Cliff Richard | TOTP Rewind – the 90s

TOTP 11 MAR 1993

Posted on July 10, 2022 by 80stastic

1993 was not a year I was looking forward to reviewing and one of the main reasons for that has now arrived in this TOTP – the unholy trinity of the three S’s. I speak of Shaggy, Shabba Ranks and Snow. The first two are both on tonight’s show whilst the latter makes his debut entry into the Top 40 this week. Somehow these three crystallised for me everything that was wrong with the charts around this time. The fact that they all arrived together at the same time probably had something to do with it. Could I have been wrong in my initial assessment? Let’s see if a gap of twenty-nine years has changed my perspective.

Opening the show though are another act who were all about the S’s so much so they had two of them in their name – it can only be Sister Sledge. Well, it could also have been Sam Smith or Sandie Shaw or Shakespear’s Sister or (God forbid) Shakin’ Stevens but let’s not go there. Seriously.

After they’d scored a hit for the third time in fourteen years with yet another remix of “We Are Family” earlier in 1993, perhaps the most obvious rerelease of all time was unleashed upon us – yes it was time once more for “Lost In Music”. Why obvious? Well, every time one song was released as a single, the other came out shortly after. Look at this lot:

26 May 1979 – “We Are Family”
21 Aug 1979 – “Lost In Music
07 Sep 1984 – “Lost In Music”
17 Nov 1984 – “We Are Family”
24 Jan 1993 – “We Are Family”
13 Mar 1993 – “Lost In Music”

I mean they’re both disco standards but is that just a teeny bit of overkill? Couldn’t they have mixed it up a bit? How about a rerelease of “Thinking Of You” instead? What? They did do that as well! It was their third hit single of 1993 when it came out again in the June. Oh come on! Wait…

*blogger is gripped by sudden panic*

They didn’t rerelease “Frankie” as well did they?! Please God no!

*checks Sister Sledge discography*

Oh thank f**k for that. They didn’t. I couldn’t have coped with a second helping of that on the show. I’d have barfed for sure. The 1993 version of “Lost In Music” peaked at No 14.

What’s that you say Tony Dortie (in your daft hat)? Bruce Dickinson is leaving Iron Maiden? Did he? I have to say that this piece of blockbusting news must have passed me by at the time. Having read up on the story, it seems that Bruce had announced he was leaving the band before they headed out on a forty-six date world tour. It doesn’t sound like a good idea and indeed it wasn’t. Both his band mates and their fanbase were pissed off with Dickinson for putting the group’s future in doubt. Maybe keeping schtum about leaving to pursue your solo career until after the tour is done may have been the way to go Bruce?

Anyway, this live single “Fear Of The Dark” wasn’t from Dickinson’s final tour as it hadn’t yet happened. Instead it was, rather obviously, from the previous year’s Fear Of The Dark tour which was enshrined forever in the resultant album “A Real Live One”. Now, I wouldn’t need every finger of one hand to list the number of Iron Maiden songs that I like but this one starts off in a rather un-Maiden-esque style with Dickinson laying off on the over the top throaty vocals and with a low key intro but then they resort to type and it loses my interest immediately. It peaked at No 8 thanks to that newly pissed off but still sizeable fanbase.

And so we return to those pesky S’s now as we find Shaggy on his way to the top of the charts with “Oh Carolina”. Up to No 2 this week and with 2 Unlimited now in their fifth week at the pinnacle, Tony Dortie’s prediction of it being No 1 the following week was hardly the stuff of Nostradamus. Yet it was, at the same time, an unlikely chart topper. Apparently “Oh Carolina” would be the first ‘reggae’ No 1 since Aswad’s “Don’t Turn Around” in 1988 if you can classify that as a reggae track and if you ignore the dub reggae of “Dub Be Good To Me” by Beats International in 1990. The following week, Snow’s “Informer” would storm to No 8 meaning there would be three reggae influenced singles in the Top 10 simultaneously for the first time ever. It was a strange time in the UK charts but why and how had this shake up of the charts come to be? Maybe it was just the law of averages and probability – it had to happen some time.

I worked for Our Price throughout the 90s and we used to source the majority of our reggae stock from the supplier Jetstar. In my memory, they are who we ordered the Shaggy single from though I could be wrong about that. Whenever you used to ring their telesales team with an order, you were guaranteed to talk to someone effortlessly cool on the other end of the line. It always sounded like the atmosphere in the Jetstar office was just one long, chilled out sesh with the occasional bit of work done now and then if they felt like it. I’m sure they are all really hard working but that was the vibe that was projected. I was jealous. Also having a good time is Shaggy who is clearly enjoying himself in this performance probably riding on the confidence of knowing he’ll have a No 1 record soon enough.

And so we come to easily the most objectionable of the three S’s of 1993 – “Mr Loverman”, Shabba Ranks. I hated everything about this; the song, its success and of course Ranks himself not least of all because of this interview on The Word:

Let’s have it right, what a f*****g arsehole! Thankfully Mark Lamarr was on hand to call him out unlike Dani Behr who wanted to sweep it all under the carpet and move on. That took place in 1992 and by March 1993, Ranks had put out a public apology for his grotesque words. Funnily enough it coincided with the rerelease of the “Mr Loverman” single. Do you think his record company Sony put some pressure on him to retract what he had said so that their product wasn’t dead in the water before it started? Yes, I did say rerelease as the single had already been a hit once the previous August when it got to No 23. Presumably the rising profile of dancehall and the success of Shaggy convinced Sony to roll the dice again and so it became a No 3 hit second time around.

The track became infamous for the use of the ‘Shabba!’ shout out which became a catch all catchphrase for just about any situation. My favourite use of it though was by Ray Von from Phoenix Nights…

It’s a third time on the show for Bryan Ferry and his treatment of “I Put A Spell On You”. Now originally I had thought that this might be just a rebroadcast of the first time Ferry did a studio performance as the staging is almost exactly the same but it isn’t as the cut away to the next act reveals. This raises the question of quite why Ferry just gave an identikit performance again? I mean I think there’s less dancers this week but everything else including the performers outfits are the same. I guess I expected a bit more creativity from Bryan than that.

“I Put A Spell On You” peaked at No 18.

I find it hard to remember but there was a time when Jamiroquai’s sound was regarded as fresh and new and exciting. That sensation didn’t last long as petty soon everything they released sounded exactly the same as..well…everything else they’d ever released. Back in 1993 though Jay Kay was a hip, young groover bringing his brand of acid jazz, soul/funk vibes to the nation. I guess he’s always been a divisive figure though. Early on he suffered from accusations of plagiarising Stevie Wonder and of being a hypocrite for espousing environmental themes in his lyrics whilst having an obsession with the collection of fast, expensive cars. Subsequent misdemeanours like being charged with assaulting a photographer and waxing lyrical in concert about how great his then partner Denise Van Outen’s breasts were didn’t do his image any favours.

I always thought “Too Young To Die” was Jamiroquai’s first single but there’d been one before it called “When You Gonna Learn” in 1992 which had made No 28 on the charts but which had escaped my attention completely. It was their first single for Sony though which may account for my confusion. As for the performance here, you have to admit that Jay Kay (it’s all about him really in much the same way that Simply Red is all about Hucknall) makes quite the impression. His vocals are good (though the ‘de de de de do’ chorus is unmistakably Wonder-esque) but it’s his look which grabs the attention. Watching him now, the first thing that springs to mind is how hot he must have been under the studio lights in his oversized clobber. Ah yes, the clothes or more specifically that hat! It would become Kay’s signature look and inform the ‘buffalo man’ logo that would be the face of the band’s brand featuring on the art work for the covers of their first four albums. Some thought had clearly gone into this from a marketing point of view.

Did I like their sound? Yeah, initially. My wife liked it so much she bought that first album “Emergency On Planet Earth”. I think I got bored with it quite quickly though. “Too Young To Die” made it all the way to the Top 10 and the album was a platinum selling No 1. The time of Jamiroquai had begun.

Next a band who, like many before them, suffer from the misguided belief by many that they were a one hit wonder. PM Dawn really weren’t though their biggest and most memorable success did rather overshadow the rest of their back catalogue which is a shame. The Spandau Ballet sampling “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss” was that huge hit of course from the Summer of 1991 and we hadn’t heard that much from the duo since. The follow up single “Paper Doll” had been scrunched up and binned when it failed to make the Top 40 whilst two further singles had at least charted though neither got further than No 29. “Looking Through Patient Eyes” would correct that though when it peaked at No 11.

Turning from Spandau Ballet to George Michael for inspiration on this one – the track heavily samples “Father Figure” – it was another great example of their wordy rapping (hood) allied to a mellow yet catchy sound. It was taken from their second album the title of which confirmed their verbose credentials – “The Bliss Album…? (Vibrations Of Love And Anger And The Ponderance Of Life And Existence)”. They really did have a thing about word heavy album titles. Their debut was called “Of The Heart, Of The Soul And Of The Cross: The Utopian Experience” whilst their fourth carried the title of “Dearest Christian, I’m So Very Sorry For Bringing You Here. Love Dad”. Like the Ferry album “Taxi”, Our Price got a promo copy of the album which ended up in my possession. My wife even made a cover for it.

Sadly, Prince Be died in 2016 after suffering for years from diabetes related conditions including having one of his legs amputated at the knee due to gangrene.

If it’s…we’ll any year since 1958 actually…then there must be a Cliff Richard single out. 1993’s first offering of that particular year was a song called “Peace In Our Time”. This is yet another song I don’t recall at all. I wonder what it sounds like?

*watches Cliff’s performance back*

Oh this is just a glorious tune. So full of life and positivity and…nah, you got me. It’s just the same old Cliff shite that he’d been peddling for years. Apparently a hit for Eddie Money in the US in the late 80s, it’s just sanctimonious crap about having faith, putting songs in our hearts and building a heaven on earth. It even goes on about turning water into wine! Just horrible. If I want a song called “Peace In Our Time”, there’s always this…

Cliff’s got all his usual mates with him here backing him up – Janey Lee Grace, that bloke from Modern Romance – whilst the main man himself does his usual weird arm movements. At one point he’s only a flick of the wrist away from doing a Bruce Forsyth pose. Cliff, of course, was at Wimbledon last week doing his usual cringe fest crowd singalong. For the love of God Cliff, give it a rest and grant us some peace in our time! By the way, I can’t find the TOTP performance so here’s a clip from some German pop show:

It’s the final week at the top for 2 Unlimited with “No Limit”. After positing the theory the other week that dance acts couldn’t sell albums, Ray and Anita completely debunk this by having a No 1 with parent album “No Limits” (note the plural). Released on the PWL label in the UK, Pete Waterman made the decision to remove Ray’s raps from the tracks which only increased the ‘there’s no lyrics’ jibes in the press. The ribbing was continued in later weeks by some unlikely critics – the Scottish popsters The Bluebells who had some fun at 2 Unlimited’s expense by shouting out ‘Techno, techno, techno, techno’ during a TOTP performance of their rejuvenated hit “Young At Heart”. Those cheeky scamps!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I Buy It?
1	Sister Sledge	Lost In Music ’93	Nope
2	Iron Maiden	Fear Of The Dark (Live)	Never
3	Shaggy	Oh Carolina	Nah
4	Shabba Ranks	Mr Loverman	Hell no!
5	Bryan Ferry	I Put A Spell On You	No but I had a promo of the album
6	Jamiroquai	Too Young To Die	No but my wife had the album
7	PM Dawn	Looking Through Patient Eyes	See 5 above
8	Cliff Richard	Peace In Our Time	What do you think?!
9	2 Unlimited	No Limit	Negative

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/m0018zst/top-of-the-pops-11031993

TOTP 10 DEC 1992

Posted on May 23, 2022 by 80stastic

When I was a lad (can’t believe I’ve started a post with that phrase!) things seemed straightforward, linear even. Timelines of events were uncomplicated. Things happened then finished. Then something else happened. What on earth am I talking about? Well, I’m thinking about musical movements.

When I was growing up in the 70s, it seemed to me that flavours of music would rise to popularity, burn brightly and then fizzle out whereupon something else would take over. So glam rock was prevalent from 1971 to 1975 approximately before punk rock pressed the reset button in a whirlwind of filth and fury. By 1978 with The Sex Pistols in disarray, punk had served its purpose and was superseded by New Wave and a Mod revival. When that bit the dust the New Romantics took centre stage with swagger and outrageous outfits. With the pin up boys of that movement aspiring to be more than cult status, New Pop was born with Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Culture Club dominating the charts. See what I mean? Yes, that’s a very simplistic view that could easily be debunked I’m sure (where was disco in all this for example?) but I’m going with it to enable my point. Talking of which, what is my point exactly? It’s this. By the time we got to late 1992, what musical movement were we in because I have no idea going by the running order on this edition of TOTP. Yes, obviously we had seen a dance explosion happen from at least 1988 onwards (some may even date it as early as 1986) but by this point it was the movement was so refracted that there was a kaleidoscope of sub genres. I remember whilst working for Our Price in the 90s a memo coming out from head office entitled ‘scary areas of your shop and how to deal with them’. First on the list was how to classify the dance collections section of the racks, so unwieldy had that section become.

Anyway, back to TOTP and this show featured a boy band, a Motown superstar, a part of the establishment that was into his fifth decade of hit records, the Queen of Latino pop, a posthumous release from one of the biggest and most flamboyant rock stars ever, some US R’n’B a cappella style, some indie rock, a collaboration between some Manc electronic dance pioneers and the kings of Brummie reggae and…descending from a parallel universe a troupe of wrestlers! Pick the bones out of that! What the Hell was going on?! Let’s find out..,

We start with that boy band – Take That. After having lived with the next big thing tag for a year or so without delivering on it, these lads had finally started turning potential and promotion into sales. Their cover of Barry Manilow’s “Could It Be Magic” was their fourth chart hit of the year and this one was the biggest of the lot, ascending ultimately to a high of No 3. Now Take That weren’t the first teen sensation to do a cover version – I’m thinking The Bay City Rollers doing “Bye Bye Baby” by The Four Seasons for example – but this did seem to set a template for the conveyor belt of acts that followed in their wake. Look at this lot:

911 – “More Than A Woman” by the Bee Gees
A1 – “Take On Me” by A-ha
Boyzone – “Father And Son” by Cat Stevens
Five – “We Will Rock You” by Queen
Let Loose – “Make It With You” by Bread
OTT – “Let Me In” by The Osmonds
Upside Down – “If You Leave Me Now” by Chicago
Westlife – “Mandy” by Barry Manilow

All fine versions I’m sure you’ll agree! To be fair though, Take That’s cover of “Could It Be Magic” was pretty good I think although their reworking of it had more to do with Donna Summer’s 1976 disco rendition than the Manilow version. I seem to recall it being received pretty well as an unexpectedly strong version which wrong footed most people’s expectations of what they would do next. Sure it was a cover but of a different flavour to their take on “It Only Takes A Minute” by Tavares that gave them their first big chart hit. Should they have reversed their release schedule and put “Could It Be Magic” out earlier and then gone big time on ballad “A Million Love Songs” for the Xmas No 1? For what it’s worth I think they got it the right way round.

This was the first time that Robbie Williams took on the vocals on his own. Little did we know what was to come in just a few short years. Gary Barlow is demoted to rank and file status – he’s on backing dancer/ vocals duties with the rest of the group. You can almost see him counting the dance steps in his head. I’d watch your back Gary if I was you.

Despite having passed away in late 1991, Freddie Mercury still retained a massive presence into 1992. In April, The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert was held at Wembley stadium and in November came “The Freddie Mercury Album”, a collection of his solo work released to commemorate the anniversary of his death. It was a nice idea for the fanbase and no doubt record label Parlophone always had it in mind to ring every drop of revenue they could out of his existing catalogue. What I didn’t quite get though was how they were going to put together a Best Of out of such scant source material. Freddie only released one, pure solo album in his lifetime which was 1985’s “Mr Bad Guy”. Yes, there was that “Barcelona” album with Montserrat Caballé but who, apart from superfans, really knows anything from that but the title track? What else is there? Well, he had a hit single in 1984 called “Love Kills” from Giorgio Moroder’s restoration of Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic silent film Metropolis. Then there’s his No 4 hit from 1987 which was his cover of The Platters oldie “The Great Pretender”. And…erm…oh yes! There’s “I was Born To Love You”, the only single to chart from that “Mr Bad Guy” album. Erm…except that isn’t on “The Freddie Mercury Album”! I presume it was a licensing issue as “Mr Bad Guy” was released by CBS rather than Queen’s EMI label. There are other tracks from it on “The Freddie Mercury Album” but maybe CBS/Sony didn’t want to give away the rights to its (then) best known tune.

Given all the above, Parlophone chose to promote the album with “In My Defence”. This was a track from the Dave Clark musical Time. This was the production that had already given us Top 40 singles by Cliff Richard (“She’s So Beautiful”), Julian Lennon (“Because”) and indeed Freddie himself who took “Time” to No 32 in 1986. I guess Parlophone could have rereleased “The Great Pretender” (which they ultimately did after “In My Defence”) but not “Barcelona” which had already been re-issued for the 1992 Olympics. “In My Defence” it was though and it’s a perfect vehicle for Freddie’s voice, all overblown drama and huge notes but it works pretty well. It could easily have been a Queen composition really. The single went Top 10 but there was an even bigger hit to come from the album the following year that had been hiding in plain sight but that’s for a future post…

Something from the US chart now as we see a song that would end up being a big hit in the UK four years down the line but not for the original artist. I don’t recall the Shai version of “If I Ever Fall In Love” but then, despite this TOTP appearance, it only made it to No 36 in our charts. In the US however, it was a huge hit staying at No 2 for eight weeks!

Was the version they perform here the version on the record? A cappella I mean?

*checks Spotify*

I found two versions. One is the TOTP version and the other has a bit of instrumentation on it but not much. I’m not mad on a cappella I have to say and Shai haven’t made me change my mind. What was the deal with the guy with his coat half on and half off?!

Oh that version that was a hit in 1996? That was by East 17 and Gabrielle of course. They changed the title to “If I Ever”, dropped the a cappella style and took it all the way to No 2. Don’t think it stayed there for eight weeks though. I didn’t like that version either.

Right it’s time for those wrestlers! Despite the charts having been infiltrated in recent weeks by novelty tripe like computer games tunes “Tetris” and “Supermarioland” and a ‘song’ by stripper troupe The Chippendales, it seemed 1992 hadn’t done with us yet in the utter shite stakes. You may not be surprised that WWF Superstars was the idea of Simon Cowell. Here’s @TOTPFacts:

"Slam Jam" was Simon Cowell's idea: "I read in one of our newspapers that [The WWF] sold out 82,000 seats in 27 minutes. Hang on, there's not a rock band in the world that can do that. I also found out that they were selling about two and a half million videos a year…" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) May 13, 2022

"… It didn't take a lot of time to realise that if they were selling that many seats and that many videos, there would be a lot of kids who would want to buy an album from the wrestlers as well." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) May 13, 2022

Hmm. It reminds me of a scene from one of my favourite ever films Stardust starring David Essex which tells the story of the rise of fictional rock star Jim MacLaine. After he has split from his band and gone solo, MacLaine’s manager Mike (played by Adam Faith) plans a worldwide TV and cinema simultaneous broadcast of a concert to promote MacLaine’s latest album. A conversation between Mike and Jim’s American manager Porter Lee Austin (played by Larry Hagman) plays out like this:

Mike: See, what we do is this. We get the cinemas and TV companies all over the world to put up a big enough advance to cover the cost of the album and the show. Well, I mean that way we can’t lose. I mean…If they can pick up money putting on boxing shows, just think what we can pick up putting Jim MacLaine on satellite. For every one boxing fan there must be at least 5,000 pop fans. I mean, to coincide with the concert what we can do is put the album out worldwide. Well, just think of all that promotion Porter Lee. It’s all or nothing this one Porter…

Porter Lee: What kind of concert Mike?

