We’re in the midst of a huge run of ‘golden mic’ hosts in these TOTP repeats. So far in 1997, the only Radio 1 DJ to have presented the show is Nicky Campbell back at the start of January. Since then we’ve had Rhona Cameron, Phil Daniels, Noddy Holder and in the next three shows we’ll see Peter Andre, Ant & Dec and Ian Wright before Jo Whiley waves the flag for Radio 1 again on 7th March. For this week though we have Ardal O’Hanlon aka Father Douglas Maguire from Father Ted. A Christmas special for that show (the one with the lingerie department scene) had recently aired so Ardal’s profile was in the ascendancy at the time. His approach to hosting is to claim propriety for the charts for this week and therefore TOTP as well and he pulls it off successfully I think.

The opening act are The Supernaturals who were a sort of nearly men of Britpop. Hailing from Scotland, they’d done the ‘paying their dues’ route of touring to create a fan base and independently releasing their early material until they were eventually picked up by major label Food in 1995. They then did a load more touring but not as headline act in their own tour but supporting the likes of Dodgy, Ash, Menswear, Sleeper, The Bluetones and in a rather unlikely move Tina Turner (must have been another support artist in after them surely?). Putting in the miles on the road paid off when their second single release “Lazy Lover” pierced the Top 40 peaking at No 34. The follow up was “The Day Before Yesterday’s Man” which was a nice play on words and an incredibly catchy bit of piano led but guitar based rock/pop. Despite this TOTP appearance though, it would only make No 25 in the charts. A re-release of their debut single “Smile” was deemed necessary to try and build on their first hit which it did but, despite being perhaps their best known tune, could only make it two places higher up the charts. Their album “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” did go Top 10 (just) but that would be the band’s commercial peak and it was a case of diminishing returns after that. Why weren’t they bigger than they were? Was it a case of bad timing with their arrival on the scene coming just as Britpop was burning out? Were they ahead of their time? They may not thank me for the comparison but were they a prototype Scouting For Girls? Or were they just always destined to be the bridesmaid and not the bride? For my part, I liked them and even bought their album though it was a few years after the event in a sale in a record shop in Madrid bizarrely whilst on holiday there.

After splitting in 2002, they reformed in 2012 and are still an ongoing entity today. If you think you don’t know or remember them, you might actually know some of their songs by osmosis as a number of them have been used to soundtrack advertising campaigns for the likes of Sky Movies, Arnold Clark Automobiles and Smile bank (guess which song they used for that one!). They’ve also featured in films and TV shows such as Shooting Fish, Hollyoaks, Clarkson’s Car Years, Fast Food and Homes Under The Hammer. With such demand to licence their work, maybe they aren’t the nearly men I thought they were.

When you think of Michelle Gayle, who do you think of? Hattie Tavernier in EastEnders? Or perhaps as half of rap duo Fresh ‘n’ Fly from her time in Grange Hill? Or the rather accomplished singer that she turned out to be during her brief music career? It perhaps should be the latter as she probably doesn’t get the credit she deserves for the decent stab she made of it. Sure, her best known song “Sweetness” was a bit sleight and throwaway but it was bright, bubbly and fun. Some of her other hits weren’t your average soap star turned pop star fare; she was no Stefan Dennis! No, my impression is that she took it seriously and wanted to be taken seriously rather than giving this opportunity her existing fame had afforded her a whirl. And some of her songs were OK. Take this one – “Do You Know” – for example. It’s a smooth as silk, sleekly produced R&B/pop song that was perfect for daytime radio and Michelle co-wrote it.

So why didn’t her time as a pop star last longer? I think it was to do with the perception of her as a singles artists as opposed to one who could shift lots of albums. She clocked up seven chart hit singles (including two inside the Top 10) but her two studio albums failed to sell in copious amounts peaking at Nos 30 and 17. She was also unlucky with record company machinations. After leaving RCA after her second album she joined EMI but a third album she recorded the them was never released. There was then an attempted comeback in 2004 when another album went unreleased after her label folded. She has had better luck and more success after becoming an author and a return to acting but this time treading the boards at the theatre. In 2023, she made a surprise if very fleeting return to her pop star days by appearing on stage with Louise at a Shepherd’s Bush gig singing her hit “Sweetness”.

