Cher | TOTP Rewind – the 90s

TOTP 23 MAY 1991

Posted on August 6, 2021 by 80stastic

To say we were still in the grip of dance music in mid 1991, this particular TOTP seems to be pretty conventional indeed featuring some very established acts, a couple of previously indie bands plotting a course for the mainstream with a more commercial sound and a new name but very much in the traditional singer-songwriter mould. There’s only two acts that would have qualified as dance music and one of them was Color Me Badd so I’m not sure they count.

Gary ‘Safe Pair of Hands’ Davies is the host and we start with a band desperately trying to convince us that they were still relevant in the new decade despite having made their fame and fortune very much as an 80s group. T’Pau hadn’t released an album for nearly three years by this point. Could they really roll back the clock and reclaim their former glories with a new one called “The Promise”? It seemed like a big ask at the time and so it would prove to be. The first taster of the songs they had been working on was lead single “Whenever You Need Me” and it offered very little in terms of a new musical direction. In short, they hadn’t developed their sound at all. Sure, it chugged along like a good ‘un in a power ballad by numbers fashion but it felt like the band had just decided to play it safe. They call it a ‘lay up’ shot in golf.

Reaction to the band’s return was mixed at best and awful at worst. Adam Sweeting of The Guardian had this to say about the album:

This melodramatic and syrupy concoction would comfortably have earned the band the Barbara Dickson slot on The Two Ronnies. Consider the first single, “Whenever You Need Me”, a Eurovision fourth-placer if ever there was one. Here, as elsewhere, Carol Decker’s masonry-toppling vocals are piled up in layers like a particularly indigestible aural lasagne

Ouch! Carol Decker still looked great and delivered the song as best she could but the rest of the band seemed to have decided that they were, in fact, serious rockers and not faded pop stars after all as they have all sprouted long hair. One of them really looks like ex- Duran Duran guitarist Andy Taylor. It isn’t but Andy’s shaggy locks look had clearly influenced him. I hope he had a good time up there on stage because I’m pretty sure this was T’Pau’s final ever TOTP appearance.

“Whenever You Need Me” peaked at No 16.

OK, we might as well get this one out of the way early. As indicated earlier, Color Me Badd are on the show.

*sighs*

Quite how this lot got to become a record selling phenomenon in 1991 is beyond me. They had a shitty song and as poster boys for the new jack swing genre, they were totally unconvincing. They weren’t even that good looking. At least New Kids On The Block had that on their side (well some of them anyway).

Regardless, “I Wanna Sex You Up” is headed for the top and is up to No 7 already. Apparently, it had already been offered to and turned down by the likes of Bell Biv DeVoe and Keith Sweat. Not quite up there with Decca turning down The Beatles but still a big mistake on there behalves. The track went double platinum in the US and was the 10th best selling single of the year in the UK.

The band are still going to this day (sort of) although the line up has changed a few times. Original members Bryan Abrams and Mark Calderon were still giving it there all on stage as recently as 2018 but unfortunately Abrams gave it a bit too much at this performance in New York….

…I like the Wikipedia description of the incident:

Abrams allegedly screamed, “I’m motherfucking Color Me Badd!” as he pushed Calderon to the floor. Officers stated that alcohol may have been a factor.

‘Alcohol may have been a factor‘ – d’ya think?! Abrams tried to make it up to Calderon at a subsequent gig by apologising via the medium of a T-shirt….

Dearie me. These are the actual guys from the band by the way and not a tribute act called Fuller Me Badd.

One of those established acts next as Simple Minds are back in the TOTP studio with latest single “See The Lights” which was the second single from their No 2 platinum selling album ‘Real Life”. Like T’Pau earlier, the band were hardly breaking new ground here. It felt like they were treading water to me. There had been a big line up change around this time as the album was made without keyboardist and original band member Mick MacNeil so maybe the band were trying to show their fans that the show would be going on as usual. More changes were a foot as drummer Mel Gaynor would also depart after this album when the band went on hiatus to reassess their options. The only album they released over the next four years was their first Best Of called “Glittering Prize 81/92”. These were uncertain times.

As with the Cher album “Love Hurts” that I talked about in a recent post, “Real Life” also swapped the cover art during its sales life. The album initially sported the minimalist and arty image on the left below before re-orders came with the shot of the band on the right which was actually the original rear cover – all very confusing. Maybe the band’s management wanted to reinforce the idea that tight were essentially a trio of permanent members now.

“See The Lights” peaked at No 20.

That singer-songwriter is up next and it can only be Beverley Craven of course with her rather affecting ballad “Promise Me”. I’m assuming her off white trouser suit and white piano in this performance are an homage to John Lennon and “Imagine”. I don’t know enough about pianos to be sure whether it is a Steinway like Lennon’s. Somebody who does know about musical instruments though is one of my wife’s best friends who is a classical musician and who, like us, was also living in Manchester in 1991 and around this time she got offered a place as part of the band for Beverley’s tour which I think included European dates. However, she turned the chance down as she had already booked a holiday with her then boyfriend and the dates overlapped. They finished not long after. I think she asked Beverley to “promise me you’ll wait for me” but she didn’t. Ahem. I’ll get my coat.

It’s that REM song next. “Shiny Happy People” may sound like a gloriously uplifting breath of fresh air pop breeze but supposedly the story behind it is a lot darker. Written about the Chinese propaganda machine spreading lies about what was really going on in the country post the Tiananmen Square uprising, Michael Stipe became concerned that rather than highlighting the propaganda, the song was actually modelling it with music fans accepting wholesale that it was just a happy, piece of bubble gum pop with no other levels to it. He may have been right.

Off the top of my head, other examples of songs where their sound is at odds with their subject matter would be “Luka” by Suzanne Vega and “Born In The USA” by Bruce Springsteen. I’m sure there are more.

“Shiny Happy People” peaked at No 6.

Impromptu gigs – they have quite the history don’t they. All the way back in the early 60s when those Cliff Richard films like Summer Holiday and The Young Ones always seemed to have a “let’s do the show right here” scene in them through to The Beatles unannounced concert from the rooftop of their Apple Corps headquarters at Savile Row in 1969 and into the 80s with U2 performing on the roof of a liquor store at the corner of 7th St and S. Main St, LA as part of the video shoot for “Where the Streets Have No Name”. Even in 1991, the practice was still alive and well as James played an impromptu gig on the roof of Manchester’s Piccadilly Hotel on 30 January. Add to that list The Wonder Stuff whose video for “Caught In My Shadow” was filmed in the grounds of St Philip’s Cathedral (otherwise known as Pigeon Park), Birmingham. Not quite a pure impromptu event though as the band had to get permission from the local council and the police had to be consulted so news of its happening had been leaked meaning that 200 indie pop kids turned up on 20 April to watch the band perform an acoustic gig.

It looked like it was great fun and that everybody had a good time (except maybe the guy in the orange top whose hands seemed surgically sewn into his pockets). The closest I ever got to an event like that was when I was on holiday in New York in 1998 and me and my mate Robin happened to stumble upon a live outside broadcast for the 1000th Ricki Lake show. I presume there’s some footage out there somewhere of me and Robin peering at the back of a crowd trying to see who everyone there was crowding round. My wife and another friend had gone off in another direction that day and saw Donald Trump coming out of Trump Tower. When we met up with them, they excitedly told us of their day and about Trump but Robin and I felt that we eclipsed then with our Ricki Lake story. I’m not sure we did given everything that has happened since.

“Caught In My Shadow” peaked at No 18.

Like T’Pau earlier, here are another band who made their name in the 80s returning with new material for the new decade. The only release that Deacon Blue had made in the 90s up to this point had been their “Four Bacharach & David Songs” EP and an album of B-sides and unreleased tracks called “Ooh Las Vegas” the previous year. “Your Swaying Arms” was their first new material since their album “When The World Knows Your Name” had, indeed, made their name and brought them huge commercial success.

Unfortunately for the band, the follow up album “Fellow Hoodlums” didn’t do anywhere near the same business as its predecessor (which had knocked Madonna off the top of the charts) and was generally seen as a mis-step. Yes, it did reach No 2 in the charts thanks to a sizeable loyal fanbase but I would wager that only second single “Twist And Shout” is remembered and indeed memorable from this era of the band. “Your Swaying Arms” was a case in point. A nice enough track that lilts along but it didn’t really go anywhere.

Ricky Ross had got himself an edgy, short haircut for this performance and the young man that I was at the time would have been always pleased to see Lorraine McIntosh strutting her stuff. Lorraine and Carol Decker on the same show! I was spoilt that week!

“Your Swaying Arms” peaked at No 23.

After the “Innuendo” and “I’m Going Slightly Mad” singles, “Headlong” was much more of a traditional sounding Queen song. Very much in the style of something like “Hammer To Fall” or “One Vision” but not as accomplished. I don’t think lyrics like ‘Hoop-diddy-diddy, hoop-diddy-do’ did it any favours to be honest. The video was shot in November and December of 1990. Within 12 months Freddie Mercury would be dead having succumbed to AIDS.

His yellow top in the video here conjures up images of him in a similarly coloured jacket whipping up the crowd into a frenzy at Wembley stadium. Meanwhile, we can assume that Brian May, unlike most of the rest of us, did have access to The Simpsons TV show judging by his T-shirt.

“Headlong” peaked at No 14.

Acting as the cheerleader of the established acts on tonight’s show comes Cher who is still at No 1 with “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)”, now in its fourth week at the top. I guess it was one of those songs that maybe appealed to people who traditionally didn’t buy much music and maybe only found themselves in a record shop once or twice a year? In today’s political vocabulary, ‘it cut through’.

According to Wikipedia, her follow up single “Love And Understanding” was released this week back in 1991 even as she was still top of the pile with her previous one. Talk about striking while the iron’s hot!

Probably the only true dance act on this TOTP is the play out video. Technotronic had been having hits for a couple of year by this point but the game was nearly up come 1991. “Move That Body” was a Top 20 hit but it would be their final one and the album it was from “Body To Body” peaked at No 27 whilst debut album “Pump Up The Jam” had been a No 2 hit. Quite the contrast. I shan’t mourn their passing I have to say.

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

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	T’Pau	Whenever You Need Me	Nah
2	Color Me Badd	I Wanna Sex You Up	Are you shitting me?!
3	Simple Minds	See The Lights	Nope
4	Beverley Craven	Promise Me	No but why wife’s friend who turned down the tour with Beverley bought the album just to torture herself some more
5	REM	Shiny Happy People	I did not
6	The Wonder Stuff	Caught In My Shadow	No
7	Deacon Blue	Your Swaying Arms	Negative
8	Queen	Headlong	Another no
9	Cher	The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)	Yes but it was all an honest mistake!
10	Technotronic	Move That Body	Do you have to ask?

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/m000y8wv/top-of-the-pops-23051991

TOTP 16 MAY 1991

Posted on August 4, 2021 by 80stastic

It’s mid May 1991 and I have been working in the Our Price store in Market Street, Manchester for about 8 months and life is OK. Except there’s one thing wrong. I haven’t yet had a Saturday off. Obviously as a Xmas temp (as I was when I started) I didn’t expect any whilst the Xmas rush was on but having secured permanent employment with the company, I have worked every Saturday since. Saturday 18 May would change all that though. How do I remember this date? Because I’d booked the Saturday off to watch the FA Cup final. Now as I have mentioned just a few times over the course of this blog, I have always been a Chelsea supporter (46 years and counting now) but I had never missed watching the Cup final regardless who was playing and 1991 wasn’t going to be any different. That year the finalists were Spurs and Nottingham Forest and I had invited some mates from out of town around to watch it. It was an eventful game but it would always be remembered as the Gazza final for all the wrong reasons…

Gazza, of course, had been a pop star less than 6 months earlier off the back of his tears at Italia ’90. His performance in the FA Cup final was more wretched even than either of his two hit singles though. Spurs and hit singles wasn’t a new phenomena restricted to just Gazza mind. The football club had released FA Cup final songs for the previous three occasions they had made the final back in the 80s, all of them with cockney rhyming slangers Chas ‘n’ Dave with the most memorable being the 1981 song “Ossie’s Dream” – ‘in the cup for Totting-ham’ and all that. 1991 was no different as “When the Year Ends in One” was released. Unlike its predecessors, it failed to make the Top 40…because it was shit. Anyway, I finally got my Saturday off to watch the game but before that was the small matter of Thursday night and TOTP. I wonder of host Bruno Brookes will mention the footy*?…

*SPOILER ALERT: He doesn’t.

