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

TOTP 29 FEB 1996

Posted on June 13, 2024 by 80stastic

1996 must have been a leap year as we’ve got a TOTP on the 29th February. The day after this show aired, Status Quo took Radio 1 to the High Court over its refusal to playlist the band’s latest single, a cover of “Fun Fun Fun” by The Beach Boys who also feature on the record. Status Quo lost their legal action with the BBC successfully claiming that the group did not fit the demographic audience the station was trying to reach. In a musical landscape dominated by Britpop and dance music, they had a point. Or did they? The album the single came from – “Don’t Stop” – went to No 2 and sold 100,000 copies so wasn’t it Radio 1’s obligation to reflect what was popular? For what it’s worth, I think they made the right decision. The album was entirely made up of cover versions including (and I’ve only just discovered this) their takes on “Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats and “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)” by Timbuk 3. I know! What on earth?! I’m almost curious enough to investigate what they sound like but not quite.

The following day, Melody Maker praised Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker for his protest at the BRIT awards two weeks earlier against Michael Jackson’s performance of “Earth Song” suggesting he should be knighted. Although Jarvis got arrested for his part in the incident (with Bob Mortimer famously attending the police station to represent him legally), I think we all know who ultimately came off better out of the episode. Pulp were probably as famous as they ever would be at that point with the controversy taking Jarvis to the front pages of the daily newspapers rather than just the music press. It hadn’t always been like that of course with the band having spent the 80s on the peripheries of indiedom before the move to Island Records and becoming bona fide chart stars. And how did they do that? Via “Perseverance” of course which incidentally is the name of the first song on the show tonight.

Yes, Terrorvision have blasted their way into the Top 5 with this, the lead single from third album “Regular Urban Survivors”, and it’s a stonking tune. Breaking the conventions of standard rock with brass parts and a vocal from Tony Wright that’s ragged and raw sounding but by no means without melody and hooks aplenty, it’s a great way to start the show and marks a welcome departure from all those dance acts and their repetitive beats. A regular reader of this blog assures me that Tony has a very nice cafe in Otley and he can often be seen behind the counter serving cups of tea and slices of Victoria sponge to the local residents or perhaps those rock fans who have gone on a pilgrimage to find one of their 90s heroes. Tony has framed pictures of his lyrics on the wall if you want to get a selfie with some rock memorabilia. Maybe he even has one that includes the infamous line in “Perseverance” about the ‘whales and dolphins’?

Ah! Here’s the dance act with repetitive beats. I knew it would only be a matter of time. Gusto were nothing to do with Chelsea right back Malo but was instead New Jersey producer Edward Greene whose hit “Disco’s Revenge” was built around a loop of a sample of a track called “Groovin’ You” by former Herbie Hancock drummer Harvey Mason. The title “Disco’s Revenge” was taken from a quote by legendary ‘Godfather of House Music’ Frankie Knuckles who described the style of music developed in his club in Detroit thus. If you’re familiar with this blog, you’ll know that, by writing the above, I’ve wandered into an area where I’ve no right in being, namely house music. I’m clearly out of my depth when discussing such matters so I’ll extricate myself quickly.

As for “Disco’s Revenge”, I’d rather have “Rocker’s Revenge and their 1982 smash hit “Walking On Sunshine”.

Whether you like her or not, the dominance of the charts by Celine Dion was in full swing by the mid 90s. With one huge No 1 to her name already in the form of “Think Twice”, she would then settle into a pattern of churning out the hits on a regular basis before exploding again with that song from the Titanic movie in 1997. Within the calendar year of 1996, she would rack up four Top 10 UK hits. No artist would have more than that. So popular was she that one Christmas around this time, the police had to be called to an Our Price store in the region (thankfully not the one where I worked) to settle a dispute between two customers who were locked in battle (literally) over the last Celine Dion CD in the shop with both refusing to let go of it! “Falling Into You” was the title track from Celine’s fourteenth studio album and saw some rather restrained vocals for once from the ‘Queen of Power Ballads’. If only those two shoppers had showed the same restraint.

Next the return of Gabrielle whom we haven’t seen on the show or in the charts for a whole two years. The curse of having your debut single go to No 1 (the only way from there is down) had afflicted Gabrielle since “Dreams” had topped the charts in 1993. Her three subsequent single releases had peaked at Nos 9, 26 and 24. However, she would spectacularly lift that hoodoo with “Give Me A Little More Time”. Just a ‘Just’ away from sharing the same title as the old Chairman Of The Board hit from the 70s (and also for Kylie in the 90s) and ‘a little’ too much to be the name of Whitesnake’s 1984 minor hit, Gabrielle’s song was actually a classy slice of soul/pop with a retro 60s feel. Perfect for daytime radio playlists, it reversed her trend of diminishing chart returns and then some by peaking at No 5.

While she’s been away, Gabrielle has had a change of image with a new hairstyle that also acts as a replacement for her trademark eye patch. She has ptosis, a condition which causes the drooping of one eyelid and has always covered it using hats, sunglasses, her hair and, of course, the eye patch. Did she ever wear it again after this point? If this wasn’t a watershed moment for the eye patch, it definitely was for Gabrielle’s career as this hit would usher in a period of sustained success. Two more mid-sized hits followed “Give Me A Little More Time” before a No 2 turned up after she joined forces with East 17 on “If You Ever”. Two more Top Tenners followed in its wake before “Rise” gave her a second No 1 some seven years after her first. She still wasn’t done as “Out Of Reach” went to No 4 on the back of its inclusion on the soundtrack to Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Next a run of three huge music legends on the bounce starting with Sting who’s beaming in to the show from that well used TOTP satellite location under Brooklyn Bridge, New York. How many times was this setting featured?! I get that the backdrop is an arresting image of the Manhattan skyline but it kind of dwarfs the artist and makes them seem incongruous. Sting’s appearance here isn’t helped by the fact that he’s doing a dance version of “Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot”. Why?! As it’s a designated dance version, there has to be a troop of backing dancers cavorting behind him but this just adds to the feeling of absurdity. Sadly I can’t find a clip of this performance on YouTube. Maybe that’s for the best.

Meanwhile, back in the studio is Tina Turner with the lead single from her latest album “Wildest Dreams”. Remarkably, this was her first studio album for seven years though it didn’t feel like Tina had been away at all thanks to a Best Of collection in 1991, her biopic film What’s Love Got To Do With It and accompanying soundtrack in 1993 and her recording of the theme tune for the James Bond flick Goldeneye in 1995. Listening to “Whatever You Want”, it sounds like it could also have been recorded for a 007 film with some heavy “Licence To Kill” vibes permeating through. Tina does her usual Tina shtick here but as with Sting before her, the backing dancers seem unnecessary. No doubt Tina and record label Parlophone would have been wanting (and perhaps expecting) a bigger hit with the track than the No 23 high it produced but I fear she may have been ever so slightly out of sync with UK chart tastes at the time.

We’d only just bid farewell to Babylon Zoo’s “Spaceman” at the top of the charts but now we were literally saying “Hallo Spaceboy” to David Bowie and the Pet Shop Boys. It seems to be generally accepted that Bowie was not at his best in the 80s. Despite the success of “Let’s Dance” (both the album and the single), pretty much all of his output that decade did not meet with the approval of the fans. However, and I’m not counting myself as a Bowie superfan but I did see him live once, I struggled with his 90s material. “Black Tie White Noise” passed me by with its lack of obvious singles, “Earthling” was never going to win me over with its exploration into the drum and bass phenomenon and then there was “Outside”. Influenced by Twin Peaks, this was a concept album that followed a narrative of a detective investigating the murder of a 14 year old girl in a fictional New Jersey town. Reviews were mixed with some labelling it as his finest work since “Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)” whilst others derided it as pretentious shit. I was probably somewhere in the middle of those two extremes of opinion but even I was definite that “Hallo Spaceboy” was a good single. How much of that is down to the involvement of the Pet Shop Boys more than Bowie I’m not sure but their influence couldn’t be denied. An almost hi-NRG backing allied to Bowie’s unique phrasing and Neil Tennant’s deadpan vocals, the decision to reference “Space Oddity” and Major Tom in the lyrics was perhaps cynical but also a clincher.

Despite looking like a vicar with a stiletto fetish, Bowie is still effortlessly cool in this performance with Neil and Chris happy to literally stand to one side to let the people see the master at work. “Hallo Spaceboy” peaked at No 12 making it Bowie’s second highest charting single as a solo artist of the whole of the 90s.

On February 13th 1996, Take That announced that they were splitting up. It’s hard to recall nearly 30 years on how much of a big deal this was especially as ten years later they came back and have stayed back for a further 18 years and counting but a big deal it was. Infamously, telephone helplines were set up by the government to support those teenage fans that were left distraught and with feelings so big that they didn’t know what to do with them. They had been together for six years or so but only three and a half of those were as chart stars. Was that a long time for a teen-oriented pop group to be around or had they called time on themselves too early? I’m pretty sure that they could have carried on for another album and a few hit singles but by that point they would have been pushing 30 which may have been at the older end of the pop star age bracket. By disappearing for 10 years, they probably gave people the chance to miss them before picking up where they left off and giving themselves a second career. Did they feel the pressure of the presence of Boyzone in the charts as a rival to their popularity? I think they possibly could have ridden that out. After the departure of Robbie Williams the year before, maybe the writing had been on the wall although there still seemed to be an appetite for the group.

To draw a line under what would turn out to be the first part of their career, a Greatest Hits album was released with a new single to promote it which was a cover of the Bee Gees 1977 hit “How Deep Is Your Love”. Was it a lazy move to bow out with a cover? Well, there was a certain amount of symmetry to the release as their breakthrough hit in 1992 had been a cover – “It Only Takes A Minute” by Tavares. The That lads give a decent take on the track with Gary Barlow’s lead vocal a passable Gibb brother impression. Whilst he and Jason Orange have sensible, mid 90s haircuts, Howard Donald has what can only be described as dread bunches whilst Mark Owen has a hairstyle I might have had in junior school! After this single, the talk turned to solo careers with Gary Barlow everyone’s favourite to be the most successful. Little did we know. One person who did seem to be in the know was host Nicky Campbell who correctly predicted a “reunion tour in the next century” in his outro.

Oasis are straight in at No 1 with “Don’t Look Back In Anger”. Of course they are. What’s maybe surprising is that despite all the fuss around the band and Britpop, this was only their second chart topper at the time after “Some Might Say” the year before. Of course they’d had some near misses. I was convinced they would be the Christmas No 1 in 1994 with “Whatever” but they lost out to East 17. Then there was the Battle of Britpop when they were beaten into second place by Blur and of course, their last single “Wonderwall” had sold and sold and sold but not at the right time to displace Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song”. This time, however, there was no stopping them even though it would only be for one week due to the hysteria surrounding Take That’s swansong.

Is there a more Britpop moment than Noel Gallagher and his Union Jack Epiphone Supernova guitar in this performance? What’s that? The Select magazine cover from April 1993 with Suede’s Brett Anderson set against a Union Jack backdrop? Or Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit on the cover of Vanity Fair in a bed with Union Jack pillow cases and bedspread? Nah, it’s Liam and that guitar for me. Perhaps an even bigger moment associated with this song in my opinion though is its use in the wonderful BBC drama Our Friends In The North. The final episode of the decades spanning show aired eleven days after this TOTP was broadcast. The final scene showed the character Geordie played by Daniel Craig striding across the Tyne Bridge (and out of our lives it felt like) after an emotional reunion with the show’s other three main protagonists. It was quite a moment for the watching millions at home. When “Don’t Look Back In Anger” came on to soundtrack this scene, it felt almost perfect. Timing wise, with the last episode being set in 1995 and the song at the top of the charts, it felt like the zeitgeist hadn’t been followed so much as tracked and hunted down. It really was sublime stuff.

Oasis themselves wouldn’t release anything after “Don’t Look Back In Anger” for nigh on 18 months as they retreated to record the difficult third album “Be Here Now” by which point Britpop was on its way out making this TOTP performance an even more defining moment in time. As Martin Tyler said of Liam and Noel’s beloved Man City winning the Premier League so dramatically in 2012, “I swear you’ll never see anything like this ever again so watch it, drink it in…”.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Terrorvision	Perseverance	Good tune but no
2	Gusto	Disco’s Revenge	As if
3	Celine Dion	Falling Into You	Never
4	Gabrielle	Give Me A Little More Time	No
5	Sting	Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot	Nah
6	Tina Turner	Whatever You Want	Nope
7	David Bowie featuring Pet Shop Boys	Hallo Spaceboy	No but I did like it
8	Take That	How Deep Is Your Love	No but my wife had that Best Of album
9	Oasis	Don’t Look Back In Anger	YES!

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/m001zqts/top-of-the-pops-29021996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 22 FEB 1996

Posted on June 7, 2024 by 80stastic

Welcome to another instalment of TOTP Rewind, the blog where I, a man who turned 56 yesterday, reviews past episodes of the legendary pop music show and who, despite having lived through this era and worked in record shops for nigh on the whole of the 90s, often has zero recall of some of the acts and songs featured. Don’t let that put you off though! I remember some of it – honest! To help stimulate my brain into activity, and I haven’t done this in a while, I’m going to check in on what I was up to in early 1996 in my personal life (I will get to the music eventually I promise!). Well, I was working at the Our Price store in Stockport and had been there for about a year following the closure of the Market Street, Manchester shop. Retail was hard work but the product was exciting and the staff all pretty much got on with each other (usually) so there were regular after work drinks in the town’s hostelries.