Mike: Don’t worry about the concert eh? Just leave that to me. I tell you one thing, it be like something you’ve ever seen before

Porter Lee: That’s a pretty good idea Mike. Maybe I can do something.

Mike: He’ll be bigger than Aldof Hitler after this lot.

OK, we probably didn’t need the Hitler reference but you get my drift. The WWF Superstars single was called “Slam Jam” (presumably after a wrestling move?) and it was, of course, dreadful. Produced by Mike Stock and Pete Waterman (it just gets worse doesn’t it?), the vinyl came in a poster sleeve bag as I recall (Cowell never misses a marketing trick) and it would reach No 4 in the charts. I’m guessing it was bought by 10 year old boys because if not, I have no idea how to explain what occurred here.

“Connecticut, we have a problem”. Host Mark Franklin advises us that there was meant to be an exclusive satellite performance by Diana Ross of her latest single “If We Hold On Together” from Connecticut but technical problems have put paid to that so we have to make do with the official video instead. To be honest, I’m not too fussed either way.

Now this was taken from the soundtrack to the Universal Pictures animated film The Land Before Time but I’m confused because it came out in 1988 so why was a song from it a hit in the UK four years later? I can only assume it had a terrestrial TV premiere around this time. Another thing that’s confusing me is what this video is that TOTP are showing? I can’t find it on YouTube. The only one I came across featured wall to wall scenes from the film whereas the TOTP version also includes footage of Diana herself. To add to the mystery, Wikipedia says there was no official video for the song. Maybe there wasn’t in 1988 but there was in 1992? I refer you to my earlier comment. I’m not really fussed either way.

As for the song, it sounded exactly as you expected it would. Basically “Somewhere Out There” from An American Tail. “If We Hold On Together” peaked at No 11.

One of the surprise breakout stars of 1992 were KWS who bagged an unlikely No 1 with their cover of KC And The Sunshine Band’s “Please Don’t Go”. A Top 10 follow up (another cover of George McRae’s “Rock Me Baby”) consolidated their success. On reflection, KWS were like the soul version of Undercover. However, by the end of the year their shtick was starting to wear thin. Yet another cover version was chosen as their third single release of the year – “Hold Back The Night” by The Trammps – but to spice it up a bit, they (or more likely their management) decided to team up with the original hitmakers on the track.

Now it’s easy in this performance to see who are The Trammps as they’re the older fellas who have taken their tuxedos and bow ties out of the back of the wardrobe. I’m assuming the KWS guys are the two on keyboards at either end of The Trammps but are they ‘K’, ‘W’ or ‘S’? Remember that their band name came from the initials of the band’s surnames – King / Williams / St. Joseph. And where was the one that wasn’t there?

“Hold Back The Night” peaked at No 30.

Ah the Breakers. Marvellous! After the Boney M “Megamix” single last week, there’s another one tonight courtesy of Gloria Estefan. Known as “Miami Hit Mix” in the UK, this was to promote Gloria’s first “Greatest Hits” album which was a huge seller over Xmas reaching No 2 and eventually going triple platinum in the UK. I recall that by opening time on Xmas Eve, the only chart stock line that we had ran out of in the Our Price in Rochdale where I was working was the cassette version of the album. We knew we had some on order that were due to come in on the day but the record company were out of stock when the delivery came in. Ian the store manager wasn’t too arsed saying “nobody will find it anywhere else in Rochdale today”. He was probably right. There wasn’t much competition record shop wise in Rochdale. There was somewhere in the Exchange shopping centre but it was very hit and miss and the manager of the place was obsessed with our shop and used to buy his records from us!

Anyway, back to Gloria and the “Miami Hit Mix”. There were five tracks in the medley from various stages of Gloria’s career. You can tell that as they were released under three different Gloria monikers:

Song	Gloria Moniker
Dr Beat	Miami Sound Machine
Conga	Miami Sound Machine
Rhythm Is Gonna Get You	Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine
1-2-3	Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine
Get On Your Feet	Gloria Estefan

As with Boney M, the Xmas party market meant that sales of the single were brisk enough to send it into the Top 10. Also like Boney M, it was the last time Gloria ventured so high in the UK charts.

Fed up of all the cover versions in the charts? Tough because here comes another one courtesy of The Lemonheads. I had no idea who this lot were at the time but their cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs Robinson” sounded pretty cool to me back then. According to some of the online reviews I have found, I was in the minority. Ultimateclassicrock.com describe it as ‘terrible’ and ‘meh’. Even Evan Dando himself can’t like it that much as he is on record as hating the original and indeed Paul Simon. So why was their cover even recorded then?

Apparently it was to celebrate the 25th anniversary home video release of The Graduate, the film it features in. The Lemonheads cover brought the band more coverage and success than they’d ever had up to that point. The band had already released four albums to little fanfare since their formation in 1986. The first three had been on indie label Taang! before they were picked up by major Atlantic for their fourth “Lovey”. However, it was fifth album “It’s A Shame About Ray” that would see them gain much wider recognition. Initial pressings of the album didn’t include the “Mrs Robinson” cover but its success meant that the album was re-released with its omission now corrected. It would achieve gold status sales in the UK and a rerelease of the title track brought the band a second Top 40 single the following year.

The pinnacle of the band’s success came with the release of the “Come On Feel The Lemonheads” album in October of 1993 which made the Top 5 in the UK charts. I had transferred from the Our Price in Rochdale to the much bigger store in Stockport by that time. The manager there when I started was a guy called Paul who looked a bit like Evan Dando and certainly the image of Dando on the cover of the album bore that out. Paul moved on to HMV (or was it Virgin?) not long after I got to Stockport. On my first day I asked him what lunch he wanted to go on. He replied “lunch is for wimps”. I visibly gulped.

“Mrs Robinson” peaked at No 19.

Right, what’s this then? 808 State vs UB40? What the Hell? Electronic dance music meets reggae pop? Who’s idea was this? OK, that’s enough questions. Time for some answers. Well, I haven’t got many to be fair. This remix of the Brummies 1981 Top 10 single “One In Ten” came from the Mancs’ fourth studio album “Gorgeous” which featured other guest artists like Ian McCulloch. Why they chose to tackle UB40’s unemployment referencing classic I’m not sure. Judging by some of the comments on YouTube against the single’s video, people are very divided on whether the remix was genius or a crime. For me, I’m always going to favour the original.

The remix of “One In Ten” peaked at No 17. 808 State would not return to the Top 20 for another five years when they did so with another collaboration, this time with James Dean Bradfield of Manic Street Preachers on “Lopez”.

After all the cover versions and medleys, here’s a proper, original song courtesy of Madonna. I say original but “Deeper And Deeper” does delve into one of her most iconic hits when it morphs into “Vogue” in the coda. Oh, and there’s a “La Isla Bonita” borrowing bridge that features flamenco guitar and castanets. And…it does pinch some lyrics from “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound Of Music. Apart from that though, totally original.

“Deeper And Deeper” peaked at No 6.

There’s only two weeks to Xmas so Cliff Richard is making his move for the festive No 1 with “I Still Believe In You”. He resorts to his usual over emoting performance tricks that he’s been peddling for years. I’m sure it’s just a case of slowing down with age but he could mix it up a bit. The other thing that doesn’t seem to have changed for years is Cliff’s hair. It seems to have been the same since the mid 80s at least. Cliff mate, it’s 1992 and you’re still sporting a mullet! Now granted I myself cultivated one during the period ‘84-‘86. Not a Chris Waddle but it was definitely long at the back. It was fashionable back then. By 1987 though, mine was gone forever. Cliff on the other hand was determined to keep the style going single handedly…erm headedly.

Cliff never did make the Xmas No 1 this year because of this next record…

A second week at No 1 for Whitney Houston with “I Will Always Love You” and I think it was becoming obvious by this point that this was no ordinary record. I don’t have actual sales figures to hand but in the Our Price in Rochdale, it felt like it was outselling everything else in the Top 5 combined. With just a couple of weeks to go to Xmas, the idea of there being a race to be the festive chart topper felt like delusion. It was never in doubt.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Take That	Could It Be Magic	Good cover but I wasn’t buying Take That thank you very much!
2	Freddie Mercury	In My Defence	I did not
3	Shai	If I Ever Fall In Love	Nah
4	WWF Superstars	Slam Jam	As if
5	Diana Ross	If We Hold On Together	Never happening
6	KWS / The Trammps	Hold Back The Night	Nope
7	Gloria Estefan	Miami Hit Mix	No
8	The Lemonheads	Mrs Robinson	Liked it, didn’t buy it
9	808 State vs UB40	One In Ten	Not for me
10	Madonna	Deeper And Deeper	Negative
11	Cliff Richard	I Still Believe In You	The feeling is not reciprocated Cliff
12	Whitney Houston	I Will Always Love You	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0017731/top-of-the-pops-10121992

TOTP 03 DEC 1992

Posted on May 19, 2022 by 80stastic

We’ve clicked over into December 1992 here at TOTP Rewind which means that the population would officially have been starting to get into Xmas mode. Working at the Our Price store in Rochdale, my own days were getting busier and felt very long as sales got brisker. So what were some of the albums that were doing the business as Xmas loomed 30 years ago? The Top 10 albums were made up of eight Best Of / compilations from the likes of Cher, Erasure, Genesis, Gloria Estefan and Simple Minds. Only two were proper studio albums which were “Automatic For The People” by REM and “Stars” by Simply Red which was still in the Top 10 after being the best selling album of 1991! Now I’m all for a good Best Of album but 1992’s Xmas offerings did seem quite cynical on behalf of the record companies.

Whilst the record shops were getting prepared for a frenzy of activity, something else in the world of music was coming to a full stop. Cult TV programme The Hitman And Her broadcast its final show two days after this TOTP went out. It seems odd to recall now but there was a time when TV stations didn’t broadcast all night, when there weren’t any late night schedules and when if you suffered from insomnia then there were no old episodes of Come Dine With Me to keep you company during the wee small hours. So when Pete Waterman’s nightclub based show appeared in our screens in 1988, it felt truly transformative.

Filmed on a Saturday night in various clubs throughout the UK but with a definite North/Midlands bias, it would be televised in the early hours of Sunday morning. Performing hosting duties alongside Waterman and securing her cult status amongst the UK’s young male population was Michaela Strachan. Ever the businessman, Waterman ensured that the programme showcased a number of his PWL artists as well as some of the acid house tunes that he loved. The clubbers themselves were as much the stars of the show as the hosts, with many a punter, eager to get themselves on TV, happy to embarrass themselves by participating in some ‘hilarious’ games. Some of the regular dancers on the show included a pre-Take That Jason Orange and the two blokes who weren’t the singer in naff 90s boy band 911. I wonder if any of the tunes on tonight’s TOTP made the Hitman And Her playlist?

Well, possibly this one. If you’ve finally had a hit after years of trying, what’s your next move going to be? Yes, release a very similar sounding follow up of course! OK, “Step It Up” isn’t an exact replica of “Connected” – its got a faster bpm for one thing – but it didn’t fall far from the tree. Stereo MC’s were on a roll by this point. Their third album “Connected” missed the top of the charts by one place and would go on to sell 420,000 copies. “Step It Up” was their second consecutive Top 20 single after the album title track. They were the bomb (or something). This performance is surely the mental image that most people who were around at the time would conjure up when hearing the name Stereo MC’s. The main protagonist of course is the Catweazle-esque Rob Birch. With his oversize trousers and glimpse of a bare chest, he was a Frankenstein’s monster mash up of MC Hammer and Peter Andre. Then there were his moves. The knees bent, hip swivelling action that Birch brings to the party surely influenced Vic Reeves and his thigh rubbing antics on Shooting Stars. In fact, the whole thing reminds me of our Maltese puppy rolling on his back exposing his bits when being sniffed by some of the local neighbourhood dogs. Yeah, sorry about that mental image. Anyway, you have to give it to Rob; he certainly left it all out there as it were. Here’s his take on his performance courtesy of the ever excellent @TOTPFacts:

Rob Birch on this Stereo MCs #TOTP performance: "You know you've only got three minutes to try to get the crowd going. You're like, 'I've got to go at it like hell for leather. And because you're buzzing on nerves, your voice starts jumping out of your body."
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) May 13, 2022

Rob Birch: "I could just be a bit like some kind of plant in a gale and just, like, let it all hang out… That #TOTP wasn't a pretend performance. it had a fluidity to it."
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) May 13, 2022

Letting it all hang out indeed. “Step It Up” peaked at No 12.

If it’s TOTP in 1992 then there must be a Michael Jackson video due and here comes the latest. “Heal The World” was Jacko’s fifth single released in the UK during the year and the sixth from his “Dangerous” album overall. I’m guessing this was always going to be the track released for the Xmas market given that it’s a huge, saccharine drenched ballad with oh so worthy lyrical subject matter. So about the song’s sound – you can’t ignore its similarity to “We Are The World” which Jackson co-wrote with Lionel Richie. I mean it’s essentially the same song. Supposedly though, it is the track that Jackson was most proud of. It even inspired him to create the Heal The World Foundation, a charity dedicated to improving conditions for children throughout the world. You can’t deny the philanthropy but it doesn’t make the song any more palatable.

I really remember the rather clunky and obvious design on the cover of the single of a plaster covering a crack across the globe which is held between the hands of a black child and a white child. It was one of those fold out sleeves that turns into a poster as I remember that were awful to refold once opened to its full extent.

Sensibly, the video for the song doesn’t include Jackson himself only children set against a backdrop of images depicting war, guns and even the Ku Klux Klan. The theme of healing is portrayed by the final scene of a candle lit vigil of children coming together as one. That restraint was not in evidence at the BRITS in 1996 when Jackson celebrated the receipt of his Artist Of A Generation award with a performance of “Earth Song” that depicted him as a Christ like figure surrounded by children. Thank God for Jarvis Cocker! In any other year, the mawkish song would surely have gone to No 1 but this was 1992 and it was up against the all conquering “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston and had to make do with the runners up spot.

Next we have another studio performance of the reactivated “Temptation (Brothers In Rhythm remix)” by Heaven 17. There’s a couple of differences between this and the previous 19th November show turn. Firstly, Carol Kenyon has a proper name check in the title graphics this time and secondly, she’s up there belting it out alongside Glenn Gregory without the two blokes on keyboards (the titular brothers presumably) for company. Still conspicuous by his absence though is Martyn Ware. Carol and Glenn don’t really need anybody else though certainly not the former who gives a masterclass in doing a live vocal performance for TV.

The original recording of “Temptation” featured a 60 piece orchestra and I’ve heard the aforementioned Ware say in an interview how mad it was back in the early 80s that they would just say to their record label that they required the services of an orchestra to play on one track and the label didn’t bat an eyelid at the cost. The 80s really were a time of excess within the record industry it seems. The Brothers In Rhythm remix of “Temptation” peaked at No 4.

The curious case of Dina Carroll next. Curious? Well, just in the respect that her success seemed to come in stages rather than via the classic overnight sensation mode. Sort of the musical equivalent of that ref who went down in stages when pushed by Paolo Di Canio back in the 90s…

Anyway, Dina had first come to national attention as the vocalist on Quartz’s dance version of Carole King’s “It’s Too Late” in 1991. Despite that flush of success, the Quartz project fizzled out and Dina disappeared from view. Behind the scenes though, a decision by her management company to launch Dina as a solo artist led to her being signed to A&M and the following year she returned to the charts with “Ain’t No Man”. “Special Lind Of Love” replicated its predecessor’s success exactly by peaking at No 16 before this single “So Close” made it a hat trick of Top 20 hits in 1992. Pretty impressive stuff which led to host Tony Dortie describing in his intro that Dina had enjoyed “an amazing year” and that she was “definitely in contention for female vocalist of the year”.

Come January 1993 her album was released and debuted at No 2 staying in the Top 20 for six months. And yet, it seemed to me that the album only really went into hyperdrive sales wise when the sixth single “Don’t Be A Stranger” was released in the October. I’ll type that again. The sixth single which was by far the biggest of the lot taken from the album when it peaked at No 3. Now surely that is curious?! We sold loads of the album in the wake of that single. Did A&M have it up their sleeves all the time, holding it back until the optimum moment? The single was different from the album version in that it was re-recorded with added orchestra strings to give it a dramatic feel. When was that decision taken? Either they got lucky or they had a long term strategy all along. Her success in 1993 led to Dina being named Best Female Artist at the BRIT awards in 1994 – again a marker that her success came in stages with her becoming award winning a whole year after Tony Dortie’s prediction.

As for “So Close” the song, it’s pleasant enough but never had the capacity to rival the sales of “Don’t Be A Stranger”. Maybe it was meant to just keep Dina‘s profile ticking over until the album was released? Surely the clamour for the album would have increased if “Don’t Be A Stranger” had been the third single anyway? Oh I don’t know. The bottom line is that it all worked out pretty well for Dina in the end unlike Paolo Di Canio who received an eleven match ban for his shove on ref Paul Alcock.

We’re back to cramming in the Breakers again this week with four of the little blighters in total. We start with one of REM’s best known songs I’m guessing which makes me wonder why these few scant seconds are all that were ever shown of it on TOTP. “Man On The Moon” was the second single to be released from the “Automatic For The People” album and is one of those songs that just works. Beautifully.

It manages to combine genuinely eccentric lyrics with ear worm producing hooks. Nominally about surrealist performance artist Andy Kaufman with references to his Elvis impersonations and work with wrestler Fred Blassie, it also seemed to be asking the listener to open their mind to multiple different realities. What if the moon landings were fake? What if Elvis wasn’t dead? Ultimately it returns to Kaufman and the conspiracy theory that he faked his own death. It’s a heady concoction. The black and white video with the image of Michael Stipe wearing a cowboy hat walking nonchalantly down a desert road before hitching a ride with a truck is in turns memorable and befittingly random. The original demo without lyrics was known by the band as “C to D slide” due to the opening which includes that shift of chords. When I attended a guitar class a few years ago, this was one of the songs we learned including that slide. It’s actually OK to play but does have some quick chord changes. By the way, I’m really not much of a guitarist. Just a chord strummer really. “Man On The Moon” peaked at No 18.

Another huge band that we only got to see a glimpse of as a Breaker were U2. To be fair they were promoting a fifth single from “Achtung Baby”, an album that had been released almost exactly a year ago so maybe they were pushing it a bit. Did the TOTP producers think that a fifth single from a year old album wasn’t a big enough story? It hardly qualified as an ‘exclusive’. Indeed, perhaps the real reason that a fifth single was released was to complete the last piece of the jigsaw that formed a picture of the band driving a Trabant car when you put all five single covers together. A nice bit of marketing by record label Island there.