What on earth is he wearing?! That clobber he’s got on makes him look like a member of a Formula 1 track side race team, ready to speed change a tyre when the driver pulls in for a pit stop. Just ludicrous! Stood next to him is a kid with floppy ‘Madchester’ hair wearing a Revenge T-shirt , Revenge being New Order’s Peter Hook’s side project band in the early 90s. The contrast is startling. Not sure that the kid’s enthusiastic clapping for acts on tonights’s show that include Danni Minogue, Jason Donovan and Cher is that sincere given his choice of T-shirt. I suspect opening act New Kids On The Block wouldn’t have been one of his faves either. Now don’t be fooled by any the studio audience whoops and hollering, by this point in their career, the band’s popularity was not at the heights it had scaled previously. In short, the wheels were coming off and they were heading down the dumper. To arrest this slide, Donnie Wahlberg convinced them to pursue a new musical direction that was more urban. “Call It What You Want” was the first offering of their new style and came from something called “No More Games: The Remix Album” which did what it said on the tin and featured hip-hop-upped versions of their previous hits. In the history of very bad ideas, this was surely in the Top 10. I get they were trying to grow and change with their pre-teen audience as they themselves grew older but surely those kids wanted grunge not dirge. The album sold moderately but didn’t really halt the band’s decline.

Apparently this was their one and only TOTP studio appearance. As such, they’ve decided to try and make it a bit special by performing the vocals live. Big mistake. Wahlberg raps adequately but Jordan Knight’s vocals, never that convincing, sound exposed and flat. Give them their due though, they could dance in sync very well.

“Call It What You Want” peaked at No 12.

One of the best known songs of the 80s making a comeback in the 90s now as we see “Tainted Love ’91” by Soft Cell re-released and back in the charts. Why? Well, there was a Best Of album released by record label Mercury called “Memorabilia – The Singles” and “Tainted Love” was back out to promote it. It was actually a re-recorded version of the song as were all but two of the eleven tracks on the album. There had already been a Soft Cell Best Of album released in 1986 simply entitled “The Singles” but it had got swallowed up in the Xmas rush and scraped to a lowly No 58 in the charts. Fast forward five years and it was deemed the right time for another compilation to boldly go where its predecessor hadn’t. Advertised as a Soft Cell / Marc Almond album, it only actually included two Almond solo originals plus his 1989 No 1 with Gene Pitney “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart” and his collaboration with Bronski Beat on 1985’s “I Feel Love (Medley)”. You can imagine a conversation at Mercury about the crucial need to include “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart” in the track listing but that would mean marketing it as a Soft Cell/ Marc Almond combined project. It worked though as the album went Top 10 and the single Top 5.

For many years, I couldn’t listen to “Tainted Love” due to the amount of times I had already heard it played on radio. It got hammered at the time and is regularly given a spin whenever anything vaguely to do with the 80s is broadcast. I had reached saturation point (see also “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen). I think I might just be coming out of that phase now though. I can’t hear that much difference between the original recording and this 1991 version – maybe a slight difference in the emphasis Marc puts on some of his phrasing and a slightly less lush production? Right until this very minute I had always believed that “Tainted Love” was the best selling single of 1981 but Wikipedia tells me that the Official Charts Company recalculated the data in 2021 giving the title to “Don’t You Want Me” by The Human League. What?! Why did they feel the need to do that 40 years on? One of the great chart swizzes ever surely?

The other week Simon Mayo was telling us how Cathy Dennis was going to be No 1 in the US with “Touch Me (All Night Long)” and now here’s Bruno Brookes saying that she is No1 in the US. Slightly disingenuous as she was actually No 2 in the Billboard Hot 100 chart (their equivalent of our Top 40) but she was No 1 in the US Dance Club Songs chart. I’m being pedantic of course. Suffice to say she was doing very well commercially.

Now, is that a catsuit she’s wearing in this performance? I do believe it is. I’ve told my woman in a catsuit story before haven’t I? OK, here it is again. In my early days at Our Price, there was a woman in our shop called Natalie who also did some modelling on the side I think. Anyway, one day she turned up for work in a catsuit and asked me if I thought it was a bit too much. Suffice to say I didn’t know where to look. One day Mick Hucknall rang the shop asking to speak to Natalie (I think she met him on a night out and he was quite enamoured). I answered the phone and when I asked who it was asking for Natalie he replied ‘Mick’. I knew it was Hucknall as Natalie had told us all that he was interested in her but she wasn’t sure what to do about it. As a claim to fame, it’s pretty poor I admit.

“Touch Me (All Night Long)” peaked at No 5 in the UK.

When I saw in the running order that Dannii Minogue was on this show, I assumed it was to perform her “Love And Kisses” single but it seems I’ve written so many of these reviews that I’ve lost tracks of the weeks. “Love And Kisses” has been and gone and we are now on to Dannii’s follow up single called “Success”. Wikipedia tells me it was also known as “$ucce$$” which was a really naff idea if true.

Like its predecessor, this was lifted from her debut album and was about the trappings of celebrity (probably). It’s got a bit more of a heavier beat to it than the much lighter “Love And Kisses” but it’s still pretty anonymous. Dannii clearly tries to deliver the song’s harder edge with a sassier performance as she takes off her jacket early doors to reveal a tattoo on her right arm which appears to be an elephant (?) and a dress with the straps dangling so perilously low as to run the risk of dropping altogether potentially causing a Janet Jackson style wardrobe malfunction. Even Bruno declared that he had been concerned (well it was pre-watershed I suppose). Also, whoever styled Dannii’s hair, what was the deal with the long straggly bit covering the left side of her face? It didn’t look practical at all. The whole thing looks like she’d just dashed out fo the back of a taxi at the last second before taking to the stage.

Talking of taxis, apparently when recording her album in Brooklyn, there has been some shootings near the studio meaning taxicab drivers were reluctant to take Dannii’s fare for the journey there. She supposedly found the recording experience in New York City both “awesome” and “terrifying”. Also potentially terrifying was the prospect of Dannii repeating that TOTP performance, droopy shoulder straps and all, before the Queen at the The Royal Variety Show that year. Thankfully, I can report that although there was a fair amount of flesh on display (especially from her backing dancers), Dannii kept her modesty intact at all times (unlike when she did those nude calendars back in the mid 90s).

“Success” did a good job of consolidating the success of “Love And Kisses” by peaking at No 11 where it stayed for three weeks.

More breakneck speed Breakers again this week as we get four songs crammed into in 1 min and 20 seconds. I’m sure the TOTP producers were beginning to worry about the competition from ITV’s The Chart Show with its video only show format and were trying to redress the balance. We start with “Shiny Happy People” by REM who Bruno reckons have got a ‘massive cult following’ in the UK. I think they may have surpassed that particular status by this point with the release of the “Out Of Time” album but the arrival of this single certainly left any remnants of being a cult way behind them. Very much the band’s marmite moment, it surely can’t be denied that “Shiny Happy People” brought them to the attention of people that had never heard of them before. We sold copy after copy after copy of the album in the Our Price store I worked in off the back of this song.

Apparently written ironically with the title and chorus being based on a Chinese propaganda poster, Michael Stipe however disputes this theory. Here’s @TOTPFacts:

"Shiny Happy People" is "not meant to be ironic at all", Michael Stipe says. "We wrote it because we were challenging ourselves. I grew up a child of the '60s listening to The Monkees and the Archies and The Banana Splits…" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 30, 2021

"… The guys threw me the stupidest song that sounded so buoyant and weird and I was like, 'Okay, I accept the challenge.' So it was bubblegum music made for kids." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 30, 2021

Of course, you can’t mention “Shiny Happy People” without referring to Kate Pierson from the B-52s whose vocals on this really did add something to it. Kate’s band were enjoying a commercial renaissance themselves after the success of 1990’s “Cosmic Thing” album so that, allied with the fact that both band’s were from Athens, Georgia made the fit between them kind of inevitable.

Not convinced that this was the song that made mainstream superstars of REM? How about this evidence then. “Shiny Happy People” was used as the theme song to the unaired pilot for the sitcom Friends, known at that time as Friends Like Us.

Still not having it? Well how about this then? REM singing a version of it called “Happy Furry Monsters” on Sesame Street. Come on. Is there a safer TV show in the history of television?

“Shiny Happy People” peaked at No 6 in the UK, easily their biggest hit at the time and still their joint third highest charting UK single to this day.

“A new name to us all” next (according to Bruno Brookes) as Flowered Up breach the Top 40 for the first time. So were they a new name? Well, they had formed two years earlier and had released two singles in 1990 which made Nos 54 and 75 so not totally unknown I would wager Bruno. In fairness to Brookes, had I heard of them before “Take It” was a hit? I really can’t remember but I do recall talk of them being ‘the next Happy Mondays’ at the time. That may have been less due to their sound and more to do with them having a Bez like dancer figure in their ranks, the brilliantly named Barry Mooncult who actually looked more like Peter Gabriel (in his Genesis days) on stage with his flower petal costume.

Their chart breakthrough coincided with a move from indie label Heavenly Records to major London Records so that may explain why it happened (major label promotion budget etc). Debut (and only) album “A Life With Brian” was released later in the year and the band had already appeared on the front covers of both Melody Maker and NME before then. I think they were quite well known in the end then Bruno. Flowered Up will perhaps forever be mostly associated with their biggest hit “Weekender”, the massively epic 12 minute long single that made the Top 20 in 1992 and which the band steadfastly refused to edit for airplay reasons. Hopefully we’ll get to see that in future TOTP repeats. In the meantime, “Take It” peaked at No 34.

Giving Dannii Minogue a run for her money in the strappy top stakes is Carol Decker of T’Pau who are back in the charts with “Whenever You Need Me“. No, really. Going against all known logic, 80s popsters T’Pau were somehow still having hits into the 90s. It really did rally against the status quo as when they returned two years after their last Top 40 hit, they sounded exactly the same. Now I’d had a soft spot for this lot back in their 80s heyday but even I couldn’t have cared less about them come 1991.

“Whenever You Need Me” was the lead single from their third album “The Promise”. I remember we had lots of it in stock in our store and hardly sold a copy. Somehow it made No 10 in the charts whilst the single made No 16 (although it was their last ever trip to the Top 40). Thinking back now, I wonder if there was some chart manipulation going on from the record label with lots of FOC stock being given to chart return stores in return for a few beeps of the album barcode on the Gallup scanner. That might well be a scandalous claim, it’s just that we really didn’t sell many at all. Whatever was going on, it didn’t really work as the band called it a day after “The Promise” (two further singles released from it did nothing at all chart-wise) although there have been reunions and sporadic gigging since then. I saw Carol Decker on the bottom of the bill on one of hose Here And Now tours about 20 tears ago and she still turns up on the music TV channels every now and again presenting things like Carol Deckers 40 Ultimate Rock Chicks or something.

After getting a little too overexcited about Dannii Minogue’s dress straps, Bruno Brookes now starts getting himself in bother over a “threesome of girls”. A threesome Bruno?! You couldn’t have just said ‘trio’?! Anyway, It’s Wilson Phillips that he’s referring to and the rest of his intro makes little sense either as he says they have had No 1 success in America and are now making it big in the UK. Whilst all of that is true – “You’re in Love” was their third single taken from their debut album to top the US charts – Bruno makes it sound as if they are only just starting to make waves in the UK. Actually, they had a Top 10 hit over here the previous year with “Hold On”. Had he forgotten that already? The UK had kind of lost interest in Wilson Phillips already though. “You’re in Love” peaked at No 29 this side of the pond and they would score just a further two hit singles on our shores, neither of which was especially big.

The highest new entry next and it’s a big one. A single going straight in at No 3 wasn’t something that happened every week back in the early 90s (especially by a new, unknown act) so there must have been a big buzz around Crystal Waters and her song “Gypsy Woman (La Da Dee)”. So unusual was it that, at the time, it meant that she was the highest debuting female artist ever*.

*She was subsequently relieved of that title by Gabrielle in 1993 when “Dreams” debuted at No 2 who was in turn usurped by Whigfield a year later when “Saturday Night” went straight in at No 1. Crystal Waters didn’t quite top the charts as Bruno suggested she might, peaking instead at No 2.

The song is actually about homelessness (it was released as “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)” in some territories) but for me, it almost bordered on novelty status with that incessant and extremely annoying ‘La-da-dee/la-dee-da’ hook. Apparently though, it was very much seen as a house music classic and, more than that, it was a trailblazer of the genre in that it combined social conscience with beats. It routinely appears in music polls as one of the greatest dance tunes of the 90s! I had no idea! Maybe I should have guessed at its house music reputation judging by the dance moves Crystal gives in this performance – she performs the song as if she’s busting some moves in a club rather than in front of an audience of millions on the UK’s premier pop music show. The track is of course nothing to do with the country singer Don Williams’ song “I Recall a Gypsy Woman” which my Dad does a pretty good version of.

