Dannii Minogue

TOTP 31 OCT 1997

Although I know the name Mary Anne Hobbs, I couldn’t tell you much about her other than she’s a DJ. Well, she’s also the presenter on this particular episode of TOTP (the second of only two she hosted but we missed the first one due to the Puff Daddy issue) so a little research on her seems in order. It turns out that she’s had a career as a radio presenter, music journalist and a DJ but that doesn’t really tell her whole backstory. She left a chaotic family home in the small Lancashire village of Garstang to work for and live with a rock band from London on a bus in a coach park in Hayes, Middlesex before securing employment with Sounds and then the NME. Following that, she moved into radio broadcasting with XFM before a confrontational interview with the BBC’s Trevor Dann* brought her to the attention of Radio 1.

*Dann was head of Radio 1 Production known as ‘Dann Dann the Hatchetman’ for his role in overseeing the culling of the station’s old guard of DJs.

Having joined in January 1996, she presented a movie review show alongside Mark Kermode and the station’s rock show but perhaps she is best known for her show The Breezeblock that showcased experimental electronic music and was particularly influential in promoting music from the then little known grime and dubstep movements (Mary Anne even has the show’s name written across her stomach here). She would leave Radio 1 in 2010 before returning to the Beeb two years later via Radio 6. She has also run parallel careers as a touring DJ, a presenter of the World Superbikes series for British Eurosport and as a documentary maker producing a series about biker culture for BBC Choice. Phew! With all that in mind, it strikes me that she wasn’t the obvious choice to present such a mainstream music show as TOTP, what with her passion for experimental and leftfield genres. I wonder what she made of some of the acts she was introducing here?

Exhibit A m’lud. “Party People…Friday Night” by 911. I can’t believe that this would have been the sort of thing that Mary Anne played either publicly on the radio or in private for her personal listening pleasure. This piece of dance/pop fluff was the band’s fourth Top 5 hit of 1997 and the lead single from their sophomore album “Moving On”. Remarkably given the lack of depth of their talents, this lot were building themselves quite the pop career. Watching this performance back, I’m struck by a number of images. Firstly, the surfeit of balloons being held aloft and waved about by the studio audience. It’s as if we’ve been transported back to 1983. Maybe that was deliberate on the part of executive producer Chris Cowey? Secondly, why is lead singer Lee Brennan wearing a jacket with sleeves that don’t fit him? Look at the length of them! Wardrobe clearly didn’t think his outfit through as it made him far more vulnerable to the grabbing hands of the teenage girls in the studio audience. Finally, they seem to have given up completely on any pretence that they weren’t miming when dancer Jimmy strides forward to take over lead vocal duties. Surely that’s still Lee’s voice we can hear? What was all that about? Was there some dissent in the ranks about Lee always being the centre of attention? I’m probably overthinking it – something I never imagined myself doing given that the subject of my thoughts are 911!

Exhibit B m’lud. Surely this horrid 90s work over of Rod Stewart’s 1978 No 1 “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” can’t have been Mary Anne’s cup of tea can it? The trend for nasty dance covers of hits from yesteryear was unfathomably popular around this time. The other week we had Clock getting their hands all over Hot Chocolate’s “You Sexy Thing” and pulling it to pieces in the most disrespectful way and now here was N–Trance following a similar path. As with the aforementioned Clock, this lot had taken a clear decision to pursue a cheesy pop route after more credible dance beginnings. It’s hard to believe this is the same people who brought us “Set You Free” two years before. Since then though, they’d already released covers of oldies by the Bee Gees and Ottawan and now we had this monstrosity completing a most ignoble hat-trick. Apparently, Rod himself gave his blessing to this version to the point where he is credited as appearing on it. He must have smelt a potential big hit rather than the rancid stench of desperation that filled my nostrils. I never much liked his original to be fair though. Written as a response to the disco movement of the late 70s, it was a clever move by Stewart I guess but oh so cynical. Unbelievably, N-Trance would do a version of the Guns N’ Roses classic “Paradise City” for their next single before returning to their former glories in 2001 when they rereleased “Set You Free”.

With Mary Anne Hobbs referring to the Spice Girls as The Teletubbies in her intro, I think we can infer from that she wasn’t a fan. Talking of fans, were they beginning to lose a few what with them only being No 1 for a single week with “Spice Up Your Life”? Even if that were true, it doesn’t stop them being on the show again seven days later – this was the ‘repeat appearances’ era of executive producer Chris Cowey after all and he wasn’t going to miss out on recycling that ‘exclusive’ performance from New Delhi, India. However, that decision means we don’t get to see the Bladerunner inspired official promo video that accompanied the single. Obviously, the promo will have been used by other pop programmes throughout the world (I’m sure the UK’s own Chart Show would have shown it) but it does seem a waste somewhat that the BBC’s premier and historic music show chose not to feature it. I suppose Cowey was trying to rebuild the TOTP brand which didn’t include showing very many videos it seems. The Spice Girls would recover from the knock of their short-lived chart topper to bag the 1997 Christmas No 1 with follow up single “Too Much”. We aren’t nearly done with them yet in these BBC4 repeats.

Now this might have been more to Mary Anne’s taste – the latest offering from Dannii Minogue…erm…sorry…it was just Dannii by this point wasn’t it? Having made a successful comeback with her last single “All I Wanna Do” going to No 4, the youngest Minogue sister was rivalling Kylie in the popularity stakes who was struggling to get the public to buy into her ‘indie Kylie’ phase. Dannii’s follow up single was “Everything I Wanted” and it rather cleverly combined a pop melody with a shuffling drum & bass style backbeat – at least that’s what it sounds like to my unsophisticated ears. Was she going for a sound similar to the likes of Baby D or Dubstar that had garnered commercial sales as well as critical acclaim? If I’m being super critical I would say that I’m not sure about the quality of her vocals but she sells the track pretty well with a more restrained, dressed down image than previously. A tour and a role in Grease: The Arena Spectacular as the character of Rizzo would follow before she returned to music with perhaps her best received album “Neon Lights” in 2003.

Surely Mary Anne Hobbs would have approved of this one? A ‘speed garage’ anthem which was emblematic of a scene that was big in London at the time – this was just the sort of thing she’d have plugged on her The Breezeblock radio show. I’m guessing here as I never actually listened to said show obviously and that seems like a good decision if indeed “Ripgroove” by Double 99 was the sort of thing that got played on it. What a racket! Is this what speed garage sounded like? Lordy! Double 99 were duo Tim Deluxe and Omar Adimora who also recorded under the pseudonyms R.I.P Productions and 10° Below but they are best known for this track which was released twice in 1997 peaking at No 31 initially but 17 places higher the second time around. The rerelease featured the vocals of MC Top Cat though what he is actually banging on about I’m not entirely sure. Something about “bruk whine”?

*googles “bruk whine”*

Well, AI Overview tells me that it’s Jamaican patois meaning a dance move that is a twist on the traditional ‘whine’ or circular hip movements/gyrations with ‘bruk’ meaning ‘broken’ or ‘out of order’. That’s that solved then. It doesn’t change my opinion about the track though. It reminds me of that hit “Incredible” by M-Beat but Wikipedia tells me that was ragga jungle rather than speed garage. Despite working in record shops throughout the 90s and despite all these years of blogging about TOTP and all the dance tunes I’ve listened to, my knowledge of dance and all its genres and sub genres hardly seems to have improved at all. I guess that’s why ‘Dance Collections’ was always the scariest section of those record shops for me. I’m not sure me and Mary Anne Hobbs would have much to talk about in terms of music were we ever to meet.

Now, apparently we’re missing a performance from this repeat – Puff Daddy and his hit “Been Around The World” which has been edited out for obvious reasons. So why couldn’t that approach have been applied to all those shows featuring his chart topper “I’ll Be Missing You”? My guess would be that it was precisely because his hit was a No 1 and to have removed it would have wrecked the natural flow of the show as it worked its way up to the best selling hit of the week. Its place in the running order would have made editing it out look odd and incongruous.

With the offending Puff Daddy removed, we find ourselves in the company of The Charlatans. I’d forgotten that they released the title track of their album “Tellin’ Stories” but release it they did as the fourth and final single to be taken from it. It doesn’t veer too far from the style of its predecessors but there’s a definite tinge of soul in there. However, it does have a bit of a stop-start feel to it, as if it’s really going to swing into something anthemic but then it pulls itself back. Probably just me. We didn’t have to wait an age for another Charlatans album which would appear in 1999 with the intermediate gap plugged by the Best Of album “Melting Pot” which I duly bought.

As for this performance, are my eyes deceiving me or did the TOTP cameras briefly catch an attempted stage invasion that was thwarted by studio floor staff? Could be as Tim Burgess seems momentarily distracted by something going on to his left. After Oasis and Stereophonics both experienced members of the studio audience breaching the consecrated safety of the stage this year, at least BBC security seemed to have got themselves organised finally.

And so to the song that deposed the Spice Girls at the top of the charts after just one week – it’s “Barbie Girl” by Aqua. So, let’s address the controversy attached to this hit which was the litigation brought by toy manufacturer Mattel against Aqua and their record label MCA for impinging upon their trademark and copyrights for the Barbie doll. In a counter move, MCA sued Mattel for defamation. In the end, both cases were thrown out by the courts with a ruling advising both parties to ‘“chill”.

Heh. Sounds like the judge in the case was John Cusack’s character Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Just watch this…

As for Mary Anne Hobbs, this would be her last time as a TOTP presenter which is probably just as well as she didn’t really look comfortable in the role. A mainstream platform in a peak viewing time slot was really taking her out of her late night comfort zone.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	911	Party People…Friday Night	Negative
2	N-Trance / Rod Stewart	Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?	As if
3	Spice Girls	Spice Up Your Life	Nope
4	Dannii Minogue	Everything I Wanted	Nah
5	Double 99	Ripgroove	No
6	The Charlatans	Tellin’ Stories	I did not
7	Aqua	Barbie Girl	Never

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/m002blmk/top-of-the-pops-31101997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 22 AUG 1997

Posted on March 27 by 80stastic

After rotating a trio of presenters in Jayne Middlemiss, Zoe Ball and Jo Whiley in the first few weeks of his tenure, TOTP Executive Producer Chris Cowey has branched out with his choice of hosts. Recent shows were piloted by Mary Anne Hobbs, Phil Jupitus and Denise van Outen. And then there’s this week – the curious case of Sarah Cawood. Having started her presenting career on Nickelodeon, she’d most recently appeared in Channel 4’s The Girlie Show. You remember The Girlie Show surely? It was a Channel 4 late night magazine show that was in the slot usually reserved for The Word and was hosted by a team of presenters including Cawood and a very young Sara Cox. It wasn’t well received by viewers or the tabloids though I always quite liked it, especially the ‘Wanker of the Week’ feature. Anyway, despite those post-pub beginnings, she was drafted into host the BBC’s flagship, prime time pop music show in 1997 but here’s the curious thing – Cawood wouldn’t present another TOTP for nearly five years at which point she was a regular until June 2003. So what was that all about? Didn’t Cowey think Cawood was any good in this 1997 show but changed his mind in 2002? I think she does a decent job for what it’s worth.

We start with one of the biggest and most unlikely hits of the year – “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba. This really was an astonishing hit from a band that had never troubled the chart compilers in their previous 15 years of existence. I’d certainly not heard of the anarcho -punk outfit before around 1992 when I worked with a colleague called Emma who was a bit of a Riot Grrrl and was into them. I’d somehow managed to miss their response to Jason Donovan taking The Face magazine to court for claiming that he was lying by denying he was gay – the band had ‘Jason Donovan – Queer as Fuck’ T-shirts printed which they gave away free with their single “Behave”. Fast forward to 1997 and the band had controversially signed to EMI having left indie label One Little Indian. The decision was viewed with mistrust at best and open hostility at worst from their fanbase and peers with accusations of hypocrisy levelled at them not least because they had recorded songs criticising the conglomerate in the past including contributing to a compilation album called “Fuck EMI”. Hmm. Chumbawamba’s stance was that the move would allow them to take their political messages to a wider audience. That was achieved and then some with “Tubthumping”. It spent three consecutive weeks at No 2 and a further eight inside the Top 10. How did they do it? By coming up with a track that crossed over massively. With its terrace chant chorus and lyrics about drinking, it appealed to the ‘lad culture’ who couldn’t have cared less about the band’s anarcho-communist political views because you could shout it as you stumbled from one bar to another on a pub crawl at the weekend and that was all mattered. Obviously, this move to the mainstream risked alienating their original fanbase but the I guess the band deemed it worth it. It was an irresistible, once heard never forgotten track which had enough going on in it to ensure it wasn’t just a lowest common denominator, appeal to the masses tune. There’s an excerpt from Brassed Off in the intro and a sample of “Trumpet Voluntary” by Jeremiah Clarke in the trumpet solo for a start.

For this performance, the band had to compromise even further by agreeing not to sing the word “Pissin’” in the lyric “Pissin’ the night away” so were left with an uncomfortable gap instead. Talking of the lyrics, I read that it was such a big hit in the US as well (No 6) because American audiences had misheard the words “I get knocked down” as “I get No Doubt” and thought it was some sort of tribute record to the “Don’t Speak” hitmakers. I would say that can’t be true but then America did vote in Donald Trump as their president. Twice. In fact, I’m surprised he didn’t try and use it to soundtrack his campaign. He’s too stupid to understand that the song is actually for and about working class people and their resilience in the face of adversity.

