Lisa Stansfield

TOTP 20 JUN 1997

We’re still in the early weeks of the Chris Cowey tenure of TOTP and this would seem to be the experimental stage where he’s trying things out to see what sticks. For example, we’ve gone from just seven featured songs from a couple of weeks ago to a whopping ten on this show. TEN! I better get my skates on then…Tonight’s host is Jayne Middlemiss for the second time in three weeks and hopefully she’ll have conquered those nerves which she displayed on her debut appearance. She gets an early opportunity to demonstrate that she has because, as with Jo Whiley last week, our host does a direct to camera piece before the credits have even rolled. There’s no prop for Jayne to kick over though like Jo had. Instead, there’s a shot of a studio clock and an ‘On Air’ sign and Jayne telling us it’s time to dance in front of the telly before doing that head nod thing she does – that might start to get annoying very quickly. It’s probably the nerves again.

We start though with an artist who never seems anything less than serenely confident in her own abilities. Lisa Stansfield had been having hits since the late 80s with the biggest and most well known of those arriving early on with “All Around The World”. Inspired by ‘The Walrus of Love’ Barry White, the track contained a tribute to him in its spoken word intro that was based on the album version of White’s “Let The Music Play”. Eight years on, Lisa would go into full on honour mode by recording a cover of White’s 1974 hit “Never, Never Gonna Give You Up”. In terms of topping and tailing Lisa’s chart career, it couldn’t have been more perfect as it would prove to be her final UK Top 40 hit when released as the second single from her eponymously titled 1997 album. The radio edit is a pretty faithful version but numerous remixes of it by the likes of Hani and Frankie Knuckles would propel it to the top of the US Dance Club Songs chart. The latter would receive a Grammy for the Best Remixed Recording, Non Classical category. Lisa would ultimately satisfy her Barry White fixation by duetting with him in 1999 on “The Longer We Make Love”.

I talked in the past post about not being sure that the presenter links were filmed at the same time and in the same studio as the actual performances due to the cutaway and cutback shots between the two. Well, I’m still thinking that way for this show. Curiously, last week, the only time the two were in sync was when Jo Whiley interacted with Wet Wet Wet who were the second act on and the same pattern is repeated in this show as Jayne Middlemiss is definitely in the same geographical and temporal space as this week’s artist who are second in the running order. Was something going on or am I reading too much into it? For the record, said second artist is Supergrass with their single “Sun Hits The Sky”. Similar to Skunk Anansie, I sometimes think this lot don’t get the credit they deserve. Certainly I’d forgotten or not known in the first place how many great tunes Skin and co had released and although I was more aware of the Supergrass output (I had two of their albums), it’s an easy trap to fall into to immediately think of “Alright” when you hear their name. However, they had so many more great (and better) tunes than that like “Moving”, “Pumping On Your Stereo”, “Caught By The Fuzz” and this one. “Sun Hits The Sky” is a tight, nifty indie rock tune that powers along with some force.

It was the third single taken from the album “In It For The Money” the title of which tied in quite nicely with an event that took place in April of 1996 when lead singer Gaz Coombes met the train robber Ronnie Biggs in Rio. Biggs had his own footnote in music history of course, having recorded with the Sex Pistols on two songs for The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle plus The Great Train Robbery of 1963 was the basis of the 1985 Paul Hardcastle hit “Just For Money”. “In It For The Money”? “Just For Money”? It’s close enough for a tenuous link isn’t it?

And so to the fourth and final appearance on the show by Eternal on the back of their hit with Bebe Winans, a previous chart topper, “I Wanna Be The Only One”. Fourth?! Yes, four weeks on the bounce they’ve featured but in defence of whoever’s decision it was, the single entered the charts at No 1 and then spent three consecutive weeks at No 2 so it was a very consistent seller. It’s taken until this fourth performance though to find a different way of promoting the single which they do here by doing a ‘live acoustic’ version of the track. Fair play as I think it works pretty well. Were the pure white outfits the girls are wearing a deliberate choice to project the gospel flavour this version has? If so, it’s kind of undermined by the stage they’re performing on which seems to have a leopard print design on it. Bit odd.

Despite its high sales and being the UK’s sixteenth best selling single of the year, it was towards the back of the queue in that list when compared to all the year’s other No 1 records. Only four chart toppers appeared below Eternal in the Top 40 of 1997 – the 1996 Christmas No 1 from the Spice Girls which is understandable but then also their 1997 festive hit which isn’t. The other two below Eternal were the dance hit “You’re Not Alone” by Olive and the Verve’s only No 1 “The Drugs Don’t Work”.

From current “I Wanna Be The Only One” hitmakers to a band whose first single to make the charts was “The Only One I Know” which peaked at No 9 in 1990. In the seven years since that breakthrough hit for The Charlatans, it hadn’t been a string of subsequent huge chart successes* since then. Of the twelve singles the band released between 1990 and 1995, none had got higher than No 12, five hadn’t cracked the Top 20 and three hadn’t even made the Top 40. Of course, high chart positions are no guarantee of song quality and the public cruelly ignored some cracking tunes. The nation finally got with it in 1996 with the release of “One To Another” which went Top 3 whilst follow up “North Country Boy” made No 4. Then came “How High” which peaked at No 6 giving the band three consecutive Top 10 hits for the first time ever. It was an impressive run of chart numbers but more importantly, they were all quality tracks and not a cover version in sight.

*It was a different story when it came to their albums with three of the five released up to this point having topped the charts.

“How High” is not only a quality tune but surely unique in referencing this TV show from my youth which made a huge impression on me and had kids up and down the country saying “Ah, grasshopper”. Not even “Kung Fu” by Ash mentions it in its lyrics.

We’ve finally arrived at the last Michael Jackson release that I’ll ever have to discuss in this blog, if not quite his final TOTP appearance. As I will be stopping at the end of the 1999 repeats, “HIStory/Ghosts” will be the last Jacko single I have to write about as he would not release another one until 2001’s “You Rock My World”. And there have been oh so many that I have had to comment on. My blogging started way back with the 1983 repeats and “Billie Jean”. Since then, the self styled ‘King of Pop’ had…

*checks Wikipedia*

32(!) UK Top 40 singles! My God! I haven’t gone back through all my posts to see if I reviewed every single one but it must be a pretty high number. So, 32 singles over 15 years (‘83-‘97) is almost exactly two a year, every year except it didn’t work like that of course. Jacko’s singles would come in gluts with the timing of them obviously based around when he had an album out which was pretty consistently every four to five years. And when an album came out, so did a bucket load of tracks released as singles from them. Seven from “Thriller”, nine from “Bad”, nine again from “Dangerous” and then five from “HIStory”. The final two of those 32 were taken from the “Blood On The Dance Floor: HIStory In The Mix” album with the very final one being this double A-side. There will be one final TOTP appearance in the 90s for Jacko with this single so I’ll devote this post to the “HIStory” track and the final one to “Ghosts”. So what can I say about “HIStory” the song? Not much apart from it’s hideous. I get that it’s a remix but seriously, Michael Jackson meets what? Italian house is that? I don’t care to find out any more. Even Chris Cowey can’t have been convinced as we get less than two minutes of the promo. There were periods in the early 90s when whole shows were structured around the screening of a video exclusive for his latest release which would command a good seven minutes of screen time.

Right then, what’s going on here? Two artists squeezed into just over a minute and a half of screen time? We’re not going back to having a ‘Breakers’ section are we? Well, no we’re not – it makes less sense than that. It seems to be essentially a plug for upcoming performances by artists on the show but here’s the thing – the clip used is just that; a minute long clip sourced from the actual performance that would be shown in full the following week. Why didn’t they just show the whole thing now? In the case of the first artist featured Blur, their single “On Your Own” had been released on the Monday before this TOTP aired as far as I can tell so why not just have played the song in full? They could have labelled it as an ‘exclusive’ if need be seeing as it hadn’t charted yet. Oh well, maybe it’s for the best given that we won’t see the full performance episode due to the Puff Daddy/P Diddy issue – a minute and a half is better than nothing at all as it’s a great track.

The third single from their eponymously titled fifth studio album, it tends to get overlooked when lined up against the No 1 that was “Beetlebum” and the memorable ‘woo-hoo’ of “Song 2” but it’s a good track in its own right. Damon Albarn has described it as the first ever Gorillaz track and you can understand where he’s coming from. It might not have the whiplash energy of “Song 2” but it has its own irresistible momentum and a huge hook in the singalong chorus. I have a distinct memory of being in a Birmingham nightclub six months later (I was visiting my younger sister) and being slammed around the dance floor along with the rest of the ravers when the DJ played “Song 2” and “On Your Own” one after the other. I was approaching 30 at the time so I don’t know what I thought I was doing but my sister is five years younger than me so I guess she would have still been in her club going years?

“On Your Own” would debut and peak at No 5 maintaining a fine run of hit singles for the band. Check these numbers out:

1 – 5 – 7 – 5 – 1 – 2 – 5

Their album sales weren’t too shabby either. Blur would return in 1999 with a fourth consecutive No 1 album called “13”.

We encounter the same curious plugging strategy that was reserved for Blur also applied to the Pet Shop Boys whose version of “Somewhere” from West Side Story is given a 30 seconds slot to big up the fact that the full performance will be on the show not next week even but in two weeks time! Just play the whole thing now for chrissakes! The single was released three days after this TOTP so surely it would have helped build anticipation for its release?

Anyway, why were Neil and Chris putting their stamp on this Bernstein and Sondheim classic? Well, it was to promote their mini residency at the Savoy Theatre in London called Pet Shop Boys Somewhere (Ok, we get it guys). The single would also be added to a rerelease of their latest album “Bilingual”. Of course, the duo had some history with cover versions stretching back to their 1987 Christmas No 1 “Always On My Mind”. They followed that with a mash up of U2’s “Where The Streets Have No Name” and Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” to glorious, extravagant effect in 1991 before taking on a one of the campiest of camp disco classics in “Go West” two years later. All of these had worked out pretty well to my ears (especially “Always On My Mind”) but I don’t think they quite pulled it off with “Somewhere”. Maybe, Neil doesn’t gave the vocal chops for such a towering song and attempting to turn it into a club anthem by adding a techno beat just to suit his voice isn’t the answer. Maybe the answer would have been to leave well alone. My wife loves West Side Story but can’t stand Tennant’s singing so I’m pretty sure she was not a fan of this one. Pet Shop Boys had twenty UK hit singles in the 90s of various sizes of which “Somewhere” was the eighteenth. There’s not much further to go now my wife will be pleased to hear.

They’re not hip, they’re not cool but, as Jayne Middlemiss says in her intro, “they’re top turns” and I’ve always got room for a bit of Del Amitri when the chance arises. Often criminally overlooked and undervalued, the Scottish pop rockers have a very decent back catalogue albeit that their chart positions weren’t always a standout. The band had notched up 11 UK Top 40 hits to this point in their career but none had got any higher than No 11. And yet…in an unlikely turn of events, they had managed to go Top 10 just two years earlier in the US with the surprise hit “Roll To Me”. Did it make them happy? Not likely. In true dour Scot style, they weren’t big fans of the song (despite having written and recorded it) and considered it rather a throwaway tune. No pleasing some people.

Anyway, they were back in 1997 with a new single (which hopefully they did like as it was the lead track off new album “Some Other Sucker’s Parade”) called “Not Where It’s At”. Was it a musical demonstration of self knowledge about their image? Probably not but listening back to it now, it does prick something in my mind about identity. Is it me or is there a smidgen of a whiff of XTC about this one? I may be committing an act of musical heresy but it just came to me all of a sudden. Maybe it’s the jangly guitars, I don’t know. I was so taken with the idea though that I asked ChatGPT what “Not Where It’s At” would sound like done by XTC. The answer I received was almost instantaneous but it also showed how AI is based on assumptions that don’t always hold water. In its final reckoning it seemed to me to be saying if XTC had come up with the track, it would have been…well…better which I’m not sure is fair. Maybe my question wasn’t fair so I asked ChatGPT a control question – “Who was I?” It’s answer? That I was a former TOTP presenter! AI – it’s not where it at.

Next up is a guy you don’t hear much about these days but whom, for a while back there, was going to be the next new music superstar after winning a MOBO and a BRIT. Finley Quaye came from a musical family – his Dad was jazz and blues pianist Cab Quaye whilst his Mum would take him to see sets at Ronnie Scott’s legendary jazz club in his childhood. Almost inevitably, he moved into a career in music in his early 20s and appeared, fully formed, in 1997 with his double platinum selling album “Maverick A Strike” and a clutch of hit singles the first of which was “Sunday Shining”, a Bob Marley track from his 1978 album “Kaya”. It’s a radically different version though blending the reggae of the original with an accessible 90s soul sound that carried itself with an air of knowing conviction – or maybe that was the super confident Finley himself?

Talking of which, as with Beck, the Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth to name a few, just about all the cool kids that I worked with at Our Price loved this guy. Given this statement, it is of no surprise that my eternally ever cooler than me wife had his album and I think she caught him live as well. Can’t remember what she thought of him but at least he turned up which he failed to do whilst playing Hull (where I now live) in 2022 and, as I understand it, failed to rock up at the venue with paying customers already inside. Mind you, he has form in that area. He was booted off stage in 2015 after just 30 minutes of a gig by the promoter of a venue in Gloucestershire for being shambolically awful. Bloody mavericks! I’d strike them off.

New show director Chris Cowey is still tinkering with the format and this week has turned his attention to the chart rundown. Having already dispensed with a full run through of the Top 40 in favour of just the 20 best selling singles that week, he’s now tacked it on to the Top 10 countdown and it’s voiced by host Jayne Middlemiss. There’s no run up to this – we’re just straight into it after Finley Quaye’s performance. It’s all a bit jarring. Anyway, Hanson are still at No 1 with “MMMBop” but it’s the last of their three weeks at the top. It’s an unusual title for a song so what’s it all about? According to band member Zac Hanson in an interview with the Songfacts website in 2004, it’s about holding on to the things in life that matter and that MMMBop represents “a frame of time or the futility of life”. Mmm…(Bop). Whatever. I do recall a lady coming into the Our Price where I worked at the time to buy the single for her granddaughter and she was pretty sure that she had asked for the right thing at the counter but wanted to double check and so asked again what it was called. My colleague Jim who was serving her said, rather understandably, “It’s called MMMBop” and we both looked at each other and couldn’t help but laugh at the oddness of him saying those words out loud*.

*I should probably be absolutely clear that we were laughing at the song title not the lady buying it!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Lisa Stansfield	Never, Never Gonna Give You Up	Nope
2	Supergrass	Sun Hits The Sky	Negative
3	Eternal featuring Bebe Winans	I Wanna Be The Only One	Yes but for my wife
4	The Charlatans	How High	No but I had a Best Of with it on
5	Michael Jackson	HIStory/Ghosts	Nah
6	Blur	On Your Own	No but I had the album
7	Pet Shop Boys	Somewhere	No
8	Del Amitri	Not Where It’s At	See 4 above
9	Finley Quaye	Sunday Shining	No but my wife had the album
10	Hanson	MMMBop	Yes but for my six year old goddaughter

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/m0028nyj/top-of-the-pops-20061997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 21 MAR 1997

Posted on February 12 by 80stastic

How was your life going in March 1997 (assuming you’re old enough to have any memories of 28 years ago)? If you were Tony Blair, you’d just received an endorsement as the next leader of the country by none other than traditional Tory supporters The Sun. Surely sitting Prime Minister John Major must have known the game was up then. If you were me (and I was), then you were stressed out at work and planning a trip to China. Those two things weren’t related – I was stressed at work as the manager of the Our Price where I worked had left a few weeks before and I was effectively acting manager by default whilst the recruitment process for a replacement was taking an age. I’d reluctantly agreed to put my hat in the ring at the behest of my colleagues (better the devil you know and all that) and we were about to introduce a new electronic stock control system which required a lot of preparation work. On top of that we had a new member of staff who was ruffling a few feathers in the team and apparently, according to my diary, one day a member of the public got stabbed in the shopping precinct where the store was located and I had to ring an ambulance, the police and try and patch him up. I have no recall of this at all so I’m either a complete fantasist or I’ve blocked out the memory of it.

