TOTP 02 MAY 1991
We’ve made it to May 1991 here at TOTP Rewind which can only mean two things; the culmination of the football season and the Eurovision Song Contest. Football-wise, the England team was indebted to little Dennis Wise who scored one of the most undignified, scrappy goals ever witnessed at international level with this goal vs Turkey in a European Championships qualifier the day before this TOTP aired…
As I recall, the general consensus was that it went in off his backside. Still, they all count. As for Eurovision, the 1991 contest took place in Rome on the Saturday and…well more about what happened there later.
Tonight’s show is hosted by the interminably smug Simon Mayo and he promises us “The most incredible opening to TOTP ever, ever seen, I mean it…”. Wow! That’s some promise! Who could he have been referring to? Well, if it’s 1991 then it could only be The KLF and indeed it is as they had crashed into the charts at No 3 with their latest single “Last Train To Trancentral”. So, did the performance live up to Mayo’s hype? Not for me sadly. Yes, there was a crowd of people up there on stage so it had more numbers than most acts and yes they were wearing white robes with Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond also sporting a bull horn protruding from their hoods which was presumably all meant to signify something ‘other’ and ‘cultish’. Maybe a better word would be ‘unpalatable’ as the imagery reminds me of The Klu Klux Klan and some sort of satanic ritual. They don’t do much though do they apart from jog around in a circle at the end and shout ‘Woo Woo!’ or is it ‘Mu Mu!’? Apparently the lady in the Native American headdress is Cressida Cauty (Jimmy’s then wife) who now goes by the name of Cressida Bowyer and is currently at the University of Brighton’s School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences where she been doing ground-breaking research into liver cancer. Seems a hell of a lot more productive than playing silly buggers and shouting “Woo Woo!’ on TV to me.
Mayo was wrong about another thing as well. His confident proclamation that “Last Train To Trancentral” would be a No 1 proved to be false as it stalled at No 2. Ha! Take that dullard!
Whilst 1991 was undoubtedly the year of The KLF, it was also an annus mirabilis for Cathy Dennis. We’d last seen Cathy back in 1989 when she was the featured vocalist on D-Mob’s “C’mon And Get My Love” single but here she was, striding out on her own with “Touch Me (All Night Long)“. Now I had no idea until now that this wasn’t a Cathy Dennis original (which was a surprise given her career as a prolific songwriter post being a pop star) but was in fact by somebody called Fonda Rae who had a minor hit with it it 1984 (it also had a Slade style spelling as it was entitled “Tuch Me (All Night Long)”). Wanna hear it? Ok then…
I say it’s not a Cathy Dennis original but she did rewrite the verses retaining just the chorus hook. The track proved to be a winner both with pop fans and dance heads as it went to No 5 in the UK Top 40 and No 1 in the US dance chart. Is that what Mayo meant when he did another of his predictions as he says in his introduction that “Touch Me (All Night Long)” was about to be No 1 in the US? If he meant the Billboard Hot 100 chart then he was wrong again as it peaked at No 2.
Anyway, back to Cathy and the single lit the touch paper for her career as she racked up a further three Top 40 hits this calendar year, all coming from her debut solo album “Move To This” which itself was a UK No 3, gold seller. For a while she looked like she had everything – the songs, the appeal, the looks and the moves. She certainly looked a better bet for longevity than some of her peers like Dannii Minogue. Unfortunately the two years between this and her next album saw grunge happen and she lost a lot of ground and her place in the scheme of things from which she never really recovered. Her final album as a recording artist, 1997’s “Am I The Kinda Girl?”, rode the Britpop zeitgeist and was critically well received but floundered commercially peaking at No 78.
OMD are next or that should really be OMD Pt II as this is the version of the band without founding member Paul Humphreys. I like the fact that remaining original Andy McCluskey didn’t see any need to change his renowned and wonderfully awful dancing style despite the band’s new era. He explained the back story of his dancing in an interview in The Scotsman, saying that it stemmed “from the perception that we were making boring robotic intellectual music that you couldn’t dance to. I was trying to say, ‘No, no, you can dance to it, look, I’m dancing to it…”. Hmm. It was famously dubbed the ‘Trainee Teacher Dance’ by DJ, presenter and writer Stuart Maconie. At least Andy went for a leather jacket look and not a comfy cardigan with patches on the elbows.
