TOTP 21 JUL 1994
After one ‘Julian C’ on the show last week in the form of Julian Cope, we have another tonight as Julian Clary takes on the role of presenter. Now, I’m wondering if this was quite the controversial choice on behalf of head producer Ric Blaxill as just seven months before, Clary had caused a furore at the British Comedy Awards when he had compared the set to Hampstead Heath and joked that he’d just been fisting former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont backstage. The uproarious audience reaction meant that his punchline “Talk about a red box!” went largely unnoticed. However, the damage had been done for The Daily Mail and The Sun who campaigned to have Julian banned from TV. Haven’t moved on much in 30 years have we?
Anyway, was seven months a big enough time gap for all that media outrage to have died down? Ric Blaxill must have been hoping that the public were at the stage where the opportunity for offence had dissipated but the potential for a return to the public consciousness moments of “did you see that on TOTP last night?” was still very much alive. I’m thinking the debut of Boy George on the show in 1982 or Nirvana in 1991. Julian was, no doubt, a big name by 1994 and not just because of his Lamont moment. I think I was first aware of him (and Fanny the Wonder Dog) in the 80s on Friday Night Live and then his game show Sticky Moments With Julian Clary. He’d even released a single in 1988 – a cover of “Leader Of The Pack” under the name of The Joan Collins Fanclub. I wonder if Julian’s turn on tonight’s show would have caused a bulging Points Of View post bag or not?
Well, Julian has certainly come dressed for the occasion in leopard print cat suit and a feather boa accessory and he gets us raving (his word) straight away with Clubhouse and “Living In The Sunshine”. Bizarrely, despite working in record shops whilst these Italian house merchants were having a couple of hits in 1994, the only single of theirs I can remember is their Steely Dan / Michael Jackson mash up “Do It Again” from a decade earlier. There’s a scientific term for this phenomenon which is the ‘reminiscence bump’ – people tend to disproportionately recall memories from when they were aged 10 to 30. Well, I was 26 in 1994 and 15 in 1983 so does that prove the theory or not? Maybe 30 is pushing it a bit. Maybe 10-21 is more like it? Or maybe I don’t recall “Living In The Sunshine” because it’s utterly forgettable crap? The only notable thing about this performance is the Punch and Judy show. Not sure that would be allowed these days or are they just dancing together in which case maybe it would? Is this is the one and only case of a Punch and Judy prop being used on the show? I think there’s one in the video for “Look Of Love” by ABC and Mud had that ventriloquist dummy for “Lonely Thus Christmas” didn’t they but not a Punch and Judy. Even Marillion didn’t gave that and they had a song called “Punch and Judy”!
Julian is getting into his stride now (literally) as he walks across the stage in front of the next artist whilst they have already started their song, salaciously referring to testosterone and pectorals but then it is a boy band he’s talking about and as he says, “what else is there?”. Bad Boys Inc were onto their fifth of six hit singles by this point and this one – “Take Me Away (I’ll Follow You)” – would prove to be their second biggest when it peaked at No 15. Dearie me though, this was so depressingly average, even by boy band standards. They really were the dregs of that particular genre and that’s allowing for the fact that the 90s were full of sub par, wannabe hopefuls looking to be the next Take That. The song is so piss weak and sounds like it was written in about the same amount of time it’s taken Julian Clary to get his make up touched up which we playfully get to see whilst Bad Boys Inc are on stage. Apparently Bad Boy Ally Begg (the one in the white long sleeved shirt) went onto become a sports TV presenter and doesn’t really like to talk about his time as a boy band member – his website glosses over that period of his life saying if you want to know about it then just Google Bad Boys Inc. He’s right to be ashamed.
Oh god! This is yet another song that takes me right back to the Summer of 1994 when I was selling loads of it during an unhappy stint working at the Our Price store in Piccadilly, Manchester. Even just seeing the single’s cover in its Wikipedia entry is giving me the fear. “Regulate” by Warren G and Nate Dogg spent eight consecutive weeks inside the Top 10 peaking at No 5 and was taken from the soundtrack to the film Above The Rim. Part of the emerging West Coast G-funk scene, Warren G hung with his hounds Snoop Doggy Dogg and Nate Dogg and was also the half brother of Dr. Dre so I guess we shouldn’t have been surprised that he would bag himself an enormous hit before too long. What was a surprise though, given all those rap connections, was that his hit was predominantly based around a classic soft rock track. “I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near)” had been a No 4 US hit for yacht rocker Michael McDonald in 1982 (not that anyone was using that term back then) but somehow it was able to be recycled for a classic gangsta funk track. Just to make it stand out even more, its intro samples some dialogue from the 1988 film Young Guns, specifically around the Lincoln County Regulators, a deputised posse that fought in the Lincoln County War in the late 19th century and from which the track took its name. The video shown here includes clips from Above The Rim which featured Tupac Shakur just to up the content on the rapper-o-meter for this track as if it needed any more.