My life was ticking along nicely then until it was rudely interrupted by me being called up for jury service. If you’ve never done it, I can say that it was both fascinating and terrifying. I don’t know if it’s still the same as I’ve not done it since but you were expected to serve for a minimum of two weeks with the courts meeting the costs of your wages. Two weeks off work might have sounded great and indeed day one was spent just sitting around waiting to be called onto a jury which I wasn’t. I remember I was reading Trainspotting by Irvine Walsh and pretty much finished the whole book that day. First thing on day two though I was selected for a jury. Watching the defence and prosecution making their cases in court was fascinating. It wasn’t until they’d finished and you had to go and discuss the case as a jury that it became real and that was the scary bit. That 17th century saying describing the make up of a jury as “twelve good men and true” was a load of bollocks I was to discover and I don’t mean the obvious flaw that women have been serving on juries since the 1920s. I vowed there and then never to get in trouble with the law because if my misdemeanour went to court, the calibre of people deciding your fate could not be guaranteed. I won’t go into any details of the case but one bloke came to his personal verdict straight away based on what the accused looked like, refused to consider any counter arguments and sat there reading his copy of The Sun for the rest of the day. As we couldn’t come to a verdict we were all agreed on by the end of play, we started to wonder what would happen. Would we have to stay overnight in a hotel like in the movies? Fearing this might be the case, The Sun reading bloke started to panic saying he was meant to be going out with the lads that night and so offered to change his mind if it would help! I was appalled! In the end, we were just told to go home and not talk about the case.

When we reconvened the following day, The Sun reader assumed his original stance and we were subsequently dismissed as a jury as we were taking to too long to come to a verdict for this type of case (an historical one brought years after the event with no physical evidence). The experience has stayed with me ever since. Back to the TOTP though and I wonder if there are any acts on tonight who should be tried for crimes against popular music?

Well, “I Wanna Be A Hippy” by Technohead must surely have some charges to face. As established in a previous post, this was an example of gabber dance music, a subgenre of hardcore techno and definitely not happy hardcore as I initially surmised. What it undoubtedly was, of course, was hideously irritating crap that, horror of horrors, also refused to shift from your brain for hours once heard.

I can think of no more of a condemnation of it than to point out that its chart peak of No 6 was actually bettered by a parody of it by The Smurfs later in the year retitled as “I’ve Got A Little Puppy” which got to No 4 despite featuring the lyric “I take it for a walk, pooper pooper scooper”. Talk about dog shit!

I seem to be getting very bogged down in definitions of dance music currently and here’s another one. After the gabber strand of Technohead comes the Dream house of Robert Miles. At least host Lisa I’Anson had the good grace to name check the sub genre in her intro meaning I didn’t have to do too much research into working out which category it belonged to. “Children” was another of those mid-90s hits like “Missing” by Everything But The Girl that stayed on the UK charts for months. Ten weeks inside the Top 10 (of which the first seven were spent at either No 2 or No 3) and sixteen in the Top 40 in total. Quite remarkable for a tune that initially was not included on Radio 1 daytime playlists. No matter though as the UK, just like the rest of Europe where it went to No 1 in twelve different countries, was unable to resist its charms. Characterised by a floating, ethereal piano riff, was it just Jean Michel Jarre for the 90s? I don’t know enough about the “Oxygène” and “Équinoxe” hitmaker to make an informed judgment but it was certainly worlds away from the headache inducing relentless beats of the likes of the aforementioned Technohead and thank god for that!

Apparently, Miles created “Children” to help combat a tragic consequence of rave culture, namely that of clubbers falling asleep at the wheel of their vehicles after a night of strenuous dancing combined with alcohol and drug use. Dubbed ‘strage del sabato sera’ (Saturday night slaughter) in Italy, Miles wanted to compose a a calming track to end a DJ set to help the crowd acclimatise before heading home. I had no idea about any of that until now. It was just that instrumental dance track that I sold over and over the counter in Our Price.

Here’s a question. How do you follow up the biggest hit of your career which knocked down barriers that had previously excluded you from a wider audience and brought you into the mainstream consciousness? Well, if you’re Björk, you turn your back on that breakthrough hit and return to your original style and principles and resume your rather experimental music career. Reading that back, it sounds rather glib and possibly inaccurate. Or is it actually correct? Let’s examine the evidence. The case for the prosecution is that surely anyone not previously familiar with Björk’s oeuvre but who loved and bought “It’s Oh So Quiet” were not going to be tempted to continue that purchasing trend by the next single “Hyperballad” were they? A skittering, jerky, bleeping track about throwing objects off a cliff in the early morning before your partner awakes to symbolise the parts of yourself you must sacrifice in order to make a relationship work, this was a return to the Björk of old wasn’t it?

The case for the defence is that the track was critically acclaimed by the music press. Look at these reviews:

“…excellent example of music meeting art”

Diver, Mike (2009). “Review of Björk – Post”. BBC. Retrieved 25 November 2020.

“…a delightful track that all fans of quality music will enjoy.”

Baltin, Steve (9 March 1996). “Pop Singles”. Cash Box. p. 7. Retrieved 14 November 2022.

“All fans of quality music” eh? Well, that’s me told. Added to that is the fact that “Hyperballad” was a UK Top 10 hit and that Björk had just won a BRIT award for International Female Solo Artist would suggest she was hardly a cult figure any longer and that she had already crossed over into the mainstream quite successfully thank you very much. The verdict? The blogger is guilty of anti-Björk bias m’lud.

Next a duo who were continually accused of committing the crime of making bland and unworthy pop music – will the Lighthouse Family please rise! In their defence, their hit “Lifted” was co-written by Martin Brammer who was the vocalist in the rather excellent 80s band The Kane Gang who knew his way around a tune and indeed is an Ivor Novello Award nominee. The prosecution would level the charges that he’s also written songs for Olly Murs and Nick Carter of Backstreet Boys. My verdict would be that though not a fan, there are much more heinous musical misdemeanours to be offended by although the claim on Smooth Radio’s website that Lighthouse Family are “one of the most popular duos of all time” may result in litigation from Simon & Garfunkel, Soft Cell, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys…

From a duo to a trio now as it’s yet another appearance on the show for 3T and their hit “Anything”. I’m so bored of this lot and their drippy ballad that the only thing that will keep me watching is to see if the one in the hat has brought his backpack with him and whether he’ll dramatically throw it down on the floor again…

*keeps watching…*

He’s definitely got it with him…

*still watching…*

Pow! He’s slam dunked it again! Now cart them all off to jail. It is beyond reasonable doubt that they are guilty of assault and battery of my ears.

It’s time for the Battle of Britpop Version 2.0 that nobody ever talks about (apart from me) probably because it wasn’t really a proper thing. We all know that Blur won said battle in the summer of 1995 but there was nearly a repeat the following year. Perhaps deliberately, Oasis and Blur missed clashing release dates of their first singles of 1996 by a week meaning there was not officially a rematch of the two bands duking it out for the No 1 spot. This was probably just as well in the case of Damon and co as they would have been stopped in the first round by their northern counterparts. “Stereotypes” was the third single released from “The Great Escape” album and its chart high of No 7 was pretty respectable. However, when “Don’t Look Back In Anger” came out seven days later, its sales dwarfed those of “Stereotypes”. Well, they did in Our Price Stockport anyway. I’m pretty sure I have these figures correct – by my memory we sold 429 CDs of the Oasis single in week one but just 13 of Blur’s. Ooof! No wonder Noel Gallagher felt cocky enough to give this message to camera at the top of the show:

“Good evening Top of the Pops. Best band in the world, live and exclusive…and it’s not Blur”

To rub salt in the wound, the TOTP producers have got both bands in the studio together tonight and are letting Oasis perform two tracks after they’d already walked off with three BRIT awards (to Blur’s zero) three days earlier but to Blur’s credit, they seem to have taken it all in good grace with Damon acting all playful around Lisa I’Anson as she introduces them. As for “Stereotypes” as a song, it’s not the band’s best work by any measure. A functional, Blur-by-numbers track to my mind but supposedly it had originally been earmarked as the lead single from the album. Now if that Battle of Britpop had been “Stereotypes” v “Don’t Look Back In Anger” instead of “Country House” v “Roll With It”, we might have had a different winner.

And so to those naughty Manc lads who, as previously mentioned, have been allotted two songs on the show which was not a regular occurrence then or at any point in TOTP history. As far as I’m aware, only The Beatles and The Jam were given that honour previously. The Fab Four’s double appearance was way before my time but I distinctly remember The Jam performing double A-side “Town Called Malice” and “Precious” in 1982 as my Weller obsessed elder brother sat watching transfixed. Fast forward 14 years and it’s self confessed Jam fan Noel Gallagher taking up the baton from his hero. “Don’t Look Back In Anger” was the second of eight No 1s for Oasis and in truth, its success was no surprise. With the album “(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?” having already been out four months and gone multiple times platinum, you might have thought that a fourth single being lifted from it was destined to not pull up any trees sales wise as so many people already had it. However, such was the buzz around this huge anthem and so long had we known that it would be coming out as a single (it was initially due out in early January but was delayed by five weeks) that there was huge anticipation for its release.

I understand the criticisms that are levelled at it (and many other Oasis tracks) that it’s so derivative and steals from other songs. There’s the “Imagine”-esque piano opening, the lyric pinch from the legendary John Lennon memoirs cassette that was stolen from the Dakota Hotel, the similarity to “All The Young Dudes” and my own personal discovery that the chords are almost the same as those of “Ralph McTell’s “Streets Of London” and yet…I still think it’s a great song, possibly their best. I think there’s a valid claim here that this song and 1996 in general was the high point of the band’s career. Sure they wouldn’t release any new material for another 18 months but this was the year of the Maine Road gigs (more of them later) plus the two nights at Knebworth House where they performed to 250,000 people but could have sold 10 times the amount of tickets. I don’t think they were ever bigger than at this point. 1997 would bring the difficult third album “Be Here Now” and the whole cringey ‘Cool Britannia’ nonsense and subsequent years would see the band change the line up though remain popular but not be the phenomenon that they once were.

I certainly recall thinking this double TOTP performance was a big deal. The way Liam goes “yeah, yeah, yeah” to the studio audience as he crosses over with Noel as if to say “settle down, of course we’re playing another and we’re the only band who can do this because we’re the best”. That second song was their cover of Slade’s “Cum On Feel The Noize” which was one of the three extra tracks featured on the CD single. For some this was a lazy, hammy choice of song to cover but I loved it especially the piss taking Black Country accents the band put in at the beginning and end of the track. Well, I was 28 years younger then and I guess my sense of humour wasn’t as mature (?) as it is (?) now. The other tracks on that CD single were “Underneath The Sky” which didn’t have that much going for it in retrospect but which I thought was perfectly fine back then and “Step Out” which was a gloriously effervescent song that unfortunately gave more credence to the claims of those who were not Oasis fans that Noel just kept stealing other people’s work when it was found to be so similar to Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” that the soul legend had to be credited on the track.

So returning to those aforementioned Maine Road gigs, I did get to the Saturday one but I nearly missed out altogether. I knew that they were going on sale from the Manchester Apollo box office and the Apollo wasn’t that far from where we were living. As it happened, the day they went on sale was one of those when I was on jury service. This was great news as it meant I didn’t have to worry about getting to work and also gave me a bit of extra time as the courts didn’t open until about 10ish. Nothing could stop me getting those Oasis tickets now…except the monstrously huge queue that I found when I arrived at the Apollo. I thought I was getting there in time for the box office to open but hadn’t banked on the number of people who had camped out overnight to be at the head of the queue. I joined the back of it and looked at my watch. The queue wasn’t moving quickly and all that time that I thought I had was now not looking like nearly enough. So couldn’t I have just stuck it out and tuned up late at court? Not an option. On a previous day I’d witnessed a fellow jury member return late from lunch by a few minutes delaying the start of the afternoon session. The judge asked him how much his lunch had cost. “Five pounds” came the reply. “Add a zero to that and that’s how much your fine is for being late back” pronounced the judge. As I got closer to the box office window, the minutes were slipping away. I got to within six or seven people from the front of the queue before time ran out and I lost my nerve. I just walked away from the queue and headed into town to do my public duty. Fortunately for me, my mate Paul (the chef from last week’s post who liked to play rap music loudly while washing his whites in our flat) was on the case and got tickets for us all so I did go to the Oasis ball after all.

The “Spaceman”’s orbit has started to decay and he’s crashing back down to earth. Yes, it’s the fifth and final week at No 1 for Babylon Zoo and what a strange ride it was. The nation lost its head over the music on a 30 seconds jeans advert causing the full track to be released. Only then did the truth come out that it wasn’t what the advert had promised but we gave a collective shrug of our shoulders and went out and bought it in our droves anyway. Jas Mann got to be the pop star who he always believed it was his destiny to be for a little while before suffering a backlash that this country always reserves for people deemed to have been too successful. We might see Babylon Zoo on TOTP again in these repeats as there were a couple of minor hit singles in the wake of their No 1 but their time in the spotlight was waning faster than a shooting star across the sky. Unlike “Starman”, “Spaceman” didn’t blow our minds, at least not for long anyway.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Technohead	I Wanna Be A Hippy	Never
2	Robert Miles	Children	No
3	Björk	Hyperballad	I did not
4	Lighthouse Family	Lifted	Nah
5	3T	Anything	Nope
6	Blur	Stereotypes	No but I had The Great Escape album with it on
7	Oasis	Don’t Look Back In Anger / Cum On Feel The Noize	Yes sir!
8	Babylon Zoo	Spaceman	I am going to admit to buying it but not for me for a friend who was obsessed with it so she could use my staff discount – honest!

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/m001zj0c/top-of-the-pops-22021996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 15 FEB 1996

Posted on May 31, 2024 by 80stastic

It’s the day after Valentine’s Day 1996 but there’s only one token slushy love song on this TOTP. What there is though are eight ‘new’ songs on the show with only the No 1 having been on previously. The grip of Britpop on the nation is on display with two bands in the running order who could be described as being part of that movement though probably not by themselves. In addition to that, the host for this one is Justine Frischmann, lead singer of Elastica, who were undeniably of that parish.

We start with one of those Britpop associated bands who were making their TOTP debut despite having been in existence for seven years by this point. I have to admit to never having heard of Ocean Colour Scene before “The Riverboat Song” though. We would all come to know the band and that song in particular thanks to the championing of them and it by Chris Evans. Not only did he play “The Riverboat Song” extensively on his Radio 1 breakfast show but six days before this TOTP aired, he had the band as the very first musical guests on the very first episode of TFI Friday performing it. Said track was subsequently used as the walk-on music for every guest as they made their way along a walkway to the bar area to be interviewed by Evans. As the show lasted nearly five years, the PRS cheques for the band must have been a substantial earner.

