevie Wonder, Barbara Carlisle and Don Henley. An aborted attempt at laying down her debut album meant that she returned to the drawing board before joining a songwriting collective who would help write songs for her actual debut LP “Tuesday Night Music Club”.
“All I Wanna Do” was the fourth single released from the album but the first to break through on any meaningful level in both the UK and US. In the former it would peak at No 4 which in the pre-Xmas rush was quite the achievement for a new artist whilst it stayed at No 2 for six weeks in the latter. You can hear why I think. A rambling yet joyous tune with a hopeful message and a killer hook in the chorus well delivered by Sheryl. It was, rather lazily, compared to “Stuck In The Middle With You” by Stealers Wheel but that does make a rather nice link with an earlier act on tonight’s show as that 1973 hit featured heavily in the Quentin Tarantino film ReservoirDogs.
As I recall, “All I Wanna Do” attracted masses of airplay but despite its success, subsequent singles failed to scale its heights and it wasn’t until “If It Makes You Happy” and “Everyday Is A Winding Road” from her eponymous sophomore album that she would become a chart regular on these shores. As for this performance, Sheryl sells the song well and I like the fact that a fake bar has been set up to reflect some of its lyrics. A good effort all round.
From one solo female artist in the first flush of success to one who had been a household name since 1978. However, Kate Bush’s run of chart hits was coming to an end and it would take an American sci-fi drama series to reverse that trend in spectacular style 28 years on. Back in 1994 though, “And So Is Love” was, rather surprisingly, released as the fourth single from an album that had already been out for a year. Rather unsurprisingly then, it would peak at a lowly No 26 and would be Kate’s last single release for 11 years.
Apparently the guitar parts on “And So Is Love” were played by Eric Clapton (who dated Sheryl Crow for a while in the 90s) but it puts me in mind more of “Brothers In Arms” by Dire Straits. In truth though, the song is hardly there at all – it’s all trademark Bush breathy vocals and has an ethereal feel to it but it just sort of exists without really doing anything or going anywhere. I’m kind of surprised that it warranted an appearance on the show but I guess head producer Ric Blaxill was trying to restore the reputation of TOTP with huge, grandstanding gestures of having massive names appear and Kate Bush certainly fell into that category. As Michelle Gayle pointed out in her intro, it was Kate’s first time in the TOTP studio for nine years and would turn out to be her last. She would release two albums of new material since the turn of the Millennium and also a “Director’s Cut” album of remixes of tracks from “The Sensual World” and “The Red Shoes” projects before that rejuvenation of “Running Up That Hill (Deal With God)”. Who saw that coming? I suppose StrangerThings have happened.
Despite the two missed shows, Pato Banton is still No 1 with “Baby Come Back” though this would be its final week at the top. It’s the video again – did Pato ever get to perform his hit in the TOTP studio? I know he was there one week but he only got briefly interviewed by the presenter and gave the rather weak excuse that Ali and Robin Campbell of UB40 weren’t available and so he couldn’t do the song without them. Ah well.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
M People
Sight For Sore Eyes
No
2
Suede
The Wild Ones
Liked it, didn’t buy it
3
Baby D
Let Me Be Your Fantasy
Nope
4
Blur
End Of A Century
Not the single but I had the album
5
Urge Overkill
Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon
No but I had the Pulp Fiction soundtrack
6
New Order
True Faith – 94
No, nor the Best Of album but I had the Substance compilation
7
Sheryl Crow
All I Wanna Do
No but my wife did
8
Kate Bush
And So Is Love
No but my wife had The Red Shoes album it came from
9
Pato Banton
Baby Come Back
Nah
Disclaimer
I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).
All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree
Welcome to TOTP Rewind where I, a man now in his mid-50s, have spent the last six years reviewing every BBC4 repeat of the fondly remembered music show. Why have I done/continue to do this? It’s a question I have repeatedly asked myself especially when they start to back up and I find myself in catch up mode as I am now. Well, I’m a nostalgic person and hiding away from present day concerns with a trip down memory lane seems quite appealing right now. Mark Goodier is our host for tonight’s show so let’s do it…
We start with a belting tune from PrimalScream. After the critical, commercial and chemical highs of the groundbreaking, inaugural Mercury Music Prize winning “Screamadelica” album, the band went in a different direction for the follow up “Give Out But Don’t Give Up”. Rejecting the acid house beats that informed its predecessor, they embraced a retro, rock ‘n’ blues sound that was no more evident than on lead single “Rocks”. The very definition of a stomper, I liked the kitchen sink approach to it in that they threw everything but it into the mix. It kicks off with a purposeful opening drum beat before being joined by that muscular guitar that elicits a searing, slide of the fretboard and then it really gets going. A T-Rex style riff hammers out the song’s template before Bobby Gillespie delivers the those opening eight lines:
Dealers keep dealin’, thieves keep thievin’ Whores keep whorin’, junkies keep scorin’ Trade is on the meat rack, strip joints full of hunchbacks Bitches keep a bitchin’, clap just keeps itchin’
How did they get past the BBC censor?! I don’t think there’s ever been a sanitised radio edit of the song has there? Apparently, Theresa May walked off stage to “Rocks” following her speech at the Tory Party conference in 2011. For a woman who is on record as stating that the naughtiest thing she had evet done was to run through fields of wheat as a child, it does seem an unlikely song choice. However, if you factor in that she was Home Secretary at the time, the fact that she chose a song that includes lyrics like “dealers keep dealing”, “thieves keep thieving” and “junkies keep scoring” hardly speaks well of her ability to keep law and order.