The single in question was “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” which I always quite liked. Apparently the gestation of the song had been quite laboured and the band had several failed attempts before they laid down a version they could live with. I always presumed that the song’s title was inspired by The Rolling Stones track “Wild Horses” but I haven’t seen anything online that comes anywhere near confirming that.

The singles from “Achtung Baby” achieved the following chart positions:

1 – 13 – 7 – 8 – 14

It’s not a bad haul for an album that was seen as a gamble in many ways with it being a definite shift in musical direction from where their success had led the band. It remains their second biggest selling album after “The Joshua Tree”.

Think of Xmas and then think of Cliff Richard. What song is currently running around your head? “Mistletoe And Wine”? How about “Saviour’s Day”? Bet it isn’t this one. It tends to get forgotten given the success of those aforementioned festive chart toppers and their ubiquity in Xmas playlists but Cliff didn’t just do those two Chrimbo tunes. There was “Little Town” in 1982, “We Should Be Together” nine years later and this one – “I Still Believe In You”.

This completely passed me by despite me working in a record shop at the time and despite it going Top 10. That’s probably because it had about as much staying power as wrapping paper come mid morning on Xmas day. In fact, it hardly even qualifies as a Xmas song with the only reference to Yuletide in the lyrics being one mention of Santa Claus. Just terrible. Cliff didn’t give up on the concept of making festive records though. In 1999, he scored an unexpected No 1 with “The Millennium Prayer”, in 2003 went Top 5 with “Santa’s List” and in 2006 got to No 2 with “21st Century Christmas”. There have also been numerous chart re-entries for “Mistletoe And Wine”, “Saviour’s Day” and even “I Still Believe In You” down the years when December rolls around once more.

The final Breaker comes from Rod Stewart and his cover of “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Waltzing Matilda)” by Tom Waits. We saw this the other week as an ‘exclusive’ live by satellite performance and the video here looks very similar to that as it’s just Rod wandering around an empty stage with a solitary piano player for company. I defy anybody to watch the video in full and be able to look at anything other than Rod’s beard for the whole four and a half minutes.

What on earth was this all about?! Boney M on TOTP?! In the 90s?! Well, it’s a straightforward answer. It was clearly another case of money for old rope. Record label Arista released this “Megamix” single with an eye on the Xmas party scene figuring the UK’s work force, pissed up and ready to party, wouldn’t be able to resist these 70’s tunes all over again. And so it came to pass that the single – a medley of “Rivers Of Babylon”, “Sunny” and “Daddy Cool” – returned Boney M to the UK Top 10 for the first time since 1979. I say Boney M but was this really them? Where was the guy with the mad Afro (Bobby Farrell) who used to leap about all over the place like he’d sat on an ants nest? Yes, there was a guy in the line up doing his best impression of Farrell but it’s clearly not him. In fact, there’s only the lead singer up there on stage that looks vaguely familiar. A bit of research tells me that it’s original member Liz Mitchell doing the singing but the rest of the group were just some randoms that were drafted in to promote the single. In an act of utter shamelessness / good business practice depending on your point of view, a cash-in “Greatest Hits” album was released early the following year which made the Top 20.

Apparently there were a number of different touring line ups of Boney M after the original line up was finally disbanded in 1986. I know! Boney M were still a thing in 1986?! They were not alone in this of course. There are plenty of examples of concurrent versions of groups following the disintegration of the originals. Off the top of my head there’s been The Temptations, Bucks Fizz, The Bay City Rollers and more recently UB40. All three female members of the original line up are still with us though sadly Bobby Farrell died of heart failure in 2010 while on tour with his version of Boney M. Unbelievably, he died on the same date and in the same city (St Petersburg) as Rasputin who was of course the inspiration behind one of the band’s biggest hits and whom Farrell used to dress up as when performing the song.

1992 had been a busy old time for Madonna. She starred in a well received film in A League Of Their Own and wrote a hit single for its soundtrack. She founded her own entertainment company called Maverick with production arms in records, film, music publishing, book publishing and merchandising. Not content with that, she released her controversial coffee table book Sex and her fifth studio album in “Erotica”. She was only 34 at the time and yet still had been a global superstar for nearly a decade.

“Deeper And Deeper” was the second single taken from “Erotica” and seems to have undergone some retrospective critical revisionism. It seems to me at the time that it didn’t create much of a fuss – how could it compete with Sex and the “Erotica” single for fuss to be fair? It now though seems to be recognised as one of Madonna’s better tracks. Indeed some may even say a banger. Certainly it was a return to that more mainstream dance sound on which she made her name but also embracing the house music movement. I have to say it never did that much for me though. At least the Andy Warhol inspired video with Madonna playing an Edie Sedgwick style character isn’t laced with whips and dominatrix style imagery like those for her recent singles “Erotica” and “Justify My Love” though there is some very loaded and deliberate peeling of bananas. “Deeper And Deeper” peaked at No 6.

This seems like a bit of overkill on behalf of the TOTP producers. This is the second time Simply Red have been on the show with two different tracks from a live EP recorded at a jazz festival. Really? “The Montreux EP” had four songs on it and after “Drowning In My Own Tears” was on a couple of weeks ago, this time we get “Lady Godiva’s Room”. Apparently this song had originally been released as the B-side to the band’s 1987 single “Infidelity” which kind of makes sense as it really sounds like B-side material to me. Uninspiring and a bit of a dirge, I was surprised that the EP got as high as it did (No 11). Make the most of this appearance though as we won’t be seeing Hucknall and co again for nearly three years (hurray!) when they will return with 1995’s “Life” album including No 1 single “Fairground”.

Right, strap in for a ten week run at the top of the charts for “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston. Not quite Bryan Adams but still ten weeks of having to find something to say about this song. I’m going to start off by not talking about the song but about the film it was taken from. The Bodyguard seems to get quite a bad rap from critics but I don’t mind it actually. My theory is that the negativity stems from perceptions of Kevin Costner or more specifically his lack of acting ability. OK, he’s done some turkeys like Waterworld and The Postman but he’s also been in some decent films. His run of four films in the late 80s of The Untouchables, No Way Out, Bull Durham and Field Of Dreams is impressive and then there was Dances With Wolves which won seven Oscars including Best Director for Costner. Not too shabby. I actually think he’s decent in The Bodyguard too.

Maybe a lot of the anti-Costner stuff comes from his lack of an English accent in Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves (which is ludicrous) and Madonna sticking her fingers down her throat in reaction to him describing her show as ‘neat’ in her documentary In Bed With Madonna. Seems a bit unfair.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Stereo MC’s	Step It Up	No
2	Michael Jackson	Heal The World	Nah
3	Heaven 17	Temptation (Brothers In Rhythm remix)	No but my wife has the Luxury Of Life album
4	Dina Carroll	So Close	…but no cigar. No
5	REM	Man On The Moon	No but I had the Automatic For The People album
6	U2	Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses	No but I had the Achtung Baby album
7	Cliff Richard	I Still Believe In You	…but I don’t believe in you Cliff. No
8	Rod Stewart	Tom Traubert’s Blues (Waltzing Matilda)	No but I think my wife has the Tom Waits album it’s from
9	Boney M	Megamix	No but one of the first albums my wife ever had was Night Flight To Venus
10	Madonna	Deeper And Deeper	Nope
11	Simply Red	The Montreux EP	Never!
12	Whitney Houston	I Will Always Love You	I did not

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/m001772z/top-of-the-pops-03121992

TOTP 12 DEC 1991

Posted on December 20, 2021 by 80stastic

Christmas is coming! Unlike in 2021 where the certainty of what our festive period will be like is now under threat again from the pandemic (or more accurately the government’s handling of it), 30 years ago, some of the most pressing issues we were facing included whether we had enough wrapping paper and remembering to buy a Radio Times to plan our TV watching (very important in the pre-digital age). If, like me, you were working in retail at this time, another consideration was when we could fit in any Christmas shopping of our own after facilitating everybody else’s by working behind a shop counter for hours on end. Oh, and what the Christmas No 1 would be… and please let it not be Cliff Richard again this year. Well, as it turned out, Cliff didn’t really get a look in but which records were in the charts back then? Let’s find out…

We start tonight’s TOTP with one of the year’s biggest breakout stars in Cathy Dennis who is in the studio to perform her fourth Top 40 hit of 1991 and her fifth overall. “Everybody Move” was the final single to be released from her gold selling No 3 album “Move To This” and was a return to the radio friendly dance material of her earlier hits after previous single “Too Many Walls” had seen her go down the slow ballad route.

In all honesty, “Everybody Move” should probably have remained an unreleased album track. It’s pretty lightweight stuff and certainly it doesn’t require a great leap of imagination from this to the kind of stuff that Cathy would end up writing for the likes of S Club 7 and Hear’say later in the decade. Accordingly, it only made it to No 25 in the UK Top 40.

Whilst the reaction on Twitter to this performance focussed on Cathy’s Joker-esque outfit, I was more drawn to her dance move which comes over like a half-hearted Mick Channon windmill celebration…

Now I know I quite often draw on football references for this blog and that I’ve just done it again immediately above but quite why presenter Tony Dortie decides to do the same in his intro to the Top 10 countdown remains a mystery. “It’s day 12 on the Advent calendar, Hearts and Leeds are currently topping things in the football world but let’s see which musical crackers are doing the business in the Top 10” he trills. Hmm. For completions sake, I should note that Leeds Utd would indeed go onto win the old Division 1 league title come May the following year however the 1991–92 Scottish Premier Division season was won by Rangers, nine points ahead of Hearts. Dortie messes up the countdown straight away when he announces that Nirvana are at No 10 with “Smells Like Teen”. What happened to your ‘spirit’ Tony?! Unlike Boris Johnson, at least Tony owns his mistakes…

And he failed miserably x
— DORTIE (@TonyDortie) November 19, 2021

There’s some more curious missing word action next as we get what would probably have been described as a ‘banging’ tune’ back then called “Running Out Of Time” by Digital according to co-host Claudia Simon. That wasn’t their full name though Claudia, was it? No, that was Digital Orgasm – ooh and indeed err missus! This wasn’t anything to do with presenter error by the way as the on screen artist and title graphics confirm that Claudia hadn’t just messed up her intro. This, it would seem, was a TOTP policy decision. Presumably, the use of the word orgasm would have been seen as far too offensive pre the 9 o’clock watershed and so was dropped.

As with all of these dance tunes from this era, I have zero recall of it despite working in a record shop while it was in the charts. Listening back to it now, it sounds like it’s been concocted in a rave laboratory with the basic tune of “Insanity” by Oceanic spliced together with snippets of “Charly” by The Prodigy. Both were huge hits so I guess if that really was the formula behind “Running Out Of Time” then it was a sound one.

As for the performance, it looks as if the TOTP producers have given a bit more thought to how to portray this seemingly endless conveyor belt of dance acts. There appear to be loads more camera cuts and in quick rotation meaning we get lots of different angles of the performers which I’m guessing was meant to try and replicate a more clubby experience. There’s also some slightly different distorted visual effect for the non vocal bits – they’ve lost the Doctor Who green which never worked for me anyway. The woman doing the singing looks almost otherworldly like one of Captain Kirk’s alien love interests which kind of helps things along as well.

“Running Out Of Time” peaked at No 16.

Oh no! It’s the dreaded Cliff Richard! Oh yes though as he’s not No 1! He’s nowhere near the top of the tree actually being at No 19 and there’s only two weeks until Christmas! Talking of trees, the show’s production team have pulled out all the stops for Cliff to make the stage look like his front room at Christmas. A fully decorated tree, a mock fireplace, cards and candles – were Health and Safety informed?! – and Cliff himself in an armchair dressed in a sparkly jacket. For some reason though, they haven’t bothered with the prop of a telephone for the faux phone call part at the beginning of the record leaving Cliff to mime speaking into an imaginary one and then putting it back in its cradle. It just looks weird. I was hoping that Cliff might go full Val Doonican and sing the whole song from that armchair but he’s up on his feet in no time to look sincerely into the camera at us and do some of those wavy arm moves of his.

Does anybody really remember “We Should Be Together”? It’s surely Cliff’s forgotten Christmas single after “Mistletoe And ~~Whine~~…sorry..Wine” and “Saviour’s Day”? You never hear it played on the radio come December despite some of the commercial stations like Magic having cleared all of their playlist schedules to play exclusively Christmas tunes. Somehow it did get to No 10 in the UK Top 40 though it was never a serious contender for the top spot.

We get the video for “Too Blind To See It” by Kym Sims next. It’s introduced by Claudia Simon who says Kym is “kickin’ up a flavour” (that’s probably ‘flava’ isn’t it?) whilst all the time a youth from the studio audience gurns away behind her looking remarkably like a young Mark Ronson.

It turns out that “Too Blind To See It” is a dance record that I do remember (finally)! I think it’s that shuffling back beat and the ‘no man in the world’ sample that must have lodged in my brain. It’s a pretty nifty tune I think and yet it was written and produced by my arch nemesis Steve “Silk” Hurley /aka the man who killed music with his “Jack Your Body” No 1 in 1987. Hmm. Anyway, on reflection it has a ring of “Finally” by Ce Ce Pension to it which is probably no surprise as Kym was the co-writer on her hit “Keep On Walkin'”.

Wikipedia tells me that “Too Blind To See It” was released on the East West Records label who were responsible for a string of dance hits around this time including “Peace” by Sabrina Johnston and “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)” by En Vogue. They all had that simple yet distinctive, generic East West cover as I recall or was that only used if they’d run out of the official picture sleeve? Can’t remember now.

“Too Blind To See It” was Kym’s biggest hit peaking at No 5 in the UK although she would have two further and smaller Top 40 hits by the end of 1992.

“Salt n’ Pepa are in the house and rockin’ the mic!” says Tony Dortie as we move back to the studio for their performance of “You Showed Me”. They’ve all come dressed in what looks like black latex jackets while their three dancers have dungarees in the same material making them look like a kinky version of Rod, Jane and Freddy.

The staging of the performance has a feel of West Side Story to it but the choreographer hasn’t really worked out what to do with DJ Spinderella who seems redundant when the rapping kicks in and is left to wander off with her allocated dance partner and act out an argument between them. At the song’s finale she retreats to the back of the stage, goes up the stairs erected there and assumes a rather risqué position by wrapping her legs around his crotch area. I take it back about Rod, Jane and Freddy – they’d have never got up to such vulgar antics! Or would they?…..

Meanwhile over on the other stage we find Right Said Fred about to perform their next hit single “Don’t Talk Just Kiss”. Before we get to the Freds though, I noticed something that I don’t believe we’ve seen before in these TOTP repeats which was the studio audience actually running across the floor to be in place for the next performance. There’s literally about a dozen people behind Tony Dortie all in a rush, vying for a view of the next pop stars on the show. I always imagined that the studio audience was shepherded around the set, the flock to the floor manager’s sheep dog. However, they all seem like they have been let off the leash to roam (or run) wherever they wish. This year zero revamp has a lot to answer for!

Anyway, I must admit that I for one thought we had heard the last of Right Said Fred when “I’m Too Sexy” finally dipped out of the Top 40 and dismissed the whole thing as a one off novelty hit. How wrong I was. “Don’t Talk Just Kiss” was not only another smash for the trio but it was (SHOCK!) a decent tune to boot! How had this happened? Well, proving that they weren’t as daft as they looked, the Fairbrass brothers (and the other one) got soul diva Jocelyn Brown in to sing on the track. Jocelyn’s vocals had already been sampled for Snap!’s 1990 No 1 hit “The Power” whilst her own 1984 hit “Somebody Else’s Guy” would form the hook for George Michael’s 1992 Top 5 hit “Too Funky”. Here though, she was actually singing on the song rather than being sampled although she didn’t actually get any credits on the record. That seems a bit weird as she’s up there front and centre on stage alongside the band for this TOTP appearance so they obviously weren’t trying to play down her contribution.

“Don’t Talk Just Kiss” would prove to be another massive hit peaking at No 3 whilst their album “Up” (released in March of the following year) would top the charts and go double platinum. Over the pond though it was a different story and the band did indeed become the one hit wonder I had thought they were destined to be. “I’m Too Sexy” had been a US No 1 but “Don’t Talk Just Kiss” stalled at No 76. Supposedly radio stations were still playing that first hit when the follow up was released and there was little interest in any Right Said Fred material that wasn’t “I’m Too Sexy”. They would have no further hits Stateside.

The camera pans around to Claudia Simon up in the gantry for the next link and she advises us of four Breakers three of which are stone cold stinkers starting with Jason Donovan and the “Joseph Megamix”. After his surprise No 1 hit earlier in the year with “Any Dream Will Do” from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, it was always on the cards that some abomination like this medley would end up being churned out to cash in. With the Christmas party season upon us, it probably seemed like a decent bet that it would be a hit but can anyone say that they’ve ever been to a party where this was put on the turntable and if so, did they not leave immediately?!

“Joseph Megamix” peaked at No 13.

Another megamix! Are you kidding me?! What’s this one then? “The Bare Necessities Megamix” by UK Mixmasters?! Sorry? What? Pardon? And crucially, why? This was a Jungle Book medley that actually only featured two songs – “I Wanna Be Like You” and the titular “Bare Necessities”. You won’t be surprised to know that this heap of shit had Simon Cowell’s fingerprints all over it as it was released on his BMG subsidiary label IQ Records. UK Mixmasters was actually some bloke called Nigel Wright who was also responsible for the equally odious act Mirage who scored some hits in the late 80s doing medleys of house records under the umbrella title of “Jack Mix”. He also did that Saturday Night Fever medley earlier in 1991. What a talented guy!

Talking of talented guys, that’s all round entertainer Gary Wilmot up there promoting this garbage. However, when the track was performed in the TOTP studio the following week, another Gary (Martin) took over the vocalist role. I had to look this guy up but apparently he went onto make his name as an acclaimed voice over actor. We won’t get to see the TOTP with Martin as it’s one of those episodes hosted by Adrian Rose who didn’t give this consent for the repeat to be aired so we’ll miss it. So….just for you… here’s that performance below you lucky people!

Finally some proper music…even if it is U2! Only kidding I liked the “Achtung Baby” era of the band and “Mysterious Ways” was the second single to be released off that album. As a follow up to their No 1 song “The Fly” it was a strong if bold choice. There’s plenty going on in “Mysterious Ways” and most of it was maybe not what we would have expected from the band at the time. This was no po-faced, earnest rock anthem like “With Or Without You” but a groovy, exuberant tune that starts as it means to go on with that wah wah peddle guitar effect from The Edge setting the tone. It sounded so much better to me than “The Fly” and should have been a bigger hit than its No 13 placing although it did make the Top 10 in America. U2 would take this path towards dance experimentation again in 1997 with the electronic influenced No 1 single “Discothèque” but for me, “Mysterious Ways” trumps it by some considerable distance.

What?! New Kids On The Block were still in our charts in December 1991? Hadn’t that particular craze blown out long before this point? Well. yes it kind of had. This single “If You Go Away” was a final hurrah of the initial phase of their career before they briefly regrouped in 1994 for a less than glorious return. They would finally return as an entity in 2008 and are still touring to this day (I think).

