Paula Abdul

TOTP 15 JUN 1995

Posted on November 28, 2023 by 80stastic

As I begin writing this post, it turns out that today (29th November) is the 40th anniversary of the release of the first ever Now That’s What I Call Music album. Unbelievably, the series that started in 1983 is still going strong in 2023 with Now 116 having just come out. I bought that first album way back when but it would prove to be the first and last Now album I would ever purchase. I wonder why I stopped my allegiance to the series so suddenly? I recall being quite excited about that first album as it did something no other compilation album had ever done before – it was a joint venture between two of the UK’s biggest record labels EMI and Virgin meaning the amount of singles available to be licensed to appear on it was much bigger than at any time before. Plus, they were the original songs not some dodgy knock off covers that appeared on those awful Top Of The Pops compilation albums from the 70s. Incidentally, Mark Goodier had a T-shirt on in one of the BBC4 repeats the other week that was advertising the Top Of The Pops compilation album that got launched in 1995.

Anyway, back to that first Now album and why I never bought another of them after that one. Did I think maybe they were a bit naff and not cool enough? After all, not all the songs on them would have earned any street cred points at school. That first one had the likes of Bonnie Tyler, New Edition and Peabo Bryson & Roberta Flack on it. It’s possible. The next time a Now album appeared on my radar was when my wife bought Now 13 around 1988. Then, in the 90s, I would see them on a regular basis as I was working at Our Price by then and selling them for a living. I remember in 1991 there being a big fuss about the landmark of Now 20 being reached. Incidentally, at one point around 1995, they thought about doing away with the numbers scheme as there was a fear that as the volume numbers got bigger and bigger, it would make the series seem outdated as no compilation series had ever gone on for that long. Anyway, I was still at Our Price (just) to help sell some of the 2.3 million copies that the best selling volume in the series (46) shifted in 1999. I’m getting ahead of myself though. I wonder how many of the songs featured in this TOTP made it onto a Now album?

By the way, tonight’s host is Michelle Gayle in the ‘golden mic’ slot which I guess was a canny choice by executive producer Ric Blaxill seeing as she brought with her both the glamour of being a pop star and the technical craft of being an actress so she could handle a few scripted lines whilst presenting.

Tonight’s opening act are Wet Wet Wet who are in the studio to promote their latest single “Don’t Want To Forgive Me Now”. However, we’ve seen them do this one on the show before as, back in April, they performed the song in the album chart slot to promote their album “Picture This”. As such, I’ve already reviewed this track so what am I supposed to say about it now? Well, there was a reaction of astonishment online to Marti Pellow’s suit, specifically that it consists of a split pattern between stripes and checks (or is it spots?). Even I, about as anti-fashion as it comes and almost allergic to buying clothes, knows that’s a fashion faux pas. It’s like putting tomato ketchup on a Sunday roast; you just don’t do it.

Chart peak: No 7

Now album? Yes – Now 31

Oh no! Not these two jokers again! In a year that included Robson & Jerome, it’s quite the feat to be possibly the worst chart act of 1995. I couldn’t stand The Outhere Brothers with their child-like call and response nonsense and the fact that they wrote filthy lyrics but were quite prepared to peddle a heavily edited and sanitised version of them so as to pursue mainstream success. At least have the courage of your convictions! After “Don’t Stop (Wiggle Wiggle)” went to No 1 earlier in the year, the duo weren’t prepared to be one hit wonders and repeated the trick with follow up “Boom Boom Boom” by inexplicably convincing the UK record buying public to buy another of their moronic tracks in enough quantities to make it a second chart topper.

Enough of those two pricks though. Id rather discuss how the word ‘boom’ historically figures heavily in pop music culture. Look at all these songs that include the word (or variants of it) in their title:

Boom! Shake The Room – DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince
Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!! – Vengaboys
Boom-Shack-A-Lak – Apache Indian
Boom Boom – John Lee Hooker
Boombastic – Shaggy
Sonic Boom Boy – Westworld

Then, of course, there’s The Boomtown Rats and for the fans of obscure 80s bands (like me) there’s Boom Boom Room. I guess it’s such a great word ‘boom’. Onomatopoeia at its finest.

Chart peak: No 1

Now album? Yes – Now 31

A second outing now for the video to “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” by U2. Now I always quite liked this song. It seemed a good fit for an superhero action movie; all swooping and soaring and dramatic. Plenty of others agreed with me as it was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song. However, it also had its fair share of detractors which resulted in a nomination for a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Original Song. It won neither so maybe they cancel each other out?

Aside from “Miss Sarajevo” from the “Passengers” side project, U2 wouldn’t release another single until “Discothèque” in 1997 which was another divisive song but then if you have a lead singer like Bono, you’re always going to divide opinion.

Chart peak: No 2

Now album? Yes – Now 32

Still with Bitty McLean? Yep, a whole two years on from his debut and biggest hit single “It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes)”, UB40’s former sound engineer was still cranking out medium sized chart hits most of which seemed to be reggae’d up versions of classic pop songs. This particular one was his take on “We’ve Only Just Begun” by The Carpenters. He’d previously done “Dedicated To The One I Love” made famous by The Mamas & The Papas and indeed that first hit was originally recorded by Fats Domino. Did he write any of his own stuff? A quick check of the track listing for his first album “Just To Let You Know…” reveals that he wrote three out of the eleven tracks on there. Hmm. Not that many then. Poor old Bitty can’t do right for doing wrong by me though. I criticise him for not writing his own stuff but I also don’t like his cover versions. This one is just drivel and would prove to be his final UK Top 40 hit. Still, he did know how to rock a super slick suit. Marti Pellow take note.

Chart peak: No 23

Now album? No

https://youtu.be/ycU1L7Th6H8?si=dQg6-2dHG-BG1Jc7

From a killer suit to a killer tune. Perhaps the most unlikely comeback of 1995 belonged to Edwyn Collins, a man without a UK hit single since 1983 when his ex-band Orange Juice reached the Top 10 with their one and only Top 40 entry “Rip It Up”. The band split in 1985 after being unable to consolidate on that success so Edwyn went solo and despite releasing a couple of albums and a handful of singles, nobody was really listening. All of that changed with “A Girl Like You” from third album “Gorgeous George”. Originally released on November 1994, it became a massive hit in just about every territory on the planet except here where it stalled at No 42. Huge airplay support saw it given a rerelease in the UK in the Summer of 1995. A shimmering, slinky, retro sounding pop song that you could have easily believed came from the soundtrack to a super cool 60s spy movie set in Paris, it finally broke the UK’s collective resistance when it went Top 5.

Having read both the account of Edwyn’s double cerebral haemorrhage in 2005 by his wife Grace Maxwell and a book detailing the history and adventures of Postcard Records, I have to conclude that Edwyn’s had quite the life and is a man of superb character and resilience. He looks great in this performance and yes that is a ex-Sex Pistol Paul Cook up there on drums as he played on the record.

Chart peak: No 4

Now album? Yes – Now 31

Before we get to the next act, we have an interloper in the studio but no need to worry, it’s not a protester with a cause but rather Louise from Eternal who surprises Michelle Gayle with a gold disc presented for sales of the latter’s debut album. Michelle seems genuinely surprised at this turn of events but retains her cool sufficiently to introduce the next act.

As with Bitty McLean earlier, here’s another artist that I’m amazed was still bothering the chart compilers in 1995. After her debut album made huge waves around the world and especially in the US, Paula Abdul went away for a couple of years and pulled off a follow up with second album “Spellbound” including the hits “Rush Rush” and “Vibeology”. Expecting her to complete a second comeback a lengthier four years on looked a forlorn hope but she managed to (sort of). Third album “Head Over Heels” would achieve gold status but those sales were drastically down on 1991’s “Spellbound” (three times platinum) and 1989’s “Forever Your Girl” (seven times platinum). Lead single “My Love Is For Real” sounded like Paula had been paying a bit too much attention to Kylie’s recent comeback hit of her own “Confide In Me” what with its Eastern influences and all. As with Bitty McLean, this would prove to be Paula’s last UK Top 40 hit.