So how is Ardal doing? Not bad actually. He has resisted doing a turn in character as Father Dougal Maguire whilst sneaking in some Father Ted references (“we’ll be having an exclusive from the British band Bush who are huge in America but very small here”) and channeling the spirit of Dougal by projecting the image of a man who is nominally in charge of the show but who doesn’t really have any control or know what’s going on (“we’ll be having some music, some counting, young people screaming and here’s Michelle Gayle singing a song…”). In his segue for the next video, he doesn’t hold back in his distaste for the duo involved by saying he doesn’t know how they got into his charts and then appearing to have had headphones on for the duration of it when the track is over. To be fair to Ardal, he had a point. “I Finally Found Someone” by Bryan Adams and Barbra Streisand was hardly down with the kids was it?

Taken from the soundtrack to Babs’s latest film The Mirror Has Two Faces (which I’ve never even heard of let alone seen), it’s perhaps what you would expect if you put these two together to record a song for a romantic comedy/drama – a big, rather overwrought ballad that ticks all the boxes of cinematic requirements. It wasn’t for me though Bry’s raspy rock voice does blend better than expected with the more refined tones of Babs. However, I’m not sure Adams is at his best when in the vicinity of movie soundtracks – often pilloried for that Robin Hood song, he was also part of the unholy trio that also included Rod Stewart and Sting that sicked up the bilious “All For One” from The Three Musketeers movie. “Have You Ever Really Lived A Woman?” from Don Juan DeMarco was similarly awful and then there’s this. Barbra and movies, on the other hand, are synonymous with each other. Tell me this though. How have I, in 2025 and at 56 years of age, only just noticed how she spells her name?!

And now for something completely different. I say completely different but, although the year had changed, the make up of the charts hadn’t as they were still home to multiple dance hits of which “Passion” by Amen! UK was just one of many. The correlation between banging tunes filling the dance floors and filling up the Top 40 was still dominant as the decade turned the final corner and headed for the finish. Who was buying these records in the shops? Was it club goers who wanted to recreate that top night they’d had last weekend in their living room? Was it DJs needing a track to complete their next set playlist? Most dance records of this time left me cold but I could appreciate their appeal and power in the setting of a nightclub but not so much being played at home. Maybe punters were practicing their dance moves in the safety of their homes before daring to present them to fellow club goers? Or maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about at all? Anyway, these are the facts for this one. The guy behind it was Irish DJ Paul Masterson who would go on to have more hits under the pseudonym of Yomanda and it was released on the painfully hip Deconstruction label reaching No 15 in the charts. It made No 40 when rereleased in 2003.

Another dance tune though this one is completely different to Amen!UK. Nuyorican Soul was a side project by American garage house producers ‘Little’ Louis Vega and Kenny ‘Dope’ Gonzalez aka Masters at Work. This single – “Runaway” – was a fairly faithful cover of a 70s disco track by the Salsoul Orchestra featuring the vocals of Loleatta Holloway who supposedly is the most sampled female singer in popular music history (remember the whole Black Box/“Ride On Time” debacle?). Vega and Gonzalez didn’t sample Loleatta in their version though choosing instead to have Puerto Rican singer songwriter India do the actual heavy lifting vocally. Some 90s production values made the whole thing sound retro yet current and it was duly a hit going to No 24 in the UK Top 40 and No 1 in our Dance Chart.

After a rather oblique Father Ted reference earlier when he referred to Bryan Adams and Barbra Streisand as “Lenny* and Petula Clarke”, Ardal O’Hanlon veers off into random-ville for his next link by name checking Toyah Wilcox, noting that it’s been 427 weeks since she’s been in the charts? That can’t be actually true can it? 427 weeks is what? Just over eight years. Right, I’m checking Toyah’s discography…

…Oh My God! He was nearly right. In fact, Ardal underestimated Toyah’s absence from the charts. Her last visit to the Top 40 was in May 1985 so a gap of nearly 12 years by this point! “Why can’t you be more like En Vogue?” he asks Toyah looking straight into the camera before we get the video for “Don’t Let Go (Love)” which is back up to No 5 this week. However, this would be the final time that the group would visit the UK Top 10. Good song as it is, it’s another of those tracks that has brackets in the title for no discernible reason. They don’t sing the word ‘love’ in the chorus – in fact, that word doesn’t appear in the lyrics at all (though ‘lovers’ does). For balance, Toyah wasn’t adverse to the use of brackets in her song titles. There’s “Be Loud, Be Proud (Be Heard)”, “Don’t Fall In Love (I Said)” and the marvellously ridiculous “Latex Messiah (Viva La Rebel In You)”.

*Recurring character Bishop Brennan’s first name was Leonard or Len as Father Dougal would call him much to his annoyance.

And here it is again. The problem for TOTP producers as to what to do with an almost instrumental dance hit. On this occasion it is The Orb with “Toxygene” and the decision on staging for their performance was to have the duo (Alex Paterson and Andy Hughes I think) each sit on a revolving mini platform tinkering with their keyboards and equipment set up. It looks ill-conceived at best and laughable at worst. What astonishes me is why the band themselves agreed to do it. Did they really think this was the best way to promote their single? Wasn’t there a video to go with it that could have been shown thereby killing two birds with one stone – a better showcase for the track and a solution for the show about how to stage it?

The track itself was supposed to be a remix of Jean Michel Jarre’s “Oxygène 8” from his “Oxygène 7–13” album though it doesn’t really sound anything like it at all which apparently Jarre wasn’t too happy about. I’ve wondered why there weren’t more uses of Jarre’s work in 90s dance tracks (there could well have been for all I know but this is the first I’ve come across) seeing as he was The Godfather of electronic, ambient and new-age sounds. There were people I knew at school who swore by him though it didn’t do much for me and my youthful pop sensibilities. Maybe Jarre’s reaction to The Orb’s treatment of “Oxygène 8” was a reason why there weren’t more samples of his work in existence.

Next an example of that curious phenomenon of when a UK artist is huge in America but can’t get arrested in their own country. In the 80s we had The Escape Club and Wang Chung. Bush were the 90s equivalent. Their debut album “Sixteen Stone” went Top 5 in the US but could only peak at No 42 over here. However, they finally broke through in the UK with the lead single from their second album “Razorblade Suitcase” which was called “Swallowed”. Listening to it now, it really does sound like a Nirvana tribute act, an accusation that was levelled at them constantly back then. I thought it was OK but I was never going to fall for them hook, line and sinker. I’m guessing though that their record company would hope that some female punters would do exactly that for lead singer Gavin Rossdale. They were out of luck if they did as he was going out with Gwen Stefani of No Doubt at the time and they would later be married for 13 years. No doubt we’ll be seeing…erm… No Doubt on these TOTP repeats very soon.

In the last post, I talked about “Walk On By” being one of the most recorded songs in history. However, “Ain’t Nobody” must be up there as well. Originally recorded by Rufus and Chaka Khan, it has also been recorded by Jaki Graham, Scooter, Richard X versus Liberty X and had been in the charts as recently as 1995 courtesy of Diana King. The there’s this version by LL Cool J. Recorded for the soundtrack of the Beavis And Butt–Head Do America film, it was a somewhat surprising No 1 in my opinion. It wasn’t as big a hit anywhere else in the world (including the US apart from their Rap Chart) and I don’t recall the film being a big hit over here (though Wikipedia tells me it did good business in America) so I’m not quite sure why it proved so popular in the UK. LL Cool J’s next hit also came from a film soundtrack as he was one of the artists on “Hit ‘Em High (The Monstars’ Anthem)” from Space Jam.

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/m0026zt7/top-of-the-pops-07021997?seriesId=unsliced