There were some ropey old boy bands in the 90s of which I would include OTT and when I say ‘ropey’, I literally mean ‘money for old rope’. The sheer audacity of their record label Epic to think they could launch this lot to global stardom on the back of some uninspired choices of cover versions. Having had their first hit with a cover of “Let Me In” by The Osmonds (blatantly copying Boyzone’s initial route into the charts), they went there again with a cover of a classic MOR ballad – Air Supply’s “All Out Of Love”. What a lazy, banal and uninventive way to go. In the 2001 film Rock Star, Mark Wahlberg’s character (a singer in a rock tribute band) argues with his brother about their differing musical tastes. Whilst he is into heavy rock, he chastises his brother for liking Air Supply. I think that says it all.

The staging of this performance with the studio audience all sat down on the floor cross-legged, gazing up at the four dullards in front of them reminds me of junior school assemblies. Watching OTT is about as much fun as those assemblies. Only two of the four band members sing solo parts while the other two just do the nerd shuffle on either end of the line up. When there’s the “what are you thinking of?” break down towards the song’s conclusion, one of the ‘singers’ does some weird arm movements like he’s cracking a whip or something. It looks really odd and jarring which is also how I’d describe the decision to call these berks OTT as there is nothing ‘over the top’ about them at all – they couldn’t have been more bland and safe.

Two years on from their No 1 single “Dreamer” and Livin’ Joy were commendably still having Top 20 hits though “Deep In You” would be the last. I’m not sure I would have predicted that continuation of chart success back in 1995 years especially for a dance act when the hits were more about the track than the artist. Tellingly though, despite the presence of five hits on it, Livin’ Joy could not shift significant quantities of their only album “Don’t Stop Movin’” which would peak at No 41 in the charts.

OK, so I have to mention the elephant in the room here which is why is singer Tameko Star wearing what appear to be a pair of marigolds throughout the performance? She looks like she should be cleaning the bathroom rather than singing on TOTP. More ‘Deep In The Loo’ than “Deep In You”.

Here’s a comeback I’m guessing we’d all forgotten about – the return of Dannii Minogue. Or should that be just ‘Dannii’? As part of her relaunch, there seems to have been a deliberate attempt to rebrand her with just her first name in the style of Madonna, Cher and…well…her sister Kylie. I’m not sure Dannii would ever be that famous as to only require her first name although, to be fair, how many other people called Dannii do you know or can think of? Looking back through her discography (which took longer than I would have imagined), it appears that this one name promotion of her had actually started all the way back to her first few single releases judging by their artwork. In Australia, it seems her records were always billed as being by just ‘Dannii’ whereas in the UK she was Dannii Minogue at least initially. However, just a handful of singles in and there was parity between the territories. There seemed to be a definite strategy in place for her return in 1997 to reinforce the Dannii only moniker – the TOTP caption doesn’t include her surname and Sarah Cawood refers to her as just ‘Dannii’.

Nomenclatures aside, her last hit had been the very minor “Get Into You” way back in 1994 so where had she been all this time? Well, she’d got married and subsequently divorced in the space of just two years which had taken its emotional toll on her. She modelled nude for Playboy (I’m sure there were also nude calendars as we were selling them in the Our Price store where I worked) and returned to TV co- hosting Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast show. By 1997, she pursued a return to music and if her name wasn’t any different then her comeback single was. Dannii’s biggest hits in the UK to this point had been covers of disco songs like “Jump To The Beat” and “This Is It” and although “All I Wanna Do” was a dance track, it sure wasn’t disco. This was Hi-NRG with a relentless (if repetitive) chorus that aligned itself well with her new adult and deliberately sexualised image. The TOTP performance plays into that with her movements shown in almost slow motion at some points and a couple of knowing winks to the camera. The single would debut and peak at No 4 but it couldn’t stimulate sales of parent album “Girl” which stalled at No 57. However, she would return in 2003 with gold selling album “Neon Nights”.

Next up are a Welsh band who, like their peers Manic Street Preachers, are still going to this day. In fact, there are a few parallels between the Manics and Stereophonics besides their nationalities – they’ve both released double figures amount of albums, they both play a brand of alternative (for want of a better word) rock music and both are referred to incorrectly using a definite article on occasion though, as I have done, Manic Street Preachers are often referred to as The Manics. On that point, I once worked with someone that insisted that Stereophonics was pronounced phonetically as ‘Steree-off-ernics” but he was a bit of a prat.

Anyway, “A Thousand Trees” was the second Top 40 hit for Stereophonics after “More Life In A Tramp’s Vest” earlier in the year and was another great example of the storytelling ability of Kelly Jones. A tale of how rumours in a small town environment can destroy a person’s reputation, I love the metaphor of matches and trees in the lyrics which Jones cleverly inverts to make his point. Parent album “Word Gets Around” was released the Monday after this TOTP aired and I remember putting it straight back on the shop stereo even though we’d just played it as I wanted to hear it again – I wasn’t disappointed. There’s some great songs on there; not just the singles but album tracks as well like my personal favourite “Check My Eyelids For Holes”. I bought the album and the follow up “Performance And Cocktails” but I’d kind of lost sight of them after third album “Just Enough Education To Perform”. I should probably update my knowledge of the rest of their back catalogue though there is a lot of it to go at with a new album due in April 2025 to boot!

As for this performance, I’m left asking the question of whether there was a problem with security in the TOTP studio around this time. After the crowd invasion of the stage when Oasis were on the other week, this time a lone youth seems to spring from out of the audience to jump around (rather uncooly) behind Kelly Jones before disappearing back into the crowd. Was that planned? If not, where were the floor managers/studio security? The show’s reputation was at stake – I’m surprised that Jones didn’t write a song about that!

And just like that, the first era of Mark Owen’s solo career was over. It took less than a year from the release of his debut single post-Take That for it took come off the rails and was emphatically demonstrated by his solo single “I Am What I Am” (not that one) peaking at a lowly No 29. Now, you could argue that this wasn’t the harbinger of doom that I’m making it out to be given that it was the third track taken from his album “Green Man” that had been out for eight months by this point. However, the album hadn’t sold well peaking at No 33 so the suggestion that punters might not have bought the single because they already had the album doesn’t really hold water. Presumably the diminishing sales caused tension between Owen’s label RCA and their artist as “I Am What I Am” has originally been earmarked to be the fourth single released from “Green Man” but a fourth single never appeared and Mark was subsequently dropped. I said earlier the ‘first era’ of his solo career as Owen would return to it six years later with the interesting single “Four Minute Warning” which peaked at No 4. Although album sales continued to be sparse, his fifth album “Land Of Dreams” released in 2022 would go Top 5 and in any case, his solo career was running in parallel with the second coming of Take That from 2006 onwards.

As for “I Am What I Am” specifically, it’s a decent enough little tune but listening to it feels to me like watching my beloved Chelsea play currently – you think they should be better than they are and you’re constantly waiting for them to make something happen and they never do (you win matches by scoring goals lads not by having loads of possession).

I mentioned earlier the connections between Stereophonics and Manic Street Preachers but the former also has one with this band – Suede. Well, sort of. There’s probably a few but the one I’m thinking of is that they both had hits with very similar titles. In 2004, Stereophonics took “Moviestar” to No 5 while back in 1997, Suede went to No 9 with “Filmstar” – ‘movie’ or ‘film’…what’s the difference? This was the fifth and final single from “Coming Up” (who did they think they were? George Michael? Michael Jackson?) and it was another example of that more accessible sound that had run through the album. Built around one of Richard Oakes’s favourite guitar riffs, its chart peak of No 9 meant that all five of the singles from “Coming Up” had gone Top 10 (maybe they were George Michael and Michael Jackson!). In this performance, keyboard player Neil Codling seems to do very little, at some points sitting there with his hands idle looking meaningfully at the camera. Who did he think he was? Brian Jones incarnate?

Will Smith remains at No 1 with “Men In Black” and his intro piece from the other week is recycled with Smith superimposed over the start of the video again. It would stay at the top for four weeks becoming the sixth best selling single in the UK that year. The film of the same name was also a smash hit with opening weekend box office receipts of $51 million making it the third highest grossing opening weekend ever at the time. I caught the movie at the cinema and enjoyed it for what it was though I don’t think I’ve ever watched any of its three sequels. There was also two soundtrack albums released – a score by composer Danny Elfman and a collection of songs by R&B and hip hop artists such as De La Soul, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Alicia Keys and Destiny’s Child as well as two tracks by Smith himself. Despite only the title track actually featuring in the film, the album was a huge success in the US going to No 1 and selling over three million copies. It sold more conservatively over here reaching gold status for 100,000 units shifted.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Chumbawamba	Tupthumping	YES!
2	OTT	All Out Of Love	As if
3	Livin’ Joy	Deep In You	Nope
4	Dannii Minogue	All I Wanna Do	Negative
5	Stereophonics	A Thousand Trees	No but I had the album
6	Mark Owen	I Am What I Am	Nah
7	Suede	Filmstar	See 5 above
8	Will Smith	Men In Black	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/m00293qb/top-of-the-pops-22081997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 29 JUL 1993

Posted on September 24, 2022 by 80stastic

It’s late July 1993 and the BBC’s musical output has gone stale. The seismic changes of the TOTP ‘year zero’ revamp happened twenty-two months ago and many are no longer with us most obviously the majority of the slew of new presenters that were introduced. In fact, the only two remaining are Mark Franklin and Tony Dortie who have been presenting solo on alternate weeks since October 1992. The show’s audience has plateaued at a level of 6.5 million which was less than it was attracting pre the revamp.

Meanwhile, over at Radio 1, whilst it seems like the ‘Smashie And Nicey’ image propagated by the likes of Simon Bates, Dave Lee Travis and Gary Davies will carry on forever, change is a-comin’. The era of Matthew Bannister as controller of Radio 1 is nearly upon us and he will action a root and branch transformation that will strip away the old, rotting wood. The culture of change would prove to be contagious. Within months, TOTP would also change head producer and the incoming Ric Blaxill would reverse most of the ‘year zero’ changes. For now though, it was the calm before the storm. Let’s see who was afloat before the sea of change appeared over the horizon…

We start with an act that was having some success under the current regime but who would flourish under the new. “Unforgiven” was D:Ream’s third of four consecutive Top 40 hits in 1993 though none would get any higher than No 19. Solid but not spectacular. Come early 1994 though they would go off like a rocket with the re-release of “Things Can Only Get Better” soaring to No 1.

Like most people I’m guessing, I don’t remember “Unforgiven” but on listening back to it, I was pleasantly surprised. It’s OK. A bit more grit to it than their most famous tune, the most impressive part of it is the bridge into the chorus which Peter Cunnah almost growls – quite the feat in a dance record. Linda Perry from 4 Non Blondes seems to have started a trend for tall hat wearing given the millinery of one of the backing singers. Where will it all end? Well, I’ll tell you where it won’t end – with me making the almost obligatory reference to Professor Brian Cox on keyboards…oh shit.

“Unforgiven” peaked at No 29.

“Show Me Love” by Robin S was not just one of the biggest dance tunes of 1993 but of the whole decade and beyond. How do you follow a hit line that? Easy! Just release virtually the same song again but change its title. “Luv 4 Luv” is “Show Me Love”, not just sonically but linguistically with the same three syllable title and chorus but with a slight change of spelling. Money for old rope? This was, to reference the film maker Stanley Kubrick, money for pieces of string too short to be useful*. Even Tony Dortie can’t resist a jibe by stating tongue-in-cheek that it’s “nothing like her first single”.

*Kubrick was a massive hoarder and when his family were sorting through his estate after his death, they found a box labelled ‘pieces of string too short to be useful’. His archives now reside at the London College of Communication .

Amazingly, enough people bought the single to send it to No 11 in the UK charts. I don’t get this. Presumably if a punter liked it enough to buy “Luv 4 Luv” then said punter must have felt the same about “Show Me Love” and also bought that so essentially you have the same record twice. Surely there can’t have been people who only bought “Luv 4 Luv”?! “I wasn’t bothered about “Show Me Love” but this new one by Robin S is great and I must have it”…said no-one ever.

When Freddie Mercury died in November 1991, Queen’s most iconic song “Bohemian Rhapsody” was rereleased and almost inevitably became that year’s Xmas No 1. Four months later, The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness took place at Wembley Stadium with the remaining members of Queen all involved. Such was Freddie’s popularity though, there was still a clamour for his recordings and so the band’s label raided his back catalogue as a solo artist. For a name as big as Freddie’s, there wasn’t actually that much solo work to raid. He only recorded two studio albums (and one of those was the “Barcelona” collaboration with Montserrat Caballé) plus the standalone single “The Great Pretender”, a couple of tracks for the Dave Clark musical Time and “Love Kills” from Giorgio Moroder’s restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. That didn’t stop Parlophone coming up with the unimaginatively titled “The Freddie Mercury Album” compilation in 1992 which included elements of all those recording projects. That album had already seen the release of “In My Defence” from Time and a rerelease for the aforementioned “The Great Pretender” which had both charted.

