Prince

TOTP 28 FEB 1997

It’s the last day of February in 1997 and we’ve just had the BRIT Awards show which featured that Union Jack mini dress worn by Geri Halliwell when the Spice Girls performed at the event. It has come to be seen as an iconic moment in UK music history. At the 2010 BRIT Awards, it was voted the most memorable performance of the last 30 years. The dress itself was auctioned in 1998 at Sotheby’s with the winning bid of £41,320 becoming a Guinness World Record as the most money paid for an item of pop star clothing at auction. The design has been copied by many a fan attending various Pride events or Spice Girls concert. Let’s see if we can spot its influence on any of the artists in this particular episode of TOTP…

By the way, tonight’s host is footballer Ian Wright who is cutting his teeth on TOTP for his staggeringly long and full media career which he built for himself after he finally stopped kicking a ball for a living. The first act he introduces are the Bee Gees who may not be wearing any Union Jack dresses but they did pick up an Outstanding Contribution Award at the BRITS earlier in the week. Whatever you thought of their music, you couldn’t deny their longevity and said award was deserved. Having released their first single in 1963, they scored their first UK hit in 1967 racking up a further eight hits (including two No 1s) before the decade ended. It would be the 70s though that would be their golden era and the period of their career that they are most remembered for with the disco explosion and Saturday Night Fever phenomenon. The 80s were a different story and one of complete extremes – they only released eight singles in total all of which except one failed to make the UK Top 40 but the one that did? Yep, it was a No 1.

And so to the 90s and although it certainly wasn’t up there with the 70s, the Gibb brothers were pretty consistent. Nine chart entries including four Top 5 hits of which “Alone” was the third. That’s not even counting the two cover versions in 1996 by Take That and Boyzone of “How Deep Is Your Love” and “Words” respectively that both went to No 1. Having blown smoke up their collective arses for a few sentences, I have to say that “Alone” tested my patience in terms of its listenability. It’s all a bit predictable and, dare I say it, indistinguishable from their other 90s hits. Even when they tried to shake things up by inserting some bagpipes into the track, it just really dated it. John Farnham* had done that 10 years before on “You’re The Voice”. The Bee Gees final UK Top 5 hit would follow in 1998 when they joined forces with Celine Dion on “Immortality”. Oh deep joy.

*Yes I also mentioned him in another recent post and no, I’m not obsessed with him!

A-ha! The first signs of the influence of the Union Jack dress are in evidence in this next performance by Republica as lead singer Saffron (real name Samantha Sprackling) chooses a Saint George’s Cross T-shirt to wear under her suit jacket. Republica were one of those curious cases where they definitely were not a one hit wonder and in any case, that hit wasn’t even the highest charting of their career but they were destined to be defined by it. “Ready To Go” is the track in question and it was originally released a year before this when it failed to make the Top 40. The 1996 version (often referred to as the Original UK Mix’) was vastly different to the one we would all grow to know with more of a dance sound to it. A piano motif existed where the hit version had guitars and it just had a lighter touch to it in general. The version that peaked at No 13 in our charts was a US remix that would ultimately become the one that was released to Europe second time around which had a much heavier sound and faster tempo making it more like a rock track than a dance anthem though I’m sure many did cut some rug to it. In fact, I bet it went down a storm in the indie discos of the time with much jumping up and down on the dance floor – I don’t think I would have been involved in this myself you understand; being 29 this year I was probably aging out of the club market.

The high octane thrill ride that was “Ready To Go” would lend itself to being the perfect soundtrack to the start of sports events. I believe Sunderland AFC used to run out to this track at their home matches back in the day. As for Republica, they looked like they might be the next big thing for a while with Saffron’s cheekbones and looks allied to a very commercial sound – a UK No Doubt possibly. However it wouldn’t last. Their final UK hit came in 1998 with the band’s fortunes being undone by a poorly received second album and record label Deconstruction going bust. They kind of remind me of a 90s version of Westworld of “Sonic Boom Boy” fame who similarly burnt brightly but briefly though Republica reformed in 2008 and are still a going concern today.

The two highest chart entries of the week are both huge dance tunes and we get both of them back to back starting with “Encore Une Fois” by Sash! This was all very confusing. The track’s title was French for “One more time” yet Sash! are a German DJ/production team. Not only that but it sounded very similar to “Insomnia” by Faithless so much so that Rollo considered his legal options for a while. A trance floor filler, it is almost entirely an instrumental track aside from the title being repeated by vocalist Sabine Ohmes plus her spoken word intro “Mesdames, Messieurs Le disc-jockey Sash! est de retour” which translates to “Ladies and gentlemen, DJ Sash! is back here”. Due to the lack of lyrics, if you watch the performance with the subtitles on, the following words flash on screen:

“Band plays an ambient house beat”

and…

“He plays a phrase again and again”

Bizarrely, that’s almost exactly what I was going to write as my review of the track!

As Ian Wright says, viewers might have had the second highest chart entry of the week in their collection already. “You Got The Love” by The Source featuring Candi Staton was originally a huge hit back in 1991 but was rereleased in 1997 as the ‘New Voyager Mix’ and was a hit all over again peaking one place higher than its 1991 counterpart at No 3. For what it’s worth I much prefer the original but I haven’t got the time nor the inclination to write about this one all over again so this is what I had to say about it when I reviewed the 1991 TOTP repeats in which it featured which numbered three – coincidentally, almost the same amount of times it was released:

TOTP 07 FEB 1991

TOTP 14 FEB 1991

TOTP 28 FEB 1991

Not wearing a Union Jack dress but definitely wearing her British influences on her sleeve was Cathy Dennis who is back in the charts with a cover of perhaps the quintessential English song – “Waterloo Sunset”. With The Kinks very much being talked about at the time as ‘The Godfathers of Britpop’, it must have seemed a sensible choice for Cathy to move away from the dance diva image that had made her name and remodel herself as a singer-songwriter, paying homage to the great Ray Davies and riding the zeitgeist at the same time. Or was it a much more cynical move? Cathy’s career was teetering on the edge and she needed a hit to revive it? We’ve seen that move so many times. Well, it’s true that the hits, whilst not having dried up completely, had certainly shrivelled in size. After debut album “Move To This” had achieved gold status, follow up “Into The Skyline” had not sustained after initial success and none of its singles had got any higher in the charts than No 23. Fast forward five years and third album “Am I The Kinda Girl?” would fail and flail its way to a lowly chart peak of No 78. Cathy’s cover of “Waterloo Sunset” did give her a No 11 hit (her highest position since 1991) but it was a temporary reprieve with the follow up single missing the Top 40 altogether. At this point, Cathy gave up on being a star in her own right and forged a hugely successful career writing songs for other people. A bit ironic then that her final hit was with a composition that wasn’t one of hers.

Cathy does a decent job of selling us “Waterloo Sunset” with this performance and, let’s be fair, convincing people they needed a version of this iconic song that wasn’t by The Kinks was not an easy sell. Her feather boa is a nice nod to the 60s as is her coy, daydreaming looks to the camera. Having her play a guitar gives me Sheryl Crow vibes which perhaps was intentional for her singer-songwriter ambitions.

And yet more evidence of the influence of that Geri Halliwell dress as Bush lead singer Gavin Rossdale is wearing a top with a Union Jack design on it. His British grunge band have finally bagged themselves a UK hit after breaking the US first as “Swallowed” has landed inside the Top 10. Rossdale, of course, was in a relationship with No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani at this point but they won’t have had a chance to spend any time together on this show as they weren’t in the studio simultaneously – the No Doubt performance we will see later is just a repeat of the one from last week. If they had met up, they could have worked on a mash up of their two hits – an ode to not talking whilst you’re eating called “Don’t Speak…Swallow”. I’ll get me coat.

Although he was about to enter that part of his career when he couldn’t guarantee himself a UK Top 40 hit with every release, having Prince (or The Artist as he was known back then) on TOTP in person would still have been a big deal. It certainly was for host Ian Wright for whom he was his idol as he gushed in his intro. Although he hadn’t won anything at the BRITS (he’d been nominated for Best International Male Solo Artist), Prince/The Artist had performed the title track from his latest album “Emancipation” at the show. Whilst he was still in the country, he popped by the BBC’s flagship music show for a performance of his latest single “The Holy River”. Seeing as he didn’t play this one at the BRITS, I’m guessing that this TOTP appearance was very much scheduled – he knew he didn’t have to promote his latest single at the awards show as he had another UK TV slot already booked. We didn’t know it at the time but excluding the rerelease of “1999” in 1998, this single would be Prince’s final UK Top 40 hit in his lifetime. As such, I wish I had something nicer to say about it but it’s all style over substance. It’s a much more toned down, traditional pop/rock song than some of his more funk driven output but it never really goes anywhere – does it even have a chorus? He can call himself The Artistall he liked but it didn’t stop him from going all Prince-like at the end where he gives us a “Purple Rain”-esque guitar solo just for good measure. Ah, well. Thanks for all the memories Mr Nelson.

And this is where we came in as we return to the protagonist of the Union Jack dress story though Geri Halliwell doesn’t have it on tonight. In fact, she’s distinctly covered up this time leaving Victoria/Posh to wear a revealing outfit with an awful lot of décolletage on show. Yes, it’s time for an exclusive performance of their new single from the Spice Girls. As with Prince before them, they’d already done a turn at the BRITS though they were given a two song slot as we got “Wannabe” and “Who Do You Think You Are”. The latter formed a double A-side with the song on the show tonight – “Mama” – which would be the Comic Relief single for 1997. In a remarkably fortunate falling of dates (hmm…), Comic Relief day and Mothering Sunday were within five days of each other this year so with that double whammy of events, there was no way that this fourth Spice Girls single wasn’t going to No 1 and when it did, the group set a new record of all of their first four releases topping the chart. Have that Gerry and the Pacemakers, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Jivebunny and Robson & Jerome!

I have to admit that “Mama” always seemed a bit of a weak effort to me, sweet to the point of being sickly despite its noble sentiments (basically the girls admitting what cows they were to their Mums when they were growing up). I much preferred the sassy, uptempo “Who Do You Think You Are”. The Spice Girls juggernaut would roll on in 1997 albeit there would be a six month gap where they didn’t release anything before they were back with a new single and album, a second Christmas No 1 and even a film. Spice Girls overload is coming!

Even Ian Wright has picked up on the constant revolving door sequence of a new No 1 becoming a weekly event, so much so that he articulates his surprise that “Don’t Speak” by No Doubt has managed a second week at the top of the charts in 1997. To me, it did have that feel of having gravitas to it that would enable more longevity than something like, I don’t know, Tori Amos or LL Cool J. If you examine the sales figures for those records in the week they were No 1, that view is kind of borne out. “Professional Widow (It’s Got To Be Big)” and “Ain’t Nobody” both sold 80,000 copies in their first weeks which was enough to secure top spot for them both. “Don’t Speak” sold 195,000 copies in week one and followed that up with 140,000 copies in week two – both these figures were more than any No 1 single had sold since Christmas. Even in its third week, it sold 85,000 copies to hold on at No 1 – again more than Tori Amos and LL Cool J. However, it couldn’t stand up to the g-force of the Spice Girls single when that was released in March.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Bee Gees	Alone	I didn’t
2	Republica	Ready To Go	Liked it, didn’t buy it
3	Sash!	Encore Une Fois	Never
4	The Source featuring Candi Staton	You Got The Love	Negative
5	Cathy Dennis	Waterloo Sunset	No
6	Bush	Swallowed	No but I had it on one of those Best Album Ever compilations
7	Prince aka The Artist	The Holy River	Nope
8	Spice Girls	Mama / Who Do You Think You Are	Nah
9	No Doubt	Don’t Speak	See 2 above

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/p00fsvld/top-of-the-pops-28021997?seriesId=unsliced

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 15 NOV 1996

Posted on December 5, 2024 by 80stastic

Why oh why didn’t we have more of this calibre of ‘golden mic’ presenter? Having four of The Fast Show cast in character was a genius move by TOTP executive producer Ric Blaxill. Or was it his decision? Did it come from higher up within the BBC to promote the first (and so far only) The Fast Show Christmas Special that was aired on 27 December of this year? Whatever the truth, the turn by Paul Whitehouse, Charlie Higson, Mark Williams and John Thomson was so much better than the usual standard we’ve seen from the majority of these celebrity hosts. It was certainly a vast improvement on the drivel many of the old Radio 1 DJs used to shovel at us (yes, obviously I’m pointing at you Simon Mayo). We start with the characters of Ted and Ralph who are straight into their uncomfortable relationship mode. I especially like the way Ted says he doesn’t know about Boyzone (sir) but then immediately informs Ralph that Take That have split up.

The first act they introduce is Robert Miles and Maria Nayler with a track called “One And One”. Miles, of course, was the poster boy of the dream house movement and had scored a massive hit earlier in the year with “Children”. Unlike that song and follow up “Fable” which were both instrumentals, this one had actual singing in it courtesy of Nayler who had started her music career with the band Ultraviolet who I’d heard of but had no idea what they sounded like. Someone who did though and who liked what he heard was DJ and producer Sasha who sought Nayler out to record the track “Be As One” which became a Top 20 UK hit earlier in 1996. This would peak the interest of Robert Miles who similarly made contact with Nayler to collaborate on the song “One And One” – clearly Maria had a thing about songs with the word ‘one’ in the title.

So what was this ‘new’ sound like? Well, it was like “Children” with vocals wasn’t it? If you liked that sort of thing then good luck to you but for me it was all fairly insubstantial. If I’ve said this once, I’ve said it hundreds of times but the record buying public didn’t agree with me and sent it to No 3 in the UK charts. However, the dream house phenomenon would peter out from this point on (although it probably morphed into something else). Miles would have just one further UK chart hit (bizarrely with a Sledge Sister) and he himself would pass away in 2017 from metastatic cancer aged just 47.

Next up are Mrs Ted’s favourites the Backstreet Boys. I’m sorry Mrs Ted but I could never understand the appeal of this lot. Awful name, useless songs and most of them were not even that good looking. Without wishing to sound too Little Englander about it, didn’t we have enough boy bands of our own without making space for New Kids In The Block 2.0? Take this song “I’ll Never Break Your Heart” for example. It’s just a sub par version of something Boyz II Men might have released. Somehow though, I still hear their songs played on the radio to this day. Maybe it’s me that’s got it all wrong? Nah, couldn’t be but even if liking the Backstreet Boys was being in the right, I’d rather be wrong. In fact, I want it that way (ahem).

Somebody put some thought into this running order (though clearly not “I’ll Get Me Coat” man who does the intro) as we segue from “I’ll Never Break Your Heart” to “Un-Break My Heart” by Toni Braxton. Just like Robert Miles’ “One And One” from earlier, this single had a remarkable chart life partly helped by the fact there was a ballad version and a dance version of the single available to buy. Look at these chart positions though:

4 – 5 – 5 – 4 – 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 4 – 2 – 4

That’s eleven weeks inside the Top 5 with a climb down the chart being reversed on three separate occasions. Compare that to the chart record of “One And One”:

6 – 6 – 6 – 5 – 4 – 3 – 5 – 5 – 4 – 6

Incredible really that two records in the charts at the same time could display such consistency of sales. Working in Our Price at the time, that pattern of sales would also have been hard to order for with the question “surely it’s going to tail off next week?” always in the back of the singles buyer’s mind. Interesting that “One And One” spent three consecutive weeks at No 6. The devil’s music perhaps?

