Welcome to the brave new world of the ‘year zero’ TOTP revamp where we are into the second show of this new era. My take on the first show was that it was a right shambles and that the new features didn’t really work at all. The presenters Tony Dortie and Mark Franklin were enthusiastic but yet to find their feet and cement their personalities on the show whilst the chart rundown was an abomination. As D-Ream would say two years on from here (and indeed Howard Jones six years before), things can only get better.

An acid test of the new format arrives in the very first act on tonight as we see if the changes introduced by new producer Stanley Appel allow dance tunes to be showcased any more effectively. The person in the test drive seat is DJ Carl Cox with “I Want You (Forever)”. Once again we open the show without seeing a host at all as we get the disembodied voice of Dortie who really is shaping a reputation for himself as a mumbler. What’s he saying? “Everyone is live and firing interaction from Brighton”? What?! Take a breath man – you’re running your sentences together! As for the staging of the performance, I have to say I don’t see anything much different from how dance acts were presented previously. The main man is once again in the background on the decks whilst the singer is up front with some dancers. So far, so same as before. Yes, the vocal is live this time as per keeping with the new edict about artists appearing on the show and there’s a bit of graphic trickery when some trippy colourisation effects are laid over the top for the non-singing parts of the track but apart from that? OK, there’s maybe some more camera angles than usual in an attempt to dazzle us into thinking that there’s more going on here than our brains can take in but I’m not sure it works. They even resort to that old strategy of slipping in some bits of the promo video to try and liven up proceedings. Nah, not for me.

Oh, hang on. That’s new! As DJ Carl Cox finishes, the camera tracks to a bank of six TV screens and Mark Franklin appears stretched out over all of them to form one big collage of his face. Ooh! Swanky! I take it all back – the whole revamp was worth it just for that moment! Franklin introduces the Top 10 countdown and – oh no – disregard my previous comment as this new countdown is just atrocious. Unforgivable.

Talking of unforgivable, here’s Morrissey! OK, a touch unfair on the 1991 version of Morrissey maybe but some of his more recent comments are truly unpalatable. Here he is a with a fairly downbeat (if not downright miserable) tune called “My Love Life” which was the fourth and final hit single that he had in the calendar year of 1991 none of which got any higher than No 25. It was also the second of two consecutive non-album singles (following “Pregnant For The Last Time”) before he would return the following year with a proper album in “Your Arsenal”.

Mozza’s backing band are now full on rockabilly rebels with quiff-tastic hair which is not a surprise as this was around the time that Boz Boorer, founder of new wave rockabilly group The Polecats, would enter into a permanent working relationship with Morrissey as his co-writer and guitarist. “My Love Life” though wasn’t a Boorer / Morrissey composition but was written with Mark Nevin who used to be in “Perfect” hitmakers Fairground Attraction.

Coincidentally, I recently read the autobiography* of another Nevin, one of my all time football heroes Pat Nevin who himself was a big Smiths fan and indeed, he devoted an entire chapter of his book (entitled This Charming Man) to the time he went round to Morrissey’s house. Pat went to Morrissey’s gaff with his friend Vini Reilly from The Durutti Column and found his host to be overly guarded on first meeting (or “defensive preciousness” as Pat called it). To try and warm him up a bit, Nevin asked Morrissey if he had ever been interested in football to which he replied:

“I can’t say I have ever really thought about it. My mind and my thoughts have never ventured towards that area, my soul was otherwise engaged“.

A typical lah-di-dah Morrissey answer you could be forgiven for thinking. However, there was a sting in the tail. Pat was playing for Everton by this point and one of his fellow players, ex-Man Utd legend Norman Whiteside, lived on the same road as Morrissey it turned out. Nevin followed up by saying:

“I only ask because another player from our team was going to pop round with me tonight, his name is Norman and he lives not far from here.”

Quick as a flash Mozza replied:

“You mean Norman Whiteside who used to play for United and moved to Everton last year?”

You little tinker Morrissey!

Nevin replied:

“Not bad knowledge for a guy whose soul is engaged elsewhere”

The ice was broken and they got along famously for the rest of the evening. They never met again but Morrissey sent Pat a postcard inscribed with ‘From one dribbler to another’ which as Pat says, could have been a perfect Smiths song title.

*All quotes in italics are from Pat Nevin, the accidental footballer published by Monoray, 2021.

Next one of those songs that got so much airplay that you end up convinced that it was a bigger hit than hit actually was. “Walking In Memphis” by Marc Cohn had already been released once in 1991 when it peaked at No 66 in June. I’m guessing it was still being played on the radio enough to warrant a re-release just a few months later and this time it would become a UK Top 40 hit. Where do you reckon it go to though? Top 10? Top 5? Nope, it didn’t even go Top 20 peaking just outside at No 22.

