Babylon Zoo

TOTP 1996 – the epilogue

That’s 1996 done and dusted. What were we to make of it and was it worth revisiting in quite the depth that both myself via this blog and BBC4 via their TOTP repeats schedule did? Possibly not but I’m nothing if not a completist! So, what was wrong (or right depending on your point of view) with 1996? Well, let’s use the admittedly blunt tool of sales to give us an overview of what was going on. Starting with the best selling albums of the year, on first inspection it would seem that it was a case of business as usual with established artists such as Simply Red, Celine Dion and the returning George Michael all in the Top 10. Then there was the decidedly mainstream like Robson & Jerome repeating their commercial phenomenon of the previous year. Talking of phenomenons, the biggest new artist of the year was surely the Spice Girls who were No 3 in the year end chart. Could a case be made to say that they were mainstream as well? Maybe though there was a world of difference between what they and the two Soldier Soldier actors were peddling. It’s an interesting question – what makes you a mainstream artist? Look at who had the best selling album of the year – Alanis Morissette. Was she mainstream just because loads and loads of people bought her album? I don’t think there’s anything mainstream about a track like “You Oughta Know”.

Just behind her at No 2 was an album that occupied that same position in 1995 – “(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?” by Oasis. It says much about their popularity that their album could sell so many copies in two consecutive years. Did this mean that Britpop was still in the ascendancy? Well, there is a theory that the movement ended when Oasis’s third album “Be Here Now” was released and that didn’t happen until 1997 so by that criteria it was certainly still a going concern in this year. However, there is no other artist that would be considered to be Britpop in the albums Top 10 (though Ocean Colour Scene made a splash by finishing in 11th). Further down the chart came Kula Shaker at a respectable No 16 and Pulp’s “Different Class” still going well at No 19 though despite their Lazarus style return, Manic Street Preachers’ most commercial album yet “Everything Must Go” was only No 20. For me, not enough evidence that Britpop was as strong a force as it was in 1995 when it peaked around the Blur v Oasis chart battle.

Indeed, many of the other artists in the list of bestsellers were either music royalty (Tina Turner, Bryan Adams, Michael Jackson, Rod Stewart) or very established artists (M People, Boyzone, Jamiroquai). There were a surprisingly high number of albums in the Top 50 that had actually been released in 1995 which suggests a certain amount of stagnation though there were some debut albums in there as well from the likes of Cast, Ash and Space. Unbelievably, there were two entries for The Smurfs (WTF?!) though pleasingly only seven albums on the end of year chart were Best Ofs. Finally mention must go to an act who carved out their own little niche for themselves this year as Fugees bagged the seventh best selling album of 1996 thanks in no small part to that single…

OK, so let’s talk singles. Fugees claimed the year’s biggest hit with “Killing Me Softly” – quite the feat for an R&B artist whose only other UK chart hit had been the No 21 single “Fu-Gee-La”. The rest of the Top 10 belonged to Scary, Baby, Ginger, Posh and Sporty whose first three singles occupied the Nos 2, 4 and 10 positions. Babylon Zoo were the latest beneficiaries of soundtracking a Levi’s advert as “Spaceman” landed at No 3 whilst Mark Morrison came in at a No 5 with the ubiquitous “Return Of The Mack”. Only two non No 1s made the Top 10 – the execrable Peter Andre and dream house poster boy Robert Miles. Gina G became the first Eurovision chart topper since Nicole in 1982 and Baddiel & Skinner with the Lightning Seeds saw Euro 96 fever put them at No 7 with the very first incarnation of “Three Lions”. Pick the bones out of that lot! Out of the whole year end Top 50, I bought precisely three and only one of them was actually for me with the other two being for other people. The majority of Nos 11 to 50 could be classified as mainstream (there’s that word again) or at the very least daytime radio friendly with honourable exceptions being both chart toppers from The Prodigy, Underworld’s “Born Slippy” and “Faithless” by Insomnia. What does all this mean? Possibly what we already knew. You can’t rely on sales numbers alone to work out musical trends.

Best-selling singles

No.	Title	Artist	Peak position
1	“Killing Me Softly“	Fugees	1
2	“Wannabe“	Spice Girls	1
3	“Spaceman“	Babylon Zoo	1
4	“Say You’ll Be There“	Spice Girls	1
5	“Return of the Mack“	Mark Morrison	1
6	“Ooh Aah… Just a Little Bit“	Gina G	1
7	“Three Lions“	Baddiel & Skinner & Lightning Seeds	1
8	“Children“	Robert Miles	2
9	“Mysterious Girl“	Peter Andre featuring Bubbler Ranx	2
10	“2 Become 1“	Spice Girls	1
11	“Don’t Look Back in Anger“	Oasis	1
12	“How Deep Is Your Love“	Take That	1
13	“Un-Break My Heart“	Toni Braxton	2
14	“Breathe“	The Prodigy	1
15	“Firestarter“	The Prodigy	1
16	“Words“	Boyzone	1
17	“Breakfast at Tiffany’s“	Deep Blue Something	1
18	“If You Ever“	East 17 featuring Gabrielle	2
19	“What Becomes of the Broken Hearted“/ “Saturday Night at the Movies“/”You’ll Never Walk Alone“	Robson & Jerome	1
20	“Anything“	3T	2
21	“Fastlove“	George Michael	1
22	“Macarena“	Los del Río	2
23	“Born Slippy .NUXX“	Underworld	2
24	“Ready or Not“	Fugees	1
25	“The X Files“	Mark Snow	2
26	“One & One“	Robert Miles featuring Maria Nayler	3
27	“Because You Loved Me“	Celine Dion	5
28	“Give Me a Little More Time“	Gabrielle	5
29	“Nobody Knows“	The Tony Rich Project	4
30	“You’re Gorgeous“	Babybird	3
31	“Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door“/”Throw These Guns Away”	Dunblane	1
32	“Cecilia“	Suggs featuring Louchie Lou & Michie One	4
33	“Flava“	Peter Andre	1
34	“Don’t Stop Movin’“	Livin’ Joy	5
35	“It’s All Coming Back to Me Now“	Celine Dion	3
36	“I Love You Always Forever“	Donna Lewis	5
37	“How Bizarre“	OMC	5
38	“Jesus to a Child“	George Michael	1
39	“Virtual Insanity“	Jamiroquai	3
40	“Forever Love“	Gary Barlow	1
41	“Hillbilly Rock Hillbilly Roll“	The Woolpackers	5
42	“I Wanna Be a Hippy“	Technohead	6
43	“There’s Nothing I Won’t Do“	JX	4
44	“Insomnia“	Faithless	3
45	“What’s Love Got to Do with It“	Warren G featuring Adina Howard	2
46	“Freedom“	Robbie Williams	2
47	“I Got 5 on It“	Luniz	3
48	“Earth Song“	Michael Jackson	1
49	“Spinning the Wheel“	George Michael	2
50	“A Design for Life“	Manic Street Preachers	2

