TOTP Rewind – the 90s | My memories of 90s chart music

TOTP 17 OCT 1997

The volatility of the Top 40 around this time – the advent of first week discounting meaning high chart debuts followed by a sharp decline in sales – must have been an issue for the Beeb’s grand old pop music show. Except for a few anomalies, the days of hits taking weeks to slowly climb the charts allowing for multiple TOTP appearances on the way were a thing of the past. In my teenage years, No 1s would stay at the top for at least three weeks but by 1997 we were at the stage where we were experiencing six different chart toppers in the same amount of weeks. Executive producer Chris Cowey tried to address this by allowing repeat performances of hits that had peaked and were either descending the charts slowly or remaining in the Top 10 as a non-mover. This resulted in creating a platform for songs that were still popular to feature on the show but also meant that singles entering the lower parts of the Top 40 didn’t get a look in. Another strategy was to have an ‘exclusive’ performance of a song the week before its release and then a second appearance when it actually entered the charts the following week. Neither of these measures were ever going to restore the show to its past glories and the peak viewing figures it experienced in the 70s and 80s but at least Cowey was trying.

Having said all of that, we start with a song that didn’t fall into either category I have just outlined above. “U Sexy Thing” by Clock was on the show’s running order as a new entry at No 12 and would feature again the following week after climbing one place to No 11. Morrissey once said in Smash Hits when reviewing the week’s singles releases “There are indeed worse groups than Modern Romance but can anyone seriously think of one?”. Lord knows what Mozza must have made of Clock then who make Modern Romance sound like peak REM.

I don’t remember this but apparently they started out as a typical Eurodance outfit with a sound similar to Cappella according to Wikipedia. However, around the middle of the decade, they took the decision to go overtly commercial with an out and out pop sound by doing hideously trashy cover versions. Tracks by Harold Faltermeyer and Tag Team were followed by more mainstream songs like “December 1963 (Oh What A Night)” and this – “You Sexy Thing”. Irritatingly, they would slightly rename the song titles giving the impression that they weren’t just cover versions but brand new tracks so the Four Seasons classic became simply “Oh What A Night” whilst Hot Chocolate’s well loved hit was “U Sexy Thing”. Just nasty. Actually, not just nasty but cynical too in the case of the latter. The choice to cover that particular track was surely influenced by its resurgence in popularity thanks to its use in the box office smash The Full Monty. In their defence, they weren’t the only people to have that idea – another tacky version was released at the same time by a duo called T-Shirt but it lost out to Clock when it failed to make the UK Top 40. In the end, the Hot Chocolate original was rereleased and beat both the updated takes on it by riding to No 6 in the charts. This made it the third time it had been a hit – it was a No 2 in 1975 and made it to No 10 when rereleased for the first time in 1987. As for Clock, they would continue to mine the rich seam of cover versions by having hits with KC And The Sunshine Band’s “That’s The Way (I Like It)” and “Blame it On The Boogie” by The Jacksons before having the decency to pack it all in by the end of the decade.

Next up is another hit that doesn’t conform to the appearance policy I described in the intro to this post – I’m beginning to think I might have got this all wrong! Anyway, the hit concerned is “Closed For Business” by Mansun and it’s on the show as it’s gone straight into the charts at No 10 which clearly justifies its place in tonight’s running order. However, a band like Mansun presented a different sort of consideration for Chris Cowey. A large and devoted fanbase meant large sales in week one but a quick drop off thereafter. “Closed For Business” (the lead track from the “Seven EP”) spent just a fortnight inside the Top 40 dropping a whopping 27 places in its second week. I guess Cowey’s dilemma here was balancing reflecting what was popular in that particular week without pandering to a specific section of the record buying public. Was there also an issue of scheduling in terms of being able to get the band in the TOTP studio at that exact point of optimum popularity of their single? Remember, Cowey didn’t seem keen on showing videos unless he really had to.

Enough of that though, what about the music? Well, this was one of those bridging-the-gap releases between albums that we’ve seen many times before. Debut album “Attack Of The Grey Lantern” had come out in the February of 1997 and follow up “Six” would not appear until 18 months later so some interim material was required to maintain Mansun’s profile presumably. As with their earlier work, “Closed For Business” had that wide screen feel to it that overwhelmed your senses without suffocating them. It was gloriously epic. I’d really liked that first album and yet, somehow, I’d lost interest by the time their sophomore effort arrived. As with Garbage, Roachford and Skunk Anansie before them, I really should check out their later work. However, I don’t think I’ll be venturing as far as their other release called “Closed For Business” – a 25 disc box set retrospective. Twenty-five!

P.S. The sleeves to the CD singles of “Closed For Business” featured paintings by artist and early Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe whose story I’m always fascinated by. In fact, the whole narrative of those involved in the history of The Beatles but who didn’t end up as who we know as the ‘Fab Four’ does. Sutcliffe, Pete Best, Jimmie Nicol…all people whose lives could have been so so different.

Wait…Siedah Garrett was in the Brand New Heavies? When did that happen? Well, 1997 obviously but how did it happen and where’s N’Dea Davenport? Well, apparently she’d been gone a couple of years by this point having left the band due to that old chestnut ‘irreconcilable differences’ (I have no info on whether there were of the musical variety) with Garrett replacing her. She’s an interesting character Siedah – I think I only knew her as duetting with Michael Jackson on “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” but there’s so much more to her than that. As Jayne Middlemiss hints at in her intro, she had a hit in 1984 with Dennis Edwards with “Don’t Look Any Further” (which was later covered by the Kane Gang and M People) and she also co-wrote Jackson’s hit “Man In The Mirror”. She toured with both Jacko and Madonna and wrote a Grammy award winning single for the Dreamgirls film. She co-wrote a number of tracks on Quincy Jones’ seven Grammy Awards winning album “Back On The Block” and has even presented America’s Top 10 deputising for the legend that was Casey Kasem (the original voice of Shaggy from Scooby Doo!).

Back to the Brand New Heavies though and despite them having the reputation of being pioneers of the acid jazz movement built upon two platinum selling albums, when it came to huge hit singles, there weren’t that many. Of their fifteen releases that made the Top 40, only one went Top 10 and that was this one – a cover version of Carol King’s “You’ve Got A Friend”. It seems kind of odd that a cover would be their biggest hit, as if it somehow invalidates their other work though, of course, they had already gone down that route when their version of Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight At The Oasis” went to No 13 in 1994. For what it’s worth, I don’t think they added anything much to the original – indeed, I would argue that it stripped it of its lush, warm feel. It’s not a terrible version just…unnecessary. Not even the (rather over the top) twenty strong gospel choir employed here could make it into something special.

Given that it was the fourth and final single from their “In It For The Money” album, perhaps not surprisingly, “Late In The Day” failed to maintain a run of five previous Top 10 hits for Supergrass when it peaked at No 18. For me, it’s not one of their best though it was probably better than many of its contemporary chart peers. Am I alone in thinking Gaz Coombes looked pretty cool despite his mutton chop sideburns?

Finally we have a hit that conforms to one of the appearance policies I described at the start of this post. Eternal were on the show last week with their single “Angel Of Mine” which had debuted on the chart at No 4. Despite falling a place to No 5 seven days later, it was still deemed popular enough to warrant a repeat of that performance on this show. When it comes to conversations about UK girl groups, I’m not sure that Eternal would be the first name on everyone’s lips. Girls Aloud, the Spice Girls, Little Mix and even Bananarama are more likely to be mentioned before them it seems to me and yet they had 15 consecutive hit singles and three platinum selling studio albums and one Best Of compilation. Was it that they didn’t crack America* that has lessened their legacy? Certainly the Spice Girls crossed over the Atlantic though I’m not sure if any of those other names above did although Bananarama had sporadic yet spectacular success including a US No 1 in “Venus”. Was it that they kept haemorrhaging group members that has dinted their reputation? Presumably not as pretty much all those aforementioned artists similarly shed original members from their line ups along the way. Does it just come down to the memorability of their tunes then? Despite the number of hits, how many could the average person name do you reckon? I’m guessing it would be less than almost every other name in that list depending on who you asked obviously. One last thing, is any of the above fair to Eternal? Don’t ask me, I’m just filling here for a lack of anything else to say which itself possibly does say a lot.

*Monica did have a US No 1 with her version of “Angel Of Mine”

It’s time for Sash! again (or should I say ‘encore une fois’?) who are back with their third consecutive No 2 hit called “Stay”. Now apparently this lot hold some sort of record for having the most No 2 hits (five in total) without ever having a chart topper or something. All those No 2s…insert your own (obvious) joke here *———-*. All three hits so far featured another artist – Sabine Ohmes, Rodriguez and now someone called La Trec as vocalist. To me, it was much the same as its predecessors albeit with more added vocals than usual. I’m sure it all made sense if you were frugging out on the dance floor but I could never understand anybody wanting to listen to it in their bedroom at home. How wrong was I though as not only did Sash! sell lots of singles but, unusually for a dance act, they shifted lots of units of their album as well. Their debut offering “It’s My Life” went platinum in the UK selling 300,000 copies and making it to No 6 in the charts.

It’s that weirdly over the top performance by Janet Jackson of “Got Till It’s Gone” again now which is being repeated as the single has gone back up the charts from No 9 to No 8 having peaked at No 6 in its debut week on the charts. Now, what links the aforementioned Supergrass to Janet Jackson (apart from being on the same show)? Well, apparently the former’s hit “Late In The Day” was inspired by a track from Graham Nash’s “Songs For Beginners” album. Nash, of course, was a founding member of The Hollies but left in 1968 to form the folk rock group Crosby, Stills and Nash (CSN) and subsequently Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY). He would write one of their best known songs “Our House” about a simple domestic event that occurred when he was living with his then partner in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. The name of that partner? Joni Mitchell. I don’t need to join the dots on this one any further do I?

It’s the fifth and final week at the top for “Candle In The Wind ‘97” / “Something About The Way You Look Tonight” by Elton John but clearly a decision was taken weeks ago to play the latter track as this is the third week on the spin we have got the promo for that one and not the cobbled together video for the former. Was it a decision based on taste? Was a fortnight of “Candle In The Wind ‘97” deemed a respectable amount of time for national mourning? Would any more have been seen as shoving it down the throats of the public? I don’t know the answer but what I am sure about is that these BBC4 TOTP repeats will have almost certainly been the first time we will have heard “Candle In the Wind ‘97” since they were originally broadcast. You never hear it on the radio. Like Ever.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Clock	U Sexy Thing	Never
2	Mansun	Closed For Business	No – missed this one
3	Brand New Heavies	You’ve Got A Friend	No – give me the original every time
4	Supergrass	Late In The Day	Negative
5	Eternal	Angel Of Mine	Nope
6	Sash!	Stay	No
7	Janet Jackson	Got Till It’s Gone	Nah
8	Elton John	Candle In The Wind’97 / Something About The Way You Look Tonight	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.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002b250/top-of-the-pops-17101997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 10 OCT 1997

Posted on April 23 by 80stastic

Three days after this TOTP broadcast, Zoe Ball and Kevin Greening hosted their first Radio 1 breakfast show having replaced Mark and Lard who were shifted to an afternoon slot. On the same day, Chris Evans, who Mark and Lard replaced, started his own breakfast show on Virgin Radio. I was never quite sure why it didn’t work out for Radcliffe and Riley in that morning slot because I used to love their afternoon show which I always used to have on in the back room of the record shop I worked in if I was in there on my own. Maybe their brand of humour didn’t sit well with people on the move in a morning? That their show wasn’t pitched at the right pace? I never used to listen to Ball and Greening so I have no opinion on whether they were any better and I can’t be bothered to look up RAJAR listener figures to compare but I’m guessing that they weren’t as big a draw as Chris Evans?

Anyway, the presenter for this TOTP also had a history of replacing Mark Radcliffe but only on a temporary basis. Mark Lamarr had sat in for Radcliffe’s late night Radio 1 show as guest presenter occasionally. Ah, so maybe that’s why he was being considered as part of the TOTP host roster at this time – he had some BBC radio credentials as well as his roles as team captain on Shooting Stars and host of Never Mind The Buzzcocks. I was wondering about that in a previous post. This was the third of fourth time that he’d hosted the show and he gets this one off to a very odd start. Having done away with any theme tune, new executive producer Chris Cowey brings it back for this one show after Lamarr seemingly takes too long learning his opening intro. A reader of this blog did alert me recently that this was coming but I wasn’t prepared for the bizarre optics we actually got – Lamarr’s face on a big bank of screens checking with someone off camera what the top of the show intro is before he then gets cut off abruptly and we get the titles and the old theme tune and then straight into the opening act. It just looks odd though I’m guessing it was meant to be an attempt at humour.

Anyway, said opening act are…a bunch of 12 year olds by the look of them. Who on earth were Catch? I know I say this all the time and it’s made worse by the fact that I was working in a record shop back then but I can’t remember this lot at all. The band’s backstory is that they emerged from a previous incarnation of a group headed by singer Toby Slater called Brattish who never actually gigged nor released anything. Slater was involved in the short lived ‘Romo’ movement…hang on. The what? I have no memory of that either which apparently was based around two club nights (Club Skinny in Camden and the West End’s Arcadia). Its sound was characterised by being either art glam, Hi-NRG/Handbag House or a cross between Adam Ant, Roxy Music, Pulp and Blur depending on who you talked to. There were specific bands allied to the movement of whom I’ve never heard of any (Plastic Fantastic or DexDex Ter anyone?) but it generally seemed to be a rejection of the back-to-basics approach of Britpop. It sounds to me like it was just a re-invention of the New Romantics. According to those in the know though, Catch were more indie-pop than Romo and I guess you could describe their only UK Top 40 hit “Bingo” as that. However, it’s not your standard indie fare. It has an intriguing quality to it. The verses have a tinny sounding rhythm track that reminds me almost of something that Frank Sidebottom would have warbled along to. Slater’s vocal gives a nod to Jilted John of “Gordon is a moron” fame (aka John Shuttleworth aka Graham Fellows) before the chorus explodes into life. I can’t deny that I quite like it in a juvenile kind of way. The lyrics describe a rites-of-passage, journey of discovery by the song’s protagonist who admits he’s 17 (Slater was actually 18 at the time of this TOTP performance) and knows nothing of the world with his carnal knowledge especially weak so he goes to a red light district to…erm…enlighten himself. Slater’s youthful appearance helps to deliver the message.