“If You Go Away” is a soporific ballad that you can imagine Michael Bolton having rejected as too banal. It was included as the only new track on their first Best Of album called “H.I.T.S.” that was released for the Christmas market. I was the chart cassette buyer at the Our Price store I was working at then and have to admit to a gross over estimate of demand for that album. We hardly sold any and my over optimistic ordering left us with quite a few copies to go into the New Year sale when they again failed to sell. Ah well, yuh learn.

The black and white video is meant to make us perceive them as serious artists as opposed to the unobtainable desire of teenage girls. That and the fact that they had changed their name to NKOTB was a giveaway that they were looking for a new audience. For me though, they would always be more T’KNOB than NKOTB (over ordering of their album aside).

“If You Go Away” peaked at a surprisngly high No 9 in the UK Top 40.

Oh God! I’m in “Martika’s Kitchen”! Yes, it’s time for one of the stupidest song titles of the year courtesy of…well, Martika. On reflection, is it stupid or misunderstood? I don’t think I twigged it at the time but the general consensus on the internet is that “Martika’s Kitchen” is actually filthy! How did I not pick up on this back then?! Firstly, it’s written by Prince which should have been enough evidence of its salacious nature to close the case right there and then. Exhibit B (m’lud) comes in the form of the lyrics, for example:

The table is set, the oven is hot
Baby, when we get started, we won’t ever ever stop

and:

I don’t care I’ve got the chair, if you think your butt’ll fit it
You turn me all the way up, I admit it

In my defence, I think the fact that Martika has chosen to wear some very non-revealing clothes in this performance maybe misled me. As for the sound of the song, at the time it seemed very pop-orientated compared to previous single “Love… Thy Will Be Done” (also written by Prince) but which didn’t seem like it could possibly have been written by the same person. However, on reflection, “Martika’s Kitchen” has some definite Prince hallmarks attached to it although parts of it also remind me of Janet Jackson’s “Nasty”.

This was the second single from her album of the same name and although it sold reasonably in the UK, like T’KNOB before it, I’m pretty sure we had plenty of copies left over for the New Year sale. Perhaps I wasn’t that great at being chart cassette buyer!

George Michael and Elton John are still No 1 with “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”. With two weeks to go, they must have been in the running for the festive chart topper but once “Bohemian Rhapsody” was re-released on the back of Freddie Mercury’s death, all bets were off. George would, of course, score a further No 1 with another cover version two years later, this time of Queen’s own “Somebody To Love” as part of the “Five Live EP” recorded at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert the year before. Elton meanwhile would return in 1992 with his “The One” album the title track of which really was a bit of a dirge.

As we’ve skipped the 19 December show, the next post will be the end of year review.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Cathy Dennis	Everybody Move	Nah
2	Digital Orgasm	Running Out Of Time	No chance
3	Cliff Richard	We Should Be Together	Never happening
4	Kym Sims	Too Blind To See It	Nope
5	Salt n’ Pepa	You Showed Me	No
6	Right Said Fred	Don’t Talk Just Kiss	Negative
7	Jason Donovan	Joseph Megamix	As if
8	UK Mixmasters	The Bare Necessities Megamix	Ditto
9	U2	Mysterious Ways	No but I bought the album
10	NKOTB	If You Go Away	I wish they would – No
11	Martika	Martika’s Kitchen	I did not
12	George Michael and Elton John	Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0011myd/top-of-the-pops-12121991

TOTP 05 DEC 1991

Posted on December 6, 2021 by 80stastic

What? It’s December ’91 already here at TOTP Rewind? Wasn’t the last post on the blog from mid November? Well yes but we’ve missed the final show win November due to that confusing scenario of one of the presenters not giving permission for the repeats to be aired. We skipped numerous episodes back in the 80s due to the late Mike Smith not giving permission before his death in 2014 and the issue has raised its head again in the early 90s shows. So who is it that hasn’t given his blessings for these repeats to be aired? His name is Adrian Rose or rather was Adrian Rose. He’s not dead but he goes by a different name now. Or should that be names as I’ve found him referred to on the internet as Adrian Woolfe and Adrian Rose Woolfe. It turns out that he went on to have a successful career in TV production (he was involved in bringing Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? to our screens) though that doesn’t explain his reluctance to give permission for his TOTP shows to be repeated. There’s a whole load of theories circulating on the internet about what his reasoning might be with some tweets on the subject having been deleted so I’m not about to launch into an investigation as to what happened here for fear of any litigious action. However, Adrian’s fellow presenters Tony Dortie and Mark Franklin, both of whom seem very willing to tweet along with these TOTP repeats and answer questions about them, did add to the debate on Twitter :

Put it this way name a Famous Tom Cruise Movie and a stand out scene.that gives you a answer..
— Tony Dortie (@TonyDortie) November 3, 2021

err….

I would add I personally think as well maybe some people were never shown the deserved respect that should be expected..Adrian was a pleasure to work with and a very smart lad
— Tony Dortie (@TonyDortie) November 3, 2021

Hmm. If you really want to dig deeper into this issue, there’s lots more out there online not least from Tony and Mark but my take on it is that when the presenters were being supplied from the Radio 1 DJ roster then their existing contracts with the BBC covered any stints on TOTP but the presenters in the new format must have had separate and different contracts with clauses that required permission for future repeats to be shown but hey, I’m no lawyer…

Anyway, the bad news is that we will miss out on 15 TOTP shows that feature Adrian Rose between now and Sep ’92 but it’s OK as I’ve checked the running order for the shows affected and all the acts on them were crap anyway. I’m kidding! Having said that, there is an awful lot of shite we won’t be subjected to (I’m looking at you 2 Unlimited) but there are some good tunes in there as well. One of the very first casualties of the Rose pruning effect is the now iconic Nirvana performance from the 28 Nov ’91 show but I’m not going there in this post as I’ll try and round up the most notable missed performances in the review the year.

Enough though of those that we missed, how about the ones that we are getting to see all over again 30 years on? Well, after last week’s rave-tastic running order, we’re right back in amongst it again with opening act Shades Of Rhythm and their hit “Extacy”. Now as I’ve said many times before, I was no clubber or indeed raver but this looks and sounds to me like all kinds of wrong. What were they all wearing?! Have they come in their pyjamas?! Nobody could sleep in those surely?! I thought they’d topped the look off with a Santa hat (it being December and all) but on closer inspection they’re like those fur lined Russian hats with the flaps but colour coded to match the rest of the outfit with the flaps done up. If the ‘performers” on stage looked bad enough, what was going on with the backing dancers? Seriously, they look like an off his tits Andy Pandy! Please tell me people weren’t going to actual clubs dressed like that at the time. As for the track itself, it seems like a pretty unexceptional rave by numbers effort to me with the TOTP live vocal policy yet again not helping much. And that title! Surely the show’s producers must have realised what the theme here was?!

Interestingly, Shades Of Rhythm were on ZTT Records. Like many I’m sure, the acts that leap to the front of my mind when I hear that record label mentioned are Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Propaganda and Art of Noise but ZTT didn’t get stuck in the 80s as they had already had huge hits this decade with the likes of Adamski, Seal and 808 State.

“Extacy” peaked at No 16.

Before we get to the next act, just a quick note on how the charts were being handled in this period of TOTP history. Basically, they’ve f****d it! If new producer Stanley Appel was given the task by BBC bosses of coming up with the worst possible way to do a chart rundown, then he couldn’t have imagined anything better than this. For a start, there is no Top 40 countdown anymore just a Top 10. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they throw it away within the first 5 minutes of the show including revealing the No 1 record. We get to see tiny clips of the Top 10 records on screen (be they the official promo video or a TOTP appearance) but we don’t hear any of them as the new theme tune plays over the top of it. It’s insane! Appel seemed to be trying to move away from the show being based on the Top 40 singles as it had been for the whole of its existence this far by meddling with the countdown and having these new features like ‘exclusive’ performances and incorporating the album chart as well. New doesn’t always mean better and this certainly wasn’t.

Anyway, ho hum. On with the show and it’s those old reliables Andy and Vince of Erasure with their new single “Am I Right?”. These two had been TOTP staples since the mid 80s and were still a safe pair of hands into the new decade. That being said, this wasn’t one of their better tunes. The third single from their “Chorus” album, they’d gone for a slowie to follow up on the title track and “Love To Hate You” which had both had much faster bpm. Was it a definite decision at attempting to be a Christmas single? Certainly the staging of this performance would suggest so. Up there on stage with the duo are some Christmas trees, a sleigh and reindeer (of the plastic variety) and a rather forlorn looking snowman. It reminds me of the Santa’s grotto I worked in as Father Christmas in Debenhams back in 1989. I was only 21 but I filled in for the regular guys when they were having their lunch breaks. I must admit to looking at the collection of elves and penguins etc on the floor beside me and thinking to myself “where is your life heading mate?”.

Back with Erasure though and all of that paraphernalia is nothing compared to the fake snow coming down for the studio ceiling in the most unconvincing of ways. Snow has surely never been so inconsistent in its precipitation anywhere in the world as it is in this TOTP studio. I hope Andy and Vince didn’t watch the playback as they were totally undermined by this nonsense.

“Am I Right?” peaked at No 15.

Oh great, it’s Simply Red (sigh)! Hucknall and co (whoever the hell those people were) were never bigger than they were at this point. “Stars” was the title track from their fourth album and it felt like every other purchase made by a customer over Christmas ’91 in the Our Price store where I was working in Manchester was that album. We sold it over and over and over again. Then we went home, came back the next day and sold it some more. It was a monster. I guess it was the default present for all those blokes who didn’t know what to get their partner (see also, Celine Dion, Dido etc). The title track would certainly have helped sell it being a sultry, smooth as velvet pop/soul standard perfectly suited to Mick’s confident vocals. It sounded like it had been written to be played on the hour, every hour on daytime radio – indeed it probably was. Having to perform a live vocal on the show in keeping with its new policy wouldn’t have worried the Huckster at all. However, he should have been worried about the outfit that he chose for the show. He appears to have come dressed as a Wild West cowboy with his waistcoat and sheriff’s badge.

Talking of Mick’s appearance reminds me that we had a guy working as a Christmas temp in the shop who looked a bit like him. He certainly had the long, curly ginger hair anyway. In fact, now I come to think of it, didn’t he tell us that he had roadied for Simply Red before coming to work in the store? I’m not sure he was telling the truth and anyway, he didn’t last the whole of the festive period due to an incident at our pre-Christmas do. I say ‘do’ but I think we all just went to Manto bar in Canal Street which was the newly opened super bar that was packing in them in down at the gay village at the time. I think the Hucknall lookalike got pissed and decided it would be a good idea to tell the store manager exactly what he thought of him via the medium of insults. When we tried to advise him that it wasn’t a good idea he said, “What? Just because he’s the manager? F**k him!” and proceeded with his plan. I’m pretty sure we never saw him again after that night.

“Stars” the song peaked at No 8 and was the highest charting single taken from the album.

After all that talk of presenters at the top of the post, I should say that tonight’s hosts are Mark Franklin and Elayne Smith who pops up on our screen to introduce the ‘exclusive’ section of the show. This was the second of only two appearances for Elayne who, in an interview with BBC Radio Three Counties presenter Edward Adoo back in 2018, described her TOTP experience as “daunting” and that she was “completely rubbish” on it. To be fair to Elayne, there have been far, far worse presenters of the show down the years than her.

Anyway, the exclusive on tonight’s show is a screening of the video for Guns N’ Roses version of “Live And Let Die”. The original was of course written by Paul and Linda McCartney and recorded by Wings for the 1973 James Bond film of the same name. Now I had always believed that the Wings version had been a huge hit so was surprised to discover that it only made No 9 in the UK. It did better in the US where it stayed and No 2 for three weeks and was kept off the top spot by three different songs including “Touch Me In The Morning” by Diana Ross (more of whom later).

Routinely chosen in polls as the best Bond theme ever, it did then beg the question as to why the world needed a Guns N’ Roses version? Well, it was just a song that Slash and Axl Rose both loved apparently so they recorded it for their “Use Your Illusion” project (it was actually on “Use Your Illusion I” for all the pedants out there). Not everyone was happy about this and the song seems to spilt opinion accordingly. In short, it’s musical Brexit. Look at these couple of tweets for example:

Brilliant cover this and even better seeing Axl do it live
— GEOFF POOLE (@venicebeach73) November 19, 2021

See? Where did I sit on the debate? I don’t mind the Guns N’ Roses version I have to say although they did seem to overdo it with the cover versions – “Use Your Illusion II” included a version of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”. Both covers would be big hits in the UK with “Live And Let Die” making it to No 5 whilst “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” peaked at No 2. As with Elayne Smith’s final TOTP appearance, the live performance promo video was the last to feature rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin before he left the band.

I did promise earlier that there’d be more Diana Ross to come and here she is with her hit “When You Tell Me That You Love Me”. Such a huge megastar is Ms Ross that she doesn’t need any backing singers or band up there on stage with her – nobody is stealing any of her limelight thank you very much – but to be fair to her, the live vocal isn’t too bad.

The sales of this single seemed surprising to me. Diana hadn’t had many big hits in the UK throughout the previous 10 years (the notable exception being “Chain Reaction” going to No 1 in 1986 obviously). It’s a huge, syrup filled power ballad which I guess went down well over the festive period when we’re all filled with love for our fellow human beings (supposedly) but even so. It would end up selling 200,000 copies in this country and *SPOILER* only missed out on the Christmas No 1 spot by a couple of hundred units.

Someone who didn’t see those sales coming was our aforementioned store manager. I distinctly recall him having a word with myself as chart cassette buyer and the CD buyer advising us not to get influenced by the success of the single into ordering loads of copies of the parent album (“The Force Behind The Power”) as in all his years of record retail, he had never seen a Diana Ross album sell well. Unfortunately, he said all of this within earshot of our colleague Andy who was a huge Diana fan and took it personally that the manager was dissing one of his idols. I think he actually said something along the lines of “ignore him, he knows nothing, go big on the album”. So who was right? Well, I think it was Andy. The album did sell well over time going platinum with sales of 300,000 in the UK despite it never getting any higher than No 9 in the charts.

Four Breakers?! Oh come on! OK, well we start with Cliff Richard (of course we do, it is nearly Christmas after all) and a little ditty called “We Should Be Together”. After bagging two of the last three festive No 1 records for himself (and he even featured on the one he didn’t as he was in Band Aid II!), Cliff naturally wasn’t not going to chance his arm again and released this…well…this! Very much his forgotten Christmas single, it peaked at No 10. Not a bad return for most artists but this was Cliff we were talking about…at Christmas! This was not a good result!

The schmaltzy video and its plot of an offshore oil worker coming home to join his family for Christmas is almost unwatchable not least for the fact that the two teddy bears that he brings as presents for his two young daughters look really crap! Very badly made. He should have gone to Build-A-Bear! Boo!

After Guns N’ Roses earlier, we now get Salt ‘N Pepa and like the former, the rap trio are also having a hit with a cover version. “You Showed Me” was written by Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds in 1964 and has been covered by loads of different artists the first of whom to have a hit with it were The Turtles in 1968 who slowed its pace right down from its original incarnation and took into the US Top 10. The hit that Salt ‘N Pepa had with it in 1991 also took it in a different direction, making it a sassy yet also smooth whilst the rapped punctuations added their customary edge. Yet another variation on the original theme came in 1996 when The Lightning Seeds released this trip-hopped, blissed out version:

It’s also been covered by Lutricia McNeal and was sampled by De La Soul (the Turtles’ recording) for their song “Transmitting Live From Mars (Interlude)” on their 1989 album “3 Feet High And Rising” for which they were sued by the LA band. I have to admit that although I do know the song, it’s probably the version by The Turtles that comes to mind rather then any of the others mentioned here. I’m not sure I even realised that the Salt ‘N Pepa take on it was the same song!

The festive period in 1991 was fast turning out to be Queen dominated. No, not her majesty and her Christmas Day speech (had the trend to not bother tuning in to that already started 30 years ago?) but the band of course. By the time this TOTP was being broadcast, Freddie Mercury had been dead for just 11 days, the announcement of his death coming 24 hours after his public statement the he had tested HIV positive and had AIDS. Although rumours surrounding his health had been rife for months, the timing of his demise was still shocking.

Queen’s “Greatest Hits II” album had been released at the end of October and suddenly it was a required purchase following Freddie’s death. I’ve never quite got why a pop star’s death inevitably leads to a rush in demand for their back catalogue. Yes, I know sometimes cynical record labels re-release material just to cash in but they do so knowing that people probably will buy it. It always seems a bit morbid. I guess it was a slightly different case with “Greatest Hits II” as it must have been scheduled for a late Autumn release for the Christmas market for some time. Or, could EMI have been hedging their bets what with all those rumours about the perilous nature of Freddie’s health doing the rounds? All I know is that we had loads of the album in stock when it was initially released and it wasn’t shifting until Freddie’s demise and then it went batshit crazy reaching No. 1 on the UK albums chart and, as of 2014, was the tenth best-selling album in the UK with 3.9 million units shifted.

In amongst all of this Queen-mania, a solo venture by their guitarist Brian May was released called “Driven By You”.

May’s only previous solo single had been “Star Fleet”, the theme tune to some long forgotten Japanese puppet sci-fi show in 1983 which I don’t remember at all (probably because it didn’t make the Top 40). I’ve just found it on YouTube and it’s horrible. “Driven By You” sounded much more like May’s day job and indeed was included on Queen’s “Greatest Hits III” album. Wasn’t it first used on a car advert though?

*checks internet*

Yes! It was used for a Ford advertising campaign! Apparently May was asked to write a song to soundtrack it and when the advert was broadcast, it was so popular it convinced Brain to re-record the song with some changed words, an expanded running time and additional verses. The result was the version that was released as a single and that would become a No 6 hit.

It would make it onto May’s solo album of the following year called “Back To The Light” which would also feature his “Too Much Love Will Kill You” follow up single that made the Top 5. However, what I recall most about the album is that it had one of the worst covers ever. Whoever thought that the image opposite would be just the thing that they wanted to promote the album….

What’s the best cover version ever? Don’t bother answering as you’ll all have a different answer depending on your musical tastes which is subjective anyway. My friend Robin used that line in defence of what I saw as an outrageous statement that he once made down the pub which was that he didn’t like any Elton John songs. None. “What?! You can’t say that!” I replied but of course he could. Talking of Elton, here’s his song “Rocket Man” back in the charts but done by Kate Bush. How so? Well, it was a track from the tribute album “Two Rooms: Celebrating The Songs Of Elton John & Bernie Taupin”. The album featured artists like Phil Collins, Sting, The Beach Boys and Hall & Oates to name but a few who all covered songs from the John / Taupin canon but it was Kate Bush with her take on her favourite Elton hit that was released as the second single from the album. She actually retitled it as “Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going To Be A Long, Long Time)” for some reason, maybe to make a distinction between her version and the original? She needn’t have bothered as nobody would ever confuse the two. Kate’s take on it added a reggae lilt and totally reworked it. Well, if you’re going to cover a song, you might as well make it your own as the hateful Louis Walsh would no doubt have said if Kate had done this on the X Factor.