That wasn’t the end of my stress though. One Saturday after work, a few of us went for a drink at a local pub and I took the pack of weekly memos with me as I planned to read them on the Sunday at home as I hadn’t had time at work. The memos were delivered to every store in a blue plastic pouch (‘the blue bag’) containing all the relevant information we needed for the next week including stock prices, charts and promotion details. As I sat down in the pub, I put them on the ledge above a radiator behind me so that they were in view of everyone and wouldn’t be forgotten at the end of the evening. What I hadn’t accounted for was the fact that there was a gap behind the radiator and between the seating and the blue bag slipped down the gap seamlessly once I let go of it. Disaster! Try as we might, we couldn’t retrieve it (and we spent the whole evening trying!) despite fashioning various apparatus using string and hooks (maybe even a coat hanger at one point) to pick it up. Either we gave up or the pub closed and I left memo less. I had to send someone to the Manchester store on Monday morning to photocopy theirs (this was the pre-digital age). As far as I knew, the memos would stay there until the pub had a refit, a time capsule from 1997. Almost 20 years later and long after I’d left Our Price, I went back to the pub and it had indeed had a refit so the memos would have been found (and binned) presumably. I resisted the temptation to ask the bar staff if they could check their lost and found for them!

As for China, my old school friend and best man at my wedding Rob was living and studying in Beijing so I’d arranged with his brother to fly out to visit him in the May. I had to get visas and inoculations and all that sort of thing sorted so there was a lot going on around this time. I’m sure I’ll get onto what went down in China in the next few posts.

Anyway, back to the month of March and if you were Kylie Minogue at that time, then you were hosting this edition of TOTP and had invested in a rather unflattering new, messy, plum coloured hairstyle. I think this was her ‘indie Kylie’ phase when she would collaborate with the likes of James Dean Bradfield of the Manics (he co-wrote her “Some Kind Of Bliss” single of this year) so I’m guessing that a new phase meant a new image. Definitely not having a style remodel was opening act Lisa Stansfield who was still very much attached to her brand of smooth R&B soul/dance that she’d made her name on. By 1997, she was onto her fourth solo album but after releasing the previous three in a four year period, it had been four years since album number three “So Natural”. Lisa had carved out a nice little sideline for herself though in recording songs for soundtrack albums – her contributions to The Bodyguard and Indecent Proposal had given her two Top 10 hits. In addition to that, she’d been back there earlier this year when remix team the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels looked to Lisa’s back catalogue to come up with “People Hold On (The Bootleg Mixes)”. However, taking a holistic approach to Lisa’s career up to this point, it’s surprisingly yet undeniably a case of diminishing returns as sales of her albums from “Affection” onwards decreased. Of course, that’s a very statistical approach – Lisa’s albums were still selling well but the UK figures were as follows:

Affection – 900,000 (triple platinum)
Real Love – 600,000 (double platinum)
So Natural – 300,000 (platinum)
Lisa Stansfield – 100,000 (gold)

It’s a definite downwards trend but I guess it’s all relative. Anyway, “The Real Thing” was the lead single from that last eponymous album and, for me, was typical Lisa fare which was fair enough but didn’t show much musical progression. On the other hand, if it ain’t broke and all that. It would return Stansfield to the Top 10 with a song that wasn’t from a film for the first time since 1991’s “Change” though she did feature on the “Five Live EP” alongside Queen and George Michael that would make No 1 off the back of the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert. However, “The Real Thing” would also be the last time a single of hers would be so high in the charts. I sometimes wonder if Lisa gets the credit she deserves though. You rarely hear her referred to when it comes to naming the UK’s most renowned female singers do you?

Ooh now, might this be a bit awkward? Kylie has to introduce one of her exes as INXS are the second artist on tonight. Ah, it was probably alright – Kylie and Michael Hutchence stopped seeing each other in 1991 so I’m guessing both parties might have moved on. Hutchence certainly had – by 1997 he was two years into a relationship with Paula Yates and they had had a daughter together. However, the relationship was intense and played out under a media spotlight and against a bitter custody battle with Yates’s ex-husband Bob Geldof over the three daughters they had together. Within eight months of this TOTP appearance, Hutchence would be dead, having committed suicide in a Sydney hotel room aged just 37. I remember thinking on hearing the news that “Suicide Blonde” would surely never be played on the radio ever again though it subsequently was resurrected after an appropriate amount of time had passed. One song that was cut in the wake of the news was “So Long Suicide” from the Duran Duran set of the gig they played on the night of Hutchence’s death. The band had already recorded a track about their friend called “Michael, You’ve Got A Lot To Answer For” that featured on their “Medazzaland” album that was released a month before his death.

As for INXS, they would carry on intermittently for the next 15 years with various guest singers including Terence Trent D’Arby at one point and then a permanent vocalist in J.D. Fortune who was recruited via reality television show Rock Star: INXS. Returning to this TOTP performance, I think this would have been their last time on the show in person not only because of Hutchence’s subsequent death but also because “Elegantly Wasted” was their final UK Top 40 hit. The title track of their tenth studio album, it sounded much like everything else they’d ever recorded since the “Kick” album. The winning formula of that record had helped the band become global success and saw Hutchence depicted as a rock god. Fast forward a decade and it was a sound that was starting to feel, if not worn out, then definitely not fresh. As with Lisa Stansfield earlier, it had been a case of diminishing returns for sales of INXS albums since the high point of “Kick” and “Elegantly Wasted” wasn’t about to reverse that trend. It was a sad end to the band’s glory days which had coincided with my time as a student at Sunderland Poly and my early years of marriage and living in Manchester. Thanks for the memories. RIP Michael.

Sometimes I look down the running order for these TOTP repeats and think to myself “what on earth do I have to say about this one?” – “Love Guaranteed” by Damage undoubtedly falls into that category. Needless to say I don’t remember it at all and listening to it in the present day, it made as much impression on me as a feather on a set of scales. It was just more of that one-paced, pedestrian R&B /pop hybrid that was popular back then. What’s that? What about Christopher Lee in the video? What about him? Plot wise, I think he’s meant to be in control of some sort of time portal but he looks as bored with the whole thing as I feel about it. Other than that, he does bugger all except stand around and stare down the lens of the camera. What? It’s the way that he stares though? Ah well, you’ve got me there.

As Kylie says in her intro to the next artist, the Aussies had taken over this particular episode of TOTP what with INXS, Kylie herself of course and now Gina G. Yes, lest we forget, the UK’s 1996 Eurovision entrant was actually Australian*. Despite trailing in eight place on the big night, “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit” had gone on to become a No 1 single. More surprising than that though was that Gina managed to sustain a pop career for another year or so and rack up four more hits. “Fresh” was the third of those and also the title track from her debut album. I don’t remember the song at all (for the record it was another ridiculously catchy, disco inflected Eurodance number) but I do recall the album – not for its music but for its dreadful cover art. It looked so amateurish and like it had been designed on the back of a beer mat down the pub. Gina is covered in chocolate icing (hmm…) holding a microphone attached to a stand with the microphone plugged into a socket on a wall. The room it’s set in is all in purple for some reason and Gina’s name and the album title look like they’ve been chucked on randomly at an angle rather than positioned with any resemblance of judgement. Then there’s Gina’s hair which looks like Crystal Tipps from 70s cartoon Crystal Tipps And Alistair. Is that some sort of air blower in the foreground (that might explain Gina’s hair) or is it an amp? You can’t tell because the whole thing has some sort of grainy tint to it that makes it look out of focus. The whole thing is an ugly mess. It was shot by renowned and award winning photographer David LaChapelle whose style has been described as “hyper-real and slyly subversive” – yeah, whatever. Regardless of what it looked like, the album continued her run of success by peaking at No 12 and achieving silver status in the UK in recognition of 60,000 sales.

*This theme was continued in 1997 as the UK entrant was Katrina And The Waves whose lead singer was Katrina Leskanich, an American but well be seeing them in these TOTP repeats soon enough.

Now, this is the song of the night so far for me. The Divine Comedy are probably not everybody’s cup of tea – was ‘wimp rock’ the term that some hack came up with to label them with? – but I’ve always quite liked them. After becoming genuine pop stars with chart hits the previous year, the band didn’t rest on their laurels and released their fifth album “A Short Album About Love” just nine months after their last “Casanova”. Despite containing three hit singles, it hadn’t sold that well so a change of tack was required. Rather than a complete change of sound, a different approach was deemed necessary and that was to record their next album at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire with an orchestra (but no audience). The plan worked in that the album made No 13 in the charts though I think I’m right in saying it was sold at a reduced price on account of only consisting of seven tracks so that may have helped its sales. It also produced another hit single in “Everybody Knows (Except You)” which was another ballad (of sorts) following on from previous hit “Frog Princess” though it was a much more…what’s the word?…agile?…unconventional?…love song but tuneful as hell. As for the performance, there was a lot of talk online about main man Neil Hannon’s cheek bones and beard. They are quite impressive though never really having had cheekbones or been able to grow a beard properly myself, I’m no expert.

By 1997, Wet Wet Wet had been having hits for a whole decade and to commemorate that anniversary, they released an album called “10”. Ironically, they wouldn’t release an album at all in the next ten years after their band splintered due to disputes over royalty payments and Marti Pellow’s hiatus to address his drugs and alcohol addictions. For the moment though, it seemed like business as usual as the band continued to churn out the hits. The phrase ‘business as usual’ could not only be applied to the band’s chart consistency but also to their sound. Lead single “If I Never See You Again” was yet more of their sophisti-pop, blue eyed soul style that they had honed over the years. I’d enjoyed their early hits but ten years in and – a bit like INXS earlier – it had all become a bit stale and predictable. Proving my point, the band’s final hit of the 90s would be with the most predictable cover version they could have chosen, the most covered song in history – “Yesterday” by The Beatles. With that and the whole “Love Is All Around” extended episode, “If I Never See You Again” might well have been the words on the lips of many a disgruntled music fan in 1997.

What’s that? Do I fancy a quick win? What do you mean? “Isn’t It A Wonder” by Boyzone has been on TOTP before on the 8 November 1996 show when it was premiered as an album track from their “A Different Beat” album? So I could just add a link to my review of that episode and I wouldn’t have to listen to/think about/ comment on it a second time? Right then…

TOTP 08 NOV 1996

The Spice Girls are holding at No 1 with the double A-side single “Mama / Who Do You Think You Are” off the back of Comic Relief day that happened the previous week. This time we get a performance of “Mama” and the girls have got some kids on stage with them to make the song even more sickly than it already was. I wonder who the kids were? Competition winners? They’ll be in their mid-30s now – you feel old now don’t you? I’m not sure that Mel B’s outfit was appropriate with her sitting next to that young lad. Still, it’ll have given him a good story to tell for the rest of his life.

The play out video is…wait…what? “Don’t Speak” by No Doubt?! But…but…they weren’t No 1 anymore and were at No 4 in the charts this week. They’d already been on three weeks in the trot whilst they’d topped the charts and yet they were back on again? Why? Well, this was all to do with the new appearance rules that had been brought in following the departure of Ric Blaxill as executive producer when songs no longer had to be new entries nor climbing the charts to be given a slot on the show. If you were going down the Top 40 you might yet get the call to appear one more time. Kylie says that “Don’t Speak” was the biggest selling single of the year to this point in an attempt to legitimise its video being given another showing but it seems a bit of a hollow reason to me. If this was the show’s new direction, I wasn’t sure about where we were heading.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Lisa Stansfield	The Real Thing	Negative
2	INXS	Elegantly Wasted	Nah
3	Damage	Love Guaranteed	As if
4	Gina G	Fresh	Nope
5	The Divine Comedy	Everybody Knows (Except You)	No but I had their Best Of with it on
6	Wet Wet Wet	If I Never See You Again	No
7	Boyzone	Isn’t It A Wonder	Never
8	Spice Girls	Mama / Who Do You Think You Are	I did not
9	No Doubt	Don’t Speak	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/m0027pnn/top-of-the-pops-21031997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 17 JAN 1997

Posted on January 16 by 80stastic

The day before this TOTP aired, Chris Evans resigned from Radio 1 leaving his former employer with a huge breakfast show sized hole in their schedule. The tipping point for Evans was station controller Matthew Bannister’s refusal to grant him Fridays off from hosting the show so he could prepare for his Channel 4 programme TFI Friday. Bannister had already turned a blind eye to multiple misdemeanours pulled by Evans during the course of his tenure including turning up late for work, going on a 17 hour bender that only ended two hours before he was due on air and broadcasting tasteless, innuendo-laden jokes. Bannister had already doubled Evans’ holiday entitlement but his star’s continued demands couldn’t be met indefinitely and he finally refused. Evans ego was so out of control at this point that he couldn’t handle someone saying ‘no’ to him and flounced off in a strop being replaced by Mark and Lard. I wonder if there are any huge egos on tonight’s show?

Tonight’s host is Scottish comedian Rhona Cameron whom I’m guessing won’t have had any ideas above her station as she was very early on in her career and was probably very grateful for the opportunity of prime time TV exposure. In fact, if I think of Rhona Cameron, I think of her ‘Sometimes’ speech in the first ever series of I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here which was in 2002. I’m surprised then that she was on our screens as early as 1997. Her first job is to introduce the Lightning Seeds who open the show with their latest single “Sugar Coated Icebergs”. Now, I do remember this one due to its peculiar title but I wasn’t sure how it went until I realised it was the same as all the other ones! Too harsh? Yes, of course it is and as I’ve said before in this blog, I don’t mind the Lightning Seeds at all but Ian Broudie (who always comes across as an unassuming guy and the polar opposite of Chris Evans) sure didn’t mind ploughing the same furrow over and over.

As the caption says, this one was written with Stephen Jones of Babybird and speculation was rife that it was about drugs. The lyrics about ‘sinking deep’ and ‘going under’ do kind of support that notion but the song’s bouncing, uplifting sound undermines that idea for me. One thing I did notice about it though was that its structure did seem to be changed to accommodate the lyrics rather. For example, in the first verse, the tempo is modified to allow the words ‘pointless’ and ‘coated’ to be worked in as the lines they are in don’t scan otherwise. Maybe that was Broudie’s way of trying to shake up the formula ever so slightly? “Sugar Coated Icebergs” would debut at its peak position of No 12 meaning that, excluding “Three Lions”, the Lightning Seeds still hadn’t ever had a Top 10 single despite having had double figures Top 40 hits. When it did come with their next single release which made No 8, it was with a cover version – “You Showed Me” by The Turtles. Still, “Three Lions” did go to No 1 three times in total and not many artists have that on their CV.

Now then, whether this was a case of egos out of control à la Chris Evans or not, what is true is that, just like the recently departed Radio 1 DJ, East 17 were attracting plenty of press that wasn’t positive. Let’s try and get the timeline of events correct here. This TOTP was broadcast on Friday 17 January but the shows were traditionally recorded on the Wednesday so that would have been the 15th. Lead singer Brian Harvey did a radio interview on the Thursday morning (16th) in which he advocated the use of recreational drugs and divulged details of his own intake. All hell broke loose as the media got hold of the story and Harvey was roundly criticised – it was even brought up at Prime Minister’s Questions on the lunchtime when John Major condemned Harvey’s words. By the end of Thursday, with the controversy still raging, the rest of the band distanced themselves from Harvey’s comments and he, himself, apologised for what he had said. Come Friday, the other three members of the group effectively sacked Harvey for unacceptable behaviour and threatened to sue him for loss of potential earnings.

All of this occurred just hours after this TOTP performance so I wonder if we can pick up on any tension between the four guys on stage. Remember that there had been doubts about Harvey’s commitment in the weeks before this incident – he’d actually quit the band before Christmas before quickly changing his mind. Rhona Cameron adds to the strained relations by pondering whether the group would split up in her intro. Watching the appearance back, I notice that Harvey is kept well away from Tony Mortimer with whom he had a difficult relationship – I don’t think they look at each other once. Harvey, for his part, looks uneasy with his hands in his pockets for some of the time. There’s also a lot going on in the background with a multitude of other people on the stage including a guy with a weird percussion contraption. It’s as if they were deliberately placed there to deflect attention from the group. Ultimately it would be Mortimer who would leave the band with Harvey reinstated as they attempted a comeback as a rebranded E-17.

