As Springtime approaches its end for another year, back in 1992 and the world of TOTP repeats, Xmas is coming into view. Bonfire night has been and gone and for all of us working in retail back then, the days were getting busier. I was working as Assistant Manager in the Our Price store in Rochdale having been promoted for the first time in my working life a couple of months previously. Despite the lengthy commute from our rented flat in Manchester, I was enjoying the job immensely. After previous manager Adrian had departed for pastures new (the Manchester Virgin megastore as I recall), a new boss arrived in the form of Ian from the Burnley store. Ian had worked at Rochdale before so knew the score which was helpful for the wet behind the ears me. Ian turned out to be a top bloke and one of the best people to work alongside. Around this time we recruited two Xmas temps called Chris and Lee who fitted in perfectly with the rest of the team. We were known as the ‘good time’ store by the Area Manager as every time he rang us, he could hear laughter in the background. It couldn’t have gone much better for a first time managerial role for me. Sadly, it also lulled me into a false sense of security that all shops were like this. There were darker times ahead in other stores.

That’s enough about my personal circumstances for now though. You’re not here for that. On with the show! One of the breakout stars of 1991 had been Cathy Dennis who had stepped out of D-Mob’s shadows into a solo spotlight to notch up four Top 20 singles and a Top 3 album in the UK and a pair of Top 10 hits in the US. Once you’ve ridden so high of course, the challenge is to stay there. Her initial success had been based on out and out dance tunes like “Touch Me (All Night Long)” and “Just Another Dream” but in the fast moving world of early 90s dance music, was it wise to just repeat that formula or should she go in another direction? After all, she had dabbled with balladry on hit single “Too Many Walls”. If it’s not broken, why fix it though? In the end she kind of fudged it with the single “Irresistible”. Both uptempo but with a definite pop touch it kind of fell between two stools. Taken from sophomore album “Into The Skyline”, it ended up sounding like Amy Grant’s “Baby Baby”. Pleasant enough but so, so lightweight as to be almost ephemeral, disappearing from your memory banks as soon as the last beat had sounded.

Chart wise it did OK returning Cathy to the Top 40 over here though it stalled at No 61 in the US. However its No 24 peak made it the biggest hit of four singles taken from the album. Despite the absence of any monster hits to promote it, “Into The Skyline” managed to go Top 10 which surprised me as I thought it had disappeared without trace. Talking of disappearing, what was the score with Cathy’s jumper in this performance? Its threadbare, tatty appearance suggests she may have had a case of moths in her wardrobe.

Now when I saw this next track on the show’s running list, I assumed they were carrying on with the nostalgia section which had been used in recent weeks to promote the 1,500th show even though that particular milestone had been passed last week. However I was wrong in my assumption as the retro clip of “I Got You Babe” by Sonny & Cher was actually in the album chart slot to promote Cher’s “Greatest Hits: 1965-1992” which was at No 1. Though there had been Cher Best Of albums in the past, there hadn’t been one since 1974 and so this one that had grouped together all her soft rock hits of the late 80s to ‘92 was justified I guess though maybe not ancient. Only four tracks predated the 80s although she had done brand new recordings of some covers from before then. The majority of the album though was made up of hits from her later successful albums like “Heart Of Stone” and “Love Hurts”.

And yet…TOTP chose her most well known song with one time partner Sonny Bono to broadcast. Maybe the producers felt that there hadn’t been enough distance of time since her most recent hits or perhaps they’d had good feedback on the nostalgia section? Either way, “I Got You Babe” was not given an official re-release at this time so the choice presumably was the producers?

I never liked this song much probably because of UB40 and Chrissie Hynde’s lame cover in 1985 or possibly because of its explainable but irritating overuse in Groundhog Day.

Another oldie next as we welcome back Heaven 17 to the show for the first time in eight years. Yes, incredibly we hadn’t seen these Sheffield electro pioneers on TOTP since they performed “This Is Mine” in 1984. To be fair, that was the last time they’d had a Top 40 hit in this country so I guess it’s not that surprising.

