It’s a case of someone old someone new in this episode of TOTP with some artists that have been around for literally decades in some cases mingling with acts making their debut on the show. Our host is Jamie Theakston (again!) and we start with a group who were definitely in the ‘old’ bracket. If this had been 1983, an appearance by CultureClub on the show would have been a big deal as they were one of the biggest pop bands in the world. Fifteen years later though, did the pop kids of 1998 know who they were and, if they did, were they bothered in the slightest that they were back? I say ‘back’ but “I Just Wanna Be Loved”, whilst a new song, didn’t immediately herald an album of never before heard material. Rather, it was a solitary new track to promote a Best Of album called “Greatest Moments”, a collection designed to cash in on a reunion tour. The tour was a success and did, a year later, lead to that album of new material with the release of 1999’s “Don’t Mind If I Do”. However, it seemed it was a case of audiences loving the hits live but not being arsed about hearing any new recordings and it floundered peaking at a lowly No 64 in the UK chart.
I’ve got to say that compared to some of the hits from their glory days*, “I Just Wanna Be Loved” does not compare. Some limp lovers rock sir? I’ll pass thanks as should have the band as this was somnambulistic rubbish. How did it get to No 4 then I hear you ask? A good promotion campaign backed with the tour and that Greatest Hits album I’m guessing.
*Apart from “Karma Chameleon” which is and will always be absolute garbage.
And what was the deal with George’s (and Mikey’s) headgear? I think @TOTPFacts sums it up nicely:
Having said all of that, I have a confession to make. I saw Culture Club on that 1998 tour. Me, my wife and some friends went though, in my defence, I was more interested in the two other artists on the bill, The Human League and ABC. I have to say that I got a bit pissed up before we went to the concert and so I can’t remember much about it other than Culture Club played the dog shit “Karma Chameleon” as the last song of the set with Boy George saying that it wouldn’t be a Culture Club gig without them playing that track which I guess is true. Various machinations in the band’s story followed including a period where Mikey Craig and Jon Moss recruited a new singer to replace George who was busy with other projects (it all came to nothing) and a BBC documentary about a planned 2014 tour that didn’t happen. Ultimately though, they got themselves together and have toured and had a Las Vegas residency as recently as 2023.
Next, we get some more of this backstage shenanigans nonsense that debuted last week. If the idea behind it was to demonstrate that the show remains a pull for some of the biggest names in pop/rock music, I’m not sure that Theakston saying that he’s there with Kele le Roc really makes that point. The whole thing is completely undermined anyway by using it as a segue to a performance by a band who aren’t actually there as we get a repeat showing of The BeautifulSouth doing “Perfect 10” from four weeks back. Yes, fourweeks back in which time the single has fallen down the charts consistently from its debut peak position of No 2, albeit whilst remaining inside the Top 10 until it finally dropped out of it this week thereby creating a rather odd looking on screen caption reading ‘The Beautiful South – Perfect 10 – 11’. My first observation is why reshow it now and my second is ‘10 – 11’ – I don’t think it’s going to rival the current ‘six-seven’ slang meme.
From a band who’d been around for nearly a decade to someone making his TOTP debut. I knew the name Lyndon David Hall from working in a record shop and knew what type of music he made but I never actually heard any of it until now. I wasn’t expecting much especially from a song called “Sexy Cinderella” but I was pleasantly surprised. I mean, it’s all very bump ‘n’ grind which isn’t really my thing (I could do without the lyrics about getting freaky with blindfolds if I’m honest) but the guy could sing and, I don’t know, it just feels like a proper song with a degree of musicality to it unlike something like that which Dru Hill served up the other week. For a while, Hall was one of the brightest new lights in UK R’n’B winning a MOBO in 1998 and being the first UK artist to be voted ‘Best Male Artist’ by readers of Blues&Soul magazine in 1999. However, after releasing three albums and appearing in the hit film LoveActually, Hall was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and died in 2006 aged just 31 following complications resulting from the stem cell transplant he received in 2005. He had been in remission at the time of his death.
Theakston’s pinching my lines! In his intro to the next artist he says “Next up, looking more like Blondie than…erm…Blondie, it’s TheCardigans”. I made that connection in my review of the 16 October show when I said of the band’s performance of “My Favourite Game”:
“Persson looks effortlessly cool up there on stage in this performance with her peroxide blond hair backlit by the studio lights making her look more like Debbie Harry than Debbie Harry did in the late 90s”
OK, I’m not claiming that I was unique in coming to that conclusion – it’s hardly a startling revelation that nobody else could possibly have made. In fact, it’s a blindingly obvious comparison but even so. It’s more evidence to add to my increasingly large file named ‘Jamie Theakston’s a bit of a prick’. I may have more to add later.
Seemingly not content with this fake backstage set up, we were now getting more and more personal video messages from artists introducing their own promos. Last week we had Michael Stipe with a segue into REM’s latest release and now here was Bono to lead us into U2’s single “The Sweetest Thing”. Released to promote their greatest hits compilation “The Best Of 1980 – 1990”, it did what it said on the tin in that it is a sweet song with a sweet story behind it. Written by Bono for his wife Ali to apologise for being in the recording studio and forgetting her birthday, it was originally released as a B-side to the 1987 single “Where The Streets Have No Name”. However, it was polished up and re-recorded for inclusion on that aforementioned Best Of album.
The song is simple yet tuneful but is turned into something else by the attendant video which saw Bono on a carriage ride across the Georgian mile in Dublin. In an attempt to apologise to his wife, he enlists various performers to join him along the journey including Boyzone*, the boxer Steve Collins, members of the Riverdance cast, some Chippendales, and the Artane Boys marching band who not only had links to U2 (drummer Larry Mullen Jr was once a member) but to the wider rock world via the appearance of some of their number on the artwork for INXS’s 1992 album “Welcome To Wherever You Are”. All of this undoubtedly adds to the charm of the video but for me, it works mainly because Bono doesn’t attempt to mine along instead remaining facing the camera with his mouth closed throughout. With his hat and wraparound glasses he reminds me slightly of Elvis Costello here. “The Sweetest Thing” debuted at No 3 on a chart that made history with the entire Top 5 made up of brand new singles for the first time ever.
*Apparently Boyzone recorded their own version of “The Sweetest Thing” but the record company suits didn’t think it sounded like a Boyzone track and any plans for a potential release were permanently scrapped. Searches of the internet have not revealed any trace of their version of the song which is probably for the best.
After Lyndon David Hall earlier, we now get another UK R’n’B artist, also from London who also won a MOBO award (two actually), who was also making their TOTP debut and who I was also not expecting much from but whose song I surprisingly thought was not bad. Kele Le Roc (real name Kelly Biggs) whom I’m beginning to think of as a female version of Lyndon David Hall so closely did their career trajectories run in parallel, would have two Top 10 hits to her name by the end of the 90s starting with this one – “Little Bit Of Lovin’” featuring a vocal that reminds me of Randy Crawford. In 2001, she would team up with Basement Jaxx on the No 6 hit “Romeo” and would go on to work with such dance luminaries as Shy FX and T Power. She would trump all of the above though in 2020 when she collaborated on a version of Baby D’s “Let Me Be Your Fantasy” with Gok Wan – no really!
Back to 1998 though and “Little Bit Of Lovin’” was co-written by Robbie Nevil who had that hit “C’est La Vie” back in 1987. He couldn’t have had anything to do with coming up with Kelly’s stage name could he? “C’est La Vie”? Kele Le Roc? Please yourselves!
From a group who’d been around for 20 odd years (U2) to a TOTP debut (Kele Le Roc) to…how would you describe AlanisMorissette at this point in her career? An established artist? Yeah, let’s go with that. Certainly, the monster success of her “Jagged Little Pill” album had positioned her squarely in that category. However, with that level of profile comes expectation and the task of following her breakthrough third studio album was daunting to say the least. In the end, topping sales of 33 million worldwide proved unachievable and “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie” sold a quarter of the copies of its predecessor. Still, 8 million units shifted is hardly too shabby.
Lead single “Thank U” was a strong introduction to the album. A multi-faceted track based around an hypnotic drum loop sample from Sly And The Family Stone, it was also very suitable for daytime radio play – Morissette was canny enough not to veer too far away from the sound that had made her a superstar. Then there were its lyrics which added an extra layer of depth. Telling the tale of her inner epiphany of self knowledge following a trip to India, they were more personal in nature than many a mainstream hit would normally feature. However, what really caused a splash weren’t its sonic properties but the visual ones that went with the video. Featuring a totally nude Alanis wondering around various public locations in Downtown Los Angeles, it was an arresting promo to say the least. Thankfully there was no chance of Morissette being actually arrested herself on public indecency charges as it was filmed in a closed set. It would become her highest charting single in the UK when it peaked at No 5 as, despite “Jagged Little Pill” containing five hits, none of them got higher than No 7. It’s the video that we see here in another example of the relaxing of executive producer Chris Cowey’s no video policy albeit that we get a personal message from Alanis introducing it (another Cowey innovation).
And so we arrive at an artist whose first hit was in 1965! Yes, it’s Cher who, rather surprisingly, would have the UK’s biggest selling single of 1998 with “Believe”. Our host’s intro does, as I suspected, provide me with some more evidence for my ‘Jamie Theakston’s a bit of a prick’ file when he says of Cher “She’s no spring chicken but she’s still a top bird”. As this will be No 1 for seven weeks, I think I’ll just finish this post with some of its chart facts:
No 1 in 23 countries
As of 2017, “Believe” had sold 1,830,000 copies in the UK making it the biggest selling single by a female artist in UK chart history
As of 2025, it was certified 5 times platinum by the BPI
In the US, “Believe” was ranked the number one song of 1999 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the Hot Dance Club Play charts
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Culture Club
I Just Wanna Be Loved
Negative
2
The Beautiful South
Perfect 10
Its a no
3
Lyndon David Hall
Sexy Cinderella
I did not
4
The Cardigans
My Favourite Game
Good tune but no
5
U2
The Sweetest Thing
Nope
6
Kele Le Roc
Little Bit Of Lovin’
Nah
7
Alanis Morissette
Thank U
No
8
Cher
Believe
I did not
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
We’ve entered October in these 1998 TOTP repeats meaning that we’re three quarters through the year already. As such, the album release schedules will have been set with an eye on the all important Christmas period. I wonder how many of the artists on this TOTP also had an album to flog and also how well it sold? Our host is Jayne Middlemiss again and we start with Steps with “One For Sorrow”. Despite dropping down the charts from No 7 to No 10, it’s a third appearance on the show for this one because…oh, I’ve no idea anymore and to be honest I’m bored of trying to work out the machinations of the TOTP running order in this era of the show. Or am I just being naive? Was it all about promoting the artist’s album and nothing to do with reflecting the state of the singles chart? Well, let’s look at the factual evidence – did Steps have an album to promote? Yes they did. Their debut “Step One” was in the shops from 14 September so there very much would have been an imperative to advertise it. Maybe it was all as purely cynical as that.
Incidentally, Steps were kept off the No 1 spot in both the singles and album charts in this year by the same artist – Manic Street Preachers. Bizarrely, that chart battle was revived 23 years later when the Manics’ album “The Ultra Vivid Lament” pipped Steps’ “What The Future Holds Pt. 2” to the top spot in 2021. Missing out on a No 1 three times to the same band? It really was a case of “One For Sorrow” for Steps.
Now, this next hit was quite a surprise. Not because the artist behind it was in the charts; as Jayne Middlemiss correctly informs us in her intro, this was the 20th single of their career of which 16 had been UK Top 40 hits. No, it was more its lofty position in the charts. Of those previous 16 hits for TheBeautifulSouth, only five had gone Top 10 (albeit including a No 1). Indeed, their last single release had peaked at No 43 and yet suddenly they were debuting at No 2 with “Perfect 10”. The lead single from their sixth studio album “Quench” (there it is!), it sold 89,000 copies in its first week though it would prove to be the band’s final Top 10 hit. How did this one become such a big hit? The lazy answer would be heavy first week of release discounting but if you check out its chart life, that doesn’t really stack up as it would spend four weeks inside the Top Ten and two and a half months on the Top 40. I’m guessing that it must have been had high levels of consistent airplay but also it was about its sound. Sometimes, The Beautiful South would do reflective, sentimental tracks like “I’ll Sail This Ship Alone”, “Let Love Speak Up Itself”, “Bell Bottomed Tear” and “Blackbird On The Wire” which weren’t always their most successful tunes but they also did little nuggets of perky, breezy pop like “You Keep It All In”, “We Are Each Other”, “Don’t Marry Her” and “How Long’s A Tear Take To Dry?”. It seems to me that these were the songs that, whether by luck or design, got the higher chart positions. “Perfect 10” was definitely in the latter category being one of their finest jaunty pop songs.
Whatever the sonic qualities of the music though, the lyrics were always sharp and incisive and in this case was a biting sexual politics narrative about rejecting the absurdity of ideas about conventional beauty. With a funky rhythm and catchiest of choruses, it’s surely one of their best known and loved songs. As an advert for their sixth studio album “Quench”, it was magnificent and said album duly topped the charts and became the 14th best selling title in the UK for 1998 despite only being released on the 12th October. Incidentally, you can see the original painting of the album’s specially commissioned artwork in Hull (where I live) where it hangs in the Ferens Art Gallery.
It’s happened again – another hit that I have no memory of at all. I’m wondering if by this point, I wasn’t at work in the record shop having been signed off sick with my poor mental health that I wrote about in a recent post. Anyway, the hit in question is “The Way” by Fastball. Jayne Middlemiss describes it as “good old southern-fried entertainment” by which she means…I’m not exactly sure but she clarifies by saying the band are from Austin, Texas. Formed in 1992, this track brought the band their big break by topping the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart for seven weeks whilst parent album “All The Pain Money Can Buy” went platinum in America. So how come I’ve never heard of them? Well, the album did nothing over here, they never had another UK chart hit and “The Way” only spent three weeks inside the Top 40. All of which is a shame as “The Way” is rather good, great even. Yes, it’s very derivative with the twangy guitar verses reminiscent of Urge Overkill’s cover of Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon” whilst the chorus puts me in mind of some of Elvis Costello’s more tuneful moments but a great song is a great song and this one has me hooked. Even its lyrics have an interesting origin story being about the 1997 disappearance of an elderly couple who left their Texan home to visit a nearby festival but were found dead two weeks later at the bottom of a ravine hundreds of miles away from their intended destination. Apparently, the band are still an ongoing entity having last released an album in 2024. I should maybe investigate them further.
Next another act with an album to sell but sadly for Republica, things didn’t work out as well as they did for the artists we’d already seen on this TOTP. Having successfully joined the plethora of female-fronted bands that were around at this time in the charts – I’m thinking Sleeper, Elastica, Echobelly, Garbage etc… – in 1997 with two hit singles and a Top 5 album, Saffron and the lads were quick off the mark with a follow up, so quick in fact that their sophomore album was called “Speed Ballads”. It seemed a sensible strategy – strike while the iron’s hot and all that. However, two obstacles stood in their way to consolidating their initial success. Firstly, their record label Deconstruction folded shortly after the album hit the shops and it never got a full release elsewhere in major territories like America. Secondly, if lead single “From Rush Hour With Love” was any sort of gauge of quality, their new material wasn’t very good. I don’t wish to be mean but it sounds like a jam session in search of a song. Presumably at the end of said session, the band looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders and said “that’ll have to do”. As they trooped out of the rehearsal room, someone might have said “we could spruce it up by giving it a clever title, a pun or something like that. How about “From Rush Hour With Love’?”. I have to admit that I didn’t get the James Bond wordplay immediately perhaps because what Saffron – who seems to be doing her best Toyah impression in this performance – actually sings is ‘From the rush hour with love’. It’s all a bit of a mess. To their credit, Republica are still active to this day albeit after a few hiatuses with an album of new material due for release in 2025.
Sarah McLachlan is one of those names that I was always aware of but whom I knew/know very little of. As such, I was surprised to see her in this TOTP as it had escaped my attention that she’d ever had a UK Top 40 hit. In my defence, “Adia” is the only time she bothered the UK chart compilers despite her very consistent output of material. As ‘The life and times of Sarah McLachlan’ was never going to be my Mastermind subject of choice, I read up a bit about the Canadian singer-songwriter and she sounds like a truly marvellous person. In 1997, she founded the LilithFair touring festival to showcase female musicians. In 2002, using funds from Lilith Fair, she founded the Sarah McLachlan Music Outreach program providing music education for inner city children after noticing that music programs were being cut from the school curriculum. Evolving into the Sarah McLachlan School of Music, in the 2024/25 school year, it provided private and group lessons to 1,754 students. Her adverts for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) has helped raise $30 million for the charity whilst she has also appeared at Live 8, a tsunami relief benefit concert and is a member of the Canadian charity Artists Against Racism. A true philanthropist.
Having said all of that, I can’t bring myself to be a fan of this track “Adia”. It’s all a bit overwrought and boy does it go on. When I was watching this, on numerous occasions I thought this must be the end but then Sarah would rev up for yet another lap of the chorus. Clearly, a lot of people disagreed with this analysis though. In America, the single went Top 3 and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance losing out only to Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”. “Adia”’s parent album “Surfacing” went to No 2 and eight times platinum in the US. Flamin’ ada!
The next artist had an album out the Monday after this TOTP aired and it was that often cited ‘difficult second album’. Having conquered the UK with their debut No 1 album “1977” in…erm…1996, Ash were faced with the dilemma that has plagued many a band before and since, how to come up with a second album under pressure after you’d had your whole life to write the first one. Actually, Ash’s ‘whole life’ didn’t amount to that much time did it when you consider that their debut was named after the year in which the band members were born and that lead singer Tim Wheeler was famously still at school when it was released. Anyway, you get my drift. When faced with the task of crafting songs for a second album, it didn’t help that Wheeler was suffering from a case of writer’s block. Added to that was his desire not just to draft “1977 Pt II” but rather come up with songs with a harder sound that would establish the band as a more serious artist. The addition of guitarist Charlotte Hatherley as a permanent member of the line up proved to be the catalyst for the creation of new material and “Nu-Clear Sounds” was duly released.