What came next though, nearly two years after Freddie’s death, was a surprise. A posthumous No1 record with a single that had stumbled to a peak of No 50 when originally released eight years prior? How did that happen? Well, it was all down to a team of remixers called The No More Brothers who took the track “Living On My Own” which had been on Freddie’s 1985 solo debut album “Mr Bad Guy” and that 1992 compilation and turned it into a dance hit. A chart topper all over Europe including the UK, it was a sales sensation. Me though, I didn’t get it. I hadn’t been aware of the 1985 original but this 1993 version didn’t make me want to seek it out. It just sounded so bland and I hated the lines ‘Dee do de de, Dee do de de, I don’t have no time for no monkey business”. What?! Written down, the first part looks like a script for a Harry Enfield’s The Scousers sketch whilst the monkey business bit was just hackneyed. How was this a No 1 record? The video is the same one used for the 1985 release and uses footage of Freddie’s 39th birthday party in Munich where he recorded the “Mr Bad Guy” album.

The general perception amongst the fanbase of Manic Street Preachers is that their second album “Gold Against The Soul” is also their worst. There is also an agreed opinion that the one stand out track on it is “La Tristesse Durera” which was released as its second single. I disagree on both counts. I love this album and though “La Tristesse Durera” is a fabulous track, it’s not my favourite from it. That honour switches between “Roses In The Hospital” and “Life Becoming A Landslide” on a regular basis.

Actually, I need to correct myself here and give the song its full title which is “La Tristesse Durera (Scream To A Sigh)”. No brackets, no points. I make this clarification not just for the sake of accuracy nor to be a pedant but to highlight a peculiar oddity about the track that has a tie in with another song I love that has brackets in the title. For some reason, when released in the US, the the song’s title was changed to “Scream To Sigh (La Tristesse Durera)”. Why? I have no idea but nearly a decade earlier, The Icicle Works’ single “Birds Fly (Whisper To A Scream)” had its title changed to “Whisper To A Scream (Birds Fly)” for the US market. What was it about US record labels and brackets and the word ‘scream’?

As for the performance here, would there have been outrage at Nicky Wire wearing a dress? There shouldn’t have been. It’s not as if we hadn’t seen it before. There was Bowie on the cover of his “The Man Who Sold The World” album and that bloke from Mud who wore one on the actual show.

“La Tristesse Durera (Whisper To A Scream)” peaked at No 22.

“Live from the Dominion Theatre in London’s West End…” Don’t get too excited it’s just Craig McLachlan in a revival of Grease the Musical and I have to say that, based on this short clip of “You’re The One That I Want” he doesn’t seem too convincing as Danny Zuko. Maybe it’s his curly hair, or his average singing voice or maybe it’s just that he’s not John Travolta which is not his fault of course. Debbie Gibson on the other hand belts it out and wears that iconic leather outfit well.

As Tony Dortie says, the cast included Shane Richie who played the role of Kenickie but as for him being “very funny” – if he performed anything like he did when on 3–2–1 in 1987…Perhaps he should have changed his name to Shame Richie…

Five Breakers again this week (bastards!) starting with Juliet Roberts and “Caught In The Middle”. I had no idea at the time but this wasn’t Juliet’s first Top 40 record – she was the vocalist on “It’s Over” by Funk Masters way back in 1983. She then joined smooth jazzers Working Week whose single “I Thought I’d Never See You Again” I quite liked though nobody else seemed to much when it peaked at No 80. Fast forward eight years and Juliet finally had a hit in her own right.

There’s a couple of parallels between Juliet and Shara Nelson who was on the show the other week. Both were having success under their own names after supplying the vocals for other artists (Shara sang on Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy”) and both were on the Cooltempo label. Also like Shara, Juliet’s solo career seemed to peter out rather. “Caught In The Middle” made No 24 though a David Morales remix the following year peaked ten places higher. A couple more Top 20 singles followed before the decade was out but that didn’t translate into album sales with her debut long player “Natural Thing” only making No 65. She continues to be in demand as a backing singer though.

The first of two huge stars now who are experiencing a drop off in singles sales as their latest offerings fail to tempt UK record buyers. After her last single “That’s The Way Love Goes” went to No 2 over here, Janet Jackson might have expected the follow up to perform similarly. It didn’t. “If” was the second single from her “Janet” album which I thought was meant to be a more smooth, sensual sounding soul record but this single could have been on the more strident previous album “Rhythm Nation 1814” with its hard beats and rock guitar riff. Yes, the lyrics aligned with the album’s sexual theme touching on fantasy and voyeurism but sonically it was nothing like the previous single.

The video plays on the voyeurism subject with scenes involving touch screen monitors and web cams, seemingly jumping on the bandwagon of Sliver, the erotic thriller starring Sharon Stone that was popular at the time. Maybe the racy video worked against the single’s commercial potential – was it too racy for anything other than a short Breaker spot on TOTP? Whatever the reason, “If” only made it to No 14 in the UK.

Oh crap! It’s “River Of Dreams” by Billy Joel. Now I like Billy and some of his back catalogue (especially the earlier stuff) is great. Even his last album prior to this (“Storm Front”) had some good singles on it. This track though rivalled “Uptown Girl” for sheer, undiluted awfulness. The title track off his only studio album of the 90s and the last to be comprised of pop songs*, it was and remains shockingly bad.

*His 2001 set “Fantasies & Delusions” contained only classical compositions.

Not everyone agreed with my assessment though. It was a huge global hit and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Record of the Year for 1994 losing out to, by coincidence, the next artist to feature on the Breakers. Why couldn’t I stand it? It was just so twee and I hated that harmonised intro that goes “In the middle of the…I go walking in the…”. I think ultimately though it reminds me of a time when I wasn’t that happy at work but that’s for a post in the near future.

Long after I’d finished working in record shops and stopped listening to Radio 1, I found myself at the radio home for the newly middle aged and listening to Terry Wogan’s breakfast show and he used to play this constantly. It nearly broke me.

“River Of Dreams” peaked at No 3.

Now to that second artist (alongside Janet Jackson) suffering an unexpected downturn in sales of their latest single and also the winner of that 1994 Grammy for Record of the Year. “Run To You” was the fourth single released by Whitney Houston from The Bodyguard soundtrack and was basically a retread of the third single “I Have Nothing” in that they were both towering ballads executed with precision by Whitney over a shiny production. So similar were they that Natalie Cole performed a medley of them at the 1993 Academy Awards (I’m guessing Whitney was indisposed).

Presumably due to the fact that the so many people already had the song due to buying the soundtrack album, “Run To You” failed to work itself into a sprint up the charts peaking at No 15 in the UK and No 31 in the US.

The video looks a bit crap by today’s high CGI standards with Whitney running against a backdrop of clouds although maybe it was a homage to the film of the aforementioned Grease when Danny and Sandy’s car takes off into the sky and they fly off into the clouds?

Neither “Run To You” nor Janet Jackson’s “If” were shown in full on TOTP which you maybe wouldn’t have expected for two such huge names.

Another huge name who had already had her video shown in full on the show is the final Breaker this week. Madonna is up to No 7 with “Rain” from her “Erotica” album. The tickets Tony Dortie refers to are for the two concert dates in September that Madonna played at Wembley Stadium as part of her The Girlie Show world tour.

“Rain” ended the first act of the show and was interspersed with “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)” by The Temptations and “Singin’ In The Rain”. Want to hear it? Here you go but having sat through the whole thing myself, I must warn you that you won’t get these 9 minutes and 48 seconds of your life back…

Back in the studio we find Dannii Minogue performing her rendition of Melba Moore’s “This Is It”. You know I said earlier about Juliet Roberts being an in demand backing singer after her solo career ended? Well, she must have been moonlighting back in 1993 as she provided backing vocals on Dannii’s previous single to “This Is It” which was called “Love’s On Every Corner”.

Twenty years after she had a hit with “This Is It”, the track supplied the title for a Best Of Dannii album which included a duet with sister Kylie of the ABBA standard “The Winner Takes It All” – I wonder which of the two of them that was then?

“This Is It” peaked at No 10.

https://youtu.be/2BkYJ5g8kE4

There’s only one Bee Gees song I remember from 1993 and it ain’t this one. “For Whom The Bell Tolls” was a surprise Top 5 hit over Xmas that year that just seemed to keep on selling even when you thought it must have run out of steam. “Paying The Price Of Love” though? Nah, I’ve got nothing. Their previous hit to this had been the shameless rewrite of “Chain Reaction” that was “Secret Love” in 1991. Did this one sound like any of their other songs? A slight hint of “You Win Again” maybe? Maybe not.

Barry Gibbs’ falsetto here is quite remarkable. That’s not a compliment though – a better descriptor would be ridiculous. I know it works somehow on most of their back catalogue especially their disco era peak but taken in isolation it’s quite mad. If he turned up on a talent show like The Voice for example and did that, would the judges turn around or would they look at each other and break out into a fit of uncontrollable giggling? What if they did turn around and then saw his mane of hair?! I can only really think of Barry Gibb and Queen’s Brian May that have always maintained the same hairstyle throughout their careers. Honourable mentions should also go to Rod Stewart and Paul Weller for sustaining comedy haircuts but they have tweaked them down the years.

“Paying The Price Of Love” peaked at No 23.

You can’t really argue with Tony Dortie’s assessment that Take That were “simply the biggest pop band in the UK” at this time as “Pray” notches up a third week at No 1. The boys are back in the studio this week and what I’m noticing from this performance is the clear division of hairstyles between them (and yes, I know I seem to be obsessed with pop star barnets yet again this week). Mark, Howard and Robbie all have that classic mid 90s long at the the sides curtains style while Jason and Gary have a more classic crew cut. I think I know which has aged the better.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	D:Ream	Unforgiven	Nope
2	Robin S	Luv 4 Luv	Never
3	Freddie Mercury	Living On My Own	I did not
4	Manic Street Preachers	La Tristesse Durera (Scream To A Sigh)	Not the single but I had the album
5	Craig McLachlan and Debbie Gibson	You’re The One That I Want	No
6	Juliet Roberts	Caught In the Middle	Negative
7	Janet Jackson	If	Nah
8	Billy Joel	River Of Dreams	Hell no!
9	Whitney Houston	Run To You	No thanks
10	Madonna	Rain	It’s a no
11	Dannii Minogue	This Is It	No it isn’t
12	Bee Gees	Paying The Price Of Love	I didn’t pay the price
13	Take That	Pray	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/m001c948/top-of-the-pops-29071993

TOTP 15 JUL 1993

Posted on September 17, 2022 by 80stastic

The day after this TOTP aired, Jurassic Park opened in UK cinemas. A ground breaking film both in terms of box office receipts and its revolutionary use of CGI, it’s hard to explain to people who weren’t there at the time quite what a big deal this film was. The hype and sense of excitement around it was palpable. I was working in the Rochdale Our Price at the time and there was only one other record shop in the town. The manager of it used to come into our store all the time and I recall him telling me that he’d been to see Jurassic Park the night before and how blown away he’d been by it. He specifically went on and on about the scene where the T-Rex has a torch light shined in its face and the pupil in its eye dilates. Like I said, it’s hard to explain now how advanced the film seemed to an audience like me who had been brought up on the special effects of Ray Harryhausen in the likes of Jason And The Argonauts and Clash Of The Titans. Of course, that original film spawned a whole franchise with the latest film coming out just this year. I wonder if any of the artists on this TOTP could be described as dinosaurs back in 1993?

I don’t think Dannii Minogue would have qualified as a dinosaur back in 1993. She was still only two years into her fledgling pop career. However, things weren’t going quite as well as they had been in 1991 for Dannii. After scoring two Top 10 successes and a couple of Top 20 singles from her debut album, the hits had dried up rather. Her version of The Jacksons’ “Show You The Way To Go” had spluttered to a high of No 30 whilst follow up “Love’s On Every Corner” had missed the Top 40 altogether. However, 1993 afforded an ideal opportunity for Dannii to kickstart her career as a disco revival was in full swing. Now bearing in mind that she’d already scored a disco styled hit with a version of Stacy Lattisaw’s 1980 hit “Jump To The Beat”, it made perfect sense for Ms Minogue to go there again and so she did with a cover of Melba Moore’s 1976 hit “This Is It”. It did the job too easily being the biggest of the five singles taken from her sophomore album “Get Into You” when it peaked at No 10. The album itself though bombed, vastly underperforming when it peaked at No 52 after her debut “Love And Kisses” had gone Top 10. It would be another ten years before she would return there with “Neon Nights”.