We were always going to see Jazz Club’s Louis Balfour weren’t we and John Thomson duly delivers. It’s the plausible detail of the script that makes this character funny for me – the names of the fictional artists and songs that Balfour introduces that are simultaneously ludicrous and believable. He’s on form in this link referencing Peter Python and The Bop and a track called “Beat My Feet Sweet”. Nice! Not nice though was the real act that he introduces – The Woolpackers with “Hillbilly Rock Hillbilly Roll”. Whose shameless and shameful idea was this to cash in on the line dancing phenomenon that was sweeping the country around this time?! Presumably some executive producer at Emmerdale from where this grotesque abomination originated. I’ve never watched the soap much – it was the one that I could never really get into – and this single wasn’t going to tempt me in.

Supposedly, the group that consisted of three cast members actually featured in a plot line of the show but I couldn’t tell you what the story was. All I knew was that this was a terrible record engineered to fleece fans of the soap or those people who would only come into a record shop once a year at Christmas. Somehow this pile of crap got to No 5 and spent ten weeks inside the Top 40. They repeated the grift the following Christmas with another line dancing song called “Line Dance Party” (the thought that must have gone into naming it!) and there were two whole albums released off the back of this initial nonsense. Here’s a thought, after you’ve done your cha cha slides, your brushes and your heel fans, here’s another move for all those involved in this record – it’s called the ‘hang your head in shame’ and that includes TOTP executive producer Ric Blaxill for having it on the show.

In 1995, Michael Jackson had the UK Christmas No 1. Twelve months on and his Yuletide offering was still being sourced from his “HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I” album but “Stranger In Moscow” was no “Earth Song”. In fact, despite its chart peak of No 4, I don’t remember this one at all. I think I can be forgiven as it’s the somnambulist’s anthem, sleepwalking its way from start to finish. Indeed, it’s 65bpm makes it one of Jackson’s slowest songs.

A ballad about loneliness, it apparently drew on Jackson’s personal experience of walking through the city at night alone looking for someone, anyone to talk to. The Russian angle was meant to highlight his feelings of fear and alienation though lyrics like “Armageddon of the brain”, “Stalin’s tomb won’t let me be” and “KGB was doggin’ me” all seem rather clunky and ham fisted. Supposedly the track’s origins came from a bizarre source – the credits theme for the computer game Sonic The Hedgehog 3. What this?

Oh my God! I think I can hear a similarity! And here’s another similarity – a cover of “Stranger In Moscow” by a band I’d never heard of before but whose version actually turns the track (for me) into a decent song. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge and dismiss.

Right, so I’ve now watched the first part of the Boybands Forever documentary on iPlayer and it dealt specifically with the rise of and rivalry between Take That and East 17. It starts with a clip of the latter’s Brian Harvey smashing up a disc for 1 million sales of East 17 records in a fit of rage. The clip was dated as being from 2015 and sees Harvey ranting about grief he’s getting from the police, the CPS, the court system before he finally says turns on the music industry. Now, you may have seen that Harvey has been posting a lot of videos of himself lately where he talks/shouts about conspiracies and cover ups and being censored. His ex-band mate John Hendy got involved by posting a reply video telling Harvey to shut up and move on. Brian, predictably, did neither. Reading between the lines, Harvey seems to be insinuating that events took place during the band’s career that should have warranted an Operation Yewtree style investigation and that they have consistently been covered up and he wants to get the truth out there whatever the cost may be to him personally. He even referenced the recent death of Liam Payne as part of his conspiracy theory. I don’t know where the truth lies in this – why would I? – but all I’m going to say is that, in retrospect, having Ken and Kenneth the “Ooh! Suit you sir!” twins introduce East 17 and Gabrielle perform “If You Ever” hasn’t aged that well.

Ken and Kenneth really push the envelope with their next link to Prince by referring to him as the “purple-headed one” – I think we all understand that double entendre. I say Prince but I think he was officially known as that squiggly symbol thing by this point. Apparently, he’d always wanted to record “Betcha By Golly Wow!” that had originally been a hit for The Stylistics in 1972 but his record company Warners hadn’t allowed it so he got his way once he was free from contractual obligations to them and recorded it for his “Emancipation” album. I have to say that although it seems a logical choice given the range of Prince’s falsetto voice, I’m not sure he does a great job with it. If it was a shout for a penalty in a football match, you’d say that he made a meal of it. It did make No 11 in the UK which suggests the record buying public once again disagreed with me. However, aside from a rerelease of “1999” as the new millennium dawned, he would never have as big a hit in this country again.

In amongst the headlines that were fashioned by the press in the Gary Barlow v Robbie Williams battle, there was another contender for solo artist supremacy who rather went under the radar and yet, for me, his first solo single was better than both his ex-band mates’ efforts combined. The perceived wisdom was that Barlow was the talent when it came to writing songs and was therefore the most likely to succeed out on his own. Williams had generated a lot of press for himself but when it came to it, his first release was a cover version – where were your songs Robbie?

Tiptoeing a path through both came Mark Owen – the ~~pretty~~ young one as described by Ralph in his intro – and therein lay the issue for Owen, that he could be dismissed as just that. Even the TOTP caption adds to the condescending narrative by stating “Wrote this track himself” with the underlying tone being “Who would have thought it?” and yet “Child” is actually very good. Coming on like a cross between Donovan and David Cassidy, Owen delivered a sparkling, shimmering pop song that perfectly suited him vocally. With all due respect, Mark doesn’t have the biggest voice but he didn’t need one for this string drenched ballad. The chart positions for the debut singles by Barlow, Williams and Owen seemed to solidify in the minds of the public some sort of natural order with Gary’s “Forever Love” going to No 1, Robbie’s George Michael cover spinning to No 2 and Mark’s “Child” finding a home at No 3. Those three chart peaks were replicated for all three’s follow up singles as well. It was like some preordained medal podium for ex-members of Take That. Time would show that it would be Williams who would ultimately ascend to the gold medal position in terms of record sales but for Mark Owen it would never get better than a bronze medal. His album “Green Man” didn’t sell in bucket loads (we had a massive overstock in the Our Price where I was working after Head Office buyers mistakenly bought in loads of it thinking it was a surefire winner) and he was dropped by his label within a year. Winning the second series of Celebrity Big Brother in 2002 raised his profile again to the point where he bagged a Top 5 hit with “Four Minute Warning” but it was a case of diminishing returns after that until the Take That reunion in 2006. Mark has continued his solo career in parallel with the band and last released an album in 2022.

In an inspired move, Bob Fleming does the voice over for the Top 10 countdown which obviously means we don’t actually hear much of the Top 10 countdown. In pole position are Robson & Jerome for a second week with their triple A-side single “What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted” / “Saturday Night At The Movies” / “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. Mercifully, this would be their last ever release (excluding a Best Of and a Love Songs collection that would follow in later years) which makes me wonder if that was the reason behind this triple track product. Going out with a bang and a third No 1 single out of three. Would they have risked doing a Frankie Goes To Hollywood if they’d have gone for a fourth single and missed the top of the charts? Or was it as simple as they’d had enough of this pop star lark and wanted to get back to their day jobs? Presumably they had a contract with their record label RCA so maybe they’d just fulfilled their contractual obligations? Whatever the reason, I think this might be their final TOTP appearance (bar Christmas specials) and I think we can all say “thank f**k for that!”. The madness was over. As for The Fast Show, it would go on for a further two series with the cast reuniting for a 30 anniversary tour this year. Nice.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Robert Miles and Maria Nayler	One And One	Nope
2	Backstreet Boys	I’ll Never Break Your Heart	Never
3	Toni Braxton	Un-Break My Heart	I did not
4	The Woolpackers	Hillbilly Rock Hillbilly Roll	As if
5	Michael Jackson	Stranger In Moscow	Nah
6	East 17 / Gabrielle	If You Ever	Sorry Brian – it’s a no
7	Prince	Betcha By Golly Wow!	No
8	Mark Owen	Child	Liked it, didn’t buy it
9	Robson & Jerome	What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted” / “Saturday Night At The Movies” / “You’ll Never Walk Alone	See 4 above

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/m00256xq/top-of-the-pops-15111996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 28 APR 1994

Posted on March 17, 2023 by 80stastic

As ever it seems, this TOTP is a right mixed bag of huge, stellar names and those that perhaps haven’t lingered in the memory anywhere near as long. To illustrate that point, two of the artists on the show are from the furthermost extremes of the spectrum. One is an absolute legend of the world of music and show business and the other…well, let’s just say I’d be surprised if many people could recall them.

We start though with a band who I had forgotten all about but do recall their name now I’m presented with them in front of me. Skin (terrible name)* were part of that early 90s UK rock movement populated by the likes of Little Angels and Thunder (indeed they toured with both of them) and also had affiliations with Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson – Skin’s drummer Dicki Fliszar (not a stage name apparently) had played in Dickinson’s tour band. This led to them signing with Maiden’s management company and record label Parlophone. The link with Dickinson even got them a place on a hit single albeit under the pseudonym of Smear Campaign on the 1992 Comic Relief single “I Wanna Be Elected”. A debut EP (under their own name) called “The Skin Up” failed to crack the Top 40 but this follow up – “The Money EP” – hit pay dirt when it climbed to a peak of No 18. Watching this performance back, they clearly had pretensions to be the next Led Zeppelin with lead singer Neville MacDonald channeling his inner Robert Plant to full effect. Just because the band were called Skin, did we really have to see two of them displaying some here?

* When my mate Robin caught Spinal Tap live around 1992, he was in the front row and managed to touch the hand of one of the group or as he described it “I got skin off the band”. I don’t think Skin, the band, would have got the same reaction from him.

Skin would go on to collect a handful of UK Top 40 hits and a Top 10 eponymous debut album and a support slot at Gateshead Stadium for Bon Jovi. Sadly, what should have been a career high turned into a disaster when a voltage converter was put to US settings by a stage hand which resulted in their guitarist’s amplifier being blown as well as the keyboard player’s Hammond organ. When I was working in the Civil Service in the early 2000s (stick with me, I do have a point), one of my colleagues was a huge Dexys Midnight Runners fan who actually got to know some of the people from the band’s history and those of The Bureau who formed out of the ashes of the first Dexys incarnation. A man who had a foot in both camps was Mick Talbot (later of The Style Council) who told my colleague that shortly before Live Aid started (The Style Council were second on that day), Mick noticed the same issue with the sound equipment (i.e. it was configured to US settings) and so, knowing it would blow, quickly changed them thereby averting a technological disaster and a late start to The Global Jukebox. There you go – the inside track on one of the biggest musical events ever courtesy of TOTP Rewind!

Here’s a band in the process of making a name for themselves – Eternal with a third consecutive hit. “Just A Step From Heaven” would follow “Stay” and “Save Our Love” into the Top 10. I’ve noticed with all their TOTP performances that it always seems to be Easther Bennett on lead vocals with the other three group members acting effectively as backing dancers. Now you could have maybe levelled the same accusation at male peers Take That in their early days with Gary Barlow always out front doing the heavy lifting vocals wise and the rest of the boys popping some moves behind him. However, they did diversify with Robbie Williams, Mark Owen and even Howard Donald all getting a shot at being lead singer (I don’t think poor old Jason Orange ever did). Did Eternal ever swap roles about like that? Was their a vocals rota? I’m not sure.

During this performance though, they did have those ‘circles’ lighting effects gliding around the stage that look like those scenes from Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons when the latter used ‘retrometabolism’ to create facsimiles of people and objects that they could control. Easther as a Captain Black figure doing away with her band mates and replacing them with replicants under her power so they remain in her shadow? Nah, you’re right. It could never have happened because Louise left the band of her own accord in 1995.

As for the song, it sounded a bit bland to me lacking the star quality of their debut hit. I much prefer this similarly (but not quite the same) titled song from the criminally overlooked The Adventures…

Next a song that turned the band responsible for it from a hardcore funk metal outfit to mainstream rock stars. That journey for Red Hot Chili Peppers had begun with a stumble in the UK when the sublime “Under The Bridge” could only make No 26 in March of 1992 but in the US they travelled much further going all the way to No 2 becoming a huge airplay hit in the process. You can’t keep a good song down though and we finally caught up with our American counterparts in 1994 when, after an energy booster in the shape of Top 10 hit “Give It Away”, we went full throttle in our appreciation of the Chili Peppers making a re-release of “Under The Bridge” a runaway chart success. OK, runaway might be pushing it for a song that peaked at No 13 but it fits with my ‘journey’ metaphor and it was literally twice the hit it was before. I was one of those that succumbed to its charms second time around.

Starting out as a poem written by Anthony Kiedis about his struggles with heroin addiction, its hit potential was seen by producer Rick Rubin and after being worked up into song form by bassist Flea and guitarist John Frusciante it found its way onto the band’s “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” album. The titular bridge refers to a bridge in LA where Kiedis found himself hanging out with drug dealers trying to score his next hit so desperate had his addiction become. Los Angeles looms large in the song with these opening lines clearly referring to it:

Sometimes I feel like I don’t have a partner
Sometimes I feel like my only friend
Is the city I live in, the city of angels
Lonely as I am, together we cry
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Anthony Kiedis / Chad Gaylord Smith / John Anthony Frusciante / Michael Peter Balzary
Under the Bridge lyrics © MoeBeToBlame, Peermusic Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner Chappell Music, Inc, Words & Music A Div Of Big Deal Music LL

Now it’s my turn to sneak a reference in but it’s not about LA but Captain Scarlet again. In the episode ‘Place Of Angels’, the good captain foils a Mysteron plot to release a deadly virus into the Los Angeles reservoir. And of course, the female pilots of the Spectrum fighter jets were known as The Angels. What’s that got to do with Red Hot Chili Peppers? Nothing but artistic license and all that. The video by director Gus Van Sant has a “Streets Of Philadelphia” feel to it with Kiedis walking through various LA locations to make the bond between song and city absolutely clear if it wasn’t enough already. Just like Springsteen, the Chili Peppers would also record material for soundtracks in the 90s when they supplied songs for The Coneheads, Pretty Woman and Beavis and Butt-head Do America movies.

Next that name that surely is lost to most in the mists of time. Except…Club House you say? Wasn’t that the name of the people who did that awful Steely Dan /Michael Jackson mash up “Do It Again” in 1983? I think it was but this can’t be the same lot returning in 1994 can it?

*checks Wikipedia*

Bloody hell it is! That’s a more unlikely comeback than Boris Johnson recovering from Partygate (please privileges committee, don’t make a fool of me by finding him innocent!). What had they been doing for a whole decade? Well, according to their bio, they’d done another medley record in 1987 mixing Mory Kanté’s “Yé ké Yé ké” with The Spencer Davis Group’s “I’m A Man” and had a US Dance No 1 with the Deee-Lite sampling “Deep In My Heart” in 1990. In addition to those two tracks, the vocalist here – one Carl Fanini – sang in that Eurodance hit by Eastside Beat “Ride Like The Wind”.

Suddenly though, like the nightmare of a returning Liz Truss, they were back with a track called “Light My Fire” which obtusely was nothing to do with The Doors song of the same name. It had failed to make the UK Top 40 when released in September of 1993 but a Cappella remix released on Pete Waterman’s PWL label sent it to the Top 10 the following year. God knows how though as it’s an abominable record, all pulsing Italian Hi-NRG beats and the phrase “Burn Baby Burn” (surely pinched from “Disco Inferno” by The Trammps) repeated over and over. If you require any more evidence that this was a steaming pool of piss, ask yourself why, if it’s such a great tune, is there the need for a man on stilts juggling, a woman fire eating and four dancers dressed as devil figures in bright red spandex suits up there on stage? Even all of the above can’t distract from the reality that this was just awful.

