Manic Street Preachers

TOTP 11 SEP 1998

In the 1997 ‘epilogue’post, I hinted that my mental health had taken a dip that year and that in 1998 it would turn into a full blown crisis. I think the BBC4 TOTP repeats schedule has arrived at the beginning of that time. I was working as the Assistant Manager of the Stockport branch of Our Price where I had been for three and a half years but our manager, whom I’d had a good working relationship with, had recently been transferred to another branch. I think she requested a move as she’d had enough of Stockport after a year – it was a big unit and took a lot of managing and could be quite stressful at times. We also had a HMV down the road so we had a lot of pressure on us to generate decent sales under stiff competition. I didn’t blame her for having had enough and she duly transferred to a smaller store with a staff of just four and get this, their names were Lisa, Lisa, Lisa and Elisa!

Anyway, that meant my store needed a new manager and, having done that role temporarily the year before, I wasn’t about to put my hat in the ring again. The new manager appointed was somebody I’d worked with before much earlier in my time at Our Price so I felt reassured that it was someone I already knew and had got on with OK. It turned out that he had changed quite a bit in the intervening years and was much more hard nosed and ruthless in his dealings with people. I won’t give his name as that would be unfair but some ex-colleagues who may be reading this can probably guess his identity. Suffice to say things went badly wrong very quickly and never recovered. Our relationship was a train wreck. We had totally opposite views on how to treat people and his approach to me was “you go home when the job is done” rather than by what time the clock says. Going to work became a daunting task progressing to being something to actually be worried about. In a couple of months, I’d reached breaking point and one morning I just couldn’t get out of our flat to go to work and kept pacing around it, over breathing and basically having a panic attack. It led to me being off work for five weeks and being transferred to a smaller store I had worked at previously. I didn’t go back to Stockport for 18 years after that morning, long after I’d left record retail behind. I’m not saying that the manger was solely the reason for my mental health issues; it was probably an accumulation of a lot of things but he was certainly a catalyst. Given all that, I’m guessing I might not like too many of the songs in the charts at this time as they could have negative associations linked to them? Let’s see…

How wrong could I be as we start with a banger from a perhaps unexpected source. “Everybody Get Up” is, for me, easily the best thing Five ever did (even if the pickings are slim). Famously based around samples from “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll”, that track was originally released by The Arrows in the 70s but is better known for the version by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts from 1982. Whoever in the Five camp came up with the idea to plunder that song was a genius with the boy band’s track brimming with bravado and swagger and making use of the rapping skills of J and Abz to full effect. I’m not entirely sure what the lyrics are all about but there’s a definite nod to a number of film titles including Lost Boys, Armageddon, The Fifth Element and Hound of the Baskervilles. There also some rather left field name checks for Fujian wrestler Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka and American mafioso and crime boss John Gotti. Actually, scrap the left field description of Gotti as Wikipedia tells me that he has a whole host of cultural references both pre and post the Five single including in tracks by House Of Pain, Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z and the hit single “King Of New York” by Fun Lovin’ Criminals. Who knew? Clearly not me. Something else I didn’t know until now is that Abz doesn’t rap the line “I’m lyrically black” which I’d always misheard and thought was a strange thing to say but “I’m lyrically blessed” which does make more sense.

A proper one hit wonder next (in the UK at least) but in the case of Jennifer Paige, her song was enduring enough to still be played on daytime radio to this day. “Crush” was a huge international hit – check out its numbers:

No 1 in three countries – Australia, Canada and New Zealand
Four weeks at No 3 in the US selling 700,000 copies
No 4 in the UK and France going gold in both territories

You could hear why it had all that success. A very accessible sound with broad mainstream appeal, confident vocal delivery and that winning hook of the little breathy sigh that punctuates the chorus. All very well constructed and yet…I didn’t like it much. I possibly should have but it didn’t grab me – competent but not commanding. Jennifer couldn’t build on the success of “Crush” much like those who had come before her including Alannah Myles, Paula Cole, Meredith Brooks, Billie Myers and Donna Lewis. After losing both her parents within two weeks of each other, Paige retreated into herself and lost her love of performing, choosing instead to write for others but she did release a crowd funded album in 2016. Incidentally, her full name is Jennifer Paige Scoggins and her surname was presumably considered an obstacle to promotion by her record company and so dropped from her stage name. Fast forward three decades and we seem a little more forgiving off such monikers…

Sometimes I forget when reviewing these TOTP repeats that they were different times when they were recorded and broadcast and things that would raise an eyebrow if not outrage today, were seen as perfectly acceptable back then. For example, I don’t think I would have been staring at the TV, mouth gaping at tonight’s host Jamie Theakston saying “More top transatlantic totty now” in his segue between Jennifer Paige and the next artist Sheryl Crow but I can’t imagine someone on the BBC saying the phrase ‘top totty’ nowadays – bias issues and ‘errors of judgement’ when it comes to editing yes but people saying “top totty”? I doubt it…unless it was Boris Johnson of course.

Anyway, Sheryl Crow. She’s on the show for a second time to promote her latest single “My Favourite Mistake” which has entered the charts at No 9 after her pre-release TOTP performance the other week. Heavily rumoured to be about her ex-Eric Clapton (which Crow denies), in an interview on the Songfacts website with her writing partner Jeff Trott, he speculated that marriage between the two had been on the cards but that their relationship didn’t last as Clapton would have wanted a very traditional marriage with Sheryl in a housewife role which she was clearly never going to agree to. Clapton is well known for holding some dodgy views. In 1976 during a concert in Birmingham, he voiced vile, racist comments, endorsing politician Enoch Powell and using the National Front slogan ‘Keep Britain White’. Using the phrase ‘top totty’ seems pretty small fry compared to that.

Just as with Boyzone on the previous show, last week’s No 1 is getting a repeat despite dropping down the charts and for similar reasons – they had an album coming out on the Monday after this TOTP aired. I’m not convinced that’s a valid reason but then I guess that’s down to record company marketing and promotion strategies. The lucky recipients of this additional exposure are Manic Street Preachers and their single “If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next” which was the lead single from that aforementioned album “This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours”. My main memory of that album wasn’t that it was the band’s first chart topper nor that it produced four hit singles but that it had a part in getting me chucked out of a record shop. Let me explain. It wasn’t the store I worked in but a rival one. Remember I said we had an HMV just down the road from us? Well, it wasn’t them either. No, it was another retailer who I believe were called Music Zone. I think that the chain had began in Stockport as a one shop operation but had expanded with stores in other town centres. Indeed, they bought all of MVC’s failing stores in 2005 to become a 104 unit empire. I’m not sure if the Music Zone in Stockport in 1998 was the original shop or not (somebody reading this might be able to confirm) but I recall that you had to climb a set of stairs to get into the shop and that they also sold a load of miscellaneous items like badges as well.

Anyway, original shop or not, this store had relaunched in Stockport around 1998 and it had come to our attention at Our Price that they were knocking out some chart CDs for around £9.99 and severely undercutting us in the process. During an Area Manager visit, the topic was discussed and a visit to Music Zone was proposed to see what was going on. Myself, the Area Manager and the store manager (yes, that one) donned our coats and went for a snoop, trying not to look too conspicuous. It turned out that Music Zone had somehow got their hands on some cheap imports of certain chart titles of which the newly released Manics album was one. The Area Manager and our store manager took a copy of it to the counter and demanded to know who was supplying them with this stock at which point the Music Zone manager told us to leave his store and called for security to make sure we left the premises. And that’s the story of how the Manic Street Preachers helped to get me thrown out of a record shop.

Up to this point, if the average punter in the street had been asked what was Aerosmith’s biggest hit, I’m guessing they might have gone for “Dude (Looks Like A Lady)” or their collaboration with Run-D.M.C. on “Walk This Way” or perhaps their debut 1973 hit “Dream On” but all three of those hits were about to be blown out of the water by a song that they didn’t write themselves. Penned by the prolific and legendary songwriter Diane Warren, “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” was the theme song to the sci-fi film Armageddon starring Bruce Willis, Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck. Warren originally envisioned it being sung by someone like Celine Dion who had, of course, already one huge ballad from a movie to her name. Another artist in the frame was U2 who again had their own track record when it came to soundtrack songs having contributed “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” to the Batman Forever movie. However, once Steven Tyler’s daughter Liv was cast in the film, attention turned towards Aerosmith.

Although, their late 80s/early 90s comeback had re-established them as a rock super power, by 1998, their fortunes, if not waning, were stalled rather by Tyler’s ACL injury which forced the band off the road in the April. With momentum lost, they needed a commercial boost once Tyler returned and boy did they get it with “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing”. No 1 around the world including America where it topped the charts for four weeks, it is easily their biggest selling hit ever. A huge, strings drenched ballad, it even had what sounded like an overture at its beginning just to up the ante and leave the listener in no doubt about the scale of what was coming. I think they pull it off admirably too. Would U2 have done it better? No, I think it would have been different but not better. As for Celine Dion, I’m guessing it would have been unlistenable (for me) in her hands/voice. As for the film, I didn’t catch it at the cinema and I don’t think I’ve seen it all the way through from start to finish but have seen the ending so I’m unlikely to seek it out for a full viewing though anything with Steve Buscemi in it is usually with doing so.

Here’s a hit the lyrics of which include some pretty high brow literary references and yet there seems to be a disparity between them and the name of the band performing the song. Shakespeare, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and…erm…Hole. Just me? OK then. How about the title of the song itself and those heavyweight literary names? “Celebrity Skin” was also the name of a pornographic magazine specialising in celebrity nudity. Still me that finds it a bit jarring? The lead single and title track from their third studio album, this was seen as a definitive move towards a more commercial sound. It’s still blistering, in your face indie rock but perhaps the contribution of Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan (including the guitar riffs) had an effect. It would give the band their second biggest hit in the UK. Right, my last attempt to highlight the incongruity of those literary references and the song – it soundtracks the ‘tongue twizzler’ scene in American Pie. Gulp!

That last bit got a bit unintentionally overly sexual but I’m afraid that the theme continues with the new No 1 which is “Booty Call” by All Saints. A third consecutive chart topper for the group, we all know what that the title refers to. Then there’s the fact that Melanie Blatt is clearly pregnant and unless it was an immaculate conception then she’d clearly had the birds and the bees chat. I didn’t like this one much and thought it easily the weakest hit they’d had so far. It was just a groove rather than a song and they seemed to be trying too hard to be En Vogue rather than All Saints. I did appreciate the jerky, slow motion dance moves the group were doing in this performance – was this for the benefit of Melanie whose movements were understandably restricted?

A few years ago, I went on a work colleague’s stag do in Leeds. I didn’t know that many people there but it was a good night anyway. Why am I telling you this? Because it transpired the next morning that one of the party had actually made a booty call in the early hours of the morning. It was quite the revelation not the least because it made me realise that a booty call was actually a thing that real people do and not a culturally concocted myth. I’m so naive.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Five	Everybody Get Up	Like it as I did, I couldn’t bring myself to buy a single by Five. I’m a music snob as well as naive
2	Jennifer Paige	Crush	I did not
3	Sheryl Crow	My Favourite Mistake	Nah
4	Manic Street Preachers	If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next	No
5	Aerosmith	I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing	Like Armageddon, I gave it a miss
6	Hole	Celebrity Skin	Nope
7	All Saints	Booty Call	No but I think my wife and the album

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002lj3r/top-of-the-pops-11091998

TOTP 04 SEP 1998

Posted on November 10 by 80stastic

With Jo Whiley having vacated her seat in the TOTP presenter merry-go-round recently, it’s time for Kate Thornton to take centre stage. Having already passed the audition with her guest stint back in July (when Jayne Middlemiss was ill supposedly), here she was as a fully fledged member of the team. I quite liked her – she seemed like a safe pair of hands and, crucially, didn’t do that knowing head tilt/smirk thing that Middlemiss did ALL THE TIME!

Speaking of things that happened on the show all the time, here are Boyzone singing “No Matter What” for the fourth week in a row. Yes, I know they were also the last artist we saw on the previous show thereby making a curious set of bookend appearances but that was no unusual occurrence in the Chris Cowey era. And yes, I know they had slipped from No 1 to No 3 but again, that was no obstacle to consecutive appearances under Cowey. However, he was really taking the piss this time though as this was literally just a reshowing of the same performance that ended last week’s show! Unlike their previous appearances, the lads weren’t all in matching outfits this time – it was hardly dress down Friday stuff but it was a more casual approach all the same. According to Kate Thornton, the reason for them being on the show again was to acknowledge that that their latest album “Where We Belong” had gone back to No 1 in the album charts off the back of “No Matter What”. Having checked, this is true – it had debuted at No 1 back in June and then spent three months kicking around the upper end of the charts before jumping from No 21 to the top again this week. OK, so you could argue that was, indeed, reason enough to grant them another slot in the running order (I don’t agree as it goes).

What doesn’t make sense here though is that “Where We Belong” originally didn’t include “No Matter What”, the song that was sparking all this interest in the album and generating all those sales. A special edition came out in the November that included it plus “I Love The Way You Love Me” which was subsequently released as a single but back in September, the original UK version of the album didn’t feature “No Matter What”. This clearly didn’t matter to the record buying public as they helped create a Joe Cocker / Jennifer Warnes* moment for the lads pushing “Where We Belong” up to the top spot.

*”Up Where We Belong”? No? Please yourselves.

Steps weren’t helping themselves when it came to dispelling those ‘ABBA on speed’ accusations were they? Third single “One For Sorrow” actively encouraged those comparisons with its pure pop confection ways. I know I’ve previously dismissed them as bubblegum/ candy floss but time retrospectively seems to have been kind to this particular track with the Official UK Chart inducting it into their ‘Pop Gem Hall of Fame’. Clearly taking inspiration from the traditional children’s nursery rhyme about counting magpies, it would peak at No 2 becoming their then biggest hit. For any one of my age though, the phrase ‘one for sorrow’ will always be associated with the legendary kids TV programme Magpie…

For those who don’t know it, Magpie was the delinquent cousin to BBC’s Blue Peter. Way cooler and with much hipper (and attractive) presenters, it was to Blue Peter what Tiswas was to Multi Coloured Swap Shop. So would Steps have been Magpie or Blue Peter viewers?

Next up is one of the shortest chart hits of the year. Clocking in at just two minutes long (though Kate Thornton gets her maths wrong by calling it “178 seconds of pure Mansun action” which by my reckoning is nearly three minutes – maybe she wasn’t such a safe pair of hands after all?) “Being A Girl (Part 1)” was Mansun’s ninth consecutive Top 40 hit. Taken from their “Six” album, in its original format it was 7:53 long but it was chopped up and its opening two minutes were released as the lead track from their “Nine EP” (hence the “Part 1” suffix). Its frenetic, almost pop-punk pace was at odds with the band’s previous output. Apparently, “Part 2” is of a much more experimental rock nature though I can’t say I’ve ever listened to it. Now, when I said that “One For Sorrow” by Steps was inspired by the children’s nursery rhyme about counting magpies, I hadn’t bargained on it being completely trumped by the origin of one of Mansun’s lyrics. Check these out:

The lyric “A frog, it cannot comprehend the sea” is a riff on a fable by fourth century Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou, from the Zhuangzi, one of the foundational texts of Taoism. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) October 31, 2025

Blimey! I reckon Zhou would have been a Blue Peter fan rather than a Magpie viewer then.

Before the revolving door of members that was/is (?) the Sugababes, there was the Honeyz. Yes, perhaps the most notable thing about this lot was the times that their line up changed with individuals leaving and returning multiple times. Here though, they were in their infancy with their original members and debut hit “Finally Found”. Its smooth production and sound with a trip-off-the-tongue chorus was always going to find a home in the upper echelons of the charts at this time when you couldn’t move for all girl groups peddling a pop infused R&B sound. However, I did find myself asking whether saturation point was being reached? I mean, they weren’t really offering anything new were they? It could have been Eternal up there on stage singing that song couldn’t it?

