Suggs

TOTP 09 MAY 1996

Posted on by 80stastic

There’s ten hits on this episode of TOTP but we’ve seen four of them before and one of the new ones is a football song (no, not that one; not yet). We’ve also seen the presenter before and not that long ago – it’s that Beertje Van Beers woman again. I’m not sure she was any more famous than she had been the first time she hosted the show a few weeks before (despite the exposure afforded her by that appearance) so why was she back again? Was it all about how she looked? In the era of Britpop and lads mags then I suppose that was a distinct possibility.

Beertje’s first job is to introduce one of those hits we’ve seen before – it’s Suggs featuring Louchie Lou and Michie One with “Cecilia”. The last time they were on led to an infamous incident when lisping boxer Chris Eubank had to contend with a bit of a tongue twister when doing the Top 10 countdown. As A-ha’s Morten Harket once sang on “I’ve Been Losing You”, he was hissing his ‘S’s’ like a snake. Poor Chris and poor the watching British public as this was a honking cover version. I’ve said this before but Suggs’s solo career has always been completely at odds to his Madness one for me. I like Madness and have even seen them live but Suggs on his own just doesn’t compute. For some reason in the mid 90s though, his awful Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel covers won the approval of UK record buyers giving him two Top 10 hits. Parent album “The Lone Ranger” achieved silver sales status and provided Suggs with a further three smaller chart hits but by the time of his second solo album “The Three Pyramids Club” (which sounds like the title of a Richard Osman novel), this brief infatuation was over and it sank without trace. Suggs never really returned to his solo career although he did have a hit with “Blue Day” in 1997 which was the FA Cup final song for my (and his) beloved Chelsea FC (more about cup final songs later). However, just last year, he teamed up with Paul Weller for the Slade-esque spelt single “Ooh Do U Fink U R”.

I’m always very cautious when it comes to commenting on rap artists purely because I don’t know enough about their music and its culture. I’m a white man who grew up in Worcester as a pop kid. If I tried to do any kind of analysis, it would be totally inauthentic. I guess I’m still allowed an opinion on what I’m watching and hearing on these TOTP repeats though right? I can’t just skip over a rap artist appearing on the show can I? The completist in me won’t let me just swerve this so here I go. I know the name Busta Rhymes – of course I do. I spent the 90s working in record shops. Could I name any of his tracks unprompted? Not a one. Would I recognise any if I were to check out his discography? Let’s see…

*checks Busta Rhymes discography*

Oh yeah. He did “Hit ‘Em High (The Monsters Anthem)” from the Space Jam soundtrack with B-Real, Coolio, LL Cool J and Method Man. And therein lies the problem. The only Busta Rhymes hit I know is from a movie about basketball starring Bugs Bunny. I don’t have any depth of knowledge nor relevance to the world of rap. OK, I’ll have to just go for the most superficial of reviews. “Woo-Hah!! Got You All In Check” was the debut single for Busta Rhymes and would peak at No 8 in both the US and the UK. I initially thought that the BBC censor was sleeping again to have let the lines “let’s get high” and “roll some weed” get through but then I checked led out the full, explicit lyrics. Dearie me! There’s no way any of that was getting through the BBC bad language filter. Mary Whitehouse would have self combusted.

Now this is an interesting link from Beertje even though she possibly only used it for its play on words. “In Holland we have three types of people; soccer players, cheeseheads and Klubbheads” she informs us. OK, so let’s break this down. Soccer players? Well, of course the Dutch have a rich history of producing fantastic footballers. One of my mates could talk for hours about Johan Cruyff and ‘total football’. Cheeseheads? I had to do some research on this I have to admit. It’s not a term to refer to enthusiasts of Dutch cheese though that would seem legitimate. No, apparently its usage dates back to the 19th century when Holland was occupied by Napoleon’s army and Dutch cheese producers got fed up with French soldiers stealing their beloved Gouda cheese. As a form of protection when confronting said soldiers, the Dutch wore helmets made out of cheese barrels hence ‘cheeseheads’. The term actually became an insult used by the French and Belgians when referring to Dutch people. Hmm. So by making sure she shoehorned in a play on words to introduce a Dutch dance act, Beertje actually insulted her own country? Oh well.

Said dance act are a team of Dutch dance producers with more than 40 aliases for their recordings including Hi_Tack, Da Klubb Kings and my personal favourite Drunkenmunky. For this their biggest hit “Klubbhopping” however, they went by the moniker of Klubbheads. I’m not going to lie, listening back to this is just making me feel nauseous, like somebody’s taken a club to my head. Klubbheads indeed.

Finally something approaching a decent tune. Having made it big with their last single “Slight Return”, The Bluetones weren’t about to rock the boat by messing with that hit formula and so they didn’t with its follow up “Cut Some Rug” which was certainly cut from the same cloth as its predecessor. Jangly guitars, a shuffling backbeat and some acerbic lyrics (“And all the time you remind me of blitzkreig and the doodle bug, salt upon a bubbling slug”) all allied with a hummable chorus. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it was the gameplan here alright.

Having gone off on a tangent earlier when discussing the origins of the phrase ‘Cheeseheads’, let’s continue that theme with an exploration into backstory of an expression that I’ve certainly used in this blog before- ‘cut some rug’. Apparently, it dates back to the 1930s and 40s when the ‘jitterbug’ dance was popular. Owing to its high energy moves, its protagonists would leave lots of marks on the dance floor that looked like cuts in a carpet or rug. I’m not sure that ‘The Bluetones shuffle’ as demonstrated by Beerjte in her intro would inflict such damage. By the way, I might make this cultural references thing an occasional series you know! Or maybe not.

One of those nearly one hit wonders now when an artist who is only known for one big hit single but whose discography shows that they actually had a further but minor chart entry. Yeah, one of them. The Tony Rich Project was, unsurprisingly, the project of one Tony Rich (real name Antonio Jeffries), a songwriter for LaFace Records who penned compositions for the likes of Toni Braxton, Boyz II Men and TLC. He made the leap into the sphere of artist in his own right with debut single “Nobody Knows”, a tender, soulful ballad that hit big both in the US and over here. Follow up single “Like A Woman” made it to No 27 in our charts then nothing. Well, not nothing as Tony continued to record and release new material well into the new century with his last album appearing in 2017 but he would never have any other major chart success. There is no truth in the rumour that Tony’s artist name inspired the title of 1999’s supernatural horror film phenomenon The Blair Witch Project. That particular movie’s name was influenced, of course, by British soft rockers The Alan Parsons Project.

“Let’s get rocked!” as the next band once sang. Def Leppard (for it is they) hadn’t released a studio album since 1992’s “Adrenalize” filling that gap with a greatest hit and B-sides collection. When the new album finally arrived, it wasn’t quite the Def Leppard of old. There were a few reasons why, not least that the band had seen which way the wind was blowing in the arena of rock music and had understood that post grunge, the sound that had served the so well in their late 80s pomp wasn’t going to cut it in the mid 90s. Added to that was the realisation that they’d been, as described by guitarist Vivian Campbell, living in a state of arrested development singing songs about putting out the trash and that they should write more mature songs that reflected their adult experience. And there was plenty of source material – founding member Steve Clark had died in 1991, guitarist Phil Collen had got divorced, bassist Rick Savage was battling facial paralysis condition Bell’s palsy and the death of his father whilst drummer Rick Allen and lead singer Joe Elliott had been arrested for spousal abuse and assault respectively. Given all that dark and heavy material, the album’s title track and lead single “Slang” seems remarkably jaunty. I can’t say that I’ve ever listened to the rest of the album but supposedly it does see the band operating outside of their comfort zone with more industrial and electronic sounds incorporated. It garnered mixed reviews ranging from a confused mess of an album to plaudits for trying to do something new. Back to the single though and it doesn’t really go anywhere for me and sounds like a poor man’s version of “Slam” by Dan Reed Network.