Of course, for all my previous talk of nobody remembering Club House or their single, the track did carve out its own little piece of pop history by being an infamous part of the origin of one of the biggest boy bands of the 90s. Ladies and gentlemen…Boyzone!

Level 42 on TOTP in 1994? The year widely acknowledged as being the lift off point for Britpop? It seems as wrong as tomato ketchup on a Sunday roast yet here they were with their second hit of that year. “All Over You” came from their “Forever Now” album and was the follow up to the title track and it sounds like it has the potential of being a decent tune akin to something like “Hot Water” from their past but it never really goes anywhere. Yes it’s got a chunky, funky rhythm courtesy of Mark King’s trademark slap bass but it meanders aimlessly with its sole intention seeming to be how many rhyming words it can get into the lyrics which end in ‘-ing’. And then. And then there’s that middle right when keyboardist Mike Lindup breaks into a solo bit that has very strong Spinal Tap “Stonehenge” vibes:

Through the heat-haze and the blue
I will shimmer and distort
And become what you always knew
But were never taught in this sad time
Take on board the things I say
Just be sure that you’ll be mine someday
Justify the things I do
Just believe that it’s all over you
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Mark King / Michael David Lindup / Philip Gould
All Over You lyrics © Peermusic (uk) Ltd.

All that was missing was some dwarves dancing around an 18” model. “All Over You” peaked at No 26 but Level 42’s chart years were nearly over. They would visit the Top 40 just one more time.

Time for that legend of music now as we get an exclusive performance from Miss Barbara Streisand (like ~~Diana Ross~~, Miss Diana Ross, you have to prefix her name with Miss). I’m not about to do a potted history of Barbara’s career here as it would take too long and I’m behind with these reviews but suffice too say, host Nicky Campbell just about sums it up in his intro. I was aware of Miss Barbara Streisand initially from her No 1 single “Woman In Love” from 1980 when I was 12 but I didn’t really regard her as a singer that much as she didn’t really have another major hit throughout the decade when I was consuming pop music avariciously. I regarded her more as a film star, that woman that was in Funny Girl, Hello Dolly!, A Star Is Born and Yentl, none of which were movies that particularly interested me at all growing up. I was aware that she was a huge name though, so much so that by the time she was touring in 1993/94 – the first time since 1966 – tickets were going for astronomical prices. A friend managed to get one for one of her four nights at Wembley Arena (from where this satellite performance came) and I think she might have paid around £200 even in 1994! It looks like a lot of the ticket price revenue went on paying for the very stylish stage set. The tour grossed $50 million playing to 400,000 people.

The song she performs here – “As If We Never Said Goodbye” – is from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Sunset Boulevard which made it the second chart hit from the show in recent months following Dina Carroll’s version of “The Perfect Year”. It also featured on Miss Barbara Streisand’s most recent album “Back To Broadway” which had been a huge success going double platinum in the US and gold over here. The single made it to No 20 and she would clock up another three chart hits in the UK during the 90s, all of them duets with Celine Dion, Bryan Adams and Vince Gill to add to those from the 80s (Don Johnson) and perhaps her most famous in the late 70s with Donna Summer (“No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)”) and Neil Diamond (“You Don’t Bring Me Flowers”).

Were Ride a big name? I guess the were amongst the ‘shoegaze’ community and the TOTP caption says their career record sales at that point was 500,000. It seems a bit unfair of the producers though who put up a similar caption for Miss Barbara Streisand detailing her 7 million album sales. Still, as Nicky Campbell says in his intro, she’d never headlined the Reading Festival. I quite liked a couple of their tunes like “Leave Them All Behind” and “Twisterella” from 1992’s Top 5 album “Going Blank Again”. This track, “Birdman” was from their third album “Carnival Of Light” which showcased a departure from the band’s usual songwriting style with Mark Gardner arriving at the studio with fully formed compositions rather than crafting tracks from jamming sessions. It also displayed a different sound with a deliberate move away from ‘shoegaze’ to a more classic rock sound. Another change was obvious in this performance as that’s not Gardner up there on vocals but guitarist Andy Bell (later of Hurricane #1, Oasis and Beady Eye). Bell had written half of the tracks on the album (including this single) so I guess he wanted to make like UB40 and sing his own song? Despite the album replicating the chart peak of its predecessor, it alienated some of their original fanbase and drew unfavourable reviews from the press whilst even the band themselves fell out of love with it referring it it as “Carnival Of Shite”. Hmm. Ride released another album (1996’s “Tarantula”) before disbanding only to reform in 2014.

The final three names tonight are all very much part of the rock/pop music establishment starting with the guy who did the personal message at the top of the show Michael Bolton. Interestingly, he did seem to plug Miss Barbara Streisand’s appearance more than his own. Even Mr Mullet Head had to bow before the ‘Queen of the Divas’. Bollers is on the show to plug his latest offering, a cover of the Bill Withers classic “Lean On Me”. This was literally money for old rope (or hair). Bolton had already done an album of cover verists in 1992 called “Timeless: The Classics” and yet he didn’t see any issue with recording yet another for his next album “The One Thing” and even less compunction about releasing it as a single when he was in need of a hit. After all, he’d done a similar thing in 1991 when, after the first two singles from his “Time. Love And Tenderness” album had failed to pull up any trees sales wise, he released a cover of Percy Sledge’s “When A Man Loves A Woman” to restore him to the Top 10. Just shameless really. Bolton gives his usual over emoting performance here which also features Michael J. Mullins on backing vocals. “Who?” you may ask. Well, he’s the guy who sang on all the later hits for Modern Romance and who was the perennial backing singer for Cliff Richard. Now if Bollers had done a cover version of “Ay Ay Ay Ay Moosey” I might have had a bit more respect for him. As it was his, version of “Lean On Me” peaked at No 14.

Prince is the next huge name on the show as he is still at No 1 with “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World”. As with many other artists, his highest charting single in the UK is certainly not his best – in my humble opinion at least. I could name a load of other tracks I prefer. Off the top of my head there’s “Purple Rain”, “Alphabet Street”, “Take Me with U”, “Raspberry Beret”…I could go on. Prince would only return to the our Top 10 twice more after “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” and one of those was with a rather obvious release of “1999” as 1998 drew to a close.

The play out song is another single that didn’t actually make the Top 40 despite the artist being one of the biggest names in in music. “We Wait And We Wonder” was the third single from Phil Collins‘ “Both Sides” album and was written as a response to the Warrington bombings and the whole situation of the Irish Troubles peaking at No 45. Despite all his success as a solo artist, Phil has had his fair share of non charting releases as well, some of them coming immediately after a huge hit. “Don’t Let Him Steal Your Heart Away” only made No 45 despite being the follow up to the chart topping “You Can’t Hurry Love”. Then there’s “Do You Remember?” which failed to make the Top 40 despite coming from his multi platinum album “…But Seriously”. “Wear My Hat” from 1997’s “Dance Into The Light” would suffer a similar fate all of which just goes to show that no matter how big your name or reputation, you cannot take the vagaries of the charts nor the record buying public for granted.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Skin	The Money EP	Nah
2	Eternal	Just A Step From Heaven	No
3	Red Hot Chili Peppers	Under The Bridge	Yes, yes I did
4	Club House	Light My Fire	As if
5	Level 42	All Over You	Never happening
6	Barbara Streisand	As If We Never Said Goodbye	I did not
7	Ride	Birdman	Negative
8	Michael Bolton	Lean On Me	See 4 above
9	Prince	The Most Beautiful Girl in the World	Not for me thanks
10	Phil Collins	We Wait And We Wonder	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/m001jvps/top-of-the-pops-28041994

TOTP 21 APR 1994

Posted on March 14, 2023 by 80stastic

So I’m 500 not out in TOTP Rewind posts but there’s no time for patting myself on the back as I’m behind with the BBC4 repeats schedule so it’s on with No 501 and we start with Bitty McLean. I’ve genuinely run out of things to say about Bitty – mate of UB40? Tick. Penchant for reggae-fied versions of classic songs? Obvs. What he did post fame? Yep, been there done that. Little Britain joke? Yeah, yeah. He is the uncle of a retired professional footballer called Aaron McLean who spent his career in the lower leagues and played for the England C team (yeah, I didn’t know there was such a thing either) but is that really such an interesting fact especially in a music blog?

OK, how about the song he’s singing here? Well, “Dedicated To The One I Love” was originally recorded by an American R&B group called The “5” Royales in 1957 and then by girl group The Shirelles who took it to No 3 to in 1961. Surely the best known version though is that of The Mamas & The Papas who had a No 2 hit with it in 1967. The track features Michelle Phillips on lead vocals for the first time as opposed to Cass Elliot. Phillips would go on to have an acting career after the band broke up in 1970 and starred in the acclaimed crime biopic Dillinger earning a Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Newcomer. Roles in TV films followed until she joined the cast of US soap Knots Landing in 1987 where the tale of “Dedicated To The One I Love” comes full circle. In a 1992 episode in which Phillips featured, the Mamas & The Papas’ version of the song plays in the background. The producers even called the episode Dedicated To The One I Love. Yeah, that’s it for this one – that’s all I’ve got.

Right, what’s next? Oh no. Not another ragga version of a pop standard?! Unlike Bitty McLean who specialised in putting an almost lovers’ rock sheen on his covers, C. J. Lewis fancied himself as the UK equivalent of Shaggy as he takes on classic 60s pop song “Sweets For My Sweet” by festooning it with loads of ‘toasting’ including the classic cliche shout out “Hear Me Now!”. Oh gawd. This was just a racket both sonically and artistically. Horrible stuff.

The version we all now by The Searchers from 1963 was a UK No 1 and is it immeasurably better than this load of nonsense. Whilst I prefer Manchester rivals The Hollies, it’s hard to resist the charms of this Merseybeat combo – “When You Walk In The Room”, “Don’t Throw Your Love Away”, “Needles And Pins”, “Sugar And Spice” and of course this one are all great 60s pop tunes…all of which makes C.J. Lewis’s dreadful cover even more heinous. Even the single’s artwork adds to the nastiness of the thing as it appears to depict a woman lifting up her skirt as Lewis looks on from his sofa. WTF? Everything about this guy was wrong including his stage name. Why did he go by the moniker of C. J. Lewis when his actual name was Steven James Lewis? He would stick with the formula of applying a ragga tip to established hits when he followed up “Sweets For My Sweet” with a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Everything Is Uptight (Alright)” and The Emotions’ “Best Of My Love”. Heaven help us.

Yes! Finally a proper song made by a proper artist! Despite being a huge name, The Pretenders hadn’t had a UK Top 40 hit since “Hymn To Her” in 1986. In their defence, they’d not actually released much material in that time with their only album since “Get Close” (from which “Hymn To Her” came) being 1990’s underwhelming “Packed!”. There had also been a successful Best Of compilation in 1987 (“The Singles”) and Chrissie Hynde had renewed her relationship with UB40 to guest on 1988’s “Breakfast In Bed” single. Oh and not forgetting that Moodswings song “Spiritual High (State Of Independence) Pt.II” that featured Chrissie on vocals and samples Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. It’s not a lot though in an eight year period. Having said all of that, it seemed a bit churlish of the TOTP caption person to just put ‘Back after 8 years’ as their comment. They couldn’t have put something about how many records they’d sold in their career or the fact that they had the first new No 1 record of the 80s with “Brass In Pocket”? 1994 though did see the band return in good form with Top 10 album “Last Of The Independents” and its storming lead single “I’ll Stand By You”. Supposedly, Chrissie wasn’t sure about the song initially. Written specifically to be a hit with songwriters Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg, she doubted her motivations about the song when it was finished. However, having played it to some friends outside of the music industry who were reduced to tears by the track, she relented and let it be released. It’s not a million miles away from “Hymn To Her” to my ears which is a compliment by the way. I like both songs. “I’ll Stand By You” has a power to it I think and Chrissie’s vocals are always right on it.

They say you can tell the quality of a song by how many times other artists have covered it. If so, “I’ll Stand By You” is a tune a few times over. It was done by Girls Aloud in 2004 as that year’s Children In Need single and three years later was also chosen as a charity record when American Idol artist Carrie Underwood recorded it for the Idol Gives Back campaign. Three years after that it was again recorded for a charitable concern when Shakira released it as a fundraiser for the Hope For Haiti Now effort after the earthquake there in 2010. I guess the track’s meaning had a major crossover quality which leant itself to supporting people in crisis as well as its original intention of describing being loyal and faithful to a person.

There’s something very appealing I think about this TOTP performance of the song; something to do with Chrissie’s dress down image and the fact that you can see her panic ever so slightly when she struggles to pick up her guitar halfway through. Nice to see founding member Martin Chambers up there on drums who had rejoined the band after leaving in 1986 after problems with his drumming after cutting his hand badly on tour and also struggling to deal with the deaths of band members James Honeyman-Scott and Pete Farndon in 1982 and 1983 respectively following issues with drug use. I guess that caption was pretty accurate in the case of Chambers then. “I’ll Stand By You” peaked at No 10 whilst the album went gold for selling 100,000 copies.

https://youtu.be/yrLfKS_iGTk

It’s the video for “Always” by Erasure next and it’s quite a thing. Set against an ancient China backdrop with Andy Bell dressed as some sort of mythical spirit, the plot revolves around the passing of the seasons as metaphors for good and evil with a battle ensuing between Bell’s character and a bad dragon type dude with the former trying to protect a Mother Nature type figure. Sheesh! The length of that sentence shows how much was going on in the video. It works pretty well though I think but then Vince and Andy always seemed to want to put some drama into their promos. Actually, I don’t think Vince is in this one at all unless he’s under that bad spirit costume which seems unlikely given Vince’s slight frame. “Always” would peak at No 4 and would also provide the title for their fourth Best Of compilation from 2015 celebrating the 30th anniversary of the formation of the band.

A new name appears from nowhere with a dance smash that gives them the highest ever UK chart entry for an unknown artist when it crashes in at No 3, enjoys a huge hit with the record and then pretty much disappears again bar a couple of minor follow ups. A footnote in musical history is created and that’s the end of the story. Right? Wrong. Who had money on a Crystal Waters comeback? No you didn’t! I’m sure even Crystal would have been surprised. Back though she was with “100% Pure Love”. Yes, the artist who brought us “Gypsy Woman (La Da Dee La Da Da)” had set her sat nav for the Top 40 once more and with a track that didn’t stray too far from the blueprint of her monster hit. As with Chrissie Hynde earlier, Crystal’s voice is distinctive to the point of being beyond replication but unlike with The Pretenders’ singer, that wasn’t a positive for me. I could never get on board with her vocals, catchy hook or not. Plenty of people disagreed with me though and the single was a sizeable hit in the US and around Europe (it went to No 15 in the UK).

I have to admit to not really remembering this one. If I think of the phrase ‘100%’ in the mid 90s, I think of the Telstar compilation series which started with the title “100% Dance Hits” and expanded out to cover musical genres such as Acid Jazz, Christmas, Blues & Soul, Reggae etc. There must have been one called “100% Pure Love” surely?