And what of TOTP? 1996 saw changes that would herald the beginning of the end for the grand old show. The BBC’s coverage of the Euros football tournament saw its weekly music programme temporarily shifted from its traditional Thursday night slot to a Friday. However, somewhere along the line, someone high up took the decision to keep it there after Euro ‘96 had finished. It would prove to be a catastrophic choice for the show’s future. This was compounded by the subsequent shifting of its 7.00 start time to 7.30 meaning it was up against Coronation Street on ITV which aired at exactly the same time. Who thought that was a good idea?! It was as if there was a deliberate plan within the corridors of the Beeb to deliberately kill the show off. 1997 would see the end of Ric Blaxill’s tenure as executive producer who was replaced by Chris Cowey but that’s all for future posts. In 1996, TOTP was in a state of transition and the outlook was far from certain.

Hits That Never Were

Whipping Boy – “When We Were Young”

Released: Feb ’96

Chart Peak: No 46

When having a three way What’sApp chat with my mates Robin and Steve once, the subject of who was our favourite Irish band of all time came up. The usual names were chucked about by me and Steve like U2, The Boomtown Rats, The Undertones, The Pogues, Westlife (joking!) until Robin threw a name into the hat that I’d never heard of before – Whipping Boy. So I looked them up on Spotify and this track was their most streamed at the time so I checked it out and I’m glad I did. They were kind of like a prototype, early era Stereophonics both in terms of their storytelling lyrics and sonically. Their lead singer was one Fearghal McKee whose name sounds like the love child of the ex lead singer of The Undertones and the “Show Me Heaven” No 1 artist and ex-Lone Justice vocalist (who share their own real life connection actually but that’s a whole other story). McKee was prone to cutting himself onstage with broken glass so maybe they were more like Manic Street Preachers than the Stereophonics? Whipping Boy split in 1998 after second album “Heartroom” earned critical acclaim but few sales and they were dropped by record label Columbia.

Crush – “Jellyhead”

Released: Feb ’96

Chart Peak: No 50

PJ & Duncan (or Ant & Dec if you prefer) weren’t the only duo to emerge from Byker Grove. Oh no. There was also a female trio called Byker Grooove (no really!) who even had a minor hit with a single called “Love Your Sexy…!!” which reached No 48. That was enough success to convince label Telstar to give the girls another go but with a tweak. Byker Grooove wasn’t going to cut it as a name so the rather uninspired Crush was chosen. A bigger change though was that the trio became a duo after Vicky Taylor left the project. This left Jayni Hoy and subsequent actor and presenter Donna Air to carry the Geordie flag with the single “Jellyhead”. Now, it really should have been crap and maybe it is but it was also a stunningly catchy pop tune that I really thought was going to be a hit. Its lyrics were almost like an updated version of “I’d Rather Jack” by The Reynolds Girls name checking Bros and The Prodigy but unlike those Stock, Aitken and Waterman pop starlets, Crush couldn’t even achieve the status of one hit wonders. After “Jellyhead” peaked at No 50, follow up “Luv’d Up” could only make No 45 and that was it for the whole project. However, there was one female member of the Byker Grove cast who would secure themselves not one, not two, not three but four UK Top 40 hit singles – Emmy-Kate Montrose, the bassist with Sunderland pop-punk four piece Kenickie appeared in the series under her real name of Emma Jackson.

Kenickie – “Punka”

Released: Sep ’96

Chart Peak: No 43

Talking of whom…If you think of Sunderland what immediately comes to mind? The 1973 FA Cup winning team? Maybe. The River Wear? Possibly. What about music though? How many bands can you name that came out of Sunderland? The list isn’t long nor does it spring to mind easily. I’m not putting the place down by the way. I will always have a fondness for Sunderland having spent three years there as a student in the 80s and it’s also where I met my wife. I don’t remember much about the local music scene though. There must have been one I guess. Think man! Well, there’s the glorious Martin Stephenson (with and without The Daintees) who should be a national treasure but still doesn’t have widespread recognition. The Toy Dolls of “Nellie The Elephant” fame came from there as did that other novelty record outfit A Tribe Of Toffs. I’m not sure either are a winning endorsement of the place though. Dave Stewart is a Mackem but you don’t really associate Eurythmics with Sunderland do you? In later years there have been bands like Field Mice and The Futureheads but what about the 90s? The only act I can think of who flew the *city’s banner was Kenickie.

*Yes, Sunderland is a city

Named after their favourite character from Grease, this post-punk four piece (including a very young Lauren Laverne) turned down an offer of a deal from Alan McGee of Creation Records before signing to EMIDisc and releasing “Punka”. A scratchy, raw sounding track that thrashed around a nursery rhyme hook complete with a chorus of children shouting its title, it only missed the Top 40 by three places. However, that was enough to create a buzz about the band and despite follow up single “Millionaire Sweeper” also missing out, they finally broke through in January of 1997 with third release “In Your Car” making it to No 24 and earning them a slot on TOTP. “Punka” itself would earn itself another shot at it duly became a bona fide Top 40 hit (albeit a minor one when it peaked at No 38). After two albums, the band split but their Wikipedia entry says that they influenced end of the decade all girl groups like Hepburn and Thunderbugs. I’m not sure that’s really the legacy that they would have wanted. Lauren Laverne would leave the music industry behind switching careers to become a TV and radio presenter. She currently hosts Desert Island Discs on Radio 4 and The One Show on BBC1.

Billy Bragg – “Upfield”

Released: Aug ’96

Chart Peak: No 46

By 1996, it had been five years since Billy Bragg’s last album “Don’t Try This At Home” which had gone Top 10 and furnished him with the hit single “Sexuality”. Why the gap? Well, Billy became a father in 1993 and so took time out to concentrate on his family. He would return in this year with the album “William Bloke” (a pun on the name of 18th century poet William Blake). With songs written about how his life had changed and with an eye on his approaching 40s, it was perhaps a more reflective piece of work than his overtly political 1980s albums. However, the only single released from it was “Upfield” which was an uptempo, joyous number that passed me by at the time but which I discovered when I bought Billy’s 2003’s retrospective album “Must I Paint You A Picture?”. It deserved better than its No 46 chart peak. Billy would spend the rest of the 90s working with American alt-country rockers Wilco on the “Mermaid Avenue” project putting music to previously unheard lyrics by folk artist Woody Guthrie which I quite liked especially the tracks “Walt Whitman’s Niece” and “Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key”.