I think it’s the lyrics that made the song memorable with those references to Elvis, The King and Graceland but it’s not really a tribute to Presley but rather concerns Cohn’s “spiritual awakening” as he puts it himself. Cohn had come to a realisation at the age of 28 that he didn’t actually like the songs he had so far written so he took a trip to Memphis to try and clear his writer’s block. The lyrics are almost entirely autobiographical, outlining his experiences whilst there like attending the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church on a Sunday morning to hear the Reverend Al Green preach (‘They’ve got gospel in the air, and Reverend Green be glad to see you, when you haven’t got a prayer’). The words also reference visiting the Hollywood Café in Robinsonville, Mississippi to see Muriel Davis Wilkins, a retired schoolteacher who performed at the cafe (‘Now Muriel plays piano, every Friday at the Hollywood’). Cohn also references blues legend W.C. Handy, Carl Perkins who originally recorded “Blue Suede Shoes” whilst that line about the ‘ghost of Elvis’ that security didn’t see is supposedly about a story that Bruce Springsteen once successfully scaled the wall at Graceland, trying to deliver a song he wrote to Elvis but The King wasn’t at home.

Inevitably Cohn drew comparisons with the likes of Billy Joel and Elton John but unlike those two, Cohn’s career was defined by that one song which won him a Grammy in 1992 for Best New Artist. As with so many albums in 1991, the surprise success of the single created a demand for his debut eponymous album which had been released in February but which was now withdrawn by Warners (it always seemed to be Warners) before being re-released meaning that those of us working in record stores had to explain what an album being withdrawn meant to confused customers wanting the album by ‘that bloke who sings the song about Elvis’.

Interesting to note that just like Carl Cox earlier, the TOTP production team felt the need to beef up the studio performance with some clips of the video. So that was dance acts and blokes sat at pianos that the show struggled to accommodate.

For the sake of completists everywhere I should mention the following:

• Cher recorded a version of this in 1995 for her “It’s A Man’s World” album and it outperformed Cohn’s version when it peaked at No 11 despite being f*****g horrible.
• In 1992, jungle pioneers Shut Up And Dance released a bastardised version of “Walking In Memphis” with the lyrics and song title changed to “Raving I’m Raving”. However, as they hadn’t obtained song clearance from Cohn, he took out an injunction to stop them from making any more copies of the record. The original version had sent the song to No 2 in the UK charts but it dropped like a stone when the shops couldn’t get any more stock. A re-recorded version was then released which sounded nothing like Cohn’s song and which nobody wanted and it fell out of the charts within two weeks.
• German happy hardcore ravers Scooter released a version of it entitled “I’m Raving”in 1996 but seriously, let’s not go there.

After last week’s Exclusive feature showed a song that wasn’t even a hit in the UK (“Fun Day” by Steve Wonder), this time it’s a better choice as the video for Queen‘s latest single is showcased. Possibly one fo the most poignant song titles ever, “The Show Must Go On” was the last Queen single to be released in Freddie Mercury’s lifetime. Despite no official statement from the band, rumours were now rife that Freddie was very ill by the end of November, he had gone.

Despite being the last track on the band’s final album with Freddie “Innuendo”, it was released as a single to promote their “Greatest Hits II” album that was released at the end of October. It sounds strange to say it now as the album went to No 1 and 12 x platinum in the UK but I recall that we hadn’t sold as many as expected in the Our Price I was working in (we’d got shed loads of it in). I clearly remember the store manager saying to me that we could do with Freddie dying to shift some more units. It wasn’t his finest hour to be honest.

The video is basically just an advert for “Greatest Hits II” being a montage of clips from some of their singles included in the retrospective including “I Want to Break Free”, “Radio Ga Ga” and “Breakthru” as well as some shots of the band’s legendary The Magic tour dates at Wembley Stadium.

Last week, I referenced a poll that stated that by 2014, Monty Python’s “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” was the most requested funeral song by us Brits. However, in 2005, a poll by digital TV channel Music Choice asked 45,000 adults across Europe which song they would like played at their funeral – “The Show Must Go On” came out on top.

The single peaked at No 16 initially but after Freddie’s death, it re-entered the Top 75 spending as many weeks there as it had done on its original chart run.

