TOTP 26 JAN 1990
OK, a few things about this particular TOTP show. Firstly, it was broadcast on a Friday rather than its usual Thursday slot due to the BBC’s coverage of the Commonwealth Games. I have zero recall of this festival of sporting endeavours but Wikipedia tells me that the opening ceremony had been on the Wednesday of this week but I’m not sure which specific event was deemed unmissable TV viewing on the Thursday and required that TOTP be shunted across the broadcast schedule.
Goldie wanted to get a kiwi bird as a pet
but couldn’t find one in the ‘jungle’. Soz!
Incidentally, the mascot for the games was called Goldie – no, not the DJ and musician of Metalheadz fame but rather a kiwi bird.
Secondly, the show is timed at 33 minutes long and includes 13 acts! Bastards! This is going to take me ages to write up! Thirdly, well here’s @TOTPFacts with the third point of note:
Well, there are pros and cons to this I feel. No duos might mean no more poorly scripted ‘comedy’ exchanges between presenters which is a good thing. However, there are at least three names on that list who I cannot abide (I’ll let you work out for yourselves who they are) and the thought of them cropping up on a regular basis for almost the whole of the next two years is a harrowing thought.
On with the show then and somewhere in a darkened laboratory, the evil professors of manufactured pop are brewing another concoction to torment the nation with. This particular experiment seemed to have combined the DNA of Big Fun with London Boys and created a two headed monster called Yell! Who on earth were these two berks?! Well, they were called Daniel James (not the Man Utd footballer clearly) and Paul Varney (not Reg’s lad surely?). Or were they? You see, Daniel James also went under the name of Colin Heywood. Oh, he was also an actor – must have been a stage name thing. Anyway, they were signed to Fanfare Records by Simon Cowell (he had to have something to do with this monstrosity didn’t he?) and they had immediate success with their cover of the Dan Hartman hit “Instant Replay”. Quite why we needed another version of this disco stomper in a cold, bleak January I’m not sure. I wonder if including the exclamation mark after their name Wham! style was Cowell’s idea?
Despite all the studio audience…erm…yelling and squealing on display here, the duo never got to be the next teen sensation they clearly hoped to be. A further two single releases (including another cover version, this time of Average White Band’s “Let’s Go Round Again”) both flopped spectacularly and Yell! disappeared into a whisper. James went back to acting whilst Varney wrote the UK’s 1999 Eurovision entry “Say It Again” by Precious which made No 6 in the chart, a whole four places higher than his own hit a decade earlier. It was also considerably more successful than his ex bandmate James’ excursion into Eurovision who came sixth in the 1986 Song For Europe competition.
Well we can slag TOTP off as much as we want (and many of us do on Twitter) but you can’t say the show wasn’t diverse. From Yell! to Public Enemy. It’s quite a leap. The second single taken from the “Fear Of A Black Planet” album, there is so much going on in this extraordinary noise that is “Welcome To The Terrodome” assaulting your senses that it’s hard to break it down. One of the things I did pick out listening back to this was the Mikey Dread sample from “Operator’s Choice” that The Soup Dragons would also use to great effect on their minor hit “Mother Universe” (which I bought) later in the year. There’s also Flavor Flav quoting bits of Al Pacino dialogue from the film Scarface and some shuddering guitar riffs – it’s a heady brew and I felt exhausted by the end if it. And that song title? Nothing to do with Frankie Goes To Hollywood nor Samuel Coleridge – here’s @TOTPFacts again with the origin story…
…prophetic words indeed.
“Welcome To The Terrodome” peaked at No 18.
Another of those debut performances that Simon Mayo promised us at the top of the show now as Del Amitri make their bow. I have to admit I’d never come across this lot before this point but they had actually been in existence since 1985 and had already released one unsuccessful album. Everything was to change for the band with the release of the almost ironically named single “Nothing Ever Happens” from their second album “Waking Hours” (that’s ‘waking’ not ‘working’ Jakki Brambles). Peaking at No 11 it would be their biggest ever hit which was a surprise to me given that they’ve had 15 Top 40 UK chart singles.
This gentle, folky song seemed very much at odds with the rest of the homogeneous dance tunes – infested charts to me and was probably one of the reasons that I liked it. Lead singer and group founder Justin Currie does a much better explanation of the song than I ever could in this performance of it in the brilliant BBC4 programme Songwriters’ Circle…
I recall hearing Steve Wright play the song on his then Radio 1 show and making some deeply unfunny Only Fools And Horses inspired comment about the band’s name afterwards. It went along the lines of:
“Del Amitri there. E’s alright ain’t he old Del”
According to Wikipedia, the band name is actually:
“a bastardisation of the name of a film producer who appeared in the closing credits of a film Currie saw in 1979 – “probably Dimitri-something, but we couldn’t remember… so eventually through osmosis or maybe Chinese Whispers ‘Dimitri’ became ‘Del Amitri’.”