Reaction to this ‘new’ Primal Scream sound was mixed. Some (like me) loved it while others found it too derivative and accused the band of just doing their best Rolling Stones impression. I think retailers expected “Rocks” to do big things sales wise though. I recall that we had a big scale out of the single from Head Office at the Our Price I was working in at the time but although it performed well initially leading the band to achieving their second highest chart peak ever of No 7, it fell away quickly. Maybe the release of the album just three weeks later had something to do with it.
The original recordings of the album were made in Memphis using the legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm section but were rejected by Creation boss Alan McGee. Said recordings eventually surfaced in 2018 and an entertaining documentary about the rediscovery of them was aired on the BBC. There wouldn’t be another Primal Scream album for three years when “Vanishing Point” appeared which was the first album to feature ex-Stone Roses bassist Mani who had joined the band in 1996. I was working in the Stockport Our Price by then with original Roses bassist Pete as my manager. I distinctly remember Mani coming into the shop one day to have a catch up with Pete but also to buy up all the Primal Scream albums we had so he could learn the bass parts.
The performance here with Denise Johnson on vocals alongside Bobby Gillespie is just glorious. Sadly, the band have seen much tragedy in recent years with three members dying fairly close to each other starting with Robert ‘Throb’ Young in 2014, then the aforementioned Denise Johnson in 2020 and finally Martin Duffy just last year.
Now, what links MPeople with Primal Scream? Apart from being on the same TOTP together and both having recordings with very similar titles (“called “Movin’ On Up” and “Moving On Up”) obviously. Well, they both have had a song used to soundtrack a speech at a Tory Party conference. Yes, just as Theresa May used “Rocks” in 2011, the six-week Prime Minister Liz Truss used the aforementioned “Moving On Up” in 2022. There’s more similarities though. Both artists were extremely pissed off that their material had been used by a political party they were adamantly opposed to and both songs used included lyrics that were totally unsuited to the purpose for which the song was chosen in the first place. Given her precarious position as Prime Minister, did nobody in her inner sanctum listen to these lyrics?
You’ve done me wrong, your time is up You took a sip from the devil’s cup You broke my heart, there’s no way back Move right out of here, baby, go on pack your bags
Just who do you think you are? Stop actin’ like some kind of star Just who do you think you are?
FFS! Anyway, M People are on the show to perform “Renaissance” not “Moving On Up” which was their fifth Top 10 hit in just over a year. Quite the achievement. This was the fourth and final single released from the “Elegant Slumming” album and was a track that many had expected for a while to be given such a release seeing as it had been used as the title song to early reality TV show TheLivingSoap. It would also provide the title for the band’s 11 disc 2020 retrospective box set.
There’s a little teaser trailer before the next artist as we cross to New York for a roof top chat with Bon Jovi who are on the show later doing an exclusive live by satellite performance. Presumably new producer Ric Blaxill wanted to make more of this slot by working in a bit of extra mileage with it courtesy of this little clip which actually gets Jon Bon Jovi to introduce the next song. It’s quite a neat trick and works quite well in the safe hands of the unflappable frontman.
Said next artist is Janet Jackson and like her music or not (and I don’t especially), you have to admit she’s prolific. Her discography tells me she has released 70 singles during her career and this one – “Because Of Love” – was the 10th of the 90s already. The fourth of six singles released in the UK from her “Janet” album, it was the follow up to the surprisingly robust Christmas No 6 hit “Again”. In a ever more familiar trend for singles in general, it would get no further than its entry week high of No 19 (see also Primal Scream’s “Rocks”). By the end of the decade, singles would be in one week and out the next on a regular basis due to record company pricing strategies with heavily discounted prices in week one.
It’s not one of Janet’s more memorable tunes despite the “shoop, shoop, doop, doop” hook she sings. Apparently, it was her first single since “The Pleasure Principle” in 1987 to miss the Top 5 in the US and is regarded as one of the last New Jack Swing records to make the charts.
From “Doop Doop” courtesy of Janet Jackson to “Doop” courtesy of…well…Doop. This Charleston based dance track was the highest new entry of the week straight in at No 3 on its way to the top of the charts. So what the Hell was all this all about? Well, they were a Dutch production duo who hit upon the ludicrous idea of added a house beat to a big band sample and turned it into a European dance craze. Supposedly this was always going to be a huge hit due to the buzz created in the clubs for this record but nowhere was it a bigger hit than in the UK. Yay, well done us!