What’s that? The song? Oh yeah, almost forgot about that. It was called “Hey Child” and was taken from their “Around The World: The Journey So Far” Best Of album. I don’t remember it at all and listening to it now, it seems like a slight, pure pop ballad that wasn’t very representative of their sound. I guess you could say the same thing about their most famous song “Stay Another Day” but “Hey Child” seems especially twee whereas their Christmas No 1 has a bit more gravitas. It would fall from its debut at No 3 to No 15 the following week. Was that drop off typical of the life cycle of singles back then or was it linked to the furore the band found themselves enveloped in? I’m not sure but I think this may well be the last TOTP appearance of the original line up of East 17.

Following quickly in the footsteps of this week’s No 1 comes another dance remix of an earlier track this time from Lisa Stansfield. Having first appeared in the charts back in 1989 as guest vocalist on the Coldcut hit “People Hold On”, Rochdale’s second most famous resident had gone on to bag herself a stellar career as a solo artist complete with multi platinum selling albums and a No 1 single. Despite all her success, Lisa always struck me as a down to earth sort – more Gracie Fields than airs and graces and certainly no Chris Evans character.

By 1997, she was about to release her fourth album so as a precursor to that, a remix of that first hit was released as “People Hold On (The Bootleg Mixes)”. Behind the remix were Dan Bewick and Matt Frost known as the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels whose treatment of the track took it to No 4 beating Coldcut’s chart peak by seven places. Unlike the Tori Amos remix though which totally restructured the original, this one just sounded like a poor man’s version of the 1989 hit to me. Even the video just features some recycled clips of promos for previous Stansfield hits rather than a brand new recording. It’s as if Lisa didn’t want anything to do with it. Whether she did or didn’t, her label Arista included it in that fourth album when it was released in the March as a bonus track. I guess it was just business at the end of the day and the music industry certainly had its share of dirty rotten scoundrels.

The 90s brought us some truly awful dance artists and tracks and this lot certainly fall into that category. Anybody remember No Mercy? They were a Latin American trio who were discovered by Frank Farian, the man who gave us 70s disco- cheesemakers Boney M and 80s pop blaggers Milli Vanilli. And now he was back with an act for the 90s, whether we wanted them or not. I was definitely of the latter opinion but enough people were of the former to send their hit “Where Do You Go” to No 2 in the UK. Yet again, the British record buying public had showed us that they could not be trusted with the nation’s reputation.

The song was built around the drumbeat from the Todd Terry remix of Everything But The Girl’s “Missing” (which they had already covered for their first single) but with some Spanish guitar flourishes, a line from that 60s hit by Peter Sarstedt and a shout-a-long chorus that wouldn’t have been out of place on an Outhere Brothers hit. What a remarkably talented bunch this lot were – and I thought Milli Vanilli were chancers! Like a floater that won’t flush away, the single lingered around the Top 40 for 14 weeks, 9 of them inside the Top 10 stinking the place out. No Mercy? NO! MERCY! FOR PITY’S SAKE MERCY!

Next to one of the most surprising comebacks of the decade. Hands up who had Texas down for scoring the fifth best selling album of the year?

*scans virtual room*

No you bloody didn’t! This was a band who’d only ever had one Top 10 hit eight years before and who last two albums had been, if not totally ignored, then studiously avoided. Nobody had them down for a Top 3 hit single at the start of 1997. So how did they do it? Well, they softened their sound it seemed to me. There was a big difference between the slide guitar licks and pounding backbeat of “I Don’t Want A Lover” and the smooth, radio friendly sound of “Say What You Want”. Their second biggest hit to this point had been a cover of Al Green’s “Tired Of Being Alone” so maybe they took inspiration from that when it came to writing songs for their fourth studio album “White On Blonde” although clearly its title was influenced by Bob Dylan’s “Blonde On Blonde”. Its lead single though was more Marvin Gaye than Zimmerman.

There was another factor in its chart success other than the way it sounded and it was to do with that man Chris Evans again. One of the last things he did before leaving Radio 1 was to champion “Say What You Want”. Given his reach at time via his breakfast show and TFI Friday, this was no small endorsement. However, I don’t think that lead singer and face of the band Sharleen Spiteri is similar to Evans in the ego stakes. Indeed, I once heard her say in an interview that she never has the lyrics to the band’s songs including in the sleeve notes as she encourages people to hear what they want to hear even if that means misinterpreting the actual words. That doesn’t sound like someone who has a ‘me, me, me‘ attitude. Texas would become one of the biggest selling artists of the late 90s and beyond. “White On Blonde” alone would shift 4 million units and generate five hit singles. Say what you want about the band but they had remarkable staying power and commitment to never give up.

Here’s someone with an ego that outdoes even Chris Evans. To be fair to Madonna, how could you not when you were* one of the most famous people on the planet? Was recording “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” on her bucket list do you think? I’m pretty sure playing the role of Eva Peron in Evita was a lifetime ambition. We’d all been waiting for this song to be released from the soundtrack to the 1996 film after a new composition written specifically for it (“You Must Love Me”) had been the lead single. Maybe it was held back for the Christmas market with her record company thinking it had a shot at being the festive chart topper? When it did finally arrive, it debuted at No 3 before slipping down the charts but it’s on this TOTP as it had gone back up the charts from No 10 to No 5 presumably due to the film being released to UK cinemas.

*the use of ‘were’ was deliberate

There was another reason though and that was the release of the dance remix of the track. A dance remix you say? Of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina”? Who knew? Well, not me and I was working in a record shop at the time so either I never sold a copy of it or I’ve completely forgotten about it. Either is possible. Want to hear it? Yeah you do…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I just didn’t get why the Backstreet Boys were so popular. I accept that I was in the minority in this opinion; their huge sales here and in America can’t be argued with and even the press had a lot of nice things to say about them but I thought they were tosh. Were they good looking (surely a pre-requisite for a boy band)? Not so you’d notice apart from maybe the blonde one. Were their songs any good? Look, I know the answer to that is going to be subjective but they sounded so pedestrian to me. Take “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)” for example. It’s just a constant, one paced backbeat throughout that never goes anywhere. And why the need for the brackets in the title? Look, I know they didn’t write the song so they had no input into that particular decision but not writing your own material isn’t a tick in the plus column. Maybe they’ll liven up a bit when we get to their later hits. I won’t hold my breath though.

Now here’s a great song from a band who enjoyed massive success in the latter part of the decade but this track – “Nancy Boy” – is the only one of theirs that is permanently deposited in my brain bank. Placebo had already released four singles up to this point but their only Top 40 success thus far had been No 30 hit “Teenage Angst”. However, they had come to the attention of one David Bowie who invited the band to open for him on some live dates in 1996 and subsequently to perform at his 50th birthday celebration at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The endorsement of such a legendary figure couldn’t help but raise their profile and “Nancy Boy” duly became a No 4 smash when released in early 1997.

A jagged, brooding and bruising song, it was also very sexual in its nature and according to lead singer Brian Molko, had been written to “capture a kind of drug induced sexual rush”. Perhaps not the standard message behind a big hit when the charts were populated by the likes of Backstreet Boys, No Mercy and Madonna singing Andrew Lloyd Webber songs. I guess though that Placebo weren’t your average band. Molko’s androgynous image in particular (which was similar to Jas Mann’s from Babylon Zoo) attracted attention (not all of it welcome) as they sort to rebel against the laddishness of Britpop culture. Talking of which, I always assumed Placebo were a US band but they formed in London and Molko was born in Belgium though his father was American.

In an interesting parallel with the storm engulfing East 17 at the time, Molko would give an interview to Kerrang magazine in this year where he said the only drug on the planet he hadn’t tried was heroin before later admitting he’d had that too. I don’t recall nationwide outrage to that confession like Harvey’s interview generated but then maybe the two incidents aren’t comparable. East 17, for all their ‘street’ claims were still a boy band and boy bands weren’t meant to behave in the way Harvey had admitted to. Molko was openly bisexual and had a counter culture image. Was it a case of dismissing him as ‘other’ and therefore anything he did or said would be perceived within those preconceptions? Whatever the truth, we’ll be seeing much more of Placebo in future TOTP repeats.

Tori Amos is No 1 with “Professional Widow (It’s Got To Be Big)” although really all the plaudits should have gone to Armand van Helden as the remixer responsible for this creation. Interestingly, the other dance remix in the charts featured on this show earlier does give equal billing to the remix team and the original artist as “People Hold On” is credited to Lisa Stansfield versus the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Was this a case of record label interference or that theme that we started the post with – artist ego?

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Lightning Seeds	Sugar Coated Icebergs	Nope
2	East 17	Hey Child	I did not
3	Lisa Stansfield versus the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels	People Hold On	Nah
4	No Mercy	Where Do You Go	Hell no
5	Texas	Say What You Want	No but I had a promo copy of the album
6	Madonna	Don’t Cry For Me Argentina	Negative
7	Backstreet Boys	Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)	Never
8	Placebo	Nancy Boy	No but I think I had it on one of those Best Album Ever compilations
9	Tori Amos	Professional Widow (It’s Got To Be Big)	Liked it, didn’t buy it

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/p00fsvjy/top-of-the-pops-17011997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 21 OCT 1993

Posted on November 5, 2022 by 80stastic

What’s up with the TOTP running order? The other week we just had eight acts on and now this show only has a paltry seven! It’s all to do with whether there’s any Breakers section of course where the producers could slam up to five artists into a two minute time period. However, they’ve really cleared the decks this week because of the running time of the new No 1 but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We open with Cappella who seemed to be a cut price 2 Unlimited with a penchant for song titles that replace the word ‘you’ with ‘U’ and ‘to’ with the number 2. So much did they like to do it that they rivalled the master of the art Prince. However, if that match up was a game of football, the result would be as follows:

PRINCE 4 – 3 CAPPELLA

I Would Die 4 U

Take Me With U

U Got The Look

I Wish U Heaven

U Got 2 Know

U Got To Know (Revisited)

U Got 2 Let The Music

This latest single would be Cappella’s biggest hit, trumping the chart achievement of its predecessors by going all the way to No 2. Listening back to it though, it was just more nasty Eurodance excrement stinking out the charts. They would linger for another four Top 20 hits over the next couple of years. They are still an active entity but seem to have a list of previous band members to rival The Fall. Sadly one of them was Marcus Birks who died of Covid 19 after previously being an anti-vaxxer and Covid denier.

https://youtu.be/D55ECn_Uzj4

1993 saw the return of INXS though in truth they hadn’t been away long. There was never much of a gap between their albums up to this point. Their latest – “Full Moon, Dirty Hearts” – was already the ninth studio album of their career in thirteen years and the third of the 90s. Previous album “Welcome To Wherever You Are” (which I’d liked and bought) had only been released fifteen months prior but the band had decided not to tour it and go straight into recording the next one instead hence the small time period between them. That recording process though was a fraught one. Michael Hutchence had suffered a fractured skull after being attacked in an alley in Copenhagen and hitting his head on the kerb. He spent two weeks in hospital and the after effects of the attack caused him to behave erratically and aggressively. There were multiple studio bust ups whilst laying down tracks for “Full Moon, Dirty Hearts”. In amongst the upheaval though, the band managed two collaborations with other artists with Chrissie Hynde and Ray Charles contributing to a track each. Despite the album making it to No 3 in the UK, its sales were well down on the likes of “Kick” and “X”. I recall there being lots of unsold copies of it in the Our Price store I was working in.

The album’s lead single “The Gift” though seemed determined to create a bit of sales history of its own. Its debut in the Top 40 of No 11 was the biggest chart entry of the band’s career and when it also peaked at that position instantly became their joint second biggest hit ever after “Need You Tonight”. Listening back to it now it does seem rather one dimensional based around a looped and relentless riff but it was also a great ear worm. Talking of ears, check out host Tony Dortie’s memory of this show:

#totp I remember being informed by BBC complaints after this Episode the word #Eargasm' was not deemed popular suitable family language
— Tony Dortie (@TonyDortie) November 4, 2022

Lisa Stansfield was very busy in 1993 having scored two Top 10 singles from movie soundtracks in “Someday (I’m Coming Back)” from The Bodyguard and “In All The Right Places” from Indecent Proposal. She’d also featured on the “Five Live EP” from The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert which had gone to No 1. However, it had been two years since her last solo studio album and so she duly delivered her third one called “So Natural” in the November. Trailed by the title track as the lead single (though technically that was “In All The Right Places” I guess as it was added onto the album’s track listing) it was yet another soulful ballad which generated the usual clichés beginning with ‘s’ from the music press like ‘sensual’, ‘sophisticated’ and ‘seductive’. I think I would use a different ‘s’ word though. Sorry Lisa.

The album would go platinum but that figure only added to a sales decline that saw debut “Affection” go triple platinum and follow up “Real Love” double platinum. By the time of her fourth album in 1997, she was down to gold status. She’s still recording and releasing music though with her last album being as recent as 2018.

https://youtu.be/j6yedYRqCac

Now if Prince and Cappella had a thing for song titles featuring ‘U’ instead of ‘you’ and ‘2’ instead of ‘to’ then Chris Rea seemed to be developing a habit for songs featuring girls names beginning with ‘J’. After “Josephine” in 1985 came “Julia” in 1993. In answer to Tony Dortie’s question “Who’s Julia”, she was, of course, Rea’s then four years old daughter.

Whatever you say about Chris, you can’t deny his productivity. He’s prolific. In a career spanning 44 years, he’s released 25 studio albums (more than one every two years), 14 Best Ofs, a live album, a soundtrack and 72 singles! Of those 72 singles though, only 13 have made the UK Top 40 and only two the Top 10 (including that Christmas song). “Julia” was one of the lucky13 peaking at No 18. The lead single from his “Espresso Logic” album (his third in three years – told you he was prolific!), it sounds a bit like his 1987 hit “Let’s Dance” to me but a little less jaunty maybe.

https://youtu.be/uAqjqAmJim8

Chris always looked such an unlikely and possibly reluctant pop star when he appeared on TOTP with a look on his face as if to say “yeah, I’m not sure about all this but I’m going with the flow”. Nice bit of slide guitar from him in this one by the way though not as good as his work on this track…

OK here’s another reason perhaps why there’s only seven acts on the show tonight. Nowhere near the time given to the No 1 record but still clocking in at just under 4:30 comes Jean-Michel Jarre. Somehow I never really got the boat to Jarre island. Obviously I knew he had these songs and albums like “Équinoxe” and “Oxygène” (did they have various numbers after them?) and that he was renowned for huge light shows when performing his instrumental pieces live. I also knew guys at school who swore by him but but it mostly left me cold. There was a Best Of album in 1991 called “Images” which I possibly sold copies of in the Our Price in Market Street, Manchester but he really didn’t register much on my musical radar.

Come 1993 and showing Chris Rea style prolificacy, Jarre had just released his eleventh studio album called “Chronologie”. According to his discography, the single released from it was called “Chronologie 4” (there’s those numbers again) though whether this is that track shown here I don’t know – the TOTP graphic just calls it “Chronologie”. Here we get an intro from Jarre himself before he bounds on stage to give us a live performance. Again like Chris Rea, Jean-Michel cuts an unorthodox pop star figure, grinning away with his keytar. Here’s a question, can you rock a gig whilst wielding a keytar? Whether you can or not, there wasn’t any appetite for this track as a single in the UK where it missed the Top 40 altogether. The album was moderately successful peaking at No 11.

https://youtu.be/5VziKpeRwp0

WHOOO?! Well, according to Tony Dortie she was someone “destined for a big future” though he was proven to be wrong in that claim. For a while though, there was a big buzz about Lena Fiagbe. Her debut single “You Come From Earth” had even been included on the track listing for “Now That’s What I Call Music 25” and received massive radio airplay but somehow fell short of the Top 40. Undeterred, the follow up single “Gotta Get It Right” was released and its upbeat, soul-pop rhythms made it a No 20 hit. It kind of sounds like Macy Gray doing a Des’ree impersonation – not an unpleasant sound but maybe not one to build a career of longevity on. And so it proved as a clutch of subsequent singles all failed to breach the Top 40 and Lena’s album bombed. She recorded a cover of Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You” for the Four Weddings And A Funeral soundtrack and provided vocals for Wasis Diop’s “African Dream” single in 1996 but then the trail went cold.

