Less than three weeks into 1991 and the hopes for a good year to one and all are already in tatters as the Gulf War has escalated with the commencement of Operation Desert Storm two days prior to this TOTP being broadcast. I knew it was serious as the night before, the League Cup quarter final highlights were bumped from the TV schedules to make way for the extra news coverage of the unfolding events. Nothing got in the way of the football. I got the same feeling in 2020 when the pandemic struck – if the football is gone then we are in trouble. Indeed, TOTP itself was shunted to the Saturday night from its regular Thursday slot to allow for extended BBC news coverage.

I remember turning up for work on the Thursday morning and making an enormous faux pas. I was on the counter (as usual) and decided to put some Warren Zevon on the shop stereo as I fancied hearing “Werewolves Of London”. As if that song with its ‘Little old lady got mutilated late last night’ lyric wasn’t unsuitable enough, it all went horribly wrong when we got to track 4 of the album which was “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner”. If you don’t know this song (and I didn’t at the time), here’s what Wikipedia says about it:

The fictional character Roland is a Norwegian who becomes embroiled in the aftermath of the Nigerian Civil War and Congo Crisis of the 1960s—the lyrics mention a “Congo war” and the years 1966 and 1967, which correspond to the mercenary-led Kisangani Mutinies after the Congo Crisis. He earns a reputation as the greatest Thompson gunner, a reputation that attracts the attention of the CIA. Roland is betrayed and murdered by a fellow mercenary, Van Owen, who blows off his head. Roland becomes the phantom “headless Thompson gunner” and eventually has his revenge, when he catches Van Owen in a Mombasa bar and guns him down. Afterward, he continues “wandering through the night”. Other violent conflicts of the succeeding decade are said to be haunted by Roland, including Ireland, Lebanon, Palestine, and Berkeley, California…

Oh. 

Thankfully a colleague did know what the song was about and whipped it off the CD player sharpish and averted any customer complaints about insensitivity. Phew! Incredibly, “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner” was not on the blacklist of songs that were banned by the BBC that were deemed inappropriate whilst the conflict raged. Want to know some that were? Here’s just a few choice examples from a list of over 60…

• “(I Just) Died in Your Arms” – Cutting Crew : OK, it has the word ‘died’ in it but even so…
• “I Don’t Want to Be a Hero” – Johnny Hates Jazz : One of the least offensive groups in history surely?! 
• “I’ll Fly for You” – Spandau Ballet : What?! 
• “A Little Peace” – Nicole : A Eurovision winning cry for world peace sung by a 17 year old?
• “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going” – Billy Ocean : Just a little tenuous don’t you think?
• “Boom Bang-a-Bang” – Lulu : Oh f**k off! Another Eurovision winner whose ‘offensive’ lyrics include “my heart goes boom bang-a-bang boom bang-a-bang when you are near”!

They were all banned but not “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner” and not the show’s opening song which is “Hippychick” by Soho. This is a great one hit wonder but its lyrical subject matter was hardly non political. Here’s @TOTPFacts:

Not only that but the band were threatened by TOTP producers with not being allowed to perform unless they lost the anti war sticker on founding member Tim London’s guitar and the CND emblazoned dresses worn by identical twin singers Jacqui and Pauline Cuff. Somehow, they convinced the producers to let the offending articles stay and “Hippychick” would go on to be a Top 10 hit. It hadn’t started out life quite as successfully though. It had missed the Top 40 altogether when first released in 1990 but it had crucially been a dance floor success in the US where it  had sold the best part of a million outselling Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart” which was No 1 (the US charts were collated based on radio-play and not just sales).  It was this that convinced their label Savage Records to give it another shot over here. 

Of course you can’t talk about “Hippychick” without mentioning that Smiths sample in the intro. The start of “How Soon Is Now” must be one of the most distinctive openings to a song ever and yet it it seemed to fit perfectly into this quirky, shuffling dance track. Genius! Johnny Marr supposedly received 25% of the track’s royalties as payment for the use of the sample. 

I really liked this one an had already been introduced to it by its inclusion of the near legendary “Happy Daze” compilation album that got hammered in our store over Xmas. Sadly for the band, they were unable to recreate the success of “Hippychick” despite having sone great tunes on their album “Goddess” (including follow up single “Love Generation” which sounded like the B52s crossed with Lone Justice). 

