Which event do you think of when you hear the word ‘comeback’? Is it a sporting occasion like Liverpool defeating AC Milan in the 2005 Champions League final after being 3-0 down at half time? Or perhaps a celebrity comeback like TV and radio presenter Richard Bacon who resurrected his career after being the first *Blue Peter presenter to have their contract terminated mid season after a cocaine use scandal? Or could it be a music themed comeback like Take That’s return in 2006 ten years after they initially called it a day?

*They even made him hand in his Blue Peter badge!

What characterises all of these comebacks? Hard work? Undeniable talent? Plain old dumb luck? Who knows but happen they did and there’s a comeback theme of sorts to this TOTP show. Let’s have a look see as to who was doing the resurrection shuffle…

We start with surely one of the most unlikely of 90s music comebacks from Go West. Actually, I say unlikely but they’d already made one comeback this decade when they popped up out of nowhere in 1990 with the “King Of Wishful Thinking” single from the Pretty Woman soundtrack. Over two years on from that though, surely lightning wouldn’t strike twice for the duo?

Back in 1985, Go West had been one of the pop stories of the year as they clocked up four Top 40 hits including the No 5 hit “We Close Our Eyes”. Following up on that breakthrough success was a harder trick to pull off though and all their subsequent 80s releases failed to make the charts. I for one didn’t think they had another hit in them at that point let alone two but here was another bona fide chart entry in the form of “Faithful”. This sounded like “King Of Wishful Thinking” all over again to me but as if it had been through the wash by accident. All the fun had been removed by pop detergent leaving a starchy replica in its place. More than that though, it sounded so out of kilter with its chart peers. Never mind comeback, this was a real throwback.

“Faithful” was taken from Go West’s third studio album, the suitability named for a comeback theme “Indian Summer” which itself was a surprise No 13 hit. They really were making like Johnny Hates Jazz and turning back the clock. Peter Cox and Richard Drummie look like they’re enjoying themselves in this performance and talking of looking like, doesn’t Drummie resemble actor Stephen Mangan a bit? Just me then.

We’re sticking with this new fangled nostalgia section (can nostalgia be new fangled?!) to celebrate the forthcoming 1,500th TOTP show. This week’s clip from the archives is “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” by Leo Sayer. Leo was one of those artists who I was aware of from an early age though I didn’t really think of as a pop star as such but more of a light entertainment performer. I think it was him appearing on things like The Muppet Show maybe but he was a bona fide pop star with proper hit songs and everything. He had two consecutive No 1 singles in the US for a start. In a ten year period starting in 1973, he had fourteen chart hits including ten inside the Top 10 of which four went to No 2 and one topped the chart. These were serious numbers. After 1983’s “Orchard Road” peaked at No 16 though, the hits dried up and Leo was deemed irrelevant to the 80s and beyond. Marital and financial problems followed and Sayer’s public profile plummeted.

And then, in 2006, resurrection. A dance version of his song “Thunder In My Heart” by UK DJ Meck entitled “Thunder In My Heart Again” returned the curly haired one to the top of the charts, twenty-nine years after his previous one. That’s how you do a comeback! The single’s success restored Leo to the public eye and he was famous enough once more to bag a slot on Celebrity Big Brother in 2007. Here’s his VT before he entered the house:

Hmm. Not the most modest chap ever but that was nothing. Check his chat out below with fellow housemate Dirk Benedict:

Oh. My. God. He was talking about himself in the third person! And the levels of self delusion! I love that he doesn’t seem to pick up on the fact that Benedict isn’t really listening to him at all. Just insane! Leo lost the plot on Day 10 and walked but luckily for him this was the series of the racist bullying scandal involving Jade Goody vs Shilpa Shetty which overshadowed his egotistical nonsense.

Sayer is still at it though and this year sees him taking his The Show Must Go On tour on the road.

No chances of the next act being on the comeback trail as this is only their second ever single! However they do provide a nice little link back to Leo Sayer’s aforementioned revival. I talk of Felix and their hit “It Will Make Me Crazy” with the link being DJ Meck who sampled their first single “Don’t You Want Me” for his 2007 hit “Feels Like Home”.

The performance here looks a bit minimalist compared to the usual dance act turn mainly because there’s no ponytailed dudes behind a bank of keyboards. Instead there’s a guy on a keytar. Nice.

“It Will Make Me Crazy” peaked at No 11.

I don’t think I can make any case for either of these two guys being comeback kings as both had been successful artists for many years before this single hit the charts. Anything that Zucchero released in the past decade had gone to No 1 in his native Italy however his only UK hit was his 1991 duet with Paul Young “Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)”. As for Luciano Pavarotti, he’d been a renowned operatic tenor for years but had crossed over into the world of popular music via the BBC’s use of his rendition of Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” for their coverage of the 1990 World Cup. The two came together for “Miserere” soon after which went to No 15 in our Top 40. Why was it a hit? Maybe the UK was in the last vestiges of the new found popularity that opera had imprinted on its consciousness following 1990? It did very little for me though.

