Welcome to TOTP Rewind where we are deep into November 1991 and the UK charts seem to be swamped by dance tunes of every hue. Over the last few weeks we’ve had the likes of Altern-8, K-Klass, Rozalla, Control, SL2 , 2 Unlimited and it doesn’t show any signs of stopping with nearly half of the acts on tonight’s show of the same flavour. As for the rest of the twelve artists, three could possibly be categorised as metal bands, there’s two Michaels, a cover version of a 70s disco classic and some mainstream Scandinavian rock pop. There’s also another new TOTP presenter who seem to be turning up as frequently as a Boris Johnson saying “Forgive me”.

We start as we mean to go on though with the first of those dance anthems from Bizarre Inc and “Playing With Knives”. The disembodied voice of the aforementioned new presenter tells us that this is the follow up to their previous hit “Such A Good Feeling” but also describes them as ‘the Stafford ravers’. Hang on, aren’t Altern-8 also from Stafford?

*checks Wikipedia*

Yes they are! What are the chances! It turns out that Bizarre Inc founding member Mark “Aaron” Archer had already defected and was part of the Altern-8 set up by this point so it all sounds a bit incestuous. I guess this was the rave equivalent of the Stourbridge indie three of The Wonder Stuff, Pop Will Eat Itself and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin who were all having chart hits at this time as well. Still, five chart acts from two West Midlands towns beginning with the letter ‘S’ – it was all a bit bizarre (inc).

As for the track, it sounded very much like its predecessor to my un(rave)-cultured ears but not as good and what was with the weird vocal effects at the start? I’ve checked out the original recorded version and it doesn’t sound like that. It sounds like she’s singing over the top of a backing track or something. Here’s @TOTPFacts with the answer:

Ah, that explains it. Poor woman must have been devastated watching the playback. Her big moment and she ends up sounding like she’s singing underwater. Why did the TOTP producers do that to her? Were they trying to beef up the performance a bit? Sure, by now the established template for a dance act of having the studio boffin blokes on keyboards wearing puffa jackets in the background behind a singer trying to combine a live vocal with some slick dance moves was wearing thin but this?! Still, it didn’t harm the single’s chart performance as it climbed all the way to No 4. Bizarre Inc would top that the following year when “I’m Gonna Get You” (featuring UK soul singer Angie Brown) went to No 3. As with most of these rave artists though, when it came to selling an album it was a different matter and their “Energique” long player stalled at No 41.

We then switch to co-host Mark Franklin (by now and old hand at this TOTP lark) who, in his segue to the Top 10 countdown, also welcomes back Terry Waite, the Anglican Church envoy who had been released by his Lebanese kidnappers after 1,763 days in captivity three days before this TOTP aired. Whilst we were all relieved for Terry and his family that he was finally free and admittedly it was a massive news story, it does sound a bit incongruous when highlighted in a pop music programme.

A first view next of a dance act that would manage to sell albums throughout the 90s and bucket loads of them too. M People would breakthrough the barrier segregating dance and mainstream pop music in spectacular fashion over the course of the decade, racking up 19 Top 40 singles (including 10 Top Tenners) and 3 Top 3 albums. They also won the 1994 Mercury Music Prize for their “Elegant Slumming” album.

However, it all began with this single “How Can I Love You More?” which, despite the promotional push of this TOTP appearance, would peak at No 29. If this has immediately made you think that you were sure that it was a bigger hit than that, rest assured that your memory is not playing tricks on you. A remix by renowned DJ and producer Sahsa was released just over a year later in February 1993 and it duly went Top 10 peaking at No 8 under the guise of “How Can I Love You More (Mixes)”.

It’s that disembodied* presenter voice again which tells us that M People are Mike Pickering, Paul Heard and Heather Small in the intro. Pickering was a DJ at legendary Manchester club The Haçienda (despite having lived in Manchester for over a year by this point, I still hadn’t ventured anywhere near the place) who had also signed Happy Mondays to Factory Records where he was an A&R person. His first name supplied the inspiration (if you can call it that) for the band’s name – I always thought it was a bit of a crummy moniker for a band to be honest.