“Bingo” would peak at No 23 but a follow up single just missed the Top 40. An album remained unreleased in this country and was only made available in Indonesia. In a bizarre and unwanted pop history footnote, “Bingo” was the song being played on a repeat of The Chart Show in the early hours of 31 August 1997 when the programme was interrupted by ITV to announce the death of Princess Diana. They never stood a chance did they? After splitting in 1999, Slater formed a couple more bands without commercial success and would tragically die aged just 42 in 2021.

From edgy teenagers to what many would call the definition of musical blandness. Is that discrediting of the Lighthouse Family fair? Or is it just an inevitable consequence of gaining popularity by playing a fusion of easy listening and soul music that appealed to the masses? I’m sure that back then, I would have balked at the idea of admitting even the slightest liking of them to my way cooler record shop work colleagues but was I actually at the other extreme of the spectrum holding onto a hatred of them? No, I don’t think so. I saw somebody online describe them as “offensively inoffensive” which I guess equates to someone being described as ‘nice’ (though I wouldn’t knock that description given the character of the people currently running the world).

“Raincloud” was the lead single from their second album “Postcards From Heaven” but they didn’t suffer from ‘difficult second album syndrome’ like some have in the annals of pop history (Stone Roses, ABC, The Jam) – it sailed to No 2 in the charts and went four times platinum in the UK. It seemed that there were more believers in than dissenters of their mainstream sound. Listening back to “Raincloud” though, those accusations of the band’s style lacking substance and being lightweight may not have been that wide of the mark – it’s fairly unremarkable fare. The next single was “High” which is widely regarded as their best tune (maybe). I guess we’ll be seeing that one in a BBC4 repeat soon enough. For now, I’ll leave the final word to Peep Show’s Super Hans…

The next performance is just weird. Ironically, the song being performed is completely mundane and ordinary. It’s the staging that I’m taken aback by. So, some details first. The artist is The Seahorses who are in the studio to perform their third hit single “Love Me And Leave Me”. The track was co-written by John Squire and one Liam Gallagher, a fact which Mark Lamarr has taken to run with for a cheap gag in setting up his intro as he suggests Liam’s only contribution to the song was coming up with the word “and” in its title. It’s not a very funny line and I’ve heard it done better in a self deprecating way by Andrew Ridgeley of Wham! When interviewed by Simon Bates on Radio 1 which words did he contribute to the writing of “Careless Whisper” he replied “the…and…”. Anyway, Lamarr proceeds to stroke Squire’s knee for some unfathomable reason and then hangs around on stage while the band performs for about half of the song. What was all that about? Was he channeling the spirit of that 1971 TOTP performance by the Faces when they invited John Peel on stage with them to mime playing the mandolin? If that wasn’t weird enough, why are there nearly a dozen random people dotted about the stage looking bored? Why are the band (except singer Chris Helme) all seated? Why…well, just why?

As for the song, it’s no “Love Is The Law”. In fact, it’s pretty dull which, on reflection, was a disappointing state of affairs just three singles into the band’s career. It starts off like a companion piece to John Lennon’s “God” with its lyrics about not believing in Jesus nor Jah but then just sort of drifts off into a cosmic trance with Helme singing about ‘astral bars’ and ‘heaven here on earth’. It’s all very unsatisfying which pretty much sums up The Seahorses. They would only release one more single before splitting up. John Squire would return to that writing partnership with Liam Gallagher 27 years later when they recorded an album together that would top the UK charts.

Did someone mention the Faces earlier? Yes me, obviously. Well, I’m going to mention them again because the next hit shares the same name as one of their songs (and albums). The 1997 “Ooh La La” by Coolio wasn’t anything to do with the English rockers though but rather it owed a lot to Grace Jones and her classic track “Pull Up To The Bumper” which it samples. So much of a debt did it owe to the esteemed Ms Jones that she was repaid with a writing credit on Coolio’s hit for a hit indeed it was peaking at No 14 though it would be his last in the UK. Just as well if this was an example of the direction he was going in. The lyrics to this one are just a load of sexual innuendo. “Deep in the pink”, “Stalk through the bush” and “keep it all wet all weekend” are just some of his double entendres that Viz’s Finbarr Saunders character would have found juvenile. At some points, he can’t even be bothered to disguise his filth and so we get lyrics like:

“Pull up your skirt and we can do it on the pool table…Your nipples look so tender, can I twirl ‘em in my mouth like a blender”

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Sly Dunbar / Robbie Shakespeare / Dana Manno / Artis L. Jr. Ivey
Ooh La La lyrics © Warner-tamerlane Publishing Corp., Boo Daddy Publishing, Oji Music, Chenana Music, Songs Of Polygram Int., Inc., Polygram Int. Publishing, Inc., Ixat Music, Inc.

Gulp! That last line can’t have got through the BBC censors surely? Let me watch the performance back with subtitles on…

Well, I can’t hear exactly what Coolio is rapping as it’s muffled (presumably on purpose) but the subtitles have replaced ‘nipples’ with ‘knees’ because that makes sense! I know “Pull Up To The Bumper” was also accused of having sexual innuendo hidden in its lyrics but it was surely more subtle than this twaddle?! Aside from all the nastiness, I think there’s a case for another writer credit in addition to Grace Jones as the chorus is filled with the phrase “doo-wa-diddy” as in “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” as made famous by Manfred Mann but actually written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Well, Coolio’s first album was called “It Takes A Thief”.

Andrew Roachford has had a lengthy and remarkable career in music – he’s been at it for nigh on 40 years, released twelve studio albums with his band, been in Mike + The Mechanics and, in 2019, was awarded an MBE for services to music. However, if success was judged purely on the number and size of his hit singles, it wouldn’t look so impressive. I make it eight Top 40 entries over a 36 year period and look at the peak positions for those eight:

4 – 25 – 22 – 21 – 36 – 38 – 20 – 34

The obvious ‘biggie’ is that first one which was “Cuddly Toy” from 1989. Do you think when an artist has one big hit early in their career that it becomes a millstone around their necks or are they just glad and proud to have had at least one? Anyway, the seventh of those hits was this one – “The Way I Feel” – which was the lead single from Roachford’s fourth studio album “Feel” and, against the odds, it would become his second biggest hit ever eight years after his first. It’s a pretty good tune but one I missed completely at the time. I’m pretty sure I saw him live at the Manchester Academy around 1994 but that was because the Sony rep who used to sell into the Our Price store I was working in put me on the guest list as we were both Chelsea fans!

As with Garbage and Skunk Anansie, Roachford is another artist whose back catalogue I should be better acquainted with. This scene from Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa shouldn’t be his only legacy…

After four years of constant hits including a No 1 no less with their last single release, bizarrely, the time of Eternal was almost at an end (not so eternal after all then). Maybe they (or their label or management) knew their sell by date was fast approaching as, in a not necessarily obvious move, instead of mining their “Before The Rain” album (which had only been out for six months) for more hits, they went straight to a Greatest Hits project. Now you’d usually expect that type of release if a group had formally announced that they were splitting up (as per Take That) not at the point of a commercial high. And yet, the Greatest Hits album was a success – No 2 in the charts, three times platinum selling, the highest selling hits package of the year and in 2013 was confirmed as the biggest selling best-of album by an all girl group in the UK.

To promote the Greatest Hits, a new song “Angel Of Mine” was released as a single. To my ears, it’s a serviceable R&B ballad but not much more and yet in America, where it was released by Monica, it went to No 1 and was the third best selling single of the year over there. Eternal’s version peaked at No 4 and would be their final Top 10 hit – of their fourteen singles released up to that point, only two had not made the Top 10. It was also the group’s last single as a trio as Kéllé Bryan left the group after being sacked by fax by Vernie and Easther Bennett’s solicitor with the sisters citing “a breakdown in professional relations”. The UK record buying public had little desire for an Eternal duo though and they would achieve just one more Top 20 single before bowing out of the music business. Numerous reunions have taken place over the years though never with all four original members. That holy grail line up for the fans was nearly green lit in 2023 but was nipped in the bud after Louise and Kéllé withdrew following the Bennett sisters apparent refusal to play LGBTQ Pride events.

I’ve said it before but I’m saying it again – I don’t/didn’t get the Backstreet Boys. I know I wasn’t their target audience (I was 29 at this point) but I just couldn’t see their appeal. Yes, they had some very slickly produced pop songs but they were just a poor man’s New Kids On The Block weren’t they? They weren’t even that good looking! “As Long As You Love Me” was a textbook example of their output. A mid-tempo ballad that was perfect for daytime radio playlists (I still hear it played on stations like Magic to this day) but oh so dull. No, not dull…cynical. A song concocted by an evil, mad pop scientist in the laboratory of dark and terrible music.

As with Mark Lamarr at the opening of the show, there’s something disconcerting about the set up of these performances with the artist having a backdrop of giant TV screens behind with their huge fizzogs plastered all over them whilst they run through the song on stage. It’s all a bit overbearing and, in the case of Eternal who had the same arrangement for their appearance immediately before the Backstreet Boys, disorientating as the order of the group on the screens wasn’t the same as where the girls were standing on stage (even though Kéllé and Vernie swapped positions halfway through).

Elton John remains at No 1 with “Candle In The Wind ‘97” / “Something About The Way You Look Tonight”. Despite it being the best selling single in UK chart history, it didn’t guarantee Elton’s next release being a huge hit. “Recover Your Soul”, taken from “The Big Picture” album would only manage a chart high of No 16 which, proportionally, must be one of the biggest drops in popularity between releases ever. Off the top of my head, I can think of the Bee Gees following up their chart topper “You Win Again” with the single “E.S.P.” which stalled at No 51 but the Elton scenario is next level I think.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Catch	Bingo	Nope
2	Lighthouse Family	Raincloud	I did not
3	The Seahorses	Love Me And Leave Me	Negative
4	Coolio	Ooh La La	Never
5	Roachford	The Way I Feel	It’s another no
6	Eternal	Angel Of Mine	Nah
7	Backstreet Boys	As Long As You Love Me	As if
8	Elton John	Candle In The Wind ‘97 / Something About The Way You Look Tonight	No

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0029vc0/top-of-the-pops-10101997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 03 OCT 1997

Posted on April 17 by 80stastic

I said in the last post that we hadn’t yet reached the Kate Thornton/Gail Porter/Jamie Theakston era of TOTP presenters and yet here was the last of those three names on our screens just the following week. Was I mistaken in my claim then? Not really. It turns out that Theakston’s appearance here was as a ‘guest presenter’ and he wouldn’t become a part of the regular roster of hosts until 1998. So kind of like an audition then, similar to what happened with Sarah Cawood the other week? Probably not as he was already an established BBC presenter being onto his second series of co-hosting Saturday morning kids TV show Live & Kicking alongside TOTP regular Zoe Ball so I’m guessing he was just filling in as no-one else was available? These days, Theakston hosts the Heart radio breakfast show with Amanda Holden though my first thought when his name is mentioned is that, like Angus Deayton, he was exposed by a tabloid newspaper for visiting a brothel and snorting cocaine in 2002. Two BBC presenters making the same misdemeanour in the same year. The Beeb was having a public relations nightmare!

Anyway, let’s see how Theakston did on his TOTP debut. We start with Oasis who are in the studio to promote their single “Stand By Me”. The second track taken from their “Be Here Now” album, it would peak at No 2 thus becoming another of those songs denied being a chart topper by the Elton John phenomenon. At the time, the album received mostly positive (and even gushing) reviews in the music press but, in retrospect, has come to be seen as the point where it all started to go wrong for the band. Criticisms of it being overproduced and bloated were given credence by the length of some of its songs. Ignoring the “All Around The World (Reprise)” outro, only two of the eleven tracks clocked in at under the five minutes mark. “Stand By Me” itself has a running time of five seconds off six minutes and we get nearly all of that 5:55 length in this performance. Was that a mark of the power and influence that Oasis held at that time? That they could command such an exposure on the BBC’s prime time music show? After all, “Be Here Now” was the best selling British album of 1997 and the fastest selling of all time in the UK.

Anyway, with some temporal distance and the revisiting of the album, although history hasn’t been too kind to it, people have generally… well…stood by “Stand By Me” which has been regarded as one of its standout tracks. I can hear why. It’s a bloody good song though it hardly broke any new ground and indeed, always reminded me of Mott The Hoople’s “All The Young Dudes” – that ascending scale at the end of the chorus? I’m not the only one who thinks that. Noel Gallagher was asked in a Q Magazine interview if he’d pinched the riff from the Bowie penned song and he admitted that he had! Not only that but that he’d used it for “Don’t Look Back In Anger” as well (though the chords for that are almost identical to “Streets Of London” by Ralph McTell). It’ll be interesting to see how many songs from “Be Here Now” that Oasis play in their 2025 reunion tour. I’m guessing not many but if there’s to be just one, my money would be on “Stand By Me”.

Theakston goes a bit un-PC in his intro for the next artist who is Louise giving it the whole Sid James steam-coming-out-of-his-ears look. Well, it was the era of ‘lads mags’ I guess so it was probably more acceptable back then. Now, continuing with the theme of pinching song ideas which we started with Oasis, Louise seems to have done a bit of appropriating herself as new single “Arms Around The World” sounds an awful lot like Janet Jackson’s “Runaway”. No, I mean like really an awful lot…

See? Anyway, “Arms Around The World” was the lead single from Louise’s second album “Women In Me” and would become her then biggest hit when it peaked at No 4 meaning five of her first six solo outings into the charts had gone Top 10. Not quite reaching the recent No 1 heights of her old band Eternal but pretty impressive all the same. There’s another (albeit more tenuous) link with the aforementioned Oasis whose next single would be “All Around The World”. “Arms Around The World”? “All Around The World”. As Sid James might have said “Cor, blimey! You lot are hard work!”.