Hits We Missed

Nick Heyward – “Rollerblade”

Released: Jan ’97

Chart Peak: No 37

I said in my review of 1995 that I would no doubt talk about this single in the ‘TOTP 1996 – the epilogue’ post and I’m nothing if not a man of my word. To be honest, given my lifelong loyalty to Nick, it was never in doubt. A whole twelve years after his last Top 40 entry came “Rollerblade”, the second and final single from his marvellous “Tangled” album. A high-tempo, dash through a hook laden tune, it clocked in at under three minutes – I’m not sure if that aided or hindered its airplay chances. No doubt its early January release date in the traditional lull period after Christmas helped it to glide into the upper end of the Top 40 albeit just for one week. Whilst I was delighted to see Nick back in the charts, I couldn’t help thinking he’d missed a trick in not releasing “Believe In Me” from the album instead which I thought was a surefire winner for a hit given the era of Britpop that it had been recorded in. I guess we’ll never know if I was right.

Nick would return in 1998 with the similarly excellent album “The Apple Bed” on the Creation label (see…there’s that Britpop connection again). With the exception of two albums in collaboration with actors Greg Ellis and India Dupree, he wouldn’t have another album out until the wondrous “Woodland Echoes” in 2017. If you’ve never heard it, do yourself a favour and get on Spotify and give it a go. Nick has spent the last couple of years reactivating Haircut 100 who even released their first single for over 40 years – “The Unloving Plum” – which topped The Heritage Chart. I saw them live at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire and York Barbican in 2023 and to further prove my Nick credentials, pretty much the only CDs left in my possession after a clear out purge this year? Yep, you guessed it.

The Wannadies – “You & Me Song”

Released: Apr ’96

Chart Peak: No 18

One of just three Top 40 entries for Swedish indie rockers The Wannadies, “You And Me Song” is surely their best known. Originally released in August 1995, it barely limped into the Top 100. However, its inclusion on the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s film Romeo + Juliet and the latter’s subsequent success (it grossed $147.6 million against a budget of $14.5 million) raised its profile and warranted it a second shot at the chart in 1996. This time it would break into the Top 20 peaking at No 18. Curiously, the rerelease changed the title of the song from “You And Me Song” to “You & Me Song” – not sure why. Maybe it was talking its lead from Baz Lurhmanm who renamed Shakespeare’s original tale of Romeo And Juliet as Romeo + Juliet?

My wife liked this at the time but wasn’t sure who it was by so tried to explain it to me so I could identify it. Not an unreasonable request what with me working in a record shop and all. Somehow though, I managed to be incredibly dumb that day and despite her describing it as that song that goes “you and me always and forever” I assured her that there was no such song only to come back to her a couple of minutes later after a lightbulb moment and say “Oh, do you mean “You and Me Song” by The Wannadies? She still brings it nearly 30 years later when I’m being particularly obtuse.

Gene – “Fighting Fit”

Released: Nov ’96

Chart Peak: No 22

I have to admit that there have been times during my life when I’ve been completely out of touch with what would have been described as “trendy” when I was growing up but which would come to be labelled the “zeitgeist”. The Smiths back in 1983 when I was 15 should have been a band that I fell in love with. I was absolutely ripe for their sound and Morrissey’s otherness should have appealed to my teenage angst and yet I ignored them for years before seeing the light (that never goes out). Fast forward to 1989 and along came the Stone Roses and I was a mere 21 year old with my whole life in front of me. Surely I would fall for their swagger and profile as the leaders of the ‘Madchester’ movement? Nope. I somehow got distracted by their songs always seeming to have the word ‘stone’ in them. I would later see the error of my ways and even ended up working alongside their original bass player, the much missed Pete Garner.

And then there was Gene. Why I dropped the ball with this lot when I was actually working in a record shop at the time beggars belief. Ten Top 40 singles and two Top 10 albums and I ignored the lot. My mate Robin certainly didn’t though. Not only was he a big Smiths fan when I wasn’t but he embraced Gene fully to the point that they would become his favourite band ever. To be fair, he might have had a head start on me as his interest in them was surely kindled by all the music press comparisons between them and his other heroes and indeed between lead singer Martin Rossiter and Morrissey. It still doesn’t answer the question though of how I failed to hear their music whilst working in a record shop. Can I blame my work colleagues who clearly weren’t interested in Gene either? I think that’s a stretch. Anyway, “Fighting Fit” was the fifth of those ten hits and the lead single from their second studio album “Drawn To The Deep End”. It’s a driving, indie rock stomper that lulls the listener in with a tinkling, gentle intro before the drums kick in and we’re off on a four minute, high octane, daredevil, wall of death ride before being deposited safely back to the ground with a false ending and a repeat of the intro as the outro. Genuinely thrilling stuff!

Mansun – “Stripper Vicar”

Released: Sep ’96

Chart Peak: No 19

As with The Boo Radleys, Mansun were a band that I only really got into for one album but that one album, their debut “Attack Of The Grey Lantern”, was a real winner. It took me a while to get into it via a promo CD that we had at the Our Price where I was working but the payoff when I got there was beautiful. Initially written as a concept album around the idea of a village of characters of dubious morals with The Grey Lantern as a superhero figure come to sort them all out, it would get to No 1 in the UK. Frontman Paul Draper admits that he ran out of steam when it came to finishing the album in the form of its original concept and so described it as “half a concept album – a ‘con’ album”. A similar thing happened to Paul Weller and The Jam’s “Setting Sons” album. “Stripper Vicar” was the lead track from an EP entitled “Three” and there’s a lot going on in it, like there’s three different songs in there all striving to be heard. It all comes together as a driving, indie tune that tells the tale of its titular character whose was a vicar by day but a stripper by night. The wordplay in the lyrics – rhyming “plastic scouser” with “plastic trousers” and “suspended” with “suspenders” – shouldn’t really work but somehow does magnificently.

I caught Mansun live in 1997 supporting Suede at a gig in Blackburn and they were great. Somebody I worked with once had been at university with some of the band and said they were always destined for success. Everyone around them knew it. Eventually I did too.

Super Furry Animals – “Something 4 The Weekend”

Released: Jul ’96

Chart Peak: No 18

The 90s was quite a time for Welsh bands. Sure the 80s gave us The Alarm and to a lesser extent The Darling Buds but the following decade saw a host of groups making their mark. Manic Street Preachers, Stereophonics, Catatonia, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and this lot – Super Furry Animals whose TOTP debut on the BBC4 repeats we missed due to (I think) one of the show’s ‘Meet a Pop Star’ competition winners going on to doing something unpalatable in their personal life in later years. That was unfortunate as their hit “Something 4 The Weekend” was quite the tune.

