TOTP 26 NOV 1999
As the last embers of the 90s lose their glow, we have arrived at the show that first featured perhaps the most controversial and divisive hit of the decade. Where the 60s had “Je t’aime… moi non plus”, the 70s turned up “God Save The Queen” and the 80s gave us “Relax”, the 90s delivered…well…all in good time. We’ve got a few other hits to get through before we arrive at that particular song (and I use that word very loosely).
Our host is Gail Porter and we begin, as had become TOTP tradition by this point (and a daft one at that), with last week’s No 1. Sort of. I’ve never thought of “It’s Only Us” by Robbie Williams as a chart topper – that status was reserved for the other song on the double A-side single “She’s The One” which was receiving all the airplay. However, despite that and despite the fact that it has dropped to No 3 this week, we get a performance of “It’s Only Us” to start the show. Clearly, this was recorded at the same time as the previous week’s run through of “She’s The One” but Robbie has taken off his heavy duty jacket to make it look like it’s a totally different appearance. We’re wise to you Robbie.
“It’s Only Us” didn’t originally feature on the “I’ve Been Expecting You” album but was added to it in 2000 following a lawsuit brought by Ludlow Music on behalf of London Wainwright III who claimed that the track “Jesus In A Camper Van” featured a lyric wholly based on one from Wainwright’s song “I Am The Way”. Williams claimed he’d heard the lyric “Every Son of God gets a little hard luck sometimes, especially when he goes around saying he’s ‘the way.'” whilst in rehab but that cut no ice with the judge in the case who ordered that 25% of income generated by “Jesus In A Camper Van” must go to Ludlow Music and that the track be removed from future copies of “I’ve Been Expecting You”. It was, of course, replaced by “It’s Only Us” whilst “Jesus In A Camper Van” is currently not available on any of the major streaming platforms.
Next up is another performance which, like Robbie Williams, I’m pretty sure was recorded back to back with another song by the artist in a musical version of a BOGOF offer. Unlike our opening act though, this artist was at the TOTP studio months prior to this broadcast as opposed to just the other week. Back in the May of 1999, Whitney Houston was on the show singing “My Love Is Your Love” to an appreciative studio audience. Clearly, that wasn’t the only song they were treated to that day. Just check out the YouTube thumbnail for that song below and then compare it with the one for her performance of “I Learned From The Best”…
Yep, exactly the same outfit and hairstyle. There’s no doubt that they were recorded on the same day. Whitney was also in the studio when she did a run through of “It’s Not Right But It’s OK” and although her outfit is different, I’m willing to bet that was recorded at the same time as the other two songs as well. What does all this mean? I’m not sure it means anything other than the traditional divvying out by the TOTP producers of spots on the show’s running order based on weekly chart positions was clearly being undermined by the practices employed here by Whitney and her team.
Getting back to “I Learned From The Best” though, this one seemed to be a return to the power ballad formula of old which had brought her so much success back in the 80s. Not surprising really as it was written by the Queen of the Power Ballad herself Diane Warren. However, it’s not exactly a traditional love song but a swipe at a former lover by a woman that has turned down his attempts of reconciliation by telling him that she learned how to reject him from the way he used to do it to her. Then there there’s the song’s sound which although it has the established key change in it, also has a swagger to it as it sashays around your ears. If it was a free kick in a football match, the commentator would say that the player taking it had put some swazz on it. Unlike those first two hits from her “My Love Is Your Love” album, “I Learned From The Best” wasn’t a big seller peaking at No 19 though I’m sure it helped to squeeze out a few more sales of the album from the Christmas retail period.
We have missed the third artist on tonight as it was R Kelly and so has been edited out. Why couldn’t the BBC have been doing this for all the potentially offensive acts in these repeats rather than just not broadcasting the whole show (mind you, some of these 90s TOTPs have been stinkers so maybe it was better that they didn’t). Anyway, it’s straight on to…oh…Glamma Kid. Who? It’s that bloke who had a hit with Shola Ama based around an old Sade track. Seeing as that strategy brought him a Top 10 hit, he thought he’d double down on it but this time he chose Carly Simon’s 1982 hit “Why”. I can’t recall this one at all so let me remind myself of it. Back in three minutes…
…well, that was an absolute car crash. If it was a firework it would have been called Satanic Desecration. Just head-bendingly awful. How dare he take Carly’s quite wonderful song and do that to it! It’s all bump ‘n’ grind nonsense with Glamma Kid banging on about hotspots or something. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, he encourages the audience to do that awful “ooh ooh” call and response thing before putting the turd flakes on this shit sandwich by getting them to wave their hands in the air. Away with you sir!
I’d forgotten that there was a third single from Blur’s “13” album. “Tender”? Yes, of course. “Coffee & TV”? Absolutely. “No Distance Left To Run”? Erm…that was the title of a documentary about them wasn’t it? Yes it was but it was also the closing track on the album (save for a two minute instrumental) that was released as its third and final single. It’s not an obvious choice for that role being a discordant, lo-fi song about the break up of Damon Albarn’s relationship with Justine Frischmann. Part of me thinks it should have been left alone to close out the album but alternatively, why shouldn’t the band push the boundaries and make their fanbase work a bit to appreciate all the facets of their heroes’ art?
“The quintessential 90s band” says Gail Porter in her outro. Not sure entirely what she meant by that. Yes, they’d been having hits for the whole of the decade but how could one band represent the whole of that era when so many movements and trends had come and gone in that period? In a move that suggested that Blur themselves wanted to get away from such descriptions, the band’s next release was a line-in-the-sand-drawing Best Of. Over the next 23 years though, they would release just three studio albums compared to six in eight years between 1991 and 1999. Maybe they were destined to be remembered as a 90s band?