Chart peak: No 28

Now album? No

I quite often rely on chart statistics in this blog to make a point or sometimes (whisper it!) pad the posts out a bit. They can be a barometer of what was happening in the charts but sometimes they don’t always tell the whole story I feel. Look at East 17 for example. I think there’s a decent argument that the band reached the pinnacle of their career with their Christmas No 1 “Stay Another Day” and that inevitably it was a slow descent from that point on. And yet…they had nine more hits after that chart topper of which six went Top 10 including two No 2s and a No 3. However, can you name any of them? Even looking at their discography, the only one that means anything to me is the single they did with Gabrielle. For me, their golden era was 1992-94. Everything past that I kind of struggle with. “Hold My Body Tight” is a case in point. There’s really not much to it at all. Lightweight doesn’t really cover it. It was the last single to be released from their “Steam” album and it did kind of feel (and sound) like an afterthought.

Chart peak: No 12

Now album? Yes – Now 31

Robson & Jerome are still at No 1 with “Unchained Melody / (There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs Of Dover”. At this point, there was talk of it becoming the biggest selling single in the UK ever but in the end such chatter was well wide of the mark. As it stands, it’s No 15 in the all time list though there’s two songs ahead of it that hadn’t been released yet in 1995.

Chart peak: No 1

Now album? No

https://youtu.be/ve___RcnRPM?si=JGuJMZ017Qd04qeu

And so to that exclusive screening of the video for “Scream” by Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson that Michelle Gayle has been bigging up all show. So was it worth the wait for this $6 million promo? Ah, I don’t know. All of these huge, blockbuster videos from past eras are always constrained by the technology that existed at the time they were made. In 1995, it looked impossibly slick and right at the cutting edge of what was possible. The black and white film, Janet’s dark make up making her look otherworldly and a spacecraft themed plot with image morphing special effects all combined well but watching it back in 2023, it doesn’t seem as impressive as my son’s FIFA computer game. It did receive eleven MTV Video Music Award nominations in 1995 – more than any other video had ever received – if that helps answer the question.

Chart peak: No 3

Now album? No

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Wet Wet Wet	Don’t Want To Forgive Me Now	No
2	The Outhere Brothers	Boom Boom Boom	As if
3	U2	Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me	Liked it, didn’t buy it
4	Bitty McLean	We’ve Only Just Begun	Nah
5	Edwyn Collins	A Girl Like You	Surely I did? No? Bah!
6	Paula Abdul	My Love Is For Real	Negative
7	East 17	Hold My Body Tight	I did not
8	Robson & Jerome	Unchained Melody / (There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs Of Dover	Never happening
9	Michael Jackson / Janet Jackson	Scream	Nope

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/m001snq0/top-of-the-pops-15061995

TOTP 11 JUL 1991

Posted on August 24, 2021 by 80stastic

Do you ever find yourself trying to remember a time before huge events had happened and had entered the world’s consciousness and what that felt like? Is it possible to access that part of your memory or does it no longer exist as any recollections you may have had up to that point can now only be viewed through the filter of those happenings?

Is that too heavy an intro for a post in a blog about 90s chart music? Too weighed down in the existential? Probably as I’m not referring to personal life changing occurrences like the birth of a child or the death of a loved one. I’m not even referring to world events like 9/11 or COVID. No, I’m talking about times before we had ever heard of a particular song or artist (well, in my defence, it is a music blog as I said earlier).

I touched on this subject the other week when we got our very first airing on TOTP of “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” by Bryan Adams before it had even got to No 1 let alone staying there for 16 weeks. I’m reminded of that theme again this week as the date of this TOTP was around the exact same time that the debut single by a group came out who the vast majority of us had never heard of but from whom it would be impossible to escape in the years to come. I refer, of course, to Take That! Yes, 30 years ago in mid July their first ever single “Do What U Like” was released to a massive shrug of indifference from the public. It made zero impression on the charts despite the efforts of the put together boy band to build a fan base by playing endless shows in schools and clubs. They even made a saucy video involving naked buttocks and jelly smearing to gain them some profile although that did seem to rather shoot them in the foot as it couldn’t be played on daytime TV.

They did manage a small Top 40 hit when their next single “Promises” scrambled it’s way to No 38 but they were back pushing their faces up at the chart window again when third single “Once You’ve Tasted Love” failed to do the business. At this point they seemed destined to fall by the way side like so many other pop wannabes down the years and they couldn’t really blame their marketing and promotion teams – they had loads of press in the teen mags and were constantly being talked up as the next big thing.

At some point around this time, Gary Barlow came into the Our Price store where I worked in Manchester. We all knew who he was due to their aforementioned press coverage. As he wandered around the store, my co-worker Craig decided to follow him around mouthing behind his back “nobody buys your records, nobody buys your records”. Cruel but undeniably funny. Of course, Barlow had the last laugh as they finally hit pay dirt with their very next release “It Only Takes A Minute” and the rest was history. Hit after hit followed including 8 No 1s before they called it a day in 1996. The hits and affection for the band were still there when they reformed in 2006 as they took on near national treasure status. All of this and I haven’t even mentioned the ubiquitous Robbie Williams!

So, in conclusion and in answer to the question “is it possible to recall a time before household names entered our lives and how that felt?” then yes it is as a small part of me will always have a mental image of Craig following Gary Barlow around Our Price openly mocking him when I hear the words ‘Take’ and ‘That’!

Blimey! That intro was so long that I feel I should be tying up this post by now but I haven’t even got to the first act on tonight’s show which is…DJ H featuring Stefy. Oh. I think this lot had a hit earlier in the year but I’ve forgotten what it was called already. This track went by the title of “I Like It”, three words that proved beyond host Bruno Brookes who introduces it as “you need it and you love it”. WTF?!

Anyway, this was just more nasty Italian House but the real dregs of the genre I would suggest. Clearly the woman up there isn’t the actual singer. At points she sounds like Martha Wash who supplied the vocals for Black Box’s ‘Ride On Time” and at others like Aretha Franklin so I’m guessing there are samples of both those singers in the mix somewhere. So boring is the performance visually (Steffi herself hardly moves at all and can’t even get her miming to the few lines she has right) that the TOTP producers include loads more shots of the studio audience than they usually would. Not only that but they are dancing! Or attempting something that approximates to dancing at least – it seems to just be jumping up and down in most cases. Right at the end of the song, it sounds like the backing track is being played on warped vinyl as it carriers crazily off beat. Surely it wasn’t meant to sound like that was it?

“I Like It” peaked at No 16.

It’s the Paula Abdul video for “Rush Rush” again next (the third time it’s been played I believe). This was pretty much the end fo the road for Paula as a successful pop star. She managed one more UK hit of the “Spellbound” album from which “Rush Rush” was taken and then one final solitary Top 40 entry in 1995. She only actually made three studio albums of which the final one “Head Over Heels” was a big commercial disappointment compared to her first two. That’s not to diminish her chart stats though. She did have six US No 1 singles and two No 1 albums after all and set a record for the most No 1 singles from a debut album on the Billboard Hot 100.

The four years between her second and third albums though was a lifetime in the music industry and nobody was that arsed when she finally returned. In that time she married and divorced the actor Emilio Estevez and also sought treatment for bulimia so it’s hardly surprising that she took her eye off the ball of her music career. She did however, re-invent herself as a reality TV judge working on shows like American Idol, Live to Dance and The X Factor and also was seen as a big enough draw still to undertake a Las Vegas residency from August 2019 to January 2020.