Although generally well received by the music press, it failed to do the business its predecessor did, shifting about a third of the units “1977” had. If that was a disappointment to the band and their label, it was also a big let down to record retailers who had been banking on a big seller in the run up to Christmas. In the Our Price chain for whom I was working, an edict came out from Head Office that stores were officially not allowed to sell out of the album – I presume it was some sort of negotiating tactic employed to gain beneficial discounts on the album. Sadly for everyone concerned, we never looked likely to run out of copies of “Nu-Clear Sounds” which is a shame as lead single “Jesus Says” is quite the tune. “Iggy Pop-tastic” is how Jayne Middlemiss describes it and you can see her point. It’s a relentlessly driving, garage rock track the lyrics of which reference the pressures that come with a job promotion and using alcohol to deal with them. Fast forward three years and Ash would release the album “Free All Angels” which would return them to former glories with a handful of hit singles and the No 1 position in the charts. In the era after TOTP had been axed, they made a conscious decision to become a ‘singles band’ embarking on the “A-Z Series”, a series of 26 singles, each represented by a letter of the alphabet and released fortnightly over a 12 month period.
I know I’ve been banging on about this for what seems like ages but this is just nonsense. Why on earth is “To The Moon And Back” by Savage Garden being given another slot in the running order when we first saw it six weeks ago when it debuted at No 3 and since then has recorded chart positions of 4 – 8 – 10 – 10 – 10 and 12? If it had featured on one of those three weeks at No 10 it might have made some sense but to give it a second shot when it’s dropped out of the Top 10?! Perhaps the truth lies in the fact that the duo’s album was residing in the Top 3 at this time some six months after its release and having spent the majority of that time between Nos 41 and 11? Was the murky and mucky business of album promotion at play here again?
It’s another new No 1 (the sixth in six weeks) and it’s from those Irish girls who fight like their da’s. Yes, it’s B*Witched with the follow up to their debut hit “C’est La Vie” and this time they were on a “Rollercoaster”. Two No1s out of two wasn’t unique but it was still a considerable achievement for a new pop act.
I wasn’t sure if I could remember how this one went but it was very familiar when I listened to it but not just because my grey cells were firing into action – there were two extra reasons why it resonated. Firstly, the bridge to the chorus sounds like “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” by The Beatles (no, it does!) and the chorus is very reminiscent of the theme tune to 70s children show HereComeTheDoubleDeckers! I swear down! Anyway, this performance sees the group pull off some of the niftiest dance moves in a confined space in the history of the show. It’s almost exhausting to watch. In fact, one of the Double Deckers characters (Billie) would have been proud of them! And yes, of course B*Witched had an album coming out ten days after this TOTP was broadcast which would go double platinum in the UK.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it
1
Steps
One For Sorrow
No
2
The Beautiful South
Perfect 10
I didn’t
3
Fastball
The Way
Negative
4
Republica
From Rush Hour With Love
Nope
5
Sarah McLachlan
Adia
Nah
6
Ash
Jesus Says
No but I had their Best Of with it on
7
Savage Garden
To The Moon And Back
Didn’t happen
8
B*Witched
Rollercoaster
And no
Disclaimer
I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).
All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree
We’ve skipped a week in these TOTP repeats due to the 6th December show being presented by Gary Glitter. Having checked the running order, I don’t think we missed much. In fact, on a personal level, I’m relieved to not have to review Peter Andre and 3T again. Talking of ‘again’, Toni Braxton was on again and there seemed to be a disconnect between executive producer Ric Blaxill’s perception of the pulling power of (Miss) Diana Ross and her ability to sell records at this time. Slap bang in the middle of the show were Oasis cover band No Way Sis with their version of “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing” which might have been of some curiosity value but, like Mike Flowers Pops before them, was hardly the stuff of legend. The only performance I would have liked to have watched was show opener Mansun doing “Wide Open Space”. I’ll have to pick that one up in my review of the year post.
Anyway, that’s what we missed but let’s get on with the show we did get to see. Our host is Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds who doesn’t strike me as the most charismatic of choices but let’s see how he does. It’s a very workmanlike start as he introduces ManicStreetPreachers who are performing the fourth and last hit taken from their “Everything Must Go” album called “Australia”. “Everyone’s a classic” says Broudie and I guess he’s not wrong as every one of them went Top 10. To put that into context, up to 1996, the only time the band had scored a Top Tenner was with their cover of “Theme From M.A.S.H. (Suicide Is Painless)” from the NME compilation album “Ruby Trax”. In fact, of the next seven singles they released after that, the highest chart peak achieved was No 15. Is it fair to say that the Manics were better known as an albums band rather than a singles one prior to the disappearance of Richey Edwards? Probably but then who would have foreseen the level of sales the band would enjoy on their reemergence as a trio?
“Australia” pretty much followed the template of the album’s previous singles though that’s not to say they all sounded the same but there was definite evidence of a decision to go in a more commercial direction in these hits, albeit the band didn’t desert all their trademark angular pop/rock and intellectual lyrics origins. The “Everything Must Go” album changed everything for the band – they were back and more successful than ever. Their next single release was “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” which would give the their first No 1 single. They were bigger than they’d ever been but what did that mean for their fans who had been there since the beginning? I can certainly remember that sixth form phase of not wanting to like anything the masses were into? Was there a similar sentiment amongst the Manics faithful?
With Christmas fast approaching, it’s time to bring out the big ballads as artists jockey for the coveted festive No 1. It’s a trick as old as time but it would often bring about huge results and Damage weren’t immune to its appeal. Only their second hit in and they’d already rolled out the ballad barrel. Now, I don’t remember “Forever” at all but it was actually more than just another single by a boy band. How so? Well, it was co-written by one Steve Mac who had previously been behind dance hits such as “(I Wanna Give You) Devotion” by Nomad and “Hear The Drummer (Get Wicked)” by Chad Jackson. However, his career changed direction with “Forever” as it came to the attention of Simon Cowell who loved it and asked Mac to join his songwriting team for a new group he was putting together. The name of that group? IOYOU. Not familiar with them? You’ll know them by the name they finally settled on – Westlife. Yes, those fresh faced Irish lads with a penchant for singing sugary ballads on stools that dominated the charts in the late 90s. Mac would go on to work with artists of the calibre of Aaron Carter, JLS, The Saturdays, Shayne Ward, O-Town, Olly Murs and Susan Boyle. Yes, I am being facetious – Mac has also worked with artists such as Ed Sheeran Biffy Clyro, London Grammar and Kylie Minogue but there’s still an awful lot of garbage in there that he’s been at least partly responsible for and it all came about because of one song that he wrote called “Forever”. The damage (ahem) that song has done.
Next up is a real stinker which I had forgotten all about until this honking reminder. Elton John loves a collaboration from as far back as 1976 when he teamed up with Kiki Dee on “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” then on into the 80s with the likes of Millie Jackson, George Michael, Jennifer Rush and Cliff Richard. As the 90s dawned, he worked with George Michael (again) and did a whole album of collaborations called “Duets” with the likes of RuPaul, Marcella Detroit and Kiki Dee (again). And then came this – a duet with Luciano Pavarotti called “LiveLikeHorses”. Host Ian Broudie says it was to raise money for Bosnia and AIDS charities in his intro but then slyly gives his own verdict on the musical worth of the track by saying “Never mind the song, just buy the record”. He’s not wrong as it’s a steaming pile of shite. Basically just another of those plodding, pedestrian ballads that Elton churned out in the 90s, the plan seemed to be to just get Pavarotti to add his esteemed vocals to it so that it would be transformed into something approaching “Miss Sarajevo” by Passengers from the previous year which, of course, Pavarotti had featured on. That track though elicited a genuine emotional reaction whereas “Live Like Horses” provoked a shrug and a “meh”.
There’s a story that when it was performed on TheNationalLotteryShow, host Bob Monkhouse spoke to both Elton and Luciano separately and it transpired that both thought the song was awful but believed that the other loved it and so promoted it together with gusto. If only they’d expressed those views to each other then we might have been spared all of this. The track appears on Elton’s 1997 album “The Big Picture” without Pavarotti’s vocals and no, I’m not going to inflict that on you. It is Christmas after all.
I’m quite liking Ian Broudie as host and the sly little digs that he’s getting in. After dissing “Live Like Horses” in the nicest possible way, he then turns his attention to Phil Collins, accusing him of “still banging on”. However, he’s not banging on his drums but…playing guitar? What was going on here then? Well, the facts were that “It’sInYourEyes” was the second single taken from the “Dance Into The Light” album and I’m guessing it didn’t live long in anyone’s mind’s eye despite Phil’s turn on the guitar. Its chart peak of No 30 would seem to back me up. Stealing the melody from “Any Time At All” by The Beatles probably didn’t help. That track was from the soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night in which a very young Phil had been in the audience for the concert sequence at the film’s end. However, the song which featured 13 year old Phil in the crowd – “You Can’t Do That” – was cut from the film meaning Phil wasn’t actually in it. So maybe it was a case of Phil’s revenge, him borrowing heavily from “Any Time At All”? As the TOTP caption hinted at, Phil would see out the 90s recording the soundtrack to the Walt Disney version of the Tarzan story. Please God let the promotion for it not have featured Phil in a loincloth.
After Elton John and Phil Collins before him, here’s a third musical heavyweight on the show in the diminutive form of Prince although he was officially known as symbol or The Artist Formerly Known As Prince or TAFKAP or The Artist or something (or nothing) by this point. For two of these artists, their long list of hits was coming to an end and sadly for His Purpleness, he was one of them. His offering to the record buying public this Christmas was a cover of “BetchaByGollyWow” that was originally a hit for The Stylistics in 1972. It all seems a bit unnecessary in retrospect and I’m glad that his final hit in the UK wasn’t a cover version – that would have seemed a bit perverse given his huge vault of songs that he wrote himself. His final two hits in this country came courtesy of the same song when “1999” was rereleased in 1998 and also the following year to coincide with new year celebrations for both entering 1999 and leaving it for the new millennium. Yes, it was an obvious and possibly cynical move but at least he ended his UK chart story with a classic song.
It’s that song by TheBeautifulSouth next. Yes, the one that Terry Wogan would often threaten to play the album version of (I’m guessing he never did) – it can only be “Don’tMarryHer”. The second single released from their “Blue Is The Colour” album, for me, this was even better than predecessor “Rotterdam” which itself had been made the Top 5 and been a massive radio hit. We all know the background story to this one with the lyrics having to be drastically revised for its release as a single. I like both versions though replacing “sweaty bollocks” with “Sandra Bullocks” was a bit of a stretch. In some ways, “Don’t Marry Her” is the definitive Beautiful South song – a jaunty, catchy melody allied to biting, bitter lyrics that speak of how life really is rather than some sanitised image that pop songs can sometimes present. It’s the first track on the album so it was a hard hitting introduction to their latest work; presumably that was deliberate on behalf of the band.
I was working in the Our Price store in Stockport this Christmas and I recall our Area Manager – the sadly passed away Lorcan Devine – sending a message to stores telling us all to go big on stocking up on “Blue Is The Colour” on the strength of the “Don’t Marry Her” single on account of it being, in his words, a belter and potential chart topper. I didn’t disagree with him but the expected sales of the album didn’t quite pan out as Lorcan had anticipated with the single peaking at No 8 (albeit that the album did go to No 1) and he had to admit to getting it wrong. Probably not being able to play the damned thing in the shop due to the opening track’s use of the “f” word didn’t help!
After a very memorable song comes one I’d forgotten all about. In fact, pressed to name any songs by SnoopDoggyDogg, I wouldn’t be able to get beyond “What’s My Name?”. There were others though (loads of them actually including a No 1 with Katy Perry) and “Snoop’sUpsideYaHead” was his fourth. Obviously based around the Gap Band hit, it actually featured their vocalist Charlie Wilson as well. As with Prince earlier, it seems rather superfluous and indeed contrived (Snoops/Oops). In fact, of more interest to me is my discovery that “Oops Upside Ya Head” was originally titled “I Don’t Believe You Want To Get Up And Dance (Oops)”. Keep that bit of trivia and mark it ‘essential pop music quiz info’.
We have a case of premature chart action at No 1 as Boyzone have gone too early with their attempt at securing the festive chart topper. After narrowly missing out in the previous two years with cover versions of The Osmonds (“Love Me For A Reason”) and Cat Stevens (“Father And Son”), their third tilt at the Christmas bestseller was a song that they co-wrote themselves* in “ADifferentBeat”.
*Actually, it was all members of the band apart from Mikey Graham. Presumably he was off having his haircut on the day they wrote it judging by his shaved head in this performance.
By releasing the single on 2nd December, Boyzone created a situation where there were too many weeks and too many other big releases to come after it for them to be able to hang on to the top spot until the Christmas chart was announced. Or maybe they knew what was coming (the Dunblane song and the third single from the Spice Girls) and so went early with “A Different Beat” so they wouldn’t be up against either of those releases in week one thereby ensuring themselves another No 1. Perhaps they should have just reversed the order of the first two singles released from the album and put their cover of “Words” by the Bee Gees out as their Christmas hit. I’m thinking it was a stronger song than “A Different Beat” which sounded like it was trying too hard to be on the soundtrack to The LionKing with its “Ee Ay Oh” chorus and African chants.
I mentioned earlier that our Area Manager had misjudged the sales potential of “Don’t Marry Her” but he wasn’t the only one encouraged into ordering too many copies of a single that Christmas. I went over the top on “A Different Beat” having nearly sold out of “Words” before it. Not wanting to do the same with the follow up, I overstocked on it massively. Doh!
There’s no 20th December show as it was hosted by Shaun Ryder who spent the whole time doing Jimmy Saville impressions so obviously BBC4 weren’t going to show that. I’m not doing a post about the Christmas Day TOTP either as I’ve reviewed pretty much everything on there already in the regular shows. I will, however, be writing a review of the whole year before moving into the 1997 repeats.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Manic Street Preachers
Australia
No but I had the album
2
Damage
Forever
No
3
Elton John / Luciana Pavarotti
Live Like Horses
Absolutely not
4
Phil Collins
It’s In Your Eyes
But not in my ears Phil – NO
5
Prince
Betcha By Golly Wow
Nah
6
The Beautiful South
Don ‘t Marry Her
Liked it, didn’t buy it
7
Snoop Doggy Dogg
Snoops Upside Ya Head
Nope
8
Boyzone
A Different Beat
I ordered loads of it but buy it? Never!
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.
Writing two of these blog posts a week can be quite a drain on the well of creativity. Consequently, I have returned to my 1996 diary for inspiration and it’s certainly thrown a memory up though not one that I’m very proud of. Two days after this TOTP aired, I was out in Manchester with my wife and a coupe of friends. The plan was to have a few drinks and then go to Chinatown first and then for a meal. And we did do all of that so what was the problem? Well, unfortunately I imbibed a few too many alcoholic beverages along the way and by the time I sat down to eat in the Yang Sing restaurant I was completely plastered, off my face, hammered. That would have been bad enough but here’s the real kicker and this was unbelievable. The table next to us had noticed my inebriated state and had engaged in conversation with us along the lines of “dearie me, is he alright?”. In an attempt to prove that I was indeed OK and more than that, not drunk at all, I proceeded to tell them that I had to be at work early the next day as I worked in the Our Price in Stockport and we were having our Christmas merchandising, signage and decorations installed. Back in those days, the company employed outside contractors to come in and do all that sort of stuff. By the end of my time at Our Price, I’m pretty sure the staff were expected to do all that sort of thing. Now we get to the really weird bit. One of the women on the next table the informs me that she works for the company putting up the merchandising and is doing the Stockport store tomorrow. Excellent! So literally in a few hours time when no doubt I will feel as rough as a badger’s arse, I’ll be opening the shop doors to the woman next to me who has witnessed me completely destroyed by drink. So, not embarrassing at all then. My diary doesn’t record what happened at work on the Monday other than it was a quiet day presumably meaning I was hung over and hiding in the stockroom away from the counter and other human beings. I wonder if this TOTP has anyone on it to match my level of humiliation?
Nothing embarrassing about opening act ManicStreetPreachers who are in the studio to perform their new single “Kevin Carter”. The third track lifted from their “Everything Must Go” album, it was also their third Top 10 hit on the spin. To give this achievement some context, their previous 13 singles had given them just one. This really was phoenix from the flames stuff given that the band had suffered the loss of main lyricist Richey Edwards. Having said that, “Kevin Carter” was one of the songs demoed for Edwards before his disappearance and which he wrote the lyrics for about the titular Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist who took his own life in 1994 haunted by the images of famine and death that he had taken in Sudan.
It’s a very spiky track with a rhythm that judders and skitters about and not the strongest chorus but then there’s the middle eight trumpet solo by drummer Sean Moore which is actually quite exquisite. I guess it would have been difficult logistically to have him play the solo and be on the drums simultaneously in this performance. Such a striking piece of music was it that it was used as the theme music to the ITV Wales current affairs show WalesThisWeek. No, really. See…
Ooh now, here’s something that’s truly mortifying! What in the world was this all about?! Well, it’s the obligatory dance tune on tonight’s show and it arrives courtesy of Jeremy Healy&Amos. Jeremy, of course, started his music career as a member of Haysi Fantayzee but went on to carve out a diverse career as a superstar DJ and musical director for fashion house Victoria’s Secret and labels launched by the likes of Jennifer Lopez and Gwen Stefani. Amos was that bloke from Emmerdale who ran the Woolpack pub. No, of course he wasn’t but he might have well have been for all the information I can find out about Healy’s partner in crime and let’s have it right, “Stamp!”was a crime of music. This track is all over the place. There’s some record decks scratching, funk style bass lines, some de rigueur dream trance keyboards flourishes and some repeated spoken word Spanish all in the mix. And then there’s the performance which is absolutely bonkers. I guess it’s trying to reflect the mishmash of styles on display with flamenco dancers, a ludicrously moustachioed man on bongos and in the centre of it all is Jeremy Healy gurning away and generally making a total prat of himself. There’s very little online about this hit – Healy’s Wikipedia page doesn’t mention it at all – and quite right too as we should all try and expunge it from our memories. A total embarrassment.