Just like Eternal, the Honeyz had a member leave the group just as their success began but for Louise Nurding read Heavenli Roberts (formerly Abdi) who dropped out after just two singles. Unlike Louise though, she would rejoin the group, leave again, rejoin again, leave again, rejoin, leave one more time before finally rejoining with her current status being a fully paid up member of Honeyz. Confused? You will be. Her replacement the first time she left was Mariama Goodman who we saw on TOTP just the other week as part of Solid HarmoniE. Her time with her new group was short lived (about 14 months) before she left and was replaced by the retuning Heavenli Abdi. She would remain with the group until 2003 when they spilt following diminishing commercial returns and being dropped by their label. However, following an appearance by the original line up on ITV’s Hit Me, Baby, One More Time show in 2005, the group was reactivated and went back out on tour. However, Naima Belkhiati wanted to pursue an acting career and so was replaced for said tour by Candace Cherry, sister of lead vocalist Célena. By August of 2006, it was all change again as Heavenli Abdi departed for the second time and was replaced by Mariam Goodman (again). They continued with this line up until 2010 when the group went into hibernation. Two years on and Honeyz were back once more, lured together by another ITV show The Big Reunion and for this convening, the trio was Cherry, Abdi and Goodman, the first time that the latter two had been in the same line up together. The trio toured throughout 2013 before Abdi left for a third time in 2014. The duo of Cherry and Goodman released the first Honeyz single for 14 years in 2015 but it failed to chart. Over the next few years the duo would appear in reality TV shows such as Celebrity Coach Trip and Pointless Celebrities before, in 2023, Abdi announced she had rejoined the group. Within a year Goodman left again was replaced by Candace Cherry which is the current state of the line up. Phew! I’ve finally found the end of the story of the Honeyz group changes. Got all that? Good.

“Now watch out Songs Of Praise. The big fella’s got a new job. Haven’t you heard? God’s a DJ”. So says Kate Thornton in her intro to the next hit which can only be “God Is A DJ” by Faithless. I can’t recall such casual blasphemy since football commentator Alan Parry called Liverpool legend “the creator supreme” back in the early 80s. As Danny Baker said in his Match Of The 80s series, “The creator supreme? One in the eye for Christians everywhere there”.

Apparently, the inspiration for the track’s title came from a slogan on a T-shirt that the band’s guitarist Dave Randall used to wear to rehearsal if you were wondering. This was the lead single from the band’s second album “Sunday 8PM” and whilst there appears to be a lot going on sonically, my main take away from re-listening to it was that it seemed like there was a void where maybe some lyrics could/should have been. I get that it’s a dance track and so maybe words aren’t the thing but if you call said track a provocative title like “God Is A DJ”, I was hoping for a bit more than the late Maxi Jazz repeatedly telling us “This is my church, this is where I heal my hurts”. I know he says (and literally says, not sings nor raps) more than that and that there are fuller lyrics to be found on the internet that maybe exist in different remixes to the edit we get here but still. Is the message as simple as ‘music is my religion’? Conversely you could say it’s full of words and meaning if, as I suspect, Maxi was doing some sign language of what he was saying in this performance. Was that what he was doing? I think I’m just confused by the whole thing and better move on to…

…The Corrs…for the second time in consecutive weeks with “What Can I Do” despite dropping from No 3 to No 7. The technique of superimposing the presenter over the artist in the intro is already starting to look really tired and jaded, probably even back in 1998. When Kate Thornton moves towards the camera at one point, it really emphasises the clunky nature of the technology and looks like a special effect from a 70s episode of Dr. Who or something. Compare Kate with the guy hovering in this clip…

As for The Corrs, they were on the verge of their imperial phase with their next two singles going to No 6 and No 2 before they scored their first and only No 1 in the summer of 2000.

Back when Madonna was still relevant and hadn’t been totally eclipsed as the most famous woman on the planet by Taylor Swift, her releasing a new single was still a major deal. Faced with such an event, Chris Cowey’s ridiculous no video policy wilted before the power of her Madgesty. However, Cowey would still get his bit in by allowing just 1:45 worth of screen time to be shown of the promo for “Drowned World (Substitute For Love)”. There may have been good reason for Cowey to cut short the video for the third single from and opening track of Madge’s “Ray Of Light” album but he didn’t exercise that here. There was some controversy surrounding the scenes where Madonna is chased in her car by paparazzi on motorbikes which critics likened to the events that led to the death of Princess Diana the year before amid accusations of insensitivity and crassness. However, we get to see those scenes in this short clip so it’s shortened length clearly wasn’t due to the editing out of the offending images. In Madonna’s defence, her publicist Liz Rosenberg said that they were nothing to do with Princess Diana and were a reflection of Madge’s own personal experiences with the paparazzi. As for the song itself, it’s a bit of a lost classic that deserved a higher chart placing than its No 10 peak. That William Orbit production that permeates the whole album is very much in evidence with Madonna, whose voice I’ve never really considered as her biggest asset, giving a great vocal performance. Is it fair to say that “Ray Of Light” is Madonna’s best ever album? Quite possibly.

As we saw earlier, Boyzone no longer had the No 1 single but who had knocked them off? I can’t decide if the next occupants of the top spot were a surprise or not? What do we think about “If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next” by Manic Street Preachers being No 1? I don’t mean the quality of the song but that they could sell enough copies to outstrip everyone else. On the one hand, they’d nearly achieved that chart feat two years earlier when perhaps their best known song “A Design For Life” made No 2. This was backed up by a three times platinum selling album and the fact that all four singles released from it went Top 10. That album – “Everything Must Go” – had seen the band breakthrough into the mainstream so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that anticipation for new material would have increased off the back of it, thus contributing to the sales of “If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next” when it was finally released. Maybe I’ve already answered my question with an earlier comment though when referring to “A Design For Life” as ‘perhaps their best known song’. Is that why, in retrospect, I’m surprised? The fact that ‘their best known song’ wasn’t their first chart topper? Or is it even that the song that did do it for the band has such an unwieldy* title? Is it a purely a case of me being offended by the linguistic aesthetics?

*Apparently, it’s in the Guinness World Records as the No 1 single with the longest title without brackets

So what about the song itself? Inspired by a Spanish Republican propaganda poster warning of the horrors of not resisting Franco’s nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War, it’s suitably epic sounding with those trademark broad sonic brush strokes whilst James Dean Bradfield manages to make that elongated title fit into a chorus somehow. It’s a good song but not a great one in my opinion and certainly not my favourite Manics tune. In the end though, it was their first No 1 single and so has its own individual elevated place in the band’s history but somehow I can’t help thinking whether it would have topped the charts without that other factor which I haven’t considered before – the dastardly record company tactic of first week discounting.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Boyzone	No Matter What	Never
2	Steps	One For Sorrow	I’d rather listen to the Magpie theme tune
3	Mansun	Being A Girl (Part 1)	Negative
4	Honeyz	Finally Found	Nope
5	Faithless	God Is A DJ	No
6	The Corrs	What Can I Do	Nah
7	Madonna	Drowned World (Substitute For Love)	No but my wife had the album
8	Manic Street Preachers	If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next	I did not

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002lj3p/top-of-the-pops-04091998

TOTP 13 DEC 1996

Posted on December 27 by 80stastic

We’ve skipped a week in these TOTP repeats due to the 6th December show being presented by Gary Glitter. Having checked the running order, I don’t think we missed much. In fact, on a personal level, I’m relieved to not have to review Peter Andre and 3T again. Talking of ‘again’, Toni Braxton was on again and there seemed to be a disconnect between executive producer Ric Blaxill’s perception of the pulling power of (Miss) Diana Ross and her ability to sell records at this time. Slap bang in the middle of the show were Oasis cover band No Way Sis with their version of “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing” which might have been of some curiosity value but, like Mike Flowers Pops before them, was hardly the stuff of legend. The only performance I would have liked to have watched was show opener Mansun doing “Wide Open Space”. I’ll have to pick that one up in my review of the year post.

Anyway, that’s what we missed but let’s get on with the show we did get to see. Our host is Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds who doesn’t strike me as the most charismatic of choices but let’s see how he does. It’s a very workmanlike start as he introduces Manic Street Preachers who are performing the fourth and last hit taken from their “Everything Must Go” album called “Australia”. “Everyone’s a classic” says Broudie and I guess he’s not wrong as every one of them went Top 10. To put that into context, up to 1996, the only time the band had scored a Top Tenner was with their cover of “Theme From M.A.S.H. (Suicide Is Painless)” from the NME compilation album “Ruby Trax”. In fact, of the next seven singles they released after that, the highest chart peak achieved was No 15. Is it fair to say that the Manics were better known as an albums band rather than a singles one prior to the disappearance of Richey Edwards? Probably but then who would have foreseen the level of sales the band would enjoy on their reemergence as a trio?

“Australia” pretty much followed the template of the album’s previous singles though that’s not to say they all sounded the same but there was definite evidence of a decision to go in a more commercial direction in these hits, albeit the band didn’t desert all their trademark angular pop/rock and intellectual lyrics origins. The “Everything Must Go” album changed everything for the band – they were back and more successful than ever. Their next single release was “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” which would give the their first No 1 single. They were bigger than they’d ever been but what did that mean for their fans who had been there since the beginning? I can certainly remember that sixth form phase of not wanting to like anything the masses were into? Was there a similar sentiment amongst the Manics faithful?

With Christmas fast approaching, it’s time to bring out the big ballads as artists jockey for the coveted festive No 1. It’s a trick as old as time but it would often bring about huge results and Damage weren’t immune to its appeal. Only their second hit in and they’d already rolled out the ballad barrel. Now, I don’t remember “Forever” at all but it was actually more than just another single by a boy band. How so? Well, it was co-written by one Steve Mac who had previously been behind dance hits such as “(I Wanna Give You) Devotion” by Nomad and “Hear The Drummer (Get Wicked)” by Chad Jackson. However, his career changed direction with “Forever” as it came to the attention of Simon Cowell who loved it and asked Mac to join his songwriting team for a new group he was putting together. The name of that group? IOYOU. Not familiar with them? You’ll know them by the name they finally settled on – Westlife. Yes, those fresh faced Irish lads with a penchant for singing sugary ballads on stools that dominated the charts in the late 90s. Mac would go on to work with artists of the calibre of Aaron Carter, JLS, The Saturdays, Shayne Ward, O-Town, Olly Murs and Susan Boyle. Yes, I am being facetious – Mac has also worked with artists such as Ed Sheeran Biffy Clyro, London Grammar and Kylie Minogue but there’s still an awful lot of garbage in there that he’s been at least partly responsible for and it all came about because of one song that he wrote called “Forever”. The damage (ahem) that song has done.

Next up is a real stinker which I had forgotten all about until this honking reminder. Elton John loves a collaboration from as far back as 1976 when he teamed up with Kiki Dee on “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” then on into the 80s with the likes of Millie Jackson, George Michael, Jennifer Rush and Cliff Richard. As the 90s dawned, he worked with George Michael (again) and did a whole album of collaborations called “Duets” with the likes of RuPaul, Marcella Detroit and Kiki Dee (again). And then came this – a duet with Luciano Pavarotti called “Live Like Horses”. Host Ian Broudie says it was to raise money for Bosnia and AIDS charities in his intro but then slyly gives his own verdict on the musical worth of the track by saying “Never mind the song, just buy the record”. He’s not wrong as it’s a steaming pile of shite. Basically just another of those plodding, pedestrian ballads that Elton churned out in the 90s, the plan seemed to be to just get Pavarotti to add his esteemed vocals to it so that it would be transformed into something approaching “Miss Sarajevo” by Passengers from the previous year which, of course, Pavarotti had featured on. That track though elicited a genuine emotional reaction whereas “Live Like Horses” provoked a shrug and a “meh”.

There’s a story that when it was performed on The National Lottery Show, host Bob Monkhouse spoke to both Elton and Luciano separately and it transpired that both thought the song was awful but believed that the other loved it and so promoted it together with gusto. If only they’d expressed those views to each other then we might have been spared all of this. The track appears on Elton’s 1997 album “The Big Picture” without Pavarotti’s vocals and no, I’m not going to inflict that on you. It is Christmas after all.

I’m quite liking Ian Broudie as host and the sly little digs that he’s getting in. After dissing “Live Like Horses” in the nicest possible way, he then turns his attention to Phil Collins, accusing him of “still banging on”. However, he’s not banging on his drums but…playing guitar? What was going on here then? Well, the facts were that “It’s In Your Eyes” was the second single taken from the “Dance Into The Light” album and I’m guessing it didn’t live long in anyone’s mind’s eye despite Phil’s turn on the guitar. Its chart peak of No 30 would seem to back me up. Stealing the melody from “Any Time At All” by The Beatles probably didn’t help. That track was from the soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night in which a very young Phil had been in the audience for the concert sequence at the film’s end. However, the song which featured 13 year old Phil in the crowd – “You Can’t Do That” – was cut from the film meaning Phil wasn’t actually in it. So maybe it was a case of Phil’s revenge, him borrowing heavily from “Any Time At All”? As the TOTP caption hinted at, Phil would see out the 90s recording the soundtrack to the Walt Disney version of the Tarzan story. Please God let the promotion for it not have featured Phil in a loincloth.

After Elton John and Phil Collins before him, here’s a third musical heavyweight on the show in the diminutive form of Prince although he was officially known as symbol or The Artist Formerly Known As Prince or TAFKAP or The Artist or something (or nothing) by this point. For two of these artists, their long list of hits was coming to an end and sadly for His Purpleness, he was one of them. His offering to the record buying public this Christmas was a cover of “Betcha By Golly Wow” that was originally a hit for The Stylistics in 1972. It all seems a bit unnecessary in retrospect and I’m glad that his final hit in the UK wasn’t a cover version – that would have seemed a bit perverse given his huge vault of songs that he wrote himself. His final two hits in this country came courtesy of the same song when “1999” was rereleased in 1998 and also the following year to coincide with new year celebrations for both entering 1999 and leaving it for the new millennium. Yes, it was an obvious and possibly cynical move but at least he ended his UK chart story with a classic song.

It’s that song by The Beautiful South next. Yes, the one that Terry Wogan would often threaten to play the album version of (I’m guessing he never did) – it can only be “Don’t Marry Her”. The second single released from their “Blue Is The Colour” album, for me, this was even better than predecessor “Rotterdam” which itself had been made the Top 5 and been a massive radio hit. We all know the background story to this one with the lyrics having to be drastically revised for its release as a single. I like both versions though replacing “sweaty bollocks” with “Sandra Bullocks” was a bit of a stretch. In some ways, “Don’t Marry Her” is the definitive Beautiful South song – a jaunty, catchy melody allied to biting, bitter lyrics that speak of how life really is rather than some sanitised image that pop songs can sometimes present. It’s the first track on the album so it was a hard hitting introduction to their latest work; presumably that was deliberate on behalf of the band.

I was working in the Our Price store in Stockport this Christmas and I recall our Area Manager – the sadly passed away Lorcan Devine – sending a message to stores telling us all to go big on stocking up on “Blue Is The Colour” on the strength of the “Don’t Marry Her” single on account of it being, in his words, a belter and potential chart topper. I didn’t disagree with him but the expected sales of the album didn’t quite pan out as Lorcan had anticipated with the single peaking at No 8 (albeit that the album did go to No 1) and he had to admit to getting it wrong. Probably not being able to play the damned thing in the shop due to the opening track’s use of the “f” word didn’t help!

After a very memorable song comes one I’d forgotten all about. In fact, pressed to name any songs by Snoop Doggy Dogg, I wouldn’t be able to get beyond “What’s My Name?”. There were others though (loads of them actually including a No 1 with Katy Perry) and “Snoop’s Upside Ya Head” was his fourth. Obviously based around the Gap Band hit, it actually featured their vocalist Charlie Wilson as well. As with Prince earlier, it seems rather superfluous and indeed contrived (Snoops/Oops). In fact, of more interest to me is my discovery that “Oops Upside Ya Head” was originally titled “I Don’t Believe You Want To Get Up And Dance (Oops)”. Keep that bit of trivia and mark it ‘essential pop music quiz info’.

We have a case of premature chart action at No 1 as Boyzone have gone too early with their attempt at securing the festive chart topper. After narrowly missing out in the previous two years with cover versions of The Osmonds (“Love Me For A Reason”) and Cat Stevens (“Father And Son”), their third tilt at the Christmas bestseller was a song that they co-wrote themselves* in “A Different Beat”.

