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

TOTP 09 AUG 1996

Posted on October 14, 2024 by 80stastic

I’m looking at the running order for this episode of TOTP from 1996 in the hope that I’ll spot a trend that will give me a foothold for a theme for this post but as usual it’s all over the place. In the latest edition of Classic Pop magazine, feature writer Ian Peel wrote:

But there’s one thing Classic Pop has never talked about or will ever talk about. And that’s ‘80s music’. Because there’s no such thing. There’s music from the 80s but it’s an era not a genre.

Anthem Publishing, 2024

Could the same not be said of the 90s? Sure, there were definite movements and trends like Britpop, Eurodance and the whole ‘Madchester’ thing just as the 80s had New Romantics, acid house music and Stock, Aitken and Waterman. However, these were transient and didn’t account for the whole of the decade’s tastes. They were a component part not the whole entity. Sometimes they would morph into something else or in the case of the dance music explosion, splinter into multiple sub genres. As for myself, I have, on occasion, been labelled as an “80s music fan” but that term is spurious – there’s plenty of music from the 80s I can’t stand and would never listen to. I like some but not all music that happened to be made in the 80s would be a more accurate description but I guess that’s a bit of a mouthful to be fair. Anyway, back to my original point which was that there are all sorts of music types represented in this show so I’ll just have to proceed with an open mind and call it as I see/hear it and see some sort of narrative emerges to glue it all together. One constant throughout the entirety of every show is, of course, the host and tonight’s is…oh god, it’s Peter Andre! He’d only been a thing for five minutes by this point – how did he get this gig so early on? Well, got it he has done let’s see how he did…

His first job is to introduce a reactivated New Edition who he claims are one of his all time favourite R&B groups before referring to them as ‘The Dream Team’. Hmm. Seems a bit over the top for a band whose best known song in this country is the bubblegum pop of “Candy Girl”. But then maybe Andre wasn’t aware of his R&B faves’ past? What was he doing in 1983 when “Candy Girl” was at No 1 in the UK.

*checks Wikipedia*

He was 10 years old and living in Australia having emigrated there with his family in 1979. Was “Candy Girl” even a hit down under?

*checks Wikipedia again*

Yes, it made No 10 in the Aussie chart so it’s certainly possible that Andre was aware of the song. In his defence, by the time he was a teenager and presumably his musical tastes more established and embedded, New Edition were recording an album with legendary R&B producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis so that may well have informed his opinion of them. Having said that, “Hit Me Off” was their first new material released since 1988 and the album before that had been a collection of doo-wop covers so that does rather undermine Andre’s claims. Why am I analysing the authenticity of Peter Andre’s music tastes? Sad as it is, I’d rather do that than write about New Edition’s 1996 comeback. “Hit Me Off”? Turn me off more like.

Another boy band next but one from our own shores. Unlike the squeaky clean New Kids On The Block who were created by ex-New Edition manager Maurice Starr to be “the white New Edition”, East 17 could never be described as beyond reproach or without vice. Whether it be interviews advocating drug use or their urban, grubby image, they were not your standard 90s boy band. It didn’t stop them selling records though, 10 million albums since their first hit back in 1992 according to Peter Andre in his intro. Is that true? 10 million?! Seems like a lot but who are we to doubt the word of a man who renewed his vows to then wife Katie Price in 2008 and ended up divorcing her 12 months later.

Anyway, “Someone To Love” was the fourteenth consecutive hit single for East 17 though by peaking at No 16, became their smallest since their second “Gold” stalled at No 28. Was the writing on the wall for the band’s future? I think it was. 1996 would turn out to be a bit of a swansong with a double platinum selling greatest hits compilation and a No 2 hit with Gabrielle. However, by 1997, first singer Brian Harvey was sacked and then songwriter Tony Mortimer left the band. There was a brief flurry of success in 1998 with Harvey reinstated and a hit single in “Each Time” but it was only delaying the inevitable. Had the band themselves realised that continued success couldn’t be taken for granted as early as 1995 and the recording of third album “Up All Night” and tried to push a new direction for themselves? “Someone To Love” is a passable gentle ballad with an acoustic guitar rhythm augmented by a sympathetic string section and Harvey’s plaintive vocals supported by some considered backing singing by his band mates. It’s actually quite a nice song and not typical of their normal output. Yes, their most famous song “Stay Another Day” was a ballad as well but that was a huge number with everything including sleigh bells thrown at it. “Someone To Love” had much more of a lilting nature. Rather sadly, in both meanings of the word, as of 2024, Terry Coldwell is the only original band member still with the group.

Next up, a song that set a new record at the time for the most plays on radio in one week. “Good Enough” by Dodgy racked up approximately 3,700 plays on national radio in seven days helping it rise to a peak of No 4 on the UK Top 40. By far the band’s biggest hit it is also, thanks to all that airplay, surely their best known as well. As far as I can tell though, it wasn’t the most played track on radio for the entire of 1996. That honour went to Mark Morrison’s “Return Of The Mack” though “Good Enough” did come in at No 8. Of those seven songs above it, only Pulp’s “Disco 2000” and “Give Me A Little More Time” by Gabrielle peaked lower in the charts than Dodgy with three of those above it being No 1 records. Not bad then for a band who had never had a Top 10 hit prior to this.

“Good Enough” wasn’t typical Dodgy fare though. An out and out pop song as opposed to an indie rock track, it felt like a deliberate attempt to write a huge hit but having read an interview with its composer Nigel Clark on its creation, it does sound like it came about organically. Messing around with an Akai S900, a very early sampler, Clark put a Lee Dorsey drumbeat on a loop and grew the track from there. Inspired by listening to Bob Marley’s “Kaya” album, he wanted it to be an upbeat track though he worried about demoing it to the rest of the band. However, their reaction was positive and after laying it down in the studio, Clark recalled thinking that “Good Enough” would last longer than Dodgy would. He was right. Thankfully though, I think their legacy is more than just that one track though – they were/are a band not a song, a fate which has befallen other artists like 4 Non Blondes who found it hard to escape the trappings of their mega hit “What’s Up?”.

The timing of its release to coincide with the Summer was perfect and surely deliberate; the single’s artwork was just a shot of a sunflower – they knew what they were doing. I think at Our Price where I was working, we had a pin badge with said sunflower on it to give away free with the single. The success of “Good Enough” would propel parent album “Free Peace Sweet” to platinum sales of 300,000 units. Pretty good going for a band derided by some as a Britpop also ran.

I’ve used the phrase “musical curiosity” or “curious musical footnote” many times whilst writing this blog – perhaps I’ve overused it but I really should have reserved it for this next hit. Anybody remember “Hanging Around” by Me Me Me? It must have passed me by despite the involvement of one of my favourite pop people ever that is Stephen Duffy. I’m not sure if his presence alongside Blur’s Alex James and Justin Welch from Elastica really qualifies as a ‘supergroup’ – probably more of a collective but it was very short lived either way. This single was their only release with the whole project only generating three tracks in total. The concept wasn’t even conceived to secure a hit single but rather as the soundtrack to a film made by artist Damien Hirst which was made for the Spellbound exhibition at the Hayward Gallery within the Southbank Centre. The film was only screened at the exhibition and once on national television at 11.50 at night.

Given that niche exposure, its peak of No 19 seems rather like a case of overachievement. Or perhaps its chart performance was down to it actually being good? Heh. Don’t be so naive I hear you shout and you’re right. When has quality been anything to do with popularity? In all fairness, there wasn’t much quality to “Hanging Around”. There wasn’t much of anything to it. A few random phrases picked because they rhymed set against a jaunty, Madness-lite tune that would have been discarded at the demo stage when it came to making the cut for a Blur album. What a waste! Stephen Duffy has a back catalogue of some incredibly affecting and crafted pop music but this…this was pure hokum. I can only assume some record label marketing and dubious ‘selling in’ practices got it into the charts at all. “Hanging around”? Nah, it was just angin’.

Although this next track topped the American charts for eight weeks, I can’t recall it being in our charts. However, most unfortunately, I do remember only too well a cover of it going to No 1 in the UK six years later. “Tha’ Crossroads” by Bone Thugs–n–Harmony was written as a tribute to a number of people close to the hip-hop group who had died recently including the rapper and their mentor Eazy-E.

The members of the group were:

Bizzy Bone
Flesh-n-Bone
Krayzie Bone
Layzie Bone
Wish Bone

That list reminds me of a reality tv series called Tool Academy the premise of which was to take twelve unsuspecting ‘bad boyfriends’ and send them to a ‘relationship boot camp’ to teach them how to be better partners. The boyfriends were given nicknames such as ‘Massive Tool’, ‘Temper Tool’, ‘Stoner Tool’, ‘Jealous Tool’ and ‘Neander Tool’. Anyway, want to know the real names of the ‘Bones’? Here you go:

Bryon
Stanley
Anthony
Steven
Charles

Heh. As hip-hop tracks go, “Tha’ Crossroads” was a little unusual with an almost gospel feel to the chorus and it was all the better for that. However, the version by Blazin’ Squad in 2002 which was retitled “Crossroads”…what on earth was going on there? I’m guessing that this lot weren’t taken seriously at the time? Certainly watching them back over 20 years later they look staggeringly ludicrous. The fact that there’s so many of them for a start undermines any credibility for me and the there’s their horribly hackneyed hip-hop posturing, all that throwing their arms about and the Ali G hand gestures. Someone from their management really should have had a word with them. One of their number appeared on Celebrity Big Brother and another ended up on Love Island. Says it all really.

Suede are back in the TOTP studio after doing an exclusive performance the other week having crashed into the charts at No 3 with “Trash”. I said in a previous post that I’d caught them live in Blackburn in early 1997 so I looked that gig on the Setlist FM website and can report it was a 14 song strong set of which, rather predictably, 10 came from latest album “Coming Up” – basically the whole album. The only tracks not taken from it were “The 2 Of Us” and “The Wild Ones” from “Dog Man Star” and “So Young” and “Animal Nitrate” from their eponymous debut album. I think I might have been ever so slightly disappointed that they didn’t do “The Drowners” and “Metal Mickey” as well.

Peter Andre says of them in his intro “here’s Suede at their most Suede”. Was that meant to be a play on words? If so, it didn’t match up to my mate Robin who once wrote me a letter (remember those!) informing me he’d been to see Suede at a very early gig when the music press were going crazy for them. His three word review? “Suede. I wasn’t”.

The UK really had a weakness for Michael Jackson in the 90s. By this point in the decade he’d accumulated thirteen hit singles over here including three No 1s and two No 2s. In addition, all three albums he released topped the charts. But it wasn’t just him that was the object of the nation’s affections – anybody related to him was also on our radar. The recently passed away Tito Jackson’s offspring benefited from the UK’s devotion to all things and people Jacko to the tune of five hit singles as 3T including this one “Why?”. There was no chance of us giving this one a miss what the King of Pop himself appearing on it alongside his nephews.

I’m surprised he deigned to be officially credited on it and didn’t just give it to them free of charge as it were given what a dreary, lamentable track it is. And don’t get me started on its lyrics. It’s very first two lines are;

Why does Monday come before Tuesday? Why do Summers start in June?

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Annie Lennox
Why? lyrics © La Lennoxa Music Co. Ltd., Boobie And Dj Songs, Inc.

Give me a break! The song sticks with this theme as a few lines later we get:

Why does Wednesday come after Tuesday? Why do flowers come in May?

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Annie Lennox
Why? lyrics © La Lennoxa Music Co. Ltd., Boobie And Dj Songs, Inc.

What?! The point Jackson was trying to make in a very laboured way was ‘why do we let ourselves fall in love if that love doesn’t last?’. Not sure what that has to do with days of the week or the seasons to be honest. Look, if you want to listen to a song called “Why” then try this one:

For the third week running, we have Robbie Williams on the show with “Freedom”. Wow! TOTP was really getting behind the launch of his solo career weren’t they? Perhaps executive producer Ric Blaxill could see something the rest of us were struggling to, namely that this guy was going to have the kind of longevity that most artists can only dream of. Robbie looks a bit disheveled in this performance though, as if he’s just wandered onto the stage direct from an all night bender. Maybe he did get a couple of hours sleep judging by the ‘ski slope’ bit of hair on the back of his head that you get if you slept in an awkward position that’s a bugger to get to behave. He’ll have eight months to sort it out though as we won’t be seeing him on the show again until his next single “Old Before I Die” is released the following April.

It’s a third week at No 1 for the Spice Girls. In 2014, a study by the University of Amsterdam and Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry found that “Wannabe” was the catchiest song of all time in that it is the most easily recognisable. In an experiment of 12,000 participants who were asked if they knew songs from a random sample of 1,000 of the most popular songs since the 1940s, the quickest to be recognised was “Wannabe” in 2.29 seconds. Second was “Mambo No 5” and third was “Eye Of The Tiger”. Hmm. Well, the Survivor hit has that very distinctive guitar riff intro with the chord changes designed to match the punches in the boxing scenes from Rocky III so that’s understandable. “Wannabe” starts with Mel B’s laugh and then is straight into the “Well, I’ll tell you what I want” hook so I get that but Lou Bega? He literally just says “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mambo No 5”! Of course people were quick to identify it!

So how did Peter Andre do as host? I have to grudgingly admit he was alright actually. Nothing too embarrassing, didn’t get his six pack out and didn’t stumble over his lines. His last job is to introduce the play out video which is “Love Sensation” by 911. Of all the 90s bands, this lot were one of the most unlikely. Lead singer Lee Brennan was your typical pretty boy but the other two? They looked like nightclub bouncers. Apparently, they met as dancers on late night, cult viewing music show The Hitman And Her and decided to form a band. Weren’t Take That’s Jason Orange and Howard Donald also dancers on the show? Anyway, despite the odds, having joined forces with Brennan, they somehow managed to score 13 UK hit singles including a No 1. Many of them were cover versions of the likes of Shalamar, Dr. Hook and the Bee Gees. This No 21 hit was all their own work though but is so lightweight as to hardly exist at all.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	New Edition	Hit Me Off	I did not
2	East 17	Someone To Love	Negative
3	Dodgy	Good Enough	No but my wife had their Free Peace Sweet album
4	Me Me Me	Hanging Around	No No No
5	Bone Thugs-n-Harmony	Tha’ Crossroads	Nope
6	Suede	Trash	No but I had their Coming Up album
7	3T / Michael Jackson	Why?	What? Of course not
8	Robbie Williams	Freedom	Nah
9	Spice Girls	Wannabe	No
10	911	Love Sensation	Never

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00fsvcz/top-of-the-pops-09081996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 02 AUG 1996

Posted on October 10, 2024 by 80stastic

We’re still in the Summer of 1996 with these TOTP repeats and we have another guest host in the ‘golden mic’ slot. In any other year, Jas Mann of Babylon Zoo would have got nowhere near this gig but this was the year of “Spaceman” and the stardust of that No 1 hit was still just about glittering over him enough to allow this appearance. It wouldn’t last much longer.

We start though with another guy who, by my reckoning, was also still very fortunate to be appearing on the show. Why was Sean Maguire still having hits two years on from his first one?! “Don’t Pull Your Love” was his seventh of eight in total ranging in size from No 27 to No 12. How could this be true? He couldn’t give away either of his albums which both sank without trace but somehow he managed to keep churning out a string of reasonably successful singles. How? Why? Yeah, he’d been in EastEnders so he was a familiar face and he didn’t look like the back end of a bus but I would have thought he’d have one, maybe two hits at most before the novelty wore off. He was quite the anomaly.

It can’t have been that the quality of the songs he was being given were irresistible to the record buying public can it? Surely not. Listening to this one, it sounds like something The Osmonds might have recorded back in the day. It wasn’t was it?

*checks internet*

No but it was a hit in the 70s by an act called Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds who took it to No 4 in the US selling over a million copies. I knew I was in the right ballpark.

I’ve never heard of them until this moment but apparently they also had an American No 1 called “Fallin’ In Love” and get this, it was covered in 1995 by German Eurodance outfit La Bouche. Wait, I didn’t review it in this blog did I?

*checks internet again*

No, it wasn’t a hit over here so it wouldn’t have been on TOTP. However, the song was in the news again in 2009 when it was sampled by the rapper Drake for his track “Best I Ever Had” which led to a lawsuit being brought against him by Playboy Enterprises who owned the rights to “Fallin’ In Love” as Drake hadn’t sought clearance for the sample. What has any of this to do with Sean Maguire? Not much but it’s surely more interesting than his pop career no?

Rivalling Jas Mann in the famous for 15 minutes stakes were the next act OMC. Yes, the difference between being a one hit wonder and a legendary electronic band who are still going 44 years after their first hit is just one letter apparently. However, whereas the name Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark didn’t mean anything and was chosen by Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys to ensure they weren’t mistaken for a punk band, OMC was an acronym for Otara Millionaires Club and was a tongue-in-cheek reference to Otara’s status as one of the poorest suburbs in Auckland, New Zealand. Their hit was “How Bizarre” which lived up to its name by being a strange concoction of mariachi guitars, tejano trumpets, almost spoken word verses (I’m not sure it qualifies as rapping) and harmonised backing vocals.

What was also atypical about the single was the amount of time it took to become a hit and its chart positions when it finally made it. It took five weeks to break into the Top 10 (including two consecutive weeks at No 19) and then spent six weeks there four of which were at No 8. It would eventually sell 400,000 copies in the UK despite never getting higher than No 5. Not surprisingly though, it topped the charts in Australia and New Zealand. Why was it such a sleeper hit? Maybe it didn’t attract enough airplay initially but when radio finally caught on to it, they realised it was perfect for summertime playlists. My wife loved this and indeed bought the CD single which might still be knocking about somewhere. Though the idea in today’s world of searching it out to put in a CD player when you could just say “Alexa play OMC” does indeed seem bizarre.

If 1996 was Jas Mann’s season in the sun, it was an annus mirabilis for Alanis Morissette. Her “Jagged Little Pill” album was No 1 for weeks and she had three hit singles, each of which charted higher than the one before. “Head Over Feet” was the biggest of those peaking at No 7. Given that so many people were buying the album and therefore already had access to those tracks, that was quite a feat. This particular single seemed almost laid back compared to some of its predecessors like “You Oughta Know” and “Ironic” which had themes of anger and dissatisfaction. By contrast, “Head Over Feet” contained lyrics that talked about falling in love with your best friend. That didn’t mean it was lacking a punch though – it was still in the heavyweight class.