When Andy McCluskey decided to carry on the OMD name after the departure of his writing partner Paul Humphreys (plus band members Martin Cooper and Malcolm Holmes) at the end of the 80s, he surely couldn’t have imagined the success he would have had straight off the bat with the single “Sailing on the Seven Seas” and the album “Sugar Tax” with both hitting No 3 in their respective charts. So when second single “Pandora’s Box” was lifted from the album and followed its predecessor into the Top 10, he must have been tempted to do the lottery that week (had it been invented by then which it hadn’t) as his Midas touch seemed to know no bounds.

My sister’s then boyfriend was obsessed with this song apparently and bought every available version of it that was released including a limited edition collector’s CD single which came housed in a rather neat little wooden box. I’m pretty sure we had this version in the Our Price I was working in at the time.

“Pandora’s Box” seemed to be a much more straight forward type of pop song compared to its more quirky, shuffling predecessor. The verses were fairly pedestrian but the pay off of the uplifting chorus was more than worth the wait.

Inspired by silent film actress Louise Brooks and named after the 1929 film Pandora’s Box in which she starred, the single was retitled “Pandora’s Box (It’s a Long, Long Way)” for the American market but God knows why? A similar practice had been inflicted upon a single by The Icicle Works who’s song “Birds Fly (Whisper to a Scream)” was reversed for its US release as “Whisper to a Scream (Birds Fly)”. Weirdos.

“Pandora’s Box” would peak at No 7 and was directly responsible for a spike in sales of the album around this time.

C+C Music Factory are up next (or CeCe Music Factory as Bruno Brookes mispronounces it) with their “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…”single, talking of which, does that bass line sound a bit like the one used so majestically in “Groove Is In The Heart” by Dee-Lite? Hmmm. Anyway, the track had plenty more hooks to it including that saxophone riff which is recycled at the end of every line. Sometimes it’s the little things like that which can make a song (see also that ringing almost tinny sounding double strummed guitar chord in “She Sells Sanctuary” by The Cult).

Oh and that lyric about ‘playing tic tac toe’? Nothing to do with noughts and crosses apparently. It refers to when you have sex with three different partners in one night according to the urban dictionary. You learn a new thing or three every day.

1991 saw the release of not only some of the biggest selling albums of the whole decade but also some of the most iconic. Look at some of these albums for a start

Artist	Title
Massive Attack	Blue Lines
Metallica	Metallica
Pearl Jam	Ten
Primal Scream	Screamadelica
Red Hot Chili Peppers	Blood Sugar Sex Magik
REM	Out Of Time
U2	Achtung Baby

All released within the calendar year of 1991. However, no such list could be compiled without including not one but two albums released in the same year by one band. That band was, of course, Guns N’ Roses and the albums were “Use Your Illusion I” and “Use Your Illusion II” both released on the same day (17th September) to much fanfare and excitement. Two albums by a huge artist on the same day! Long before the Blur vs Oasis chart battle, this was a majorly significant event in the record industry. Within six months though the practice would appear old hat as Bruce Springsteen followed suit with the “Human Touch” and “Lucky Town” albums both released on 31 March 1992.

Before that Guns N’ Roses day in September though, we had the first new material from the band of the decade (although the track “Civil War” had appeared on the charity album “Nobody’s Child: Romanian Angel Appeal” in 1990) with the single “You Could Be Mine”. Not only would it in effect be the lead single from the “Use Your Illusion II” album but it was also being used prominently in the soundtrack to one of the biggest films of the year, the much anticipated Terminator 2: Judgment Day the sequel to 1984’s Terminator. The flick was a huge success becoming the highest-grossing film of 1991, beating Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (more of which later) into the process.

“You Could Be Mine” seems a perfect fit with the film and was used during the ending credits and in the film itself in early scenes with John Connor and that’s despite it having what would normally be seen as the impediment of having a one-minute drum and guitar intro. The video is basically just a straight in concert performance intertwined with some action sequences from the film but it’s all held together by the fairly weak premise of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator himself being dispatched to assassinate the band after the gig. Somehow though despite the hokey ending as Arnie finally catches up with the band as they leave the venue and deciding that killing them would be a ‘Waste of Ammo’, it all kind of hangs together and just works; for me at least.

“You Could Be Mine” would peak at No 3 and would herald a run of seven singles taken from across both “Use Your Illusion” albums stretching into 1993 when the final “Civil War EP” was released.

https://youtu.be/6j0HfZCP-og

A rare in the studio appearance from Billy Bragg next as he performs his “Sexuality” hit single. To be honest, it’s nowhere near as much fun as the video we saw in the Breakers last week, shorn as it is of Kirsty MacColl in the background making small dick gestures behind Billy’s back plus some admirable attempts at slapstick humour from the Braggster himself.

So what was “Sexuality” all about anyway? There is a lot of online discussion about some of the lyrics references. What was the significance of an uncle who once played for Red Star Belgrade or of a nuclear submarine sinking off the coast of Sweden? I think a lot of it was just Billy playing around with word puns like rhyming ‘Sweden’ with ‘read them’ and Robert De Niro with Mitsubishi Zero (which wasn’t a car at all but a Japanese WWII fighter aircraft). My general reading of the song is that it’s a celebration of sexual freedom in whatever form that takes.

I saw Billy in concert in Dublin in 2006 and in the middle of his set an extremely pissed fan got out from his seat and wondered up the aisle to the stage waiving an autograph pad. Billy handled it pretty well but you could see that it really annoyed him as he issued the withering put down “I’m working mate”.

“Sexuality” peaked at No 27.

Another video from another big rock band next as after Guns N’ Roses we now get INXS with “Bitter Tears”. This was another track from their “X” album and managed to immediately see off the possibility of a run of flopped singles from the band. Despite the album having been out for 9 months by this time and “Bitter Tears” being the fourth and final single from it, another Top 40 miss (previous single “By My Side” only made No 42) was avoided when it made it to a peak of No 30.

As Bruno Brookes hints at in his intro, the band were about to play a huge gig at Wembley stadium on 13 July 1991 as part of their Summer XS tour to a sold-out audience of 74,000 fans. The band would never play live to a bigger crowd. It was recorded and and filmed and would become the live album “Live Baby Live” which would be released in the November. “Bitter Tears” was included in the set list for the concert but didn’t make it onto the track listing for the album (it did however feature in the video of the gig).

The style of the promo video for “Bitter Tears” follows the well worn template that all the band’s videos seemed based on. A straight performance of the song filmed in black and white with a few cut away graphics thrown in to maintain interest. I’m not sure if they were all shot by the same director but if they were, he or she did seem to be a one trick pony.

After Guns N’ Roses sang “You Could Be Mine” earlier in the show, here were Bros being even less decisive with “Are You Mine?”. The 90’s pop career of Bros after their late 80s success could not be better summed up than by the phrase the ‘after the Lord Mayor’s show’. The biggest group in Britain at the height of Brosmania, by the time the new decade was getting into its stride, they were an afterthought at best. Seriously, who thought a third album by the Goss twins was a good idea? A third one though they did make and it was called “Changing Faces”. It struggled to a high of No 18

I knew that they were still trying to recapture their glory days back then as I was working in a record shop but I could not have told you how any of their later singles went with “Are You Mine?” a prime example. I think I have a strong defence for my lack of recall about this one though on the basis that it is absolutely dire and instantly forgettable. A complete snooze fest from start to finish.

There would be one more single released before the duo went their separate ways, Matt Goss into a successful residency at Las Vegas and Luke into an acting career. 27 years later that documentary about them would appear and the rest is history…

“Are You Mine?” peaked No 12.