Now here’s a song that divides opinion. “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by Crash Test Dummies received a lot of positive reviews at the time for being original, melodic and taking on the difficult issue of the suffering and humiliation that children can experience if there was something in their life that marked them out as different. Retrospectively though, the track regularly appears in various ‘worst song ever’ type polls. For what it’s worth, I’d place myself in the former group. It seems to me that much of the criticism it receives is about its title and by extension chorus. What is it that people object to? That it’s lazy? Silly? That doesn’t really add up though. There have always been songs with nonsensical titles – some by major artists. Look at “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” by The Beatles or “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da Da” by The Police. Or is it vocalist Brad Roberts’ deep singing voice that offends listeners so? Again, there have always been singers with low registers whose work people love. Look at Johnny Cash for example.

Anyway, the song was a huge international success including the UK where it made No 2. Bizarrely though, it was probably least successful in their home country of Canada where they’d already had a huge hit with “Superman’s Song” in 1991. Subsequent releases from parent album “God Shuffled His Feet” were more successful there than “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”. All very curious. One of those releases, “Afternoons & Coffeespoons” gave the band a No 23 hit in the UK whilst a cover of “The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead” by their heroes XTC for the movie Dumb And Dumber supplied their final hit over here when it made No 30.

Talking of dividing opinion, this next band have always been rather good at that. Some see them as master crafters of intelligent pop music whilst for others, they are the antithesis of that, inauthentic chancers with an overblown sense of their own worth. I’m talking about Deacon Blue -and I’m firmly in the former camp. Some people really do hate them though. I found someone online who’s written a piece about how he’d been reminded about how much he hated them when he saw them live. Eh? Well, in his defence, they were the support band for Simple Minds so he hadn’t chosen to catch them in concert per se, he was there for the headline act. He despised them so much that when they were on stage, he took the opportunity to delete some emails off his phone rather than raise his head to look st them. Simple Minds though we’re great according to him. Hmm. Another who shared this view was my Our Price manager at the time who commented on the band’s TOTP appearance here that it was the most cliched, hackneyed performance they could possibly have come up with. Again, hmm. Show some dignity guys.

Ah yes, “Dignity”. Ricky Ross, Lorraine McIntosh (swoon) and…erm…the others were on the show to plug their first Greatest Hits album “Our Town” which would be a platinum selling No 1 (so there were quite a lot of us who liked them after all). The album featured all but two of their singles and three new tracks including “I Was Right And You Were Wrong” (another song title for the doubters) which had been released as a single and made No 32 but which didn’t generate a TOTP appearance. Instead, we get “Dignity” which was actually given a formal rerelease as a single (its third time in total) and it made No 20, its highest ever position on the UK charts. Deacon Blue would split up in this year only to return in the new millennium from which point they have released six further studio albums.

https://youtu.be/YV4AZCMDtSY

It’s that Tony Di Bart fella now, possibly the most unlikely and unconvincing pop star since…well, who? Chesney Hawkes? Glenn Medeiros? At least they had pin up appeal. Is it too harsh to suggest that you couldn’t say the same thing about Tony? Maybe it was all about the song in this case and not the guy who was delivering it? Time has been kind to “The Real Thing” with it being seen as a genuinely great pop record as opposed to part of the handbag house brigade that was all the rage in 1994. I can’t say that I share that opinion though. I found its success bewildering. Maybe I wasn’t going to the right type of clubs? Host Mark Goodier (who seems to have spent the whole show lurching about like he’s got a bad back) was wrong in his rather insensitive (given who was standing next to him) chart prediction – Di Bart wasn’t No 1 the next week though he was the week after.

Wait! What? Was that bloke stood next to Mark Goodier and who did the personal message to camera at the top of the show not Prince?! Was it just a very good lookalike?! I ask because at no point does Goodier actually refer to the guy nor acknowledge his presence and in that VT clip he does send himself up for the whole symbol moniker. If it was a lookalike, what was the point? Just to mess with our minds?

On the other hand, maybe it was the real thing as we don’t get the standard video promo but an exclusive pre-recorded performance. But then, if he was actually in the country and at the studio, why wouldn’t he have done a regular run through of “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World” like all the other artists on the show did with their songs? This was just weird as was the version that Prince recorded for the show. The slowed down, sexy take might have been the bedroom choice but it wasn’t the song that everyone was hearing on their radios and buying in the shops was it? Anyway, it was Prince’s first and only UK No 1 having missed out twice before when the 1985 reissue of “1999/Little Red Corvette” and 1999’s “Batdance” both peaked at No 2.

The play out song is “Back In My Life” by Joe Roberts but who was/is Joe Roberts? Well, he’s English and had a handful of minor hits in the mid 90s before disappearing whence he came. Ironically, the single that came out after this No 39 hit was a cover of Prince’s “Adore” so not only did he follow the Purple One on the TOTP running order but his singles release schedule also followed him. He sounds a bit like a poor man’s Curtis Stigers whilst one promo shot of him that I found sees him looking like Bo Selecta’s characterisation of David Blaine. Shazam!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Bitty McLean	Dedicated To The One I Love	No
2	C. J. Lewis	Sweets For My Sweet	God no!
3	The Pretenders	I’ll Stand By You	Liked it, didn’t buy it
4	Erasure	Always	Nope
5	Crystal Waters	100% Pure Love	Nah
6	Crash Test Dummies	Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm	See 3 above
7	Deacon Blue	Dignity	No but I had the original Raintown album with it on
8	Tony Di Bart	The Real Thing	Not my bag – no
9	Prince	The Most Beautiful Girl In The World	I did not
10	Joe Roberts	Back In My Life	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/m001jn48/top-of-the-pops-21041994

TOTP 07 APR 1994

Posted on March 7, 2023 by 80stastic

We’re a week into April 1994 here at TOTP Rewind and the world of music is about to be rocked to its core by a tragic event. The day after this TOTP aired, the body of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain was found at his Seattle home after he had committed suicide. The coroner estimated the time of death to have been around three days earlier. He was 27 years old when he died, joining the bizarre list of musicians, artists actors and other celebrities who passed away at that age. The rock world’s ‘27 Club’ members included Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Robert Johnson and Pete de Freitas before Cobain became its latest member. Amy Winehouse would add to its number in 2011 whilst Manic Street Preacher Richey Edwards was also 27 when he disappeared in February 1995 though legal process meant that he wasn’t declared dead for another seven years. I recall the tabloid front pages carrying that image of his corpse with just his protruding legs visible which seemed very invasive even back then. I’d never been a huge Nirvana fan but this was shocking news.

As the story didn’t break until the following day, TOTP makes no mention of it which is probably just as well as I’m not sure that chirpy host Andi Peters would have provided the right tone for any reference. Peters was a regular face on our TVs at the time. He’d graduated from Children’s BBC’s The Broom Cupboard to co-presenting the corporation’s Saturday morning kids show Live & Kicking. He was a face. However Andi, in the same way that Gary Lineker knew that he had to diversify to maintain a career after kicking a football for a living had to end, saw possibilities behind the camera rather than in front of it. He went on to be TV producer for shows such as The Noise, The O–Zone and Shipwrecked. He reached the pinnacle of that part of his career in 2003 when he returned from whence he came to be executive producer of a relaunched version of TOTP (rebranded as All New Top of the Pops). Failing to build the show’s falling audience, Peters resigned his position after two years following the show being moved to BBC2. Nowadays, you can catch him on Good Morning Britain promoting the show’s latest competitions. He’s still annoying, though in his defence, he doesn’t look a day older than he does here in 1994. My mate Robin knew him when he worked at the BBC. He got Robin to moonlight on the aforementioned The Noise show where he ended up being coerced into doing the conga with the Spice Girls. No, really.

No sign of the Spice Girls on this TOTP though (they wouldn’t arrive until 1996) but there are some big names on the show and some…well…not so big ones. We start with one of the latter. Black Machine anyone? This is quite unfair of course on your blogger as I struggled to say anything about this lot the last time they were on the show which was only last week and seeing as they were the play out song then, I’m having to comment on them twice in a row! Well, I’m nothing if not a trier so here goes. “How Gee” sounds very 1990 to me. What was that song by Chad Jackson? “Hear The Drummer Get Wicked”? Yeah, it sounds like that to me. Performance wise, they’ve clearly taken inspiration from The Blues Brothers with a robust back four of Jake and Elwood lookalikes while the front two rappers bust some moves. Sticking with the movie theme, “How Gee” was featured in the 2021 movie House Of Gucci starring such stellar names as Lady Gaga, Al Pacino, Adam Driver and Jared Leto. Sadly for Black Machine, they would not become a huge name in the world of music despite, as the TOTP caption says, “How Gee” selling a million copies worldwide.

It’s the ‘Battle of the Exclusives’ on tonight’s show according to Andi Peters starting with Erasure who are back after a year away with a track called “Always” from their sixth studio album “I Say I Say I Say”. I’d always liked Andy and Vince going right back to their debut single “Who Needs Love Like That” back in 1985 which used to get played at 17 years old me’s nightclub of choice The Barn in Worcester.

However, by 1994 I was starting to lose sight of them. Although “Always” is classic Erasure in many ways with its usual hooks and bitter sweet vocals from Andy Bell, I don’t recall it at all despite it being another huge hit for them (it was Top 10 all around Europe and No 4 in the UK). Why would I have suddenly become disinterested in a band that had soundtracked the whole of my student days? Had I decided that they weren’t 90s enough? I’m not sure but I do know that I never really rediscovered my enthusiasm for them after this point. Looking at their discography, I couldn’t tell you what any of their subsequent singles sounded like and the only album of theirs I own post the 80s is their 2013 Christmas one called “Snow Globe” that a friend bought me for…erm…Christmas.

https://youtu.be/LWunhP_vPKk

A huge tune by a huge name incoming! I say name but I think Prince was actually, officially going by that squiggly symbol in 1994. Or was it The Artist Formerly Known As Prince? Or TAFKAP? Or just The Artist?Or even Love Symbol? Whatever it was, he was doing it to display his displeasure about the working relationship between him and his record company Warner Bros. Records. Annoyed that they wouldn’t release his new material at the speed at which he was delivering it to them, he started to appear in public with ‘slave’ written on his face (he was infamously lampooned by Blur drummer Dave Rowntree who appeared on TOTP with ‘Dave’ writ large on his cheek).

Prince felt that the poor sales of his 1992 “Love Symbol” album was down to Warners not marketing it sufficiently and so he asked to release his single “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World” on his own NPG label. In doing so, he demonstrated that there was nothing that he couldn’t do when he came up with a devilishly clever marketing campaign for the single. He essentially placed a lonely hearts ad in various magazines asking women to send in photos to his Paisley Park complex and from the fifty thousand who did, he selected seven finalists to be in the single’s video and thirty semi finalists to be on the artwork for its cover. The single was a huge global hit including No 3 in the US and No 1 over here, famously his first and only in the UK (not counting Chaka Khan and Sinéad O’Connor who took covers of his songs to the top of the charts).

I always viewed “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World” as a bit of an anomaly. Firstly, there was it being released on his own label which as I recall meant it be distributed by Pinnacle in the UK rather than Warners which was odd. Then it didn’t appear on an album until 18 months later when “The Gold Experience” finally came out. Lastly, it seemed overly commercial for a Prince song. Was he writing a big, radio friendly hit to order as Warners had asked him to or was it some kind of “F**k you” from him to them with him showing that he could do all of that but he was planning on leaving Warners and therefore this was a “Here’s what you could have had” moment? I’m tending towards the latter. The fact that a lawsuit for plagiarism was successfully brought against Prince makes me think even more that he was giving Warners the finger. The song the courts found that he stole from was by one Raynard J and was called “Takin’ Me To Paradise” and was published by Warners’ own publishing company. That Prince made his point using a song that was already part of their catalogue just adds more spite to their dispute. To be fair to Prince, I can’t hear too many similarities between the tracks.

I should have mentioned earlier that there was another artist message this week before the titles began. This time it was from Pet Shop Boys who are on the show later. This was becoming a regular feature! And then, after the Prince video, we get another one from Take That who are in Germany but are on the show later as *SPOILER ALERT* the chart toppers. It all seems a bit pointless but I guess it was producer Ric Blaxill demonstrating that TOTP was still the show that the stars wanted to be on.

A new artist now as we get a first look at Tony Di Bart. This guy was almost the classic case of a perfect One Hit Wonder. Almost. The perfect template is to come from literally out of nowhere, have a No 1 record and promptly disappear never to be heard of again. This would have been the fate of ex-bathroom salesman Tony if not for the fact that he had one other minor hit as the follow up to said No 1. Curses! The Di Bart chart topper was “The Real Thing” (that dastardly second hit was “Do It” which made No 21) and was what was presumably described at the time as a ‘dance floor filler’.

I have to admit to not getting any of this little footnote in pop history at all. I thought the record was awful – I couldn’t stand his nasal voice – and didn’t understand at all why it would be a No 1. OK, maybe it was big in the clubs but it didn’t seem to have the crossover appeal that something like Haddaway’s “What Is Love” had. Also, with the best will in the world, Tony was hardly the most charismatic performer when it came to delivering the song. I mean, whether you liked “The One And Only” or not, you could see that Chesney Hawkes was a good vehicle for it but Tony? So how did it happen? I don’t know is my honest answer. Right place, right time? We’ll be seeing Tony again so maybe I’ll become more informed as to how this all came about on repeated viewings.

As with Haddaway last week, the next act on is somebody that I associate with 1993 entirely yet here he is in 1994 still having major hits. Bitty McLean shot to fame with a Fats Domino cover in “It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes)” and I thoroughly expected him to have his 15 minutes and then disappear but he actually managed to keep himself in the charts to the tune of seven hit singles of which “Dedicated To The One I Love” was his fourth. A cover of a song made famous by The Mamas And The Papas, it gave him his third Top 10 hit. I did find all these reggae-fied cover versions of pop standards a bit tedious I have to say but then it worked wonders for his mates UB40 who had huge hits like “Red Red Wine”, “Breakfast In Bed”, “I Got You Babe” and “(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You” so why wouldn’t he have gone down the same route? Fair play to him but it just did nothing for me. Bitty would go on to work and tour with dub reggae legends Sly and Robbie and in 2017 he delivered lectures on Jamaican music production techniques to the Westphalia School of Music in Philadelphia which is consistently ranked as one of the top music programs in the US. Maybe Bitty had better reggae credentials than first met the eye.

Next to a band that were on the verge of calling it a day. Little Angels had been consistent hitmakers since the start of the 90s with nine chart entries though only one of them had managed to make it into the Top 20. They had, however, achieved a No 1 album with “Jam” in 1992. So why had they decided to break up the band just two years later? Had they fallen out with their record company Polydor? Had they fallen out with each other? I don’t have the answers but they did go out with their second biggest hit ever when “Ten Miles High” peaked at No 18. Looking at the lyrics to the song, it certainly seems like it’s a valedictory track with lines like “Ten miles high and the end is in sight” and there’s also a reference to their humble beginnings and their journey to fame with “Down by Scarborough beach to the Madison Square”. Talking of Scarborough, the TOTP captions, which disappeared halfway through on a recent show, are back with a bang but couldn’t they have found something more complimentary to say about the band other than that they were from the seaside town given that this would have been their final TOTP appearance?

Little Angels released a Best Of later in the year entitled “A Little Of The Past” and played a sold out six date tour culminating in a final gig at the Royal Albert Hall. Inevitably, they reformed in 2012 for some festival dates but have not done anything together since 2013.