Unlike the first two names in that list above, SFA started their career singing Welsh language songs and unlike the aforementioned Kenickie, did sign with Creation records when offered a deal by Alan McGee and it was him who encouraged them to sing in English. In fact, the band had already made that decision for themselves but their strong Welsh accents bewildered McGee into believing they were still singing in their native tongue. The Welsh media gave the band some criticism for this but it turned them into chart stars when they hit the Top 40 with just their second single “God! Show Me Magic”. Its follow up “Something 4 The Weekend” did even better making the Top 20 becoming part of a curious footnote in pop history when it was in the charts at the same time as The Divine Comedy’s hit of the same name. Well, almost. The Furries replaced the word ‘for’ with the number ‘4’ for the single release of the track (the album version was called “Something For The Weekend”).

Ah yes, that debut album. It was called “Fuzzy Logic” but it wasn’t its title that intrigued us all at the Our Price store in Stockport where I was working. No, it wasn’t the cover art which was a montage of images of the same man in a number of different disguises and looks. Now none of us realised that they were all of Welsh drug dealer turned raconteur Howard Marks because we were all hung up on the notion that the image at the top in red and yellow was of our manager, the aforementioned late, great and much missed Pete Garner in his early years. Even Pete himself was convinced it was him! So why was Howard Marks on the cover of the album? Apparently the band’s lead vocalist Gruff Rhys had an association with Marks having invited him down to the recording sessions for “Fuzzy Logic” at the Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire. The link goes further though. In the film of his life called Mr Nice, Marks was portrayed by actor Rhys Ifans who had once been a member of Super Furry Animals.

As for the band’s sound, it could claim to be hard to categorise though many a music journalist would try and shoehorn them into the Britpop movement or the Welsh equivalent Cool Cymru. My best attempt to describe it would be an eclectic mix of styles including 60s psychedelia, indie rock, glam rock and 90s dance that created a truly imaginative noise. “Something 4 The Weekend” was a prime example of this though I think my favourite of theirs might well be the marvellously titled “Juxtaposed With U”.

My Life Story – “12 Reasons Why I Love Her”

Released: Aug ’96

Chart Peak: No 32

Here’s another song that I didn’t cotton onto at the time but which I’ve since discovered in later life. Now, I thought My Life Story came along much later than this but according to their Wikipedia page they formed in 1984! They didn’t experience chart success though until the mid 90s when they got caught up with the coming of Britpop and they clocked up six Top 40 singles though none of them got any higher than No 27.

The first of those was “Twelve Reasons Why I Love Her” and it’s a quite extraordinary song. Essentially a list of things that the protagonist loves about the object of his affection, it’s kind of like the Britpop version of “Twelve Days Of Christmas”. I’m going on a lot about Britpop which is probably unfair to My Life Story who, if they were part of that scene, were in their own little corner of it. Yes, lead singer Jake Shillingford’s vocals wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a track by Menswear or maybe Rialto but My Life Story weren’t your identikit Britpop outfit. For a start, there were twelve members in their line up at one point and the sound that they made was often nearer to that of a chamber orchestra than a rock/pop band. Listen to those descending strings on “12 Reasons Why I Love Her”! It took me a few listens to place them but they sound very similar to “The Tunnel Of Love”, the 1983 No 10 single by Fun Boy Three. In a way, they had more in common with French chanson singer Jacques Brel than Britpop or maybe Marc Almond covering Jacques Brel at least. Or The Walker Brothers? OK, I’m reaching a bit now but you kind of get my drift. My Life Story disbanded in 2000 but there have been various reunions since and they released their fifth studio album in February 2024.

Their Season In The Sun

Fugees

Though they had been around since the turn of the decade, 1996 was undoubtedly the year when Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel went stratospheric. Their album “The Score” would ultimately sell 22 million copies worldwide and provide them with huge hit singles in “Killing Me Softly”, “Ready Or Not” and “No Woman, No Cry”. At the height of their fame and success though, they split. Why? My research suggests that one of the reasons was that Lauryn and Wyclef had an affair with the former misleading the latter into believing he was the father of her child when in fact it was Bob Marley’s son Rohan. Well, it makes a change from musical differences I guess.

All three members would go on to have successful solo careers with the Fugees reforming for a reunion tour before splitting again. Another reunion was announced in 2021 to celebrate 25 years since “The Score” was released but the promised tour dates have been cancelled not one time, not two times but three times so far with the latest cancellation coming just three days before the tour was due to start in August 2024. Ready or not? It would seem not.

Upside Down

One of the most manufactured boy bands ever, these also rans even had a documentary made about their formation informing their publicity machine and they still couldn’t get any higher than No 11 in the charts. That said, they did manage four hit singles in the calendar year but it was a case of diminishing returns and even that well worn strategy of releasing a cover version (Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now”) couldn’t save them. They weren’t helped by their record label (which had gambled everything on their act being successful) going bankrupt but the decision to relaunch with the worst band name ever in the history of band names – Orange Orange – was criminal.

One massive hit then (almost) nothing. It’s a much told music industry story but perhaps what is best remembered about Jas Mann and his pop vehicle Babylon Zoo was the deception that his song “Spaceman” pulled on the record buying public. That Levi’s advert which only used the speeded up vocals of the intro and outro that created the impression that the whole track was like that led to many a punter being disappointed once they got home and played the single to discover it was essentially a hoary, old rock song. That didn’t stop it becoming the third biggest selling hit of the year in the UK mind. Following it up proved impossible and a couple of minor hits was never going to establish Babylon Zoo as long term contenders. At least their final chart foray had an element of self knowledge – “All The Money’s Gone”.

Alanis Morissette

Against the odds, the biggest selling album of 1996 in the UK was a huge slow burner having debuted on the chart at No 76 in the August of the previous year. The story of “Jagged Little Pill” which included eleven weeks at No 1 and 3 million sales in the UK alone is all the more remarkable because it came from a Canadian solo female artist that most of us had never heard of before. It took nearly six months for it to rise to the UK Top 10 and then spent nearly a year inside it once it got there. Inevitably, following it up was always going to be difficult and 1998’s “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie” duly failed to match its predecessor’s heights only managing a tenth of “Jagged Little Pill”’s sales. Alanis has continued to record new material though with her most recent album being released in 2022.

Mark Morrison

With a gold selling album and No 1 single both titled “Return Of The Mack” in this year, Leicester’s Mark Morrison was never bigger than in 1996. Sure he had a few hits after then but it was those 12 months that saw him rise to fame as he clocked up three more Top 10 hits in the wake of his chart topper. It would seem though that he couldn’t handle his celebrity as his personal life spiralled with the R&B artist facing a number of criminal charges including bringing a firearm aboard an airliner, affray, kidnapping and paying a lookalike to complete his community service sentence. He still has some presence in the music world though it mainly seems to be due to adverts by McDonalds and Burger King featuring his most famous track for obvious reasons.

Last Words

So, 1996 – was it any good? Like most years it was a curate’s egg. Some good, a lot of bad and a fair sprinkling of utter tosh. Sadly, I don’t think the remaining years of the decade will prove to be any different. The charts were becoming increasingly manipulated by record company marketing strategies to maximise first week sales. This resulted in 24 different No 1 singles this year, the most since 1980 with an increasing trend for records debuting at No 1 and then falling away. This would only increase for here on in. As for me, I’d completed my second year at Our Price Stockport and things were pretty stable. 1997 would see changes to my work life and things start to unravel with my mental health. Some of the posts for that year might be difficult to write…

TOTP 25 APR 1996

Posted on July 12, 2024 by 80stastic

We have arrived at one of the most infamous episodes of TOTP certainly of the 90s, maybe ever. It’s that show with Chris Eubank. Why was he presenting the nation’s favourite music programme? Well, he’d retired from boxing in the September of 1995 having failed to regain his super-middleweight title from Steve Collins. However, he would return to the fight game later in 1996. For now though, he was seen by executive producer Ric Blaxill as a suitable choice for the ‘golden mic’ slot. As far as I can tell he was one of only three sporting celebrities to host TOTP with the others being footballer Ian Wright and jockey Frankie Dettori. All three you could argue have a personality that transcended their sporting fame – Wright is exuberant and Tigger-ish, Dettori is cheeky and likeable and Eubank…well, he’s eccentric if not downright odd. I’m actually quite intrigued to see what he says in his links to camera. Ding! Ding! Round one!

Eubank starts by introducing himself (as if he needed to) by giving us his full nomenclature including his middle name Livingstone. It’s pretty impressive as middle names go but nobody will ever top ex-footballer Emile William Ivanhoe Heskey. He then says something about the forthcoming “goodies” on the show and that he’s feeling “effervescent”. It’s a nervous, stumbling start – he needs to get a few punchy lines in to settle him down. The act he introduces are Babylon Zoo and their second hit of the year “Animal Army”. I said of this song when the video was shown the other week that it had traces of both Oasis and the Stone Roses about it and listening to it again here, I’m even more convinced of that assertion. Try closing your eyes and just listening to this performance – see what I mean? Anyway, Jas Mann has grown a spattering of facial hair and is wielding a guitar for this performance which we never saw during the “Spaceman” weeks. I presume he was trying to establish some musicianship credentials on the hunt for credibility points but I’m not sure he really wins that fight. Following what would turn out to be the third biggest selling single of the year in the UK was always going to be a bout too far but its peak of No 17 was probably a little on the harsh side on reflection. Babylon Zoo would stagger on for one final round before being KO’d when third single “The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes” peaked at No 32.

Eubank looks like he’s on the ropes already, appearing dazed and confused and uttering barely remembered lines instructing us to “enjoy the show”. He needs to rally and quickly. Whilst he takes a break between rounds and gets some encouragement from his corner man, we get a performance of the latest dance hit to cross over from the clubs to the charts. “Keep On Jumpin’” was originally recorded by US disco act Musique in 1978 but didn’t trouble our charts until it was revived by The Lisa Marie Experience who took a version of it to No 7 in the UK Top 40 and to the top of our Dance Chart. Despite their name, this lot were actually two male house DJs Neil Hinde and Dean Marriott (aka D. Ramirez). They would go on to remix tracks for the likes of Sash, Eternal, Robin S and Inner City. “(Keep On) Jumpin’” (no brackets, no points) would be their only chart hit as The Lisa Marie Experience though. I’m assuming that their name was inspired by Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of Elvis and Priscilla, who, at this time, was in the process of divorcing perhaps the most famous person on the planet Michael Jackson. I’m guessing they were hoping to trade subliminally on the news headlines that the couple would have been generating? Is that a known marketing strategy?

As for their hit, they couldn’t get clearance to use a sample of the original track so had to record their own version of the chorus which they do pretty faithfully with convincing disco strings to the fore. Having not been a UK hit in the 70s, the song found itself in the Top 10 twice in the space of a few weeks in 1996 when a much more housed-up version by Todd Terry featuring Martha Wash and Jocelyn Brown peaked at No 8.

Eubank throws a cryptic curveball with his next link, setting the mathematicians in the watching audience a brain teaser – “how long does it take a lady to make that step?”. What was he on about? I can only assume he was referring to the first video of the night for “The Box” by Orbital. In it, actor Tilda Swinton plays an alien-like character who observes Earth and its inhabitants in stop-motion giving the impression that she is operating outside of temporal constructs before disappearing whence she came. It’s all very The Man Who Fell To Earth which apparently was the inspiration for the promo according to its co-director Jes Benstock. Was its stop-motion effect what Eubank was being obscure about in his intro? Another question I have is how famous was Tilda Swinton at this point? I’m thinking not that well known beyond the art house crowd as most of her credits up to this point were for a clutch of Derek Jarman films. This was well before her roles in The Beach, Vanilla Sky and The Chronicles Of Narnia franchise. If my guess is true, then her smaller profile would only have added to her portrayal of the mysterious protagonist of the video.

As for the track itself, “The Box” would become one of Orbital’s bigger hits peaking at No 11. It sounds like the soundtrack to a 60s spy thriller but with a few dance beats thrown in. Maybe the duo of brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll were in training with their eye on the prize of an actual film soundtrack which they achieved the following year with their reworking of the theme to the 1997 remake of The Saint which gave them their second consecutive No 3 hit following the rather disturbing “Satan Live”. In 2000, they would continue with the soundtrack work when they contributed a track (with Angelo Badalamenti) to the aforementioned The Beach movie.

Eubank’s landing some blows now (or at least he thinks he is) with some more enigmatic words. This time, he says “We live in a country where the minds of the people are manipulated by the press. Think about it”. I mean, he’s not wrong and nearly 30 years later that is still the case but why was he prompted to say that at this time? Was he having a particularly bad time with the tabloids? In his early pugilist career, he hadn’t enjoyed a good relationship with the press who depicted him as arrogant and with ideas above his station with his flamboyant sartorial style and posturing or as his Wikipedia entry puts it ‘the man you love to hate’. After he’d lost his boxing title and was supposedly retired from the fight game, would he have still attracted so much attention? I guess by presenting TOTP he was hardly shying away from the public counting his money in his expensive mansion was he?

Definitely on the covers of the music press would have been Ash who were onto their third (and ultimately biggest) hit in “Goldfinger”. I guess this would have been a breakthrough moment for the band – their first time inside the Top 10 and it came with a single that was released a good six months after their last hit. Momentum could easily have been lost. “Goldfinger” not only consolidated that previous success but went beyond it. To do that, the band had to come up with a bloody good tune and they did that. I used my words carefully there – it’s a good tune but not a great one to my ears in the respect that I think they’ve got better songs. Still better than most of the garbage in the charts though. Watching this performance back, I’m struck by how much Tim Wheeler looks like Vernon Kay? Odd(job).

Eubank is finding his feet now and getting a combination together. He’s not stumbling over his words so much and is addressing the audience in a more direct way informing us that he’s got something next to get us “absolutely freaking” before describing it as a modern day version of “Knees Up Mother Brown”. Who can he be talking about? It’s Technohead of course and their latest hit “Happy Birthday”. Yes, the people who brought us “I Wanna Be A Hippy” thought we could do with another dose of their dumbo brand of high speed, happy hardcore nonsense and duly delivered unto us a second hit. It’s a carbon copy of its infuriating predecessor but that didn’t stop UK punters from buying it in enough numbers to send it to No 18 – just bonkers. That’s also the word I would use for this performance which is a riot of idiots jumping around maniacally for the duration of the ‘song’. And what was the recreation of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party all about? Ever wondered why the hatter was mad? Well, apparently it was an actual condition arising from the use of mercury in the Victorian era to cure pelts in the hat making process. When the mercury got into the systems of the hat makers, it gave rise to mental health problems including dementia hence the phrase. In terms of Lewis Carroll’s character in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, some analysis suggests he was written this way to highlight some of the most irritating and unpleasant traits of human nature. ‘Irritating’ and ‘unpleasant’? Well, that explains it then as “Happy Birthday” by Technohead was nothing if not irritating and unpleasant.

P.S. The Emily who Eubank says happy birthday to in his intro is presumably his daughter Emily whose 2nd birthday it had been six days before this TOTP aired.

Oh dear. Eubank makes a misstep in his next intro although in 1996, I’m not sure his choice of words would necessarily have tripped him up. Would we have winced at him describing Louise Werner of Sleeper as “an absolute tottie” back then? I like to think I would have but I can’t be sure. Also, would Eubank’s Nicholas Parsons reference have hit home with the TV audience in 1996? The game show that Parsons presented that shared its name with Sleeper’s single ran from 1971 to 1983 so had been off our screens for 13 years by this point. I think that particular punch line might have failed to hit its intended target.

Just like Ash earlier, Sleeper were at a pivotal moment in their career with the release of their first Top 10 single “Sale Of The Century”. Also just like Ash, it came six months after their last hit so it was an important moment momentum wise. In terms of the song itself, it was arguably just more of the same Sleeper sound that previous hits “Inbetweener” and “What Do I Did Now?” had established. That shouldn’t be seen as a criticism though. They had a successful formula and were giving the people what they wanted. What’s that? Couldn’t the same argument be applied to Technohead? Erm…no. Why not? Well…I didn’t like them did I? That’s fair enough isn’t it? I think it is. Interestingly, Louise Werner doesn’t have her guitar with her for this performance and she seems a bit lost without it. Not knowing quite what to do with herself, she resorts to a few skip and jump movements. She should have floated around the stage Muhammad Ali style, throwing a few jabs, ducking and weaving. I’m sure Chris Eubank would have been even more enamoured with her than he already was.

It’s round seven and Eubank rallies with an intro that sits well with the esoteric, faux-existential quotes he specialises in. It also shows that he knew something of the band he was introducing. “Now here’s a group to make you philosophise and think” he pronounces before the Manic Street Preachers fill our screens. There’s no doubting that the Welsh rockers have a canon of work that displays a certain intellectual rigour with their influences ranging from Nietzsche to Camus to Chomsky and much wider. Was it possible that Eubank was a Manics fan or just that he’d done his research? Whatever Eubank’s truth, the band were telling us that theirs was that they were definitely still a going concern despite the disappearance of Richey Edwards via the success of “A Design For Life”. Ironically, the song’s best known lyric – “We don’t talk about love, we only wanna get drunk” – in which the band highlight the working class’s right to do so, would be sung back to them by crowds of middle class festival goers. Think about that as Chris Eubank might have said.

OK, we nearly at the KO moment for Eubank. The moment when Chris is dealt a blow he can’t recover from. When the BBC4 audience, with our prior knowledge of what’s coming, look on with a building sense of schadenfreude until suddenly it’s here…and Chris Eubank has to introduce Suggs singing “Cecilia”. Why was this a big deal? Because of our host’s lisp of course – it’s not a great look is it? Taking the piss out of a speech impediment. Six years on from this, Gareth Gates would win the hearts of the public on Pop Idol with his singing and looks but also because of his determination to not let his stammer prove too big an obstacle in his pursuit of becoming a pop star and recording artist. I guess Eubank’s perceived arrogance and eccentric demeanour meant he was never going to be afforded the same reaction.

His intro for the actual performance by Suggs and Louchie Lou and Michie One of “Cecilia” has him on the ropes but the knockout blow comes during the Top 10 countdown when he has to say “At six, Cecilia by Suggs”. That moment was used in an episode of Never Mind The Buzzcocks in the a round called Freeze Frame which was basically a What Happened Next? section…

Go to 3:40 in for the “At thickth, Thethilia by Thughth” moment

Mark Morrison is still in pole position at the top of the charts and he’s still got his rather creepy handcuffs with him. The recurrent line “you lied to me” combined with Morrison’s style of delivery has made me ponder that “Return Of The Mack” is what you get if you combined “Ain’t No Doubt” by Jimmy Nail (“she’s lying”) with “It Wasn’t Me” by Shaggy. What a thought!

After the Suggs KO, the defeated Chrissy boy gives a reflective speech about being true to yourself before signing off with a cheery “Good bloody show”. To paraphrase Chumbawamba, you can knock Eubank down but he’ll always get up again. The play out song is something of an oddity called “That’s Nice” by Minty. If you don’t remember it (as I don’t), it’s probably because it never charted as far as I can tell. Yes, it’s another of those left field Ric Blaxill choices where he championed a track that would not actually become a Top 40 hit.