The one thing that did stand out for me was Joe Elliott’s super straightened new hairdo. It put me in mind of – and this is very niche – a particular style of grooming that some owners of the Maltese breed of dog go in for. We have a Maltese dog and we make sure he has a regular trim at the dog groomers but I’ve seen owners displaying their dogs at Crufts with the fur all grown out and straight as a curtain. Poodle rock indeed.

The next three hits we have seen before on the show starting with an ex-No 1! Yes, it’s that curious TOTP phenomenon of a record having gone down the charts and either going back up or putting the blocks on its descent to such an extent of being afforded a place on the show’s running order. We saw it in an earlier 1996 show when Oasis’s “Wonderwall” got a repeat airing when it re-entered the Top 5 having dropped out of the Top 10 a few weeks earlier. Now it’s the turn of Mark Morrison whose “Return Of The Mack” is still holding at No 2 despite having been on the charts for two months. The last time Beerjte was hosting, she introduced Morrison as that week’s No 1 and he celebrated by picking her up and carrying her off at the end of the song. Thankfully, she’s put enough physical distance between them this time to ensure that doesn’t happen again. In her intro, there’s a moment where she throws a look in the direction of Morrison on the stage behind her and I’m sure you can detect something in it that says “don’t think of trying it again mister”. I hope so anyway.

I would never describe Damon Albarn as a “Charmless Man” but by his own confession, this period of Blur’s career saw him potentially as a clueless one. If that sounds harsh, look at this from Damon himself:

See? I think I said in my last post when Blur were on the show performing this track in the ‘exclusive’ slot that it was a decidedly decent song and I stand by that though it’s clearly not one of their most high profile despite its chart peak of No 5. I’m sure Liam Gallagher would have dismissed it as “chimney sweep music” though. I’m not sure what drummer Dave Rowntree’s over sized drumsticks nor Graham Coxon’s shrunken guitar in this appearance were all about – presumably some band in joke. Graham’s ‘Freedom For Tooting!’ t-shirt was obviously a reference to the 70s sitcom Citizen Smith starring Robert Lindsay as hapless revolutionary Wolfie Smith. I recently listened to an interview with Lindsay and he recounted that the fame that the role brought him had its downsides including being harassed by both admiring women and jealous boyfriends on a night out and, in one extreme case, being blamed for an outbreak of football hooliganism when attending a match played by his hometown team of Ilkeston as the perpetrators had come dressed as Wolfie for the day. I’m pretty sure that Graham Coxon would never have done anything so charmless.

George Michael stays at No 1 with “Fastlove” for a second of three weeks. This track would prove to be his last hit in America, a territory that he dominated in his “Faith” era. That album provided George with six huge hit singles including four consecutive No 1s between ‘87 and ‘88. Quite phenomenal. Things started to tail off a bit with 1990’s “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1” albeit that lead single “Praying For Time” did furnish another chart topper. By the time of the “Older” album nearly a decade after his late 80s pomp, although sizeable hits, “Jesus To A Child” and “Fastlove” would peak at Nos 7 and 8 respectively whereas both hit the top spot in the UK. This was very much a role reversal of those “Faith” chart positions – of those four American No 1s, in the UK the corresponding peaks were:

2 – 11 – 8 – 13.

Although his US numbers were down, George continued to stack ‘em high over here throughout the rest of the decade. These were the chart positions of his seven single releases after “Fastlove” until the end of ‘99:

2 – 3 – 2 – 10 – 2 – 2 – 4

There may have even been cultural differences in terms of chart compilation and release strategies that explains the contrasts highlighted above but I thought they were…well…worth highlighting.

We play out with another football song but, as I said at the top of the post, it’s still not that one. This TOTP aired two days before the 1996 FA Cup final between Liverpool and Manchester United and it tuned out to be a complete damp squib of a game that was decided by a solitary goal by Eric Cantona (himself the subject of yet another football song in the Top 40 that will feature on the following TOTP repeat). Already in the charts was the cup final song by United called “Move Move Move (The Red Tribe)” which would peak at No 6. Released a week later was this effort from their ultimately defeated opponents under the name of Liverpool FC & The Boot Room Boyz. Despite losing the cup final (cream suits and all), this pile of shite actually won the chart battle when it entered the chart at No 4. With a similar title to United’s hit – “Pass & Move (It’s The Liverpool Groove)” – it also tried to capture the predominant dance sound of the time much as their rivals had. Both failed dismally. Liverpool should have just updated 1988’s “Anfield Rap” – now that was a football record with a groove.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Suggs featuring Louchie Lou and Michie One CeciliaNever
2Busta RhymesWoo-Hah!! Got You All In CheckNo
3KlubbheadsKlubbhoppingNot likely
4The BluetonesCut Some RugI did not
5The Tony Rich ProjectNobody KnowsNah
6Def LeppardSlangNegative
7Mark Morrison Return Of The MackNope
8BlurCharmless ManNo but I had their Great Escape album
9George MichaelFastloveAnother no
10Liverpool FC & The Boot Room BoyzPass & Move (It’s The Liverpool Groove)As if

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.

TOTP 25 APR 1996

Posted on by 80stastic

We have arrived at one of the most infamous episodes of TOTP certainly of the 90s, maybe ever. It’s that show with Chris Eubank. Why was he presenting the nation’s favourite music programme? Well, he’d retired from boxing in the September of 1995 having failed to regain his super-middleweight title from Steve Collins. However, he would return to the fight game later in 1996. For now though, he was seen by executive producer Ric Blaxill as a suitable choice for the ‘golden mic’ slot. As far as I can tell he was one of only three sporting celebrities to host TOTP with the others being footballer Ian Wright and jockey Frankie Dettori. All three you could argue have a personality that transcended their sporting fame – Wright is exuberant and Tigger-ish, Dettori is cheeky and likeable and Eubank…well, he’s eccentric if not downright odd. I’m actually quite intrigued to see what he says in his links to camera. Ding! Ding! Round one!

Eubank starts by introducing himself (as if he needed to) by giving us his full nomenclature including his middle name Livingstone. It’s pretty impressive as middle names go but nobody will ever top ex-footballer Emile William Ivanhoe Heskey. He then says something about the forthcoming “goodies” on the show and that he’s feeling “effervescent”. It’s a nervous, stumbling start – he needs to get a few punchy lines in to settle him down. The act he introduces are Babylon Zoo and their second hit of the year “Animal Army”. I said of this song when the video was shown the other week that it had traces of both Oasis and the Stone Roses about it and listening to it again here, I’m even more convinced of that assertion. Try closing your eyes and just listening to this performance – see what I mean? Anyway, Jas Mann has grown a spattering of facial hair and is wielding a guitar for this performance which we never saw during the “Spaceman” weeks. I presume he was trying to establish some musicianship credentials on the hunt for credibility points but I’m not sure he really wins that fight. Following what would turn out to be the third biggest selling single of the year in the UK was always going to be a bout too far but its peak of No 17 was probably a little on the harsh side on reflection. Babylon Zoo would stagger on for one final round before being KO’d when third single “The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes” peaked at No 32.

Eubank looks like he’s on the ropes already, appearing dazed and confused and uttering barely remembered lines instructing us to “enjoy the show”. He needs to rally and quickly. Whilst he takes a break between rounds and gets some encouragement from his corner man, we get a performance of the latest dance hit to cross over from the clubs to the charts. “Keep On Jumpin’” was originally recorded by US disco act Musique in 1978 but didn’t trouble our charts until it was revived by The Lisa Marie Experience who took a version of it to No 7 in the UK Top 40 and to the top of our Dance Chart. Despite their name, this lot were actually two male house DJs Neil Hinde and Dean Marriott (aka D. Ramirez). They would go on to remix tracks for the likes of Sash, Eternal, Robin S and Inner City. “(Keep On) Jumpin’” (no brackets, no points) would be their only chart hit as The Lisa Marie Experience though. I’m assuming that their name was inspired by Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of Elvis and Priscilla, who, at this time, was in the process of divorcing perhaps the most famous person on the planet Michael Jackson. I’m guessing they were hoping to trade subliminally on the news headlines that the couple would have been generating? Is that a known marketing strategy?