“Sailing On The Seven Seas” peaked at No 3 whilst parent album “Sugar Tax” went platinum. Fast forward 30 years and that quip by Mayo that the album’s title was “as good a name for a tax as any” looks pretty silly doesn’t it given that just last week we heard of government plans to raise a sugar and salt tax to help to break Britain’s addiction to junk food.
OK, we arrive at the Eurovision part of the show. The UK entry for 1991 was Samantha Janus with a little ditty called “A Message To Your Heart”. The contest took place in Rome on 4th May and by this point in our history, the UK had only finished outside of the Top 10 once since 1978. Indeed, we’d finished 2nd twice on the spin at the end of the 80s and had been a respectable 6th the previous year. Twelve months on and our competing song was once again written by Paul Curtis who had penned the previous year’s entry, “Give A Little Love Back To The World” by Emma. Whereas that song had an environmental theme, “A Message To Your Heart” was all about those in the world suffering from poverty and starvation with the lyrics offering up a contrast of the have and have nots with lines referring to those who “are hungry just from being born” and those of whom “their only hunger being greed”. That was all very laudable but the sound of the song was completely at odds with its lyrics in that it was defiantly up tempo. In this TOTP performance, Janus ploughs on through it like a soft rock anthem with plenty of air grabs, fist clenches and tossing of her hair. She also does a lot of grinning, smiling and there’s that little prayer hand gesture which reminds me of Aneka of “Japanese Boy” fame. It’s not really her fault I guess – it just doesn’t make any sense in the context of the song.
Come the day of the contest itself, Janus was given the 20th singing slot out of 22 performers. I’m not sure that helped her and neither did her pink mini-dress outfit when singing about poverty and starvation…that and her dreadful out of tune singing obviously. Samantha finished 10th overall which was seen as quite the disaster back then but which would be seen as a right result these days. Janus was devastated though and thought it would spell the end of her. Fortunately for her, she recovered and went onto have a very successful acting career both on stage and on TV with her most memorable role being that of Ronnie Mitchell in Eastenders I would imagine though my personal favourite of her shows was Game On.
As for the UK ‘s relationship with Eurovision, we recovered some ground during the rest of the 90s with three 2nd place finishes building to our last win with Katrina and the Waves in 1997. Since the turn of the century though, it’s all pretty much turned to shit.
“A Message To Your Heart” peaked at No 30 in the UK charts.
I never knew Nomad had a second hit! Well, if I did I’d forgotten all about it but here is the follow up to “(I Wanna Give You) Devotion” called “Just A Groove”. Right, let’s have a listen to it then…
…my God that was awful! There’s no tune in there at all. It’s just a backing track with some bullshit lyrics about Nomad having the music. Vocalist Sharon D. Clarke went on to have a Laurence Olivier Award winning acting career and has appeared in many West End productions and also had a wide TV career appearing in shows such as Soldier Soldier, Eastenders and most recently in the eleventh series of Doctor Who. Now I don’t know if it’s that bit of info which is causing me to hear this but it when she’s singing ‘Nomad’s got the groove’ it sounds a bit like ‘Nomad’s Dr Who’.
If that wasn’t weird enough, check this lot of trivia out. Having already discussed in length the 1991 Eurovision Song Contest earlier in the blog, it turns out that, in 2000, Sharon took part in the Eurovision qualifier A Song for Europe as part of Six Chix who came second to Nikki French. Now if you know your 90s chart history, that name will ring a bell as Nikki scored a No 5 hit in 1995 with a dance version of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. However, 9 years prior to that in 1986, she recored a song called “Dirty Den” released under the name Whiskey and Sofa. Dirty Den? Eastenders? The soap that Sharon appeared in? Weird no? Oh suit yourselves!
Meanwhile band member Steve McCutcheon, known professionally as Steve Mac, would go on to a hugely successful record producer and songwriter career having had a hand in 30 No 1 singles in the UK chart including four for Irish boyband Westlife. However, he was still clearly honing his skill backing 1991 as “Just a Groove” peaked at a lowly No 16 and was Nomad’s last ever UK chart hit.