So we’ve established that neither Soho’s anti war messaging nor Warren Zevon’s “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner” warranted being banned by the BBC in the light of the Gulf War and now we have a video from Belinda Carlisle that clearly depicts a soldier leaving his partner to go off to fight in a war! The lyrics even include the lines ‘I can hear the whistle, military train’! The BBC censors clearly hadn’t learned their lesson from the ‘chicks’ll cream’  “Grease Megamix” debacle the other week. 

“Summer Rain” was the sixth and final single to be lifted from Belinda’s “Runaway Horses” album. The chart performance of said singles were the most inconsistent and frankly bizarre since those taken from Fleetwood Mac’s “Tango In the Night ” album. Look at this:

1. “Leave A Light On” – No 4
2. “La Luna” – No 38
3. “Runaway Horses” – No 40
4. “Vision Of You” – No 41
5. “(We Want) The Same Thing” – No 6
6. “Summer Rain” – No 23

Just weird. Looking at her discography overall, I hadn’t quite realised before that although Belinda would carry on having hit albums and singles here in the UK for the duration of the 90s, “Summer Rain” (and the “Runaway Horses” album) which was pretty much where her success ended in her native US. Check this out:

• US Top 40 singles 1991 – 1999: 0
• UK Top 40 singles 1991 – 1999: 11
• US Top 40 albums 1991 – 1999: 0
• UK Top 40 albums 1991 – 1999: 3

Not sure why that would have been. I would have thought her brand of radio friendly soft rock would have been perfect for the genre formatted US airwaves. She  would return in the Autumn of 1991 with the “Live Your Life Be Free” album and single and is in October of this year bringing her The Decades Tour to the UK to celebrate 35 years as a solo artist.

Someone who’s an “All True Man” next (whatever that is). Alexander O’Neal seemed to have been trading off his past glories for the past few years before finally returning with some brand new material in 1991. Some of his releases since his massive selling “Hearsay” album of 1987 included the singles “Fake ’88”, “Hearsay ’89” and a medley of his old hits called “Hit Mix (Official Bootleg Mega-Mix)”. His only album releases had been a Xmas album and “Hearsay – All Mixed Up” which was, unsurprisingly, a remix album of “Hearsay” tracks. I guess it would have been his record label squeezing every last drop out of his recent back catalogue  rather than Alexander himself but even so. He finally got around to recording some songs for his new album (also called “All True Man”) and released the title track as the lead single. It was written by the go to R’n’B songwriters/ producers of the day in Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and sure enough they supplied O’Neal with what would be his last ever Top 20 hit. 

I have to say that Alexander O’Neal’s music has never really done anything for me. I could just about stand “Criticize” but the rest of it? Nah, I’m good thanks and “All True Man” wasn’t going to sway me otherwise. He clearly had a sizeable fab base in this country though as the album peaked at No 2 in the charts and achieved gold status sales although those paled in comparison to “Hearsay”. I did like the way he always dressed in a suit and tie for TOTP though. Standards and all that. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBhDtHvC_dY

Now here’s a clam from host Nicky Campbell. That Dirty Dancing is the most popular film soundtrack of all time – is that right? Would it have been right in 1991? And what does he meant by popular anyway? The best selling is surely a more quantifiable criteria? In his intro he dismisses the advances of South Pacific, The Sound Of Music and Saturday Night Fever before introducing the re-released “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life” by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes. According to Wikipedia, the best selling soundtrack album of all time is The Bodyguard but that didn’t come out until 1992 so that can be dismissed in terms of Campbell’s claim. The second biggest selling on Wikipedia’s list though is Saturday Night Fever with Dirty Dancing third. Given that Saturday Night Fever had 10 whole years in existence and therefore years worth of sales before Dirty Dancing was even released, I’m backing it to have been in the lead sales wise back in 1991. It’s all academic anyway as presumably Campbell just needed a link into the song and could have made up anything as long as it segued neatly into the video clip. 