Who’s this then? Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam? That can’t be right surely? The people that had a hit in 1985 with “I Wonder If I Take You Home”? They had another hit 6 years later? I have literally zero recall of this but for the record their second hit was called “Let the Beat Hit ‘Em” and was produced by Clivillés and Cole who we saw earlier under their other guise of C+C Music Factory. It sounds completely bland to my non dance ears but it is lauded by the likes of Pete Tong and Trevor Nelson no less the latter of whom says of it in Music Week magazine “It’s not the coolest record I’ve ever bought but it’s the most fun.”

“Let the Beat Hit ‘Em” peaked t No 17 in the UK but it topped the dance and R&B charts in the US.

And here we are, the first of 16 weeks at No 1 for Bryan Adams and “Everything I Do (I Do it For You)“. How am I supposed to write about one song for so long?! On top of that, I need to be wary of just repeating the same trivia and tidbits that @TOTPFacts might serve up as he has the same problem. OK, I think I’ll allow myself to reproduce one @TOTPFacts tweet per post so here’s this week’s:

The starting point for "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" was Michael Kamen's "Maid Marian" cue for Prince Of Thieves… https://t.co/Hp58YEmMWs #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 20, 2021

Apparently Bryan and producer Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange wrote the song in just 45 minutes. I’m guessing Michael Kamen’s piece took a while longer.

I’d forgotten that Bryan actually made it into the TOTP studio for at least one week of the song’s chart reign but here he is in his trademark white T-shirt and jeans emoting all over the stage although the show’s producers do intercut his performance with the promo video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpeEWfonhKA

In case you’re bored of the song already, here’s a 1992 cover of the song by Fatima Mansions which was released as part of a double A-side with “Suicide Is Painless” by Manic Street Preachers which was a charity single for the Spastics Society. It made No 7 but hardly received any airplay as the Manics track was predominantly the one played on radio.

The play out video is “Love And Understanding” by Cher. Coming hard on the heels of her recent No 1 with “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)”, I’m guessing much was expected by her record company of the follow up. It did pretty well making it to the Top 10 (just) in the UK and the Top 20 in the US. Its sales (plus a last minute inclusion of “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)”) helped propel parent album “Love Hurts” to No 1 in the UK where it would stay for 6 weeks and end up becoming the best selling female album of the year.

I was working at the Market Street Our Price store in Manchester at the time and around then, the company was committed to its slogan of ‘mad about music, see a specialist’ (or something like that) which meant every week day morning, we had to play music from a particular genre like Easy Listening, Folk or Classical. Once 12 o’clock came around there was a rush to put a chart album on and I recall shoving “Love Hurts” on as the first thing that came to hand after a particularly gruelling morning of folk music. The store manger happened to walk by and said to me “Time for some proper music eh?”. We should probably both have been ashamed.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	DJ H featuring Stefy	I Like It	I’d rather have bought “I Like It’ by Gerry and the Pacemakers frankly.
2	Paula Abdul	Rush Rush	No
3	OMD	Pandora’s Box	No but I have it on a Best Of CD of theirs
4	C+C Music Factory	Things That Make You Go Hmmm…	Liked it, didn’t buy it
5	Guns N’ Roses	You Could Be Mine	See 3 above
6	Billy Bragg	Sexuality	No but I bought Accident Waiting To Happen, another single from the album
7	INXS	Bitter Tears	See 3 above
8	Bros	Are You Mine?	Are you mad more like! No
9	Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam	Let the Beat Hit ‘Em	Nope
10	Bryan Adams	Everything I Do (I Do it For You)	I did not
11	Cher	Love And Understanding	Despite somehow managing to buy two recent Cher singles (one by mistake), I managed to avoid this one. Honest!

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/m000yw8k/top-of-the-pops-11071991

TOTP 27 JUN 1991

Posted on August 20, 2021 by 80stastic

It’s 1991 and that grand old institution that was TOTP is having an identity crisis. Ratings had fallen and the show was struggling to retain its relevance to a Top 40 chart which had become increasingly dominated by dance music the stars of which were the tunes themselves rather than those making them. The programme’s traditional format and the way it delivered flamboyant pop stars into the nation’s living rooms every Thursday night functioned rather less well when its content was anonymous looking DJ types stood behind some keyboards or a mixing desk. Adding to its dilemmas was the competition it faced from other music shows. Having gone head to head with TOTP in the late 80s with its own version of the show in The Roxy, ITV had usurped that traditional format and came up with The Chart Show whose video only / no presenter format on a Saturday morning was increasingly popular. Then of course there was MTV which had been serving the UK via its MTV Europe network since 1987 although its penetration into UK homes was hardly universal. Still, its style and programming was starting to make TOTP look like a TV relic. Rallying against this, the show employed what was then cutting edge technology (presumably) in green screen backdrops for the presenters, changes to the Top 40 countdown (the show’s whole modus operandi since its inception), an ill judged Top 5 albums feature and cramming more and more videos into its 30 minutes of screen time. The 30 minutes time limit was beginning to look very restricting. I’m sure The Chart Show lasted at least an hour and of course MTV broadcast all day long.

As we approach the mid-point of the year, the show has reduced its regular hosts to a shallow pool of names, those being Gary Davies, Bruno Brookes, Jakki Brambles, Mark Goodier, Nicky Campbell and tonight’s presenter Simon Mayo. Anthea Turner had already been relieved of her duties a few weeks prior. Come the end of September, all of these names would be jettisoned in favour of new, younger and mainly unknown faces as part of the ‘Year Zero’ revamp brought in by new executive producer Stanley Appel. For now though, the show is limping along trying to convince us all that everything is fine and that there’s nothing to see here (literally true in the case of some of those pesky dance acts).

So, as stated, it’s Simon Mayo’s turn at the wheel for this particular instalment and he brings his usual smug sense of his own importance to proceedings. I’m finding Mayo especially grating in these repeats although to be fair, all of the aforementioned names had their own intrinsic foibles. If Mayo was smug then we also had Goodier (plain boring), Davies (overly chummy), Brambles (disinterested) and Brookes (just creepy). Mayo begins the show by asking the audience to name any Belgian “singing superstars” – I say ask, it’s more like he’s goading us in a ‘see I can name more than you’ way as he references The Singing Nun and Plastic Bertrand before advising us that we can “add this lot to the pile” as he introduces Cubic 22 with their hit “Night In Motion”. They’re hardly singing though are they Simon? No, because Cubic 22 were one of those dance acts meaning some faceless bods behind keyboards and a couple of dancers. The only voices you hear are some sample vocals shouting ‘Party time’ and ‘Let me hear ya!’. That really doesn’t qualify Cubic 22 as singing stars in my book Mayo. The performance here though is a prime example of the challenges TOTP faced in reflecting the nation’s dance music choices. Watch it without the track playing and the visual element is woeful. Lots of shots of hands playing keyboards and the two dancers doing some very ordinary synchronised moves. At least with a video you might get some clever graphics or distracting images. Why on earth did they have such an act in the studio open the show?!

Next, Mayo comes across like wannabe football fan David Cameron (‘call me Dave, I’m a football fan but is it Aston Villa or West Ham?) with his remarks about “Rush Rush” by Paula Abdul being an ode to Welsh striker Ian Rush. I know he’s a Spurs fan (he goes on about Terry Venables later on in the show) but did he have to try so hard to get his football credentials over?

This was the lead single from Paula’s “Spellbound” album and I’m sure we had an import CD of it in the Market Street, Manchester Our Price I was working in ahead of its UK release. I can’t believe anyone would have coughed up the £18 or whatever it was just to be able to say they had it a couple of weeks before anybody else!

Playing across the bottom of the video is the Top 40 countdown which Mayo didn’t think worthy of a mention in his intro (though of course his pathetic Ian Rush quip was) and they’ve even tweaked that as they have gone back to referencing everything in the Top 40 whereas they had previously omitted anything going down the charts. As I said earlier, identity crisis.