“Regulate” was a smash all around the globe leading to Warren G cranking out another five hits in the UK alone including a couple of No 2s before the decade was out. He missed a trick though by not forming a supergroup called G-Force alongside Ali G, Kenny G and Stevie G.
As announced at the top of the show by the lead singer in that direct to camera slot, The Grid are back on the show for a third time I believe with their mega hit “Swamp Thing” As with their previous appearances, they’re doing exactly the same performance with the banjo player stuck under a space age hairdryer or something. They could have thought of a different staging for a third appearance couldn’t they?
Some 29 years on from this huge track, another dance phenomenon has entered social parlance but this time around it’s not The Grid but ‘The Griddy’*
*With thanks to my teenage son for alerting me to this.
The profusion of reggae fusion chart hits that started in 1993 with the likes of Shaggy and Bitty McLean was still going strong over 12 months later. One of its least worthy proponents was this guy – C. J. Lewis – who’d already had success with his No 3 cover of “Sweets For My Sweet” some months earlier and now he was at it again by desecrating the classic Stevie Wonder song “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)”.
C.J. (real name Stephen James Lewis so shouldn’t that be S. J. Lewis?) tries to make the song his own (to quote Louis Walsh) by reordering the words in the title to read “Everything Is Alright (Uptight)”. Yeah, that’s worked a treat mate. This is just a horrible abomination. C.J. spends most of his time toasting “Ribidibidoo-badey” to a bemused looking studio audience who shuffle about pretending to dance for the duration of the song. Compare it with this TOTP performance of the original by Stevie and…well, there is no comparison.
Two years on from this, the song was in the news again when Oasis recorded “Step Out” and were asked for 6% royalties by Wonder due to its similarities to “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)”. The Manc lads didn’t want to do that so removed it from the track listing for their second album “(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?”. When it did appear as an extra track on the “Don’t Look Back In Anger” single, it included a credit for Wonder alongside co-songwriters Sylvia Moy and Henry Cosby.
I think Julian Clary has kept it the right side of respectable so far given the restrictions of the 9 o’clock watershed but he can’t help himself when doing the link to The B–52’s and their “(Meet) The Flintstones” single banging on about sniffing loincloths and having a gay old time. Well, I guess that was what he was invited on for. A second Flintstones film came out in 2000 called The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas but none of the stars of the 1994 original reprised their roles. The brand new cast couldn’t replicate the success of its predecessor and it completely bombed at the box office. In a nice (if tenuous) little connection to this edition of TOTP, the second film featured Joan Collins in the supporting cast. Joan Collins? Julian Clary? The Joan Collins Fan Club? Oh, please yourselves!
It’s time for some rockin’ next courtesy of Skin. What was it with all these British rock bands of the 90s that they all wanted to be the next Led Zeppelin? That certainly seemed to be the case with the lead singers who were all intent on doing their best Robert Plant impression (I’m ignoring Julian’s comment about all that hair in show making them look like Tammy Wynette!). “Tower Of Strength” was the band’s second Top 40 entry of the year following “The Money EP”, it was also the second hit in 1994 to have the title “Tower Of Strength”. The first had been the rerelease of The Mission’s single that had originally been a No 12 hit in 1988. It made No 33 the second time around.
It got me thinking about the phrase and its origins which are religious in nature with it usually being reserved for God in the Bible. Its usage changed to referring to religious faith in general when Tennyson used the phrase to compare the Duke of Wellington to God. However, it was Shakespeare who changed its meaning to the one we understand today when he used it in Richard III. Blimey! Bit of culture there! Musically, there have been two other chart entries of a song called “Tower Of Strength” and both were in the charts at the same time in late 1961 so I’m guessing they were different versions of the same song – one by somebody called Gene McDaniels but by far the bigger hit was by Frankie Vaughan who went all the way to No 1. As for Skin, it sounds to me like they’ve pinched the melody from “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers which I suppose makes some sort of sense. “Tower Of Strength”? “Lean On Me”? Same sort of thing isn’t it? Oh please yourselves (again)!