Simon Mayo’s smugness gets an outing again next as he informs us all that “Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” by Paul Young and Zucchero was an old Record of the Week on his Radio 1 Breakfast Show and that it is now shooting up the charts. Yeah, whatever Simon. Presumably this wasn’t anything to do with your own musical choice but was the result of a deal brokered between the record company and the Radio 1 playlist team made up of producers, music editors etc.
Back to Zucchero and Paul though and last week, the hashtag Keith Lemon was trending on account of the Italian singer’s resemblance to Leigh Francis’ comedy character. However, somebody this week posited the theory that he looked more like Coronation Street‘s Jim MacDonald. Let’s have look then…
Nah, definitely Keith Lemon for me.
“Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” was taken from Paul’s very first Best Of collection called “From Time To Time – The Singles Collection” which was a huge seller in the UK. Since then, his record label Columbia have released a further eleven Paul Young Best Ofs under various different titles. That’s more than double the amount of studio albums he recorded for them! Talk about getting the most out of your money!
“Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” peaked at No 4.
After being a Breaker last week, Frances Nero has leapt up the charts nine places which warrants a studio performance of “Footsteps Following Me”. The title of the song sounds pretty sinister when you think about it. Having examined the lyrics, it seems to be about the need for trust between lovers with phrases like ‘I am allergic to jealousy’ and ‘love without freedom will die’. There’s also a line which is utterly banal and lazy and that line is ‘free as a bird high in the sky’. Oh come on! Primary school kids could write better than that!
“Footsteps Following Me” peaked at No 17 whilst Frances Nero sadly passed away in 2014.
Chesney is gone – toppled by the might of Cher and an old 60s song that was included on the soundtrack to her latest film Mermaids. It’s not quite how I imagined him going out really. Surely someone more ‘happening’ (as the TOTP hosts were likely to say) in 1991 like The KLF or Seal would have been expected to dethrone *Chezza? Cher though? I for one didn’t see it coming.
Within a few short weeks of “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” being at No 1, Cher released an album called “Love Hurts”. Nothing very exceptional about this of course but there are couple of little anecdotes about the album’s release that I recall. Firstly, “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” wasn’t on it. Except that it was. What am I banging on about? Well, it wasn’t included on the US release of the album as the single had not been anywhere near as popular over there where it peaked at No 33. Across Europe however, it was huge and was a No 1 in Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Norway and the UK of course. Consequently, the European version of the album did include it as a bonus track. Presumably that decision helped to send the album to No 1 in the UK where it was a three times platinum seller.
Secondly, there was the issue of its cover. When it was originally released it had some weird mirror reflection artwork going on with a banner across it proclaiming the album’s title. This was the version released in North America and also the initial worldwide copies. Once we started re-ordering it at the Our Price I worked in, the albums that arrived had an entirely different image of a red haired (and very air brushed) Cher against a plain white background. What was that all about?
*Does the nickname Chezza work for both Chesney and Cher? Just wondering.
The play out video is “Get Ready!” by Roachford. Despite having released a dozen or so albums and more than 30 singles over the course of his career, Andrew Roachford says that somebody mentions his biggest hit “Cuddly Toy” to him at least once every day which reminded me of this…
“Get Ready!” peaked at No 22.
For the sake of posterity, I include the chart run down below:
| Order of Appearance | Artist | Title | Did I buy it? |
| 1 | The KLF | Last Train To Trancentral | No |
| 2 | Cathy Dennis | Touch Me (All Night Long) | Negative |
| 3 | OMD | Sailing On The Seven Seas | Not the single but I’m sure it’s on a Best Of CD of their that I have |
| 4 | Samantha Janus | A Message To Your Heart | Of course not |
| 5 | Nomad | Just A Groove | Nah |
| 6 | Paul Young / Zucchero | Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman) | No but I bought that Best Of album with it on |
| 7 | Frances Nero | Footsteps Following Me | Nope |
| 8 | Cher | The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss) | Yes but it was all a big mistake honest! |
| 9 | Roachford | Get Ready! | Yes albeit from the Bargain Bin |
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/m000xw3v/top-of-the-pops-02051991
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 