As for their hit, they couldn’t get clearance to use a sample of the original track so had to record their own version of the chorus which they do pretty faithfully with convincing disco strings to the fore. Having not been a UK hit in the 70s, the song found itself in the Top 10 twice in the space of a few weeks in 1996 when a much more housed-up version by Todd Terry featuring Martha Wash and Jocelyn Brown peaked at No 8.

Eubank throws a cryptic curveball with his next link, setting the mathematicians in the watching audience a brain teaser – “how long does it take a lady to make that step?”. What was he on about? I can only assume he was referring to the first video of the night for “The Box” by Orbital. In it, actor Tilda Swinton plays an alien-like character who observes Earth and its inhabitants in stop-motion giving the impression that she is operating outside of temporal constructs before disappearing whence she came. It’s all very The Man Who Fell To Earth which apparently was the inspiration for the promo according to its co-director Jes Benstock. Was its stop-motion effect what Eubank was being obscure about in his intro? Another question I have is how famous was Tilda Swinton at this point? I’m thinking not that well known beyond the art house crowd as most of her credits up to this point were for a clutch of Derek Jarman films. This was well before her roles in The Beach, Vanilla Sky and The Chronicles Of Narnia franchise. If my guess is true, then her smaller profile would only have added to her portrayal of the mysterious protagonist of the video.

As for the track itself, “The Box” would become one of Orbital’s bigger hits peaking at No 11. It sounds like the soundtrack to a 60s spy thriller but with a few dance beats thrown in. Maybe the duo of brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll were in training with their eye on the prize of an actual film soundtrack which they achieved the following year with their reworking of the theme to the 1997 remake of The Saint which gave them their second consecutive No 3 hit following the rather disturbing “Satan Live”. In 2000, they would continue with the soundtrack work when they contributed a track (with Angelo Badalamenti) to the aforementioned The Beach movie.

Eubank’s landing some blows now (or at least he thinks he is) with some more enigmatic words. This time, he says “We live in a country where the minds of the people are manipulated by the press. Think about it”. I mean, he’s not wrong and nearly 30 years later that is still the case but why was he prompted to say that at this time? Was he having a particularly bad time with the tabloids? In his early pugilist career, he hadn’t enjoyed a good relationship with the press who depicted him as arrogant and with ideas above his station with his flamboyant sartorial style and posturing or as his Wikipedia entry puts it ‘the man you love to hate’. After he’d lost his boxing title and was supposedly retired from the fight game, would he have still attracted so much attention? I guess by presenting TOTP he was hardly shying away from the public counting his money in his expensive mansion was he?

Definitely on the covers of the music press would have been Ash who were onto their third (and ultimately biggest) hit in “Goldfinger”. I guess this would have been a breakthrough moment for the band – their first time inside the Top 10 and it came with a single that was released a good six months after their last hit. Momentum could easily have been lost. “Goldfinger” not only consolidated that previous success but went beyond it. To do that, the band had to come up with a bloody good tune and they did that. I used my words carefully there – it’s a good tune but not a great one to my ears in the respect that I think they’ve got better songs. Still better than most of the garbage in the charts though. Watching this performance back, I’m struck by how much Tim Wheeler looks like Vernon Kay? Odd(job).

Eubank is finding his feet now and getting a combination together. He’s not stumbling over his words so much and is addressing the audience in a more direct way informing us that he’s got something next to get us “absolutely freaking” before describing it as a modern day version of “Knees Up Mother Brown”. Who can he be talking about? It’s Technohead of course and their latest hit “Happy Birthday”. Yes, the people who brought us “I Wanna Be A Hippy” thought we could do with another dose of their dumbo brand of high speed, happy hardcore nonsense and duly delivered unto us a second hit. It’s a carbon copy of its infuriating predecessor but that didn’t stop UK punters from buying it in enough numbers to send it to No 18 – just bonkers. That’s also the word I would use for this performance which is a riot of idiots jumping around maniacally for the duration of the ‘song’. And what was the recreation of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party all about? Ever wondered why the hatter was mad? Well, apparently it was an actual condition arising from the use of mercury in the Victorian era to cure pelts in the hat making process. When the mercury got into the systems of the hat makers, it gave rise to mental health problems including dementia hence the phrase. In terms of Lewis Carroll’s character in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, some analysis suggests he was written this way to highlight some of the most irritating and unpleasant traits of human nature. ‘Irritating’ and ‘unpleasant’? Well, that explains it then as “Happy Birthday” by Technohead was nothing if not irritating and unpleasant.

P.S. The Emily who Eubank says happy birthday to in his intro is presumably his daughter Emily whose 2nd birthday it had been six days before this TOTP aired.

Oh dear. Eubank makes a misstep in his next intro although in 1996, I’m not sure his choice of words would necessarily have tripped him up. Would we have winced at him describing Louise Werner of Sleeper as “an absolute tottie” back then? I like to think I would have but I can’t be sure. Also, would Eubank’s Nicholas Parsons reference have hit home with the TV audience in 1996? The game show that Parsons presented that shared its name with Sleeper’s single ran from 1971 to 1983 so had been off our screens for 13 years by this point. I think that particular punch line might have failed to hit its intended target.

Just like Ash earlier, Sleeper were at a pivotal moment in their career with the release of their first Top 10 single “Sale Of The Century”. Also just like Ash, it came six months after their last hit so it was an important moment momentum wise. In terms of the song itself, it was arguably just more of the same Sleeper sound that previous hits “Inbetweener” and “What Do I Did Now?” had established. That shouldn’t be seen as a criticism though. They had a successful formula and were giving the people what they wanted. What’s that? Couldn’t the same argument be applied to Technohead? Erm…no. Why not? Well…I didn’t like them did I? That’s fair enough isn’t it? I think it is. Interestingly, Louise Werner doesn’t have her guitar with her for this performance and she seems a bit lost without it. Not knowing quite what to do with herself, she resorts to a few skip and jump movements. She should have floated around the stage Muhammad Ali style, throwing a few jabs, ducking and weaving. I’m sure Chris Eubank would have been even more enamoured with her than he already was.

It’s round seven and Eubank rallies with an intro that sits well with the esoteric, faux-existential quotes he specialises in. It also shows that he knew something of the band he was introducing. “Now here’s a group to make you philosophise and think” he pronounces before the Manic Street Preachers fill our screens. There’s no doubting that the Welsh rockers have a canon of work that displays a certain intellectual rigour with their influences ranging from Nietzsche to Camus to Chomsky and much wider. Was it possible that Eubank was a Manics fan or just that he’d done his research? Whatever Eubank’s truth, the band were telling us that theirs was that they were definitely still a going concern despite the disappearance of Richey Edwards via the success of “A Design For Life”. Ironically, the song’s best known lyric – “We don’t talk about love, we only wanna get drunk” – in which the band highlight the working class’s right to do so, would be sung back to them by crowds of middle class festival goers. Think about that as Chris Eubank might have said.