The black and white promo video sees Kate in a more playful mood than perhaps we were used to though her ukulele playing looks a bit suss. Meanwhile, the scene with the concertina player with his arm around her brought back memories of her duet with Peter Gabriel on “Don’t Give Up” to mind. Kate’s version would peak at No 12. Oh, and the best cover version of all time? That would be “Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going To Be A Long, Long Time)” according to readers of The Observer newspaper who voted it as such in 2007. So that settles that then.

The KLF were a bit out of the ordinary weren’t they? That’s quite the understatement I know. Maybe I could put it in football terms. They were like a musical José Mourinho when he famously said “I’m not one of the bottle. I’m a…I think I’m a special one” and just like José, I don’t think we’d seen anything like The KLF for a very long time.

After selling more singles than any other act in 1991 so far, they decided to do a collaboration with the ‘First Lady of Country Music’ Tammy Wynette on “Justified & Ancient (Stand by The JAMs)” ! WTF?! Bizarre? Out of left field? I’m not sure there are words to describe how weird this seemed in 1991. Surely the safe thing would have been to release another dance track in the mould of their ‘Stadium House’ trilogy of hits “What Time Is Love?”, “Last Train to Trancentral” and “3 a.m. Eternal” but then The KLF could never be described as being sensible. Apparently Tammy didn’t really know what she was singing about (she’d never head of a 99 ice cream) and originally thought the lyrics were ‘justified and anxious’ but somehow it all comes together magnificently.

The single with Tammy is radically different from the album version on “The White Room” which was a much less frenetic sound and featured the vocals of Errol “Black Steel” Nicholson which caused us record shop staff some problems when disgruntled shoppers, having bought the album on the strength of the single, returned them when they discovered that “that song about ice cream vans isn’t on it”.

And so to this TOTP performance. Would this have qualified as a water cooler moment had the phrase existed in 1991? I think maybe. So obviously Tammy wasn’t actually there in the studio with Jimi Cauty and Bill Drummond but was she really doing her bits live and in sync from “somewhere in concert in Great Britain” as Mark Franklin suggests in his intro? The staging of the performance has tribal drummers and some extras dressed in towering ice cream costumes with Tammy contributing to the visuals via a bank of TV screens in the background. It was officially bonkers. My eyes though are drawn to Jimmy Cauty (I think it’s Jimmy Cauty) who’s come dressed as Jeremy Healy from Haysi Fantayzee of “John Wayne Is Big Leggy” fame.

At the end of the performance, the ice cream van that was the visual image for the promotion of the single turns up at the back of the stage in which Elayne Smith pops up to do the link into the No 1 record. She does seem to waste the moment though, not making any reference to either the van or the performance that we have all just witnessed. Cauty and Drummond had a history of using vehicles to promote their singles – remember the American police car known as the JAMsMobile aka Ford Timelord that was the central image behind their “Doctorin’ the Tardis” No 1 from 1987 under their guise of The Timelords?

“Justified & Ancient (Stand by The JAMs)” was widely talked up as a potential Christmas No 1 but the death of Freddie Mercury put paid to that although it did go to No 2 in early 1992 which was the year when The KLF retired from the music industry by basically blowing up the whole project.

Now did I say that 1991 was remembered for being a Queen Christmas earlier? I may have jumped the gun as Elton John was certainly no shrinking violet (has he ever been?) when it came to records in the charts at this festive time. After Kate Bush’s version of his “Rocket Man” song earlier we now get the man himself with another of his older songs. I have to admit I’d kind of lost track of the timeline for Elton and George Michael‘s version of “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” being a No 1 hit. In my head I thought it was a chart topper much later than this but I realise I’ve melded together this record and the “Five Live” EP which was also a No 1 but in April 1993 and featured George Michael performing, amongst other tracks, “Somebody to Love” at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert held at Wembley Stadium in April 1992. In addition, Freddie scored a posthumous solo No 1 in the August of 1993 with a remix of his ‘Living On My Own” single. There was clearly a George/Queen/Elton frenzy going on between Christmas 1991 and the Summer of 1993 – no wonder my poor memory couldn’t cope.

So why was this George / Elton live version of “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” back in the charts? After all, hadn’t we already had a cover of the song in the charts recently courtesy of Oleta Adams from the aforementioned Elton John / Bernie Taupin album? Yes, yes we had – it peaked at No 33 back in October. Well, given that Elton donated the proceeds of his single 1990 “Sacrifice” to various AIDS related charities and that his friend Freddie Mercury had just died of an AIDS related illness and that he founded the Elton John AIDS Foundation in 1992, it’s no surprise that “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” was to raise money for 10 different charities for children, AIDS and education. George, of course, was no stranger to charity having been front and centre of the Band Aid single and having performed at Live Aid where he actually sang “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me”. After his death, we learned that he had contributed loads of money incognito to many varied causes.

This live version of the song had been recorded on the final show of his Cover To Cover tour at Wembley Arena on 23 March 1991. The bit where George introduces Elton and the audience’s reaction to the surprise event is probably my favourite part. The single went straight in at No 1 (the fifth to do so in 1991 according to Mark Franklin) and would stay there for two weeks before giving way to the re-release of his old pal Freddie’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Shades Of Rhythm	Extacy	Nah
2	Erasure	Am I Right?	No but it’s probably on my Greatest Hits CD of theirs
3	Simply Red	Stars	Ooh no
4	Guns N’ Roses	Live And Let Die	See 2 above
5	Diana Ross	When You Tell Me That You Love Me	Nope
6	Cliff Richard	We Should Be Together	No we shouldn’t Cliff!
7	Salt ‘N Pepa	You Showed Me	No
8	Brian May	Driven By You	…but not bought by me
9	Kate Bush	“Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going To Be A Long, Long Time)”	Negative
10	The KLF	Justified & Ancient (Stand by The JAMs)	Thought I might have but singles box says no
11	George Michael and Elton John	Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me	It’s a no from me

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/m0011myb/top-of-the-pops-05121991

TOTP 12 SEP 1991

Posted on October 10, 2021 by 80stastic

After last week’s massive rave up of a show, surely the TOTP studio wouldn’t be taken over by mad ravers ‘avin’ it large again this week? Well, yes and no. Dance music is definitely represented by the artists in the actual building again but when you add in the videos chosen by the producers to be shown this week, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were back in the 70s or at The Royal Variety Performance. No seriously, two of the artists on this TOTP had either already been on Her Majesty’s favourite night out of the year or would appear on it in the near future, those acts being Cliff Richard (13 times!) and Right Said Fred (once in 1992). The mainstream acts didn’t stop with just those two though. No, also on TOTP tonight were Bryan Adams (twice!), Roxette and Julian Lennon who’s Dad John had also appeared at The Royal Variety Performance as part of The Beatles with his infamous “just rattle your jewellery” remark in 1963. Oh, and despite having only released one new song in the 90s so far, The Stone Roses are suddenly back on the show with a re-release of a track from their 1989 debut album for some reason. This has all the makings of a curate’s egg of a programme.

Before all that though, what’s the rather cryptic announcement from host Simon Mayo at the top of the show all about? “If you got your tickets for tonight’s show through Keith Prowse, you can watch through to 7.30 but cheer and applaud louder because you are watching for free. Seems fair enough to me.” Eh? What was the story there then? Some dispute between the BBC and the legendary ticket agency and music publisher Keith Prowse? Was Mayo legally obliged to say that? It just seems so utterly incongruous and bizarre.

Talking of bizarre, the opening act tonight are Bizarre Inc with “Such A Feeling” and these guys were definitely ‘avin’ it. In an attempt to stand out from the rest of the rave crowd, they have employed a couple of podium dancers to give a visual form to their track. Watching it back, it remains me of the time that I was working in the Our Price in Rochdale and on a night out found myself in the town’s Xanadu nightclub having become detached from my colleagues. My God! The sights I saw – including podium dancers! I loved working at that store but the delights of a night out in Rochdale I was not prepared for.

Bizarre Inc were from Stafford and at one point included a band member who would find their way into Altern-8 who were also having mainstream chart hits at this time. It all sounds a bit incestuous to me.

“Such A Feeling” peaked at No 13 but Bizarre Inc would return before the end of the year with a Top 5 hit in the re-released “Playing with Knives”.

“20th Century Boy” by Marc Bolan & T. Rex is next having been re-released off the back of a Levi’s advert. The marketing guys at Levi’s had struck a rich vein of 70s tunes to help promote their jeans at this time, having worked through a load of 60s songs at the back end of the 80s. They’d already turned to The Steve Miller Band and Bad Company in their pursuit of soundtracks to their iconic advertising campaign but suddenly they had struck on the idea that some glam rock was now what was required. I guess you can’t knock their choice; T.Rex had lit up the charts with some huge tunes that had turned Marc Bolan into a superstar. Between 1970 and 1973 the chart peaks of their singles read:

2 – 1 – 1 – 2 – 1 – 1 – 2 – 2 – 3 – 4

with the No 3 in the list being the original release of “20th Century Boy”. Come 1974 though, the spell appeared to be broken. The release of the “Zinc Alloy And The Hidden Riders Of Tomorrow” album met with a downturn of sales and a critical backlash. The return to all those complex song titles from the band’s psychedelic folk era when they were known as Tyrannosaurus Rex maybe wasn’t the best idea – as well as the album’s title, the tracks on it included “Painless Persuasion v. The Meathawk Immaculate” and “The Leopards Featuring Gardenia & the Mighty Slug”. The album wasn’t even released in the US and the band were dropped from their label. Bolan split from producer Tony Visconti and the group splintered.

Subsequent albums releases fared even worse but the explosion of the punk movement in ’76 seemed to re-energise Bolan and he even toured with The Damned as well as reinstating his public profile with his own TV show Marc. I was too young to experience those early hits in real time being aged just 2 when “Ride A White Swan” bestrode the charts in ’70 but I have faint memories of that TV show and I think my elder brother had a pin badge with Bolan’s image on it.

Of course, tragedy was just around the corner (or more specifically a small humpback bridge near Gipsy Lane on Queens Ride Barnes, southwest London) when Marc was killed in a car accident when his girlfriend Gloria Jones lost control of the mini they were travelling in. His legacy lives on though with names like Johnny Marr and Siouxsie and the Banshees crediting him as being a major influence with the latter recording their own version of “20th Century Boy” as the B-side to the single “The Staircase (Mystery)” single in 1979.

Simon Mayo’s having a nightmare here. After the weirdness of the Keith Prowse comment he’s started going on about Paddy Ashdown now. Was Ashdown in the news back then? Was this when all the ‘Paddy Pantsdown’ stuff was happening?

*checks internet*

No that scandal blew up in the run up to the ’92 election. I can’t find a Paddy Ashdown story for Sep ’91 so I’m not sure what Mayo is going on about. Surely he wasn’t using the show as a platform for his own political views?

Anyway, the act he is introducing via this political lay-by is Roxette with “The Big L.” The circus themed video for this one includes a scene where there’s five greased up body builder types huddled together on a small circular platform all playing mouth organ. What was that all about?! Maybe the video director had been influenced by the recent bare-chested antics of Marky Mark and his Funky Bunch or maybe even the “Do What U Like” video by Take That (the one with the bare arse cheeks and a ton of jelly) which had been creating waves of controversy around this time? With it being a Roxette video though, it just comes across as a bit safe and lame rather than daring.

“The Big L.” peaked at No 21.

Is it me or is there a bit of an echo in the studio tonight? I thought I’d noticed one in a couple of Simon Mayo’s links before but it seems to have spread to the performers now. There’s a distinct trace of reverb on Sabrina Johnston‘s live vocals on “Peace”. Or was that a deliberate sound effect? Sound quality issues aside, this was up there with Oceanic’s Insanity” in the bangin’ tunes stakes. Sadly for Sabrina, she also followed the same career path as Oceanic in that she could never really follow up on the success of “Peace’ . An album was released and two further singles from it but none of them managed to indent the charts. Indeed, Sabrina’s only other chart entry was when a remix of “Peace” made No 35 as part of a double A-side with Crystal Waters to promote the HIV/AIDS charity album “Red Hot + Dance” (the one with George Michael’s “Too Funky” on it). In later years though, she did go onto appear as a backing vocalist on Lauryn Hill’s album “The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill”.

More Paddy Ashdown quips from Simon Mayo next. Give it up mate! “I Wanna Be Adored” by The Stone Roses is the the prompt for him to get in another Paddy joke (as it were). Had Ashdown done a particular poorly received press conference or something back then?

“I Wanna Be Adored” was the opening track on the band’s iconic eponymous debut album from ’89. So why was it being released as a single two and a half years later? Well, I think it was to do with the legal battle with their then-record label Silvertone. The band wished to terminate their five-year contract with Silvertone whose owners Zomba Records took out an injunction against the Roses in September 1990 to prevent them from recording with any other label. The courts ruled in favour of the band in May 1991 but Silvertone appealed the decision thereby delaying the release of any new material from the band further. I guess Silvertone wanted to make as much dough out of the band as they could before they were their act no longer and so released a number of tracks from that debut album that had never previously been released (or indeed intended for release) as stand alone singles. “I Wanna Be Adored” was followed by “Waterfall”, ‘I Am The Resurrection” and a re-release of “Fool’s Gold” in ’92. Bit naughty that.

“I Wanna Be Adored” was also one of the tracks that my one time Our Price manager Pete played on as the band’s original bass player. The Martin Hannett produced album that Pete featured on never saw the light of day as the band weren’t happy with it until it was released as “Garage Flower” in 1996 against the wishes of everyone involved in the original recordings.

I said in the last post that I didn’t think we’d be seeing this act until her next hit in about three years time. I was wrong. Following her appearance in the Breakers Crystal Waters has moved up the charts sufficiently to qualify for another appearance this week with her “Makin’ Happy” single. The single edit of this was remixed by Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley who I very much see as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse bringing death to music with his “Jack Your Body” No 1 single in 1987.

The video is a typical dance track promo with Crystal’s face superimposed over a background of abstract, dancing figure images and some very literal interpretations of the song’s lyrics – some Rocky Horror Picture Show style lips for ‘She screams Ah ooh’ and a camera for ‘Now picture you with me’. To be fair, most of the lyrics seem to be comprised of ‘ooh-wee ooh ooh-wee ooh ooh-wee ooh-wee ooh-wee’. It’s hardly Proust is it?

“Makin’ Happy” peaked at No 18.

Having gone after Paddy Ashdown for a cheap laugh, Mayo now sets his sights on pop royalty in Cliff Richard. Asking the audience the question who has appeared on TOTP most across its then 27 year history, he mimes us a clue of who it is. For some reason he thinks giving a double thumbs up and waving his arms about as if protecting himself from some falling debris is a dead ringer of an impression of Cliff! Surely the thumbs up gesture would be more likely to be Paul ‘Whacky Thumbs Aloft’ McCartney and although Cliff has been known to do some very odd arm movements whilst performing, Mayo’s interpretation seems very wide of the mark.

As for the song Cliff is singing, I have no memory whatsoever of “More To Life” but then I didn’t watch the TV show Trainer which it was the theme tune for. Apparently Trainer was a follow up (of sorts) to mid 80s yachting drama Howard’s Way but was set in the word of horse racing. As with Howard’s Way, Simon May (not Mayo) wrote the instrumental theme tune for the opening credits but lyrics were added for the version over the closing credits which were supplied by Mike Read (yes, the Radio 1 DJ). In later years of course, Read would pen “UKIP Calypso” for a UKIP dinner that he was attending and, with the endorsement of Nigel Farage, it was released as a single. It was widely panned as being racist for Reads’s mock Caribbean accent and the lyrics ‘The leaders committed a cardinal sin / Open the borders let them all come in / Illegal immigrants in every town / Stand up and be counted Blair and Brown’. That’s Mike Read there, friend of Nigel Farage and writer of racist songs. Arsehole. Read of course was very matey with Cliff as I recall and often did impressions of him. There really was no end to his talents was there?

“More To Life” the song is just bland, Cliff-by-numbers pop and the whole story saga should be condemned to the rubbish tip of terrible cultural ideas.

Marky Mark & The Funky Bunch are up next with “Good Vibrations”. Now I’ve always quite liked Mark Wahlberg as an actor. I know some of the films he’s been in have had bad reviews like Planet Of The Apes and The Happening and he’s certainly no De Niro or Pacino but even so, like I said, I quite like him.

However, I didn’t know until now when I’ve read up on him that he did some terrible things as a teenager like racially aggravated assault for which he was sentenced to two years in jail but served only forty-five days of his sentence. Eighteen years later he apologised to his victim in person who stated publicly that he had forgiven Wahlberg. Now knowing this information and reading an interview back with him in Smash Hits magazine as Marky Mark, he clearly was a prick back then. In said interview he refers to women as ‘bitches’ and the Smash Hits writer describes his conversation as “…the blokiest tirade you ever did hear this side of an Eddie Murphy Live video…” – like I said, a prick.

He followed this up a year later in December ’92, while performing on the cult late night Channel 4 show The Word, by praising fellow guest Shabba Ranks who had stated gay people should be crucified for which both he and Ranks were widely condemned and criticised (not least by The Word presenter Mark Lamarr on the show). Supposedly Wahlberg doesn’t like to be reminded or asked about his music career these days. It’s not hard to see why.

The huge dance anthems just keep on coming as Rozalla enters the game with “Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good)”. Having been massively popular on the dance floors of the clubs in Ibiza in the Summer, it was no surprise that it became a huge hit in the UK charts when the returning hordes went searching for a memento of their holidays in the nation’s record shops. Well, at least we’d moved on from those foreign holiday hits like Ryan Paris from back in the day.

Rozalla was born in Zambia though moved to Zimbabwe aged 18 where she scored five No 1 singles. She relocated again in 1988, this time to London where she worked with production duo Nigel Swanston and Tim Cox and the collaboration bore fruit in the form of “Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good)”. Looking at her performance here, you wouldn’t have imagined that such a huge sound could have come from such a diminutive and slight looking person. She absolutely bosses it though and has the crowd in the palm of her hand when she takes her very sparkly jacket. She would go on to have a eight UK Top 40 hits in total including a re-release of this track re-titled as “Everybody’s Free (Ca$ino Mix)” in 1996.

Moving the Breakers to just before the No 1 is really starting to piss me off now. It’s lulling me into a false sense of security before hitting me with the realisation that there are at least three more songs to review even though the show is nearly over. We start with a man not seen in the Top 40 for seven years but who topped all the Best Newcomer and Most Promising New Act polls at the time of that success. Julian Lennon had already released three albums by ’91 but they had spiralled into a pattern of diminishing returns since the success of debut “Valotte”. Subsequently, his return to the Top 40 with “Saltwater” was quite the surprise. Tackling the issues of environmental conservation and world poverty in a pop song wasn’t unique but neither was it a regular occurrence back then. Obviously there was the whole Bad Aid project to address famine in Ethiopia and wasn’t “Crazy Horses” by The Osmonds about pollution? Then of course there was “Save The Whale” by …erm…Nik Kershaw. I’m sure there are plenty more examples but my point is that unlike sewers and non disposable wipes, the charts weren’t clogged up with them.