Talking of novelties, here was something you didn’t see that often – a contemporary Christian music (CCM) artist breaking through to have a monster hit in the mainstream charts. Amy Grant is known as ‘The Queen of Christian Pop’ but here she was back in 1991 with yet another song that had been a US No 1. How many has that been just on this TOTP? Three? If you include Cathy Dennis’s dance chart topper? “Baby Baby” was one of those radio friendly, feel-good pop songs that you found yourself humming along to even though you didn’t particularly like it. Now my wife really did like this one to be fair and even today she can sometimes be heard humming it absent-mindedly.

The heart-warmingly sweet / nausea inducing (delete as appropriate) video received a nomination for Best Female Video at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards. Totally lacking in special effects but just portraying Amy and her on screen love interest doing luv’d up things seemed to appeal to a simpler sense of what life should all be about. Love, friendship, fun…and rolling oranges back and forth to each other apparently. I’m trying to think of any other Christian Music artists that I know of. Stryper? Were they a CCM artist?

*checks Wikipedia*

Yes! They are Christian Rock band! Two things here. How did I dredge that up from my memory banks and what the Hell is Christian Rock?!

“Baby Baby” peaked at No 2 in the UK.

When I think of Jason Donovan and 1991, only one thing comes immediately to mind – Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and his No 1 record “Any Dream Will Do”. Despite Bruno advising us that the show starring Donovan is opening in June, Jase isn’t here with that song. No, it’s a little ditty called “RSVP”, a single that’s so forgettable, nobody ever did reply to him. Apparently it was a ‘not released before’ track from his forthcoming Greatest Hits album but top points to anyone who remembered this bilge. In line with his recent chart track record, it wasn’t a major hit peaking at No 17. Not even Jason’s guitar playing and some leather trousers could save this one.

Cher is still at the top of the pile with “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)”. Now as its the third week of its reign at the top and I have nothing else to say about it, I dug about for some tenuous links between Cher and other artists on this TOTP and I found one! “Baby Baby” wasn’t Amy Grant’s first US No 1. That came in 1986 when her duet with Peter Cetera “The Next Time I Fall” hit the top. And who has had a massive hit duetting with the ex-Chicago man? Yes, Cher of course whose “After All” went Top 10 in the US in 1989. Small world and all that.

To finish off, we have a forthcoming No 1 record by perhaps one of the most useless bands in the whole of the decade (in my humble opinion). Color Me Badd were an R’n’B four piece who briefly threatened global dominance after their “I Wanna Sex You Up” single became a hit all around the world. The group described their style as ‘hip-hop doo-wop’ although I seem to recall a lot of talk of them being part of this new jack swing movement but maybe that was purely because of the song’s inclusion on the soundtrack to the film New Jack City. For the record, I described Color Me Badd as atrocious shit and yet the UK seemed unable to resist their …erm…charms and sent it to No 1. Was it just that it had the word sex in the title and chorus? I can just imagine loads of beered up young men sidling up to women on the dance floor in clubs up and down the country crooning “I Wanna Sex You Up” to them. Ugh!

As for Color Me Badd themselves, I have to say that the word sex wasn’t what came to mind when looking at them. If you were trying to put a hip hop boy band together, I don’t think I’d have included a Kenny G lookalike and someone trying (and failing) to look like “Faith” era George Michael but with a long bob haircut in their ranks.

Order of Appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	New Kids On The Block	Call It What You Want	Ok, I will. It was shit
2	Soft Cell / Marc Almond	Tainted Love ’91	Nope
3	Cathy Dennis	Touch Me (All Night Long)	Nah
4	Danny Minogue	Success	Failure – no
5	REM	Shiny Happy People	I didn’t
6	Flowered Up	Take It	No
7	T’Pau	Whenever You Need Me	Negative
8	Wilson Phillips	You’re In Love	But not with this song – no
9	Crystal Waters	Gypsy Woman (La Da Dee)	I’d have rather listened to Crystal Tips and Alistair sing
10	Amy Grant	Baby Baby	I didn’t. Not sure if my wife did or not
11	Jason Donovan	RSVP	Dear Jason, this is a shit song – no
12	Cher	The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)	Yes but it was all a genuine mistake
13	Color Me Badd	I Wanna Sex You Up	Hell 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/m000y2fl/top-of-the-pops-16051991

TOTP 09 MAY 1991

Posted on July 30, 2021 by 80stastic

It’s early May 1991 and UK comedian Bernie Winters (of Schnorbitz fame) has just died. During his career, he portrayed vaudeville entertainer Bud Flanagan whilst Bud’s comic partner Chesney Allen was played by Leslie Crowther…and guess what? It turns out that Chesney Hawkes is named after Chesney Allen! And that, dear reader, is one of the most tenuous links I have ever come up with to tie together the news of 1991 with the charts of that year. It’s especially tenuous as Chesney’s reign at the No 1 has just come to an end the other week and effectively also his time as a pop star. So who was in the charts then around now? Let’s find out….

Tonight’s host is Gary Davies who had been a TOTP presenter for nigh on a decade by this point. You have to give him points for longevity. However, before the year’s end, he would lose that gig as the ‘year zero’ revamp kicked in. In fact, he was the last Radio 1 DJ to host the show in its old format. Tonight’s he’s got some sort of yin and yang design top on which probably looked pretty cool in 1991. Probably.

The first act he introduces are Electronic with “Get The Message” but for some inexplicable reason, the version they choose to mime to here is a remix of the single and not the radio edit. The remix in question is a DNA Groove Mix (yes those blokes who remixed “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega in 1990) but it sounds limp next to the radio version. I’d even go as far as piss weak. Whose idea was this?! Bernard Sumner doesn’t seem to know how to deliver this version of the song so we get a lot of arms raised with a clenched fist and some really loose noodling around dance steps. He looks as unsure what to do as I did on my one and only (gets another Chesney reference in!) visit to The Haçienda.

“Get The Message” peaked at No 8 and was the first of just two Top 10 hits for the band.

One of the biggest stars of the last 12 months is up next as Seal is back in the studio with his new single “Future Love Paradise“. This was his second solo single after “Crazy” at the end of the previous year and was actually the lead track from an EP called “Future Love EP”. It was very much in the same vein as its predecessor although not quite as immediate I would suggest. Not content with sounding a bit like “Crazy”, Seal also went back to his uncredited No 1 with Adamski “Killer” for some inspiration, repurposing the line ‘Don’t you know that racism has a minimum future kids, Can only lead to no good’ for inclusion in the lyrics to “Future Love Paradise”.

Seal is still rocking his leather trousers for this performance though he has added the affectation of a guitar as well. As the song kicks in, he finally uses it as a musical instrument rather than a fashion accessory to do some fairly unimpressive fake strumming. Still, it was a pretty solid follow up I always thought. An Our Price colleague called Mark loved this, purchasing it on the day of release. No messing about for Mark. However, its sales in general were decent rather than spectacular and it shuddered to a halt outside the Top 10 at No 12. A bit of a comedown from the No 2 high of “Crazy” and, of course, that No 1 in “Killer”. Maybe punters were waiting for the album that Gary Davies plugged in his intro.

Another follow up to a recent huge hit next as Roxette attempt to repeat the success of their No 4 record “Joyride” with new single “Fading Like a Flower (Every Time You Leave)“. This one had much more of a rock ballad feel to it than the pure pop moment that was “Joyride” – almost “Listen To Your Heart Pt II” in fact. All the usual soft rock elements are present and correct including some guitar licks that sound a bit like “Wind of Change” by Scorpions and the obligatory final flourish key change. It’s all very professionally done and that but a little too formulaic maybe?

As with Seal, it couldn’t replicate the success of its predecessor and exactly like Seal, it also peaked at No 12.

*How much longer is this Top 5 albums feature going to go on for?! The premise of TOTP is that it was based around the singles chart! It’s not that hard is it?! Oh well, the Top 5 albums for April 1991 were

Eurythmics – “Greatest Hits”
Simple Minds – “Real Life”
Roxette – “Joyride”
Rod Stewart – “Vagabond Heart”
REM – “Out Of Time”

Pretty mainstream stuff I guess (if you are counting REM as part of the establishment now). Personally I had got very excited about the release of the first ever Eurythmics Best Of album though. It sold and sold throughout the year and looked nailed on to be the biggest seller of 1991 until Simply Red released “Stars” and it was pipped at the last. Bloody Hucknall! So much to answer for.

A live performance next from a new act now as Beverley Craven‘s time in the spotlight has arrived. Although she seemed to appear overnight as a fully fledged singing star, she’d actually been paying her dues for some years before this point. She’d been playing London pubs and writing songs since she was 18 (she was 27 at the time of this TOTP performance) and having finally been picked up by Epic Records, she had been sent to LA to work with some established songwriters and to learn her craft playing in bars and restaurants over there. Her first attempt at recording her debut album was with one Stewart Levine who was the man responsible for producing the Simply Red albums “Picture Book” and “A New Flame”. He was also the guy behind the aforementioned “Stars” album. Another man with so much to answer for then. A little bit of cosmic karma struck Levine though when Beverley didn’t like what he had done with her songs and with Epic also rejecting the recordings, a new producer was hired. Ha! Go on Bev!

New producer Paul Samwell-Smith met with more approval and the album, simply titled “Beverley Craven”, was released in July 1990….and nobody even noticed. Four singles were released from it and they all sank without trace. However, she had gone down well in Europe and so a British tour was arranged to capitalise. The single “Promise Me” was re-released in the wake of this and with heavy promotion behind it, the charts were finally cracked. The single went Top 3 which led to the inevitable public clamour for her album that had been ignored initially. Epic however employed that annoying practice of withdrawing it from sale before re-releasing it with a fanfare and a TV advertising campaign. Cue lots of frustrated punters.

Singing the song live on TOTP was a very clever decision though, imbuing Beverley with an immediate credibility as a singer-songwriter rather than a pop star. The piano playing also helped to establish her musicianship. For a while, Beverley was huge. A further two of those early singles were re-released both becoming hits and the album (when it was finally available again) spent nearly a year in the charts. The following year, she won The Best Newcomer award at the BRITS. However, after giving birth to her first daughter Mollie, the quick follow up album that Epic required was not forthcoming, eventually arriving a year later in 1993. Although a gold seller, “Love Scenes” didn’t perform as well as her debut and after a five-year hiatus due to giving birth to two more daughters, Beverley didn’t release a third album until the 90s were nearly over. By this point, she had almost gone back tho the same public profile she had had at the start of the decade. In later years, Craven has toured with Julia Fordham and Judie Tzuke as part of the Woman To Woman show and in 2018 had to take time out to recuperate after surgery for breast cancer.

Me? What did I think about it? Yeah, I quite liked “Promise Me” in the same way that I quite liked “Get Here” by Oleta Adams. I quite liked it – is that damning with faint praise? Sorry Bev, Didn’t meant to.

UPDATE: This bloke on Twitter says that was the last one. Hurray!

That was the final album chart on #TOTP by the way
— Gareth Windibank (@eightiespopkid) July 23, 2021

Ah bollocks! It’s the return of Michael Bolton and we all know wha that means. No, not his monstrous hair but that I have to fess up, once again, to having seen him live. I know, I know. Do I have to go over this all again in detail? I was drunk in a nightclub when I agreed to accompany my work colleague Andy to see him in Sheffield but before I could check with Andy what I had agreed to, he had purchased the tickets. Honest truth that! And yes, the support was Kenny G (or as Michael referred to him, ‘The G Man’). OK. Happy now?

Right. Well, “Love Is A Wonderful Thing” was the lead single from his “Time, Love & Tenderness” album and as I remember, Andy was quite enthralled by it. Not so enthralled were The Isley Brothers who filed a lawsuit for copyright infringement against Bolton and his record company due to the similarity between his song and their own also called “Love Is a Wonderful Thing” which had been released in 1966 and was a minor hit. Like very minor. No 110 in the charts minor. Bollers denied all knowledge of The Isley Brothers’ song but in 1994, a Los Angeles jury ruled in favour of the plaintiff and against him. Aghast at the decision, the hairy one appealed the verdict and the court fight continued for nearly seven more years but to no avail. Bolton, his co-writer and Sony Publishing were ordered to turn over more than $5 million in profits from the sales of his version of the song to The Isley Brothers.

The weird thing is, the two songs don’t really don’t sound that similar at all to me. See what you think. Here’s The Isley Brothers….

…and here’s the Bolton song…

I’m really not convinced. “Love Is A Wonderful Thing” (by Michael Bolton) peaked at No 23.

If you thought you were going to get away with out some horrible dance music on the show, think again. It was 1991 after all! Your weekly dose of crappy bpm is courtesy of somebody/thing called T99 and is called “Anasthasia”. Now according to Gary Davies, it was a somebody and his name was Olivier Abbeloos who was one half of Quadrophonia who supplied last week’s dose of crappy bpm. This isn’t him though. Here’s @TOTPFacts:

Olivier Abbeloos had no idea about this #TOTP! "They did a remix with a rapper and a vocalist, and I didn't like the vocalist, so I said to Nick [Halkes, co-founder of XL Recordings], 'Sorry, but this can't happen'. He called the vocalist back and we re-recorded the vocal…"
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 23, 2021

"I went back home. Four days later I was watching Top Of The Pops & they announced, '… his name is Olivier Abbeloos and he's live in the studio…' But I wasn't! I was in my seat at home. And there was Nick Halkes performing in my place, without letting me know anything!" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 23, 2021

Yeah, I couldn’t really care less either. The track and performance here comes over like a poor man’s KLF. Somehow though it peaked at No 14.