So now you know Steve Wright. OK?
Three Breakers now starting with Lonnie Gordon and “Happenin’ All Over Again”. Question: When is a Donna Summer song not a Donna Summer song? Answer: When Donna refuses to record it because she has fallen out with its writers Stock, Aitken and Waterman and it’s given to someone else. That someone else was of course Lonnie (God I so keep wanting to type Donegan) Gordon. Listening back to it, you could really hear Donna recording this but Lonnie got the glory (it was Single of the Fortnight in Smash Hits magazine!) and took this Italo House infused S/A/W tune all the way to No 4.
It was covered eight years later by…ahem…Tracie from Coronation Street…
Who? Wreckx-n-Effect? No – rack up another score in the blogger’s- memory-fails-him-again tally. Apparently they were New Jack Swingers from Harlem and they would go onto have a No 2 record in the US with the rather quaintly entitled “Rump Shaker” (only kept off the top spot by the all conquering success of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”) but I don’t remember that one either. Anyway, that’s all a couple of years down the road. In the right here, right now (i.e. 1990) they have a middling hit with “Juicy”. I’m assuming I won’t know this either….
*clicks play on the video below*
…well part of it was familiar so I looked it up and it samples “Juicy Fruit” by M’Tume which I do remember from the charts of 1983. No wonder it sounded familiar. Wreckx-n-Effect’s version peaked at No 29 over here, five places higher than M’Tume’s original which somehow seems wrong to me.
The final Breaker this week is “The Face” by And Why Not? (try saying that band name without picturing Barry Norman sat in a chair slyly slagging off some film or other -impossible). This lot’s brand of reggae-tinged pop had them briefly hailed as the next big thing but despite three Top 40 hits (“The Face” was the biggest peaking at No 13) and support slots with UB40 and Transvision Vamp, it never quite happened for the Brummie trio. Supposedly, Wendy James fancied one of them (according to Smash Hits magazine anyway). Not sure that particular endorsement helped their cause.
You never hear them mentioned at all nowadays, not even in these nostalgia-fuelled times of reunion tours and deluxe box set album reissues. Even specialist reissue label Cherry Red hasn’t picked up the rights on their only album “Move Your Skin”. My wife had a copy back in the day – I’ll ask her if she still has it if they want to borrow it!
All of this week’s Breakers will be be back as the first three acts of next week’s TOTP.
Oh god! Double cringe moment incoming. As the camera cuts back to Jakki Brambles it catches her dancing to And Why Not? which seems to involve some sort of half-hearted, squawking chicken move. She compounds this by introducing the next act F.P.I. Project by referencing the fact that their single “Goin’ Back To My Roots” was originally a hit for Odyssey in 1981. “Here it is 1990 stylee…” she advises. Stylee?! Stylee Jakki?! God, did we really use that expression back then? Surely nobody still trots that one out today do they?
This being the third time F.P.I. Project have been on the show, I’ve run out of things to say about them. OK, look nine years on from this, they released “Goin’ Back To My Roots” again. How did it fare compared to the No 9 peak of its 1990 counterpart? It spent one week on the UK charts at No 96. I know there were a lot of ‘nines’ in those last two sentences but will that do? Who said ‘Nein’?
The F.P.I. Project performance was clearly just footage from a previous show slotted into the current one (i.e. they weren’t actually there in the studio that week) . The cut from that clip back to Simon Mayo clearly takes him by surprise and he tries to style (or is that stylee?) it out by making some snidey remark about TOTP cameramen before introducing yet another track that must have passed me by at the time. “I’ll Be Good to You” by Quincy Jones and featuring the vocal talents of Chaka Khan and Ray Charles is the track in question.
Taken from Quincy’s platinum selling and multiple grammy winning “Back On The Block” album, it was originally a hit in 1976 by R’n’B duo The Brothers Johnson with Jones on production duties. Thirteen years later, he returned to it and got Ray Charles and Chaka Khan to do the vocals. Look, I know everyone involved in this song are /were musical legends but having listened to it today, I just can’t warm to it. Completely passes me by. This fact didn’t pass me by though. Ray Charles fathered 12 children by 10 different women in his lifetime – and we thought Boris Johnson had form in this area!
Here now to hammer home the feeling of having the January blues is Phil Collins. Some might say that Phil’s presence alone would be enough to bring you down but just to make sure there’s no escape from the melancholy he’s singing a song called “I Wish It Would Rain Down”. The second single to be lifted from his ridiculously successful “…But Seriously” album, it would return Collins to the Top 10 in the UK but was even more successful across the pond where it went Top 3 in the US and was the best selling single of the year in Canada!