Tony Dortie’s at it again next with his urban jargon when he introduces the next act Cathy Dennis as “whipping up a storm and creating a flavour all over the world?” Creating a flavour? Actually, I bet he spelt it ‘flava’. Was that really a phrase back in ’91? Anyway, our Cathy is adopting that well worn record company strategy of following two fast hits with a slow one with the release of her ballad “Too Many Walls”. Previous singles “Touch Me (All Night Long)” and “Just Another Dream” had made a star of Cathy (although she was formally introduced to us on D Mob’s 1989 hit “C’mon and Get My Love”) so now was the time to consolidate on her success by demonstrating her diversity and that there was more to her than some sprightly dance/pop tunes. You can tell there has been some restyling of her image to support this new direction as Cathy is wearing a classy looking (albeit day- glo coloured) jacket and roll neck sweater outfit as opposed to the slinky catsuit of her “Touch Me (All Night Long)” appearance on the show and the Betty Boo style space cadet outfit for “Just Another Dream”.

“Too Many Walls” was a decent attempt at a ballad even if the final result is a little underwhelming. I was surprised to discover that it was co-written by Cathy with Anne Dudley of pioneering sound explorers Art of Noise as the song resides squarely in the safer parts of the pop world.

Despite her UK success, Cathy was still a bigger star in the US than over here at this point with this single peaking inside the Billboard Top 10 at No 8 whilst it got no further than No 17 here.

After the disastrous decision in last weeks’ TOTP of getting Status Quo to launch the new album chart feature, this week we get Simply Red. Whether this is a better choice or not is open to debate. On the plus side, they were probably seen as more contemporary and they were undeniably popular as “Stars” would become the biggest selling album of the year in the UK. On the downside, it means having to stomach Mick Hucknall. The track they perform here is “For Your Babies” which you would have been forgiven for thinking must be the second single released from the album but that wasn’t the case. The title track would take that slot when it was released a month on for this performance. Maybe new TOTP producer Stanley Appel was fastidious in the details of the show and insisted that an artist must perform a non-single album track if featured in the album chart section rather than just the latest single? As it was, “For Your Babies” was released as the third single in early 1992 and would make No 9 in the charts.

Whatever you say about Hucknall, I would imagine that this new policy of making artists sing live on the show wouldn’t have fazed him in the slightest and he gives a controlled, quality vocal here on what for me, was one of the tracks on the album that I could actually stand. Mind you, by the time the album had been played to death in the Our Price I was working in all over Xmas, I could quite happily never had heard it or Mick Hucknall ever again. We get another of those ill advised interviews at the end of the song as Dortie climbs onto the stage to have a rather obsequious word with the ginger one for no apparent reason other than to plug his forthcoming tour and namecheck the new members of the band. Clearly no lessons were learned from the sphincter clenching embarrassment of an interview with Belinda Carlisle last week.

The Breakers are back to pre-‘year zero’ revamp levels with four of them crammed into 1 minute and 35 seconds. Dortie makes a bit of a mess of introducing them as he refers to “The rugby song” by Kiri Te Kanawa (you couldn’t remember “World In Motion” Tony?) and mispronouncing Public Enemy as Public Enery reviving memories of Sir Henry ‘Enery’ Cooper and this advert:

Anyway, the Breakers start with Oleta Adams doing a version of Elton John’s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me”. This was taken from the Elton John / Bernie Taupin tribute album “Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin” which included covers of their songs by some huge names such as Kate Bush, Tina Turner, Hall & Oates, The Beach Boys, Eric Clapton and Sting. Despite scoring a huge global breakthrough hit with “Get Here” earlier in the year, maybe one of those aforementioned artists would have been expected to be picked as the single to promote the album but Oleta it was who got the nod and I personally think she does a decent job of one of my favourite Elton tunes. I think her take on it got patchy reviews as did the album as a whole despite its platinum sales in this country.

Also on the album was George Michael doing a song called “Tonight” from Elton’s 1976 “Blue Moves” album and yet it is George’s cover of “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” that is far better known than Oleta’s. Elton and George first performed it together at Live Aid in 1985 with Michael including it in his set list for his Cover to Cover tour of 1991 with Elton being introduced on stage at Wembley Arena for the final show to reprise it. That performance was recorded and released as a single in November and would go to No 1 raising money for ten different charities all of which makes you wonder why George’s version wasn’t used for the “Two Rooms” album.

Oleta’s cover reached No 33 in the UK charts.