As there’s no lyrics in this apart from the occasional “doop”, it’s left to a load of dancers obviously dressed in 1920s style dresses and headgear to deliver some sort of performance. If it wasn’t from the obligatory two male DJ nerds lurking around at the back of the stage (one looking like Rick Wakeman), this could be a dance routine by Pan’s People. I know Ric Blaxill had brought back some of the Radio 1 DJs from the 80s as hosts of the show but this was ridiculous!
Doop would become only the third ever Dutch act to have a UK No 1 after Pussycat with “Mississippi” and “No Limit” by 2 Unlimited. In a bizarre twist of fate, it would become the first instrumental chart topper since “Eye Level” by the Simon Park Orchestra in 1973 which was the theme tune for Van der Valk about a Dutch detective. And that reference just might be more oblique than the angle from which Marco Van Basten scored his wonder goal for Holland in the 1988 European Championships.
A largely forgotten hit next though a pretty good song. Just two short years after Shakespear’s Sister took “Stay” to No 1 for six weeks, Marcella Detroit and Siobhan Fahey’s working relationship had been dissolved and the former was striking out on her own with a solo album. Wikipedia tells me that it wasn’t her debut though as that came in 1982 after a protracted gestation period but failed to sell in any territory. Marcella looks pretty different on the cover with an 80s perm and highlights. Her transformation into a Louise Brooks coiffured model type is almost as huge a change as that of Alanis Morrisette who made a similar image change from her early incarnations to her commercial peak.
So, 12 years and one pop duo later came her sophomore album “Jewel” which got mixed press reviews but which sold reasonably well going to No 15 in the charts. The lead single was “I Believe” which also sold steadily rising to No 11. Its a very accomplished, nicely produced song which makes the most of Marcella’s dynamic yet pure vocals. It probably should have been a bigger hit.
The performance here employs a very basic black and white to colour change just at the moment where the song really blooms at the chorus. I wonder if whoever came up with that were really pleased with themselves? To be fair, I was when, as a student at Sunderland Polytechnic, our group came up with the same wheeze when producing a video as part of a module. Our plot revolved around a bored student falling asleep in a tedious lecture and daydreaming about being pushed into a swimming pool at which point he wakes up. We called it WetDream (genius!) and had the lecture part in black and white and the dream sequence in colour (also genius!). I really must find it out and get it online one day.
Anyway, back to Marcella (or Marcy as host Mark Goodier calls her). We (my wife and some friends) were supposed to go and see her live at the Academy in Manchester but she called off the gig at the last minute. We all went out drinking at a pub called Briton’s Protection instead. My friend Robin was delighted as he hadn’t wanted to go to see Marcella in the first place and the pub had his favourite ale (Jennings) on tap. Fast forward 25 years and Marcella and Siobhan would work out their differences and reunite for a tour and EP of new material. I never did see Marcella live but Robin continues to enjoy a nice pint of Jennings to this day.
Some Breakers now starting with TheBeautifulSouth and their new single “Good As Gold (Stupid As Mud)”. I seem to remember many people believing the title to be “Carry On Regardless” due to the phrase featuring heavily in the lyrics and also possibly because of the Carry On film of the same name. The band hadn’t released anything in 1993 so this was a taster from new album “Miaow”. It was still cast from the same mould as some of their earlier material with catchy melodies and socially observant lyrics to the fore but there had been one big change since we last saw/heard them. Vocalist Briana Corrigan had left the band with rumours abound that she was less than impressed by some of Paul Heaton’s lyrics including on the single “36D” which criticised the glamour industry by making targets out of the models. Briana was replaced by Jacqui Abbott who would stay with the band for four albums before leaving and then rekindling her creative relationship with Heaton in 2014.
Sales of the album would not halt the decline that third album “0898” had suffered from after predecessors “Welcome To The Beautiful South” and “Choke” had both gone platinum but by the end of 1994 they would have the Christmas No 1 album and the second best selling record of the whole year in their first Best Of album “Carry On Up The Charts” (Heaton was clearly a bit of a fan of the Carry On franchise). For the second time in the band’s history, the artwork for the album’s cover got them into hot water. After thejr debut received a ban from Woolworths for originally featuring a woman with a gun in her mouth, “Miaow” had to undergo a change of image as well when HMV objected to the picture of a crowd of dogs seated in a music hall with a gramophone on stage as it impinged in their legendary logo.
“Good As Gold (Stupid As Mud)” remains one of the Beautiful South’s most well known songs I think despite it only making it to No 23 in the charts. The follow up would be the second song made famous by Harry Nilsson to return to the charts this year after Mariah Carey’s take on “Without You” when the band released a cover of “Everybody’s Talkin’”.