Enter Julian with a rather drippy yet heartfelt take on it all with his 6th form poetry-esque lyrics bemoaning man’s capability to land on the moon but not be able to stop children starving back on earth. Musically, it inevitably drew comparisons with his Dad especially the “Strawberry Fields Forever” beginning whilst the Beatles connection was continued by the guitar part that was written but not performed by George Harrison. I quite liked it and its themes seem more relevant today than ever. Like his debut single “Too Late For Goodbyes”, it peaked at No 6 whilst his only other Top 40 entry was his cover of Dave Clark Five’s “Because” for the 1986 musical Time soundtrack winch literally crept in at No 40.

What?! Shabba Ranks was in the charts?! The Shabba Ranks that was discussed earlier for his vile homophobic comments on The Word? Yep, the very same but this was a year before that controversial moment broke so presumably, in ’91, he wasn’t courting the condemnation that followed. Here he’s teamed up with Maxi Priest for a single called “Housecall” which sounds horrific to my ears and which thankfully passed me by at the time. Fortunately we only get 18 seconds of it in the Breakers, a feature which now seems to be a totally pointless exercise in boosting the amount of songs featured in the show (we’ve gone up from 13 to 14 in recent weeks). Julian Lennon only got 24 seconds and the final Breaker Bryan Adams gets 17 seconds! This was ridiculous and presumably just a ploy to be able to say it was keeping up with ITV competition The Chart Show. Utter nonsense (as was Shabba and Maix’s collaboration).

Hang on! Did I just say Bryan Adams was in the Breakers? But *spoiler* he’s still at No 1 isn’t he? Yes, but both statements are true because he’d been at No 1 so long now that his next single was due for release. “Can’t Stop This Thing We’ve Started” chart life would would come and go within a mere five weeks peaking at No 12 whilst “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” was still riding high in the Top 40. This was the time when it really started to get nuts I think. His new (and infinitely better in my opinion) song had been rejected in favour of a record buying public continuing to purchase his previous single that had been No 1 for over three months. This was just bonkers!

In the US, it would peak at No 2 but you know what they put on the B-side of the US release? Yes, “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You”! It had been No 1 in America for seven weeks! Why make it at the B-side?! In the UK the flip was a live version of his duet with Tina Tuner “It’s Only Love”. I quite liked the speeded up stop animation in the video which enlivened an otherwise straight performance promo.

So it’s a 10th week for good ol’ Bry with that Robin Hood song. The video for “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” was directed by Julien Temple which I don’t think I knew before. Bit of a contrast to his punk origins of the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock And Roll Swindle. Apparently it was shot in Sheffield. You’d have thought that he would have chosen Nottingham as his location wouldn’t you? I mean, it’s only about 30 odd miles from Sheffield anyway. And, the day it was being shot, Nottingham Forest were playing in the FA Cup final against Spurs. All the omens and references surely pointed to Nottingham not Sheffield? I wonder which football team Bryan Adams supports? Oh he must have a team. Look at Sylvester Stallone (Everton), Tom Hanks (Aston Villa) and Kevin Costner (Arsenal). Then you’ve got Robert Plant being a Wolves fan and Dave Grohl supports West Ham.

*checks internet*

I knew it! Bryan is a fan of….my beloved Chelsea! Who said he had/was bad taste?

It’s Right Said Fred and “I’m Too Sexy” to play us out but before that, Simon Mayo ends his last show before the ‘year zero’ revamp by signing off with “I’ll see you sometime”. He definitely knew didn’t he?

Back to the Freds and there’s a link between them and the aforementioned Julien Temple as the latter directed the Jazzin’ For Blue Jean short film for David Bowie to promote his 1984 “Blue Jean” single which starred none other than Richard Fairbrass as one of the band for fictional pop star Screaming Lord Byron. As toe curlingly awful as Jazzin’ For Blue Jean is (and I’ve watched it) it still knocks the promo for “I’m Too Sexy” into a cocked hat. What do you think about that Fairbrass?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Bizarre Inc	Such A Feeling	Bizarre Inc? Godawful stink more like! No
2	Marc Bolan & T. Rex	20th Century Boy	No but I have a Best Of CD with it on
3	Roxette	The Big L.	No
4	Sabrina Johnston	Peace	Liked it, didn’t buy it
5	The Stone Roses	I Wanna Be Adored	No but I’ve got the album
6	Crystal Waters	Makin’ Happy	It didn’t make me happy – no
7	Cliff Richard	More To Life	God no!
8	Marky Mark & The Funky Bunch	Good Vibrations	Nah
9	Rozalla	“Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good)”	I did not
10	Julian Lennon	Saltwater	No but I didn’t mind it actually
11	Shabba Ranks/ Maxi Priest	Housecall	NO!
12	Bryan Adams	Can’t Stop This Thing We’ve Started	Negative
13	Bryan Adams	(Everything I Do) I Do It for You	Double negative
14	Right Said Fred	I’m Too Sexy	It’s a final 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/m00103fx/top-of-the-pops-12091991

TOTP 20 DEC 1990

Posted on May 18, 2021 by 80stastic

Xmas 1990 is upon us meaning that we are just days away from finding out that year’s festive No 1 record. This also means that there is precious little time for record companies to stimulate enough sales to get their particular act to the coveted top spot. Activity is frenzied and to paraphrase David Bowie, you can almost see the record pluggers sliding down chimneys.

As for me, I’m working my first Xmas at Our Price and am just longing for some time off after day after day of huge queues of customers all needing serving. Back then, Our Price still had what must now been seen as an archaic ‘masterbag’ system where the contents of a CD, tape, VHS etc were kept filed behind the counter with just the empty case on the racks. This meant serving someone could be quite labour intensive as you had to go and find what they wanted behind the scenes first. If you were on the counter all day, it felt like a long shift.

Added to this was the impending pressure that all the temps felt which was who (if any of us) would be kept on after Xmas was over. As it stood, I had nothing lined up work wise if I wasn’t kept on and we had the rent on our flat to make. My wife was also in temporary employment at a toy shop but we knew that was definitely ending as the store was to close after Xmas. This was proper adult stuff. It came to pass that I did end up being offered a permanent job by the store manager whist I was out for a drink one night in the achingly trendy Dry bar with my wife one evening. I think it was the first time we’d been in there as we were skint most of the time. The manager (Greg) happened to be there as well and he just sidled up to me and said did I want to stay on after Xmas. I immediately accepted and that was that. The biggest phew of all time (or at least it felt like it)! Was it just a case of serendipity that secured my employment (and our rent)? That I just happened to be in the right bar at the right time? I guess I’ll never know now but I will always be grateful to Greg. It turned out that only a couple of us got permanent jobs so the relief was even bigger once this became apparent.

Back to the music though and we start with “Mary Had A Little Boy” by Snap! The fourth and final single to be lifted from their “World Power” album, it extended their run of Top 10 singles by peaking at No 8. Although superficially based around the Mary Had A Little Lamb nursery rhyme, there’s not actually much of the source material on display save for the chorus the lyrics of which paraphrase its opening couple of stanzas. The rest of it seems to be about Turbo B working up the courage to chat up the titular Mary. It’s all pretty nasty stuff as well with him rapping about Mary’s ‘fantasy body’ and describing himself as a ‘ruthless chiller’ and a ‘ladies killer’. Was there a more objectionable pop star this year than this guy? Oh yeah, there was Timmy Mallett of course but even he wasn’t sure about this track, describing it in Smash Hits (as the guest singles reviewer) as sounding “as though they’re scraping the barrel by doing what is basically a nursery rhyme.” Having your music dissed by Timmy Mallett? Ouch!

Three songs now that were all Breakers on the previous show starting with The Carpenters and (They Long To Be) Close To You”. Although their songs are instantly recognisable to us, I hadn’t checked out their chart history before nor realised quite how many of their songs had actually been hits over here. I was thinking it would resemble Barry Manilow who, for all his fame, only ever had one Top 10 record in the UK. Not so Richard and Karen. Although not as successful as in the US where they had three No 1 singles, a haul of seven Top Tenners (of which two were No 2 hits) in this country is pretty impressive.

Oscar Wilde famously said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and that is true of many a music artist. Perhaps the biggest indication of your standing is if you are so well respected that you have your own tribute album. The Carpenters achieved this in 1994 when “If I Were A Carpenter” appeared featuring covers of their songs by artists including Sheryl Crow, The Cranberries and Sonic Youth. This one was my favourite though…

Some INXS now as “Disappear” does the very opposite by climbing three places to No 21. This was peak INXS in many ways, consolidating on the staggering commercial success of “Kick” by pretty much repeating the formula and thereby keeping the record company and fans alike happy. This was pre-grunge and before the mainstream emergence of Nirvana that overnight seemed to make every other contemporary rock band irrelevant. Things were pretty sweet in the band’s world. Michael Hutchence even had a nice, steady girlfriend in Kylie Minogue.

In a review of “Disappear” on the songmeanings.com site, there is a comment by a user that says the song sounds like the theme tune to a kids TV show called Super WHY!. OK then, lets’s see if there’s anything in this….

…no, that claim is just utter nonsense.

Enigma now and there’s no disputing it that “Sadness (Part 1)” is going to be massive as it rises from No 27 to No 6 in one week prompting ideas of it even being No 1 for Xmas. It didn’t quite achieve that but it did rise to the top spot eventually in the New Year for one week whilst spending an impressive seven whole weeks in the Top 10. I have to admit that I thought it was at No 1 for much longer than that. This Gregorian chant inspired piece of ambient, new age pop (if there is such a genre) was soon seen as a massive cash cow by Virgin records who proceeded to flood the market with a series of ‘mood’ music compilations, the most successful of which was “Pure Moods” featuring artists like Vangelis, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Enya and, of course, Enigma. Included in the comments on YouTube for the video to “Sadness (Part 1)” was this lovely little observation:

If you’re here because you remember this from the Pure Moods CD as a kid – I regret to inform you your parents definitely were banging to this song

Dear me! Thankfully this statement does not apply to me. I must stop reading these user comments!

Oh, I neglected to mention that the host for this one is Bruno Brookes who displays some shocking musical ignorance by declaring “The 80s return and remember this film…” before introducing the “Grease Megamix”.The 80s Bruno? The pissing 80s?! Are you out of your mind?! Grease came out in 1978 you cretin! It was based on a musical that opened in 1971 depicting life in a US High School in the 50s – what on earth is 80s about Grease?! What’s that?! Bruno also says it was mixed by Pete Waterman so maybe he was referring to him? No, not having that. Let me listen to his intro again…

…no he’s clearly referring to the film Grease. Just unforgivable. Oh and on checking , it wasn’t remixed by Pete Waterman but by Phil Harding and Ian Curnow of PWL.

Enough of Brookes and his inaccuracies though. Why were John Travolta and Olivia Newton John back in the charts in 1990? It was to celebrate / promote the release of the film on home video. OK, that makes sense but why, if it’s a megamix, does it only feature one song? The actual record featured three songs from the soundtrack ( “Summer Nights” / “You’re The One That I Want” / “Greased Lightnin'”) but TOTP just showed “Summer Nights”. I’m guessing it was a timing issue as the full megamix is 4:46 in length so maybe they just showed the end of it which happened to be solely “Summer Nights”? It does look odd I have to admit.

“Grease Megamix” peaked at No 3. Xmas party anyone?

Back to the songs we’ve already seen now as MC Hammer brings us “Pray”. Taken from his album “Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em” which went diamond (note, not platinum but diamond) in the US. Now either I didn’t know or I had erased from my memory but in conjunction with the album, there was a film imaginatively entitled Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em: The Movie. Ye Gods! I looked it up on IMDB and the storyline is listed as:

MC Hammer returns to his hometown and, with the help of some funky tunes, defeats a druglord who is using kids to traffic his stuff.

WTF?! That sounds…no, I’ve got no words. And of course, you know what’s coming next…user reviews! Yes, I had to go there again didn’t I? Now these reviews were either deeply ironic or deeply insane. I’m not sure which. Here’s one…

“This movie is clearly about the epic, nay, cosmic struggle of good and evil, that films like Full Metal Jacket or Apocalypse Now can’t even begin to address. Even though Hammer is a rapper, and generally that would be a bad thing, this film depicts him as the sword of justice fighting the evil drug dealers of Oakland with his “posse”. Hammer plays dual roles in this film: one as himself (i.e. MC Hammer) and another as the Reverend Pressure who is known for his jaw dropping performances. This leitmotif is similar to the star turns of Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall in films like “Coming to America” where they play multiple characters except that Hammer is clearly better. This film also has a really important message: say yes to Jesus and Hammer, no to drugs and violence. I cannot imagine a film that does a better job of capturing the essence of the nineties, except perhaps Cool As Ice. Sadly, however, this film was overlooked by the Academy.”

Wow! A lot to unpack there but basically Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em: The Movie is better than Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now according to somebody called cindi0724. Not only that but it can only be eclipsed by the film Cool As Ice which of course was Vanilla Ice’s acting debut. Starting to see a theme in cindi0724’s thinking yet? I like the way she notes that the film was ‘overlooked by the Academy’. Overlooked?! Completely disregarded and ignored and with good reason more like.

Want to hear another review? Here’s someone called Pilgurn’s take on MC Hammer’s film:

“Without a doubt sending out an inspiring message to the youth of all our great cities around the globe. Just to free your legs and to dance and rap your way through disputes and even into a girls heart. Absolutely fantastic bombastic, watch it any time you wanna get jiggy.”

As a mantra for life, it’s hard to argue against freeing your legs and dancing and rapping your way through disputes isn’t it?

“Pray” peaked at No 8.

After the “Grease Megamix”, we now get another 50s inspired medley, this time courtesy of Status Quo. Unlike Enigma who took 26 years to record “Sadeness (Part II)”, the Quo only took 80 days to release “The Anniversary Waltz (Part II)” as the follow up to Part I. To put this in context, Michael Palin managed to circumnavigate the world in 80 days back in 1989 whilst it took Rick, Francis and co the same amount of time to come up with some money for old rope, Jive Bunny style medley bullshit. Quite the achievement.

Following Part 1’s formula to the letter, this was some rock ‘n’ roll standards from the likes of Buddy Holly, The Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry all cobbled together but unlike Jive Bunny – and this was the band’s crucial differential – they were all recorded live. There was even a a small sketch of a rabbit on the record sleeve to make the point. You weren’t fooling anybody boys – this was unmitigated shite. Even so, their army of fans still bought enough of it to send it to No 16 in the charts proving you can actually fool all of the people all of the time if they are Quo fans.

OK so this was the last TOTP to be broadcast before the Xmas Day show (which I won’t be reviewing as there’s nothing in there that I haven’t already passed comment on) but when did we actually find out the Xmas No 1 for 1990? Well, it was officially announced on Sunday 23rd December 1990 meaning the chart run down featured in this programme did NOT tell us who it was. All of which was just as well for Cliff Richard as he was only at No 2 by this point with “Saviour’s Day”. Was it this this TOTP performance that ensured he got enough last minute sales to get over the line? Possibly. We know that he also did The Des O’Connor Show in the run up to Xmas which Andy, the singles buyer at the Our Price store where I was working, put great stock in and predicted it would win Cliff the race.

Aside from being his 13th No 1 record, “Saviour’s Day” was also the single that meant that he was the first recording artist to achieve a chart topper in five different decades – a fact that was much trumpeted at the time I recall. He would only last one week at the top due to some dastardly, cunning ploy by Iron Maiden to manipulate the singles sales in the slowest week of the year after the Xmas rush but that’s all for a future post.

Close but no cigar time for Vanilla Ice as “Ice Ice Baby” will fall just short of becoming the Xmas No 1 by one week despite it spending its fourth week at the top here. He would follow up that single’s success by releasing a cover of Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” in the new year which would make the Top 10 but it was all down hill from then on in with no subsequent releases even making the Top 20 over here….until that Jedward mash up thing in 2010 but let’s not go there again.

Inevitably after two megamix singles already on the show, we end with the most famous medley transgressors of them all. “The Crazy Party Mixes” was the seventh (!) hit for Jive Bunny And The Mastermixers who couldn’t resist the lure of Xmas and just had to release a festive party single to delight us all. It was taken from an album called “It’s Party Time” (of course it was) and, like all their releases, it was hateful.

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

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Snap!	Mary Had A Little Boy	Nope
2	The Carpenters	They Long To Be (Close To You)	No but we all have a Carpenters Greatest Hits CD don’t we?
3	INXS	Disappear	Not the single but I have it on something somewhere I think
4	Enigma	Sadness (Part 1)	No
5	John Travolta and Olivia Newton John	Grease Megamix	Negative
6	MC Hammer	Pray	Nah
7	Status Quo	The Anniversary Waltz (Part II)	Are you joking me?
8	Cliff Richard	Saviour’s Day	Hell no!
9	Vanilla Ice	Ice Ice baby	No No baby
10	Jive Bunny And The Mastermixers	The Crazy Party Mixes	And once again Hell no!

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/m000v4b8/top-of-the-pops-20121990

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?

TOTP 06 DEC 1990

Posted on April 23, 2021 by 80stastic

We’ve finally hit December 1990 here at TOTP Rewind and that can only mean one thing, the Xmas rush is on and I don’t just mean that scramble to find presents for family and friends – there is also the race for the Xmas No 1 to consider. This was definitely still a thing back then before it was hijacked and devalued by X Factor winners and latterly some bloke going on about sausage rolls every Yuletide. As such, the Top 40 is awash with new songs frantically looking for those all important sales that could make them a festive chart topper. As host Mark Goodier says at the top of the show “Tonight we may well see the song which is the Xmas No 1 so stay tuned”. Eyes down then (or should that be prick up your ears) as we find out who’s in the running…

…well surely not this lot?! Twenty 4 Seven featuring Captain Hollywood had been Top 10 in our charts with their single “I Can’t Stand It” just a couple of months prior to this but their chances of being the Xmas No 1 with a song that was just some more Eurodance pap were slim to non existent. The performance of their single “Are You Dreaming” here is….excruciating frankly.

The three lads in the group bounce on stage and start jive talking about dreams of cars, money and girls until one of them adopts the moral high ground when he interjects with “Yo wait a minute man, you better think about the world”. WTF?! What’s that supposed to mean? The world is a pretty big subject really don’t you think? Care to narrow it down a bit? Are we talking the environment here? Or politics? World peace maybe? What?! The whole thing reminds me of this image on Twitter that went viral a few years ago…

The rest of the song seems to be a jumble of influences and steals. The ‘oaah oh oh oh’ chant in the chorus is very similar to “Montego Bay” by Bobby Bloom (and later covered by Amazulu) whilst the lyrics seem to have stolen from Kajagoogoo (‘Eye to eye from you to me …eye to eye from me to you”) and there is a zeitgeist moment when an obligatory Vanilla Ice theme emerges (“(yeah) dreams can be very nice (yeah) Sometimes hot sometimes ice cold (yeah)”). Just pants. Get off!

“Are You Dreaming” peaked at No 17 – miles away from the Xmas No 1 title.

Now this next song had a better chance of…ahem…pulling off a Xmas No 1 as it were (Fnarr! Fnarr!) although it would have been a controversial one. In its favour, it was by a genuine pop music heavyweight, a superstar of the genre in Madonna. Against its chances were its sexually provocative sound and lyrics. “Justify My Love” was one of two new songs released from Madge’s first ever Greatest Hits album “The Immaculate Collection” (the other was “Rescue Me” which I mentioned in the post for the previous week’s TOTP). Written with Lenny Kravitz and Ingrid Chavez, the lyrics didn’t hold back and Madonna’s almost total delivery of them as a spoken word whisper created an almost threatening vibe to the song:

I want to run naked in a rainstorm
Make love in a train cross-country
You put this in me
So now what, so now what?