To the main event now. Weighing in at a colossal 7 minutes and 15 seconds it’s the full fat video for Meatloaf’s “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)”. OK so firstly, just to clarify the timings, the album version of the song clocks in at a whopping 12:01 but the radio edit was more than halved to 5:13. The absolute full video version is actually 7:52 but I’m guessing they shaved a few seconds off here to allow Tony Dortie to do an outro. The video was directed by Michael Bay who would later direct Transformers and Pearl Harbour (not a great CV I would suggest) and cost $750,000. It’s based on the Beauty and the Beast story which is clearly obvious but there’s also a definite hint of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula which had been out less than a year. The scene where ‘beauty’ is being ravished by two lesbian vampire types is an almost shot for shot steal of a scene from it.

The single itself was the biggest selling of 1993 in the UK selling 761,000 copies and spent a total of sixteen weeks in the Top 40 of which fourteen were in the Top 10 and seven were at No 1. As we’ve got another six weeks of this, I’ll leave it there for the moment.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Cappella	U Got 2 Let The Music	Never
2	INXS	The Gift	Nah
3	Lisa Stansfield	So Natural	No
4	Chris Rea	Julia	Nope
5	Jean-Michel Jarre	Chronologie 4	Hell no!
6	Lena Fiagbe	Gotta Get It Right	I did not
7	Meatloaf	I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)	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/m001drbj/top-of-the-pops-21101993

TOTP 10 JUN 1993

Posted on September 3, 2022 by 80stastic

June 1993 saw the demise of two big names in the world of comedy – one a performer and one a TV show. The former was comedian Les Dawson who died on the same day this TOTP aired aged just 62. The latter was US sitcom Cheers which ended this year after 275 episodes over 11 seasons. Channel 4 broadcast the final three shows over the weekend following this TOTP. Both had a musical element to them. Dawson included his wonky piano playing in his act whilst Cheers had one of the greatest theme tunes of all time…

Let’s see if any of the tunes on this TOTP are anywhere near as good as Gary Portnoy’s famous song…

Certainly not this one! As I said in the last post when confronted by Eurodance merchant Haddaway opening the show, I’d totally had enough of that particular genre of music by this point. This time it’s the turn of Snap! to be the first act on with their new single “Do You See The Light (Looking For)”. The TOTP producers often seemed to top the show’s running order with a dance act. In recent weeks we’ve had Stereo MCs, Felix and 2 Unlimited in addition to Haddaway. I guess it made sense to try and begin proceedings with a bang. The year zero revamp hadn’t quite let go of the party atmosphere era of Michael Hurll. Having said that, the performance here of Snap! featuring Niki Harris seems to suggest a soirée rather than a massive rave-up. I have to say that as objectionable as his views were, the group seemed to lose something when rapper Turbo B left. The performance here seems very lacklustre. Maybe if the set hadn’t been so sparse it might have sparked things into life a bit. And why do the backing singers resemble water nymphs?

This track was taken from “The Madman’s Return” album and the album version of it is quite different with vocals by Thea Austin instead of Niki Harris, a rap by the aforementioned Turbo B and even a (slightly) different title in “See The Light”. The single version peaked at No 10 and No 14 in 2002 when it was remixed and rereleased.

Spin Doctors are still going up the charts? Checking its stats, “Two Princes” remained on the chart for 18 weeks so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s a pretty nifty tune all said and done and there was a brief moment in time when the band seemed to be the next big thing. Parent album “Pocketful Of Kryptonite” went to No 2 and achieved platinum sales in Europe and yet somehow it all seemed to stall and fall away on both sides of the Atlantic.

If I’m honest, the follow up singles just weren’t as good. “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” and “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues” just didn’t capture the imagination in the same way as “Two Princes” although in the case of the latter, in a three way race of Superman themed singles, they definitely finish above Laurie Anderson and Black Lace.

“Two Princes” peaked at No 3 in the UK.

A proper pop moment next as TOTP brings us the return of Pet Shop Boys. Neil and Chris had been away for only 18 months or so but their last release had been their first official Best Of album “Discography” which on reflection felt like a line in the sand drawing to a close the first part of their career. What would the first material of their next phase be like? Well, not too dissimilar to their previous work to be fair. “Can You Forgive Her” didn’t feel like a massive departure from what had gone before but then Neil Tennant’s voice is so distinctive that it overrides sometimes any potential musical deviation on their behalf. Not always of course. For example, something like “Jealousy” or “Se A Vida É” sound nothing like “West End Girls” but in the case of “Can You Forgive Her”, it didn’t seem, to me anyway, like a radical new sound. Not that it wasn’t any good either though. It had a strident feel to it, enabled by a punchy chorus that demanded to be heard. And heard it was as it gave the duo their first Top 10 hit in two years after their previous three singles all failed to make that achievement.

Somehow though it always feels overshadowed by the second single to be lifted from parent album “Very” which was the enormous hit that was the cover of Village People’s “Go West”. Initial copies of the album came in an orange CD jewel case featuring raised bumps which resembled Lego. In those days, the Our Price chain I worked for didn’t use security tagging and so the CDs we sold weren’t ‘live’ on the shelves as it were. The actual CDs were filed away behind the counter so the cases were empty. However, the manager of the store I was working in when the album came out thought the Lego case so nickable that we kept those behind the counter as well and had a dummy case on display that used the inner back sleeve to say what it was. Genius! Except it was a pain in the arse to put together when selling it to a customer and we also had a few people ask if our dummy sleeve was somehow a different version of the album. It would be another five years before I worked in an Our Price that displayed CDs live.

Anyway, back to the show and this performance really does give us the pop moment I referred to earlier. There’s so much to unpack here. The over exaggerated pointy dunce hats, Neil Tennant in a high chair, the cricket bat wielding space cadet backing dancers, a huge egg on stage for no reason but most of all there was Chris Lowe. The perennially motionless man moved more in that one performance than in all his previous ones added together. What had got into him? There were even what passed for dance moves! Maybe I was wrong. Perhaps this really was a different Pet Shop Boys to what had gone before.

1993 really was the year ragga/dancehall took over the charts. After Shaggy, Shabba and Snow came the ludicrously named Chaka Demus And Pliers. Opening themselves up to all sorts of tool related jibes, this pair of toasters joined forces in 1991 and released “Murder She Wrote” the following year in America to great acclaim. The follow up was “Tease Me” and the hordes lapped it up sending it to No 3 in the UK Top 40. The lyrics were fairly clear about the song’s subject matter with references to ‘reaching climax’ and its title of course. There’s also that shout out line which seemed to encapsulate the whole movement – “Number One In The World”. I’m sure that seemed to feature on every song of this type after that.

Chaka Demus and Pliers have bought all their mates with them to the TOTP studio for a jolly up whilst the camera man seemed very intent on giving us multiple views of the gyrating female backing dancers. Ahem. We’ll also be seeing lots more of CD and P before 1993 is out.

And the fascination with all things erotic thriller continues. I’m guessing Indecent Proposal must have been performing well at the box office to generate this much of a profile. It’s another outing for “Ordinary Love” by Sade which was featured heavily in the film but was not actually on the soundtrack. After last week’s glimpse of the mermaid promo video, we get a live by satellite performance from New York this time. Sade Adu looks stunning as ever but it’s the two guitarists in the background who have caught my eye. They spend the first half of the performance not even bothering to mime playing their instruments but doing the nerd shuffle together whilst clicking their fingers in unison. It doesn’t really seem appropriate for an artist as sophisticated as Sade. Bet they got a bollocking when the cameras were turned off.

Therapy? were enjoying a huge breakthrough year in 1993. After the “Shortsharpshock EP” featuring lead track “Screamager” made the Irish rockers bona fide Top 10 artists in March, the follow up was also an EP. “Face The Strange” featured four tracks of which “Turn” was chosen to promote it. Clearly the EP’s title is a David Bowie reference being a lyric from his song “Changes”. I learned recently that I know someone who met Bowie and not just met but took him out for a drink around about 1972 just as he was launching his Ziggy Stardust era. I know! There’s a few Bowie super fans that I know who would be blown away by my friend’s recollections. What’s that? The Therapy? song? Oh, I didn’t like it much. Sorry.

The Breakers are their usual eclectic/bonkers mix of artists starting with the evergreen Cliff Richard. Despite being 52 at the time and having had his first hit 25 years ago, Cliff was showing no signs of slowing down in 1993. In fact, the decade was going pretty well for him so far. He’d already clocked up a No 1 in “Saviour’s Day” and four other Top 10 hits. Also having a fine old time of it around now was Maxi Priest who’d had a hit twice with Shabba Ranks (albeit with the same song in both cases) and who’d supplied the ‘Shabba!’ sample for the massive selling “Mr Loverman” single. To add to his collection of chart connections came “Human Work Of Art”. You see, Maxi had released this as a single from his “Bonafide” album three years prior but it had failed to chart.

It was recycled for Cliff’s 1993 album called…erm…”The Album” and this time made No 24. It sounds every inch a Cliff record and you’d be hard pressed to guess at its reggae-fied earlier incarnation. It’s also utterly awful under his guardianship. Yes, it’s a polished production but then you can polish a turd of course.

I can’t find the official video online so here’s it being performed on Surprise Surprise.

From the despair of another banal Cliff record to…where? Well, fortunately it’s Manic Street Preachers with their new single “From Despair To Where” (ahem). OK, firstly weren’t they have meant to have split up by now? Wasn’t that their mission statement to make one blow your socks off, anarchistic album then dissolve the band? Clearly that was just bravado then. What they actually did was to record second album “Gold Against The Soul” which I liked enough to buy but which the fan base has always dissed as the worst album in their back catalogue. I’m sure I heard an interview with James Dean Bradfield once where he was asked to rank the band’s albums in order of merit and even he put it bottom of the list.

Maybe debut “Generation Terrorists” had raised the bar and expectations too high but the music press gave it mixed reviews at best. Maybe fan favourite and third album “The Holy Bible” would have been a more acceptable choice with its themes of human suffering and bleakness. Was “Gold Against The Soul” seen as too radio friendly, too (gulp) corporate rock? It sounded alright to my ears with the lead single ticking all my aural boxes. It swoops and soars but bites as well with lines like ‘there’s nothing nice in my head’. It had all of that and yet wasn’t even the best track on the album for me. I liked this version of the band a lot but then I’m not a paid up member of the Manics army who could shoot my opinion down in flames I’m sure.

What I’m not sure about is the video which is basically some moody shots of the band (Richie looks especially cool) intertwined with some sepia tinted clips which seem to suggest a sci-fi /horror film but it’s all a bit blurry to make a clear judgement although that look like an alien autopsy in the thumbnail below.

The Manics of course did do a TV show theme tune when they covered “Suicide Is Painless” – the theme tune from M*A*S*H. Better than the theme to Cheers? It’s a tough call but yes possibly.

The Sister Sledge revival bandwagon continues apace with a rerelease of their 1984 hit “Thinking Of You”. Remixed as the (RAMP Radio Mix), it was the last of three singles taken from the Greatest Hits compilation “The Very Best Of Sister Sledge 1973-93” following “We Are Family” and “Lost In Music”. It would peak at No 17 just six places lower than its 1984 counterpart. However the song dated back to 1979 when it was a track on the “We Are Family” album and issued as the B-side to the initial release of “Lost In Music”.

Reading that paragraph back it seems like the group made a 40+ year career based around just three songs that have been recycled over and over again. Lead singer Kathy Sledge even did her own cover version of “Thinking Of You” with house duo Aristofreeks in 2015. OK look, I know there’s also “He’s The Greatest Dancer” and “Frankie” in their repertoire but the former is very similar to the “Family/Lost/Thinking” trilogy and the latter is one of the worst recordings of all time (and I’ve just had to listen to Cliff Richard’s “Human Work Of Art”). I doubt even the Sledge sisters want to be remembered for that one.

Sister Sledge have only released one more single since this. And guess what? It was a rerelease of “We Are Family” in 2004 which made No 93 on our charts.

Who? The Time Frequency? Sounds like a phrase Dr Who might say. Have we seen this lot before? Can’t remember now. So many of these dance acts about. Anyway, “The Ultimate High” was a track off their “Power Zone EP” and sounds very much like a knock off version of “Insanity” by Oceanic to me but then, as I’ve said many times before, I’m no dance music aficionado.

The Time Frequency were from Scotland so I wonder if they knew fellow Scottish dance acts Primal Scream and The Shamen or is that a bit like an American, who on meeting someone from London, asks them if they know their cousin who lives in Notting Hill?

Lisa Stansfield? Again? It can’t be! She seems to be on every week at the moment. Given the high level of exposure it got, I’m surprised that “In All The Right Places” didn’t get higher than its No 8 peak. She’s back in the studio this time and has gone full on Louise Brooks with her haircut. No messing about like the other week with that half hearted Brett Anderson-esque wedge style. The way the stage has been set up with her first name and first name only in lights gives it a feel of a residency at Las Vegas. In fact, I could just imagine Liza Minnelli up there belting this one out.

Lisa will be back in October with her “So Natural” album and single.

UB40 have made it to the top spot deposing Ace Of Base in the process. Were they on tour at this time as it’s the video for “(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You” yet again this week? I’m guessing that the director got the band to perform emerging into a tight corridor to link in with the themes of claustrophobia and paranoia that the film it was taken from (Sliver) clearly was based around. Ironically, a few years down the line, the band fractured into two different identities due to internal arguments and there’s no way that Ali and Robin Campbell would ever be in such close proximity to each other like that again.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Snap!	Do You See The Light (Looking For)	Never happening
2	Spin Doctors	Two Princes	Liked it, didn’t buy it
3	Pet Shop Boys	Can You Forgive Her	No but I have it on their Pop Art Best Of
4	Chaka Demus And Pliers	Tease Me	As if
5	Sade	No Ordinary Love	Nope
6	Therapy?	Face The Strange EP	Nah
7	Cliff Richard	Human Work Of Art	Of course not
8	Manic Street Preachers	From Despair To Where	No but I bought the album
9	Sister Sledge	Thinking Of You	No
10	The Time Frequency	Power Zone EP	Not likely
11	Lisa Stansfield	In All The Right Places	Negative
12	UB40	(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You	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/m001bdx3/top-of-the-pops-10061993

TOTP 03 JUN 1993

Posted on August 31, 2022 by 80stastic

In a recent post I made a reference to the ex-footballer Chris Waddle who had just been voted the 1993 sports writers’ Player of the Year. As this is a music blog, I obviously had to mention Waddle’s almost surreal attempt at pop superstardom in 1987. I even inserted a clip of him performing on TOTP. Unfortunately that seemed to cause the misapprehension amongst some that I was mixing up my TOTP years. As such, I need to be careful in this intro as I am going to talk about his partner in crime, Glenn Hoddle. You see, the day after this TOTP aired, Glenn was appointed as the new manager of my beloved Chelsea. Back in 1993, this was big news for Chelsea fans. Growing up, I’d seen my team managed by a succession of useless gaffers like Ken Shellito, Danny Blanchflower and Geoff Hurst. The latest incumbent Ian Porterfield had been similarly challenged. Hoddle, by contrast, was in demand after taking unfashionable Swindon Town into the Premier League. Plus, he brought some glamour with him. At 36 years of age, he was young for a manager and of course he had been a pop star (of sorts) in the 80s. Let’s see if there’s anyone in this show who can hold a light to Glenn in his “Diamond Lights” pomp…

…oh God no! Not him! I knew it must be coming as it’s one of the big hits of 1993 but I always, always hated it. I talk of Haddaway and his Eurodance song “What Is Love”. This guy was like a German Sydney Youngblood in that both served in the forces before deciding they’d give this pop star lark a go – Haddaway was in the Navy (you can sail the seven seas) and Youngblood the US Army. His debut single was pretty much No 1 in every country in Europe apart from the UK where he had to be satisfied with a No 2. Yes, it was catchy but all those Eurodance hits were catchy – it didn’t guarantee any measure of quality though. It’s not even that Haddaway couldn’t sing as the guy clearly had some pipes on him. It’s just that there seems to be a never ending conveyor belt of this sort of stuff this year and even by early June I was sick of it all. Yes, I guess it’s got a bit more soul to it than something like “No Limit” but that stabbing synth riff used to make my skin crawl.

The other reason I couldn’t take Haddaway seriously was that, having spent three years in Sunderland as a student, hearing his name immediately sent the synapses in my brain firing to arrive at the North East phrase of ‘hadaway n’ shite’ – a proclamation of negativity or disbelief to put it politely.