Hell’s teeth it’s Therapy? again! “Trigger Inside” was these Irish rockers fifth Top 40 hit in the past year and second of 1994 already! Talking of teeth, the band seemed to have a bit of a dental obsession. Having already released a single called “Teethgrinder” with a particularly graphic front cover, this one starts with the lyric
Here comes a girl with perfect teeth I bet she won’t be smiling at me
The very next line name checks serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer which TOTP wisely avoids showing in this short clip. This track seems to be at the heavier end of the rock scale and not especially radio friendly (and that’s before considering the Jeffrey Dahmer reference) but the band’s fanbase was by now large enough to guarantee them a chart placing. “Trigger Inside” was at its No 22 peak despite it being its first week on the charts.
Apart from one solitary entry at No 40, Alison Moyet hadn’t had a UK chart hit since her cover of “Love Letters” made No 4 in 1987. That outcome would have seemed unlikely back then. After all, she’s had two massive hits from her album of that year “Raindancing” in “Is This Love?” and “Weak In The Presence Of Beauty”. However, a delay of four years until her next album “Hoodoo” had seen her lose her place amongst pop’s big hitters and the album sold respectably but significantly less numbers than its predecessors.
Commercial success wasn’t what mattered to Alison though who fought her record company Sony for artistic control of her work which led to a confrontation over the release of her next album “Essex”. Sony refused to release it unless tracks were re-recorded and re-produced to make a more radio friendly pop album that stood a better chance of success. The result of this stand off was “Whispering Your Name”, a 1983 song written by Jules Shear but originally recorded by Ignatius Jones, leader of shock rock band Jimmy and the Boys. In an act of compromise, Alison committed to two versions of the song; an acoustic “MacArthur Park”* style ballad that appeared on the album and the danced up version that was released as a single.
*The Richard Harris version, not Donna Summer’s
The former is clearly the better version to my ears with the latter sounding like something Dusty Springfield might have recorded as a B-side during her Pet Shop Boys collaboration era. Mind you, even that version is a million times better than the Ignatius Jones take which is an abomination:
Mark Goodier makes a big deal in his intro of the fact that Dawn French appears in the video for “Whispering Your Name” just as she’d done seven years prior for the “Love Letters” promo. Now don’t get me wrong, I like Dawn French (we even had a French And Saunders VHS on our wedding present list!) but I don’t think her ‘zany’ antics added anything to the video at all. Maybe I felt differently back then but viewed in 2023 it all seems a bit tired. The single would make No 18 perhaps validating Sony’s strategy but it would be Alison’s last ever chart entry as a solo artist.
CarterTheUnstoppableSexMachine’s time as chart dwelling pop stars was entering the final bend come 1994 – in short, it turned out that they could be stopped after all. After the unlikely gold selling albums that were “30 Something” and “1992 – The Love Album” (a chart topper no less), subsequent releases suffered from a dose of diminishing returns. Not that they were suddenly outside of the charts being refused entry but the numbers were in decline. This single “Glam Rock Cops” and its predecessor “Lenny And Terence” were their lowest peaking singles (Nos 24 and 40 respectively) since their first ever chart hit, the 1991 reissue of “Sheriff Fatman”. The quality of their material was still there though. “Glam Rock Cops” is a great song and the performance of it here shows how comfortable Jimbob and Fruitbat had become by this stage with the whole idea of being pop stars. As ever, the lyrics are clever and intriguing though were they influenced by The Jam’s “Going Underground” with the line “The public gets the music that no public could deserve”?
We rejoin Bon Jovi now who have come in off that roof in New York and are performing on, yes you guessed it, yet another nondescript stage that could just as easily have been located round the corner from the TOTP studio as where it actually was, 3,500 miles due West. Really? I thought new producer Ric Blaxill was trying to get away from all that and have artists performing against landmark backdrops.
Anyway, the single the band are plugging is “Dry County” which was the sixth and final single to be released from their “Keep The Faith” album. Remember, this was an album that had been released on 3rd November 1992 and this TOTP aired on 10 March 1994 – that’s 16 months later! This was almost Michael Jackson-esque! As well as the length of time between album and single releases there was also a small (or large as it happens) matter of the length of time of the track itself. Apparently, this is Bon Jovi’s longest song clocking in at 9:52. It was edited down to 6:00 for single release. The band and or their record company clearly had plenty of confidence in the track’s potential for success. Hey! They must have ‘kept the faith’ in it (I’ll get me coat). Or maybe it was just their “Bohemian Rhapsody” moment.
The title referred to a county that prohibits alcohol but here it also acts as a metaphor for the decline of the US oil industry with the song describing the effects of such on the inhabitants of towns whose economies were reliant on the resource. It’s a bit of a retread of Tommy and Gina’s struggles in “Livin’ On A Prayer” or, indeed, most of Bruce Springsteen’s back catalogue. “Dry County” managed a very respectable peak of No 9 in the UK. They would end the year with the 21 million selling Best Of album “Crossroads” which was also the UK’s best selling album of 1994.