The success of the single (a No 15 hit) would pave the way for a run of six consecutive Top 10 hits and two multi platinum albums in “Moseley Shoals” and “Marchin’ Already”. In the April of 1996, they were the opening act on the bill supporting Oasis at their two Maine Road gigs. I went to the Saturday gig but to my shame missed Ocean Colour Scene as I was too busy pre-gig drinking with friends. We arrived in time for second support artist Manic Street Preachers though. I can’t remember much about the gig except I have a clear memory of the massive queue for the bar and pints being handed back to customers over people’s heads. A sad indictment on me that my memories of the day are mainly alcohol related.

Back to “The Riverboat Song” though and it is widely considered to be heavily influenced by the Led Zeppelin track “Four Sticks”. As I have never been a regular traveler on the boat to Led Zep island, I’ve no idea if this is true so I’ll have to investigate…

…yep, a definite similarity. However, what I’d really like to hear would be a Led Zeppelin/ Two Ronnies mash up of the track. They could call it “Four Candlesticks” (sorry).

I give myself a hard time in this blog about not recalling artists and songs from back in the day but seriously, who remembers “Giv Me Luv” by Alcatraz? Apparently this was a No 12 hit though it only remained on the Top 40 for two weeks. Listening to it now, it sounds like a mash up of “French Kiss” by Lil Louis and “Show Me Love” by Robin S. Quite what genre of dance music that would be described as I have no idea.

As I was also clueless as to who this lot were, I googled them but there seem to be a few groups called Alcatraz or variants of that name throughout musical history. There’s the English heavy metal band called Alcatrazz who formed in 1980 but split in 1983 after being dropped by their label. Picking up the baton immediately were an LA rock band also called Alcatrazz featuring Graham Bonnet, Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen (great name!) in the line up. Formed in 1983, they are still a going concern or rather two going concerns as, after an internal dispute, there are two versions of the band, one led by Bonnet and one by Jimmy Waldo (another great name!) and Gary Shea. If that’s not confusing enough, there was also a German band called Alcatraz (with one ‘z’) from the 70s who played Black Sabbath and Soft Machine covers. Oh, and also an outfit called Alcatraz House Band, an acoustic rock trio who play covers by the likes of Fleetwood Mac, The Cult and Tom Petty. Seriously people, enough with naming yourselves after a Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco! I’ve been to Alcatraz Island and done the prison tour and I wouldn’t wish that place on anyone, not even the people that gave us “Giv Me Luv”!

Next a reefer anthem that got past the BBC censors presumably because they didn’t know what the slang term of the title meant. “I Got 5 On It” by Luniz was all about splitting the cost of a $10 bag of marijuana and laying down your half. It’s logical at least. After not understanding that “No Fronts” by Dog Eat Dog was all about blazing up just the other week, the Beeb did take a more cautious approach to this one as we only get to see two minutes of Luniz performing live by satellite in LA with the Hollywood sign prominent in the background. Did cutting the length of the track in half mean the watching TV audience didn’t get exposed to any drug references? Erm… not really. I watched it with subtitles turned on (in case I misheard anything) and read “hoochies wanna puff on it”, “you take a puff and pass my bomb back”, “messin’ with that weed”, “I’ll be damned if you get high on me for free” and “Hell no, you best to bring your own spliff chief”. I mean, come on! What did they think they were rapping about?!

“I Got 5 On It” crashed into the charts at No 3 continuing the popularity of huge hip hop hits in the UK at this time like “Regulate” by Warren G and Nate Dogg and Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise”. My main association of this song though is via my friend Paul. At this time, having moved to the area because of his wife’s work, Paul, who is a chef, was living temporarily out of a hotel in Manchester and used make use of our flat’s washing machine to wash his work whites. While there, he would open the flat’s big sash windows and blare some hip hop tunes out of them including “I Got 5 On It”. Thankfully, the local drug dealer who we called Mr Dodgy never seemed to notice.

Despite having been a UK No 1 way back in 1979, we still couldn’t get enough of “I Will Survive” in the mid 90s. Gloria Gaynor, of course, had that original chart topper with the song and it’s her version that is the definitive take on the track. She took it back to No 5 in 1993 when all sorts of 70s acts were having a revival. However, she wasn’t the only artist to take on the disco staple. In 1994, Dutch group Hermes House Band topped the charts in their home country with a version retitled “I Will Survive (La La La)” whilst later in these 1996 TOTP repeats, I’m sure we’ll see American singer Chantay Savage’s restyling of it as a ballad which went to No 12 in our charts. One year later, the musically eclectic US band Cake would score a minor hit with their version of it.

And then there was this by Diana Ross which managed a UK chart peak of No 14. Yet again I have zero recollection of this even existing so my first (and probably the only one required) question is WHY?! Yes, Miss Diana Ross (I bet they rehearsed and rehearsed Justine Frischmann to make sure she got that right in the intro!) is a Motown and soul legend but she didn’t add to her legacy with this limp version of a disco belter. She just hasn’t got the voice to do it justice and so we get a weak, watered down facsimile of it. I’m guessing she needed a hit as the other three singles from her “Take Me Higher” album hadn’t done any heavy lifting sales wise but even so. Also, why wear a jacket only to awkwardly take it off a few seconds into the performance and what were those gloves all about?!

Talking of being taken higher, here’s another song that is widely believed to be about drug use. Red Hot Chilli Peppers had certainly come into contact with illicit substances during their then 14 year old career in rock ‘n’ roll and were no strangers to writing songs about their experiences with “Aeroplane” appearing to be one of them, especially if you believe the online analysis. With the opening line of “I like pleasure spiked with pain”, it’s not hard to see why many would come to the conclusion it’s referring to drug use. Then there’s the lyrics about “decomposing” and “turning to dust” which could be construed as being about singer Anthony Kiedis having a relapse after being clean for a number of years. However, some offer the opinion that it’s about sex and more explicitly S&M with the titular aeroplane being the rock music lifestyle that afforded such…erm…activities. All I know is that the line about the “star of mazzy ” must surely refer to the band Mazzy Star and their track “Into Dust”. The full lyrics include the use of the ‘f’ word twice but said word is omitted in this live by satellite performance. Presumably someone had a word with Kiedis beforehand about time differences and the UK watershed!

After Supergrass announced themselves to the mainstream in 1995 with one of the anthems of the Summer in “Alright”, it all went quiet for six months. No rerelease of non-hit “Caught By The Fuzz”. Nothing. I guess they were working on second album “In It For The Money”. The problem was that the album would not be released for another fourteen months (meaning a gap of nearly two years) since debut “I Should Coco” came out. Given their new found popularity and the predominance of Britpop (of which they were seen as a prime mover), that was too long to wait for new material. Enter “Going Out” to plug the gap. This wasn’t one of those one off, non-album, standalone singles though. It would end up being the lead track from “In It For The Money” despite the gulf between their releases.

If we’d been expecting a retread of “Alright” though, we didn’t know Supergrass that well. “Going Out” was no blatant attempt to repeat the formula of their biggest success or to pin their colours firmly to the Britpop mast. Rather it harked back to the psychedelic end of 60s pop in sound – I could imagine The Kinks of the Small Faces having recorded it for example. Its No 5 peak was a very solid consolidation of their success but I wonder what Gaz Coombes was talking to the keyboard player about mid performance here? Do you think it was a pre-rehearsed set up because he didn’t know where to put himself during the instrumental break? Or maybe he was asking him about what he’d read in the papers about drummer Danny Goffey who was in the tabloids for his relationship with fashion designer Pearl Lowe at the time. Indeed, Goffey almost fell out with Coombes as he thought “Going Out” was written about them. Coming to that conclusion from the very sparse lyrics seems a bit of a stretch though.

Mariah Carey must have enjoyed doing TOTP – she always seemed to be in the studio in person and here she was again to perform her latest single “Open Arms”. This was the third track to be released from her “Daydream” album and, as a big ballad, was presumably timed to coincide with Valentine’s Day. I think she’d done the same thing two years before with her cover of Nilsson’s “Without You”. Lo and behold, and I had no knowledge of this until this very day, “Open Arms” was also a cover version. Originally recorded by American soft rockers Journey of “Don’t Stop Believin’” fame, Mariah took her take on it to No 4 in the UK charts. It’s the usual Carey production but it’s all a bit lacklustre sounding to me and was panned by the critics. Having checked out Journey’s recording, I can’t say that it’s much better to my ears though it made No 2 in 1982 in the American chart. Despite my opinion of the song, Justine Frischmann referring to Mariah as “Mazza Cazza” does seem ever so slightly disrespectful.

Now, is this the most people ever on one stage for a TOTP performance? There’s a multitude of extras up there with Sting. Obviously, the majority of them are made up of the gospel choir he’s brought with him (you don’t get small gospel choirs do you?) and it’s an impressive sight. Sadly, the word ‘impressive’ can’t be applied to Sting’s song as “Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot” is quite the dirge. The lead single from his fifth studio album “Mercury Rising”, it was inspired by a truly affecting story of a friend of his who was suffering from AIDS. It seems wrong to be so glib about a song that tells such a story but I found it really dull. Well performed and recorded I’m sure but dull nevertheless.

As ever, Sting’s fan base made sure the album was a success though it sold only half the amount of copies as previous album “Ten Sumoner’s Tales”. “Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot” would peak at No 15, easily the best performing single from the album chart wise. However, Stimg had a nice little side line being a ‘featured artist’ on other people’s hits in 1996. He’d already appeared on Pato Banton’s cover of The Police’s “Spirits In The Material World” and would also guest on Tina Turner’s “On Silent Wings” single in the May.

Another week at the top for Babylon Zoo with “Spaceman” and is Jas Mann starting to take it all a bit for granted and not putting the effort in any more. It looks like he’s got a five o’clock shadow in this performance. Maybe he thought superstardom was in the bag or that he’d have the biggest hit of the year at least even though it was only February at the time. However, despite selling 1.15 million copies, despite being the best selling single since “Can’t Buy Me Love” by The Beatles and despite being the fastest selling debut single in British pop music history, it wasn’t the biggest UK hit of 1996. It wasn’t even the runner up.* In an extraordinarily strong field sales wise featuring the phenomenon of the Spice Girls, and the fever pitch propelled football anthem “Three Lions”, the biggest selling single in the UK came courtesy of an American hip hop trio who’d only had one minor hit here before and who would only ever record two albums in their career…

*”Spaceman” came in third

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Ocean Colour Scene	The Riverboat Song	Don’t think I did
2	Alcatraz	Giv Me Luv	Never
3	Luniz	I Got 5 On It	No but clearly my mate Paul did
4	Diana Ross	I Will Survive	As if
5	Red Hot Chilli Peppers	Aeroplane	Nah
6	Supergrass	Going Out	Nope
7	Mariah Carey	Open Arms	I did not
8	Sting	Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot	Nope
9	Babylon Zoo	Spaceman	I am going to admit to buying it but not for me for a friend who was obsessed with it so she could use my staff discount – honest!

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/m001zj09/top-of-the-pops-15021996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 08 FEB 1996

Posted on May 29, 2024 by 80stastic

OK so the ‘golden mic’ host thing, I get it. An attempt by TOTP executive producer Ric Blaxill to inject an element of glamour to the proceedings, to shake up the traditional format, to maybe spring a surprise on the millions watching at home. So we had various members of Take That and Boyzone for the swoon factor, PJ and Duncan honing their presenting skills for their future careers, a number of comedians including Jack Dee, Phill Jupitus, Jo Brand and Mark Lamarr to add some humour to the links and some names that defied explanation based on performance (Craig McLachlan was truly awful). However, one of the oddest incumbents of the ‘golden mic’ slot was surely the host of this particular show – Julian Cope. Quite why the head shaman of rock ‘n’ roll, the too cool for school arch-drude, a guy so out there that he lives not just in the left field but on the extreme peripheries of it, would be seen as a good fit for a mainstream pop music show is strange indeed.

Now, let me be clear – I like Julian and some of his music is mighty fine (not that I claim to know all his canon of work). I’ve read his double autobiography Head–On / Repossessed and I’ve even attended one of his megalithic exhibitions though sadly it wasn’t the one in the British Museum where he arrived in five inch platform boots and doused in so much hairspray that he set the fire alarms off causing the building to be evacuated. That’s how you walk into a room! He’s also one of the world’s first bloggers dating back to 1997 and has written an ‘Album of the Month’ review since May 2000 and hasn’t ever missed a month. As a blogger who has been reviewing TOTP repeats these past eight years, I utterly respect his commitment to the cause. And yet…was he really a sensible choice for hosting the grand old show? For a start, would the watching youth even know who he was? Yes, he’d performed on the programme some six months previously promoting his “Try, Try, Try” single but he was hardly a chart regular. Then there was his propensity for protest. Hadn’t Ric Blaxill figured out that Julian would use this prime time exposure to further causes that were close to his heart and wouldn’t that cause a problem in compromising the BBC’s impartiality? Predictably, Cope does exploit his half hour in the spotlight to promote his objection to the building of the Newbury bypass in a series of sloganed T-shirts. OK, well let’s see how this turns out…

The opening act, like it so often was, is a dance act and also as was often the case, their single had already been a hit. “Loving You More” by BT had got to No 28 in September 1995 but made No 14 when rereleased the following year. Obviously, I don’t remember this one as I wouldn’t have been interested in it back then. What do I think of it now? Well, it’s still not my bag but I’ve heard much, much worse in the course of these 90s TOTP repeats. It’s actually quite a smooth sound and vocalist Vincent Covello has a decent set of pipes as well as looking like a swarthy version of Marti Pellow. As for the guys at the front of the stage, they look like they’ve just wondered in from a Fast Show sketch. Most odd.