It may be a new decade but that didn’t put any sort of brakes on Erasure‘s imperial phase. Here they are with their first new material since 1989’s “Wild” album and “Chorus” would confirm that their popularity was a strong as ever when it went straight in at No 3 in the charts. Admittedly, it was hardly a major change of musical direction for Andy and Vince but hey, if it ain’t broke and all that. The lead single from their fifth studio album of the same name, would it have sounded out of place on any of three previous albums? I liked it though. It fair whipped along with a hooks a plenty and the most unlikely use of a word in the chorus (‘fishes’) since George Michael managed to get ‘feet’ into “Careless Whisper”. It was also perfect for any Radio 1 daytime playlist.

The album would give the duo their third consecutive No 1 when it was released later in the year. I’m pretty sure that on that day, our deliveries of new releases didn’t turn up until well into the afternoon which meant we missed out on loads of sales as everyone who wanted it on the day of release popped over the road to HMV who had racks of it. By the end of the 90s, retailers had agreed with the record companies that new releases could be delivered on the Friday before the release date to allow shops to get them ready for sale first thing Monday morning on the strict proviso that they could not be sold before then. The rule was pretty much totally observed in my experience although there must have been the odd title that slipped through the net company wide.

Back to Erasure though and what was the deal with the Vince and Andy mannequins in this performance? They weren’t a feature of the official promo video so presumably they were made just for this TOTP appearance. Seems a bit extravagant but then I guess Erasure were (well Andy anyway).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilflc0JYVY0

More inane attempts at wit from Mayo next when he introduces “Hey Stoopid” by Alice Cooper and tries a line about getting a thick ear if you go into a record shop and saying ‘Hey Stupid’. Well, I worked in a record shop at the time Simes and never did I have the licence to assault a customer who happened to annoy me.

As for Alice, after his unlikely monster hit “Poison” in 1989, he managed to eke out a few more in the 90s though none were as successful as “Poison”. As with Erasure before him, this lead single was also the same title of his album which featured guest contributions from some of rock’s biggest names including Slash, Ozzy Osbourne, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and Nikki Sixx. Given the deliberate mis-spelling of ‘stupid’, I’m surprised Noddy Holder wasn’t on that list.

As for the song itself, it was fairly dumb as mud stuff and not likely to oust the likes of “School’s Out”, “Elected” or indeed “Poison” as one of Alice’s most famous songs (and yes I know the first two are actually Alice Cooper the band tracks).

“Hey Stoopid” peaked at No 21 in the UK.

Now most of us may know Omar just for “There’s Nothing Like This” but there was far more to him than just that one song. He has worked with some legendary names like Stevie Wonder and Lamont Dozier and is still making music to this day. His career is actually remarkably similar to that of another British soul singer Roachford. See how their stories resemble each other:

Omar	Roachford
Grew up in musical family. His father drummed for Bob Marley, his brother is Grammy winning producer, remixer and DJ Scratch Professer and is sister is a BRIT School alumna	Grew up in a musical family and was playing in his uncle’s touring band as a teenager
Is a multi instrumentalist	Is a multi instrumentalist
Unjustly and incorrectly categorised as a one hit wonder – “There’s Nothing Like This”	Unjustly and incorrectly categorised as a one hit wonder – “Cuddly Toy”
Appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to music in 2012	Appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to music in 2019

Now I’m no soul aficionado but even I could appreciate that “There’s Nothing Like This” was slick, smooth and perfectly sung. Oh and get this from @TOTPFacts:

Not long before this #TOTP appearance, Omar had to turn down an offer of playing on Jason Donovan's tour. "They wanted me to play percussion, but I was too busy. Even though they were offering £1000 a week."
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 13, 2021

The insertion of that bit of trivia will make sense later on.

After weeks of cramming in up to four acts in the Breakers section, this week we only have two. First off is Chesney Hawkes with a song called “I’m A Man Not A Boy”. You could almost hear the music press laughing in Chesney’s face at the title. Its No 27 chart peak sounded the death knell for the poor lad’s pop star career which was over before it had even started. No 27? That was an awful attempt at following up a record that had topped the charts for five weeks. It did however do one thing which was to disprove the theory that Chesney, like the aforementioned Omar and Roachford, was not a one hit wonder.

In truth, “I’m A Man Not A Boy” was nowhere near as good a pop record as its predecessor. It was a weak tune with a risible title. Maybe there was a different track on the Buddy’s Story album that his label Chrysalis Records (them again!) could have released instead that might have done the trick? It was all too late now though. A third and final track off the album was released as a single called “Secrets Of The Heart” which was a fairly terrible ballad. It did nothing to reverse Chezza’s fortunes and it peaked at No 57.

Fast forward to 1993 and a comeback single called “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” was released but its soon became apparent that Chesney was now persona non grata in the world of pop and it couldn’t get any higher than No 63. The parent album disappeared without trace. Hawkes seems to have come to terms with his time as a pop star though and now lives happily in Los Angeles with his American wife Kristina and their three children.

Now if it hadn’t been for the next single, I could have said that Chesney’s song was ‘The One And Only’ Breaker this week but here’s Incognito with “Always There” to stop that happening (damn it!). Now I had never heard of this lot before 1991 but I turns out that they were actually part of the UK Jazz Funk movement of the early 80s with their first album released in 1981. However, it would be another 10 years before their next long player by which time, like Omar earlier in the show, they had been signed to Gilles Peterson’s newly formed acid jazz label Talkin’ Loud. Impressed by their arrangement of “Always There”, it was picked out as a single but there was a problem. The band’s vocalist was sick so the replacement was the legendary R&B singer Jocelyn Brown (of “Somebody Else’s Guy” fame). The impetus that Jocelyn gave the record turned it into a Top 10 smash.

I also hadn’t been aware that “Always There” was actually a cover version with the original having been a minor hit for an act called Side Effect in the mid 70s. Incognito would repeat the cover version trick for their next hit the following year, a version of Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ’bout A Thing”.

The increasingly tiresome Mayo indulges himself in some more dreadful attempts at humour as he introduces “It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over” by Lenny Kravitz by stating that it was inspired by some football commentary by John Motson. OK, Simon well not only was that lame but it didn’t make any sense. I presume you were trying to make a link to the legendary line from the 1966 World Cup final commentary “some people are on the pitch, they think it’s all over…it is now!” but that was, of course, by Kenneth Wolstenholme and not John Motson. This is schoolboy error stuff.

“It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over” was written by Kravitz as he attempted to save his marriage to actress Lisa Bonet (who found fame playing Denise Huxtable in The Cosby Show). Despite his attempts, the two divorced in 1993 and she would later play the role of singer Marie De Salle in the wonderful High Fidelity with John Cusack and Jack Black. If you merge those two characters together you just about get Denise La Salle who had a hit with the execrable “My Toot Toot” in 1985. You can tell I’m flagging a bit here can’t you?

“It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over” peaked at No 11.

And the moment has arrived. The moment you all dreaded. It’s the first week of Bryan Adams and “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” and he hasn’t even got to No 1 yet! It’s strange to think that as this TOTP went out with the song entering the chart at No 8 that we had no idea at that point how ingrained it would become in our psyche not just in 1991 but forever more. Taken from the soundtrack to the Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, it proved to be irresistible to UK audiences famously staying at the top of the charts for a record breaking 16 weeks.