After the “How Men Are” album from which that single came had run its course, the group had gone into a commercial collapse. Mid and late 80s albums “Pleasure One” and the spookily entitled “Teddy Bear, Duke & Psycho” had missed the charts completely but suddenly they were back! Why? Well, I’d like to be able to say it was due to the public rediscovering them due to some brilliant new material they’d released but sadly it was, like Cher, due to a Greatest Hits album. “Higher And Higher: The Best Of Heaven 17” didn’t do nearly as well as Cher’s peaking at a lowly No 31 despite it being a reasonable retrospective covering all their singles plus a few album tracks and the inclusion of a Brothers In Rhythm remix of their biggest hit “Temptation”. Well, it was 1992 after all.

That remix nearly matched the success of the original peaking just two places shy of the 1983 version’s No 2 position. I know it’s a great track and I love “The Luxury Gap” album but I still found it surprising and confusing that it could be a hit all over again nine years on. 1983 felt like forever ago. I’d been a 15 year old who’d never had a girlfriend back then. I was now 24 and had been married for two years. I guess it must have been the Brothers In Rhythm association that sold it to the masses. Don’t get me wrong, I was happy to see it back in the charts it’s just that those 1983 memories of it were so strong and definitive that this new version almost felt wrong somehow.

Another dance remix of “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang” returned Heaven 17 to the Top 40 (just!) the following year but that would prove to be their final chart entry though they are now ironically a big live draw – they never toured at all during their glory years.

Something that you very rarely used to see on TOTP but which seemed to creep in more and more during this era of the show was a single that wasn’t a hit. We have another example here as Madness release a live version of the old Jimmy Cliff song “The Harder They Come”. Taken from their live album “Madstock!” which captured their legendary live shows at Finsbury Park in August of this year, it failed to make the Top 40 peaking at No 44. After managing to squeeze three more hits out of their back catalogue already in 1992 with rereleased singles to promote their “Divine Madness” Best Of album, maybe they thought another hit just before Xmas was a shoo-in?

Quite why this performance comes from Red Square, Moscow seems to be lost in the mists of time. It doesn’t add much to proceedings apart from some obligatory Russian Ushanka hats being worn by the band and some half hearted attempts at traditional Russian dancing which almost allows Suggs and Chas Smash to fulfil the prophecy of the song title. I guess Saint Basil’s Cathedral in the background must make for one of the most impressive TOTP backdrops ever though.

Wait, what? I’m sure I’ve already announced at least twice before in this blog that this must be the final TOTP appearance for The Pasadenas but here they are yet again! This time though is the last time and I think that they knew the game was up. Why? Well, they’d resorted to a cover version to reverse the downturn in their commercial fortunes, that well known and used trick for dredging up a hit when your career depends on it. What makes it even more desperate is that they’d already released a whole album of cover versions earlier in the year called “Yours Sincerely”. They pulled it off once- “I’m Doing Fine Now” was a Top 5 hit for them – but subsequent single releases from it had bought diminishing returns. So when the cover version technique ran out of steam, surely you don’t try and rectify it by doing another cover version do you? You do if you’re The Pasadenas as their version of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” did make the charts (unlike Madness and “The Harder They Come”) but it was only delaying the inevitable. A No 22 hit wasn’t enough to stop them being dropped by Columbia/Sony Music and they ignored the advice of their last ever hit single and disbanded a couple of years later.

In a frankly bizarre coincidence, their last time on the show was to perform a song that had a link to a band making their first appearance in eight years. Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware and Glenn Gregory both performed on Tina Turner’s career resurrecting version of “Let’s Stay Together” in 1983. Indeed Ware also helped produce it.

Some Breakers next starting with INXS and “Taste It” who were on the show two weeks ago in their first ever in person appearance. This time it’s just the promo video though.

I haven’t got that much else to say about this one other than I really like the fact that the band used the same font for the parent album “Welcome To Wherever You Are” and all the singles from it. A simple yet effective band of white across the cover with the title of the album/single in black and the band’s name in red. It reminds me of those label printers you got in the 70s where you pushed the sticky backed tape through the device, selected the letter you wanted (normally via a wheel) and then literally punched the impression onto the tape.

The Prodigy are next with “Out Of Space” and I was surprised to discover that this short clip in the Breakers was its only time in the show given the success the last fifteen months had brought them. In that time they’d had No 2 and No 3 hits plus a further Top 20 entry and their debut album “Experience” had been released to great acclaim. “Out Of Space” would add another Top 5 single to that haul.

