TOTP 07 AUG 1998
It’s a monumental episode of TOTP this one as it’s the last one hosted by Jo Whiley. Well, that’s not strictly true as she returned in 2006 to do a couple more shows but it’ll be the last I review in this blog that features her. So what to make of Jo? I have to admit to having held very strong negative views about her in the past. I couldn’t get along with her over enthusiasm when it came to expressing her love of music. If that sounds miserabilist or misanthropic, let me clarify. It was her professed love of all music, whatever its genre or merits which gave the impression that she would be as comfortable introducing Go West as The Go-Betweens as long as it kept her on the airwaves. However, after her campaigning on behalf of her sister who has learning disabilities during the pandemic that she and others like her should be prioritised to receive the COVID vaccine, I gained a lot of respect for her. She also does a lot of charity work for the likes of Mencap so there’s that as well. However, I just can’t shake my distrust of her proclamations and motives when it comes to music but maybe I’m just jealous of her career. As to why she left the roster of TOTP hosts at this time, I’m not sure. To focus on her Radio 1 show The Lunchtime Social? To spend more time with her family* Whatever the reason, I think, against the odds, I might actually miss her.
*She has four children
I won’t be missing the opening act tonight though who are Ace Of Base though I can’t guarantee this will be the last we see of them in these 90s TOTP repeats. What I can say with some conviction is that their brand of reggae-lite Europop was just terrible, shockingly bad. No, I don’t accept the comparisons with ABBA whose complex, pop compositions were superbly crafted. Ace Of Base, by contrast, peddled simple, almost nursery rhyme-like ditties that were sickly sweet but of zero nutritional value. If ABBA were the Armani Casa of furniture then Ace Of Base were IKEA – flat-pack, flat track dull(y). “Life Is A Flower” was a typical example of their oeuvre. Hooky but schlocky. Their next single would be a cover of Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer”. Cruel indeed.
This is starting to worry me now as my poor brain cells seem to be misfiring again. How many times have I said in this blog lately that I don’t remember a song or an artist? Well, it’s happened once more. Who were/are Lucid? Well, I’m not entirely sure as there’s not a lot of information about them online. The ever reliable @TOTPFacts has come to my rescue though with this tweet:
Grateful as always but it’s pretty slim pickings. Got anything else? Oh, they have…
Excellent! Will that do for this entry? No? OK, well, they had three hits the first of which was “I Can’t Help Myself” which I assume was a big hit in the clubs judging by Jo Whiley’s intro that references Ibiza. It’s very underwhelming to my ears though. Maybe executive producer Chris Cowey was in agreement with me given the over the top staging of this performance. “A tune so dangerous we’ve been forced to restrain the lead singer” says Jo before we see singer Clare Canty in a straitjacket. It’s a daring look but surely it would have been more of an arresting image if she’d have done the whole performance under duress as it were but she releases herself from her (clearly fake) bonds halfway through which kind of undermines the whole idea. Or maybe it was, in fact, just a bad idea to have a woman restrained on stage (even if it was just for effect)? Maybe the thinking behind it wasn’t so lucid after all?
What’s this? Jo Whiley interviewing a pop star on the show? This wasn’t a regular occurrence so was Chris Cowey letting her go out with a bit of a bang? Presumably, he couldn’t get both Brandy & Monica in the TOTP studio simultaneously so the video and a brief (and cringeworthy) interview with one of them – Brandy – was deemed the next best thing. Or was it just that Cowey couldn’t ignore the hit that was “The Boy Is Mine” any longer and Jo was in the right place at the right time? This was another of those hardy hits like “How Do I Live” by LeAnne Rimes that stuck around the charts for ages having debuted at No 2 and then spent weeks hovering around the lower end of the Top 10 before it settled on a three week run at No 13. It was at this point that it was finally deemed worthy of a slot on the show which makes no sense but running orders rarely did in the Cowey era. Maybe there were some undeclared contractual issues preventing the song getting an airing until now or maybe it was just a combination of timing and Cowey’s previous stubbornness not to feature videos on the show? Whatever the truth, what was undeniable about the record is that it was a monster. If the resilience it displayed in our charts was impressive, it was nothing compared to the success it had in the US where it spent 13 weeks at No 1 and was the biggest selling single of the year. It also held a curious chart record of being the first hit to ascend to No 1 from a position outside of the Top 20 since The Beatles charged from No 27 to the top in 1964 with “Can’t Buy Me Love”.