Look, this song is going to be on show after show after show which means I’ll have to write about it a lot so I don’t propose to dump everything I have to say about it on week one. So to start with, here’s some statistics about its chart performance:

No 1 in the UK for 16 weeks from July 7 to October 27
Topped the Europe-wide sales chart for 18 continuous weeks, still an all-time record
Topped the European-wide radio airplay chart for 10 weeks
No 1 for 7 weeks in the US, Billboard Hot 100, which combines radio airplay and sales,
No 1 for 8 weeks on the US Adult Contemporary Chart ,the longest run atop that chart since 1979
No 1 for 9 weeks in Adams’s native Canada
No 1 for 11 weeks in Australia
No 1 for 12 weeks in Sweden
No 1 in 18 countries being try best sell of the year in 7 of them
Sold 15 million copies worldwide

Phew!

More gibberish from Simon Mayo next as he introduces “I Touch Myself” by Divinyls. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there’s an awful lot of touching going on; touching this, touching that, touching cameramen. I don’t know whether I approve actually. Mind you, it hasn’t done the Divinyls any good at all has it? There at No 12 this week…”. What?! No Simes, there isn’t a lot of touching going on, it’s just that there is a song in the charts with the word ‘touch’ in its title and surely you meant to say “it hasn’t done the Divinyls any harm at all has it?” to make any sort of sense of your nonsense.

This week it’s the infamous studio performance where singer Chrissy Amphlett spends a lot of time seemingly fondling her breasts. The sexual tension is added to by her guitarist playing his instrument in an erect, phallus like position. Blimey! Wilkipedia informs me that the B-side to the single was a track called “Follow Through”. Oh God! Don’t bring any toilet humour into the already overcrowded proceedings.

Despite taking “I Touch Myself” to No 10, they were unable to repeat the trick and it became their only UK chart hit. Chrissy Amphlett sadly passed away in 2013 from breast cancer but her legacy was the I Touch Myself project promoting breast cancer awareness and encouraging women to check themselves regularly.

Hallelujah! Color Me Badd have been toppled and we have a new No 1! The bad news is it’s Jason Donovan. Yes, in some sort of twisted version of a Faustian pact, we had traded the obvious material benefit of getting rid of those berks who wanted to sex us up for our pop music souls by placing “Any Dream Will Do” at the top of the pile. Look, it’s not that I hate musicals (I don’t at all) but I can’t really be doing with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and certainly not the insipid and twee “Any Dream Will Do”. I wasn’t the only one. Look at this tweet from an actual Jase fan:

As someone who was a fan of @JDonOfficial as a kid, this song was what killed every bit of fandom I had back then. He was singing songs from school play territory & it just seemed so naff. Now I'm older I look back with fondness at the stuff before this, though..but this…cringe
— CodaQueen (@CodaQueen) August 13, 2021

Quite. No wonder Omar turned his offer of touring with him down!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTjHrTpUO3U

The play out video is “Sheriff Fatman” by Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine and it’s finally time for my claim to fame story. This single appeared on the duo’s album “101 Damnations”. The album closes with the track “G. I. Blues” which is an anti-war song inspired by John Savage’s character in The Deer Hunter. Now, look at the personnel listed as having contributed to the making of the album in the screenshot below. See that arrow pointing to someone called Rob Sheridan? Rob was Best Man at my wedding!

This has been my go to claim to fame indie story for years. How Rob knew Jim Bob and Fruitbat I really can’t recall but knew them he did and there is his name, recorded in history for all to see. And then…during the first wave of the pandemic last year, when joining in on Tim Burgess’s Twitter Listening Party “101 Damnations”, Jim Bob tweeted this:

This piano bit is a lot harder to play than it sounds. We had to get a friend Rob to play it but he did it too well so we had to change it after he’d left the studio #TimsTwitterListeningParty
— Jim Bob (@mrjimBob) July 14, 2020

What! You mean that isn’t Rob playing on the album after all?! Noooo!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Cubic 22	Night In Motion	No chance
2	Paula Abdul	Rush Rush	I was in no rush to buy this
3	Erasure	Chorus	Don’t think I did
4	Alice Cooper	Hey Stoopid	No
5	Omar	There’s Nothing Like This	Nope
6	Chesney Hawkes	I’m A Man Not A Boy	Dearie me no
7	Incognito	Always There	Nah
8	Lenny Kravitz	It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over	No but I had the album
9	Bryan Adams	(Everything I Do) I Do It for You	Negative
10	Divinyls	I Touch Myself	Liked it, didn’t buy it
11	Jason Donovan	Any Dream Will Do	See 6 above
12	Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine	Sheriff Fatman	No but I must have it on something

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/m000ypc8/top-of-the-pops-27061991

TOTP 20 JUN 1991

Posted on August 17, 2021 by 80stastic

This is my fifth year of reviewing these BBC4 TOTP repeats. I started with the shows from 1983 and we are now up to 1991. This is my 367th post over two blogs. Thats over 825,000 words. I’m tired. I’m stuck in the house due to testing positive for COVID and I’m staring at a blank document awaiting inspiration to strike. I’m not helped by the fact that the TOTP production team were determined back then to cram in as many acts as possible into 30 minutes of screen time. This week there are 14 acts! 14! I’m not sure I can do it anymore. Look, I’ll try OK, just for you…

…OK, first song of the night and not only do I not remember it at all but it’s already giving me a headache. The cause of my distress is “Tribal Base” by Rebel MC / Tenor Fly / Barrington Levy. What that Rebel MC who did “Street Tuff” because this sounds nothing like that. Wikipedia informs me that this was from his second album which was in a ‘breakbeat hardcore’ style with some ‘reggae fusion’ thrown into the mix. I have absolutely no idea what any of those words mean. Apparently it was a precursor to the ‘jungle’ sound which then begat drum’n’bass both of which I do remember because you couldn’t escape them in the mid 90s (‘jungle ist massive’ and all that).

As for Tenor Fly, he was a leading light of the rave movement whilst Barrington Levy is a reggae and dancehall legend whose back catalogue stretches back to 1979. Now of course, it’s possible that there are some reggae fusion fans out there reading this (there might be!) that are now shouting at their devices incredulous at my lack of knowledge in this field but I can only tell it how it was and is via my own memories and knowledge. I have very little else to say about this one other than I didn’t expect to see a double neck guitar on stage for a track like this. I thought they were the preserve of prog rock.

“Tribal Base” peaked at No 20.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDpN6GBPMUw

Presenter Nicky Campbell makes a really lame quip about the Rebel MC never stopping and being a ‘rebel without a pause’ (groan!) and then follows it up by saying that “Salt ‘n’ Pepa would have been here tonight but Salt is currently having a baby which is kicking it almost as hard as she is here…”. Surely the pun there was about pushing it Nicky as in “Push It”, one of their most well known hits? Their actual current single is “Do You Want Me” which is promotes the idea of men respecting women and not pressurising them until they are ready to have sex….or as @TOTPFacts put it:

No shagging with Salt 'N' Pepa until the third date. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 6, 2021

Yes, well…anyway. Salt ‘n’ Pepa would continue this conversation in their next single “Let’s Talk About Sex” which including these classic lyrics:

Yo, Pep, I don’t think they’re gonna play this on the radio
And why not? Everybody havin’ sex
I mean, everybody should be makin’ love
Come on, how many guys you know make love?

“Do You Want Me” peaked at No 5.

Talking of having sex (as just about every song in the charts seemed to be at this time), here is LaTour with “People Are Still Having Sex”. Campbell bravely takes on the single’s title by trying to intellectualise the subject going on about a “chilling assessment of contemporary attitudes towards an activity fraught with danger” before saying it’s great to dance to. Was it really though? Even the backing dancer up there on stage for this studio performance doesn’t seem to know what moves to do. Oh yes, that backing dancer who’s mouthing “hello lover”? General consensus on Twitter was that she was one of the Bombalurina women last seen cavorting with Timmy Mallett. She got all the good gigs didn’t she?