Featuring samples from Max Romeo and Ultramagnetic MCs, the track cemented the band’s status as premier league electronic rave pioneers. That was maybe something that had appeared unlikely when they first appeared with the public information film sampling single “Charly” which saw them cast initially as novelty record merchants. They were still four years away though from being the heavy techno behemoths of “Firestarter” and “Breathe”. Did anyone see that coming? Or the ostriches?

The other week I noted how Metallica were still releasing singles from an album that had been out for well over a year. This week we have another example of a hard rock band doing exactly the same thing – step forward Guns N’ Roses. Their two “Use Your Illusion” albums had been released on the same day back in September 1991 yet five single releases across both albums later, here they were with another one. “Yesterdays” was taken from the second “Illusion” album and I always felt like it stood alone from the rest of the singles from the project in that it eased back from all the heavy rock bluster, especially in that almost sprightly opening guitar riff. You could make a case that it harks back to the opening of “Paradise City” even I guess. Of course it reverts to type eventually in the middle eight when Slash goes back to his usual ways but even so.

Every single from the “Illusions” albums made the UK Top 10 bar the final one “Civil War” and that only missed it by one place. Pretty impressive stuff. There would be a monumental gap of 17 years between the “Illusion” double pack and the next album of new material when “Chinese Democracy” came out in 2008. That album gained almost mythical status during the wait for it. It was forever listed in the new release info we used to get weekly in Our Price as date ‘To Be Confirmed’. Those 17 years were punctuated just once by 1993’s covers album “The Spaghetti Incident?” but it didn’t really satisfy the fan base selling only a third of both “Illusion” albums.

The final Breaker is by Simply Red with their “The Montreux EP”. The track played is called “Drowning In My Own Tears”. Ah, make your own jokes up!

A genuine titan of a tune next. No seriously, it was enormous, a monster, a leviathan. It came, it saw, it conquered and then it shat over everything else in the charts combined. A gargantuan hit. OK, I’ve run out of words now. I can only be talking about “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston. I already knew this song as my wife had a Dolly Parton Best Of CD with it on before Whitney got her mits on it and I much prefer her version but you can’t deny the reach of Whitney’s take on it which is now the definitive recording for many. This is going to be No 1 for ages so I’m not going to say loads about it straight away. For now though, here’s some facts and stats about it:

• It topped the US charts for 14 weeks and the UK for 10
• It was the biggest selling single of 1992 and the 10th best selling single of the 90s in the UK
• By 2013, it had sold 20 million copies making it the best selling single by a female artist ever
• It won the 1994 Grammies for Record Of The Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance
• For a time it was the second biggest selling single of all time after “We Are The World” by USA For Africa but was bumped into third place in 1997 by Elton John’s new version of “Candle In The Wind”
• It is taken from The Bodyguard soundtrack which is the biggest selling soundtrack of all time

Phew!

From Houston to Houston we have a problem as Genesis are inflicting a live single on us. Yes, after Madness earlier and their live single came “Invisible Touch (Live)” which was taken from the accompanying live album “The Way We Walk Volume One: The Shorts” which documented the band’s 1992 We Can’t Dance tour. The track listing was basically the singles released from their last three studio albums so all the radio friendly pop hits hence ‘shorts’. There was also a ‘longs’ live album featuring songs from their prog rock days but the less said about that the better. Live versions of the poppier end of their catalogue was concern enough.

I guess it made sense to choose a track that had been a US No 1 as the single to promote the album if a little obvious. “Invisible Touch” must surely have been and remain one of their most played songs on radio. One question though, is this the version heard on the single or just Phil Collins doing a live vocal as per TOTP policy? I’m guessing the latter as wouldn’t we be able to detect noise from the concert crowd otherwise? It follows then that when Phil does his audience response bit with the studio audience that is actually the latter repeating “yeah-uh” back to him and not them miming along to the original gig goers as that would just be too weird. Yeah, you’re right – I’m overthinking it. Who cares?

Boyz II Men have come to the end of the road at No 1 (come on, it’s an open goal!) and been replaced by Charles And Eddie with “Would I Lie To You”. At the time I couldn’t believe that this had happened as I hated this pair and what I perceived as their insipid, stupid tune. Thirty years on and I can’t quite understand what I was so enraged about. I still don’t like the song but I don’t have any hatred for it either. If anything it’s bland and inoffensive but then I guess that might be the biggest crime of all for some.

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/m00170d6/top-of-the-pops-19111992