Look, if I want a song called “What Is Love” there’s one right here which is infinitely more preferable to me…

Isn’t this No 1 yet? Must surely be next week then. UB40’s version of “(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You” has exploded sales wise – we were shifting loads of it in the Our Price store in Rochdale where I was working – though I was never quite sure why. It just sounded so clunky and mechanical and…well…ham-fisted in its production. All the charm of the song seemed to have been sucked out of it. Nothing wrong with putting a completely different spin on a song of course but it felt like they put as much love into it as they would have writing a shopping list. Compare their laborious take on the song with this joyous version from 1986 by Lick The Tins…

I know the UB40 version was on the soundtrack to the film Sliver but surely that wasn’t responsible for its popularity was it? I’ve never seen the film but it was an erotic thriller so surely didn’t have that mainstream appeal of something like Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves and we all know what that film did for Bryan Adams. Surely the age rating it would have been given would have precluded some potential record buyers from even getting into the cinema? I’m guessing that the promo video for the single is based around CCTV scenes featured in the movie some of which clearly indicate that Sharon Stone’s character has gone further than just crossing her legs as per her Fatal Attraction character. I’m no prude but I’m surprised the BBC didn’t edit them out.

Right here comes Jamiroquai to “Blow Your Mind” except that this track was hardly going to do that. It’s just a watered down version of their first hit “Too Young To Die” isn’t it? A jam session that’s been told it’s a song and believed the messenger. Jay Kay just scats his way through it with a lot of Fast Show jazz club free-styling – the wearing of his trademark silly hat doesn’t convince. Neither does the staging of this performance. Why has the stage been made to look like someone’s living room? There’s two sofas with members of the band sat precariously on arms and a backrest (that’s the sort of thing I’d tell my child off about) plus a fruit bowl on a coffee table possibly featuring plastic fruit. Why? How is that a depiction of blowing your mind? Just nonsense.

“Blow Your Mind” peaked at No 12, a chart position so high that it is the only thing that is mind blowing about the whole release.

Now, host Tony Dortie informs us that the next artist should have been performing live in the studio but she’s unwell so we have to make do with the video for “Lords Of The New Church” by Tasmin Archer. On reflection, surely this track should have been the follow up to her No 1 smash “Sleeping Satellite” rather than the excellent but commercially challenged “In Your Care”? It’s much more up tempo and certainly more radio friendly and, according to Tasmin herself, was written about a new breed of politicians in the early 90s and definitely not the 80s post punk band of the same name.

All of the above theory though is debunked by the chart position the single attained – a lowly high of No 26, ten places lower even than its predecessor. Was Tasmin losing her audience already at this point? If so, could it have been halted if the release order of “In Your Care” and “Lords Of The New Church” had been reversed? We’ll never know but what is a fact is that she suffered from a case of diminished returns when it came to her five hit singles whose chart peaks were:

1 – 16 – 26 – 30 – 40

I’m not sure what’s going on in the video which seems to revolve around a man in a gold lame suit and a Stetson hat travelling through Nevada on his way to Las Vegas. Perhaps a studio performance from Tasmin might have sold the record more. When you consider that she was scheduled to do just that but couldn’t due to ill health, was that single event a sliding doors moment in her career? Yeah, I’m probably reading too much into that aren’t I?

Here come this week’s Breakers starting with Sade and their (Sade are a band not a singer remember) single “No Ordinary Love”. A little bit of a chart curio this one. I’d forgotten this but this was actually the second time it had been a Top 40 hit in under a year. How so? Well, originally released as the lead single to fourth album “Love Deluxe”, it had peaked at No 26. Sade had even performed it in the TOTP studio. However, subsequent singles from the album had failed to chart and sales of the album were less than its predecessor. In fact, much like Tasmin Archer, Sade had suffered from diminished returns as well but with their albums. “Love Deluxe” sold half of what third album “Stronger Than Pride” sold which in turn sold half of sophomore album “Promise”. All of them performed less well than the iconic debut “Diamond Life”.

As such, were Epic Records in a panic about their artist’s commercial value and that’s why they rereleased a single that had proven to be popular (albeit in a small way)? Maybe but it seems more of a case of opportunism as the rerelease* was surely due to the inclusion of the song in the film Indecent Proposal. Yes, if a song was in a film in 1993 it was more than likely to be an erotic thriller and probably this one. Strangely though, despite featuring in the actual film proper, it didn’t make it onto the official soundtrack. Maybe that’s why the promo video doesn’t include any clips from the film in it – probably some complicated licensing issues. Ah yes, the promo video that sees Sade Adu as a mermaid. Hmm. I wonder what angle the director was going for?

The rereleased “No Ordinary Love” peaked at No 14.

*When is a re-release actually a re-entry? Apparently the 1993 version had the same track listing and catalogue number as its 1992 counterpart.

And talking of Indecent Proposal…here’s a song that is on the official soundtrack to the film. We saw Lisa Stansfield on the show in person last week performing “In All The Right Places” and that exposure has helped propel it into the charts at No 13. As she’s in the Breakers section, it’s the video this time which does include scenes from the film. As I mentioned last week, rumours persisted at the time that Lisa had been offered the Demi Moore role in the film. Whether she was or not, what is true is that she did finally get to appear in a film some six years later when she starred in musical comedy Swing opposite Hugo Speer. I’ve never seen it but it gets decent reviews online so it might be worth a watch plus she recorded most of the music for it.

So who remembers this? “Three Little Pigs” by Green Jellÿ? Yeah, I know. You’ve tried to forget it. I really wasn’t excited by the concept of a comedy rock band from America I have to say but that’s what this lot were having been around since 1981. One of their early songs was called “I’ve Got Poo-Poo On My Shoe” so we shouldn’t have been surprised by this god awful retelling of the Three Little Pigs fairytale. They had form.

The musicianship is intentionally bad (that’s part of the joke you see) whilst much was made of the ‘hilarious’ stop motion clay animation video. It was hardly original though was it? We’d already seen this sort of parody single back in the 80s from the likes of Weird Al Yankovic and The Firm, the latter of which had also used the same video technique to great effect on their No 1 single “Star Trekkin’”. I didn’t get why this was so popular (the single went Top 5) unless it was kids buying it thinking they were being rebellious.

They followed this up with a cover of “Anarchy In The UK” that they interlaced with references to The Flintstones. Again, not original as The Screaming Blue Messiahs beat them to it by about five years with their “I Wanna Be A Flintstone” hit.

Ah, some proper music now or as host Tony Dortie describes it “some solid musical nourishment” courtesy of A–ha who are back with new single “Dark Is The Night”. Nothing to do with the Shakatak single of the same name, this was the trio’s first UK Top 40 hit since “Crying In The Rain” three years before and was the lead single from their fifth studio album “Memorial Beach”.

By 1993, A-ha’s days of being teen pin-ups were well behind them but then they’d never really pursued that anyway. It was kind of a byproduct of their Scandinavian good looks. However, they definitely seemed determined to shed that image with a song like “Dark Is The Night” which is such a more mature sound than something like “Touchy” or “Take On Me”. I liked it but not too many others seemed to. Its chart trajectory petered out at No 19 whilst the album got no higher than No 17 and produced no further hits. The commercial failure of the project convinced the band to take a seven year hiatus before returning with the “Minor Earth, Major Sky” album.

That means that this could well be the last time we see A-ha on TOTP which also means one final chance for me to indulge in an activity I had been doing since I was 17 and which I was still doing in 1993 despite it being my 25th birthday three days after this TOTP aired. I am, of course, referring to ‘Morton Harket hair watch’. My fascination with Morton’s barnet had been with me through A Levels, Polytechnic and even getting married. My aim – to get my hair to look like his. Here he seems to have grown it and let it flop with no product aided quiff to be seen. Surely I could achieve that?! Sadly, even if I could, my complete lack of cheekbones meant I would never pull off the Morten look convincingly.

https://youtu.be/Whk9qSC3D-Y

As the Tory party leadership contest draws to a close and we stand at the dawn of a new PM, what better act to mark the event than P.M. Dawn?! You think I’m done with the crappy puns? Hell no! It seems now that it is “More Than Likely” that Liz Truss will be the next UK Prime Minister. Heaven help us all. OK, now I’m done – back to the matter at hand. This was the very last of six UK Top 40 hits for both artists concerned here P.M. Dawn and Boy George though this one only just made it peaking at No 40 despite this TOTP appearance at Disneyworld no less. It’s not quite as bonkers as New Order on the set of Baywatch on Venice Beach but it’s up there. It’s a decidedly odd vista, the two of them togged up in completely inappropriate clothes for the weather, sat down metres apart for the whole performance with the Disney castle towering above them in the background. @TOTPFacts has the story behind the location:

This PM Dawn/Boy George performance in Disneyworld apparently took place during a layover on George's flight from London to Buenos Aires for his first South American tour. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 26, 2022

The song itself is another gorgeous P.M. Dawn melody which suits Boy George’s vocals perfectly. It really should have been a bigger hit. I had a promo copy of parent album “The Bliss Album…?” which includes a rather wonderful version of “Norwegian Wood” by The Beatles:

It all ended tragically for the original line up of the group. DJ Minitemix was accused of sexually assaulting a 14 year old relative and was subsequently fired from the band whilst Prince Be died of renal disease in 2016.

This is starting to feel like overkill now as we get the third song on the show from the film Indecent Proposal and a fourth from an erotic thriller if you include UB40’s from Sliver. A Breaker last week, Bryan Ferry is in the studio this week (with everyone’s trusty sidekick bass player alongside, the ubiquitous Gail Ann Dorsey) to perform “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”. As with P.M. Dawn and Boy George earlier, this would be Bryan’s final UK chart single although he would continue to have big selling albums.

As usual, Bryan is effortlessly cool but it all looks a bit too comfy and predictable for me. The reaction he provoked with his debut TOTP appearance in 1972 with Roxy Music performing “Virginia Plain” is a million miles away from what he’s doing here. Maybe it’s unfair to compare them. Maybe.

https://youtu.be/qx9jD87obTA

I’m not sure that I ever knew until now that “All That She Wants” hitmakers Ace Of Base were a family group (well almost). Three of the four members were siblings – they’re basically the Swedish Corrs. It got me thinking about other famous family bands. There’s Oasis obviously plus the Campbell clan of UB40 (pre and post their splintering). The Beach Boys featured three brothers and a cousin and then of course there’s The Osmonds and The Jackson 5. How about Kings Of Leon or the Bee Gees? There’s been a few. Where do Ace Of Base rate in this list? For me, they’re below The Partridge Family* and they weren’t even a real family! I’d almost even have Glenn and Chris before them. Almost.

*Yes, I know Shirley Jones was David Cassidy’s stepmother.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Haddaway	What Is Love	Hadaway and shite!
2	UB40	(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You	Nah
3	Jamiroquai	Blow Your Mind	No but my wife had the album
4	Tasmin Archer	Lords Of The New Church	Nope
5	Sade	No Ordinary Love	Negative
6	Lisa Stansfield	In All The Right Places	No
7	Green Jellÿ	Three Little Pigs	Pigshit – no
8	A-ha	Dark Is The Night	No but I have it on a Best Of CD
9	P.M. Dawn / Boy George	More Than Likely	No but I had a promo copy of the album
10	Bryan Ferry	Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow	I did not
11	Ace Of Base	All That She Wants	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/m001bdx1/top-of-the-pops-03061993

TOTP 27 MAY 1993

Posted on August 25, 2022 by 80stastic

When I started doing this TOTP blog five and a half years ago I never imagined it would last this long. My starting point was January 1983, the year that saw music competing as my chosen interest alongside football. I was 14 years old in January 1983 and by the time of this TOTP show in late May 1993, I was just about to turn 25. Funny how the gap between those ages seems like a chasm in terms of maturity and growing up and yet the same ten year period between the ages of say 44 and 54 (how old I am currently) doesn’t seem anywhere near as seismic.

And what if you look at those ten years in terms of the charts comparing 1983 to 1993 – how different were the Top 40s? Sure, the names will have changed but how about the music trends and movements? I guess the biggest difference is the predominance of dance in all its myriad forms within the charts but in terms of quality? Well, I’m not getting into that in one short intro to be honest. Suffice to say, I have watched, listened to, dissected and given verdict on hundreds of artists, songs and genres after rewatching these old TOTP shows and the whole thing has been frankly bewildering. Let’s see if anyone on this episode can make sense of it for me…

I don’t think I’m going to get any answers from the opening act. Stereo MCs are one of the most mystifying bands ever. A platinum selling No 2 album that yielded four Top 20 singles and then nothing for nine years. The gap until “Deep Down & Dirty” meant that the album gained almost mythical status about whether it would ever come out (see also “Chinese Democracy” by Guns N’ Roses). And yes I know that their career didn’t start with “Connected” and that they had released two albums before it but unless you’re a really committed fan of the band, surely they don’t register with most people.

“Creation” was the fourth and final of those “Connected” singles and it’s of a very similar vein to its predecessors but I have to say I don’t recall it. To be fair, I bet I’m not alone. I kind of like the way that they found a formula that worked and just stuck to it – no mixing things up with a slower ballad for this lot.

“Creation” peaked at No 19, the same position as its immediate predecessor “Ground Level” and one place lower than “Connected” – they were pretty consistent you have to admit. And then they weren’t in terms of releasing music at least. Why the nine year wait for “Deep Down & Dirty”? Well, the band toured “Connected” until 1994 and had gone back into the studio after finishing the dates but inspiration failed to strike. Instead of recording they busied themselves by forming their own label and signed and released music by new artists. They also did remixes for the likes of U2 and Madonna and then things like starting families were also a factor. Basically, life got in the way to paraphrase John Lennon’s famous quote. However, a small part of 1992/93 will always belong to Stereo MCs.

Are you kidding me?! Tina Turner with “I Don’t Wanna Fight” again?! Is this the third week on the trot?

*checks BBC4 schedule*

It is! Seriously, what am I supposed to say about this record for a third consecutive time? Well, supposedly the song was originally offered to Sade but I really can’t imagine what a version of it by the makers of “Smooth Operator” and “Your Love Is King” would have sounded like. This had happened before with another of Tina’s biggest ever hits and the title of the biopic from which “I Don’t Wanna Fight” was taken. Here’s Bucks Fizz with the story (no really – Bucks Fizz!)

What else? Oh yeah, it was written by Lulu more of whom later. The What’s Love’s Got To Do With It soundtrack would give Tina two further hit singles and she would return in 1995 with the theme tune to the James Bond film Goldeneye.

If it’s 1993 then Suede must be along in a minute and, right on cue, here they are with their new single “So Young”. The bright new hope for British music were confident enough in themselves to release a fourth and final single from their debut album that had already been out for two months and to be fair to them, they were right to have faith in the track. This was pure anthem, so sky-scraping in its stature that the press didn’t seem to notice the ‘chase the dragon’ heroin reference in its lyrics (wonder what The Shamen thought given the fuss over “Ebeneezer Goode” the previous year).

Watching this performance back, the band don’t radiate zeitgeist other than via Brett Anderson’s effortless other worldliness. Matt Osman’s enormous frame was always an obstacle to the notion of cool whilst Bernard Butler shakes his mane vigorously whilst rocking back and forth in away that suggests he might benefit from being sedated. Two years later though, he would let rip in similar fashion whilst performing “Yes” with David McAlmont on Later With Jools Holland and I would think it was one of the greatest things I’d ever seen. Such are the vagaries of music, taste and opinion.

“So Young” entered the Top 40 at No 22 and exited it the following week suggesting that they were a fan base phenomenon but by 1996, they would release the No 1 album “Coming Up” which would generate five Top 10 singles. The moral of the story? Don’t believe the hype but do trust the process.

Back to the aforementioned Lulu now as we find Louchie Lou & Michie One with their version of the Scottish singer’s most famous tune “Shout”. I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again – I despise “Shout” and have little time for Lulu. As such a ragga version of the song was not going to enthral me. Retitled as “Shout (It Out)”, I would have placed this as being released years earlier, say 1986, if asked but I think that’s my brain playing tricks on me again as that’s when a re-release of Lulu’s version was a hit all over again. If I’d thought about it and indeed listened to the track again then surely I would have come to the conclusion that 1993 was the optimal year for the Louchie Lou and Michie One version to have been a hit seeing as it was a ragga/rap restyling of it. Ragga had a grip on the UK charts in this year thanks to the deadly three ‘S’s of Shaggy, Shabba and Snow. In fact, it was probably a bit of cynical marketing from their record label – jump on the bandwagon but use a well known record to get a head start on the rest of the field. Or maybe I’m being too harsh on Louchie Lou and Michie One, casting them as record company puppets. After all, I don’t know anything about them and how they came to be on TOTP with a hit record. Wikipedia just says they met at a Rebel MC concert in 1991.