Oh and one last thing. The BBC censors were asleep at the wheel again as for the second time on tonight’s show we get the use of the word ‘whore’ in a song’s lyrics:
Man spends his whole life waiting, praying for some big reward But it seems sometimes the payoff leaves you feeling like A dirty whore
It’s a fourth and final week at the top for Mariah Carey and “Without You”. As successful as Mariah’s version of the song was, she isn’t the only artist to have taken on this monster pop song. The list of those who have tackled it includes Air Supply, Shirley Bassey, Petula Clark, Glen Campbell, Elaine Paige, Rose Marie…wait. Rose Marie? I know a story about her and it involves my time at Sunderland Polytechnic again. My friend Robin (he with the passion for Jennings ale) had a friend named Cess (short for Cesspit) come to visit him in Sunderland. Unfortunately for Cess, Robin was out when he arrived at his gaff and so, in an era before mobile phones, he had some time to kill. Looking for something to do, Cess wandered into Sunderland town centre and noticed that there was a matinee gig going on at the Empire Theatre. “That’ll do” thought Cess and in he went. The gig was by Rose Marie – the Irish Bette Midler as some named her – and the audience was mainly made up of elderly ladies having a nice afternoon out. I should have pointed out that Cess was a bit of a punk back then and at the time was sporting a pink Mohican hairstyle so I’m not entirely sure the rest of the audience were really his people but apparently he spent a great afternoon singing along with Rose Marie and her fans.
The play out song is “Rock My Heart” by Haddaway. Hadn’t we all had enough of this bloke by this point? This was the fourth and final hit from his debut album and, just like the preceding three, went Top 10. After doing a ballad for his last single, he’d cranked up the beats again for this high tempo Eurodance number which was not a million miles away from his biggest hit “What Is Love”. I wasn’t going to any of the clubs that might have played this sort of stuff back then (indie night at Fifth Avenue in Manchester was more my scene) so maybe I wasn’t its target audience but why was this guy so successful? Really though, why?
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Primal Scream
Rocks / Funky Jam
No but I bought the album
2
M People
Renaissance
No but my wife had the album
3
Janet Jackson
Because Of Love
No
4
Doop
Doop
Of course not
5
Marcella Detroit
I Believe
Liked it, didn’t buy it
6
The Beautiful South
Good As Gold (Stupid As Mud)
No but I have that Best Of album it on
7
Therapy?
Trigger Inside
Negative
8
Alison Moyet
Whispering Your Name
Nah
9
Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine
Glam Rock Cops
See 5 above
10
Bon Jovi
Dry County
No but I had a promo copy of the album
11
Mariah Carey
Without You
Nope
12
D:Ream
U R The Best Thing
And no
Disclaimer
I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).
All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.
We’re into December 1993 here at TOTP Rewind and the charts are starting to shape up for the race for Christmas No 1 with many a new release jostling for position on the starting grid as it were. Of the ten songs featured in this show, only two of them have been on previously. Amongst them are two future chart toppers including the festive one but we start by addressing this whole 3D thing. I can’t say I’m any sort of expert on 3D technology but I’m guessing that back in 1993 it probably seemed quite revolutionary. However, according to Wikipedia, the first stereoscope that tricked the brain into combining two separate images to produce 3D perception was developed in 1838! Fast forward 150 odd years and Panasonic introduced the first TV with 3D capability in 1981. Twenty years on from that and 3D screenings of films gained in popularity peaking with the release of Avatar in 2009. In the wake of that film, there was a short period of demand for 3D TVs but sales plateaued quickly and production of them had. all but stopped by 2016. OK, so given all the above, I’m sticking with my original summation that this was probably quite the event in 1993*.
*Apparently, this TOTP was part of the BBC’s 3DTV week (so an event indeed) which included this notorious piece of TV history…
So how did TOTP incorporate 3D into the show? Well, they kind of fudged it. The whole show wasn’t in 3D but there were some sections that lent themselves to some experimentation. The ‘weather vane’ opening titles were accentuated by adding some 3D graphics to them of the glasses that were required to appreciate the effects (proceeds from the sales of the glasses went to Children In Need). Then host Tony Dortie’s links were an obvious opportunity to add some 3D-ness so instead of the usual backdrop of the studio audience he had the show logo in 3D behind him. The show’s producers also hijacked the official promo videos for the Breakers section and showed some specifically put together films instead that highlighted the 3D technology in its best light. This resulted in the most inappropriate visual backing you’re ever likely to see for “YMCA” by The Village People. They do the same thing for the whole of U2’s “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” video before climaxing with the pièce de résistance of the studio performance by Take That but more of that later. On with the actual music…
We begin with a song that I knew from its recording by another artist but not the actual original. “Don’t Look Any Further” was originally released by ex-frontman of The Temptations Dennis Edwards in 1984 on the Motown label but failed to chart. Four years later, The Kane Gang released their version of the song. You remember The Kane Gang surely? They had a couple of hits in 1984 with “Closest Thing To Heaven”and “Respect Yourself” and their song “Smalltown Creed” was the inspiration behind the ‘Ooh Gary Davies’ jingle for the Radio 1 DJ. After that they rather drifted away despite a second album which included the glorious “Motortown” single and “Don’t Look Any Further”. Sadly, neither of these great tracks could revive their commercial fortunes peaking at Nos 45 and 52 respectively.