Minty was a vehicle for Australian performance artist, club promoter, fashion designer and friend of Boy George, Leigh Bowery. Wikipedia tell me that Minty were part of the Romo movement which I’d never heard of but which was short for Romantic Modernism and was characterised by a hotchpotch of musical genres including disco, glam rock and the New Romantics with its base camp being the club night Club Skinny in Camden. This track was a posthumous release as Bowery died from an AIDS related illness on New Year’s Eve 1994 though the project continued under the leadership of his long term female partner Nicola Bateman. I’m guessing now but was Leigh Bowery the inspiration for the character of Vulva from Spaced?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Babylon Zoo	Animal Army	Not for me but for a friend. Honest!
2	The Lisa Marie Experience	(Keep On) Jumpin’	No
3	Orbital	The Box	Not for me thanks
4	Ash	Goldfinger	No but I have it on their Intergalactic Sonic 7″s compilation album
5	Technohead	Happy Birthday	As if
6	Sleeper	Sale Of The Century	Liked it, didn’t buy it
7	Manic Street Preachers	A Design For Life	No but I had the Everything Must Go album
8	Suggs featuring Louchie Lou and Michie One	Cecilia	Nah
9	Mark Morrison	Return Of The Mack	Nope
10	Minty	That’s Nice	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/m0020ldh/top-of-the-pops-25041996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 11 APR 1996

Posted on July 2, 2024 by 80stastic

I’ve reached another blogging milestone – this is my 600th post over my 80s and 90s TOTP sites combined. Thank you to anyone and everyone who has ever taken the trouble to read any of them. 600 eh? Phew! When I started back in 2017 with the 1983 BBC4 repeats, I didn’t have any such goal in mind. In fact, I wasn’t sure I would even make it to the 1984 repeats but make it I did and seven (actual) years later, I’m still at it but with an end in sight as I won’t go past the year 2000 (as Busted almost sang). The 600th episode of TOTP was on 9th October 1975 but I was only seven then so don’t remember it at all. For the record though, it featured The Sparks, Bob Marley and David Essex at No 1. As for other 600th episodes, that landmark was reached in EastEnders on 6th November 1990 by which point I’d only just got married and moved to Manchester two weeks before so watching the latest escapades of Phil and Grant Mitchell probably wasn’t high on my list of things to do. The 600th episode of Coronation Street was broadcast on 12th September 1966 two years before I was born. Let’s see if any of the artists and hits in my own 600th anniversary are worth celebrating…

Well, if it’s a celebration we’re having then I guess we should start with a party tune and “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit” by Gina G is definitely that. This is her third consecutive week on the show and in the studio so the BBC couldn’t be accused of not getting behind our Eurovision entry this year. Now, in the last post I mentioned that I had a Gina G story. It’s time for it to be told. Around this time, Ricky Ross, having broken up Deacon Blue, was launching his solo album “What You Are” and the Sony rep who used to sell into the Our Price I was working in got all the staff on the guest list for an album launch party at a bar in Manchester. There was a free bar at the party and many, many drinks were consumed. I actually had a five minute chat with Ricky who was a nice bloke.

What’s this got to do with Gina G? Well, I also got talking to some guys who said they were the people behind “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit” but that they weren’t getting any royalties from it and were taking legal action or something. That’s about all I can remember (it was a free bar after all!) but searching online nearly thirty years later to see if there was anything in what they told me, I found that there was loads of legal action surrounding the song. Gina G reckoned she was owed over £136,000 for her part in its success while another case was launched by one Simon Taube who wrote the song and it was recorded by Gina with two producers called Wainwright and Burton who went under the alias of The Next Room. Enter one Stephen Rodway to the story as the new producer for the track who went under the professional name of Motiv-8. A deal was signed between Taube and Rodway giving the latter 30% of any royalty payments. However, said royalties were all collected by Rodway’s production company FX leading to Taube and the original producers suing FX for £408,000. Were those guys at that album launch that I spoke to Taube, Wainwright and Burton? Did they ever receive all of what they thought they were owed? Or even just a little bit?

How long has this been going on Paul? Seven years and 600 posts mate! Keep up! Seriously though, I love Paul Carrack’s voice and he’s written some pop classics but I’m not sure why one of them was back in the charts in 1996. “How Long” was originally a No 20 hit for his band Ace in 1975 but apparently it was reactivated 21 years later for Paul’s solo album “Blue Views” and reissued to promote it. It would peak at No 32 one place below the cover of it by the Yazz/Aswad collaboration from 1993. For such a timeless track, those chart peaks seem slightly underwhelming but justice arrived in 2020 when, 45 years after its original release, its use in an advertisement for Amazon Prime prompted 4,000 downloads, 831,000 streams and the No 1 spot in the Billboard Rock Digital Song Sales chart.

Although widely perceived to be a song about infidelity between a couple, it was actually written by Carrack when he found out that Ace bassist Terry ‘Tex’ Comer had been secretly working with Scottish folk-rock duo The Sutherland Brothers. By strange coincidence, also released the same year was “Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)” by Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel which was another song about band disharmony. When members of the original Cockney Rebel approached Harley about their desire to write songs for the band, he refused and the band split with Harley forming a new group. Hitting the top spot with their first release under their new moniker, the song was a jibe at the original Cockney Rebel members who Harley believed had done him dirty by trying to change a winning formula.

Just like “How Long”, “Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)” has been covered by many artists including Duran Duran, Erasure and The Wedding Present whose performance of it here includes David Gedge looking exactly like me 35 years ago – or is it me looking like Gedge?

I’ve never been much of a rap /hip-hop fan but I know a good tune when I hear one and “California Love” by 2Pac featuring Dr.Dre and Roger Troutman is a good tune. His first release since being…well…released from prison in 1995, it features amongst others a sample from “Woman To Woman” by Joe Cocker (not Jarvis’s Dad) and would top the US charts while making it to No 6 in ours. Its hook though is surely the ‘golden throat’ vocal in the chorus courtesy of Roger Troutman who sounds like a character from Viz but was actually a singer, songwriter, producer and all round pioneer of the funk movement. The aforementioned ‘golden throat’ sounds like a porn film title but was actually a custom made ‘talk box’ / vocoder supplied by electronics firm Electro Harmonix which he also used to contribute vocals to the Scritti Politti single “Boom! There She Was” in 1988. Then there’s the legendary Dr. Dre’s involvement which supposedly led to the falling out between himself and 2Pac. The latter, of course, would be dead within six months, murdered as part of the East Coast-West Coast hip-hop rivalry (unless you believe the conspiracy theories that he faked his own death). Rumours circulated that former friend turned rival Notorious B.I.G. was involved in 2Pac’s murder but then he was killed himself in 1997 in another Las Vegas drive by shooting. All of these artists would become a source of exasperation to me whilst working in Our Price as their albums would attract the white, middle class gangs from da hoods of Cheshire who would try and nick their CD sleeves for the parental guidance warning lyrics printed inside them. We had to replace them with temporary inserts and keep the real thing behind the counter.

Both Dr. Dre and Notorious B.I.G. continue to feature in my life as a source of inspiration for in jokes between myself and my wife. Whenever one of us says that we’ve forgotten something, it will be followed by a cry of “Forgot about Dre” referencing his 2000 single with Eminem and which Mark and Lard satirised on their Radio 1 show. Notorious B.I.G. was also known as Biggie Smalls which gets a regular shout out if one of us says “no biggie” as in “it’s not a big deal”. We sound insufferable don’t we but we’re not really – honest!