Talking of odd, let’s check in on host Julian Cope and see how he’s holding up. Well, he’s brought his mascot Sqwubbsy with him for moral support. You may recognise Sqwubbsy as he’s been on the show before dancing in the studio audience as Julian performed the aforementioned “Try Try Try” and he also made an appearance at the Poll Tax riots of 1990 (hence his pin badge here). Again, I’m surprised he got away with flouting such political credentials on TOTP. Anyway, Cope manages not to fluff his intro for second act Joan Osborne and her single “One Of Us”. Nothing to do with the ABBA song of the same name, this was an example of a curious trend in the 90s of American female solo artists having one big hit over here and then disappearing almost as soon as they had arrived. Starting as the decade began with Alannah Myles and “Black Velvet”, there followed the likes of Lisa Loeb and her only hit “Stay (I Missed You)”, Paula Cole with “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?”, Meredith Brooks (“Bitch”) and Jennifer Paige (“Crush”).

Joan wasn’t quite the one hit wonder as she had one other solitary UK Top 40 entry but “One Of Us” is undoubtedly her best known song. Imagining God arriving on Earth being a regular person dealing with the trials and tribulations of everyday life like riding on the bus, it was written by founding member of The Hooters (of “Satellite” fame) Eric Bazilian. Its memorable lyrics helped propel it to success but also landed Joan in hot water in some territories who objected to the lines:

What if God was one of us, just a slob like one of us

Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Eric M. Bazilian
One of Us lyrics © Warner Chappell Music, Inc

Now when I was listening back to this, another song immediately sprang to mind, a connection that I hadn’t thought of at the time. Anybody else getting a hint of “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by Crash Test Dummies? Well, that connection it seems was deliberate as Bazilian admits that as he sat down to record the song’s demo, he had a voice in his head, that of Brad Roberts of the Canadian folk rockers and that the verses of “One Of Us” share a similar melody to that of “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”. Hmm (hmm hmm hmm).

The first video of the night comes from The Smashing Pumpkins who are onto their fourth UK hit single in “1979”. Another one of those bands that I probably should know much more about than I do, the bits that I do know, I quite like including this track. The video for it won the MTV Music Video Award for Best Alternative Video in 1996. What’s the significance of the year 1979? Well, songwriter and lead singer Billy Corgan says the song is about the transition from youth to adulthood and that feeling like you are on the cusp of things in your life changing and a new chapter about to happen. That’s all fine but Corgan was born in 1967 so he would have been just 12 years old in 1979, not even a teenager let alone nearly an adult so that doesn’t really work does it? By that logic, the song should have been called “1984” but then that title had already been taken by George Orwell I suppose and Eurythmics who wrote “Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four)” for the soundtrack of the film of said novel.

Writing all of this got me thinking about other songs whose titles are just years. Off the top of my head there’s “1999” by Prince, “1963” by New Order but the one I’m plumping for is this whose lyrics include the marvellous lines:

She rocked out to Wham, not a big Limo Bizkit fan

Thought she’d get her hand on a member of Duran Duran

Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Jaret Ray Reddick / John Lowe Kenneth Allen / Mitchell Allan Scherr
1985 lyrics © Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd., Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

“We’re sailing high over the Mother Earth tonight. We’re clearly out of our trees” trills our host before introducing a band that would receive more flack and accusations of blandness than anyone since Level 42 were in their heyday. Lighthouse Family were Tunde Baiyewu and Paul Tucker who met at Newcastle University and began writing songs together one of which, “Ocean Drive”, brought them to the attention of record label Polydor. However, not impressed by the calibre of the rest of their material, the duo needed to come up with a surefire hit or risk being dropped. Enter “Lifted”, a feel good soul song that almost drifted into easy listening territory. Backed by a bundle of airplay, much was expected of the single but it stiffed at No 61 on initial release in 1995. Fortunately for the band, they still had the aforementioned “Ocean Drive” track which breached the Top 40 a few months after the failure of “Lifted” making them a bona fide chart act. With that foothold secured, a rerelease of “Lifted” seemed a sensible career move and it duly went straight into the chart at No 4 before spending a further three weeks inside the Top 10. “Ocean Drive” also received the rerelease treatment going to No 11 before the album of the same name became a huge success going on to sell 1.8 million copies in the UK.

So where did all the cries of them being bland come from and did they deserve the criticism? Well, they didn’t do much for me but there has always been a space for lowest common denominator music that appeals across the board but which offends those who consider themselves as ‘serious’ or ‘true’ music fans. I’m thinking Simply Red, Dido, Savage Garden, James Blunt etc. Certainly Lighthouse Family were never going to get high praise from the ‘inkies’ music press who were in thrall to Britpop. Even today, a quick search of the internet unearths online forum comments such as ‘Shitehouse Family’ and ‘offensively inoffensive’. Is that fair? Look, I refer you to my mate Robin who, in response to me saying to him that he couldn’t just state that he hates every single song Elton John has ever recorded, replied “Yes I can. I thought you knew that music taste is subjective”. It’s a fair point. If you like Lighthouse Family then good luck to you.

East 17 were a hit making factory to rival Stock Aitken & Waterman in the mid 90s. “Do U Still?” was their 13th consecutive UK chart hit of which nine went Top 10. They had a formula and it worked for quite some time. ‘If it wasn’t broken, why fix it?’ was their motto to the point that by 1996, they were just rewriting previous hits. This one was almost a replica of their 1993 hit “Deep” which was a great record but three years in, shouldn’t the band have been doing more than just retreading the same water? Well, the record buying public disagreed with me as they often did and sent it to No 7. They still had another four UK chart hits in them of which three went Top 3 so clearly the band weren’t quite done yet but was there more gravitas than we realised at the time to their lyrics to this one of “Do you still love me…do you still need me…do you still want me?”.

With the then current No 1 being propelled by a TV advert, was there room for another such generated hit? Well, yes there was as the Levi’s campaign wasn’t the only one to employ a song that would capture the public’s imagination. The Coca Cola TV advertisements had been hugely successful in not just promoting their brand but making hit records of the music that soundtracked them stretching back to 1971 when the New Seekers took “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing”* to No 1.

* A Britpop obsessed UK would make a hit out of this song when covered by Oasis cover band No Way Sis in 1996.

Seventeen years later, the unknown Robin Beck also hit the top spot with “First Time” after providing the music for a Coca Cola campaign. Come 1996 and it was a revitalised song from the 60s that slinked its way up the charts in the form of “I Just Want To Make Love To You” by soul singer Etta James. I, for one, didn’t know anything about Etta but I’d certainly seen the advert her song soundtracked. The construction worker who takes his shirt off while having a diet coke break under the gaze of the swooning female office staff? Sure you know it. This one…

Anyway, the success of the song meant an appearance on the UK’s premier music show was required so we get a satellite link from San Diego where Etta and her band are ready to go with an idyllic setting of the ocean behind them. Unfortunately, the wind that day was pretty strong and it makes for an uncomfortable experience for the performers and watching TV audience. You can actually hear the wind swirling about them and see the fringes on their leather jackets tossing around. Just when you’re thinking that this is all a bit odd, the cringe factor is turned up to ten when two guys in sailor outfits stroll onto the set in a blatant attempt to recreate the vibe of the Cola advert. Gulp!

Doubling down on the awful satellite performances, 3T (as opposed to BT earlier) are up next from Malibu Beach to mime their hit “Anything”. Presumably they’d closed down a part of the beach to film this as it appears deserted which gives the whole thing an eerie feel. It’s not helped by the weird camera angles focussing on the driftwood. In fact, it puts me in mind of the iconic finale of the original Planet Of The Apes film when astronaut Taylor sees the Statue of Liberty and realises he’s been on Earth the whole time. All that’s missing is for one of 3T to drop to his knees and scream “You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you all to Hell!”. The closest they get is when the one with the backpack (maybe he’s got their packed lunches in there) flings it to the ground at the song’s climax. I hope he didn’t have any cans of coke in there; they’ll make a right mess when he opens them.

After what seems like a lifetime spent away from the studio after those back to back satellite performances, we’re within its confines again with, for me, easily the best song on the show tonight. After a run of six consecutive chart hits that all peaked tantalising just outside the Top 20, Terrorvision would break their huge hit duck and how when “Perseverance” careered into the Top 5 in week one. I think it’s fair to say that these West Yorkshire guys weren’t your standard rock outfit with brass parts and almost doo wop vocals incorporated into their songs. After trialling their style in their early work, “Perseverance” was when it properly all came together for me (a bit like with Shed Seven the other week). Some great hooks allied with that memorable lyric about the ‘whales and dolphins’ made this their best tune yet and would also be their biggest hit until “Tequila” made it to No 2 three years later. The fact that it was in and out of the Top 40 inside three weeks just reflected the changing chart life of new release singles and how big the band’s fan base had become. Indeed, the album the “Perseverance” trailed – “Regular Urban Survivors” – would become their highest charting collection when it peaked at No 8 and it would provide the band with a further three hit singles during the calendar year. We might well be seeing more of Terrorvision in these 1996 TOTP repeats.

It kind of seems appropriate that Julian Cope finishes his hosting stint by introducing a song called “Spaceman” at No 1. As the man himself says “It is cosmically correct that this is No 1 so I get to introduce it”. Yep, it’s another week at the top for Babylon Zoo. Despite being seen very much as a one hit wonder (which they’re not), it’s overlooked that their album “The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes” actually sold pretty well placing at No 6 in the charts and shifting 100,000 copies in the UK alone. Some (though not all) of its reviews in the music press were even favourable but history has not been kind with it routinely turning up in lists of the worst albums ever made. If punters were disappointed when they heard “Spaceman” in full for the first time, what were the reactions like of people that bought the album on the strength of the single? The only albums that fall into a similar category that I can think of are “Laughing At The Pieces” by Doctor And The Medics which promised much with the success of “Spirit In The Sky” but delivered very little and Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s “Flaunt It” which arrived in a blaze of publicity following the “Love Missile F1-11” single and was meant to be the future of rock ‘n’ roll but very much wasn’t. Unlike the Sputniks, at least Babylon Zoo had some self knowledge by calling their 1999 comeback single “All The Money’s Gone”.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	BT	Loving You More	Of course not
2	Joan Osborne	One Of Us	Negative
3	The Smashing Pumpkins	1979	I did not
4	Lighthouse Family	Lifted	No
5	East 17	Do U Still?	Nope
6	Etta James	I Just Want To Make Love To You	Nah
7	3T	Anything	Never
8	Terrorvison	Perseverance	Liked it, didn’t buy it
9	Babylon Zoo	Spaceman	I am going to admit to buying it but not for me for a friend who was obsessed with it so she could use my staff discount – honest!

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/m001z96z/top-of-the-pops-08021996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 01 FEB 1996

Posted on May 24, 2024 by 80stastic

I’m still way behind in these TOTP reviews (give me a break BBC4!) but at least I’m now in the same month as the repeats schedule which is February of 1996. It’s yet another ‘golden mic’ host in comedian Lee Evans (who was only on just the other week it feels like). In fact, the celebrity host rather than a Radio 1 DJ seemed to be the norm around this time. Next week we have Julian Cope (blimey!) and the week after that Justine Frischmann from Elastica. As for the music, it’s the usual mix bag of styles with the following genres represented – bouncy techno (that was a thing apparently), art rock, Britpop, heavy rock, Gabber (again, a thing apparently), hardbag (seriously, I’m not making these up!), rap metal and…well…whatever you want to label Babylon Zoo as.

So what category does opening act QFX fall into? Well, they’re the ‘bouncy techno’ outfit according to Wikipedia. I have no recall of this lot at all but it seems they were from Scotland and had five medium sized UK Top 40 hits. A bit like Time Frequency then (in my easily befuddled by dance music brain anyway). This one – “Everytime You Touch Me” – was their first and second biggest when it peaked at No 22. So what was this ‘bouncy techno’ of which I speak? Well, unsurprisingly given where QFX hailed from, it originated in the Scottish rave scene before it crossed the channel to infiltrate the Dutch happy hardcore market where it became known as gabber (more of that later). It was characterised by having a tempo of 160 to 180 bpm and…oh I’ve no idea have I? I just know it wasn’t for me. Like I said earlier, I was easily confused by dance music. Though I couldn’t get into the music, I can appreciate the wild steps by the backing dancers in this performance. Unreal. Do you think the silver suits were influenced by the current No 1?

A bit of art rock? Look, these aren’t my categories but Wikipedia’s OK? I would just put “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” by Radiohead firmly in the ‘bloody good tune’ box. The fifth and final single from “The Bends”, its release seemed like a very big moment in the band’s career. Up to this point, their singles had only just brushed the Top 20 but going straight in at No 5 showed how much the band’s fan base had grown. Sure it was out of the Top 40 two weeks later but the fact that they could release a track from an album that had been out for just under a year by this point and it garnered such first week sales illustrated how much interest there was in Radiohead. And who wouldn’t be interested in this song! Based around a rolling guitar arpeggio, it was the definition of sublime. The fact that it was in and out of the Top 40 very quickly only added to its power – in a way it was too good for the charts. Some of the other hits taking up chart positions around it didn’t deserve to be in its presence. It came, it outshine everything else and…well…faded out. We wouldn’t see or hear any new Radiohead material for the next 15 months before “Paranoid Android” trailed third album, the seminal “OK Computer”.

Want to hear a ‘hardbag’ dance tune? No, me neither but it’s not up to me is it? Blame TOTP executive producer Ric Blaxill or the punters that bought the record. Said record was “The Naughty North & The Sexy South” by E–Motion. What a racket this was both sonically and metaphorically. Somebody was making money out of this nonsense. Even this small amount of exposure to the track via this TOTP repeat is giving me a headache. Just repetitive, hammering beats with the track’s title rapped over and over. Look, everyone knows if you’re singing about the naughty north and the sexy south, it goes like this…

In the naughty north and in the sexy south

We’re all singing, I have the mouth

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Adam Ant / Marco Pirroni
Ant Rap lyrics © Tamadan Ltd.

