We’ve entered October in these 1998 TOTP repeats meaning that we’re three quarters through the year already. As such, the album release schedules will have been set with an eye on the all important Christmas period. I wonder how many of the artists on this TOTP also had an album to flog and also how well it sold? Our host is Jayne Middlemiss again and we start with Steps with “One For Sorrow”. Despite dropping down the charts from No 7 to No 10, it’s a third appearance on the show for this one because…oh, I’ve no idea anymore and to be honest I’m bored of trying to work out the machinations of the TOTP running order in this era of the show. Or am I just being naive? Was it all about promoting the artist’s album and nothing to do with reflecting the state of the singles chart? Well, let’s look at the factual evidence – did Steps have an album to promote? Yes they did. Their debut “Step One” was in the shops from 14 September so there very much would have been an imperative to advertise it. Maybe it was all as purely cynical as that.

Incidentally, Steps were kept off the No 1 spot in both the singles and album charts in this year by the same artist – Manic Street Preachers. Bizarrely, that chart battle was revived 23 years later when the Manics’ album “The Ultra Vivid Lament” pipped Steps’ “What The Future Holds Pt. 2” to the top spot in 2021. Missing out on a No 1 three times to the same band? It really was a case of “One For Sorrow” for Steps.

Now, this next hit was quite a surprise. Not because the artist behind it was in the charts; as Jayne Middlemiss correctly informs us in her intro, this was the 20th single of their career of which 16 had been UK Top 40 hits. No, it was more its lofty position in the charts. Of those previous 16 hits for The Beautiful South, only five had gone Top 10 (albeit including a No 1). Indeed, their last single release had peaked at No 43 and yet suddenly they were debuting at No 2 with “Perfect 10”. The lead single from their sixth studio album “Quench” (there it is!), it sold 89,000 copies in its first week though it would prove to be the band’s final Top 10 hit. How did this one become such a big hit? The lazy answer would be heavy first week of release discounting but if you check out its chart life, that doesn’t really stack up as it would spend four weeks inside the Top Ten and two and a half months on the Top 40. I’m guessing that it must have been had high levels of consistent airplay but also it was about its sound. Sometimes, The Beautiful South would do reflective, sentimental tracks like “I’ll Sail This Ship Alone”, “Let Love Speak Up Itself”, “Bell Bottomed Tear” and “Blackbird On The Wire” which weren’t always their most successful tunes but they also did little nuggets of perky, breezy pop like “You Keep It All In”, “We Are Each Other”, “Don’t Marry Her” and “How Long’s A Tear Take To Dry?”. It seems to me that these were the songs that, whether by luck or design, got the higher chart positions. “Perfect 10” was definitely in the latter category being one of their finest jaunty pop songs.

Whatever the sonic qualities of the music though, the lyrics were always sharp and incisive and in this case was a biting sexual politics narrative about rejecting the absurdity of ideas about conventional beauty. With a funky rhythm and catchiest of choruses, it’s surely one of their best known and loved songs. As an advert for their sixth studio album “Quench”, it was magnificent and said album duly topped the charts and became the 14th best selling title in the UK for 1998 despite only being released on the 12th October. Incidentally, you can see the original painting of the album’s specially commissioned artwork in Hull (where I live) where it hangs in the Ferens Art Gallery.

It’s happened again – another hit that I have no memory of at all. I’m wondering if by this point, I wasn’t at work in the record shop having been signed off sick with my poor mental health that I wrote about in a recent post. Anyway, the hit in question is “The Way” by Fastball. Jayne Middlemiss describes it as “good old southern-fried entertainment” by which she means…I’m not exactly sure but she clarifies by saying the band are from Austin, Texas. Formed in 1992, this track brought the band their big break by topping the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart for seven weeks whilst parent album “All The Pain Money Can Buy” went platinum in America. So how come I’ve never heard of them? Well, the album did nothing over here, they never had another UK chart hit and “The Way” only spent three weeks inside the Top 40. All of which is a shame as “The Way” is rather good, great even. Yes, it’s very derivative with the twangy guitar verses reminiscent of Urge Overkill’s cover of Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon” whilst the chorus puts me in mind of some of Elvis Costello’s more tuneful moments but a great song is a great song and this one has me hooked. Even its lyrics have an interesting origin story being about the 1997 disappearance of an elderly couple who left their Texan home to visit a nearby festival but were found dead two weeks later at the bottom of a ravine hundreds of miles away from their intended destination. Apparently, the band are still an ongoing entity having last released an album in 2024. I should maybe investigate them further.

Next another act with an album to sell but sadly for Republica, things didn’t work out as well as they did for the artists we’d already seen on this TOTP. Having successfully joined the plethora of female-fronted bands that were around at this time in the charts – I’m thinking Sleeper, Elastica, Echobelly, Garbage etc… – in 1997 with two hit singles and a Top 5 album, Saffron and the lads were quick off the mark with a follow up, so quick in fact that their sophomore album was called “Speed Ballads”. It seemed a sensible strategy – strike while the iron’s hot and all that. However, two obstacles stood in their way to consolidating their initial success. Firstly, their record label Deconstruction folded shortly after the album hit the shops and it never got a full release elsewhere in major territories like America. Secondly, if lead single “From Rush Hour With Love” was any sort of gauge of quality, their new material wasn’t very good. I don’t wish to be mean but it sounds like a jam session in search of a song. Presumably at the end of said session, the band looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders and said “that’ll have to do”. As they trooped out of the rehearsal room, someone might have said “we could spruce it up by giving it a clever title, a pun or something like that. How about “From Rush Hour With Love’?”. I have to admit that I didn’t get the James Bond wordplay immediately perhaps because what Saffron – who seems to be doing her best Toyah impression in this performance – actually sings is ‘From the rush hour with love’. It’s all a bit of a mess. To their credit, Republica are still active to this day albeit after a few hiatuses with an album of new material due for release in 2025.