*Actually, it was all members of the band apart from Mikey Graham. Presumably he was off having his haircut on the day they wrote it judging by his shaved head in this performance.

By releasing the single on 2nd December, Boyzone created a situation where there were too many weeks and too many other big releases to come after it for them to be able to hang on to the top spot until the Christmas chart was announced. Or maybe they knew what was coming (the Dunblane song and the third single from the Spice Girls) and so went early with “A Different Beat” so they wouldn’t be up against either of those releases in week one thereby ensuring themselves another No 1. Perhaps they should have just reversed the order of the first two singles released from the album and put their cover of “Words” by the Bee Gees out as their Christmas hit. I’m thinking it was a stronger song than “A Different Beat” which sounded like it was trying too hard to be on the soundtrack to The Lion King with its “Ee Ay Oh” chorus and African chants.

I mentioned earlier that our Area Manager had misjudged the sales potential of “Don’t Marry Her” but he wasn’t the only one encouraged into ordering too many copies of a single that Christmas. I went over the top on “A Different Beat” having nearly sold out of “Words” before it. Not wanting to do the same with the follow up, I overstocked on it massively. Doh!

There’s no 20th December show as it was hosted by Shaun Ryder who spent the whole time doing Jimmy Saville impressions so obviously BBC4 weren’t going to show that. I’m not doing a post about the Christmas Day TOTP either as I’ve reviewed pretty much everything on there already in the regular shows. I will, however, be writing a review of the whole year before moving into the 1997 repeats.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Manic Street Preachers	Australia	No but I had the album
2	Damage	Forever	No
3	Elton John / Luciana Pavarotti	Live Like Horses	Absolutely not
4	Phil Collins	It’s In Your Eyes	But not in my ears Phil – NO
5	Prince	Betcha By Golly Wow	Nah
6	The Beautiful South	Don ‘t Marry Her	Liked it, didn’t buy it
7	Snoop Doggy Dogg	Snoops Upside Ya Head	Nope
8	Boyzone	A Different Beat	I ordered loads of it but buy it? Never!

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0025pv8/top-of-the-pops-13121996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 11 OCT 1996

Posted on November 15, 2024 by 80stastic

Writing two of these blog posts a week can be quite a drain on the well of creativity. Consequently, I have returned to my 1996 diary for inspiration and it’s certainly thrown a memory up though not one that I’m very proud of. Two days after this TOTP aired, I was out in Manchester with my wife and a coupe of friends. The plan was to have a few drinks and then go to Chinatown first and then for a meal. And we did do all of that so what was the problem? Well, unfortunately I imbibed a few too many alcoholic beverages along the way and by the time I sat down to eat in the Yang Sing restaurant I was completely plastered, off my face, hammered. That would have been bad enough but here’s the real kicker and this was unbelievable. The table next to us had noticed my inebriated state and had engaged in conversation with us along the lines of “dearie me, is he alright?”. In an attempt to prove that I was indeed OK and more than that, not drunk at all, I proceeded to tell them that I had to be at work early the next day as I worked in the Our Price in Stockport and we were having our Christmas merchandising, signage and decorations installed. Back in those days, the company employed outside contractors to come in and do all that sort of stuff. By the end of my time at Our Price, I’m pretty sure the staff were expected to do all that sort of thing. Now we get to the really weird bit. One of the women on the next table the informs me that she works for the company putting up the merchandising and is doing the Stockport store tomorrow. Excellent! So literally in a few hours time when no doubt I will feel as rough as a badger’s arse, I’ll be opening the shop doors to the woman next to me who has witnessed me completely destroyed by drink. So, not embarrassing at all then. My diary doesn’t record what happened at work on the Monday other than it was a quiet day presumably meaning I was hung over and hiding in the stockroom away from the counter and other human beings. I wonder if this TOTP has anyone on it to match my level of humiliation?

Nothing embarrassing about opening act Manic Street Preachers who are in the studio to perform their new single “Kevin Carter”. The third track lifted from their “Everything Must Go” album, it was also their third Top 10 hit on the spin. To give this achievement some context, their previous 13 singles had given them just one. This really was phoenix from the flames stuff given that the band had suffered the loss of main lyricist Richey Edwards. Having said that, “Kevin Carter” was one of the songs demoed for Edwards before his disappearance and which he wrote the lyrics for about the titular Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist who took his own life in 1994 haunted by the images of famine and death that he had taken in Sudan.

It’s a very spiky track with a rhythm that judders and skitters about and not the strongest chorus but then there’s the middle eight trumpet solo by drummer Sean Moore which is actually quite exquisite. I guess it would have been difficult logistically to have him play the solo and be on the drums simultaneously in this performance. Such a striking piece of music was it that it was used as the theme music to the ITV Wales current affairs show Wales This Week. No, really. See…

Ooh now, here’s something that’s truly mortifying! What in the world was this all about?! Well, it’s the obligatory dance tune on tonight’s show and it arrives courtesy of Jeremy Healy & Amos. Jeremy, of course, started his music career as a member of Haysi Fantayzee but went on to carve out a diverse career as a superstar DJ and musical director for fashion house Victoria’s Secret and labels launched by the likes of Jennifer Lopez and Gwen Stefani. Amos was that bloke from Emmerdale who ran the Woolpack pub. No, of course he wasn’t but he might have well have been for all the information I can find out about Healy’s partner in crime and let’s have it right, “Stamp!” was a crime of music. This track is all over the place. There’s some record decks scratching, funk style bass lines, some de rigueur dream trance keyboards flourishes and some repeated spoken word Spanish all in the mix. And then there’s the performance which is absolutely bonkers. I guess it’s trying to reflect the mishmash of styles on display with flamenco dancers, a ludicrously moustachioed man on bongos and in the centre of it all is Jeremy Healy gurning away and generally making a total prat of himself. There’s very little online about this hit – Healy’s Wikipedia page doesn’t mention it at all – and quite right too as we should all try and expunge it from our memories. A total embarrassment.

With their repertoire of sardonic, social commentary yet beautifully crafted songs, I don’t think The Beautiful South could be accused of being a national embarrassment. Indeed, Paul Heaton is more of a national treasure. He even offered to nationalise his songs so that every time they are played on radio the state would receive the royalties revenue and could use it to improve living standards. Predictably, the Conservative government of the time refused his generous offer of a gift to the British public.

One of those songs that would have been included in his proposal was “Rotterdam (Or Anywhere)” the lead single from fifth studio album “Blue Is The Colour”. Perhaps one of their most well known songs and one of their biggest hits (it peaked at No 5), it was inspired by the lack of a welcome Paul Heaton received in a snooty bar in Rotterdam which he perceived didn’t want ‘his type’ as part of their clientele. Paul has refuted the idea that it’s a criticism of Rotterdam itself but more of the type of people who consider themselves the beautiful elite whom you see everywhere. Heaton’s experience of this just happened to be in a bar in Rotterdam. There’s something about its barbed lyrics with its references to Liverpool, Rome and pickled people that appealed to the nation. Interesting to note that Heaton is happy to completely take a back seat in this performance and hand all the vocals to Jacqui Abbott. As of a 2020 interview in The Guardian, neither the band nor the duo of Jacqui and Heaton have ever played “Rotterdam” live in that city nor Rome but it always goes down well in Liverpool and anywhere in Ireland for the line “gargoyles dipped long in Irish stout”. It has also taken on a life of its own as a football chant with the chorus being adopted by home fans to taunt their away counterparts with “insert name of opposition get battered everywhere they go”. I must tell my football obsessed son where that chant comes from.

Next up are a band whose name I remember but as for their hits, I couldn’t name you a one. Apparently Damage were marketed as being the British 3T despite the fact that there were five of them (the clue was in the name guys – bit embarrassing) and despite my inability to name any of them, they would rack up nine UK Top 40 hits including four Top Tenners. This really was a boom time for British R&B/pop artists what with the likes of Eternal, Gabrielle and Michelle Gayle representing the women of the genre and MN8, Mark Morrison and Ultimate Kaos showing up for the men (well, boys in the case of Ultimate Kaos). It makes me wonder how there was room for another such act in Damage but their run of hits proves that there was. “Love II Love” was their breakthrough hit and its title has left me wondering if it was inspired by another UK R&B artist, that of Soul II Soul. Anyway, it doesn’t do much for me although the video is at least diverting with the band as puppets being controlled by a mean alien lady. The only other thing to delay us here is to mention that lead singer Jade Jones has been in a relationship with Emma Bunton since 1998 finally marrying her in 2021. The Spice Girls are on later but this can’t be where they met as it was Damage’s promo video that we saw on the show and not the real thing in the studio.

Now I wouldn’t call this next hit embarrassing, not at all. However, despite it being the artist’s biggest ever hit, it’s also one of their weakest to my ears. “Flying” by Cast was a standalone single presumably recorded and released to plug the gap between their debut and sophomore album that wasn’t released until April of 1997. It’s not that it’s an awful song (and I don’t recall having this opinion of it at the time) but there really isn’t much to it. It’s very repetitive – the chorus is also its intro with its lyric sung four times over – and said lyrics are so basic and uninspiring that they sound like they took about the same amount of time to come up with as the Liz Truss/Kwasi Kwarteng infamous and disastrous mini budget (now that was something that was truly shameful). Look at these:

It’s like flying through the air, you can make it if you dare

You live your life without a care, you know that love is everywhere

Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: John T. Williams
Flying lyrics © BMG Rights Management, Universal Music Publishing Group

I mean, come on. Was that the best John Power could do? I don’t think so. To be fair to him, I saw Cast live this year as part of a three band open air show along with Embrace and Ocean Colour Scene. We arrived late halfway through the set and only caught a bit of “Flying” which they were playing as we entered the venue but I have to admit it sounded better live.

This week’s ’flashback’ section features Madonna and “True Blue” which was No 1 in the corresponding week ten years previously. Here’s the post from my 80s blog in which I discussed it:

TOTP 09 OCT 1986

Next up is the most misunderstood song since Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The USA”. Babybird was basically a vehicle for songwriter Stephen Jones who had been churning out hundreds of lo-fi demos in his Nottingham flat without being signed to a major label until Echo Records (a division of the Chrysalis Group) offered him a deal. His first single release for them “Goodnight” was a No 28 hit spending just two weeks in the charts but it was second single “You’re Gorgeous” that would become the song that he would forever be remembered for. On first hearing, it may have seemed like a full blown, lush ballad but first impressions can be deceiving. I can’t recall the specific realisation that I (and so many others) must have had that not everything was as it seemed here but clearly the lyrics of the verses were at odds with that joyful chorus. The tale of a sleazy photographer manipulating his model with promises of magazine covers, it was a brilliant example of subverting the established love song narrative. And yet so many people didn’t get it. Even today, if you check out the comments on YouTube against its promo video you’ll find people saying that their Mums used to sing it to them when they were little or that the song makes the commentator’s spirit feel lighter or that the song has such fun, happy vibes. Should those people be embarrassed or is it a case of ignorance is bliss? Who am I to tell people how to consume or enjoy a song?

And for the third time in the TOTP studio we have Donna Lewis performing “I Love You Always Forever”. Seriously? What is there left for me to say about this one? Or should I be the one who’s embarrassed with my lack of creativity? OK, I’m just going to fling some stuff out there and see if any of it sticks or resonates…

The song was inspired by the H.W.Bates 1962 novel Love For Lydia with the lyric of the chorus being lifted directly from the book.
It was originally entitled “Lydia” but Lewis was talked into renaming it by her record label due to there being no reference to a ‘Lydia’ lyrics. Could it also have been to do with the fact that there was already a song out there called “Lydia” by Dean Friedman?
It spent nine weeks at No 2 sat behind Los Del Rio’s “Macarena”. Surely the Ultravox/ Joe Dolce moment of the 90s?
Despite not toppling Los Del Rio’s hit, “I Love You Always Forever” completely trounced it in the airplay chart being heard by 100 million radio listeners in one week compared to 19 million for “Macarena”.

That do ya?

Was this the moment that we all knew that the Spice Girls were here to stay? After the runaway success of almost novelty hit “Wannabe”, the decision on how to follow it up was always going to be crucial. Would they carry on into the extremes of bubblegum pop or go in an altogether different direction? I guess there two ways of reacting to “Say You’ll Be There”:

It was a super smooth and slick pop/dance number with a dash of R&B that was so prevalent and popular around this time. Therefore it showed a maturity to the group that was not apparent in “Wannabe” and was a wise career move aimed at longevity.
It was a safe and boring decision to jump on that pop/dance bandwagon and shows that the surprise of their debut hit had been sacrificed for guaranteed further success.

I’m not embarrassed to say that I was of opinion No 1. It was super radio friendly and the way that they divided up the vocal parts between the five of them promoted that gang mentality and also allowed for fans to pick out a favourite Spice Girl.

It’s another single that’s straight in at No 1 now as The Chemical Brothers top the charts in week one with “Setting Sun”. Working in a record shop, I was aware of Manchester duo Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands via my much hipper than me work colleagues – they had especially liked their debut album “Exit Planet Dust” which was a shop stereo favourite. However, perhaps like many, I didn’t really take that much notice of them until this single the publicity surrounding which was substantially heightened by the presence of the record of one Noel Gallagher. How much the Oasis man’s association affected sales we may never know but regardless, his input helped forge a spectacular dance tune that even I could get on board with. By all measurable criteria, I should have hated this. After all, “Higher State Of Consciousness” by Josh Wink hadn’t so much set my teeth on edge as trigger a full blown nervous breakdown in me every time I heard it and “Setting Sun” wasn’t a million miles away from that with its sprawling, squealing cacophony of sounds that metaphorically slammed you to the wall and kept you pinned there for the duration when it came on. Whether it was the presence of Noel I’m not sure but this track seemed to have more…what?…structure to it? Those sniffy elements of the music press would laud it as the best thing Gallagher ever did which makes for a good line but is a bit embarrassing on their behalf.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Manic Street Preachers	Kevin Carter	No but I had the album
2	Jeremy Healy & Amos	Stamp!	As if
3	The Beautiful South	Rotterdam (Or Anywhere)	No but I must have had it on something
4	Damage	Love II Love	Definitely not
5	Cast	Flying	Nah
6	Madonna	True Blue	Nope
7	Babybird	You’re Gorgeous	Negative
8	Donna Lewis	I Love You Always Forever	I did not
9	Spice Girls	Say You’ll Be There	I can’t because I wasn’t – no
10	The Chemical Brothers	Setting Sun	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0024s0b/top-of-the-pops-11101996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 02 AUG 1996

Posted on October 10, 2024 by 80stastic

We’re still in the Summer of 1996 with these TOTP repeats and we have another guest host in the ‘golden mic’ slot. In any other year, Jas Mann of Babylon Zoo would have got nowhere near this gig but this was the year of “Spaceman” and the stardust of that No 1 hit was still just about glittering over him enough to allow this appearance. It wouldn’t last much longer.

We start though with another guy who, by my reckoning, was also still very fortunate to be appearing on the show. Why was Sean Maguire still having hits two years on from his first one?! “Don’t Pull Your Love” was his seventh of eight in total ranging in size from No 27 to No 12. How could this be true? He couldn’t give away either of his albums which both sank without trace but somehow he managed to keep churning out a string of reasonably successful singles. How? Why? Yeah, he’d been in EastEnders so he was a familiar face and he didn’t look like the back end of a bus but I would have thought he’d have one, maybe two hits at most before the novelty wore off. He was quite the anomaly.

It can’t have been that the quality of the songs he was being given were irresistible to the record buying public can it? Surely not. Listening to this one, it sounds like something The Osmonds might have recorded back in the day. It wasn’t was it?

*checks internet*

No but it was a hit in the 70s by an act called Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds who took it to No 4 in the US selling over a million copies. I knew I was in the right ballpark.

I’ve never heard of them until this moment but apparently they also had an American No 1 called “Fallin’ In Love” and get this, it was covered in 1995 by German Eurodance outfit La Bouche. Wait, I didn’t review it in this blog did I?