We stay in the studio – there was a definite preference for studio performances under executive producer Chris Cowey – with No Doubt whose name allows Theakston to deliver the most woeful, lame and obvious line imaginable his intro. Like most people I’m guessing, my first encounter with Gwen Stefani and co was via super-hit “Don’t Speak”. What stands out to me about their subsequent releases is how they sounded so very little like that global No 1. “Just A Girl” and this one – “Spiderwebs” – were much more of that ska punk/pop fusion sound that characterised their origins. Of course, I’m not familiar with those origins – it’s just what I’ve read – as, despite working in a record shop, I’d barely heard the band’s “Tragic Kingdom” album from which the hits came. I did know said hits though and “Don’t Speak” seemed to me to bear little resemblance to what followed. Was it a deliberate attempt to go more mainstream or just a song that came about organically and ended up with a more wide reaching sound?

As for “Spiderwebs”, it’s a pretty cool track although it’s subject matter about Gwen Stefani receiving unwanted attention from a smitten suitor isn’t the most obviously appealing source material. Still, similar to No Doubt, there was another band who based their career on a post-punk/ reggae fusion sound and who scored the biggest hit of their career with a song about stalking so who am I to be the songwriting…ahem…police?

Now here’s a curious thing and I’m not just talking about the artist for whom the adjective ‘curious’ could always be applied. No, I’m referring to the fact that Chis Cowey found a place in the running order for Björk whose release “Jóga” was never going to make the Top 40. Why? Because it broke the chart regulation of being released in more than three formats. The lead track for third album “Homogenic”, it was only made available in the shops as a three CD and VHS Box Set, hence in four formats. It seems a curious (there’s that word again) marketing strategy to launch your artist’s next collection of new material – releasing the very first example of it in a format that broke chart rules. Did her record label One Little Indian not understand these rules and so it was a massive error on their part? Maybe so as Wikipedia says that they tried to argue that the VHS was bundled for free and so the release didn’t contravene the Official Chart Company’s three format restriction but the OCC weren’t having any of it. Host Jamie Theakston says in his segue that “Jóga” wouldn’t chart as only 3,000 copies of it had been made. Was that true? Or was that One Little Indian retrospectively trying to cover their backs? As I say, the whole thing is very curious.

As for what “Jóga” sounded like, well, I’ve had to revise my opinion about Björk in this blog many times from my initially derogative stance as I’ve leaned to appreciate her craft more but I’m going old school on this one – what a racket! Supposedly a love letter both to her best friend called Jóga and her native country Iceland, the story goes that Björk gave the concept of the track to her engineer Markus Dravs who then came up with a rhythm track that she felt was too abstract. Then producer Mark Bell took said track and added “some noises” which just about sums the whole thing up – a noise. No amount of strings can polish it up for me and Björk wailing away about being in a “state of emergency” wasn’t going to convince me otherwise.

Although M People hadn’t released anything since their cover of the Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park” in 1995, their absence hadn’t been as pronounced as it might have been due to the use of their “Search For A Hero” song to soundtrack a series of TV adverts for Peugeot during 1996. Despite its exposure causing a clamour for the song all over again (it had already been a No 9 hit), the band resisted all calls to rerelease it. Working in a record shop in pre-digital times, it really used to annoy me when this sort of thing happened. An artificial demand for a track caused by an advert or a radio station deciding to add it to their playlists which wasn’t actually available as a single to buy. Another example was when a Manchester radio station started playing “Acquiesce” by Oasis* despite it not being officially released as a single. We had loads of people ask for that convinced it was their new single. Fortunately, in that case, we could flog them the “Some Might Say” CD single as it was an extra track on that and we always kept all the Oasis singles in stock at all times what with us being in Stockport. Another example where there was no simple solution though was when the film Mannequin was first shown on TV in the early 90s and the next day, we had a procession of people come in asking for “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” by Starship which had been a hit in 1987! None of this will mean anything to people that have grown up in the era of streaming platforms and digital music but those who were there will recognise my pain!

*”Stand By Me” itself would be used for a series of adverts for the Halifax bank between 2021 and 2023.

Anyway, back to M People and they finally did release a single (of new material no less) in “Just For You” from their fourth and final album “Fresco” in 1997 and although not one of their most instantly recognisable tracks, it’s a very pleasant sound all the same. Gone was that rather clunky production that characterised their early hits and in its place was a much more smooth soul sound. It was perfect for daytime radio scheduling but perhaps they missed a trick by not releasing it a couple of months earlier as it had a great Summer vibe to it. However, its chart peak at No 8 would be their penultimate Top 10 hit. The time of M People was coming to an end.

The aforementioned Janet Jackson now with, for the third artist in a row, a lead single from a new album. Having signed the then biggest record deal in history with Virgin Records, our first taste of the fruits of that deal was “Got ‘Til It’s Gone” from “The Velvet Rope” album. As indicated by its title, the track took inspiration the Joni Mitchell song “Big Yellow Taxi” with the copyright cleared sample running throughout it so majorly that it a credit was given to Joni on the song. Also featuring was Q-Tip (no, not Paul Young’s old band) from A Tribe Called Quest. I can’t say that it did much for me and I much preferred the original (excruciating laugh and all). I also didn’t think much to the over the top staging of this performance with Ms Jackson not being revealed from her backwards facing throne until nearly a minute in. Get over yourself Janet!

Now, just as Louise seemed to have stolen from Jackson’s “Runaway”, so Janet seems guilty of some musical thievery as she was on the end of litigation from UK soul singer Des’ree who claimed that “Got ‘Til It’s Gone” was very (meaning too) similar to her hit “Feel So High”. In 1998, she was awarded an out of court settlement of 25% of the publishing royalties equating to about £2 million. You can hear why she won…

Clearly it was felt that they’d been enough wailing and wringing of hands caused by the death of Princess Diana by this point and so we don’t get “Candle In The Wind ‘97” this week but the other song on the Elton John single. Yes, it was a double A-side single though that fact has been mostly forgotten now. The ‘other song’ was “Something About The Way You Look Tonight” and was essentially the lead single from his album “The Big Picture”. Wikipedia tells me that the track was released on its own without “Candle In The Wind ‘97” five days before the double A-side but I don’t remember that at all. Indeed, the official charts website makes no reference to this. Is it possible that it was just a case of bad timing and the single was all ready to go before the tragic car crash in Paris on 31 August and its release was just overtaken by events?

Whatever the truth, the song itself was a typical 90s Elton ballad which sounded like it could have been on the Lion King soundtrack to me. It wasn’t though and another song that wasn’t on an album was “Candle In The Wind ‘97” which did not feature on “The Big Picture”. I wonder how many people bought it thinking it was?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Oasis	Stand By Me	No, I’d given up on buying their singles by this point
2	Louise	Arms Around The World	Nope
3	No Doubt	Spiderwebs	Nah
4	Björk	Jóga	Definite no
5	M People	Just For You	Negative
6	Janet Jackson	Got ‘Til It’s Gone	I did not
7	Elton John	Something About The Way You Look Tonight / Candle In The Wind ’97	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0029vby/top-of-the-pops-03101997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 26 SEP 1997

Posted on April 14 by 80stastic

This particular TOTP episode is a curious mix of hits that have been hanging around the charts for ages, one that we only saw seven days ago, two dance tracks that were all about the tunes and not the artists, a mostly forgotten Robbie Williams hit that was actually a line in the sand moment and that Elton John single. Pick the bones out of that! Well, I intend to so let’s get to it…

Tonight’s host is Jo Whiley who seems to be on permanent rotation with Jayne Middlemiss and Zoe Ball (I guess we haven’t got to the Kate Thornton/Gail Porter/Jamie Theakston era yet). We start with Chumbawamba who have spent a solid six weeks in the Top 5 with “Tubthumping” and was now on the move back up the charts from No 5 to No 3 having slipped from its original peak of No 2. It seems there was a reason for this. In the wake of the death of Princess Diana, its airplay completely crashed presumably because:

It wasn’t a ballad and that was the only form of musical composition deemed required at this time
Its lyrics about being knocked down could hardly have been more inappropriate given the events in Paris of 31st August

In the week before that date it had been the most played track on radio but in the week after it almost completely disappeared from playlists. A further week on from that and it was decided that a suitable period of time had passed and it was right back up there on the airplay charts presumably helping to boost its sales once more. And they say a week is a long time in politics.

Depending on your point of view, “Sunchyme” by Dario G is either a work of genius or musical sacrilege – I fall into the latter category. Based around the wonderful “Life In A Northern Town” by The Dream Academy (which I bought back in the day), this monster of a dance tune had been in existence for months as a bootleg but hadn’t got a formal commercial release as label Eternal Records couldn’t get clearance for the samples used in it. This delay in making it available to the masses only helped to build anticipation of its release which, when it finally happened, sent the single to No 2 in the charts. Like George Michael’s “You Have Been Loved” before it, this would also surely have been a chart topper at any other time.

I guess I can hear why “Sunchyme” struck a chord with its Dream Academy sample forming the basis of a catchy hook that sounded almost gospel-esque when chopped up in that way. Allied to a distinctive Italian house piano riff, it really didn’t matter if punters didn’t know the 1985 No 15 hit source material, the track couldn’t fail. My claim that it was committing musical heresy by treating one of the best hits of the 80s (to my ears) like that meant little to the nation’s clubbers which I suppose is fair enough. Quite why this performance comes across as the stage version of The Lion King though, I’m not quite sure. Still, I suppose it makes a change from the usual anonymous, pony-tailed blokes on keyboards behind a gyrating, spandex clad dancer.

Jo Whiley gives us a smooth segue from Dario G to the aforementioned Robbie Williams when she says “from a Northern town to South of the Border”. Not bad Jo. Now I labelled this hit as mostly forgotten earlier and I stand by that description for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s almost as if Robbie himself wants to consign it to history – it did not feature on his 1999 compilation album “The Ego Has Landed” that was put together with tracks from his first two solo albums specifically for the American market. Then, it didn’t appear on his 2004 Greatest Hits which featured 19 tracks. Nor was it on the 2009 compilation “Songbook” that was given away free with the Daily Mail as part of a promotion campaign for Robbie’s “Reality Killed The Video Star” album. Such freebie albums are usually where lesser hits are to be found but it wasn’t a home for “South Of The Border”. It did make the cut for the 2010 Best Of “In And Out Of Consciousness” but that was a comprehensive, 39 tracks career retrospective. It was his only hit that failed to make the Top 10 for nine years and 20 single releases. So, pretty much forgotten.

And yet…it perhaps shouldn’t be as it demarcated a pivotal crossroads in his career. The relative failure of the single (it peaked at No 14) was seen by many as evidence that Robbie Williams the solo artist would not sustain. It was just a matter of time before he petered out completely and its this commonly held perception that made what came next all the more unexpected and revelatory. His next single, which according to legend was a make or break release, was “Angels”. And yet the story could have all played out very differently as “South Of The Border” was never intended to be a single. The plan was that “Let Me Entertain You” was going to be the third track taken from the album “Life Thru A Lens” but Robbie had a dose of the wobbles and didn’t feel confident enough to release something with such a provocative title. At the last minute, it was ditched for “South Of The Border”. Who knows whether, if the original plan had been adhered to, the Robbie Williams story would have been any different. Maybe. Maybe not.

As for “South Of The Border”, it’s probably a better song than its legacy might suggest. I think I prefer it to previous single “Lazy Days” which doesn’t get the same rap by virtue of a six place chart difference it would seem (it peaked at No 8). There’s a spoken word bit low in the mix in the middle eight that we don’t get in this performance (which isn’t great by the way) where Robbie talks about going for a night out on the town with various celebrities including Anthea Turner and Daniella Westbrook which always quite intrigued me. The turnaround of Williams career would be more compelling though.

Damn! It’s that studio performance by Tina Moore of “Never Gonna Let You Go” again! What am I supposed to say about this one…again? Well, what I have noticed is that so far is that Jo Whiley has only been in the studio at the same time as one of the four artists on the show so far, that being Dario G. Now, two of them are understandable in that they’re just re-showings of previous performances (including Tina Moore) but the Robbie Williams cut away suggests his appearance was pre-recorded and Jo’s intro was tacked on the end separately. Why would that be? A scheduling issue?

Anyway, from what I can work out this was Tina’s fifth week on the chart and she was actually climbing it having peaked at No 7. The positions for her hit in the thirteen weeks of it’s time in the Top 40 were:

7 – 11 – 9 – 12 – 9 – 11 – 11 – 17 – 15 – 23 – 21 – 28 – 35

Check those numbers out. It reversed its decline four times. Four! That’s quite a chart journey. It seems the general public weren’t gonna let Tina go for a while.

It’s the second of those two dance tracks I mentioned at the top of the post now as German group Bellini take to the stage or should that be the dance floor as all the five women on our TV screens were doing was peddling some not overly impressive dance moves. There’s a lot of leg shaking and twerking but not much else. Now, I assumed that said women were just some jobbing dancers put together for TV appearances to promote the single “Samba De Janeiro” but it seems they were full time members of the band. Sort of. Full time they may have been but permanent they were not. Bellini’s list of group members might not be quite of The Fall or The Waterboys proportions but I counted fifteen past and present names in their Wikipedia entry and that doesn’t include the guys behind their sound, the producer duo of Ramon Zenker and Gottfried Engels otherwise known as The Bellini Brothers.

As for the track itself, it pays a huge debt to Brazilian jazz percussionist Airto Moreira sampling two of his tracks from the 70s and was a Top 10 hit all around Europe. If I’d had to guess, I would have put its release date as a year later to coincide with the 1998 World Cup tournament which seemed to have loads of samba themed songs soundtracking its coverage. I wasn’t far off as it was used extensively during the 2008 Euros after every goal was scored and Norwich City has played it as ‘goal music’ for pretty much the last 20 years. Indeed, Bellini took their name as a tribute to Brazilian football legend Hilderaldo Bellini who won the World Cup in 1958 and 1962 which is quite odd as the guys behind the Bellini Brothers moniker were German but then I guess they were never going to name themselves after 80s German international footballer Horst Hrubesch whose surname was pronounced by most English commentators as ‘Rubbish’.