“(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life” was back in the charts having been re-released to cash in on a second wave of the film’s popularity after it had received its terrestrial TV premier over Xmas 1990. That sort of occurrence couldn’t happen today because of streaming services. Want to hear that song from the film you’ve just watched over and over again? I’m sure it’ll be on Spotify. Back in 1991 though, once releases were out of the charts, they were deleted very quickly and you could only buy an old single from second hand shops or if it was on the Old Gold series via Pickwick Records and the like. This could also be true of albums that weren’t seen as being classics or perennial best sellers. Nowadays just about everything has received the deluxe box set re-issue treatment. Want a double CD expanded edition of ex-Dollar singer Thereza Bazar’s only solo album with 19 bonus tracks even though nobody bought it first time around? Sure – no problem. Your’s for just £11! The mind boggles.  

“(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life” peaked at No 8 second time around. 

OK, 1991 just got a bit more interesting. The time of The KLF is upon us. Although they’d already become chart stars the previous year with “What Time Is Love?”, for me, “3 a.m. Eternal” was when I really started to think that something of great importance was happening. It just sounded sound otherworldly – who the Hell were the Ancients of Mu Mu and what did they want? In reality it was, of course, just Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond playing with the music industry again as they had done before with The Timelords and “Doctorin’ the Tardis” but what a game they played. In the light of “3 a.m. Eternal”, demand for their album “The White Room” rocketed and it hit No 3 in the album chart (well according to Wikipedia – I could have sworn it was a No 1 but maybe that was just in the in-house Our Price chart). 

A year later they would perform a version of the track with punk band Extreme Noise Terror at The BRIT awards  – yes that one with the machine guns – before announcing their retirement from the music industry but that’s for another post. 

Oh and what did it mean, “3 a.m. Eternal”? According to the songfacts.com website, it referred to chucking out time at the Spectrum Acid House club in London.

It will be No 1 soon enough… 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycxulpliZAA

Now that the post Xmas slump is over and the record company release schedules have awoken from their slumbers, the Breakers are back starting with The High and “Box Set Go”. I seem to recall a lot of buzz around this lot at the time (well they were in the Breakers section, home of the ‘happening’ records in the charts!). I’m sure their album “Somewhere Soon”, with its distinctive diamond symbol against a mostly black cover, was a Recommended Release at Our Price. The other thing I remember about them was that they had an ex-Stone Roses member in their ranks – one Andy Couzens. For all that though, The High sounded more like The La’s  or even The Byrds to me. 

Infamously signed to London Records after only one gig, the album was critically well received but could only make it to a..ahem…high of No 59. They’d already had three Top 40 near misses before “Box Set Go” was remixed by the legendary producer Martin Hannet and re-released to give them their only chart hit when it peaked at No 28. Hannet had worked with Couzens before during his Roses days. I worked with another ex-Stone Roses member, the original bass player called Pete later on in my Our Price career and he once told me that Hannet had spent ages trying to get a particular sound on one of their early tracks and when it was finished, Pete said “but I can’t hear it in the mix Martin”. Hannett’s reply was “Ah yes Pete but you know that it’s there”. Marvellous. 

Now here’s a great track. A Tribe Called Quest had been around since 1985 but their debut album “People’s Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm” wasn’t released until 1990 from which “Can I Kick It?” was the third single released. Heavily sampling Lou Reed’s “Walk On The Wild Side” amongst other tracks, it sounded fresh and innovative to me although you could argue that it wasn’t a million miles away from De La Soul’s D.A.I.S.Y. Age sound (indeed, De LA Soul feature in the video). The previous year we had suffered a terrible, terrible cover version of “Walk On The Wild Side” courtesy of Jamie J. Morgan but this was a different flavour altogether. 

At the time of its release, I had been given the weighty role of being the Best Sellers CD buyer in the Our Price store I was in, responsible for making sure all those classic albums were always in stock. However, we’d just had a new manager installed after previous manager Greg had left and he wanted to shake things up a bit. To that end, he asked me to order in some extra copies of the “People’s Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm” album for the Best Sellers section on the back of the single’s success as it wasn’t in the chart and therefore would only be stocked in limited numbers. Wikipedia tells me that the album peaked at No 54 so that punt probably didn’t pay off. 

Bizarrely, we would get another “Walk On The Wild Side” influenced single later on in the year via Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch which was the follow up to their “Good Vibrations” single but it only made it to No 42 in the charts whereas “Can I Kick It?” would get all the way to No 15 in the UK. 

