It’s another of those episodes where the climax of the show isn’t the No 1 but an exclusive appearance by a featured artist doing a two strong song performance. After Paul Weller the other week, it’s the turn of the Sex Pistols this time around who have reformed for the Filthy Lucre tour. As for the rest of the line up, there’s only six other chart hits on the show of which we’ve seen three previously. I have to say I’m not liking this new format that’s been adopted since the move to Friday nights. Thankfully, this is the last of these I understand. Maybe audience reaction to them wasn’t great? By the way, our host tonight is Gina G who is as famous as she’ll ever be at this point after her Eurovision entry “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit” topped the UK charts just a few weeks back.

We start though not with Gina but with David Howe from Chingford in Essex. Don’t ask “Who he?” – he literally tells you in his direct to camera message that he’s the first winner of the TOTP meet and greet competition and his prize was a trip to Madrid to hang out with Shampoo. I pondered in my last post what David would have thought of that and he looks rather underwhelmed despite the gloriously sunny backdrop behind him. The Shampoo girls Jacqui and Carrie look miserable with the whole situation. Maybe David was star struck whilst Shampoo were cultivating their abrasive ‘riot grrrl’ image?

It’s one of those ‘new’ songs to kick off the show from Everything But The Girl and “Wrong”. Despite being their most commercially successful period with three consecutive Top 10 hits as opposed to just three Top 40 singles in their entire career previously, I was having serious trouble getting on board with this new direction that they’d taken. I could appreciate that Todd Terry remix which had single handedly rejuvenated their career but I was missing their old stuff like the deserts miss the rain as the song went*.

*It was also the title of a 2002 Best Of album that tellingly didn’t include “Wrong”.

The gorgeous “Baby, The Stars Shine Bright” album was a particular favourite but all this electronica dance stuff was becoming a big turn off for me. Would it be wrong of me to suggest that this latest hit was basically just a retread of “Missing”? They’d even got Todd Terry back in to remix it! Tracey’s voice was as affecting as ever but the track didn’t stand up to repeated plays for me. “Wrong” would effectively draw a line under this era of the band being their last ever single to visit the Top 10 and ushering in a return to more conservative chart positions before Tracey and Ben took a quarter of a century off from Everything But The Girl only returning in 2023 with the “Fuse” album which went Top 3.

By 1996, Britpop had totally embedded itself in UK culture and its musical landscape. The movement’s swagger was hard to avoid but there were signs that a different type of genre was emerging as an antidote to all that Britpop brashness. From small pockets, intelligent, wrily observed, quirky pop music was sprouting. We’d already seen Space in the charts recently with a single that featured a glockenspiel and now came The Divine Comedy. Channeling the spirit of 60s baroque pop, this outfit from Northern Ireland was mainly just a vehicle for the creative genius of Neil Hannon. Having formed in 1989, they’d already released three albums into the pop void before Radio 1’s Chris Evans championed “Something For The Weekend”, the lead single from fourth studio album “Casanova”. With that backing, a first ever Top 40 hit was achieved when it debuted and peaked at No 14. Hannon’s distinctive, almost spoken vocal delivery style might have almost put the song into the novelty bracket à la The Mike Flowers Pops but there was something more substantial to it. Maybe it was the storytelling in the song which relates the tale of a suitor’s unwanted advances to a young woman who tricks him into looking in the woodshed only for her friends to knock him unconscious and steal his car and money. You don’t get songs detailing that kind of stuff everyday of the week. The line “There ain’t nothing in the woodshed…except maybe some wood” was typical of the humour Hannon would bring to his idiosyncratic songwriting. He even looked unconventional for a pop star but that was also part of his appeal I think. I have a friend who adores him and when she met him and got him to sign something for her, he included the famous woodshed line alongside his signature.

“Something For The Weekend” would usher in a run of chart hits that would last the entire 90s and into the middle of the next decade. Perhaps their best known tune is “National Express” with its lyric about having an arse the size of a small country which made the Top 10 in 1999. That same year, the marvellous Best Of album “A Secret History” was released achieving gold status sales and peaking at No 3. It’s a great starting point for anyone wanting to investigate the band’s catalogue. In a bizarre turn of events, psychedelic Welsh rock band Super Furry Animals would have a hit with a track also called “Something For The Weekend” just a couple of weeks after The Divine Comedy had done so though they changed the title to “Something 4 The Weekend” for the single release.