Dannii gives her usual energetic performance to sell the song backed with some equally perky dancers though why they have a backdrop of a sprawling metropolis lit up at night and some palm trees I don’t know. Even more confusing is what Dannii’s then fiancé is doing on the show. Host Tony Dortie introduces him at the end of the song with news of the couple’s impending nuptials. Julian McMahon was his name and he met Dannii on the set of Home And Away. According to Wikipedia, he appeared in the video for “This Is It” but sadly their marriage only lasted eighteen months. It can’t have been his dance moves that first attracted Dannii – in his brief time on screen here he looks like a pissed uncle at a wedding and even after the song has stopped continues to bob up and down like a pigeon’s head when walking. All very odd.

https://youtu.be/2BkYJ5g8kE4

Ah, Tony Dortie has joined me on the Jurassic Park references. “We’ve got no dinosaurs on the show tonight, just Paul Weller’s prehistoric haircut” he chortles to himself. Blimey! If he thought the 1993 version of Weller’s barnet was bad, what would he have made if its current incarnation?

Anyway, this felt like the point in Weller’s solo career where he achieved full lift off. His debut solo album had reminded people of his abilities as a songwriter after it had looked like the 90s might just pass him by. However it was his second album “Wild Wood” which would go platinum in the UK and show that Weller was a force still to be reckoned with. It’s worth remembering that he was only 35 at the time so we shouldn’t have been surprised at his re-emergence and that reports of his musical death were greatly exaggerated.

“Sunflower” was the lead single from the album and I’d forgotten what a strong song it is. It whipcracks away with a spiky rhythm and rapier like guitar riff – mesmerising stuff. It reminds me in parts of a song that Weller himself covered whilst in The Jam – “Big Bird” by Eddie Floyd.

The simple yet effective video with its quick cutaways and a camera revolving around Weller imbues it with even more urgency and energy. “Sunflower” peaked at No 16. It should have been higher.

OK, no real dinosaur connections with 4 Non Blondes other than to say on the soundtrack to Wayne’s World 2, the running order has “Out There” by Dinosaur Jr. followed immediately by “Mary’s House” by – yes – 4 Non Blondes. Tenuous I know.

I can’t find a clip of this particular performance of “What’s Up?” so I have had to use one from a previous week but Linda Perry has swapped her rastacap style headgear for something that Slash might have worn. It hasn’t affected her vocals though as she belts the song out. Whatever you thought of the song (and many didn’t like it), Linda had some pipes on her. Her performance here has echoes of Shakespear’s Sister “Stay” in that Perry has a touch of Siobahn Fahey about her. Not her voice as I’d have to say that is superior to the ex-Banana’s (sorry Siobahn!) but for her twisted, almost demonic delivery especially when she opens her eyes wide amongst all that eye shadow.

https://youtu.be/U-65MrNIWos

Now there’s some I’m sure who would have been happy to describe Deacon Blue in 1993 as dinosaurs (not me obviously). How did they fit into a dance obsessed chart with their well crafted pop songs about hardship, hope and heartbreak? Well, the truth is that they did try to fit in with fourth studio album “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” being co-produced by legendary dance DJ Paul Oakenfold (somebody I once worked with told me I looked like Oakenfold – I don’t). This new musical direction received mixed reviews and commercially underperformed compared to all three of its predecessors.

Now I would count myself as a fan of the band and have a few of their records but I really don’t remember a fourth single from “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” but here it is. “Hang Your Head” was the lead song of a four track EP and was very un- Deacon Blue like with its driving beat and rock guitar licks – it was no “Dignity” – but actually it sounds OK to me. Not enough of the wonderful Lorraine McIntosh in this performance though.

A Best Of album came out the following year but the band split after that before reforming five years later. They continue to record and perform live with their last album being as recent as 2021.

This week’s Breakers start with Jon Secada who’s chart career wasn’t quite extinct in 1993 but surely that dinosaur-destroying asteroid was on its way. Having scored an unlikely Top 5 hit with “Just Another Day” the previous year, Jon stalked another hit raptor like and came up with a trio of them though none got any higher than No 23. This one, “Do You Really Want Me”, was the last of them and from the few seconds afforded it on the show sounded like a lost squawking seagull. Where’s an asteroid when you need one?

Ah, now. Here’s an interesting one and an example how quickly the pop world can turn. Back in 1991, Jesus Jones bestrode the charts T-Rex* like, the dominant species of the Top 40. Then that aforementioned asteroid hit in the form of the music press who decided that the band had been the inkies’ darlings for long enough and that they were crap after all.

*I’m meaning the dinosaur here but I guess my point would also work with Marc Bolan’s band.

To their eternal credit, the band carried on regardless and are still together today. Back in 1993 though, “Zeroes And Ones” was the final single to be lifted from their “Perverse” album and would prove to be their last ever UK Top 40 hit. It also provides the title for an upcoming Best Of album due out in October 2022. As for the track itself, it’s pretty standard Jesus Jones fare and I must admit it passed me by at the time.

Also on the end of a music press backlash were Blur who had experienced a slump after the success of debut album “Leisure” and a poorly received US tour. Unlike Jesus Jones though, Blur were able to evolve from their dinosaur state to become one of the 90s (and beyond’s) biggest bands. Enabling that leap from the thrills of “Leisure” to the glories of “Parklife” was inbetweener “Modern Life Is Rubbish”* from which “Chemical World” was the second single to be released. Although it didn’t pull up any trees at the time sales wise, it has retrospectively been labelled as one of the defining albums of Britpop with its Small Faces and The Kinks influences and lyrics that spoke of the experience of British life.

Immediately though, it didn’t appear as if Blur’s fortunes had been reversed. These were the chart peaks for every single release since “There’s No Other Way” made the Top 10 in 1991 until “Girls And Boys” did the same in 1994:

24 – 32 – 28 – 28 – 26

“Chemical World” was responsible for the penultimate entry in that sequence but it probably deserved better. If Paul Weller would come to be seen as one of the Godfathers of Britpop then Blur (alongside Oasis of course, where else would they be?) were its pin up boys. Blur’s and our own worlds would look very different just twelve months later.

*I actually picked up the “Modern Life Is Rubbish” album whilst on holiday in New York. Naturally it was in the bargain bin.

Being a musical dinosaur was the last thing that you could accuse Utah Saints of in 1993. They were at the cutting edge of making groundbreaking, mainstream dance music with their penchant for sampling pop records from the likes of Eurythmics and Kate Bush and repurposing them. However, after three consecutive Top 10 hits, was the writing on the wall for them when fourth single “I Want You” only made No 25? All of them came from their eponymous debut album but apart from a couple of stand alone singles, there was nothing then until 2000 – the equivalent of the Jurassic period (56 million years) in the world of pop.

Why did “I Want You” fail? Well, maybe sampling thrash metal band Slayer’s “War Ensemble” was just a little too niche to secure the band a fourth massive crossover hit. Just a thought.

Like Jesus Jones and Blur before him, Kenny Thomas was facing the challenge of following up on initial success with more hit-worthy material. Even host Tony Dortie talks about the soul crooner being under pressure to do so in his intro. “Stay” was the song that was chosen to relaunch Kenny but unlike the aforementioned Shakespear’s Sister and their track, it wasn’t a resounding success peaking at No 22.

Kenny’s music left me cold at the best of times but this one made me fell like I was locked in a freezer. Sorry Kenny but if this song was a scene from Jurassic Park, it would have been the bit where the guests on the island take a tour in those electric vehicles and none of the dinosaurs appear prompting the two kids to say “I don’t see anything. Do you see anything? There’s nothing there.”

Now, in much the same way that the dinosaurs were wiped off the surface of the earth by that asteroid, the next act seem to have been expunged from the history of 90s music in that you hardly hear them mentioned at all nowadays. In 1993 though, Oui 3 were bona fide chart stars with three Top 40 singles to their name. OK, none of them got any higher than No 17 and two of them were actually the same song (one single was re-released eight months after it initially came out) but that’s three chart hits all the same. That re-release was their Buffalo Springfield sampling song “For What It’s Worth” which, as he told us in his intro, was Tony Dortie’s favourite single of the year to that point. What he didn’t tell us was the name of Oui 3’s new hit which was “Break From The Old Routine”. Bet their record label weren’t too impressed by that. Schoolboy error Tony!

I liked both singles and my wife enjoyed them so much she bought their album “Oui Love You”. Not many other people did though as it peaked at No 39. A second album was never released and after one final minor hit (“Facts Of Life” – No 38) and a couple of stand alone singles that flopped, it was all over – Oui 3 were no(n) more. What I hadn’t realised until now was that one of the band was Blair Booth who was one third of late 80s collaboration Terry, Blair and Anouchka featuring Terry Hall and who were responsible for the marvellous non-hit “Missing”:

Oui 3 though were nothing like Terry, Blair and Anouchka, coming on, as they did, like Stereo MC’s cooler, more laid back cousin. The rapping was on point (though I’m no judge of what makes a good rapper to be fair) and they had what I can only describe as some good grooves. I would have been interested to see what that second album would have sounded like.

Despite having been around for the best part of a decade by 1993, Madonna was nowhere near being a dinosaur what with all the controversy over her “Erotica” album making her still seem exciting and contemporary. Fast forward to 2022, and Madge is plodding around the music landscape like a ponderous brontosaurus desperately seeking ~~Susan~~ validation that she is still relevant.

Anyway, “Rain” was her latest single and the last to be released in the UK from “Erotica”. I’ve said before that when I first heard the album that was the track that stood out to me as a potential hit single. I was right as well but it took a while. As it turned out it would make No 7 meaning that all five of the singles from “Erotica” made the Top 10 over here. Well, there was the evidence if you needed any that Madonna wasn’t a dinosaur back then.

Compared to the other singles, “Rain” felt like it didn’t really belong on the album. It was in many ways a very standard, though lushly produced, big ballad. The lyrics are based around that well worn literary (and indeed cinematic) metaphor of rain being a cleansing agent and washing away previous sorrows to be followed by the sunshine and redeeming warmth of a new love. Or are they? This was a track from “Erotica” remember so were lines like “I feel it…It’s coming…Rain…Feel it on my fingertips” actually referring to something rather more sexual? Does the video give us any clues? Well, it’s much safer than something like “Justify My Love” being a sort of film within a film with the plot depicting Madonna as the star of a promo being directed by composer Ryuichi Sakamoto no less. There is a scene of her kissing a man behind a glass screen while water falls but it’s pretty tame stuff. What do I know though as it won two MTV Video Awards for Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography.

Take That are straight in at No 1 with “Pray”. Straight in! To think just a couple of years before when Gary Barlow popped into the Our Price store in Market Street, Manchester where I was working, my colleague Craig followed him round the shop floor mouthing “nobody buys your records” behind his back!

To say that the group were very much seen as five individuals with each one having a devoted fan base (I’m guessing!), what comes across in the performance here is that the other four very much look like Barlow’s backing dancers. The lead vocals were shared out more equally over subsequent releases. As I recall, Mark Owen took centre stage on “Babe”, Robbie Williams did “Everything Changes” and Howard Donald got the job on “Never Forget”. Did Jason Orange ever get a go to show us his vocal talents? I’m not sure he ever did. No wonder the poor lad ended up leaving the band.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Dannii Minogue	This Is It	Not likely
2	Paul Weller	Sunflower	No but I had the Wild Wood album
3	4 Non Blondes	What’s Up?	No but I found a copy of their album behind a filing cabinet when shutting down the Our Price in Market Street, Manchester
4	Deacon Blue	Hang Your Head	No
5	Jon Secada	Do You Really Want Me	As if
6	Jesus Jones	Zeroes And Ones	Nope
7	Blur	Chemical World	No but I had the album Modern Life Is Rubbish
8	Utah Saints	I Want You	I didn’t actually
9	Kenny Thomas	Stay	Never happening
10	Oui 3	Break From The Old Routine	No but my wife had their album
11	Madonna	Rain	Nah
12	Take That	Pray	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/m001c1qq/top-of-the-pops-15071993

TOTP 17 OCT 1991

Posted on October 27, 2021 by 80stastic

It’s mid October 1991 and therefore week three of the new TOTP format – had we all got used to it yet? I recall some of these performances so I must have carried on watching it whether I liked the show’s new style or not (pretty sure it was the latter). I would have been 23 by this point – was that too old to have been watching TOTP? In my defence, I was working in a record shop (Our Price) for a living so I could make a case that it was work related. Looking back, I didn’t feel too old to still be a TOTP viewer but as I say, I was working in a mainstream, chart led record shop so it kind of felt the obvious thing to do.

Now if I was too old to be watching the show, tonight’s opening act were surely too old to have been performing on it?! Presenter Tony Dortie correctly advises us that even back in 1991, it was 20 years since Slade had scored their first No 1 single (“Coz I Luv You”) and in 1991 the youngest member of the band was Jim Lea at a sprightly 42 while the rest of the band were all 45. That makes them 8 year younger than I am now and I would like to think I’m not an old man yet but mid 40s for being on a pop music show that had recently gone through a revamp to show it was still ‘hip for the kids’? Clearly new producer Stanley Appel hadn’t learned his lesson from two weeks ago when one of the bands booked for the first show under his tutelage were Status Quo!