Still Cher at the top of the heap with “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” but what’s Gary Davies telling us in his intro? The film it’s taken from Mermaids, hadn’t even opened in the cinemas at this point? It wasn’t even due its premiere for two weeks with general release a further week away after that? So why was the song so popular? I was assuming that people had picked up on it from flocking to the cinema. Maybe it was being hammered on the radio. Well, if The Simpsons could have a No 1 song when hardly anybody in the UK had access to their TV show, then I guess Cher could have a hit from a film that wasn’t out yet. As cheesy as it is, I’d have “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” over “Do The Bartman” any day.

The play out video is “There’s No Other Way” by Blur. Now of course, the most striking thing about this video is Damon Albarn’s horrific bowl haircut. However, the rest of the band aren’t much better apart from drummer Dave Rowntree who has a sensible short style that he maintains to this day. A bit like when Peter Best didn’t get The Beatles haircut when John, Paul and George when in Hamburg. Luckily, for Dave he didn’t get kicked out of the band for not joining in like Pete did.

However, the other thing I have noted is those Japanese style blue willow plates that the meal is served on. They were everywhere in the 70s and early 80s. My Mum certainly had some (probably still does). Although it’s clearly meant to be very interesting, the rest of the video isn’t really. It’s just trying to be too clever by half. What was with the scarily huge trifle at the end and the shots of the worm? Pseuds! At least they were talked into changing the band name from Seymour to Blur.

“There’s no Other Way” peaked at No 8.

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

Order of Appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Electronic	Get The Message	No but I must have it on something surely?
2	Seal	Future Love Paradise	No but I had the album
3	Roxette	Fading Like a Flower (Every Time You Leave)	Nope
4	Beverley Craven	Promise Me	I did not
5	Michael Bolton	Love Is A Wonderful Thing	I promise you I didn’t
6	T99	Anasthasia	No
7	Cher	The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)	Yes but it was all an honest mistake!
8	Blur	There’s No Other Way	Don’t think I did

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/m000y2fg/top-of-the-pops-09051991

TOTP 02 MAY 1991

Posted on July 27, 2021 by 80stastic

We’ve made it to May 1991 here at TOTP Rewind which can only mean two things; the culmination of the football season and the Eurovision Song Contest. Football-wise, the England team was indebted to little Dennis Wise who scored one of the most undignified, scrappy goals ever witnessed at international level with this goal vs Turkey in a European Championships qualifier the day before this TOTP aired…

As I recall, the general consensus was that it went in off his backside. Still, they all count. As for Eurovision, the 1991 contest took place in Rome on the Saturday and…well more about what happened there later.

Tonight’s show is hosted by the interminably smug Simon Mayo and he promises us “The most incredible opening to TOTP ever, ever seen, I mean it…”. Wow! That’s some promise! Who could he have been referring to? Well, if it’s 1991 then it could only be The KLF and indeed it is as they had crashed into the charts at No 3 with their latest single “Last Train To Trancentral”. So, did the performance live up to Mayo’s hype? Not for me sadly. Yes, there was a crowd of people up there on stage so it had more numbers than most acts and yes they were wearing white robes with Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond also sporting a bull horn protruding from their hoods which was presumably all meant to signify something ‘other’ and ‘cultish’. Maybe a better word would be ‘unpalatable’ as the imagery reminds me of The Klu Klux Klan and some sort of satanic ritual. They don’t do much though do they apart from jog around in a circle at the end and shout ‘Woo Woo!’ or is it ‘Mu Mu!’? Apparently the lady in the Native American headdress is Cressida Cauty (Jimmy’s then wife) who now goes by the name of Cressida Bowyer and is currently at the University of Brighton’s School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences where she been doing ground-breaking research into liver cancer. Seems a hell of a lot more productive than playing silly buggers and shouting “Woo Woo!’ on TV to me.

Mayo was wrong about another thing as well. His confident proclamation that “Last Train To Trancentral” would be a No 1 proved to be false as it stalled at No 2. Ha! Take that dullard!

Whilst 1991 was undoubtedly the year of The KLF, it was also an annus mirabilis for Cathy Dennis. We’d last seen Cathy back in 1989 when she was the featured vocalist on D-Mob’s “C’mon And Get My Love” single but here she was, striding out on her own with “Touch Me (All Night Long)“. Now I had no idea until now that this wasn’t a Cathy Dennis original (which was a surprise given her career as a prolific songwriter post being a pop star) but was in fact by somebody called Fonda Rae who had a minor hit with it it 1984 (it also had a Slade style spelling as it was entitled “Tuch Me (All Night Long)”). Wanna hear it? Ok then…

I say it’s not a Cathy Dennis original but she did rewrite the verses retaining just the chorus hook. The track proved to be a winner both with pop fans and dance heads as it went to No 5 in the UK Top 40 and No 1 in the US dance chart. Is that what Mayo meant when he did another of his predictions as he says in his introduction that “Touch Me (All Night Long)” was about to be No 1 in the US? If he meant the Billboard Hot 100 chart then he was wrong again as it peaked at No 2.

Anyway, back to Cathy and the single lit the touch paper for her career as she racked up a further three Top 40 hits this calendar year, all coming from her debut solo album “Move To This” which itself was a UK No 3, gold seller. For a while she looked like she had everything – the songs, the appeal, the looks and the moves. She certainly looked a better bet for longevity than some of her peers like Dannii Minogue. Unfortunately the two years between this and her next album saw grunge happen and she lost a lot of ground and her place in the scheme of things from which she never really recovered. Her final album as a recording artist, 1997’s “Am I The Kinda Girl?”, rode the Britpop zeitgeist and was critically well received but floundered commercially peaking at No 78.

OMD are next or that should really be OMD Pt II as this is the version of the band without founding member Paul Humphreys. I like the fact that remaining original Andy McCluskey didn’t see any need to change his renowned and wonderfully awful dancing style despite the band’s new era. He explained the back story of his dancing in an interview in The Scotsman, saying that it stemmed “from the perception that we were making boring robotic intellectual music that you couldn’t dance to. I was trying to say, ‘No, no, you can dance to it, look, I’m dancing to it…”. Hmm. It was famously dubbed the ‘Trainee Teacher Dance’ by DJ, presenter and writer Stuart Maconie. At least Andy went for a leather jacket look and not a comfy cardigan with patches on the elbows.

“Sailing On The Seven Seas” peaked at No 3 whilst parent album “Sugar Tax” went platinum. Fast forward 30 years and that quip by Mayo that the album’s title was “as good a name for a tax as any” looks pretty silly doesn’t it given that just last week we heard of government plans to raise a sugar and salt tax to help to break Britain’s addiction to junk food.

OK, we arrive at the Eurovision part of the show. The UK entry for 1991 was Samantha Janus with a little ditty called “A Message To Your Heart”. The contest took place in Rome on 4th May and by this point in our history, the UK had only finished outside of the Top 10 once since 1978. Indeed, we’d finished 2nd twice on the spin at the end of the 80s and had been a respectable 6th the previous year. Twelve months on and our competing song was once again written by Paul Curtis who had penned the previous year’s entry, “Give A Little Love Back To The World” by Emma. Whereas that song had an environmental theme, “A Message To Your Heart” was all about those in the world suffering from poverty and starvation with the lyrics offering up a contrast of the have and have nots with lines referring to those who “are hungry just from being born” and those of whom “their only hunger being greed”. That was all very laudable but the sound of the song was completely at odds with its lyrics in that it was defiantly up tempo. In this TOTP performance, Janus ploughs on through it like a soft rock anthem with plenty of air grabs, fist clenches and tossing of her hair. She also does a lot of grinning, smiling and there’s that little prayer hand gesture which reminds me of Aneka of “Japanese Boy” fame. It’s not really her fault I guess – it just doesn’t make any sense in the context of the song.

Come the day of the contest itself, Janus was given the 20th singing slot out of 22 performers. I’m not sure that helped her and neither did her pink mini-dress outfit when singing about poverty and starvation…that and her dreadful out of tune singing obviously. Samantha finished 10th overall which was seen as quite the disaster back then but which would be seen as a right result these days. Janus was devastated though and thought it would spell the end of her. Fortunately for her, she recovered and went onto have a very successful acting career both on stage and on TV with her most memorable role being that of Ronnie Mitchell in Eastenders I would imagine though my personal favourite of her shows was Game On.

As for the UK ‘s relationship with Eurovision, we recovered some ground during the rest of the 90s with three 2nd place finishes building to our last win with Katrina and the Waves in 1997. Since the turn of the century though, it’s all pretty much turned to shit.

“A Message To Your Heart” peaked at No 30 in the UK charts.

I never knew Nomad had a second hit! Well, if I did I’d forgotten all about it but here is the follow up to “(I Wanna Give You) Devotion” called “Just A Groove”. Right, let’s have a listen to it then…

…my God that was awful! There’s no tune in there at all. It’s just a backing track with some bullshit lyrics about Nomad having the music. Vocalist Sharon D. Clarke went on to have a Laurence Olivier Award winning acting career and has appeared in many West End productions and also had a wide TV career appearing in shows such as Soldier Soldier, Eastenders and most recently in the eleventh series of Doctor Who. Now I don’t know if it’s that bit of info which is causing me to hear this but it when she’s singing ‘Nomad’s got the groove’ it sounds a bit like ‘Nomad’s Dr Who’.

If that wasn’t weird enough, check this lot of trivia out. Having already discussed in length the 1991 Eurovision Song Contest earlier in the blog, it turns out that, in 2000, Sharon took part in the Eurovision qualifier A Song for Europe as part of Six Chix who came second to Nikki French. Now if you know your 90s chart history, that name will ring a bell as Nikki scored a No 5 hit in 1995 with a dance version of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. However, 9 years prior to that in 1986, she recored a song called “Dirty Den” released under the name Whiskey and Sofa. Dirty Den? Eastenders? The soap that Sharon appeared in? Weird no? Oh suit yourselves!

Meanwhile band member Steve McCutcheon, known professionally as Steve Mac, would go on to a hugely successful record producer and songwriter career having had a hand in 30 No 1 singles in the UK chart including four for Irish boyband Westlife. However, he was still clearly honing his skill backing 1991 as “Just a Groove” peaked at a lowly No 16 and was Nomad’s last ever UK chart hit.

Simon Mayo’s smugness gets an outing again next as he informs us all that “Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” by Paul Young and Zucchero was an old Record of the Week on his Radio 1 Breakfast Show and that it is now shooting up the charts. Yeah, whatever Simon. Presumably this wasn’t anything to do with your own musical choice but was the result of a deal brokered between the record company and the Radio 1 playlist team made up of producers, music editors etc.

Back to Zucchero and Paul though and last week, the hashtag Keith Lemon was trending on account of the Italian singer’s resemblance to Leigh Francis’ comedy character. However, somebody this week posited the theory that he looked more like Coronation Street‘s Jim MacDonald. Let’s have look then…

Nah, definitely Keith Lemon for me.

“Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” was taken from Paul’s very first Best Of collection called “From Time To Time – The Singles Collection” which was a huge seller in the UK. Since then, his record label Columbia have released a further eleven Paul Young Best Ofs under various different titles. That’s more than double the amount of studio albums he recorded for them! Talk about getting the most out of your money!

“Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” peaked at No 4.

After being a Breaker last week, Frances Nero has leapt up the charts nine places which warrants a studio performance of “Footsteps Following Me”. The title of the song sounds pretty sinister when you think about it. Having examined the lyrics, it seems to be about the need for trust between lovers with phrases like ‘I am allergic to jealousy’ and ‘love without freedom will die’. There’s also a line which is utterly banal and lazy and that line is ‘free as a bird high in the sky’. Oh come on! Primary school kids could write better than that!

“Footsteps Following Me” peaked at No 17 whilst Frances Nero sadly passed away in 2014.

Chesney is gone – toppled by the might of Cher and an old 60s song that was included on the soundtrack to her latest film Mermaids. It’s not quite how I imagined him going out really. Surely someone more ‘happening’ (as the TOTP hosts were likely to say) in 1991 like The KLF or Seal would have been expected to dethrone *Chezza? Cher though? I for one didn’t see it coming.