Phil looks as sweaty as ever under the studio lights in this performance but I’m more interested in his backing band. Jakki Brambles tells us that Eric Clapton performs guitar on the track in her intro but is that actually ‘God’ up there on stage behind Phil? After much squinting at the screen, I don’t believe it is but it seems that they deliberately got a lookalike in to fool us! Also, check out Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on bass!
I thought “I Wish It Would Rain Down” was marginally better than previous single “Another Day In Paradise” but that’s not saying much – they’re both shite.
Who came first then? Adamski? Normski? Chelski?! Well, I think it was Normski who fronted BBC’s DEF II programming from 1988 to 1994 closely followed by Adamski with this his first hit single, “N-R-G”. The Chelski term didn’t come into existence until 2003 when my beloved Chelsea FC were taken over by Russian billionaire businessman Roman Abramovich. I still can’t stand the term to this day.
Anyway, here’s Adamski making his TOTP debut as Simon Mayo advises and according to The Story Of 1990 TOTP documentary, the girl dancers on stage with him were completely the producers idea and Adamski hated it. The rasta guy though was his flat mate (one Daddy Chester) but his dancing alone was judged to be inadequate. This highlights the problem that TOTP had with the flood of dance tunes making the charts back then. Just what did you do when it came to a studio performance of the track? The programme really struggled to showcase this new genre.
On her way to pop’s summit is Sinéad O’Connor with her Prince cover “Nothing Compares 2 U”. Despite having had a shaved head as early as 1988 when she even appeared on TOTP to perform “Mandinka” with that hairstyle, I recall there being quite a bit of press about it again in 1990. Maybe she was just more mainstream this time, reaching elements of the nation that she hadn’t previously with this huge hit thereby promoting this fascination with her looks. According to Wikipedia, her shaved head was initially an assertion against traditional views of women but having decided to grow it back years later, she lopped it all off again after being mistaken for Enya!
T’KNOB have gone! Yes, the new pretenders to pop’s throne have been deposed by Princess Kylie whose cover of “Tears On My Pillow” has risen to the top after just two weeks. It won’t last long though as she’ll be dethroned next week by Sinéad O’Connor (not sure of her status in pop’s royal family). Of the three Kylie Minogue singles released in 1990, “Tears On My Pillow” was easily the weakest but then the other two, “Better The Devil You Know” and “Step Back In Time”, are for me possibly her two greatest tunes.
“Tears On My Pillow” was included on the soundtrack to The Delinquents in which Kylie starred and which was the most successful Australian film of 1990 in Australia. Reading that statement back, was that much of an achievement? By comparison, it was the 17th highest grossing film of the year in the UK. Draw your own conclusions.
Finally we get to the thirteenth and final song of the night and guess what? It’s another dance track I can’t recall at all. Gino Latino anyone? Not an Italian TV chef but a DJ (real name Lorenzo Cherubini), “Welcome” was his only UK Top 40 hit (as far as I can tell) and it peaked at No 17. Check this out though. He also went under the pseudonym of Jovanotti and look at this tweet I found on a @TOTPFacts thread:
I promise you I had no idea about any of this when I started going on about Normski earlier!
For posterity’s sake, I include the chart run down below:
| Order of appearance | Artist | Song | Did I Buy it? |
| 1 | Yell! | Instant Replay | NO! |
| 2 | Public Enemy | Welcome To The Terrordome | I did not |
| 3 | Del Amitri | Nothing Ever Happens | Not the single but it’s on my Greatest Hits CD of theirs |
| 4 | Lonnie Gordon | Happenin’ All Over Again | Nah |
| 5 | Wreckx-n-Effect | Juicy | Nope |
| 6 | And Why Not? | The Face | No but my wife had their album |
| 7 | The FPI Project | Going Back To My Roots | No |
| 8 | Quincy Jones featuring Chaka Khan and Ray Charles | I’ll Be Good To You | Buy it? I didn’t even remember it |
| 9 | Phil Collins | I Wish It Would Rain Down | As if |
| 10 | Adamski | N-R-G | N-O-P-E |
| 11 | Sinéad’ O’Connor | Nothing Compares 2 U | Don’t think so |
| 12 | Kylie Minogue | Tears On My Pillow | No |
| 13 | Gina Latino | Welcome | Goodbye more like – no |
Disclaimer
OK – here’s the thing – the TOTP episodes are only available on iPlayer for a limited amount of time so the link to the programme below only works for about another month so you’ll have to work fast if you want to catch the whole show.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000ng7c/top-of-the-pops-26011990
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.
Some bedtime reading?
https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 