Sarah McLachlan is one of those names that I was always aware of but whom I knew/know very little of. As such, I was surprised to see her in this TOTP as it had escaped my attention that she’d ever had a UK Top 40 hit. In my defence, “Adia” is the only time she bothered the UK chart compilers despite her very consistent output of material. As ‘The life and times of Sarah McLachlan’ was never going to be my Mastermind subject of choice, I read up a bit about the Canadian singer-songwriter and she sounds like a truly marvellous person. In 1997, she founded the Lilith Fair touring festival to showcase female musicians. In 2002, using funds from Lilith Fair, she founded the Sarah McLachlan Music Outreach program providing music education for inner city children after noticing that music programs were being cut from the school curriculum. Evolving into the Sarah McLachlan School of Music, in the 2024/25 school year, it provided private and group lessons to 1,754 students. Her adverts for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) has helped raise $30 million for the charity whilst she has also appeared at Live 8, a tsunami relief benefit concert and is a member of the Canadian charity Artists Against Racism. A true philanthropist.

Having said all of that, I can’t bring myself to be a fan of this track “Adia”. It’s all a bit overwrought and boy does it go on. When I was watching this, on numerous occasions I thought this must be the end but then Sarah would rev up for yet another lap of the chorus. Clearly, a lot of people disagreed with this analysis though. In America, the single went Top 3 and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance losing out only to Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”. “Adia”’s parent album “Surfacing” went to No 2 and eight times platinum in the US. Flamin’ ada!

The next artist had an album out the Monday after this TOTP aired and it was that often cited ‘difficult second album’. Having conquered the UK with their debut No 1 album “1977” in…erm…1996, Ash were faced with the dilemma that has plagued many a band before and since, how to come up with a second album under pressure after you’d had your whole life to write the first one. Actually, Ash’s ‘whole life’ didn’t amount to that much time did it when you consider that their debut was named after the year in which the band members were born and that lead singer Tim Wheeler was famously still at school when it was released. Anyway, you get my drift. When faced with the task of crafting songs for a second album, it didn’t help that Wheeler was suffering from a case of writer’s block. Added to that was his desire not just to draft “1977 Pt II” but rather come up with songs with a harder sound that would establish the band as a more serious artist. The addition of guitarist Charlotte Hatherley as a permanent member of the line up proved to be the catalyst for the creation of new material and “Nu-Clear Sounds” was duly released.

Although generally well received by the music press, it failed to do the business its predecessor did, shifting about a third of the units “1977” had. If that was a disappointment to the band and their label, it was also a big let down to record retailers who had been banking on a big seller in the run up to Christmas. In the Our Price chain for whom I was working, an edict came out from Head Office that stores were officially not allowed to sell out of the album – I presume it was some sort of negotiating tactic employed to gain beneficial discounts on the album. Sadly for everyone concerned, we never looked likely to run out of copies of “Nu-Clear Sounds” which is a shame as lead single “Jesus Says” is quite the tune. “Iggy Pop-tastic” is how Jayne Middlemiss describes it and you can see her point. It’s a relentlessly driving, garage rock track the lyrics of which reference the pressures that come with a job promotion and using alcohol to deal with them. Fast forward three years and Ash would release the album “Free All Angels” which would return them to former glories with a handful of hit singles and the No 1 position in the charts. In the era after TOTP had been axed, they made a conscious decision to become a ‘singles band’ embarking on the “A-Z Series”, a series of 26 singles, each represented by a letter of the alphabet and released fortnightly over a 12 month period.

I know I’ve been banging on about this for what seems like ages but this is just nonsense. Why on earth is “To The Moon And Back” by Savage Garden being given another slot in the running order when we first saw it six weeks ago when it debuted at No 3 and since then has recorded chart positions of 4 – 8 – 10 – 10 – 10 and 12? If it had featured on one of those three weeks at No 10 it might have made some sense but to give it a second shot when it’s dropped out of the Top 10?! Perhaps the truth lies in the fact that the duo’s album was residing in the Top 3 at this time some six months after its release and having spent the majority of that time between Nos 41 and 11? Was the murky and mucky business of album promotion at play here again?

It’s another new No 1 (the sixth in six weeks) and it’s from those Irish girls who fight like their da’s. Yes, it’s B*Witched with the follow up to their debut hit “C’est La Vie” and this time they were on a “Rollercoaster”. Two No1s out of two wasn’t unique but it was still a considerable achievement for a new pop act.

I wasn’t sure if I could remember how this one went but it was very familiar when I listened to it but not just because my grey cells were firing into action – there were two extra reasons why it resonated. Firstly, the bridge to the chorus sounds like “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” by The Beatles (no, it does!) and the chorus is very reminiscent of the theme tune to 70s children show Here Come The Double Deckers! I swear down! Anyway, this performance sees the group pull off some of the niftiest dance moves in a confined space in the history of the show. It’s almost exhausting to watch. In fact, one of the Double Deckers characters (Billie) would have been proud of them! And yes, of course B*Witched had an album coming out ten days after this TOTP was broadcast which would go double platinum in the UK.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it
1	Steps	One For Sorrow	No
2	The Beautiful South	Perfect 10	I didn’t
3	Fastball	The Way	Negative
4	Republica	From Rush Hour With Love	Nope
5	Sarah McLachlan	Adia	Nah
6	Ash	Jesus Says	No but I had their Best Of with it on
7	Savage Garden	To The Moon And Back	Didn’t happen
8	B*Witched	Rollercoaster	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/m002m4hl/top-of-the-pops-02101998