With their repertoire of sardonic, social commentary yet beautifully crafted songs, I don’t think TheBeautifulSouth could be accused of being a national embarrassment. Indeed, Paul Heaton is more of a national treasure. He even offered to nationalise his songs so that every time they are played on radio the state would receive the royalties revenue and could use it to improve living standards. Predictably, the Conservative government of the time refused his generous offer of a gift to the British public.
One of those songs that would have been included in his proposal was “Rotterdam (Or Anywhere)” the lead single from fifth studio album “Blue Is The Colour”. Perhaps one of their most well known songs and one of their biggest hits (it peaked at No 5), it was inspired by the lack of a welcome Paul Heaton received in a snooty bar in Rotterdam which he perceived didn’t want ‘his type’ as part of their clientele. Paul has refuted the idea that it’s a criticism of Rotterdam itself but more of the type of people who consider themselves the beautiful elite whom you see everywhere. Heaton’s experience of this just happened to be in a bar in Rotterdam. There’s something about its barbed lyrics with its references to Liverpool, Rome and pickled people that appealed to the nation. Interesting to note that Heaton is happy to completely take a back seat in this performance and hand all the vocals to Jacqui Abbott. As of a 2020 interview in The Guardian, neither the band nor the duo of Jacqui and Heaton have ever played “Rotterdam” live in that city nor Rome but it always goes down well in Liverpool and anywhere in Ireland for the line “gargoyles dipped long in Irish stout”. It has also taken on a life of its own as a football chant with the chorus being adopted by home fans to taunt their away counterparts with “insertnameofopposition get battered everywhere they go”. I must tell my football obsessed son where that chant comes from.
Next up are a band whose name I remember but as for their hits, I couldn’t name you a one. Apparently Damage were marketed as being the British 3T despite the fact that there were five of them (the clue was in the name guys – bit embarrassing) and despite my inability to name any of them, they would rack up nine UK Top 40 hits including four Top Tenners. This really was a boom time for British R&B/pop artists what with the likes of Eternal, Gabrielle and Michelle Gayle representing the women of the genre and MN8, Mark Morrison and Ultimate Kaos showing up for the men (well, boys in the case of Ultimate Kaos). It makes me wonder how there was room for another such act in Damage but their run of hits proves that there was. “Love II Love” was their breakthrough hit and its title has left me wondering if it was inspired by another UK R&B artist, that of Soul II Soul. Anyway, it doesn’t do much for me although the video is at least diverting with the band as puppets being controlled by a mean alien lady. The only other thing to delay us here is to mention that lead singer Jade Jones has been in a relationship with Emma Bunton since 1998 finally marrying her in 2021. The Spice Girls are on later but this can’t be where they met as it was Damage’s promo video that we saw on the show and not the real thing in the studio.
Now I wouldn’t call this next hit embarrassing, not at all. However, despite it being the artist’s biggest ever hit, it’s also one of their weakest to my ears. “Flying” by Cast was a standalone single presumably recorded and released to plug the gap between their debut and sophomore album that wasn’t released until April of 1997. It’s not that it’s an awful song (and I don’t recall having this opinion of it at the time) but there really isn’t much to it. It’s very repetitive – the chorus is also its intro with its lyric sung four times over – and said lyrics are so basic and uninspiring that they sound like they took about the same amount of time to come up with as the Liz Truss/Kwasi Kwarteng infamous and disastrous mini budget (now that was something that was truly shameful). Look at these:
It’s like flying through the air, you can make it if you dare
You live your life without a care, you know that love is everywhere
I mean, come on. Was that the best John Power could do? I don’t think so. To be fair to him, I saw Cast live this year as part of a three band open air show along with Embrace and Ocean Colour Scene. We arrived late halfway through the set and only caught a bit of “Flying” which they were playing as we entered the venue but I have to admit it sounded better live.
This week’s ’flashback’ section features Madonna and “True Blue” which was No 1 in the corresponding week ten years previously. Here’s the post from my 80s blog in which I discussed it:
Next up is the most misunderstood song since Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The USA”. Babybird was basically a vehicle for songwriter Stephen Jones who had been churning out hundreds of lo-fi demos in his Nottingham flat without being signed to a major label until Echo Records (a division of the Chrysalis Group) offered him a deal. His first single release for them “Goodnight” was a No 28 hit spending just two weeks in the charts but it was second single “You’reGorgeous” that would become the song that he would forever be remembered for. On first hearing, it may have seemed like a full blown, lush ballad but first impressions can be deceiving. I can’t recall the specific realisation that I (and so many others) must have had that not everything was as it seemed here but clearly the lyrics of the verses were at odds with that joyful chorus. The tale of a sleazy photographer manipulating his model with promises of magazine covers, it was a brilliant example of subverting the established love song narrative. And yet so many people didn’t get it. Even today, if you check out the comments on YouTube against its promo video you’ll find people saying that their Mums used to sing it to them when they were little or that the song makes the commentator’s spirit feel lighter or that the song has such fun, happy vibes. Should those people be embarrassed or is it a case of ignorance is bliss? Who am I to tell people how to consume or enjoy a song?
And for the third time in the TOTP studio we have Donna Lewis performing “I Love You Always Forever”. Seriously? What is there left for me to say about this one? Or should I be the one who’s embarrassed with my lack of creativity? OK, I’m just going to fling some stuff out there and see if any of it sticks or resonates…
The song was inspired by the H.W.Bates 1962 novel LoveForLydia with the lyric of the chorus being lifted directly from the book.
It was originally entitled “Lydia” but Lewis was talked into renaming it by her record label due to there being no reference to a ‘Lydia’ lyrics. Could it also have been to do with the fact that there was already a song out there called “Lydia” by Dean Friedman?
It spent nine weeks at No 2 sat behind Los Del Rio’s “Macarena”. Surely the Ultravox/ Joe Dolce moment of the 90s?
Despite not toppling Los Del Rio’s hit, “I Love You Always Forever” completely trounced it in the airplay chart being heard by 100 million radio listeners in one week compared to 19 million for “Macarena”.
That do ya?
Was this the moment that we all knew that the Spice Girls were here to stay? After the runaway success of almost novelty hit “Wannabe”, the decision on how to follow it up was always going to be crucial. Would they carry on into the extremes of bubblegum pop or go in an altogether different direction? I guess there two ways of reacting to “Say You’ll Be There”:
It was a super smooth and slick pop/dance number with a dash of R&B that was so prevalent and popular around this time. Therefore it showed a maturity to the group that was not apparent in “Wannabe” and was a wise career move aimed at longevity.
It was a safe and boring decision to jump on that pop/dance bandwagon and shows that the surprise of their debut hit had been sacrificed for guaranteed further success.
I’m not embarrassed to say that I was of opinion No 1. It was super radio friendly and the way that they divided up the vocal parts between the five of them promoted that gang mentality and also allowed for fans to pick out a favourite Spice Girl.
It’s another single that’s straight in at No 1 now as TheChemicalBrothers top the charts in week one with “Setting Sun”. Working in a record shop, I was aware of Manchester duo Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands via my much hipper than me work colleagues – they had especially liked their debut album “Exit Planet Dust” which was a shop stereo favourite. However, perhaps like many, I didn’t really take that much notice of them until this single the publicity surrounding which was substantially heightened by the presence of the record of one Noel Gallagher. How much the Oasis man’s association affected sales we may never know but regardless, his input helped forge a spectacular dance tune that even I could get on board with. By all measurable criteria, I should have hated this. After all, “Higher State Of Consciousness” by Josh Wink hadn’t so much set my teeth on edge as trigger a full blown nervous breakdown in me every time I heard it and “Setting Sun” wasn’t a million miles away from that with its sprawling, squealing cacophony of sounds that metaphorically slammed you to the wall and kept you pinned there for the duration when it came on. Whether it was the presence of Noel I’m not sure but this track seemed to have more…what?…structure to it? Those sniffy elements of the music press would laud it as the best thing Gallagher ever did which makes for a good line but is a bit embarrassing on their behalf.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Manic Street Preachers
Kevin Carter
No but I had the album
2
Jeremy Healy & Amos
Stamp!
As if
3
The Beautiful South
Rotterdam (Or Anywhere)
No but I must have had it on something
4
Damage
Love II Love
Definitely not
5
Cast
Flying
Nah
6
Madonna
True Blue
Nope
7
Babybird
You’re Gorgeous
Negative
8
Donna Lewis
I Love You Always Forever
I did not
9
Spice Girls
Say You’ll Be There
I can’t because I wasn’t – no
10
The Chemical Brothers
Setting Sun
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.
It’s yet another ‘golden mic’ presenter hosting for this episode of TOTP. This innovation from Executive Producer Ric Blaxill was becoming ever more pervasive since being introduced in 1994. Looking ahead to the 1996 shows, there seems to be a celebrity/pop star at the helm nearly every week punctuated occasionally by a Radio 1 DJ like Lisa I’Anson or the duo of Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley. Come 1997 though, new Executive Producer Chris Cowey would phase the ‘golden mic’ slots out and instead return to a more settled, rotating roster of young BBC presenters like Jayne Middlemiss, Jamie Theakston and Zoe Ball. Whether this was a good thing or not is down to your own personal preferences but as long as it kept Simon Mayo out in the cold and away from the show, it worked for me.
Anyway, the pop star hosting this November ‘95 show was Louise, late of Eternal and now embarking on a solo career. A symbiotic relationship – TOTP got some girl next door charm and a stage school trained presenter whilst Louise had her profile raised at a crucial time of her career, just one single into her time as a solo artist. Actually, had she started seeing Jamie Redknapp by this point? That was another symbiotic relationship in terms of heightening each other’s fame. I’m not casting any aspersions on their devotion to each other by the way; they were married for 19 years and have two children together after all. However, if you look at David and Victoria Beckham as the model for building a brand back then, you can’t help but draw comparisons. Again, I’m not doubting the sincerity of their personal relationship but they certainly didn’t shy away from the Posh and Becks image. I’m not sure that Jamie and Louise pursued that power couple badge as keenly as P & B did but the inevitable press interest in them must have increased their fame surely?
We start with a rerelease of a dance tune. Of course we do – this was 1995 after all, the year of this practice. We really should be familiar with the name of said dance tune as it wasn’t just released twice but five times over an eight year period! Not only that but it shared the same title as this week’s No 1 record. “I Believe” by HappyClappers was originally released in 1994 but failed to even make the Top 100. A rerelease in June 1995 saw it become a No 1 on the UK Dance chart whilst also securing a not too shabby peak of No 21 on the UK Top 40. However, following the trend of the time, it came out for a third time less than six months later becoming a No 7 hit. Hurray and a big hand for the Happy Clappers! Two years later it was back again making No 28 before a fifth and final outing in 2003 thanks to a Carl Cox remix saw it fail to make any meaningful impression on the charts. As a pop kid, I clearly don’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to dance music but if pressed for an opinion, I’d say the track doesn’t really warrant all that attention and multiple releases. I’m sure it packed out dance floors in clubs up and down the land but rather than make me want to applaud it, I’m more likely to give it a massive thumbs down.
When it comes to soap stars turned pop stars, Sean Maguire was pretty unusual. A good looking lad who’d made his name on first Grange Hill and then EastEnders, you could understand him wanting to give pop music a go but by the mid-90s, hadn’t we all had enough of this particular subset of pop star? After all, it had been a whole nine years since Anita Dobson and Nick Berry swapped Albert Square for the pop charts and opened the door for a bath full of soap stars to slip through. Most famously there were Kylie and Jason but also Craig McLachlan, Kylie’s sister Dannii, Stefan Dennis, Sophie Lawrence and of course Ant & Dec. Seemingly though we were still willing to accept pretty much anybody as pop stars as long as they’d been in a soap. After Sean Maguire came Sid Owen (EastEnders), Will Mellor (Hollyoaks), Natalie Imbruglia (Neighbours) and Adam Rickitt (CoronationStreet).
Maguire though seemed different – like this was a serious career move for him not just a quick, cheap cash-in on his soap fame. To this end, he had eight Top 40 hits all peaking somewhere between No 27 and No 12. It’s not a bad haul I suppose. When it came to albums though, Sean couldn’t convince people that he was a serious artist. His first album peaked at No 75 whilst his second and final one could only make it to No 43. This hit – a cover of The Real Thing’s 1976 chart topper “You To Me Are Everything” – came slap bang in the middle of his run of hits making it to No 16. A cover version normally means an artist being desperate for a career reviving hit and that may be the case here after the lead single from his second album “Spirit” only made it to No 22. In Maguire’s defence, this was the first time he’d released a cover as a single (he would release one further one subsequently) but there is still a case to be answered here as to why he’s plodded through a disco classic so laboriously. A very obvious choice of cover badly executed would be my assessment.
Now, the unusual sight of a former No 1 being back on the show just a week or so after it had been toppled. This wasn’t a case of some creative running order manipulation on behalf of the aforementioned Ric Blaxill though. No, this was a legitimate slot allocation as “Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio was going back up the charts from No 3 to No 2! Quite remarkable.
We get the video this time which though inevitably including clips from the DangerousMinds film (the soundtrack of which the song appears on), also introduced a different element to the whole promo concept. By getting the star of the movie Michelle Pfeiffer to agree to film some scenes with Coolio himself, a whole new dimension to the visuals was created. Though Pfeiffer herself does little other than stare at Coolio whilst he raps in her face, the intensity between them and brooding nature of the interaction (somehow accentuated by Pfeiffer’s cut glass cheekbones) is visually arresting. As a result, the promo won Best Rap Video at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1996.
Enya was never your typical chart star was she? In a parallel universe, she was the ultimate one hit wonder with her 1988 chart topper “Orinoco Flow” making her famous for a month before the novelty of her Celtic, new age sound was replaced by the next latest craze. Except that, in the real world, she didn’t disappear. Or at least she did but kept coming back every couple of years with a new, commercially successful album. “Watermark”, the parent album for “Orinoco Flow”, went four times platinum in both the UK and America, selling 11 million copies worldwide. Three years later, she returned with “Shepherd Moons” which matched those numbers. Another four years would pass before her next studio album “The Memory Of Trees” appeared. Although there was a dip in sales, it still shifted 3 million units in the US and went double platinum over here. That’s about 30 million sold over the course of seven years and three albums! And yet I would wager that Enya wasn’t seen as a musical heavyweight unless you were maybe a record company executive. Did the punters or the music press consider her as a peer of other mammoth selling artist like, I don’t know, Michael Jackson or Mariah Carey? I’m guessing not but these are just my own thoughts of course. Maybe I’m underestimating and misrepresenting Enya.
Anyway, the lead single from “The Memory Of Trees” was “Anywhere Is”. A more upbeat, dare I say almost jolly track than some of her more ethereal work, it would become her second highest peaking UK hit after “Orinoco Flow” when it got to No 7. Enya seems to almost propel the song along in this performance by pure will power hypnotising the watching audience into enjoying it via the intense stares she constantly gives to the camera. Seriously, it’s a bit StepfordWives or probably we’d say AI these days.
This was always going to happen – another showing of Madonna’s in studio appearance from the other week, her first for 11 years. Fortunately for Ric Blaxill, as with Coolio before, he could claim that a repeat of Madge’s turn was legitimate as “You’ll See” was going up the charts. This was quite the stroke of luck as songs climbing the Top 40 was becoming more and more seldom with the trend for singles careering in and out of charts at high speed was more the norm. Even an artist s big as Madonna couldn’t be guaranteed a hit to climb steadily anymore. This was her first single to go up the charts in successive weeks since “Erotica” went from No 10 to No 4 to No 3 in 1992.
TheBeautifulSouth released 34 singles during their career but I’m guessing that this one is not one of their best remembered. Not because it’s not any good, it’s yet another one of their bittersweet pop confections but because it’s one of those rare things – a non-album single. Plugging the gap between their 1994 six times platinum selling compilation “Carry On Up The Charts” and their 1996 studio album “Blue Is The Colour”, “Pretenders To The Throne” was a medium sized hit peaking at No 18.
As far as I can tell, the band only released one other non-album single but this one wasn’t made available in the UK. Their version of The Mamas & The Papas hit “Dream A Little Dream” was only released in Germany and the way to get hold of it in this country was to buy the soundtrack to the Meg Ryan / Kevin Kline romcom FrenchKiss for which it was recorded. I was working in the Our Price store in Stockport at the time and can only assume that a local radio station had picked up on the track and was playing it as we kept getting asked for it all the time in the shop. This was in an era before digital streaming platforms and so customers used to get quite narky after having made the effort to come into the store to get that song off the radio they liked only to be told it couldn’t be purchased.
Another example was when a station started playing “The Masterplan” by Oasis convincing listeners that it was their new single only to be told by us that actually it was just an extra track on their “Wonderwall” CD single. This wasn’t too much if a problem as we routinely kept all the Oasis singles in stock regardless of whether they were in the charts or not but I could have done without those conversations where the punter was convinced of their own information and that I was in the wrong.
And so we come to the latest in what seems like an endless conveyor belt of Michael Jackson video exclusives that we were served up by TOTP throughout the 90s. By my reckoning, “Earth Song” was the twelfth single released by Jackson by this point in the decade and everyone had been a hit in the UK so I’m assuming that we had to endure the unveiling of each accompanying promo the same amount of times. The whole thing was bloody exhausting!