*checks internet again*

No, it wasn’t a hit over here so it wouldn’t have been on TOTP. However, the song was in the news again in 2009 when it was sampled by the rapper Drake for his track “Best I Ever Had” which led to a lawsuit being brought against him by Playboy Enterprises who owned the rights to “Fallin’ In Love” as Drake hadn’t sought clearance for the sample. What has any of this to do with Sean Maguire? Not much but it’s surely more interesting than his pop career no?

Rivalling Jas Mann in the famous for 15 minutes stakes were the next act OMC. Yes, the difference between being a one hit wonder and a legendary electronic band who are still going 44 years after their first hit is just one letter apparently. However, whereas the name Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark didn’t mean anything and was chosen by Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys to ensure they weren’t mistaken for a punk band, OMC was an acronym for Otara Millionaires Club and was a tongue-in-cheek reference to Otara’s status as one of the poorest suburbs in Auckland, New Zealand. Their hit was “How Bizarre” which lived up to its name by being a strange concoction of mariachi guitars, tejano trumpets, almost spoken word verses (I’m not sure it qualifies as rapping) and harmonised backing vocals.

What was also atypical about the single was the amount of time it took to become a hit and its chart positions when it finally made it. It took five weeks to break into the Top 10 (including two consecutive weeks at No 19) and then spent six weeks there four of which were at No 8. It would eventually sell 400,000 copies in the UK despite never getting higher than No 5. Not surprisingly though, it topped the charts in Australia and New Zealand. Why was it such a sleeper hit? Maybe it didn’t attract enough airplay initially but when radio finally caught on to it, they realised it was perfect for summertime playlists. My wife loved this and indeed bought the CD single which might still be knocking about somewhere. Though the idea in today’s world of searching it out to put in a CD player when you could just say “Alexa play OMC” does indeed seem bizarre.

If 1996 was Jas Mann’s season in the sun, it was an annus mirabilis for Alanis Morissette. Her “Jagged Little Pill” album was No 1 for weeks and she had three hit singles, each of which charted higher than the one before. “Head Over Feet” was the biggest of those peaking at No 7. Given that so many people were buying the album and therefore already had access to those tracks, that was quite a feat. This particular single seemed almost laid back compared to some of its predecessors like “You Oughta Know” and “Ironic” which had themes of anger and dissatisfaction. By contrast, “Head Over Feet” contained lyrics that talked about falling in love with your best friend. That didn’t mean it was lacking a punch though – it was still in the heavyweight class.

Curiously, there were two videos for the song – the ‘head’ version does what it says on the tin with a camera permanently fixed on a close up of Alanis’s face as she sings whilst the ‘feet’ promo for the European market that we see here is in black and white and has her sat around a camp fire in what looks like a building site with her band, sat cross legged, all strumming guitars. I think I prefer the ‘head’ one as its more affecting. Could it also have been the inspiration for Radiohead’s “No Surprises” which saw Thom Yorke singing under duress in a see through helmet as it filled with water?

Despite all of Alanis’s success in 1996, she would finish the year with a flop single when “All I Really Want” failed to make the Top 40. It seemed six singles from the same album was going too far even for Morissette’s growing army of fans.

Noel Gallagher once said that there was a time in Oasis’s career when everything the band released sounded like “Get It On” by T-Rex. Well, in 1996, was everything starting to sound a bit like Alanis Morissette? OK, Alisha’s Attic were hardly a carbon copy but could their hit “I Am, I Feel” be described as a poppier version of the Canadian singer? Maybe it’s just because they followed Alanis on this particular show that they somehow fused together in my head or maybe it’s to do with that aforementioned anger that is present in their lyrics? I mean, these are fairly dark:

“Like I wanna bite his head off, yeah, that’d be fun, cause I sure got an appetite“

Writer(s): Karen Poole, Michelle Poole, Terence Martin

If I’m being truthful though, Alisha’s Attic weren’t following where Alanis Morissette had walked but in the footsteps of a long line of female pop duos stretching back to the 80s with Mel & Kim and Pepsie and Shirley and on into the 90s with Shakespears Sister, Shampoo and perhaps the couple most like them Scarlet. That lineage would continue into the new millennium with t.A.t.u. and…erm…Daphne and Celeste? Or perhaps they modelled themselves after a trio. I’m thinking Wilson Phillips who consisted of Carnie and Wendy Wilson who were the daughters of The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson and Chynna Phillips who was the offspring of John and Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & The Papas. So what you may ask? Well, sisters Shelly and Karen Poole were themselves from a pop background with their Dad being Brian Poole of *Brian Poole and the Tremeloes fame.

*Their bass player was Len ‘Chip’ Hawkes father of Chesney.

Anyway, I quite liked Alisha’s Attic and their quirky pop tunes of which eight were Top 40 hits. None got higher than No 12 (which was actually the peak position for three of their singles) and “I Am, I Feel” itself would spend three weeks at No 15 plus two at No 18 and for all the No 1 artist’s posturing about ‘girl power’, surely was a better feminist anthem than “Wannabe”.

And talking of feminist anthems, here’s Neneh Cherry with “Woman”. I say ‘feminist anthems’ but I’m not sure that’s the correct terminology anymore. It conjures up images of Viz character Millie Tant and the world is certainly more nuanced than that. Look, just to be clear, I believe in equality of the sexes and hate all the ‘lads, lads, lads’ culture (groups of men can be such pricks) so if I misuse a phrase then please accept my apologies in advance.

Right, with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get back to Neneh Cherry. She was on The Graham Norton Show last week promoting her memoir A Thousand Threads which was published just a few days ago. It seems to be quite comprehensive and not just a retread of her discography – apparently she doesn’t get to that iconic TOTP appearance when she was seven months pregnant until three quarters of the way through the book. Sounds like an interesting read to be fair. In her interview with Graham we found out that the first record she ever bought was by Donny Osmond and that she’s now a grandmother – quite possibly the coolest grandmother ever but still a grandmother. Yeah, you feel old now don’t you. Me too.

From Neneh Cherry to the Manic Street Preachers via Bernard Butler. In the last post, I talked about how Suede recovered from the departure of their guitarist and song writer to return with their most commercial album ever. Butler, of course, is up there on stage with Neneh for this performance. And the Manics? Well, like Suede, they also lost a founding member from their line up around this time albeit in totally different circumstances with the disappearance of Richey Edwards. As with Suede, they bounced back with their biggest selling album ever in “Everything Must Go” the title track of which was released as the second single from it. I always preferred this to “A Design For Life” though I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it was that huge, orchestral swathe in the mix that they managed to produce that many in the music press compared to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. Apparently the song was written as an acknowledgment that since Edwards was no longer giving his input to the band, inevitably their identity and music had to change with the lyric “and I just hope that you can forgive us” a direct plea to the fans.

Despite the hopping around on one leg antics of James Dean Bradfield in this performance, I’m more drawn to the static drummer Sean Moore. It might be because he is stood up throughout as opposed to sat at a drum kit or it could very well be that his look here reminds me of the character of Garland Greene from 1997 film Con Air.

With this single, Eternal set a new record as the first all female group to score ten consecutive Top 20 hits in the UK. What a stinker of a song to do it with though. “Someday” was recorded for the Disney film The Hunchback Of Notre Dame though it only features as an instrumental with the full song having been discarded at the storyboarding stage. You can understand why. It’s a dreary, jaded, love-song- by-numbers snoozefest. In fact, I’d have been more entertained if Eternal had stood there on stage and spent three minutes making snoring noises. Apparently, “I Swear” hitmakers All-4-One recorded “Someday” as well and it’s their take that’s on the US version of the soundtrack. So why were Eternal asked to record it for the European soundtrack? I don’t get it. In an unusual disruption to their timeline, the group’s next single release was from their “Power Of A Woman” album but “Someday” would turn up on their 1997 studio album “Before The Rain” making a right mess of the chronology of their discography. Tsk.

The final three songs on the show have all been on before so I might whip through these at speed. We start with “Macarena” by Los Del Rio and can I get away with just signposting you to other versions of the song rather than thinking of something witty to say about it? I can? Marvellous!

OK, here’s the original 1993 version that sounds very different to the hit we all know and loathe that was The Bayside Boys remix:

Then there’s the Los Del Mar take on it which was out at the same time. Despite it being sung without any English lyrics, this lot were actually from Canada and it was their cover that was a big hit over there. That absence of English lyrics is pretty much the only difference to the Bayside Boys remix and yet amazingly, in Australia, they were both in the chart at the same time with Los Del Rio at No 1 and Los Del Mar at No 2. Just how do you explain that? Fortunately for the UK, the Los Del Mar version peaked at a lowly No 43.

There are loads of other versions including a country version by The GrooveGrass Boyz, a rap version by US rapper Tyga, an Italian version by Los Locos and even a take on it by Los Del Chipmunks (!). Finally, for those that really can’t stand the “Macarena”, there’s this…

Without wishing to discredit the aforementioned achievement of Eternal, I fear it was totally undermined, nay blown out of the water, by the chart feats of the Spice Girls. They are in the TOTP studio for the first time this week I think after two appearances from Japan and though the stage and space in which they have to work are much reduced, they give an energetic performance with Mel C even managing to get in her trademark backflip. “Wannabe” is into its second of seven weeks at No 1 and would be the second best selling single in 1996 in the UK after “Killing Me Softly” by the Fugees. That was literally just the start though. Of the eleven singles released during their career, nine would top the chart. They would sell 100 million records in total being both the best selling British act of the 90s and the best selling girl group of all time. Take that Eternal.

The play out video is “Freedom” by Robbie Williams. Now, if we’re talking chart records as we were Eternal and the Spice Girls, then we can’t ignore this man (whether you really want to or not). He has notched up seven No 1 singles and sold 77 million records worldwide. By 2008, he’d sold more albums in the UK than any other British solo artist in history. And yet somehow, it all started with this fairly straight cover of a George Michael song. Given that Robbie wouldn’t release anything else until “Old Before I Die” nine months later, I think “Freedom” could almost be a forgotten Williams single, like a false start. Indeed, it did not feature on either his 1999 compilation “The Ego Has Landed” that was initially released for the US and Australia markets nor his first official “Greatest Hits” album in 2004. However it was included on No the 2010 collection “In And Out Of Consciousness”.

Apparently, Williams was in a bad way when he filmed the video for “Freedom” struggling with an alcohol addiction and he certainly looks wild eyed in the promo – are his pupils dilated in some shots? He claims to have mimed to the original George Michael track as he hadn’t recorded his version before the video was filmed. Is that likely? Is that how it worked? Anyway, we’ll be seeing lots more of Mr Williams on TOTP in future repeats. As for Jas Mann, I’m not sure we will be seeing him again as he never presented the show after this (he was pretty shit to be fair) and he would only have one more UK hit when “The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes” made No 32. The odds on either him or Robbie becoming pop music superstars were probably evenly matched and low back then. Funny that.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Sean Maguire	Don’t Pull Your Love	Never
2	OMC	How Bizarre	No but my wife did
3	Alanis Morissette	Head Over Feet	No but I had the album
4	Alisha’s Attic	I Am, I Feel	Nope
5	Neneh Cherry	Woman	No but my wife had the album
6	Manic Street Preachers	Everything Must Go	See 3 above
7	Eternal	Someday	Negative
8	Los Del Rio	Macarena	As if
9	Spice Girls	Wannabe	No
10	Robbie Williams	Freedom	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.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0023k99/top-of-the-pops-02081996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 30 MAY 1996

Posted on September 4, 2024 by 80stastic

Those sneaky BBC4 schedulers have done me dirty by suddenly announcing with a day’s notice that the 1996 TOTP repeats are back. I thought I had at least another week to knock out this last remaining episode for review before they’d start again! Serves me right for dragging my feet I guess. Sadly, as well as being my favourite word, procrastination is also my middle name.

Before I crack on with this particular show, I should address the fact that we’ve missed one. The 23rd May episode was not repeated with the general consensus being that it was for reasons of sensitivity. One of the artists featured was the actor John Alford who is best known for his roles in Grange Hill and London’s Burning. Alford was giving this soap star turned pop star malarkey a go – well, it had worked for loads of others before him including another ex Grange Hill pupil in Sean Maguire who, by massive coincidence, was also on the same show. Alford managed three UK chart hits in 1996 (all cover versions obviously) but subsequently disappeared after his only album tanked when peaking at No 171. In later years he has had several run ins with the law and is currently awaiting trial for alleged sex offences involving a girl aged under 16 hence the decision not to air the show he featured on presumably. I’ve had a look at the rest of the running order for that particular episode and there is little chance of FOMO raising its head in my personal opinion. In addition to the aforementioned Alford and Maguire, most of the other hits on that week we’d already seen before including those by Robert Miles, Black Grape, Tony Rich Project, Gina G and, unbelievably, Mark Morrison (again!). We did miss out on SWV and Dodgy but I can live with that.

Tonight’s hosts are funny men Jack Dee and the late Jeremy Hardy who do the whole show as if they were BBC presenters from the 50s which is fairly amusing for most of the time. We open with, I read to my astonishment when researching them, the best-selling boy band of all time!! What?! The Backstreet Boys?! That’s what Wikipedia tells me, yes. It also says that they are the first group since Led Zeppelin to have their first ten albums reach the Top 10 on the US charts. OK, so there are a couple of things to unpack here before we go any further. Firstly, the Backstreet Boys have made ten albums?! Surely not! I’m checking their discography. Wait there…

…they have! Although, one of them is a Christmas album and didn’t make the Top 10 in America. Maybe that claim included Greatest Hits compilations? Secondly, the biggest selling boy band of all time? What about New Kids On The Block or Take That or One Direction? Or even one of those K-pop groups? And what criteria are we using to define boy band? Were The Beatles* a boy band or The Jackson 5? If they qualify the. Surely they outsold Backstreet Boys?

*Obviously they weren’t but I’m playing Devil’s Advocate here

Whatever the truth behind the claim, their sales certainly didn’t start out like that. Not in the UK anyway. Their first two singles releases failed to make the Top 40 over here (though both were subsequently rereleased and became hits). Somehow the UK were initially impervious to the five piece’s charms but we finally caved when third single “Get Down (You’re The One For Me)” made it to No 14. Quite why though remains a mystery to me as it’s awful, useless, just no good. Based around that annoying swing beat riff that was prevalent about a year before and used on hits by the likes of MN8 and Montell Jordan with hackneyed, pseudo sexual lyrics, it truly stank the place out. They weren’t even that good looking were they? Maybe the pretty boy one with blonde hair but the rest? What did I know though. Their next thirteen singles went Top 10 in the UK including a No 1, two No 2s and four No 3s. It seemed that we really were getting down with the Backstreet Boys and they were indeed the ones for us.

From a boy band to a collaboration that was rather more out of left field albeit that one of the collaborators was about to become so successful that a crossover into the mainstream would be inevitable. Jamiroquai were an established chart act by this point with two hit albums and a readily identifiable sound to their name. They also had Jay Kay as their frontman who was providing the gossip columns with material as he embraced the pop star lifestyle. In 1996, their third album “Travelling Without Moving” was released and would go on to sell eight million copies worldwide, four times more than the sales of their first two combined. It also generated their three highest charting singles to date in “Virtual Insanity” (No 3), “Cosmic Girl” (No 6) and “Alright” (No 6). Before all of those though came “Do U Know Where You’re Coming From”. This was a joint project with jungle pioneer M–Beat and you might be forgiven for thinking that this was a revamp of the similarly titled Diana Ross hit “Theme From Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To)” given that M-Beat’s last hit had been a cover of another female soul singer – Anita Baker’s “Sweet Love”. It wasn’t (thank God!). What it was though, to my ears, was a track that was trying to tick too many musical boxes but ended up being a confused, mess of a song. I think there might be a decent tune in there somewhere but all those shuffling, jungle breakbeats just kept fracturing any cohesiveness it might have had.

The single did get to No 12 and was included as an extra track on “Travelling Without Moving” (albeit with a very slight title change). M-Beat (aka Marlon Hart) would not have any further UK chart hits though he did produce remixes for Soul II Soul and Roy Davis Jr. who would have minor hits with them in the late 90s. Hart himself would become homeless not long after this TOTP appearance before taking IT consultancy positions for McLaren F1 and Lloyds Bank and finally returning to music in 2022. So he did know where he was coming from after all!