What I did find out though was that their album was full of similar ragga-fied treatments of well known songs with versions of Kool And The Gang’s “Get Down On It” and “Somebody Else’s Guy” by Jocelyn Brown. Their only other major hit though was when they appeared on Suggs’ hit cover of Simon And Garfunkel’s “Cecilia”. It might have been crap but it did give us this rather memorable TOTP intro from Chris Eubank:

I’m still in pursuit of some insight into how the musical changes over the course of the ten years of these TOTP repeats came to be but I’m not sure I’ll get any sense out of Lenny Kravitz given the psychedelic tip he seems to be on with his latest single “Believe”. This is a full blown, trippy wig out with Lenny channelling his inner “Hey Jude” and singing about the power of positive thought, self belief, God and, of course, love. The BBC producers have picked up on the vibe and added some kaleidoscope effects for good measure.

Lenny’s really thrown the kitchen sink at this one with strings and a lush orchestration all in the mix. It’s not that it doesn’t work or isn’t a decent tune but for me it just fails to be the soaring anthem it strives to be. Maybe I wasn’t the only person to think this judging by its chart peak of No 30. I’m guessing that wasn’t the high that Kravitz was hoping for given the effort and time that seems to have gone into its creation. Still, the whooping studio audience seemed to enjoy it but maybe that was less organic and more at the floor manager’s direction.

Three Breakers this week starting with the second cover version on the show tonight. Bryan Ferry wasn’t averse to doing his own version of other people’s songs – his first ever solo album “These Foolish Things” was a collection comprised entirely of covers – and in 1993 he returned to that blueprint with his “Taxi” LP. After lead single “I Put A Spell On You” had made decent head way up the charts by peaking at No 18, the follow up would surely have been expected to do the same. It nearly did when “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” made it to No 23.

It wasn’t the first Gerry Goffin /Carole King song Ferry had covered. The aforementioned “These Foolish Things” album contained his take on their song “Don’t Ever Change” and he revisited their canon of work for this single. The Shirelles scored a No 1 with it in 1961 but the version I prefer is Carole King’s herself as it appeared on her iconic “Tapestry” album. And Bryan’s take on it? Yeah, he does it justice I think.

As it’s Ferry, there is of course a glamorous model in the video with not many clothes on whilst he mooches about the set. This particular model was Anna Nicole Smith. If that name rings a bell it’s probably due to the 1993 Playmate of the Year’s controversial marriage aged 27 to 89 year old billionaire J. Howard Marshall who died just eighteen months after their wedding. Smith herself would die aged just 39 after an accidental drug overdose.

Yeah, look I’m behind with these reviews so I haven’t got the time to ponder about Megadeth and their “Sweating Bullets” single OK? I will say this though. If you’ve ever wondered what might have become of Ed Sheeran had he been into trash metal instead of his stultifying brand of pop music, here’s your answer.

We arrive now at the seventh and final* Guns N’ Roses single to be pulled from their “Use Your Illusion” albums a whole 22 months after the first single “You Could Be Mine” appeared. Amazingly, all six singles to this point made the UK Top 10 and this final one only missed completing the set by one place. “Civil War” was that track although it was actually the lead song from a UK only EP.

*The song “Estranged” from “Use Your Illusion II” was released after “Civil War” in January 1994 but not in the UK

“Civil War” had been in existence for a while initially featuring on the 1990 charity album “Nobody’s Child: Romanian Angel Appeal”, but it would also be included on the track listing for “Use Your Illusion II”. An anti war protest song, it features a sample from the film Cool Hand Luke starring Paul Newman in the titular role in its intro:

Feeling that the song still needed more embellishment, Axl Rose whistles the tune from American civil war song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” in the intro and coda. In a presumably unintentional but rather neat act of symmetry, this final “Use Your Illusion” track was originally made available as the B-side to the aforementioned “You Could Be Mine”, the very first single released from that double album project.

The song itself is another epic sounding rock track which almost leaves you exhausted by the end of it. The spare, whistled opening could deceive on first listen that this was going to be a wistful, acoustic affair akin to “Patience” but it’s actually more in common with “November Rain” or “Don’t Cry”. Yes, you could level accusations of being overblown, bloated and lyrically naive at it but it works pretty well for me, even the corny, dumb closing line “What’s so civil ‘bout war anyway?”.

The band would release an album of punk covers called “The Spaghetti Incident” in November of 1993 and then there was precisely nothing (bar their much derided cover of “Sympathy For The Devil” from the Interview With A Vampire soundtrack) until that aforementioned “Chinese Democracy” album fifteen years later.

Look out Suede! You might be the hip, young band for disaffected youth in 1993 but here come the original purveyors of angst flavoured, doom pop who recorded the album for miserable, misunderstood and introspective teenagers in 1983 with “The Hurting”. Well, here they come sort of anyway. It’s not quite the Tears For Fears we knew and loved on show here for this is TFF without Curt Smith who left the band acrimoniously in 1991. I guess he was burnt out after the mind numbingly laborious process that was the recording of the “Seeds Of Love” album.

Left to his own devices, remaining member of the duo Roland Orzabal decided to carry on under the band’s banner and delivered the “Elemental” album and its leading single “Break It Down Again”. In direct contrast to the song and album titles, Roland didn’t break it down into elements, he threw everything at it including…what…is that five cellos being played on stage up there? And, unlike Lenny Kravitz earlier, he pulled it off. In fact, not having listened to “Break It Down Again” for a good while, it’s actually a far better tune than I remember. It’s got an interesting, choppy structure (shame the producers used it as a marker to cut the song off in mid flow in this performance) and Roland’s voice is bloody good. I don’t think he gets the credit probably for his vocal talents. Back in the 80s, I always preferred the softer, purer voiced Curt Smith to take on singing duties but I think he’s won me over finally here. As an aside, conversely I liked the idiosyncratic tones of Andy McCluskey’s voice to the angelic sounding Paul Humphreys’ in OMD.

Ah yes, that phrase ‘back in the 80s’ brings me full circle to the question in the intro as to how chart music had changed in the decade between 1983 and 1993. Maybe Tears For Fears encapsulate the whole discussion. Ten years on from “The Hurting” they were still going out to bat and knocking it out of the park. All that had really changed was the personnel and hairstyles. Too simplistic a view? Yeah probably.

“Break It Down Again” made the Top 20 (just) and the album went Top 5, a good enough return to convince Orzabal to carry on and release another Curt-less album, the much less well received “Raoul And The Kings Of Spain” before Smith returned to the fold in 2000. Their current album “The Tipping Point” is possibly my favourite of 2022 so far. And yes I think that’s the ubiquitous Gail Ann Dorsey up there on bass who was on the show with the aforementioned Bryan Ferry the other week.

1993 was turning out to be quite the year for Lisa Stansfield. She started it with a Top 10 hit in “Someday (I’m Coming Back)” from The Bodyguard soundtrack, scored a No 1 as part of the “Five Live EP” duetting with George Michael on “These Are The Days Of Our Lives” (still in the Top 5 at this point by the way) and now here she was with another hit from another soundtrack.

“In All The Right Places” was the song chosen to promote the film Indecent Proposal, an erotic drama starring Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson and Robert Redford. Erotic dramas were all the rage at the time with Basic Instinct and Sliver also doing the business at the box office in this period. It’s rumoured that Lisa Stansfield herself was considered for the Demi Moore role but that could be cobblers I suppose.

Certainly not cobblers was Lisa’s performance here as she just dons her stylish black dress and gets on stage alone to belt out the song. She appears to have copied Brett Anderson’s Bob haircut though (or is it the other way round). The song is an accomplished, sultry ballad that suits Lisa’s voice perfectly. As well as appearing on the soundtrack, it also made it onto her third studio album “So Natural” which was released in the November.

Oh and was there some actual thought put into the running order for this TOTP? Bryan Ferry’s version of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” was also on the Indecent Proposal soundtrack.

Ace Of Base are at No 1 for the second of three weeks with “All That She Wants”. Just like the TOTP producers who seemed to have planned their running order this week, I’ve also put some thought into this post and not just thrown it together. Ace Of Base recorded a song called “Cecilia” (which I referenced earlier) for their third album “Flowers” which was written by them as a deliberate continuation of the Simon And Garfunkel song. Want to hear it? Nah, me neither.

The show ends with a weird outro from host Mark Franklin. Why on earth is he sat at a table with a random woman whom he does not introduce, both with a glass of red wine poured out before them whom he ‘cheers’ just before the credits roll. Wait. What? How? Why? Etc etc…

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Stereo MCs	Creation	I did not
2	Tina Turner	I Don’t Wanna Fight	No
3	Suede	So Young	No but I had the album
4	Louchie Lou & Michie One	Shout (It Out)	Never happening
5	Lenny Kravitz	Believe	Nope
6	Bryan Ferry	Will You Love Me Tomorrow	No but I had a promo copy of the album
7	Megadeth	Sweating Bullets	Sod off!
8	Guns N’ Roses	Civil War EP	No but I have a Greatest Hits album with it on
9	Tears For Fears	Break It Down Again	Didn’t but probably should’ve
10	Lisa Stansfield	In All The Right Places	Negative
11	Ace Of Base	All That She Wants	See 7 above

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/m001b6p1/top-of-the-pops-27051993

TOTP 06 MAY 1993

Posted on August 13, 2022 by 80stastic

When I decided to carry on doing these TOTP reviews into the 90s repeats, the one year I really wasn’t looking forward to revisiting was 1993. In my mind’s eye, it was all nasty Eurodance anthems, the dreaded three ‘S’s of Shaggy, Shabba and Snow and the worst Xmas No 1 of all time. Well, we’re into May now and whilst the horror of Mr Blobby is still a way off, we’ve already had plenty of the of the other flavours of shite. Let’s hope a new month brings new hope of better things to come…

Well, that hope didn’t last long did it! FFS! Straight off the bat we have some more Eurodance nonsense courtesy of one of the genre’s biggest acts. After driving us all insane with the abomination that was “No Limit”, 2 Unlimited have not been able to resist the temptation to do it all over again with a tune that is so similar they should have just called it “No Limit 2.0” and be done with it. In truth, all their tunes pretty much sounded the same though didn’t they? And yes by saying that, I now sound just like my Dad speaking to me about pop music circa 1983. “Tribal Dance” was the latest of their musical oeuvre to annoy the shit out of us and it would rise to No 4 in this, the biggest year of their career. This track supposedly includes more of Ray’s raps than usual but still less than the version that the rest of Europe would get. I have to say that I don’t feel short changed.

There was a lot of talk online about this TOTP performance and it mostly revolved around the words ‘inappropriate’ and “cultural appropriation’ and you can see why? What the hell were those costumes the backing dancers were wearing all about?! Yes, obviously somebody was trying to pursue a theme of ‘tribal’ as per the song’s title but this?! Of course, it’s quite possible that nobody made any sort of dissenting comment back in 1993 but you like to think we live in more enlightened times these days. Or perhaps we don’t. I’m sure I could be accused of being too ‘woke’ about it by someone. In truth though, all you need is Michael Caine a red tunic and you’ve got a re-enactment of the film Zulu.

https://youtu.be/lqXtjn9Yc68

The official video for “That’s The Way Love Goes” by Janet Jackson soundtracks the Top 40 countdown to No 11. It’s also the second of three new entries inside the Top 5 this week that we will see on the show tonight. Reading some of the online comments about the video, I’m now wondering if I’m missing something. People seem to love this promo and describe it as being “a timeless classic”, “visually stylish” and “one of the most creative videos ever made” with the protagonists “chillin’ and vibin’ out together”. And yet. All I’m seeing is Janet surrounded by some sycophants (including a very young Jennifer Lopez) in a loft apartment imploring her to play a tape of her new single before mooching and smooching about with each other. I’m probably just a grumpy, middle aged man who’s forgotten how to have fun and enjoy anything anymore though.

“That’s The Way Love Goes” peaked at No 2 in the UK and was a No 1 record in the US.

After starting the show with some frenetic Eurodance beats before sliding into some slinky R&B vibes we now arrive at a huge slice of stadium house courtesy of Utah Saints (U-U-U-Utah Saints)*. “Believe In Me” was the third of their trilogy of Top 10 hits and although I thought it was OK, it didn’t quite have the immediacy of “What Can You Do For Me” and “Something Good”. After turning to Eurythmics and Kate Bush for source material for those two tracks, they’ve stuck with the 80s by sampling The Human League for this one. It works but doesn’t seem as clever as its predecessors, a bit too obvious somehow.

*Sorry, contractually obliged to do that

In their wisdom, the TOTP producers have decided to overlay the whole performance here with a green wavelength graphic which probably seemed like a good idea at the time but which feels intrusive in retrospect. And what on earth is that the guy with the tied back dreadlocks playing? It looks like a key-tar but has some sort of built in computer where a keyboard should be. It’s like a prototype for the controller in the Guitar Hero computer game. Oh and the “This is the Utah Saints calling all humanoids” line is entirely lame. Reminded me of this sketch:

I wasn’t wrong about 1993. It really was the year that kept on giving – the problem was that it was serving up huge dollops of horseshit. Here’s another steaming clump – “All That She Wants” by Ace Of Base. This was one of those songs that came from nowhere and was suddenly huge immediately. That’s how it felt anyway. It must have been picking up plenty of airplay before it went massive as I’m sure we kept getting asked about it in the Our Price I was working in before it was in the charts. We didn’t have a clue what it was the punters were talking about but Head Office soon cottoned on and ordered it in for stores in bulk. How this cod reggae/ lowest common denominator Europop mash up made *SPOILER ALERT* three weeks at No 1 is as mystifying as the rise and rise of Liz Truss. I always hated that little sax parp that introduced the chorus and also the way the vocalist sang the line ‘She’s the hunter, you’re the fox’ with that elongated, descending stress on the last word. Heinous isn’t a strong enough word for it. The performance here didn’t help to endear me to the song either. Who did the two women arm dancing think they were? Susan and Joanne from the aforementioned Human League?

Ace Of Base were, of course, from Sweden and are the third biggest selling band from those shores after ABBA and Roxette but when the competition for that particular bronze medal includes the likes of Rednex (of “Cotton Eye Joe” fame), Dr. Alban and Europe, it rather undermines the achievement of a place on the rostrum.

https://youtu.be/XRlvQDfGbxc

I really feel the need for something decent in this week’s Breakers to lift the mood, nay standard. We start with something unusual though. I knew Sounds Of Blackness were a gospel group but that’s all that I knew and I certainly couldn’t have named any of their songs.

However, having looked them up on Wikipedia I do remember the cover for their 1993 album “Africa To America: The Journey Of The Drum” from which this single – “I’m Going All The Way” – came. It was produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis who were nothing if not versatile – they were also the producers behind Janet Jackson who was on the show earlier of course. Look, I can appreciate gospel music but back in 1993 I don’t think it was what I was looking for and I certainly wasn’t expecting to find it in the Top 40.

https://youtu.be/jfA7yNmo1Q4

In my head, there’s a definite line drawn in 1985 that marked the end of Depeche Mode as, for want of a better description, a pop band and their going forwards as, for want of another better description, a rock band. Now I do know that those terms are far too simplistic to do justice to the career of the band. I think it’s just that 1985 saw the release of their first Best Of album “The Singles 81>85” and that felt like a real marker in the sand that said, ‘OK, here’s a a physical reminder of everything we’ve done up to this point but from here on in, we’re going in a new direction”. The following year “Black Celebration” was released and everything did feel different starting with its dark lead single “Stripped”.

By 1993, Depeche Mode had perfected that new, harder sound into something massively commercial. The 1990 ”Violator” album sold seven and a half million copies worldwide and housed four classic singles. Then came “Songs Of Faith And Devotion” starting with strident lead single “I Feel You” which we didn’t get to see on TOTP for some reason. The follow up single was “Walking In My Shoes” and this little snippet on the Breakers was all we got of it. What was going on here? It’s another great track, doomy yet melodic and the video sees Dave Gahan in his full on rock god phase. Tragedy of course struck the band in May this year with the unexpected death of Andy Fletcher. Just today though, photos have been released of Gahan and Martin Gore back in the studio which is good news.