What do you do if you run out of toilet tissue? There’s “Always The Sun” quips Nicky Campbell about the final Breaker from The Stranglers. Ooh, bit of politics as Ben Elton used to day on Friday Night Live (or was it Saturday Night Live?). I wonder if Campbell got into hot water with the BBC bosses for that? So what was this 1986 hit doing back in the charts? It was to promote a Best Of album of course (“Greatest Hits 1977–1990”) which sold surprisingly well going platinum and reaching No 4 in the charts. I think it got a TV Ad campaign behind it which caught a lot of retailers out (I remember our shop selling out of it one Saturday afternoon). 

Supposedly the 1990 version is a remix but it sounds pretty similar to me apart from some extra guitar noodling. Hugh Cornwell (who had left the band by this point) had originally though that “Always The Sun” could have been another “Golden Brown” in terms of sales but it peaked at No 30. According to his his book The Stranglers Song By Song he’d been amazed by its poor chart position stating “We’d given CBS something great to work with and I could see in this guy’s face that he knew he hadn’t delivered”. Maybe CBS felt bad about that and tried to repay the debt five years on with that  promotional campaign for “Greatest Hits 1977–1990”?  Maybe not. 

The1991 version peaked one place higher than its 1986 counterpart at No 29. 

Sting again next and after last week’s play out video position in the show’s running order, he’s been promoted to a place in the main body of the programme as befitting his rock star status (ahem). Not that it did him much good as “All This Time” would actually go down form its peak here of No 22 the following week. 

I’m sure I’ve told this story before but it’s worth another outing. My friend Robin has a friend who is a professional musician and he has toured with some major names including Sting and erm…Westlife. Anyway, he found himself at a dinner party at Sting’s gaff through this work connection and in the middle of the meal, all the guests were asked to relocate to another room and where a TV was. Sting then proceeded to get them to all watch a documentary…about Sting! I did say last week that he could be a right knacker. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bo4jDhrrKw

So it’s definitely not Seal at No 1 meaning it must be Enigma and “Sadness (Part I)”. It’s taken 6 weeks for the record to make it to the top (including 4 in the Top 10) yet it would only get 1 week at the pinnacle. It would stay in the Top 40 for another 5 weeks though demonstrating the longevity of its appeal. Curiously though, it would only be the 37th best selling single of the year. That 6 week long run up to becoming No 1 would become an almost extinct practice by the end of the decade as discounted pricing by the record companies in a single’s first week of release to drive sales would mean records going in at No 1 immediately before falling away dramatically. I have to say I wasn’t a fan of discounting new releases. It created a false sales history and, if you worked in a record shop like I did, it was a bloody nightmare to ensure you never sold out of anything.

I started this post talking about my potential incident of insensitivity when I played “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner” on the shop stereo the day after the commencement of Operation Desert Storm in the Gulf War. By way of contrast, here’s a man full of “Sensitivity” – it’s Ralph Tresvant! This guy was the latest former member of Jackson 5 rip off merchants New Edition to try and further his musical career following the success of Bobby Brown and Ronnie DeVoe, Michael Bivins and Ricky Bell (Bell Biv DeVoe collectively). 

As with Alexander O’Neal earlier on, this track was produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and can’t you just tell by the song’s intro. Those tumbling, percussive drum beats are the exact same ones they used when producing “Human” for The Human League back in 1986. Waste not want not I guess. The rest of it is pretty unremarkable 90s R’n’B to my ears but then I’m no expert.

“Sensitivity” was the lead single from Ralph’s eponymous debut album which featured his old pal Bobby Brown on one track. It also includes a track called “She’s My Love Thang”  – of course it does. “Sensitivity” peaked at No 18 in the UK but was a Top 5 hit in the US and also an R’n’B No 1 single over there. 

For posterity’s sake, I include the chart run down below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWpdtyDZMH8

Disclaimer

OK – here’s the thing – the TOTP episodes are only available on iPlayer for a limited amount of time so the link to the programme below only works for about another month so you’ll have to work fast if you want to catch the whole show.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000wfdn/top-of-the-pops-19011991

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.