It’s a second time on the show now for Roachford and “Only To Be With You” and I still can’t find a clip of either TOTP performance on YouTube. The last time they were on, the single was languishing outside the Top 40 at that unluckiest of chart positions No 41 but good fortune was on Roachford’s side as new producer Ric Blaxill gave them a prime slot anyway and the exposure propelled it up the charts. This time around they are twenty places higher at No 21 which perhaps shows that the show still had the power to make hits. Or maybe not. Despite this performance, the single went down the charts by one place the following week. It’s all very confusing.

Time for the second contender in ‘The Battle of the Exclusives’ now as Pet Shop Boys enter the ring to duke it out with Erasure. It seems somehow fitting that it’s these two artists as they always seem to go together in my mind. There’s some obvious reasons for this. Both are duos, both made synthesizer heavy pop music, both came to prominence around the same time (‘85-‘86) and both had a gay vocalist (Neil Tennant actually came out as gay in this year via an interview with Attitude magazine to the surprise of nobody). There’s one more thing though. As with Erasure, Pet Shop Boys had soundtracked my youth but by 1994 I was losing sight of them as well. Again, I’m not sure why but I didn’t seem to be interested in any of the albums they released during the rest of the decade. Maybe it was that dreadful Comic Relief song (“Absolutely Fabulous”) that finally put me off. Neil and Chris got along very well without me of course still making some fine tunes and indeed, all was not lost for me. 2002’s…ahem…”I Get Along” single was a great pop tune and just last year I finally got to see them live (the date had been postponed for two years due to the pandemic) and they were great. Back in 1994 though, I was struggling to care. This single – “Liberation” – is classic Pet Shop Boys ballad territory akin to “Being Boring” or “Jealousy” but it just seemed to pass me by.

There was a lot of fuss about the song’s video which was almost completely CGI and also had a 3D element to it which made it perfect for Cyberworld, an early 3D cinema demonstration which was shown on IMAX screens and touring roadshows throughout the UK. Given all that expense and hype, there was no way that Neil and Chris weren’t going to incorporate it into their performance here which, as Andi Peters points out, you can’t miss.

So who won ‘The Battle of the Exclusives’? Per Shop Boys edge it performance wise for me thanks to that video but Erasure got the biggest chart peak of No 4 whilst “Liberation” trailed in at No 14. However , it was the fourth of five singles taken from their “Very” album so maybe that was a factor.

The aforementioned Take That are No 1 (of course they are) with “Everything Changes”. Their fourth single to go straight in at No 1, not even Slade, The Jam, Queen nor Elvis could match that.

I said the other week that though I didn’t think much of this song, if it had been one of Wham!’s poppier moments, would we have been lauding yet another George Michael classic? I’ve worked out why I drew that comparison now; “Everything Changes” has a distinct flavour of this track from Wham!’s “Make It Big” album:

Now I find out though that this wasn’t a George Michael original after all but a cover of an Isley Brothers song! I hate it when a plan falls apart!

The play out track is yet another cover. I have to say that I have zero recall of A.M. City’s take on “Pull Up To The Bumper” by Grace Jones. The reason for that is probably because it only made No 83 in the charts and the reason for that was that it was dreadful. To say that Ric Blaxill made a big deal of predicting new entries in the Top 40 for the following week by means of a rolling script across the screen during the No 1 record, he was bloody awful at picking them for the play out music. How many duds is this now? Two? Three? Get your game together Ric!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Black Machine	How Gee	No
2	Erasure	Always	I think we’ve established that I was losing interest by this point
3	Prince	The Most Beautiful Girl In The World	I did not
4	Tony Di Bart	The Real Thing	No – I didn’t get it at all
5	Bitty McLean	Dedicated To The One I Love	Nope
6	Little Angels	Ten Miles High	Nah
7	Roachford	Only To Be With You	Negative
8	Pet Shop Boys	Liberation	See 2 above
9	Take That	Everything Changes	Never
10	A.M. City	Pull Up To The Bumper	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/m001jf1y/top-of-the-pops-07041994

TOTP 09 DEC 1993

Posted on December 7, 2022 by 80stastic

In the last post I made a claim that the No 1 was a bit of an anticlimax on the grounds that it followed the biggest boy band around who performed in the studio against a backdrop of 3D images (ooh!). By comparison, the No 1 was in its seventh week at the top and we were surely all getting a bit fed up of its video. It doesn’t seem right though does it? TOTP was always a chart based show highlighting which songs were the most popular in a chronological way via the chart countdown. Despite the use of such a linear tool, the implication is that the excitement heightens as we get to the nation’s favourite song. But what if said record doesn’t deserve such a reception? I realise this leaves me open to accusations of musical snobbery but if the No 1 is so heinous, what’s the plan? The question is especially relevant to this particular TOTP as, like a Tory minister doubling down on a failed economic policy, the ending of this show has two terrible songs.

Having said all of the above, the start of the show is pretty ropey as well. Bad Boys Inc were one of the many awful boy bands that appeared in the wake of Take That during the 90s. The whole thing reeked of cynicism with no more of a bigger example than this slushy ballad aimed at the Christmas market. After, two uptempo pop singles had made them bona fide chart stars (albeit in quite a minor way), they took that well worn path of releasing a slowie as their third single to, you know, showcase their diversity. The fact that it was shoved out into the marketplace as Christmas approached was surely just coincidence no? “Walking On Air” (note the similarity of title to established festive tune “Walking In The Air” from The Snowman) was ghastly whilst the performance here (I can’t find it in YouTube as nobody seems interested in recording it for posterity) is just as dire. The lead singer out front forever putting his hand to his heart to show his sincerity backed by three twirling, sliding goons all performing on a bed of dry ice. What a shower!

Disregarding the Bee Gees, I haven’t heard such high pitched vocals since Modern Romance did their ballad “Walking In The Rain” a decade earlier. What is it with ballads and the word ‘walking’? “Walking In Air”, “Walking In The Rain”, “Walking In Memphis” and of course who could forget George Michael’s ‘guilty feet’ in “Careless Whisper”. The record buying public showed their lack of affection for Bad Boys Inc with their own feet by walking past their local record shop and therefore not buying their single. It peaked at No 24.

Now here’s a very old track (even in 1993) which was suddenly and maybe surprisingly a very big hit. Sudden because it’s gone straight into the chart at No 5 and surprising because when it was first released in 1981 it did nothing at all sales wise. There is a reason for its explosion of popularity though and as usual it’s to do with record company promotional activities. “Controversy” was the title track from Prince’s fourth studio album and by 1993 he’d added another ten to that number so why was it plucked for single release at this point in his career? To advertise a Best Of album of course. “The Hits 1”, “The Hits 2” and “The Hits / The B sides” was a triple headed beast of a release documenting The Purple One’s best/most well known/biggest (delete as applicable) songs so far. Previous single “Peach” was released in the October to promote the set but that was a brand new composition I think. To give the Best Ofs an extra push for Christmas, another single was required and “Controversy” was selected for the job. Did I know this track? Don’t think I did. I only cottoned onto Prince from about 1983 when conversely “1999” was in the charts the first time around. Did I like it? Not that much. Was I surprised that it was such a big hit? Yes I was. As with “Peach” though, the two CD singles contained hits that weren’t included on the Hits albums plus there was a William Orbit remix of “The Future” so maybe that was it?

We’re back to this trend of the TOTP hosts telling us that an artist should have been on the show but can’t be because they’re ill/indisposed etc. I asked the other week why they bothered with this practice as they could have just shown the video without saying anything and we wouldn’t have known any better. This week, they’ve doubled down like…ah I’ve been here before haven’t I? They have made a complete spectacle of this issue though with Gabrielle. According to presenter Mark Franklin she can’t perform in the studio tonight and the reason is…Well, let’s ask Gabrielle herself because she’s in the actual studio! What?! Mark asks her if she’s OK and Gabrielle days “Not at the moment because I’ve got flu”. Got flu?! Got flu?! Why aren’t you in bed Gabrielle?! This is madness! Look, when I’ve had flu I’ve had to crawl to the bathroom if I needed the loo on my hands and knees. The idea that I could have got myself into a TV studio and been interviewed in front of a TV audience of millions is just unconscionable. I don’t wish to doubt her but really?!

Anyway, enough of the health issues, what about the music? Well, I’m guessing that Gabrielle’s record label were ever so slightly uncomfortable at this point. After the euphoria of a No 1 single with her debut single “Dreams”, might they have been expecting a bigger follow up hit than the No 9 that the unfortunately entitled “Going Nowhere” supplied? If so, then a lot must have been riding on “I Wish”. Sadly, it wasn’t really up to the task being a fairly average piece of soul/pop and it peaked at No 26. Maybe it just got lost in the Christmas rush. Gabrielle would recover to bag a further eight Top 10 hits including No 1 “Rise” in 2000. Seems like Gabrielle’s wish came true.

The Bee Gees are up to No 6 in an unexpected tilt at the Christmas No 1 spot with “For Whom The Bell Tolls”. To mark the event we get a live by satellite performance from New York. As with the vast majority of these satellite specials, it’s a total let down. Maybe I’m viewing them through 2022 eyes and in 1993 it may have been a major event but I can’t help but think it’s totally lame. A completely uneventful run through of the song performed underneath Brooklyn Bridge is interlaced with some totally non related shots of ice skating at the Rockefeller Center. And that’s it. Yes, it’s a cinematic backdrop I guess with the Statue of Liberty visible in the background and a helicopter comes into view at one point but I was more fascinated by who the fourth Bee Gee was up there with Barry, Maurice and Robin.

There’s an easy line to be written here about the next artist and the title of her latest single but I’m not that obvious. All I’ll say is that 1993 is surely a year that Dina Carroll would never forget. Five hit singles and an album that was the highest selling debut by a British female artist in UK chart history at the time? It was the stuff of dreams. The last of those five hits was “The Perfect Year” which was from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Sunset Boulevard. It seemed a bit of an anomaly to me at the time. Firstly, it wasn’t on the aforementioned album (“So Close”) which confused and upset a few punters in the Our Price store I was working in and wouldn’t appear on an album until Dina’s sophomore effort “Only Human” appeared a whole three years later.

Secondly, the schedule for its release had clearly been set to cash in on the Christmas holidays market with the lyrics even referencing New Year’s Eve but it was hampered by the extended success of previous single “Don’t Be A Stranger”. So well received had it been that it was still in the Top 10 and outsold “The Perfect Year” on the latter’s first week of release. Clearly, record label A&M would not have wanted her previous hit to be splitting sales of her new one but because of the latter’s Christmas theme, they couldn’t keep it back any later. Dina having two simultaneous hits added to the customer confusion in store:

Customer: Do you have the Dina Carroll single?

Me: Which one? There’s two

Customer: The one that’s in the charts

Me: They both are

Customer: The one that’s a big ballad

Me: They both are

Customer: Well, I’ll get her album then I’m covered

Me: Her album doesn’t have both singles on it

Customer: Are you having a laugh?

Me: Not really, no

Dina’s performance here is very professional but then she’d had plenty of practice at being on TOTP that year. It felt like she was on the show every other week. Her black and white outfit is very effective against the Wintery backdrop though those impractical, oversized sleeves must have been a nightmare at the dinner table. Also, why did they feel the need to insert some clips (presumably) from the video while Dina was singing? They looked so incongruous. Children running across a field and then staring at the camera motionless – why? Then there’s the old fella. The expression he had on his face reminded me of something and it’s this. My sadly departed mother-in-law used to work as a receptionist in a doctor’s surgery and would sometimes bring home freebies from the pharmaceutical companies like mugs. She had one that was just an old man grinning on it. The first time I saw it I couldn’t understand why anyone would have that image on a mug and then I turned it around and saw the drug it was advertising – it was a brand of laxative. Aaah…

“The Perfect Year” had to settle for a chart peak of No 5, two places lower than “Don’t Be A Stranger”.

https://youtu.be/oIwVk6aFuek

Four Breakers now starting with UB40 whose single “Bring Me Your Cup” I don’t recall at all. It was the third track lifted from their “Promises And Lies” album and listening to it now, it’s actually a lot better than I was expecting. It starts out very understated but forms an unexpected ear worm very quickly with its lilting rhythm allied to Ali Campbell’s soothing vocals. Should probably have been a bigger hit than No 24 but then the album had been out for over four months by then so maybe it was to be expected. Not a bad effort though.

In amongst the endless diet of Eurodance bollocks that 1993 served up there were the occasional morsels of unexpected taste. Songs that would appear for no apparent reason and then the artist would pretty much disappear again. Off the top of my head I’m thinking Spin Doctors, The Frank and Walters and this lot – Blind Melon. These US psychedelic rockers reminded me of fellow countrymen Jellyfish who similarly are known in this country for one hit and not much else despite there being so much more to them. Blind Melon’s contribution to the story of 1993 was “No Rain”, a hippy, trippy, winsome tune with some Beatles influences thrown in for good measure. It sounded like an antidote to some of the god awfulness populating the charts and yet again a complete outlier.

Helping to promote the song was the video featuring the ‘bee girl’, a tap dancer in a bee costume and large glasses who gets laughed off stage and then spends the rest of the film trying to dance for anyone who will let her. She eventually finds an unlikely outlet for her routine – a field of similarly dressed people all dancing together. The girl playing the character would become a bit of a star, hobnobbing with the likes of Madonna at the MTV awards before having a career as an actress appearing in two episodes of US medical drama ER. Blind Melon themselves would have two further very minor UK chart hits before disbanding in 1999. They have reformed a couple of times since despite the drugs overdose death of vocalist Shannon Hoon.

Name a Pet Shop Boys single released in 1993? “Go West” right? Has to be. No? “Can You Forgive Her” then? Still not the one you’re thinking of? “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing” – well, no I don’t habitually spend hours trying to remember the titles of Pet Shop Boys singles but…oh, of course! That was the third track released from their “Very” album and in many ways is the quintessential PSB song. Eccentric title? Check! Swirly synth back beat? Check! Gloriously catchy, camp melody? Check! Typically deadpan vocals from Neil Tennant? Check! This was what they did best. Sadly, I think it got caught up in the Christmas rush and didn’t even make the Top 10, peaking at No 13.

The kaleidoscopic video features Chris and Neil in daft wigs that make the former look like Mike Flowers of Mike Flowers Pops (two years before anybody knew who he was) and the latter like Louis Balfour, host of The Fast Show’s Jazz Club. Nice!

The final Breaker comes from “the most successful rap group of 1993” according to host Mark Franklin. Were Cypress Hill that big?

*checks their bio*

Seems they were. The band have sold 20 million albums worldwide and in 1993 their second album “Black Sunday” went straight into the US charts at No 1 selling 261,000 copies in its first week. Their eponymous debut album was also still on the charts at the same time and they became the first hip hop artist to have two albums in the Top 10 simultaneously.

From “Black Sunday” came this third single “I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That”. I’d liked the House Of Pain sounding “Insane In The Brain” (who couldn’t?) but by this one I’d probably lost interest. Maybe I had a beef with them as the album was one of those that always needed a temporary inlay card to display it otherwise the real CD cover would get nicked especially as the booklet contained 19 facts about the history of hemp and the positive attributes of cannabis. The middle class, white kids in Altrincham where I was working loved all of that stuff and especially those T-shirts and posters with the image of an alien on them with a massive reefer blazing up bearing the legend ‘Take me to your dealer’. Laughed their arses off at that every time.