Within a few short weeks of “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” being at No 1, Cher released an album called “Love Hurts”. Nothing very exceptional about this of course but there are couple of little anecdotes about the album’s release that I recall. Firstly, “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” wasn’t on it. Except that it was. What am I banging on about? Well, it wasn’t included on the US release of the album as the single had not been anywhere near as popular over there where it peaked at No 33. Across Europe however, it was huge and was a No 1 in Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Norway and the UK of course. Consequently, the European version of the album did include it as a bonus track. Presumably that decision helped to send the album to No 1 in the UK where it was a three times platinum seller.

Secondly, there was the issue of its cover. When it was originally released it had some weird mirror reflection artwork going on with a banner across it proclaiming the album’s title. This was the version released in North America and also the initial worldwide copies. Once we started re-ordering it at the Our Price I worked in, the albums that arrived had an entirely different image of a red haired (and very air brushed) Cher against a plain white background. What was that all about?

*Does the nickname Chezza work for both Chesney and Cher? Just wondering.

The play out video is “Get Ready!” by Roachford. Despite having released a dozen or so albums and more than 30 singles over the course of his career, Andrew Roachford says that somebody mentions his biggest hit “Cuddly Toy” to him at least once every day which reminded me of this…

“Get Ready!” peaked at No 22.

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

Order of Appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	The KLF	Last Train To Trancentral	No
2	Cathy Dennis	Touch Me (All Night Long)	Negative
3	OMD	Sailing On The Seven Seas	Not the single but I’m sure it’s on a Best Of CD of their that I have
4	Samantha Janus	A Message To Your Heart	Of course not
5	Nomad	Just A Groove	Nah
6	Paul Young / Zucchero	Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)	No but I bought that Best Of album with it on
7	Frances Nero	Footsteps Following Me	Nope
8	Cher	The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)	Yes but it was all a big mistake honest!
9	Roachford	Get Ready!	Yes albeit from the Bargain Bin

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/m000xw3v/top-of-the-pops-02051991

TOTP 18 APR 1991

Posted on July 22, 2021 by 80stastic

Those generous TOTP producers have seen fit to cram 14 (FOURTEEN!) songs into this particular show which means lots of typing and putting my grey cells through their paces for old muggins here. They’ve shoe horned 5 Breakers in this week which is the reason for the high song count and having timed it, they are squeezed into just 1 minute and 21 seconds of screen time. That’s 16 seconds per song. What was the point of that?! OK, there weren’t too many places that you could watch a music video back in 1991 so was it a case of something was better than nothing? I’m not sure. There was The Chart Show which was a staple of Saturday morning TV by this point having moved from Channel 4 to ITV in 1989 so maybe they were trying to compete with that? There was also MTV Europe though how may of us had access to that back in the day? Whatever the reason, I hope for my sake that this was a one off and the TOTP producers showed some self control in the future.

Tonight’s host is Jakki Brambles and for some weird reason concerning how the brain stores totally irrelevant and throw away bits of info for years, there are some parts of this show that I can really remember mainly surrounding Jakki’s to camera bits. More of that later though as we start the show with James and “Sit Down”. The boys are at No 2 by now and still have designs on that No 1 spot. *SPOILER ALERT* However, the fact that they spent three weeks there and were unable to dislodge Chesney Hawkes must have rankled with not only the band but also their army of fans. Possibly music lovers in general saw it as a monstrous injustice. Possibly.

Anyway, they’re in the studio this week and look happy enough with life especially guitarist Larry Gott who laughs and smiles his way through the performance. After leaving the band in 1995, Gott took up studying Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University, specifically furniture design. Somebody I worked with at Our Price in Stockport was also on the course with him and said he didn’t talk much about James at all preferring to just be a student with the rest of the cohort. He graduated in 2000 and won awards for his ‘reaction recliner’ design including the Allemuir Award for Industry and the Blueprint Award for Creativity. Not to be outdone, my colleague at Our Price became a successful freelance graphic designer and photographer. “Outstanding” – as Kenny Thomas might have said.

So if it wasn’t James who would dethrone Chesney, who did do the deed? In an unlikely turn of events, the honour fell to Cher who, despite her last album “Heart Of Stone” being a Top 10 success in 1989, hadn’t had a UK No1 single for 26 years when she topped the charts with “I Got You Babe” as part of Sonny & Cher. The song that rectified this for her was a cover of “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)” which had originally been a minor hit for Betty Everett in 1968. Cher’s version was taken from the soundtrack to her latest film project called Mermaids. This family comedy-drama which also stars Bob Hoskins, Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci is rarely shown on TV these days but, and I haven’t seen it since going to the cinema to catch it in 1991, is actually OK as I recall. A little too heavy on the quirkiness and I found Winona’s character a tad annoying but not bad.

The film’s soundtrack featuring original 60s tracks by the likes of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons and Smokey Robinson and The Miracles sold reasonably well off the back fo the success of “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)” but I never realised until now that there was a second Cher track on the album called “Baby I’m Yours” (another cover) which had been released as its lead single but which did bugger all in the charts.

So why did the UK go mad for the second single? I really don’t know. Was the film a massive commercial success? According to IMDB, it was ranked the 20th top film in the UK for 1991 – not too shabby but hardly a phenomenon. “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)” on the other hand was the third best selling single of the year in 1991 behind only 16 weeks at No 1 “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” by Bryan Adams and Xmas No 1 “Bohemian Rhapsody”/”These Are the Days of Our Lives” by Queen. Sadly, my purchase of it added to its popularity. Now just hold on before you all pile on. The whole thing was a mistake. Firstly, I bought it for my wife and not me. Secondly, she didn’t even want it either as I had purchased the wrong thing entirely in Cher. She had wanted a completely different single that features in next week’s TOTP. Quite how I managed to make such a mistake, I have no idea. The fact that back in 1989 I had bought another Cher single (“If I Could Turn Back Time”) had nothing to do with the whole sorry escapade at all and that is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So help me God!

Whoah! OMD? In the charts in 1991? Yes, it was true. One of the most surprising comebacks of the year (maybe even the decade) was the return of OMD but they weren’t the same beast we had last seen in the Top 40 way back in 1986 with “(Forever) Live And Die”. No, for one, founding member Paul Humphreys had done a runner and left the band! How so? Well, after reaching a commercial peak around the middle of the 80s with the huge US hit “If You Leave” from the Pretty In Pink soundtrack, things had started to unravel. Their next album “The Pacific Age” had been recorded under duress and the results were patchy. The aforementioned “(Forever) Live And Die” had been a sizeable hit but it was the only one from the album which received mixed critical reviews.

Suffering from a creative drought, a Best Of album was released in 1988 which was a huge success going three time platinum but the band were clearly trading on former glories. By 1989, Humphreys (along with two other band members ) had had enough and left to form footnote-in-electronic-music-history band The Listening Pool whilst Andy McCluskey committed to carry on under the OMD name.

“Sailing on the Seven Seas” was the first post Humphreys single and a curious thing it was too. Listening to it now, it seems quite pedestrian though I don’t recall thinking that at the time. That almost shuffling glam rock back beat allied with McCluskey’s plaintive vocals and a decidedly weird Jean Michel Jarre style keyboard solo in the middle and yet the UK record buying public lapped it up. The single would rise all the way to No 3, OMD’s highest charting hit since “Souvenir” some 10 years earlier. I don’t think either McCluskey or record label Virgin really expected that sort of success if they were being honest.

Things would get even better though as “Sailing on the Seven Seas” paved the way for the successful launch of parent album “Sugar Tax” which would go platinum in the UK and spawn a further Top 10 single in “Pandora’s Box”. Remarkable stuff really. OMD were back and how!

Seriously?! Still with Black Box?! That ship hasn’t sailed, struck an iceberg and sunk yet?! This must surely be their last TOTP appearance (please!)? Anyway, they’re here once more with “Strike It Up” and…hang on…did Jakki Brambles say “Will you welcome Black Box featuring Steps”?! Steps?! As in Steps that did “Tragedy”? As in ‘H’ from Steps? Relax, it will be a few years before that lot appear in these TOTP repeats. No, this was Stepz (with a ‘z’ see?) who was the rapper dude on the track. And who was he? Well, as far as I can ascertain, he also went by the names Stepsi and Stepski but his real name was Lee Bennett Thompson and he also worked with Quartz who did that Carole King cover with Dina Carroll. Yeah, I don’t care either. Next!

After the Levis-inspired success of “Should I Stay or Should I Go”, it was inevitable that a follow up single was released by The Clash and what more obvious candidate could there be than “Rock the Casbah“. Similarly pulled from their “Combat Rock” album, it made complete sense even though it had already been a No 30 hit in the UK 9 years previously. I certainly remember it being in the charts back in 1982 but curiously have little memory of it being an even bigger it (No 14) in the charts in 1991.

The video prompted some controversy featuring as it does a Muslim hitchhiker and a Hasidic Jew befriending each other on the road on the way to a Clash gig which, according to director Don Letts, was all “about breaking taboos”. At one point they are seen eating hamburgers in front of a Burger King restaurant whilst later on the Muslim character is seen drinking a beer. Although the track was initiated by the band’s drummer Topper Headon, that isn’t him in the video as he had been sacked for continuous drug abuse by then. That’s actually original drummer Terry Chimes on the drums that we see on screen.

Despite the recent Gulf War BBC black list, the track was chosen by Armed Forces Radio to be the first song broadcast on the service covering the area during Operation Desert Storm and to Joe Strummer’s horror, the phrase “Rock the Casbah” was written on an American bomb that was to be detonated on Iraq during the the conflict. Commercially, it was the biggest US hit that the band ever had and, alongside “Should I Stay or Should I Go”, is predominantly what The Clash are known for ever the pond in some quarters and let’s be fair, it is a f*****g tune!

It’s The Mock Turtles again with “Can You Dig It?”! Excellent! The last time they featured in this blog I rambled on and on about how they had done an instore PA at the Our Price where I was working in Manchester and that I had got on the guest list for their gig that night at The Manchester Academy and about their connection to Jude Law. This week I have dredged up my signed copy of their “Two Sides” album from that PA. I didn’t queue up to have it signed I should add. Rather it was a left over copy after they had finished and I recall having a long discussion with the Assistant Manger about how it should be treated as a promo as it was part of a promotion event. I seemed to put a lot of stock in the fact that it was signed I think rather than if it had cost the shop any money to get it in which surely was the deciding factor when it came to its promo status. For the life of me I can’t recall if it was supplied by the record company FOC or if the shop was charged fo it but the AM won and I had to cough up the readies to buy it. It’s a pretty good album with some lovely pop tunes on it but it does have an awful cover, signatures or no.

“Can You Dig It?” was a hit all over again in 2003 when it was used in that Vodafone advert featuring David Beckham who was still in his Hoxton Fin hairstyle period back then…

…but for me, they will always be a part of my 1991.

“Can You Dig It?” peaked at No 18 on its initial release and at No 19 in 2003.

It’s those pesky, high speed Breakers next, four of which were never shown on the show in full. Five write ups for me then all for the sake of 1 min and 21 seconds worth of videos. Cheers TOTP producers! We start with “My Head’s In Mississippi” by ZZ Top which I have zero recollection of. It only got to No 37 in the charts so I could be forgiven I guess. It sounds a bit like the band doing their best Johnny Cash impression from the 16 seconds we got to hear of it on TOTP – I couldn’t be bothered to root out the track in full to be honest. It was taken from an album called “Recycler” which I don’t remember either though it did have the track “Doubleback” included on it from Back to the Future Part III apparently.

ZZ Top would return the following year with a cover of the Elvis track “Viva Las Vegas” to promote a Greatest Hits album which was much more fun.

Nope, don’t remember this either. “Seal Our Fate” by Gloria Estefan was the second of four singles taken from her “Into The Light” album all of which made the UK Top 40 but none of which made the Top 20. Make of that what you will. If we saw ZZ top channelling their inner Johnny Cash before, this was like Gloria being Britney Spears some 7 years before Britney was Britney. Apparently the video was well received by her fans as if Gloria could do its choreography routine then this was proof that she had made a full recovery from her injuries sustained in a coach crash in March of 1990.

Next on the Generation Game style conveyor belt of Breakers is Silver Bullet with “Undercover Anarchist” which was the follow up to “20 Seconds To Comply”. Again I don’t remember this one at all but then that’s hardly surprising as the TOTP graphics team seemed to have forgotten what the single was called whilst it was still in the charts as their caption reads “Under Anarchist”.