Even the video is shite, using lazy cultural stereotype lookalikes to illustrate the north (Oasis, a whippet, an old fella gurning) and the south (Blur, Del Boy, pearly kings and queens) . Where are Marco, Merrick, Terry Lee, Gary Tibbs and yours truly when you need them?

I don’t think there can be too many disputing voices if I categorise the next band as being Britpop can there? The Bluetones were very much seen as part of that movement with their place at the forefront of it being secured by this – their biggest ever hit – “Slight Return”. I hadn’t taken that much notice of the band’s first two major label single releases “Are You Blue Or Are You Blind” and “Bluetonic” despite them both being Top 40 hits but I couldn’t ignore this one when it crashed into the charts at No 2. I recall selling out of it in the Our Price store I worked presumably because the initial copies the company’s buying department had allocated for us (the scale out) weren’t enough to cope with the demand. Maybe they were caught on the hop by the single’s success? Understandable I guess considering those two previous hits had peaked at Nos 31 and 19. I also seem to remember there being some issues restocking it with our orders continually coming back as out of stock. Distribution issues or perhaps their label were similarly caught on the hop by their artist’s sudden rise to fame? None of us should have been really as it’s a great song, full of melody and hooks. That stuttering chorus allied to a shuffling beat – it was a winner all day long. Singer Mark Morriss looked every inch a Britpop hero in his massive parka type coat. He must have just dissolved into a pool of sweat when he got back to the dressing room though after performing in it under those studio lights. Eleven days after this TOTP aired, the band’s debut album “Expecting To Fly” was released and certainly lived up to its title by soaring to the top of the charts in week one. The Bluetones had lift off!

Definitely and defiantly another Britpop act now as the watching millions get introduced to Northern Uproar. These little scamps were from Stockport which, coincidentally, was where I was working at the time in the Our Price in Merseyway shopping centre. Coming on like a distant member of the Gallagher family tree, they powered their way to a No 17 hit with this double A-side single “From A Window” / This Morning”. Listening to it now, it all seems very derivative and a bit of a mess frankly but it probably seemed very exciting back in 1996. Frontman Leon Meya did seem to have a bit of presence at least though his wardrobe had, like Mark Morriss before him, been influenced by Liam Gallagher a bit too much.

In my last post, I stated that I’d been trying to organise a PA for the Our Price in Stockport where I worked but my plans to secure Upside Down had been met with a definite “Forget it”. I’m pretty sure my attention then shifted to Stockport’s very own Northern Uproar but clearly any intentions I had didn’t get any further than the “What about…” stage as I never got any nearer to them than watching this TOTP appearance.

After a double barrel of Britpop, now it’s time for something completely different. I don’t recall the term ‘Gabber’ being in common use back in 1996 as a descriptor for this type of music but maybe I wasn’t moving in the right circles to hear it. Technohead were one of its protagonists but having watched their performance of “I Wanna Be A Hippy” back, my uninformed take on it would be that it was happy hardcore. I don’t think I’m that far off in my assessment as both strands emerged from the Dutch techno rave scene in the early 90s. According to Wikipedia, the difference between the two is that happy hardcore has breakbeats running alongside the 4/4 kick drum…whatever the hell that means.

Technohead was yet another alias for husband and wife team of Michael Wells and Lee Newman whose previous vehicles included Tricky Disco and LFO. “I Wanna Be A Hippy” was remixed by Dutch-American producers Flamman & Abraxas and had been a massive hit all around Europe in 1995. Everywhere in fact except the UK. Our resistance to the Gabber effect was only so resilient though and we yielded early the following year when it made No 6 in our charts. Based around a song from the 1989 comedy film Rude Awakening called “I Like Marijuana”, its references to drug taking (“I want to get stoned on Mari-marijuana” and “I want to get high”) were never going to fly on the BBC’s prime time, before the watershed, flagship pop music show so the performance here is highly edited with the offending lyrics literally blanked out and not mimed. It kind of makes a nonsense of the whole thing as if it wasn’t nonsensical enough already. The awful thing is, once heard, the track becomes an immovable ear worm. I can’t get it out of my head and it’s driving me mad! Gabber Gabber Don’t!

And so we arrive at the second tenuous link to Adam And The Ants of the night in the form of rap metal outfit (if that indeed is what they were) Dog Eat Dog. I literally have zero memories of this lot and their hit “No Fronts:The Remixes” though I actually don’t mind it now that I’m acquainted with it. The last time this lot were on the show, the lead singer’s very staid and sensible haircut caused quite a reaction online from the BBC4 TOTP community. I wonder if back in the day a similar thing had happened as he’s donned a baseball cap (on backwards naturally) for this second appearance.

Now, we saw the BBC make heavy edits to literally the previous act’s hit and yet there seemed to be zero censorship of “No Fronts: The Remixes” which includes the lyrics:

By the smell on the skunk, it’s the funk we blow it. So split the mud and reach for the sack, ease up your mind never look back. Inhale deeply and pass it around, c’mon everybody, let’s all get down….No guns just blunts, we kick this just for fun

Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Dan Nastasi / Dave Neabore / David Maltby / John Martin Connor / Sean Kilkenny
No Fronts lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

Blimey! They weren’t exactly a bunch of ‘goody two shoes’ were they?! Ahem. Presumably the BBC censors didn’t know that what a ‘blunt’* was!

*A hollowed out cigar filled with cannabis

There’s no doubting the musical genre of the next artist. Meatloaf never strayed very far from the rock ballad blueprint did he? This particular example of it – “Not A Dry Eye In The House” – would be his penultimate UK Top 10 hit. After being disregarded for a slot on the show as one of the new entries to the chart last week, TOTP couldn’t ignore The Meat any longer when it climbed to No 7.

I have to say that it’s not a great example of his canon of work but then it wasn’t written by long term partner Jim Steinman. Rather it came from the pen of Dianne Warren who undeniably knew her way around a soft rock ballad having written Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”, Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” and Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” amongst many, many others. However, “Not A Dry Eye In The House” seems to be soft rock ballad by numbers to me which somehow lacks the theatre of some of Meatloaf’s biggest hits. It’s a serviceable example of the genre but I’m surprised it was as big a hit as it was.

“Spaceman” by Babylon Zoo is obviously still No 1 what with it being the best selling single in the UK for 30 years by that point.

Now as I’m still behind with these write ups, I’m going to just leave this here. This is the Zupervarian remix of the track which is what the public thought they were buying based on the Levi’s ad. The happy hardcore (that again) version with the speeded up vocals all the way through. You’re welcome.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	QFX	Everytime You Touch Me	No
2	Radiohead	Street Spirit (Fade Out)	No but I had The Bends album
3	E-Motion	The Naughty North & The Sexy South	As if
4	The Bluetones	Slight Return	Could have but didn’t
5	Northern Uproar	From A Window / This Morning	Nope
6	Technohead	I Wanna Be A Hippy	Never
7	Dog East Dog	No Fronts:The Remixes	Nah
8	Meatloaf	Not A Dry Eye In The House	I did not
9	Babylon Zoo	Spaceman	I am going to admit to buying it but not for me for a friend who was obsessed with it so she could use my staff discount – honest!

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/m001z96w/top-of-the-pops-01021996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 25 JAN 1996

Posted on May 20, 2024 by 80stastic

Oh God! As The Boo Radleys once sang…”It’s Lulu”. Yes, the diminutive Scottish singer has been handed the ‘golden mic’ presenter slot this time around. I can’t really be doing with Lulu – firstly I can’t stand her most famous hit “Shout” and secondly, she just doesn’t seem like a nice person. I’m not the only one with this opinion – the late Dale Winton once said of her whilst hosting music panel show Never Mind The Buzzcocks that he would “gladly dance on her grave”. Ouch!

Anyway, let’s not obsess about Lulu and turn our attention to the music and we begin with another band who were very much associated with the Britpop movement. They seem to be coming thick and fast now don’t they? Shed Seven (for it is them) were about to have the best year of their career. Their five UK Top 40 hits in 1996 were more than any other artist in that calendar twelve months. Yes, things were certainly “Getting Better” (sorry!) for the lads from York as this single became their highest charting at the time when it peaked at No 14. Taken from sophomore album “A Maximum High” (which went Top 10 and is their biggest selling studio album), this was the sound of a band really hitting their stride. I’d not really got wholly on board with their early stuff but “Getting Better” was a belter. It sounded like they’d really tightened up their sound and decided on a defiantly more commercial style which was about to pay off. They would follow this up with the equally good “Going For Gold” and round the year off with possibly one of their most well known hits “Chasing Rainbows”. If that sounds like this post is so far just a list of Shed 7 songs, well, let’s just say I’m not the only one to have done that. Look at this from @TOTPFacts…

“Getting Better” was one of five Shed Seven titles featured in a speech in the House Of Commons by Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes, in 2008. Baker insisted it was “entirely coincidental”. Hmmmm #TOTP pic.twitter.com/aR0nDktM35
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) May 10, 2024

Coincidence my arse! The article says the guy used to be a regional manager for Our Price (for whom I worked in the 90s) so that only makes it more likely that he knew what he was doing. Anyway, my own personal go to memory of this song is when the BBC used it to soundtrack a clip for the Euro 96 football tournament. After an indifferent start, the England team had beaten Scotland and thumped Holland to qualify for the knockout stages and the Beeb used “Getting Better” as the music for a montage of England goals. As England progressed to the semi-finals, they then used the aforementioned “Going For Gold” to promote their coverage of the match. There was definitely a Shed 7 fan working for BBC Sport back then!

Now I absolutely remember “Whole Lotta Love” by Goldbug and thinking it was wild at the time but listening back to it some 28 years later, it sounds like a bit of a mess. Reworking the famous Led Zeppelin tune to incorporate the Pearl & Dean cinema music (pa-pa per pa per pa pa-pa pa per pa) might have seems like a good idea at the time but it doesn’t hold much water in retrospect. Released on the achingly trendy Acid Jazz label, the single was championed by Radio 1 DJ Chris Evans (makes a change from Simon ‘Smug’ Mayo) and went straight into the chart at No 3.

I’m not saying anything very profound nor insightful by stating that Led Zeppelin weren’t keen on releasing singles in the UK and “Whole Lotta Love” was another case in point. Despite being hugely well known thanks to the instrumental version by CCS that was used as the theme to TOTP for years during the 70s, it didn’t get a release in this country despite being a hit just about everywhere else. As I’ve said before, I never got the boat to Led Zep island and so my knowledge of their catalogue is paper thin but even I can appreciate the rock majesty of “Whole Lotta Love”. The Goldbug version though? Let’s just say it makes the Far Corporation’s take on “Stairway To Heaven” seem celestial by comparison. All those people on stage during this performance just seemed to add to the chaos. Goldbug would release just one further single which barely scraped into the Top 100 before the group split up amongst a dispute with Acid Jazz over unpaid royalties.

Back in 1993, with “All That She Wants” topping our charts, I reckon you’d have got very long odds on Ace Of Base still having hits three years later but here they were with their seventh such smash “Beautiful Life”. Now, if you’re wondering what the story behind this tune is (and I know you are!), here’s @TOTPFacts…

Jonas Berggren on “Beautiful Life”: "I was at the Canary Islands… and the last evening I just heard the song in my head… It was melancholic to leave the islands and it was a wonderful evening, with the mood and sunset. It was a beautiful life!" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) May 10, 2024

Hmm. OK. I get that your muse could appear to you watching a beautiful sunset whilst in the Canary Islands but then inspiration gives rise to that song?! Not a beautiful ballad or feel good anthem but a nasty, Eurodance track?! Nah, come on! You came up with a song that sounds like a prototype for “Barbie Girl”. Let’s move on…very quickly…

…to The Saw Doctors. What an anachronism this lot were. A good time Irish rock band in a UK chart of the mid 90s informed by a record buying public obsessed with dance music and Britpop? That was never going to fly. But it did somehow. Lulu seemed very enthused by the whole prospect of them being on the show and even adopts an Irish accent in support of them.

So how do we account for this single – “World Of Good” – becoming a No 15 hit and securing the band a slot on TOTP? Was it just a natural extension of a loyal fan base garnered by their reputation as a great live band? Surely it can’t have been off the back of a very long tail of popularity for The Commitments project? They were all the rage years before this. Mind you, the guitarist with the glasses does have a look of the piano player in the film. Maybe it was a simple as the song being a pretty good tune? No, I’m being naive. Since when has a song being good guaranteed it being a chart hit? Whatever the reason, The Saw Doctors would repeat the feat when their next single peaked at No 14 but they would return to the UK Top 40 just once more in 2002. It was a different story in the Irish charts though in which the band continued to have massive hits – three No 1s including the biggest selling Irish single ever “I Useta Lover” – way into the new millennium. They are still a going concern despite numerous line up changes though mainly as a touring band rather than a recording artist.

The 90s was a boom time for boy bands. They were everywhere beginning with America’s New Kids On The Block through to our own Take That and onto those nice Irish lads Boyzone and Westlife. They were some of the Champions League names but, looking lower down the table, there were some more mid ones as well such as 911, Let Loose and 5ive. Down in the relegation places were the likes of OTT, Gemini and the execrable Bad Boys Inc. Most of those bands were put together deliberately to appeal to the young female market, sometimes quite cynically and more often than not it seemed by Louis Walsh. However, in a league of their own when it came to manufactured boy bands were Upside Down. Put together by independent record label World Records (who, it would transpire, weren’t exactly the ‘global’ player their name suggested when they subsequently went bankrupt), this quartet looked like being yet another failed group when their debut single “Change Your Mind” only scraped into the Top 40 at No 35. The came the story of how they came into existence as told by the BBC documentary series Inside Story. Detailing the audition and selection process and the marketing strategy for such a group was compelling viewing and I did indeed watch the programme. It also exposed the utter cynicism and manipulation at the heart of the music business. In short, Upside Down were the antithesis of the likes of The Saw Doctors whose own origins were so organic you’d expect them to be on display in an aisle at Sainsbury’s.