Supposedly inspired by the Michael Jackson/Paul McCartney duet on “The Girl Is Mine” and by The Jerry Springer Show as referenced in Brandy’s chat with Whiley, it’s a mid-tempo R&B ballad that exerts a deceptive pull on the listener. Both singers’ vocals are low in the mix with a distinct lack of histrionics but rather gestate a slow but determined ear worm that burrows into your brain and sets up home there. It’s the musical equivalent of Aesop’s fable about the tortoise and the hare. Both Brandy and Monica went on to have long and successful careers in the worlds of music and acting and revisited “The Boy Is Mine” just last year featuring on a remix of the track by Ariana Grande.
Now this edition of TOTP was originally meant to be 25 minutes in length with seven songs featured which is a reduction of one from the standard eight but has been further reduced by the omission of the Puff Daddy & Jimmy Page hit “Come With Me” from the Godzilla movie for obvious reasons. However, the censors could have taken this one out for me as well on the grounds of poor quality and possibly taste as well. As with Lucid earlier, I have zero recollection of Baby Bumps and their hit “Burning” and there is precious little about them online either. Even the normally reliable @TOTPFacts can only come up with the fact that their hit sampled “Disco Inferno” by The Trammps. So who were these chumps and why were they having a hit with this awful butchering of a classic track? Well, they seem to be a female version of The Village People judging by their stage costumes and as for why they were having a hit…well, the bad taste of the record buying public strikes again. It is a dreadful treatment of “Disco Inferno” and was there something wrong with the sound as the lead woman’s singing sounded too quiet in parts. I say ‘singing’ but it was more like shouting and is it me or does she not seem able to count to four?! I’m sure she shouts “Four, two, three, four”. Twice. Apparently, they had another hit in 2000 but happily I won’t have to review it as this is a 90s blog and will finish with the 1999 repeats.
It’s yet another hit from a film soundtrack next as Apollo Four Forty launch into the upper echelons of the chart with “Lost In Space”. As it’s Apollo Four Forty, of course, it’s a dance track but then, there had been a trend for dance versions of old film/TV theme tunes around this time. Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen had given us their treatment of the Mission Impossible theme whilst Orbital took on The Saint. As for Lost In Space, I did see the film starring Matt Le Blanc of Friends fame which was a big screen adaptation of the 60s TV series and, like most people who watched it, I thought it stank the cinema out. Just hopeless and not because I was looking through nostalgic glasses at the TV series as I hardly remembered that but just because it was a bad film. It pretty much did for Le Blanc’s film star aspirations. – I think he had a small part in the Charlie’s Angels reboot after this but not much else.
As for the Apollo Four Forty song, it didn’t do an awful lot for me. Apparently, it was based (loosely) on the second John Williams theme tune that he composed for the series but it’s all at breakneck speed and features some frenetic fret work (including a precursor of the Royal Blood bass guitar style possibly?) that’s all a bit much for me. Then there’s the geezer with the peroxide blonde hair and glasses giving me a headache by shouting out random phrases like “Space is the place” and “This cold war’s just got hot”. When he shouts “Can you feel it?”, he sounds like one of those blokes on the mike at a fairground exporting people to “Scream if you want to go faster!”. Like I said, headache inducing.
The Spice Girls remain at No 1 with “Viva Forever” but this will be its last week at the top. As with last week, we don’t get the stop-motion animation video but that performance recorded whilst the group were on tour. In an earlier form, the song was titled “Obrigado” which means ‘thank you’ in Portuguese and I can imagine that as it scans similarly to “Viva Forever”. Talking of titles, Viva Forever! was the name of the Spice Girls jukebox musical written by Jennifer Saunders which opened in 2012 to a very poor reception and some of the worst reviews of that year. Thankfully for the group, the song did not receive the same response as the musical.
| Order of appearance | Artist | Title | Did I buy it? |
| 1 | Ace Of Base | Life Is A Flower | Definitely not |
| 2 | Lucid | I Can’t Help Myself | I could though – no |
| 3 | Brandy & Monica | The Boy Is Mine | Nah |
| 4 | Baby Bumps | Burning | Never |
| 5 | Apollo Four Forty | Lost In Space | No |
| 6 | Spice Girls | Viva Forever | 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/m002kx4v/top-of-the-pops-07081998
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 