Sly & Robbie featuring Simply Red are the act that we already saw just a week ago but that performance of their cover of “Night Nurse” is re-shown again seven days on because the single has gone into the charts at No 13.

This does nothing for me and, in fact, I’d rather listen to Martin Freeman’s version in a toilet from Breeders…

I’d almost forgotten there was a fourth single from Blur’s eponymous fifth studio album but there was and here it is…”M.O.R” was, perhaps understandably, the smallest hit of those four singles with it being released over six months after the album when it peaked at No 15. Now if you’d forgotten how it goes but then thought that it was instantly recognisable when you watched this TOTP repeat, that’ll be the Bowie effect. We were given a clue by Jo Whiley* in her intro when she said “Now some boys who just keep swinging” as “M.O.R.” borrows from Bowie’s “Boys Keep Swinging” and “Fantastic Voyage” from his “Lodger” album. Bowie and Brian Eno had come up with the concept of composing multiple songs with the same chord progression for the album and those two songs were the ones that made the cut. So were Blur paying homage to or stealing that concept? Does it even matter? The truth is that at least Blur were trying to do something different and not just repeat the formula of past glories. Could Oasis say the same for their output at the time?

*Never one to miss an opportunity to show off her music credentials was she Jo! Dream Academy and now David Bowie references!

The video for “M.O.R.” features four stuntmen as the band members in a plot about escaping the police. The monikers given to the fictional ‘actors’ playing Blur are all genuine anagrams of the band’s actual names. Check these out:

Trevor Dewane – Dave Rowntree
Lee Jaxsam – Alex James
Morgan C. Hoax – Graham Coxon
Dan Abnormal – Damon Albarn

That last one is genius, better than Bellini anyway!

Obviously, “Candle In The Wind ‘97” by Elton John is still at the top of the charts. I’m not sure when the sales of the single started to slow down. It was No 1 for five weeks and sold 658,000 copies on its first day of release and 1.5 million in the first week. As of September 2017 it had sold 4.94 million copies in the UK. By those numbers, I’m guessing there must have been a tapering off even when it was still No 1. For context though, this TOTP aired just under a month after Princess Diana’s death and one day shy of three weeks since her funeral.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Chumbawamba	Tubthumping	YES!
2	Dario G	Sunchyme	No but I bought The Dream Academy original
3	Robbie Williams	South Of The Border	No but I had a promo copy of the album
4	Tina Moore	Never Gonna Let You Go	I did not
5	Bellini	Samba De Janeiro	Nah
6	Sly & Robbie/Simply Red	Night Nurse	Nope
7	Blur	M.O.R.	No but I had the album
8	Elton John	Candle In The Wind ’97	NO!

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0029lyt/top-of-the-pops-26091997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 19 SEP 1997

Posted on April 10, 2025 by 80stastic

I haven’t done this for a while but I should probably check in with what I was doing back in 1997. I know, I know but I’ve spent loads of posts banging on about TOTP and the changes under Chris Cowey and then the whole Princess Diana funeral (which won’t be going away anytime soon thanks to the Elton John single) so I’m giving myself some time off to talk about what I know best – myself. This year was turning out to be pretty eventful – I’d been to China, my beloved Chelsea had finally won something and there were big changes at work. Our manager, the legendary Pete Garner, had left and, as assistant manager, I’d been left in temporary charge of the Our Price store in Stockport. Not only that but I had to oversee its conversion to a ‘live’ stock inventory system and it had all started to take a toll on me. I’d applied for the manager’s position because the staff wanted me to but I was glad not to have got it in the end as I was feeling pretty stressed anyway. The person who got the job was a lovely woman called Lisa who wound have been in post by now. I got on great with Lisa but she only stayed for one Christmas before moving on and then things really went downhill but that’s all for another time. For now, things were starting to stabilise after a few rocky months so let’s see what songs I would have been selling to the punters back then. *SPOILER ALERT* – it was mainly just one specific song!

It’s from ‘rocky’ to ‘Ricky’ as we get our first glimpse of the Puerto Rican hip swiveller Ricky Martin. Now, most of us (me at least) just know him for his No 1 song “Livin’ La Vida Loca” but that wasn’t his only hit. No, before that came “(Un Dos Tres) Maria”. I don’t remember this at all but then I hadn’t been holidaying in the Balearic Islands that Summer and so hadn’t heard it being played constantly in the clubs and bars there. Conforming to the tradition of British holidaymakers wanting to buy that song* that had soundtracked their time away, the British public duly sent it to No 6 in the UK charts.

*A tradition which stretched back as far as 1974 and “Y Viva Espana” and took in Ryan Paris, Baltimora, Sabrina and the execrable MC Miker and DJ Sven.

The track is widely recognised as igniting the whole Latin / dance crossover craze of the 90s (personally, I thought it was Gloria Estefan who did that…or was it the “Macarena”?) it seems to consist of a lot of counting to three in Spanish and that backbeat that was popularised by The Goodmen’s hit “Give It Up” and pinched by Simply Red for “Fairground”. Despite its success – it topped the chart in most South American countries as well as Australia and much of Europe – his record company weren’t keen on it initially as he’d made his name recording ballads. It would become the biggest selling Latin pop song of all time when it was remixed by the aforementioned Gloria Estefan producer Pablo Flores. Didn’t those record company executives know that any song called “Maria” was a guaranteed winner? Just ask Blondie, P. J. Proby, Santana, Tony Christie….

After witnessing her little sister Dannii return to the charts recently after a gap of three years, big sister Kylie Minogue was ready to make her own comeback. In truth, she’d been chomping at the bit for a while. Her own three years absence had only been punctuated by her unlikely murder ballad hit with Nick Cave (my own guitar class version of “Where The Wild Roses Grow” remains pretty special!) so by 1997 she was set to deliver her new sound to the world. Sadly for Kylie, there were a number of impediments stopping her from doing that. Firstly, her record label Deconstruction postponed her album’s planned release from the January to May. It was postponed again with a new date of September scheduled. With the death of Princess Diana in late August, the album’s proposed title of “Impossible Princess” caused Deconstruction to panic that it might be seen as in bad taste and so it was delayed for a further three months. Kylie herself agreed for it to be retitled eponymously to enable its release in Europe eventually in March 1998. Once finally out, it divided fans and press alike. Whilst some appreciated her attempt to reinvent herself with an album of diverse musical styles ranging from electronica to trip hop to rock, others weren’t able to accept Kylie as musical chameleon and even accused her of being a fraud. Seemingly, this was the preserve of the likes of David Bowie.

As host Jayne Middlemiss states, lead single “Some Kind Of Bliss” was written with James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore of the Manic Street Preachers which led the music press to dub this latest incarnation of her career ‘Indie Kylie’. It was a lazy term given the disparate nature of the album but it stuck which fed the belief that Kylie was jumping (albeit belatedly) on the Britpop bandwagon – well, it had worked (sort of) for Robbie Williams after all. As for me, I liked it, certainly more than her SAW produced bubblegum pop hits of the late 80s. However, it didn’t cut much ice nor indeed through with the record buying public with its chart peak of No 22 meaning it was the first time she’d missed making the UK Top 20. There were mitigating circumstances though. It was released at the same time as Elton John’s “Candle In The Wind ‘97” which accounted for 75% of all sales that week so it was hard for any new release to make an impression. Retrospectively, this era of Kylie and its associated album has been more favourably recognised and is a favourite for a niche part of her fanbase despite its poor commercial performance. She would storm back to the top of the charts come the new millennium with No 1 hit “Spinning Around” and those hot pants but back in 1997, her future was more pants than hot.

The No 1 that never was next. In any other week in pop history, “You Have Been Loved” by George Michael would surely have topped the charts but the events in Paris on 31st August and the subsequent outpouring of grief by the nation and the release of the aforementioned Elton John single meant it was never to be. Don’t take my word for it, even Jayne Middlemiss says so in her intro. This week’s chart would break all sorts of sales records but it also provided an unusual chart quirk with the top two positions occupied in week one of sales by two artists who had also duetted on a No 1 record of their own – 1991’s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me”.

Now this is quite strange. A band making their debut TOTP appearance nine years after they formed and seven since their debut album went Top 5. Like Garbage and Skunk Anansie, I should really know more about The Sundays and make an effort to explore their back catalogue further. I know some people who swear by them (including comedian David Baddiel who is best friends with guitarist David Gavurin) but somehow, once again, I didn’t get the memo. Formed in 1988 after Gavurin met vocalist Harriet Wheeler at Bristol University, the couple initially started writing songs for their own enjoyment rather than as a route to a career in music. However, augmented by bassist Paul Brindley and drummer Patrick Hannan, they sent out some demo tapes and became the subject of a record label bidding war, finally signing to Rough Trade. Their debut single “Can’t Be Sure” topped the indie charts and, in direct contrast to the title of their single, were assured acclaim from the music press inkies. The album “Reading, Writing And Arithmetic” followed in 1990 peaking at an impressive No 4. However, no other singles were released from it due to the collapse of Rough Trade though “Here’s Where The Story Ends” topped the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart in America. Tin Tin Out would take a dance cover of it to No 7 in 1998. The album’s jangly guitar pop sound and Wheeler’s distinctive, quirky vocals and the fact that it was unavailable following Rough Trade’s demise for years helped create a myth around the band. That and their devotion to musical perfection and a low public profile. They eventually reappeared in 1992 with sophomore album “Blind” (having signed to Parlophone Records) and were rewarded with a No 15 chart peak and more sold out shows though it wasn’t received as well as their debut in the music press. Yet again, singles weren’t forthcoming – only minor hit “Goodbye” appeared in the UK. I’m beginning to understand why they’d never been on TOTP before now.

Gavurin and Wheeler stepped back from music following “Blind” to start a family before resurfacing in 1997 with their third and so far final album “Static & Silence”. It would continue their run of success by going Top 10. I had a promo copy of it but I’m not sure I ever played it (call myself a music fan?!). The album supplied “Summertime”, their highest ever charting single which finally secured them a place on the running order of the BBC’s prime time music show. The perfect soundtrack to the last moments of Summer and the beginning of Autumn, it was written about Gavurin and Wheeler’s perception of some of their friends joining dating services. I’m not sure that something like today’s Tinder could inspire such a whimsical piece of music.

The band have been on hiatus for nigh on 30 years since though apparently they have continued to write songs throughout though whether anyone will ever get to hear them is anybody’s guess. Still, I’ve got at least three albums to check out in the meantime. Now, where’s that promo copy of “Static & Silence”?

All I knew of Sly & Robbie before this point was their reputation as reggae and dub producers and their 1987 hit single “Boops (Here To Go)”. Of their collaborators here Simply Red, I (regretfully) knew much more. Finally, despite a discography of nearly 80 studio albums, I pretty much was only familiar with one Gregory Isaacs song, that being this one, “Night Nurse”. Supposedly, this was an updated take on the reggae classic but I can’t understand why you wouldn’t just seek out the original. However, back in 1997, that wouldn’t have been an easy ask. You couldn’t just say “Alexa, play “Night Nurse” by Gregory Isaacs” – no, you’d have had to do some research and possibly order a whole album from your local record store just to get that one song so maybe it was easier just to buy the single that was available. Indeed, maybe some punters weren’t aware of the original and its creator – I barely knew Gregory Isaacs and I worked in a record shop! Whatever the truth behind its success, this version of “Night Nurse” made No 13 on the UK charts.

Boyz II Men had 12 UK Top 40 hits according to officialcharts.com but could anyone name more than three? A superfan maybe? Or their Mums perhaps? I thought I was doing well with two – “End Of The Road” and “I’ll Make Love To You” (though they’re basically the same song so is that only one really?). “4 Seasons Of Loneliness” was their tenth and guess what? It was a ballad. Or was it? It sounds more like a voice exercise than a song. Their sweet harmonies prowess is all very well but you still need a proper tune to wrap them around. I work in a theatre these days and often witness the actors in pre-show mode and I can honestly say I’ve heard vocal warmups that are more tuneful than “4 Seasons Of Loneliness”. I’m also willing to bet that there was a floor manager out of shot holding up ‘scream now’ signs to the studio audience when each of the four band members gets to their solo parts. Not many people seemed to agree with my assessment though – it went to No 10 over here and No 1 in America.

Oh gawd! Guess who’s back? Yes, it’s Mark Morrison and, rather predictably, he’s still going on about the bloody ‘Mack’! His recent three month spell at Her Majesty’s pleasure for attempting to take a firearm on a plane (daringly hinted at in her intro by Jayne Middlemiss) doesn’t seem to have made him reflect on his life choices much. He’s just reliving the past glories of his previous hits and most obviously “Return Of The Mack” by calling this track “Who’s The Mack!”. Morrison clearly didn’t take any educational programmes in prison otherwise he would have known to put a question mark and not an exclamation mark at the end of that song title. His track is more of the same nonsense as before so I was more interested in the staging of the performance and the backdrop of words behind him which resembled the set of Have I Got News For You. Were they the song’s lyrics? I don’t know but apparently a few people wanted to know about this ‘Mack’ bloke – there are at least two other songs called “Who’s The Mack” by Ralph Tresvant and Ice Cube.

And so we’re finally at the chart moment not just of the year but of all time – maybe. Depending on how you want to look at it, “Candle In The Wind 1997” is either the best selling or the second best selling single worldwide of all time. What?! Yes, it’s a sentence that needs explanation. The only other contender for that title is “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby but it was released in 1942 before the advent of formalised UK and US charts so it’s harder to confirm its sales. In 2007, Guinness World Records adjudged that “White Christmas” had sold 50 million copies whereas “Candle In The Wind 1997” had shifted 33 million making the former the biggest seller. However, in 2009, a further clarification said that Elton’s single was the best-selling single since UK and US singles charts began in the 1950s. What’s not in doubt is that the tribute to Princess Diana is the fastest selling single of all time in the UK with 650,000 copies snapped up within 24 hours. At its peak, it sold six copies per second. Needless to say, it was No 1 in just about every country in the world.