The four band members were picked from 8,000 hopefuls and apart from the lead singer, didn’t seem like anyone you’d look twice at in the street but then I wasn’t the project’s target audience. The short guy I recall was interviewed about the prospect of pop stardom and him saying something like “If there’s any fans out there for me, I’ll find them” which sounded vaguely threatening! As for their song, it was clearly a rip off of “Careless Whisper” and was originally meant to be Bad Boys Inc’s next single until they were dropped by their label but, with the exposure that followed the broadcast of the documentary, would ultimately rise to No 11. Three more Top 40 hits followed (including a cover of Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now”) before World Records went bankrupt and Upside Down regrouped and relaunched with the worst band name ever Orange Orange. Inevitably, they flopped and split.

Around this time, I was pondering on the idea of arranging a personal appearance by an artist at the Our Price store where I worked to try and raise our profile (there was a HMV in the same precinct). I even went as far as speaking to someone at Head Office about my plan and asked about the possibility of getting Upside Down to come to the store. I was told very politely by the lady in marketing that “I think they’re very busy at the moment” meaning “You’ve no chance mate”. Some of my female work colleagues had got very excited about the prospect of being in close proximity to the lead singer of Upside Down, the other guys in the group not so much though.

OK. This is very strange. Just seven days ago, we had the video for Coolio’s new single “Too Hot” on the show which had debuted inside the Top 10 in its first week on the chart. Despite that exposure, it fell ten places to No 19. As such, there was no way it would be on the programme again this week. However, that didn’t mean Coolio wouldn’t be on the show as we got a repeat of him in the TOTP studio performing “Gangsta’s Paradise”! As Lulu said in her intro, the single had been on the charts for fourteen weeks by this point and was no longer No 1 so what gives? Well, in this week, it actually moved up the chart from No 18 to No 11 so the TOTP producers could make a case that its reappearance was legitimate but come on! Surely there was another track inside the Top 40 they could have showcased instead?

*scans that week’s Top 40*

Erm…well…it was actually pretty slim pickings. Most of the new entries were indeed featured on the show. Due to the fast moving nature of the charts back then with singles entering high in the first week and then falling away dramatically the following week (as Coolio had done), there weren’t that many records actually climbing the charts. These were the only artists that were also new entries that week which didn’t make the cut:

Culture Beat (No 32)
Xscape (No 31)
Meatloaf (No 23)
Chemical Brothers (No 13)

I think you could make a case for Chemical Brothers though could you not?

Oh now this is a tune! “Weak” by Skunk Anansie almost rips your ears off. That chorus! That vocal! Unfairly and inaccurately lumped in with the Britpop crowd – they were more Britrock* if anything – Skunk Anansie were fronted by the magnificent Skin with her striking look and stunning voice.

*Skin described their sound as “clit-rock”!

Deceptively simple in its construction around just three chords, it veritably exploded when the chorus was reached, so powerful was it. Why this didn’t get beyond No 20 in the charts is beyond me. As much as I liked “Weak” however, I have to admit to not following through on my initial interest with Skunk Anansie. More and bigger hits came in “Weak”’s wake but I can’t say I recall that many of them. My potential familiarity with their canon of work wasn’t helped by their second album “Stoosh” needing a parental guidance sticker because of some of its lyrics meaning we couldn’t play it on the shop stereo despite at least one of my colleagues really wanting to hear it. Still, that didn’t affect the band’s sales – they spent 142 weeks on the singles and album charts up to 2003 and have sold five million records.

Is it that time already? Not my teatime but 3T-time! Yes, the offspring of Tito Jackson (Taj, TJ and Taryll – see what they did there?) were amongst us in 1996 to the tune of four hit singles and a gold selling album. With their uncle Michael having huge success at this time, it was impossible to avoid the family connection being mentioned. Did it go as far as accusations of nepotism? Well, Jacko did sign them to his record label MJJ Music, mentored them and even appeared with them on one of their hits. Yeah, it’s hardly paying your dues playing the pub and club circuit is it?

“Anything” was their debut single and what a drippy ballad it was – wetter than Rishi Sunak’s suit the other day. There were no suits on display in this performance though as all three were wearing baggy shirts and what look like pyjama bottoms. And what on earth was the rucksack accessory all about and why did he take it off and fling it to the floor at the song’s climax? Was he trying to beef up their image or the song’s sound? Actually, the optics on Sunak’s General Election announcement could only have been worse if he’d taken his soaking wet suit jacket off and thrown it down in anger.

After selling half a million copies in one week*, Babylon Zoo are unsurprisingly No 1. “Spaceman” would go on to sell 1.15 million copies in total and no, I don’t know how many of those were returned to shops under the trades description act after people got past the first 20 seconds or so. To be fair, although a lot is made about how the song didn’t sound like it did on the Levi’s advert, it’s maybe a misconception that everyone who bought it felt cheated. Given those huge numbers and its exposure on radio and indeed TOTP, a lot of people must have actually liked the way it sounded all the way through.

*According to Lulu and the TOTP caption though Wikipedia says 383,000

Has it stood the test of time? I’d have to say no and that it was very much an ‘in the moment’ hit. Certainly Babylon Zoo themselves (or more correctly Jas Mann) hardly left a legacy of work behind after the fame of that hit finally faded. I wonder how many people who bought it would admit to it today?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Shed Seven	Getting Better	Not the single but I must have it on something surely?
2	Goldbug	While Lotta Love	Nah
3	Ace Of Base	Beautiful Life	Never
4	The Saw Doctors	World Of Good	Nope
5	Upside Down	Change Your Mind	As if
6	Coolio	Gangsta’s Paradise	No
7	Skunk Anansie	Weak	No but I had it on one of those Best Album Ever compilations I think
8	3T	Anything	Not likely
9	Babylon Zoo	Spaceman	I am going to admit to buying it but not for me for a friend who was obsessed with it so she could use my staff discount – honest!

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/m001z1vp/top-of-the-pops-25011996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 18 JAN 1996

Posted on May 16, 2024 by 80stastic

It’s all change in the charts in these TOTP repeats as all but the No 1 are songs that haven’t featured previously and even that No 1 is in its first (and only) week at the top. There’s also a new host who similarly would only get one go in the hot seat. Comedian Alan Davies had become a well known name both a a live stand up and radio personality by 1996 but he was still a year away from his big mainstream breakthrough role in mystery crime drama Jonathan Creek. Watching this TOTP back, Davies doesn’t seem a particularly good fit for the show. His sardonic humour and aloof manner were perhaps not the ideal skills set for presenting a fast moving, pop music show. He just doesn’t seem very engaged or indeed engaging.

We start tonight with Bucketheads whose last hit was the Top 5 stand out dance tune “The Bomb! (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind)” which combined disco funk with house beats to great effect in 1995. The follow up sort of stuck to that formula with a reworking of Brass Construction’s 1976 hit “Movin’” retitled as “Got Myself Together”. Whilst a very competent dance floor filler I’m sure, for me it didn’t have that something extra that made its predecessor that little bit more intriguing. They’ve wheeled out all the usual visual 70s funk tropes for this performance but I can’t help feeling that you’d be better off listening to the original if funk was your thang (sorry!).

Sunscreem were not a band that I paid that much attention to back in the day but that’s possibly my bad as I’ve quite enjoyed some of their songs when they’ve featured on these TOTP repeats. “Blue Skies” is another case in point. Enough of a good melody in the chorus to satisfy my pop sensibilities but also with the correct bpm to stay hip with the dance heads. If I’d only given them more of a chance in the 90s, I might have had a bit more musical credibility with my record shop colleagues.

As with the artist at No 1 this week, the band had issues with their record company Sony Music. They’d released tracks independently for inclusion on some dance compilations and therefore broke the terms of their contract with Sony. In return, Sony didn’t put much effort into promoting Sunscreem with their second album “Change Or Die” not released in major territories outside of the UK. The writing was on the wall and the band negotiated their release from their Sony contract. Sunscreem are still going though with their last album being released in 2018.

How do you follow one of the biggest selling singles in the world in 1995? Well, in the case of Coolio, and this didn’t seem like the most likely strategy, you release a cover version of an old Kool & The Gang track. “Too Hot” was a hit for Robert ‘Kool’ Bell and his mates in early 1980 but was reactivated by the “Gangsta’s Paradise” star sixteen years later as the follow up to that single. Obviously, it’s not a straight cover what with Coolio being a rapper and all but it does kind of hang together quite well. I can’t say that I remember this one from back then though. In fact, if pressed on Coolio’s cannon of work, I really could only name “Gangsta’s Paradise” and “C U When You Get There” (that inevitably the wags amongst us referred to as “C U Next Tuesday”). I’m sure most people would come up with the same tracks. Both the lyrics and video for “Too Hot” warn of the dangers of unsafe sex which set him apart from some of the other West Coast rappers. Maybe Coolio actually lived in a socially conscious world rather than a “Gangsta’s Paradise”.

Lush were another of those bands that I was on acquaintance terms with only by virtue of knowing what the covers of their albums looked like and who they were distributed by for ordering purposes in the record shops I worked in. As for their sound…well, I knew they were part of the ‘shoe gaze’ crowd but I’m not sure I’d ever actually heard any of their songs which is a shame in hindsight as “Single Girl” is quite the tune. The more I write about my time in record shops, the more it makes me feel like it was a whole list of missed listening opportunities. Anyway, back to Lush and supposedly this era of the band saw them leaving behind that ‘shoe gaze’ phase and moving towards the Britpop zeitgeist; not that Lush saw themselves in that bracket. That’s the thing about Britpop – no act associated with the movement seemed to want to admit to being associated with the movement.

Alan Davies’s intro here seems rather inappropriate in retrospect. His story about chatting up lead singer Miki Berenyi at a Pulp gig and asking for her number only to realise she’d given him that of a pizza delivery place might have seemed vaguely humorous at the time but then Miki posted this on Twitter when the BBC4 TOTP repeat went out recently…

I think this is the one where Alan Davies intro'd us with an anecdote about me staving off his chat-up lines with a fake telephone number… (I genuinely thought I gave him the right number, but didn't realise he was chatting me up) https://t.co/OM7dqHmXSO
— Miki Berenyi (@berenyi_miki) May 10, 2024

So it was true?! Why did Davies think telling that story to an audience of millions watching at home was a good idea? Did he ask Miki’s permission beforehand to use the anecdote? Thankfully Miki seems like a good sort and went on to say it was 30 years ago and isn’t a big deal.

“Single Girl” was subsequently parodied by the Shirehorses (aka Mark and Lard) as “Single Bloke”. I used to love listening to their Radio 1 afternoon show when I was working in the Our Price store in Altrincham which I’d have on in the background if I happened to be away from the counter. Clearly another reason why I didn’t know how Lush sounded as I could have used that time to acquaint myself with their album. Ah, well.

I think I’ve said this before but what was it with Nightcrawlers (featuring John Reid -for the pedants!) and their song titles? They all seemed to feature the words ‘Push’, ‘Pushing’ or ‘Feeling’. So here we get “Let’s Push It” but they also had hits with “Don’t Let The Feeling Go”, “Keep Pushing Our Love” and “Push The Feeling On” (which was released six times!). Talk about sticking to a formula! Creativity? New ideas? Balls to all that! Just keep selling the masses the same song over and over again and when I say same song, I don’t just mean the titles but also the sound. Seriously, could you really distinguish any of their hits from another?

After starting the decade in spectacular style with the No 1 single “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” and No 1 album “Greatest Hits 1965-1992”, there’d been a bit of a downturn for Cher commercially. After “Love And Understanding” made the UK Top 10 in the early Summer of 1991, of her next seven singles released, none got any higher than No 31 with the nadir being reached with the last of those being a version of “I Got You Babe” with Beavis and Butt-head. That was followed by an almighty reversal of fortunes when she featured on the 1995 Comic Relief single “Love Can Build A Bridge” alongside Neneh Cherry, Chrisse Hynde and Eric Clapton which topped the UK chart. I think these days we’d called it an ‘asterisk’ hit what with it being for charity and all. A No 1 is a No 1 though and it acted as a springboard for Cher who recorded her twenty-first studio album and first since 1991’s “Love Hurts” for new label Warners in 1995’s “It’s A Man’s World”. Featuring a number of cover versions of songs by the likes of James Brown, Marc Cohn and The Walker Brothers, it went gold in the UK which was not insignificant but was nowhere near the numbers of her Greatest Hits collection which sold 10 times that amount.

OK, that’s enough stats and chart positions, what about the actual music? “One By One” was the second single released from the album and it was, rather unbelievably, the debut single for Liverpool band The Real People (then known as JoJo And The Real People) in 1987. Who you ask? Well, they may not have had many hits (one minor Top 40 entry in 1992) but they did help none other than Noel Gallagher to record a demo to send out to record companies in the early days of Oasis featuring many songs that would end up on “Definitely Maybe”. So my question is how did “One By One” come to the attention of Cher/her management/Warners? I’m not sure there’s a straight line between the two. Anyway, here’s the original version of the song…

The Cher version released in the UK was quite different to that made available in America. The former was a trademark, chugging rock guitar number but the latter dropped all those traditional stylings (including backing vocals and sax solo) and turned it into an R&B tune. The Wikipedia entry for the song includes clips of both versions and the difference is quite startling. “One By One” made No 7 in the UK and paved the way for Cher to return in 1998 with the all conquering “Believe” album and single.

Talking of Liverpool bands, here’s one that, unlike The Real People, would have loads of hits. Cast were onto their third with “Sandstorm”. I liked this lot. I’d bought their debut single “Finetime” and also enjoyed its follow up “Alright”. Somehow though, I considered this one to be slightly inferior though listening to it now, I’ve no idea why as it’s a banger in very much the same vein as its predecessors. Supposedly a fave of the aforementioned Noel Gallagher, Cast seemed to have timed their arrival to perfection in terms of riding the Britpop zeitgeist. I’m sure they would deny their membership but they were definitely seen as a part of that movement.