“I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That” peaked at No 15.

We have arrived at the first of those two terrible songs that end the show. By 1993, Cliff Richard was absolutely synonymous with Christmas. Not only had he claimed the festive No 1 twice since 1988 (thrice if you count his contribution to Band Aid II) but he seemed to have a tilt at it every year. “We Should Be Together” was his offering in 1991 peaking at No 10 and “I Still Believe In You” was strategically released in late November the following year to try and capture those Christmas sales making it to No 7. Come 1993 and Cliff was chancing his arm once more with “Healing Love”. Not a specifically Christmas themed song for once, it was actually the last of five singles released from his “The Album”…erm…album. It was co-written by Nik Kershaw who knows his way around a decent pop tune but this definitely wasn’t one of them. It’s not just that it’s a sluggish, turgid, completely unexceptional tune but the lyrics are dreadful. Really hackneyed stuff about losing the battle but winning the war and how about this for a line a seven year old could have written…

“Now I can see that you’re feeling sad…”

Come on! For this performance, Cliff has turned up in a jacket and tie and looks like he’s got his schedule wrong and was expecting to be on Wogan and not TOTP. As ever, he’s brought with him that guy from the aforementioned Modern Romance as one of his backing singers who’s been with him since “Mistletoe And Wine”.

“Healing Love” never hit a sniff at topping the charts peaking at No 19 but Cliff never really gave up on his quest for another Christmas No 1. The following year, he teamed up with his old pal Phil Everly for a double A-side of “All I Have To Do Is Dream” and a remix of his old hit “Miss You Nights” but it topped out at No 14. He couldn’t have come any closer in 1999 with the divisive “The Millennium Prayer” which actually went to No 1 and was still top of the pile with just one week to go before being toppled by Westlife. Undeterred, he went again in 2003 (“Santa’s List” – No 5) and 2006 (“21st Century Christmas” – No 2) and this year he has released a Christmas album. Cliff was 82 in October. You have to admire his longevity if not his music.

Just…just…f*****g WHY?! What were people thinking?! Oh, yeah. Of course. There was no thinking happening at all. A complete lack of brain activity. How else can you explain this total failure of any sense of taste on such a widespread scale? This monumental aberration. Nothing about “Mr Blobby” by Mr Blobby deserved anything but our complete contempt. So why was it f*****g No 1? Were 5 year olds (or their parents) buying it? When The Teletubbies became a phenomenon a few years later with the pre school population and released a record, I could just about understand parents doing just that but Mr Blobby wasn’t quite the same type of character. His beginnings weren’t on children’s TV but an early evening light entertainment show presumably not being watched by toddlers so who was his single appealing to? It certainly wasn’t funny and neither was its accompanying video which featured a number of celebrity cameos. Obviously, Edmonds was there being responsible for the whole debacle but there’s also a very young looking Jeremy Clarkson as Mr Blobby’s limo driver, Carole Vorderman, Wayne Sleep and bizarrely ex-footballer and pundit Garth Crooks. Mr Blobby is seen in various scenes where he inevitably falls over destroying everything in his path which includes parodies of four well known recent pop promos – “Addicted To Love” by Robert Palmer, “Rhythm Is A Dancer” by Snap!, “I Can’t Dance” by Genesis and “Stay” by Shakespear’s Sister. The last one particularly grinds my gears for the pure reason that it uses actual footage of the original in the parody – why? We all knew which video it was lampooning when the camera switched to the lookalike Marcella Detroit so why try and install some credibility by using images of the real one? I don’t know why this especially offends me but it does. Anyway, this madness will all be over soon as Take That will be top of the charts next week and surely also the Christmas No 1 won’t it? Won’t it?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Bad Boys Inc	Walking On Air	Of course not
2	Prince	Controversy	No
3	Gabrielle	I Wish	Nope
4	Bee Gees	For Whom The Bell Tolls	I did not
5	Dina Carroll	The Perfect Year	Nah
6	UB40	Bring Me Your Cup	Negative
7	Blind Melon	No Rain	No but maybe should have
8	Pet Shop Boys	I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing	No but I assume it’s on their Pop Art Best Of which I have
9	Cypress Hill	I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That	It’s another no
10	Cliff Richard	Healing Love	Never happening
11	Mr Blobby	Mr Blobby	What do you think?

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/m001frnn/top-of-the-pops-09121993

TOTP 14 OCT 1993

Posted on November 2, 2022 by 80stastic

It’s mid October 1993 and the England national football team have just suffered a disastrous defeat in their attempt to qualify for next year’s World Cup. The day before this TOTP aired, they lost 2-0 to Holland in a winner takes all match virtually extinguishing their chances of going to USA ‘94. Defeat came in controversial circumstances with England denied a penalty and Dutch midfielder Ronald Koeman escaping a clear red card at 0-0 before stepping up to curl a free kick into the England net just two minutes later.

A documentary crew recorded England manager *Graham Taylor’s reaction on the touch line so that the moment of his utter despair was captured for posterity. I recall going into work at the Our Price in Stockport the next day and the mood being decidedly downbeat. Presumably that mood was replicated across the country. I wonder if there were any tunes on TOTP to lift our spirits…

*Graham’s favourite recording artist was Dame Vera Lynn. I’m pretty sure she’s not on the show though.

Well, there’s a positive vibe about the opening act who are experiencing a definite high really early in their career. Eternal are up to No 7 with their debut single “Stay”. Is it just me or did they seem to appear overnight as a fully formed pop sensation? There never seemed to be any doubt that they would be successful. Maybe it was the slick dance moves that convinced or perhaps they were just the right set of people at the right time to address the gap in the market for a UK all female R&B infused pop group? Whatever the reason, they did in fact ‘stay’ around for most of the decade (albeit not all four of them together) whereas the unfortunate Graham Taylor would be gone from the England job just over a month after this TOTP aired.

I’ve been writing this TOTP blog for almost six years now covering the period 1983-1993 and written over a million words and still there’s one band who refuse to retreat from the Top 40. Starting with “Flight Of Icarus” in ‘83 and right up to this one “Hallowed Be Thy Name”, those monsters of rock Iron Maiden had eighteen UK Top 40 singles of which nine went Top 10. I haven’t gone back through the literally hundreds of posts to see if I had to find something to write about every single one but I’m guessing most of them will have featured. That’s a lot of words to write about a band I have very little interest in.

Looking at their discography, they are good for another ten hits before TOTP was axed in 2006. I fear that they may outlast my blogging resolve. As for this particular single, it was yet another ‘live’ track (they seemed quite keen on those) taken from their “A Real Dead One” album. I can’t be arsed to listen to it but I’m guessing it’s pretty similar to most of their previous chart entries. If that makes me a musical snob then so be it.

Finally!! I’ve been banging on about Dina Carroll and her single “Don’t Be A Stranger” for months now. I may have seemed at one point to be rather obsessed by it. Why? Well, I couldn’t understand why her record label A&M waited until the very last moment to release it as a single. It was the sixth and final track from her album “So Close” but it was as by far the biggest selling going all the way to No 3 when none of the previous five got any higher than No 12. They must have known they had a song with massive hit potential on “So Close” – they even used it to promote the album’s release on TOTP back on 28th January in the show’s album chart feature. So why then let it languish unreleased for another nine months? Were they holding it back for Christmas? I’m going over old territory again here. All I know is that we sold loads of “Don’t Be A Stranger” which stayed in the Top 40 for eleven weeks (nine of them inside the Top 10) with the knock on effect that sales of the album went crazy over the Christmas period that year. Ah! So it was about Christmas then! Maybe A&M knew what they were doing after all.

Next a band at the peak of their fame and apex of their commercial success. From high school slackers to darlings of the inkies music press – that was the seven year journey of The Lemonheads who had just released their sixth studio album called (rather oddly I always thought) “Come On Feel The Lemonheads”. The album would go to No 5 in the UK whilst also supplying their biggest ever hit single “Into Your Arms”.

When not talking about that England defeat, a lot of the staff at the Our Price in Stockport where I was working were very excited by the prospect of this album coming out. Undoubtedly, “Into Your Arms” is a good song but what was catching my attention about the album was its front cover on which Evan Dando looked curiously like the store’s previous manager who had just left to join HMV. Given that Dando’s face seemed to be in every magazine cover at the time – he was included in People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People list – I think I would have been pleased with the comment. Sadly my cheek bone structure would always disqualify me from any such comparison.

As with their previous appearance in the TOTP studio, Evan looks like a giant up there on stage making his guitar seem like a toy. And what was it that they were throwing about mid-song? Just bits of paper? Breadcrumbs like the audience were ducks in a pond? Pop stars eh? Don’t ya just love ‘em?

The Breakers are back with a vengeance after taking last week off with four of the blighters coming at us. We start with a rerelease of a UK No 1 from 1986 – well if it’s good enough for Frankie Goes To Hollywood…”Chain Reaction” was somewhat of a surprise chart topper for Diana Ross coming as it did after an extremely fallow three years preceding it. More so than that though, it was a UK phenomenon as it was totally ignored in the US. None of the other singles from parent album “Eaten Alive” were big hits so what was it about “Chain Reaction” that appealed to us so?* I’m guessing the Bee Gees factor seeing as they wrote it and Barry Gibb does backing vocals on it.

* I say ‘we’ but I have to admit I could never stand it.

So why was it in the charts again? To promote her latest Greatest Hits album “One Woman: The Ultimate Collection” obviously which was a huge seller over that Christmas and went four times platinum in the UK. The 1993 rerelease was actually entitled “Chain Reaction ‘93” (who’d have thought it?!) and was supposedly a remix though they just recycled the original video to promote it. The 1993 incarnation peaked at No 20.

Some big hitters in the Breakers this week as after Miss Diana Ross comes Prince. Back in 1993, the purple one had just released a sprawling Best Of package comprising three separate albums – “The Hits 1”, “The Hits 2” and “The B Sides”. I say Prince but really it was his record company Warners. The former wanted to release the first album by his latest project The New Power Generation but the latter went with the the Best Ofs that they’d wanted to release two years earlier. In total that was 56 tracks if you bought the whole set (36 singles and 20 B-sides). You could buy “The Hits 1” and “The Hits 2” separately but “The B-Sides” had to get bought as part of the whole set. To promote the kit and caboodle came the single “Peach” which was included on “The Hits 2”. Helpfully for all the completists out there, the two CD singles released in the UK came backed with extra tracks that had been singles that weren’t included on either of “The Hits” albums.

As for the song itself, it’s a damn funky, infectious number with some typically dirty lyrics. Never one to shy away from writing about sex, Prince went into the 90s really pushing the envelope. “Gett Off”, “Cream”, “Sexy MF”…and then “Peach” with lyrics like this:

She was pure, every ounce, I was sure when her titties bounced
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Prince Rogers Nelson
Peach lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

Years later, I asked a work colleague when discussing “Peach” where was the censor? Her reply was succinct and to the point – “on the dance floor”. Of course, for readers of a certain vintage and inclination, the word ‘peach’ when used in a sexual manner will always conjure up images of Viz’s Sid the Sexist character and his chat up line “D’yer like fruit pet?” I’ll leave you to work out the rest.

https://youtu.be/-fWvjev6WeI

The Prodigy are next with “One Love”, the lead single from their second album “Music For The Jilted Generation” except said album would not appear until July the following year, nearly nine months later. They did a similar thing with their debut album “Experience”. That was released in September of 1992 yet their first two singles which both featured on it came out twelve and nine months before it way back in 1991. I’m not reading anything into it especially; it just struck me as curious.

There was a practice for singles that came out in between albums to be stand alone releases to maintain a band’s profile during the intervening gap. Off the top of my head there’s “The Way You Are” by Tears For Fears that came out in between “The Hurting” and “Songs From The Big Chair” and…oh, here’s a thing…remember that 1990 single from the Stone Roses that was released in between their eponymous debut and “Second Coming”? Remember its title? Yep, “One Love”. Now that is curious. The Prodigy’s “One Love” peaked at No 8 and its video is a complete head f**k.

Bon Jovi’s singles from their “Keep The Faith” album didn’t make much sense. I mean, sure the title track as their first new material of the decade was always going to be a big hit and so it was peaking at No 5. The album came out about three weeks later and then nothing was released from it until January presumably to avoid getting caught in the Christmas rush. So far, so sensible. “Bed Of Roses” was the second single to be released and it understandably peaked at a lower position than its predecessor given that punters would have already bought the album. Then things start to go a bit odd. Third single “In Your Arms” made No 9 thereby reversing the beginnings of a possible case of diminished returns. The following single “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” performed pretty well to say it was the fourth to be released from the album but it did appear to revert to type by peaking at No 17 (the worst performing of all the album’s singles).

And then came this one, the fifth called “I Believe”. This was nearly a year since the album came out and yet it managed to get to No 11. This didn’t make any sense at all. The song itself wasn’t anything special and not one of their best remembered tunes I would suggest. The CD single did have three live tracks on it so could that have influenced potential buyers? The final single to be released from the album completed the oddness. “Dry County” came out on March 7th 1994 a whole sixteen months after the album was released and peaked at No 9. Oh I give up.

There have been many songs on TOTP whilst I have been writing this blog that I have zero recall of and my general reaction has been this:

https://youtu.be/3sIUxy5hDSI

However, my discovery that there is not a single trace in my memory banks of this next act has left me shocked. Why? Well, because they sound pretty good to me and the sort of thing I would have liked. Presumably I didn’t watch this TOTP when first broadcast and missed seeing them but I was working in a record shop at the time so I really have no excuse. I’m talking about One Dove who were a Scottish dance act. Hang on…me?Liking dance music? That can’t be right. I’ve said many times I’m really not a dance head but there’s something very accessible about this track “Breakdown”. It’s got a proper tune and singer Dot Allison (who would have an extensive solo career after the band split) is playing a guitar! It’s also got a hypnotic quality to it. It reminds me of “Visions Of You” by Jah Wobble’s Invaders Of The Heart featuring Sinéad O’Connor. It should have been a bigger hit than a No 24.

Apparently the band split after becoming disillusioned with the music business when their label tried to commercialise their sound. And yes, I had to look all of this up owing to my complete lack of knowledge about One Dove before this repeat aired. I wonder if I merged them into The Doves in my head who were a completely different band altogether but who formed out of Sub Sub who had a massive hit with “Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use)” in this year. Maybe they were just displaced by that false memory? Getting old is just crap isn’t it?

Oh crikey! It’s Phil Collins! Yes, the much maligned croaker restarted his solo career this year after the last couple of years were taken up with the Genesis album “We Can’t Dance”. Now whatever you might say or think about Phil, his popularity is undeniable. His 1993 album “Both Sides” was his fifth solo venture. Of those five albums to that point, four of them (including “Both Sides”) went to No 1 whilst the other peaked at No 2. “Both Sides Of The Story” was the lead single and (almost) title track from the album and went straight into the Top 10 at No7. Wait…is this the one with the bagpipes near the end? I think it is. As with most of Phil’s and indeed Genesis’s TOTP turns, the producers have cleared the decks running order wise to give an enormous time slot of over five minutes for the performance. Phil spends most of it over emoting and the whole thing sounds particularly overwrought.

Phil played his last show with Genesis in March of this year having to retire from touring due to serious back issues resulting in nerve damage which won’t allow him to drum any more.

https://youtu.be/o-srnmevlL4

Take That and Lulu remain at No 1 with “Relight My Fire”.