So why exactly were these gods of glam rock in the charts and on TOTP in 1991? Well, after their resurrection in the mid 80s due to hits like “My Oh My” and “Run Runaway”, the band’s chart fortunes had once again been on the slide and they’d descended into a world of greatest hits packages for the Xmas market and endless re-releases of that festive single (8 separate occasions in the 80s). However, 1991 racked up a quartet of a century of the band’s existence (in one form or another) and the Slade fan club-organised a 25th anniversary party to celebrate. Wanting to cash in on the renewed interest in the band, their record label Polydor floated the idea of yet another Greatest Hits compilation album but backed with a TV advertising campaign and two new singles to add interest for the fanbase. “Radio Wall of Sound“was the first of those two singles and it’s a right old stomper and no mistake but why is bassist Jim Lea doing most of the singing and not Noddy Holder? Well, it was written by Lea for a solo project and when the band came to record it, they found that it was not in Noddy’s key and so Lea did most of the vocals with the Nodster just joining in on the chorus. Around this time, Noddy had come into the Our Price where I was working and I ended up serving him. I can’t recall what he bought but I was delighted to note that his credit card was emblazoned with the legend N Holder on it. However, my joy was cut short when I realised that his real name is Neville and so the ‘N’ of course referred to that and not ‘Noddy’.

Back to “Radio Wall of Sound” though and despite it definitely sounding like a Slade record, for me it also displayed another influence. The radio DJ voice-over bits were undeniably channelling Starship’s “We Built This City”. Apparently, the DJ in question is Mike Read who had presumably taken time off from writing the theme tune for BBC horse racing drama Trainer and had also had to miss a UKIP fund raiser dinner party to record his lines.

To be fair to Stanley Appel and his production team, they’ve gone in hard straight away to create a buzz with some pyrotechnic explosions behind the band before they even start singing. Happily, they haven’t reverted to that practice during their mid 80s revival of handing out nasty, cheap looking and probably highly flammable Slade scarves to the studio audience to wave around.

“Radio Wall of Sound” achieved a decent chart high of No 21 but was undone by, according to Noddy Holder, a lack of TV slots to promote it. Apparently they’d tried to do Wogan but couldn’t get on the show. I checked the listings for the week that this TOTP was broadcast and the two musical guests on Wogan were Alison Moyet and Texas both of who performed their latest singles – Alison’s track “This House” peaked at No 40 and The Texas single “In My Heart” stalled at No 74. Neither were pulling in huge hits in the early 90s so it seems odd that a space couldn’t be found for Slade (especially Texas who at this point had only scored one hit single in 1989 and were six years away from their commercial peak of the “White On Blonde” album). The second of those new Slade singles was called “Universe” and was released as the follow up to “Radio Wall of Sound” in the December but got lost in the Xmas market and failed to chart. As such, Polydor went cold on the idea of the band recording any new material and they broke up in 1992 with Lea and Holder leaving whilst Dave Hill and Don Powell carried on under the banner of Slade II.

As Tony Dortie walks up the gantry steps at the end of the song to do the link into the Top 10 countdown, you can hear what I assume can only be Noddy Holder making some guttural noises that sound like an alarm going off. Maybe he was making it up to the studio audience for his lack of vocal participation on “Radio Wall of Sound”?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svvVOGtWbWQ

Oh crikey, Enya‘s back! Yes, she of the No 1 song “Orinoco Flow” that everyone went overboard about back in 1988 for being so dreamlike and haunting and blissful and all those other epithets that the press and media bestowed up on her. The single propelled her to international stardom and the album it was taken from (‘Watermark”) sold 11 million copies worldwide. Well, it took her three years to record the follow up which was an album called “Shepherd Moons” of which “Caribbean Blue” was the lead single. I remember that the album was expected to shift a huge number of units over Xmas in the Our Price store I was working in and therefore a huge amount of units were ordered in. It didn’t disappoint going to No 1 with 13 million copies purchased world-wide. All this sales were achieved without the massive promotional pull of a No1 single that its predecessor “Watermark” had benefitted from. “Caribbean Blue” went to No 13 in the UK but was not a huge hit globally only making the Top 10 in her native Ireland.

For this studio performance, the stage has a back drop that seems to be some sort of lost temple in an overgrown jungle but which fortunately still has functioning dry ice machines. Enya herself sits statically at the piano but unlike with Julian Lennon’s keyboard performance the other week, new TOTP producer Stanley Appel resisted the urge to beef up the performance with clips of the official promo video (even though it featured future Eastenders star Martine McCutcheon).

The intro to the song by presenter Mark Franklin is a bit sycophantic…

“She’s live in the studio tonight playing the unique sound of Enya…”

What sound did you expect her to play Mark? She is Enya after all so she was hardly likely to come out and do a tribute to Liberace was she?!

Moving on and it’s another studio performance by another returning female solo star in Lisa Stansfield. Like Enya before her, Lisa had also scored a massive No 1 back in the late 80s with “All Around the World” but hadn’t been seen in the charts for a good 18 months by this point. “Change” was the lead single from her second solo album called “Real Love” and that album would help to establish Lisa as one of the UK’s most prominent soul singers by going double platinum over here and reaching No 3 in the charts. It housed four UK Top 40 singles including one of her most well known songs in “All Woman” though the track I would have liked to have seen released was “Soul Deep” that remained an album track.

Lisa’s grown her hair a bit since the days of “All Around the World” and that short cut and kiss curl look. She still looks fabulous. I worked in Our Price Rochdale (Lisa’s hometown) for a whole year between ’92 and ’93 and the only time she came into the shop, I was on my day off. Damn it!

Luckier than me was presenter Mark Franklin who gets to interview Lisa at the end of her performance for one of those embarrassing interviews in which he asks Lisa about her forthcoming tour and we find out that she is going on tour (surprise surprise), that it begins in February and is going pretty much everywhere on the planet. Quality in depth interviewing there. He reminds me of Lady One Question from early noughties Channel 4 comedy gambling game show Banzai…

So after Stevie Wonder and Queen in weeks one and two of the show’s new format, week three brings us another big hitter in the ‘video exclusive’ section as we get U2‘s latest promo for their new single “The Fly”. Their first release of the 90s, this was the lead single from their multi-platinum “Achtung Baby” album. Very much seen as a change of style at the time with its multi layered guitars and distorted effects on Bono’s vocal, it was certainly no “With Or Without You”. Indeed, Bono is on record as describing the song as “The sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree”. For me though it sounded like U2 doing their best INXS impression but that wasn’t a bad thing in my book although I was surprised to find a copy of the 7″ in my singles box as I don’t recall buying it. I would also end up buying the album on which there are much better tracks than “The Fly” for me.

The song would also announce Bono’s ‘The Fly’ character which was meant to send up the stereotype of an egomaniacal rock star. Sadly for Bono, I’m not sure everyone got the joke and his wearing of large wrap-around sunglasses backfired on him in many ways. Attending press conferences in ‘The Fly’ persona was probably not the best idea Bono ever had either and didn’t help his cause.

Whatever any of us thought about the song, it created itself a space in chart history as the single that eventually toppled Bryan Adams’ 16 week run at the top of the charts. Ironically, although it went straight in at No 1, “The Fly” was only made available for three weeks before the band’s record label Island deleted it so that they could clear the release schedules for further singles to be pulled from the album. How many music fans wished that Bryan’s record label A&M had done a similar thing with “(Everything I Do) I Did It For You”?

Dannii Minogue‘s annus mirabilis continues a pace with her fourth hit single of 1991 “Baby Love”. Not a cover of the Diana Ross & The Supremes number but a cover version all the same as this track was originally recorded by one hit wonder Regina and was a US No 10 hit in 1986. Dannii would have been better off going for the Motown track in my opinion as the Regina song doesn’t seem to have much going for it to my ears. Interesting to note that now the acts have to sing live on the show, Dannii’s dance moves are considerably curtailed – in fact she hardly moves at all leaving all the “nifty dance moves” (as promised by Tony Dortie in his intro) to her trio of backing dancers. To be fair to her, you couldn’t have expected anything but an out of breath vocal if she’d also attempted all the dancing we saw for her performance of previous hit “Jump To The Beat”.

The film that she is starring in that will be released the following year that Tony Dortie references, I hadn’t realised I’d seen until I researched it for this post. Success (also known as One Crazy Night) tells the story of four Beatles obsessed fans (plus an Elvis fan who can’t stand them) who find themselves locked in the basement of the hotel that the moptops are staying in whilst in Australia during their touring years period. While waiting to be rescued, they start to share their deepest secrets with each other. Often compared (unfavourably) to The Breakfast Club, it attracted criticism for the use of Beatles songs that didn’t belong in the time period the film was set. The plot takes place in 1964 but some of the songs used are from much later albums like “Abbey Road” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” which does seem unforgivable. However, the fact that I even remembered the film at all suggests it must have done something right to stay in my memory banks although I’d certainly forgotten that Dannii Minogue was in it.

“Baby Love” peaked at No 14.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uqo01s83XU

The video for “Wind Of Change” by Scorpions is next. As Tony Dortie says, it was giving Bryan Adams a run for his money by occupying the No 2 spot in the charts this week although I have no idea how many copies it was actually selling and whether it was indeed anywhere near to knocking the Canadian off his throne.

The song was the subject of an eight part podcast in 2020 which raised the possibility that the song was written by or connected to the CIA. What?! The premise goes that the CIA may have wanted to engender anti Soviet Union sentiment by utilising pop culture and the result was the writing of this people unifying, Cold War busting anthem. I haven’t heard the podcast but it’s an interesting theory and all. However, I get the impression it involves lots of internet rabbit holes and reminds me of all those conspiracy theorists out there who believe that Paul McCartney was killed in a car crash in 1966 and replaced with a lookalike as the Beatles obsessed nation couldn’t have handled the truth. I’m not buying either story.

This week the album chart feature is fulfilled by Paul Young whose Best Of collection “From Time to Time – The Singles Collection” is at No 5 this week. I’m guessing that neither Paul nor his record label Columbia could have foreseen the album going straight in at No 1 and being certified triple platinum but that’s exactly what happened. To be fair to Paul, it was a quality package filled with substantial hits from 1983 to the present (i.e. 1991) plus four newly recorded tracks one of which was this cover of Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over“. I’d bought the original back in 1987 and although Paul’s version is inferior, he does a decent job of it all the same.

The performance here is interesting with Paul sat down for the duration and strumming a guitar! Don’t think I’d ever seen him do that before or indeed knew he could play. And isn’t that Paul Carrack on keyboards once of Ace, Squeeze and Mike + The Mechanics? It is you know. Bizarrely, Carrack had shared lead vocal duties with another Paul Young whilst in Mike Rutherford’s Genesis offshoot project but this one was the ex lead singer of Sad Café who passed away in 2000 rather than the singer of such hits as “Love of the Common People”, “Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home)” and “Everytime You Go Away”.

Paul’s version of “Don’t Dream It’s Over” peaked at No 20.

Mark Franklin goes in for another interview about tour dates when he grills Paul Young about his forthcoming Xmas tour and then we’re into the Breakers starting with Ce Ce Peniston and “Finally”. Hang on – I thought this was in the charts much later than this and after she’d had already had a hit with a track called “We Got a Love Thang”

*checks officialcharts.com*

Yes I was right…and wrong. It was a much bigger hit (No 2) when re-released in March of ’92 after “We Got A Love Thang” had been a Top 10 hit at the start of the year. I had completely forgotten that “Finally” was also a No 26 hit in ’91. The track has routinely featured in various publications and music stations polls usually called something like The Biggest 90’s Dance Anthems of All Time etc and was also a huge smash in the US where it peaked at No 5. There was also a parent album called “Finally” which also performed well in the UK peaking at No 10.

I always quite liked it and much preferred it to “We Got a Love Thang”. It was kept off the top spot in ’92 by another long running No 1 song – Shakespears Sister’s “Stay”.

The second Breaker comes from Moby with “Go”. As with Ce Ce Peniston, I get a little confused over the chart history of this one. Various sources say that it was either released in March ’91 or July of that year – either way, it took a long time then for it to get into the Top 40. Maybe it was a sleeper hit, big in the clubs but not being played on mainstream radio?

The track was originally the B-side to Moby’s debut single from the previous year “Mobility” but was remixed with added samples from the obligatory Jocelyn Brown (the ‘yeah’ bit) and David Lynch’s mystery-horror TV series Twin Peaks and it would eventually (ahem) go Top 10. It wasn’t really my cup of tea although I would end up working with someone at Our Price who adored Moby well before his record-busting “Play” album of 1999 (which I did succumb to buying).

The clip that we see on TOTP of the kaleidoscopic video for the track was pretty standard dance tune fare and gave no idea to the identity of Moby who would turn out to be a little bald headed American bloke (although he does feature if you watch the whole promo).

Oh, it’s one of those TOTP performances that get talked up as memorable but was it actually any good? I refer to Monty Python and “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life”. I say Monty Python but it’s really just Eric Idle surrounded by what seemed to be a cast of thousands but was in fact a few blokes in Python-esque housewife fancy dress and a fake band. I guess it’s quite well choreographed with various explosions, instruments being broken and parts of the set falling down (hopefully the Health & Safety risk assessment was rigorous) and Idle does a good job of leading us all through it (and the studio audience through the set) but was it that funny?! That walk through the studio reminded me of similar performances by Adam Ant for “Goody Two Shoes” and that time Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes To Hollywood took a stroll to relieve the boredom of miming to “Two Tribes” on the show for the ninth (?) time. In all honesty, I preferred Adam and Holly’s excursions. The taxi at the end to whisk Idle away brought to mind Blur in that milk float at the start of the TOTP in the week of the legendary Blur v Oasis chart battle.

“Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” went all the way to No 3 whilst the re-release of the “Monty Python Sings” album off the back of it peaked at No 62.

And it’s STILL there at No 1 – Bryan Adams records a 15th consecutive week at the top of the charts with “(Everything I Do ) I Do It For You”. Bryan must have got a taste for doing songs for film soundtracks as he would record three more before the decade was out – “All for Love” (with Rod Stewart and Sting) reached No 2 in the UK charts in 1994 from the film The Three Musketeers whilst “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?” a year later from Don Juan DeMarco peaked at No 4. A final soundtrack song was recorded with Barbara Streisand in 1996 called “I Finally Found Someone” from her The Mirror Has Two Faces movie. Into the new millennium, he recorded “Here I Am” for the DreamWorks animation film Spirit: Stallion Of The Cimarron. I don’t think I liked any of them.

Just before the closing credits, Eric Idle returns to pie presenters Mark Franklin and Tony Dortie in the face. A watching nation cheered him on.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Slade	Radio Wall Of Sound	Nope
2	Enya	Caribbean Blue	No
3	Lisa Stansfield	Change	Yes! Well, it’s in my singles box but I think my wife bought it actually.
4	U2	The Fly	Yes! Two on the trot! When was the last time that happened?
5	Dannii Minogue	Baby Love	This was never going to complete a hat-trick of purchases – no
6	Scorpions	Wind Of Change	Nah
7	Paul Young	Don’t Dream It’s Over	No but I bought his Best Of album with it on
8	Ce Ce Pensiton	Finally	I did not
9	Moby	Go	Go? No.
10	Monty Python	Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life	Never happening
11	Bryan Adams	(Everything I Do ) I Do It For You”	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/m0010rl4/top-of-the-pops-17101991

TOTP 25 JUL 1991

Posted on September 9, 2021 by 80stastic

It’s 1991 here at TOTP Rewind and it’s a pivotal period for the grand old show which was in its 28th year. The ‘year zero’ revamp is just around the corner and we have already seen a flurry of cosmetic changes to the programme in the weeks prior to it. Various bits of tinkering with the chart rundown had led to inconsistencies in the show’s core concept and in the last few episodes we have seen a nasty green screen backdrop employed behind the presenters. However, that now seems to have been ditched as tonight’s host Mark Goodier is seen against a background of the real set. However, they do seem to have positioned him away from the studio audience who are all facing towards the stage area and not looking at Goodier at all. This gives the whole thing a rather sparse look, as if this is the dress rehearsal rather than the actual show.

The first act on tonight are making their debut in person performance on the show (I believe) but this landmark event is shot through with tragedy. The Shamen had been building a reputation on the club scene following the release of their “En-Tact” album the previous year but mainstream success had so far eluded them (bar one Top 30 entry for the single “Hyperreal”). However, the decision to remix and releases their “Pro-Gen” track from that album and retitle it as “Move Any Mountain (Progen ’91)” would prove to be a masterstroke as it crashed into the charts at No 9 this week. All of this chart activity however had come heart breakingly late for bass and keyboards player Will Sinnott who had tragically drowned whilst on a trip to Tenerife to film a promo video for “Move Any Mountain”. Founder member Colin Angus decided to carry on under The Shamen name with rapper Mr C promoted to the position of full time band member. I have to say that I prefer the original track “Pro-Gen” where Mr C’s rapping is dialled down a bit. However, if you didn’t like either of those mixes then there were plenty of others to choose from as apparently there were as many as 35 versions of the track circulating in Europe and the band themselves released a whole album (“Progeny”) dedicated to mixes of the track – 19 remixes of “Move Any Mountain (Progen 91)” plus 16 samples and loops according to Wikipedia. Phew!

I worked with someone at Our Price in later years who had a massive crush on Mr C which took me by surprise a bit. He never struck me as the hereat throb type. “Move Any Mountain (Progen ’91)” would peak at No 4 unable to dethrone Bryan Adams but they would return a year later to claim that No 1 spot with the infamous “Ebeneezer Goode” single. Naughty, naughty!

C+C Music Factory again?! How many times is this that the video for “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…” has been on? Three? Four? How am I supposed to keep coming up with stuff to say about this one?! Oh, hang on…there’s a cover version of it you say by a band called Stooshe? Never heard of them. Well, that could be an oasis for my word count desert. Let’s have a listen then…

…well that was ghastly! Harrowing even. Who the hell are these people?

*checks Wikipedia*

So, they’re a British girl group from London formed to be an urban and soulful Spice Girls! The name is pronounced as in ‘pushy’ and originates from the word ‘stoosh’ which is urban slang for either something expensive, a girl who thinks she’s nicer than she is or being stoned! WTF?! The suffix -she was added on the end to represent female empowerment (oh you mean ‘girl power’ then?). The resulting name is pronounced like the Scottish word ‘stooshie’ which means ‘the disruption caused by a disagreement or misunderstanding’. What a load of old ‘tosh’… that’s ‘tosh’ as in ‘what a lot of old bollocks’.

C+C Music Factory’s version of “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…” peaked at No 4.

Still enjoying 1991 was Dannii Minogue who is back on TOTP with her third hit in the last four months. “Jump To The Beat” was of course a cover of the Stacy Lattisaw No 3 hit from 1980 and it completed a peculiar little pop palindrome for Dannii when it peaked at No 8 meaning her three Top 40 entries so far had achieved the following chart peaks:

8-11-8

Stacy Lattisaw was only 13 when she had her hit but Dannii was a whole six years older at 19 when she took it back into the charts. Someone who was younger than both of them was the daughter of a guest at a wedding that I attended around this time. It was the evening do of a friend from school of my wife’s and there was a little girl there who clearly loved this record and was throwing herself around the dance floor as the DJ played it. As the night drew to a close and the DJ announced there was only one song left we all begged him to play “Jump To The Beat” again for this young girl but the jobsworth refused and played “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” instead as he had clearly decided well in advance that would be his final record of the night. Instead of at least one guaranteed person on the dance floor, he got nobody as everyone walked off as soon as the first strains of Bryan Adams came over his disco speakers. Nobhead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry8fTptf2AU

Having introduced themselves to UK audiences with the funk metal of “Get The Funk Out”, Extreme threw us all a curve ball when they followed it up with the spare and brittle sounding acoustic ballad “More Than Words”. Despite Mark Goodier’s warning not to be fooled by the gentle song and that they were a serious rock band, many a pop fan was duped into buying the band’s “Pornograffitti” album on the strength of “More Than Words”. Such a deception had not been put into practice since 1986 when the Doctor and the Medics album “Laughing At The Pieces” was bought by many a chart follower expecting an LP full of “Spirits In The Sky”s.

The joke was on Extreme in the end though as the song became an albatross around their necks and they became known as ‘the More Than Words guys’ (see also 4 Non Blondes and Berlin whose biggest hit was more famous than the band). It’s a pleasant enough rock ballad though I guess and went to No 1 in the US and would surely have done the same over here but for the Bryan Adams effect.

1991 wasn’t all about acts making their first breakthrough into the charts like Dannii Minogue, The Shamen and Extreme that we have seen on the show so far. It was also about this who rose phoenix like from the ashes to rekindle former glories like Feargal Sharkey and Mike and the Mechanics who both returned to the charts in this year after a big gap away from them. And this lot. OMD (who seemed to be basically Andy McCluskey at this point) were enjoying not one but two Top 10 hits in 1991 with the second being this one “Pandora’s Box”.

It was hard not to believe the band were all just about McCluskey to be fair when you watched performances like this and all you can see are his extraordinary ‘Dad Dancing’ moves which have been described as ‘a geography teacher with ants in his pants’ and ‘an epileptic windmill’. My brother-in-law looks a bit like Andy McCluskey I always think (although my wife can’t really see it). I have never witnessed him dancing though.

“Pandora’s Box” peaked at No 7.

After getting Bette Midler into the TOTP studios the other week, the producers have pulled off another coup by twisting the arm of Cher into making a visit. She’s here to promote her latest single “Love And Understanding” and as with Andy McCluskey’s dancing, all you can see in this performance is Cher’s hair. Presumably that was a wig? It’s not as shocking as Madonna’s pink fright-wig back in 1984 for her performance of ‘Like A Virgin” but it was still a bold statement.

Just like Madonna, Cher is up there all on her own with no backing singers / dancers / band which I’m kind of surprised about. You would imagine she would have a whole Mariah Carey style entourage with her. The following single release from Cher was a song called “Save Up All Your Tears” which was the opening track of the “Love Hurts” album and which I recall was also recorded by Robin Beck of “First Time” fame (that cola advert song from 1988) but which tonked when released as the follow up to her surprise No 1. They are almost exactly the same! Here’s Robin’s version…

And here’s Cher’s…

Apart from Cher’s more throaty vocals, almost indentical.

“Love And Understanding” peaked at No 10.

This next bloke is “a bit of a musical genius” according to Mark Goodier. Why? He’s only the ‘The Godfather of House Music’ that’s why! Even a dance tune dodger like me knew the name Frankie Knuckles and of his legendary status within the genre. “The Whistle Song” must be his best known tune in his own right but he has also remixed some massive chart hits like “You Are Not Alone” by Michael Jackson, “Un-Break My Heart” by Toni Braxton and “Ain’t Nobody” by Chaka Khan. Such is his influence that he even has another nickname which is ‘The Man Of The House’ which immediately makes me think of this:

Despite acknowledging his indisputable legacy, “The Whistle Song” did very little for me. A performance that included a key-tar and a flute on the same stage?! Come on! No wonder the TOTP producers got in four backing dancers in hot pants to liven things up a bit. The single peaked at No 17.

Three Breakers this week starting with “Twist And Shout” by Deacon Blue. Obviously not that “Twist And Shout”, this was the second single to be released from the band’s “Fellow Hoodlums” album and was easily the biggest hit from it. In fact, it would turn out to be the last of their only three Top 10 singles. I think there was just something simple and joyful about this song that made UK record buyers sit up and take note. The fact that it was released in the Summer also added to its appeal. There’s plenty of hooks in it as well which always helps and none more so than Lorraine McIntosh’s high pitched squeal on the word ‘upside’ in the lyric ‘turned the big world upside down’.

The single’s success, as with OMD and “Pandora’s Box” earlier in the show, would initiate a welcome spike in sales of the parent album which although a No 2 record, had failed to shift the units that its predecessor “When The World Knows Your Name” had done. The basic but colourful video enhanced the feel good factor of the song with the bond between the band obvious to see.

Despite the phenomenal success of his debut album, Seal‘s single releases were suffering from a dose of the diminishing returns. “Crazy” had been a huge hit just missing the top spot by one place but follow up “Future Love Paradise” hadn’t made the Top 10 and this one, “The Beginning”, didn’t make the Top 20. Maybe it was because so many people had splashed out on the album that had already been out for six weeks and which had gone straight to No 1 that there was little demand to buy more tracks released from it? Maybe Seal was an albums artist? His first two albums both went to No 1 after all whilst he only ever had three Top 10 hits under his own name and one of those was a re-recording of “Killer” (which was officially credited to Adamski). “The Beginning” was a pretty decent tune although were they all starting to sound just a little bit samey by this point?

I really didn’t see this next hit coming. Bomb The Bass? As in “Beat Dis” Bomb The Bass? Tim Simenon’s alias hadn’t been seen ins the charts since 1988 when they had racked up three consecutive Top 10 hits and been one of the breakout sensations of the year. Three years is a long time in the music industry though and I had just about forgotten all about Bomb The Bass. They had also been rather hamstrung to be fair when they had been caught up in the BBC / Radio 1 Gulf War censorship controversy with their band name being deemed far too politically sensitive leading to an airtime black out (see also Massive attack).

Undeterred, they released new single “Winter In July” after the conflict had ended to positive reviews. This new direction seemed much less frenetic than the likes of “Beat Dis” with a more soulful feel (surely the single’s title was a nod in the direction of Stevie Wonders’ “Hotter Than July”) and helped to return Simenon to the Top 10 where it peaked at No 7. Parent album “Unknown Territory” perfumed steadily rather than spectacularly but this would prove to be their commercial peak. Simenon would go on to produce material for the likes of Gavin Friday and Depeche Mode before taking an extended break from the music industry due to physical and mental exhaustion. He returned to the business in 2008 with his “Future Chaos” album.

We’re only into week 3 of Bryan Adams‘ 16 week reign at the top of the charts. How are we all holding up? Given the amount of projected posts that I will have to find content for about “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You”, I’m allowing myself to use one @TOTPFacts tweet a week to help me out. Here’s this week’s :

Bryan Adams had competition: Chicago's Peter Cetera also submitted a version. Michael Kamen: "In all honesty, Cetera's was too pretty. I write sweet melodies, and sometimes they need someone to deliver them with enough authority to make sure that you don't fall asleep." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 27, 2021

Well, Cetera did have a proven track record for soundtrack compositions. His 1986 hit “Glory Of Love” was featured in The Karate Kid II for which it received nominations for an Academy Award for Best Original Song, a Golden Globe in the category of Best Original Song and a Grammy Award in 1987 for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Male Artist. It was also a US No 1 and UK No 3 song. Cetera’s effort doesn’t seem to have ever seen the light of day and even in this digital age of leaks and spoilers, I can’t find a trace of it anywhere online.