Five years on and the song was rejuvenated by the dance act of 1993 MPeople who were on a roll having already racked up three Top 10 singles during the year including No 2 hit “Moving On Up”. They do a pretty good job of the track with the vocals shared between Heather Small and Mark Bell which I’m guessing didn’t happen too often. To my mind though, I would have thought that the track “Renaissance” would have been a better choice of single given that it already had a public profile from its use as the soundtrack the BBC student documentary TheLivingSoap which aired this year. That oversight was corrected early the following year when it became the fourth and final single released from “Elegant Slumming”.
It’s that U2 video for “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” now or rather it isn’t as it’s been sacrificed for a promo film put together to highlight the 3D sheen that it’s been lacquered with. It seems to be a load of unrelated images of people doing everyday things like sitting in cafes, buying flowers at a market in European city settings like Paris, Amsterdam and Venice. A carnival (?) full of costumed and bemasked participants comes in towards the end. I wonder if the show’s producers had to have a difficult conversation with U2’s management to get approval for showing this instead of the official video that they’d have paid money to make?
Next a song that always reminds me of Christmas 1993. I’ve not been complimentary about Björk in the past but I’ve amended my opinion over time from she can’t sing to she can sing but I just don’t like her voice but I’ll have to modify it again. I have actually enjoyed re-hearing her singles “Venus As A Boy” and “Play Dead” on these TOTP repeats and this one, “Big Time Sensuality”, is the best of the lot. From its brooding, slowly building intro, it moves through the gears of its electronic beats to a pulsating and sustained rhythm that somehow manages to upstage even Björk’s idiosyncratic vocals. It’s a banger and no mistake.
The live by satellite performance here from Rennes means we don’t get to see the actual infamous video with Björk filmed hamming it up on the back of a truck while it moves slowly through the streets of New York City.
Did its black and white filming and use of fast motion special effects influence the promo for The Prodigy’s “Firestarter”? Maybe but it was definitely sent up by those masters of parody French and Saunders though…
And it’s finally arrived. The moment in pop music history when the UK officially lost its collective mind and deemed it necessary to rush out and buy 600,000 copies of a record perceived by many a poll as the worst of all time. The MrBlobby phenomenon is hard to explain. Initially a recurring character from BBC light entertainment programme Noel’sHouse Party, he became enshrined in British popular culture and somehow still retains a presence to this day. His original premise was as a tool in the GotchaOscars segment of the show, a kind of Candid Camera for the 90s where celebrities were duped into performing humiliating activities. Under the impression that Mr Blobby was a genuine Children’s TV character, they were then left to look on in bewilderment as this pink and yellow spotted costumed figure with a permanent grin proceeded to trash everything in its path and immediate vicinity. Somehow, this walking catastrophe managed to capture the nation’s hearts and his fame transcended his initial purpose. He would crop up on other TV shows including Lovejoy and Keeping Up Appearances and was a regular on other light entertainment programmes and kids TV like Live&Kicking and TheGenerationGame. Sensing there was money to be made unexpectedly out of this dereliction of duty to the traditions of humour on behalf of the public, merchandisers got in in the act with a number of Mr Blobby products including dolls, slippers, towels and a ‘blobbumentary’ VHS video. A record was inevitable and duly arrived in late November to cash in on the Christmas market.
I can find no redeeming features at all to “Mr Blobby” the single. Sure, there’d been many a novelty record make the charts prior to it. My Dad owned a copy of Benny Hill’s “Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)” which was not only a chart topper but the Christmas No 1 of 1971. There was at least a plot to it though featuring a fair few innuendos to keep the adults engaged. It worked for kids as well – I can remember playing it on the family record player as a child and being entertained. It was a multi level masterpiece compared to “Mr Blobby”. There have also been records that have come out of TV shows like TheWombles in the 70s but at least they had a charm and were written by genuine songwriter Mike Batt. Plus, the Wombles were eco-friendly and ahead of their time. Mr Blobby was just an accident prone, irritating twat. The 80s provided us with another novelty No 1 in “The Chicken Song” by SpittingImage and as lame as it was, at least it had its origins in a controversial, politics lampooning, satirical comedy show with genuinely amusing puppets. Mr Blooby was devoid of any trace of humour and his costume was shit. As for the actual “Mr Blobby” ‘song’ if you an call it that, there are no words but seeing as this is a text based blog, I guess I’ll have to try and write some. It’s just hideous, an assault to the ears, totally devoid of any musical merit, atrocious, excrement…They couldn’t use the character’s voice on account of it being electronically altered and also that he only uses it to say “Blobby, blobby, blobby” so what sort of vocal could they use instead? Of course, the most annoying of all vocals committed to vinyl ever – a St Winifred’s school style kids choir! Heinous!