Perhaps best known on these shores not for *SPOILER ALERT* staying at No 1 for 6 weeks nor indeed being our Christmas No 1 that year but for being the song that Jacko was performing at the BRITS in 1996 when Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker protested at his Christ complex antics by wafting his behind in Jacko’s direction.
As this is a video ‘exclusive’, we get around 5 minutes and 45 seconds of the promo. I’m assuming this won’t always be the case in subsequent weeks. Given, how much we’ll be seeing this in future TOTP repeats, can I get away with leaving this one here for now? I think I can.
It’s a hat-trick of superstars for TOTP. After Madonna and David Bowie on the past two shows, this week it’s Tina Turner in person in the studio. I’m not sure I watched her performance here though as I don’t recall it at all. In fact, I have little memory of the song either. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, Tina’s singing a Bond theme – “Goldeneye” – and I’ve never been much of a Bond fan. Consequently, a new film and associated theme song was never going to get me that excited. Secondly, despite this being the first film in the franchise for six years, the song didn’t actually pull up any trees chart wise. In at No 10 and then a slide down the chart week on week that not even the opening of the actual film could halt. Maybe I don’t remember it much because it didn’t hang around for long.
Listening to it now, it sounds like a Bond theme and looks like a Bond theme with all those 007 lookalikes on stage with Tina but somehow it doesn’t seem like one of the great Bond themes to me. Inevitably, at the time, there were comparisons with Shirley Bassey, the artist behind two of the most memorable Bond songs ever but I just don’t find it convincing. Others, however, did. A 2022 Classic FM list ranked all 24 Bond themes based on their musical merit. “Goldeneye” came in at No 3! I was astonished when I read that. For me, the greatest of them all is McCartney’s “Live And Let Die” – I thought that was a universally accepted given. Apparently not as that came a lowly 17th on the list. What about those classic mid to late 80s songs by Gladys Knight, Duran Duran and A-ha? Nos 7, 9 and 23 (!) respectively. Hmm. Maybe there’s a reason I’m not a massive Bond fan. I just don’t get it. I mean, I thought Daniel Craig was good in the ones of his that I’ve caught but there’s loads I’ve never seen that including Goldeneye which was the first of the Pierce Brosnan years.
Watching Tina’s performance here, it struck me what a strange gig it must have been for those six ‘Bonds’ on stage with her. Presumably they were from a modelling agency? What brief were they given? All you have to do is stand there with a gun and look as suave as you can?
It’s a second week of four at No 1 for Robson&Jerome with “I Believe” giving a strange top and tail arrangement to the show after it opened with “I Believe” by Happy Clappers.
The guys have gone for a more casual look this time with their black jackets of last week now removed to reveal plain white shirts (and breaches in the case of Jerome). 29 years on and I still am not sure how to explain the popularity of the duo. They had the best selling album and single of the 1995 in the UK! I think I’ll leave the final word to Alan Partridge..,
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Happy Clappers
I Believe
Defo no
2
Sean Maguire
You To Me Are Everything
Ha! No
3
Coolio
Gangsta’s Paradise
Nah
4
Enya
Anywhere Is
Nope
5
Madonna
You’ll See
Negative
6
The Beautiful South
Pretenders To The Throne
Not the single but I think I have it on a subsequent Best Of
7
Michael Jackson
Earth Song
I did not
8
Tina Turner
Goldeneye
Never happened
9
Robson & Jerome
I Believe
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.
I’m nearly 26! Well, I’m not (I’ll be 55 next birthday) but back in 1994 I was four days from being that age. I know it’s a daft thing to say because 29 years is a long time but it feels like a lifetime ago. The memory is such a mysterious beast though. Certain things that I would have been able to reel off without hesitation at the time like the names on the staff rota I can now no longer raise from the depths of my recollection. Neither can I tell you what I did on my birthday that year. Yet, random snatches of conversation (that shouldn’t have been that memorable!) have lingered and endured. I wonder if I’ll remember all the songs from this TOTP…
N.B. The host this week is yet again the insufferable Simon Mayo who has his full weaponry of obscure and hopelessly unfunny one liners on display. I don’t propose to comment on every one as I have done previously as he doesn’t deserve the attention but be sure that they were all of his usual woeful standard.
Yep, this one’s in the old memory banks. Giving the reggae treatment to pop standards was quite the trend around this time and the latest act to jump on the bandwagon were BigMountain who scored a massive hit with their version of Peter Frampton’s “Baby I Love Your Way”. The perennial appeal of this song seems quite disproportionate to its quality to me. Not only was a live version of it a hit for Frampton himself in 1976 but it returned in 1988 as part of a medley with “Freebird” by Will To Power which went to the top of the US charts. And here it was again in 1994 only being held off the UK No 1 spot by Wet Wet Wet. Just like “Love Is All Around”, Big Mountain’s version was from a film soundtrack, RealityBites starring Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke and Ben Stiller.
I’ve talked about this film before because someone has to as it seems to be largely forgotten these days. Reflecting the angst of the Generation X demographic and channeling the grunge scene vibe (and I know that makes it sound really wanky!), it told the story of a group of friends and roommates whilst also breaking the fourth wall (sort of) with the character of TV network executive Michael (Ben Stiller). Supposedly, it now holds cult classic status but you never see it on TV or any of the streaming platforms. The soundtrack is actually pretty fab including the likes of Crowded House, Squeeze, U2, Lenny Kravitz and World Party. It was also home to another runaway hit in “Stay (I Missed You)” by the then unsigned Lisa Loeb And Nine Stories which was a US No 1 and UK No 6.
Back to “Baby I Love Your Way” though and I have to say I found the Big Mountain version a bit sickly and twee. I wasn’t the only person who wasn’t a fan of the song when it featured in another film…
TheBeautifulSouth burst onto the UK charts with a nest full of big hits after the break up of The Housemartins. Their first four singles released between June 1989 and September 1990 furnished them with chart positions that included No 1, No 2 and No 8. However, of their next seven releases, none got any higher than No 16 and three didn’t make the Top 40 at all despite all of them being quality tunes (bloody stupid British record buying public). Now I’m not suggesting that the band looked at this and thought “let’s release a cover version to arrest this trend” but that is what happened. “Everybody’s Talkin’” came to fame via the version recorded by Harry Nilsson that featured in the film MidnightCowboy and was a perfect choice to be given The Beautiful South treatment. Possessing of a delicate, fluttering melody, it was also a great showcase for the vocal talents of the recently recruited Jacqui Abbott. I think this may have been her first ever TOTP appearance which may explain her rather nervous looking demeanour.
“Everybody’s Talkin’” gave the band their biggest hit since their 1990 No 1 “A Little Time” when it peaked at No 12. A year after this they recorded another cover version, this time their take on The Mamas & The Papas hit “Dream A Little Dream” for the soundtrack of the film FrenchKiss. I’m pretty sure that it didn’t get a UK release as a single which caused record shop staff issues when trying to explain this to annoyed punters who had seen the film. The song being picked up for airplay by local radio stations didn’t help either. The band recorded a whole album of cover versions in 2004 called “Golddiggas, Headnodders and Pholk Songs” which would provide them with their final Top 40 hit in “This Will Be Our Year”. The Beautiful South split in 2007 famously citing ‘musical similarities’.
Another one that I definitely remember now which is surprising given it’s a dance tune but “Swamp Thing” by TheGrid was no ordinary dance record – this one had a banjo in it! Dave Ball (ex- Soft Cell of course) and Richard Norris weren’t exactly new to the UK Top 40 having previously visited its mid echelons with “Crystal Clear” and “Texas Cowboys” but “Swamp Thing” was by far their biggest hit reaching a nose bleed inducing No 3. Apparently, the banjo part wasn’t a sample having been played specifically by folk musician Roger Dinsdale though there were a couple of sampled spoken word bits in there. It was for all intents and purposes though, an instrumental track which maybe makes its commercial success more surprising. Maybe.
The accompanying video with the baby crawling about amongst some synthesiser instruments and equipment puts me in mind of the promo for “French Kiss” (the track by Lil’ Louis not the aforementioned film) which also featured a young child playing with some toys against a white background.
Of course, if you’re talking visual clips featuring banjos, it’s hard not to think of this…
No, don’t recall this at all but that’s hardly surprising given that “Fountain Of Youth” by Arrested Development was never released as a single. This appears to be an attempt by the TOTP producers to shoehorn an international artist onto the show just because they happen to be in the country. Simon Mayo tells us in his intro that they are his guests on his Radio 1 show the following day so why not get them on the BBC’s flagship music show while we’re at it? There was a problem though. Here’s @TOTPFacts with the story:
Arrested Development's current single "Ease My Mind" was falling from its peak of 33 to 35 in this week's singles chart, which made it ineligible to appear on #TOTP under the rules of the show at the time. It was the last of their four UK top 40 singles.
The solution was to create a space for them using the old ‘album track slot’ trick. The album in question was “Zingalamaduni” which was released the following week. However, it wasn’t a huge success, peaking at No 16 over here and massively underselling compared to their multi platinum debut “3 Years, 5 Months And 2 Days In The Life Of…”. I can’t say that “Fountain Of Youth” does much for me and who was the old fella on the raised stage at the back? Mr. Wendal perhaps? More to the point, what was he doing? Praying to the fountain of youth? Drinking an elixir from it? Or was he just watering a plant?
I said I wouldn’t spend any time commenting on Simon Mayo’s pathetic puns in his segues but his attempt to draw humour from “Shoop” by Salt ‘N’ Pepa by restyling it as adding salt and pepper to soup is truly pitiful. Anyway, this was a rerelease of a single that peaked at No 29 in 1993 but which was given another chance in the wake of the success of “Whatta Man” with En Vogue and this time it managed a high of No 13.
It’s a pretty groovy track with the ‘Shoop’ hook an instant ear worm and infinitely preferable to the only other songs I can think of with that word in the title – Cher’s version of “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” and “Exhale (Shoop Shoop)” by Whitney Houston.
Who couldn’t remember this? Is this the first time Pulp appeared on TOTP?*
*Yes, if you merge those two sentences then you almost get the title of Pulp’s first Top 40 hit and yes that was deliberate and yes, I’m a smart arse.
Of course, Jarvis and co had been around for a good 10 years by this point but “Babies” (the lead track from “The Sisters EP”) really did seem to draw a line under their early, rather gloomy work, and announce themselves as the coolest uncool anti-pop stars in the UK. Essentially a song about voyeurism that doesn’t end well for the protagonist, it wasn’t your typical pop song subject matter. And yet Pulp made it work and then some. Once the viewing public got a first glimpse of Jarvis and his idiosyncratic moves and looks to camera, his stardom was assured. His Bob Geldof / John Travolta style taunting of Wet Wet Wet only added to his appeal for many. Pulp had arrived.
In case you didn't catch it: taped instead Jarvis Cocker's jacket was a piece of paper with "I HATE WET WET WET" written on it – a phrase we'll all be screaming in another five or six weeks' time. #TOTPpic.twitter.com/xeCn6rDMf8
Well I definitely remember Pink Floyd releasing “The Division Bell” as it went to No1 in the album charts and we sold plenty of it in the Our Price shop in Manchester where I was working at the time. What I don’t recall is how it sounded as I’m pretty sure it never got played on the in store stereo (apparently record shop staff snobbiness was alive and well in 1994). Therefore, the single “Take It Back” which was taken from it is new to me. Listening to it now, I find myself asking “Is this really Pink Floyd? The Pink Floyd of “The Dark Side Of The Moon” and “The Wall” fame? because it sounds like a second rate Runrig to me.” Look, I’m no Pink Floyd devotee and I don’t own any of their albums so I may be committing heresy here but this sounds so lame. The video is awful too.
I think Mariah Carey must have been a friend of the show. How else do you explain her being on it in person so many times otherwise? “Anytime You Need a Friend” wasn’t what she said to producer Richard Blaxill when he was struggling to fill his running order but was the follow up to her recent No 1 single “Without You” and it was generally seen as a stand out track on parent album “Music Box” by critics as its gospel flavour allowed Mariah to dive deep into her record breaking vocal range. I guess it’s well produced and does a job but I’m not sure I would have remembered it without the prompt of this TOTP repeat. Mariah would see 1994 out with the release of that Christmas record which undeniably has lived longer in the memory than “Anytime You Need a Friend” and which peaked at No 8 here but was the first of her singles to miss the Top 10 in the US.
OK, so we all remember this one and some would no doubt wish that they could erase it permanently from their memories. It’s week one of fifteen at the top of the charts for Wet Wet Wet with “Love Is All Around”. My first observation of this performance would be why do they look like they’ve arrived hot foot from a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat? Oh, it’s meant to be a hippy / summer of love / flower power type thing is it? That would explain the long hair, the flowers inserted into the necks of the guitars and the bean bags I suppose? I think they may have lost people right from the start with this staging idea. Oh well. Just another 14 weeks to go. Channel your inner Jarvis Cocker people!
Oh, one last thing. There’s no play out tune this week. Not sure if this is a permanent change but it seems like a good idea given that the producers had wasted this slot on songs that didn’t even make the Top 40 played over a montage of visuals from the show that we’d all just seen.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Big Mountain
Baby I Love Your Way
Nah
2
The Beautiful South
Everybody’s Talkin’
Not the single but I have it on their Carry On Up The Charts Best Of. Don’t we all?
3
The Grid
Swamp Thing
No
4
Arrested Development
Fountain Of Youth
My wife had their first album but a second one was a purchase too far. No
5
Salt ‘N’ Pepa
Shoop
Negative
6
Pulp
The Sisters EP
No but I had seen them live the year before supporting Saint Etienne and they were by far the better band on the night
7
Pink Floyd
Take It Back
No I won’t – this was awful
8
Mariah Carey
Anytime You Need a Friend
Nope
9
Wet Wet Wet
Love Is all Around
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.
Welcome to TOTP Rewind where I, a man now in his mid-50s, have spent the last six years reviewing every BBC4 repeat of the fondly remembered music show. Why have I done/continue to do this? It’s a question I have repeatedly asked myself especially when they start to back up and I find myself in catch up mode as I am now. Well, I’m a nostalgic person and hiding away from present day concerns with a trip down memory lane seems quite appealing right now. Mark Goodier is our host for tonight’s show so let’s do it…
We start with a belting tune from PrimalScream. After the critical, commercial and chemical highs of the groundbreaking, inaugural Mercury Music Prize winning “Screamadelica” album, the band went in a different direction for the follow up “Give Out But Don’t Give Up”. Rejecting the acid house beats that informed its predecessor, they embraced a retro, rock ‘n’ blues sound that was no more evident than on lead single “Rocks”. The very definition of a stomper, I liked the kitchen sink approach to it in that they threw everything but it into the mix. It kicks off with a purposeful opening drum beat before being joined by that muscular guitar that elicits a searing, slide of the fretboard and then it really gets going. A T-Rex style riff hammers out the song’s template before Bobby Gillespie delivers the those opening eight lines:
Dealers keep dealin’, thieves keep thievin’ Whores keep whorin’, junkies keep scorin’ Trade is on the meat rack, strip joints full of hunchbacks Bitches keep a bitchin’, clap just keeps itchin’
How did they get past the BBC censor?! I don’t think there’s ever been a sanitised radio edit of the song has there? Apparently, Theresa May walked off stage to “Rocks” following her speech at the Tory Party conference in 2011. For a woman who is on record as stating that the naughtiest thing she had evet done was to run through fields of wheat as a child, it does seem an unlikely song choice. However, if you factor in that she was Home Secretary at the time, the fact that she chose a song that includes lyrics like “dealers keep dealing”, “thieves keep thieving” and “junkies keep scoring” hardly speaks well of her ability to keep law and order.
Reaction to this ‘new’ Primal Scream sound was mixed. Some (like me) loved it while others found it too derivative and accused the band of just doing their best Rolling Stones impression. I think retailers expected “Rocks” to do big things sales wise though. I recall that we had a big scale out of the single from Head Office at the Our Price I was working in at the time but although it performed well initially leading the band to achieving their second highest chart peak ever of No 7, it fell away quickly. Maybe the release of the album just three weeks later had something to do with it.
The original recordings of the album were made in Memphis using the legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm section but were rejected by Creation boss Alan McGee. Said recordings eventually surfaced in 2018 and an entertaining documentary about the rediscovery of them was aired on the BBC. There wouldn’t be another Primal Scream album for three years when “Vanishing Point” appeared which was the first album to feature ex-Stone Roses bassist Mani who had joined the band in 1996. I was working in the Stockport Our Price by then with original Roses bassist Pete as my manager. I distinctly remember Mani coming into the shop one day to have a catch up with Pete but also to buy up all the Primal Scream albums we had so he could learn the bass parts.
The performance here with Denise Johnson on vocals alongside Bobby Gillespie is just glorious. Sadly, the band have seen much tragedy in recent years with three members dying fairly close to each other starting with Robert ‘Throb’ Young in 2014, then the aforementioned Denise Johnson in 2020 and finally Martin Duffy just last year.
Now, what links MPeople with Primal Scream? Apart from being on the same TOTP together and both having recordings with very similar titles (“called “Movin’ On Up” and “Moving On Up”) obviously. Well, they both have had a song used to soundtrack a speech at a Tory Party conference. Yes, just as Theresa May used “Rocks” in 2011, the six-week Prime Minister Liz Truss used the aforementioned “Moving On Up” in 2022. There’s more similarities though. Both artists were extremely pissed off that their material had been used by a political party they were adamantly opposed to and both songs used included lyrics that were totally unsuited to the purpose for which the song was chosen in the first place. Given her precarious position as Prime Minister, did nobody in her inner sanctum listen to these lyrics?