A stage performance of this track doesn’t really work does it? The tempo of it doesn’t really naturally make for a visually engaging spectacle whilst the main guy (Mr LaTour?) comes across as really creepy. Just nasty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njX-0VAMcTs

Campbell works very hard in his next link to make sure he gets the title of the song right, overly articulating the world ‘funk’ when introducing “Get The Funk Out” by Extreme. It’s the promo video but surely this performance would surely have been better suited to the TOTP studio than LaTour’s? It’s full of energy with lead singer Gary Cherone looking almost demonic with some of the weird shapes he pulls his body into.

When I first heard this, I thought Cherone was singing ‘No Robbie Nevil’s going to spoil my fun’ as in the “C’est La Vie” hit maker from the 80s as opposed to what he actually sings which is “No rotten apple gonna spoil my fun” which makes much more sense. Quite why Robbie Nevil would have been seen as a party pooper by a bunch of funk metal heads I have no idea.

“Get The Funk Out” peaked at No 19.

Meanwhile back in the studio we find Kenny Thomas having an enormous hit (I said hit!) with “Thinking About Your Love”. Kenny was one of the biggest breakout stars of 1991 with four Top 40 hits and a Top 3 album. Eventually the hits dried up and by the middle of the decade Kenny had disappeared from view altogether. However, he re-entered the public consciousness after appearing in ITV’s Hit Me Baby One More Time in 2005 although he was beaten to a place in the grand final by one of the weakest and weediest pop bands of the 90s in 911 – the shame!

Nowadays, he’s the lead singer of Living In A Box who shared the same record label in Chrysalis Records back in the day which is how they originally met. On the band’s official website, in answer to the question ‘Are you going to be singing some of your own songs at the Living In A Box shows?’, Kenny replied:

Yes, definitely! Fans coming to see The Box will hear their hits and people who want to hear some of mine will get the chance to hear those too. I think the fans will hear six Top 10 records in our set, which is quite something.

Well it would be Kenny if that were true but although ‘The Box’ (nobody calls them that surely?!) did have three Top 10 hits, you only had the one in “Thinking About Your Love” which makes a grand total of four not six.

A load of Breakers now starting with something for which the official description is, I believe, ‘techno bollocks’. Cubic 22 were a Belgian (not Italian for once) dance project whose only UK Top 40 hit was “Night In Motion”. They comprised Peter Ramson and Danny Van Wauwe the latter of whom sounds like he should be a Man Utd midfielder who was bought for a lot of money but who can’t make the team. Apparently we’ll get to see them in the studio next week. Oh joy. Cue another visually bizarre performance just like LaTour.

If the track sounds vaguely familiar, here’s @TOTPFacts with the reason why:

The piano riff from "Night In Motion" was later pinched by British dance outfit Strike for "U Sure Do", which reached 31 in 1994 and 4 in 1995: https://t.co/b639Sfosyr Borremans and Van Wauwe didn't get any money out of it. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 13, 2021

“Night In Motion” peaked at No 15.

This is more like it! Despite having been formed in 1987, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine had never achieved any mainstream success until now. Quite why was 1991 the turning point in their career? Well, it could have been that their brand of sample heavy, indie dance pop that they had been making was finally receiving national recognition with bands like EMF, Jesus Jones and Pop Will Eat Itself all having chart hits around this time. Or maybe it was just that their band name really fitted in with the sex obsessed Top 40 at this time!

“Sheriff Fatman” (possibly their most well known song though certainly not their biggest hit) was a re-release of an early single that had failed to chart though it had been a big indie hit. Like the band themselves, their timeline is a bit chaotic but as far as I can tell, it was re-released when the duo signed with Chrysalis Records (them again!) after the collapse of Rough Trade – a bit like when “Sit Down” was re-released after James has moved from Rough Trade to Fontana. Also like “Sit Down” was the fact that “Sheriff Fatman” had been on that influential ‘Madchester’ themed “Happy Daze” compilation album which I think must have been when I first heard the track.

Highlighting the dodgy practices of slum landlords via the use of some inspired wordplay in their lyrics, “Sheriff Fatman” was an absolute stomper and a mosh pit favourite for fans when played live. Indeed, those lyrics, once heard were impossible to forget.

Moving up on second base
Behind Nicholas Van Wotsisface
At six foot six and a hundred tons
The undisputed king of the slums
With more aliases than Klaus Barbie
The master butcher of Leigh-on-Sea

Those lines of course had their basis in reality. Nicholas Van Wotsisface was a reference to British businessman and convicted criminal involved in property Nicholas van Hoogstraten whilst Klaus Barbie was the German Nazi known as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’ for having personally tortured prisoners of the Gestapo. This wasn’t your average pop song – even Nicky Campbell acknowledges that in his introduction to Jim Bob and Fruitbat as “something very intriguing now…”.

All of this and I haven’t even got onto my CUSM claim to fame yet. I’ll leave that for the next post when they are on the show properly though.

“Sheriff Fatman” peaked at No 23.

Next a young man who was being talked up as the next big thing in British soul…or was it acid jazz?. Time has decreed that it was a sub genre called ‘neo soul’ actually. His name was Omar and his song was “There’s Nothing Like This”. In fact, his full name was Omar Lye-Fook (which sounds like a lyric from Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves Of London”) and he was a hugely talented musician who could play multi instruments and had a smooth, velvety voice to go with that.

Like many singles in 1991 it seems, “There’s Nothing Like This” was another re-release having originally been issued in 1990 on Kongo Records. It was re-released by the hugely influential acid jazz label Talkin’ Loud when Omar signed with them in 1991 becoming his biggest ever hit when it peaked at No 14. The bass riff gave it an instant hook that made it stand out and he looked set for superstardom. And then…nothing. There was no follow up single until the following year and that was actually the lead single from his new album. By that point, momentum appeared to have been lost. Omar didn’t have another Top 40 hit until 1997.

In my mind, I have an image of Simon Mayo saying “That was Omar and “There’s Nothing Like This”….except the rest of the album”. Maybe I made it up but it sounds like the sort of snide thing Mayo might have said.

The final Breaker sees the return of Paula Abdul with the lead single from her second album “Spellbound”. Unlike all her other hits up to this point, “Rush Rush” was a ballad and a big one at that. No uptempo dance number here. It was all very accomplished and polished and all those other words ending in ‘-ished’ but it was ever so slow and just a tad dull I thought.

In the US, it would supply Paul with her fifth consecutive No 1 single and indeed stayed top of the charts or five whole weeks. Over here, it got to No 6 which was just about the same pattern of difference between the UK and America for all her releases. And yes, clearly that’s Keanu Reeves in the video which was a play on the James Dean film Rebel Without A Cause – oh, is that what put the idea in Nicky Campbell’s ahead for his awful ‘rebel without a pause’ pun?

Talking of awful puns, here’s Driza Bone with “Real Love”. The people behind Driza Bone were producers and remixers Vincent Garcia and Billy April but it turns out they didn’t come up with the name themselves though. Here’s @TOTPFacts with the rest of the story:

Driza Bone were named after an Australian brand of oilskin raincoat. Billy April: "[Vincent Garcia] saw that name on a trip to Australia in 1990 and liked it. When we couldn’t come up with anything better we used it." #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) August 6, 2021

As well as being an act in their own right (they employed a revolving conveyor belt of vocalists – this one was Sophie Jones), they also used their name for the remixing arm of their set up and worked with artists like Lisa Stansfield, Jody Watley, Mary J. Blige, Shanice and Duran Duran.

Sadly for Drizabone, I remembered their dreadful name more than their song which peaked at No 16.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrKvI7v1zX0

Just when we thought that the Jason Donovan phenomenon was all over, he comes back with a massively successful hit! I have to admit I didn’t see this coming at all. I thought he was spent, done – ‘you’ve had your season in the sun now f**k off mate’ type of thing. Yet his decision to agree to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s offer to play the lead role in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (apparently he mulled it over for a whole three weeks) proved to be completely correct as his version of “Any Dream Will Do” scored him a huge No 1 single.