Oh God, I haven’t even got onto the video yet. I’ll maybe leave that for another post because horror of horrors, this diabolical record not only gets to No 1 (twice!) but it will also be *SPOILER ALERT* the 1993 Christmas No 1.
From the ridiculous to the sublime. The East17 v Take That rivalry was hardly Oasis v Blur but in 1993 that particular feud didn’t exist so the Walthamstow street urchins meets Manchester’s slick pop idols was much bigger than the Bros versus Brother Beyond battle of 1988 surely? In the war for chart dominance, Take That seemed to be pulling clear of East 17 having bagged themselves two consecutive No 1s whilst Tony, Brian and…erm…the other two were flailing around in the mid parts of the Top 40. Their last two singles hadn’t even made the Top 10. Something needed to be done and it was with the release of the sixth and final single from their debut album everything was suddenly alright again. “It’s Alright” is, for me, the band’s best ever work even eclipsing the smooth sound of “Deep” and Christmas tear jerker “Stay Another Day”.
I’m a sucker for a song that starts slowly and then explodes into life and “It’s Alright” fits the bill perfectly. From that tinkling piano intro courtesy of Tony Mortimer leading into Brian Harvey’s isolated, angelic vocal (whatever else has been said about him, the guy could sing) to the momentary lull and the song taking off with that shouty chorus allied to a breakneck electronic backing – its marvellous stuff. Add in some punchy, racing strings and a return to the soft, lilting piano riff for the outro and it’s almost 1993 pop perfection. The album version was much more lacklustre and so you really needed to buy The Guvnor mix of the single (which I did). The song is really all about Tony and Brian’s parts so they had to find something for the other two to do for this performance. One of them gets a bass guitar to fiddle about with whilst the other is left to his own devices up front – he resorts to some shadow boxing moves at one point. He might as well have been hiding in one of the telephone boxes that inexplicably decorate the stage. At least it would have given them a reason for being there. The nostalgia of Brian Harvey’s chimney style beanie hat is also bizarrely comforting to me.
“It’s Alright” went to No 3 becoming their biggest hit at that point and also kickstarted their golden era which would culminate in that cash cow of a Christmas No 1 a year later.
The Breakers next but as specified earlier, not the official promo videos that should have accompanied them but those specially put together films to show off the 3D effects. We start with the first sighting in the UK charts of SnoopDoggyDogg. There’s so much to say about this artist (just check out the length of his Wikipedia entry) that I’m not about to try and give a potted history of him in a few sentences here. However, I do recall in 1993 that he was being talked up as the next big rap/hip-hop superstar. He had a credible back story having featured on the legendary Dr.Dre’s debut album and single. A year later he was centre stage with his own debut material released, like Dre’s, on the Death Row Records label. “What’s My Name?” was a Top 10 smash in the US but only managed to peak at No 20 over here which seems odd given that it sold 200,000 copies in the UK. I’m pretty sure we sold many of them in the small branch of Our Price I was working at in Altrincham, Cheshire. I never failed to be amused by the antics of clearly middle class white kids in a market town in Trafford, Greater Manchester who would wander around the store acting as if they were from the hood. They’d affect that ‘-izzle’ vocabulary that Snoop Doggy Dogg is known for popularising (“shizzle my nizzle” and all that), in a faux black patois whilst flicking through our rap section. Who were they kidding? I once heard one lad say to his mate as he browsed the section, “Oh man that’s bad* and that’s badder than that and that’s badder than that!”.
*Bad meaning good obvs
Instead of the infamous dog morphing video, we are dished up some images of rides at a fairground to display the those 3D effects. Man, that’s bad!*
*Bad meaning shite
Alongside Mariah Carey’s “Hero” and “Again” by Janet Jackson, the next Breaker was one of those ballads that hung around the charts for ages, sold loads but never really achieved the chart peak you might imagine it would. Of the three, “For Whom The Bell Tolls” by the BeeGees achieved the highest position of No 4 (“Hero” made No 7 and “Again” No 6). It spent a total of twelve weeks inside the Top 40 including six in the Top 10. Check out its full chart run:
It’s solid stuff and that peak of No 4 would make it the band’s biggest hit of the whole decade. For all you tend to think of their massive success being in the 70s (which it was), they didn’t do too badly in the 90s. Eight Top 40 hits of which four went Top 5. Compare that to the 80s when they only had one entry into the Top 40 albeit that went all the way to the top (“You Win Again” in 1987). Having said all that “For Whom The Bell Tolls” seems a fairly unremarkable ballad to me. It does however allow for both Barry (verses) and Robin (chorus) to showcase their rather unique vocals. There’s also something about the bridge that reminds me of Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me” and if it sounds bizarre to mention Shaggy and the Bee Gees in the same breath, remember that the former made an unlikely album with Sting. As for the 3D film, it’s an aerial shot of a mountain range that looks like that one Jon Bon Jovi stood at the top of for the “Blaze Of Glory” video.