*Why did they keep doing this when introducing a new presenter on the show, not putting their fizzog on screen until a third of the way through the show?

If I thought that their name was a bit rubbish, I couldn’t argue with Heather Small’s vocal which blows most of their dance act peers out of the water when it came to doing it live. So recognisable would her vocal stylings become that she would eventually become famous all over again 20 years later via the sitcom Miranda…

So that’s the new presenter! His name is Steve Anderson and sadly, his story ends tragically. A stand up comic, after his brief stint on TOTP, Steve worked on the shopping channel Price Drop TV and appeared as a trust coach on the BBC Two dating show Would Like To Meet before returning to comedy in 2007, opening the Portable Comedy Club in London the following year. However, he died unexpectedly in his sleep aged just 49 in 2012. As with The Wonder Stuff, Pop Will Eat Itself, he must have had a connection with Stourbridge as he was buried there. RIP Steve.

Back in 1991 though, he was introducing Bassheads and their smash hit “Is There Anybody Out There?”. Although this is another dance act, there’s not an actual ‘singer’ on this one to front the whole thing although there are the obligatory males (they always seem to be blokes don’t they?) scratching away on mixing desks in the background. What the track does have though is a small section of rapping in it so, in an attempt to mix it up a bit, the show producers have positioned the rapper within the front row of the gawping crowd to make it appear as if he is just a part of the studio audience. Then when he starts rapping, it’s got some sort of surprise value. Genius! Except it isn’t really is it? It doesn’t work that well and it’s not even an original trick is it, a studio plant? So pleased are they with this staging though that the TOTP producers repeat the trick by placing Mark Franklin in that same front row. He is clearly seen as the camera pans round before Bassheads have even finished performing and is in position to go straight to camera for the next segue. To be honest, I think they’ve overplayed their hand on this one and it’s all becoming a bit tedious.

Talking of tedious….here’s Michael Bolton! Bollers was onto his fifth UK hit with this, his version of Percy Sledge’s “When A Man Loves A Woman” which was also his second US chart topper after “How Am I Supposed To Live Without You”. Taken from his “Time, Love & Tenderness” album, he wouldn’t score quite as big a success with it over here but it did make the Top 10 all the same.

This seemed like so much cynical, money for old rope to me. Having seen a poor return in the UK on his past two singles (neither of which made the Top 20), Bolton resorted to a cover of a song that was already well known (it had been a No 2 hit as recently as 1987 over here thanks to its use in a Levi’s advert) just in time for the Christmas market. It should have been renamed “When A Tosser Needs A Hit”. Michael was still well cocooned in his monstrous mullet phase and it seems like his backing band were recruited on their ability to grow their hair the same. Check out the guitarist and drummer!

The follow up single was something called “Missing You Now” which was a collaboration with Kenny G which gives me terrifying flashbacks to when I saw Bolton in concert and the support was “The G Man” as he called him. And no, I’m not retelling that story all over again! It’s in many a previous post on the blog if you really want to know exactly what happened!

And back with the dance tunes! This is just getting ridiculous now! Who the chuff were Love Decade?! I have zero recollection of either them or their track “So Real”. Whoever they were, they seemed intent on breaking the record for the amount of faceless blokes on keyboards you could have on the TOTP stage at any one time. Unusually, this time the singer isn’t a woman and to be fair, the guy does a better job than some of his peers.

As far as I can make out, they were from Manchester and were also known as Decadance. The singer was a bloke called Jerome Stokes who sounds like he should be playing up front for a Championship football club whilst his oppos included Rob Van Winkelen…wasn’t that Vanilla Ice’s real name*? Also, what was with “THE NORTH HAS RISEN’ banner behind them. The Twitter consensus seemed to be that it was a retort to the Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu performance of “It’s Grim Up North” the other week – go on you Manc lads!

“So Real” peaked at No 14.

*No, no it wasn’t but it was close.