It doesn’t really matter as if I’d wanted to listen to a track with the word ‘anarchist’ in the title then I would have gone for this by one Hull’s finest…

There was a definite hint of 80s chart acts making a comeback in this particular TOTP. After OMD earlier in the show here were Transvision Vamp who had been AWOL for the whole of 1990 after their last chart appearance with “Born To Be Sold ” at the end of 1989. They hadn’t been idle though as they had been recording their third album, the ludicrously entitled “Little Magnets Versus The Bubble Of Babble” and inevitably they wanted to move away from the bubble gum glam pop that had brought them fame and fortune with tunes like “I Want Your Love” and “Baby I Don’t Care”. However, record label MCA weren’t that keen on the idea of the band maturing and refused to release the album in the UK. Instead, it was given a limited world wide release with copies only available in Australia, New Zealand and Sweden. The idea was to see how it did in those territories before a UK released was sanctioned. This lead to many an import copy of the album finding its way into UK record stores. We certainly had one in the Our Price I was working in and we had a Wendy James devotee who would come in week after week to see if the UK release was out yet. I can’t recall if he was tempted by the £20 import CD that we had in stock but if he didn’t buy it then nobody would have.

The lead single from the album was “(I Just Wanna) B with U” and it was the first track that Wendy received an official co-writing credit for. Was it any good though? Well, I was underwhelmed and I’d liked a lot of the band’s previous singles. I wasn’t the only one unimpressed as it struggled to a high of No 30, the band’s last ever UK chart hit. Follow up single “If Looks Could Kill” missed the Top 40 by one place and that was that. By the time that MCA had authorised an UK release for the album, the band had split anyway. Even now, the album is not available on Spotify although its singles are on a Best Of album which can be streamed. Was it the new material that let them down or were the band just an anachronism in the new decade? Who knows but they did burn brightly during their time in the sun.

Talking of 80s pop stars making a 90s comeback, here’s Pete Wylie and he’s joined forces with fellow scousers The Farm to do a re-working of “Sinful”. Yes, despite being completely wonderful, this was the first time Pete had been in the Top 40 since “Sinful” had been a No 13 hit back in 1986. His lack of chart success really is a crime against music.

I’m not totally secure in my knowledge of the circumstances around this release. The Farm were at their commercial peak having secured two Top 10 singles in 1990 with “Groovy Train” and “Altogether Now” from their No 1 album “Spartacus” which was released in the spring of 1991. However, their commercial fall was imminent. They released a third single from the album the Monday after this TOTP aired but “Don’t Let Me Down” peaked at a disappointing No 36. This re-working of Sinful retitled “Sinful! (Scary Jiggin’ with Doctor Love)” was a non-album single but presumably it was a live favourite as showcased by the video here.

Later in the year, Wylie would release the criminally ignored album “Infamy! Or How I Didn’t Get Where I Am Today” whilst The Farm would release an album called “Love See No Colour” in 1992 which would fail to chart making them, along with the aforementioned Transvision Vamp and purveyors of blue eyed soul Johnny Hates Jazz as acts that followed up a No 1 album with an LP that failed to chart.

A terrible accident would befall Pete later in the year when he suffered a near fatal fall when a railing gave way in Upper Parliament Street, Liverpool causing him to fracture his spine and his sternum. The legend goes that when the ambulance crew turned up and did their usual checks including to ask what the injured party’s name was, Pete replied ‘You should f*****g know who I am!”. I love Pete Wylie!

“Sinful! (Scary Jiggin’ with Doctor Love)” peaked at No 28.

Next a song that was… well…just bizarre and yet it just worked. Despite no longer being the chart topper he was in the 80s, Paul Young was doing a decent job of keeping his career going into the new decade with a couple of Top 40 hits in 1990 from his “Other Voices”. By the time 1991 came around though, he had also had a couple of flops. So what do you do when your career needs a lift? Release a Best Of album of course! “From Time to Time – The Singles Collection” was a huge success going to No 1 and three time platinum in the UK off the back of an extensive TV ad campaign.

The album included three new tracks that were in fact cover versions that all ended up being released as singles. “Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” was the first of those and was actually a duet with some geezer called Zucchero. I’d never heard of him before at the time but, as Jakki Brambles says in her intro, he was a very big deal indeed in his native Italy. “Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” was actually his song and he had released it himself back in 1987. When Paul Young heard it whilst on holiday there, he approached the Z man about covering it but the reply came back ‘why don’t we do it as a duet?’. And so it came to pass that Paul Young would have his biggest hit since “Every Time You Go Away” back in 1985 stood next to a bloke who, according to the reaction on Twitter when this TOTP was re-shown the other week, looked very much like Keith Lemon. They have a point.

I think it’s the lyrics which make this record so curiously memorable. Certainly some of the lines have stayed with myself and my wife all these years. For example, ‘Look at me, I’m a flower’ and ‘You got to dig a little deeper lady’ stand out – maybe they didn’t translate too well from Italian to English. It’s the ‘even doing my own cooking’ line though that steals it. At the time, I wasn’t the most handy in the kitchen and so anything that I did produce would be met with a retort of ‘even doing my own cooking’ by my wife. I have got a lot better now! Zucchero’s inspiration for the line came from his own culinary trials…

Zucchero on "Sensa Una Donna": "At the time, I was almost divorced by my ex-wife and I was living in a small house by myself, trying to save my marriage. I was very sad and upset. I was in the kitchen and I had to cook by myself for the first time!" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 9, 2021

"So I started to cook some really terrible spaghetti, and I said, ‘I can’t live without you, because I can’t cook by myself!’ That’s why I say in the song: ‘I’m here cooking by myself.’ The song came out very quickly – music and lyrics in about half an hour." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 9, 2021

OK, just to clarify, I wasn’t that bad that I couldn’t have cooked some pasta nor was I in the process fo getting divorced!

It’s the first of Jakki’s lines that have stuck with me now as she says at the song’s end “Senza Una Donna which means Without A Woman – bare faced liars the pair of them”. Well, I’d have to say that Paul looks pretty cool with a sharp haircut but Zucchero? I can’t unsee Keith Lemon now.

Another Jakki Brambles line that for some reason has stuck in my brain these last 30 years next as she introduces Chesney Hawkes who is at No 1 for the 4th week with “The One And Only”. After starting off her intro with “What else can we say about our next man…” and listing all his ‘achievements’ which include having “a bit of a famous Dad” – Whoah! Stop right there! A bit of a famous Dad?! Len “Chip” Hawkes was the bassist in The Tremeloes it’s true but was he really that famous? It’s also true that Decca famously chose The Tremeloes over The Beatles for a recording contract back in 1962 so the band do have a place in pop music history but Hawkes wasn’t anything to do with it as he didn’t join the band until 4 years later. And yes, he did co-write some of their Top 10 hits but would anyone have really recognised him walking down the street back in 1991? Was he doing lots of TV appearances as some sort of talking head aficionado on pop music Paul Gambaccini style? I don’t think so. I suppose Jakki did say “a bit of a famous Dad” as opposed to “celebrity royalty” but even so.

Sorry, went off on a bit of a tangent there. Anyway, finally Brambles gets to her killer line as she says “All that remains for me to say is Chesney Hawkes…GET YOUR HAIRCUT!” She had a point. Chesney’s Barnet was a disgrace. He’d clearly grown it out since appearing in Buddy’s Song and it now resembled a bob. Thankfully, he no longer has said style now that he is nearly 50.

The play out video and the final of 14 songs on the show tonight is “Deep, Deep Trouble” by The Simpsons. When I was a small child, my Dad had the “Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)” single by Benny Hill. I thought it was funny at the time as I had an undeveloped sense of humour. My Dad thought it was funny because…I’m not sure why…I think it must have been the ridiculousness of the tale that Hill’s distinctive voice imparted. As I grew older (and so did my Dad), that record never got played again in our house because it was a novelty record and novelty records don’t age at all well. Suffice to say, “Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)” was a timeless classic compared to “Deep, Deep Trouble” which has rightly been consigned to the dustbin of popular culture.

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

Order of Appearance	Artist	Title	Did I Buy It?
1	James	Sit Down	No but I have it on their Best Of album
2	Cher	The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)	Yes but it was an honest mistake!
3	OMD	Sailing On The Seven Seas	No but I have it on their Best Of album
4	Black Box	Strike It Up	Nope
5	The Clash	Rock The Casbah	No but I must have it on something
6	The Mock Turtles	Can You Dig It?	Not the single but I bought the album (signed!)
7	ZZ Top	My Head’s In Mississippi	No
8	Gloria Estefan	Seal Our Fate	Negative
9	Silver Bullet	Undercover Anarchist	I did not
10	Tranvision Vamp	“(I Just Wanna) B with U”	No but I have it on their Best Of album
11	Pete Wylie / The Farm	Sinful! (Scary Jiggin’ with Doctor Love)	I bought the original in 1986 but not this version
12	Paul Young / Zucchero	“Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)”	No but I have it on Paul’s Best Of album
13	Chesney Hawkes	The One And Only	Nah
14	The Simpsons	Deep, Deep Trouble	Hell 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/m000xp0k/top-of-the-pops-18041991

TOTP 15 FEB 1990

Posted on November 3, 2020 by 80stastic

OK, we’ve just had Valentine’s Day in 1990 but much more important than that is the fact that four days prior to this TOTP broadcast, the world saw Nelson Mandela released from incarceration after 27 years. A world changing event of immense political importance…or so you would have thought. I clearly recall there being complaints from viewers to the BBC about their coverage of this historic event interrupting their enjoyment of Antiques Roadshow! Some simple research of the internet confirmed that they received 500 (!) such complaints! If that wasn’t bad enough, 23 years later, they received about 850 complaints about the extent of its coverage of Mandela’s death, including its decision to interrupt a repeat of sitcom Mrs Brown’s Boys on BBC1 to bring viewers news of his death. Mrs. Fucking. Brown’s Boys.

Anyway, enough of world events, back to the music and tonight’s show is hosted by Anthea Turner who has just got married to her manager and ex- Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell. Peter, of course, went out with fellow Radio 1 DJ Janice Long between ’84 and’85. It was a complicated web of relationships at Radio 1 back in the day. Anthea has ditched all that rock chick, back combed hair (for the wedding presumably) and the first act she introduces tonight are Black Box with “I Don’t Know Anybody Else”. This was the follow up to their huge No 1 “Ride On Time” which was the best selling single in the UK of the previous year so this track had a lot to live up to. Despite early encouraging signs (it crashed into this week’s chart as the highest new entry at No 5), it ultimately fell short of emulating its predecessor when it peaked at just one place higher the following week.

It always sounded like a pound shop version of “Ride On Time” to me – looks / sounds the same but isn’t quite as good. My overriding memory of this track though relates to a visit to see my girlfriend around this time whilst we were geographically separated (I was in Worcester and she in Hull). I’d saved up my dole money and traversed north to stay with her for a few days. One night, we ventured out into town and ended up in a bar called The Mint who were having a music quiz night. Fancying my chances, we entered and found ourselves in a tie break situation for first place. The winner was to be decided by the team that was the first to spot a current chart hit but played backwards. To my elation then (and shame now) I was first up off my seat to correctly identify Black Box and “I Don’t Know Anybody Else”. We won a cheap bottle of bubbly but in the bleak, unemployed Winter of 1990 it felt like gold.

Oh blimey it’s Cher again with her “Just Like Jesse James” video. On reflection, this is just Cher doing her version of Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead Or Alive” (indeed Jon Bon Jovi himself would come as close as dammit to covering his band’s own song for his almost identical solo hit “Blaze Of Glory” later in the year). This isn’t that surprising given that “Just Like Jesse James” was co-written by Desmond Childs who was responsible for the Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer”, “Bad Medicine” and “Born To Be My Baby”. By pure coincidence (or was it?), he also wrote “How Can We Be Lovers?” for Michael Bolton who will make his TOTP debut later in the show (gulp!).

This was Cher’s first hit of the 90s in the UK but she wouldn’t stop there. Oh no – she released 21 further singles over the course of the decade resulting in 16 Top 40 hits of which 6 went Top 10 and 3 were No 1s (if you include a charity single she featured on in “Love Can Build a Bridge”). Say what you like about her, she could spin a modicum of musical talent an awful long way.

After, Eric Clapton contributed guitar to Phil Collins current hit “I Wish It Would Rain Down” the other week, Phil returns the favour now by supplying the drums on Clapton’s new single “Bad Love”. Now this always sounded like Clapton had just re-written “Layla” to me and guess what? He had! Here’s @TOTPFacts:

Eric Clapton on "Bad Love": "Warner Bros wanted another 'Layla'. I thought, 'Well, if you sit down and write a song in a formatted way, it's not so hard. You think, 'What was 'Layla?' comprised of? A fiery intro modulated into the first verse & chorus with a riff around it" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) October 30, 2020

It really is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster of a record with the bridge part of it basically stolen from “Badge” by Cream which Clapton also wrote of course. Apparently that was the idea of one Mick Jones – no not the lead guitarist with The Clash but the one from AOR dinosaurs Foreigner (boo!). For all its calculated and knowing composition, I didn’t mind it – at least Clapton was just stealing from himself and wasn’t trying to jump on the latest bandwagon. An Italo House Clapton anyone?

“Bad Love” peaked at No 25.