Checking Zucchero’s Wikipedia entry, the list of artists he has collaborated with is extraordinary. I was scrolling for ages. It includes someone who also appears on this TOTP though I would not have guessed who from the running order for the show.

A definite comeback next from someone we last saw in the UK charts in 1988. Vanessa Paradis had caused quite the controversy when “Joe Le Taxi” made No 3 over here in 1988 mainly because she was just 15 at the time. Rewatching the video for the track, it does seem like it was a lot of fuss about nothing. She was hardly provocatively dressed wearing plain old jeans and a baggy jumper. It seems to be centred around the fact that she gyrated her hips when dancing. Anyway, after that hit there was zip from Vanessa though she continued to have hits in her native France. She also diversified by beginning an acting career and was also doing some modelling famously portraying a bird in a swinging cage in an advert for the fragrance Coco by Chanel.

By 1992, she was in a relationship with Lenny Kravitz who produced her third studio and first English language album. Simply entitled “Vanessa Paradis”, its lead single was “Be My Baby”. Nothing to do with The Ronettes, this was however an uptempo 60s revival with dashing strings and that pastiche sound that was so familiar that you were sure you knew the song already on first hearing.

As for the performance here, the staging seems to have been designed to look classy with the sweeping drapes backdrop but Vanessa herself would have definitely benefited from watching the aforementioned Ronettes in action. She’s ever so stiff and should have copied some of Ronnie Spector’s shimmy moves. As it was, she concentrated on the singing whilst the coordinated moves were left to her backing singers. “Be My Baby” was a sizeable hit all around Europe (No 6 in the UK) but subsequent singles released from the album failed to chart and she has not returned to our Top 40 in the intervening 30 years.

Some Breakers now starting with…oh no…not Michael Bolton again! Look, how many more times is he going to be on the show because that’s how many times my Mikey B secret has a chance of coming out! Either I have to go through it every time he’s on or you’ll have to go back into the blog archives for the full horror of it. And I’m not doing the former so…

He’s back in the charts with a cover version of the Bee Gees song “To Love Somebody” which was the lead single from his album of soul covers called “Timeless: The Classics”. In some territories (more specifically my head) it went by the title of “Money For Old Rope”.

Do you think he just pinched the idea to cover this track off Jimmy Somerville who recorded it to help promote his Best Of album of 1990? I’m just checking the track listing for the album and it includes his treatment of “Reach Out I’ll Be There” by The Four Tops, “You Send Me” by Sam Cooke and, in a startling lack of inspiration and creativity, “Yesterday” by The Beatles, only the most covered song of all time. This guy was just stealing a living wasn’t he?

The Bollers version of “To Love Somebody” peaked at No 16.

And so to that surprising artist that Zucchero collaborated with. Who had money on John Lee Hooker? Well, it was the legendary American blues singer, songwriter and guitarist who performed on the track “Ali d’oro” from the Italian’s 2001 album “Shake”. It was Hooker’s last ever recording before he died in the June of that year.

None of this explains why Hooker was in the UK Top 40 at this time. For the reason, you need look no further than jeans, specifically Lee Jeans as “Boom Boom” was being used to soundtrack their latest ad campaign. Does it count as a comeback? Well, maybe for the song rather than the artist as it was originally recorded in 1961, whilst Hooker also performed it in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers, the only film he ever appeared in.

I knew a tiny bit about John Lee Hooker at this time, mainly due to the specialist music mornings we used to have at Our Price when rock/pop music was not allowed to be played on the shop stereo, only albums from genres like Folk, Country and of course Blues. Hooker’s critically lauded 1989 album “The Healer” would get a spin now and again and then there was his 1991 album “Mr. Lucky” which was a Recommended Release I think. I was hardly an expert but I could hear that “Boom Boom” was a tune Don’t take my word for it though. In 1995 it was included in The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame’s list of ‘The Songs That Shaped Rock And Roll’.

No comeback going on with this one, this was pure, cynical bandwagon jumping with the particular flavour of the month being flogged to death being the craze for singles released off the back of video games. After “Tetris” by Doctor Spin came “Supermarioland” by Ambassadors Of Funk. Based obviously on the Nintendo game featuring that Italian plumber, this one at least had a credible name behind it. Whereas Doctor Spin was an Andrew Lloyd Webber project, Ambassadors Of Funk was the brainchild of DJ, producer and remixer Simon Harris of “Bass (How Low Can You Go)” fame. It was still a pile of shite mind.

The video (if you can call it that) is just dreadful. Filmed at Chessington World Of Adventures, it’s two dancers arseing about with someone in a Super Mario costume. Cheap doesn’t come into it. Ah, I’m done with this already. Game over!