Well, this is shaping up to be a show of extremes. We move from a jungle/acid jazz-funk mash up to some hard rock courtesy of Metallica. A Top 10 hit pretty much everywhere, “Until It Sleeps” was the lead single from new album “Load”. It’ll come as no surprise to anyone who’s taken even a passing interest in my blog previously that I‘m not the biggest Metallica fan. I can acknowledge the power of “Enter Sandman” but that’s the extent of my appreciation. Consequently, this track didn’t and doesn’t make my musical radar bleep.

Its video is more interesting to me though. It looks like the set of a horror movie or perhaps the darker moments of Stranger Things most of the time but its imagery is apparently inspired by the work of 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, specifically The Garden Of Earthly Delights, Haywain and Ecce Homo. I can’t say that I’m that familiar with Bosch’s work but here’s @TOTPFacts with the visual evidence:

The video for “Until It Sleeps” was inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. This bit has a basic similarity to “Ecce Homo”, for example. #TOTP pic.twitter.com/ySF60N1qPw
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 9, 2024

And this human-eating monster is a nod to “The Garden of Earthly Delights” #TOTP pic.twitter.com/gW5BapAz4t
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 9, 2024

From high art to a rancid fart of a song. That dreadful moment of the 90s is upon us – it’s time for Peter Andre and “Mysterious Girl”. Brace yourselves everyone, we’re going in! It seems an odd concept to grasp now but there was a time when Peter Andre wasn’t a part of our lives, always there in the cultural milieu, grifting away at his latest cash grab and attempting to give himself a sheen of relevance and currency. So embedded is he in our society that in the 2007 British comedy film Grow Your Own starring Eddie Marsan, at one point in its story about locals on an allotment reacting angrily when some refugees are given plots on it, one character announces “You know who I blame? Peter Andre!”.

Back in 1996 though, he was only known for one minor hit single in the UK called…erm… “Only One”. A concerted media campaign targeting teen magazines though raised his profile enough to put out a follow up. “Mysterious Girl” was actually a rerelease having peaked at No 53 in September 1995. We all dodged a bullet then but when the gun was reloaded for a second time we were hit right between the eyes with both barrels. This horrible, cod reggae, Inner Circle rip off would spend eleven consecutive weeks in the UK Top 10 mainly skittering between Nos 2 and 3. Thankfully it never made it to the top of the charts though even that silver lining would become a black cloud burst in 2004 when it got to No 1 after a concerted campaign by DJ Chris Moyles. Gee, thanks Chris. I was working in the Our Price store in Stockport in 1996 and we sold this single over and over and over again. When we’d finished doing that, we sold it some more and every time I did, the questions running around my head were “What am I doing with my life? How did it come to this?”. I’d had similar thoughts when I’d been the stand in Father Christmas in Debenhams seven years earlier whilst sat in Santa’s Grotto surrounded by soft toy reindeers and nodding penguins. Peter Andre – so much to blame him for.

It’s an Antipodean double whammy as we go from an Australian dope in Peter Andre to a song called “Australia” that’s pretty dope – I believe that can also mean ‘good’ in the modern vernacular*.

*God, I sound like the two stuffy characters Jeremy Hardy and Jack Dee are using to present the show!

Occupants of the revived ‘album’ slot are Manic Street Preachers and a track from their “Everything Must Go” album that would also turn out to be the fourth and final single released from it when it made No 7 in the charts in the December of 1996. The album had only been out for ten days at this point and with it going straight in at No 2, a place on the BBC’s flagship music show was not only deemed appropriate but also assured and deserved. Interestingly, the band shunned the chance to preview their next single, the album’s title track, that would hit the shops in July and instead opted for this song that was written as a metaphor for getting as far away from the UK and its tabloid press as possible in the wake of band member Richey Edwards’ disappearance the previous year. Also of note in this performance is the nerdy look of James Dean Bradfield including spectacles and a neat and tidy haircut. Quite the change from those early “Generation Terrorists” era TOTP appearances.

I’d seen the Manics support Oasis* at their Maine Road gigs a month before this show aired and would see them headline their own show about a year afterwards. I also had the album – I was becoming quite the fan though what I was not a fan of was the cardboard sleeves they insisted releasing their singles in at this time. Working in a record shop as I was, they were a pain to display.

*No, I didn’t get involved in the frankly shameful Oasis reunion gigs tickets fiasco. I saw them when they were at the top of their game and relevant – I have no desire to revisit the money grabbing so and so’s they seem to have become nearly thirty years later.

If it’s time for Celine Dion then it must also be time for a big, heart string pulling ballad and we do indeed get both these outcomes with “Because You Loved Me”. Released as the second single from her “Falling Into You” album, it was also included on the soundtrack to the film Up Close And Personal starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. I’ve never seen this film before but reading the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, I don’t think I’ll be seeking it out for a viewing anytime soon. A rather stodgy sounding news drama/romance that bore no resemblance to the book on which it was based? No, I’m alright thanks. Pfeiffer was making a habit though of starring in films that had a huge big hit single featured in them. Just a few months before, Coolio had conquered the globe with his Stevie Wonder channeling “Gangsta Paradise” from Dangerous Minds.

As for “Because You Loved Me”, it’s all pretty laboured and predictable to my ears but was clearly aural nectar for lots of other people’s lugholes as it went to No 1 in America and won a Grammy and was nominated for an Academy Award. And to think we’re still 18 months away from her even bigger film ballad “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic. Gulp!

Having finally scored themselves a massive hit by rereleasing their debut single “Lifted”, the Lighthouse Family have shone their spotlight onto another earlier release to secure themselves a follow up. As well, as being the title track of their debut album, “Ocean Drive” was also their second ever single and their first ever Top 40 hit when it peaked at No 34 in October ‘95. Could the old rerelease strategy work for a second time? Of course it could and not even the fact that “Ocean Drive” was almost identical to “Lifted” would stop people buying it for a second time. Harsh? Possibly but almost certainly accurate. Yes, this was more of that radio friendly, lilting groove, smooth vocal, easy listening soul/pop that they made their name on. And why not? You didn’t have to buy or listen to it if it didn’t float your boat did you eh?

So where is Ocean Drive? Well, there’s a mile long road in the South Beach neighbourhood of Miami Beach, Florida which bears that name and is famous for its Art Deco hotels, restaurants and bars. So, that must be what inspired the song then? Well, according to Wikipedia, it wasn’t as it’s about a road in the UK. A quick search of the internet reveals that there is indeed an Ocean Drive and it’s not that far from me in Hull being located in a village in the East Riding of Yorkshire called Newport. There might not be any Art Deco buildings there but google maps shows me that there is a pub called the Crown & Anchor, one called The Jolly Sailor Inn and a fish and chip shop called Johnny Haddocks so Ocean Drive kind of fits the nautical theme. Mr and Mrs Lighthouse (as name checked by Dee and Hardy in their intro) would fit right in.

After being on the show as an ‘exclusive’ two weeks prior, Bryan Adams is back again as his single “The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You” has blasted into the charts at No 6. There’s something different about this second performance though that I can’t quite put my finger on…oh yeah, that’s it…Bry’s missing a member from his band. Where’s the guitarist that was standing on his left from the last time? In an attempt to fill the space, they’ve moved the keyboard player to the front of the stage but he’s no substitute for standing back to back with Bryan and rocking out like his guitarist did. Also, the drummer looks very different. On the first appearance the guy behind the kit had huge Afro hair but that’s all gone this time around. Is it the same guy? Was he just wearing a wig the first time? If it was the latter, he clearly decided to ignore the advice of the title of the track he was drumming on and ditched it.

Listening back to this, is it me or is there a slight whiff of U2 about some of the guitar work as it comes out of the chorus? No? Nothing like The Edge? How about Bry’s bass player then? If you squint your eyes does he look a bit like Adam Clayton? OK, you got me. All this talk of drummers, Adam Clayton and U2 is me trying to tee up the show’s play out tune but more of that later. First, we have a new No 1 to deal with…

And so after weeks of anticipation and a flurry of football songs in the charts that weren’t that football song, it’s finally here and it’s gone straight in at No 1. As with Peter Andre, it’s hard to recall now that there was a time when “Three Lions (It’s Coming Home)” wasn’t a part of the national psyche, wasn’t trotted out every time England played in a football tournament and wasn’t sung on the terraces. A time when the subject of a song about the England football team would instantly bring to mind New Order’s “World In Motion” or possibly “Back Home” from 1970. All of this was trampled into the turf by Baddiel, Skinner and the Lightning Seeds in 1996. Now bearing in mind that Euro 96 hadn’t even started by this point, the promotion surrounding the release of the single must have been pretty extensive to have propelled it straight to the top of the charts on week one. Despite working in a record shop at the time, I can’t recall if there was a massive buzz around the song before a ball had been kicked in anger but we must have sold loads of it in that first week. After debuting at the very top of the charts, the following month saw it mostly at No 2 with a solitary week at No 4 before returning to No 1, with sales no doubt fuelled by the England team progressing to the semi-finals. We all know what fate befell them there sadly. That month gap between the two occasions that “Three Lions” was the UK’s best selling single saw “Killing Me Softly” by Fugees at No 1. It dropped a place as Euro 96 came to its climax and then leapfrogged back to the top for another week after it had finished. This meant that these two singles spent seven weeks swapping the No 1 position between them. There’s another less talked about twist of trivia that bonded the two together acts together and it really is quite bizarre – the single that the Lightning Seeds released before “Three Lions” was a song called “Ready Or Not” whilst the single that the Fugees released after “Killing Me Softly” was a song called…yep…”Ready Or Not”. What are the chances eh?

Quite why the FA approached Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds to write a song for the tournament I’m not sure but Broudie’s decision to get Frank Skinner and David Baddiel involved made perfect sense (ooh, see what I did there? ‘Perfect’ and ‘Sense’? Oh never mind!) what with the duo having recently finished the third and final series of Fantasy Football League for the BBC. Both comedians were by now also synonymous with the beautiful game with Skinner professing his love of WBA and Baddiel a fellow fan of my beloved Chelsea.

Like everybody in the country it seemed, I got caught up with the feel good factor that the football was bringing and “Three Lions” seemed a perfectly good soundtrack to that period. However, its repeated appearance at every football tournament since has made it almost unlistenable now. They really did flog it to death. An updated version with changed lyrics went to No 1 two years later for the 1998 World Cup and it topped the charts again as England reached the semi final in 2018 in the same competition. As far as I can tell, the only tournaments that England qualified for since the song was originally released when “Three Lions” hasn’t featured in the charts were the 2000 and 2004 Euros. My research tells me that Fat Les’s “Jerusalem” and a version of “All Together Now” were the predominant England songs for those years respectively.

The play out track is “Theme From Mission: Impossible” by Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jnr. Yes, here’s the reason for my cack handed referencing of the two members of the aforementioned U2 earlier in the post. The very first movie of the Mission: Impossible franchise was released this year and nearly 30 years later it is still going, still with Tom Cruise as the star and with the most recent outing Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (the seventh film so far) having been released in 2023. I caught the first film at the cinema in Stockport as the Our Price store there where I was working had an arrangement with the local cinema to supply them with CDs to play in the foyer. It might even have been a special preview screening that I attended as I seem to remember coming out with a press pack of still photos etc. I think I enjoyed it but I’m not sure that I’ve watched any of the sequels in their entirety. I recall watching the original 60s TV series as a small child and being confused by Leonard Nimoy being in it but not being dressed as Mr Spock!

I’m guessing that Adam and Larry were approached to record the movie’s theme tune off the back of U2’s wildly successful contribution to the previous year’s Batman Forever film. They don’t muck about with it too much though they’ve clearly danced it up a bit and explore that further with a number of remixes on the 12” and extra tracks on the CD single. At the end of the day though, it all pales in comparison to the iconic original which kind of negates the whole thing. Competing with its composer Lalo Schifrin really did prove to be an impossible mission.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Backstreet Boys	Get Down (You’re The One For Me)	As if
2	Jamiroquai / M-Beat	Do U Know Where You’re Coming From	No
3	Metallica	Until It Sleeps	I did not
4	Peter Andre	Mysterious Girl	Sir! You insult me with your impertinence!
5	Manic Street Preachers	Australia	No but I had the album
6	Celine Dion	Because You Loved Me	Never
7	Lighthouse Family	Ocean Drive	Nope
8	Bryan Adams	The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You	Negative
9	Baddiel, Skinner and the Lightning Seeds	Three Lions (It’s Coming Home)	Nah
10	Theme From Mission: Impossible”	Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jnr	Another no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0021s8z/top-of-the-pops-30051996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 25 APR 1996

Posted on July 12, 2024 by 80stastic

We have arrived at one of the most infamous episodes of TOTP certainly of the 90s, maybe ever. It’s that show with Chris Eubank. Why was he presenting the nation’s favourite music programme? Well, he’d retired from boxing in the September of 1995 having failed to regain his super-middleweight title from Steve Collins. However, he would return to the fight game later in 1996. For now though, he was seen by executive producer Ric Blaxill as a suitable choice for the ‘golden mic’ slot. As far as I can tell he was one of only three sporting celebrities to host TOTP with the others being footballer Ian Wright and jockey Frankie Dettori. All three you could argue have a personality that transcended their sporting fame – Wright is exuberant and Tigger-ish, Dettori is cheeky and likeable and Eubank…well, he’s eccentric if not downright odd. I’m actually quite intrigued to see what he says in his links to camera. Ding! Ding! Round one!

Eubank starts by introducing himself (as if he needed to) by giving us his full nomenclature including his middle name Livingstone. It’s pretty impressive as middle names go but nobody will ever top ex-footballer Emile William Ivanhoe Heskey. He then says something about the forthcoming “goodies” on the show and that he’s feeling “effervescent”. It’s a nervous, stumbling start – he needs to get a few punchy lines in to settle him down. The act he introduces are Babylon Zoo and their second hit of the year “Animal Army”. I said of this song when the video was shown the other week that it had traces of both Oasis and the Stone Roses about it and listening to it again here, I’m even more convinced of that assertion. Try closing your eyes and just listening to this performance – see what I mean? Anyway, Jas Mann has grown a spattering of facial hair and is wielding a guitar for this performance which we never saw during the “Spaceman” weeks. I presume he was trying to establish some musicianship credentials on the hunt for credibility points but I’m not sure he really wins that fight. Following what would turn out to be the third biggest selling single of the year in the UK was always going to be a bout too far but its peak of No 17 was probably a little on the harsh side on reflection. Babylon Zoo would stagger on for one final round before being KO’d when third single “The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes” peaked at No 32.

Eubank looks like he’s on the ropes already, appearing dazed and confused and uttering barely remembered lines instructing us to “enjoy the show”. He needs to rally and quickly. Whilst he takes a break between rounds and gets some encouragement from his corner man, we get a performance of the latest dance hit to cross over from the clubs to the charts. “Keep On Jumpin’” was originally recorded by US disco act Musique in 1978 but didn’t trouble our charts until it was revived by The Lisa Marie Experience who took a version of it to No 7 in the UK Top 40 and to the top of our Dance Chart. Despite their name, this lot were actually two male house DJs Neil Hinde and Dean Marriott (aka D. Ramirez). They would go on to remix tracks for the likes of Sash, Eternal, Robin S and Inner City. “(Keep On) Jumpin’” (no brackets, no points) would be their only chart hit as The Lisa Marie Experience though. I’m assuming that their name was inspired by Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of Elvis and Priscilla, who, at this time, was in the process of divorcing perhaps the most famous person on the planet Michael Jackson. I’m guessing they were hoping to trade subliminally on the news headlines that the couple would have been generating? Is that a known marketing strategy?

As for their hit, they couldn’t get clearance to use a sample of the original track so had to record their own version of the chorus which they do pretty faithfully with convincing disco strings to the fore. Having not been a UK hit in the 70s, the song found itself in the Top 10 twice in the space of a few weeks in 1996 when a much more housed-up version by Todd Terry featuring Martha Wash and Jocelyn Brown peaked at No 8.