Despite the proliferation of dance tunes that seemed to dominate the charts (and therefore TOTP as well) around this time, we’ve actually seen some undeniably indie bands feature on the show in recent weeks as well. We’ve had peroxide blonde Brummies Birdland and psychedelic doomsters The House Of Love on the same show previously and now we get one of the biggest names of all indiedom in The Wedding Present. Now my mate Robin had been well into this lot back in Poly but I hadn’t really got on board in the same way. I knew their single “Why Are You Being So Reasonable Now?” from a couple of years before which had just missed the Top 40 and also “Kennedy” their bona fide chart hit from ’89 and of course the iconic sleeve for their indie label debut album “George Best” but that was probably about it.

This single “Brassneck” was taken from their first major label album release “Bizarro” (albeit in a beefed up production form compared to the album version) and was a shot across the bows of the then prevalent mainstream chart music. Uncompromising is the word I would use and that can also certainly be applied to main man David Gedge’s performance of the song here. No cheeky grins and jumping about from the Gedge here. His look of disinterest is almost defiant. Apparently it wasn’t deliberately conceived but more rather grew organically. Here’s Dave himself with the story during an interview with https://gedgesongs.wordpress.com:

“I was just following an old tradition established by some of my heroes… those punk bands who didn’t take Top Of The Pops seriously and who took the mickey out of the whole ‘miming’ thing. I started doing it during the TV rehearsals, fully expecting a producer or director to tell me to stop messing about but no one did. So with each run-through it became a little more… extreme, ha, ha”.

Some 10 months or so on from this broadcast I was working at Our Price In Manchester and went out for a drink after work with some colleagues (possibly in the pre-IRA bomb version of Sinclair’s Oyster Bar or maybe the Old Wellington for the Manc pedants out there) and our table was joined by a woman who turned out to be one of Mark E Smith’s sisters. She turned to me and asked me to sing some Wedding Present songs as I was the spitting image of David Gedge! And it turned out I was back then…well sort of. She also told me that Gedge was a ‘sex god’ to use her phrase which immediately turned my complexion bright red. There’s a clip of The Wedding Present doing a cover of “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)” on TOTP where I swear it’s me up there doing the vocals. Obviously the middle aged me doesn’t look like him now of course (to be fair Gedge doesn’t look like Gedge anymore) but as a skinny 22 year old I could pass for him. In my 80s blog I revealed how I spent three years being called ‘Dan’ at Sunderland Poly due to my resemblance to the actor Dan Ackroyd so Dave Gedge was a step up! Sadly I look more like Sam Allardyce these days. Bah!

“Brassneck” peaked at No 24.

Talking of cover versions, here’s Rod Stewart doing his best to murder the Tom Waits track “Downtown Train”. Rod included his version on his 1989 “Best Of” album and it just sounds so sanitised compared to Tom’s original. Stewart somehow manages to purge all the earthiness from the song.

Not content with ruining one Waits composition he repeated the crime again two years later when he covered Tom Traubert’s Blues”. You know what, I do like some Rod Stewart stuff – “The Killing of Georgie (Part I and II)” for example is fabulous – but he’s also done a lot of crap and I get the impression that he’s not that nice a character either.

“Downtown Train” peaked at No 10 over here and No 3 in the US.

‘Sybil!!!!’ When the singer Sybil (full name Sybil Lynch) was in the charts I never made any connection (subconscious or other wise) with Basil Fawlty’s wife but every time I hear her name mentioned now I can’t get the Fawlty Towers character so superbly played by Prunella Scales out of my head!

Sybil the singer’s cover of “Walk On By” peaked at No 6 but she would continue to release cover versions in her later career including treatments of Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day”, Al Greens’s “So Tired Of Being Alone” and Carole King’s “It’s Too Late”. None of them made the UK Top 40. Despite her reliance on other artists for the majority of her hits, she went on to work in education, at one point teaching lyric & songwriting composition and creative writing. Who said ‘I know nothing’?!

Stand well back! The career of Depeche Mode is about to rocket into the stratosphere! In March 1990, the band released their “Violator” album and their world was never the same again. It went triple platinum in the US selling 3 million copies and propelled the band into playing gigs in huge super size stadiums – an estimated 1.2 million fans across the planet saw the World Violation Tour. Such was the extent of Mode mania in the US that when the band held an in-store autograph signing at Wherehouse Entertainment in Los Angeles to promote the album, some 20,000 fans turned up with a near riot ensuing. Not that the band had been small fry by anyone’s description before then but this was next level stuff.

“Enjoy The Silence” was the second single to be taken from the album (following the excellent “Personal Jesus” ) and I’m going to say that it is perhaps the band’s most well respected and important of their career. It won Best British Single at the 1991 BRIT Awards and went Top 10 both in the US and here. Indeed, it was the first time the band had visited the UK Top 10 since “Master And Servant” six years previously. In a Q Magazine interview in 2008, Dave Gahan said of the track:

“It really made the album cross over into another cosmos. It had been a constant climb over the previous 10 years, but I don’t think we were prepared for what was about to come. The album was a worldwide success and suddenly these huge royalty checks started coming in and you were able to do whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted – the velvet rope was always open.“

It really is an excellent song and the iconic video with its King Midas imagery (a man who has everything but just wants a quiet place to sit down) cements its reputation. Songwriter Martin Gore seemed to like songs that included the word ‘silence’ as much as Sybil liked cover versions – they had a 1982 hit song with “Leave in Silence” of course.

Oh bloody hell! It’s Michael Bolton! And you know what this means…my Michael Bolton story! OK, I’ve told this one before in my 80s TOTP blog when a certain Kenny G* featured on the show but here it is again. In 1993, I went to see Michael Bolton in concert! Oh God, even just typing the words out looks wrong! There are mitigating circumstances I swear!

I was working in Our Price at the time and was on a works’ night out that ended up at a nightclub where I was well and truly off my tits. A guy I worked with called Andy was also there. Andy loved his mainstream pop music and was quite a character. He named his car Jason after Jason Donovan and just about shoved me out of the way one day so he could get to serve Barbara Knox (Corrie’s Rita Fairclough) in the shop. He also loved Michael Bolton and asked me, whilst I was under the influence in the nightclub, if I would go with him to see the poodle haired one in concert in Sheffield. And I said yes. Now remember, I was blotto – that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Andy bought the tickets the next day before I could back out and so I found myself travelling to Sheffield a few weeks later to see Michael Bolton. I seem to have blacked out anything that I witnessed that evening from my memory but my impression is that Andy enjoyed it rather more than I did. Still, it’s a good story.

*And what has this to do with Kenny G? Well, Kenny was the support act. Yes, just when I though it couldn’t be any more of a surreal experience, it turned out that ‘the G man’ (as Bolton referred to him) was on the same bill!

For the purposes of factual acknowledgement, “How Am I Supposed To Live with Out You” was Bolton’s first (and biggest) UK hit peaking at No3. It was a US No 1 despite the fact that Laura Branigan (of “Gloria” fame) had already had a Top 20 hit with it in 1983.

The Stranglers‘ run of 80s chart hits had started to peter out by the middle of the decade and so to arrest that trend they used the old cover trick to beef up their profile by releasing a version of “All Day And All Of The Night” by The Kinks. It worked, returning them to the Top 10 in ’88 for the first time in five years.

Needing another fillip to start the new decade they repeated the exercise by releasing “96 Tears” which had been a US No 1 in 1966 for ? and the Mysterians. Nothing to do with Captain Scarlet (that was the Mysterions), they were a garage rock band from Michigan but you could be forgiven that “96 Tears” was a Stranglers original so easily does it fit their trademark sound. The distinctive organ riff that runs thorughout puts me in mind of those Oldham baggy stars Inspiral Carpets and guess what they also did a version of it…

Back to The Stranglers and their version would peak at No 17 and they would enjoy a brief renaissance in 1991 when their “Greatest Hits 1977–1990” collection album went all the way to No 4 in the album charts off the back of a successful TV ad campaign.

Sinéad O’Connor is still at No 1 with “Nothing Compares 2 U”. It’s the third of four weeks at the top spot and if the UK record buying audience hadn’t tired of it already, it seems the TOTP producers were starting to. We get just over two minutes of the song in this clip. The single sold three and a half million copies worldwide and was the second biggest selling single in the UK in 1990. That’s how you do a cover version Rod Stewart!

We close with “Steamy Windows” by Tina Turner. The third single from her “Foreign Affair” album, it peaked at No 13 in the UK.

The song was written by blues rock guitarist Tony Joe White who wrote “Polk Salad Annie” famously recorded by Elvis Presley. Tony was one of those artists that would get played during one of our specialist music mornings when when I worked for Our Price. You were only allowed to play music of a certain genre like easy listening, jazz or blues. Here’s his version of the track which I think I prefer to Tina’s histrionic take on it…

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

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Black Box	I Don’t Know Anybody Else	It helped win me a bottle of bubbly but I didn’t celebrate by buying the single – no
2	Cher	Just Like Jesse James	No – phew!
3	Eric Clapton	Bad Love	Nah
4	The Wedding Present	Brassneck	I may have looked like Gedge but I didn’t feel the need to buy his single
5	Rod Stewart	Downtown Train	God no
6	Sybil	Walk On By	No
7	Depeche Mode	Enjoy The Silence	It seems I did enjoy the silence as it’s not in my singles collection. WTF?
8	Michael Bolton	How Am I Supposed To Live Without You	Quite easily Michael…oh except I saw you in concert. Oh God the shame!
9	The Stranglers	96 Tears	It’s a no
10	Sinéad O’Connor	Nothing Compares 2 U	Don’t think so
11	Tina Turner	Steamy Windows	Nope

Disclaimer

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000nwtc/top-of-the-pops-15021990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues

TOTP 02 FEB 1990

Posted on October 27, 2020 by 80stastic

We’ve come through January 1990 here at TOTP Rewind and by general consensus that was one shitty month. When BBC4 were showing the TOTP repeats of the tail end of 1989 back in the Summer, there was a clamour on Twitter for the 80s to be consigned to the dustbin and for the sweet release of the 90s to swoop in and rescue us. Yeah, it hasn’t quite worked out like that yet I would wager. So far we’ve had a truck load full of nasty Italo house tunes, the New Kids On The Block phenomenon go into overdrive and ..erm…Fish! OK, that’s not absolutely everyone we’ve seen so far but you get my drift. Surely February will be better?

Well, early signs are not good as tonight’s presenter is well known Tory supporter Bruno Brookes who welcomes us to another “spondicious” TOTP. Spondicious? Is that a word? Well, according to the online Urban Dictionary it is and means awesome, brilliant, amazing, ace and was used in the Midlands in the 80s. Whoa! Hold on there! I’m from the Midlands and grew up there in the 80s and I have never said that word in my life! Wait, where’s Brookes from?

*checks internet*

…hmm. Well he was born in Stoke and went to school in Newcastle-Under- Lyme in Staffordshire so yes, he is a Midlander but in an online list of 51 words and phrases you only know if you are from Stoke-on-Trent, spondicious is nowhere to be seen. I’m not convinced.

On with the music though and here comes Lonnie Gordon to kick off the show with her S/A/W penned hit “Happenin’ All Over Again”. This was Lonnie’s biggest hit by far peaking at No 4 (she had two further Top 40 entries in ’91 and ’95). There was an album as well called “If I Have to Stand Alone” but it only got a limited release in parts of Europe, Japan and Australia but curiously it was never released in the UK. However, as ever, it’s Cherry Red Records to the rescue as they gave it the special edition reissue treatment in 2009! In the promotional blurb for the album, Cherry Red state:

“If I Have To Stand Alone” is one of three sought-after albums from the Stock Aitken Waterman / PWL Hit Factory to be given a simultaneous Special Edition release on Cherry Pop, along with Mandy Smith – “Mandy” and Princess – “Princess”

WTF?! Mandy Smith’s album? Sought after? Why not go the whole hog and call it ‘spondicious’ while you’re at it?!

Back to Bruno who’s up on the studio bridge with a gaggle of young girls from the audience surrounding him as he prepares to do the next link. Bruno opens with:

“I’d just like to say that all these girls are at least six foot tall“

Jeeze! I thought for one, horrifying spilt second he was going to say ‘All these girls at least sixteen’! Thankfully he was only making a comment about his diminutive size and nothing of a more salacious nature. When he does get around to introducing the next act it’s Wreckx-n-Effect with “Juicy”. So what was their name all about? According to band member Aquil (Aquil?) Davidson it means “Making things happen, gettin’ busy”. Of course, over here in the UK, ‘gettin’ busy’ meant something altogether different…

Back to those New Jack Swingers Wreckx-n-Effect though and the lyrics to their hit single were more gettin’ jiggy than gettin’ busy…

Look a there Juicy is a cutie, she has nice legs and a big booty

Have no fear ’cause Juicy is here, she said you can lick me everywhere

Pure filth! You’d never get that sort of smut with Sooty! Actually, what would you get if you crossed New Jack Swing with the Sooty Show? New Jack Sweep? Sue Jack Swing? I’ll stop now.