Curiously, there were two videos for the song – the ‘head’ version does what it says on the tin with a camera permanently fixed on a close up of Alanis’s face as she sings whilst the ‘feet’ promo for the European market that we see here is in black and white and has her sat around a camp fire in what looks like a building site with her band, sat cross legged, all strumming guitars. I think I prefer the ‘head’ one as its more affecting. Could it also have been the inspiration for Radiohead’s “No Surprises” which saw Thom Yorke singing under duress in a see through helmet as it filled with water?

Despite all of Alanis’s success in 1996, she would finish the year with a flop single when “All I Really Want” failed to make the Top 40. It seemed six singles from the same album was going too far even for Morissette’s growing army of fans.

Noel Gallagher once said that there was a time in Oasis’s career when everything the band released sounded like “Get It On” by T-Rex. Well, in 1996, was everything starting to sound a bit like Alanis Morissette? OK, Alisha’s Attic were hardly a carbon copy but could their hit “I Am, I Feel” be described as a poppier version of the Canadian singer? Maybe it’s just because they followed Alanis on this particular show that they somehow fused together in my head or maybe it’s to do with that aforementioned anger that is present in their lyrics? I mean, these are fairly dark:

“Like I wanna bite his head off, yeah, that’d be fun, cause I sure got an appetite“

Writer(s): Karen Poole, Michelle Poole, Terence Martin

If I’m being truthful though, Alisha’s Attic weren’t following where Alanis Morissette had walked but in the footsteps of a long line of female pop duos stretching back to the 80s with Mel & Kim and Pepsie and Shirley and on into the 90s with Shakespears Sister, Shampoo and perhaps the couple most like them Scarlet. That lineage would continue into the new millennium with t.A.t.u. and…erm…Daphne and Celeste? Or perhaps they modelled themselves after a trio. I’m thinking Wilson Phillips who consisted of Carnie and Wendy Wilson who were the daughters of The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson and Chynna Phillips who was the offspring of John and Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & The Papas. So what you may ask? Well, sisters Shelly and Karen Poole were themselves from a pop background with their Dad being Brian Poole of *Brian Poole and the Tremeloes fame.

*Their bass player was Len ‘Chip’ Hawkes father of Chesney.

Anyway, I quite liked Alisha’s Attic and their quirky pop tunes of which eight were Top 40 hits. None got higher than No 12 (which was actually the peak position for three of their singles) and “I Am, I Feel” itself would spend three weeks at No 15 plus two at No 18 and for all the No 1 artist’s posturing about ‘girl power’, surely was a better feminist anthem than “Wannabe”.

And talking of feminist anthems, here’s Neneh Cherry with “Woman”. I say ‘feminist anthems’ but I’m not sure that’s the correct terminology anymore. It conjures up images of Viz character Millie Tant and the world is certainly more nuanced than that. Look, just to be clear, I believe in equality of the sexes and hate all the ‘lads, lads, lads’ culture (groups of men can be such pricks) so if I misuse a phrase then please accept my apologies in advance.

Right, with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get back to Neneh Cherry. She was on The Graham Norton Show last week promoting her memoir A Thousand Threads which was published just a few days ago. It seems to be quite comprehensive and not just a retread of her discography – apparently she doesn’t get to that iconic TOTP appearance when she was seven months pregnant until three quarters of the way through the book. Sounds like an interesting read to be fair. In her interview with Graham we found out that the first record she ever bought was by Donny Osmond and that she’s now a grandmother – quite possibly the coolest grandmother ever but still a grandmother. Yeah, you feel old now don’t you. Me too.

From Neneh Cherry to the Manic Street Preachers via Bernard Butler. In the last post, I talked about how Suede recovered from the departure of their guitarist and song writer to return with their most commercial album ever. Butler, of course, is up there on stage with Neneh for this performance. And the Manics? Well, like Suede, they also lost a founding member from their line up around this time albeit in totally different circumstances with the disappearance of Richey Edwards. As with Suede, they bounced back with their biggest selling album ever in “Everything Must Go” the title track of which was released as the second single from it. I always preferred this to “A Design For Life” though I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it was that huge, orchestral swathe in the mix that they managed to produce that many in the music press compared to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. Apparently the song was written as an acknowledgment that since Edwards was no longer giving his input to the band, inevitably their identity and music had to change with the lyric “and I just hope that you can forgive us” a direct plea to the fans.

Despite the hopping around on one leg antics of James Dean Bradfield in this performance, I’m more drawn to the static drummer Sean Moore. It might be because he is stood up throughout as opposed to sat at a drum kit or it could very well be that his look here reminds me of the character of Garland Greene from 1997 film Con Air.

With this single, Eternal set a new record as the first all female group to score ten consecutive Top 20 hits in the UK. What a stinker of a song to do it with though. “Someday” was recorded for the Disney film The Hunchback Of Notre Dame though it only features as an instrumental with the full song having been discarded at the storyboarding stage. You can understand why. It’s a dreary, jaded, love-song- by-numbers snoozefest. In fact, I’d have been more entertained if Eternal had stood there on stage and spent three minutes making snoring noises. Apparently, “I Swear” hitmakers All-4-One recorded “Someday” as well and it’s their take that’s on the US version of the soundtrack. So why were Eternal asked to record it for the European soundtrack? I don’t get it. In an unusual disruption to their timeline, the group’s next single release was from their “Power Of A Woman” album but “Someday” would turn up on their 1997 studio album “Before The Rain” making a right mess of the chronology of their discography. Tsk.

The final three songs on the show have all been on before so I might whip through these at speed. We start with “Macarena” by Los Del Rio and can I get away with just signposting you to other versions of the song rather than thinking of something witty to say about it? I can? Marvellous!

OK, here’s the original 1993 version that sounds very different to the hit we all know and loathe that was The Bayside Boys remix:

Then there’s the Los Del Mar take on it which was out at the same time. Despite it being sung without any English lyrics, this lot were actually from Canada and it was their cover that was a big hit over there. That absence of English lyrics is pretty much the only difference to the Bayside Boys remix and yet amazingly, in Australia, they were both in the chart at the same time with Los Del Rio at No 1 and Los Del Mar at No 2. Just how do you explain that? Fortunately for the UK, the Los Del Mar version peaked at a lowly No 43.

There are loads of other versions including a country version by The GrooveGrass Boyz, a rap version by US rapper Tyga, an Italian version by Los Locos and even a take on it by Los Del Chipmunks (!). Finally, for those that really can’t stand the “Macarena”, there’s this…

Without wishing to discredit the aforementioned achievement of Eternal, I fear it was totally undermined, nay blown out of the water, by the chart feats of the Spice Girls. They are in the TOTP studio for the first time this week I think after two appearances from Japan and though the stage and space in which they have to work are much reduced, they give an energetic performance with Mel C even managing to get in her trademark backflip. “Wannabe” is into its second of seven weeks at No 1 and would be the second best selling single in 1996 in the UK after “Killing Me Softly” by the Fugees. That was literally just the start though. Of the eleven singles released during their career, nine would top the chart. They would sell 100 million records in total being both the best selling British act of the 90s and the best selling girl group of all time. Take that Eternal.

The play out video is “Freedom” by Robbie Williams. Now, if we’re talking chart records as we were Eternal and the Spice Girls, then we can’t ignore this man (whether you really want to or not). He has notched up seven No 1 singles and sold 77 million records worldwide. By 2008, he’d sold more albums in the UK than any other British solo artist in history. And yet somehow, it all started with this fairly straight cover of a George Michael song. Given that Robbie wouldn’t release anything else until “Old Before I Die” nine months later, I think “Freedom” could almost be a forgotten Williams single, like a false start. Indeed, it did not feature on either his 1999 compilation “The Ego Has Landed” that was initially released for the US and Australia markets nor his first official “Greatest Hits” album in 2004. However it was included on No the 2010 collection “In And Out Of Consciousness”.

Apparently, Williams was in a bad way when he filmed the video for “Freedom” struggling with an alcohol addiction and he certainly looks wild eyed in the promo – are his pupils dilated in some shots? He claims to have mimed to the original George Michael track as he hadn’t recorded his version before the video was filmed. Is that likely? Is that how it worked? Anyway, we’ll be seeing lots more of Mr Williams on TOTP in future repeats. As for Jas Mann, I’m not sure we will be seeing him again as he never presented the show after this (he was pretty shit to be fair) and he would only have one more UK hit when “The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes” made No 32. The odds on either him or Robbie becoming pop music superstars were probably evenly matched and low back then. Funny that.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Sean Maguire	Don’t Pull Your Love	Never
2	OMC	How Bizarre	No but my wife did
3	Alanis Morissette	Head Over Feet	No but I had the album
4	Alisha’s Attic	I Am, I Feel	Nope
5	Neneh Cherry	Woman	No but my wife had the album
6	Manic Street Preachers	Everything Must Go	See 3 above
7	Eternal	Someday	Negative
8	Los Del Rio	Macarena	As if
9	Spice Girls	Wannabe	No
10	Robbie Williams	Freedom	Nah

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/m0023k99/top-of-the-pops-02081996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 26 JUL 1996

Posted on October 8, 2024 by 80stastic

It’s the Summer of 1996 and the Olympic Games are being held in Atlanta, Georgia. For Team GB though, it was a games to forget as we endured our worst performance since 1952 with just one gold and only 15 in total. Lack of sufficient funding was identified as a major issue – cyclist Chris Boardman had to resort to practicing in his bathroom with the shower turned on in an attempt to create the humidity conditions of Atlanta for acclimatisation training. In a rare moment of celebration, the day after this TOTP aired, that single gold medal was won by rowers Matthew Pinsent and Steve Redgrave in the Men’s Coxless Pair. Meanwhile, in this week’s show, there seemed to be no shortage of cocks but sadly, like Team GB, hardly any gold standard performers. Where were Shed Seven and Gene when you needed them?*

*See what I did there? “Going For Gold”? “Olympian”? No? Oh well, it’s the taking part that’s important not winning so they say.

Bit of admin before we get going. Tonight’s host is Lisa I’Anson and we start with another to camera piece featuring the latest winner of the meet and greet competition who is in Hollywood with New Edition. The first act in the studio though is Pato Banton & The Reggae Revolution. What the guy who had a No 1 with his version of “Baby Come Back” in 1994? That guy was still having hits two years later using the same formula of reggae-fying old pop hits?! That guy?! The very same but his take on the 1967 hit “Groovin’” would be his last UK chart entry. He never got close to repeating his chart topping feat with this one peaking at No 14. He did like a collab as the kids say though – two with Sting (who seems to have a weakness for this type of artist seeing as he’s also teamed up with Shaggy), one with Ranking Roger and now this one with The Reggae Revolution. Who were they? I can’t find out much about them though I did note one of their members is called David Forskins. Stop sniggering at the back – he’s a drummer. Skins? Drum skins? Geddit? What? It was me that mentioned members? Oh, you young rascals!

Next up is Mark Morrison and for once he’s not singing “Return Of The Mack”. No, he’s finally got round to releasing a follow up single or should I say rereleasing as “Crazy” had been out before, making No 19 in 1995. Morrison doesn’t tamper with the formula much with it basically being “Return Of The Mack II”. I did notice though that the lyrics have Morrison claiming “I went to Number One (like a bomb)” presumably referring to his recent chart topper so my question is, were those the lyrics when “Crazy” was originally released before ROTM went to No 1 or did Morrison rewrite them after the event? If it’s the former, he was either very lucky or very arrogant. Either way, he then bangs on about girls “trippin’” on him since he got famous which apparently means acting crazy and is a word he seems very keen on as it was also the title of his next single. The two after that were called “Horny” and “Moan & Groan” – he was a classy fella our Mark.

He’s got a rapper in to help with the flow on this one and his name is Daddy Wattsie. When I was at polytechnic back in the 80s, I knew someone with the surname Watts who insisted on people calling him ‘Wattsie’. He was a bit of a knob and I’m not sure about Daddy Wattsie either. Had I not had the subtitles on iPlayer, I wouldn’t have had a clue what he was going on about (which is some nonsense about hip-hop ragamuffin DJs or something). Meanwhile, Morrison is singing about “doggin’” (that got past the censor) and then blatantly pinches Bobby Brown’s shtick by harping on about his prerogative. It’s all rather unpleasant and Morrison tops it off when he whips out his trademark handcuffs. Well, he had to keep up his ‘king of the cuffs’ moniker that Lisa I’Anson gave him in her intro I suppose. It’s hardly the same as being known as an Olympic champion though is it?

This next track should come with a health warning – it used to come close to giving me panic attacks. There was something about “Higher State Of Consciousness” by Josh Wink that would scratch at my nerve ends. It made me feel claustrophobic and like I just needed to escape from its sonic reach every time I heard it. Was it something to do with its frequency, its bpm, all its little bleeps, breaks and bass (to quote the title of an old dance compilation series)? Or was it that it sounded to me like a car alarm going off? Whatever it was about it that disturbed me so, what was even worse was that I foolishly let my record shop colleagues know about its effect upon me and they would mercilessly play it when I was on the shop floor.

Not content with giving me the jitters for five weeks in Autumn 1995 (the length it spent inside the Top 40), Josh Wink – a DJ, producer and remixer from Philadelphia (real name Joshua Winkelman) – decided to double down on my uneasiness by rereleasing it less than a year later under the shortened name of Wink. I mean, why? It had already been massive in the clubs of Europe and a No 8 hit in the UK on first release so why put it out again? Ah, well – it was all about the remixes wasn’t it? “Higher State Of Consciousness 96 Remixes” included a version by Dex and Jonesey (whoever they were) which deemed it worthy of another push at the charts. It succeeded as well peaking one place higher than its 1995 predecessor. Pass the paracetamol!

The first of two songs on this show that I will always associate with each other. Not for any musical reasons but purely because they formed an end panel display in the Our Price store where I was working at the time. In fairness, they were also both comeback singles of a sort. The first one is from Suede who released their first new material for nearly two years with “Trash” , the lead single from their third studio album “Coming Up”. It was also the first new material written without Bernard Butler who had left the band after the “Dog Man Star” album so there was a lot riding on this song. Would the absence of Butler prove to be insurmountable for the band? Or would his replacement Richard Oakes prove to be a just as gifted songwriter? History shows us that it was the latter scenario that played out. “Coming Up” would become Suede’s biggest selling album going platinum in the process. It generated five Top 10 singles with “Trash” itself the biggest of those and Suede’s joint highest charting hit ever when it peaked at No 3. You could hear why. It was a great tune displaying a much bigger pop sensibility than anything on “Dog Man Star”. Apparently, it was a deliberate choice by Brett Anderson to go down that route after the downturn in sales experienced by their 1994 album. Although, defiantly more ebullient, “Trash” also retained the band’s edge. This was angular pop with Brett singing about being “litter on the breeze”. It worked and it worked well.

Obviously the band toured the album and I caught them in Blackburn with my mate Steve in February of 1997. They were supported by Mansun who would release their excellent debut album “Attack Of The Grey Lantern” two days later but that’s all for a future post. For now, Suede were back and how. They’d survived the fallout from Bernard Butler’s departure and added to their ranks in the aforementioned Richard Oakes and keyboard player Neil Codling (who Lisa I’Anson rather fawned over in her intro). Britpop may have seemed to have washed them away but they had surfaced from the depths and were riding their own wave and not the zeitgeist.

Although mostly overshadowed by her 60s career and subsequent rise from the ashes in the 80s, Tina Turner was remarkably consistent in the 90s. I’m not talking gold medal standard here (most of it wouldn’t even make the medal podium) but she was certainly a qualifier for the final. She achieved 18 Top 40 hits in the UK during the decade albeit that most of them were distinctly medium sized with only four making the Top 10. The fifteenth of those hits was her cover of the soft rock classic “Missing You”. The third single to be lifted from her “Wildest Dreams” album, this was a stinker from start to finish. The 1984 John Waite original had always been a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine but Tina’s rendition is simply the worst. It just doesn’t suit her growly vocal and overblown delivery. Whoever made the decision for Tina to record should have been disqualified. I was surprised to learn that Trevor Horn produced it because the backing sounds all tinny and hollow. There’s even a sound in there that is reminiscent of that ‘boing’ effect you get from a mouth harp. Just horrible. Let’s move on quickly…

I’m still not convinced by this meet and greet competition. I mean, the locations are great – so far we’ve had the likes of Madrid and now Hollywood – but the pop stars involved don’t strike me as stellar. After Shampoo the other week, this time we’ve got New Edition. That’s New Edition of “Candy Girl” fame from 1983. That’s 1983! Since then, despite continued success in the US, they’d scored just one more hit single in the UK with “Mr. Telephone Man” from 1985. Sure, after the group split in 1988, all the members went on to solo success (or trio success in the case of Bell Biv DeVoe) especially Bobby Brown but when they reformed in 1996, would they have been seen as a huge name? I guess what I’m saying is would the competition winner have been blown away by meeting them? I’m not so sure. Had TOTP been an American TV show, maybe the chance to hangout with New Edition would have been a huge deal – after all the 1996 version of the group scored a huge hit in comeback album “Home Again” which sold two million copies in the US and went to No 1. It wasn’t the same level of success over here though. The album stalled at No 22 whilst it’s lead single “Hit Me Off” peaked at No 20 (it was an R&B chart topper and No 3 hit on the Billboard chart over the pond). I suppose we just weren’t as invested in the group here – we didn’t have that level of connection with them.

Anyway, the performance here is from the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios, Hollywood which explains why there is a huge crash of water behind them every now and again as the log flume ride splashes down. By the way, if you’re thinking that there seem to be more members of New Edition than you remember, don’t worry. You’re not losing it. There were five in the original line up but there are six here as both Bobby Brown and the guy who replaced him – Johnny Gill – are both featured. As for their song, it sounds like every other R&B song from this era with them singing about spending “an hour in the shower when it’s nice and wet”. If only they had misjudged the staging of this performance even slightly then maybe that log flume ride would have made their desire to be soaking come true.

Who remembers Joyrider? Not me for one. As Lisa I’Anson tells us in her intro, they were from Portadown, Northern Ireland and this was their big moment. One solitary week in the UK Top 40 and a TOTP appearance. They can’t gave thought this would be it for them surely but it pretty much was. Their single fell out of the charts despite this exposure and the follow up peaked at No 54. They did release an album but initial pressings didn’t include their only hit – a rock cover of Jane Wiedlin’s “Rush Hour” – which seems like a massive oversight though I believe it was reissued with it as included at a later date.

Listening back to this frenetic, high speed run through of one of the finest pop records of the 80s, the first question that comes to mind is ‘Why?’. Maybe their label desperately needed them to have a hit and we all know which position to assume in that scenario and, after all, such a tactic had worked for Gun a couple of years earlier when they gave Cameo’s “Word Up” the rock guitar treatment. Then there’s California rockers Redd Kross who did a brilliant job on “Yesterday Once More” for a Carpenters tribute album offering more proof that songs from one music genre could work in that of another given the right choice and treatments but something about Joyrider’s example of this just didn’t click for me. I think it’s that the pop brilliance of the original just can’t be beaten so any attempt at doing something different with it was doomed to failure if indeed you can call a No 22 peaking single a failure. What I can say with some certainty is that we won’t be seeing Joyrider on TOTP ever again.

And so to that other single that was on the end panel in Our Price alongside Suede that week. Just as Gary Barlow was toppled by the Spice Girls, here came another chart adversary but this one was much closer to home and with a much deadlier rivalry. Since leaving Take That in 1995, – labelling Barlow a “clueless wanker” as his parting shot across the bows as he went – the only time we’d seen anything of Robbie Williams was in the tabloids being out of it on another bender. His much hinted at solo career seemed to be taking an age to appear*

*I assume there were some record company legalities to be sorted before he could officially extricate himself from Take That’s label RCA and therefore release anything? His choice of song to cover for his debut single certainly suggested so and indeed, he signed to Chrysalis Records ultimately.

Finally, there was something with his name on it that you could buy in the shops when “Freedom” came out. His version of George Michael’s “Freedom 90” though seemed fairly redundant to me. It was a pure copy of the original with only Robbie’s trademark gurning vocals any sort of differential. What I found really revealing though was that the extra tracks on the CD singles were just remixes of “Freedom” and an interview with Williams in two parts. I recall saying to an Our Price colleague how pathetic this seemed and asking where his songs were. I was convinced at this point that he was doomed to fail as a solo artist. Within a year, Williams would meet Guy Chambers (ex of the wonderful Lemon Trees) who would answer my question about where his songs were and after a couple of false starts, Robbie would become a superstar. I watched a documentary about him on Netflix recently and although I had anticipated it portraying him as all self indulgent and woe is me, he was actually brutally honest about what a f**k up he was/is. In July ‘96 though, I for one thought I had him all figured out and had proclaimed sentence on him. I was wrong. Very wrong.

The Spice Girls have gone to No 1 with “Wannabe” and in so doing, become the first all female group to top the UK charts since The Bangles in 1989 with “Eternal Flame”. Perhaps more significantly, they were the first UK all female group to do so ever. This really did feel like a changing of the guard moment with the deposed former No 1 artist having been a member of the recently defunct biggest boy band in the UK. The Spice Girls were here to wash all them and all the pretty boys that followed in their wake away – it was time for ‘girl power’.

Like last week, the group are still in Japan but this time we get to see them at night in an oriental garden. Interestingly, they subvert the usual model of performance by running across bridges whilst miming before eventually lining up together to knock out some loosely choreographed dance moves. Obviously, we also get Sporty Spice doing her back flips. In another life she was surely an Olympic gymnast*.

*She has completed the London Triathlon twice.

The play out video is “Mysterious Girl” by Peter Andre which is still in and around the top end of the charts. Thankfully we only get a few seconds of the repugnant Andre and his cartoonish six pack. Apparently, his 16 years old son Junior wants to follow in his Dad’s footsteps and become a pop star – he is already signed to Columbia Records. As if there aren’t enough problems in the world along comes a dynasty of Andres making music. There really should be a law against it.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Pato Banton & The Reggae Revolution	Groovin’	Nah
2	Mark Morrison	Crazy	No
3	Wink	Higher State Of Consciousness 96 Remixes	Hell no!
4	Suede	Trash	No but I had their Coming Up album
5	Tina Turner	Missing You	Never
6	New Edition	Hit Me Off	Nope
7	Joyrider	Rush Hour	I did not
8	Robbie Williams	Freedom	Negative
9	Spice Girls	Wannabe	Not likely
10	Peter Andre	Mysterious Girl	Are you crazy?!

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/p00fsvcm/top-of-the-pops-26071996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 19 JUL 1996

Posted on October 3, 2024 by 80stastic

We’ve jumped from the end of June straight into the middle of July ‘96 with these BBC4 repeats having missed two whole shows in the process. Why? Well, general consensus amongst the TOTP community seems to be that there were some issues with the meet and greet competition winners in terms of criminal proceedings being brought against them in later life. Yet another depressing indictment of our society.

With that sombre start to the post, I’m looking for some positive energy now so who’s hosting this week? Well, he’s certainly bringing the energy but whether I’ll have a positive reaction to him is in doubt for our host tonight is Keith Allen or more specifically his alter ego ‘Keithski’. I find Allen the person quite intriguing and his autobiography was a good read but ‘Keithski’ was a bellend. Totally unfunny and intensely annoying. Before we even get to him though, we have the direct to camera message at the top of the show and this one is a little piece of pop music history. Was this our first glimpse of the Spice Girls on our TVs? Probably not as they must have been doing the media rounds to promote “Wanabe” to have got it to debut at No 3 in the charts but it must be their first TOTP appearance and given the show would have been the most obvious choice for pop fans to get their weekly fix of chart music then it might well have been a first for many viewing at home.

Anyway, they’ll be along in due course but we start with …who? Umboza? Yes, Umboza. Surely you remember their first, Lionel Richie sampling hit “Cry India”? Erm, no I don’t actually and I must have reviewed it for this blog. The only thing I recall writing is that their name reminded me of the tropical fruit drink Um Bongo which had that memorable ad campaign featuring the jingle “Um Bongo Um Bongo they drink it in the Congo”. However it seemed that one hit wasn’t enough for these fame guzzlers and so they were back with “Sunshine” using the same formula as before but with a different sample. Instead of “All Night Long (All Night)” we had “Bamboléo” by the Gipsy Kings – it seemed that Lionel Richie wasn’t the one they were looking for this time (I’ll get me coat later). Given the ubiquity of that song (it always seems to soundtrack any piece of film that has a Latin theme to it), I was amazed to discover that it’s never been a hit in the UK in its own right. In fact, the Gipsy Kings have never had a single make the Top 40 which makes you wonder how they became so popular over here. Was it something to do with the late 80s lambada craze?

As for Umboza, this sounded to me like music for bozos. Were committed clubbers seriously out dancing to this on a weekend? Maybe it was popular at some of the more cheesy nightclub establishments? Certainly the guy fronting this nonsense has gone down the cheddar route with his Saturday Night Fever suit and wide winged collars. The whole thing seems very unnecessary on reflection and should be consigned to the pop music waste bin of bad ideas.

As an antidote to the crap that opened the show, here’s some rock music from Terrorvision who were on to their third hit of the year with “Bad Actress”. I say antidote but it was more like a placebo (no, not the band!) as I feel like this particular song gave off the sense that it was better than it actually was. Oh sure, compared to Umboza, it was the best song ever recorded but, in reality, it wasn’t even Terrorvision’s best song. After some great earlier hits like “Oblivion” and “Perseverance”, “Bad Actress” was quite pedestrian or at least was jogging along rather than running at full pelt. Tony Wright has to annunciate the word ‘actress’ as ‘act-tress’ rather than ‘actriss’ so as to enable some rhyming lyrics and the whole thing feels forced as if the band was told to hold up in the studio and not come out until they’d written and recorded a single from scratch. Terrorvision would finish the year with a fourth and final Top 20 hit before disappearing for two years and then returning with the “Shaving Peaches” album and that No 2 hit single.

Oh not this again. Why was the “Theme From Mission Impossible” by Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jnr going back up the charts? Well, it’s an easy and obvious answer – the film had been released in the UK and was doing big business. This caused the ripple effect of blowing out the burning fuse about to detonate the chart life of its iconic theme tune and sending it from a low of No 27 to a second peak of No 16 before finally leaving the Top 40 by stealth four weeks later. I don’t know what else to say about this one other than “What’s done is done when I say it’s done”* and my review of this hit is done.

*It’s a line of dialogue from the film if that doesn’t mean anything to you

Here’s another song that’s been similarly knocking around the charts for a few weeks. By my reckoning, this was the sixth week on the chart for “Don’t Stop Movin’” by Livin’ Joy with all of them spent inside the Top 10. It was a most orderly descent of the chart with one place dropped per week from its debut at No 5 for the first five weeks until a rise of one place back up to No 8 afforded this further TOTP appearance. In total, it would spend three months in the Top 40 and nearly re-entered it in November when it missed achieving that feat by just one place. There was one last week at No 62 before it ignored the instruction of its title and did, indeed, finally stop moving…sorry…movin’.

Next, a charity record for a very worthy cause – The Nordoff -Robbins Music Therapy Centre – whose aim is to help children with psychological, physical or developmental disabilities using the tool of music. Back in 1996, the Rock Therapy project was set up to raise funds for the charity via the release of the single “Reaching Out”. Sadly for the charity, and in a cruelly ironic twist, the song failed to raise much money when it peaked at No 126. Yes, No 126. Not a great example of the power of music and its ability to help change lives. This lowly chart peak was despite the presence of such huge names as Queen’s Brian May, ex-Free singer Paul Rodgers, “Stop” hitmaker Sam Brown, the “Wide Eyed And Legless” Andy Fairweather Low and…erm…the drummer from Wet Wet Wet. The sad truth was though that “Reaching Out” was a stinker of a record. Words can’t quite express how awful it was but I’ll try. How about lumbering, insipid, lifeless, soulless or passionless? No? A sleeping pill in the form of a song? Not quite there? Musical melatonin? Yes, that’s the one. Nailed it which incidentally is what should have happened to “Reaching Out” – a nail put through every copy.

And so it begins. The time of the Spice Girls is here. Sporty! Scary! Ginger! Baby! Posh! Girl Power! An undeniable global phenomenon and it started with debut single “Wannabe” and what a curious thing it was. Musically all over the place but with enough cohesion and charisma to make it a worldwide chart topper. Look, I can’t recount the whole Spice Girls story in one post and I’m guessing you wouldn’t want nor need me to but just a few words about their origins seeing as we’re starting at the beginning. Recruited Monkees style by Bob and Chris Herbert of Heart Management via an advert in the trade paper The Stage, their intention was to create a girl group to rival the boy bands that were dominating the charts of the early 90s. After whittling down 400 hopefuls to just five – Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Victoria Adams, Geri Halliwell and, with their very own Pete Best figure, one Michelle Stephenson. The group were originally titled Touch of which Stephenson was seen initially as an important ingredient (she’d received the highest scores at the first audition). However, she was removed from the project by Heart Management amid accusations of laziness and lack of commitment. Stephenson naturally refuted such claims stating that she left of her own accord to care for her mother who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Victoria Adams (later Beckham) wrote in her autobiography that Stephenson “just couldn’t be arsed” to work as hard as the rest of the group. Whatever the truth, she was ultimately replaced by Emma Bunton and the rest is history. Michelle Stephenson would forge herself a career as a television presenter for a while whilst also finding work as a backing singer for the likes of Ricky Martin and Julio Iglesias.

As for this satellite performance from Japan, it’s notable that Posh Spice is the only person in the group not to have any solo lines in the song. Stephenson has her own story behind that as well claiming “Wannabe” was originally written with Stephenson in mind and that after she left, Adams refused to take on her parts. Other accounts suggest that it was due to Adams experiencing scheduling conflicts during the writing of the track (which happened after Stephenson’s departure). Yeah, right. Just one more thing, wasn’t Ginger Spice meant to be called Sexy Spice originally? Stephenson has her own take on that as well claiming she was going to be given that nickname. Ginger does make a lot more sense if we’re talking spices but then I’ve also never seen any spices called Sporty, Scary, Baby and Posh on the racks of my local supermarket either.

As with the Spice Girls, there’s a lot to unpack about the story behind the next song and given the song in question, I’m not sure I can be bothered to go through it all. Damn the completist in me! Right, let’s go through this quicker than a Cole Palmer hat trick. Two Andalusian Spanish blokes who’d had a Latin lounge act called Los Del Rio since 1962 went to a private party whilst touring Venezuela thirty years later and witnessed a dance by a local flamenco teacher. One of the fellas is inspired to write some lyrics in tribute to the dancer’s moves and calls it “Macarena” after his daughter. Initially released in 1993 to mediocre success, the track turned into a true worldwide sensation three years later thanks to a remix by The Bayside Boys who added a dance beat and English language lyrics. Its popularity in nightclubs led to a dance being associated with the song which would become a global craze. Fourteen weeks at the top of the US Billboard Hot 100 followed making it the best selling single of 1996 in America. With Europe falling in line with the track’s dance moves, it clocked up No 1s all over the continent. Dear old Blighty initially resisted the charms of these two codgers and their insanely infectious hit when it spent two weeks at Nos 64 and 77 in June but come July, it leapt straight in at No 11 making it one of the then biggest leaps up the chart in history. It would go on to sell eleven million copies worldwide and is a staple of party playlists to this day. I myself have witnessed teachers and children alike performing its moves at end of year discos when my son was in primary school. And that’s all I’m saying (for now) about “Macarena”. Ay!

Neneh Cherry burst onto the music scene in the late 80s with the box fresh, street wise sound of “Buffalo Stance” and her debut, platinum selling album “Raw Like Sushi”. She was one of the big stories of 1989 though she’d actually been around the industry for years before that performing in the likes of The Slits and post-punk outfit Rip Rig + Panic. Indeed, her stepfather was the American jazz musician Don Cherry. That first blast of success though proved hard to sustain with 1992’s sophomore album “Homebrew” a significant commercial downturn. In the intervening four years though, Cherry had actually come up with two of her biggest hits albeit that neither was completely under her own steam. “7 Seconds” with Senegalese artist Youssou N’Dour was a perhaps unexpectedly huge hit almost everywhere whilst her appearance alongside Cher, Christie Hynde and Eric Clapton on 1995 Comic Relief single “Love Can Build A Bridge” would provide her only career No 1 record.

In 1996 though, she would come up with a last commercial hurrah as a purely solo artist with the album “Man” and hit single “Woman”. Written as a response to James Brown’s 1966 hit “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World”, it talked of the hardships faced by women in life and very much espoused and sought to empower the female voice. Culturally, in the same week that the Spice Girls were making their debut on the show, the difference in style between “Woman” and ‘Girl Power’ was marked. Still, two techniques to amplify your point however dissimilar they were from each other is surely better than one. Matching its themes was the sound of “Woman” – brooding yet soulful, did it have a hint of Portishead about it? The single would give Neneh one last Top 10 hit whilst the album would achieve silver status for sales of 60,000 copies. She is still releasing music to this day with her last album, 2022’s “Versions” being reworking of songs from her back catalogue. Her two daughters Tyson and Mabel are both singers, with the latter having had both her albums go Top 3.

P.S. Nice to see Bernard Butler up there on stage with Neneh, He has a credit on the song for a ‘Special Guitar Section’ plus a shout out from Keithski.

Ah yes, Keithski. How to evaluate Allen’s alter ego in this TOTP? Irritating? Vexatious? Infuriating? Probably all of the above. He seemed determined to get one over the TOTP producers by slipping in some innuendo into his segues but some of it was so cryptic (“Banging out the round ones”, “Check the pellets in my pistol”, “Bump and grind to the garden tribe”) he just sounded like he was talking crap at high speed. Allen finally drops the act to announce the winner of the latest meet and greet competition before fake yawning as he introduces this week’s new No 1…

Hard as it is to remember, there was a time before the reemergence of Robbie Williams when all signs pointed to another ex-member of Take That being the one with the stellar solo career. Everybody expected Gary Barlow as the chief songwriter of the group to be the one to carry on seamlessly with chart hit after chart hit and sure enough, here he was first out of the traps with his debut solo single “Forever Love” straight in at No 1. The natural order of things was happening just as expected. To nobody’s surprise, his first post Take That hit was a big, slushy ballad with the piano to the forefront demonstrating our Gary’s musicianship as he sought to do a George Michael and transcend from boy band star to mature recording artist. It would sell over 100,000 copies in its first week of release before eventually going gold. There’s a bit in this performance when the screaming audience are at their loudest where Barlow almost smirks to himself. Maybe it was from embarrassment or maybe it was his inner voice saying “You’ve cracked it Gary lad. This solo star stuff is a piece of piss. All your dreams are coming true”. And it looked like they were. Uptempo follow up single “Love Won’t Wait” also topped the chart whilst his debut solo album “Open Road” did the same achieving platinum status sales. Meanwhile, as we shall see in next week’s show, Robbie decided to launch himself with a copycat, pointless version of George Michael’s “Freedom”. Nah, Gary was clearly the true talent. Fast forward two years and the roles were well and truly reversed. Barlow couldn’t buy a hit whilst Williams was unavoidably everywhere, racking up the hits as fast as Keithski could speak. Pop had raised see its fickle finger once more…

After a weak pun from Keithski where he refers to Gary Barlow as Ken Barlow, we’re into the play out song which is “Krupa” by Apollo Four Forty. As you might have guessed, I didn’t take much notice of this electronic dance group from Liverpool who’d made their name as remixers initially before raiding the charts in their own right. After three small Top 40 hits, “Krupa” became their biggest ever (at the time) when it peaked at No 23. Essentially an instrumental track, it was inspired by the jazz drummer Gene Krupa. So here’s the question that needs answering – did I know who Gene Krupa was back then? You know, I think I did. I have a vague recollection of having watched a documentary about the most influential drummers in music history and Krupa was featured. I could be bullshitting myself of course as we all know that the memory shifts and re-edits things to make false recollections but I’m sticking by my stick man story. Apollo Four Forty would go onto rack up a further six UK Top 40 hits including their biggest “Lost In Space” from the soundtrack to the 1998 film of the same name which was a remake of the 60s TV series.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Umboza	Sunshine	As if
2	Terrorvison	Bad Actress	No
3	Theme From Mission Impossible	Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jnr	Nope
4	Don’t Stop Movin’	Livin’ Joy	Nah
5	Rock Therapy	Reaching Out	Never
6	Spice Girls	Wannabe	I did not
7	Los Del Rio	Macarena	Of course not
8	Neneh Cherry	Woman	No but my wife and the album
9	Gary Barlow	Forever Love	Negative
10	Apollo Four Forty	Krupa	Not my bag

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/m00239nb/top-of-the-pops-19071996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 28 JUN 1996

Posted on September 30, 2024 by 80stastic

It’s another of those episodes where the climax of the show isn’t the No 1 but an exclusive appearance by a featured artist doing a two strong song performance. After Paul Weller the other week, it’s the turn of the Sex Pistols this time around who have reformed for the Filthy Lucre tour. As for the rest of the line up, there’s only six other chart hits on the show of which we’ve seen three previously. I have to say I’m not liking this new format that’s been adopted since the move to Friday nights. Thankfully, this is the last of these I understand. Maybe audience reaction to them wasn’t great? By the way, our host tonight is Gina G who is as famous as she’ll ever be at this point after her Eurovision entry “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit” topped the UK charts just a few weeks back.

We start though not with Gina but with David Howe from Chingford in Essex. Don’t ask “Who he?” – he literally tells you in his direct to camera message that he’s the first winner of the TOTP meet and greet competition and his prize was a trip to Madrid to hang out with Shampoo. I pondered in my last post what David would have thought of that and he looks rather underwhelmed despite the gloriously sunny backdrop behind him. The Shampoo girls Jacqui and Carrie look miserable with the whole situation. Maybe David was star struck whilst Shampoo were cultivating their abrasive ‘riot grrrl’ image?

It’s one of those ‘new’ songs to kick off the show from Everything But The Girl and “Wrong”. Despite being their most commercially successful period with three consecutive Top 10 hits as opposed to just three Top 40 singles in their entire career previously, I was having serious trouble getting on board with this new direction that they’d taken. I could appreciate that Todd Terry remix which had single handedly rejuvenated their career but I was missing their old stuff like the deserts miss the rain as the song went*.

*It was also the title of a 2002 Best Of album that tellingly didn’t include “Wrong”.

The gorgeous “Baby, The Stars Shine Bright” album was a particular favourite but all this electronica dance stuff was becoming a big turn off for me. Would it be wrong of me to suggest that this latest hit was basically just a retread of “Missing”? They’d even got Todd Terry back in to remix it! Tracey’s voice was as affecting as ever but the track didn’t stand up to repeated plays for me. “Wrong” would effectively draw a line under this era of the band being their last ever single to visit the Top 10 and ushering in a return to more conservative chart positions before Tracey and Ben took a quarter of a century off from Everything But The Girl only returning in 2023 with the “Fuse” album which went Top 3.

By 1996, Britpop had totally embedded itself in UK culture and its musical landscape. The movement’s swagger was hard to avoid but there were signs that a different type of genre was emerging as an antidote to all that Britpop brashness. From small pockets, intelligent, wrily observed, quirky pop music was sprouting. We’d already seen Space in the charts recently with a single that featured a glockenspiel and now came The Divine Comedy. Channeling the spirit of 60s baroque pop, this outfit from Northern Ireland was mainly just a vehicle for the creative genius of Neil Hannon. Having formed in 1989, they’d already released three albums into the pop void before Radio 1’s Chris Evans championed “Something For The Weekend”, the lead single from fourth studio album “Casanova”. With that backing, a first ever Top 40 hit was achieved when it debuted and peaked at No 14. Hannon’s distinctive, almost spoken vocal delivery style might have almost put the song into the novelty bracket à la The Mike Flowers Pops but there was something more substantial to it. Maybe it was the storytelling in the song which relates the tale of a suitor’s unwanted advances to a young woman who tricks him into looking in the woodshed only for her friends to knock him unconscious and steal his car and money. You don’t get songs detailing that kind of stuff everyday of the week. The line “There ain’t nothing in the woodshed…except maybe some wood” was typical of the humour Hannon would bring to his idiosyncratic songwriting. He even looked unconventional for a pop star but that was also part of his appeal I think. I have a friend who adores him and when she met him and got him to sign something for her, he included the famous woodshed line alongside his signature.

“Something For The Weekend” would usher in a run of chart hits that would last the entire 90s and into the middle of the next decade. Perhaps their best known tune is “National Express” with its lyric about having an arse the size of a small country which made the Top 10 in 1999. That same year, the marvellous Best Of album “A Secret History” was released achieving gold status sales and peaking at No 3. It’s a great starting point for anyone wanting to investigate the band’s catalogue. In a bizarre turn of events, psychedelic Welsh rock band Super Furry Animals would have a hit with a track also called “Something For The Weekend” just a couple of weeks after The Divine Comedy had done so though they changed the title to “Something 4 The Weekend” for the single release.

I saw The Divine Comedy live back in 2017 when they supported Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott at Craven Park, home of rugby team Hull Kingston Rovers. As good as Hannon was, I wish it had been in a smaller setting rather than a stadium gig. Maybe something like that woodshed if they cleared out all the wood.

It can’t be time for Celine Dion again already can it?! I think this is the third time she’s been on with “Because You Loved Me” and to add insult to injury, it’s that concert performance once more that the TOTP producers tried to convince us was a live satellite link up when it obviously wasn’t. I hadn’t noticed before but the camera picks out members of the audience some of whom are visibly touched by what they are witnessing. One woman had clearly been crying. Now, I’m not going to go down the musical snobbery route – people like what they like and may have a strong emotional attachment to a song based on some event from their own private lives – but it did take me by surprise. Haven’t seen tears on TOTP like that since that teenage girl was highlighted sobbing on the Duran Duran video for “The Reflex”.

Right, it’s time for that exclusive performance from Madrid by Shampoo now that was the mystery prize for the meet and greet competition won by Dave from Chingford. Presumably he was watching from the sidelines off camera. Shampoo were one of a number of female duos that were successful in the 90s including Shakespears Sister, Scarlet and Alisha’s Attic. Jacqui and Carrie though were a curious outfit. A handful of moderately sized hit singles in the UK and yet they sold a million copies of their debut album “We Are Shampoo” in Japan and Asia. There’s probably some deep connection at play there which warrants some detailed cultural analysis but I haven’t got time to go into all that now. All I will say is that their sound and image didn’t seem to be anything particularly new. Hadn’t we seen something similar from the likes of Transvision Vamp and Fuzzbox previously?

Anyway, it’s time to address the elephant in the room which is the title of this their last ever hit. Literally in the week that the phenomenon that would become the Spice Girls released their debut single “Wannabe”, Shampoo were in the charts with a song called “Girl Power”. Yes, the slogan that Sporty, Posh, Baby, Scary and Ginger used to promote themselves around the world was already out there in the cultural vernacular. Now, I’m not suggesting some act of dishonest appropriation not least because Shampoo didn’t invent the phrase themselves. The origins of ‘girl power’ are recognised as belonging to US punk band Bikini Kill who used it as the subtitle to their second feminist zine in 1990. However, it is quite the coincidence don’t you think? Could the Spice Girls management have been influenced by the Shampoo single or is that just me forcing an event that never happened to create my own narrative? Surely the marketing strategy for the Spice Girls had been months in the formulating and hadn’t just adopted something as pivotal as the ‘girl power’ mantra on the hoof? Well, apparently it was. The Spice Girls did just nick it off Shampoo! Here’s @TOTPFacts with the story:

"Girl Power" charted a week before The Spice Girls' "Wannabe". In a 2016 interview, Geri Halliwell said she got the phrase from Shampoo. “I saw them and I thought, 'Oh my God, that is so good.'” #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) September 20, 2024

"Girl Power" was previously the title of a 1991 zine by US riot grrrl band Bikini Kill, which is presumably where Shampoo saw it. Mel C: "It was very much in existence already. It was then Geri who shouted it during an early television interview and it stuck." #TOTP pic.twitter.com/GvXkqjixWX
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) September 20, 2024

Ha! Well, I guess Shampoo themselves must have nicked it off Bikini Kill then. After all, it was sometimes spelt ‘grrrl power’ after the ‘riot grrrl’ movement they aligned themselves with in their early days. What’s undeniable is that the fortunes of Shampoo and the Spice Girls went in wildly different directions from this point on. The latter would conquer the world in less than six months while the former never returned to the charts and whose last single release was a desperate cover version of a song by Christmas playlist perennials The Waitresses. Rubbing salt in the wound, whilst Jacqui and Carrie were having to entertain Dave from Chingford in Madrid, they were missing out on being in the TOTP studio at the same time as their heroes the Sex Pistols. For what it’s worth, I preferred Shampoo’s brand of “Girl Power” to anything the Spice Girls released under that banner.

Right, what’s wrong with this picture with said picture being Black Grape performing “England’s Irie” with their mates Keith Allen and Joe Strummer? Well, two days before this went out, the England football team lost their Euros 96 semi final with Germany in heartbreaking fashion on penalties. Thus, the timing of this exultant performance of a song about them seems slightly off. Surely they should have released it a few weeks earlier when “Three Lions” came out? By the time it was finally in the charts, all the expectation, excitement and general sense of positivity that had engulfed the nation had completely dissipated. I did mention recently that the release schedule for Black Grape’s singles had been too tight when “Fat Neck” came out the month before “England’s Irie”. Maybe someone at the label messed up? Or maybe they’d banked on England making the final which would have given the record a whole weekend’s trading before the game on the Sunday evening to rack up some monster sales? Either way, this performance was rendered a bit after-the-Lord Mayor’s-show by the events of the Wednesday evening.

Talking of which, who can forget Gareth Southgate’s tortured face after being the only person to miss his penalty? I recall that the next morning, the aforementioned Chris Evans conducting a debrief of the match on his breakfast show (he always was a bandwagon jumper and being a footy fan was now seen not just as acceptable but the done thing in the era of ‘lad culture’). He pronounced that Southgate was a “top man” and played “Walkaway” by Cast as a tribute to him and the team whilst the nation cried into our cornflakes. As for Black Grape, they would only trouble the Top 40 compilers once more after their second album “Stupid Stupid Stupid” was poorly received though they are still releasing new material to this day with latest album “Orange Head” having come out earlier this year.

The Fugees reign supreme still at the top of the charts with “Killing Me Softly”. Yet again we have the same studio performance we’ve always had, presumably as it was the only time they were in the country. They could have mixed it up a bit and showed the official promo video for it at least once. After all, it did win an MTV Video Music Award for Best R&B Video. Interestingly, the TOTP producers let the ending credits roll over the top of it even though we still have the Sex Pistols to come creating a false ending effect. There are no further credits when the Pistols finish.

Lauryn Hill had a small acting career that briefly ran in tandem with her singing one. Most notably she starred in Sister Act 2: Back In The Habit. I think this is my favourite scene from the film:

Somebody remarked on Twitter that Gina G must be really tall as she seems to be stooping in every link that she does and they’re right. It’s like she’s a mime artist performing being trapped in a cube. Most odd. Not as odd though as the ‘punk’ outfit she has on to introduce the Sex Pistols. What’s with the feather headdress? That look is more Hiawatha than high priestess of punk.

Anyway, the Sex Pistols are finally here to perform for us. I was just too young when they were at the height of their fame/infamy in 1976/77 to be caught up in the punk phenomenon though I was aware of the band’s name (which seemed very dangerous to the then eight year old me) and that two of the band were called Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten. I couldn’t have named any of their songs or told you what they sounded like though. My next encounter with the band came a few years later in a music lesson at Grammar school (I’d passed my 11 plus exam) when the hardest kid in class Paul Dukes convinced the recently qualified and wet behind the ears teacher that “Friggin’ In The Riggin’” from “The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle” album was a suitable song for composition appreciation. Inevitably, the needle was abruptly removed from the record long before the song’s end. As I got older and more into music, I expanded my knowledge of rock history which included getting to know the band’s story and music though mainly the holy trinity that is “Anarchy In The UK”, “God Save The Queen” and “Pretty Vacant”. I eventually bought the “Never Mind The Bollocks” album as well.

There had been a mini Pistols revival in 1992 when Virgin raided the band’s rather limited back catalogue to release the “Kiss This” compilation that achieved gold status and made the Top 10 on the charts. Four years later, a full on reunion including original bass player Glen Matlock was put into effect for the six month long Filthy Lucre tour. One of the dates was at Finsbury Park on the 23td June, the day after England had defeated Spain in a quarterfinal of the Euros on penalties. Yes, the one with that Stuart Pearce celebration…

Pearce and Gareth Southgate somehow found themselves at Finsbury Park introducing the Sex Pistols on stage the following day. No, really look:

Stuart Pearce and Gareth Southgate introducing the Sex Pistols on stage at Finsbury Park – the day after England beat Spain on penalties at Euro ‘96. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🎸#Euro96Relived pic.twitter.com/CjmnQQEE0b
— Stu’s Football Flashbacks (@stusfootyflash) May 12, 2020

Also there that day was my manager at the Our Price where I was working, the late, great Pete Garner original bassist with the Stone Roses. I had to cover his Sunday shift in the shop so he could go. I only know this as it’s all in my recently found diary that handily covers the whole of 1996. It also tells me that I listened to the Sex Pistols gig live on the radio that evening. Back to this TOTP performance though and inevitably the band do one of the ‘holy trinity’ tracks. “Pretty Vacant” made No 6 in the charts when released in the Summer of 1977 and would usher in the band’s first ever appearance on TOTP so I guess there’s some history and symmetry at play in the band choosing to perform it here. It was the follow up to the press baiting and BBC banned single “God Save The Queen” released at the height of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee celebrations. That ban clearly had zero effect on the band’s sense of daring as they then released a song that included John Lydon’s surely deliberate annunciation of the word ‘vacant’ as ‘vay-c**t’. Twenty-six years later, The Darkness tried a similar linguistic trick on their festive hit “Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End)”. Bells End? Bellend? We all caught up? Good.

For the second track, the band went for a less obvious choice in “New York”, a song generally perceived to be about US glam rockers New York Dolls whom, of course, Malcolm McLaren used to manage before switching his attention to the Pistols. Clearly the passage of time had softened the band’s edges as they presumably relented to BBC demands about the song’s lyrics with the word ‘shit’ sung by Lydon as ‘it’ and ‘faggot’ as ‘maggot’. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Everything But The Girl	Wrong	I did not
2	The Divine Comedy	Something For The Weekend	No but I had that Best Of album
3	Celine Dion	Because You Loved Me	No
4	Shampoo	Girl Power	Nah
5	Black Grape / Joe Strummer / Keith Allen	England’s Irie	Nope
6	The Fugees	Killing Me Softly	No but my wife had the album
7	Sex Pistols	Pretty Vacant	I have the Never Mind The Bollocks album
8	Sex Pistols	New York	See 7 above

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/m00233z0/top-of-the-pops-28061996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 21 JUN 1996

Posted on September 25, 2024 by 80stastic

Here’s a blast from the past. Anyone remember Julia Carling? I have to admit I’d forgotten all about her but here she is presenting TOTP in 1996. OK, the show was maybe not commanding the same profile as in its 70s and 80s heyday but it was still the BBC’s flagship music programme. So who was/is Julia Carling and how did she get this gig? Well, she was a TV presenter (obviously) who’d started as a VJ on VH-1 and guested on Channel 4’s Big Breakfast before her spot here. She was also the wife of England rugby player Will Carling though Wikipedia informs me that the couple divorced in this year. Will was rumoured in the tabloids to be romantically linked with Diana Princess of Wales something that must have passed me by at the time. As for Julia, she spent some time on This Morning before disappearing from our screens to concentrate on a career in journalism and writing a book.

Before we get to Julia though there’s the return of the direct to camera message from a featured artist that was curiously replaced by a highlights montage the other week. Not sure what all that was about but there’s no ignoring its reappearance as we get Black Grape in the slot this week but it’s Keith Allen not Shaun Ryder taking centre stage as he’s joined them for their Euro 96 single “England’s Irie”. Unfortunately, Allen is there as his alter-ego, the never-not-annoying Keithski banging on about the football so let’s move on quickly to opening act Longpigs. Although more often than not categorised as Britpop, they never seem to get talked about as much as some of the movement’s other luminaries. In fact, the most frequent comment about the band always see seems to be that their guitarist was Richard Hawley who, of course, went on to forge a career as a solo artist in the new millennium. Longpigs had some decent tunes though of which this one – “She Said” – is probably my favourite. Despite sounded like the band are performing it under duress, it also has a power and menace of its own. Part of that menace comes from the repeated lyric “you better hit her”. I’m not quite sure what songwriter and singer Crispin Hunt was getting at when he wrote it but, certainly taken in isolation, the line is dubious. That apart, I do think the track stands up with that piano scale leading into the chorus simple yet very effective. Back to Crispin though and his name must be up there as the most posh boy moniker in all of Britpop. What? How about Crispian Mills of Kula Shaker? Oh hush!

Gabrielle’s career is a curious mixture of massive hits and middling, blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em chart entries. For every “Dreams”, “Rise” and “Out Of Reach”, there was a “Because Of You”, “I Wish” or this one – “Forget About The World”. The second single from her eponymous sophomore album, it would peak at No 23 whilst spending just three weeks on the Top 40. As such, I don’t recall this one at all but *whisper it* it’s actually quite good. A nice tune, perfect for Summer with a polished but not ostentatious production, I much prefer it to some of those aforementioned bigger hits. One thing that does let it down though, and this applies to nearly all of Gabrielle’s work, is her lack of diction. I had to have subtitles permanently on to be able to understand what she was singing about. Annunciate Gabrielle annunciate! Never mind forget about the world, she forgot about the words!

Another female solo artist now as we get the latest single from Mariah Carey who, after a slowish start to her UK chart career, was on a hot streak of Top 10 hits by the mid 90s. “Always Be My Baby” was the eleventh in a row to achieve such a chart peak over here. Of course, in the US, it had always been huge smash after huge smash right from the start with eight of her first ten hits going to No 1.

This track was the fourth and final to be lifted from her “Daydream” album and would go straight in at No 3 (it was a chart topper in America obvs). It would stay within the Top 40 for eight weeks, quite the feat of endurance in a chart era of singles debuting high then falling away rapidly. Contrast that with the stats for Gabrielle’s single – two comparable hits with wildly fluctuating chart performances. Why was that exactly? I’ve been writing this blog long enough to know that question is largely unanswerable. I even wrote a dissertation on it as a student and couldn’t get to the bottom of it. If I had to guess, I’d say that maybe Mariah had more airplay behind it than Gabrielle? Could be as I thought I didn’t know “Always Be My Baby” but the “doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-dum” hook sounded very familiar. Maybe though I was thinking of this 1992 hit from Betty Boo…

If it looks, sounds and has the whiff of an act of desperation, then it surely is an act of desperation. It had been two years since Let Loose had a huge hit single with “Crazy For You” that had transformed them briefly into contenders for the next teenage heartthrob band. By 1996 though, despite having a clutch of medium sized hits to their name, nothing had replicated the success of their breakthrough song and their album had sold moderately. Enough to warrant a follow up but a chart high of No 20 wasn’t going to give Boyzone sleepless nights.

The alarm bells must have truly started ringing though when the lead single from their second album – “Everybody Say, Everybody Do” – could only scramble to No 29 in the charts at the back end of 1995. Seven months would pass before the band reappeared. Presumably, in that time, the decision was made to break the pop music emergency glass and execute the standard, fall back contingency plan which was – altogether everyone – RELEASE A COVER VERSION! Yes, of course. When in need of a career reviving hit, that was the obvious move. In the case of Let Loose, their safe word song was the old Bread hit “Make It With You”. Now OK, it’s a nice ballad and it certainly did the job (albeit a stop gap one) when it returned the band to the Top 10 but that particular track had already been used for a similar purpose by The Pasadenas* only four years previously when their version peaked at No 20. Stealing ideas from the “Tribute (Right On)” hit makers was surely a low. Despite the cover’s chart success, the band still ended up going down the pan when second album “Rollercoaster” hit the skids and then disappeared without trace taking Let Loose with it. Ah, the ups and downs of life as a 90s boy band.

*The Pasadenas had done a whole album of covers in an attempt to rebuild their career.

And so to a band who had just announced that they were splitting up according to Julia Carling and she was right as Crowded House (initially) called it a day in 1996 after having been around for about a decade. Was she right about it being their last time on TOTP though? Having done a little research, I think she might have been. 1-0 to Julia. Anyway, Crowded House were going out with a bang in that they released their first Greatest Hits album called “Recurring Dream” which would go on to sell over a million copies in the UK twice as many as their previous bestselling studio album “Woodface”. It included three new songs of which “Instinct” was one. Taking of things recurring, thus was yet another track that I thought I didn’t remember until I listened to it and it was hidden deep in my memory banks, presumably buried behind a heap of recollections of drunken nights out or the name of that kid from school that I can never recall. Anyway, it’s a very Crowded House tune which seems a lazy but accurate way to describe it. Another way would be that it was a typical example of their thoughtful, well crafted melodic rock/pop which I’ve always been a sucker for. In fact, perhaps one of my favourite gigs ever was seeing them play The Academy in Manchester around 1991 when bassist Nick Seymour did his infamous ‘chocolate cake’ party trick. Is “Instinct” one of the band’s best tunes? No, I wouldn’t say so but it’s a decent tune and at least they used the correct word for its title and didn’t make one up just so it scanned better. Yes, I’m talking about you Gary Kemp!

A second new track called “Not The Girl You Think You Are” was released as a follow up which I do remember as it sounded so much like The Beatles which was apparently deliberate as Neil Finn has described it as an homage to the Fab Four. It would help propel “Recurring Dream” to the top of the charts. It was also assisted in achieving that chart feat by an advertising campaign that featured a tag line that went something like “you know more Crowded House songs than you think you do” which I remember thinking was quite clever at the time. Its sales performance felt similar to that of The Beautiful South’s “Carry On Up The Charts” Best Of from a couple of years prior. Not shed loads of massive hits but enough familiar songs that it felt like a soundtrack to your life and therefore something you would need to own to represent it.

Crowded House would reconvene in 2007 and release the “Time On Earth” album though without founding member and drummer Paul Hester who tragically committed suicide in 2005 after battling with depression. The band’s latest album “Gravity Stairs” was released just four months ago in May of this year.

Oh shite! It’s that dreadful Simply Red song that was appropriated as the official Euro 96 anthem. “We’re In This Together” should have been made available on the NHS for insomniacs – talk about soporific! I mentioned the last time this tripe was on that my reaction to it was in line with a Joe Pasquale heckler who threw his crutches away whilst shouting “I’d rather fall over than listen to this shit!” on the way down. Following on from that, I’ve remembered another extreme reaction that was in response to actually hearing a Simply Red track. When at polytechnic, a friend was in the student bar and not in a particularly good mood. Whatever was troubling him was not helped by Hucknall and co coming on the bar jukebox. His response to this was to set fire to his hair! Talk about “A New Flame”!

By this point in his career, Maxi Priest had been having chart hits for a decade beginning with “Strollin’ On” in 1986. Although there were a many a single that missed the Top 40 along the way, there were also plenty of major successes. Look at his 1990 hit “Close To You” which combined New Jack Swing and soul so well that it went to No 1 in America making him one of only two reggae artists (alongside UB40) to ever achieve a US chart topper.

However, to some uneducated ears (and I include my own in that description), it might seem that Maxi has become an enduring figure predominantly off the back of doing some reggae covers of already well known songs like “Some Guys Have All The Luck” and “Wide World” but that perhaps doesn’t tell the whole story. Maxi established himself by being able to adapt his natural reggae tendencies to align with the predominant musical trends of the day. His Wikipedia page lists his own musical genres as being Roots Reggae, R&B, Lovers Rock, Dancehall and Reggae Fusion. He’s worked with artists as diverse as Jazzie B, Roberta Flack, Lee Ritenour and Apache Indian. His choice of collaborator hasn’t always been spot on though. His willingness to follow the zeitgeist meant teaming up with two of the three S’s* of 1993’s ragga phenomenon. “Housecall” saw him join forces with the despicable Shabba Ranks before this track – “That Girl” – had him in partnership with the laughable Shaggy. Sampling “Green Onions” by Booker T. & the M.G.’s, I’m convinced that this would be so much better if Shaggy had not been involved. He’s turned up and done his usual nonsense in that low growl of his so we get random interjections like “Gangsta kinda lover”, “Fancy kinda lover” and, inevitably, “Sexy kinda lover” before he just resorts to making grunt noises. Come on Maxi! You were better than that!

*A Maxi Priest / Snow duet has yet to happen thankfully

It’s time for this week’s ’exclusive’ performance from Black Grape with their contribution to the “Beautiful Game” compilation album (which also featured “Three Lions”) entitled “England’s Irie”. I never really got this one perhaps because, like Simply Red’s awful “We’re In this Together”, it doesn’t seem to have that much to do with football. Sure, there’s a few stock phrases in there like “Cross into the box”, “A perfect pass” and “It’s a football thing” that clearly anchor it as a football song but some of the lyrics are tenuous at best. “Dribble around my socks”? “Check my shirt and drink my shots”? “Squeeze me in box”? I suppose that last one could relate to the infamous photo of Vinnie Jones grabbing Gazza by his nuts but still. Maybe Shaun Ryder’s lack of a connection to football might explain it. Here’s @TOTPFacts:

Shaun Ryder on “England’s Irie”: “I know fuck all about football. I was born at the back of Old Trafford and I’m a red by birth, but I don’t do football. It means absolutely nothing to me.” #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) September 20, 2024

Hmm. Shaun was aided in this track by Keith Allen and Joe Strummer who, as Julia Carling states in her intro vowed never to appear on TOTP with The Clash (2-0 to Julia). The fact that he broke that vow to perform on this track, well…I think this sums it up:

Of all the songs Strummer could have performed on TOTP THIS is the one 😠😫
— Simon Davies (@dinodonkey83) September 21, 2024

Keith Allen, of course, was carving out a nice little side career for himself with football songs. As well as this one, there’s “World In Motion” with New Order and he would go on to release three further football ‘songs’ under the Fat Les banner. Cheers for that Keith. Apart from the lyrics, there are other things about “England’s Irie” that confuse me. For a start, what has the word ‘Irie’ got to do with the England football team? Here’s @TOTPFacts again:

(Explaining to a judge) “Irie” is Jamaican slang that originated in the Rastafari movement. Anything that makes you feel “alright” – that’s cool, enjoyable, or positive – can be described as irie. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) September 20, 2024

Secondly, apart from Strummer, nobody seems to be wearing an England football shirt. Shaun’s looks more like an England rugby top, Keith Allen is wearing orange as if he’s Dutch but also a kilt as if he’s Scottish. The drummer’s wearing an Argentina shirt for Chrissakes! It’s all a bit of a mess but then this is Black Grape we’re talking about so…

Before the No 1 record, Julia announces the first winner of the TOTP meet and greet competition and it’s David Howe from Chingford in Essex! I wonder what David thought of his prize – a chance to hang out with Shampoo as they shoot an ‘exclusive’ performance for the show in Madrid. A trip to the Spanish capital would have been nice but Shampoo? They were hardly the biggest of names were they? At least it wasn’t Peter Andre though!

The Fugees are No 1 for a third week with “Killing Me Softly”. This was one of those singles that flew off the shelves. There were a few of them in the 90s where anticipation for a song’s release created phenomenal demand. “Mmm Bop” by Hanson (no really!) was another along with “Don’t Speak” by No Doubt and “…Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears. Nothing though can touch the clamour for Elton John’s “Candle In The Wind 1997” after Princess Diana died but that’s a whole other story for a future post.

The play out track is “Where It’s At” by Beck. This was a track taken from his “Odelay” album (the one with the shaggy dog jumping over a hurdle on the cover) and was only his second UK hit when it peaked at No 35. Everyone I ever worked with at Our Price seemed to love Beck as he was perceived as being super hip. My view? Yeah, I quite liked him though not as much as my wife who bought “Odelay”. “Where It’s At” was typically edgy and alternative with samples a plenty and a whiff of 60s psychedelica. It would win Beck a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance though, for me, it wasn’t as memorable as follow up “Devil’s Haircut”. Still, what did I know.

P.S. In a link more tenuous than an “England’s Irie” lyric, there’s a connection between Julia Carling and Beck…Jeff Beck the rock guitarist with whom she lived for six years from the age of 18.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Longpigs	She Said	No but I had their album I think
2	Gabrielle	Forget About The World	No
3	Mariah Carey	Always Be My Baby	Nope
4	Let Loose	Make It With You	As if
5	Crowded House	Instinct	No but I had the Best Of album with it on
6	Simply Red	We’re In This Together	Never!
7	Maxi Priest / Shaggy	That Girl	Nope
8	Black Grape / Keith Allen / Joe Strummer	England’s Irie	Nah
9	Fugees	Killing Me Softly	No but my wife had the album
10	Beck	Where It’s At	See 9 above

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/m00233yy/top-of-the-pops-21061996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 14 JUN 1996

Posted on September 19, 2024 by 80stastic

It’s mid June 1996 and the TV schedules are full of football as the Euros tournament is in full swing. England have started with a disappointing draw against Switzerland so there’s a lot riding on the next game against Scotland the day after this TOTP aired. As flagged by Nicky Campbell last week, the show has moved to Friday night for the duration of the football but it would never return to that hallowed Thursday night slot. In retrospect, it could be argued that this was the beginning of the end for TOTP with the subsequent decision to change its time of broadcast from 7.00 to 7.30pm an act of wanton self destruction, pitting it against Coronation Street as it did.

Before any of that though came an act of physical destruction that would put football and audience figures for a pop music show into a terrible and shocking perspective. The day after this episode of TOTP was broadcast, the Manchester bombing happened when the IRA detonated a 3,300 lb bomb on Corporation Street in the centre of the city. I was living in Manchester at the time (but working in the Our Price store in Stockport) and had booked the Saturday off to watch the England game. I wasn’t in the centre that morning though my wife had been as she’d gone to pick up her Mum from Piccadilly train station as she was visiting us for the day. Fortunately, they were in and out before the bomb was detonated at 11.17am. Thanks to the efforts of the emergency services (and the fact that an IRA code-worded warning had been made an hour and a half prior to the detonation), there were no fatalities that day though 212 people were injured. The explosion caused a 300m high mushroom cloud to rise above the city and could be heard up to 15 miles away. I was out walking at the time (can’t remember why) and, like everyone else in the vicinity, heard the bomb go off. My immediate thought was that a waste incinerator had exploded rather than a terrorist attack. Sadly, I was wrong. The devastation to the area would prompt the regeneration of Manchester City centre at a cost of £1 billion in today’s money that was paid out by insurers. 400 businesses in a half mile radius of the blast were affected 40 percent of which never recovered. There is a narrative that the bomb was the best thing to ever happen to Manchester City centre though the counter argument is try telling that to people and businesses that were caught up in it. Also, there were already regeneration schemes in place following the city’s ultimately unsuccessful bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. Whichever side of the argument you came down on, the IRA bomb of 1996 will never be forgotten.

On that sombre note, I’ll try and shift subject to the rather more trivial subject of pop music and there was no greater example of its sometimes redundant nature than Peter Andre. Now the last time I reviewed “Mysterious Girl”, I forgot to mention the contribution of rapper Bubbler Ranx who was brought in as Andre, it turned out, was as hopeless at rapping as Gazza* was when he tried out for the John Barnes role on “World In Motion”. Congratulations then Bubbler for your part in “Mysterious Girl”. Who can forget your cry of “Baby girl” that opens the song and your superb control of language and beautiful phrasing on lines such as “Body weh you have a make de man dem a bawl”. Yes, your legacy to pop music is that you made this dreadful track even shittier than it already was. Well done sir. Reports suggest that Ranx has retired from rapping and is now a preacher. Lord have mercy!

*Thankfully he was much better at football as his iconic goal in that England v Scotland game proved.

A couple of pieces of housekeeping to mention at this point. Firstly, tonight’s host is Mark Owen who is still a few months away from launching his solo career with the “Child” single and “Green Man” album so he seems to have been spending his time since the dissolution of Take That cultivating a look that resembles 1970s TV series Catweazle or at last an extra in a Robin Hood movie. What was going on there Mark? His look isn’t much better these days with someone I work with recently telling me that she thinks Owen looks like a tramp!

Secondly, there’s been a change to the show’s opening with the direct to camera message by a featured artist having been replaced by a montage of clips of the acts to come on tonight’s show. I’m not sure I have an opinion either way on which one I prefer. Thirdly, Owen reminds us of a competition that the show is running in which you can win the opportunity to meet and hang out with a mystery pop star. I don’t remember this at all but what are the chances that said pop star was Peter Andre?!

Back to the music and we now get “Don’t Stop Movin’” by Livin’ Joy. Nothing to do with the chart topper by S Club from 2001, this was the follow up to the act’s somewhat surprising No 1 from the previous year “Dreamer”. This was a case of some things change, some things stay the same as the band had a new singer in the extravagantly named Tameko Star replacing original vocalist Janice Robinson but their sound on this new song was exactly the same as previously. Robinson herself had superseded Penny Ford as the vocalist with Snap! as the Eurodance /Italo House merry-go-round twirled throughout the 90s. She would continue a career in music post Livin’ Joy supporting the likes of Tina Turner on tour before eventually ending up as a contestant on X Factor in 2018. No, really. Look…

Anyway, Janice’s departure didn’t stop the flow of hits as “Don’t Stop Movin’” went Top 5 and was followed by another three UK chart entries. As I hadn’t liked “Dreamer” much, it will surprise nobody (including myself) that its follow up did little for me either. It was all a bit too frantic and energetic and listening to it now, it reminds me of “Don’t Give Me Your Life” by Alex Party but guess what? The two Italian brothers in Livin’ Joy were also members of Alex Party! Clearly, the notion of having two creative ideas as opposed to one they kept recycling was beyond these people!

It’s the theme tune to the biggest movie of the year according to Mark Owen now as “Theme From Mission: Impossible“ by Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton is up to No 7. So, was it the biggest movie of 1996? Well, depends on what you mean by ‘biggest’ I guess. Seeing as the film hadn’t even been released in the UK by this point, Owen was either referring to its reception in the US where it opened in the May or the hype that was surrounding it. Going by gross box office receipts though, no it wasn’t the biggest film of the year – that was Independence Day. It wasn’t even second in that list as it trailed in third after disaster movie Twister. Maybe it got the best reviews then? Probably not. Reviews ranged from mixed to positive with aggregator Rotten Tomatoes giving it an average of 6/10. Indeed, the cast of the original 60s TV series were also unimpressed with one actor leaving the cinema before the film ended. It did, however, open in a then record 3,012 theatres in America becoming the first film to break the 3,000 mark. It also broke the record for the biggest receipts for a film opening on a Wednesday with $11.8 million.

The soundtrack was also a success selling half a million copies in the US. Looking at the track listing for the album, it’s not a bad collection at all featuring contributions from The Cranberries, Massive Attack, Pulp, Skunk Anansie, Longpigs, Cast and of course the reworked theme tune. However, only the Clayton and Mullen treatment and The Cranberries from those names above actually feature in the film.

To get us in the mood for the much heralded Paul Weller double live performance later in the show, here are mod revivalists Ocean Colour Scene as his warm up act. Too harsh? Probably. Were/are they a ‘mod’ band? I don’t think so really but having turned around their initially failing career thanks to a leg up from Weller whom invited them to tour with him in 1993, the lazy labels coming their way from the music press were inevitable. That connection continued when guitarist Steve Craddock and singer Simon Fowler were invited to contribute to Weller’s “Wildwood” album when the whole ‘Modfather’ tag started to appear. Having seen Ocean Colour Scene live just last month, I couldn’t detect much of a ‘mod’ vibe coming from them or their music though there were plenty of Weller style haircuts on middle aged men in the audience.

As for being Weller’s warm up act here, that’s also unfair as the band were becoming firmly established in their own right by this point. This track, “The Day We Caught The Train” – was their third consecutive hit single (and joint biggest of their career) when it debuted on the chart at No 4. My accusation is also undermined by the presence of Weller himself self on piano in this performance so he would have effectively been supporting himself which doesn’t quite work*. As we shall see with Weller later, the vocals here are live. In fact was the whole show meant to be live performances? Tameko Star could have been for Livin’ Joy earlier. Peter Andre? Surely not?

*Having said that, I once saw Haircut 100 at Cadogan Hall and Nick Heyward was his own support act.

As for “The Day We Caught The Train”, this is probably my favourite OCS tune (did people really refer to them in abbreviated form like OMD?) but why didn’t they do the “We’ve got the whole wide world” line as the song comes out of the middle eight? Maybe because it has a definite sound effect over it on the recorded version and they were doing this live? What was the song about? It seems to have been inspired by the 1979 film Quadrophenia with lyrics like “riding the coast” referring to Mods riding their Lambretta scooters down to Brighton whilst the song’s protagonist Jimmy surely refers to the film’s lead character Jimmy Cooper played by Phil Daniels. There’s even a picture of a scooter in the cover of the single. So they were mods after all!

Right, is anyone having it that this was a live satellite link up with Celine Dion? It reeks of being pre-recorded to me. The fact that there’s no actual conversation between her and Mark Owen suggests that the whole thing is staged. A quick search of the internet shows me that Celine did indeed play Quebec for two nights in June 1996 but on the 7th and 8th of that month. Given that this TOTP was broadcast on the 14th, even allowing for the fact that it might have been recorded the day before, there’s no way that link up was live. Celine didn’t play a live concert on the 14th and she was in Sydney not Quebec on the 13th. Pure hokum. Fair play though to Celine for playing along with it and doing a little intro as if she was talking to Owen. Not good enough though – just like your song “Because You Loved Me”.

Right, what’s this nonsense? A horrible, hackneyed dance tune based around the chorus of Blur’s “Girls & Boys”? Oh brilliant! Just what we all needed and wanted I’m sure. Pianoman was actually Bradford producer James Sammon who worked with the likes of Ian Brown, Craig David and…erm…Donna Air whilst still finding the time to be a pirate radio DJ and run a record shop. His only hit under the moniker of Pianoman (he had others, didn’t they all?) was “Blurred”. Confusingly, the TOTP caption says it was originally a hit in March 1994 but I’m guessing that refers to the Blur track itself as I can’t find any record of an official release for “Blurred” other than this one in 1996 though Wikipedia tells me it was a hit in Ibiza in 1995 – a ‘hit’ presumably means it went down a storm on the dance floors of nightclubs.

Even back in the mid 90s this must have sounded dated – the production feels very start of the decade to me albeit the track is based around a song that didn’t even exist then. Why did they need a rapper on it to shout the inane, generic phrase “Move to the groove” or that computerised voice that says “One, two, three” and “Breakdown”?! The guy on keyboards in the red Adidas T-shirt looks like the geekier, younger brother of Graham Coxon (if indeed it is possible to look geekier than the Blur guitarist). The whole thing is just nasty but enough people bought it to send it to No 6 in the charts. Sammon tried to repeat the trick by sampling Belinda Carlisle’s “Live Your Life Be Free” for the follow up but thankfully the British public didn’t fall for this nonsense a second time.

After the Top 10 rundown, as ever, we get to the No 1 but it isn’t the usual climax of the show. No. We still have those two live performances by Paul Weller to come so it’s a bit of a false ending and I’m not sure it worked. From its very beginnings, TOTP always ended with the No 1 record; it was the natural apex of a chart based show; it made sense. What didn’t make sense was having two more songs after the chart topper one of which had already been a hit a year before, live version or not. If this was a new direction for the show, it didn’t feel properly thought through.

Anyway, let’s deal with that No 1 which is the Fugees for a second week with “Killing Me Softly”. With sales of over 350,000 copies in just two weeks, it was always going to stay at No 1 but nobody surely foresaw the phenomenon it would become, not even the band’s record company Sony who would have to actively withdraw it from sale when it was still at No 2 into August to allow follow up single “Ready Or Not” to be released unimpeded.

The song was a No 1 US hit for Roberta Flack in 1973 and was originally recorded by Lori Lieberman in 1972 after she collaborated on the lyrics with Norman Gimbel. Then came the all conquering take on it by Fugees but there exists out there another version which is both dreadful and entertaining at the same time…

There’s one more piece of housekeeping to be discharged before the Weller double bill and it’s the details of that chance to meet and hang out with a mystery pop star that may involve foreign travel. Ooooh! I love the fact that the BBC felt the need to put the ‘Lines are now closed’ caption up for a competition that happened 28 years ago! Also, the price of the phone call to enter was 20p!

Finally Paul Weller is on stage and he kicks off with “The Changingman”, the second single from his 1995 album “Stanley Road”. Quite why I’m not sure. It seems an incongruous choice for a music show that is based around the current chart. Presumably I’ll have reviewed this when it was initially a hit. I wonder what I said about it. If you’re wondering too, well, here’s the link to the relevant post:

TOTP 04 MAY 1995

Here’s the answer to that competition question which Weller helpfully announces. “Peacock Suit” was the lead single to his fourth studio album “Heavy Soul” but it didn’t actually get released until the 5th August, nearly two months after this performance. “Heavy Soul” itself wouldn’t appear until June 1997! Why the long gap? I’ve no idea – all I know is that it pissed off both Weller fans and record shop employees when the former would try and buy the record only to be told by the latter that it wasn’t out yet. Cue lots of “It must be, it was on Top of the Pops last night” type comments. Listening to “The Changingman” and “Peacock Suit” back to back, I’m struck by how similar they sound. That’s not a criticism – they’re both decent enough tunes – but an observation. In the case of the latter, just as Ocean Colour Scene were similarly inspired earlier, it’s surely about those pesky, preening mods again isn’t it? The single would debut and peak at No 5 when it was finally released making it not only Weller’s highest charting solo hit ever but also his biggest since “You’re The Best Thing” achieved the same position as part of the “Groovin’” EP in 1984.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Peter Andre featuring Bubbler Ranx	Mysterious Girl	Never
2	Livin’ Joy	Don’t Stop Movin’	Nah
3	Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton	Theme From Mission: Impossible	Nope
4	Ocean Colour Scene	The Day We Caught The Train	No but maybe should have
5	Celine Dion	Because You Loved Me	As if
6	Pianoman	Blurred	No chance
7	Fugees	Killing Me Softly	No but my wife had The Score album it was from
8	Paul Weller	The Changingman	No but I had the Stanley Road album it was from
9	Paul Weller	Peacock Suit	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/m0022v3w/top-of-the-pops-14061996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 06 JUN 1996

Posted on September 13, 2024 by 80stastic

Ah, it’s time for that infrequent event of a TOTP being aired on my birthday. This particular show coincided with my 28th birthday (I’m now 56) and usually I wouldn’t have remembered what I got up to on my special day but, as I revealed just the other week, I recently rediscovered an old diary that helpfully covers the year 1996 in its entirety so lets see what occurred that day.

*checks diary*

Well, sensibly I’d booked the day off work and so had lunch in town with my wife before another meal in the evening at a favourite restaurant. Perfect. I did fit in going to my first aid course in between eating and I hope I was listening carefully as I spent the next couple of days with a gippy stomach. Maybe that favourite restaurant shouldn’t have been such a favourite! Anyway, presumably I didn’t see this TOTP episode due to being out so let’s see what I missed.

Tonight’s host is Nicky Campbell and the first act he introduces is Louise who is back in the charts with her third, and possibly most well known, solo single “Naked”. This was the point in the ex-Eternal member’s career when her management/label made a clear and definite decision to change her image from angelic, girl-next-door to pvc-clad, sex goddess. It worked as well. FHM Magazine readers voted Louise second in their list of the ‘100 Sexiest Women’ of 1996 (X–Files star Gillian Anderson came first). I’m guessing one of those that voted for Louise may have been this fellow (@jjtotheb) who commented on the YouTube video of this performance:

“I remember having my first tug to this”

Well, you can’t argue with that I guess. Or maybe you can. Providing the view from the other side is this chap on Twitter/X:

I remember this performance vividly. My reaction is still one of, "why is someone with no sex appeal trying so very hard to convince us all she has it?" I mean, you might just as well be putting that tight PVC on Sister Wendy Beckett. #TotP
— Tony T-Rox Cowdrill 🦁⭐️ (@TonysaurusRox) August 31, 2024

Hmm. Well, whatever your feelings about Louise, we should probably do her the courtesy of discussing her song rather than just her looks and clearly “Naked” was written as a integral component of her rebrand. With lyrics that include the words ‘sexual’, ‘sensual’ and, of course, its title, there was no doubt that this was a much sassier type of track than she had been given previously. To my ears it was a catchy, competent soul/pop hit that was a bit Madonna-lite* and no more but it’s No 5 peak helped to establish Louise as a genuine solo artist with a chart career. She would clock up a further nine UK hits all but two of which would go Top 10.

*Actually, the synthesised riff in the chorus of “Naked” is very reminiscent of the intro and outro motif of “Father Figure” also now I come to think of it.

After “Children” gave Robert Miles a continent-straddling mega-hit earlier in the year, it must have seemed to the poster boy for ‘dream house’ music that the obvious way to follow it up was to release another track that was almost identical to its predecessor. Genius! And lo, it came to pass, that the single “Fable” did just that. The record buying public did what they always do and fell for the trick by buying enough copies to send it to No 7. So, the moral of the story of fable is ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ otherwise known as ‘don’t f**k with the formula’.

Now, before carrying on, I feel I should pull Nicky Campbell up on something he says in his intro for the next artist who is Tina Turner. Our host describes her as “the great soul survivor” and notes that the performance we are about to see of her new single “On Silent Wings” is from a live concert in Rotterdam before announcing “and let’s face it, if you can survive Rotterdam, you can survive anything”. What?! Why the need to slag off Holland’s second biggest city? Has he even been there? I can’t vouch for what it was like in 1996 but I visited it in 2018 and it was delightful. The Markthal (Market Place complex) is a marvel, its skyline stunning and parks wonderful to spend time in. A few months after this TOTP aired, The Beautiful South would have a big hit with “Rotterdam (Or Anywhere)” though I’m not sure that was a love letter to the city either. Around the same time that song was in the charts, I found myself on holiday in Barcelona where Tina’s Wildest Dreams tour was in town at the Palau Sant Jordi sports arena. I didn’t feel the need to shell out a small fortune that I didn’t have for tickets, I must admit.

Anyway, back to “On Silent Wings” which was the third single pulled from her “Wildest Dreams” album which was, rather surprisingly, her first collection of new studio material since 1989’s “Foreign Affair”. Those intervening years had been filled with a Best Of and the soundtrack to the biopic of her life. I’m guessing I wasn’t really paying much attention to this era of Tina as I couldn’t tell you how any of the songs from this album went but I was surprised to read that it was produced by Trevor Horn. The country-tinged slumber fest that is “On Silent Wings” is a world away from his iconic work with the likes of ABC, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Art Of Noise. Apparently, the studio recording of the song also features vocals by Sting which obviously we don’t get to hear in this ‘live’ clip. Money for nothing or money for old rope? You decide.

Really?! In 1996, did we really have to have this in the charts?! A pretty much identikit version of one of Cliff Richard’s most naff, sickly and insipid tunes by a bloke who would be given the middle name of ‘love rat’ by the tabloids?! I refer, of course, to Darren Day, a former Butlin’s redcoat who made a small name for himself in 1988 via talent show Opportunity Knocks (then hosted by Bob Monkhouse) before carving out a bigger career on London’s West End theatre circuit. His appearance on TOTP though arose from his turn as the star of the touring stage version of the 1963 film Summer Holiday. I’m guessing there was a soundtrack album to go with the show and so the titular track was released as a single. I can’t quite work out who would have wanted to shell out hard cash to purchase this though. Someone who had been to the show and wanted a souvenir of it? Wouldn’t a tour programme have sufficed?

Day does a passable impression of Cliff in his performance of “Summer Holiday” but I don’t think the presence of the songwriters (Bruce Welch and Brian Bennett of The Shadows) on stage with him is as a big a scoop as Nicky Campbell tries to make out in his intro. Day looks like someone who you would be happy to take home to meet your parents here, in total contrast to the image he would go on to cultivate. In the 90s alone, he was engaged to Ana Friel, Tracy Shaw and Isla Fisher. Into the 2000s, he was in a relationship with Hear’say singer Suzanne Shaw (he seemed to have a thing for women with that surname) with whom he had a child and they would also work together in a relaunch of the Summer Holiday show. The last entry in his filmography on Wikipedia came back in 2018 with a minor role in The Krays: Dead Man Walking.

Next up we have the first sighting of a group that my friend Robin once dismissed (he’s good at dismissing things) as being a “joke band”. In Robin’s defence, he wasn’t alone in his opinion. Scousers Space gave the music press a dilemma in that they were hard to categorise. ‘Wacky’, ‘Novelty’, ‘Quirky’ and, in a spectacularly failed attempt by some hack to appear pithy, ‘Queasy Listening’ were just some of the descriptors used to label the band’s sound. Lead singer Tommy Scott was especially combatant in his refusal to accept such tags:

“It is because I just do not want to stick to one genre of music. I am into everything so why can’t it all just go into one song? Why would you want to do just country or rock? Why can’t you just do what you want?”

Skillen, Paul (29 January 2021). “‘Scouse Pop: Essay On Creativity”. University of Chester.

Have that Robin! For my part, I quite liked their stuff. Yeah, it was a bit out there yet catchy enough to make daytime radio playlists. My wife liked them enough to buy their debut album “Spiders” which would furnish the band with four hit singles no less. The first of those (though actually their fourth single release) was “Female Of The Species”, its title no doubt inspired by both the Rudyard Kiping poem and the title track to 1950s James Bond rip off film Deadlier Than The Male by The Walker Brothers.:

In this performance, Scott looks just the right side of being a wide eyed, crazy person but then such an image never did Keith Moon any harm did it? Well…yeah it did I suppose seeing as his self destructive behaviour led to him dying at the age of 32 but you get my point. The really lazy option was to lump them in with all those Britpop bands (I’m sure we did in the Our Price store I was working in when it came to setting up a Britpop display) but that was…well…really lazy. They were distinctly different from the usual Britpop candidates like fellow scousers Cast* who were ploughing a much more ‘authentic’, 60s influenced guitar sound.

*I should point out that I did also like Cast to be fair

The “Spiders” album peaked at No 5 whilst 1998’s follow up “Tin Planet” went Top 3 but it seemed as if, once the 90s were over, so were Space’s commercial fortunes. A third album’s release was constantly delayed leading to the band leaving their record label whilst line up changes meant that they pulled their own legs off in 2005 by breaking up the band. A reunion in 2011 has seen them release a further four albums (including that ever delayed third one “Love You More Than Football”) and they still tour to this day proving that there is still space for Space even three decades later.

Due to its success and ubiquity, we would all be forgiven for thinking that “Three Lions (It’s Coming Home)” by Baddiel & Skinner / Lightning Seeds was the official song of the Euro 96 football championships. It wasn’t however – that particular ‘honour’ fell to Simply Red who gave the world this woeful own goal of a song “We’re In This Together”. Apparently this was the last track on their 1995 album “Life” and ‘last’ is how previous act Space might have described it in their Scouse vernacular because it was and remains a terrible track. Awful. Just no good. It hasn’t even got any thing to do with football as far as I can tell judging by the lyrics in which Hucknall wails about “the train of universal feeling” and his eyes being “open just like the ocean”. Utter drivel.

The track was performed at the opening and closing ceremonies of the tournament but I’m guessing hardly anyone remembers it despite that exposure. Of all the plethora of football songs that littered the charts around this time (and there were a lot most of which were indescribably terrible), I think this is the worst. I listened the other day to an interview with the comedian Joe Pasquale (stay with me) and he recounted the tale of an early gig in Wales when he was on the end of what he described as the worst heckle in the world. A member of the audience who was on crutches threw them at Joe and then slumped to the floor shouting something in Welsh at him as he fell. Pasquale picked up the crutches and left the stage at which point a guy met him round the side and said could he have his mate’s crutches back. When Joe asked him what his mate had shouted at him, he replied “You don’t want to know”. Pasquale insisted and was told that he’d shouted “I’d rather fall over than listen to this shit!” and he was true to his word. This is exactly how I feel about Simply Red’s “We’re In This Together”.

From a dodgy tune to a tune by Dodgy now as the “Staying Out For The Summer” hitmakers return with “In A Room”, lead single from their third studio album “Free Peace Sweet” (see what they did there?). I think this track gets overshadowed rather by subsequent single “Good Enough” which is surely their best known hit (apparently one of the most played tracks on British radio in the last 25 years) but it’s actually a pretty decent song in its own right. Angular guitars allied with some breezy drumming courtesy of Matthew Priest and a strident if not completely obvious hook would give them their then biggest hit when it debuted at No 12. Just a few short weeks later though would come that ever present hit making Dodgy good enough for daytime radio playlists everywhere and consigning “In A Room” to also-ran status. Shame.

By 1996, it was four years since Shakespeares Sister had topped the charts for eight weeks with their mammoth hit “Stay” but it felt more like forty. The pop world had not so much moved on as relocated to the other side of the planet and Siobhan Fahey was struggling to find her way back to it. I say Siobhan Fahey as Marcella Detroit had long since been jettisoned from the band rather publicly via an acceptance speech by the former’s publisher at the 1993 Ivor Novello Awards ceremony. After dealing with some personal issues (not least her divorce from Eurythmics Dave Stewart), the Shakespeares Sister project was relaunched with the single “I Can Drive”. Much less ‘pop’ than their previous stuff, it has a definite glam rock bent to it with Siobhan’s much maligned vocals and delivery making her look and sound like she’s auditioning for a part in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. The song itself has shades of “All The Young Dudes” to it but the verses sound just like those of this hit for OMD that was released just a couple of months after this TOTP aired. Who copied who I wonder?

“I Can Drive” didn’t provide the jump leads to restart Shakespeare Sister’s career that Siobhan must have been hoping for when it stalled at No 30. Relations between her label London Records deteriorated to the point that they refused to release third album “#3” and a parting of the ways became inevitable. The album was finally released in 2004 on Fahey’s own website and a reunion with Marcella Detroit in 2019 saw the duo release a new single and embark upon a tour together.

And so we arrive at the record that would become the biggest selling single of 1996 in the UK. Although the Fugees had already had a Top 40 hit earlier in the year with “Fu-Gee-La”, I don’t think I’d even noticed it as it debuted and exited our charts in just three weeks back in April. Fast forward a couple of months and they went supernova with their cover of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song” which they retitled as “Killing Me Softly”. If I remember correctly, this was around the time that record companies started to allow new singles to be made available in the shops to buy on the Sunday of the week of release as opposed to the traditional Monday. I guess they realised that with stores now routinely opening on both weekend days after the Sunday Trading Act of 1994, there was some logic in stimulating more sales of their products by having them on the shelves for an extra day. I was working in the Our Price store in Stockport on the Sunday that “Killing Me Softly” came out and all I remember doing is selling copy after copy of it from opening to closing time. I couldn’t refill the shelves quick enough (Stockport was a two floor store and I think there was only two of us in that day; I was downstairs where the singles were). It was absolutely relentless.

Why did it capture the nation’s hearts so? Well, it was a bloody good cover version with the hip-hop slant the band put on it coming up trumps alongside some unusual hooks such as the synth sitar sound that kickstarts the track and Wyclef Jean’s “One time, two times” interjected chants. Even so, did that explain its stratospheric sales? It was No 1 just about everywhere and the best selling single of the year not just here but in Germany, Holland, Iceland and Belgium as well. In the UK, it spent nine consecutive weeks at either No 1 or No 2 and 15 weeks inside the Top 40. Its sales were still going strong when the band released follow up “Ready Or Not” causing their record label Columbia to withdraw it from sale to clear the path for its successor. Maybe it was something to do with the amount that radio got behind the track. It broke the record at the time for the most radio plays in a week in the UK. Whatever the reasons, it made the Fugees superstars for a while and led to successful solo careers for all three members Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel.

After blowing smoke up their collective arses for most of this review, I have to say that the performance here is actually quite annoying mainly due to Wyclef Jean who insists on shouting about being on Top of the Pops and bellowing “Yo!” and “Pow!” over and over. Makes you wish he was “Gone till November”.

The play out video is “The Changing Man” by Paul Weller. Why were we seeing the video for a hit from 12 months previous? It was to trail the fact that Weller would be doing two tracks live on the show next week that Nicky Campbell referred to. It was a feature designed to promote the new Friday night slot that the show was shifting to over the Summer due to the Euro 96 football tournament. It would prove to be a short lived phenomenon with only the reactivated Sex Pistols going on to perform two songs on the show later in the month. As I’ll have already reviewed “The Changing Man” in the 1995 TOTP repeats, I won’t delay myself here any further.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Louise	Naked	Nope
2	Robert Miles	Fable	Negative
3	Tina Turner	On Silent Wings	Nah
4	Darren Day	Summer Holiday	As if
5	Space	Female Of The Species	No but my wife had their Spiders album
6	Simply Red	We’re In This Together	God no!
7	Dodgy	In A Room	No but my wife had the Free Peace Sweet album
8	Shakespeares Sister	I Can Drive	No
9	Fugees	Killing Me Softly	No but my wife had The Score album it came from
10	Paul Weller	The Changing Man	No but I had the Stanley Road album with it on

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/m0022v3t/top-of-the-pops-06061996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 30 MAY 1996

Posted on September 4, 2024 by 80stastic

Those sneaky BBC4 schedulers have done me dirty by suddenly announcing with a day’s notice that the 1996 TOTP repeats are back. I thought I had at least another week to knock out this last remaining episode for review before they’d start again! Serves me right for dragging my feet I guess. Sadly, as well as being my favourite word, procrastination is also my middle name.

Before I crack on with this particular show, I should address the fact that we’ve missed one. The 23rd May episode was not repeated with the general consensus being that it was for reasons of sensitivity. One of the artists featured was the actor John Alford who is best known for his roles in Grange Hill and London’s Burning. Alford was giving this soap star turned pop star malarkey a go – well, it had worked for loads of others before him including another ex Grange Hill pupil in Sean Maguire who, by massive coincidence, was also on the same show. Alford managed three UK chart hits in 1996 (all cover versions obviously) but subsequently disappeared after his only album tanked when peaking at No 171. In later years he has had several run ins with the law and is currently awaiting trial for alleged sex offences involving a girl aged under 16 hence the decision not to air the show he featured on presumably. I’ve had a look at the rest of the running order for that particular episode and there is little chance of FOMO raising its head in my personal opinion. In addition to the aforementioned Alford and Maguire, most of the other hits on that week we’d already seen before including those by Robert Miles, Black Grape, Tony Rich Project, Gina G and, unbelievably, Mark Morrison (again!). We did miss out on SWV and Dodgy but I can live with that.

Tonight’s hosts are funny men Jack Dee and the late Jeremy Hardy who do the whole show as if they were BBC presenters from the 50s which is fairly amusing for most of the time. We open with, I read to my astonishment when researching them, the best-selling boy band of all time!! What?! The Backstreet Boys?! That’s what Wikipedia tells me, yes. It also says that they are the first group since Led Zeppelin to have their first ten albums reach the Top 10 on the US charts. OK, so there are a couple of things to unpack here before we go any further. Firstly, the Backstreet Boys have made ten albums?! Surely not! I’m checking their discography. Wait there…

…they have! Although, one of them is a Christmas album and didn’t make the Top 10 in America. Maybe that claim included Greatest Hits compilations? Secondly, the biggest selling boy band of all time? What about New Kids On The Block or Take That or One Direction? Or even one of those K-pop groups? And what criteria are we using to define boy band? Were The Beatles* a boy band or The Jackson 5? If they qualify the. Surely they outsold Backstreet Boys?

*Obviously they weren’t but I’m playing Devil’s Advocate here

Whatever the truth behind the claim, their sales certainly didn’t start out like that. Not in the UK anyway. Their first two singles releases failed to make the Top 40 over here (though both were subsequently rereleased and became hits). Somehow the UK were initially impervious to the five piece’s charms but we finally caved when third single “Get Down (You’re The One For Me)” made it to No 14. Quite why though remains a mystery to me as it’s awful, useless, just no good. Based around that annoying swing beat riff that was prevalent about a year before and used on hits by the likes of MN8 and Montell Jordan with hackneyed, pseudo sexual lyrics, it truly stank the place out. They weren’t even that good looking were they? Maybe the pretty boy one with blonde hair but the rest? What did I know though. Their next thirteen singles went Top 10 in the UK including a No 1, two No 2s and four No 3s. It seemed that we really were getting down with the Backstreet Boys and they were indeed the ones for us.

From a boy band to a collaboration that was rather more out of left field albeit that one of the collaborators was about to become so successful that a crossover into the mainstream would be inevitable. Jamiroquai were an established chart act by this point with two hit albums and a readily identifiable sound to their name. They also had Jay Kay as their frontman who was providing the gossip columns with material as he embraced the pop star lifestyle. In 1996, their third album “Travelling Without Moving” was released and would go on to sell eight million copies worldwide, four times more than the sales of their first two combined. It also generated their three highest charting singles to date in “Virtual Insanity” (No 3), “Cosmic Girl” (No 6) and “Alright” (No 6). Before all of those though came “Do U Know Where You’re Coming From”. This was a joint project with jungle pioneer M–Beat and you might be forgiven for thinking that this was a revamp of the similarly titled Diana Ross hit “Theme From Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To)” given that M-Beat’s last hit had been a cover of another female soul singer – Anita Baker’s “Sweet Love”. It wasn’t (thank God!). What it was though, to my ears, was a track that was trying to tick too many musical boxes but ended up being a confused, mess of a song. I think there might be a decent tune in there somewhere but all those shuffling, jungle breakbeats just kept fracturing any cohesiveness it might have had.

The single did get to No 12 and was included as an extra track on “Travelling Without Moving” (albeit with a very slight title change). M-Beat (aka Marlon Hart) would not have any further UK chart hits though he did produce remixes for Soul II Soul and Roy Davis Jr. who would have minor hits with them in the late 90s. Hart himself would become homeless not long after this TOTP appearance before taking IT consultancy positions for McLaren F1 and Lloyds Bank and finally returning to music in 2022. So he did know where he was coming from after all!

Well, this is shaping up to be a show of extremes. We move from a jungle/acid jazz-funk mash up to some hard rock courtesy of Metallica. A Top 10 hit pretty much everywhere, “Until It Sleeps” was the lead single from new album “Load”. It’ll come as no surprise to anyone who’s taken even a passing interest in my blog previously that I‘m not the biggest Metallica fan. I can acknowledge the power of “Enter Sandman” but that’s the extent of my appreciation. Consequently, this track didn’t and doesn’t make my musical radar bleep.

Its video is more interesting to me though. It looks like the set of a horror movie or perhaps the darker moments of Stranger Things most of the time but its imagery is apparently inspired by the work of 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, specifically The Garden Of Earthly Delights, Haywain and Ecce Homo. I can’t say that I’m that familiar with Bosch’s work but here’s @TOTPFacts with the visual evidence:

The video for “Until It Sleeps” was inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. This bit has a basic similarity to “Ecce Homo”, for example. #TOTP pic.twitter.com/ySF60N1qPw
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 9, 2024

And this human-eating monster is a nod to “The Garden of Earthly Delights” #TOTP pic.twitter.com/gW5BapAz4t
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 9, 2024

From high art to a rancid fart of a song. That dreadful moment of the 90s is upon us – it’s time for Peter Andre and “Mysterious Girl”. Brace yourselves everyone, we’re going in! It seems an odd concept to grasp now but there was a time when Peter Andre wasn’t a part of our lives, always there in the cultural milieu, grifting away at his latest cash grab and attempting to give himself a sheen of relevance and currency. So embedded is he in our society that in the 2007 British comedy film Grow Your Own starring Eddie Marsan, at one point in its story about locals on an allotment reacting angrily when some refugees are given plots on it, one character announces “You know who I blame? Peter Andre!”.

Back in 1996 though, he was only known for one minor hit single in the UK called…erm… “Only One”. A concerted media campaign targeting teen magazines though raised his profile enough to put out a follow up. “Mysterious Girl” was actually a rerelease having peaked at No 53 in September 1995. We all dodged a bullet then but when the gun was reloaded for a second time we were hit right between the eyes with both barrels. This horrible, cod reggae, Inner Circle rip off would spend eleven consecutive weeks in the UK Top 10 mainly skittering between Nos 2 and 3. Thankfully it never made it to the top of the charts though even that silver lining would become a black cloud burst in 2004 when it got to No 1 after a concerted campaign by DJ Chris Moyles. Gee, thanks Chris. I was working in the Our Price store in Stockport in 1996 and we sold this single over and over and over again. When we’d finished doing that, we sold it some more and every time I did, the questions running around my head were “What am I doing with my life? How did it come to this?”. I’d had similar thoughts when I’d been the stand in Father Christmas in Debenhams seven years earlier whilst sat in Santa’s Grotto surrounded by soft toy reindeers and nodding penguins. Peter Andre – so much to blame him for.

It’s an Antipodean double whammy as we go from an Australian dope in Peter Andre to a song called “Australia” that’s pretty dope – I believe that can also mean ‘good’ in the modern vernacular*.

*God, I sound like the two stuffy characters Jeremy Hardy and Jack Dee are using to present the show!

Occupants of the revived ‘album’ slot are Manic Street Preachers and a track from their “Everything Must Go” album that would also turn out to be the fourth and final single released from it when it made No 7 in the charts in the December of 1996. The album had only been out for ten days at this point and with it going straight in at No 2, a place on the BBC’s flagship music show was not only deemed appropriate but also assured and deserved. Interestingly, the band shunned the chance to preview their next single, the album’s title track, that would hit the shops in July and instead opted for this song that was written as a metaphor for getting as far away from the UK and its tabloid press as possible in the wake of band member Richey Edwards’ disappearance the previous year. Also of note in this performance is the nerdy look of James Dean Bradfield including spectacles and a neat and tidy haircut. Quite the change from those early “Generation Terrorists” era TOTP appearances.

I’d seen the Manics support Oasis* at their Maine Road gigs a month before this show aired and would see them headline their own show about a year afterwards. I also had the album – I was becoming quite the fan though what I was not a fan of was the cardboard sleeves they insisted releasing their singles in at this time. Working in a record shop as I was, they were a pain to display.

*No, I didn’t get involved in the frankly shameful Oasis reunion gigs tickets fiasco. I saw them when they were at the top of their game and relevant – I have no desire to revisit the money grabbing so and so’s they seem to have become nearly thirty years later.

If it’s time for Celine Dion then it must also be time for a big, heart string pulling ballad and we do indeed get both these outcomes with “Because You Loved Me”. Released as the second single from her “Falling Into You” album, it was also included on the soundtrack to the film Up Close And Personal starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. I’ve never seen this film before but reading the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, I don’t think I’ll be seeking it out for a viewing anytime soon. A rather stodgy sounding news drama/romance that bore no resemblance to the book on which it was based? No, I’m alright thanks. Pfeiffer was making a habit though of starring in films that had a huge big hit single featured in them. Just a few months before, Coolio had conquered the globe with his Stevie Wonder channeling “Gangsta Paradise” from Dangerous Minds.

As for “Because You Loved Me”, it’s all pretty laboured and predictable to my ears but was clearly aural nectar for lots of other people’s lugholes as it went to No 1 in America and won a Grammy and was nominated for an Academy Award. And to think we’re still 18 months away from her even bigger film ballad “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic. Gulp!

Having finally scored themselves a massive hit by rereleasing their debut single “Lifted”, the Lighthouse Family have shone their spotlight onto another earlier release to secure themselves a follow up. As well, as being the title track of their debut album, “Ocean Drive” was also their second ever single and their first ever Top 40 hit when it peaked at No 34 in October ‘95. Could the old rerelease strategy work for a second time? Of course it could and not even the fact that “Ocean Drive” was almost identical to “Lifted” would stop people buying it for a second time. Harsh? Possibly but almost certainly accurate. Yes, this was more of that radio friendly, lilting groove, smooth vocal, easy listening soul/pop that they made their name on. And why not? You didn’t have to buy or listen to it if it didn’t float your boat did you eh?

So where is Ocean Drive? Well, there’s a mile long road in the South Beach neighbourhood of Miami Beach, Florida which bears that name and is famous for its Art Deco hotels, restaurants and bars. So, that must be what inspired the song then? Well, according to Wikipedia, it wasn’t as it’s about a road in the UK. A quick search of the internet reveals that there is indeed an Ocean Drive and it’s not that far from me in Hull being located in a village in the East Riding of Yorkshire called Newport. There might not be any Art Deco buildings there but google maps shows me that there is a pub called the Crown & Anchor, one called The Jolly Sailor Inn and a fish and chip shop called Johnny Haddocks so Ocean Drive kind of fits the nautical theme. Mr and Mrs Lighthouse (as name checked by Dee and Hardy in their intro) would fit right in.

After being on the show as an ‘exclusive’ two weeks prior, Bryan Adams is back again as his single “The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You” has blasted into the charts at No 6. There’s something different about this second performance though that I can’t quite put my finger on…oh yeah, that’s it…Bry’s missing a member from his band. Where’s the guitarist that was standing on his left from the last time? In an attempt to fill the space, they’ve moved the keyboard player to the front of the stage but he’s no substitute for standing back to back with Bryan and rocking out like his guitarist did. Also, the drummer looks very different. On the first appearance the guy behind the kit had huge Afro hair but that’s all gone this time around. Is it the same guy? Was he just wearing a wig the first time? If it was the latter, he clearly decided to ignore the advice of the title of the track he was drumming on and ditched it.

Listening back to this, is it me or is there a slight whiff of U2 about some of the guitar work as it comes out of the chorus? No? Nothing like The Edge? How about Bry’s bass player then? If you squint your eyes does he look a bit like Adam Clayton? OK, you got me. All this talk of drummers, Adam Clayton and U2 is me trying to tee up the show’s play out tune but more of that later. First, we have a new No 1 to deal with…

And so after weeks of anticipation and a flurry of football songs in the charts that weren’t that football song, it’s finally here and it’s gone straight in at No 1. As with Peter Andre, it’s hard to recall now that there was a time when “Three Lions (It’s Coming Home)” wasn’t a part of the national psyche, wasn’t trotted out every time England played in a football tournament and wasn’t sung on the terraces. A time when the subject of a song about the England football team would instantly bring to mind New Order’s “World In Motion” or possibly “Back Home” from 1970. All of this was trampled into the turf by Baddiel, Skinner and the Lightning Seeds in 1996. Now bearing in mind that Euro 96 hadn’t even started by this point, the promotion surrounding the release of the single must have been pretty extensive to have propelled it straight to the top of the charts on week one. Despite working in a record shop at the time, I can’t recall if there was a massive buzz around the song before a ball had been kicked in anger but we must have sold loads of it in that first week. After debuting at the very top of the charts, the following month saw it mostly at No 2 with a solitary week at No 4 before returning to No 1, with sales no doubt fuelled by the England team progressing to the semi-finals. We all know what fate befell them there sadly. That month gap between the two occasions that “Three Lions” was the UK’s best selling single saw “Killing Me Softly” by Fugees at No 1. It dropped a place as Euro 96 came to its climax and then leapfrogged back to the top for another week after it had finished. This meant that these two singles spent seven weeks swapping the No 1 position between them. There’s another less talked about twist of trivia that bonded the two together acts together and it really is quite bizarre – the single that the Lightning Seeds released before “Three Lions” was a song called “Ready Or Not” whilst the single that the Fugees released after “Killing Me Softly” was a song called…yep…”Ready Or Not”. What are the chances eh?

Quite why the FA approached Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds to write a song for the tournament I’m not sure but Broudie’s decision to get Frank Skinner and David Baddiel involved made perfect sense (ooh, see what I did there? ‘Perfect’ and ‘Sense’? Oh never mind!) what with the duo having recently finished the third and final series of Fantasy Football League for the BBC. Both comedians were by now also synonymous with the beautiful game with Skinner professing his love of WBA and Baddiel a fellow fan of my beloved Chelsea.

Like everybody in the country it seemed, I got caught up with the feel good factor that the football was bringing and “Three Lions” seemed a perfectly good soundtrack to that period. However, its repeated appearance at every football tournament since has made it almost unlistenable now. They really did flog it to death. An updated version with changed lyrics went to No 1 two years later for the 1998 World Cup and it topped the charts again as England reached the semi final in 2018 in the same competition. As far as I can tell, the only tournaments that England qualified for since the song was originally released when “Three Lions” hasn’t featured in the charts were the 2000 and 2004 Euros. My research tells me that Fat Les’s “Jerusalem” and a version of “All Together Now” were the predominant England songs for those years respectively.

The play out track is “Theme From Mission: Impossible” by Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jnr. Yes, here’s the reason for my cack handed referencing of the two members of the aforementioned U2 earlier in the post. The very first movie of the Mission: Impossible franchise was released this year and nearly 30 years later it is still going, still with Tom Cruise as the star and with the most recent outing Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (the seventh film so far) having been released in 2023. I caught the first film at the cinema in Stockport as the Our Price store there where I was working had an arrangement with the local cinema to supply them with CDs to play in the foyer. It might even have been a special preview screening that I attended as I seem to remember coming out with a press pack of still photos etc. I think I enjoyed it but I’m not sure that I’ve watched any of the sequels in their entirety. I recall watching the original 60s TV series as a small child and being confused by Leonard Nimoy being in it but not being dressed as Mr Spock!

I’m guessing that Adam and Larry were approached to record the movie’s theme tune off the back of U2’s wildly successful contribution to the previous year’s Batman Forever film. They don’t muck about with it too much though they’ve clearly danced it up a bit and explore that further with a number of remixes on the 12” and extra tracks on the CD single. At the end of the day though, it all pales in comparison to the iconic original which kind of negates the whole thing. Competing with its composer Lalo Schifrin really did prove to be an impossible mission.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Backstreet Boys	Get Down (You’re The One For Me)	As if
2	Jamiroquai / M-Beat	Do U Know Where You’re Coming From	No
3	Metallica	Until It Sleeps	I did not
4	Peter Andre	Mysterious Girl	Sir! You insult me with your impertinence!
5	Manic Street Preachers	Australia	No but I had the album
6	Celine Dion	Because You Loved Me	Never
7	Lighthouse Family	Ocean Drive	Nope
8	Bryan Adams	The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You	Negative
9	Baddiel, Skinner and the Lightning Seeds	Three Lions (It’s Coming Home)	Nah
10	Theme From Mission: Impossible”	Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jnr	Another 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/m0021s8z/top-of-the-pops-30051996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 16 MAY 1996

Posted on August 28, 2024 by 80stastic

The BBC4 TOTP repeats schedule is all over the place at the moment with some rather large gaps punctuating the 1996 episodes. As such, I’ve taken my eye off the ball somewhat but have realised that there are two shows from that year that I haven’t reviewed yet so I’m officially back to it. We pick it up in the middle of May and find footballer Ian Wright in the ‘golden mic’ slot. I think this may have been his very first shot at TV presenting which kicked off a lengthy and varied media career including game shows, panel shows, his own talk show and, of course, football punditry. Back in 1996, though coming to the end of his career, Wright was still an Arsenal player and over a year away from becoming their all time top goal scorer at the time. However, the 1995-96 season which had just finished had not been a happy one for Wrighty. He didn’t have a good relationship with dour Scottish manager Bruce Rioch leading to him putting in a transfer request (albeit that was later withdrawn). I’m guessing that Rioch wouldn’t have automatically given his blessing to one of his players hosting a pop music show (just as well that the football season had just finished) but then Wright had a natural affinity with the show having been a pop star himself (nearly) in 1993 when his single “Do The Right Thing” got to No 43 in the charts. It wasn’t totally terrible in fairness…

Anyway, TOTP executive producer Ric Blaxill showed considerable foresight giving Wright his break in TV presenting given what he went on to do in his post football media activities. I’m expecting a lot of bubbly enthusiasm from him. Let’s see how he does…

We start, confusingly though, with another footballer (sort of). Eric Cantona had risen Lazarus like from his ‘king fu’ take down of a Crystal Palace fan in 1995 and the eight month ban that followed to drive Manchester United to a second double in three seasons having just scored the winner in the FA Cup final just five days before this TOTP aired. His star would never shine so bright as it did at the culmination of the 1995/96 season. To mark his remarkable comeback from potential football oblivion, there was a song in the charts honouring his achievements. In the ‘direct to camera’ section at the very start of the show, the producers had hired a Cantona lookalike to stand in a United shirt as a camera spins around him and a football commentary plays in the background. I’m not sure it works on reflection especially as the guy doesn’t look that much like Cantona and has an expression on his face that says “Ah what you gonna do? They’re paying me for this!”

Enough of football though, to the music and we start with “There’s Nothing I Won’t Do” by JX. I really haven’t much to say about this apart from I don’t remember it obviously. Their previous single- “Son Of A Gun” – I could confidently have named unprompted, probably because it was a hit twice (No 13 in 1994 and No 6 the following year) but this one? My memory banks are emptier than Liz Truss’s head. And yet, listening back to it some 28 years later, it does sound familiar but I’m putting that down to the generic nature of its Eurodance sound. As my Dad used to say to me back in the 80s, “it all sounds the same”. With awful inevitability, I know say the exact same words to my 14 year old son when he plays his music in the car.

Not remembering one Eurodance hit out of a whole ocean of them in the mid 90s is one thing but not being able to bring to mind a whole artist? That’s another level but that’s what has happened with this next artist. Who is/was Horace Brown?! I would have thought that a name like Horace would have made him more memorable to me; I mean, how many Horaces are there in the history of music? There’s Horace Andy the Jamaican roots reggae singer songwriter and…erm…Horace Wimp from the ELO song? Anyway, it turns out that this Horace was an American R&B singer who had two middling sized hits in the UK whilst signed to the Motown label. This one – “One For The Money” – was the bigger of the two when it peaked at No 12.

Taking lyrical inspiration from “Blue Suede Shoes”, it sounds a bit like… well…Another Level (to use that phrase again). Whilst those 90s soul boys were all about the sass and sang about whipped cream and licking things (eeew!), Horace Brown was less salacious and more tedious singing the rather childish line “Three to get the honeys”. That’s not even the worst lyric of “One For The Money” though. At one point he sings about “living in an eight room mansion on the hill”. An eight room mansion?! Surely a mansion has more rooms than that?! I live in a mid terrace house in Hull and we have… let me see…nine! OK, we had a loft conversion done but still. Maybe he meant eight bedrooms? Details Horace, details!

It’s yet another football song now that still (still!) isn’t that one nor is it even the Eric Cantona single but instead comes courtesy of Liverpool FC & Boot Room Boyz whose “Pass & Move (It’s The Liverpool Groove)” is this week’s highest new entry.

Wrighty gives it the big ‘un about those now infamous cream suits that the Liverpool team wore as they strolled about the Wembley turf before kick off sarcastically calling them “blinding” but Ian himself hasn’t always got his fashion choices correct. Who could forget his bouncy castle puffer coat?

If this was old twitter there would be an account called Ian Wright’s big coat pic.twitter.com/NgD4GQq90f
— Cake 🍰 (@rigby113) December 3, 2023

Now here’s a mystery. Quite why did Black Grape feel the need to release this standalone single called “Fat Neck”? The usual answer would be to fill the gap between albums. There were two years and three months between the band’s debut “It’s Great When You’re Straight…Yeah” and disappointing follow up “Stupid Stupid Stupid” so a new track was an established record company strategy of maintaining their artist’s profile. Mystery solved. Except…a month after “Fat Neck” another Black Grape single came out and yes, it was another football song – “England’s Irie” for the Euro 96 tournament. Admittedly, it was a collaboration with Joe Strummer and Keith Allen but surely everyone knew it as a Black Grape song which would have done the job of keeping the band’s name in lights without the need for “Fat Neck” as well?

Added to this was the fact that back in March, they’d released the third and final single from “It’s Great When You’re Straight…Yeah” in the form of “Kelly’s Heroes” meaning that Shaun and co had three singles out in four months. Both “Fat Neck” and “England’s Irie” were released on the same label (Radioactive) and even had sequential catalogue numbers so this was clearly deliberate and not a scheduling cock up between two different labels’ calendars. So the question remains why the need for “Fat Neck” especially when it wasn’t much of a song but rather Black Grape-by-numbers. In the label’s defence both singles ended up going Top 10 so maybe they knew what they were doing after all.

As Ian informs us in his next intro, it was the Eurovision Song Contest two days after this TOTP aired so it must be time for a plug for the UK entrant Gina G with “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit”. I’ve lost count the amount of times Gina has been on the show now but it’s a lot. She secured herself one further place in the running order* by going to No 1 in the charts the week following Eurovision despite finishing an underwhelming 8th on the big night.

*BBC4 didn’t show that particular TOTP denying us one last Gina performance of her most famous tune but we’ll go into that in further detail in the next post.

Quite why Gina’s undeniably catchy song failed to garner more votes remains unsolved. It was a Top 10 hit all round Europe including Norway where the contest took place. It was suggested that perhaps Gina wasn’t actually up to doing the live singing on the big night with her credentials for doing so seeming to rest on the fact that she was the songwriter’s then girlfriend rather than her vocal talents. I’m not sure if that’s correct or fair though as she had done some singing for an Australian dance group called Bass Culture in the early 90s with a single called “Love The Life” getting a legitimate commercial release. Whatever the reasons behind her lacklustre points total, it didn’t matter when it came to being a pop star as, in addition to bagging the first UK No 1 single to originate from Eurovision since Nicole’s “A Little Peace” in 1982, she would go on to achieve four further Top 40 hits including two Top Tenners. She was a bona fide pop star for a while and how many of us can say that?

I said in a previous post that one of Gina’s backing dancers reminded me of Samantha Janus though it wasn’t actually her. This time, I’m thinking she looks like another EastEnders actress but this time Kim Medcalf who played Sam Mitchell (the second version) on two separate occasions over a period of 20 years. Again, I’m fairly sure it’s not her in reality. These are hardly ‘doof doof’ revelations are they?

Surely with deliberate planning on behalf of the producers, we now have the rarely seen/heard “Ooh Aah” segue as we switch from Gina G to 1300 Drums featuring Unjustified Ancients of M.U. and their hit “Ooh! Aah! Cantona”. Yes, it’s another football song but still not that one! What’s going on here?! Anyway, I’m guessing that this track was released to cash in on the Cantona effect. Eric was possibly at the peak of both his powers and profile at this time having successfully resurrected his image following the ‘kung fu’ incident the previous year which led to a ban of eight months from playing football. As mentioned earlier, five days before this TOTP was broadcast, he’d scored the only goal of the FA Cup final to secure Manchester United the ‘double double’. He’d almost single-handedly hunted down a Newcastle United side that held a twelve points lead over United at one point. Within a year, he would be gone, retiring at the age of 30. Following his retirement, he had both the phrase “Ooh Aah Cantona” with which his adoring fans serenaded him and his name and number from his shirt (Cantona 7) patented as commercial trademarks. If that was to prevent further records by the likes of 1300 Drums being made without his approval, then I raise my collar to you sir for this hit was missing an ‘s’. It’s just a generic Italo House backing to what I always thought was a fairly moronic chant. What a bunch of chancers! The Unjustified Ancients of M.U. were nothing to do with The KLF’s Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond as far as I’m aware but just a pathetic play on words.

The performance here is bizarre but then I’m not sure what on earth any choreographer could have done with this. Presumably, the Can Can dancers are to reflect Eric being French but it’s all a bit tenuous. Then they wheel out the aforementioned Cantona lookalike who does pretty much nothing other than stand there with a cup which, by the way, looks about as much like the FA Cup as he did like Cantona. If he does look like a footballer at all it’s Chelsea legend Dan Petrescu who himself is a dead ringer for X Files star David Duchovny. There’s a couple of guys in Cantona masks which I’m guessing were modelled on his Spitting Image puppet. In 2009, said masks were used to superb effect in the Ken Loach film Looking For Eric which is a great watch if you get the chance. Cantona himself would, of course, embark on his own career in film after leaving football appearing in multiple movies (including the Loach one as himself) and only this morning I saw him on my TV as the face of the latest William Hill bookmakers advertisement. The world has not forgotten Cantona, and you can bet on that.

The TOTP producers have missed a trick with this next artist. Judging by the cutaway from Ian Wright’s intro, this is just a repeat of the studio performance from the other week of Smashing Pumpkins doing “Tonight, Tonight”.

So what you may ask? Well, they could have shown the promo film for the single which won six awards at the 1996 MTV Music Video Awards including Video of the Year. Stylistically based on the 1902 Georges Méliès silent film A Trip To The Moon, it featured primitive special effects, backdrops and puppets which made for a piece that was at turns both charming and disturbing. The plot concerns a male and female protagonist couple making a journey to the moon on a zeppelin. On arrival, they jump off the zeppelin to fall to their destination with their descent slowed by their umbrellas. Once on the moon, creepy looking hostile aliens take them prisoner before our heroes fight them off again with their multi purpose umbrellas. Escaping in a rocket, they then encounter a sea-god type who fortunately is friendly and puts on a show for their entertainment featuring mermaids and starfish before returning them to the surface in a bubble. Lovely stuff as Alan Partridge might say. Stylus Magazine put it at No 40 in their 2006 list of the top 100 music videos of all time. I think the video might have lived in the memory longer for the TOTP audience longer than the straight studio performance they’d already seen before .

Right, let’s have a little check in with how Ian Wright is doing as host. Well, he’s been competent I would say in not fluffing his lines and has kept his Tigger-ish over exuberance in check. However, he does seem overly intent on name checking his then Arsenal teammates. We had ‘Ooh Aah’ Ray Parlour during the Gina G link and now he manages to squeeze in Tony Adams for the next artist on account of the fact that it is his namesake Bryan Adams. Somewhat surprisingly, “The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You” was his first single released from a studio album since “Do I Have To Say The Words?” in July 1992. I say ‘somewhat surprisingly’ as it wasn’t as if Bry hadn’t been seen in our charts since then. Quite the opposite in fact. Look at this lot:

“Please Forgive Me” – No 2 – 1993 – to promote a Best Of album
“All For Love” (with Sting and Rod Stewart) – No 2 – 1994 – Three Musketeers soundtrack
“Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?” – No 4 – 1995 – Don Juan DeMarco soundtrack

On top of that, he appeared on TOTP alongside Bonnie Raitt for a performance of non-hit single “Rock Steady”. It was like he’d hardly been away and yet here he was back for more with the lead single from a new album called “18 Til I Die. I couldn’t be doing with any of those stop gap, turgid ballads listed above but “The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You” was more of a return to form. He was back with some bluesy rock swagger and a memorable hook in the chorus (that tiny bit of guitar that pre-empts the words “is you” makes it). Sure, the lyrics are a bit hackneyed and the title undeniably cheesy but, for me, this was his best hit in quite some time.

We’re into the home straight now as Wrighty gets to grips with the Top 10 countdown. He goes for a straightforward, factual, no gags presentation until he gets to No 5 when he can’t resist taking the piss out of poor old Chris Eubank’s lisp from a few weeks back by pronouncing it as “Thethilia and Thuggth”. Before introducing George Michael at No 1 for a third week with “Fastlove”, he’s back on the footballer name drop game when he mentions his mate Paul Ince aka ‘The Guv’nor’. It’s a clumsily constructed reference with it only being made it so he can call George the guv’nor of the music business but otherwise I think he’s done an OK job as host. I didn’t know this until now but Ince has a solid link to pop music and no, it’s nothing to do with him appearing on any Manchester United singles. He is the uncle of ex The Saturdays star and now TV presenter Rochelle Humes. Well I never!

As for George Michael, I’m kind of surprised that “Fastlove” stayed at top of the charts for three weeks given that we were entering the era of weekly straight-in-at-No1s but looking at the charts, the competition wasn’t that strong at the time with the Top 3 stagnating rather with two hits that had been around for ages in “Return Of The Mack” and “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit”. Eventually, “Fastlove” couldn’t resist the push given to Gina G following the Eurovision Song Contest which aired two days after this TOTP.

As Wright closes the show with a massive Afro wig on for some reason, Bryan Adams wonders into shot from out of the studio audience wearing a Chelsea shirt! What?! Our host asks Bryan the question I want to know the answer to – “Are you a Chelsea fan?”. It turns out that he is and has been since about 1985 which is when he came to live in London. How did I never know that the Groover from Vancouver supported my beloved Chelsea?! Clearly I can’t have watched this particular TOTP when it aired originally.

The play out video is “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette. Like the aforementioned singles by Mark Morrison and Gina G, this was another hit that was enjoying an elongated time on the charts. Seven weeks inside the Top 40 was quite the run and this second outing on TOTP was due to it going back up the charts from No 25 to No 23 having spent the previous three weeks descending them.

As with the Smashing Pumpkins video I mentioned earlier, the promo for this one also won big at the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards collecting three gongs but losing out to Billy Corgan and co in the Video of the Year and Best Direction in a Video categories. One of those three wins was for Best Editing and you can see why with the illusion of there being four different Alanis Morissettes travelling in a car all done without any special effects. The different versions of herself are colour coded (red, green and yellow sweaters) to display different aspects of her personality. According to Alanis, the driver in the red beanie hat is the responsible one in control, yellow sweater with the braids is the quirky one, red sweater is a romantic risk taker and green sweater is the fun one who gets into trouble. To be honest though, I can’t see much to distinguish them from each other as they all just seem to spend the entire journey laughing, shouting, singing and throwing their arms about. Ok, red sweater (the risk taker) climbs out of the window and is nearly taken out by a bridge and the (responsible) driver tries to stop her but that seems a to be the only demonstration of their dominant character traits. There is a final ‘irony’ at the video’s end when the car runs out of petrol despite the start of the promo showing Alanis driving away from a petrol station. We don’t actually witness her filling up the tank though so maybe she just bought the coffee in her hand potentially confirming that “Ironic” really is the song that can’t stop not being ironic. That’s a little ironic, don’t you think?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	JX	There’s Nothing I Won’t Do	No
2	Horace Brown	One For The Money	Negative
3	Liverpool FC & Boot Room Boyz	Pass & Move (It’s The Liverpool Groove)	Never
4	Black Grape	Fat Neck	Nah
5	Gina G	Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit	Nah
6	1300 Drums featuring Unjustified Ancients of M.U.	Ooh! Aah! Cantona	As if
7	Smashing Pumpkins	Never Never	No but I probably should have
8	Bryan Adams	The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You	Nope
9	George Michael	Fastlove	I did not
10	Alanis Morissette	Ironic	No but I bought her 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/m0021s8x/top-of-the-pops-16051996?seriesId=unsliced