You’ve done me wrong, your time is up You took a sip from the devil’s cup You broke my heart, there’s no way back Move right out of here, baby, go on pack your bags
Just who do you think you are? Stop actin’ like some kind of star Just who do you think you are?
FFS! Anyway, M People are on the show to perform “Renaissance” not “Moving On Up” which was their fifth Top 10 hit in just over a year. Quite the achievement. This was the fourth and final single released from the “Elegant Slumming” album and was a track that many had expected for a while to be given such a release seeing as it had been used as the title song to early reality TV show TheLivingSoap. It would also provide the title for the band’s 11 disc 2020 retrospective box set.
There’s a little teaser trailer before the next artist as we cross to New York for a roof top chat with Bon Jovi who are on the show later doing an exclusive live by satellite performance. Presumably new producer Ric Blaxill wanted to make more of this slot by working in a bit of extra mileage with it courtesy of this little clip which actually gets Jon Bon Jovi to introduce the next song. It’s quite a neat trick and works quite well in the safe hands of the unflappable frontman.
Said next artist is Janet Jackson and like her music or not (and I don’t especially), you have to admit she’s prolific. Her discography tells me she has released 70 singles during her career and this one – “Because Of Love” – was the 10th of the 90s already. The fourth of six singles released in the UK from her “Janet” album, it was the follow up to the surprisingly robust Christmas No 6 hit “Again”. In a ever more familiar trend for singles in general, it would get no further than its entry week high of No 19 (see also Primal Scream’s “Rocks”). By the end of the decade, singles would be in one week and out the next on a regular basis due to record company pricing strategies with heavily discounted prices in week one.
It’s not one of Janet’s more memorable tunes despite the “shoop, shoop, doop, doop” hook she sings. Apparently, it was her first single since “The Pleasure Principle” in 1987 to miss the Top 5 in the US and is regarded as one of the last New Jack Swing records to make the charts.
From “Doop Doop” courtesy of Janet Jackson to “Doop” courtesy of…well…Doop. This Charleston based dance track was the highest new entry of the week straight in at No 3 on its way to the top of the charts. So what the Hell was all this all about? Well, they were a Dutch production duo who hit upon the ludicrous idea of added a house beat to a big band sample and turned it into a European dance craze. Supposedly this was always going to be a huge hit due to the buzz created in the clubs for this record but nowhere was it a bigger hit than in the UK. Yay, well done us!
As there’s no lyrics in this apart from the occasional “doop”, it’s left to a load of dancers obviously dressed in 1920s style dresses and headgear to deliver some sort of performance. If it wasn’t from the obligatory two male DJ nerds lurking around at the back of the stage (one looking like Rick Wakeman), this could be a dance routine by Pan’s People. I know Ric Blaxill had brought back some of the Radio 1 DJs from the 80s as hosts of the show but this was ridiculous!
Doop would become only the third ever Dutch act to have a UK No 1 after Pussycat with “Mississippi” and “No Limit” by 2 Unlimited. In a bizarre twist of fate, it would become the first instrumental chart topper since “Eye Level” by the Simon Park Orchestra in 1973 which was the theme tune for Van der Valk about a Dutch detective. And that reference just might be more oblique than the angle from which Marco Van Basten scored his wonder goal for Holland in the 1988 European Championships.
A largely forgotten hit next though a pretty good song. Just two short years after Shakespear’s Sister took “Stay” to No 1 for six weeks, Marcella Detroit and Siobhan Fahey’s working relationship had been dissolved and the former was striking out on her own with a solo album. Wikipedia tells me that it wasn’t her debut though as that came in 1982 after a protracted gestation period but failed to sell in any territory. Marcella looks pretty different on the cover with an 80s perm and highlights. Her transformation into a Louise Brooks coiffured model type is almost as huge a change as that of Alanis Morrisette who made a similar image change from her early incarnations to her commercial peak.
So, 12 years and one pop duo later came her sophomore album “Jewel” which got mixed press reviews but which sold reasonably well going to No 15 in the charts. The lead single was “I Believe” which also sold steadily rising to No 11. Its a very accomplished, nicely produced song which makes the most of Marcella’s dynamic yet pure vocals. It probably should have been a bigger hit.
The performance here employs a very basic black and white to colour change just at the moment where the song really blooms at the chorus. I wonder if whoever came up with that were really pleased with themselves? To be fair, I was when, as a student at Sunderland Polytechnic, our group came up with the same wheeze when producing a video as part of a module. Our plot revolved around a bored student falling asleep in a tedious lecture and daydreaming about being pushed into a swimming pool at which point he wakes up. We called it WetDream (genius!) and had the lecture part in black and white and the dream sequence in colour (also genius!). I really must find it out and get it online one day.
Anyway, back to Marcella (or Marcy as host Mark Goodier calls her). We (my wife and some friends) were supposed to go and see her live at the Academy in Manchester but she called off the gig at the last minute. We all went out drinking at a pub called Briton’s Protection instead. My friend Robin was delighted as he hadn’t wanted to go to see Marcella in the first place and the pub had his favourite ale (Jennings) on tap. Fast forward 25 years and Marcella and Siobhan would work out their differences and reunite for a tour and EP of new material. I never did see Marcella live but Robin continues to enjoy a nice pint of Jennings to this day.
Some Breakers now starting with TheBeautifulSouth and their new single “Good As Gold (Stupid As Mud)”. I seem to remember many people believing the title to be “Carry On Regardless” due to the phrase featuring heavily in the lyrics and also possibly because of the Carry On film of the same name. The band hadn’t released anything in 1993 so this was a taster from new album “Miaow”. It was still cast from the same mould as some of their earlier material with catchy melodies and socially observant lyrics to the fore but there had been one big change since we last saw/heard them. Vocalist Briana Corrigan had left the band with rumours abound that she was less than impressed by some of Paul Heaton’s lyrics including on the single “36D” which criticised the glamour industry by making targets out of the models. Briana was replaced by Jacqui Abbott who would stay with the band for four albums before leaving and then rekindling her creative relationship with Heaton in 2014.
Sales of the album would not halt the decline that third album “0898” had suffered from after predecessors “Welcome To The Beautiful South” and “Choke” had both gone platinum but by the end of 1994 they would have the Christmas No 1 album and the second best selling record of the whole year in their first Best Of album “Carry On Up The Charts” (Heaton was clearly a bit of a fan of the Carry On franchise). For the second time in the band’s history, the artwork for the album’s cover got them into hot water. After thejr debut received a ban from Woolworths for originally featuring a woman with a gun in her mouth, “Miaow” had to undergo a change of image as well when HMV objected to the picture of a crowd of dogs seated in a music hall with a gramophone on stage as it impinged in their legendary logo.
“Good As Gold (Stupid As Mud)” remains one of the Beautiful South’s most well known songs I think despite it only making it to No 23 in the charts. The follow up would be the second song made famous by Harry Nilsson to return to the charts this year after Mariah Carey’s take on “Without You” when the band released a cover of “Everybody’s Talkin’”.
Hell’s teeth it’s Therapy? again! “Trigger Inside” was these Irish rockers fifth Top 40 hit in the past year and second of 1994 already! Talking of teeth, the band seemed to have a bit of a dental obsession. Having already released a single called “Teethgrinder” with a particularly graphic front cover, this one starts with the lyric
Here comes a girl with perfect teeth I bet she won’t be smiling at me
The very next line name checks serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer which TOTP wisely avoids showing in this short clip. This track seems to be at the heavier end of the rock scale and not especially radio friendly (and that’s before considering the Jeffrey Dahmer reference) but the band’s fanbase was by now large enough to guarantee them a chart placing. “Trigger Inside” was at its No 22 peak despite it being its first week on the charts.
Apart from one solitary entry at No 40, Alison Moyet hadn’t had a UK chart hit since her cover of “Love Letters” made No 4 in 1987. That outcome would have seemed unlikely back then. After all, she’s had two massive hits from her album of that year “Raindancing” in “Is This Love?” and “Weak In The Presence Of Beauty”. However, a delay of four years until her next album “Hoodoo” had seen her lose her place amongst pop’s big hitters and the album sold respectably but significantly less numbers than its predecessors.
Commercial success wasn’t what mattered to Alison though who fought her record company Sony for artistic control of her work which led to a confrontation over the release of her next album “Essex”. Sony refused to release it unless tracks were re-recorded and re-produced to make a more radio friendly pop album that stood a better chance of success. The result of this stand off was “Whispering Your Name”, a 1983 song written by Jules Shear but originally recorded by Ignatius Jones, leader of shock rock band Jimmy and the Boys. In an act of compromise, Alison committed to two versions of the song; an acoustic “MacArthur Park”* style ballad that appeared on the album and the danced up version that was released as a single.
*The Richard Harris version, not Donna Summer’s
The former is clearly the better version to my ears with the latter sounding like something Dusty Springfield might have recorded as a B-side during her Pet Shop Boys collaboration era. Mind you, even that version is a million times better than the Ignatius Jones take which is an abomination:
Mark Goodier makes a big deal in his intro of the fact that Dawn French appears in the video for “Whispering Your Name” just as she’d done seven years prior for the “Love Letters” promo. Now don’t get me wrong, I like Dawn French (we even had a French And Saunders VHS on our wedding present list!) but I don’t think her ‘zany’ antics added anything to the video at all. Maybe I felt differently back then but viewed in 2023 it all seems a bit tired. The single would make No 18 perhaps validating Sony’s strategy but it would be Alison’s last ever chart entry as a solo artist.
CarterTheUnstoppableSexMachine’s time as chart dwelling pop stars was entering the final bend come 1994 – in short, it turned out that they could be stopped after all. After the unlikely gold selling albums that were “30 Something” and “1992 – The Love Album” (a chart topper no less), subsequent releases suffered from a dose of diminishing returns. Not that they were suddenly outside of the charts being refused entry but the numbers were in decline. This single “Glam Rock Cops” and its predecessor “Lenny And Terence” were their lowest peaking singles (Nos 24 and 40 respectively) since their first ever chart hit, the 1991 reissue of “Sheriff Fatman”. The quality of their material was still there though. “Glam Rock Cops” is a great song and the performance of it here shows how comfortable Jimbob and Fruitbat had become by this stage with the whole idea of being pop stars. As ever, the lyrics are clever and intriguing though were they influenced by The Jam’s “Going Underground” with the line “The public gets the music that no public could deserve”?
We rejoin Bon Jovi now who have come in off that roof in New York and are performing on, yes you guessed it, yet another nondescript stage that could just as easily have been located round the corner from the TOTP studio as where it actually was, 3,500 miles due West. Really? I thought new producer Ric Blaxill was trying to get away from all that and have artists performing against landmark backdrops.
Anyway, the single the band are plugging is “Dry County” which was the sixth and final single to be released from their “Keep The Faith” album. Remember, this was an album that had been released on 3rd November 1992 and this TOTP aired on 10 March 1994 – that’s 16 months later! This was almost Michael Jackson-esque! As well as the length of time between album and single releases there was also a small (or large as it happens) matter of the length of time of the track itself. Apparently, this is Bon Jovi’s longest song clocking in at 9:52. It was edited down to 6:00 for single release. The band and or their record company clearly had plenty of confidence in the track’s potential for success. Hey! They must have ‘kept the faith’ in it (I’ll get me coat). Or maybe it was just their “Bohemian Rhapsody” moment.
The title referred to a county that prohibits alcohol but here it also acts as a metaphor for the decline of the US oil industry with the song describing the effects of such on the inhabitants of towns whose economies were reliant on the resource. It’s a bit of a retread of Tommy and Gina’s struggles in “Livin’ On A Prayer” or, indeed, most of Bruce Springsteen’s back catalogue. “Dry County” managed a very respectable peak of No 9 in the UK. They would end the year with the 21 million selling Best Of album “Crossroads” which was also the UK’s best selling album of 1994.
Oh and one last thing. The BBC censors were asleep at the wheel again as for the second time on tonight’s show we get the use of the word ‘whore’ in a song’s lyrics:
Man spends his whole life waiting, praying for some big reward But it seems sometimes the payoff leaves you feeling like A dirty whore
It’s a fourth and final week at the top for Mariah Carey and “Without You”. As successful as Mariah’s version of the song was, she isn’t the only artist to have taken on this monster pop song. The list of those who have tackled it includes Air Supply, Shirley Bassey, Petula Clark, Glen Campbell, Elaine Paige, Rose Marie…wait. Rose Marie? I know a story about her and it involves my time at Sunderland Polytechnic again. My friend Robin (he with the passion for Jennings ale) had a friend named Cess (short for Cesspit) come to visit him in Sunderland. Unfortunately for Cess, Robin was out when he arrived at his gaff and so, in an era before mobile phones, he had some time to kill. Looking for something to do, Cess wandered into Sunderland town centre and noticed that there was a matinee gig going on at the Empire Theatre. “That’ll do” thought Cess and in he went. The gig was by Rose Marie – the Irish Bette Midler as some named her – and the audience was mainly made up of elderly ladies having a nice afternoon out. I should have pointed out that Cess was a bit of a punk back then and at the time was sporting a pink Mohican hairstyle so I’m not entirely sure the rest of the audience were really his people but apparently he spent a great afternoon singing along with Rose Marie and her fans.
The play out song is “Rock My Heart” by Haddaway. Hadn’t we all had enough of this bloke by this point? This was the fourth and final hit from his debut album and, just like the preceding three, went Top 10. After doing a ballad for his last single, he’d cranked up the beats again for this high tempo Eurodance number which was not a million miles away from his biggest hit “What Is Love”. I wasn’t going to any of the clubs that might have played this sort of stuff back then (indie night at Fifth Avenue in Manchester was more my scene) so maybe I wasn’t its target audience but why was this guy so successful? Really though, why?
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Primal Scream
Rocks / Funky Jam
No but I bought the album
2
M People
Renaissance
No but my wife had the album
3
Janet Jackson
Because Of Love
No
4
Doop
Doop
Of course not
5
Marcella Detroit
I Believe
Liked it, didn’t buy it
6
The Beautiful South
Good As Gold (Stupid As Mud)
No but I have that Best Of album it on
7
Therapy?
Trigger Inside
Negative
8
Alison Moyet
Whispering Your Name
Nah
9
Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine
Glam Rock Cops
See 5 above
10
Bon Jovi
Dry County
No but I had a promo copy of the album
11
Mariah Carey
Without You
Nope
12
D:Ream
U R The Best Thing
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.
Look, there’s no way of putting a nice bow on this, 1992 was yet another crappy year. Nothing happened! Well, not literally obviously but it was like the UK was waiting for the next big thing to arrive any minute but whatever it was going to be, it hadn’t even done its packing by the end of the year let alone have any sort of ETA. Nothing sums this up more than this fact. The biggest selling album of the year was “Stars” by Simply Red which was also the biggest selling album of the previous year. Where was the influence of the much vaunted grunge rock movement? It was certainly conspicuous by its absence in terms of both the singles and albums charts. The singles market had a disastrous year with sales slumping dramatically. There were only 12 different No 1 songs, the smallest number for thirty years. I guess we should have a look at them….
Dearie me! Less than half of the twelve were by brand new artists and of that number only two were British. There were at least four big ballads in there (none bigger than Whitney Houston’s), three cover versions and the return of a man who hadn’t had a hit for seven years and he was better known as an actor than a singer! Three of the total of eight British acts in the list had made their name in the 80s whilst the hang over Xmas No 1 from 1991 was by Queen. The only vaguely interesting song on the list was “Ebeneezer Goode” by The Shamen. Even if you didn’t like it, at least it ruffled a few feathers. Of the twelve, I bought none at all although my wife did buy the Wet Wet Wet album with “Goodnight Girl” on it. There wasn’t quite a Bryan Adams event with Shakespear’s Sister coming the closest with an eight week run at the top. Whitney Houston would better that by two weeks but that run was spread over 1992 and 1993. There were some decent singles like…erm…give me a minute…it’ll come to me…Utah Saints? The Wedding Present “Hit Parade” project? There was an awful lot of shite though from the likes of Tetris, Ambassadors of Funk, The Chippendales and WWF Superstars. What the hell was going on?!
The best selling albums weren’t much cop either. Half of the Top 20 were Best Of / Collections with the highest placing studio albums coming from Michael Jackson, Genesis and Right Said Fred with only the latter being released in 1992 itself. The Top 50 reads like a register of rock/pop royalty. Elton John, Diana Ross, Bryan Adams, Queen, U2, Mike Oldfield, Madonna, Tina Turner, ABBA, Cher…Only the likes of REM and The Shamen (again) stand out as even vaguely interesting. Rock music was represented by some already well established names in Bon Jovi, Guns N’ Roses and Def Leppard. Even Nirvana (oh there’s grunge!) were hardly a new name come the end of 1992 and although their No 20 placing in the best sellers list with “Nevermind” was laudable, where were all the other bands following in their wake? Special mention should go to Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine who did score a No 1 album this year against the odds though it doesn’t appear in the best selling Top 50.
Hits We Missed
This section hasn’t been that busy in reviews of recent years because we haven’t missed any TOTP episodes due to issues surrounding presenters but that all changed again in 1992. I should be clear that the Adrian Rose repeats were not broadcast because he refused to sign the waiver and nothing to do with any unpalatable reasons. I haven’t checked exactly how many shows were missed but it was certainly double figures. Then there were songs that made the charts but somehow never made it onto the show, not even a few seconds in the Breakers. Maybe they could gave fitted a few more in if they hadn’t gone so heavy in all those live by satellite exclusive performances. Anyway, whatever the reason, here’s a few we missed.
Buffy Sainte Marie – The Big Ones Get Away
The name Buffy meant nothing to me in 1992. Not even in terms of vampire slayers as the Joss Whedon TV series* didn’t premiere until five years later. Buffy Sainte Marie certainly didn’t register but my store manager in the Our Price in Manchester knew her and was keen to listen to her first new album for sixteen years on the shop stereo. So it was that I came to hear “The Big Ones Get Away” which sounded like it came from a different time altogether and a million miles away from much of the dross that was populating the charts. No, not from a different time but timeless, shining like a beacon through the grey mists of contemporary trends. So understated yet powerful. Genuinely affecting.