Another comeback! Well, sort of. It’s a song that is resurrected rather than the artist. When Undercover had a massive hit with a danced up version of Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” just weeks before, the blueprint for creating dance remixes of decidedly rock/pop songs was set. In its wake came this, a cover of “Run To You” by Bryan Adams. After 16 weeks at the top of the charts for “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” the year before, you would have thought we might all have had enough of Bry for a while but Rage proved otherwise. I say Rage but they were known as En-Rage in some European countries due to the pre-existence of a German heavy metal band with that name but it was the shorter moniker that was on the single in the UK.

Now I hated this probably because in my youth I’d bought the original Adams single (No, you f**k off!) but there seems to be a fair amount of online love for it and especially for singer Tony Jackson. Tony’s vocals were in demand as he’d previously performed as back up to the likes of Billy Ocean, Amii Stewart and Paul Young before his moment in the spotlight. Clearly the guy could sing based on this performance but why throw away your talents on such a shite song?! As ever, I was in the minority as sales of the single took it all the way to No 3.

Rage never managed another hit – they tried to repeat the trick with a dance version of “House Of The Rising Sun” by The Animals but it missed the Top 40 completely – whilst Tony Jackson sadly passed away in 2001.

Madonna was hardly in need of a comeback in 1992. Although it had been three years since her last studio album “Like A Prayer”, she’d certainly not been quiet in the intervening years. Her 1990 Best Of album “The Immaculate Collection” achieved mammoth sales in the UK whilst singles like “Justify My Love”, “Rescue Me” and “This Used To Be My Playground” were also big hits. And then came “Erotica”. The album came wrapped in controversy though much of that was generated by the simultaneous release of coffee table book Sex and its provocative images contained within. It would provide Madonna with five UK hit singles and although selling six million copies worldwide, that was half the amount of its predecessor.

My abiding memory of the album is that on the day of its release, I was working in the Our Price in Rochdale and the shop’s central heating had broken down. It was bloody freezing. I could see my breath despite being inside the shop. Consequently, no customers were coming in and the takings were awful. I think we took less than £400 all day which was pitiful in terms of what was expected. I recall putting up a display of “Erotica” in store but it made zero difference to sales. Obviously we played the album in store and I remember thinking that the track “Rain” would make a good choice of single. It was eventually released as the fifth and final single the following year. I knew I should have pursued a career in A&R (OK OK, I’m joking!)

Less of a comeback now and more of a second chance at an opportunity missed. When Erasure’s debut single “Who Needs Love Like That” failed to make the Top 40 in 1985, I for one couldn’t understand why. They were a synth pop duo in an age when people loved synth pop duos, they had a damned catchy tune and it was a guaranteed club floor filler. At least it was at my choice of nightclub back in 1985, The Barn in Worcester. I think that would have been where I first heard the track probably.

It was rereleased in 1992, seven years and eighteen chart hits later to promote Andy and Vince’s first Best Of album “Pop! The First 20 Hits”. The title is a bit confusing. I’ve just said they’d had eighteen Top 40 hits to this point not twenty. The explanation is that the album includes the duo’s first three singles that were not hits but not the “Breath Of Life” remix which had its own chart entry in addition to the standard version. Just to add to the confusion, it actually had twenty-one tracks on it as the final one is the “Hamburg Remix” of “Who Needs Love Like That” which is the version that was rereleased in ‘92. Got all that? Good.

This is one of those live by satellite performances, this time from Broadway, New York. It doesn’t really work for me as it’s in an empty theatre and despite all the over the top costumes that Andy and Vince – who finally enters the fray two thirds through in full drag queen get up – are wearing, it all seems rather flat.

“Who Needs Love Like That (The Hamburg Remix)” peaked at No 10. Oh and I’m not sure what host Mark Franklin is on about when he says it got to No 82 on first release in ‘85. It was definitely No 55.

There’s a new No 1 as Boyz II Men ascend to the top spot with “End Of The Road”. I think this may be the third time this has been on the show and they’ve got another two weeks at No 1 after this so I’m struggling for anything else to say about it. OK well, clearly the dry ice machine has got stuck in top gear and the lads are still having issues with their wardrobes. More than that though, what’s going on with the ‘stand up sit down’ routine? All four members of the group start off sat down on stools but one by one get up for their individual turn in the spotlight. I get that the song was structured to include solo spots for the guys but what were the stools for? Why didn’t they just perform standing up? It reminds me of that old TV show Blind Date where the prospective daters are asked a question by the picker and each one gets up to perform their answer.

At the end of the performance, host Mark Franklin appears and is also wearing a baseball cap Boyz II Men style. When I first visited New York in 1994, I came back with a baseball cap as a souvenir. Soon afterwards, my mate Robin came to stay at our flat in Manchester. We were heading out for a drink and I donned my baseball cap at which point Robin refused to go any further with me until I took it off. “Sir, you’re an Englishman!” were his words of admonishment. He was probably right to be fair.

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/m0016cdj/top-of-the-pops-29101992