In my ten years of working in record shops, the only other event that came anywhere near to the profile (though not sales) that “Candle In The Wind 1997” held was the Oasis v Blur chart battle in 1995. The difference was that I enjoyed being a part of that, literally on the shop floor. I felt almost privileged to be working within the record industry when that happened. Its a clumsy and perhaps even insensitive comparison but with the Elton John phenomenon, it felt like record shop staff were somehow aid workers trying to support the public through their outpouring of grief by supplying the medication of that single. The difference I guess is that we hadn’t volunteered for the role, we were just caught up in the frenzy. I have definite memories of punters grabbing the single out of our hands as we tried to refill the shelves. For some people, conventions of social niceties went out of the front door as fast as the single. I know it was our job but it really felt like hard work at that time. If this all sounds like offensive hyperbole then I apologise – I’m just trying to describe the unique nature of what happened back then as I experienced it. I’m sure everyone has their own story to tell /perspective on this moment in time.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Ricky Martin	(Un Dos Tres) Maria	No
2	Kylie Minogue	Some Kind Of Bliss	Liked it, didn’t buy it
3	George Michael	You Have Been Loved	Nah
4	The Sundays	Summertime	No but I had that promo copy of the album
5	Sly & Robbie / Simply Red	Night Nurse	Negative
6	Boyz II Men	4 Seasons Of Loneliness	Nope
7	Mark Morrison	Who’s The Mack!	Never
8	Elton John	Candle In The Wind 1997	No, I was not part of the madness

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0029lyr/top-of-the-pops-19091997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 12 SEP 1997

Posted on April 5, 2025 by 80stastic

I’ve decided that this post will be a Diana’s death free zone on account of it having dominated the last two and that we still have weeks of the Elton John single to come. Right then, let’s get to it starting with tonight’s presenter. Now, I thought that, under executive producer Chris Cowey, the ‘golden mic’ feature where a celebrity would host the show had been done away with and replaced with a roster of young BBC presenters sourced from their existing youth TV output. So why is comedian Mark Lamarr on hosting duty this week? Well, maybe he was considered as a member of the extended BBC family or an associate member if you like seeing as he was a regular on two of the corporation’s popular panel games Shooting Stars and Never Mind The Buzzcocks at the time. Anyway, our host he is and he will lead us through tonight’s acts in a similarly dismissive manner to his Buzzcocks demeanour. Well, did we expect anything else?

We start with Hanson who were only on last week but are back again as they have shot into the charts at No 4 with “Where’s The Love”. I recently met up with a friend with whom I discussed my blog and admitted that after nearly nine years of writing it that occasionally the creative juices can run dry. I summed this position up by saying “Sometimes I ask myself ‘what more can I say about Hanson?’”. And so here I am facing that very question. OK, how about this? Somebody on Twitter described Hanson as ‘Kula Shaker meets The Osmonds’ which I thought was pretty clever but he followed it up with ‘Tuneless meets unlistenable’ which I thought wasn’t. What was unlistenable were some of the comments that drummer Zac made on his Pinterest account in 2020 which were described by Ashley Spencer of Vice Media as “a trove of pro-gun memes many of which were racist, transphobic, homophobic and sexist”. Three years later, Zac Hanson was appointed as a deacon in the Georgian Orthodox Church under the name Father Mercurios. Form your own opinions. I had to.

In the last post, I posited the theory that Ocean Colour Scene had become serial chart stars by 1997 based on the peaks of their last half a dozen or so singles. The same logic could also be applied to Cast. Check out the placings of their last six hits below:

8 – 9 – 4 – 7 – 9 – 7

The last of those was “Live The Dream”, the third single released from their sophomore album “Mother Nature Calls”. It’s a fairly laid back, strolling type number that’s quite pleasant though, on reflection, I’m kind of surprised was considered suitable for release as a single. Its chart high would suggest I don’t know what I’m taking about*. However, I’m pretty sure all of those peaks were achieved in their first week of sales when they would have been discounted as new releases so was it more a reflection of their growing fanbase than the hit potential of the song?

*Actually, I did my dissertation at polytechnic on what makes a hit record a hit record – I think I called it something one the lines of ‘The Mechanics of the Music Industry’. Something wanky like that. Does that mean I did know what I was talking about? Of course not as I came to no valid conclusions. Obviously.

For the aforementioned question “What more can I say about Hanson?”, repeat for Tina Moore. Well, The Guardian no less ranked her hit “Never Gonna Let You Go” at No 11 in their list of ‘The best UK garage tracks – ranked!’ in 2019 which I guess shouldn’t be disregarded assuming that sort of thing means something to you (it doesn’t to me). As for this performance, this is just a repeat of her previous appearance from the other week which Mark Lamarr had clearly watched before his stint as host as he takes the piss out of a part of it that I hadn’t picked up on before. “In the middle of this next track, Tina Moore does some of the snappiest footwork I’ve ever seen since Bambi learned to walk but watch very carefully as it might be too fast for the human eye” he warns. What follows, via a camera situated underneath the glass podium Tina is performing on, are some of the slowest, most plodding shoe shuffle moves ever witnessed on prime time TV!

Next up is Finley Quaye with his second hit single “Even After All”. The follow up to “Sunday Shining”, it would be his biggest ever peaking at No 10. It was again more of that soul/reggae fusion sound on which he made his name with a meandering groove that was perfect for whiling away whatever was left of the weekend after a big night out on the Saturday. Finley’s affectation here for singing with one arm behind his back confused me at first glance and left me asking the question “Finley Quaye didn’t have just one arm did he?”. Of course he didn’t so with that issue resolved my next query was “What is he wearing?”. The 60s went that way *points behind him* Finley!

My final question to myself was “How did I not know at the time that his nephew was trip-hop artist Tricky?”. The clue was right there in the title of Tricky’s album “Maxinquaye” which was literally the name of his Mum (minus an ‘e’) – Maxine Quaye who is Finley’s half-sister. Apparently the family ties are quite distant though – Finley and Tricky didn’t actually meet until 1996.

Here comes the next instalment of the curious tale of Kavana the pop star. I find his story* peculiar because on the one hand, he could have been extraordinarily successful with his classic teen heart-throb looks and catchy pop tunes and on the other, on another day, you look at him and think “How did this bloke become a pop star?” so insubstantial was he.

*Apparently he has an ‘explosive’ autobiography coming out later this year. I’m not so intrigued by his story that I would shell out good money for that though!

For the record, come 1997, Kavana was at the peak of his fame with two Top 10 hits under his belt and a Smash Hits award for Best Male Artist on his mantelpiece. Given all of this, the decision was taken to maintain his career momentum by rereleasing his debut single “Crazy Chance” which had been a minor hit in 1996. Given a remix and retitled as “Crazy Chance ‘97”, it would do the job efficiently enough by returning a No 16 chart peak. It was co-written by Take That’s Howard Donald but I don’t think I’d own up to that if I was Howard as it sounds like an Eternal B-side at best.

Now, what was going on with the staging of this performance? All that hazy camera focus and wobbly, garishly coloured ‘green screen’ effect behind Kavana? Many of the TOTP online community came up with the theory that it must have been a nod to or in joke with Mark Lamarr referencing his time on The Word the look of which Chris Cowey seems to be trying to recreate. Had he taken inspiration for the controversial Channel 4 show or was he just trying out something new?

Maybe Cowey was indeed trying to be inventive as we stick with the ‘green screen’ effect for the next act who are N–Tyce. That’s N-Tyce, not ‘N Sync nor N-Joi but N-Tyce…yeah, I’ve got no idea either. Apparently they had four UK Top 20 hits though of which this one, “We Come To Party” was their second and biggest. I’m sure it’s not as clear cut a divide as this but it did superficially seem like the first part of the 90s were all about boybands whilst the second part was the turn of all girl groups. Eternal, All Saints and of course the Spice Girls are names that trip easily off the tongue but N-Tyce? They would surely have been a perfect choice for the ‘identity parade’ round in the aforementioned Never Mind The Buzzcocks. As if that wasn’t enough indignity, there were those tours supporting Boyzone and Peter Andre that Mark Lamarr mentions in his link – “so it is true there’s always someone worse off than you” he closes his segue with. He’s not wrong though is he?

Just as with Tina Moore earlier, the next performance is just a re-showing of an earlier appearance on the show as we get Mariah Carey and “her wobbly legged sailors” again as Lamarr puts it. I like the way he plays along with the all too easily seen through deception that Mariah is actually there in the studio by craning his neck as if to get a better view. His shout of “Go on love!” is the icing on the cake. I have nothing else to say about her song “Honey” except that it was her 13th of 19 US No 1 singles! *Nineteen!

*You’ve got that Paul Hardcastle song in your head now haven’t you?

Even Lamarr has to stop his cynic act to prostrate himself at the altar of this week’s No 1. After crossing over into the mainstream with “Bitter Sweet Symphony”, The Verve really hit the big time with follow up “The Drugs Don’t Work”. A ballad that redefined melancholy, it was either written about Richard Ashcroft’s father-in-law who passed away after having cancer or his own Dad who died of a blood clot when Ashcroft was just 11 years old – depends which story you believe. One which I’m not sure that I believe is that its success was somehow fuelled by the mood of the nation which was in mourning over the death of Diana, Princess of Wales…Damn! I said I wasn’t going to mention it! Oh well, I nearly made it through the whole post. The theory goes that with the single having been released the day after Diana died, the public were more open to “The Drugs Don’t Work” than they perhaps might have been, that they connected with it more if you like, and bought it in enough copies to send it to No 1 for a week. Just a week mind as then “Candle In The Wind ‘97” would have been in the shops and all bets were off. It was, in effect, a makeshift chart topper until the real mania could take place courtesy of Elton John. I’m just not having that. I just don’t think that those people that were literally buying armfuls of the Elton single at a time would have also bought a song by an indie band, no matter how melancholy it was.

Now I can’t find any reference to it online anywhere but wasn’t there someone within the Irish media at the time, a TV presenter or a radio DJ perhaps, who totally misunderstood the song and called for it to be banned? Apparently, he thought that the story behind “The Drugs Don’t Work” was that of a drug user moaning that their recreational drugs weren’t giving them the required high. I haven’t made that up have I?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Hanson	Where’s The Love	Didn’t happen
2	Cast	Live The Dream	I did not
3	Tina Moore	Never Gonna Let You Go	Negative
4	Finley Quaye	Even After All	No but my wife had his album
5	Kavana	Crazy Chance ’97	Nope
6	N-Tyce	We Come To Party	No
7	Mariah Carey	Honey	Nah
8	The Verve	The Drugs Don’t Work	No but I had the Urban Hymns album

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0029cfk/top-of-the-pops-12091997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 05 SEP 1997

Posted on April 2, 2025 by 80stastic

Given the events in Paris five days before this TOTP aired and that the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales was to happen the following day, it will be interesting to remind ourselves how the BBC handled broadcasting their flagship pop music show. On the face of it, a programme based around the pop charts might have seemed at odds with the sombre mood of the nation which was still in shock and in some cases hysterical about accepting the tragic news. A studio audience shouting and cheering and behaving in an overexcited way whilst a presenter introduced the latest sounds might have seemed incongruous at best and disrespectful at worst. Would the decision to cancel the show altogether have been considered? You would assume so given that radio stations had been tying themselves up in knots all week about their on air output and avoiding playing anything deemed to be inappropriate. That decision wasn’t made though so let’s see how they did handle it.

Tonight’s host is Zoe Ball who we haven’t seen in these repeats as yet though she had presented the show before but the Puff Daddy/P Diddy/R Kelly issue meant they weren’t broadcast on BBC4. There’s no discernible changes in the opening of the show with Zoe giving us the well worn line about TOTP still being No 1 though there’s no actual prop of the figure ‘1’ this week. The studio audience breaks into the usual screaming/cheering on cue but Zoe does seem to be playing it straighter than we’ve seen from fellow presenter Jayne Middlemiss up to now.

The first artist on tonight is global superstar/diva (delete as appropriate) Mariah Carey. By this point in her career, Mariah was up to her sixth studio album in just eight years – “Butterfly” was released the week after this TOTP aired and was trailed by lead single “Honey”. This wasn’t a case of just churning out another album though. No, this was the moment Mariah went full hip-hop. Or was it R&B? Or both? It’s not my bag so I don’t feel qualified to comment really but everything online I’ve read tells me this was an ‘important’ album for Mariah which usually signals a crossroads in an artist’s career. Messing with the formula can produce amazing results – think of all those brilliant songs by The Beatles we would have been denied if they’d never deviated from their early ‘moptop’ sound. It can also go the other way alienating the fanbase – I lost faith with Radiohead once they disappeared up their own arses on “Kid A”. Of course, it’s all subjective. You may prefer Genesis of the “Invisible Touch” brand to the early Peter Gabriel era or the abstract noodling of late period Talk Talk to their synth pop beginnings. Similarly, a hip-hop-upped Mariah Carey may have held your attention more than her warbly balladeer persona. Personally, I wasn’t bothered about either. As for the track “Honey”, is it me or does she not actually appear to sing that much on it? I can hear the backing singers more than Mariah. Was she turned down in the mix or something? Even when you can hear her, all she seems to be doing is some elongated, over pronouncing of the words so we get a load of ‘ye-aah’, ‘no-oo’, and ‘ba-aabe’. Then, before she can really let rip, she’s joined on stage by a rapper (called Mase apparently) – well, she had gone hip-hop I suppose. It’s all a bit of a mess and guess who had his fingerprints all over it? Yep, P Diddy. We couldn’t have had this show cancelled as well?

Next up are Ocean Colour Scene and we find another case of someone being about out-sung. “Travellers Tune” was the second single lifted from the band’s “Marchin’ Already” album and featured soul singer P.P. Arnold on additional vocals but describing her contribution as ‘additional’ hardly does her justice. It’s not that frontman Simon Fowler doesn’t do a decent job of anchoring the song but P.P. Arnold brings it into dock and secures its lines with a clear hitch knot. It’s not surprising as her track record shows she has worked with some huge names like Ike and Tina Turner, Small Faces and the aforementioned Peter Gabriel as well as having her own hits in the 60s and collaborating with dance acts like Beatmasters and Altern-8.