I don’t want to be your mother
I don’t want to be your sister either
I just want to be your lover
I want to be your baby
Kiss me, that’s right, kiss me

OK, OK steady on. We haven’t even got to the video yet! Ah yes, that video. Clearly the promo film that TOTP uses was not the official video for the single which was deemed far to explicit for pre-watershed broadcast so instead we got a compilation of scenes from her previous hits. To be fair, there did seem to be some attempt to co-ordinate the scenes chosen with the music (Madonna cavorting about in the waves from “Cherish” for example) but it was nothing compared to the banned video. Shot entirely in black and white, it had a European, art house feel to it and included imagery of sadomasochism, voyeurism and bisexuality alongside some actual (albeit brief) nudity, all designed to push back the barriers of what a pop promo could /should be. All very deliberate and yet designed to be defensible as well as controversial – Madonna would argue that all the women characters in her videos are sexually in control.

The film would be released as a stand alone video single (imagine that all you kids brought up on YouTube with instant access to anything ever recorded) and would sell over one million copies world wide. I certainly recall the Our Price I was working in stocking it and it being quite a big deal as it had an 18 certificate.

In a 1991 interview with Q magazine, Lenny Kravitz had this to say about “Justify My Love” and working with Madonna:

“I think it’s a classic of its type, like an old Donna Summer song. And I like Madonna a lot. She’s the best; the queen of what she does. She’s very articulate, elegant, and she has taste up the ass. It’s unbelievable.”

‘Taste up the ass’?! Oh give it a rest Lenny!

“Justify My Love” would peak at No 2 – close but no cigar Madge.

Oh this is just a great song and one that will always remind me of this time of my life. The Farm were already bona fide chart stars by this time courtesy of their previous Top 10 single “Groovy Train” but “All Together Now” completely sealed the deal. But this was more than just a chart hit, more than just a catchy pop song. Written about the unofficial truce in 1914 during WWI when British and German troops came out of the trenches to play football with each other for Christmas, it also combines a piece of classical music in its structure via its use of ‘Pachelbel’s Canon’ by the German Baroque composer Johann Pachelbel. Once I realised this, Pachelbel would be my go to classical artist for those specialist music mornings that Our Price insisted upon during the week when I was first working there.

Going back to the lyrical subject matter, we were all now familiar with the truce story thanks to Paul McCartney’s “Pipes Of Peace” single but The Farm had actually beaten him to it in terms of writing a song about it when they recorded a very different version of the song (called “No Man’s Land”) for a Peel session back in 1983.

Fast forward 7 years and with Suggs of Madness as their producer, they returned to that Peel session track and turned it into “All Together Now”. It even had the brilliant fellow scouser Pete Wylie on backing vocals. What’s not to like?!

The song is very closely associated with football having been co-opted by many a team (including Everton FC) and to promote both the Euro 2004 and 2006 World Cup tournaments. Beyond that though, it has soundtracked charity work like Operation Shoebox which sends gifts in shoeboxes to soldiers serving in Afghanistan. When lead singer Peter Hooton returned to his former school in Bootle, Merseyside in later life, the children there sang his song and read out WWI poetry. Like I said, more than just a pop song.

At one point, it looked like “All Together Now” with its unity and anti-war themes might have a genuine tilt at being the Xmas No 1 but would eventually run out of steam peaking at No 4. Perhaps the ultimate Xmas No 1 that never was?

One of the biggest break out stars of the year next. Did MC Hammer have a serious shot at the Xmas No 1 spot? “Pray” was the third single to be lifted from his “Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em” album and after pinching from Rick James for “U Can’t Touch This” and the Chi-Lites for “Have You Seen Her”, this time Hammer picks the pocket of Prince for a prominent sample of “When Doves Cry”. I say pickpockets but Prince did actually authorise the use of the sample, the first in fact of just a handful that he would allow.

This was very much in the mould of “U Can’t Touch This” but I found it all a bit dull and repetitive. Repetitive? Yes, check out this piece of trivia I found on Wikipedia:

The word ‘pray’ is mentioned 147 times during the song, setting the record for the number of times a song title is repeated in an American Top 40 hit.

I wasn’t alone in my thinking. Reviewed in Smash Hits by no less a musical authority than Timmy Mallett, the annoying little git described it as ‘awful’ and a ‘messy noise’. Of course he couldn’t resist the open goal that was MC Hammer’s name:

“I think he’s got a great name though. MC Mallett would be even better than MC Hammer but I’m MC Mallett”.

Timmy Mallett there, the dickhead’s dickhead.

“Pray” was never a serious Xmas No 1 contender peaking just inside the Top 10 at No 8 although it was a No 2 record in the US.

And just like that the game was up. After correctly predicting that The Farm would have a Top 5 hit with “All Together Now” earlier, Mark Goodier amazingly managed to be right twice in the space of a few minutes as *spoiler alert* we do get to hear the Xmas No 1 for 1990 on this very show. Of course, it had to be Cliff Richard didn’t it? This was peak Cliff wins Xmas time. After securing the festive chart topper just two years before with “Mistletoe And Wine”, here he was again with another mawkish, horrible effort in “Saviour’s Day”. In some ways it was a hat trick of Xmas No 1s as he’s appeared on the Band Aid II record in 1989. If pressed, I would have to say it was marginally less annoying than “Mistletoe And Wine” but again, it would be a case of splitting arse hairs.

He’s, of course, backed a by a choir of extras including that bloke from Modern Romance (again) and can’t resist doing that weird arm waving thing he always does. The gaelic whistle bit (which sounds like an attempt to mimic Simple Minds take on Irish folk song “She Moved Through the Fair” when they released “Belfast Child”) prompts Cliff to stand next to the whistle player and attempt to ‘play’ his microphone in the same way. Oh God, my eyes hurt. Also, what is he wearing? That silver jacket makes him resemble that Honey G woman who tried to convince us (and herself) that she was a rapper on X Factor a few years ago. This is just all kinds of wrong.

In the run up to the Xmas chart, a TV news crew (Granada?) visited our shop to talk to the people on the front line selling the records about who we thought would be the Xmas No 1. They interviewed the singles buyer who was Andy (another Our Price legend) who loved all the attention. He once just about pushed me out of the way to get to serve actress Barbara Knox who played Rita Fairclough in Coronation Street so he wasn’t going to miss out on this opportunity! Andy correctly predicted that Cliff would be the Xmas No 1 on account of the sales he would generate from appearing on The Des O’Connor Show. I so wish I could find the interview on line but despite extensive searching, I have turned up a blank.

TOTP were still sticking with the Top 5 albums feature that they had started in the Summer and so here are the best selling albums for November 1990:

Elton John – “The Very Best Of Elton John”

2. Phil Collins – “Serious Hits …Live!”

3. The Beautiful South – “Choke”

4. Paul Simon – “The Rhythm Of The Saints”

5. Madonna – “The Immaculate Collection”

A couple of things to note here. Madonna’s “The Immaculate Collection” was already starting to show its huge sales potential and sure enough, it would end up being the best selling album of the whole year in the UK despite having only been released on Nov 9th.

Secondly, can anyone make sense of Mark Goodier’s comment here?

“No 1 artist album in November, Elton John The Very Best Of Elton John …a sort of greatest hits collection”

Yes, thanks Mark. An album called ‘The Very Best Of…’ really didn’t require the qualifying statement ‘a sort of greatest hits collection’!!

RIght, where are we up to with the Snap! single release schedule of 1990? One of the most dominant charts acts of the year were onto their fourth hit with the release of “Mary Had A Little Boy”. This was the last single to be lifted from their “World Power” album and was based around the ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ nursery rhyme but now I’m wondering if this track was specifically chosen as Xmas approached with one eye on a “Mary’s Boy Child” Boney M vibe. Maybe not.

This didn’t do anything for me and after a Megamix single early the next year had been and gone, I would have bet money that would have been the last we would have seen of Snap! but I hadn’t reckoned on rhythm being a dancer two years later.

Much like MC Hammer earlier, their run of Top 10 singles was maintained when “Mary Had A Little Boy” made it to No 8 but it was never going to seriously trouble Cliff.

Right, if it’s 1990 then there must be a New Kids On The Block record in the charts and indeed there is. “This One’s For The Children” was their eighth (!) Top 10 hit of the year and was clearly aimed at the Xmas market being a track from their “Merry, Merry Christmas” album and all. It is also possibly the most saccharine, schmaltzy dollop of shite it has ever been my misfortune to hear. It’s as if “We Are The World”(hardly a lyrical masterpiece itself) had been re-written by a six year old. Look at these lyrics:

There are some people living in this world
They have no food to eat, they have no place to go

or these…

Many people are happy and many people are sad
Some people have many things that others can only wish they had

For the love of God! Actually, God does get a name check later:

This one’s for the children
May God keep them in His throne

Just unbearable.

They must have thought they had a genuine chance of being the Xmas No 1 with this but even Cliff would have baulked at this sentimental crap. “This One’s For The Children” peaked at No 9 and would see out not just 1990 but also T’KNOB’s imperial phase. They would never be as popular again. Phew!

After Goodier does a spoonerism in his Top 10 countdown when he says “Kinky Boots” is up 5 at No 9 (it’s the other way round Mark, up 9 at No 5), we get to Vanilla Ice who is not only still at No 1 but also “rapping totally live” in the studio! Would this have been a big deal back in the day? I think it might have been you know. Ice does a good job of performing “Ice Ice Baby” as well alongside his trio of backing dancers plus a DJ. Pretty nifty moves and rhymes. Right, I can’t be seen to be endorsing Vanilla Ice so to even it up, here is his atrocious rhyming message for all the readers of Smash Hits back then :

“Yo, this is Vanilla Ice, Just chillin’ like Bob Dylan, And maxin’ like Michael Jackson on Smash Hits Baby!”

Oof!

Still, Vanilla Ice looked a good bet for staying at No 1 until Xmas and he would prove to be Cliff’s stiffest competition. The race for that coveted spot would go right to the wire.

The play out video is “24 Hours” by Betty Boo and is surely the least remembered of her trio of hit singles in 1990. Nowhere near as good as either “Doin’ The Do” or “Where Are You Baby” it would stall at No 25. Betty’s profile didn’t take an immediate nose dive though as she was voted that year’s best British Breakthrough Act at the 1991 BRIT Awards. However, a lip-synching scandal whilst on tour in Australia combined with caring for her mother when she was diagnosed with cancer meant a pause would have to be inserted into her pop career, a pause from which she would never really recover as a recording artist.

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

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Twenty Four Seven featuring Captain Hollywood	Are You Dreaming	Not dreaming, having a nightmare more like – no
2	Madonna	Justify My Love	No but I have that Immaculate Collection CD it’s included on
3	The Farm	All Together Now	I was sure I had but the singles box says no
4	MC Hammer	Pray	Nah
5	Cliff Richard	Saviour’s Day	Hell no!
6	Snap!	Mary Had A Little Boy	Nope
7	New Kids On The Block	This One’s For The Children	See 5 above
8	Vanilla Ice	Ice Ice baby	No No baby
9	Betty Boo	24 Hours	No

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000ty1q/top-of-the-pops-06121990

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?

TOTP 11 OCT 1990

Posted on March 19, 2021 by 80stastic

Hello and welcome back to 1990, the year when the charts were infested by cruddy Eurodance pop, the Bleep ‘n’ Bass phenomenon, old pop standards of yesteryear revitalised by their use in adverts and mega hits propelled to massive sales off the back of their inclusion on box office breaking film soundtracks. Oh, and ruddy New Kids On The Block and those pesky ninja turtle creatures. However, giving a massive pale (and possibly black nail varnished) middle finger to all of this are Goth gods The Sisters Of Mercy who stride back into the TOTP studio this week with their latest hit “More”. Yes, proving that Goth was still relevant, Andrew Eldritch and co released their first single since 1988’s ‘Lucretia My Reflection”. It’s actually the lead single off their album “Vision Thing” talking of which – get this. How many albums do you reckon The Sisters Of Mercy have released during their 40 odd years career? I mean proper, studio albums, not Best Ofs nor EPs. It’s three.THREE! And this one, “Vision Thing released in November 1990, is the most recent one! Not keen on hard work our Andrew is he? in November 2016 when interviewed by the TeamRock website, he said of his release slumber:

“I can tell you one thing – if Donald Trump actually does become President, that will be reason enough for me to release another album. I don’t think I could keep quiet if that happened.”

Well, Andrew, ‘The Donald’ has been and gone (thank God!) and still no new album from you laddie. They seem to have committed themselves to being a perennial touring band from what I can work out but if they never have any new material to play, have they made themselves a nostalgia circuit band by default?

“More” must have passed me by at the time as I have no recollection of it at all but it has all their usual Sisters trademarks. Eldritch’s unearthly vocals, the dark, chugging guitar sound and the cauldron of shrieking vocals emanating from the almost Macbethian trio of backing singers. Apparently the track was co-written by Jim Steinman, he of Meatloaf fame. Want to hear The Loaf’s version of it? If you must…

Enough of all that! What we need now is something completely wholesome to counteract the creepy, gothic stuff and what could be more wholesome than Cliff Richard?! Cliff was still plundering tracks from his “From A Distance: The Event” live album and after “Silhouettes ” just the other week, came the title track. It was originally recorded by Nanci Griffith of course (though not actually written by her) on her “Lone Star State Of Mind” album. Listen to her restrained and pure rendition of it here on the Letterman show….

and then contrast it with the pig’s ear that Cliff makes of it below…

He’s ruined it with all that grandstanding and those lumbering drum fills and synth refrains – very similar to the desecration he inflicted on traditional Christmas carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem” when he did his own arrangement of it called “Little Town”. Nasty. And who are all those people up there on stage with him? It looks like the worst episode of Glee you’ve ever seen!

Cliff’s treatment of “From A Distance” made No 11 but it was topped by Bette Midler’s version a year later which peaked at No 6.

Ah. I wasn’t expecting The Chimes to be back on the show with “Heaven” after it was a Breaker last week. Consequently, I’ve very little left to say about it (and I didn’t have much in the first place). Singer Pauline Henry of course went on to have a string of hits in the mid 90s on her own, the biggest of which was a cover of Bad Company’s “Feel Like Making Love”. If you search for The Chimes on Amazon, as well as the original and Cherry Red deluxe edition of their album, you also get a result for something called “Heaven – Very Best Of Pauline Henry And The Chimes” which seems like a very cynical marketing trick to me. Surely both artists stood independently of each other without needing to mash them together. I recall A&M doing a similar thing with a Sting / The Police Best Of album. I’m trying to think of other examples now. Oh yes, there’s one for David Grant & Jaki Graham as well but I guess they did record two actual duets together at least. A tenner says that there must be a Best Of Kajagoogoo and Limahl in existence as well.

“Heaven ” peaked at No 24.

The year of New Kids On The Block still has some legs in it yet I’m afraid. This was their seventh hit of the year and after the 70s soul sound of The Chi-Lites returned to the UK Top 40 in 1990 courtesy of Paul Young and MC Hammer covers, now we had some Philly Soul with T’KNOB’s take on “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” by The Delfonics.

This was actually a double A-side single with the other track being “Let’s Try It Again” which was taken from their “Step By Step” album. Presumably, the two songs were twinned together to help stimulate sales of two of the band’s albums as “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” was from their 1986 self titled debut album. Those dastardly record companies at it again! Apparently, “Let’s Try It Again” (which I don’t think I’ve ever heard as all the airplay went to “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)”) was the beginning of the end for the band’s phenomenal appeal. It was their first single since 1986’s “Stop It Girl” that failed to peak within the US Top 40. Many put their decent down to over saturation – did the world really need the New Kids animated cartoon series that tonight’s host Bruno Brookes mentions? Talking of Bruno, he gets into a right muddle with his intro for them when he forgets to mention the song title and when he corrects this in his outro, he name checks the wrong A-side. Piss poor as ever Bruno.

“Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” / “Let’s Try It Again” peaked at No 8 in the UK.

The final six songs on this week’s broadcast have all been featured on the show before starting with The Beautiful South and “A Little Time”. They’re in the studio this week but where is Paul Heaton? Oh there he is! On the keyboards right at the back. We don’t really get to see him until at least a minute in. I like the fact that he steps into the shadows for this song and gives the spotlight rightfully to Brianna Corrigan and Dave Hemmingway. Both had underrated voices I think. Dave had a very pure, ballad vocal whilst Brianna had a most unusual tone that completely suited those bittersweet Heaton tunes. It was a great shame in many ways that she felt that she couldn’t stay in the band but then, without her departure, we wouldn’t have had Jacqui Abbott which in turn of course led to all those marvellous Heaton and Abbott songs.

I saw The Beautiful South live in 1997 (I think) at the Manchester Arena and have also seen Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott back in 2017 at the Hull KR stadium gig. I’ve even seen The South who were what the band morphed into when the original incarnation split in 2007. I think Hemmingway was still in the line up at that point (although he has since retired) alongside the final female vocalist Alison Wheeler who replaced Abbott in 2000. It seems I’m a bit of a fan. Maybe it’s the Hull connection.

“A Little time” will be at No 1 within a couple of weeks.

Another of last week’s Breakers now as Neneh Cherry returns to the TOTP studio for her version of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”. The AIDS charity record “Red Hot + Blue” that this track was taken from would go on to sell over 1 million copies worldwide. Its success would lead to a number of releases by parent organisation the Red Hot Organization throughout the 90s including “Red Hot + Dance” (which would include the one-off George Michael single “Too Funky”) and “Red Hot + Country” which featured such heavyweights as Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton and the aforementioned Nanci Griffith. As for that original album “Red Hot + Blue”, my favourite track from it was definitely this one by David Byrne…

Neneh Cherry was still a massive name in 1990 off the back of the success of her platinum selling debut album ‘Raw Like Sushi”. However, it would take her three years to release the follow up (1992’s “Homebrew”) by which point grunge had happened and the musical landscape had shifted. The album performed poorly sales wise (peaking at No 27) whilst none of the singles from it made the Top 20. However, she would return in 1996 with the more popular “Man” album which included the huge worldwide hit “7 Seconds” with Youssou N’Dour.

Monie Love again? I think this is the third time that “It’s A Shame (My Sister)” has been on the show. Not bad for a single that didn’t even make the Top 10. In a Smash Hits article, Monie (real name Simone Johnson) described the art of writing raps thus:

“Er..well you just write it down. You just put what is exactly in your head down on paper. All it takes is being able to pronounce your words and if you’re a good English student then you could write a good rap.”

That’s it?! OK, well I’ve got an English ‘O’ level and I write a lot of words doing this blog so let’s give it a go…

*spends half an hour trying to write a good rap*

Nah, that’s bollocks Monie. I’m crap at writing rap lyrics it turns out. I followed your advice about putting exactly what is in my head down on paper and it came out like this…

My name is Dickie B, I’m looking at a tree

My cat wanted to pee, so he did it up against the tree

“It’s A Shame (My Sister)” peaked at No 12.