I saw The Divine Comedy live back in 2017 when they supported Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott at Craven Park, home of rugby team Hull Kingston Rovers. As good as Hannon was, I wish it had been in a smaller setting rather than a stadium gig. Maybe something like that woodshed if they cleared out all the wood.

It can’t be time for Celine Dion again already can it?! I think this is the third time she’s been on with “Because You Loved Me” and to add insult to injury, it’s that concert performance once more that the TOTP producers tried to convince us was a live satellite link up when it obviously wasn’t. I hadn’t noticed before but the camera picks out members of the audience some of whom are visibly touched by what they are witnessing. One woman had clearly been crying. Now, I’m not going to go down the musical snobbery route – people like what they like and may have a strong emotional attachment to a song based on some event from their own private lives – but it did take me by surprise. Haven’t seen tears on TOTP like that since that teenage girl was highlighted sobbing on the Duran Duran video for “The Reflex”.

Right, it’s time for that exclusive performance from Madrid by Shampoo now that was the mystery prize for the meet and greet competition won by Dave from Chingford. Presumably he was watching from the sidelines off camera. Shampoo were one of a number of female duos that were successful in the 90s including Shakespears Sister, Scarlet and Alisha’s Attic. Jacqui and Carrie though were a curious outfit. A handful of moderately sized hit singles in the UK and yet they sold a million copies of their debut album “We Are Shampoo” in Japan and Asia. There’s probably some deep connection at play there which warrants some detailed cultural analysis but I haven’t got time to go into all that now. All I will say is that their sound and image didn’t seem to be anything particularly new. Hadn’t we seen something similar from the likes of Transvision Vamp and Fuzzbox previously?

Anyway, it’s time to address the elephant in the room which is the title of this their last ever hit. Literally in the week that the phenomenon that would become the Spice Girls released their debut single “Wannabe”, Shampoo were in the charts with a song called “Girl Power”. Yes, the slogan that Sporty, Posh, Baby, Scary and Ginger used to promote themselves around the world was already out there in the cultural vernacular. Now, I’m not suggesting some act of dishonest appropriation not least because Shampoo didn’t invent the phrase themselves. The origins of ‘girl power’ are recognised as belonging to US punk band Bikini Kill who used it as the subtitle to their second feminist zine in 1990. However, it is quite the coincidence don’t you think? Could the Spice Girls management have been influenced by the Shampoo single or is that just me forcing an event that never happened to create my own narrative? Surely the marketing strategy for the Spice Girls had been months in the formulating and hadn’t just adopted something as pivotal as the ‘girl power’ mantra on the hoof? Well, apparently it was. The Spice Girls did just nick it off Shampoo! Here’s @TOTPFacts with the story:

Ha! Well, I guess Shampoo themselves must have nicked it off Bikini Kill then. After all, it was sometimes spelt ‘grrrl power’ after the ‘riot grrrl’ movement they aligned themselves with in their early days. What’s undeniable is that the fortunes of Shampoo and the Spice Girls went in wildly different directions from this point on. The latter would conquer the world in less than six months while the former never returned to the charts and whose last single release was a desperate cover version of a song by Christmas playlist perennials The Waitresses. Rubbing salt in the wound, whilst Jacqui and Carrie were having to entertain Dave from Chingford in Madrid, they were missing out on being in the TOTP studio at the same time as their heroes the Sex Pistols. For what it’s worth, I preferred Shampoo’s brand of “Girl Power” to anything the Spice Girls released under that banner.

Right, what’s wrong with this picture with said picture being Black Grape performing “England’s Irie” with their mates Keith Allen and Joe Strummer? Well, two days before this went out, the England football team lost their Euros 96 semi final with Germany in heartbreaking fashion on penalties. Thus, the timing of this exultant performance of a song about them seems slightly off. Surely they should have released it a few weeks earlier when “Three Lions” came out? By the time it was finally in the charts, all the expectation, excitement and general sense of positivity that had engulfed the nation had completely dissipated. I did mention recently that the release schedule for Black Grape’s singles had been too tight when “Fat Neck” came out the month before “England’s Irie”. Maybe someone at the label messed up? Or maybe they’d banked on England making the final which would have given the record a whole weekend’s trading before the game on the Sunday evening to rack up some monster sales? Either way, this performance was rendered a bit after-the-Lord Mayor’s-show by the events of the Wednesday evening.