Unlike Mariah Carey before them, “Travellers Tune” itself wasn’t breaking any new ground and was more of the blues rock sound that made the band’s name as Britpop broke. It was still a decent…well…tune though, full of melody and enough hooks to keep the listener engaged. Its chart peak of No 5 meant their last five singles had achieved the following chart highs:

7 – 4 – 6 – 4 – 5

They were now established chart stars. Indeed, “Marchin’ Already” would knock Oasis’s “Be Here Now” off the top of the album chart when released nine days after this TOTP aired. Ocean Colour Scene had supported Noel, Liam et al on their 1995 tour. As far as I can tell, they won’t be supporting them on their 2025 reunion tour though the likes of Cast and Richard Ashcroft have been confirmed.

Not this guy again! How on earth did Ginuwine manage to have hits with his nasty brand of call and response R&B? Having already bagged himself two UK Top 20 singles, he went one further with a third chart entry by going Top 10 with – blasphemy upon blasphemy – a cover of Prince’s “When Doves Cry”. How dare he?! This really was nonsense for the feeble minded. Predictably, Ginuwine (real name Elgin Lumpkin – no, really!) starts his performance by exhorting the crowd to wave their arms in the air and shouting “Ho-ooo!”. Someone else made their name by doing a similar thing but he was playing it for laughs – Ginuwine was…well…being genuine!

This version of “When Doves Cry” was produced by Timbaland whose own real name is Timothy Mosley but I’m guessing he isn’t named after Moseley, the suburb of South Birmingham like Ocean Colour Scene’s “Moseley Shoals” was. No, because that was a humorous play on Muscle Shoals, Alabama, home to several famous recording studios. There’s nothing funny about Ginuwine covering Prince which was a mad idea. Elgin Lumpkin? I think Elgin lost his marbles on this one.

Now here’s a quality tune from a group who were only what the Spice Girls could/should have been like – the time of All Saints (and their cargo pants) is upon us. Just like Baby, Posh, Scary, Sporty and Ginger, this lot had a back story that involved a Pete Best type figure – for Michelle Stephenson (Lost Spice) read Simone Rainford who was part of an original trio (alongside Melanie Blatt and Shaznay Lewis) named All Saints 1.9.7.5. who were signed to ZTT Records. Two single releases failed to make any impression on the charts and, following internal conflicts, Rainford left the group who were subsequently dropped by their label. Tasked with finding a replacement member and a new recording contract, Blatt and Lewis turned up trumps on both accounts finding the Appleton sisters Natalie and Nicole and a new label in London Records. The mix was perfect and they hit the ground running with debut single “I Know Where It’s At”, a slinky, R&B infused but resolutely pop track (that’s how you do it Mariah!) that became an instant earworm once heard. I never knew that it had a Steely Dan sample in it but then I’m hardly a Steely Dan aficionado so I can forgive myself that. For the record though it’s this track:

Although the comparisons with the Spice Girls were inevitable, I always thought that All Saints were cooler by far though in truth, I’m not convinced that they were similar acts at all. My sense is that the Spice Girls had a much younger fanbase. The All Saints performance here ticks all the boxes, synchronised moves though not overly choreographed, those cargo pants and a definite sense of unity. They would become a huge success with five No 1 singles and two multi platinum albums before they split in 2001. Though there have been two subsequent reunions and three further albums as well as solo careers and the duo Appleton, I still have the feeling that, if not unfulfilled potential, then there was more we never got to see and hear from All Saints.

Following up “MMMBop” was always going to be a tall order for Hanson but they gave it a decent go with “Where’s The Love”. A No 5 hit over here (it didn’t chart in the US as it wasn’t given a physical release so didn’t comply with Billboard regulations), it was another uptempo, hook-laden pop tune. However, to me, this always sounded like a more mature sound compared to its predecessor. Now I now the words ‘mature’ and ‘Hanson’ don’t seem compatible (especially in 1997 – had lead singer Taylor’s voice even broken yet?) but hear me out. Whereas “MMMBop” had that saccharine feel to it that even the youngest of the young could cotton onto (my then six year old goddaughter included), “Where’s The Love” just seemed more like a proper song. I’m probably vastly over examining this whole subject but then I have to write something about it don’t I?

At the time of their biggest fame, drummer Zac wasn’t even a teenager and I have a distinct memory of Huey Morgan of Fun Lovin’ Criminals telling a story about him whilst appearing on Never Mind The Buzzcocks. Apparently, they’d been in a recording studio at the same time and Huey had lit up a cigarette during a break only to be confronted by the youngest Hanson brother saying “You can’t smoke in here, you can’t smoke in here!”. Huey wasn’t going to be told what he could and couldn’t do by an 11 year old and so it spilled over into an argument resulting in him telling the viewing audience that he had “beef with the little guy”. Where’s the love Huey?

It’s the fourth and final week at the top for “Men In Black” and still we have the superimposed Will Smith intro over the top of the video. I guess TOTP just got him to freestyle for a bit and then cut up whatever he gave them and laid it over the four separate times the video was played. I wonder how much more footage they had if he was at the top any longer? Four weeks feels like enough but we should maybe have cherished that time more – Elton is on his way…

…but not yet. We finally get to the part of the show where they acknowledge “the end of a very sad week” as Zoe Ball puts it. Clearly, Zoe had been given instructions about the presenting style that was required at this time and she duly delivered a muted tone with some basic intros and a lack of extravagance. There weren’t even any of those knowing looks and raised eyebrows that Jayne Middlemiss was determined to make her trademark. And talking of Jayne…why has she suddenly appeared on screen alongside Zoe? All she does is a plug for the chart rundown show on the Sunday – this seemed really odd. Was it meant to be a show of unity by the show’s presenters as if to say “we’re all in this together’? If so, it failed as Jayne can’t resist her raised eyebrows look before Zoe steps in and takes over with a respectful intro into the last song of the night which, by very fortunate happenstance, is actually a suitable track and a new release.

“You Have Been Loved”, Zoe tells us, was written by George Michael for his late mother. However, everything I’ve read online says it was inspired by the death of his lover Anselmo Feleppa who passed away from an AIDS-related illness in 1993. I guess maybe the cover story given to the press about his mother* was deemed necessary as George hadn’t come out as gay by this point (he would do so in 1998).

*His previous single with Toby Bourke “Waltz Away Dreaming” was also reported to have been recorded as a tribute to his Mum

The sixth and final single taken from George’s “Older” album, “You Have Been Loved” was the tale of losing a loved one (whoever that may have actually been) and had already been distributed to radio stations for plugging and so was manna from heaven for programme directors desperately trawling the playlist catalogues for something inoffensive to play*. It would peak at No 2 and would surely have been a third No 1 from the album but for the Elton John single. As it was, “Older” itself would receive a sales injection off the back of it.

*As I recall, another contemporary tune that was deemed appropriate was “Don’t Go Away” from Oasis’s recently released “Be Here Now” album.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Mariah Carey	Honey	Didn’t happen
2	Ocean Colour Scene	Travellers Tune	Negative
3	Ginuwine	When doves Cry	Never
4	All Saints	I Know Where It’s At	Nope
5	Hanson	Where’s The Love	I did not
6	Will Smith	Men In Black	Nah
7	George Michael	You Have Been Loved	No

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0029cfh/top-of-the-pops-05091997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 29 AUG 1997

Posted on March 31, 2025 by 80stastic

We’ve nearly got to that point in the 90s when one the decade’s most historic events took place – the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Two days after this TOTP aired, reports started to emerge that she had been involved in a car crash in Paris before her death, aged just 36, was confirmed. It really is one of those seismic incidents which anchors you in time. I’m guessing we can all remember where we were when the story broke. I myself was in my flat in Manchester doing not very much at all (well it was a Sunday) but from the moment news came in of what had happened, the coverage was wall-to-wall. Normal life seemed to be put on hold. Now, I should say straight out that I’m not a fan of the monarchy and don’t believe in the institution but I could appreciate that this was a tragedy especially for her two young children. What I couldn’t understand though was the reaction of the general public which seemed to be frenzied hysteria – vast swathes of the population seemed to lose all sense of proportion. There were stories of people missing funerals of family and friends to go to London to watch the funeral procession on its way to Westminster Abbey. Coverage of the funeral showed people wailing uncontrollably and hurling bunches of flowers at the coffin. I just didn’t understand nor agree with, what seemed to me, to be these disproportionate displays.

The day of the funeral on 6th September saw everything close in the morning as a mark of respect and so that the nation could watch the funeral. The Our Price store where I worked dutifully complied. We opened in the afternoon and the very first bloke who came in walked straight up to the counter and said “Have you got that song that Elton John sang at the funeral?”. In today’s digital world, that wouldn’t have seemed like an unreasonable request but back in 1997, it was a ludicrous question. I was flabbergasted. How did he think we would have copies of a single in stock of a song that had just been performed for the first time ever about an hour before. At this point, it hadn’t even been decided that it would be made available to the general public via a single release. I should be clear that the guy was asking for that version of the song specifically performed at the funeral and not just the original “Candle In The Wind” recording. Even if he’d have been happy with the original, we might have had it on a Greatest Hits but that would have been it. In 2025, a song from an event of such public interest could be made available on a streaming platform instantly but in 1997, the world just didn’t work like that. Ultimately, the song was released as a single about a week later but that’s a discussion for a future post. Right now, let’s sit back and watch TOTP as if in a more innocent time before Diana’s death.

Jayne Middlemiss is our host again and executive producer Chris Cowey is still wedded to the idea of incorporating a model of the figure 1 into the show’s opening to enforce the idea that it is still the No 1 music show on TV. This week, a glammed up Jayne in full evening dress walks on as the model No 1 drops to the floor behind her. No, you’re right it doesn’t really work does it? The opening artist is Jon Bon Jovi who continues the royal theme to this post with his single “Queen Of New Orleans”. The second track released from his “Destination Anywhere” album, like its predecessor “Midnight In Chelsea”, it was co-written with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics. A solo album by the man behind Bon Jovi was never going to be a huge departure from the sound that made him and his band global stars but “Queen Of New Orleans” is no “Livin’ On A Prayer”. It’s got a laid back feel to it with Jon growling his way through the lyrics whilst some rock guitars squall and squeal away in the background. Ah yes, those lyrics. It’s hard to believe that two men with the amount of hits to their names as Bon Jovi and Stewart could have come up with such useless words. For example:

“Me and Leigh met Summer of ‘95, in a burgundy dress looking finer than a French wine“

Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: David Allan Stewart / Jon Bon Jovi
Queen Of New Orleans lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

Really? Burgundy and French wine in a line together? Talk about cheesy (thank God they didn’t!). Then there’s this:

“That night I made a move, man I felt hard, when I put my hands in her cookie jar”

Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: David Allan Stewart / Jon Bon Jovi
Queen Of New Orleans lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

Oh please! Viz’s Finbarr Saunders would have baulked at that. And finally, in a blinding piece of self knowledge, we have this:

“She said baby our love’s just like your songs, the beat ain’t bad but the words are all wrong”

Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: David Allan Stewart / Jon Bon Jovi
Queen Of New Orleans lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

Ha! Apart from appearing on a few charity singles, Jon Bon Jovi has yet to return to his solo career.

Shola Ama had nine UK Top 40 hits in total but apart from her cover of Randy Crawford’s “You Might Need Somebody”, I couldn’t have told you the names of any of them without checking her discography first. It turns out that this one – “You’re The One I Love” – would be her highest charting when it peaked at No 3. This was actually a rerelease of her debut single which stalled at No 85 in 1996. Her album “Much Love” came out on the Monday after this TOTP and would go to No 6 eventually selling 100,000 copies. Shola was big news and never bigger than when she won a BRIT award for Beat British Female and two MOBOs for Best Newcomer and Best R&B act. And then…well, it all went a bit flat. A follow up album appeared in 1999 but it was a commercial failure peaking at No 92. Shola would remain within the music business even featuring on a Top 10 hit in 2004 for The Pirates. However, it maybe wasn’t the career she might have imagined she would have after her success filled start.

As for “You’re The One I Love”, it’s a very serviceable R&B/soul hit the type of which was very prominent at this time but does it linger long in the memory? Not mine I’m afraid. Apparently, Shola’s son is a big name music producer called Mekhi or prollymac or something – he’s one of those ‘Nepo Babies’ which is what the kids are saying these days but I wouldn’t know about that or Mekhi/prollymac. In fact, I struggled to find anything to say about his Mum.

Who’s this? Conner Reeves? Do I know this guy? Let me think….Reeves…Reeves….I know Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves obviously and Country legend Jim Reeves. Hell, I even remember 80s footballer Kevin Reeves but Conner (with an ‘e’ not an ‘o’) Reeves? Nope, I’ve got nothing. What’s his hit called? “My Father’s Son”? That kind of sounds familiar but am I getting confused with that song by Mike + The Mechanics about a son’s regret over an unresolved conflict with their now deceased father – “The Living Years”. Actually, didn’t the bloke who had a hit with that song called “Jessie” do one called “My Father’s Son”?

*checks internet and cross references*

That’s him. Joshua Kadison and yes he did but that’s not this song. It’s all very confusing.