The second hit for Rage Against The Machine now. After “Killing In The Name” had been a No 25 hit earlier in the year (sixteen years before its Xmas No 1 sideshow), “Bullet In The Head” did even better piercing yer actual Top 20.

The band have been nominated for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame on four occasions (2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021) but failed every time to get voted in. Rage Against The Machine there, the Nigel Farage of funk metal. And yes, I know their political views couldn’t be more diametrically opposed but I need to put this post to bed and a cheap line is all I’ve got for this lot.

Oh do f**k off! Even in 1993 at the height of his infamy, nobody needed any more Shabba Ranks surely?! After the Top 3 success of “Mr. Loverman” (itself a rerelease), record company Sony were always going to give 1991 single “Housecall” another tilt at the charts. It peaked at No 31 on its initial release but a remix saw it leap into the Top 10 second time around. A collaboration with Maxi Priest (whom I have no beef with BTW), it gave rise to the “Shabba!” sample on “Mr. Loverman” that was both ubiquitous and pilloried in 1993.

Finally some genuine relief from all this musical crud! Kingmaker hailed from Hull (my home for these last eighteen years) but in 1993 I was living in Manchester and working in Rochdale so I missed what surely must have been a sense of excitement in the band’s hometown at having the first authentic chart act since The Housemartins in the 80s.

“Ten Years Asleep” was their third Top 40 hit and came from their sophomore album “Sleepwalking”. Unbelievably, its lead single “Armchair Anarchist” which is a fab tune had stalled at No 47 in October of 1992 but its follow up did the trick rising to No 15, the band’s joint highest chart placing. True, it wasn’t a million miles away from the sound of acts like The Wonder Stuff and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin but at a time when decent indie pop tunes were at a premium, this was wonderful. Dealing with the vexing and existential subject of the passing of time and the inevitable conforming behaviours that seem to affect all of us, the lyrics showed what a great writer Loz Hardy was even though his hand had been forced by the band’s record label demanding that he essentially write a hit record. In this performance he looks like Ian Hart playing John Lennon in The Beatles biopic Backbeat.

It seems odd to consider it now but Kingmaker had been a bigger deal than the likes of Radiohead and Suede both of whom had supported them on tour in 1992. However, disputes with their record label about approaches to writing, recording and formatting of their music hampered their progress and by the time that third album “In The Best Possible Taste” came out in 1995, they’d been sunk by the good ship Britpop. They split soon after but reformed briefly in 2010 without Hardy as Kingmaker MMX.

https://youtu.be/1-cyqEARfA4

Oh dear. In fact, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. This is just cringe (the kids don’t use the ‘worthy’ suffix do they?). Nobody can deny Elton John his place in musical history (except my mate Robin who once told me that he didn’t like even one of his songs) but this is just…wrong.

“Simple Life” was the fourth and final single from his 1992 album “The One” and it failed to make the Top 40 despite this ‘exclusive’ TOTP performance from Atlanta. Literally, what was the point of this? The song is turgid enough but the sight of Elton all togged up on a stage with just a black backdrop for company and deprived of his piano thereby forcing him into attempting to (gulp) ‘dance’…well, it’s just cruel. He even flicks his wig at one point as if to say ‘look I’ve got hair’ even though we know he didn’t. Please, I know I said spare me from all the Eurodance crap earlier in the post but this really wasn’t the lifebelt I was hoping for.

https://youtu.be/0EA_crzEeG8

While Elton was struggling around the edges of the Top 40, his mate George Michael was still at No 1 as part of the “Five Live” EP. Last week we had his version of Queen’s “Somebody To Love” but this time it’s his duet with Lisa Stansfield on their 1991 Xmas No 1 (double A-sided with “Bohemian Rhapsody”) “These Are The Days Of Our Lives”. Recorded at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert of the previous year, I’d never liked the original but in the hands (or rather mouths) of George and Lisa it sounds pretty good. The former wouldn’t release any new music after this until 1996’s “Older” album but the latter would return later in 1993 with her third studio album “So Natural”.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	2 Unlimited	Tribal Dance	Definitely not
2	Janet Jackson	That’s The Way Love Goes	Nah
3	Utah Saints	Believe In Me	I did not
4	Ace Of Base	All That She Wants	As if
5	Sounds Of Blackness	I’m Going All The Way	No
6	Depeche Mode	Walking In My Shoes	Good song but no
7	Rage Against The Machine	Bullet In The Head	Nope
8	Shabba Ranks and Maxi Priest	Housecall	Away with you!
9	Kingmaker	Ten Years Asleep	I seem have been asleep as it’s not in the singles box
10	Elton John	Simple Life	Hell no!
11	Queen / George Michael / Lisa Stansfield	Five Live EP	Don’t think I did

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/m0019tp2/top-of-the-pops-06051993

TOTP 17 DEC 1992

Posted on May 27, 2022 by 80stastic

It’s only a week until Xmas 30 (!) years ago and I’m working my arse off in Our Price, Rochdale doing long days and serving even longer queues of customers as the panic of not getting all your shopping done sets in. I’m enjoying it though as the team at the shop were great. Everyone was hard working and got on with each other. That bonhomie amongst the staff was needed though when it came to dealing with the public, especially on Xmas Eve when many of the punters who entered the store that day were manic and had no time for any basic manners or civility. In short, they slaughtered us. Many an exchange went like this:

Me: I’m sorry but we’ve sold out of Gloria Estefan’s Greatest Hits on cassette madam.

Customer: You f******g what?! You’ve ruined my daughter’s Xmas you have!

Something like that anyway. No doubt I would have sold some of the singles showcased on this final regular TOTP before Xmas…

N.B. I’m not reviewing the Xmas day episode. It’s too long and most of the acts on there have already featured in previous posts.

We start with The Shamen who are getting in the Xmas party spirit by dressing up as characters from Alice In Wonderland. Eh? Why? Where are the Santa hats and Xmas jumpers? If they really wanted to go down a literary route, surely Dickens’ A Christmas Carol would have been the way to go? Scrooge in his bedclothes, ghosts, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley and his chains….hey, they could have even called themselves Jacob and the Marley Chain. OK, the last bit is a crap idea but surely no worse than what they actually came up with. Again I ask, why? Oh, hang on. The ever reliable @TOTPFacts might have the answer…

Given the book's long association with psychedelics – Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" et al – I think we can guess why The Shamen decided to dress up as characters from Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) May 20, 2022

Ah well possibly I guess. An overindulgence of some illegal substances might explain why Mr C is dressed as the Knave of Clubs. Surely it’s the Knave of Hearts (who stole some tarts)? As for the song itself, “Phorever People” sounds like “Ebeneezer Goode” part II but then, why re-invent the wheel when the first one is spinning so well? The four singles taken from their “Boss Drum” album achieved the following chart peaks:

6 – 1 – 4 – 5

Pretty impressive stuff. That run of success helped earned the band the Smash Hits Best New Act award for 1992. Quite an achievement for a band that had been in existence since 1985.

A quick word on the presenters tonight. One is regular Tony Dortie but the other is rising BBC star Mr Blobby. This character achieved the seemingly impossible feat of being more annoying than Noel Edmonds despite the latter being responsible for Blobby’s rise to fame on Noel’s House Party. How on earth was the Blobby phenomenon allowed to happen?!

A third appearance on the show next for the video to “Deeper And Deeper” by Madonna. This became Madge’s first single to fail to make the Top 5 in this country since 1987’s “The Look Of Love”. None of the subsequent three singles released from the “Erotica” album managed to outdo “Deeper And Deeper” although they all went Top 10. It was a mixed bag of a time for Madonna. Her profile was as notorious as ever thanks to her X-rated coffee table book Sex and yet her album “Erotica” only sold half as many copies as its predecessor “Like A Prayer”. Nowhere was this dichotomy witnessed more succinctly than in the fact that Madonna’s managed to be simultaneously the most and least fanciable female at that Smash Hits poll winners party.

The people who started the early 90s trend for dance versions of pop standards have returned to the scene of the crime to remind us all that they were the original culprits. I speak of East Side Beat who kicked this ghastly movement off in 1991 with a cover of Christopher Cross’ “Ride Like The Wind”. In their wake came acts like Undercover, Rage and KWS but this Italian duo were back to remind us they were alive and kicking with their version of…erm…”Alive And Kicking” by Simple Minds. You’ll remember that this 1985 track had only recently been back in the Top 40 promoting the Scottish stadium rockers Best Of album. Was that in the thinking behind East Side Beat’s choice of song to cover? The fact that it had been reinforced in the minds of pop fans just a short time ago and had proved to retain its popularity? Could they jump on the bandwagon of its promotion and marketing campaign? Or was it all just one big happy coincidence?

Whatever the truth of the matter, their song choice worked. A Top 40 hit meant a TOTP appearance and there’s a lot to unpack about this particular performance. We start with the intro to it by Tony Dortie who, not for the first time I may add, uses the description drum ‘n’ bass erroneously. WTAF?! How is some naff Eurodance in any way, shape or form anything to do with drum ‘n’ bass?! By Goldie’s teeth!! I think Tony has retrospectively admitted he had no idea what he was talking about during some of his links but that just begs the the question why go there at all?!

Secondly, what was going on with the backing dancers? They appear to be wearing Italian club football shirts but were seemingly not allowed to wear any shorts with them. Hmm. All a bit dubious. Hang on. Is football the reason that East Side Beat chose “Alive And Kicking” to cover? Wasn’t that the song that soundtracked the advertising campaign for the launch of Sky’s coverage of the inaugural season of the Premier League? Yes it was…

Again I say hmm. Thirdly, and I’m really not wishing to get into racial stereotyping here but the lead singer must be the least stylish Italian ever!

East Side Beat’s cover of “Alive And Kicking” peaked at No 26.

Now I can’t find a clip of this live by satellite performance from Miami by Gloria Estefan so if you’re reading this after the episode has fallen off iPlayer, you’ll have to take my word for it but there’s something off about it. I couldn’t put my finger on it for ages but I think it’s the way the backing musicians have set up so they’re not actually facing the same way as Gloria as she performs. It’s quite off putting once you’ve noticed it, like they’re part of a different performance altogether but where somehow the two parallel worlds have collided like an episode of Star Trek. Talking of which, in what universe was it appropriate to add a bit of a 2 Unlimited keyboard riff to a Latino pop medley?

The “Miami Hit Mix” peaked at No 8.

The running order for this TOTP has now taken us from cover version to megamix and back to cover version in the space of three records. The second cover of the night comes from The Lemonheads whose version of Simon & Garfunkel ‘s “Mrs Robinson” was a Breaker last week. This week however, they’re in the studio and their performance has a definite Nirvana / Smells Like Teen Spirit vibe to it. Just looking at them, they look incongruous and like they don’t really belong on TOTP. Too counterculture, too anti-establishment, too slacker? Too tall in the case of Evan Dando. He looks enormous here. Apparently he’s 6ft 3” and he looks every bit of it bestriding the stage in his red duffle coat. Well, bestriding it until he attempts an abortive forward roll. Presumably that was supposed to put the watching audience on alert that something unexpected might happen and that there was an element of chaos at play as per that Nirvana performance. He even tells us audibly by singing “you don’t know what’s gonna happen next” at one point. What does happen is that he breaks into an impression of Morrissey. I mean it’s unmistakably Mozza – Dando has been known to boast about how great his impression of him is – but isn’t that just copying what Kurt Cobain did when he was on the show? I mean Cobain’s impression was terrible and Dando’s is clearly better but where’s the originality? Furthermore, isn’t Evan’s oversized coat derivative of the Nirvana lead singer’s fashion style? Too harsh? Maybe. Perhaps Evan should have stuck with his Beatles head wobble impression instead of branching out into Mozza territory.

One final thing. At the start of the performance, he shouts over to the bass player “louder man!”. Those instruments weren’t actually plugged in surely?

To the Breakers and guess what? We begin with the aforementioned Nirvana! Just like Guns N’ Roses before them the other week, here was a band still releasing tracks as singles from an album that was well over a year old. “In Bloom” was the fourth such single taken from “Nevermind” and there is a school of thought (championed by Courtney Love no less) that this should have been the lead single from the album on the basis that it’s a much better song than “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. For what it’s worth, I think she’s right. She also once said that “Hungry Like The Wolf” is the best song ever written so she knows her stuff. Ahem.

The Ed Sullivan Show pastiche video works pretty well as it remains faithful to the source material and it’s that element of realism that completes the humour of Nirvana as clean cut boys à la those lovable moptops.

“In Bloom” peaked at No 28.

OK. Just when you think the bottom of the barrel can’t be scraped any harder…We really did witness some truly ghastly acts in the UK charts during 1992. Wrestlers (WWF Superstars) strippers (The Chippendales), two acts peddling singles based on computer games (Tetris and Ambassadors Of Funk) and now this. After Shut Up And Dance delivered “Raving I’m Raving” based on “Walking In Memphis” by Marc Cohn earlier in the year, now came “We Are Raving – The Anthem” by Slipstreem. Using Rod Stewart’s “Sailing” as its blueprint, this load of arse juice was an abysmal idea that sounded even worse. Who were these berks and why didn’t Rod but an injunction out to stop this atrocity? After all, it’s what Marc Cohn did. I’ve got no words left for this type of garbage. Next!

As well as being remembered for some terrifyingly dreadful chart hits, 1992 will also rightly be recalled as the year of The Wedding Present “Hit Parade” project. Twelve singles in one calendar year and all made the Top 40 meaning that they equalled Elvis Presley’s 1957 record. Except their achievement was better as they wrote all their songs whereas Elvis’s were written for him. They did however do some cover versions for the B-sides including for the final release “No Christmas” which had Elton John’s “Step Into Christmas” on the flip and a fine version it is too.

The highest chart position attained by any of the “Hit Parade” singles was No 10 while the lowest was No 26. It still stands up as quite the achievement I think.

Now working in a shop in Rochdale at this time, I lived in hope that the next artist might pop in one day as she grew up there from the age of 11. Sadly, the day Lisa Stansfield glided into the store was my day off! FFS!

Anyway, there was much hope that her latest single “Someday (I’m Coming Back)” was going to be a huge seller coming as it did from the soundtrack to The Bodyguard. It was certainly a decent sized hit peaking as it did at No 10 but there was genuine belief that it could have been a Top 3 contender. I have to say it seemed a bit lacklustre to me. Maybe it was overshadowed by all those Whitney Houston power ballads that packed out the rest of the album. Lisa’s track was the only one to be released as a single from the soundtrack that wasn’t by Whitney so I guess she deserves some kudos for that.

Do you think that Lisa was having a bad hair day when this performance was recorded? How else do you explain her decision to wear a cat burglar’s hat otherwise?

Now I’m not sure why the TOTP producers chose to show this next video instead of the official promo for “Heal The World” by Michael Jackson. It’s a concert clip from the Dangerous World Tour. I’ve put in some footage from the Bucharest date below but I don’t know if that’s the one shown on the programme. It’s looks like Jacko’s wearing the same jacket in both so I’ll go with that. The five UK dates had already been and gone so it can’t have been to increase ticket sales and in any case, wouldn’t all the gigs have sold out almost immediately anyway?

I guess if anyone had the best shot of beating Whitney to the Xmas No 1 it was Michael Jackson. Possibly the most famous person on the planet and with a huge, goodwill to all ballad, it seemed like a decent shout. And yet I never felt like he would actually do it. Maybe that was purely based on what we were selling in the Rochdale store but I just never doubted it would be a Houston Xmas chart topper. For once, I was right.

It’s a second medley on the show tonight. After Gloria Estefan earlier, here come Boney M. Ever wondered why they were called Boney M? Here’s @TOTPFacts with the answer…

Frank Farian named Boney M after Boney, an Aussie TV drama about a half-aboriginal detective called Bonaparte. The series featured a white actor badly “]
blacked-up in the title role, and was a bit of a joke in Germany. https://t.co/qXtEsd7L4w #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) May 20, 2022

I remember Boney! It used to be on Sunday afternoons on ITV in the Midlands where I grew up. When it came on, me and my brother used to say (in a very un-PC way) “first he was fatty, then he was skinny, now he’s Boney”. We thought we were hilarious!