On reflection, you could say that these early singles were quite conventional, rock/pop songs but if you’re a good songwriter (as I believe lead singer John Power to be) then your tunes will always stand up when heard through the lens of retrospect. Image wise, Power seems to be copying the Oasis sartorial look with that jacket (or maybe they copied him?) but the standout performer is always Keith O’Neill with his energetic, powerful drumming. At the time, we hadn’t witnessed anything like it on the show since Talk Talk’s Lee Harris a decade earlier.

I’ve given myself a hard time on this blog lately about not remembering certain songs or artists but I think I can give myself a free pass for not recalling this lot. Who on earth were Solo?! Well, apparently, they were an American a cappella R&B group who had one minor hit in the UK with this song “Heaven” which got to No 35. I don’t wish to be unkind but this sounds so dull. Clearly the guys can sing but I’m not sure why TOTP executive producer Ric Blaxill thought their performance here was any sort of ‘exclusive’ (“Heaven” wasn’t even a hit in the US) nor why he gave them the direct to camera message slot at the top of the show. And that band name! Is that solo as in with no instruments? Well, no instruments except a double bass it seems. So obvious was the name Solo that they had to go by the name Solo (US) here to avoid confusion with dance producer Stuart Crichton who had released records under that moniker. That’s before we even mention Han Solo (Star Wars), Napoleon Solo (The Man From U.N.C.L.E) and Skid Solo (Tiger comic).

Just as the UK was falling in love with George Michael all over again in 1996, the US seemed to be going a bit cold on him. George had ended Michael Jackson’s six week reign at the top of the charts with “Jesus To A Child” going straight in at No 1. The lead single from his album “Older”, it was followed by a further chart topper in “Fastlove” and three other singles that peaked at either No 2 or No 3. The album went six times platinum here and effortlessly leapt to No 1. However, across the pond, those two singles only made it to Nos 7 and 8 respectively and the album peaked at No 6 and was only the 99th best selling album of the year. By contrast, it was the UK’s 5th best selling of 1996. That’s not to say it didn’t sell at all in the US; one million sales is not to be disregarded lightly but “Faith” sold ten (!) times that amount in the late 80s. Why should this be? Well, maybe the songs weren’t as obviously commercial and radio friendly as those of “Faith” and George had been away for a while – it had been six years since “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1” came out. Maybe, his audience had just moved on in his absence? It can’t have been a gay backlash as he didn’t come out until 1998. Sadly for George, his stay at the top will last just one week as he was unable to repel the march of “Spaceman” by Babylon Zoo. He should have maybe stuck with those “Faith” era Levi’s.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Bucketheads	Got Myself Together	Never happening
2	Sunscreem	Blue Skies	No but maybe should have
3	Coolio	Too Hot	Nah
4	Lush	Single Girl	Nope
5	Nightcrawlers	Let’s Push It	I did not
6	Cher	One By One	Negative
7	Cast	Sandstorm	See 2 above
8	Solo	Heaven	Definitely not
9	George Michael	Jesus To A Child	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001z1vm/top-of-the-pops-18011996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 11 JAN 1996

Posted on May 7, 2024 by 80stastic

As we move into mid January 1996, the Christmas bloat affecting the Top 40 has started to clear and we have seven new songs (of nine) in the show tonight. Nearly all of them, I cannot recall. Is this how it is for everyone else who religiously watches these BBC4 TOTP repeats? That you’ve forgotten the majority of songs that feature on them? Maybe it is and that might be excusable given how the frequency of songs going into and out of the charts exploded in the 90s and that we are 28 years removed (currently) from these events but I worked in record shops for almost the entire decade. How can’t I remember them? What’s my excuse?

Well, I’m going to confront my shame and jump right into this. The first artist on tonight is Judy Cheeks with “Reach” who…wait…what? Oh no…this is unforgivable! My research tells me that not only has this track been a hit before (No 17 in 1994) but that Judy appeared on TOTP to promote it…which means I’ll have reviewed it in this blog…and I still don’t remember it! Absolutely shameful! Hang on though, could I get away with just copying and pasting what I said about it first time round here? I mean, I’ve forgotten about it so maybe you would have too? No, I’m better than that surely? Actually, I’m not sure I am. Here you are, fill your boots…

TOTP 05 MAY 1994

NEXT!

Nope. No idea about this either. Not the artist Tori Amos obviously (I think my wife had her first album “Little Earthquakes”) but this single called “Caught A Lite Sneeze”. And herein lies the rub. The album it was from – “Boys For Pele” – I recognised instantly when I looked it up on Wikipedia but as to what it sounded like, I’m as clueless as Esther McVey. You see, my colleagues in the Our Price I worked in would not have been seen dead putting Tori Amos on the shop stereo and even if they had done, the chances of me being able to sit down and listen to it at work were almost nil. I think I’ve just answered my own question as to what my excuse is for not knowing some of these songs. As for this song, it’s typical Tori fare – vocals that are all at once kooky and tortured allied to a floating, haunting melody but it never seems to really go anywhere; it just sort of meanders along until Tori presumably feels she’s made her point. I do like her rotating harpsichord and piano moves though. The album sold well enough, perhaps belatedly propelled by an unexpected No 1 single being released from it in January 1997 when a dance remix of ‘Professional Widow” by Armand van Helden took Amos to the top of the UK charts. That’s all way in the future though…

Onto a third consecutive hit that I don’t remember. Baby D were also onto their third hit after ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy” (a No 1 record no less) and their reworking of The Corgis hit as “(Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime) I Need Your Loving”. “So Pure” was more of that pop-ified drum ‘n’ bass stye that had served them so well on those previous hits or as Russ Jones put it when reviewing the single for The Guardian:

“The fabulous third single from the squeaky-voiced diva and maker of jungle for people who hate jungle but love glamorous melodies, vaguely familiar piano breaks, and copping off under strobe lights.”

Jones, Ross (23 December 1995). “Reviews: Singles”. p. 27. The Guardian.

Obviously it did little for me and my purer pop sensibilities but I’m sure it went down a storm on the dance floor at Xanadu’s nightclub in Rochdale. The mostly black and white video features a bloke who looks like Eric Cantona’s younger, longer haired brother but I’m guessing he’s actually Claudio Galdez from the band.

Following my long standing tradition of not getting on board with bands that I really should have, here’s another that I missed out on. Yes, after The Smiths and the Stone Roses failed to light up my musical radar (at least initially, I subsequently discovered their charms), here come Gene. Unlike me though, my mate Robin LOVED Gene and indeed picks them as his favourite band ever eclipsing even his early heroes the aforementioned Smiths. Ah yes, The Smiths. Morrissey and co were never far from people’s lips when discussing Gene as the comparison between Mozza and lead singer Martin Rossiter were obvious though a little lazy. After three earlier middling sized hits (including title track of debut album “Olympian”), their very first single “For The Dead” was rereleased and scored the band their biggest ever hit when it peaked at No 14. As with the Tori Amos album earlier, I definitely knew the front cover of said album but I never seemed to actually hear it. I seem to blowing out of the water the myth about working in a record shop as the biggest doss and coolest job ever with every word I type! At Robin’s prompting, I am investigating the band’s back catalogue and liking what I hear. “Olympian” is a mighty track as is “Fighting Fit”. Sadly for me, the band are no longer a going concern having split in 2004. Martin Rossiter perfumed a career-spanning, one-off, farewell solo gig at the O2 Forum Kentish Town on 20 November 2021 and yes, my mate Robin was there.

Finally, a song I do remember but that could be due to it being used to soundtrack the opening titles of an ITV late night football highlights show called Football League Extra in the mid to late 90s. Dreadzone were an off shoot from Big Audio Dynamite and featured that combo’s previous members Greg Roberts and Leo Williams. Their band name was dreamt up by BAD co-founder and film director, DJ and musician Don Letts. Their so far only hit single was the No 20 peaking “Little Britain” which used the melody from “Tang” the sixth section of classical composer Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” (the first section was famously used in that Old Spice advert) whilst it also features samples from the films If and Excalibur. Now, when BAD were having hits with “E=MC²” and “Medicine Show”, with songs featured samples from films such as Performance, The Good, The Bad And The Ugly and A Fistful Of Dollars Don Letts failed to get the relevant copyright clearance for them so I hope that he wasn’t in charge of Dreadzone’s sampling practices!

Almost an instrumental but not quite, “Little Britain ” is the very definition of a jaunty tune guaranteed to put a smile on your face. Indeed, even the ever curmudgeonly John Peel loved Dreadzone and nominated their album “Second Light” (from which “Little Britain” was taken) as one of his favourite albums ever whilst six of their tracks featured on his Festive Fifty show of 1995. The band are still a going concern though they haven’t released an album since 2017. Somehow it doesn’t seem fair that mention of the title Little Britain might these days conjure up images from the comedy sketch series of the same name starring David Williams and Matt Lucas rather than Dreadzone’s single.

It’s another of those singles now that hung around the Top 40 for weeks and weeks like “Missing” by Everything But The Girl, “Father And Son” by Boyzone and “It’s Oh So Quiet” by Björk. Add to that list “Wonderwall” by Oasis. Like all of their singles, the Our Price in Stockport where I was working at this time stocked this one all year round as the sales they achieved couldn’t be ignored. “Wonderwall” has so far racked up 89 weeks on the UK Top 100 including 30 consecutively between November 1995 and June 1996. Now, there are a couple of links between Oasis and the act on before them Dreadzone which I was not aware of until now. Firstly, both bands signed to Creation Records in 1993 (although Dreadzone subsequently signed to Virgin). Secondly, in this year of 1996, Oasis performed two nights at Knebworth for an audience of 125,000 each time, the largest outdoor concerts in UK history at the time. One of the support acts for them on those appearances? Yep, Dreadzone. I don’t know about a “Little Britain” but it’s certainly a small world.

After his first No 1 “Oh Carolina” in 1993, Shaggy struggled to consolidate on it with follow up single “Soon Be Done” failing to make the Top 40. He seemed to be making a better attempt in building on his second chart topper “Boombastic” with the track “Why You Treat Me So Bad”. To help him out with his endeavours, he’s roped in American rapper Grand Puba on this one though he isn’t in the TOTP studio for this performance (which I can’t find on YouTube by the way). To make up for his absence, Shaggy has doubled up by miming both his own vocals and Grand Puba’s which perhaps gives a false impression of the depths of his talents. The performance and track are both very underwhelming in my book.

When in Hull city centre recently, I witnessed perhaps the worst thing I’ve ever seen. A busker with a microphone and a speaker but instead of playing a backing track and singing along to it, he was playing the actual track and miming! His track of choice as I was walking past him? The Shaggy version of “In The Summertime” (featuring Rayvon of course which was quite apt as this guy was like an act from Phoenix Nights). As if the scene before me wasn’t bad enough, two young women came up to the busker and showed him their phone on which they were playing the Shaggy song and asked this bloke if he was, indeed, Shaggy! I mean, how did it come to this?

And so we arrive at perhaps the most infamous hit of 1996 already and we’re only two weeks into January! No chance of me not remembering this one! It’s time for “Spaceman” by Babylon Zoo! OK, so let’s get the reason why it was so infamous out of the way early doors. Yes, that moment that bound a nation together in collective dismay when we all realised that the brilliant dance tune from the latest Levi’s jeans advert wasn’t, in fact, a brilliant dance tune at all but a hoary old rock dirge with a load of synths slapped on it. It’s the way it starts with that speeded up, robot vocal over a pumping dance beat before literally grinding to a halt in front of our ears (if that is possible) and lurching into the main part of the track that dealt such a crushing blow.

So, who were Babylon Zoo and from whence did they come? They were essentially a vehicle for the ego of lead singer Jas Mann who ruffled a few feathers in press interviews with his claims of genius and being the future of music. Enjoying the patronage of record company executive Clive Black, the release of “Spaceman” was delayed when he took the band with him from Warners to EMI after being poached by the latter. However, promo copies of the single had been distributed to radio stations and when one in Manchester played it, a listening ad agency decided it would be perfect for the Levi’s contract. The futuristic sounding intro and outro were the work of legendary producer Arthur Baker and on his magic touch was a monster hit spawned. With 383,000 copies sold in its first week, it became the fastest selling single in the UK since “Can’t Buy Me Love” by The Beatles in 1964. It would sell 1.15 million copies in the UK overall and top charts around Europe including five weeks at No 1 here. As well be seeing a lot more of this track, I’ll leave it there for now.

It’s a sixth and final week at No 1 for “Earth Song” by Michael Jackson. I’m still waiting for the TOTP that will coincide with Jarvis Cocker’s protest against Jacko at the BRIT awards so I won’t be commenting on this single again until that show airs.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Judy Cheeks	Reach	No
2	Tori Amos	Caught A Lite Sneeze	It’s a no from me
3	Baby D	So Pure	Nah
4	Gene	For The Dead	Nope
5	Dreadzone	Little Britain	Negative
6	Oasis	Wonderwall	I didn’t
7	Shaggy	Why You Treat Me So Bad	Never
8	Babylon Zoo	Spaceman	I did but for a friend who was obsessed with it so she could use my staff discount – honest!
9	Michael Jackson	Earth Song	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001yty7/top-of-the-pops-11011996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 1996 – the prologue

Posted on May 7, 2024 by 80stastic

1996? Same as 1995 wasn’t it? Britpop was still a thing, The Beatles ‘Anthology’ project gave us another single, Take That at No 1…same old same old. Well yes…and no. By February, Take That weren’t a thing anymore (and wouldn’t be for another ten years) after announcing their break up with a Greatest Hits album and final single “How Deep Is Your Love”. Britpop was still about but a new force in pop music was to emerge during the Summer that would subvert the traditional teenage girl market – yes, the Spice Girls are coming! Gulp! ‘Girl Power’ wasn’t the only term in town though as the Summer also brought us Euro ‘96 and that football single by Lightning Seeds and Baddiel & Skinner – “Three Lions”.