Talking of which, who can forget Gareth Southgate’s tortured face after being the only person to miss his penalty? I recall that the next morning, the aforementioned Chris Evans conducting a debrief of the match on his breakfast show (he always was a bandwagon jumper and being a footy fan was now seen not just as acceptable but the done thing in the era of ‘lad culture’). He pronounced that Southgate was a “top man” and played “Walkaway” by Cast as a tribute to him and the team whilst the nation cried into our cornflakes. As for Black Grape, they would only trouble the Top 40 compilers once more after their second album “Stupid Stupid Stupid” was poorly received though they are still releasing new material to this day with latest album “Orange Head” having come out earlier this year.

The Fugees reign supreme still at the top of the charts with “Killing Me Softly”. Yet again we have the same studio performance we’ve always had, presumably as it was the only time they were in the country. They could have mixed it up a bit and showed the official promo video for it at least once. After all, it did win an MTV Video Music Award for Best R&B Video. Interestingly, the TOTP producers let the ending credits roll over the top of it even though we still have the Sex Pistols to come creating a false ending effect. There are no further credits when the Pistols finish.

Lauryn Hill had a small acting career that briefly ran in tandem with her singing one. Most notably she starred in Sister Act 2: Back In The Habit. I think this is my favourite scene from the film:

Somebody remarked on Twitter that Gina G must be really tall as she seems to be stooping in every link that she does and they’re right. It’s like she’s a mime artist performing being trapped in a cube. Most odd. Not as odd though as the ‘punk’ outfit she has on to introduce the Sex Pistols. What’s with the feather headdress? That look is more Hiawatha than high priestess of punk.

Anyway, the Sex Pistols are finally here to perform for us. I was just too young when they were at the height of their fame/infamy in 1976/77 to be caught up in the punk phenomenon though I was aware of the band’s name (which seemed very dangerous to the then eight year old me) and that two of the band were called Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten. I couldn’t have named any of their songs or told you what they sounded like though. My next encounter with the band came a few years later in a music lesson at Grammar school (I’d passed my 11 plus exam) when the hardest kid in class Paul Dukes convinced the recently qualified and wet behind the ears teacher that “Friggin’ In The Riggin’” from “The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle” album was a suitable song for composition appreciation. Inevitably, the needle was abruptly removed from the record long before the song’s end. As I got older and more into music, I expanded my knowledge of rock history which included getting to know the band’s story and music though mainly the holy trinity that is “Anarchy In The UK”, “God Save The Queen” and “Pretty Vacant”. I eventually bought the “Never Mind The Bollocks” album as well.

There had been a mini Pistols revival in 1992 when Virgin raided the band’s rather limited back catalogue to release the “Kiss This” compilation that achieved gold status and made the Top 10 on the charts. Four years later, a full on reunion including original bass player Glen Matlock was put into effect for the six month long Filthy Lucre tour. One of the dates was at Finsbury Park on the 23td June, the day after England had defeated Spain in a quarterfinal of the Euros on penalties. Yes, the one with that Stuart Pearce celebration…

Pearce and Gareth Southgate somehow found themselves at Finsbury Park introducing the Sex Pistols on stage the following day. No, really look:

Also there that day was my manager at the Our Price where I was working, the late, great Pete Garner original bassist with the Stone Roses. I had to cover his Sunday shift in the shop so he could go. I only know this as it’s all in my recently found diary that handily covers the whole of 1996. It also tells me that I listened to the Sex Pistols gig live on the radio that evening. Back to this TOTP performance though and inevitably the band do one of the ‘holy trinity’ tracks. “Pretty Vacant” made No 6 in the charts when released in the Summer of 1977 and would usher in the band’s first ever appearance on TOTP so I guess there’s some history and symmetry at play in the band choosing to perform it here. It was the follow up to the press baiting and BBC banned single “God Save The Queen” released at the height of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee celebrations. That ban clearly had zero effect on the band’s sense of daring as they then released a song that included John Lydon’s surely deliberate annunciation of the word ‘vacant’ as ‘vay-c**t’. Twenty-six years later, The Darkness tried a similar linguistic trick on their festive hit “Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End)”. Bells End? Bellend? We all caught up? Good.

For the second track, the band went for a less obvious choice in “New York”, a song generally perceived to be about US glam rockers New York Dolls whom, of course, Malcolm McLaren used to manage before switching his attention to the Pistols. Clearly the passage of time had softened the band’s edges as they presumably relented to BBC demands about the song’s lyrics with the word ‘shit’ sung by Lydon as ‘it’ and ‘faggot’ as ‘maggot’. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

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/m00233z0/top-of-the-pops-28061996?seriesId=unsliced