Anyway, Conner Reeves’ song was his debut hit of five (five!) in total and apparently big things were predicted for him but I’m not sure why on the strength of “My Father’s Son” as it’s a bit of a plodder. How would I describe his sound? Well, Wikipedia categorises it as blue-eyed soul which is as good a description as any I guess. As for his image, he’s giving me serious Gilbert O’Sullivan vibes with that cap. Did he always wear it? Was it his USP? He looks like a bit of a knacker to be honest. In short, I’m not sold. In fact, I’d go as far as to say I’d rather have “Son Of My Father” than “My Father’s Son”…

Hmm. The running order for this particular show isn’t turning out to be the best. Now we’ve got UB40 but it’s not the UB40 of their classic early 80s hits. No, the 1997 version of the band had certainly seen better days and was probably past its sell by date. They hadn’t released a new studio album for four years and had filled that gap with a Best Of Volume 2. “Tell Me Is It True” was their first release of any nature for two years and was initially from the soundtrack to the movie Speed 2: Cruise Control though it would later turn up on their album “Guns In The Ghetto”. As Jayne Middlemiss hints at in her intro, the band actually had a cameo appearance in the film but I didn’t know that until now as I’ve never seen it. I loved the original Speed starring the aforementioned Keanu Reeves (I love it when a post comes together) but he wasn’t in the sequel and it got bad reviews so I gave it a miss. There were a few supposed blockbuster movies out that Summer that didn’t really land – Event Horizon and The Fifth Element were two others. I actually fell asleep in the latter though I was talking to someone at work the other day who loves it.

Anyway, that’s all besides the point. What is the point? The music of course so was “Tell Me Is It True” any good? Well, having listened back to it, it was actually better than I expected. The verses echoed back to those glory days of their prime although the chorus was a bit of a letdown. Also a letdown was the reaction to the “Guns In The Ghetto” album so the band returned to that reliable sales generator the “Labour Of Love” project with Volume III released in 1998. The new millennium would see the band splinter acrimoniously but that’s a whole other story/film/documentary…

And yet another artist who I don’t know at all despite having been in full time employment in a record shop at the time of her biggest hit. The name Tina Moore does resonate with me but only because that’s the name of the wife of the 1966 World Cup winning England captain Bobby Moore. Tina Moore the singer? My memory bank is as empty as a MAGA supporter’s head. For the record, she had two UK chart hits with “Never Gonna Let You Go” the first and biggest of them. Now if it sounds a bit like Rosie Gaines that’s possibly because it was on the flip side of white label copies of “Closer Than Close” but it wasn’t picked up for an official release like its partner. When it finally was, it was this ‘Bump-N-Go’ remix by Kelly G (an associate of Chicago house legend Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley no less) that did the trick sending the track to No 7. I assume the “chicka-boom” comment by Middlemiss in her intro was a reference to the noise of the track’s two-step backing track was it? Look, I don’t know what I’m talking about do I? I’m clearly winging it here!

And so to a band whose name I do recall but I would struggle to tell you any of their songs let alone how they sounded. Symposium were ‘the best live band in Britain’ according to the Melody Maker’s front page in late March 1997. I obviously never saw them live but judging by this TOTP appearance, I’ve got a fair idea of what one of their gigs would have been like. “They’re noisy, they’re wild, they’re anarchic” Jayne Middlemiss tells us in her intro which I’m sure fitted perfectly with how the band’s label would have wanted them to be described but were they? Certainly their song “Fairweather Friend” had lots of pop punk energy but was it anything we hadn’t heard before? Green Day springs to mind. Maybe if I’d have been the same age as the band (18 or so) I’d have found them as entertaining as the even younger studio audience clearly did. Once again, I have to question the lack of security here – there’s a semi-mosh pit going on down the front and then, breaking a longstanding taboo, one of the band stage dives into the audience! Naturally, after such antics, there’s then a stage invasion just as we’ve seen recently with Oasis and to a lesser extent Stereophonics recently. What was going on here?!

“Fairweather Friend” would be Symposium’s biggest hit of three peaking at No 25. By 2000, the perennial problem of ‘musical differences’ would do for the band though they reformed for occasional gigs in 2022. By the way, they surely have two of the most tongue-twister type named members in their line up since Big Country drummer Mark ‘Unpronounceable Name’ Brzezicki – try saying Wojtek Godzisz and Hagop Tchaparian three times in a row.

What was executive producer Chris Cowey thinking of with this running order? After stage-diving and stage invasions with Symposium, the next act in the studio is Chumbawamba! All those youngsters in the studio audience needed calming down not given another track to get their adrenaline pumping! “Tubthumping” was definitely the latter! Thankfully, the first couple of rows of the audience seem to have settled into a rather nerdy ‘dance’ of bending over when singer Dunstan Bruce sings “I get knocked down” and raising their arms when he sings “but I get up again” before shaking their fist rather limply to “You’re never gonna keep me down”. Ah to be young again – actually, they’ll all be in their mid-40s now! Oh, and talking of unusual band member names, Chumbawamba had Danbert Nobacon and Alice Nutter in their ranks but obviously they were made up.

It’s a third week at the top for “Men In Black” and once again we have a superimposed Will Smith introducing the video. I think it worked OK once but I fear overexposure had caused the magic dust to disperse too far by this point. The same couldn’t be said for the single itself which continued to see off all opposition to remain at No 1 for this chart and the following week’s. However, we would all be saturated by the news of a car crash in Paris in the days to come after this TOTP was broadcast.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Jon Bon Jovi	Queen Of New Orleans	No
2	Shola Ama	You’re The One I Love	Negative
3	Conner Reeves	My Father’s Son	I did not
4	UB40	Tell Me Is It True	No and that’s the truth
5	Tina Moore	Never Gonna Let You Go	Nope
6	Symposium	Fairweather Friend	Nah
7	Chumbawamba	Tubthumping	YES!
8	Will Smith	Men In Black	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00293qd/top-of-the-pops-29081997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 22 AUG 1997

Posted on March 27, 2025 by 80stastic

After rotating a trio of presenters in Jayne Middlemiss, Zoe Ball and Jo Whiley in the first few weeks of his tenure, TOTP Executive Producer Chris Cowey has branched out with his choice of hosts. Recent shows were piloted by Mary Anne Hobbs, Phil Jupitus and Denise van Outen. And then there’s this week – the curious case of Sarah Cawood. Having started her presenting career on Nickelodeon, she’d most recently appeared in Channel 4’s The Girlie Show. You remember The Girlie Show surely? It was a Channel 4 late night magazine show that was in the slot usually reserved for The Word and was hosted by a team of presenters including Cawood and a very young Sara Cox. It wasn’t well received by viewers or the tabloids though I always quite liked it, especially the ‘Wanker of the Week’ feature. Anyway, despite those post-pub beginnings, she was drafted into host the BBC’s flagship, prime time pop music show in 1997 but here’s the curious thing – Cawood wouldn’t present another TOTP for nearly five years at which point she was a regular until June 2003. So what was that all about? Didn’t Cowey think Cawood was any good in this 1997 show but changed his mind in 2002? I think she does a decent job for what it’s worth.

We start with one of the biggest and most unlikely hits of the year – “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba. This really was an astonishing hit from a band that had never troubled the chart compilers in their previous 15 years of existence. I’d certainly not heard of the anarcho -punk outfit before around 1992 when I worked with a colleague called Emma who was a bit of a Riot Grrrl and was into them. I’d somehow managed to miss their response to Jason Donovan taking The Face magazine to court for claiming that he was lying by denying he was gay – the band had ‘Jason Donovan – Queer as Fuck’ T-shirts printed which they gave away free with their single “Behave”. Fast forward to 1997 and the band had controversially signed to EMI having left indie label One Little Indian. The decision was viewed with mistrust at best and open hostility at worst from their fanbase and peers with accusations of hypocrisy levelled at them not least because they had recorded songs criticising the conglomerate in the past including contributing to a compilation album called “Fuck EMI”. Hmm. Chumbawamba’s stance was that the move would allow them to take their political messages to a wider audience. That was achieved and then some with “Tubthumping”. It spent three consecutive weeks at No 2 and a further eight inside the Top 10. How did they do it? By coming up with a track that crossed over massively. With its terrace chant chorus and lyrics about drinking, it appealed to the ‘lad culture’ who couldn’t have cared less about the band’s anarcho-communist political views because you could shout it as you stumbled from one bar to another on a pub crawl at the weekend and that was all mattered. Obviously, this move to the mainstream risked alienating their original fanbase but the I guess the band deemed it worth it. It was an irresistible, once heard never forgotten track which had enough going on in it to ensure it wasn’t just a lowest common denominator, appeal to the masses tune. There’s an excerpt from Brassed Off in the intro and a sample of “Trumpet Voluntary” by Jeremiah Clarke in the trumpet solo for a start.

For this performance, the band had to compromise even further by agreeing not to sing the word “Pissin’” in the lyric “Pissin’ the night away” so were left with an uncomfortable gap instead. Talking of the lyrics, I read that it was such a big hit in the US as well (No 6) because American audiences had misheard the words “I get knocked down” as “I get No Doubt” and thought it was some sort of tribute record to the “Don’t Speak” hitmakers. I would say that can’t be true but then America did vote in Donald Trump as their president. Twice. In fact, I’m surprised he didn’t try and use it to soundtrack his campaign. He’s too stupid to understand that the song is actually for and about working class people and their resilience in the face of adversity.

There were some ropey old boy bands in the 90s of which I would include OTT and when I say ‘ropey’, I literally mean ‘money for old rope’. The sheer audacity of their record label Epic to think they could launch this lot to global stardom on the back of some uninspired choices of cover versions. Having had their first hit with a cover of “Let Me In” by The Osmonds (blatantly copying Boyzone’s initial route into the charts), they went there again with a cover of a classic MOR ballad – Air Supply’s “All Out Of Love”. What a lazy, banal and uninventive way to go. In the 2001 film Rock Star, Mark Wahlberg’s character (a singer in a rock tribute band) argues with his brother about their differing musical tastes. Whilst he is into heavy rock, he chastises his brother for liking Air Supply. I think that says it all.

The staging of this performance with the studio audience all sat down on the floor cross-legged, gazing up at the four dullards in front of them reminds me of junior school assemblies. Watching OTT is about as much fun as those assemblies. Only two of the four band members sing solo parts while the other two just do the nerd shuffle on either end of the line up. When there’s the “what are you thinking of?” break down towards the song’s conclusion, one of the ‘singers’ does some weird arm movements like he’s cracking a whip or something. It looks really odd and jarring which is also how I’d describe the decision to call these berks OTT as there is nothing ‘over the top’ about them at all – they couldn’t have been more bland and safe.

Two years on from their No 1 single “Dreamer” and Livin’ Joy were commendably still having Top 20 hits though “Deep In You” would be the last. I’m not sure I would have predicted that continuation of chart success back in 1995 years especially for a dance act when the hits were more about the track than the artist. Tellingly though, despite the presence of five hits on it, Livin’ Joy could not shift significant quantities of their only album “Don’t Stop Movin’” which would peak at No 41 in the charts.

OK, so I have to mention the elephant in the room here which is why is singer Tameko Star wearing what appear to be a pair of marigolds throughout the performance? She looks like she should be cleaning the bathroom rather than singing on TOTP. More ‘Deep In The Loo’ than “Deep In You”.

Here’s a comeback I’m guessing we’d all forgotten about – the return of Dannii Minogue. Or should that be just ‘Dannii’? As part of her relaunch, there seems to have been a deliberate attempt to rebrand her with just her first name in the style of Madonna, Cher and…well…her sister Kylie. I’m not sure Dannii would ever be that famous as to only require her first name although, to be fair, how many other people called Dannii do you know or can think of? Looking back through her discography (which took longer than I would have imagined), it appears that this one name promotion of her had actually started all the way back to her first few single releases judging by their artwork. In Australia, it seems her records were always billed as being by just ‘Dannii’ whereas in the UK she was Dannii Minogue at least initially. However, just a handful of singles in and there was parity between the territories. There seemed to be a definite strategy in place for her return in 1997 to reinforce the Dannii only moniker – the TOTP caption doesn’t include her surname and Sarah Cawood refers to her as just ‘Dannii’.

Nomenclatures aside, her last hit had been the very minor “Get Into You” way back in 1994 so where had she been all this time? Well, she’d got married and subsequently divorced in the space of just two years which had taken its emotional toll on her. She modelled nude for Playboy (I’m sure there were also nude calendars as we were selling them in the Our Price store where I worked) and returned to TV co- hosting Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast show. By 1997, she pursued a return to music and if her name wasn’t any different then her comeback single was. Dannii’s biggest hits in the UK to this point had been covers of disco songs like “Jump To The Beat” and “This Is It” and although “All I Wanna Do” was a dance track, it sure wasn’t disco. This was Hi-NRG with a relentless (if repetitive) chorus that aligned itself well with her new adult and deliberately sexualised image. The TOTP performance plays into that with her movements shown in almost slow motion at some points and a couple of knowing winks to the camera. The single would debut and peak at No 4 but it couldn’t stimulate sales of parent album “Girl” which stalled at No 57. However, she would return in 2003 with gold selling album “Neon Nights”.

Next up are a Welsh band who, like their peers Manic Street Preachers, are still going to this day. In fact, there are a few parallels between the Manics and Stereophonics besides their nationalities – they’ve both released double figures amount of albums, they both play a brand of alternative (for want of a better word) rock music and both are referred to incorrectly using a definite article on occasion though, as I have done, Manic Street Preachers are often referred to as The Manics. On that point, I once worked with someone that insisted that Stereophonics was pronounced phonetically as ‘Steree-off-ernics” but he was a bit of a prat.

Anyway, “A Thousand Trees” was the second Top 40 hit for Stereophonics after “More Life In A Tramp’s Vest” earlier in the year and was another great example of the storytelling ability of Kelly Jones. A tale of how rumours in a small town environment can destroy a person’s reputation, I love the metaphor of matches and trees in the lyrics which Jones cleverly inverts to make his point. Parent album “Word Gets Around” was released the Monday after this TOTP aired and I remember putting it straight back on the shop stereo even though we’d just played it as I wanted to hear it again – I wasn’t disappointed. There’s some great songs on there; not just the singles but album tracks as well like my personal favourite “Check My Eyelids For Holes”. I bought the album and the follow up “Performance And Cocktails” but I’d kind of lost sight of them after third album “Just Enough Education To Perform”. I should probably update my knowledge of the rest of their back catalogue though there is a lot of it to go at with a new album due in April 2025 to boot!