Controversy came courtesy of Jarvis Cocker wafting his arse in the direction of Michael Jackson at the BRIT Awards leading to his arrest and Shaun Ryder whose expletive laden appearance on TFI Friday with Black Grape led to his ban from live broadcasting and the show to have to be recorded rather than going out live on air. Oasis continued their stratospheric rise with a second No 1 single and by playing some historic gigs – two nights at Manchester City’s then ground Maine Road (I was at the second) and two at Knebworth House which saw the biggest ever demand for concert tickets in British history. In complete contrast, former Manchester heroes the Stone Roses had a dreadful year with founding guitarist John Squire leaving the group who then performed a very poorly received gig at the Reading Festival which saw the press (and fans) pour scorn on Ian Brown’s vocals in particular.

The best selling single of the year would come from a hip hop version of an old Roberta Flack song which broke the record at the time for the most radio plays in a single week. Meanwhile, the album that shifted the most units in 1996 was by a most unlikely artist who seemed to have already peaked during the previous year having had two minor hits and spending twenty weeks in the UK Top 40 albums chart but never getting higher than No 12. In an almighty turnaround, by the end of the year, that album would have been No 1 for eleven weeks (seven of them consecutively) and spent forty-one on the spin inside the Top 10. Alanis Morissette, your time has come.

In the wider world, there were two royal divorces, a Doctor Who feature film with Paul McGann in the title role (that split opinion as I recall), a cloned sheep called Dolly and Glenn Hoddle announced he was leaving my beloved Chelsea to become the next England manager. Independence Day was the biggest grossing film of a year which also saw the release of the film adaptation of Irvine Walsh’s Trainspotting whose soundtrack would go three times platinum in the UK. My own personal year saw me stay in the Our Price store in Stockport and enjoy a holiday in Barcelona…until I had the worst case of the runs I’ve ever had. Let’s hope the TOTP repeats of 1996 don’t similarly stink the place out.

TOTP 04 JAN 1996

Posted on May 6, 2024 by 80stastic

Here we go again…it’s another new year of BBC4 TOTP repeats which means a whole lot more blogging for yours truly. This is my eighth year (real time) of doing this and my fourteenth TOTP year that I’ll have reviewed. “Why?” is probably the question you’re about to ask and it’s one I have posed to myself many a time. I nearly gave it up after finishing the first TOTP year (1983) as it was taking so much time but I didn’t and so resolved to finish the decade. Then another big decision – do I carry on with the 90s repeats? I resolved to at least give it a go as it coincided with my time of working in record shops so I thought that would be a good tie-in and also the provider of potential material for the posts. My personal circumstances changed around this point also which meant that I had more time to devote to it and now I can see the end in sight. Once the 90s repeats are done (assuming we all get that far) I’ll stop. I left record shops behind in 2000 so it seems reasonable to end it all there. By my reckoning, that will be in roughly two years (real) time.

For now though, it’s back to early January 1996. As the singles chart is fairly slow moving and congested after the Christmas sales period, of the nine hits featured on tonight’s show, we’ve seen five of them before. We start with one of those from The Outhere Brothers with Molella and their single “If You Wanna Party”. I have zero left to say about this pair of pillocks and I’m really hoping this is the last time we have to see them on the show. Their discography says they had one more hit after this called “Let Me Hear You Say ‘Ole Ole” which made No 18 in 1997. Well, even if this isn’t their last time on the show that’s at least a year off from the chance of them appearing again. Their very last single was a little ditty called “Ae-Ah” which sounds like the noise I make when I bend down these days.

You never hear Dubstar mentioned when conversation turns to Britpop artists do you? That’s maybe because they weren’t really part of that movement although that didn’t stop us adding them to the Britpop display on an end panel in the Our Price I worked in. “Not So Manic Now” was their third single and then biggest hit before it was trumped by a rerelease of debut single “Stars” in the wake of its success. I quite liked both tracks – they were kind of like a poppier version of Portishead and Sarah Blackwood’s fragrant vocals have an aroma of Kirsty MacColl listening back to them now, a connection I didn’t make at the time. Parent album “Disgraceful” had Robert Steel’s memorable ‘pencil case vulva’ artwork on its cover which certainly made it stand out though the album never quite achieved the sales its singles hinted at when it peaked at No 30. I had no idea until researching this post that “Not So Manic Now” was actually a cover version having been recorded by local Castleford band Brick Supply. Want to hear it? Yeah me too…

…wow! I think I actually prefer that original version. The sort of thing I would have lapped up in the 80s had I been aware of it. If you look online, there is some debate as to what the song is about with some very grim scenarios put forward so I think I prefer to think of it like my mate Robin who would use the song’s title to describe the canon of the Manic Street Preachers material post the disappearance of Richie Edwards.

Two back to back hits we’ve seen before now beginning with “Oh Father” by Madonna. As with every Madonna song, there is reams of stuff written about this online though for myself, having reviewed it once, I’m not inspired to say much more about it. I sometimes think with these prolific artists like Madge and Prince, if you record so much material, it can’t all be good can it? Scanning through her singles discography for example, are the likes of “Gambler”, “Who’s That Girl” or “Hanky Panky” really that great? Sure, she’s made some wonderful pop records over the decades but there has to be the odd duffer in there occasionally surely? For what it’s worth, I don’t think “Oh Father” is one of them though it is rather a ‘lost’ Madonna single which you rarely hear played on the radio.

So by my reckoning, this is the fourth time that Boyzone have been on the show performing “Father And Son” including one from months earlier when they featured in the ‘Album Chart’ slot. That seems like an awful lot of times – when Ronan says to the studio audience mid song “Boyzone back on Top of the Pops” he wasn’t wrong was he? He probably should have added the words “yet again” though. This is clearly just a reshowing of one of those four appearances – you can tell because Roman’s got his hair gelled in spikes but he has it flattened in one of the later performances.

The song has longevity in other ways as well. It was originally a hit for Cat Stevens in 1970 then, of course, Boyzone twenty-five years later. In 2004, the two joined forces with Ronan Keating doing a virtual duet with Cat Stevens (now known as Yusuf Islam) which also rose to No 2 with the profits going to the Band Aid Trust. Then, sixteen years on from that, Yusuf put together a duet of the song with himself using his original 1970 vocals for the ‘son’ part and recording his 2020 self voice for the role of the ‘father’. Johnny Cash also recorded two versions of the track, once in 1974 and a version also turned up on his posthumous 2003 album “Unearthed” as a duet with Fiona Apple. Just for good measure, psychedelic rockers the Flaming Lips got involved in the song’s story when their track “Fight Test” was deemed in a lawsuit to be so similar to “Father And Son” that 75% of any royalties from it have to go to Yusuf Islam.

I thought I didn’t know this next song – “Lump” by the Presidents Of The United States Of America – but as soon as I heard it, everything came rushing back. My lack of memory isn’t easy to understand given the song’s hook is pretty basic. Maybe I just haven’t heard it agin in the intervening 28 years since it was in the charts. I’m guessing it doesn’t get that much radio play. If you do hear the band on the airwaves these days, it’s probably their biggest hit “Peaches” anyway. To my utter surprise, their discography tells me that they had two other Top 40 entries in the UK singles chart. Maybe I’d remember them too if I heard them but I really can’t be arsed to put that theory to the test. There is however one other song that they did that I do recall and guess what? It’s a cover version of a huge song. No wonder I remember it. In 1998, Presidents Of The United States Of America recorded their take on the iconic song “Video Killed The Radio Star” by British synth pop band the Buggles which I only knew because it featured in the Adam Sandler film The Wedding Singer as it wasn’t a hit peaking at No 52 here. I quite enjoyed their version actually when I would have thought it was impossible to hold a torch to the Buggles so kudos to them.

Anyway, back to “Lump” and its garage rock channelling, unsophisticated sound was a welcome presence in the charts as an antidote to all those over processed, homogenised Eurodance tunes and, some might say, a decent alternative to the ever pervasive Britpop movement. As for that band name, I’m guessing they chose it so they could be introduced on stage at gigs with “Ladies and gentlemen…the Presidents Of The United States Of America”.

Whatever the truth was behind the departure of Louise Nurding (as was) from Eternal, as with Robbie Williams exit from Take That, it didn’t look like losing a high profile member was going to derail the group; at least initially anyway. Second album “Power Of A Woman” sold two million copies worldwide (although that was half the amount of debut “Always And Forever”) and furnished the reconfigured trio with four Top 10 hits the second of which was “I Am Blessed”. Presumably, this huge ballad was released with the Christmas market in mind though looking at its chart run, something somewhere didn’t quite go to plan. Debuting at No 14 two weeks before Christmas, the chances of it sweeping all others before it to become the festive chart topper looked remote at best. A two place move the following week and then a one place drop the week after would suggest that maybe the marketing or promotion of the single was off. Did it get swallowed up in the Christmas glut of competing releases? And then, curiously, an upturn with three consecutive weeks of chart climbs saw it break into the Top 10 finally coming to a halt at a high of No 7. It just doesn’t seem like the record performed how it would have been expected to by the group’s label.

Maybe that rise up the charts had something to do with, if not divine intervention, then at least papal influence as the trio did indeed (as referenced by host Nicky Campbell) perform “I Am Blessed” for then Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. Rather than being a gospel number though, it sounds like the type of power ballad that could have sat comfortably withinthe track listing of the soundtrack to The Bodyguard with Easther Bennett doing her best Whitney Houston impression. There was, however, a bona fide gospel number as an extra track on the CD single with the trio taking on “Oh Happy Day” by the Edwin Hawkins Singers. As if performing for the Pope wasn’t enough, Eternal were still a year or so away from the band’s commercial high point of achieving a No 1 single with “I Wanna Be The Only One”. Hallelujah!

Again? Seriously? As good as song as it is, this must be about the fifth time that Everything But The Girl have been on the show performing “Missing”. What else can I say about this song? Well, nothing really but then there is more to Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt than this track. I guess like most people, I first came across the duo in 1984 when “Each And Every One” made No 28 on the UK Top 40. From then, I kind of lost sight of them until 1986 and the wonderful “Come On Home” single. It was taken from the album “Baby, The Stats Shine Bright” which my wife loved and is one of the records that I always associate with first meeting her when we were both 18. A couple more albums followed including “Idlewild” which housed their then biggest hit single, that Rod Stewart cover, which took them to No 3 but which I was never that fond of. They put that right though with their sumptuous “Covers EP” in 1992. “Amplified Heart” arrived in 1994 with the original version of “Missing” before that Todd Terry remix changed everything.

In amongst all of this, Ben would suffer the potentially fatal and certainly life changing Churg-Strauss syndrome, an autoimmune condition that resulted in him having 5m of necrotised small intestine removed. In 1997, Ben wrote a book called Patient about his experience and I was lucky enough to catch him talking about it during a personal appearance at Waterstones on Deansgate, Manchester as part of the book tour to support its publication. It really is a remarkable story and I urge anyone to read the book if you come across it – it was out of print for a few years but was republished on the Bloomsbury imprint in 2014. There, that’s better than rehashing what I’ve already said about “Missing” because you know what? I don’t want to talk about it (ahem).

And here’s another song I don’t want to talk about – Michael Jackson is still No 1 with “Earth Song” but I’m going to skip this completely as in a few repeats time, we’ll be entering February, the month of the BRIT awards and that protest by Jarvis Cocker against Jacko’s performance of this track at them. Consider my powder kept dry…

Nicky Campbell! What are you doing man?! Whose idea was this to get him to pose naked with just a guitar to cover his modesty?! Do you think he is actually nude? I didn’t want to look too closely to investigate further. He could be as I’m pretty sure that bit was recorded on a closed set – there’s no sign of any studio audience in shot. The apparent reason for the…what should we call this?…’sketch’ (?) is because the video for the new George Michael single was rumoured to feature some nudity but didn’t so Campbell added some of his own. A likely story.

What is true is that this was the first self penned single by George in nearly four years so it was kind of a big deal. On top of that, it was the first new material with new record label Virgin since leaving his contract with Sony Music after a protracted legal battle. “Jesus To A Child” was the lead single from George’s third studio album “Older”. It would be a huge commercial success – No 1 in the UK, the fifth best selling album here of 1996 (eventually going six times platinum) and giving George six hit singles all of which went Top 3 or higher; this was the first time this had ever been achieved in this country. The front cover of the album features a simple close up of George’s face half covered in shadow. He’d changed his look significantly since we’d last seen him in public (his performance at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert?). The bouncy hair and designer stubble had been replaced by a buzz cut and sculpted facial hair which puts me in mind somehow of Mr. Claypole (if you know, you know). I’m sure there was a story at the time about how the initial designs for the artwork for the album had been stolen and turned up in somebody’s dustbin or something but maybe I’m mistaken.

As for “Jesus To A Child”, it was a deeply personal song written about the death of George’s partner Anselmo Feleppa who’d died from an AIDS related brain haemorrhage in 1993 (Michael was not yet out about his sexuality but he retrospectively went on record saying the clues were there for those who were listening). In many respects it was a brave sound to come out with as your first new material for years. A brooding, sombre mature ballad that was completely at odds with a musical landscape of Britpop and dance tunes. It was definitely more aligned to “Different Corner” than “Too Funky”. The UK record buying public reacted positively to it though; so positively that it went straight to No 1 albeit for a solitary week. My main memory of this song though is being asked by a punter in the Our Price store I was working in what the new George Michael single was called. I must have been distracted that day as I came back with the answer “Jesus To A Lizard” mixing up George with US hardcore rockers The Jesus Lizard. I felt as embarrassed as Nicky Campbell should have been.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	The Outhere Brothers with Molella	If You Wanna Party	I do, I do…but not with you two berks – NO!
2	Dubstar	Not So Manic Now	Liked it, didn’t buy it
3	Madonna	Oh Father	No
4	Boyzone	Father And Son	Nah
5	Presidents Of The United States Of America	Lump	It’s a no
6	Eternal	I Am Blessed	Negative
7	Everything But The Girl	Missing	No but I must have it on something surely?
8	Michael Jackson	Earth Song	Team Jarvis all the way! That’s a no by the way
9	George Michael	Jesus To A Child	Nope

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/m001yty5/top-of-the-pops-04011996?seriesId=unsliced