*The original film was out this year but it passed me by.
I said earlier I’d never heard of the name Buffy Sainte Marie until 1992 though I had heard unknowingly one of her songs. She co-wrote the Oscar winning “Up Where We Belong” for AnOfficerAndAGentleman. Her legacy will be much more than that though. She is also an artist, pacifist and social activist campaigning to highlight the issues affecting the indigenous peoples of the Americas of which she is one having been born in a reserve in Saskatchewan, Canada to Cree parents.
Released: January1992
Chartpeak: No39
Daisy Chainsaw – Love Your Money
This lot were a riot (or should that be riot grrl?). Forging a reputation for anarchic live gigs with lead singer KatieJane Garside performing in soiled clothes and drinking from a baby’s bottle, these indie rockers gained an unlikely foothold in the actual Top 40 with their “Love Sick Pleasure” EP which featured the track “Love Your Money”. Their USP was Garside’s vocal stylings which ranged from childlike whispering to outright screaming. They hit the spot though on “Love Your Money” which made No 26 in the charts. Perhaps inevitably given Garside’s vocal techniques, the reason we never saw Daisy Chainsaw on TOTP was nothing to do with Adrian Rose nor that they just weren’t asked; they were but had to turn it down due to Garside having a throat infection!
Garside left the band in 1993 becoming a recluse until reappearing in 1999 with Queenadreena.
Released: February1992
Chartpeak: No26
Jah Wobble’s Invaders Of The Heart – Visions Of You
I just started watching Danny Boyle’s Pistol last night so including this next artist seems appropriate. Jah Wobble’s name is inextricably linked with John Lydon despite him leaving PiL after their first two albums. He formed Invaders Of The Heart in 1982 but it wasn’t until ten years later that they had a bona fide chart hit.
“Visions Of You” featured the vocals Sinéad O’Connor which perfectly suited this blissed out, vibes heavy track that appeared on the “Rising Above The Bedlam” album. This wasn’t the first time the charts had been home to such an Indian influenced song of course. There was The Beatles’ later work and some of George Harrison’s solo material in the 60s and 70s and Monsoon’s “Ever So Lonely” in 1982. It wasn’t the last either with Kula Shaker ploughing that furrow in 1996 with their “K” album and in particular the track “Govinda”. And yet “Visions Of You” seemed like a genuine outlier back in early 1992.
A colleague I worked with at Our Price in Manchester loved this track and it would get a regular airing in the shop stereo which is probably why I know it as I don’t recall hearing it on the radio much.
Released: February1992
Chartpeak: No35
The Lightning Seeds – Sense
The Lightning Seeds probably get a tougher rap than they deserve. Sure, “Three Lions” has become unlistenable due to it being reactivated every international football tournament that England are in and from “Jollification” onwards it all became a bit formulaic but for me, you can’t doubt that Ian Broudie is one talented guy. Just look at his past history and where he came from. He was a member of Big In Japan with Holly Johnson and Bill Drummond and also in John Peel favourites Original Mirrors. Then he formed Care with ex Wild Swans singer Paul Simpson who came up with one of the best singles of the 80s not to make the Top 40 in “Flaming Sword”. As that decade ended came The Lightning Seeds whose “Pure” single was a highlight of 1989. In between that and the band’s golden period surrounding “Jollification” and “Three Lions” came sophomore album “Sense”.
Remembered mainly for lead single “The Life Of Riley” and its use on MatchOfTheDay’s Goal Of The Month section, it was also home to title track “Sense”. Released as the album’s second single, this largely forgotten track was co written with the legendary Terry Hall and is a wonderful pop record. Hall recorded his own version of the song in 1994 for his album “Home” and it probably trumps Broudie’s vocals version for me but I can’t put it in a review of 1992!
I bought the single and was delighted to discover that “Flaming Sword” was the B-side! What’s not to love!
Released: May1992
Chartpeak: No31
Vegas – Possessed
Talking of Terry Hall…Mr Misery (I love Terry but he is quite dour!) was on a roll with collaborations this year. After Ian Broudie came Dave Stewart of Eurythmics. I think there were more than just the two of them in Vegas but all the publicity surrounding the project focussed on them (I think it was a Tears For Fears or OMD type arrangement). The fusion of creative minds generated one album and three singles but the only one to garner even a sniff of chart action was the lead single “Possessed”. This really does come under the title of ‘lost gem’. Literally lost as the album has long since been deleted and has never appeared on streaming services.
In the most recent issue of ClassicPop magazine within an article on Dave Stewart, there is a little box out on Vegas. In it, Stewart texts the head of a music investment firm whilst being interviewed to ask them to investigate making the album available again (fingers crossed!). He also says record company BMG gave them some money to record a making of the album documentary but instead they spent it arseing about in a disused hotel casino in France remaking sections of The Shining. Apparently that footage is in the faults somewhere but I don’t think there is the same clamour for that to be made available as there is for the album!
The single is almost pop perfection with Terry’s downbeat vocals aligning somehow perfectly with an uplifting chorus that speaks of recovery and rejuvenation. There’s a line in there that speaks probably to many of us but certainly to me – “I even like myself again”. A nice trick if you can pull it off.
Released: September1992
Chartpeak: No32
The Beautiful South – Old Red Eyes Is Back
One of my favourite albums of 1992 was The Beautiful South’s “0898” which contained four great singles including this which was the first to be released. Technically it came out in 1991 (30 Dec) but it was on an Adrian Rose TOTP in the January so I think I’m OK to include it here.
With its clever Sinatra reference in the title, “Old Red Eyes Is Back” was a very literal yet heart wrenching depiction of alcoholism and also a nifty little tune to boot. Despite not making the Top 20, it’s become one of the band’s best remembered tunes I think. Maybe it’s the subject matter that speaks to so many. A sad indictment indeed.
This was actually an EP entitled “Dixie-Narco” rather than a regular single release though “Movin’ On Up” was the track that got all the airplay and indeed was the only track on it that came from their seminal “Screamadelica” album. The other tracks on the EP were “Stone My Soul”, a cover of “Carry Me Home” written by Dennis Wilson for the Beach Boys’ “Holland” album (though never included) and “Screamadelica” which had been recorded at the time for its namesake album but which only made it onto the 20th anniversary Limited Collectors Edition.
The opening song on”Screamadelica”, “Movin On Up” was surely destined to always be released as a single (of sorts as it turns out). Who could resist its uplifting, gospel tinged vibe and the sadly departed Denise Johnson‘s vocals? I couldn’t and the EP duly rests in my singles box.
The performance we missed seems fairly restrained for Bobby Gillespie though he does seem to have a case of restless leg in his right one which involuntarily keeps…ahem…movin’ on up.
TOTPshowfeaturedon: 6February1992
Chartpeak:No11
Everything But The Girl – Love Is Strange
Another EP! Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt have made some great records but the truth is that until the Todd Terry mix of “Missing” went stratospheric, their biggest hits were cover versions. The last time we had seen the couple on TOTP was four years prior to this when their cover of “I Don’t Want To Talk About It” went Top 3. Two albums and no hit singles later, they returned to covers and released an EP of them called…erm…”Covers EP”. The track listing was eclectic rather than obscure featuring “Tougher Than The Rest” by Bruce Springsteen, “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper, “Alison” by Elvis Costello and this one, Mickey and Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange”. Originally released in 1956, its use in the film DirtyDancing brought it to the attention of a whole new generation. Ben and Tracey’s take on it erred towards sweet and gentle but I didn’t mind that at all. Twee did someone say? How dare you?!
Although this was a stand-alone release in the UK, a whole album was cobbled together for the US. Called “Acoustic” it comprised the “Covers EP”, a version of Tom Waits’ “Downtown Train” (that’s how you cover that song Rod Stewart!) and six acoustic versions of EBTG songs. I seem to recall that their record label rereleased their 1991 album “Worldwide”, which had underperformed commercially, with the “Covers EP” tacked onto it in the wake of its success. I could be wrong though.
Damn! We missed a Kim Wilde episode! Oh…erm….yes, anyway…in 1992, after a total of zero chart hits in the decade so far, Kim Wilde set upon a course of reinventing herself as Belinda Carlisle. OK, it wasn’t quite as literal as that but the resemblance of “Love Is Holy” to something like “Heaven On Earth” can’t be ignored. There was good reason why though. It was written by one Rick Nowels who had written some of Belinda’s previous hits. The plan worked with the single returning Kim to the Top 40 for the first time since 1989.
It was only a temporary reprieve though. The album “Love Is…” was a moderate seller and failed to produce any further hit singles. A final chart hurrah arrived the following year when Kim took a cover of Yvonne Elliman’s “If I Can’t Have You” to No 12 to promote her “Singles Collection 1981-1993” album.
Kim is still a massive live draw and her 2018 album “Here Come The Aliens” charted at No 21, her best position since the aforementioned “Love Is…” thirty years ago.
My first impression of Tori Amos was that she was an American Kate Bush. Now that might be seen as a compliment by many but there was much more to Tori than my initial crude assessment. She’s a classically trained pianist with a mezzo-soprano vocal range for a start. A child prodigy, she was admitted to the Peabody Institute, John Hopkins University aged just five. She briefly fronted synth pop band Y Kant Tori Read who failed dismally, the demise of whom inspired Tori to write material for herself. One of them was “Crucify” which would become her second consecutive UK Top 40 hit after “Winter” made No 25 in March. Both were taken from her debut album “Little Earthquakes” which was well received by critics and fans alike.
With a title like “Crucify”, the song was bound to cause some controversy and it was duly banned in the US Bible Belt for being sacrilegious and blasphemous. Conversely, the aforementioned Kate Bush changed the title of her single “Running Up That Hill” from its original name of “A Deal With God” so as to avoid such a reaction in certain territories. Admittedly she was under record company pressure to do so but a difference between her and Amos all the same.
Tori’s performance on TOTP couldn’t have been more different from the ‘91 vintage of female singer songwriter sat at a piano as personified by Beverley Craven. She looks like she can barely keep her bum on the seat and that at any moment she’ll cock a leg onto the piano Little Richard style.
Tori Amos returned in 1994 with a huge hit in “Cornflake Girl” and even bagged a surprise No 1 in 1997 when an Armand van Helden remix of “Professional Widow (It’s Got To Be Big”) topped the charts.
Having started life as buskers on Dublin’s Grafton Street, The Pale eventually came to widespread public attention with the release of their major label debut single “Dogs With No Tails”. As I recall, the track was picked up on by Radio 1 breakfast DJ Simon Mayo who gave it substantial airplay on his show. I’m pretty sure that will be where I heard it first. He had a habit of trying to break records that he had stumbled on as well as being responsible for the resurrection of songs like “Donald Where’s Your Troosers”, “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” and “Kinky Boots” for no discernible reason. He often came across as full of his own importance to me.
“Dogs With No Tails” sounded completely out of sync with the dominant music movements of the time coming on like an Irish Les Négresses Vertes (“Zobi La Mouche” and all that). Maybe that was its appeal. Something to remind us that music didn’t have to be formulaic and homogeneous.
Despite that Mayo endorsement, it just failed to make the Top 40. My wife was one of those who tried to make it a hit and it duly resides in our singles box to this day. Undeterred, the band changed tack, left A&M and released a number of critically well received albums independently. They are still an ongoing entity touring extensively and with their last album being as recent as 2019.
Released: June1992
Chartpeak: No51
NaturalLife – NaturalLife
Seemingly now just a footnote in pop history to inform us that this was Shovell from M People’s first band, there was a bit more to this lot than that. They were the only London band to appear on the bill for the two day CitiesInThePark mini festival to commemorate the recently deceased legendary producer Martin Hannett in 1991.
More exposure came from Radio 1 who’s listeners voted their debut single “Strange World” as their Record of the Week. Despite not charting, there was enough of a buzz about the band got a second tilt at the Top 40 in the shape of the band’s eponymously titled second single. This was again voted Record of the Week and got decent airplay. I was sure this one would be a hit and I duly bought it. I loved its rock guitar / dance percussion hybrid and memorable lyrics (“Business man you’re 21, said you carry your pen like a soldier’s gun”). Sometimes though airplay doesn’t translate to sales and it fell short once more by just seven places. Had the promised land of the Top 40 been reached, maybe a TOTP appearance would have followed and then who knows what. Sadly, that’s a tale for a parallel universe.
Released: Feb 1992
Chartpeak: No47
XTC – TheBalladOfPeterPumpkinhead
XTC really are a criminally underrated band. How can the genius of their work correlate to the lack of commercial success they have received. By 1992, they hadn’t had a Top 40 hit for ten years, the last being the incredible “Senses Working Overtime”. Maybe it didn’t matter to Andy Partridge and co by that point. They had a loyal fanbase and had arguably produced some of their best work in the intervening time.
Then, out of the blue, came another chart entry via the wonderful “Disappointed” which made the giddy heights of No 33. I could have gone with that track for the Hits We Missed section as it didn’t warrant a TOTP appearance. However, I’ve gone with the follow up “The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead” as despite missing the Top 40, is probably better known via its association with the film Dumb And Dumber courtesy of the cover of it by Crash Test Dummies in 1995.
It’s a cracking song (oops! Went a bit Wallace And Gromit there or is it Dominic Raab?) which pulls you in right from the deceptively slow intro which then explodes into life via a harmonica riff and keeps you locked in for the next four minutes helter skelter ride. The Crash Test Dummies version is almost identical apart from featuring a female lead vocalist (Ellen Reid) instead of the distinctive bass-baritone of Brad Roberts. Had the Canadian band already got permission from XTC to record it prior to the film coming out or was it specifically recorded for the soundtrack? If the latter, why didn’t the film makers just ask to use the original? The Crash Test Dummies did what XTC couldn’t and took the song into the charts where it peaked at No 30.
I bought the XTC version and the “Disappointed” single which both came from the band’s “Nonsuch” album.
Released: May 1992
Chartpeak: No71
Spinal Tap – TheMajestyOfRock
How many times have I watched ThisIsSpinal Tap? I’ve lost count but every time I do catch it, I find another little detail of brilliant comedy. And oh please let the rumour that has recently surfaced about a sequel actually happening be true. Back in 1992, the main protagonists of the project had already reconvened but not for a follow up film. No, they had recorded an album – the pun-tastic “Break Like The Wind” – and even did some live dates to promote it. For me, that blurring of the lines between fiction and reality that helped add layers of intertextuality is what’s made the project endure all these years.
The marketing campaign for the album included the brilliant tool of getting the Our Price chain to amend their weekly instore charts to include “Break Like The Wind” going in straight at No 0. Positioned above that weeks No 1 album, it was all too much for one customer I served who came to the counter looking for an explanation as to what on earth had happened to the chart. “But you can’t have position zero” he argued. I tried to explain it was just a promotional joke on behalf of the record company but he wasn’t satisfied with my explanation and wandered off muttering the words “number zero” and “pah”!
The album’s actual chart position was a peak of No 51 and it included two singles – “Bitch School” which was a minor Top 40 hit and this one, “The Majesty Of Rock” which missed the chart altogether. The lyrics are gloriously ridiculous:
To the majesty of rock, the pageantry of roll
The crowing of the cock, the running of the foal
And that’s the majesty of rock, the mystery of roll
The darning if the sock, the scoring of the goal
Lovely stuff. My mate Robin caught the band at the Albert Hall on the tour. Here he is attempting to get some skin off the band…
Released: May1992
Chartpeak: No61
Tom Cochrane – LifeIsAHighway
This was a Top 10 hit in the US which never translated to the UK. I’d never heard of Tom Cochrane before and I never heard anything about him after this track but apparently he was the the leader of Canadian 80s rockers Red Rider. During the Summer of ‘92, my Our Price colleague Knoxy spent a few weeks on holiday in America and when he came back said that he’d heard this song everywhere he went. Based on that, I thoroughly expected it to be huge over here but it just didn’t happen. Maybe it was too formulaic US rock for a a UK population who were enamoured with KWS at that point!
Years later, a version of it by an outfit called Rascal Flatts covered the song and it was used in the soundtrack to the Walt Disney/Pixar animation Cars. See what they did there?
Released: June1992
Chartpeak:No 62
A House – Endless Art
Now I have to admit that I didn’t know of this tune at the time but it definitely is of 1992 vintage. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered it randomly on Spotify (randomly in terms of I wasn’t looking for it anyway. I know the algorithms make pure randomness impossible). Like The Pale earlier, this lot were from Dublin and just like “Dogs With No Tails”, “Endless Art” was not your typical indie rock song. Yes, the idea of a ‘list’ song wasn’t original (think “We Didn’t Start The Fire” by Billy Joel, “Nothing Ever Happens by Del Amitri etc) but the way they executed it made it stand out for me. Maybe it’s just Dave Couse’s Irish accent that brings it to life. The list of artists from various fields and eras is remarkable easy on the ear with a couple of rhyming names placed in close proximity to aid the song’s flow. I think my favourite is “Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse RIP”. The innovative stop-motion video for the single drew lots of praise but even that wasn’t enough to propel it into the Top 40. They finally creeped in two years later with “Here Come the Good Times (Part 1)” but the band split a couple of years after that.
Their legacy far outstripped their commercial achievements with the Irish Times rock critics voting their “I Am The Greatest” album the third best Irish long player of all time behind only “Loveless” by My Bloody Valentine and “Achtung Baby” by U2. Indeed, some have argued that they were more important than Bono et al.
A House. RIP.