In addition to “Glory Of Love”, he also had a song on the hugely successful Pretty Woman soundtrack so the guy had chops when it came to film music. It wasn’t to be but I find it hard to believe that we would have had Peter Cetera at No 1 for 16 weeks in the Summer of 1991.

The play out video is “Pregnant For The Last Time” by Morrissey. This was a non album single that I have no memory of whatsoever. It sounds quite rockabilly and actually listenable which you can’t always say about Morrissey (especially these days). Not sure if Mozza himself still likes it though as he hasn’t played it live since the 1991 Kill Uncle tour apparently.

“Pregnant For The Last Time” peaked at No 25.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	The Shamen	Move Any Mountain (Progen’91)	No but I easily could have done
2	C+C Music Factory	Things That Make You Go Hmmm	Nope
3	Dannii Minogue	Jump To The Beat	Never going to happen
4	Extreme	More Than Words	Bit too formulaic for me
5	OMD	Pandora’s Box	No but it’s on their Best Of CD that I have
6	Cher	Love And Understanding	Nah
7	Frankie Knuckles	The Whistle Song	Not for me
8	Deacon Blue	Twist And Shout	See 5 above
9	Seal	The Beginning	No but I was one of those who had the album
10	Bomb The Bass	Winter In July	No
11	Bryan Adams	(Everything I Do) I Do It For You	Negative
12	Morrissey	Pregnant For The Last Time	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/m000z2j4/top-of-the-pops-25071991

TOTP 16 MAY 1991

Posted on August 4, 2021 by 80stastic

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

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

*SPOILER ALERT: He doesn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*checks Wikipedia*

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

“Baby Baby” peaked at No 2 in the UK.

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

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

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

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

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

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000y2fl/top-of-the-pops-16051991

TOTP 11 APR 1991

Posted on July 16, 2021 by 80stastic

Right, I’m starting to get behind on writing up these TOTP reviews. I’m averaging over 3,000 words per post so with two shows being shown on BBC4 a week….I could have easily written multiple books over the number of years I’ve been doing this. With that in mind, I’m going to have to whizz though some of these acts with just a cursory nod to detail and research.

Tonight’s host is Anthea Turner (groan) and we start with The Wonder Stuff who have arrived at that crossroads that most indie type bands arrive at eventually. The one where they look at the sign that points to ‘Megastardom and riches but hand your soul in at the door’ one way and ‘stay credible, critically acclaimed and penniless’ the other. A fork in the road encountered by many before and since. Spandau Ballet started out as the pin up band for the New Romantics cult but made the decision to go mainstream and be one of the biggest bands in the world when they recorded the “True” album. One year on from this TOTP broadcast, The Shamen would go from an underground indie / dance hybrid to being all over our TV screens with a No 1 single and a gurning pop star rapper in Mr C. For now though, it was the turn of Miles Hunt and the gang and they chose fame and fortune with the release of “Size Of A Cow”. The lead single from new album “Never Loved Elvis”, this was a catchy, knock about, shout-a-long tune that was much more pop than anything they had ever done before. It’s almost like a prototype for Blur’s “Country House”. It was hard not to like it though. Hunt himself throws himself into the song with a tartan suit borrowed from Andrew Ridgely and his ruffled shirt. It’s almost like an audition to be the next Dr Who (had it still been on air back then ).

The album would be a huge success going Top 3 whilst “Size Of A Cow” peaked at No 5. Around this time they played a gig at Walsall’s Bescot Stadium to 18,000 fans but had they lost any of their original fan base? If they hadn’t, their loyalty may have been tested to the limit when they teamed up with Vic Reeves for a cover of “Dizzy” later in the year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P-vjvP6b1Y

Madonna‘s only single of 1991 was “Rescue Me”. Nothing to do with the 1965 Fontella Bass single of the same name, this was the second of two new tracks from her mega selling “Immaculate Collection” Best Of album. The first had been the controversial “Justify My Love” and initially there had been no plans to release “Rescue Me” as a follow up but after extensive airplay, Sire Records changed tack and gave it an official release. The video shown here was hastily cobbled together using footage from Madonna’s 1987 Who’s That Girl World Tour.

I have to say it’s not one of my favourites of hers by some distance. I wasn’t that keen on all the spoken word verses although I suppose the chorus is catchy enough. Apparently, when it debuted at No 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in March 1991, it was the highest new entry for a song since The Beatles’ “Let It Be” went straight in at No 6 in March 1970. That can’t be right can it? Whilst we’re talking about the song’s chart performance, it should also be noted that it peaked at No 3 in the UK (Madonna’s fourth of nine singles to peak at that position ) and was the 27th of her 70 UK hit singles! 70! That’s nearly one for very year she’s been alive isn’t it? Actually how old is Madonna now?

*checks Wikipedia*

She’s 62. Close enough.

A bit of a patronising intro from Anthea next as she says of Alison Limerick‘s “Where Love Lives”:

“Alison Limerick first released her debut single last year. It didn’t do so well but she’s released it again and now it’s a hit….”

It’s the tone in her voice, the small grimace on her face and the downwards motion hand gesture that seem a bit snide to me. If this was a text message it would have a sad face emoji at the end of it. Enough of Anthea though.

Alison is one of those names that have been around for ages like Ruby Turner or Beverley Knight but who surprisingly doesn’t have the number of hits that you would think they do. “Where Love Lives” is one of just six Top 40 UK hits. Actually its two of six as it was a hit again in 1996. As Anthea correctly pointed out, it was first released in 1990 when it peaked at No 87 but after extensive play in the clubs, it warranted a re-release – with the addition of the suffix (Come On In)’91 – and it was a No 27 hit. It reached its highest peak though when remixed in 1996 when it made No 9.

Alison looks damn cool here as she gives a slick performance with her Grace Jones style crew cut and sharp dance moves. She has worked with acts as diverse as The Style Council, This Mortal Coil and The James Taylor Quartet and she continues to record and sing live to this day.

It’s another showing of the Gary Clail On-U Sound System performance of “Human Nature” from the other week next although I think Anthea stuffs up the intro by saying Gary Clail and the New Sound System. I’ve played it back three times now and I’m pretty sure that’s what she says. I know I sound pedantic but her job on TOTP was literally to say the names of artists and their songs. You can’t get that shit wrong, you really can’t.

As for Gary, although “Human Nature” was the only hit he had that enabled a TOTP appearance, he had his eyes on the prize as way back as 1985 when he featured on an On-U Sound System track called “Half Cut For Confidence” The backing musicians on it were industrial hip-hop legends TackHead but they were credited as TOTP an acronym for The Occult Technology of Power but surely it was also a deliberate pun on the BBC music show?

“Human Nature” peaked at No 10.

Not sure I remember this one. Monie Love and Adeva together? Nope it doesn’t (and yes I’m going there) ring any bells. When I saw the title of their single, I assumed it was a cover of the Anita Ward disco classic “Ring My Bell” that went to No 1 in 1979 but no, it isn’t. This was the sixth and final single to be taken from Monie Love’s “Down To Earth” album so we had heard quite a lot from her over the last year or so. The same could not be said of Adeva who had not been near the charts for nearly two years when her debut album provided her with four Top 40 hits including three that peaked at No 17. Would it be mean to suggest it was Adeva whose career needed a shot in the arm off the coat tails of Monie Love? Probably yes but it is true that “Ring My Bell” would be her last ever Top 20 hit.

The video rather predictably goes with a boxing match concept thereby including both the ringing of a bell theme and setting up a confrontation as in Monie Love vs Adeva. There’s no actual punches thrown though as all the action is done from the safety of their respective corners.

This wasn’t really my cup of tea at all and I’d rather it had been a cover of Anita Ward.

Now here’s a line that you would never have expected to hear and which actually doesn’t make any sort of sense but then it is from the mouth of Anthea Turner so….

“We’ve got a real treat for you now. A stage full of expensive suits. In those suits are Mike + The Mechanics…”

A bit to unpack here. What is the big deal about some middle aged men wearing expensive suits? Were we meant to be jealous? If so, how is that a treat for us? Or were we meant to admire how good they looked in them? With the greatest respect to Paul Carrack, Mike Rutherford and Paul Young (not that one) et al, I don’t think the suits made that much difference in the looks department.

“Word of Mouth” would peak at 13 whilst its parent album of the same name went silver certifying 60,000 sales. Its cover art seemed to influence a much cooler band 14 years later. Have a look…

It’s the top selling albums of the month feature next and for March 1991 they were:

1.Eurythmics – “Greatest Hits”

2. Chris Rea – “Auberge”

3. The Farm – “Spartacus”

4. REM – “Out Of Time”

5. Debbie Harry / Blondie – “The Complete Picture”

Well, that seems a bit better than recent months. Yes, two are Best Of compilations but what Best Ofs! The Eurythmics one was their first ever and I for one was certainly looking forward to it coming out. It would go on to be the second best selling album of the year after it was pipped at the post by Simply Red’s “Stars”. Although it wouldn’t stand the test of time, at least “Spartacus” was by a new, up and coming band after months of the Top 5 being populated by the likes of Elton John, Madonna and Pavarotti. Talking of time, REM’s “Out Of Time” was really starting to establish them as a world conquering band. It was only really Chris Rea that was letting the Top 5 down.

Another glimpse of patronising Anthea next as she seeks to make us all dismiss the fact that Dannii Minogue is not just Kylie’s sister by pointing out that Dannii Minogue is actually Kylie’s sister. After highlighting her genealogy, Anthea says “she’s a great little actress, she’s got a charming personality…”. No doubt Anthea thought she was being complimentary but it just doesn’t come across like that. The use of the word little seems unnecessary and the charming personality vibe indicates that there is a silent ‘though’ implied.

“Love And Kisses” was her debut hit but I don’t think time has been kind to it. There’s not much of a tune in there and it seems to hinge on an energetic dance routine rather than any musical virtues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-CdWiqRNo4

Chesney Hawkes is still No 1 and we get the video this week although there seems to be some confusion over this as I have found two different promos for “The One And Only”. The one that TOTP shows is a straight forward performance of the song in a gig setting intercut with some scenes of Chezza arriving at the venue, being mobbed by fans and signing some autographs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mk82Ns6vdk

However, there is also another video that seems to have an A-ha “Take On Me” inspired plot to it. In this one, two female friends go to the cinema to watch Buddy’s Song (the film that launched Chesney and that features “The One And Only”) and Chesney steps out of the film and into the cinema auditorium to beckon one of the girls to come to a storage room with him. It’s not really a winning chat up line. There then follows some intertextuality themed escapades as Chesney gets pulled in and out of the film pursued by his father played by Roger Daltrey in hot pursuit. Eventually Chesney and cinema girl both end up in the film together before a climatic snog. Now apparently, ‘cinema girl’ is played by Saffron from Republica and if this is true, then this is the second time in a matter of weeks that I have been unaware of her presence on the show. We saw her recently as the vocalist for N-Joi on their “Anthem” single. I don’t know, a character from soap opera Families turning up in The Mock Turtles and now someone being in a Chesney Hawkes video whilst also fronting a dance act. These were strange times indeed.

Did someone mention The Shamen before? Well, here are the very fellows with “Hyperreal”. Taken from their “En-Tact” album, it achieved what previous singles “Pro-Gen” and “Make It Mine” hadn’t by becoming the band’s very first Top 40 hit. I have to say that I didn’t think it was as good as either of those but it was still pretty decent tune anyway.

Tragically, this would be the last single release before band member Will Sinnott drowned whilst swimming off the coast of Canary Island La Gomera. Electing to carry on, Colin Angus pressed forward with the release of “Move Any Mountain” (which was basically a remix of “Pro-Gen” under a new title) and it would cement the band’s reputation as chart stars when it peaked at No 4 in the Summer.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgUCeaSM8co

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	The Wonder Stuff	Size Of A Cow	I didn’t
2	Madonna	Rescue Me	No but I did have The Immaculate Collection with it on
3	Alison Limerick	Where Love Lives	Nope
4	Gary Clail / On-U Sound System	Human Nature	Liked it, didn’t buy it
5	Monie Love / Adeva	Ring My Bell	Nah
6	Mike + The Mechanics	Word Of Mouth	And the word was no
7	Dannii Minogue	Love And Kisses	Definitely not
8	Chesney Hawkes	The One And Only	It’s a no
9	The Shamen	Hyperreal	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/m000xp0h/top-of-the-pops-11041991

TOTP 28 MAR 1991

Posted on July 8, 2021 by 80stastic

Sibling rivalry. Healthy competition or the bringer of long lasting family fractures? I have siblings and, as a football obsessed youngster, grew up knowing that my elder brother was so much better at the game than me. I could barely get into my school team whilst he had scouts from professional clubs sniffing around. It was….character building. There are of course many examples of sporting siblings but how many of them attain an equitable level of success and fame. My theory would be that one is always more successful / well known than the other. Off the top of my head…

Serena Williams vs Venus Williams? Definitely Serena
Andy vs Jamie Murray? Andy surely
Anton vs Rio Ferdinand? Easily Rio
Gary vs Phil Neville? Hmm, I’d have to go Gary

OK, I’m sure you could all come up with anomalies to debunk my theory but I’m sticking with it. More than that, I’m going to try and extend it to musical siblings. Who have we got? Ray and Dave Davies from The Kinks, The Gibb brothers of the Bee Gees, Noel and Liam Gallagher, the three Wilson brothers in The Beach Boys, Hanson(!)… I’m beginning to see a problem with this in that these siblings were in bands together so it’s harder to make a definitive judgement. OK, some of them pursued their own solo careers so you could assess those I suppose but I’m not sure that’s a fair yardstick and yes, you could make a case for Brian Wilson over Dennis and Carl but then what about the twins Charlie and Craig Reid of The Proclaimers? They were tied to each other biologically and musically. So we’re am I going with all of this? In a very clunky and laborious way to the the first act on tonight’s TOTP who is Dannii Minogue – Kylie’s sister. And those last two words go straight back to my original point. Was Dannii always destined to be in the shadow of Kylie? Or as author Kathy Lette put it that there was always a perception that Dannii was the B-side to Kylie’s A?