OK, we nearly at the KO moment for Eubank. The moment when Chris is dealt a blow he can’t recover from. When the BBC4 audience, with our prior knowledge of what’s coming, look on with a building sense of schadenfreude until suddenly it’s here…and Chris Eubank has to introduce Suggs singing “Cecilia”. Why was this a big deal? Because of our host’s lisp of course – it’s not a great look is it? Taking the piss out of a speech impediment. Six years on from this, Gareth Gates would win the hearts of the public on Pop Idol with his singing and looks but also because of his determination to not let his stammer prove too big an obstacle in his pursuit of becoming a pop star and recording artist. I guess Eubank’s perceived arrogance and eccentric demeanour meant he was never going to be afforded the same reaction.

His intro for the actual performance by Suggs and Louchie Lou and Michie One of “Cecilia” has him on the ropes but the knockout blow comes during the Top 10 countdown when he has to say “At six, Cecilia by Suggs”. That moment was used in an episode of Never Mind The Buzzcocks in the a round called Freeze Frame which was basically a What Happened Next? section…

Go to 3:40 in for the “At thickth, Thethilia by Thughth” moment

Mark Morrison is still in pole position at the top of the charts and he’s still got his rather creepy handcuffs with him. The recurrent line “you lied to me” combined with Morrison’s style of delivery has made me ponder that “Return Of The Mack” is what you get if you combined “Ain’t No Doubt” by Jimmy Nail (“she’s lying”) with “It Wasn’t Me” by Shaggy. What a thought!

After the Suggs KO, the defeated Chrissy boy gives a reflective speech about being true to yourself before signing off with a cheery “Good bloody show”. To paraphrase Chumbawamba, you can knock Eubank down but he’ll always get up again. The play out song is something of an oddity called “That’s Nice” by Minty. If you don’t remember it (as I don’t), it’s probably because it never charted as far as I can tell. Yes, it’s another of those left field Ric Blaxill choices where he championed a track that would not actually become a Top 40 hit.

Minty was a vehicle for Australian performance artist, club promoter, fashion designer and friend of Boy George, Leigh Bowery. Wikipedia tell me that Minty were part of the Romo movement which I’d never heard of but which was short for Romantic Modernism and was characterised by a hotchpotch of musical genres including disco, glam rock and the New Romantics with its base camp being the club night Club Skinny in Camden. This track was a posthumous release as Bowery died from an AIDS related illness on New Year’s Eve 1994 though the project continued under the leadership of his long term female partner Nicola Bateman. I’m guessing now but was Leigh Bowery the inspiration for the character of Vulva from Spaced?

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Babylon ZooAnimal ArmyNot for me but for a friend. Honest!
2The Lisa Marie Experience(Keep On) Jumpin’No
3OrbitalThe BoxNot for me thanks
4AshGoldfingerNo but I have it on their Intergalactic Sonic 7″s compilation album
5TechnoheadHappy BirthdayAs if
6
Sleeper		Sale Of The CenturyLiked it, didn’t buy it
7Manic Street PreachersA Design For LifeNo but I had the Everything Must Go album
8Suggs featuring Louchie Lou and Michie One CeciliaNah
9Mark MorrisonReturn Of The MackNope
10MintyThat’s NiceAnd 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/m0020ldh/top-of-the-pops-25041996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 11 APR 1996

Posted on by 80stastic

I’ve reached another blogging milestone – this is my 600th post over my 80s and 90s TOTP sites combined. Thank you to anyone and everyone who has ever taken the trouble to read any of them. 600 eh? Phew! When I started back in 2017 with the 1983 BBC4 repeats, I didn’t have any such goal in mind. In fact, I wasn’t sure I would even make it to the 1984 repeats but make it I did and seven (actual) years later, I’m still at it but with an end in sight as I won’t go past the year 2000 (as Busted almost sang). The 600th episode of TOTP was on 9th October 1975 but I was only seven then so don’t remember it at all. For the record though, it featured The Sparks, Bob Marley and David Essex at No 1. As for other 600th episodes, that landmark was reached in EastEnders on 6th November 1990 by which point I’d only just got married and moved to Manchester two weeks before so watching the latest escapades of Phil and Grant Mitchell probably wasn’t high on my list of things to do. The 600th episode of Coronation Street was broadcast on 12th September 1966 two years before I was born. Let’s see if any of the artists and hits in my own 600th anniversary are worth celebrating…

Well, if it’s a celebration we’re having then I guess we should start with a party tune and “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit” by Gina G is definitely that. This is her third consecutive week on the show and in the studio so the BBC couldn’t be accused of not getting behind our Eurovision entry this year. Now, in the last post I mentioned that I had a Gina G story. It’s time for it to be told. Around this time, Ricky Ross, having broken up Deacon Blue, was launching his solo album “What You Are” and the Sony rep who used to sell into the Our Price I was working in got all the staff on the guest list for an album launch party at a bar in Manchester. There was a free bar at the party and many, many drinks were consumed. I actually had a five minute chat with Ricky who was a nice bloke.

What’s this got to do with Gina G? Well, I also got talking to some guys who said they were the people behind “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit” but that they weren’t getting any royalties from it and were taking legal action or something. That’s about all I can remember (it was a free bar after all!) but searching online nearly thirty years later to see if there was anything in what they told me, I found that there was loads of legal action surrounding the song. Gina G reckoned she was owed over £136,000 for her part in its success while another case was launched by one Simon Taube who wrote the song and it was recorded by Gina with two producers called Wainwright and Burton who went under the alias of The Next Room. Enter one Stephen Rodway to the story as the new producer for the track who went under the professional name of Motiv-8. A deal was signed between Taube and Rodway giving the latter 30% of any royalty payments. However, said royalties were all collected by Rodway’s production company FX leading to Taube and the original producers suing FX for £408,000. Were those guys at that album launch that I spoke to Taube, Wainwright and Burton? Did they ever receive all of what they thought they were owed? Or even just a little bit?

How long has this been going on Paul? Seven years and 600 posts mate! Keep up! Seriously though, I love Paul Carrack’s voice and he’s written some pop classics but I’m not sure why one of them was back in the charts in 1996. “How Long” was originally a No 20 hit for his band Ace in 1975 but apparently it was reactivated 21 years later for Paul’s solo album “Blue Views” and reissued to promote it. It would peak at No 32 one place below the cover of it by the Yazz/Aswad collaboration from 1993. For such a timeless track, those chart peaks seem slightly underwhelming but justice arrived in 2020 when, 45 years after its original release, its use in an advertisement for Amazon Prime prompted 4,000 downloads, 831,000 streams and the No 1 spot in the Billboard Rock Digital Song Sales chart.

Although widely perceived to be a song about infidelity between a couple, it was actually written by Carrack when he found out that Ace bassist Terry ‘Tex’ Comer had been secretly working with Scottish folk-rock duo The Sutherland Brothers. By strange coincidence, also released the same year was “Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)” by Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel which was another song about band disharmony. When members of the original Cockney Rebel approached Harley about their desire to write songs for the band, he refused and the band split with Harley forming a new group. Hitting the top spot with their first release under their new moniker, the song was a jibe at the original Cockney Rebel members who Harley believed had done him dirty by trying to change a winning formula.

Just like “How Long”, “Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)” has been covered by many artists including Duran Duran, Erasure and The Wedding Present whose performance of it here includes David Gedge looking exactly like me 35 years ago – or is it me looking like Gedge?