Released: June 1992
Chart peak: No 46
Martin Stephenson And The Daintees – Big Sky New Light
I’d known about Martin Stephenson since the mid 80s when The Daintees (as they just were back then) released “Trouble Town”, a marvellous, uplifting little pop tune on Kitchenware Records. Then came the switch to major label London Records, a repositioning of the band as Martin Stephenson And The Daintees and the “Boat To Bolivia” album which attracted superlative praise from the critics but not much in the way of sales. “Gladsome, Humour & Blue” became their highest charting album in 1988 and then just as I was leaving the bubble of being a student came “Salutation Road” which is just a great album.
Their final album for London was “A Boy’s Heart” and “Big Sky New Light” was the lead single from it. Not my favourite Stephenson tune by any means but in a year that saw Mr Big and Nick Berry very nearly top the charts, I wasn’t going to miss out this little bit of quality to balance the equation. A gently driven yet solid song, it saw Martin enliven it with some shouted vocals and even the odd ‘yeah!’. I bought the single though I have to say it was from the bargain bin.
Martin went onto a prolific solo career beginning with the following year’s “High Bells Ring Thin” album and he has also reactivated the Daintees to re-record all four of their albums on the 30th anniversary of their release.
Released: June 1992
Chart peak: No 71
Pele – Megalomania
Hailing from Ellesmere Port, Cheshire (I once knew a girl from Ellesmere Port – that’s it, that’s the story. Not great is it?) this lot built up a strong live following and were quickly picked up by M&G Records and set to work recording their debut album “Fireworks”. When it finally came out it was a Recommended Release in the Our Price chain and hopes were high that it would accrue some steady sales but ultimately it didn’t really light up the sky. It did however feature three very good singles that received decent airplay but which all failed to chart.
The middle one of those was “Megalomania” which was a bright and breezy pop tune that was perfect for daytime playlists. All the singles were to be fair. Listening back to them now, they’re kind of like a poppier version of Pale Fountains who I loved. Despite being ignored by the UK record buying public, “Megalomania” was a No 1 in South Africa and the band toured with the likes of Del Amitri and The Pogues. A record company dispute caused the band to split but main man Ian Prowse carved out a successful music career forming Amsterdam and striking up a working relationship with Elvis Costello.
Released: February1992
Chartpeak: No73
Their Season In The Sun
Charles And Eddie
They arrived out of nowhere with a retro sounding yet broad church appealing song that would conquer the charts. Not quite the classic definition one hit wonder of one huge song then nothing – they had three further UK hits though none made it any higher than No 29 – but it was damn close. Certainly Charles And Eddie (terrible name) were never bigger than they were in the Autumn of 1992.
Curtis Stigers
An unlikely pop star, Curtis came from a jazz club background but emerged with the backing of major label Arista as some sort of rock ‘n’ soul artist, Daryl Hall and John Oates style. Amazingly it worked and Curtis racked up two consecutive Top 10 hits in the first half of the year. Suddenly the spell was broken and his biggest hit after that would be a No 28 five years later.
Curtis returned to his jazz roots recording multiple albums for the Concord Jazz label and if his Twitter account is anything to go by, remains a thoroughly decent chap which is all that matters to me.
KWS
The biggest band to come out of Nottingham since Paper Lace. It’s quite an accolade (don’t tell Tindersticks I said it though). Similar to Charles And Eddie, they weren’t quite the one hit wonders people might suspect they are. They actually accrued five UK Top 40 singles including a follow up Top 10 hit but it’s their cover of KC And The Sunshine Band’s “Please Don’t Go” that they will forever be associated with.
This really sounded like lowest common denominator stuff – never mind the quality, feel the sales. They were the soul brother to Undercover’s poppier take on the genre (more of them later). Inevitably, their story ended as all such short lived encounters with fame do – with one of them appearing on the Identity Parade round on Never Mind The Buzzcocks.
The Shamen
It seems a bit unfair to include The Shamen in this section as they existed long before 1992 and for many years after too. This 12 month period though brought them commercial success like no other before or since. A Top 3 album and four Top 10 singles including the controversy raking No 1 “Ebeneezer Goode”. It was a level of profile that they would never reach again. Maybe they took too long (three years) to release their next album “Axis Mutatis” or maybe they were undone by the rise of Britpop? Either way, The Shamen will always have 1992 to remind them how big they once were.
Shanice
Finally the classic one hit wonder! One enormous single and then no further Top 40 entries ever – not under her own name at least. “I Love Your Smile” bounded to No 2 propelled by that infectious ‘de der dup dup der der der’ vocal hook but then nothing. Zip. Nada. Shanice paid the bills by doing backing vocals for the likes of Toni Braxton and Usher whilst also branching out into acting and even reality TV with her show with her husband Flex And Shanice. Flex?!
Tasmin Archer
An intriguing marketing campaign (‘Who is Tasmin Archer?’) helped launch this breakthrough artist into the stratosphere but in reality it was the strength of her debut single “Sleeping Satellite” that achieved success which she couldn’t have conceived of in her wildest dreams. So radio friendly was it that it was surely cooked up in the hit song laboratory. It soared to No 1 and hinted at huge things for Tasmin but those “Great Expectations” were never really fulfilled. Her album went Top 10 and three more singles from it were hits though none bigger than No 16. Even an EP of Elvis Costello covers couldn’t reactivate her career. By the time of her second album in 1996, she’d been mostly forgotten leaving people to ask ‘Who is Tasmin Archer?’ all over again.
Undercover
This lot’s short lived success was almost inexplicable. Lame dance versions of rock/ pop standards fronted by a guy who looked like he’d turned up after his other job as a bingo caller? Come on! Seriously? Two big and one smaller hit was the extent of their success before obscurity beckoned. For a short while though they were Top of the Shop Pops.
Last Words
And it’s done. Another TOTP year reviewed and another stinker. A completely directionless 12 months with the charts full of all sorts of crap. In the non music world, there was another General Election win for The Tories (BOO!) and my beloved Chelsea were still awful and five years away from actually winning anything. Personally, there was a big change for me work wise with an unexpected promotion and move to a different shop which I loved. TOTP itself was still finding its way after the sweeping changes of the ‘year zero’ revamp. For my money, those changes hadn’t worked in that the show wasn’t substantially any better than the complacent dinosaur it had become. The endless ‘exclusives’ were tedious and the four Breakers in under two minutes supremely annoying. By the end of the year, most of the new presenters had gone leaving a hardcore of just Tony Dortie and Mark Franklin. Clearly it wasn’t working for new executive producer Stanley Appel either. And so 1993 beckons. In my head , this year was one of the worst of the whole decade. Please, please let me be wrong…
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.
We’ve missed yet another show due to the Adrian Rose issue and so find ourselves well into June of 1992 here at TOTP Rewind. The Euros international football tournament is well under way but England are already out having lost 2-1 to hosts Sweden two days before this episode aired. After the excitement of Italia ‘90, it was a huge disappointment for the nation but in truth the team had massively underperformed not having won a single game and scoring just one goal. Graham Taylor was vilified in the press especially by The Sun and their infamous ‘turnip’ campaign. I would never endorse anything in that publication but Taylor was not, by any metric, a successful appointment.
I was still working at the Our Price store on Market Street, Manchester at this time. There was another store in Manchester at Piccadilly above which there was office space which was used by area and regional managers for admin work. I had my initial interview as a Xmas temp there. It was also used for company events where directors were invited to come and address store employees and take questions from them about company policy, initiatives etc. At one point it also housed some unsaleable stock that needed sending back to the central warehouse in Heston, Greater London and I recall spending a day up there packing up all sorts of crap albums. It was soul destroying. The person I spent the day doing this with was called Matt who went onto be a senior product manager at EMI and now runs a campaign management company for music artists. Meanwhile, I’m currently…unemployed. I seem to remember Matt was much more conscientious in his work that day boxing up loads more than I did. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Anyway, that’s enough of my personal stuff…on with the show! We start with Utah Saints and their Kate Bush sampling hit “Something Good”. Watching this back, it’s interesting to note how much the performance comes over like that of a conventional rock/pop band due to the fact that there’s some actual instruments on show. There’s the energetic bass player, someone on keyboards and the bloke with the megaphone thwacking some drums. The Kate Bush vocal is taken care of via a guy on the decks spinning a picture disc of her. As such, despite it undoubtedly being a dance anthem, the TOTP producers don’t feel the need for all that garishly coloured special effects wash to be deployed as it has been in the past for dance acts on the show. It makes for a much more enjoyable experience or maybe it’s that it just appeals to my more traditional tastes. As you know I was never a ravehead.
Tonight’s presenters are Mark Franklin and…WTF? Bob Geldof?! Why?! What was going on here?! It’s true that just a few weeks before they had Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse as Smashie and Nicey guest present but that was a tie in to promote Enfield’s comedy show that was returning to BBC2 later that evening. Was Geldof there to promote something? He released his third solo album in 1992 called “The Happy Club” but it can’t have been to do with that surely? It seems there were some other guest presenters during the ‘year zero’ era. In December, Tony Dortie was joined by Mr Blobby (I kid you not) whilst several EastEnders actors took a turn but here’s Tony Dortie to explain that connection:
One of the things that isn't mentioned much is how old School #Eastenders and #totp got on so well @westbrookdanni Sid Owen wld always come n hang out for rehearsals they were also good and fun guest hosts. @deangaffney1 ledge. Albert Sq used to always have Pop star set visits
So what was the deal with Sir Bob? Perhaps the more pertinent question is what the hell did he think he was doing with some of the comments he proceeds to make on the show? He comes across as a creepy, bitter, old bellend. Witness his first segue which is into one of those satellite link performances from the US this time with SophieBHawkins. “I don’t want to ask you any questions I just want to look at you” Geldof pervs. Eeeewww! Sophie just laughs nervously. What was he thinking?! Sadly it won’t be the last inappropriate comment he makes during the show. Here’s Tony Dortie again with his take on what went down:
#totp 2Bob Geldof was thoroughly unpleasant about the artistes appearing as well, just the worse ….being rude has never been in style. At the time nobody said anything cz Sir Soap dodger got given his "I'm Privileged pass"
Tony telling it how it was there. Anyway, back to the music and Sophie B Hawkins. Who was she and where had she come from? Well, she was a bit of a cultural all rounder being a singer -songwriter, musician and painter and hailed from New York City(baby!). As well as being a song title Shania Twain would pay good money for, “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” was her debut single and was a worldwide smash. This was one of those songs that’s all about the hook of the chorus with the verses actually being quite pedestrian. It works though; there’s even a false ending in there just to mix things up a bit. I don’t think that I picked up on the fact that the object of her affections in the lyrics is actually a woman and that the whole song is written from the perspective of the singer observing said woman in an abusive relationship and wanting to rescue her from it. Sophie comes across as quite the bohemian her bio suggests she was/is in this performance which does a good job of engaging the audience. As Mark Franklin says (and in a much more appropriate way than Geldof would have I’m sure), she seemed like a lot of fun. Not quite a one hit wonder (she had three more UK Top 40 hits), this is probably the one she is best remembered for though. It peaked at No 14.
Now if we thought that Utah Saints were subversive earlier when it came to being a dance act on TOTP when acting more like an archetypal rock band…well, we hadn’t seen anything yet! This ‘performance’ from TheOrb must be one if the most outlandish in the show’s history. These ambient house innovators had already made a splash with their debut album “The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld” but they would become a sensation with the release of “U.F.Orb” which would go to No 1. It was previewed by the single “Blue Room” which would make history as the longest track to ever enter the UK singles chart. Clocking in at a mammoth 39 minutes, it took advantage of a change in regulations when the chart compilers allowed a maxi single to run to 40 minutes (alongside the existing 25 minute limit) as long as only one title was listed amongst the single’s tracks. It duly entered the Top 40 at No 12 before climbing to a peak of No 8.
Enough of the statistics though, let’s get to what was going down on screen. No DJs nor ponytailed fellas jigging about behind keyboards here. No, the best way to promote the track in the eyes of The Orb’s Alex Paterson and Kris Weston was to have the pair sat playing a sci-fi version of chess whilst passing a cross bearing orb between the pair of them. To pad it out a bit there’s some kaleidoscopic imagery of dolphins and some strobe lights flickering about. How to describe this performance? Avant- garde? Leftfield? Eccentric? Or maybe just plain old weird. Apparently it had a cosmic effect on Robbie Williams. Here’s @TOTPFacts:
“He thought it was so radical. He’d never seen a band come in and just dictate and piss people off so much and get away with it.” A collaboration resulted: this 1997 cover of The Bee Gees' "I Started A Joke" https://t.co/tJ0jwGircR#TOTP
“Blue Room” features the guitar playing of Gong and System 7 member Steve Hillage. When working at the Our Price store in Stockport in the mid 90s, Steve was the inspiration for a saying we used if someone had a mishap with a brew. If anyone spilt their drink a cry of ‘Steve Spillage!’ could be heard. Well it amused us.
Geldof is back now having a dig at Elton John whose latest video is up next. We all knew that Elton’s hair wasn’t real but to bring it up by going on about his new wig seemed unnecessary at best especially coming from a man who was criticised himself over his appearance at the time of Band Aid/Live Aid (he was too busy for a haircut if you remember). As Elton was on just the other week, I’ll return to Tony Dortie and his tweets to cover this one…err…”The One”:
We need to do more to celebrate Elton John he is truly one of the most talented Living Musicians in the history of music since time began @eltonofficial there is nobody who doesn't like Elton #totp
Ah. You see the thing is Tony that’s not quite true. I refer you to my comments last week about my friend Robin who dismissed all of Elton’s back catalogue as unlistenable bollocks. I was wrong about him not having a favourite Lionel Richie song though. “Three Times A Lady” was his choice which is presumably three times the song that “The One” is.
Despite 1992 being awash with dance anthems, there was still space in the UK pop landscape for a boy band. Enter TakeThat. Actually, was the term ‘boy band’ in use back in 1992 or am I using it retrospectively? Certainly there were groups* that attracted a predominantly female teenage fan base before then. Bay City Rollers in the 70s, Duran Duran and Bros in the 80s but were they referred to as boy bands at the time? I’m not so sure. The 90s was a boy band boom time though. Off the top of my head and not counting US groups there were the big three of Take That, Boyzone and Westlife but there were also 5ive, 911, A1, Bad Boys Inc, Upside Down, East 17 and many more probably including a number in their moniker. All of these (with the exception possibly of East 17) followed a template of pretty boys singing catchy but lightweight tunes and doing some nifty dance steps while they were at it. Their catalogue of songs would almost certainly include some cover versions.
*I’m not counting The Beatles on the grounds that the connotations of what it meant to be a boy band certainly didn’t apply to them.
I guess New Kids On The Block had shown what that set up could achieve sales wise as the new decade dawned. It was probably inevitable that the UK would find its own version of them eventually. It was just that Take That got there first. Anyway, here they are in the studio again performing “It Only Takes A Minute” again and judging by the screams of the audience, they know they’re on to a good thing. Interesting to note that even at this early stage the only other band member to get a vocal line and their own personal camera close up is Robbie Williams. Hmm. “It Only Takes A Minute” peaked at No 7.
Four Breakers this week starting with U2 and “Even Better Than The Real Thing”. The fourth single from their “Achtung Baby” album of the previous year, its original version was later eclipsed by the Paul Oakenfold Perfecto dance remix both in terms of chart peak and, for many a music lover, its artistic merit. I always liked the version as it was originally intended though. It sounded angular and dynamic propelled by another great guitar riff from The Edge, the distinctive sound of which was created by a DigiTech Whammy pitch shifter pedal which created a double octave sweep (for all you tech enthusiasts out there). The video was a Godley & Creme production with the continuous rotating footage created by a 360 degree camera rig. They certainly liked to innovate those guys. Remember the face morphing “Cry” video from 1985? “Even Better Than The Real Thing” peaked at No 12 whilst the dance mixes did even better than the real thing by going to No 8.
One of my favourite albums of 1992 was “0898” by TheBeautifulSouth which spawned four great singles yet we hadn’t seen any of them on TOTP until now. We may have missed some appearances due to the Adrian Rose scenario I guess. That situation was finally rectified when third single “Bell Bottomed Tear” made it into the Breakers. Despite it being the biggest hit of the four peaking at No 16, we would not see it again on the show. After two faster paced singles with Paul Heaton as the main vocalist, it was the turn of Dave Hemmingway to come centre stage what with it being a ballad and all which seemed to be his forte. I say ballad though it seems to be more of a lament for a one night stand that didn’t turn into a relationship.
The final single released from the album (“36D”) was the least successful missing the Top 40 completely though was possibly the most notorious. Supposedly it was a trigger for Briana Corrigan to leave the band as she objected to it reflecting negatively on glamour models when it should have been the media that gave them the platform that was criticised. There was probably more to it than that but that was the story I heard.
A first sighting now of the best selling US girl group of all time. Yes, before Destiny’s Child, SWV and the rest came TLC and they were bigger than them all with sales of 85 million copies. With four No 1 singles and a No 1 album in America alone, no wonder the group were inducted to the Black Music & Entertainment Hall Of Fame this year alongside the likes of such legendary names as Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding and Michael Jackson. It all started with debutsingle “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg” thoughI have to admit to not being particularly aware of it at the time despite it making No 13 in our Top 40. By the time the likes of “Creep”, “Waterfalls” and the “CrazySexyCool” album came around you couldn’t fail to notice them and I didn’t. Apparently the group’s them manager Pebbles (yes she of “Girlfriend” fame in the late 80s) makes an appearance at the end of the video for “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg”. Tragically Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes died in a road traffic accident in 2002.
When I think about Diana Ross in the early 90s (not that I do very often you understand) the only song that comes to mind is her No 2 hit “When You Tell Me That You Love Me”. Taken from the album “The Force Behind The Power”, it was a huge hit over Xmas of ‘91. I was therefore taken aback to learn that the album actually generated five UK Top 40 singles. “One Shining Moment” was the third of those and even made No 10. It’s a smoother sound than WYTMTYLM which always seemed just ever so slightly hysterical in its yearning but it’s also fairly unremarkable and I’m surprised it was such a big hit.