And here it is. That most divisive of records and it came courtesy of a 59 year old man who had been having hits for five decades and who, for many, was the standard bearer for the music industry elite, a man so comfy and unthreatening that he was the antithesis of what a rock star should be. He only ever had sex once allegedly for chrissakes! And yet, as the new millennium dawned, Cliff Richard was suddenly anti-establishment and rallying against what was deemed acceptable he did it all without a trace of sex (obviously), drugs or rock ‘n’ roll.
The cause of this controversy was his hit “The Millennium Prayer” which was the words of The Lord’s Prayer set to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne”. That’s it. That’s what all the fuss was about. It seems odd in retrospect but so concerned about its lack of commercial appeal and accusations of exploiting people’s religious beliefs were Cliff’s record company EMI that they refused to release it (they had history when it came to losing their nerve in a controversy, for example their dropping of the Sex Pistols in 1977 following the Bill Grundy incident). As a result, Cliff took his bat and his ball (and “The Millennium Prayer”) and tuned up at independent label Papillon’s door and it was they who released it as a charity single with the proceeds going to Children’s Promise. The extreme reactions didn’t stop there though. George Michael no less described the song as a “heinous piece of music” and the campaign behind it as “vile”. Radio stations baulked at the track with BBC Radios 1 and 2, Capital FM’s sister station Capital Gold, and the Magic network of oldies stations all declining to put it on their playlists.
In the face of such opposition, how did it manage to debut at No 2 and spend three weeks at No 1 then? Well, you ignore Cliff’s fanbase at your peril. His legion of supporters and indeed Christian groups mobilised themselves to protest outside BBC offices and overwhelmed radio stations with requests to play it. Premier Radio, a Christian station, played “Millennium Prayer” regularly. The grassroots movement outstripped and outmanoeuvred conventional marketing strategy and the song became Cliff’s 14th chart topper of his career. The BBC in particular must have felt like they were tying themselves up in knots with its Radio stations largely ignoring it (the Top 40 chart show played it I think) but here he was on TOTP, their flagship music show, to perform the song. They even afforded him enough time for a small interview with Gail Porter who performed the whole “we’re not worthy” routine for good measure. And then there was the song, if indeed that’s what it was. Let’s have it right, George Michael nailed it. It was heinous. Abominable. Monstrously bad even. And yet who am I to tell punters they were wrong to buy it? However, does anyone listen to it now?
*checks Spotify plays*
Well, it’s been streamed 3 million times which seems like a lot but compared to his more traditional pop hits like “We Don’t Talk Anymore” (41 million plays) and “Devil Woman” (39 million)…Does it even get played on those all Christmas songs stations come December each year? Whatever its legacy, there will always be a bit of 1999 that belongs to Cliff and “The Millennium Prayer”.
It’s another case of third-single-from-the-album syndrome as, after Blur earlier, we get Texas now. “When We Are Together” was the third single lifted from fifth studio album “The Hush” and was the band’s first non Top 10 hit since “So In Love With You” struggled to a peak of No 28 in 1994. There’s no particular reason for this that I can fathom other than it was taken from an album that had been in the shops for six months by this point meaning many potential purchasers of the single could have already bought the album and have access to the track.
The song itself stuck to the formula that Texas had struck upon with the “White On Blonde” album with its Motown feel and radio friendly uptempo beat. If there were any concerns within the band’s camp that said formula was losing its potency, their next release in 2000 – their first Greatest Hits compilation – must surely have dispelled them as it topped the charts and went six times platinum. Interestingly, half the album’s 18 tracks were made up of songs from “White On Blonde” and “The Hush”.
We have yet another new No 1 this week in the form of Wamdue Project and their track “King Of My Castle”. I say ‘their’ but this was the work of one Chris Brann who sounds like a journeyman midfielder currently playing his trade in the Championship with West Brom but who was actually an American electronic music producer. “King Of My Castle” was originally released in 1997 and was a club hit without crossing over into chart action. However, a remix by Roy ‘Walterino’ Malone (I’ve no idea) saw it debut at No 1 in the UK charts and become a Top 5 smash just about everywhere else.
Now, there can’t have been too many hits that reference Sigmund Freud’s structural model of the psyche but this one did with its title referring to Freud’s comment of “the ego is not king of its own castle” when describing that the human ego is not free and is instead controlled by its own unconscious id. This was deep stuff we were talking. That being said, the track itself was pretty much the opposite of deep, to my ears anyway. A very basic house beat allied to some repetitive lyrics, it never seems to really get going and drifts about in the shallow end for its entirety. Maybe it was all to do with the bpm and you needed to be in a sweaty nightclub to appreciate it better.
There’s an amusing footnote to this particular story which is that Wamdue Project appeared on the initial nominations list for ‘Best British Newcomer’ at the 2000 Brit Awards only for embarrassed organisers to withdraw the name once they had realised that Brann is American. That must have dented their egos. Ahem.
| Order of appearance | Artist | Title | Did I buy it? |
| 1 | Robbie Williams | She’s The One/Its Only Us | No |
| 2 | Whitney Houston | I Learned From The Best | Negative |
| 3 | Glamma Kid | Why | Certainly not |
| 4 | Blur | No Distance Left To Run | No but I had the album |
| 5 | Cliff Richard | The Millennium Prayer | Heavens above no! |
| 6 | Texas | When We Are Together | Nah |
| 7 | Wamdue Project | King Of My Castle | Nope |
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/m002wz4f/top-of-the-pops-26111999
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 