The Exclusive act tonight is a bit of a let down. Scorpions? Did they really qualify for a section which had recently been filled by the likes of Steve Wonder and Queen? I get that they were a bigger deal in mainland Europe and especially in their native Germany and that you had to admire their longevity (they had been formed when The Beatles were in their chart eating pomp) but “Wind Of Change” had been their only worldwide hit. Were they a band or a song?

“Send Me An Angel” was the follow up to that Cold War busting, Berlin Wall toppling anthem and was very much in the same vein but without the hook of that whistling bit. It was a big hit in countries like France, Sweden, The Netherlands and of course Germany but it caused very minor ripple in the pools of the UK and US charts where it peaked at Nos 27 and 44 respectively. I can imagine many a lighter having been waved in the air when the band performed the track live but it’s a fairly unremarkable soft rock ballad otherwise.

There’s hardly time for Steve Anderson to get through his next ink before his face is wiped off screen by the Breakers section starting with…who? Anticappella? Was that really their name? Yet again, this one must have passed me by but apparently they were the brainchild of Italian producer Gianfranco Bortolotti who was responsible for a load of shite dance hits in the UK throughout the 90s as he was also the guy behind the similarly titled Capella. Remember them? They had a slew of hits in the mid 90s with tracks like “U Got 2 Let the Music”, “U Got 2 Know” and “U & Me”. He seems to be a tad limited creatively I would suggest if his band names and song titles are anything to go by. Oh hang on, Anticapella’s debut hit here does have a different and indeed unconventional title – “2√231”. The record was still as rank as old arses though.

That Scandinavian rock pop that I mentioned earlier now from, of course, Roxette with the fourth single from their “Joyride” album called “Spending My Time”. Now I may have not been able to recall a fair few of the songs in the show tonight and this one is no exception but I won’t have been the only one. You see, the single was not one of their bigger hits and indeed only peaked at No 32 in the US where their previous five single releases had been either No 1 or No 2. The reason that hit underperformed and therefore became one of their least known songs was because of record company shenanigans, at least that’s what the band’s Per Gessle said to the songfacts.com website:

“I’m sure it would have become a Top 5 song in the US if EMI wouldn’t have scrapped the entire company and sacked 122 people in the middle of marketing this one. People loved it but radio never got the chance to catch up. The Music Business. You win some, you lose some.”

Yes apparently, at the end of 1991, EMI merged with other record companies to form EMI Records Group North America. The merger resulted in the new company firing over a hundred members of staff and saw Roxette receiving little support from the new label (that’s what it says on Wikipedia anyway).

It was either that or the fact that it was a very dull song that did for it. “Spending My Time” peaked at No 22 in the UK.

I know I shouldn’t be surprised any more by the frequency with which metal bands have sneaked onto TOTP courtesy of an inflated chart position instigated by a loyal fanbase but somehow I am. Again. In the middle of all this raving comes Skid Row and a little ditty called “Wasted Time” which would make the UK Top 20. This was from their “Slave To The Grind” album and is supposedly about Steven Adler, the original drummer of Guns N’ Roses. The song was was written by lead singer Sebastian Bach, guitarist Dave Sabo and bass player Rachel Bolan. Despite his input, Bolan is on record as describing the track as “The biggest piece of shit we ever recorded.”. Yeah, I’ll leave it there. Really nothing else to say.

Now, here’s a bunch of rockers I did quite like. Although undoubtedly part of the rock family tree as it were, Extreme made a name for themselves off the back of the acoustic sub section of that genre. Their previous and biggest hit “More Than Words” was definitely in that vein and music fans went wild for its spare, brittle nature making it a US No 1 and a UK No 2 song. Although they reportedly came to see “More Than Words” as an albatross around their collective necks, it didn’t stop the band from releasing another acoustic single as its follow up, albeit a more fast paced track. Written by Guitarist Nuno Bettencourt on his newly acquired first ever 12-string guitar, “Hole Hearted” had a strange gestation though as he described in an interview with Songfacts.com:

“I wrote it on the toilet! I got kind of excited that I had my first 12-strin, and it made me want to go to the toilet. I sat down, took my time, and dare I say, the ideas just came out. They came pouring out.”

That tale reminds me of the time when I was a first year student at Sunderland Polytechnic. Back then, I truly believed that I had a shot at a career in music journalism. How so? Well, I was the co-editor of the music section of the poly newspaper and I had secured an interview with a bona fide chart band who had recently been in the Top 10 and had scored a US No 1! Who were they? Cutting Crew of course! They were playing a gig at the poly and I interviewed them backstage beforehand. In reply to my question about how long he thought the band would last, lead singer Nick Van Eede replied that they would have a lengthy career as they had “songs coming out of our arses”. The quote made it into the published article with an addendum from the paper’s editor which read “that explains a lot”. Smart arse (ahem).

Anyway, back to Extreme, and although nowhere near as big a hit as “More Than Words”, “Hole Hearted” did a decent job as a follow up peaking at No 4 in America and No 12 over here despite never actually being shown on TOTP in full.

Meanwhile back in the studio we find Sonia – no really, she was still plugging away at it in late ’91 – with her version of The Real Thing’s “You To Me Are Everything”. Now that there’s a live vocal policy on the show, the diminutive scouser has cut down on any dance moves to concentrate on, you know, actually singing. To be fair, I’ve heard a lot worse on TOTP in recent weeks but although she was undoubtedly small, she was no Heather Small.

The track was taken back into the charts in ’95 when Sean Maguire (remember him?) recorded it during his time on the soap star turned pop star conveyor belt. Get this – he had 8 (EIGHT!) Top 40 hits! “You To Me Are Everything” was the fifth of those. Oh god! That means we’ll be seeing loads of him in future TOTP repeats on BBC4 if they get that far!

Sonia’s version peaked at No 13.

And so to the No 1 which is the third different chart topper in four weeks after having the same song at the top of the pile for 16 weeks straight. Yes, after the (not so) ‘exclusive’ premiere full length video for “Black And White” on last week’s TOTP, Michael Jackson has assumed his place at the chart throne. Sticking with the theme of royalty, it was around this time that ‘The King Of Pop’ title started to be banded around and apparently it was instigated by Jacko himself. Supposedly, any TV network that wanted to have the rights to show the premiere of the “Black And White” promo had to agree to refer to the singer as ‘The King Of Pop’. Well, Mark Franklin doesn’t do so this week but did they comply in the last show?

*quickly checks BBC iPlayer*

No they didn’t! Maybe that story was a load of bollocks then…

As for the song itself, well the subject matter of racial tolerance was certainly a noble one though I do recall some incredulity from the critics of the day at the lyrics ‘don’t matter if you’re black or white’ given the argument that was raging in the public domain about what was happening to the colour of Jackson’s own skin. A theory of skin bleaching took hold in the media and I have to admit that when he took to the Oprah Winfrey show to explain that it was down to a skin disorder called vitiligo that causes a loss of pigmentation in patches on the body, I was one of the doubters. I think we can now all accept that he was telling the truth about that at least.

So how did “Black And White” sound? I think on first hearing I thought it was a bit overblown and all over the place but it didn’t take too many hearings for it to lodge itself in my brain. It was certainly catchy enough. It was a musical smorgasbord though with elements of pop, dance, hip hop, rap and rock all stuck in the mixer. On the rock strand though, the much peddled story that the song’s metal guitar riff was provided by Slash from Guns N’ Roses turned out to be a myth . He did play on the album but on the track “Give In To Me”.

The album was of course “Dangerous” which at the time seemed to be weighed down by its own expectations (Mark Ryden’s over the top cover art work didn’t help with that). It was meant to eclipse “Thriller” as his magnum opus both artistically and commercially. In the end it fails on both accounts for me but its reputation has grown after some revisiting of it by critics and the press. It would spawn 9 (NINE!) singles equalling “Bad”‘s haul and sell 32 million copies worldwide. Within those 9 singles, I think “Black And White” stands up pretty well.

After the 10 and a half minutes afforded to the premiere of the video last week, it is severely curtailed tonight with the Macaulay Culkin intro and the controversy courting ‘panther dance’ coda both stripped out.

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/m0011f4w/top-of-the-pops-21111991