Eubank throws a cryptic curveball with his next link, setting the mathematicians in the watching audience a brain teaser – “how long does it take a lady to make that step?”. What was he on about? I can only assume he was referring to the first video of the night for “The Box” by Orbital. In it, actor Tilda Swinton plays an alien-like character who observes Earth and its inhabitants in stop-motion giving the impression that she is operating outside of temporal constructs before disappearing whence she came. It’s all very The Man Who Fell To Earth which apparently was the inspiration for the promo according to its co-director Jes Benstock. Was its stop-motion effect what Eubank was being obscure about in his intro? Another question I have is how famous was Tilda Swinton at this point? I’m thinking not that well known beyond the art house crowd as most of her credits up to this point were for a clutch of Derek Jarman films. This was well before her roles in The Beach, Vanilla Sky and The Chronicles Of Narnia franchise. If my guess is true, then her smaller profile would only have added to her portrayal of the mysterious protagonist of the video.

As for the track itself, “The Box” would become one of Orbital’s bigger hits peaking at No 11. It sounds like the soundtrack to a 60s spy thriller but with a few dance beats thrown in. Maybe the duo of brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll were in training with their eye on the prize of an actual film soundtrack which they achieved the following year with their reworking of the theme to the 1997 remake of The Saint which gave them their second consecutive No 3 hit following the rather disturbing “Satan Live”. In 2000, they would continue with the soundtrack work when they contributed a track (with Angelo Badalamenti) to the aforementioned The Beach movie.

Eubank’s landing some blows now (or at least he thinks he is) with some more enigmatic words. This time, he says “We live in a country where the minds of the people are manipulated by the press. Think about it”. I mean, he’s not wrong and nearly 30 years later that is still the case but why was he prompted to say that at this time? Was he having a particularly bad time with the tabloids? In his early pugilist career, he hadn’t enjoyed a good relationship with the press who depicted him as arrogant and with ideas above his station with his flamboyant sartorial style and posturing or as his Wikipedia entry puts it ‘the man you love to hate’. After he’d lost his boxing title and was supposedly retired from the fight game, would he have still attracted so much attention? I guess by presenting TOTP he was hardly shying away from the public counting his money in his expensive mansion was he?

Definitely on the covers of the music press would have been Ash who were onto their third (and ultimately biggest) hit in “Goldfinger”. I guess this would have been a breakthrough moment for the band – their first time inside the Top 10 and it came with a single that was released a good six months after their last hit. Momentum could easily have been lost. “Goldfinger” not only consolidated that previous success but went beyond it. To do that, the band had to come up with a bloody good tune and they did that. I used my words carefully there – it’s a good tune but not a great one to my ears in the respect that I think they’ve got better songs. Still better than most of the garbage in the charts though. Watching this performance back, I’m struck by how much Tim Wheeler looks like Vernon Kay? Odd(job).

Eubank is finding his feet now and getting a combination together. He’s not stumbling over his words so much and is addressing the audience in a more direct way informing us that he’s got something next to get us “absolutely freaking” before describing it as a modern day version of “Knees Up Mother Brown”. Who can he be talking about? It’s Technohead of course and their latest hit “Happy Birthday”. Yes, the people who brought us “I Wanna Be A Hippy” thought we could do with another dose of their dumbo brand of high speed, happy hardcore nonsense and duly delivered unto us a second hit. It’s a carbon copy of its infuriating predecessor but that didn’t stop UK punters from buying it in enough numbers to send it to No 18 – just bonkers. That’s also the word I would use for this performance which is a riot of idiots jumping around maniacally for the duration of the ‘song’. And what was the recreation of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party all about? Ever wondered why the hatter was mad? Well, apparently it was an actual condition arising from the use of mercury in the Victorian era to cure pelts in the hat making process. When the mercury got into the systems of the hat makers, it gave rise to mental health problems including dementia hence the phrase. In terms of Lewis Carroll’s character in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, some analysis suggests he was written this way to highlight some of the most irritating and unpleasant traits of human nature. ‘Irritating’ and ‘unpleasant’? Well, that explains it then as “Happy Birthday” by Technohead was nothing if not irritating and unpleasant.

P.S. The Emily who Eubank says happy birthday to in his intro is presumably his daughter Emily whose 2nd birthday it had been six days before this TOTP aired.

Oh dear. Eubank makes a misstep in his next intro although in 1996, I’m not sure his choice of words would necessarily have tripped him up. Would we have winced at him describing Louise Werner of Sleeper as “an absolute tottie” back then? I like to think I would have but I can’t be sure. Also, would Eubank’s Nicholas Parsons reference have hit home with the TV audience in 1996? The game show that Parsons presented that shared its name with Sleeper’s single ran from 1971 to 1983 so had been off our screens for 13 years by this point. I think that particular punch line might have failed to hit its intended target.

Just like Ash earlier, Sleeper were at a pivotal moment in their career with the release of their first Top 10 single “Sale Of The Century”. Also just like Ash, it came six months after their last hit so it was an important moment momentum wise. In terms of the song itself, it was arguably just more of the same Sleeper sound that previous hits “Inbetweener” and “What Do I Did Now?” had established. That shouldn’t be seen as a criticism though. They had a successful formula and were giving the people what they wanted. What’s that? Couldn’t the same argument be applied to Technohead? Erm…no. Why not? Well…I didn’t like them did I? That’s fair enough isn’t it? I think it is. Interestingly, Louise Werner doesn’t have her guitar with her for this performance and she seems a bit lost without it. Not knowing quite what to do with herself, she resorts to a few skip and jump movements. She should have floated around the stage Muhammad Ali style, throwing a few jabs, ducking and weaving. I’m sure Chris Eubank would have been even more enamoured with her than he already was.

It’s round seven and Eubank rallies with an intro that sits well with the esoteric, faux-existential quotes he specialises in. It also shows that he knew something of the band he was introducing. “Now here’s a group to make you philosophise and think” he pronounces before the Manic Street Preachers fill our screens. There’s no doubting that the Welsh rockers have a canon of work that displays a certain intellectual rigour with their influences ranging from Nietzsche to Camus to Chomsky and much wider. Was it possible that Eubank was a Manics fan or just that he’d done his research? Whatever Eubank’s truth, the band were telling us that theirs was that they were definitely still a going concern despite the disappearance of Richey Edwards via the success of “A Design For Life”. Ironically, the song’s best known lyric – “We don’t talk about love, we only wanna get drunk” – in which the band highlight the working class’s right to do so, would be sung back to them by crowds of middle class festival goers. Think about that as Chris Eubank might have said.

OK, we nearly at the KO moment for Eubank. The moment when Chris is dealt a blow he can’t recover from. When the BBC4 audience, with our prior knowledge of what’s coming, look on with a building sense of schadenfreude until suddenly it’s here…and Chris Eubank has to introduce Suggs singing “Cecilia”. Why was this a big deal? Because of our host’s lisp of course – it’s not a great look is it? Taking the piss out of a speech impediment. Six years on from this, Gareth Gates would win the hearts of the public on Pop Idol with his singing and looks but also because of his determination to not let his stammer prove too big an obstacle in his pursuit of becoming a pop star and recording artist. I guess Eubank’s perceived arrogance and eccentric demeanour meant he was never going to be afforded the same reaction.

His intro for the actual performance by Suggs and Louchie Lou and Michie One of “Cecilia” has him on the ropes but the knockout blow comes during the Top 10 countdown when he has to say “At six, Cecilia by Suggs”. That moment was used in an episode of Never Mind The Buzzcocks in the a round called Freeze Frame which was basically a What Happened Next? section…

Go to 3:40 in for the “At thickth, Thethilia by Thughth” moment

Mark Morrison is still in pole position at the top of the charts and he’s still got his rather creepy handcuffs with him. The recurrent line “you lied to me” combined with Morrison’s style of delivery has made me ponder that “Return Of The Mack” is what you get if you combined “Ain’t No Doubt” by Jimmy Nail (“she’s lying”) with “It Wasn’t Me” by Shaggy. What a thought!

After the Suggs KO, the defeated Chrissy boy gives a reflective speech about being true to yourself before signing off with a cheery “Good bloody show”. To paraphrase Chumbawamba, you can knock Eubank down but he’ll always get up again. The play out song is something of an oddity called “That’s Nice” by Minty. If you don’t remember it (as I don’t), it’s probably because it never charted as far as I can tell. Yes, it’s another of those left field Ric Blaxill choices where he championed a track that would not actually become a Top 40 hit.

Minty was a vehicle for Australian performance artist, club promoter, fashion designer and friend of Boy George, Leigh Bowery. Wikipedia tell me that Minty were part of the Romo movement which I’d never heard of but which was short for Romantic Modernism and was characterised by a hotchpotch of musical genres including disco, glam rock and the New Romantics with its base camp being the club night Club Skinny in Camden. This track was a posthumous release as Bowery died from an AIDS related illness on New Year’s Eve 1994 though the project continued under the leadership of his long term female partner Nicola Bateman. I’m guessing now but was Leigh Bowery the inspiration for the character of Vulva from Spaced?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Babylon Zoo	Animal Army	Not for me but for a friend. Honest!
2	The Lisa Marie Experience	(Keep On) Jumpin’	No
3	Orbital	The Box	Not for me thanks
4	Ash	Goldfinger	No but I have it on their Intergalactic Sonic 7″s compilation album
5	Technohead	Happy Birthday	As if
6	Sleeper	Sale Of The Century	Liked it, didn’t buy it
7	Manic Street Preachers	A Design For Life	No but I had the Everything Must Go album
8	Suggs featuring Louchie Lou and Michie One	Cecilia	Nah
9	Mark Morrison	Return Of The Mack	Nope
10	Minty	That’s Nice	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0020ldh/top-of-the-pops-25041996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 11 APR 1996

Posted on July 2, 2024 by 80stastic

I’ve reached another blogging milestone – this is my 600th post over my 80s and 90s TOTP sites combined. Thank you to anyone and everyone who has ever taken the trouble to read any of them. 600 eh? Phew! When I started back in 2017 with the 1983 BBC4 repeats, I didn’t have any such goal in mind. In fact, I wasn’t sure I would even make it to the 1984 repeats but make it I did and seven (actual) years later, I’m still at it but with an end in sight as I won’t go past the year 2000 (as Busted almost sang). The 600th episode of TOTP was on 9th October 1975 but I was only seven then so don’t remember it at all. For the record though, it featured The Sparks, Bob Marley and David Essex at No 1. As for other 600th episodes, that landmark was reached in EastEnders on 6th November 1990 by which point I’d only just got married and moved to Manchester two weeks before so watching the latest escapades of Phil and Grant Mitchell probably wasn’t high on my list of things to do. The 600th episode of Coronation Street was broadcast on 12th September 1966 two years before I was born. Let’s see if any of the artists and hits in my own 600th anniversary are worth celebrating…

Well, if it’s a celebration we’re having then I guess we should start with a party tune and “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit” by Gina G is definitely that. This is her third consecutive week on the show and in the studio so the BBC couldn’t be accused of not getting behind our Eurovision entry this year. Now, in the last post I mentioned that I had a Gina G story. It’s time for it to be told. Around this time, Ricky Ross, having broken up Deacon Blue, was launching his solo album “What You Are” and the Sony rep who used to sell into the Our Price I was working in got all the staff on the guest list for an album launch party at a bar in Manchester. There was a free bar at the party and many, many drinks were consumed. I actually had a five minute chat with Ricky who was a nice bloke.

What’s this got to do with Gina G? Well, I also got talking to some guys who said they were the people behind “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit” but that they weren’t getting any royalties from it and were taking legal action or something. That’s about all I can remember (it was a free bar after all!) but searching online nearly thirty years later to see if there was anything in what they told me, I found that there was loads of legal action surrounding the song. Gina G reckoned she was owed over £136,000 for her part in its success while another case was launched by one Simon Taube who wrote the song and it was recorded by Gina with two producers called Wainwright and Burton who went under the alias of The Next Room. Enter one Stephen Rodway to the story as the new producer for the track who went under the professional name of Motiv-8. A deal was signed between Taube and Rodway giving the latter 30% of any royalty payments. However, said royalties were all collected by Rodway’s production company FX leading to Taube and the original producers suing FX for £408,000. Were those guys at that album launch that I spoke to Taube, Wainwright and Burton? Did they ever receive all of what they thought they were owed? Or even just a little bit?

How long has this been going on Paul? Seven years and 600 posts mate! Keep up! Seriously though, I love Paul Carrack’s voice and he’s written some pop classics but I’m not sure why one of them was back in the charts in 1996. “How Long” was originally a No 20 hit for his band Ace in 1975 but apparently it was reactivated 21 years later for Paul’s solo album “Blue Views” and reissued to promote it. It would peak at No 32 one place below the cover of it by the Yazz/Aswad collaboration from 1993. For such a timeless track, those chart peaks seem slightly underwhelming but justice arrived in 2020 when, 45 years after its original release, its use in an advertisement for Amazon Prime prompted 4,000 downloads, 831,000 streams and the No 1 spot in the Billboard Rock Digital Song Sales chart.

Although widely perceived to be a song about infidelity between a couple, it was actually written by Carrack when he found out that Ace bassist Terry ‘Tex’ Comer had been secretly working with Scottish folk-rock duo The Sutherland Brothers. By strange coincidence, also released the same year was “Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)” by Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel which was another song about band disharmony. When members of the original Cockney Rebel approached Harley about their desire to write songs for the band, he refused and the band split with Harley forming a new group. Hitting the top spot with their first release under their new moniker, the song was a jibe at the original Cockney Rebel members who Harley believed had done him dirty by trying to change a winning formula.

Just like “How Long”, “Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)” has been covered by many artists including Duran Duran, Erasure and The Wedding Present whose performance of it here includes David Gedge looking exactly like me 35 years ago – or is it me looking like Gedge?

I’ve never been much of a rap /hip-hop fan but I know a good tune when I hear one and “California Love” by 2Pac featuring Dr.Dre and Roger Troutman is a good tune. His first release since being…well…released from prison in 1995, it features amongst others a sample from “Woman To Woman” by Joe Cocker (not Jarvis’s Dad) and would top the US charts while making it to No 6 in ours. Its hook though is surely the ‘golden throat’ vocal in the chorus courtesy of Roger Troutman who sounds like a character from Viz but was actually a singer, songwriter, producer and all round pioneer of the funk movement. The aforementioned ‘golden throat’ sounds like a porn film title but was actually a custom made ‘talk box’ / vocoder supplied by electronics firm Electro Harmonix which he also used to contribute vocals to the Scritti Politti single “Boom! There She Was” in 1988. Then there’s the legendary Dr. Dre’s involvement which supposedly led to the falling out between himself and 2Pac. The latter, of course, would be dead within six months, murdered as part of the East Coast-West Coast hip-hop rivalry (unless you believe the conspiracy theories that he faked his own death). Rumours circulated that former friend turned rival Notorious B.I.G. was involved in 2Pac’s murder but then he was killed himself in 1997 in another Las Vegas drive by shooting. All of these artists would become a source of exasperation to me whilst working in Our Price as their albums would attract the white, middle class gangs from da hoods of Cheshire who would try and nick their CD sleeves for the parental guidance warning lyrics printed inside them. We had to replace them with temporary inserts and keep the real thing behind the counter.

Both Dr. Dre and Notorious B.I.G. continue to feature in my life as a source of inspiration for in jokes between myself and my wife. Whenever one of us says that we’ve forgotten something, it will be followed by a cry of “Forgot about Dre” referencing his 2000 single with Eminem and which Mark and Lard satirised on their Radio 1 show. Notorious B.I.G. was also known as Biggie Smalls which gets a regular shout out if one of us says “no biggie” as in “it’s not a big deal”. We sound insufferable don’t we but we’re not really – honest!

Here’s a band that was lumped in with the Britpop movement whether they liked it or not but are hardly talked about anymore despite having a clutch of decent tunes. If Longpigs are mentioned these days, it’s usually to say that they included a young Richard Hawley in their ranks (he’s the guitarist on the left of the screen) and he, of course, would go onto much solo success as a ballad crooner with albums like “Coles Corner” and “Lady’s Bridge”. He was also briefly a member of Pulp after Longpigs split. I’ve seen him a couple of times live and he was great.