I’ve never been much of a rap /hip-hop fan but I know a good tune when I hear one and “California Love” by 2Pac featuring Dr.Dre and Roger Troutman is a good tune. His first release since being…well…released from prison in 1995, it features amongst others a sample from “Woman To Woman” by Joe Cocker (not Jarvis’s Dad) and would top the US charts while making it to No 6 in ours. Its hook though is surely the ‘golden throat’ vocal in the chorus courtesy of Roger Troutman who sounds like a character from Viz but was actually a singer, songwriter, producer and all round pioneer of the funk movement. The aforementioned ‘golden throat’ sounds like a porn film title but was actually a custom made ‘talk box’ / vocoder supplied by electronics firm Electro Harmonix which he also used to contribute vocals to the Scritti Politti single “Boom! There She Was” in 1988. Then there’s the legendary Dr. Dre’s involvement which supposedly led to the falling out between himself and 2Pac. The latter, of course, would be dead within six months, murdered as part of the East Coast-West Coast hip-hop rivalry (unless you believe the conspiracy theories that he faked his own death). Rumours circulated that former friend turned rival Notorious B.I.G. was involved in 2Pac’s murder but then he was killed himself in 1997 in another Las Vegas drive by shooting. All of these artists would become a source of exasperation to me whilst working in Our Price as their albums would attract the white, middle class gangs from da hoods of Cheshire who would try and nick their CD sleeves for the parental guidance warning lyrics printed inside them. We had to replace them with temporary inserts and keep the real thing behind the counter.

Both Dr. Dre and Notorious B.I.G. continue to feature in my life as a source of inspiration for in jokes between myself and my wife. Whenever one of us says that we’ve forgotten something, it will be followed by a cry of “Forgot about Dre” referencing his 2000 single with Eminem and which Mark and Lard satirised on their Radio 1 show. Notorious B.I.G. was also known as Biggie Smalls which gets a regular shout out if one of us says “no biggie” as in “it’s not a big deal”. We sound insufferable don’t we but we’re not really – honest!

Here’s a band that was lumped in with the Britpop movement whether they liked it or not but are hardly talked about anymore despite having a clutch of decent tunes. If Longpigs are mentioned these days, it’s usually to say that they included a young Richard Hawley in their ranks (he’s the guitarist on the left of the screen) and he, of course, would go onto much solo success as a ballad crooner with albums like “Coles Corner” and “Lady’s Bridge”. He was also briefly a member of Pulp after Longpigs split. I’ve seen him a couple of times live and he was great.

Back to Longpigs though and “On And On” (not a tribute to the longevity of this blog!) was their second and joint biggest hit of their career alongside the excellent follow up “She Said”. Weirdly, just as I mentioned Aswad earlier for their version of “How Long” with Yazz, I get to name check them again as they also had a hit with a song called “On And On” in 1989 though obviously not the Longpigs song.

No, it’s not that moment (not yet) but it is Suggs with his cover of the Simon & Garfunkel song “Cecilia”. I’ve always had a soft spot for Madness and have even seen them live but Suggs as a solo artist? No, nay, never. I didn’t like any of his solo singles (not even “Blue Day” with my beloved Chelsea FC) and haven’t enjoyed his performances on these TOTP repeats. I’m not sure why Suggs on his own is such a turn off for me – maybe it’s the hackneyed layer of ska he applies to all his songs which annoys, especially on cover versions like this. He’s roped in Louchie Lou and Michie One for this single whom you may recall had a ragga-fied hit in 1993 with a version of one of the worst songs in the history of recorded music – Lulu’s “Shout”. I don’t think their contribution helped at all. However, given that they are on the record and in the studio with Suggs, why did they need the other two backing dancers for this performance? They don’t add anything much either although in reality, no amount of intervention could fumigate this stinker.

Yes, Babylon Zoo did have another hit and here’s the proof. “Animal Army” was the follow up to “Spaceman” and nearly 30 years later, it doesn’t stand up well at all. It probably needed crutches in that department even back then. You can see what Jas Mann was trying to do; repeat the recipe that made its predecessor such a banquet of a hit but without the magic ingredient of the exposure of a Levi’s ad campaign, it was always going to taste a bit bland. It feels like it should have been better than it was, that all the flavours were there but it wasn’t quite right – it had been overcooked. In the mixing bowl was a bit of glam rock, a hint of Suede, even a dash of Stone Roses and Oasis in the vocal phrasing but the lyrics were utter tosh about elephants, lions, leopards and then bizarrely dinosaurs and angels. Just nonsense. The inclusion of some elephant trumpet noises at one point is a direct steal from the opening of Talk Talk’s “Such A Shame”. So, in conclusion, very derivative and ultimately not very convincing. It would debut at No 17 but was out of the chart within two weeks. It was a similar story everywhere else. The Babylon Zoo story was coming to an end only weeks after it had started.

Talking of derivative, this single by Upside Down sounds so familiar to something else but I can’t quite put my finger in what it is*. “Every Time I Fall In Love” was the second hit for this lot who were perhaps the ultimate in manufactured boy bands with their audition and selection process filmed for the BBC documentary series Inside Story. If this was the sound of falling in love, it was enough to make us all platonic. Plastic, shallow and facile. I can’t find a clip of this studio performance but they’ve turned up in different coloured silk suits but getting dressed themselves was clearly beyond them as they’ve forgotten their shirts underneath their suit jackets. It’s like Showaddywaddy meets The Chippendales. Sadly, Upside Down had another two hits in them before they disappeared and renamed themselves Orange Orange. No, really.

*Update: I think it might be “The Girl Is Mine” by Michael Jackson?

Next an allegorical song for the ages from Rage Against The Machine. The lead single from their second album “Evil Empire”, “Bulls On Parade” warns of how the arms industry encourages war and conflicts as it’s good for business and securing military contracts. RATM pull no punches about their disgust at the practice with lines like these:

Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes

Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal

Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Brad Wilk / Timmy Commerford / Tom Morello / Zach De La Rocha
Bulls on Parade lyrics © Wixen Music Publishing

Nearly thirty years later, the world appears to have learned nothing. There’s no space here for pithy irreverence from me. I’ll leave it there.

I’m not giving any devastating insight by stating that there was a lot riding on the release of “A Design For Life” for Manic Street Preachers. This was their first new song since the disappearance of rhythm guitarist and songwriter Richey Edwards. Having made the decision to carry on, there must have been a huge amount of trepidation within the band and their record company about how it would be received. Would the fan base accept them as a trio? Would this new song be too far removed from the dark material of their “Holy Bible” album? They needn’t have worried – “A Design For Life” would give the band the biggest hit of their career and provide them with probably their best known song. There was something about the scale of track that hypnotised. Perhaps it was the dominant but not domineering string section (the same players as employed on the majestic “Yes” by McAlmont & Butler) that gave it such power. You knew it was going to be massive from the first time you heard it and hear it we did as it was played endlessly on radio in a way none of their previous singles had ever been. Parent album “Everything Must Go” would indeed go… three times platinum and furnish the band with four hit singles. Manic Street Preachers had not only survived the loss of a crucial band member but they were actually flourishing in the aftermath.

A few posts ago I wrote about the BBC series This Life and about how its soundtrack was full of contemporary music (mainly Britpop) including the Manics. Ten years after the series finished, a reunion special was made to catch up with the characters and see what had happened to them all. In one scene, they have a barbecue and drink long into the night. The music that they played as they partied? Yep, “A Design For Life”.

It’s a third and final week at the top for The Prodigy and “Firestarter”. The band had experienced plenty of big hits before of course – five of their previous nine singles had gone Top 10 but a No 1 record, even in 1996 when there were more than ever thanks to record company marketing, promotion and pricing strategies, was still a huge deal especially for a band seen as being so far from the mainstream. Incredibly, they would repeat the trick with their next single “Breathe” paving the way for an electric performance at Glastonbury in 1997 which blew me away. Sadly for the band, that year also saw Radiohead play the set of their lives there the following night which rather stole some of their thunder but it shouldn’t diminish the achievement of a band whose first hit was dismissed as having creating the much maligned toy town techno genre.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Gina GOoh Aah…Just A Little BitNope
2Paul CarrackHow LongI did not
32Pac featuring Dr.Dre and Roger TroutmanCalifornian LoveNo
4LongpigsOn And OnDecent tune but no
5Suggs featuring Louchie Lou and Michie OneCeciliaNever!
6Babylon ZooAnimal ArmyNah
7Upside DownEvery Time I Fall In LoveAs if
8Rage Against The MachineBulls On ParadeWorthy but no
9Manic Street PreachersA Design For LifeNo but I had the Everything Must Go album
10The ProdigyFirestarterAnd 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/m0020crr/top-of-the-pops-11041996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 12 OCT 1995

Posted on by 80stastic

We’re well intro the Autumn of 1995 with these TOTP repeats now but away from which artists were in the charts, who else was in the news around this time? Well, the day before this show aired, Everton striker Duncan Ferguson was making headlines of the wrong kind when he was sentenced to 3 months imprisonment for making lines on the head of Raith Rovers defender John McStay after head butting him during a game. As such, he became the first British footballer to be given a custodial sentence for an on-field offence. I wonder if there are any criminal records on this TOTP that deserved to be sent down?

Here’s one for a start! PJ & Duncan should have been locked up and the key thrown away for this rubbish. Eighteen months on from their first hit, the novelty was wearing thin. “U Krazy Katz” was the duo’s seventh Top 40 single and what a stinker it was! Everything about this song honked not least its awful title. ‘Crazy’ spelt with a ‘K’ and ‘Cats’ spelt with a ‘K’ and a ‘Z’ with the obligatory ‘U’ replacing ‘You’. Who did they think they were? Slade?! As for the track, it’s like Modern Romance doing their mambo styled hit “Don’t Stop That Crazy Rhythm” but instead of singing it they‘ve rapped their way through the damned thing. Vile stuff.

Although their music was still crap, something had changed with these two. Yes, obviously they’d gone for 40s style suits and brogues (and an ill judged cane for Dec/Duncan) for this appearance rather than the usual baseball cap, jeans and trainers look but it’s something else I’m referring to. A small but defining detail that would shape their future careers to this day…yep, they swapped sides! It’s not for the whole performance but there are definite points where they swap over so that PJ is on the left (as we look at the TV screen) and Duncan on the right. Do you think they watched this back and thought “Haway man! We look better this way round ‘n’ that!”. Think of Ant & Dec now and I’m betting your mind’s eye places the former on our left and Dec the right. It’s hard wired into our brains but up to this point, their stints on TOTP had their positions reversed. By the way, that’s another more obvious change that is on the way – the dropping of the PJ & Duncan monikers and the adopting of the Ant & Dec brand. There’s only two more PJ & Duncan hits to endure after this one before they switch.

The solo career of Suggs was the equivalent of a one man crime wave. It should have been illegal and actionable. After his disastrous cover of “I’m Only Sleeping” by The Beatles as his debut offering, the Madness frontman followed it up with this original track called “Camden Town”. A fusion of ska and pop with a side order of reggae, it was jaunty for sure but oh so insubstantial. The verses remind me of the theme tune to Only Fools And Horses but set in Camden rather than Peckham. Ah yes, that title location. Was that a deliberate and contrived attempt to drum up some credibility for Suggs off the back of the epicentre of the burgeoning Britpop movement?

Now, I like Madness and have seen them in concert but whilst Suggs’s character makes sense within the structure of the band, out on his own, his affected delivery and stilted movements just grate on me. Worse was to come with his cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecilia” released from his album “The Lone Ranger” the following April.

So what links Mariah Carey and Simply Red? Well, the former’s video for her single “Fantasy” was set in an amusement park and saw Mariah riding a rollercoaster and the latter were at No 1 at the same time with “Fairground” and the promo for that one was filmed at Blackpool Pleasure Beach with The Big One rollercoaster prominently featured. There was another link between Mariah and a fellow resident in this week’s chart. Ten places below her at No 16 were folk-rockers The Levellers with their new single…yep…”Fantasy”. Fancy that!

Next, a second consecutive studio performance for Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue with their murder ballad duet “Where The Wild Roses Grow”. I mentioned in the last post that I performed this song in a guitar class I used to attend back in 2010 as a duet with a student called Lisa and that it was recorded for posterity. The guitar teacher gave me a CD of our performance and I added it to my iTunes library. I thought I could maybe embed it into this blog but I’ve run into a few tech issues. I got a new Mac a while back and never got around to importing everything from my old one onto the new one including my iTunes library (well, we’re all on Spotify now aren’t we?). When I’ve gone back to said library on the old Mac, it says that the file for the track can’t be located. It’s all a bit of a mess. If I could find the original CD, maybe I could upload it to the new Mac? Can’t find it anyway so it looks like you’re all have to live with the disappointment of not hearing my Nick Cave impression but rest assured it was immense!

My duet with Lisa wasn’t as unexpected as Nick and Kylie’s what with us both attending the same guitar class and all but there have been other pairings throughout musical history that rivalled their unlikeliness. How about Youssou N’Dour and Neneh Cherry on “7 Seconds” or Marc Almond and Gene Pitney with “Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart”. Yeah, Richard and Lisa from guitar class doesn’t sound as left field as some of those names I admit. As for musical crimes, “Where The Wild Roses Grow” is an excellent song and should never be considered in those terms but if you listen to the lyrics, well that’s literally a different story altogether.

After Jimmy Nail used his Auf Wiedersehen, Pet fame to launch his music career in 1985 with a cover of Rose Royce’s “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore”, it took him seven years to come up with his next hit single, the chart topping “Ain’t No Doubt”. However, once he’d made that comeback, he was determined to stick around and in the mid 90s, he was prolific. He released three albums in three years between ‘94 and ‘96, the middle of which was “Big River”. Coming after “Crocodile Shoes” and before “Crocodile Shoes II” (a “Crocodile Shoes” sandwich?), it was a sizeable success going platinum in the UK and making the Top 10. Its lead single was the title track which made No 18 on the UK charts. A love letter to the River Tyne and its heyday at the heart of the once thriving shipbuilding industry that also acknowledges its decline, it features the guitar work of fellow Geordie Mark Knopfler. It’s a decent enough song that was a good platform for Nail’s gruff voice but quite why it needed a rerelease three months later as “Big River ‘96” is beyond me and also most of the record buying public as it stalled at No 72.

I’ve said before in this blog that you could do worse than give Jimmy’s 1997 Best Of album “The Nail File” a spin on your streaming platform of choice. Tracks like the Paddy McAloon penned “Cowboy Dreams” and “Country Boy” are just great songs and you can’t deny that Jimmy has a distinctive voice. A crime against music? Hadaway and shite!

Something serious now. The War Child International charity was founded in 1993 to ensure war child victims have access to protection, education and psychosocial support both in conflict and post-conflict areas with the UK arm established in 1994. A year later, they worked with British and Irish artists to create “The Help Album” to raise funds for the charity. Featuring the likes of Oasis, The Stone Roses, Suede, The Charlatans and Sinéad O’Connor, it took John Lennon’s “Instant Karma!” as its inspiration and was recorded, mixed and released within five days. So quick was the process that initial copies hit the shops with no track listing printed on the sleeve. Despite that drawback, the album went to No 1 in the compilation album chart. A single and an EP were taken from the album, the former was a cover of The Beatles’ “Come Together” by supergroup The Smokin’ Mojo Filters whose membership included Paul McCartney, Paul Weller, Noel Gallagher, Steve Craddock, Steve White and Carleen Anderson. It peaked at No 19. The “Help EP” was a four track release that included contributions from Portishead, Guru, PJ Harvey but was headed up by this song – “Lucky” by Radiohead.