Their 1992 “Megamix” was the third such single released by the band – or whatever assembled line up passed for the band at that time – in the last four years. This was by far the biggest hit though peaking at No 7.

It’s still there, it will be the Xmas No 1 and it will continue to occupy top spot in the charts for weeks to come. Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” was a sales phenomenon. It was on the way to being just the second single in the last six years to reach one million sales in the UK. It would end up selling over 1,550,000 copies. The Bodyguard film wasn’t even released in the UK until Boxing Day. Presumably that gave it a second wind sales wise (as if it needed it).

Mr Blobby is back to say goodbye just before the credits roll. One year later he would be on the show again, this time with the Xmas No 1 crown. What a time to be alive!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	The Shamen	Phorever People	Nope
2	Madonna	Deeper And Deeper	No
3	East Side Beat	Alive And Kicking	Never!
4	Gloria Estefan	Miami Hit Mix	Nope
5	The Lemonheads	Mrs Robinson	Liked it, didn’t buy it
6	Nirvana	In Bloom	Ditto
7	Slipstreem	We Are Raving – The Anthem	NOOO!
8	The Wedding Present	No Christmas	No but I have their version of Step Into Christmas on something
9	Lisa Stansfield	Someday (I’m Coming Back)	I did not
10	Michael Jackson	Heal The World	No but I had a promo copy of HIStory with it on
11	Boney M	Megamix	No but my wife’s first ever album purchase was Nightflight To Venus
12	Whitney Houston	I Will Always Love You	No but god knows how many I sold that Christmas

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/m0017ftn/top-of-the-pops-17121992

TOTP 28 MAY 1992

Posted on February 25, 2022 by 80stastic

When dance music transitioned from the clubs to the mainstream / Top 40 in a major way towards the end of the 80s, it presented TOTP with a major challenge in terms of how to feature these acts that weren’t your traditional pop stars. Mostly they weren’t up to the challenge. Then came the ‘year zero’ revamp under the stewardship of Stanley Appel. Would the new format be better suited to these problematic hits? Well, after a fair few attempts during the first eight months of the new era, the true test had arrived. The first three acts in the studio tonight are all peddling dance tunes. Given the responsibility of landing this tricky manoeuvre safely are presenters Mark Franklin and Femi Oke.

It’s straight in at the deep end with the opening act Future Sound Of London and their track “Papua New Guinea”. It turns out that there wasn’t just one person called Cobain who was making a name for himself in the early 90s musical landscape. Gary Cobain (doesn’t quite have the same ring as Kurt does it?) and Brian Dougans met as students in Manchester in their 80s with the latter pointing heavily towards what might be to come when he wrote and produced the ground breaking “Stakker Humanoid” single which was described by The Guardian as “the first truly credible UK acid techno record to break into the mainstream”. With Cobain contributing to the resulting album project, it led to the duo releasing material under various aliases until following “Stakker Humanoid” into the charts as Future Sound Of London (often abbreviated OMD like to FSOL).

Despite the fawning in the music press inkies, there was nothing for me in “Papa New Guinea”. The just didn’t get it. Apparently ot samples both Aussie art rockers Dead Can Dance and industrial electronic knob twiddlers Meat Beat Manifesto so the source material didn’t speak to me either. I did work with someone who was into Meat Beat Manifesto but she was never going to convince me of their charms.

So how did TOTP deal with the vexatious issue of showcasing an unfamiliar dance act? With a load of strobe lights and that grainy coloured overlay effect again of course. As a staging technique I thought it was weak I have to say. Oh and that blue with the stupid hat- what was that all about. @TOTPFacts sums my feelings up perfectly:

Future Sound Of London's fashion guru. #TOTP pic.twitter.com/6qAfF1rryp
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) February 18, 2022

So, Future Sound Of London didn’t work for me on any level. “Papua New Guinea”? Give me “Aikea-Guinea” by Cocteau Twins any day. By the way, I can’t find a clip of the TOTP performance so the official promo video will have to do.

Next to “Friday I’m In Love” by The Cure which according to a Rolling Stone magazine article is a song that has caused Robert Smith many “Wild Mood Swings” it comes to his relationship with it. At times he has hated it for the level of fame and attention it attracted even disowning it and those who like it denouncing them as not being fans of The Cure. Conversely, he has also listed it as being one of his three favourite singles by the band ever.

It’s a well worn concept; the idea that the commercial success that the artist has craved is ultimately unsatisfying when it arrives and that what really matters is their ‘art’. There must be loads of examples of this throughout rock history. Off the top of my head, The Monkees famously rejected being chart puppets to fulfil their desire to make their own music on their own terms. When it comes to disowning your biggest hits, I saw Supergrass live around the early 2000s and they didn’t play “Alright” which seemed a bit childish. Oh and REM and “Shiny Happy People” for sure.

In the light of everything above, I was surprised to learn that “Friday I’m In Love” isn’t actually the band’s highest charting single. It peaked at No 6 but three years earlier “Lullaby” had made it to No 5.

We’re back on a dance tip now with the curious case of “Raving I’m Raving”. The Wedding Present spent 1992 entering the higher end of the Top 40 before crashing out immediately due to the limited amount of copies of each single that were pressed as part of their “Hit Parade” project. Shut Up And Dance had a similar chart arc but for a very different reason.

Formed in 1988, this electronic dance duo had released a series of idiosyncratically titled singles such as “Dance Before The Police Come” and “Autobiography Of A Crackhead” before hitting on the idea of basing their next release on Marc Cohn’s “Walking In Memphis”. Keeping the melody but replacing some of the original’s lyrics with the word raving (“put on my raving shoes” and of course the single’s title), it created a huge amount of interest and initial sales were enough to send it straight into the charts at No 2. Genius! Or was it?

Sadly for Shut Up And Dance founders PJ and Smiley (who heard Duncan when reading that last word?) they had failed to get copyright clearance from Cohn who soon got his lawyers on the case. Despite offers to give any royalties to charity, Cohn wasn’t having any of it and insisted that no further pressings of the single were made meaning that it was essentially deleted as soon as it came out. With no more copies available, the single dropped like a stone even to No 15 and then out of the chart altogether. The whole thing was over in three short but eventful weeks.

This TOTP performance was ultimately pointless in terms of increasing sales of the single as there were no more copies left to sell. That and the fact that Cohn wouldn’t even let them perform the track on TV hence we get a completely different song without the original melody or reworked Cohn lyrics. It’s just a different song altogether. Madness! For me, it wasn’t that the whole legal issue made the project a non starter – I didn’t get why it was seen as such a great idea in the first place. It almost seemed like a novelty song to my ears.

As for how TOTP dealt with the band’s appearance on the show, the smoke machines were put in full whack, there’s a lot of arm waving from both the studio audience and the artist (whose vocalist is doing his best Seal impression) and a computer graphic effect whereby the female singer has her head size reduced in ever decreasing frames. It’s all a bit rubbish really….like the song itself. Interestingly, they do try and address the fact that the ring featured isn’t the one that people went out and bought by having presenter Femi Oke describe it as the “TOTP remix”. That wasn’t fooling anybody though.

Yay! It’s Kriss Kross with “Jump” next! The heavy emphasis on the guys ;plus video extras) you know…jumping…with the associated jerky camera angle puts me in mind of “Jump Around” by House Of Pain but performed by Musical Youth perhaps.

What is it that they are actually rapping about? Apart from jumping obviously. Well the lyrics include lines like ‘bull crap is what I’m dumpin’ (ooer!) and ‘I love when a girl is like jockin’ which seems to mean a number of things from obsessing over someone with intense affection to copying the likeness of. I’m guessing it’s the latter here with Mack Daddy or indeed Daddy Mack liking it when girls copy their rapping… or dance moves…or even wearing their jeans back to front of course.

“Jump” peaked at No 2.

Meanwhile back in the studio we find…yes, another dance act. This time it’s Bassheads back again to follow up their Top 5 hit “Is There Anybody Out There?”. This time they’ve gone “Back To The Old School” but shouldn’t that be “Back To The Old Skool”? I found some reviews of the track online that describe it as having ‘massive old skool (yes spelt like that) break house beats’and being a ‘proper killer tune’. Like Ted on The Fast Show, I wouldn’t know anything about that sir – this sort of stuff really want my favourite subject at skool.

As for the staging of the performance, there’s loads more dry ice, a close up of a DJ type fella shouting “How’s everybody feelin’ out there?“ and at one the band are clearly asked to move about in slow motion so some visual effects can be added to make it look like they are leaving some kind of vapour trail behind each movement. It may have looked impressive in 1992 I guess but it looks plain dreadful today.

“Back To The Old School” peaked at No 12.

https://youtu.be/DJjubfaayA8

If I knew anything about the UK soul/ R’n’B scene of the early 90s then I would know all about this next artist. However, I didn’t and don’t and so have relied upon Wikipedia for this one. Don–E was actually Donald McLean (nothing to do with the “American Pie” hitmaker obvs) and he was quite the all rounder writing, producing and playing on his debut album “Unbreakable” from which this single “Love Makes The World Go Round” was taken.

One of the reasons I don’t know anything about this guy is because I don’t remember him at all. Nothing. Zip. Listening to him now, he’s got a definite Stevie Wonder flavour to him and puts me in mind a bit of Omar of “There’s Nothing Like This” fame. Ah now then. I’ve just got to the hit in his bio on Wikipedia that says he duetted with Omar on a track on his 2005 album “Try This”. I swear down I hadn’t read that before my earlier Omar reference.

That 2005 release was his first album for 10 years as his solo career had stalled after his initial success with “Love Makes The World Go Round” and he’d focussed instead on writing for and producing other artists. He seems to combine those duties and releasing his own material these days.

Three Breakers this week none of which would be seen in the show again. What a nonsense this feature has become. We start with Cud. I know at least one person who swears by these Leeds indie rockers but I only really know this single (“Rich And Strange”) I must admit. I did like it though. Just that right balance of leftfield yet tuneful with a driving guitar riff that reminds me of The Pixies.

It was taken from their third album “Asquarius” which was actually their first album for major label A&M having released their previous material on indie Imaginary Records. Wikipedia tells me that they referred to their sound as something called ‘Lion Pop’ which is a new genre on me. It seems to have been some sort of precursor to Britpop as far as I can make out though I don’t recall Cud being mentioned in that now much maligned bracket probably because they split in 1995. They reformed in 2006 and apparently Embrace (whom I love) keyboard player Mickey Dale is an occasional member of their line up. The things you learn from Wikipedia.

“Rich And Strange” peaked at No 24.

Mr. Big had more than one hit over here? I would have bet money on “To Be With You” being their only chart entry but here they are with something called “Just Take My Heart”. Obviously it’s terrible. In fact, is there a case to be made that at this very point in rock history that Mr. Big were the worst band in the world? Judging by this and their previous hit, they were certainly the most boring. Just look at some of the lyrics to this one:

‘I can’t imagine living my life after you’ve gone; wondering why so many questions have no answers’

My God! A love lorn teenager would be embarrassed by that and yet it was deemed good enough to be recorded as an actual song that would get played on the radio! Even their videos were terminally tedious. Just the band performing the song on black and white film. Mr.Big? Mr.Big Log more like.

“Just Take My Heart” peaked at Number No 26. They were never to be seen on the UK Top 40 again.

And now for something completely different…and far more interesting. For all the talk of the rise of grunge rock in the early 90s, we haven’t actually seen that much of it in TOTP. Look at this show for example – it’s like a bloody rave is going down in the studio! To rebalance that, here comes an all female band that were definitely and defiantly here to play some grimy, kick ass, heavy punk rock.

Although not actually from Seattle (they were from LA in fact) L7 seemed to be inextricably linked to grunge possibly because some of their early material was released on legendary label Subpop home of grunge protagonists Soundgarden, Mudhoney and of course Nirvana. That link was strengthened by the fact that their third album “Bricks Are Heavy” was produced by Bitch Vig, the man nicknamed ‘the never mind man’ for his work on Nirvana’s stellar second studio album.

From that album came this single “Everglade” a high speed riot of their brand of punk infused heavy metal. To think that within four years, the concept of all female band would have morphed into the template that allowed the Spice Girls to dominate planet pop.

Of course, along with their music there was an uncompromising attitude and approach that would lead to a number of unforgettable controversies. I was among the disbelieving TV audience that Friday night watching anarchic Channel 4 TV show The Word when lead vocalist Donita Sparks whipped down her jeans and knickers to finish performing “Pretend We’re Dead” nude from the waist down. This incident occurred on the same show that they had a secret camera in Oliver Reed’s dressing room which Donita thought was pretty shitty so she thought she’d add her own brand of f****d up anarchy to the chaos. Watching it back I felt sorry for the bass player who thinks she’s stealing the show by mounting the drum rider only to trim around and see Sparks with her fanny out! As one of the user comments in the clip below just so succinctly puts it – ‘Gash!’ How nice.

This week’s ‘exclusive’ performance comes from Lisa Stansfield who’s flown in from Berlin to be on the show according to presenter Mark Franklin. I’m not sure it was worth the flight. Lisa has a fine voice but this single (“Set Your Loving Free”) didn’t have a lot going for it to my ears. I’ve only just watched Lisa’s performance of it and already I’ve forgotten how it goes. Bland doesn’t cover it. No it really doesn’t- I’m going to have to find another word. Dreary? No. Lacklustre? Nope. Vapid? Yes, vapid is the word.

It was the fourth single taken from her “Real Love” album. If you’re going to release four tracks from an album, by the time you get to the fourth it needs to be a memorable tune I say. Unfortunately “Set Your Loving Free” wasn’t. The daft thing is that there was a great song on the album that went unreleased…

“Set Your Loving Free” only made it to No 28 but Lisa returned at the end of the year with a track that must have made her a fair wad over the years; not because it was a chart topper…ahem…all around the world (it peaked at No 10 in the UK) but due to the fact that it was included on the best selling soundtrack of all time. I refer to The Bodyguard of course with Lisa’s contribution being “Someday (I’m Coming Back)”. Nice work if you can get it.

And so to the No 1 which again is a dance tune of sorts though nothing to do with that mad ‘raving’ nonsense. KWS are into their fourth week at the top with their cover of KC And The Sunshine Band’s “Please Don’t Go”.

I said in a recent post that there was some legal controversy over this record and so there was. A very similar version had been recorded by German dance act Double You who had big hit with it all over Europe. Wanting to get a slice of the action, indie label Network Records sought distribution rights for the single in the UK but failed to secure them. Their solution was to get an act of their own to record it and put that out instead. Enter KWS. It proved to be a winning move with a UK No 1 disc and US Top Tenner. Pushing their luck, it was released in Germany and went to No 7 before legal action from Double You forced it to be withdrawn from sale. It fell out of the charts the following week making it the single with the highest position to drop out of the national charts ever. Does any of this sound familiar? For Double You read Marc Cohn and for KWS read Shut Up And Dance. 1992 was a good year to be a lawyer in the music industry.

Ghjj

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Future Sound Of London	Papua New Guinea	Certainly not
2	The Cure	Friday I’m In Love	Not the single but I have it on a Greatest Hits CD of theirs
3	Shut Up And Dance	Raving I’m Raving	Hell no
4	Kris Kross	Jump	It was fun but not a purchase
5	Bassheads	Back To The Old School	I literally rather would have gone back to school – no
6	Don-E	Love Makes The World Go Round	Nah
7	Cud	Rich And Strange	Liked it, didn’t ‘t buy it
8	Mr. Big	Just Take My Heart	No no no….
9	L7	Everglade	See 7 above
10	Lisa Stansfield	Set Your Loving Free	No chance
11	KWS	Please Don’t Go	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/m0014j5w/top-of-the-pops-28051992

TOTP Rewind – the 90s

My memories of 90s chart music

TOTP 20 JUN 1997

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TOTP 21 MAR 1997

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TOTP 17 JAN 1997

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TOTP 21 OCT 1993

PRINCE 4 – 3 CAPPELLA

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TOTP 10 JUN 1993

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TOTP 03 JUN 1993

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TOTP 27 MAY 1993

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TOTP 06 MAY 1993

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TOTP 17 DEC 1992

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TOTP 28 MAY 1992

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