Talking of crap, here’s Status Quo with the “Anniversary Waltz Part 1”. Oh come on, even the most committed of Quo fans must have known this was a pile of shite and cringed in embarrassment when it was released. It’s horrible. Bruno Brookes introducing it by saying that the band celebrated their 25th anniversary with a massive party at Butlins in Minehead just about sums it up! Of all the venues in the country to book for such a celebration, that was the optimum one?! What? Minehead was where Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt met all those years ago? Oh. Well, I don’t care. The “Anniversary Waltz Part 1” was a terrible idea and remains the last time that the band were in the Top 10. Even a re-release of their ‘party tune’ that was “Marguerita Time” would surely have been a better idea?

Maria McKee is still at No 1 with “Show Me Heaven”. Although she never came anywhere near to repeating the commercial triumph of this single, Maria has continued to write and record material. She wrote two songs for the aforementioned Bette Midler on her 1995 “Bette Of Roses” album whilst The Chicks (previously known as Dixie Chicks) recorded her song “Am I the Only One (Who’s Ever Felt This Way)” for their “Wide Open Spaces” album. Of course, we all know that Feargal Sharkey took her song “A Good Heart” to No 1 in 1985 but he also recorded the McKee penned “To Miss Someone” on his “Songs from the Mardi Gras” album. She has also contributed to numerous tribute albums for the likes of Blind Willie Johnson and T-Rex.

“Show Me Heaven” wasn’t her only soundtrack album hit. After that song was recorded for Days Of Thunder, she also contributed “If Love Is a Red Dress (Hang Me in Rags)” for the Pulp Fiction soundtrack.

The play out video is “World In My Eyes” by Depeche Mode. This is supposedly Andy Fletcher of the band’s favourite song that they have ever recorded. Fletcher’s career is an unusual one in that opinion is divided as to what he actually does in the band. In the 1989 “101” documentary about the band, Fletcher himself had this to say on the subject:

“Martin’s the songwriter, Alan’s the good musician, Dave’s the vocalist, and I bum around.”

Whilst that may be tongue in cheek, it remains the case that Fletcher is the only member of the band (past and present) who has never received a songwriting credit. He is also the only member of Depeche Mode who does not sing although he does do something with synthesizers on stage during live gigs. Apparently he is very active in Depeche’s business affairs and has assumed the role of band spokesperson.

Are there any other examples of band members who don’t contribute much musically? Bez of course in Happy Mondays is an obvious one and isn’t there somebody in Coldpay who doesn’t do much (or is that all of them apart from *Chris Martin?). How about journalist Fiona Russell Powell (aka Eden) and photographer David Yarritu who joined the ranks of ABC for their “How To Be A Zillionaire” album?

“World In My Eyes” peaked at No 17.

*Sorry Coldplay fans!

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

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	The Sisters Of Mercy	More	Less actually – no
2	Cliff Richard	From A Distance	…is where I wish to remain from Cliff – no
3	The Chimes	Heaven	Negative
4	New Kids On The Block	Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)	This was not a mind blowing cover – no
5	The Beautiful South	A Little Time	Not the single but I have it on their Best Of album
6	Neneh Cherry	I’ve Got You Under My Skin	It’s a no
7	Monie Love	It’s A Shame (My Sister)	Nope
8	Status Quo	The Anniversary Waltz (Part One)	Sod off
9	Maria McKee	Show Me Heaven	Nah
10	Depeche Mode	World In My Eyes	I did not

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000t134/top-of-the-pops-11101990

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?

TOTP 23 AUG 1990

Posted on February 25, 2021 by 80stastic

It’s late August in 1990 and the new football season is to kick off two days after this TOTP was broadcast. After a rousing performance by the England team at Italia ’90, the country seems to have fallen back in the love with the national game which is experiencing a surge in popularity as it rises phoenix like from the ashes of its nadir in the mid 80s. The same description could be applied to tonight’s opening act who are The Human League. After massive commercial success at the start of the previous decade with the “Dare” album, Phil, Suzanne, Jo and co struggled to replicate that commercial peak and 1984 follow up “Hysteria” was a big disappointment. Licking their wounds, they decamped to the US and hooked up with legendary R’n’B producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis for the 1986 “Human” single which was an American No 1 and retuned the band to the Top 10 in the UK. However, their resurrection proved to be a false dawn and by the end of the 80s, they were in massive decline. The dawn of the 90s saw the band regroup with a new line up and intentions to re-establish themselves in the pop hierarchy. “Heart Like A Wheel” was the lead single from new album “Romantic?” and whilst it did gain them entry back into the Top 40, it was hardly a glorious return to form. The single peaked at No 29 whilst the album struggled to a high of No 24. Its perceived failure led to their long time record label Virgin unceremoniously cancelling their recording contract and the band were out in the wilderness for five years before being picked up by EastWest Records and launching the most unlikely of comebacks just as Britpop was taking hold with the hit single “Tell Me When” and parent album “Octopus”.

Watching this performance back, the band do seem to be in the midst of an identity crisis. Apart from the fact that there were two new band members on view, the core trio of Oakey, Catherall and Sulley appear to be on very different pages image wise. Phil, in the days when he still had hair, has resorted to his early 80s shoulder length cut albeit without the lopsided bit on one side whilst Susan Ann has gone all rock chic with her golden, cascading tresses. Joanne has her hair up but part from that looks pretty much like she always did. Not a lot of cohesion going on there I would argue.

What? Oh the song? Well, to me it doesn’t sound that different to “Tell Me When” which would return them to the Top 10 in 1995. Clearly the 1990 record buying public wasn’t quite ready to embrace The Human League back into their lives at that point in history but give it five years guys. Nowadays of course, the group are stalwarts of the live circuit and indeed, I caught them in concert back in 2019 at an open air gig in Hull where they performed “Heart Like A Wheel” plus just about every other song you could have wished for from their back catalogue. The band were on good form but the crowd were seemingly more interested in getting annihilated on booze and other substances which kind of made for a bad atmosphere. It did strike me though that Joanne and Susan Ann had made a career from basically ‘arm-dancing’ for nearly 40 years – you know, all that rhythmic arm waving they do. It’s a living I suppose.

Move over Whitney Houston – you’ve got competition! Yes, there was a new kid on the block (not not them!) in the huge, pop/soul ballad stakes come 1990 when Mariah Carey appeared seemingly from nowhere with her debut single “Vision Of Love”. Little did we know then that this 20 year old would become one of the biggest selling artists of the whole decade. Not only did this track become her breakthrough commercial moment but it also provided Mariah with her first husband in Tommy Mottola, the then head of Columbia Records who signed her after he had heard the demo of “Vision Of Love” at a record company bash. Has anybody ever punched above their weight in the relationship/looks stakes more than Tommy Mottola?

Anyway, “Vision Of Love” was a huge hit (No 1 in the US and No 9 over here) and introduced us to Mariah’s legendary five-octave vocal range. Ah yes, that voice. The technical terms for her vocal stylings are ‘whistle register’ and ‘melisma’ otherwise known to some of us as screeching. Too harsh?! Ok, how about ‘warbling’? Look you know what I’m referring to – the Mariah Carey effect that influenced a generation of would be singing stars to over emphasise notes and prolong them just that bit too long. I’m not saying she can’t sing – clearly she can – but I always found that element to her vocals to be the wrong side of grating.

Despite the success of “Vision Of Love”, it took Mariah a while to establish herself in the UK. Follow up singles “Love Takes Time” and “Someday” barely made the Top 40 here whilst they were No 1 records in the US. Yes, the album sold well in the UK (300,000 units) but nowhere near what it did in the US where 9 million copies were sold. It wasn’t really until her 1993 album “Music Box” did she really start shifting massive numbers over here when the album went to No 1, went five times platinum and included the No 1 single “Without You”. Incidentally, if there was any fierce rivalry between Mariah and Whitney, there was a show of unity in 1998 when the pair duetted on the single “When You Believe” from the animated feature The Prince of Egypt.

OK, I’ve got nothing in the memory banks for this one. “Look Me In The Heart” by Tina Turner anyone? Apparently this was the fourth single to be released from her “Foreign Affair” album which was pushing it a bit considering the album was initially released just under 12 months previously. Unsurprisingly it didn’t do anywhere near as well as its predecessor singles peaking at No 31. Incredibly, record label Capitol didn’t think even that was enough fleecing of the public for one album and released a fifth single (“Be Tender with Me Baby”) in October.

As for “Look Me In The Heart” itself, apart from being completely banal it also has an embarrassingly awful title. Can you imagine two people being in the midst of an emotional discussion about the state of their relationship and one of them saying ‘Look me in the heart and say that’? I can’t – nobody would come out with that would they? They’d say ‘Look me in the eye…’ surely? Oh well, artistic licence and all that – maybe I’m missing the point. Sadly, Tina was not finished in the cringe stakes for 1990. By the end of the year she was back in the Top 5 duetting with Rod Stewart (!) on a version of “It Takes Two”. Come on Tina. You’re better than that. Look me in the heart* and tell me that wasn’t just money for old rope?

*Oh

My God! I’ve just realised that this particular TOTP includes two of the most heinous crimes against popular music on the same show! Not only do we have a complete git at No 1 (Timmy Mallett /Bombalurina) but incredibly, some 12 months after their first musical misdemeanour, it seemed that the UK record buying public still hadn’t had enough of Jive Bunny & The Mastermixers! You could possibly excuse one novelty record becoming a hit by blaming it on some sort fever that induced a national loss of taste but this was their fifth hit on the trot! What was happening to us? I can only assume that the success of “Can Can You Party” was the result of some illegal chart tactics that involved a massive buying in operation by unscrupulous record company reps.

The monsters behind Jive Bunny didn’t even see the need to tinker with the formula at all. It’s still just a load of hits of yesteryear cut and pasted together and then supported by a video featuring nonsensical and unrelated black and white footage with that f*****g horribly animated rabbit superimposed over the top. And talking of “It Takes Two” as we were before re: Tina Turner and Rod Stewart, if I thought that was bad, Jive Bunny declared ‘hold my beer’ and were involved in a version that featured Radio 1 DJs Liz Kershaw and Bruno Brookes! Thankfully that one didn’t make the charts unlike “Can Can You Party” which peaked at No 8.

Some Breakers now and we start with the Steve Miller Band. The only thing I knew about Mr Miller (and indeed his band) at the time was that song “Abracadabra” from 1982 which I hadn’t even liked that much. So what was this “The Joker” song and why was it in our charts? Well, it had been a No 1 record for the band in the US in 1974 but had never been a hit over here. Cue its strategically well placed use in a Levis advert and…I don’t ned to write anything else do I?

Much was made of the song’s lyrics and in particular the phrase ‘the pompatus of love’. What was that when it was home? Here’s @TOTPFacts with the answer…

What the hell is "the pompatus of love"? Miller heard this nonsense word in "The Letter" by doo-wop band The Medallions, which includes the lyric, "Let me whisper sweet words of dismortality and discuss the pompatus of love". https://t.co/FfdpU92eoX #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) February 19, 2021

Oh, OK – thanks. Anyway, some of the other lyrics, referenced songs including Miller’s own “Space Cowboy” (nothing to do with Jamiroquai then) and The Clovers’ 1954 song “Lovey Dovey” whilst I’m guessing we all knew what he meant by being a ‘midnight toker’.

“The Joker” would go onto become involved in one of the most controversial chart battles ever when it went up against Deee-Lite (more of whom later) and their “Groove Is In The Heart” single for the No 1 spot. Supposedly sales for each single were so tight that a dead heat was called and using a rule that had never been instigated previously, “The Joker” was instilled a the No 1 song that week on account of its sales having increased most from the previous week. This ruling was disputed by Deee-Lite’s record company WEA and it was subsequently scrapped. Chart compilers Gallup later released data that showed that the Steve Miller Band had sold a mere 8 (EIGHT) copies more than Deee-Lite and so were the rightfully crowned chart toppers. All seemed a bit of a rum do to me. Jive Bunny probably had something to do with it as well!

Right, after all that controversy, we need something relaxing to calm us down and here’s a track that fits that particular bill well. “Release Me” by Wilson Phillips was their follow up to smash hit “Hold On” and it sounded like it. It was almost exactly the same song! OK, its got a slightly slower bpm to it and they all seem to sing the whole song in harmony unlike its predecessor which I think had separate vocal parts but its pretty damn similar. For once the record buying public were too aware than to fall for the ‘buying the same song twice’ trick again and it only made No 36 on the UK Top 40. Our American counterparts however had no such discernment and sent it to No 1 for the second consecutive chart topper after “Hold On”.

Look out! It’s “The End of the World”! Not literally of course but this version of the old Skeeter Davis song by Sonia did signify the end of something – this was her last ever single with Stock, Aitken and Waterman. It was also the last single released from her “Everybody Knows” album and after four high tempo, poppy hits before this point, a slowie was well overdue. Sonia had dipped her toe in the ballad market recently with her collaboration with Big Fun on the Childline charity single “You’ve Got a Friend” but this was her first time in that territory on her own. It’s a decent choice of song but Sonia’s version is hardly dripping with the emotion of the original and sounds more mechanical than melancholic in comparison.

I could have sworn that Cilla Black did a version of this (which would have made even more sense of the decision to get scouser Sonia to record it) but she didn’t. I think I was getting confused with “You’re My World”. My abiding memory of Sonia’s version is hearing it piped over the instore sound system in Debenhams in Hull some weeks later. I was back working there as a Xmas temp (after my legendary stint as stand in Father Christmas the year before!) but I knew I had a job at Our Price waiting for me to start in October so I wasn’t there long this time. And no I didn’t let on to Debenhams that I would be leaving as I needed a few weeks work before I could start at my record shop ‘career’ and deliberately misled them. If, by any remote chance, any management from Debenhams in Hull from circa 1990 are reading this, I am so sorry but let’s face it, it wasn’t the end of the world.

That time worn pop tradition of a singer leaving a band to court solo fame was still in evidence as the 90s began. After Nick Heyward leaving Haircut 100, Limahl departing Kajagoogoo and George Michael leaving Wham! behind in the 80s, here comes Lindy Layton ditching Beats International to pursue independence. To be fair, she wasn’t kicked out of the band like Heyward and Limahl were – it was much more amicable by all accounts (Norman Cook even helped produce her debut solo album “Pressure”) but jump ship she did after Cook et al had given her an initial pop platform. It seemed to be the right move when she scored an immediate hit with a cover of Janet Kay’s “Silly Games” teaming up with …erm…Janet Kay to do so. However, subsequent single releases from “Pressure” all failed to dent the Top 40 and by 1993 she did what many others previously had done to revive a career – came calling at Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s door (well, they did have a Sonia sized vacancy on their artists’ roster to fill). Two SAW singles failed to do much business chart-wise and Lindy had all but disappeared from the pop world by the mid 90s.

You can tell from this TOTP performance that this was meant to be a new start for Lindy – she’s got a new short hairstyle and changed her wardrobe dramatically from her Beats International appearance. Her version of “Silly Games” was pretty slick as well. She looked a good bet for a prolonged solo career at this point. Ah, the fickle nature of pop – silly old game innit?

In 1990, Cliff Richard was celebrating the 30th anniversary of his recording career and to commemorate this milestone, he released a live album called “From A Distance: The Event” which was recorded in June 1989 at his The Event concert, held at Wembley Stadium over two nights. Cliff’s version of “Silhouettes“, a No 3 hit for Herman’s Hermits in 1965, was plucked from said album to promote it. It reached No 10 in the UK Top 40. It is also, undeniably, horrible. Not content with inflicting this upon us, the album also contained his next Xmas No 1 in “Saviour’s Day”. Have you ever seen such cruelty?!

I’m guessing that the next tune was intended by the band’s record company as a stop gap release between albums to maintain their profile. It ended up becoming their biggest ever hit. Deacon Blue‘s only release this calendar year so far had been their New Year anthem “Queen Of The New Year” back in …erm…January as the fifth and final single from their “When The World Knows Your Name” album. With the rich seams of tunes having been exhausted from that album and the new one not to be released until June 1991, something was needed to ensure fickle pop fans didn’t forget about them in the meantime. The answer of course was a cover version (the answer is always a cover version) but Deacon Blue took things further by releasing an EP of four Burt Bacharach and Hal David songs called… well….the “Four Bacharach & David Songs” EP.

The track that got all the airplay though was “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”. There was something about the crystal clean production and the vocals of Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh that bewitched UK pop fans to purchase it in enough quantities to send it all the way to No 2. I was one of them. This EP of cover versions idea obviously resonated with Everything But The Girl who released their own EP in 1992 featuring “Love Is Strange”, Bruce Springsteen’s “Tougher Than The Rest”, Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” and Elvis Costello’s “Alison”. I bought that as well.

As for Deacon Blue, although it would be harsh to say this was the pinnacle of their popularity, they would only have one more Top 10 single in their career although they continue to tour and record new material to this very day with their last album “Riding On The Tide Of Love” being released *performs some basic maths calculation* 20 days ago!

If Jive Bunny was the bread in this show’s shit sandwich, here comes the filling and it really reeks! Timmy Mallett / Bombalurina have leapt to No 1 with “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini” and consequently he’s been invited back on the show for another studio performance. What makes it all the worse is that Mallett seems to take it seriously in that he mimes the lines correctly and has learnt his little dance moves. If he’s done it all a bit more free form and tongue-in-cheek ,would it have been less odious? Nah, you’re right. Nothing could save this turd from stinking the place out.

The play out video is a huge tune. Sorry, that should be HUUUUGE TUUUUNE! Appearing fully formed from out of nowhere came Deee-Lite with the barnstorming dance floor legend that was and remains “Groove Is In The Heart”. I know this will make me sound like a knacker but the groove on this tune is immense! These self proclaimed ‘groovniks’ hailed from New York City and were composed of Lady Miss Kier, Supa DJ Dmitry and Jungle DJ Towa Tei and had an image as wild as their hit song. Dayglo colours, psychedelic patterns and huge 70s style platform shoes somehow seemed totally appropriate despite being at least two decades out of fashion.

That track though! Listed in in Gary Mulholland’s marvellous book This Is Uncool: The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk And Disco as one of the tracks of the year, I think I’ll let Gary do the talking for me:

“If I was ever asked to play some crazy DJ version of Russian roulette, where you had one chance and one chance only to make a roomful of disparate people dance or you die – I would play ‘Groove Is In The Heart’ and book my cab home”.

Well said Gary.

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	The Human League	Heart Like A Wheel	Nah
2	Mariah Carey	Vision Of Love	Nope
3	Tina Turner	Look Me In The Heart	As if
4	Jive Bunny & The Mastermixers	Can Can You Party	Can can you piss off please?
5	Steve Miller Band	The Joker	It’s a no
6	Wilson Phillips	Release Me	After “Hold On” you now want releasing? Make your mind up! No
7	Sonia	End Of The World	No
8	Lindy Layton and Janet Kay	Silly Games	Negative
9	Cliff Richard	Silhouettes	Silhouettes? It was enough to give me Tourettes! No
10	Deacon Blue	Four Bacharach And David Songs	Yes, yes I did
11	Bombalurina	Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini	How does f**k off sound as an answer?
12	Deee-Lite	Groove Is In The Heart	Where’s my copy of this?! I must have bought this surely?!

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.

Some bedtime reading?

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