For some reason, and I don’t recall this but Wikipedia assured me it happened, Radio 1 refused to support the EP with airplay which contributed to it only making No 51 in the charts. TOTP had no such qualms and so we got this video exclusive which gave us an early taste of a Radiohead track that would end up on their third album, 1997’s “OK Computer”. This is a great song, epic in its sound and ambition but also moving in its intensity – the sort of song that has the power to send shivers up your spine. For some reason, it’s always reminded me of the theme tune to the 1981 BBC2 adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

The affecting video could sadly have been made in 2024 what with the world witnessing the Russia/Ukraine and Gaza/Israel conflicts, the only difference being that such images (and much, much worse) are now beamed directly into our heads via our mobile phones.

On a much lighter note, “The Help Album” included some great cover versions such as Suede taking on Elvis Costello’s “Shipbuilding”, Terry Hall and Salad doing “Dream A Little Dream Of Me” and this one by the Manic Street Preachers…

All three tracks on the spin to end the show we have seen before so I’m going to rifle through them beginning with “When Love And Hate Collide” by Def Leppard. Like many artists, the Sheffield rockers recently went down the orchestral versions of their back catalogue route (see also Midge Ure, Embrace and even Cutting Crew) with an album called “Drastic Symphonies”. Said album includes an orchestral version of “When Love And Hate Collide” which does make it sound monumentally epic.

An orchestra can’t do anything about the song’s lyrics though which are straight up dreadful. Clichéd, hackneyed and in places non sensical. Look at these:

I got your number on my wall but I ain’t gonna make that call

When divided we stand baby, United we fall

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Richard Savage / Joseph Elliott
When Love & Hate Collide lyrics © Bmg Platinum Songs Us, Bludgeon Riffola Limited, Bludgeon Riffola Ltd

How can you stand divided but fall united? And who had a phone number on their wall? I know this was pre-mobile phone ubiquity but wouldn’t you have written a phone number on a telephone pad or Filofax even? Then there’s stock phrases like “Heart of Stone” and “hits you right between the eyes” and some dreadful rhyming couplets like “fighting for” and “act of war”. What do you expect though from grown men who wrote a song in “Let’s Get Rocked” from the point of view of an American teenager with references to ‘taking out the trash’ and ‘tidying your room’?

I seem to have used the word ‘epic’ a lot in this post but if there’s anyone in the history of music for whom that word was invented it must be Meatloaf. However, he’d also give Def Leppard a run for their money when it came to wonky lyrics. I mean, just look at the title of this one – “I’d Lie For You (And That’s The Truth)”. Clever play on words or just plain dumb? On top of that there’s more clichés like ‘selling your soul’, ‘holding your hand’ and ‘moving mountains’. Somehow though, Meat manages to sound the right side of ridiculous just by the sheer force of his personality and stage persona. He’s joined for this performance by an un-name checked woman but whom my research (OK Wikipedia!) tells me is Patti Russo who toured and recorded with Meatloaf between 1993 and 2013. She still tours and “I’d Lie For You (And That’s The Truth)” regularly appears in her set list (and that’s no lie).

It’s a third week (of four) for Simply Red with “Fairground” at the top of the charts and we are still yet to see that aforementioned Blackpool Pleasure Beach video. To date, the single remains the band’s only No 1. In fact, despite all their hits over the years (31 Top 40 entries by my reckoning), very few have come close to getting to the peak. “Holding Back The Years” and “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” were both just one position away from hitting top spot but as for the rest – well, only one other made the Top 5. I guess they’re more of an albums band. A quick check of their discography shows that indeed they are with them racking up four No 1 studio albums plus a Greatest Hits collection that also topped the charts. Now that’s a criminal record!

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1PJ & DuncanU Krazy KatzNo chance
2SuggsCamden TownI did not
3Mariah CareyFantasyNever happened
4Nick Cave / Kylie MinogueWhere The Wild Roses GrowSang it, never bought it
5Jimmy NailBig RiverNope
6RadioheadLuckyNo but I had their OK Computer album
7Def LeppardWhen Love And Hate CollideNah
8MeatloafI’d Lie For You (And That’s The Truth)No
9Simply RedFairgroundAs if

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/m001wsmk/top-of-the-pops-12101995?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 10 AUG 1995

Posted on by 80stastic

The BBC4 commemorative shows celebrating the 60th anniversary of TOTP are finally over meaning a return to the schedule of the 1995 repeats. If you recall, we’d just entered August of that year with the Blur v Oasis Battle of Britpop rapidly coming into view. However you feel about that time now with nearly 30 years perspective, it was a heady experience for me personally, feeling right at the centre of it working in a record shop in Greater Manchester. However, neither band are on this TOTP with both their singles being released the Monday after it aired. Blur performed “Country House” in an exclusive slot the week before – “Roll With It” will get one in next week’s show.

Anyway, tonight’s host is Lisa I’Anson and we start with…who? Mary Kiani? Well, I should show a little humility after bigging up my record shop credentials earlier as Mary clocked up four solo UK Top 40 hits in the 90s plus three (including a Top Tenner) as the vocalist for dance project The Time Frequency. That’s not a bad career. In comparison, how many chart hits have I ever had? None obviously though my rendition of Nick Cave and Kylie’s “Where The Roses Grow” in guitar class back in the day was pretty special. Back to Mary though and her journey to the UK Top 40 wasn’t via your usual route. As a session singer, she toured with the credibility sapping Donny Osmond. Mary clearly didn’t care about any of that though. Post chart success, she would contribute her vocals to “The Simpsons’ Yellow Album”.

Yet in 1995, she was riding the dance tidal wave. This single – “When I Call Your Name” – went to No 1 in the UK Dance charts. I don’t remember it at all but listening to it now, it’s a pleasant enough ditty which wouldn’t sound out of place on an M People album. That’s either a compliment or an insult depending on your opinion of M People I guess. I’m not sure about the ‘white out’ special effects in this performance though – all a bit too Dr Who in the 70s.

Kiani has continued to release material sporadically over the years but remains a big draw on the gay club circuit and in Australia where she now lives.

Yes! This is what the kids want! Music played by a bunch of teenagers for teenagers! Ash were indeed teenagers having started the band back in 1992 when lead singer Tim Wheeler was only 15 years old. This performance of their first Top 40 hit “Girl From Mars” came just four weeks after the band had sat their final ‘A’ Level exams! Imagine that! I’d love to think that the band sat around saying “What shall we do in the Summer while we’re waiting for our exam results?” and one of them pipes up “Well, we could take a single to No 11 in the charts and appear on TOTP. Anyone fancy that? Or we could get a job fruit picking or even just bum around doing nothing. I’m easy”. Of course, Ash were much more involved in the music industry than that scenario suggests by this point. They’d already released a mini album called “Trailer” on indie label Infectious Records and three singles from it. In March 1995, they put out “Kung Fu”, the lead single from their full debut album “1977” which just missed the Top 40. Momentum was building and with the championing of them by Radio 1’s Steve Lamacq and the station giving major airplay to “Girl From Mars”, the inevitable big hit ensued. And quite right too. It’s a great tune, one of many the band would record. “1977” would go to No 1 but in many ways they are the perfect singles band. Indeed, in 2009/2010, they took The Wedding Present idea of releasing a single every month but upped the ante by making the cycle every two weeks. Over those two years, they released 27 singles.

I caught them live in 2011 in Manchester on the anniversary tour for their “Free All Angels” album (also a No 1) and they were great. However, my abiding association with “Girl From Mars” belongs to someone I was working with at the time. Cara was/is one of the nicest people you could meet but she had a reputation for being…erm…in a world of her own at times I think is the best way to put it. This state of being caused her to be known on the lunch rota as ‘Cara – on loan from Mars’. The description stuck rather and when she left after getting a job with Head Office, we bought her the single as a leaving present. I am always reminded of Cara whenever I hear “Girl From Mars” to this day.