It wasn’t how it started though. Dannii, despite being 4 years younger than her sister, was the most well known of the two in the beginnings of their careers as she appeared on Australian TV variety show Young Talent Time and indeed it was Dannii that got Kylie invited on the show to perform with her. After that, their careers seemed to run in tandem. Kylie became known to us in the UK as Charlene from Neighbours whilst Dannii took the role of Emma Jackson in Home And Away. Crucially though, Kylie had met Stock, Aitken and Waterman and beat her sister to chart stardom with her No 1 single “I Should Be So Lucky”. Was that the moment that their paths separated and Kylie was fused onto the nation’s consciousness ahead of Dannii?

By the time that Ms Minogue junior was releasing her “Love And Kisses” single, Kylie had already racked up 3 hit albums and 12 Top 10 singles including 4 No 1s in the UK. Dannii had a lot of catching up to do. She wasn’t helped by the fact that “Love And Kisses” wasn’t released in the UK until a whole year after its Australian release. When it finally did arrive, it performed pretty well rising to No 8 over here despite it being a fairly insubstantial, Janet Jackson style bit of pop fluff. Its parent album of the same name (it had been changed from its original “Dannii” title in Australia) also clocked up enough sales to achieve gold status and provided Dannii with a further four Top 40 singles.

1991 was Danni’s highpoint of the 90s though. The rest of the decade saw mainly dwindling sales (with the odd exception) and by around 1995/6, she was peddling her calendar that included naked shots of her. We definitely sold a few of those in the Our Price store I was working in (ahem). However, 2003’s “Neon Nights” dance album was well received and went Top 10 and she followed that up by appearing as an X Factor judge on our TVs every Saturday night from 2007 to 2010.

Did someone mention The Bee Gees before? Here are the Brothers Gibb with their “Secret Love” video. I’ve been sat here at my computer for a good five minutes now and I can’t think of anything else to say about this record other than it really wasn’t one of their finest moments. How about I just pad it out with some sales stats? Yeah? OK, well even their US record label had lost faith in them by this point and subsequently didn’t do that much promotion for the parent album ‘High Civilisation” in the States. Consequently, it didn’t chart at all over there though it did struggle to a high of No 24 in the UK. It was more popular in the rest of Europe specifically in Germany (No 2) and Switzerland (No 6). No further singles from the album were big hits anywhere on the planet.

We wouldn’t see The Bee Gees in the charts for another two years.

Right, who’s this fella? He looks like a scaffolder or something rather than a pop star. What’s that Bruno Brookes? He used to be a scaffolder actually? Oh right. Presumably that’s why you’re dong this link from the studio gantry and with the camera pointing up at you to give the impression of height – not something you were ever very good at eh?

This fella was, of course, Gary Clail (and his On-U Sound System) with “Human Nature”. I was never quite sure what the On-U Sound System bit was all about but it was a nod to the On-U Sound Records label which specialised in dub music. Clail himself had been releasing record since 1985 (presumably when he wasn’t atop a scaffold somewhere) and also worked with legendary hip hop artists Tackhead but I have to admit I hadn’t heard of him before 1991.

“Human Nature” though was a great track and deservedly went Top 10. Despite his dub roots, the sound on this seemed like The Shamen meets The KLF to me but then I knew very little about dub music so I was probably way off. It was the lyrics though that I noticed most – their themes of intolerance and social divisions and the inability of mankind to empathise sound as relevant today as back then which doesn’t say much for the progress of society in the last 30 years. I say it was the lyrics I noticed most but you couldn’t fail to catch an eyeful of Lana Pellay (aka Lanah P aka Alan Pillay). Wow! Now Ru Paul’s Drag Race might well be seen as mainstream these days but back then, drag queens weren’t on your TV that often. I don’t think even Lily Savage had cut through to the masses by this point so Lana’s performance seemed to imbue the whole act with an element of outrageousness it seemed to me. It may have even outraged some viewers I guess.

However, Bruno Brookes seemed more taken with Clail himself as he referred to him as ‘Mr Cheeky Face’ at the end of the track. Well, I suppose he did have a glint in his eye that reminds me a bit of Robbie Williams . No? Maybe? Gary would have one further Top 40 hit in 1991 but has continued to release material as recently as 2014.

Oh please. Not again. Not another Eurodance mega mix single! After Technotronic and Black Box pulled off the same cheap stunt of releasing a single made up of all their other previous hits mixed together because…well just because they could, here were Snap! getting in on the act. Theirs was called “Mega Mix” – as opposed to Black Box’s “The Total Mix” and Technotronic’s “Megamix” – they were so imaginative with their titles weren’t they?

“Mega Mix” peaked No 10 which seems remarkable given all the tracks on it had all been Top 10 hits themselves in the last 12 months (including a No 1). How did people keep falling for this shit? Was it a club DJ thing? Thankfully, we won’t see Snap! for another 12 months or so but when they do return it will be as serious as cancer.

Finally, finally James are in the TOTP studio. After having three (albeit smallish)Top 40 hits in 1990 without being invited onto the show, the producers could ignore them no longer when the re-release of “Sit Down” went straight in at No 7. Originally released on Rough Trade in 1989 when it peaked at No 77, the band were convinced by new label Fontana to re-record it with Pixies producer Gil Norton and, propelled by a major marketing campaign (which even included appearing on Wogan before the single was released), it became a huge hit spending three weeks at No 2 behind Chesney Hawkes (sorry Chesney lad but there’s no defending that).

In a way, the song is the total antithesis of Gary Clail’s “Human Nature”, reassuring us that we are not all alone in the world with our worries and anxieties and to reach out (sorry, hate that phrase) to our fellow human beings and sit down next to each other to succour some comfort. When played live in Paris before it was released, the Mancunian element of the audience spontaneously sat down on the floor eventually triggering the whole 1000 strong crowd to do the same. This communal sitting down was repeated at a show at the G-Mex, Manchester in December 1990 thereby setting a trend tho be repeated at every show for the last 30 odd years. And yes, I’ve seen James live and sat down with them.

“Sit Down” success would pave the way for the band to become a huge mainstream success. The time of James had arrived.

It’s Scritti Politti and Shabba Ranks up next with their horrendous treatment of The Beatles song “She’s A Woman”. Having watched it back, quite what is it that Shabba Ranks adds to the record? There’s a mini rap breakdown towards the middle of it when he blathers on about ‘crazy music lovers’ or something but it only lasts a few seconds. Other than that he seems to be making some indecipherable noises in the background throughout -presumably he was extorting us to ‘wind it up’ or some other such nonsense.

I’ve always sided with Mark Lamarr when it comes to Shabba Ranks. Apart from his repulsive views, I’ve always viewed him as ridiculous for his tendency to shout out ‘Shabba’ in what felt like all his records which was beautifully lampooned in Phoenix Nights…

…Ray Von there who, like James before him, was also asking for people to “Sit Down”.

“She’s A Woman” peaked at No 20.

Now then, Bruno Brookes in a half way decent segue shock now as he finds a way to bridge the gap between Shabba Ranks and the next act Definition Of Sound. “Shabba Ranks who once said of himself I’m not a star I’m a galaxy. There you are that’s the definition of self confidence…” I don’t need to join the dots for what comes next do I?

Definition Of Sound were Kevin Clark and Don Weekes although they went by the monikers of Kevwon and The Don. That’s Kevwon not Rayvon. As well as the single “Wear Your Love Like Heaven”, they also had an album out called “Love And Life: A Journey With The Chameleons” which was a bit confusing as there was also the Manchester band called The Chameleons. Anyway, I looked up the album on Amazon and saw some customer reviews of it. One was positively brimming with enthusiasm for it:

There is not one bad track on this excellent album. It sounds as fresh today as it did back in the early nineties and is a real feel good collection of songs.

There was also this courtesy of marinegirl who simply said:

Dreadful

Well, you can’t please everyone.

I’m guessing that the lucky number seven the chorus is linked in with the title of the track given its significance and the regular occurrence of it in the New Testament. There’s also some nicely squeezed in reference to drug taking in the lyrics:

Oi, I change my angle and my point
(Oooh) In fact it’s time to roll up a joint.. venture

There also seems to be a lot of talk about women and the pursuit of them and yet Kevwon told Smash Hits magazine that he was “as sexy as a wet stamp”. Well, if you’re a philatelist …wet stamps…just saying.

The start of the 90s had seen The Rolling Stones on the road with their Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle Tour but recordings wise, they would not release an album of new material until 1994’s “Voodoo Lounge”. To fill the gap between that and 1989’s “Steel Wheels”, a live album of the tour was released. Entitled “Flashpoint”, it featured 15 live tracks and two new studio recordings one of which was the single “Highwire”. Supposedly written about the international arms trade and the events that led to the first US war with Iraq, I have no recollection of this at all but I don’t mind it actually but then I’m hardly a Stones aficionado. The song’s first line (“We sell them missiles, we sell them tanks, we give them credit, you can call up the bank”) was considered far too politically sensitive by the BBC and duly the video shown on TOTP begins with the second verse. However, it wasn’t on their list of banned songs presumably because it was released after the conflict had ended.

“Highwire” peaked at No 29.

He’s done it! Chesney Hawkes is No 1! Yes, Chesney mania is in full swing as people can’t seem to get enough of his “The One And Only” single. He’s back in the studio tonight with his band although, they’re not quite the same people that adorned all the covers of the pop press. By the end of its five week run at the top, the band line up had changed to include that guy who looked a bit like Lou Diamond Phillips on bass and the black guy on keyboards who gets very over excited during this performance had been replaced by a white dude. Also, the drummer has been changed so that it’s Chesney’s brother Jodie up there on the sticks.

Ah yes, Chesney’s drummer. I promised you a boring Chesney story last time and here it is. I was once in the same room as Chesney’s drummer! It was for an album playback event at a bar in Manchester (I think it was for Ricky Ross) and the record company rep had got a load of us from the Our Price store I was working in on the guest list. It was a free bar and a very messy do. I didn’t speak to Chesney’s brother though I did manage to grab a few words with Ricky. That’s it. Thats’ my Chesney story…

…ooh, and I’ve found another example to support my musical sibling rivalry theory that I posited at the start of the post. Whatever you might think about Chesney (and James fans clearly hate him) he was, is and will always remain more famous than his brother.

See, this post should really be over now what with that final bit of sibling theme tying it altogether nicely but sadly, there is still one ‘song’ left. The play out video is “Over To You John” by Jive Bunny. FOR F***’S SAKE! The end of March 1991 and these pillocks are still in the charts. Thankfully it is the last time we shall ever see them. Yes, it is finally all over.

“Over To You John” reminds me of the 1983 single by Pink Floyd called “Not Now John”. Thankfully, there isn’t a Jive Bunny style Pink Floyd mega mix. Or is there…..yikes!

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

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Dannii Minogue	Love And Kisses	Not likely
2	The Bee Gees	Secret Love	If I’d wanted Chain Reaction (which I didn’t), I’d have bought back in 1986
3	Gary Clail and O-Nu Sound System	Human Nature	No but I easily could have
4	Snap!	Mega Mix	Hell no
5	James	Sit Down	Not the single but I have their first Best Of album with it on
6	Scritti Politti and Shabba Ranks	She’s A Woman	Horrendous stuff – no
7	Definition Of Sound	Wear Your Love Like Heaven	No but I think I downloaded it off iTunes years later
8	The Rolling Stones	Highwire	Nah
9	Chesney Hawkes	The One And Only	Nope
10	Jive Bunny	Over To You John	Now please f**k off John and never come back

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/m000xh7c/top-of-the-pops-28031991

TOTP Rewind – the 90s

My memories of 90s chart music

TOTP 31 OCT 1997

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TOTP 22 AUG 1997

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TOTP 29 JUL 1993

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TOTP 15 JUL 1993

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TOTP 17 OCT 1991

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TOTP 25 JUL 1991

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TOTP 16 MAY 1991

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TOTP 11 APR 1991

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TOTP 28 MAR 1991

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