Back to Longpigs though and “On And On” (not a tribute to the longevity of this blog!) was their second and joint biggest hit of their career alongside the excellent follow up “She Said”. Weirdly, just as I mentioned Aswad earlier for their version of “How Long” with Yazz, I get to name check them again as they also had a hit with a song called “On And On” in 1989 though obviously not the Longpigs song.

No, it’s not that moment (not yet) but it is Suggs with his cover of the Simon & Garfunkel song “Cecilia”. I’ve always had a soft spot for Madness and have even seen them live but Suggs as a solo artist? No, nay, never. I didn’t like any of his solo singles (not even “Blue Day” with my beloved Chelsea FC) and haven’t enjoyed his performances on these TOTP repeats. I’m not sure why Suggs on his own is such a turn off for me – maybe it’s the hackneyed layer of ska he applies to all his songs which annoys, especially on cover versions like this. He’s roped in Louchie Lou and Michie One for this single whom you may recall had a ragga-fied hit in 1993 with a version of one of the worst songs in the history of recorded music – Lulu’s “Shout”. I don’t think their contribution helped at all. However, given that they are on the record and in the studio with Suggs, why did they need the other two backing dancers for this performance? They don’t add anything much either although in reality, no amount of intervention could fumigate this stinker.

Yes, Babylon Zoo did have another hit and here’s the proof. “Animal Army” was the follow up to “Spaceman” and nearly 30 years later, it doesn’t stand up well at all. It probably needed crutches in that department even back then. You can see what Jas Mann was trying to do; repeat the recipe that made its predecessor such a banquet of a hit but without the magic ingredient of the exposure of a Levi’s ad campaign, it was always going to taste a bit bland. It feels like it should have been better than it was, that all the flavours were there but it wasn’t quite right – it had been overcooked. In the mixing bowl was a bit of glam rock, a hint of Suede, even a dash of Stone Roses and Oasis in the vocal phrasing but the lyrics were utter tosh about elephants, lions, leopards and then bizarrely dinosaurs and angels. Just nonsense. The inclusion of some elephant trumpet noises at one point is a direct steal from the opening of Talk Talk’s “Such A Shame”. So, in conclusion, very derivative and ultimately not very convincing. It would debut at No 17 but was out of the chart within two weeks. It was a similar story everywhere else. The Babylon Zoo story was coming to an end only weeks after it had started.

Talking of derivative, this single by Upside Down sounds so familiar to something else but I can’t quite put my finger in what it is*. “Every Time I Fall In Love” was the second hit for this lot who were perhaps the ultimate in manufactured boy bands with their audition and selection process filmed for the BBC documentary series Inside Story. If this was the sound of falling in love, it was enough to make us all platonic. Plastic, shallow and facile. I can’t find a clip of this studio performance but they’ve turned up in different coloured silk suits but getting dressed themselves was clearly beyond them as they’ve forgotten their shirts underneath their suit jackets. It’s like Showaddywaddy meets The Chippendales. Sadly, Upside Down had another two hits in them before they disappeared and renamed themselves Orange Orange. No, really.

*Update: I think it might be “The Girl Is Mine” by Michael Jackson?

Next an allegorical song for the ages from Rage Against The Machine. The lead single from their second album “Evil Empire”, “Bulls On Parade” warns of how the arms industry encourages war and conflicts as it’s good for business and securing military contracts. RATM pull no punches about their disgust at the practice with lines like these:

Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes

Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal

Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Brad Wilk / Timmy Commerford / Tom Morello / Zach De La Rocha
Bulls on Parade lyrics © Wixen Music Publishing

Nearly thirty years later, the world appears to have learned nothing. There’s no space here for pithy irreverence from me. I’ll leave it there.

I’m not giving any devastating insight by stating that there was a lot riding on the release of “A Design For Life” for Manic Street Preachers. This was their first new song since the disappearance of rhythm guitarist and songwriter Richey Edwards. Having made the decision to carry on, there must have been a huge amount of trepidation within the band and their record company about how it would be received. Would the fan base accept them as a trio? Would this new song be too far removed from the dark material of their “Holy Bible” album? They needn’t have worried – “A Design For Life” would give the band the biggest hit of their career and provide them with probably their best known song. There was something about the scale of track that hypnotised. Perhaps it was the dominant but not domineering string section (the same players as employed on the majestic “Yes” by McAlmont & Butler) that gave it such power. You knew it was going to be massive from the first time you heard it and hear it we did as it was played endlessly on radio in a way none of their previous singles had ever been. Parent album “Everything Must Go” would indeed go… three times platinum and furnish the band with four hit singles. Manic Street Preachers had not only survived the loss of a crucial band member but they were actually flourishing in the aftermath.

A few posts ago I wrote about the BBC series This Life and about how its soundtrack was full of contemporary music (mainly Britpop) including the Manics. Ten years after the series finished, a reunion special was made to catch up with the characters and see what had happened to them all. In one scene, they have a barbecue and drink long into the night. The music that they played as they partied? Yep, “A Design For Life”.

It’s a third and final week at the top for The Prodigy and “Firestarter”. The band had experienced plenty of big hits before of course – five of their previous nine singles had gone Top 10 but a No 1 record, even in 1996 when there were more than ever thanks to record company marketing, promotion and pricing strategies, was still a huge deal especially for a band seen as being so far from the mainstream. Incredibly, they would repeat the trick with their next single “Breathe” paving the way for an electric performance at Glastonbury in 1997 which blew me away. Sadly for the band, that year also saw Radiohead play the set of their lives there the following night which rather stole some of their thunder but it shouldn’t diminish the achievement of a band whose first hit was dismissed as having creating the much maligned toy town techno genre.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Gina G	Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit	Nope
2	Paul Carrack	How Long	I did not
3	2Pac featuring Dr.Dre and Roger Troutman	Californian Love	No
4	Longpigs	On And On	Decent tune but no
5	Suggs featuring Louchie Lou and Michie One	Cecilia	Never!
6	Babylon Zoo	Animal Army	Nah
7	Upside Down	Every Time I Fall In Love	As if
8	Rage Against The Machine	Bulls On Parade	Worthy but no
9	Manic Street Preachers	A Design For Life	No but I had the Everything Must Go album
10	The Prodigy	Firestarter	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0020crr/top-of-the-pops-11041996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 09 JUN 1994

Posted on April 9, 2023 by 80stastic

OK, so this ‘golden mic’ feature of TOTP producer Ric Blaxill’s that saw celebrities, pop stars and comedians brought in to host the show has stepped up a gear in recent weeks. After the rather obvious choice of Take That’s Mark Owen and Robbie Williams and the ‘it just about worked’ decision to give the over the top Meatloaf a go, Blaxill had gone in the opposite direction by inviting the sardonic wit of Jack Dee into the studio recently. Of the three guest turns, it was Dee’s deadpan delivery that worked best for me. Maybe it did for Blaxill as well as he’s opted for not one but two comedians this week. Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer were fast becoming household names by 1994. Having broken through with Vic Reeves Big Night Out on Channel 4 in 1990/91, the duo had made the move to BBC2 with their latest show The Smell Of Reeves And Mortimer. The first series had aired in the Autumn of 1993 and brought us some brilliant new characters like Uncle Peter (“Donkey!”), The Bra Men – Pat Wright & Dave Arrowsmith (“Are you sayin’ I’ve got nowt”) and the wonderful Slade parody Slade In Residence. Vic had himself become a pop star of course in 1991 with the hits “Born Free” and “Dizzy” (a No 1 record no less) so maybe with feet in both camps, Vic & Bob were a logical choice to host TOTP?

Anyway, if Blaxill was hoping for some zany comedy to add some zoom to the show, what he got was a whole lot of controversy courtesy of opening act Manic Street Preachers. After becoming somewhat disillusioned with the direction that they had taken with the radio friendly, melodic rock of sophomore album “Gold Against The Soul”, the Manics decided a back to basics return to their origins was required. Where they ended up though was a very dark place indeed. With 75% of their third album “The Holy Bible” being written by Richey Edwards whose mental state was fragile to say the least, the songs were bleak. Where previously we’d had “Motorcycle Emptiness” and “Little Baby Nothing” from first album “Generation Terrorists”, now there was “Archives Of Pain” and “The Intense Humming Of Evil”. And yet the songs were valid. This was no death metal nonsense. The tracks spoke of the extremes of the human condition detailing suicide, anorexia, serial killers and the holocaust.

When ABC released “Beauty Stab” in 1983 as the follow up to the iconic “Lexicon Of Love”, it was seen as a the ultimate example of killing your career. Eleven years later it seemed like a case of the Manics saying “hold our beers” but although the sales of “The Holy Bible” were initially disappointing, its legacy has far overtaken its chart achievements. Routinely voted as one of the best albums of the 90s if not of all time, it is also the album held most dearest by the band’s fanbase.

The lead single from it was “Faster” which certainly sounds rawer than any of the singles from “Gold Against The Soul” but it was the choice of James Dean Bradfield to where a balaclava on this TOTP appearance that caught the headlines. The IRA connotations led many a viewer to believe the band were IRA sympathisers which the band, of course, vehemently denied. The BBC received 17,500 complaints and the band’s record company Sony were concerned that they would not be allowed on the show again. They were eventually invited back but not for another two years when they were a trio following the disappearance of Richey Edwards on 1st February 1995. My own opinion of balaclava -gate? I believe their defence detailed by @TOTPFacts below but for such a politically switched on band, it seemed a bit naive to not have foreseen such a reaction.

"Because we were all dressed in army regalia, it felt like we were parodying the use of legitimate power, like the special forces. It didn't enter our heads that people would see it as an Irish paramilitary symbol." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) March 31, 2023

As for “Faster”, I couldn’t engage with this era of the band. Maybe I was just that bit too old at 26 but I know people who swear by “The Holy Bible” album. Maybe I should explore it further.

As the camera switches back from the Manics to Vic and Bob, we get an unintentional piece of comedy gold when the former asks an unsuspecting member of the studio audience if she had liked the last performance. Having not been listening but suddenly confronted with a microphone in her face, she answered in the only way she could and with a belief that this was what was required of her, she whooped. Marvellous stuff.

The next act is a kind of diva supergroup. Kind of. I suppose a collaboration between disco/Hi-NRG heavyweights Kym Mazelle and Jocelyn Brown was as inevitable as it was obvious but the fact that it was the idea of Simon Cowell kind of discredits it slightly. Why were they doing a cover of the disco classic “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)” made famous by Barbara Streisand and Donna Summer? The aforementioned Cowell alongside producers Matt Aitken and Mike Stock (working together for the first time since the split of SAW) had heard the version made by Erasure’s Andy Bell and k.d. lang for the Coneheads movie and thought they could do it better. And better in their eyes meant Kym and Jocelyn.

It made sense though. Jocelyn was the voice behind 80s club classic “Somebody Else’s Guy” and in the 90s had supplied vocals on Top 10 hits for Incognito and Right Said Fred. Meanwhile, Kym had duetted with Dr. Robert of The Blow Monkeys on Top 10 dance hit “Wait” in 1989. More recently, she’d been in the Top 30 in 1993 with Rapination on “Love Me The Right Way”. Put them together on a legendary disco track and you’ve got a sure fire, gigantic hit on your hands yes? Well, sort of. Despite entering the charts at No 15 and the exposure of this TOTP appearance, the single topped out just two places higher. The only country where it was a bigger hit than that was The Netherlands. By comparison, the Streisand/Summer original was an American No 1 and UK No 3. Why wasn’t it a bigger success second time around? Did the kids not know the original? Was it seen as too retro compared to the contemporary sounds of, say, Eurodance? Who knows but let’s just hope it pissed off Simon Cowell.

It’s that bloody “Absolutely Fabulous” song again! I think this is the third time it’s been on the show. There was no Comic Relief live event in 1994 so maybe the single was being given an extra push by the BBC? The song is of course the work of the Pet Shop Boys and seeing as I have nothing else left to say about what must be their worst ever single, how about I squeeze in a link between it and the aforementioned Barbara Streisand? Neil Tennant is on record as saying that after he and Chris Lowe had shot the video with Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley, they all went for a meal at a restaurant in Holland Park and got pissed. Right at the end of the evening, into the restaurant walked John Cleese, Joan Collins and Christopher Biggins who had all been to see Barbara Streisand who had been playing at Wembley Arena. Naturally, Tennant had already been to see her the previous week. So that’s Cleese, Collins, Biggins, Saunders, Lumley and the Pet Shop Boys all in the same place at the same time. It sounds like the best Blankety Blank line up ever! Absolutely fabulous darling!

Meanwhile, back in the studio, Vic and Bob are weaving their particular brand of comedy magic via the gift of scotch eggs. “Would anyone like a scotch egg?” they ask the studio audience on the gantry to which one game girl, with an unshakable desire to get herself noticed, shouts in Vic’s face, “I’ll have a scotch egg! Hiya Mum!”. Excellent work!

After that classic example of letting your parent know that you’re on TOTP, we get Blur who are in a much more sombre mood with the second single from their “Parklife” album. I’m guessing that the images and sounds that come to most of our minds when we think of the “Parklfe” era of the band, it’s Damon and Phil Daniels lord marching it up on the title track or the hypnotic, non sequitur chorus of “Girls & Boys”. However, there are also some majestically understated songs on the album too. “End Of A Century” falls into that category for me and then there’s “To The End”. The obvious choice of second single would surely have been the title track but then Blur weren’t always obvious and had depths to them that it could be argued their Battle of Britpop opponents Oasis didn’t. “To The End” was such a change of mood from “Girls & Boys”. A dramatic ballad with a full orchestral accompaniment, did it wrong foot record buyers after the faux hedonism of its predecessor? Certainly, it was nowhere near as big a hit peaking at No 16.

A year or so later, the band would release an even grander ballad in “The Universal” from their “The Great Escape” album. It put me in mind of Madness from a decade earlier when The Nutty Boys broke from their hits formula to release two wistful, pensive pieces in “One Better Day” and “Yesterday’s Men” in 1984 and 1985 respectively.

The performance here is suitably melancholy. The black and white camera tint, the formal suits the band are wearing and the deliberate lack of movement on stage (Alex James seems almost Ron Mael-esque). Damon just about pulls off the vocals but who was the woman sat on stage with them? Apparently, Lætitia Sadier from Stereolab adds some vocals on the recording but I’m not convinced that’s her next to Damon. Whoever she was, as Vic Reeves noted afterwards, she didn’t do much did she?

Acid jazz was in the air (waves) back in 1994. After Galliano appeared on the show the other week, here were label mates The Brand New Heavies with their sixth consecutive Top 40 hit “Back To Love”. I was never that much of an Acid Jazzer though my wife was quite keen and I think she bought the album that this track came from (“Brother Sister”). However, I quite liked the breezy Summer feel of this one – a real daytime radio winner. The band doubled down on that vibe with their next release, a cover version of Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight At The Oasis” which I would suggest would become their best known hit. Meanwhile, “Back To Love” would peak at No 23.

Here’s a rather nice thing. A 50s doo-wop song given the hard rock treatment. The first era of Guns N’ Roses was coming to an end and it did so with a rather unexpected finish. The band’s decision to record an album of cover versions in 1993’s “Spaghetti Incident” seemed a bit odd to me but I guess it was to plug the gap between albums of new material. Nobody could have known that gap would be 17 years long. It sold well enough but in nowhere near the numbers of the “Use Your Illusion” albums and “Appetite For Destruction”. A collection of mainly punk and hard rock songs by the likes of New York Dolls, The Stooges, The Damned and Nazareth, it also included “Since I Don’t Have You” by The Skyliners.

https://youtu.be/x2rdbTd4OXk

Easily for me the stand out track on the album, it really shouldn’t work but somehow it does. Axl Rose’s angular, throat throttling vocals should decimate the song but actually it’s safe in his hands…erm…mouth (?). Being the hard rockers they are though, the band can’t resist adding their own imprint on the track so in the middle we get the line “Yep, we’re f****d”. I’m guessing that didn’t feature on any radio edit of the song.

Now I would have bet money that this had been released around Christmas in 1993 but clearly not. However, it had been planned to put it out then and subsequently in February but was pulled both times so that might explain my confusion. “Since I Don’t Have You” peaked at No 10. The band’s next single – another cover, this time of “Sympathy For The Devil” by The Rolling Stones for the film Interview With The Vampire – would be their last for 14 years.