Apparently one of the CD singles featured a live Motown medley as one of the extra tracks. A live Motown medley you say? By Take That? Yeah, I think I’d rather have these boys featuring a guy who’s possibly more maligned than even Phil Collins…

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Eternal	Stay	Nope
2	Iron Maiden	Hallowed Be Thy Name	Never happening
3	Dina Carroll	Don’t Be A Stranger	Despite harping on about it all this time, I never actually bought it
4	The Lemonheads	Into Your Arms	No
5	Diana Ross	Chain Reaction ‘93	Nah
6	Prince	Peach	Liked it, didn’t buy it
7	The Prodigy	One Love	I did not
8	Bon Jovi	I Believe	No but I had a promo copy of the album
9	One Dove	Breakdown	No but maybe I should have
10	Phil Collins	Both Sides Of The Story	As if
11	Take That / Lulu	Relight My Fire	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/m001dhjb/top-of-the-pops-14101993

TOTP 08 OCT 1992

Posted on April 9, 2022 by 80stastic

By 1992, TOTP was into its 29th year. The very first show had been broadcast on New Year’s Day 1964 and was produced in Dickenson Road Studio in Manchester which was just a short walk from where I was living in 1992. Anyway, whilst the show could boast an enduring longevity a new music vehicle debuted on this very day. Yes, a few hours after this TOTP had finished, the very first Later…with Jools Holland hit our screens. Whilst TOTP would eventually peter out and be deemed unwanted in 2006, Later… is still part of the BBC’s broadcasting schedule today albeit that it had undergone some changes of format, times of transmission and even some tinkering with its name in that time. Its remit was vastly different from TOTP in that it was not bound by charts or hit records (mind you those time honoured rules seem to have gone by the by in recent TOTP repeats as well). Showcasing a wide variety of musical genres, its circular arrangement of stages, jam sessions with the host and a studio audience of 300 meant that you couldn’t really mistake Later…for its older sibling. Musical guests on that first show were The Neville Brothers (Gary and Phil!), The Christians, Nu Colours and D’Influence – I’d have maybe been interested in The Christians but nothing else. Over the years it has received accolades and criticism alike both for its choice of artists and its host but whatever your opinion of it, you have to give credit to a show that has lasted that long. I wonder if any of the acts on TOTP tonight ever received an invite from Jools?

We start with M People. They must have been on Later…surely? I’m going to have to check the list of episodes for 59 series to be sure. Hmm. Not sure about this post’s theme all of a sudden.

*checks anyway*

Yes! They first appeared in series 4 nearly two years on from this TOTP broadcast alongside Nick Lowe and an all female Bulgarian state choir. By 1998, they were so successful that they qualified for their own Later…Special with the whole show dedicated to them. Back in 1992 though they were struggling to establish themselves as a consistently successful chart act. They had achieved three consecutive Top 40 hits but diminishing returns had set in and each one peaked at a lower chart position than the one before. Not wanting to leave anything to chance, the band returned to the studio to record two new tracks to not only reverse that trend but to add to their debut album “Northern Soul” for a re-release. One of those tracks was “Excited” which was put out as a single. It did what it was designed to do but only just when it peaked at No 29.

In his intro, host Tony Dortie (more on him ‘laterz’) encourages us to jump about to the song which is the exact opposite of what plays out as the band give the most static of performances with certainly no jumping going on. The track is all about the chorus which is perfect for Heather Small’s enormous, swooping vocals. The rest of it is a bit meh – yes, not the most articulate of critiques but then I’m writing 6,000 words a week on this blog so I’m allowing myself the odd bit of lazy writing OK?

The band should probably have just gone straight to Plan B which is what they ended up doing eventually anyway. In the February of the following year they rereleased “How Can I Love You More (Mixes)” which did what it said on the tin and remixed their debut single (including a mix by Sasha) and the combination of radio and club versions was enough to take then into the Top 10 for the first time. Then came the Mercury Music Prize winning “Elegant Slumming” and the rest was history.

It’s the mini chart rundown from 20 – 11 next over the video for “Sentinel” by Mike Oldfield. He’s a big name, he’s surely been on Later…Yes, of course he has on series 12 in 1998 appearing alongside Fun Lovin’ Criminals amongst others. He played the intro from “Tubular Bells” – of course he did. We’ve seen both the video for “Sentinel” and an ‘exclusive’ performance of the song before so do I have to comment on this one again? I do? Erm…well, obviously this was from “Tubular Bells II” and six years later Oldfield released “Tubular Bells III” and then a year later “The Millennium Bell”. It didn’t stop there though as he re-recorded the original album for its 30th anniversary in 2003. And I thought Later… had some longevity.

Next up are Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. Did they ever appear on Later…? What do you reckon? Well, they didn’t as far as I can tell. Their stock was pretty high in 1992 though. They’d headlined the NME stage at Glastonbury in the Summer and had toured extensively in the US where MTV had picked up some of their videos for heavy rotation. Indeed, this single “Not Sleeping Around” topped the Modern Rock / Alternative chart over there. The lead single for second studio album “Are You Normal?”, it peaked at No 19 in the UK making it their second biggest hit ever. Apparently Jools Holland wasn’t a fan though.

As for the song itself, I don’t remember this one but listening back to it now it has hints of EMF, The Wedding Present and Jocks Wa Hey. Who are the last name on that list you say? Only the greatest band that never existed! Still not sure? The Young Person’s Guide To Becoming A Rock Star? Channel 4? Late 90s? Here they are in all their glory…

What a time the next artist was having around now. Not only was Tasmin Archer on her way to No 1 with “Sleeping Satellite” but by the time it got to the top of the charts she was also appearing on the third ever edition of Later…and who was she sharing the bill with for that show? Only Motown legend Smokey Robinson! She must have been pinching herself. Nobody had ever heard of her six weeks before that.

Although her fame was fleeting, she isn’t the one hit wonder many may think. Her album “Great Expectations” provided her with a further three hit singles including the dark but powerful “In Your Care” which was written about child abuse and raised money for the Child Line charity. The song’s subject matter showed that Tasmin wasn’t one for shying away from issues and was a brave choice as a follow up single to a No 1 record.

Two years later she demonstrated her self belief by covering not one but four songs by one of the most respected songwriters of a generation when she released the “Shipbuilding EP” which included four Elvis Costello songs. It took some balls to record her version of the EP’s title track . Not only was it written by Costello but there was already a version in existence that was recognised as the definitive take on the song by Robert Wyatt. My wife is a big Costello fan and she liked Tasmin’s version enough to buy it. There really was more to Archer than just “Sleeping Satellite”.

Now a tricky one to predict for many reasons next but I’m specifically referring to whether they ever appeared on Later… Prince was certainly a big enough name to have done so but did his schedule ever allow it? It didn’t according to Wikipedia and Jools Holland never got to accompany the great man but there is this rather lovely tribute to him by Gregory Porter from the show:

The follow up to “Sexy MF” and the second single from the “Love Symbol” album, “My Name Is Prince” peaked at No 7 on the UK Top 40. Oh the irony of that song title given his battles with his nomenclature! The naming of the song was surely deliberate. It’s a typical, full on Prince funk out of a track and I quite liked it at the time but it’s not up there amongst the very best of his work on reflection. Apparently that is actually Prince in the video behind that chainmail face covering sending fans wild as he performs in an alleyway which is quite appropriate as the full video features Cheers actress Kirstie Alley. I’m guessing that wasn’t deliberate though.

The next artist we last saw on the show as part of Quartz performing their dance version of Carol King’s “It’s Too Late” back in 1991. The following year she was back in her own right, striking out on her own as Dina Carroll (Dina bring short for Geraldine). She’d already clocked up one Top 40 single in 1992 called “Ain’t No Man” but it didn’t make it onto TOTP. She’s made the cut this time though with her second single “Special Kind Of Love”. This was a jaunty little number if a little generic. I could imagine Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey belting this one out – in fact it does sound a bit like the latter’s “Emotions” track come to think of it. There’s even a little bit of vocal dynamics Mariah style in the middle. Not unpleasant though. Dina would go supernova the following year with her Top 3 hit “Don’t Be A Stranger” propelling sales of her “So Close” album through the roof. Said album would eventually furnish Dina with six chart hits.

She looks ever so slightly uncomfortable in this performance up there on her own like she’s not entirely sure where to put herself. At one point she nearly misses her vocal cue and at another seems to look to the side of the stage as if hoping for someone behind the scenes to tell her where to stand. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have noticed anything at the time but writing a blog makes me look for the slightest details now.

As for her Later…credentials, she appeared on the very first Hootenanny in 1993 which would have coincided with the height of her success. Ah yes, Hootenanny, Jools’ annual New Year’s Eve shindig. My wife and I used to watch this religiously but our commitment has waned in recent years. I think it was when we found out it wasn’t live and was in fact recorded some time in October I think. You can’t trust anything or anyone these days can you?

“Special Kind Of Love” peaked at No 16.

Next a bloke who really should have been a none hit wonder rather than the one hit variety but here he is with a second Top 40 entry. Billy Ray Cyrus was responsible for one of the year’s cringiest songs in “Achy Breaky Heart” but here he was trying to prove that he was a proper artist really and not a novelty song singer. “Could’ve Been Me” was his follow up to that ~~turd~~ song and he’s doing his best Merle Haggard impression to convince us of his credibility. That ain’t working for me at all and neither is the fact that his performance is being broadcast live from Nashville, the home of country music. This guy was pure (Dwight) hokum surely?

Cyrus never had another UK hit despite releasing 53 singles and 16 studio albums during his career. The figure for his appearances on Later….? That would be a big, fat zero. Oh and a final quiz question before we’re done with Billy Ray. Can you name another artist who is only known really for one hugely successful song but who had a follow up hit that included the words ‘Could’ve Been’ in the title? Yep, it was the shopping mall princess herself, Tiffany.

Four Breakers this week two of which we’ve already seen in full before. Why did the producers keep doing this? It seems like such a waste especially when you consider that one of those two songs is by Status Quo!

Yes, we’re stuck with the Quo putting in a halfhearted shift at the money for old rope factory. Even Jools Holland couldn’t be doing with them and they were never invited on Later…The video for “Roadhouse Medley (Anniversary Waltz – Part 25)” seems mainly to just be the promo for their 1984 single “The Wanderer” which is one of the tracks in the medley intercut with some live gig footage but really, who gives a s**t?

The second artist who’s already performed in full on the show previously is Sade who, we must remember, are a band not a singer. At least the video for “No Ordinary Love” has singer Sade Adu costumed as a mermaid to…erm…retain our interest (as opposed to some blokes in denim arseing around on a bus as per Quo’s video). And Later…?What do you reckon? Yes, of course they’ve been on but not until November 2000 presumably to promote their “Lovers Rock” album.

Now here’s a real forgotten song – “Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough” by Patty Smyth and Don Henley. Hands up who remembers this? Well, if anyone is reading this in the US or Canada they might well have raised an arm as this was a No 2 record in America and the biggest selling single of the year in Canada. Over here though, it petered out at No 22.

So who is/was Patty Smyth? That’s Patty Smyth not Patti Smith the legendary US punk rock icon. Well, Patty was in a band called Scandal (never heard of them) who had one major hit in America in 1984 but it didn’t translate to the UK. By far her biggest hit was this one as discussed above but that shouldn’t define her career. She has written multiple songs for film soundtracks, worked with bands like The Hooters and – get this – she was invited by Eddie Van Halen to join the rock giants as a replacement for singer David Lee Roth but she declined as she was pregnant at the time with her first child. That was with her first husband Richard Hell of Richard Hell & The Voidoids fame. I only really know about this guy through my wife who’s elder brother listened to a lot of Hell’s music when they were growing up. As if that partner wasn’t interesting enough, guess who Patty is married to now? John McEnroe the tennis legend! I know! John is also a musician having been taught to play the guitar by his friend Eric Clapton. And I thought my guitar teacher was good.

Back to the music though and “Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough” is a nice enough country rock ballad that you could imagine The Eagles having recorded (no surprise given Henley’s involvement). I could also picture it being on the soundtrack to a romantic drama probably starring Matthew McConaughey and Sandra Bullock.

Neither Don Henley nor Patty Smyth (nor John McEnroe!) have ever appeared on Later…though Patti Smith has.

The final Breaker comes from Simple Minds who are back in the charts but not with new material. Back in 1992, the band were at the start of a four year hiatus between albums. Record label Virgin wisely decided that now would therefore be a good time to raid the band’s back catalogue and release a Best Of album. “Glittering Prize 81/92” was that album but as it was a Virgin endeavour it precluded the inclusion of tracks from the band’s first three non-Virgin albums. Sadly this meant marvellous songs like “I Travel” were missing from the track listing. Still, you couldn’t say it wasn’t jam packed with hits. Sixteen of them were on the album and the appeal of that was enough to send it to No 1 and triple platinum.

To promote it, a double A-side single was released, that being “Love Song/Alive And Kicking” The former was a track from 1981 that had been a minor hit peaking outside of the Top 40 whilst the latter was that well known behemoth of a rock anthem that went to No 7 in 1985. Interesting that Virgin chose the lesser known “Love Song” to promote the album (it’s that song that TOTP play) though in my memory it was “Alive And Kicking” that picked up all the airplay.

We sold loads of this album in the Our Price in Rochdale where I was working whilst the single also sold well peaking at No 6. There’d already been an unofficial Greatest Hits album by the band in the form of live album “Live In The City Of Light” from 1987 – Phil Collins did a similar thing by releasing “Serious Hits Live” before a formal Greatest Hits – plus the “Themes” box sets from 1990. Subsequent years would see the band release multiple Best Of albums including an acoustic one in 2017.

Despite their status and longevity, Simple Minds have never been on Later… though Simply Red have. Where’s the justice?

And so we arrive at the moment that I realised that this Take That thing wasn’t going away anytime soon. Having achieved the status of genuine pop stars with bona fide hits, it was time to consolidate and how do you do that after your first two hits have been uptempo numbers? With a ballad of course and Gary Barlow had just the thing. Written when he was 15 and presumably when he knew little about the whole love thing, “A Million Love Songs” was perfect for cultivating the affection of thousands of teenage girls up and down the country. Tuneful yet simple, there was nothing very complicated going on here although the self referential use of the phrase ‘love songs’ did add an extra layer to it. Kind of like the innocent, wide eyed younger sibling to “Song For Whoever” by The Beautiful South.

It’s not often mentioned but the single wasn’t actually a single at all but an E.P (“The Love Songs E.P.” to be exact). The CD single and vinyl formats all contained three other songs in addition to “A Million Love Songs”. The cassette version only had a different mix of it. There was also a limited edition 7” that came with transfer tattoos that had the same track listing as the cassette. So what were the other songs on the E.P. and were they any good? They were “Still Can’t Get Over You”, “How Can It Be” and “Don’t Take Your Love”. As for their quality, I have no idea (nor wish to find out) as they lay largely redundant and attracted very little radio play. The group themselves can’t have been that enamoured with them as none made the cut for their debut album though one of them was included as a bonus track on a 2006 expanded edition.

This TOTP performance seemed designed to establish two things. One, that the band could do more than just dance about like pop puppets to some disco-lite tracks and two, that Gary Barlow was the talent here. I defy anybody watching this back then to have looked at the group and say that the guy second left in the hat doing backing vocals will have a bigger solo career than the bloke on the piano. The fact that he did also led to Robbie Williams appearing on Later…something that neither Gary Barlow nor Take That managed.