More dodginess from Brooke’s next as he allows a female member of the studio audience to fondle his frankly vile looking tie! “You should be watching the band not studying my tie” he protests too much.

Now despite the next band’s TOTP performance being the source of a full three page feature in Smash Hits magazine, I can’t actually find a clip of it on YouTube. In said article, And Why Not? (for it is they) state that for the record, they think that Stock, Aitken and Waterman are crap. Must have been a bit awkward being on the same show as Lonnie Gordon and her S/A/W produced song then. Apparently they were in dressing room No 24 whilst Lonnie was just down the corridor in No 31.

Anyway, despite going through the usual experience of TOTP debutants – admitting that everything is so much smaller than it looks on TV and being bored waiting around for hours before they get their three and a half minutes slot – the boys look like they enjoyed their moment, jumping around and grinning like good ‘uns. Their tune “The Face” isn’t bad either with its jerky bass line and choppy guitar licks – they could have dropped the Bros style grunting in places though. There would be one more very minor Top 40 hit and one flop from And Why Not? before they left the pop music world to it.

The case of US singer Sybil is a curious one. She managed to rack up five Top 40 hits in the UK including three Top Tenners and yet three of those songs were cover versions. Not only that, two of them were written by the same song writing team and then made famous by the same singer! Yes, after she scored a No 19 hit in late ’89 with the Bacharach and David tune “Don’t Make Me Over” originally recorded by Dionne Warwick, she then repeated the trick for her next single when she released a cover of the duo’s “Walk On By” again, a song best known for being sung by Dionne Warwick. There have, of course, been numerous cover versions of the song down the years by artists as disparate as Gloria Gaynor to The Stranglers and indeed, it would be continued to be covered throughout the 90s and into the new millennium by Gabrielle, Cyndi Lauper and Seal. For me, Sybil’s take on it is one of the weakest. It’s not that she couldn’t sing the thing, more a case of a clunky production that lost all the soul of the original and didn’t age well to my ears.

Sybil would return in 1993 with yet another cover and the biggest hit of her career, this time of the old Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes song “The Love I Lost”, which she took to No 3 in the charts. Meanwhile back in 1990, her treatment of “Walk On By” would peak at No 6.

Three Breakers next starting with Birdland who I had completely forgotten about until now. These Brummie indie kids were given that poisoned chalice of the title of being ‘the next big thing’ by the music press but all that expectation quickly dissolved when they were hamstrung by delays to the release of their debut album. Initially their fiery brand of high octane, post punk noise and chaotic live gigs had the press drooling. Assisted by their strident Andy Warhol homage image, they came over like a peroxide blonde Ramones meets The Jesus And Mary Chain. Despite their first four single releases topping the indie charts between ’89 and ’90 (including this mainstream breakthrough track “Sleep With Me”), a delay that meant the album was not released until ’91 saw all momentum lost and it struggled to a peak of No 44. Their plight is nicely summed up by band members and brothers Ron and Lee Vincent in a recent Von Pip Musical Exptress (VPME) website interview in which they were asked:

What five words would best sum up Birdland’s career in the late 80’s early 90’s?

Their replies were:

ROB : Speed/chaos/pop/blonde/noise

LEE: Well ‘short’ has to be one of them!!

A great track next which shows that quirky pop doesn’t have to mean novelty song. Having finally scored a Top 40 hit the previous year with dance cross over “The Sun Rising”, The Beloved followed it up with “Hello”, a song just about as far removed from its Lionel Richie namesake as it’s possible to be. Essentially a list song, like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire”, comprising an eclectic mixture of names of both real and fictitious people, it hooked me in immediately. Even now, I like the idea that the names chosen weren’t all mega famous identities and indeed many of them would requite lengthy explanation to today’s youth as to who they actually were/are. Billy Corkhill? Vince Hilaire? I’m guessing your average 18 year old today wouldn’t have a clue. There was also something about the order in which Jon Marsh sang the names that intrigued. I think it was probably just the alliteration and rhyming in retrospect:

“Little Richard, Little Nell, Willy Wonka, William Tell”

“Billy Corkhill, Vince Hilaire, Freddy Flintstone, Fred Astaire“

If you watch the video closely, when Marsh name checks Jeffrey Archer, he sneaks in a ‘wanker’ gesture into his dance moves such was the band’s revulsion at Archer as, in their own words, “the epitome of slimeball Tory liar”. Well played Jon.

“Hello” seemed to have much more of a conventional pop song structure to me than “The Sun Rising” which was probably another reason why I was drawn in and ultimately bought it – I was always more of a pop kid than a dance head.

“Hello” peaked at No 19 making it the band’s joint second biggest hit ever.

By the start of the new decade, Eurythmics had been around for ten whole years and had released eight albums in that time but they were nearing the end of their time together, at least the first phase of it. This single, “The King and Queen of America”, was the third to be taken from their No 1 album “We Too Are One” but there would be only one more single release (the glorious “Angel”) this year before the duo took just about the rest of the decade off. The constant recording and touring schedule had created tensions between and Annie and Dave and although there was no official split, they went on hiatus until reforming in late 1999 for the “Peace” album.

I hesitate to say this but possibly the video to this one is more interesting than the actual song with Annie and Dave playing multiple characters such as cheerleaders, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, game show hosts and TV evangelists to visualise the song’s message of taking a swipe at the concept of the American Dream. Unsurprisingly, it was never released in the US as a single.

Despite “We Too Are One” being the second No 1 album of their career, the singles from it all under performed:

Title	Peak chart position
Revival	26
Don’t Ask Me Why	25
The King and Queen of America	29
Angel	23

Maybe, the timing of that career hiatus was right after all.

Meanwhile, back in the studio, we find another indie guitar band (that’s two on the same show following Birdland in the Breakers before – have that house music!) in House Of Love. I knew of these guys from having bought the incredibly pretentious “The Hit List” compilation album fronted by Mark Goodier with its ‘for the discerning music lover‘ tagline. It included one of the band’s previous singles “I Don’t Know Why I Love You” in its track listing which had peaked at No 41 in ’89 (one of two successive singles to do so that year for the band – how’s your luck?). “Shine On” would break that particular hoodoo when it crashed into the charts on its way to a peak of No 20. It was actually a new version of their original debut from ’87 having been signed to major label Fontana who didn’t seem to ‘get’ their latest addition to their stable and desperately wanted a hit which was at odds with the creative aspirations of the band.

Lead singer Guy Chadwick, who always seemed to be trying morph into Mark E Smith to me, would come to regard signing with Fontana as the worst mistake in the band’s career. Unbelievably, Chadwick is now 64 meaning he was already 34 at the time of this performance.

House Of Love limped on for another couple of years before splitting in ’93 and ultimately reforming in ’03.

Back to the videos now and we find Mantronix with “Got To Have Your Love”. Mr Mantronix’s real name is Kurtis Khaleel but he changed it to Kurtis Mantronik which then became the inspiration for his dance act’s name when he replaced the ‘k’ with an ‘x’. Why? Well, according to Kurtis himself (in a Smash Hits interview) it was because:

“Mantronix just sounds cooler. Man…and er, tronix“.

Hmm. Not sure that we’re dealing with an intellectual heavyweight here. What else did we find out about him in the interview? Well, he had just two hobbies which were:

“Music, music, music. And Girls“

Hmm. Asked if he was a sophisticated type he replied:

“In some ways. Hehe. Ummm, um like when it comes to when your’e in a one-to-one situation with the the opposite sex”

I see…and his ideal woman?

“Someone that understands me, all my moods because I’m a very moody person. Um, she’d be basically independent. If I said ‘naff off she’d leave and come back the next day or whatever because she’d know that I don’t really mean it. Like I said before – music, music and girls…so she’d have to accept that.”

Does he have a girlfriend?

“No”

No further questions m’lud.

“Got To Have Your Love” peaked at No 4.

Back to Bruno Brookes now who reveals that the next song is about one of his heroes. Really? Who could that be then? Nelson Mandela perhaps? Martin Luther King maybe? Who is it Bruno? Well it is of course…. Jesse James? Jesse James?! The notorious outlaw and murderer? The Jesse James who took part in a train robbery in a Ku Klux Clan mask? That Jesse James? He’s your hero Brookes? OK, there is a train of that depicts James as a hero, an American Robin Hood, standing up against corporations in defence of the small farmer, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. Wikipedia, however, advises though that there is no evidence that he shared the loot of his robberies with anyone other than his gang members. Think your hero worship of Jesse James is shot down in flames Bruno. Oh well, at least he didn’t say Margaret Thatcher.

Anyway, the source of all this Jesse James discussion is of course Cher and her single “Just Like Jesse James”. The second track lifted from her “Heart Of Stone” album, it was very much a reflection of the soft rock direction that Cher had gone in. It was written by AOR songwriters in chief Desmond Child and Diane Warren who had provided huge hits for the likes of Bon Jovi, Aerosmith and Starship so you could see why Cher would want to record one of their compositions.

After admitting that I had bought Cher’s previous single “If I Could Turn Back Time” in my 80s blog, I am pleased and relieved to announce that I kept my money firmly in my pocket when it came to this one.

“Just Like Jesse James” peaked at No 11.

From Mantronix earlier to Technotronic now and their single “Get Up! (Before the Night Is Over)“. The brain child of producer Jo Bogaert, what was the origin behind this band name? Here’s @TOTPFacts with the answer:

Jo Bogaert says the name Technotronic was inspired by Frippertronics, a tape-loop system used by King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp. "That sounded cool. I applied the suffix of the genre I was doing, techno, to tronic." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) October 23, 2020

Oh, it’s another ‘it sounded cool’ moment as per Mantronix. Look, I’ve never been in a band so have never been through the whole band name saga but I’m guessing the idea is to come up with a cool sounding moniker for your group? What’s that Mr McAloon? Prefab Sprout? Ok – right you are. As I say, I’ve never been through it.

Back to Technotronic and I should point out that this single featured Ya Kid K who wrote the lyrics and sang vocals on their previous mega hit “Pump Up The Jam” although they drafted in some model with ultra-blue lipstick to do the visuals for the video and promotion. This, I believe, is yer actual Ya Kid K in this performance though. Her real name is Manuela Barbara Kamosi Moaso Djogi with the ‘Kamosi’ (meaning ‘the only one’) part informing the ‘K’ bit of her stage name. She is not to be confused with Leila K of Rob’n’Raz featuring Leila K fame. What is it with all the ‘K’s? Someone should have pointed the trend out to Kurtis Mantronik – he really should have stuck with the ‘k’ rather than dropping it for an ‘x’.

That trademark Technotronic sound would eat up the charts in 1990 with this single reaching No 2 and a further three singles becoming chart hits including two Top 10s.

The third different No 1 in three weeks now as Sinéad O’Connor makes it to the top with “Nothing Compares 2 U”. Is it fair to say that, despite her clear musical talent, the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Sinéad isn’t actually her music? How many of her songs could you name apart from “Nothing Compares 2 U”? I’ve got “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (which was the follow up), that song she did with Jah Wobble (“Visions of You”) and I think she did a cover of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”. Apart from that….Sadly I think her back catalogue is over shadowed by the controversies that seem to have followed her around for her whole career from tearing up photos of The Pope on Saturday Night Live to Tweets about non-Muslims. It’s certainly been a life lived.

Whilst commenting on Megadeth in a recent post, I stated that I was never not dumbfounded by the amount of useless heavy metal acts that seemed to get so much chart action in these TOTP repeats. I also name checked Anthrax, W.A.S.P and Mötley Crüe. Well add another to the list for here come Skid Row with “18 And Life”. This lot of New Jersey rockers were fronted by Sebastian Bach whose real name was Sebastian Bierk – oh make your own jokes up….

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

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Lonnie Gordon	Happenin’ All Over Again	Nah
2	Wreckx-n-Effect	Juicy	Nope
3	And Why Not?	The Face	No but my wife had their album
4	Sybil	Walk On By	No
5	Birdland	Sleep With Me	I did not
6	The Beloved	Hello	Yes! I did buy this one! The cassette single no less!
7	Eurythmics	The King And Queen Of America	That’s a no
8	House Of Love	Shine On	No but I had their previous single on that Hit List album
9	Mantronix	Got To Have Your Love	Definitely not
10	Cher	Just Like Jesse James	No – phew!
11	Technotronic featuring Ya Kid K	Get Up! (Before The Night Is Over)	Obviously not
12	Sinéad’ O’Connor	Nothing Compares 2 U	Don’t think so
13	Skid Row	18 And Life	Hadaway and shite

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000nnyl/top-of-the-pops-02021990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues