It’s mid February 1998 and my beloved Chelsea have just sacked our manager Ruud Gullit! What?! The guy that just took us to our first major trophy win in 26 years and he’s been got rid of just nine months later?! What the hell was going on?! Well, much was speculated back then and since but my take is that Ruud wanted two contracts – one as a player and one as a manager which chairman Ken Bates balked at. When discussing how much said contracts would be worth, Gullit talked in net figures as opposed to gross (“I always talk netto” he famously quipped) which further put Uncle Ken’s nose out of joint. Add to these issues the idea that Bates just thought Ruud was too flash and disliked him and the legendary Dutchman was out on his ear. It was a huge story when it broke which although it shocked and saddened me, also made me realise that Chelsea were a big deal again after years in the shadows. Indeed, they were second in the league and in the quarter finals of two cup competitions at the point that Gullit got the bullet. My anguish was assuaged by the appointment of another footballing legend as his replacement – Gianluca Vialli -who would ironically become player-manager and deliver four trophies in his two and a half year tenure. I wonder if any of the acts on this episode of TOTP deserved the boot because it just wasn’t working out?

Nobody would want to get rid of the guy opening the show would they? Errol Brown, the front man of Hot Chocolate and the singer of all those classic hits? He always seemed so…well…nice. Nice he may have been but he’d also left Hot Chocolate over a decade before and whilst his former band members carried on without him (I know – without Errol, what was the point?), Brown was fronting his own version of Hot Chocolate for the nostalgia circuit. Maybe there was some tension there which might explain the confusion over the latest of the band’s revivals. After racking up their final UK Top 40 hit fourteen years prior (they were the only band to have a hit in every year between 1970 and 1984), there had been a relaunch of the band and a Greatest Hits package in 1987, 1993 and 1997. They’d been based around their hits “You Sexy Thing” and “It Started With A Kiss” and it’s that song which got another rerelease in 1998.

That last revival had seen the aforementioned “You Sexy Thing” become a No 6 hit in the November of 1997 and TOTP mysteriously billed it as being a solo single by Errol Brown when he appeared on the show even though it was officially (and correctly) by Hot Chocolate. However, the 1998 release of “It Started With A Kiss” was credited to Hot Chocolate featuring Errol Brown so what was going on there? Some contractual/naming rights shenanigans? Who knows? What is clear is that this performance saw Errol give a stripped back, almost acoustic version of the song which loses that lush, smooth production of the original for me. Also, the studio audience sat round him in a semi circle clapping along is giving me Blue Peter vibes which can’t be right on TOTP surely? My lasting memory of “It Started With A Kiss” though is of hearing it played on Radio 1 back in 1982 when it was first a hit and when Errol sang “You don’t remember me do you?”, Steve Wright chiming in with “Yeah, Errol, bald head, does a bit of singing now and again. I remember you” or words to that effect. How I laughed.

Hire or Fire? It has to be hire for Errol

Look out! It’s Cleopatra comin’ atcha! Yes, we have arrived at the time when three teenage sisters from Manchester were going to be the next big thing. However, a flurry of initial success lasted less time than the milk in the their Egyptian namesake’s bath before going sour. Hailing from the infamous Moss Side area, Cleo, Yonah and Zainam Higgins burst into our lives with that catchphrase and a No 3 debut single in “Cleopatra’s Theme”. Early labelling in the press as a UK, female Hanson was as lazy as it was obvious but three Top 5 hits in 1998 earned them BRIT and MOBO Awards nominations. Not only that but they were signed to Madonna’s Maverick label in the US where exposure on the Nickelodeon and Disney channels gave them a sizeable hit single and an album that sold 300,000 copies. They even toured with the Spice Girls and performed at the Vatican Christmas Carol Concert at the request of the Pope! What?! They had their own sitcom TV series on CITV! Maybe they were a big deal. Somehow though, none of this could sustain the group. A record company restructure resulted in a lack of promotion for their first single of the new millennium and a second album went unreleased in the UK. The group’s death knell came not by the bite of an asp but by Warner wanting to promote Cleo as a solo star and Cleopatra were no more. They did appear in ITV’s 2005 Hit Me, Baby, One More Time TV series but they couldn’t best Chesney Hawkes and didn’t make the final. Similarly, Cleo appeared on the second series of The Voice UK but bowed out in the semi-finals.

So why didn’t Cleopatra become global superstars with some longevity? Over exposure maybe? The appeal of their act had a built in time limit? Or perhaps their songs weren’t good enough? Watching them perform on this TOTP, I was expecting their hit to be…well…better but it doesn’t really go anywhere for me. The hooks don’t quite bite – not compared to the aforementioned Hanson’s “MMMBop” certainly – and all that spelling out their name letter by letter I found tedious. Another person who found Cleopatra tedious was the mother at the centre of a tale an ex-work colleague once told me. On a Saturday afternoon in Hull on the infamous Hessle Road, she overheard said mother say to her daughter who was unbelievably called Cleopatra, “Oi Cleopatra! Pack it in or I’ll twat ya!”. Only in Hull.

Hire or Fire? Sorry girls – it’s P45 time.

OK – just what is going on with presenter Jayne Middlemiss’s hair? It started off fairly coiffured and styled but just two songs in, it’s become loose and out of place as if she’s been head-banging down the front of the stage to…who? Cleopatra? Errol Brown? Can’t be surely? If that sounds a bit sexist, commenting on a woman’s look, I didn’t intend that obviously. It’s just that it had noticeably changed in a short space of time and piqued my attention.

Erm…on with the music I think. Who remembers Headswim? No, not me though looking at the cover of their second album “Despite Yourself”, that rang a few bells but I couldn’t have told you what they sounded like. Well, what they did sound like was Radiohead wannabes it transpires if their only hit “Tourniquet” was anything to go by. Radiohead but just not as good. Radiotails maybe. It’s all very angsty and doom laden with searing guitars and tortured vocals but it doesn’t really take me with it somehow.

That second album was recorded after the death of the brother of the band’s Daniel and Tom Glendining so maybe its sound is understandable but it still doesn’t make it any more listenable. The album failed to sell in any significant way and the band were dropped by label Epic. The members of Headswim pursued new musical ambitions with various other projects and even played a one off gig in 2022 to promote the rerelease of debut album “Flood” but there has been nothing from the band since.

Hire or Fire? I think Epic had the right idea

P.S. If I wanted a song that mentioned tourniquets in it, then I’d go for this:

Remember in the late 80s and early 90s when there was a trend for classic hits from the 70s to be reactivated by inserting a nasty, clunky backbeat into the mix and making them palatable to the club generation? I’m thinking of Quartz covering Carole King’s “It’s Too Late”, Black Box taking on Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Fantasy”, Snap!’s revisiting of the Gap Band with “Oops Up” and Fresh 4 (featuring Liz E) hijacking Rose Royce’s “Wishing On A Star”. Well, that final track was raided again in 1998 by rising-star-soon-to-be-legend Jay–Z. Admittedly, he didn’t come up with a horrible dance version but rather he remade it with a hip-hop/ rap twist AND, in a boost of credibility, he persuaded original vocalist Gwen Dickey to do the singing on it for him. However, despite being named in the intro by Jayne Middlemiss, when she declares “here’s Jay-Z…” and the camera pans to Gwen with no sign of the rapper, it looks odd. Eventually, we get a glimpse of him via the three giant screens behind Gwen which feature him rapping his sections thus reuniting the two but it doesn’t quite pull it off visually for me.

As for the track it’s basically Gwen doing a retread through the chorus of her old hit with Jay-Z rapping the verses when he references missing his homies, getting his shit together and, in an unexpected twist, about being interrupted by a chicken he used to cluck with. I presume he means a female acquaintance he used to hang out with? It would peak at No 13 but “Wishing On A Star” would continue to be covered by the likes of Jay-Z’s partner Beyoncé, Seal, Paul Weller and even The X Factor 2011 finalists featuring One Direction and JLS.

Hire or Fire? The original is great but I can live without a hip-hop version thanks

I know I say this all the time in this blog but this next hit I genuinely do not remember. No, it’s not just that I can’t recall it from the dusty recesses of my mind but rather that there is just nothing there at all – as if it never existed. Seriously, it’s like watching it for the very first time but 27 years after the event. Wes was Wes Madiko, a Cameroonian musician who’d worked with French ambient artists Deep Forest and who toured the globe with his brand of world music whilst also highlighting the plight of suffering children. He was a stand-up guy basically. His hit “Alane” was an exuberant and joyful blast of African chants in the Duala language of Cameroon set to an infectious dance beat which puts me in mind of The Lion King. And guess what, Wes contributed a track to the soundtrack of The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride. “Alane” would be his only UK hit and he would sadly die in 2021 aged just 57.

Hire or Fire? I’m saying hire on this one. I might not have know it before but it was a pleasant surprise

After Headswim earlier, here was another band who were hardly your cheesy, TOTP charts stars of yore. I was pretty slow on the uptake when it came to Spiritualized. Although my groovy record shop colleagues were definitely into this lot, all I knew about them was that they had an album out that came in really annoying and impractical packaging that was a nightmare to display in the store. Initial copies of the band’s third album “Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space” came in a box designed to resemble prescription medicine with a booklet containing dosage advice and the CD housed in foil blister packaging! I don’t think I could get past that literally nor metaphorically to get to the actual music. As such, I missed out on the NME’s album of 1997 (as referenced by Jayne Middlemiss in her intro) and its attendant singles the second of which was “I Think I’m In Love”. This earthy, organic, almost hypnotic track wasn’t your standard late 90s chart hit and thank heavens for that. Despite it essentially being just a list of clever word play, it had an authenticity to it that I couldn’t detect in Headswim which sounds mad given that they were writing about personal experience of death. Ah the vagaries of subjectivity when it comes to musical choice.

Anyway, I finally cottoned onto Spiritualized when they released the marvellous “Stop Your Crying” in 2001 after I’d left record shops behind me and become a civil servant*. Parent album “Let It Come Down” was purchased off the back of it as were tickets to see them live in York where I was then living and they made a huge sound as I recall. The band are still together (though I think front man Jason Pierce is the only constant member) and they released their ninth studio album in 2022.

*That was a culture shock and I clearly won’t be writing a blog about that!

Hire or Fire? Definitely a job offer being made to this lot

Ah shite. It’s the Backstreet Boys again with their piss weak ballad “All I Have To Give”. We saw this a few weeks back as a pre-release exclusive I think and it’s gone into the charts at No 2 this week and so is back on again. It’s just a reshowing of that first performance which means they’re all sat down on directors chairs. Presumably Louis Walsh was watching at home and used this appearance as a blueprint for every performance by Westlife. Ever.

Hire or Fire? I’m firing all five of their asses!

The Middlemiss bonce has lurched from sleek to slack during the show but it’s back under control again as she introduces the No 1 song this week – “Doctor Jones” by Aqua. Not a lot else to say about this one other than that the contrast in voices between singer Lene Nystrøm and her bald male counterpart René Dif is the most striking on the show since Marcella Detroit and Siobhan Fahey took to the stage as Shakespears Sister. Also, the name Jones does seem to turn up in a fair few songs. Apart from “Doctor Jones”, there’s this lot for starters off the top of my head:

• “Mr. Jones” – Counting Crows
• “Me and Mrs. Jones” – Billy Paul
• “Jones Vs. Jones” – Kool And The Gang
• “Janie Jones” – The Clash

Any others?

Hire or Fire? It’s the old tin tack for Aqua

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Hot Chocolate featuring Errol Brown	It Started With A Kiss	Didn’t happen
2	Cleopatra	Cleopatra’s Theme	Not for me
3	Headswim	Tourniquet	Nah
4	Jay-Z / Gwen Dickey	Wishing On A Star	Negative
5	Wes	Alane	Nope
6	Spiritualized	I Think I’m In Love	I did not
7	Backstreet Boys	All I Have To Give	As if
8	Aqua	Doctor Jones	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/m002fzcb/top-of-the-pops-13021998?seriesId=unsliced