Another one of those dance records next that hung around the Top 40 for weeks on end like one of those floater turds that won’t flush away without the need to resort to a literal shitty stick to break it up. Apologies for the excrement metaphor but I really have had enough of having to find something to say about these ‘club anthems’ that lingered like a nasty fart (see also Reel 2 Real’s “I Like To Move It”). “Get-A-Way” by Maxx was one such record. It stayed on the Top 40 for 10 weeks of which 5 of them were inside the Top 10 peaking at No 4 for 2 weeks.

The last time this lot were on the show they performed against the backdrop of a police car for no discernible reason and this time their dancers are jigging away behind some wire mesh fences. Why? Were they meant to have been caught by the fuzz and now be in some sort of detention centre? Just ridiculous.

A classic one hit wonder (huge hit then nada) next as Dawn Penn takes to the stage with her song “You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No)”. Back in 1994, my reaction would have been the same as Vic Reeves – who? As it happens, Dawn was part of the ‘rocksteady’ movement of the late 60s that was a successor to ska and a precursor to reggae (Wikipedia tells me) and she’d originally recorded the track (then just titled “You Don’t Love Me”) in 1967. Dawn then took a Guns N’ Roses style 17 years off from singing before returning to the track and doing a dancehall version of it. Thanks to her appearance at an anniversary show for her original label Studio One Records, the song was released as a single and with plenty of radio support became a huge hit in the UK peaking at No 3.

The UK had always been susceptible to one hit wonders from out of the leftfield like this one. I’m thinking Althea and Donna, Phyllis Nelson, Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley etc and just like those acts, Dawn seemed an unlikely pop star. She was already 42 when she appeared on TOTP which I guess is fairly old to be having your first hit. “You Don’t Love Me (No No No)” entered the charts at No 9 and spent the next four weeks inside the Top 10. Despite Dawn’s protestations, the UK did love her.

It’s the second of fifteen (gulp!) weeks at the top for Wet Wet Wet and “Love Is All Around”. They’re in the studio pretending to be hippies again but this time scenes from Four Weddings And A Funeral have been interspersed into the performance. I’m guessing the production company or distributors pushed for that though the film didn’t need any more promotion as it was top of the box office charts for weeks. I have to say I do like the film – it’s one of those that I always tend to end up watching if I stumble across it whilst channel flipping. Its appeal may have waned over the years but I still think the acting performances are good (apart from a rather wooden Andie Mac Dowell) and the pacing works really well. I wonder if some of the negativity that it attracts now is related to the Wets single putting people off by being No 1 for so long? I’m bound to refer to the film agin over the next 13 weeks but I think I’ll leave it there for now.

The play out tune is back after being omitted last week and it’s yet another dance tune, this time “Harmonica Man” by Bravado. I can’t tell you much about this as I don’t remember it and I can’t be arsed to research it online but it seems to have been inspired by The Grid’s “Swamp Thing” with its banjo theme but they’ve used an harmonica instead. Apparently it spent one week inside the Top 40 peaking at No 37.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Manic Street Preachers	Faster	I did not
2	Jocelyn Brown and Kym Mazelle	No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)	No
3	Pet Shop Boys	Absolutely Fabulous	Not even for charity
4	Blur	To The End	No but I had the Parklife album. Didn’t we all?
5	Brand New Heavies	Back To Love	No but my wife had the album
6	Guns N’ Roses	Since I Don’t Have You	No but I have it on their Greatest Hits album
7	Maxx	Get-A-Way	Hell no
8	Dawn Penn	You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No)	No, no and indeed no
9	Wet Wet Wet	Love Is All Around	Nope
10	Bravado	Harmonica Man	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.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001kkld/top-of-the-pops-09061994

TOTP 30 SEP 1993

Posted on October 27, 2022 by 80stastic

When Robbie Coltrane died recently, like many people, it got me thinking about his acting credits and the roles on which he made his name. Although I’ve seen many of the Harry Potter films due to my son’s influence, it won’t be Hagrid that I remember him for. Not when there’s so many other turns that I could reflect on. There’s his memorable performance as Dr Johnson, creator of A Dictionary of the English Language in Blackadder The Third for starters. Then there’s his starring role in the critically acclaimed National Treasure from 2016.

However for me, he was never better than in Cracker which first aired on ITV three days before this TOTP was broadcast. Based around the immensely complex character of criminal psychiatrist Dr Edward ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald, it ran for three series from 1993 to 1995 plus a couple of later specials in 1996 and 2006. Whilst its plots were incredibly engrossing (the Hillsborough story is the one I remember the most), there was another source of interest for me in that it was set and filmed in Manchester where I was living at the time. I think they even filmed in the area I lived called Longsight. I certainly recall walking home up my road one night and stumbling upon a whole film crew filming outside a house with many actors / extras dressed as police. I wasn’t the only person who was given a shock that night. The local drug dealer (‘Mr Dodgy’ we called him) nearly shat himself when confronted with the scene.

Talking of scares, here’s “Big Scary Animal” by Belinda Carlisle to open the show. This is the third time in consecutive weeks that this track has been featured but despite all that exposure, it couldn’t break into the Top 10 peaking just outside at No 12. Belinda’s discography tells me that she has more Greatest Hits albums to her name than studio albums which would suggest that she was all about the singles but that argument doesn’t quite stack up when you crunch her numbers. Discounting her solo debut “Belinda”, the following four albums all went Top 10 in the UK with two of them achieving platinum sales status. And yet…have you ever met somebody who owns a Belinda Carlisle studio album?

How do you follow up one of the biggest selling songs of the year which also happens to be your debut single? This was the dilemma facing Gabrielle who had shot to fame off the back of her No 1 “Dreams”. Talk about setting a high bar for yourself. Sadly and perhaps inevitably, “Going Nowhere” failed to live up to expectations. Not exactly a prophetic song title as it did make the Top 10 but it didn’t have that mercurial bit of magic that “Dreams” had courtesy of that adapted Tracy Chapman sample. It sounds like something Aretha Franklin might have recorded in the 80s. A very clunky, dated sound in a dance obsessed 1993.

Two further singles were released from her debut album “Find Your Way” and they did the opposite of that instruction by getting lost in the lower reaches of the charts, neither even making the Top 20. Was Gabrielle’s pop star career in danger of petering out? Perhaps against the odds, she would turn her fortunes around gradually over the course of the decade before peaking again triumphantly with a definitely prophetically titled song, the No 1 single “Rise” in 2000.

What’s going on here then? The pop phenomenon (and they really were) of 1984 back in the charts in 1993? Well of course it was all about record company plundering of an artist’s back catalogue to squeeze some more revenue out of their reputation. Frankie Goes To Hollywood were unavoidable in 1984. They owned the charts with three No1 records totting up fifteen weeks at the top between them. They became one of a handful of artists to command the No1 and No2 chart positions in the same week and were surrounded by controversy after the BBC banned the first of those No1 singles “Relax” due to its overtly sexual nature (Mike Read and all that). After the success came the downfall and the gap of two years between debut album “Welcome To The Pleasuredome” and follow up “Liverpool” proved insurmountable in terms of maintaining their profile and the band split in 1987 after basically imploding.

This though was all ancient history in pop terms and by 1993 record label ZTT calculated that the nine years between Frankie’s annus mirabilis and a revisiting of their story was long enough. To try and entice a new fanbase or indeed reactivate their existing one towards their amazing story once more, they released “Bang!…The Greatest Hits Of Frankie Goes To Hollywood” – it did what it said on the tin. Like Belinda Carlisle earlier, Frankie have far more compilations than studio albums to their name (a ratio of 10:2) but this one was by far the most successful going to No 4 in the charts and achieving gold status sales. To promote the album, a version of “Relax” was re-issued – the “Classic 1993 Version” to be exact – though I’m not entirely sure how different it was from the original which already had a myriad of mixes anyway.

There’s no controversy this time around with videos as the BBC is showing a live performance promo of the song directed by David Mallet. Even nearly ten years on, the notorious and banned S&M video with an obese Roman emperor and drag queens was never going to be shown before the watershed. The 1993 rerelease of “Relax” peaked at No5. Quite remarkable.

This next one is just a brilliant song in my book and a highlight from a great album that doesn’t get the praise it deserves. “Roses In The Hospital” was the third single from “Gold Against The Soul” by Manic Street Preachers and regularly trades positions in my mind with “Life Becoming A Landslide” (the follow up single) as the best track on the album.

Borrowing just ever so slightly from Bowie’s “Sound And Vision” (or is it “Sorrow”?), it’s got an unexpectedly funky backbeat allied with the hookiest (yes, that’s a word!) of choruses. Add in a wonderful coda that combines a refrain of the phrase “forever delayed”* with a knowing nod to The Clash’s “Rudie Can’t Fail” and it couldn’t…well…fail. It didn’t either when becoming the biggest hit from the album by peaking at No 15. This was the highest chart positions of any of their own compositions at the time with 1992’s No 7 “Theme From M.A.S.H (Suicide Is Painless)” obviously a cover version.

I was working in the Our Price in Stockport around this time and there were actually two Our Prices in the town, the big one on Merseyway and a much smaller one just around the corner from it. That store had a reputation for stocking classical music and I believe actually employed a ‘mature’ lady (compared to all us youngsters working for the company anyway) for a few hours a week who had great classical product knowledge. I was covering in the smaller store on the morning “Roses In The Hospital” came out and for some reason Sony sent us one 7” single despite the fact that the store didn’t stock any vinyl. Why do I remember this non-consequential crap? Oh and apparently that isn’t Nicky Wire in the Minnie Mouse mask as he was on honeymoon so his place was taken by a roadie in disguise. He wasn’t making some anti-Disney statement. Didn’t Echo and the Bunnymen do something similar when performing “Seven Seas” on the show in 1984 with a guy in a fish costume standing in for an absent Les Pattinson?

* “Forever Delayed” would be the title of the band’s first Best Of album in 2002 though curiously “Roses In The Hospital” was not included on the track listing. It did appear on the DVD version of the album and 2011 retrospective “National Treasures -The Complete Singles”.

Just the two Breakers this week starting with an act that always confuses me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I always get US3 confused with the similarly named Oui 3 who were having hits around this time. Secondly, like fellow jazz rapper Guru who was also on the show as a Breaker recently, they had an album that I remember selling loads of in Our Price but which Wikipedia tells me was not a massive commercial success. In the case of Guru that was the album “Guru’s Jazzmatazz Vol. 1” which only made No 58 in the charts whilst US3’s was “Hand On The Torch” which topped out at No 40.

“Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)” was the biggest hit from the album though it took a re-release to achieve this peak of No 23 after it bombed initially the year before. Sampling Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island”, I quite liked this though it wasn’t really my bag.

After Frankie Goes To Hollywood earlier, here’s another huge star of the 80s. Unlike Frankie though, Paul Young had managed to eke out some chart hits after his imperial phase of 83-85 had petered out and remain a semi regular visitor to the charts. In the 90s up to this point he had scored a total of four Top 40 entries (including No 4 hit “Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” with Zucchero). Just like Frankie though, he had also released a big selling Greatest Hits compilation called “From Time To Time – The Singles Collection” which had even topped the charts in 1991*.

However, Paul’s studio albums had suffered from a case of diminishing returns for a while with each one selling less than its predecessor right back to his debut “No Parlez” in 1983. By the time we got to 1993’s “The Crossing”, he was beyond the point of no return when it came to reversing that trend with it peaking at a lowly No 27. The lead single from it was a song that suggested that Paul (or his songwriters) had taken a leaf out of the ABC book of composition but instead of Smokey singing, we had Otis Redding feeling sad. I speak as a person who owns some Paul Young records and I have to say that “Now I Know What Made Otis Blue” is not his finest hour. However, it is deceptively catchy and has some powerful ear worm potential. Maybe that’s why it made an impressive chart high of No 14. Paul would visit the UK Top 40 only twice more and in a very reduced way but he remains a big draw on the live circuit.

*As with Belinda Carlisle before him, Paul has more Best Of compilations to his name than actual studio albums.

The debut now of a group who would enjoy enormous and sustained success throughout the decade despite losing a popular member Robbie Williams / Take That style. The presence in the UK charts of all female American R&B groups like En Vogue, SWV and Jade had highlighted a gap in the market for a UK version. In all honesty, apart from Bananarama, we hadn’t had many girl bands of any musical persuasion at all. Up to 1993, who else was there? Toto Coelo? Belle And The Devotions? The Reynolds Girls? The Beverley Sisters? We were seriously lagging behind. Enter Eternal – sisters Easther and Vernie Bennett and friends Kéllé Bryan and Louise Nurding. Put together by First Avenue Records using the En Vogue template, they exploded out of the gate with debut single “Stay” which made No 4 confirming consumer appetite for such a band.

Underpinning that success was the confidence of their performance here. Easther gives a strong lead vocal while the synchronised dance moves behind her are absolutely on point including some Egyptian style head slides and eye catching arm waving. Talking of eye catching, perhaps predictably, Louise Nurding got a lot of attention as the only non-black person in the group and within two years she would leave the band to pursue her own successful solo career. Had EMI always got her flagged for such a move? There was a rumour that they didn’t think they could break the band in the US as an R&B act if they had someone white in the line-up but I don’t want to pursue that particular line of thought. Suffice to say both Eternal and Louise were able to co-exist and have plenty of chart hits. The former had eight UK Top 10 hits including a No 1 post Louise who herself racked up an impressive twelve Top 20 hits half of which went Top 5. The one album they recorded as a four piece – “Always And Forever” – went four times platinum in the UK and sold four million copies worldwide paving the way for many an all female band in their wake including Spice Girls, All Saints, Girls Aloud and The Saturdays.

https://youtu.be/fvXOqli-yhY

Host Mark Franklin informs us that Chaka Demus And Pliers were meant to be in the TOTP studio to perform “She Don’t Let Nobody” but the former wasn’t very well and they had to cancel. He probably had a sore throat having strained it doing all those ‘Baby Girl’ and ‘Number One in the World’ shout outs. Ho hum.

This next one is a curious thing. Not the performance itself which is pretty standard but the fact that it was the band’s one and only time in the TOTP studio and it was for a single that only made it to No 40 in our charts. Can’t be that many acts that have such a TOTP history. Of course, the videos for Spin Doctors previous hit singles “Two Princes” and “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” had been on the show before but this run through of “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues” was the band’s only live performance.

The third single taken from their “Pocketful Of Kryptonite” album, it was very much in the same vein as its predecessors (no shaking things up with a slushy ballad for these guys) but a much more washed out, half-hearted version. Maybe that explains its lowly chart placing. Jimmy Olsen was of course Superman’s nerdy pal who had his own DC Comic but I’d take Fitz from Cracker to solve a case over Jimmy every time.

DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince still reign supreme at No 1 with “Boom! Shake The Room”. The pair seemed to have an issues with buildings – their debut album was called “Rock The House”. Yeah, you guessed it. I’ve got nothing left to say about this one. Thankfully this is its last week at No 1 as the Take That juggernaut is coming…

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Belinda Carlisle	Big Scary Animal	Nope
2	Gabrielle	Going Nowhere	No
3	Frankie Goes To Hollywood	Relax	Not in 1993 but I did back in 1984 obviously
4	Manic Street Preachers	Roses In The Hospital	Not the single but I bought the album
5	US3	Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)	Didn’t mind it, didn’t buy it
6	Paul Young	Now I Know What Made Otis Blue	Nah
7	Eternal	Stay	I did not
8	Chaka Demus And Pliers	She Don’t Let Nobody	Certainly not
9	Spin Doctors	Jimmy Olsen’s Blues”	Negative
10	DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince	Boom! Shake The Room	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001d7qy/top-of-the-pops-30091993

TOTP Rewind – the 90s

My memories of 90s chart music

TOTP 11 SEP 1998

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TOTP 04 SEP 1998

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TOTP 13 DEC 1996

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TOTP 11 OCT 1996

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TOTP 02 AUG 1996

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TOTP 30 MAY 1996

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TOTP 25 APR 1996

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TOTP 11 APR 1996

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TOTP 09 JUN 1994

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TOTP 30 SEP 1993

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