As for this performance, I’m left asking the question of whether there was a problem with security in the TOTP studio around this time. After the crowd invasion of the stage when Oasis were on the other week, this time a lone youth seems to spring from out of the audience to jump around (rather uncooly) behind Kelly Jones before disappearing back into the crowd. Was that planned? If not, where were the floor managers/studio security? The show’s reputation was at stake – I’m surprised that Jones didn’t write a song about that!

And just like that, the first era of Mark Owen’s solo career was over. It took less than a year from the release of his debut single post-Take That for it took come off the rails and was emphatically demonstrated by his solo single “I Am What I Am” (not that one) peaking at a lowly No 29. Now, you could argue that this wasn’t the harbinger of doom that I’m making it out to be given that it was the third track taken from his album “Green Man” that had been out for eight months by this point. However, the album hadn’t sold well peaking at No 33 so the suggestion that punters might not have bought the single because they already had the album doesn’t really hold water. Presumably the diminishing sales caused tension between Owen’s label RCA and their artist as “I Am What I Am” has originally been earmarked to be the fourth single released from “Green Man” but a fourth single never appeared and Mark was subsequently dropped. I said earlier the ‘first era’ of his solo career as Owen would return to it six years later with the interesting single “Four Minute Warning” which peaked at No 4. Although album sales continued to be sparse, his fifth album “Land Of Dreams” released in 2022 would go Top 5 and in any case, his solo career was running in parallel with the second coming of Take That from 2006 onwards.

As for “I Am What I Am” specifically, it’s a decent enough little tune but listening to it feels to me like watching my beloved Chelsea play currently – you think they should be better than they are and you’re constantly waiting for them to make something happen and they never do (you win matches by scoring goals lads not by having loads of possession).

I mentioned earlier the connections between Stereophonics and Manic Street Preachers but the former also has one with this band – Suede. Well, sort of. There’s probably a few but the one I’m thinking of is that they both had hits with very similar titles. In 2004, Stereophonics took “Moviestar” to No 5 while back in 1997, Suede went to No 9 with “Filmstar” – ‘movie’ or ‘film’…what’s the difference? This was the fifth and final single from “Coming Up” (who did they think they were? George Michael? Michael Jackson?) and it was another example of that more accessible sound that had run through the album. Built around one of Richard Oakes’s favourite guitar riffs, its chart peak of No 9 meant that all five of the singles from “Coming Up” had gone Top 10 (maybe they were George Michael and Michael Jackson!). In this performance, keyboard player Neil Codling seems to do very little, at some points sitting there with his hands idle looking meaningfully at the camera. Who did he think he was? Brian Jones incarnate?

Will Smith remains at No 1 with “Men In Black” and his intro piece from the other week is recycled with Smith superimposed over the start of the video again. It would stay at the top for four weeks becoming the sixth best selling single in the UK that year. The film of the same name was also a smash hit with opening weekend box office receipts of $51 million making it the third highest grossing opening weekend ever at the time. I caught the movie at the cinema and enjoyed it for what it was though I don’t think I’ve ever watched any of its three sequels. There was also two soundtrack albums released – a score by composer Danny Elfman and a collection of songs by R&B and hip hop artists such as De La Soul, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Alicia Keys and Destiny’s Child as well as two tracks by Smith himself. Despite only the title track actually featuring in the film, the album was a huge success in the US going to No 1 and selling over three million copies. It sold more conservatively over here reaching gold status for 100,000 units shifted.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Chumbawamba	Tupthumping	YES!
2	OTT	All Out Of Love	As if
3	Livin’ Joy	Deep In You	Nope
4	Dannii Minogue	All I Wanna Do	Negative
5	Stereophonics	A Thousand Trees	No but I had the album
6	Mark Owen	I Am What I Am	Nah
7	Suede	Filmstar	See 5 above
8	Will Smith	Men In Black	No

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00293qb/top-of-the-pops-22081997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 15 AUG 1997

Posted on March 24, 2025 by 80stastic

We’ve lost another month to the Puff Daddy/P Diddy issue as “I’ll Be Missing You”, having spent three weeks at No 1 and then slipping a place to No 2 to accommodate Oasis for seven days, went back to the top of the charts for another three weeks! Bloody hell! Who did we miss? Nobody I was that bothered about to be honest – I’m actually very relieved to have missed reviewing Gary Barlow, Boyzone, Backstreet Boys and Peter Andre. Maybe Paul Weller and Morrissey would have been interesting but hey ho!

We pick the TOTP story back up in the middle of August and this one is actually quite an important episode. Not for the artists on it who are quite underwhelming but because this was the week that the decision was taken (presumably by new executive producer Chris Cowey) to do away with any sort of theme music at all. From early February 1995 we’d had the Vince Clarke composition “Red Hot Pop” which had replaced “Now Get Out Of That” by Tony Gibber which had ushered in the ‘Year Zero’ revamp. Prior to that, the show had been soundtracked by Paul Hardcastle’s “The Wizard” stretching back to 1986. Come 15th August 1997, we had nothing except an intro from the host – Denise van Outen this week – and then the opening of the first song played under the titles.

Said first song is “Bitch” by Meredith Brooks. Yeah, that one. Meredith was one of a number of female solo artists in the 90s who would be known for one hit and one hit only (see also Alannah Myles, Paula Cole, Donna Lewis) but what a hit it was – No 2 in the US and No 6 over here. Co-written with songwriter Shelly Peiken who was frustrated at having had album cuts for the past 10 years but never a huge hit single, her vexation spilled over into the lyrics of “Bitch” and a worldwide smash was born. It nearly never happened though as her record label Capitol baulked at some of the lyrics and the song’s title. One of those unsure about the song’s potential was producer Geza X who expressed concern that the lyrics might have a negative effect on its chances of commercial success. That’s infamous punk producer Geza X who produced the Dead Kennedys classic “Too Drunk To Fuck”! Unbelievable!

Despite those misgivings, it was released and the rest is history. Its success would lead to a spate of covers and parodies including this one by Australian comedian Chris Franklin and yes, it’s as bad as you might be imagining.

As with Michael Jackson the other week, I think it’s the final TOTP appearance that I’ll have to comment on in my blog (which I’m calling time on at the end of the 1999 repeats) by Wet Wet Wet. And what a crummy way to go out – with a version of one of the most recorded songs in the history of popular music. Why were they covering “Yesterday” by The Beatles? Was it just to ensure a hit? Unlikely. The first phase of their career might have been winding down but was it in need of a reviving, shot-in-the-arm smash? No, it was just another case of the band having recorded a 60s song for the soundtrack of a film. Panic not though. This wasn’t a repeat of their 15 week spell at No 1 with “Love Is All Around” from Four Weddings And A Funeral. Their version of “Yesterday” was taken from the soundtrack to Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie and would peak at No 4. Despite how many times the song has been covered, its chart statistics aren’t that impressive. Famously never released by the Fab Four as a single whilst they were together, it was taken into the charts by Matt Monro and Marianne Faithfull in 1965 within a month of each other with ‘The Man with the Golden Voice’ winning out with a high of No 8 compared to Marianne’s No 36. Ray Charles would have a go at making it a hit two years later but he wouldn’t crack the Top 40. In 1976, The Beatles original was finally released and it scampered up the charts to match Matt Monro’s placing. 21 years later Wet Wet Wet, whether deserved or not, would have the biggest UK hit with it. So was their version any good? Well, I think Marti Pellow’s voice suited the song well enough but it’s a fairly unremarkable take on it and the pedal steel guitar interlude is particularly incongruous. On the plus side, Marti’s lost his peroxide blonde hair at last. So, farewell Wet Wet Wet. There was some good stuff, some not so good stuff and some downright annoying stuff but it was undoubtedly a chart life well lived.

No, Olive weren’t a classic one hit wonder (a No 1 record then nothing) but could I have told you what their other hit was without checking? Absolutely not. Turns out it was called “Outlaw” and, for what it’s worth, having listened back to it, I much prefer it to “You’re Not Alone”. Why? I guess because it sounds like a proper song rather than a dance track. Although it retains a shifting, skittering drum ‘n’ bass backbeat, it’s got a defined structure to it – there’s a genuine song in there. I could imagine it reconfigured in a pure pop style and it would work.

In an act that seemed to confirm their pop sensibilities, Olive would release a cover version of one of the classic pop songs of the 70s when they chose 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love” as the lead single from their second album “Trickle”. It wouldn’t reverse their chart fortunes but there remains a lot of love online for Olive. It seems they remain ‘not alone’.

There’s three female solo artists on tonight’s show starting with Mary J Blige who is enjoying her biggest ever UK chart hit* with “Everything”. Based around “You Are Everything” by The Stylistics, it was written and produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis – of course it was. It was a good vehicle for Blige’s vocals though I’m still surprised that it was as big a hit as it was with it peaking at No 6. With her huge, tinted wrap-a-round glasses and long hair, Mary seems to have modelled her look on ex-Dutch international footballer Edgar Davids but that can’t have been the case surely?

*She would also have a No 4 hit in 1999 with a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “As” but that was a duet with George Michael

“You Are Everything” was also a hit for Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross in the early 80s but my research tells me that there was another version of it that was never actually released but was surely one of the oddest collaborations in pop history. There are only snippets of the track that have been leaked online but I give you heavy metal band Judas Priest doing a cover of a soul song produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman…

Judging by what I’d read about this one beforehand, I wasn’t expecting much but it was actually better than predicted. The Wildhearts had established themselves as a consistent chart band and by this point in the decade had amassed seven consecutive Top 40 hits (though none bigger than No 14). Hit number eight came courtesy of the lead single from their fourth studio album “Endless, Nameless” entitled “Anthem”. Having made their name with a brand of melodic rock, 1997 saw them spurn that for an industrial rock style that was more about distortion and feedback than riffs and hooks. The album was not well received by their fanbase and it failed to make the Top 40 of the album chart. The band’s lead vocalist Ginger though has proclaimed it as his favourite Wildhearts album and retrospectively, it has come to be seen as a strong rock statement.

As for “Anthem”, as I said, I had feared the worst, a grungey mess akin to *Nirvana’s infamous TOTP appearance in 1991 when Kurt Cobain sang live on “Smells Like Teen Spirit” deliberately badly. However, despite vocal duties being undertaken not by regular singer Ginger but by bassist Danny McCormack, I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, it’s a heavy sound but far from a noise. It does get a bit repetitive towards the end with the constant chanting of its chorus but I wasn’t completely put off. One person who was far from put off was the topless guy in the studio audience who was having it large down the front. Do you think he was a superfan? There’s always one and he was probably it. He’s probably approaching his 50s now. I wonder if he’s kept the faith?

*The title “Endless, Nameless” is also that of a Nirvana song apparently

I think I was expecting the next turn to be an out and out diva house artist but that’s possibly because I was confusing Robyn with Robin S though, in my defence, they both had hits with songs called “Show Me Love”. This wasn’t the American singer Ms S though but Swedish singer Robin Miriam Carlsson (aka Robyn) who would rack up eight UK Top 40 hits over a 13 year period including a No 1. I don’t know/remember any of them I have to say. That run started with “Do You Know (What It Takes)” and, having listened to it, my impression is that this was a blueprint for the sound that would make Britney Spears a global superstar. It’s not a surprising reaction on my behalf when I tell you that the co-writer and producer of the track was one Max Martin* who would go on to write “…Baby One More Time”. So, given all of this, maybe we should be asking ourselves why Robyn didn’t become Britney Spears before Britney did? She had the looks and the sound after all. On reflection though, given what would happen to the ‘Princess of Pop’, maybe Robyn was quite happy with the pop career she had?

*Martin would go on to write/co-write an incredible 27 Billboard No 1s including Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” and Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” so he clearly knew what he was doing when it came to penning hits for female pop stars!

Our third female solo artist on the show tonight is Kym Mazelle who despite not having a large collection of huge hits, does have a huge reputation – not for nothing is she known as ‘The First Lady of House Music’. Having worked with the likes of Dr.Robert of The Blow Monkeys, house legend Marshall Jefferson, Norman Cook, Soul II Soul and Jocelyn Brown, here she was stepping out on her own with her version of Candi Staton’s “Young Hearts Run Free” from the soundtrack to Romeo + Juliet. It’s a fairly faithful cover of the disco classic albeit with a nod towards the genre on which Kym made her name which makes me wonder why the film’s director Baz Luhrmann didn’t just use the original* in his film?

*Staton’s version was eventually rereleased in 1999 when it made No 29.

Despite all that she achieved in her long career, I have to say that the first thing I think of when I hear her name is this song in which she gets a name check…

We’re stuck with this Top 20 countdown business and we’re onto our third person doing the voiceover for it after Jayne Middlemiss and some random anonymous bloke. This week’s it’s Mark Goodier and he will keep the gig for the next five years.

The first No 1 that Goodier has to announce comes from Will Smith and it’s yet another song from a film and yet another hit that is based around a sample of an older song. “Men In Black” was, of course, from the movie of the same name and was the second chart topper this year to be built around Patrice Rushen’s “Forget Me Nots” following George Michael’s “Fastlove” in April. What were the chances?! It was also the second UK No 1 for Smith though the first hit (of any size) under his own name – “Boom! Shake The Room” was as The Fresh Prince with DJ Jazzy Jeff.

With the film a box office smash, its theme tune was almost assured massive hit status and so it proved to be with it topping charts around the world (though curiously not in America where it wasn’t given a physical release). It was the UK’s sixth best selling single of 1997 and would kick off a string of chart successes in this country for Smith up to 2005. As for me, it was one of those songs that you could appreciate for what it was but after one or two listens it became rather annoying. The appearance mid-video here of a superimposed Smith apologising to the TOTP viewers for not being there in person is similarly irritating but I’m sure executive producer Chris Cowey would have been pleased with himself for the coup.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Meredith Brooks	Bitch	No
2	Wet Wet Wet	Yesterday	I did not
3	Olive	Outlaw	Nope
4	Mary J. Blige	Everything	Nah
5	The Wildhearts	Anthem	Negative
6	Robyn	Do You Know (What It Takes)	Another no
5	Kym Mazelle	Young Hearts Run Free	Didn’t happen
8	Will Smith	Men In Black	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0028x68/top-of-the-pops-15081997?seriesId=unsliced