Back in 1991, the UK pretty much only knew Mariah Carey for her big ballad “Vision Of Love” from the previous year which went Top 10. Subsequent singles were only very minor hits and we could have been forgiven for thinking that Mariah might have had her day over here already. So when “Emotions” came out, those of us who had been of that opinion had to eat some humble pie. Not only was the single a Top 20 hit but the album of the same name went platinum in the UK alone. Furthermore, the single was a completely different sound and tempo to “Vision Of Love”, being an R’n’B disco stomper. Ah yes, that disco influence. Did it sound ever so slightly like the 1977 No 1 disco hit “Best Of My Love” by (ahem) The Emotions? Yes, yes it did and it didn’t go unnoticed by one of its songwriters, none other than Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire who took legal action and received a settlement. “Emotions” was co-written and produced by producers du jour Robert Clivillés, and David Cole of C+C Music Factory and according to one of their touring party, Carl Sturken, this is the story behind the song as he told it in an interview with songfacts.com:

“I am absolutely one thousand percent certain that when they wrote that groove, they labeled it ‘Emotions’ because it’s The Emotions’ groove. Then when Mariah Carey comes in to write over it, she sees ‘Emotions’ written as the name of the groove, so she writes a song called ‘You’ve Got Me Feeling Emotions.'”

Yeah, a likely story.

Was “Emotions’ the song where we really became aware of Mariah’s infeasibly wide vocal range? When she performed it at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards, she reportedly sounded a G-sharp three and a half octaves above middle C. This was one of the highest notes produced by a human voice in the history of recorded music! I know we’re supposed to be impressed and all but listen to this compilation of her highest notes and tell me if it sounds nice!

Public Enery Public Enemy now with their tribute to the newly appointed Foreign Secretary of Boris Johnson’s government Liz Truss. “Can’t Truss It”was the lead single from their “Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black” album and was the follow up to seminal long player “Fear Of A Black Planet”. I say follow up but how did you follow up such a seismic album when it included such tracks as “911 Is A Joke” and “Fight The Power” the latter of which has come to be regarded as one of the most influential songs in hip hop history and which regularly appears in polls that try to quantify the best /most important songs of all time. “Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black” certainly attempted the impossible performing well commercially but some reviews of it described it as good rather than classic.

As well as the much sampled James Brown and Sly & the Family Stone, “Can’t Truss It” features the more left field sample of “Im Nin’Alu” by Ofra Haza and peaked at No 22 on the UK Top 40.

And so we get to “The Rugby Song”. The1991 Rugby World Cup was only the second time the tournament had been held and this time host countries were England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and France with the final taking place at Twickenham Stadium, London. To celebrate this event, an official Rugby World Cup song was recorded and released by New Zealand opera singer Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. “World In Union” was its title and it was based on “Thaxted” from the middle section of “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity”, a movement from Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” though most of us knew the melody as being from the hymn, “I Vow to Thee, My Country”. It was hardly “World In Motion” by New Order but it proved to be surprisingly (at least to me) popular earning itself a chart high of No 4.

As for the tournament itself, it kind of passed me by. I had to look up that England actually made the final (losing to Australia 12-6) though when I checked the names of the team that day, I certainly recognised the likes of Will Carling, Rory Underwood, Rob Andrew and Jeremy Guscott. Maybe I even watched the final on TV but I can’t recall. There seemed to be a much bigger fuss about the 2003 final probably because we won it (Johnny Wilkinson and all that) and I definitely remember watching that match.

Just as the era of “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” is coming to an end, we enter another that defies explanation – the time of 2 Unlimited is upon us. This lot were formed by Belgian producers Jean-Paul De Coster and Phil Wilde but those aren’t the people that we associate with 2 Unlimited. No, they would be Dutch rapper Ray Slijngaard and vocalist Anita Doth who fronted the act. “Get Ready for This” for this was their debut hit and it was just dreadful. Totally annoying and basically just a keyboard riff played over and over again. Apparently the UK release was different to the version the the rest of Europe got served up which featured a rap from Ray but all we got was the line ‘Ya’ll ready for this?’ repeated four times plus the occasional ‘yeah!’ thrown in for good measure. Oh and an 808 State-lite middle eight. This was just an awful nonsense.

Foolishly I consoled myself with the thought that this would just be another one off Eurodance hit and we would never hear from 2 Unlimited again. How wrong I was as they would clocked up 14 UK Top 40 hits over the course of the decade including their only No 1 “No Limits:” in 1993. My God! What were people doing in the 90s?!

“Get Ready For This” closes with Dortie dancing on stage with 2 Unlimited (Gary Davies would never have done such a thing!) and we get the aforementioned “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” by Bryan Adams now into its 14th of 16 weeks at the top to close the show. By this point, I think the papers were seriously talking it up as the Xmas No 1! I’ve really got nothing left to say about this other than the parent album “Waking Up The Neighbours” had been released about three weeks before and had gone to No 1 as well. If it’s any consolation to those all Bryan’d out, he would not record another studio album for five years and once he had stopped releasing singles from “Waking Up The Neighbours” in early 1992, he would only release three singles in that time two of which were from film soundtracks and one was a stand alone to promote 1993’s Best Of album “So Far, So Good”. The end is in sight…

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/m0010k2r/top-of-the-pops-10101991