Before Ant and Dec were the TV behemoths that we know today, they were of course PJ & Duncan, characters from BBC teen drama Byker Grove who went on to be actual pop stars after performing as the fictional band Grove Matrix in the show. It was almost Monkees-esque. The song they performed in the show was called “Tonight I’m Free” and was the duo’s first actual single release in 1993 but it failed to chart. Second single “Why Me?” did crack the Top 40 but it was third single “Let’s Get Ready To Rhumble” that will always be what people remember about their career as pop stars. Ridiculous and, indeed ridiculed, it was also catchy as hell based around the catchphrase of US boxing and wrestling ring announcer Michael’s Buffer. The addition of the ‘h’ in ‘Rhumble’ was to avoid copyright issues as Buffer had trademarked the phrase. The lyric “Watch us wreck the mike PSYCHE!” far outlives anything else they released and they released a lot of stuff – three studio albums and fifteen singles! There’s also a line that gave a big indication as to their future careers though we couldn’t possibly have known at the time. “I’m Ant (I’m Declan), a duo, a twosome” they…erm…rap? They would eventually rebrand themselves as Ant & Dec whilst still recording music (specifically thejr third album – “The Cult Of Ant & Dec”) before giving it up in 1997.
There were two different versions of the CD single so to differentiate between them in the Piccadilly Our Price, the singles buyer wrote on the masterbags “Twat” (Dec/ Duncan) and “Twat in a hat” (Ant / PJ). When I got transferred to the Our Price in Stockport in the new year, it turned out that the album the staff had played most on the shop stereo had been PJ & Duncan’s “Psyche” and that their favourite track was one called “She Scores A Perfect Ten”. Want to hear it? Sure you do…
Hmm. It’s got a bit of an East 17 “Deep” vibe so better than I would have expected. Also better than expected are the lads moves in this TOTP performance – talk about in sync! PSYCHE!
We’ve reached eight weeks at the top for Wet Wet Wet with “Love Is All Around”. By this point they had drawn level with Shakespear’s Sister and The Archies in terms of length of time as the UK No 1 knowing that one more would see them replicate Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Wings and John Travolta and Olivia Newton John. The sixteen weeks of Bryan Adams was still a way off though. Were we thinking it could be challenged at this point or did we believe that common sense must kick in soon?
The play out song is “Trouble” by Shampoo. Now they might seem like a small footnote in the history of pop music and they may have only had five Top 40 hits none of which got higher than No 11 and their four albums didn’t sell anywhere except Japan but…there is still so much love for this pair online and I know people who swear by them.
Jacqui Blake and Carrie Askew were school friends from Plumstead, London who ran a fanzine for Manic Street Preachers and somehow became pop stars themselves. The TOTP producers managed to get them as the last act on this show but the first on the next so I’ll keep my powder (and hair) dry for the moment before delving into the Shampoo story in the next post.
So how did Julian Clary do as host? I think he brought something different to the show and I liked how he shook up the presenting format with his walks across stage and shots of him ‘dancing’ and the pretence of him having his make up retouched mid song. However, it all seemed a bit tame on reflection. I guess he was never going to do a Norman Lamont pre watershed though.
| Order of appearance | Artist | Title | Did I buy it? |
| 1 | Clubhouse | Living In The Sunshine | No |
| 2 | Bad Boys Inc | Take Me Away (I’ll Follow You) | As if |
| 3 | Warren G and Nate Dogg | Regulate | I did not |
| 4 | The Grid | Swamp Thing | It’s a no from me |
| 5 | C. J. Lewis | Everything Is Alright (Uptight) | Never |
| 6 | The B-52’s | (Meet) The Flintstones | Nope |
| 7 | Skin | Tower Of Strength | Nah |
| 8 | PJ and Duncan | Let’s Get Ready To Rhumble | Negative |
| 9 | Wet Wet Wet | Love Is All Around | Didn’t happen |
| 10 | Shampoo | Trouble | 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/m001l56h/top-of-the-pops-21071994
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 