It’s a second outing for the award winning video for “Waterfalls” by TLC next. The song was nominated in two categories at the 38th Annual Grammy Awards in 1996. As I type this, we’ve just had this year’s – the 66th – and there are a couple of parallels between the 1996 and 2024 shows. Both featured performances by Annie Lennox (and both songs she sang were cover versions) and both had Celine Dion presenting an award. Whatever you think of her music (and it all sounds hateful to me), it was a good news story to see her in public after all the reporting of her recent health problems.

Although “Waterfalls” didn’t win the gong for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals, they did walk away that year with the award for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals (blimey what a mouthful!) for “Creep”.

It’s a second song that has been on the show before next and perhaps rather surprisingly it’s another studio outing for Julian Cope with his single “Try Try Try”. Surprisingly? Well, the single only spent three weeks on the chart and only one of those (this week when it debuted at No 24) inside the Top 40. So how did it come to be on the show twice? Well, Julian was afforded an ‘exclusive’ slot a couple of weeks before the single was released. Although that explains the maths of it, a second studio appearance did seem a bit like overkill – Julian was hardly a mainstream pop star in 1995. Indeed, was he ever a mainstream anything? Apart from a brief spell in 1986/87 when Island Records tried to promote him as a more traditional rock star for the “Saint Julian” / “World Shut Your Mouth” era, Cope has always chosen a path less travelled. Conversely, maybe that was why the TOTP producers wanted him back on their show; as an antidote to the more generic, manufactured pop acts of the time. I mean just look at him here! Utterly bonkers with his Gandalf style hat and oversized hi-vis jacket with leopard print lining. Maybe it was just a case of counting though. A chart entry of No 24 was probably a big enough number to justify another go on the show.

A bigger mystery than the appearance of Julian himself on the show though is the person in the studio audience with the giant paper mache head that looks like the Mekon from the 2000 AD and Eagle comics. What was that all about?! Fortunately, @TOTPFacts is here with the answer:

Breaking free from the chains of being a potential one hit wonder comes Tina Arena who clocks up a second Top 40 entry with “Heaven Help My Heart”. Whereas her debut hit was intense and brooding, this one was a paint-by-numbers country ballad that, unlike Julian Cope, went straight down the middle of the road. Indeed, so bland was it that when Radio 1 DJ Chris Evans played it, he took it off air after a minute or so declaring it too easy listening for his zeitgeist riding, lad culture fawning, Britpop following show and despatched a (presumably all too willing) lackey to hand deliver it to Terry Wogan over at Radio 2. What a prick! Evans that is, not Terry. Ironically, within a couple of years, ballads like “Heaven Help My Heart” would become big chart hits in the UK from the likes of Shania Twain and LeeAnn Rimes as the last vestiges of Britpop played out.

Tina’s next single also featured the word ‘heaven’ in the title as she released a cover of Maria McKee’s “Show Me Heaven”. Gulp! Heaven help us all.

There have been some terrible cover versions to besmirch the charts over the years. More specifically, there have been some terrible Beatles covers. I’m thinking “Strawberry Fields Forever” by Candy Flip, Tiffany’s approximation “I Saw Him Standing There” and, of course, Bananarama and Lananeeneenoonoo’s take on “Help!” (no I don’t care that it was for charity, it’s shit). Despite the dreadful stink caused by all of these, this version of “I’m Only Sleeping” by Suggs also reeks to high heaven. Taken from his first solo album “The Lone Ranger”, it somehow went Top 10. As shown in the examples above, covering The Beatles isn’t for everyone and to my ears, Suggs makes a porcine one of it here. Did he really think he could just add his usual layer of ska pop over the original and get away with it. He doubles down on the error in the performance by doing his Suggs shtick of juddery movements (even doing a staged fall at one point) just to make sure we all knew that we were residents of Suggsworld for three minutes.

Incredibly, he managed to out-shite himself with another cover taken from the album the following year when he took on “Cecilia” by Simon & Garfunkel which led to the infamous Chris Eubank intro but that’s for a future post.

Another year and another controversial Madonna video. After the press backlash she received following the release of her “Erotica” album and coffee-table book Sex, in 1992 when she was deemed by some to have gone too far with her sexual explicit material, Madge seems initially to have decided to tone things down a bit. “I’ll Remember” was an unthreatening big ballad from the film With Honors with a more classic looking and dare I say it tasteful video. Her next studio album “Bedtime Stories” addressed subjects that were more about love than sex but then came the fourth and final single to be released from it. “Human Nature” was a direct response to the criticism she had received for “Erotica” and Sex – an answer song, a musical middle finger. Look at some of these lyrics:

“Oops, I didn’t know I couldn’t talk about sex…You punished me for telling you my fantasies…I’m not your bitch, don’t hang your shit on me”


Songwriters: Dave Hall / Madonna Ciccone / Kevin Harold Mc Kenzie / Shawn Mc Kenzie / Michael Deering
Human Nature lyrics © Wb Music Corp., Emi April Music Inc., Webo Girl Publishing Inc., Stone Jam Music, Wize Men Music Publishing, Webo Girl Publishing, In

Blimey! Then there’s the aforementioned video with Madonna and her dancers decked out in S&M gear (hell, even her pet chihuahua is dressed in leather!) and cavorting in small boxes which on reflection looks like a kinky version of Celebrity Squares! Clearly it’s about Madonna retaking control of the narrative but hadn’t we seen all this before and in a more provocative way? Remember the X-rated promo for “Justify My Love”? Talking of that track, the intro of “Human Nature” seems to mirror it with its hypnotic trip-hop beat opening with Madonna repeating the line “Express yourself, don’t repress yourself” over and over. All in all, I found the whole thing rather tiresome but what did I know? The single still made No 8 in the UK though it was notably not a big hit in America.

A week before the Battle of Britpop, we had another contest of the charts though not with the same levels of rivalry nor media attention. The Battle of the Boybands (which nobody called it at the time) saw the pretenders to the throne Boyzone on the same show as current kings Take That though I don’t think the latter were in the studio together as the clip is just a previous appearance re-shown. First up though are those nice Irish lads with their third hit single “So Good” which is up to No 3. Whilst Take That’s “Never Forget” lived up to its name as being one of the group’s most memorable songs even being performed at the Coronation Concert for King Charles III, “So Good” really didn’t fulfil the claim of its title being one of the band’s least remembered hits – in short, it’s so bad.

And so to the boyband winners. Take That are at No 1 for a second week with “Never Forget”. Although Boyzone would eventually amass a comparable amount of chart topping singles themselves, to my mind they always came up short when in a straight competition with Gary, Mark, Howard, Jason (and never forgetting Robbie of course!) for the title as the nation’s favourite 90s boyband. Maybe not the gulf in popularity that we saw in the 80s between Bros and Brother Beyond but a clear distance nonetheless. Just my personal view of course. Other opinions are available. What’s that? What about those other Irish lads Westlife? Oh feck off!

The play out track is “Don’t You Want Me” by Felix and if it sounds familiar then that’s probably because it was a hit three times in the UK during the 90s. This was its second incarnation making No 10. The original release was a No 6 hit in 1992 and in 1996 it returned to the charts peaking at No 17. Obviously, each release had a different mix but this practice of recycling dance tracks that had already been a chart success before was really prevalent around this time. “Don’t You Want Me” was on the Deconstruction Records label but given its release history, Reconstruction Records might have been a more apt name (chortle).

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Mary KianiWhen I Call Your NameNope
2AshGirl From MarsNo but I have theirBest Of album Intergalactic Sonic 7″s with it on
3TLCWaterfallsI did not
4Julian CopeTry Try TryNo No No
5Tina ArenaHeaven Help My HeartNah
6SuggsI’m Only SleepingDear me no
7MadonnaHuman NatureNegative
8BoyzoneSo GoodSo bad – no
9Take ThatNever ForgetIt’s a no
10FelixDon’t You Want MeNo I don’t

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/m001vvzc/top-of-the-pops-10081995