“A Million Love Songs” peaked at No 7.

Before we get to the No 1, a little more on presenter Tony Dortie. Tony has been revisiting his past and tweeting along with some of these TOTP repeats. He seems like a decent sort, quite self deprecating. Anyway, he announced that last week’s repeats would be the last he would engage with but promised to bow out with a story that couldn’t be shown on any of The Story Of…TOTP documentaries. He also promised to reveal the real reason why the much reviled Adrian Rose refused to give consent for his TOTP presenter shows to be aired again. There was much build up to Tony releasing this video and he prefaced it with an explanation that all the legals had been cleared and the story was ready to go. Wow! This was surely going to be explosive and blow the lid on the show’s secrets. Are you ready to hit that play button? Go for it!

Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for the loss of 10 minutes and 35 seconds of your life that you won’t get back if you do.

Thanks for nothing Tony. Laterz!

It’s a final week at the top for The Shamen and “Ebeneezer Goode”. With the single deleted by the band to clear the release schedule for the next single, they would be back near the top of the charts again soon enough when “Boss Drum” went to No 4. A final trip to the Top 5 was squeezed in when “Phorever People” was released just before Xmas. The Shamen were never anywhere near as big again.

P.S. They never appeared on Later…either.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	M People	Excited	No but I think my wife bought the album
2	Mike Oldfield	Sentinel	Nah
3	Ned’s Atomic Dustbin	Not Sleeping Around	I did not
4	Tasmin Archer	Sleeping Satellite	Nope
5	Prince	My Name Is Prince	Didn’t mind it, didn’t buy it
6	Dina Carroll	Special Kind Of Love	No
7	Billy Ray Cyrus	Could’ve Been Me	Hell no!
8	Status Quo	Roadhouse Medley (Anniversary Waltz – Part 25)	Never!
9	Sade	No Ordinary Love	Nah
10	Patty Smyth and Don Henley	Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough	Negative
11	Simple Minds	Love Song/Alive And Kicking	No but I’ve got one pop those Best Of albums
12	Take That	A Million Love Songs	Never happening
13	The Shamen	Ebeneezer Goode	Don’t think I did

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/m001648s/top-of-the-pops-08101992

TOTP 23 JUL 1992

Posted on March 14, 2022 by 80stastic

We’re in mid Summer ‘92 at TOTP Rewind. The Euros have been and gone (and with them Graham Taylor’s credibility as the England manager) and the Olympics in Barcelona are just about to start and we all know what that means…yes that bloody song by Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballe will be everywhere including the top end of the charts very soon. For now though, we have a TOTP which is, yet again, a right mix bag of music and artists. We’re back to a presenting duo rather than the solo host we have seen recently with Tony Dortie being paired with Claudia Simon. The producers are sticking with the small changes to the format they made recently meaning we get to see Claudia and Tony do an intro even before the titles roll and then do the Top 10 countdown before we see/hear any artists. I’m not convinced about any of it.

When we do get to the actual music, the first intro is very odd. As the camera alights on Claudia and Tony, the latter says “This record is massive on the dance floor” but the camera keeps moving down towards the stage. Claudia says out of shot “Making their debut on Top of the Pops…” and then…nothing. Surely Claudia was teeing up actually saying who the first act was?! What happened? Did her mike fail? Did she forget who she was introducing? Or did the producers say “Just forget it. Too late now anyway. They’ve started and the artist graphic is on screen already”?

That artist graphic told us that the band were Sunscreem with “Love U More”. So who were these lot? I remember the name but the only other thing I recall about them was that they were a Sony artist (the curse of opening all those deliveries while working for Our Price in the 90s strikes again!). Turns out that they weren’t just another anonymous dance act put together to front a hit single. They were a house band from Essex- no I don’t mean they were the resident band for the whole of the county but that they played ‘house’ music – and actually performed live concerts.

Having been tipped as the next big name in dance music during ‘91, they finally broke into the UK Top 40 with “Love U More”. Listening to it now, it does ring a few bells one of which reminded me of “Sunshine On A Rainy Day” by Zoë. If that bell was ringing though then there was an air horn going off in my head about their performance which is giving me heavy D:Ream vibes. It’s not just their sound, the lead singer even has a tartan suit on!

That singer is Lucia Holm who recorded a fine version of one of my favourite ever songs “Heaven” by The Psychedelic Furs in 2005.

Not only that, check out this fact from @TOTPFacts about her involvement in another of my favourite tunes:

Sunscreem singer Lucia Holm also played cello on "Life In A Northern Town" by The Dream Academy – from which her playing was later sampled by Dario G for his dance track "Sunchyme". https://t.co/s2CrslZ6jO #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) March 11, 2022

I had no idea! I was also in the dark that Steps covered “Love U More” on their debut album. Look!

Nice to see some actual, proper musical instruments on display in a dance outfit performance though I’m not sure about the two dancers throwing some shapes. Sunscreem would go on to have eight UK Top 40 hits though none would get any higher than No 13. “Love U More” itself would make No 23.

Snap! are up to No 2 with “Rhythm Is A Dancer” and it’s obvious now that it’s going to be a chart topper. I’m not sure I would have predicted it spending six weeks as the nation’s best seller though but then what did I know eh? Oh yeah, I was working in a record shop at the time so maybe I should have had my finger in the pulse a bit more.

The track routinely features in the ‘Best No 1s /dance anthems of the 90s’ polls but I bet nobody involved in the record could have foreseen its influence extend to this extent…

Thought Shakespear’s Sister only had one hit? You are sorely mistaken for they had six UK Top 40 hits in total though I’m guessing this one would have a decent chance at being a very low scorer on Pointless. “Goodbye Cruel World” was actually the lead single from their “Hormonally Yours” album and not the all conquering “Stay” but nobody noticed it when it was initially released in late September ‘91 and it struggled to a high of No 59. Maybe that would have been the end of the band had they not had that Dave Stewart penned No 1 song up their sleeves but up their sleeves it was and the rest is (you’re) history.

Essentially a straightforward rock/pop song, it had enough quirkiness about it to make it stand out from the crowd. However, it never made it above its chart position here of No 32 in spite of this TOTP exposure. To be fair, the whirling dervish routine of Siobhan Fahey was starting to irritate and they did seem to shoehorn in a platform for Marcella Detroit’s to display her operatic range every song. Siobahn seems to think it’s Xmas time judging by the white fur trim in her outfit but it’s their bass player that my eyes are more drawn to. She looks ever so familiar and judging by the #TOTP tweets for this show, a fair few people thought the same and wanted to identify her. General consensus was that its Claire Kenny who has worked with the likes of Orange Juice, Sinéad O’Connor and Brian Eno though I think it’s Amazulu that I recognise her from which probably says quite a lot about me.

The Breakers are in a much more sensible place in the show this week and we start with the poster boys of grunge Nirvana. To say how influential they were, their career was pretty short and their back catalogue fairly small. Three studio albums and six UK Top 40 hits in a seven year existence. Yes, you could argue that The Beatles only existed for a decade and look at their legacy but they released thirteen albums in that period. You could also make the case that Nirvana’s potential for longevity was truncated by Kurt Cobain’s death but I think that the band were never likely to pull a U2 and carve out a 40 year career. Cobain’s heroin addiction was always an issue and the group almost broke up after disagreements surrounding Kurt’s attempts to reorganise their royalties structure so that he got more to reflect his songwriting input. There’s also that theory that those who shine the brightest burn out the quickest and that the band were always destined to fulfil that particular narrative but is that just a lazy take on their story?

Anyway, one of those six hit singles was “Lithium” which was the third track to be released from “Nevermind”. It’s a good song and all that but it doesn’t stray far from the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” template in that the verses are subdued lulling us into a false sense of security before the violent eruption of the go apeshit chorus.

The video is a collage of gig footage. Cobain had originally had an idea for an animation to tell the story of a girl called Preggo who lives in a forest and takes some eggs she found in her closet to a king in a castle. This was shelved when it became apparent that it the video would take four months to make. They couldn’t think of anything else to do than just cobble some concert clips together?

“Lithium” peaked at No 11 in the UK singles chart.

Still bleeding the “Stars” album dry are Simply Red or more accurately their record label EastWest. I’m wondering about the wisdom of releasing a fifth single (“Your Mirror”) from an album that had been out for 10 months by this point and which had sold so many copies in the first three of those months that it became the biggest selling album of the whole year.

Were EastWest hoping that there were still some punters out there who hadn’t yet been persuaded into buying “Stars” by the first four singles off it but who might be convinced by the fifth? Surely not. Was it designed to appeal to completist super fans who couldn’t resist the lure of Simply Red product? Did such people exist? Were there exclusive extra tracks on the single? Or was it as I first thought just a case of milking the label’s elite cash cow as much as they could?

“Stars” was the band’s fourth album – would that have bought them to the end of their current record deal? Were EastWest concerned they might lose their lucrative charges? As it turned out they didn’t but it would be four years before the next Simply Red album. Had they thought that might be the case and so wanted to maximise sales of the current one by going all Michael Jackson on its singles release schedule? Were the band on tour and so the single was to promote that?

So many questions to which I’m not sure I actually care what the answers are. This is Simply Red and Mick Hucknall we’re talking about here after all! Suffice to say “Your Mirror” did nothing for me but it reached a respectable No 17 on the charts which presumably meant something to EastWest.

Talking of Jacko…after the first three singles from Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” album had been given the ‘exclusive’ treatment by TOTP, the video for his latest single only warrants a slot in the Breakers! Possibly to prevent litigation from The King of Pop’s lawyers, it gets a full outing on the following week’s show.

The single in question is “Who Is It” and the critical reception it received at the time suggested that it was “Billie Jean” 2.0. I can certainly hear that in the bridge into the chorus but is there a bit of “Dirty Diana” in there as well?

It managed to get to No 10 in the UK despite it being the fourth single off the album but curiously wasn’t released simultaneously in the US where they went with “Jam” as the fourth single release. I didn’t really care for it at all. Oh, and never mind ‘who is it’, the question I wanted to ask was why doesn’t the song title have a question mark at the end of it? Answer me that.

So who did get the ‘Exclusive’ slot this week instead of Jackson? It’s gone to Enya? Really?! Are you sure?! Yes, for she was in the studio to promote her single “Book Of Days” from the album “Shepherd Moons”. As Tony Dortie says, it also featured in the Tom Cruise/Nicole Kidman film Far And Away. I think I went to the pictures to see that one. It was OK but far too long and the ending is one of the worst in cinematic history.

As for the performance here, there’s a few things to unpack. Firstly, is she singing live as per TOTP policy? She could be but with all those vocal effects on the record it’s hard to tell. Secondly, what was the deal with the platinum blonde wigs on the cello players? Was it a tribute to Gerry Anderson’s UFO and the purple wigs worn by the female staff at moon base? Finally, the flowers on the piano and studio floor – was that an influence on the cover to the Oasis single “Don’t Look Back In Anger”?

“Book Of Days” peaked at No 10.

https://youtu.be/5hTo-3TF0Nw

Obviously “Sexy MF” by Prince was never going to get any airplay if the true word behind the acronym hadn’t been blanked but it’s not like the rest of the lyrics were squeaky clean. Some of them were filthy:

You seem perplexed I haven’t taken you yet

Can’t you see I’m harder than a man can get

I got wet dreams comin’ out of my ears

I get hard if the wind blows your cologne near me

Sheesh! Where was the censor? Presumably on the dance floor.

“Sexy MF” peaked at No 4.

Action from the US chart next as we get a first look at an artist who’s about to bring his success over here. I say first look but if we’d have been watching Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine carefully we’d have seen his guy before. I have to admit that as a teenager I was probably more interested in directing my gaze at Gloria rather than her band! Anyway, enough of that! The guy in question is Jon Secada and “Just Another Day” would be first and biggest hit.

I could never see the appeal of this song and found it quite laborious and dull. I seemed to be in the minority though as it went to No 5 both in the UK and the US. Now I’m not saying the guy can’t sing but, as someone commented on Twitter, he doesn’t half make a meal of this performance which is a flurry of gurning expressions, mike stand wielding and fist clenching. He makes Spandau’s Tony Hadley look like a wallflower. No doubt we’ll be seeing more of Mr Secada in future repeats.

You wait ages for one ‘Exclusive’ (that never comes if you’re Michael Jackson) and then two come along. The second one after Enya earlier is from Elton John and Eric Clapton who have collaborated on a little ditty called “Runaway Train”. The second single released from Elton’s “The One” album, I have to say that this is utter garbage. A right dirge and money for old rope for the pair of them. This did nothing for either protagonist’s reputation. Even the video effects are horrible and only serve to increase the strength of the headache listening to the song will give you.

Unfortunately Claudia Simon stumbles over her words in the intro to this one saying that the video was “shot at the Wembley during Elton’s worldwise tour’. Sadly, there was nothing wise about this train wreck of a release and it peaked at a lowly No 31.

Jimmy Nail is No 1 again with “Ain’t No Doubt” and he’s in the studio again doing his weird, shambling performance that he’s done every week so far in that same dark suit and T-shirt ensemble. He almost motionless and it’s left to his brass section to provide all the movement on stage. The dinner jackets, black bow ties and shades they’re all wearing remind me of the backing singers Nick Heyward had for his single “Warning Sign” back in 1984:

Jimmy was riding high on the back of the success of his Spender TV series which was huge back in the day and regularly pulled in audiences of 14 million. I’m pretty sure I was one of them though I can’t recall any of the episodes or stories now. In keeping with my own memory, it’s almost as though that it’s entirely forgotten now. Never repeated on TV and never even released on DVD or video and yet his first big hit series Auf Wiedersehen Pet is never off the likes of ITV 4 or the Drama channel.

We play out with “Shake Your Head” by Was (Not Was). Some of the things that the lyrics say you can’t do are palpably untrue. ‘You can’t win money at the horses” for example. I’ll wager some of the thousands attending this week’s Cheltenham festival would disagree. The biggest whopper though is “And you can’t influence the masses”. Vote Leave campaign anyone?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Sunscreem	Love U More	Nah
2	Snap!	Rhythm Is A Dancer	Nope
3	Shakespear’s Sister	Goodbye Cruel World	I did not
4	Nirvana	Lithium	No
5	Simply Red	Your Mirror	Certainly not
6	Michael Jackson	Who Is It	Negative
7	Enya	Book Of Days	It’s a no from me
8	Prince	Sexy MF	Not the single but I have it on a Best Of CD I’m sure
9	Jon Secada	Just Another Day	Never happening
10	Elton John and Eric Clapton	Runaway Train	I’d have rather bought Runaway Train by Soul Asylum and that’s shit as well
11	Jimmy Nail	Ain’t No Doubt	And no
12	Was (Not Was)	Shake Your Head	Not the single but I bought their Best Of album Hello Dad…I’m In Jail with it on

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00156d0/top-of-the-pops-23071992

TOTP Rewind – the 90s

My memories of 90s chart music

TOTP 28 FEB 1997

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TOTP 13 DEC 1996

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TOTP 15 NOV 1996

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TOTP 28 APR 1994

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TOTP 21 APR 1994

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TOTP 07 APR 1994

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TOTP 09 DEC 1993

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TOTP 14 OCT 1993

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TOTP 08 OCT 1992

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TOTP 23 JUL 1992

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