Diana (or Ms Diana Ross to use her full title) would continue to have medium sized hits in the UK throughout the decade though interestingly not in her native US – none of the singles from “Force Behind The Power” were hits there. She even had a No 1 Best Of album in this country in 1993 when “One Woman: The Ultimate Collection” was a huge seller that Xmas.
Ah shit! Geldof’s back making more asinine comments although I can’t really quibble about his target here. When Def Leppard were on the show recently with their “Let’s Get Rocked” single, I derided it as one of the dumbest songs of the decade and I was right. However, they came pretty close to topping that ‘achievement’ with its follow up “Make Love Like A Man”. I can hardly bear to hear the lyrics on this but if I have to listen to them then you can read them. Look at this horseshit:
‘Make love like a man, I’m a man that’s what I am’
What. The. Fuck?! Lead singer Joe Elliott has stated that they weren’t trying to be macho with this song but rather funny. Remind me never to invite Joe round to my house if I need cheering up with a laugh. Even Elliott seems to have seen the light though. In a 2014 interview he admitted he would rather not play this song live anymore as the lyrics are a nod too stupid. No shit. Despite all of the above, did Geldof really need to introduce it with the following words:
“Here’s their new single I’d quite like to give you one big girl otherwise known as Make Love Like A Big Girl’s Blouse”? No he didn’t. What’s that? He was trying to be funny too? Add him to the list of people never to be invited around to my gaff. “Make Love Like A Man” peaked at No 12.
Erasure are No 1 with their “ABBA-esque EP”. It’s the video this week for the “Take A Chance On Me” track with Vince and Andy dressed up as Agnetha and Anna-Frid in their 70s pomp. I wonder if they argued about who would be who? Vince looks quite convincing as Agnetha, Andy not so much as Anna-Frid. I seem to remember there being a lot of praise about how amusing the video was at the time but I’m not sure if it’s retained that humour.
Geldof and Mark Franklin are reunited for the show’s ending and we discover that unbelievably the former was there to promote his latest release – a single called “Room 19 (Sha La La La Lee)”. You’ll be glad to hear that it didn’t make the Top 100.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Utah Saints
Something Good
Liked it, didn’t buy it
2
Sophie B. Hawkins
Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover
Nope
3
The Orb
Blue Room
Not really my bag
4
Elton John
The One
Nah
5
Take That
It Only Takes A Minute
No
6
U2
Even Better Than The Real Thing
No but I had the album Achtung Baby
7
The Beautiful South
Bell Bottomed Tear
No but I had the album 0898
8
TLC
Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg
Negative
9
Diana Ross
One Shining Moment
It’s another no
10
Def Leppard
Make Love Like A Man
God no!
11
Erasure
Abba-esque EP
No but my wife did…maybe
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.
It’s late October 1990 and I’m on my honeymoon in Germany. Yes, having tied the knot with my girlfriend five days prior to this TOTP broadcast, we were abroad (for the first time for me) thanks to one of our old friends from Polytechnic who had sorted out a cheap holiday for us as they were working as a temp in a travel agents at the time. Unfortunately for me, my feet were in spasms of agony after I had made a very poor choice when purchasing a pair of shoes for the big day on the morning of the wedding. Why I did this so late I can’t recall but I had no time to wear them in and the shape of them clearly didn’t agree with my feet. My despair was compounded when I realised that I hadn’t packed any other sort of footwear for the honeymoon and so had to spend the whole week wearing them in pain.
As a result of being out of the country, I am absolutely sure that I would not have watched this particular TOTP – if memory serves, I was bathing my poor plates of meat whilst watching some German football in our accommodation. I wonder if there was anything soothing on the show that night or was it a distinctly more painful experience….
We start with the song that closed the last show but this time the artist is in the studio. Not only that but, according to host Jakki Brambles, she had broken off rehearsals with the reformed Go-Go’s to be there. It can only be Belinda Carlisle with “(We Want) The Same Thing”. That Go-Go’s rehearsal was for a tour to promote their first Best Of album although according to Wikipedia, it peaked at No 127 in the US so I’m not sure that the tour was really that successful in achieving its aim.
“(We Want) The Same Thing” on the other hand was doing a great job of re-energising Belinda’s “Runaway Horses” album, surprisingly going Top 10 despite being the fifth single to be released from the album. When I joined Our Price the following week, there was a tip from the buying department in the weekly memos advising stores to stock up on the album noting that it was a record that, despite being over a year old, just wouldn’t stay dead.
Belinda’s beehived backing singers appear to include Sharon Watts from Eastenders in their number whilst her own outfit seems to have been inspired by a French maid character that you might see on those ‘saucy’ postcards back in the 70s. Thankfully it isn’t the same thing though despite what young teenage lads watching on TV may have wanted.
Another golden oldie back in the charts?! Oh and guess what? It was from yet another film. This time it was the supernatural romantic thriller Ghost starring Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg that was to blame. The Righteous Brothers had already featured in a very successful film back in 1986 when they were included on the Top Gun soundtrack with “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” (there really was an all roads lead to Tom Cruise thing going on wasn’t there?) but now their version of “Unchained Melody” was at the centrepiece of Ghost’s most iconic moment – the pottery wheel scene. Cited as ‘one of the most iconic moments of ’90s cinema’, all that mucky clay business created a clamour for the song that could only be sated by a re-release that would become not only a No 1 record (it originally peaked at No 14 in 1965) but also *spoiler alert* the UK’s top selling single of 1990. The single’s success would be reason enough for a follow up and so, inevitably, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” was re-issued and made No 3 as did a hastily arranged Righteous Brothers Best Of compilation.
The Righteous Brothers were, in their original format, Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield. Medley, of course, already had his own personal bit of soundtrack history when he duetted with Jennifer Warnes on “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” from Dirty Dancing. Given this info, I was immediately confused when I saw the video being used to promote “Unchained Melody” as there was only one Righteous Brother on display who was Hatfield, Where the Hell was Bill Medley?! Well, the legend goes something like this. Hatfield and Medley had agreed to do one solo song each per album. Both had wanted to sing “Unchained Melody” for their fourth album but Hatfield won the coin toss.
The song would cause another Top 40 phenomenon five years later when it was performed by actors Robson Green and Jerome Flynn in the ITV drama Soldier Soldier. I was working in the Stockport branch of Our Price at the time and the amount of people who had not been near a record shop for years that ventured in to enquire about that record from Soldier Soldier was unreal. When eventually released, like The Righteous Brothers five years before them, it would become the best selling single of the year in the UK. Strange times indeed. And we haven’t even mentioned the Gareth Gates version in 2002 but let’s not get into that eh?
An example of a new track being used to promote a load of old tunes next as we get “Don’t Ask Me” by Public Image Limited. This single was taken from a Best Of album called “The Greatest Hits, So Far” (although PiL never did manage another chart entry after this). It sounded so very pop music-like to me which was a surprise given John Lydon’s previous canon of work. When I was a full on pop kid back in ’83 influenced almost entirely by the Top 40, “This Is Not A Love Song” sounded like it had come from a different universe entirely compared to its chart peers. I didn’t know much of PiL’s back catalogue (although I obviously knew of Lydon’s Sex Pistols’ history) but anybody could hear how completely ‘other’ this song was in the shiny world of ‘new pop’ back then. Fast forward seven years, and although anything with Lydon’s vocals on it could never be described as mainstream, “Don’t Ask Me” was ….well…a good pop song. According to @TOTPFacts though, the band’s bassist Allan Dias who wrote it really wasn’t happy with how it sounded:
"I hate that version that's out, it's so soft. You should have heard my version – it was cutting, it kicked! They softened it up, they made it MTV-friendly." #TOTP
“Don’t Ask Me” peaked at No 22 and it took PiL a further two years to release any new recordings which arrived in the form of the album “That What Is Not”. Two years was nothing though as the album after that didn’t appear for TWENTY years as the band was put on hiatus.
I’ve always found Lydon a captivating character and been intrigued by his confrontational interviews. However, his support for Donald Trump in the 2020 US Presidential election was a step too far for me and I found his views totally unpalatable.
Oh come on! This is getting ridiculous now! After Maria McKee spent a month at No 1 with a song from a Tom Cruise movie and after seeing “Unchained Melody” back in the charts earlier from the film Ghost, here were Berlin riding high in the Top 40 once more with that song from yet another movie! And indeed, another Tom Cruise film! What was it with this guys films generating huge hits in the music charts back then? After Top Gun gave us the frankly awful (in my book) “Take My Breath Away”, we then had two singles from the soundtrack to Cruise’s 1988 flick Cocktail in “Kokomo” by The Beach Boys and Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” which both became massive successes.
Even his 1992 film Far And Away whose soundtrack was composed by John Williams and was a mixture of traditional Irish instrumentation and conventional orchestra; yes even that managed to give us “Book Of Days” by Enya! The following year his Interview With A Vampire film spawned what was seen as heresy for many a rock fan, the Guns N’ Roses cover of “Sympathy For The Devil” by The Rolling Stones (described by a record shop colleague at the time as ‘comedy record of the week’).
Out of interest, I just googled if there was an album of Tom Cruise film songs and there is! Called “Born On The Fourth Of July – Music From The Films Of Tom Cruise”, it’s yours for £369.32 from Amazon! All of this would eventually and inevitably lead to Cruise having a go at the old singing lark himself when he played rock star Stacee Jaxx in Rock Of Ages. Behold the Cruisemeister!
Finally some new music from a new band (sort of). Having finally hit big commercially with “I’m Free” over the Summer, The Soup Dragons needed a quick, sure -fire follow up to consolidate on that success. So what did they do? Well, they did what everyone does and re-released a previous single that had flopped and bingo! Another bona fide chart hit! The previous single in question was “Mother Universe” which for me was even better than “I’m Free” and I duly bought it. However, that original version that was released back in 1989 (which I hadn’t known) didn’t sound like the re-release….
Compare that rather turgid mix to the revamped, pimped up 1990 incarnation…
It’s as if the magic elixir that they had discovered for “I’m Free” had been liberally poured all over the original “Mother Universe” recording and what grew in its place was the slick, knowing and well-to-do cousin of its poor relative. The gospel choir, the Mikey Dread sample in the intro and all those other little elements that had conspired to make “I’m Free” so irresistible did the trick again. and “Mother Universe” (the re-release) was another chart hit, albeit much smaller than its predecessor peaking at No 26.
Despite that, and as much as I liked “I’m Free”, this will always be the better record for me (see also The Boo Radleys whose “Wake Up Boo!” is by far their biggest and most played hit but I infinitely prefer its follow up “Find The Answer Within”) Is there a name for that syndrome of preferring a more obscure song to the one that was an artist’s biggest hit that everyone else always chooses? Oh yes, I think it’s called being a precious, music snob.
Jason Donovan again?! For all that he was the pop prince of 1989 which was his year in the sun, he seems to have cast quite the shadow over 1990 as well. “I’m Doing Fine” was his fourth single release of the year (all taken from his “Between The Lines” album) and was also the worst performing, peaking at No 22. Now what’s Jakki Brambles saying about him in her intro? Something about him proving all his critics wrong by actually playing live at his…erm…live gigs. She protests too much I do fear. And what was that about The Beatles? This was his tribute to them? What’s that supposed to mean? OK, let’s have a listen then….
…well, as a Beatles influenced record it’s hardly Oasis is it? The opening guitar chords are very vaguely reminiscent of their “Rubber Soul” era but if anything, it sounds more like a track by The Monkees than the MopTops. It’s like a piss weak version of “Tonight” by New Kids On The Block which in itself was a piss weak take on The Beatles / Beach Boys sound. And what the heck was Donovan’s performance here all about? All that Billie from The Double Deckers thumbs up, arm jerking, his ridiculous hair and those frankly bizarre strides. Yet again, I say he protests too much.
Ooh! A single now from a new album that the music business is in raptures over according to Jakki B – what could it be? Oh… it’s “The Rhythm Of The Saints” by Paul Simon. This is probably a completely unfair opinion and I am certainly no expert on the album but wasn’t this just a retread of his iconic “Graceland’ album only not as good? As I said, probably unfair but the sales figures kind of back me up. Although it sold well (2 x platinum in both the UK and the US – indeed it was a No 1 album over here), those numbers were dwarfed by what “Graceland” achieved. Again, probably an unfair gauge but apart from lead single “The Obvious Child”, none of the other tracks lifted from “The Rhythm Of The Saints” were hits.
Although both were termed ‘world music’ albums, whereas “Graceland” had combined Western pop themes with African rhythms, its follow up relocated geographically to South America and took its inspiration from Brazilian drum beats. “The Obvious Child” was pleasant enough although those drums seemed a bit incongruous but it was nowhere near as memorably quirky as say “You Can Call Me Al”. I’m sure that in the intervening 30 years that some revisionism will have taken place and “The Rhythm Of The Saints” will no doubt be critically adored but it all felt a bit underwhelming to me at the time. “Graceland 2”? Bit obvious wasn’t it Paul?
A couple of Breakers next from two guys who knew each other well and had worked with together previously. George Michael was not happy with his record company Sony Music at this time as he perceived that they were not supporting him as an artist. So toxic had the relationship become that he refused to film a video for his last single “Praying For time” which had been the first track released from his second solo album “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1”. As far as I can see, he didn’t film one for follow up single “Waiting For That Day” either. The clip below seems to be taken from the South Bank Show judging by Melvyn Bragg’s voice over. It’s quite an interesting clip though, explaining as it does how George put the track together by employing the ubiquitous James Brown “Funky Drummer” sample in a totally different way alongside some mellow folk style guitar chords. The melody borrows heavily from “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by The Rolling Stones so George wisely drew attention to this by referencing that song in the lyrics and giving Mick Jagger and Keith Richards a songwriting credit.
After the mega success of “Faith” and its attendant singles, whatever came after from Michael would probably not be seen favourably in comparison but for me, “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1” is by far the better album with “Waiting For That Day” one of the stand out tracks. However, much like Paul Simon, the album didn’t sell anywhere near as well as its predecessor and the singles were not huge hits. “Waiting For That Day” peaked at No 23 in the UK and No 27 in the US.
I don’t recall this Elton John single at all. “You Gotta Love Someone”? Nope – I’ve got nothing at all. Was this another track from “Sleeping With The Past”?
*checks Wikipedia*
FFS! It was from the Days Of Thunder soundtrack! Pissing Tom Cruise strikes again!
It’s not much of a song in truth. As with much of his early 90s output, it was a trudging, mid tempo ballad that Elton tried to liven up a bit at the end with the addition of a gospel choir – he should have got onto The Soup Dragons for help in that direction. It peaked at No 33 but was included on “The Very Best Of Elton John” album that was released this month and which would end up being the first thing I ever sold when I came to work at Our Price a week or so later.
Paul Simon, George Michael, Elton John and now Paul McCartney in the running order for this TOTP! Talk about big names! They weren’t exactly new and exciting though were they? We saw “Birthday” just the other week so I’ve very little left to say about it.
The 90s were not Paul’s most successful years I would argue. He didn’t have a single that even made the Top 15 let alone the Top 5. He did however dabble in a different musical genre when he released “Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio”, his first foray into classical music and a collaboration with conductor and composer Clive Davis to commemorate The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s 150th anniversary. Towards the end of the decade, he released the “Flaming Pie” album which, although not necessarily reversing his commercial fortunes, was critically well received.
“Birthday” peaked at No 29.
We arrive at what remains the only No 1 song ever penned by Paul Heaton*. Given his canon of work, this seems incredible. “A Little Time” was the first single from the second album by The Beautiful South called “Choke” and rather bizarrely was the only single from it to be a Top 40 hit. The album sold well enough – it went platinum and peaked at No 2 – but the two further singles released from it, (the Soul II Soul lampooning “My Book” and “Let Love Speak Up Itself”) peaked at Nos 43 and 51 respectively. The phenomenon of No 1 singles by established artists (so not one hit wonders) being followed by records that didn’t even chart is not a common one I’m guessing. I can think of “E.S.P” by The Bee Gees peaking outside the Top 40 after their chart Topper “You Win Again”. off the top of my head.
I recall that when I started at Our Price, whoever the chart LP buyer was in my store had gone a bit overboard with the orders for “Choke” and there was a massive overstock of it that I don’t think was ever cleared (a lack of further hit singles from it probably didn’t help!).
*”Caravan Of Love” was a No 1 for The Housemartins but was a cover version of an Isley-Jasper-Isley song
The play out video is “Dressed For Success” by Roxette whose re-release schedule was still in full effect at this point. Having hit it big with “It Must Have Been Love” (yet another film soundtrack single), the band’s record company had embarked upon a strategy of re-issuing their previous singles that hadn’t been hits first time around. We’d already had “Listen To Your Heart” go Top 10 and now it was time for “Dressed For Success” to try its luck. Despite its self prophesying title, it didn’t quite do the same job although its peak of No 18 was 30 places higher than its original release.
Not sounding as accomplished as either “It Must Have Been Love” or “Listen To Your Heart”, it was like a clunky version of early Abba material. It did the job of maintaining the duo’s profile though until new album “Joyride” was released in the March of 1991.
For posterity’s sake, I include the chart run down below:
No but it was on that first Q Magazine album that I bought.
8
George Michael
Waiting For That Day
No but my wife had the album
9
Elton John
You Gotta Love Someone
No
10
Paul McCartney
Birthday
Negative
11
The Beautiful South
A Little Time
Not the single but I have it on their Best Of album
12
Roxette
Dressed For Success
Nah
Disclaimer
OK – here’s the thing – the TOTP episodes are only available on iPlayer for a limited amount of time so the link to the programme below only works for about another month so you’ll have to work fast if you want to catch the whole show.
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 Rewind - the 90s 