If it’s Christmas party season in 1993 then it must be time for a rerelease of a 70s disco classic. Yes, following in the footsteps of the likes of Sister Sledge, Boney M and Gloria Gaynor who all enjoyed small revivals in this year comes The Village People and their huge 1978 hit “Y.M.C.A.”. As far as I can tell, this was its first time back in our charts since which seems remarkable considering its ubiquity. I’m guessing there was a Best Of album out as well to cash in on the “Y.M.C.A. (‘93 remix)” No 12 chart performance but I really can’t remember. The most striking thing about this though is the film that the TOTP producers chose to go with it to highlight 3DTV week. Whose idea was it to sync one of the biggest, campest disco party tunes of all time with some ground level images of a big stick and a Dalmatian dog walking by it?! Even in super duper 3D that must have been boring as hell!
We have reached the TOTP 3D crescendo. Where previously the effects had been restricted to using specifically created videos replacing the official promos for featured songs and some jiggery pokery going on behind host Tony Dortie during his links, the moment had come for some actual 3D-ness whilst an artist performed in the studio. And what better artist for this extravaganza than the biggest in Britain TakeThat?*
*One in the eye for the overlooked East 17 there
After their last two singles had both gone straight into the charts at No 1, a third looked a sure fire bet and what’s more, they’d timed it perfectly to bag the Christmas chart topper whilst they were at it. The track chosen for the job was “Babe”, an out and out ballad which was a change of direction for the band. Yes, they’d had a hit with a ballad before in “A Million Love Songs” but whilst that was a bit of a sway-a-long swooner, “Babe” was of a different flavour. For a start it was completely overwrought, written to bring teenage girls to a state of high tension and unmanageable emotions. I recall thinking the first time I heard it that it was the drippiest, wettest sounding thing I’d heard since…I dunno…”Seasons In The Sun” by Terry Jacks maybe?
Secondly, the vocals were supplied by Mark Owen for the first time and not Gary Barlow. His saccharine stylings were perfect for the song which apparently had been written specifically for him by Barlow at the request of the band’s manager Nigel Martin-Smith to cash in on Owen’s popularity (like Ringo Starr, he got the most fan mail). Post 1996 when the band first broke up, the talk was all about who would have the biggest solo career – Gary Barlow or Robbie Williams? The claims of a third band member are largely skipped over nowadays but it should be remembered that Mark Owen also has a back catalogue of work including five albums and six hit singles. The first of those, “Child”, was actually pretty good.
Thirdly, Barlow’s construction of the song also had to take into account the guitar playing proficiency (or limits thereof) of Jason Orange. With shades of The Monkees lingering, Orange (and Owen presumably) were wanting to be more proactive in the recording of their songs rather than being pretty boy backing dancers to Barlow’s talent and so Jase had begun to learn to play the guitar. Gary takes up the story:
“Jay had always felt that musically he didn’t contribute to the band like the rest of us, which is what prompted him to take up the guitar. Eventually Mark, whose voice was getting better, and Jay, who had totally cracked the chords for the chorus, had the song down pat; it was time for the middle eight. The trouble was I didn’t want Jay to have to learn any more chords, so I wrote the rest of the song around the ones he already knew. There was one other complication in that Mark was at the top of his range, so it couldn’t go any higher. It’s a hell of a way to write a hit.”
Anyway, “Babe” duly crashed in at No 1 on its first week of release making Take That the first act in UK chart history to achieve this feat*. The Christmas No 1 would elude them though in unlikely and controversial circumstances when Mr Blobby, having been deposed by Take That, went back to the top of the chart on Christmas Day.
*Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s first three singles all went to No 1 but didn’t all top the charts in week one. “Relax” took twelve weeks to rise to the summit
As for the 3D effects, the images used behind and swirling around the band seem to be a very literal interpretation of the song. We get an early 20th century phone and a load of numbers on screen when Owen sings “so I picked up the phone and dialled your number” before the special effects team give up and just have a heart shape with the band members emblazoned on it flying around. It was probably all very exciting if you were a teenage girl and had the requisite 3D glasses at the time. I wasn’t and didn’t.
The No 1 bizarrely seems like an anti climax after all that but then it is Meatloaf who is in his seventh week at the top with “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” so maybe that’s about right. Meat would never have another No 1 record in the UK nor US though he came close in 1995 when another preposterously titled single “I’d Lie For You (And That’s The Truth)” got to No 2 in this country. RIP Meatloaf.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
M People
Don’t Look Any Further
No but my wife had the album
2
U2
Stay (Faraway, So Close!)
No
3
Björk
Big Time Sensuality
No but I should have
4
Mr Blobby
Mr Blobby
What do you reckon?
5
East 17
It’s Alright
Yes, yes I did!
6
Snoop Doggy Dogg
What’s My Name?
Nope
7
Bee Gees
For Whom The Bell Tolls
Nah
8
The Village People
Y.M.C.A. (‘93 remix)
Negative
9
Take That
Babe
I did not
10
Meatloaf
I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)
And no
Disclaimer
I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).
All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 