Here’s a band that was lumped in with the Britpop movement whether they liked it or not but are hardly talked about anymore despite having a clutch of decent tunes. If Longpigs are mentioned these days, it’s usually to say that they included a young Richard Hawley in their ranks (he’s the guitarist on the left of the screen) and he, of course, would go onto much solo success as a ballad crooner with albums like “Coles Corner” and “Lady’s Bridge”. He was also briefly a member of Pulp after Longpigs split. I’ve seen him a couple of times live and he was great.

Back to Longpigs though and “On And On” (not a tribute to the longevity of this blog!) was their second and joint biggest hit of their career alongside the excellent follow up “She Said”. Weirdly, just as I mentioned Aswad earlier for their version of “How Long” with Yazz, I get to name check them again as they also had a hit with a song called “On And On” in 1989 though obviously not the Longpigs song.

No, it’s not that moment (not yet) but it is Suggs with his cover of the Simon & Garfunkel song “Cecilia”. I’ve always had a soft spot for Madness and have even seen them live but Suggs as a solo artist? No, nay, never. I didn’t like any of his solo singles (not even “Blue Day” with my beloved Chelsea FC) and haven’t enjoyed his performances on these TOTP repeats. I’m not sure why Suggs on his own is such a turn off for me – maybe it’s the hackneyed layer of ska he applies to all his songs which annoys, especially on cover versions like this. He’s roped in Louchie Lou and Michie One for this single whom you may recall had a ragga-fied hit in 1993 with a version of one of the worst songs in the history of recorded music – Lulu’s “Shout”. I don’t think their contribution helped at all. However, given that they are on the record and in the studio with Suggs, why did they need the other two backing dancers for this performance? They don’t add anything much either although in reality, no amount of intervention could fumigate this stinker.

Yes, Babylon Zoo did have another hit and here’s the proof. “Animal Army” was the follow up to “Spaceman” and nearly 30 years later, it doesn’t stand up well at all. It probably needed crutches in that department even back then. You can see what Jas Mann was trying to do; repeat the recipe that made its predecessor such a banquet of a hit but without the magic ingredient of the exposure of a Levi’s ad campaign, it was always going to taste a bit bland. It feels like it should have been better than it was, that all the flavours were there but it wasn’t quite right – it had been overcooked. In the mixing bowl was a bit of glam rock, a hint of Suede, even a dash of Stone Roses and Oasis in the vocal phrasing but the lyrics were utter tosh about elephants, lions, leopards and then bizarrely dinosaurs and angels. Just nonsense. The inclusion of some elephant trumpet noises at one point is a direct steal from the opening of Talk Talk’s “Such A Shame”. So, in conclusion, very derivative and ultimately not very convincing. It would debut at No 17 but was out of the chart within two weeks. It was a similar story everywhere else. The Babylon Zoo story was coming to an end only weeks after it had started.

Talking of derivative, this single by Upside Down sounds so familiar to something else but I can’t quite put my finger in what it is*. “Every Time I Fall In Love” was the second hit for this lot who were perhaps the ultimate in manufactured boy bands with their audition and selection process filmed for the BBC documentary series Inside Story. If this was the sound of falling in love, it was enough to make us all platonic. Plastic, shallow and facile. I can’t find a clip of this studio performance but they’ve turned up in different coloured silk suits but getting dressed themselves was clearly beyond them as they’ve forgotten their shirts underneath their suit jackets. It’s like Showaddywaddy meets The Chippendales. Sadly, Upside Down had another two hits in them before they disappeared and renamed themselves Orange Orange. No, really.

*Update: I think it might be “The Girl Is Mine” by Michael Jackson?

Next an allegorical song for the ages from Rage Against The Machine. The lead single from their second album “Evil Empire”, “Bulls On Parade” warns of how the arms industry encourages war and conflicts as it’s good for business and securing military contracts. RATM pull no punches about their disgust at the practice with lines like these:

Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes

Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal

Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Brad Wilk / Timmy Commerford / Tom Morello / Zach De La Rocha
Bulls on Parade lyrics © Wixen Music Publishing

Nearly thirty years later, the world appears to have learned nothing. There’s no space here for pithy irreverence from me. I’ll leave it there.

I’m not giving any devastating insight by stating that there was a lot riding on the release of “A Design For Life” for Manic Street Preachers. This was their first new song since the disappearance of rhythm guitarist and songwriter Richey Edwards. Having made the decision to carry on, there must have been a huge amount of trepidation within the band and their record company about how it would be received. Would the fan base accept them as a trio? Would this new song be too far removed from the dark material of their “Holy Bible” album? They needn’t have worried – “A Design For Life” would give the band the biggest hit of their career and provide them with probably their best known song. There was something about the scale of track that hypnotised. Perhaps it was the dominant but not domineering string section (the same players as employed on the majestic “Yes” by McAlmont & Butler) that gave it such power. You knew it was going to be massive from the first time you heard it and hear it we did as it was played endlessly on radio in a way none of their previous singles had ever been. Parent album “Everything Must Go” would indeed go… three times platinum and furnish the band with four hit singles. Manic Street Preachers had not only survived the loss of a crucial band member but they were actually flourishing in the aftermath.

A few posts ago I wrote about the BBC series This Life and about how its soundtrack was full of contemporary music (mainly Britpop) including the Manics. Ten years after the series finished, a reunion special was made to catch up with the characters and see what had happened to them all. In one scene, they have a barbecue and drink long into the night. The music that they played as they partied? Yep, “A Design For Life”.

It’s a third and final week at the top for The Prodigy and “Firestarter”. The band had experienced plenty of big hits before of course – five of their previous nine singles had gone Top 10 but a No 1 record, even in 1996 when there were more than ever thanks to record company marketing, promotion and pricing strategies, was still a huge deal especially for a band seen as being so far from the mainstream. Incredibly, they would repeat the trick with their next single “Breathe” paving the way for an electric performance at Glastonbury in 1997 which blew me away. Sadly for the band, that year also saw Radiohead play the set of their lives there the following night which rather stole some of their thunder but it shouldn’t diminish the achievement of a band whose first hit was dismissed as having creating the much maligned toy town techno genre.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Gina G	Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit	Nope
2	Paul Carrack	How Long	I did not
3	2Pac featuring Dr.Dre and Roger Troutman	Californian Love	No
4	Longpigs	On And On	Decent tune but no
5	Suggs featuring Louchie Lou and Michie One	Cecilia	Never!
6	Babylon Zoo	Animal Army	Nah
7	Upside Down	Every Time I Fall In Love	As if
8	Rage Against The Machine	Bulls On Parade	Worthy but no
9	Manic Street Preachers	A Design For Life	No but I had the Everything Must Go album
10	The Prodigy	Firestarter	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/m0020crr/top-of-the-pops-11041996?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 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