I’d forgotten that to went straight in at No 2 – not something that happened every week in 1991 – so the buzz around the release must have been big. It would spend two weeks at No 1 whilst the cast album of this production was also No 1 for two weeks. Donovan’s success in the role and the way it reignited his career was a beacon for others to follow in his wake with the likes of Phillip Schofield, Donny Osmond and Boyzone’s Stephen Gately all playing Joseph over the next few years. In 2007, the song gave its name to a second Lloyd Webber talent show-themed TV series as he searched for a new star to play the role in a revival of the show. The winner was Lee Mead who took a version of the song to No 2 in the charts. It was clearly one of those songs that people just couldn’t get enough of.

As for Jason, “Any Dream Will Do” would prove to be a false dawn. There would be just one further Top 10 single (a cover of The Turtles’ “Happy Together”) and an album in 1993 that his new label Polydor Records had so little faith in that they licensed several of his old hits and included them on the album much to his annoyance. It didn’t work and the album stiffed at No 27. It would be the last Jason Donovan album of the 90s.

Oh, and one final thing, what were all those Pet Shop Boys references that Nicky Campbell made in his intro about?

Some sadness attached to this next performance from Bette Midler as the artist who originally recorded “From A Distance”, Nanci Griffith, passed away literally days ago aged just 68. RIP Nanci.

Getting Bette Midler into the TOTP studio in person must have been quite the coup for the BBC and she’s come dressed as if she’s auditioning for the part of Peter Pan in that year’s Xmas pantomime at the Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury. She even adopts a Peter Pan stance when starting the song with one hand at her waist while leaning back as if surveying Neverland. All that was missing was a slap of her thigh. Come the key change at the song’s finale, she attempts a few jumps as if expecting to be lifted high into the rafters by some invisible wires but sadly for her, she can’t get off the ground. Where’s Tinker Bell with her pixie dust when you need her?

Joshing aside, I have to admire ‘The Divine Miss M’ for her very overt social media stance against the horrific presidency of Donald Trump. Good on you Bette.

“From A Distance” peaked at No 6.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2GFBdOiKUI

Those jokers Color Me Badd are still at No 1 with “I Wanna Sex You Up”. In a Smash Hits interview, the band announced that “I Wanna Sex You Up is just a modern way of saying ‘I want to romance you'”. OK, so firstly, nobody’s opening line is ‘I want to romance you’ is it?! Secondly, the phrase ‘I Wanna Sex You Up’ definitely does not say ‘I want to romance you’ anyway!

The play out video is “The Motown Song” by Rod Stewart. In keeping with the sexually charged feel of the show, Nicky Campbell can’t resist one final risqué comment when he introduces the track thus:

You can hear the charts on Sunday 4.30 on Radio 1 FM, see them again next week on TOTP presented by Radio 1’s very own blonde bombshell Simon Mayo. We leave you tonight with a man who’s partial to a blonde bombshell…or three…it’s Rod Stewart and The Motown Song…”

So there you have it – a show featuring songs called “People Are Still Having Sex” and “I Wanna Sex You Up”, a band whose name included the word ‘sex’, a conversation about shagging with Salt ‘n’ Pepa and then we round it all off with an innuendo about threesomes (or was that a foursome?!). And we didn’t even have the song on about female masturbation!

I’ve made it through! Fourteen acts and their tracks all viewed and reviewed! Maybe I have more resolve than I gave myself credit for!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Rebel MC / Tenor Fly / Barrington Levy	Tribal Base	Nah
2	Salt ‘n’ Pepa	Do You Want Me	Nope
3	LaTour	People Are Still Having Sex	Definitely not
4	Extreme	Get The Funk Out	Not in the singles box but I think I might have it on something
5	Kenny Thomas	Thinking About Your Love	Negative
6	Cubic 22	Night In Motion	Not my bag at all
7	Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine	Sheriff Fatman	See 4 above
8	Omar	There’s Nothing Like This	No
9	Paula Abdul	Rush Rush	I was in no rush to buy this
10	Driza Bone	Real Love	Another no
11	Jason Donovan	Any Dream Will Do	Ooh no!
12	Bette Midler	From A Distance	…is where I would like to be when this song is on
13	Color Me Badd	I Wanna Sex You Up	Vile – no
14	Rod Stewart	The Motown Song	One final 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/m000yhc2/top-of-the-pops-20061991

TOTP 26 JUL 1990

Posted on February 5, 2021 by 80stastic

We are still in the middle of Summer here at TOTP Rewind, Summer 1990 that is. I haven’t dropped in on the 22 year old version of myself for a few posts so let me give him a bell and see if he’s there….oh yeah, affordable mobile phones are yet to flood the market so I didn’t have one in 1990 – indeed I spent most of the decade without one. Never mind, I know where he’ll be – working at Kingston Communications on that temporary VDU input contract. What’s that? The contract finished a couple of weeks ago? So where is he now then? Try Queen’s Gardens? OK, thanks. Not having any work again, the 1990 me used to often spend my time idling the hours away wandering around Queen’s Gardens in Hull, usually with my trusty Sony Walkman for company.

Queen’s Gardens, Hull – yes they do look nice don’t they?

I’m guessing my girlfriend / wife must have had a job at this time as I have no recollection of spending anytime with her shooting the breeze in the gardens in the sun. I think my period of free time didn’t last that long as Kingston Communications asked me to come back for a further couple of weeks work later on in the Summer so impressed were they by me as the master of VDU input. For now though, I’m busy doing nothing and listening to? What was I listening to on that Walkman? The only thing I can recall is that I had purchased the cassette single of the latest World Party single called “Put The Message In The Box” so I was probably playing that on repeat.

Enough of me though and back to TOTP. Tonight’s host is Jakki Brambles who appears to have undergone a dramatic image restyle with her hair now up but with some cascading ringlets framing her face. From cascading ringlets to cascading rain as we join opening act Blue Pearl who are still “Naked In The Rain”. As well as the unlikely named Durga McBroom on vocals, the band also featured Youth, the well known record producer and musician. His is an interesting story with notable career moments including being founding member and bass player in gothic rockers Killing Joke and going on to produce pretty much everyone from Art Of Noise to The Verve via Crowded House, James, Erasure and Bananarama (more of whom later). One of his less heralded projects but one which I always quite liked were funk pop-rockers Brilliant who included future KLF masterminds Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond as their keyboardist/guitarist and A&R manager respectively. Drummond didn’t share my like of the band though stating in an interview on Norwegian radio station NRK P2 that:

“I signed a band called Brilliant, who I worked with, we worked together, and it was complete failure. Artistically bankrupt project. And financially deaf. We spent £300,000 on making an album that was useless. Useless artistically, useless… commercially.”

Ouch! Well, I disagree Bill. What say you reader?

Back to Blue Pearl though and after “Naked In The Rain” peaked at No 4, the house duo seemed to be set to ride the dance wave into the early 90s and beyond but follow up track “Little Brother ” only made it to No 31 whilst the album “Naked” was caught with its pants down at a lowly No 58. The project was disbanded in 1993 but “Naked In The Rain” returned to the Top 40 in 1998 as…erm… “Naked In The Rain 98”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBiABXbcLBQ&pbjreload=101

Oh knackers! It’s going to be one of those dance dominated shows isn’t it? The second act tonight are Technotronic featuring Ya Kid K with “Rockin’ Over The Beat”. I really can’t think of anything else I want to say about this lot. C’mon man think! Ok, how about a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles connection? They’re all the rage aren’t they? Brilliant (no not them)! Here goes…Technotronic contributed the song “Spin That Wheel” to the soundtrack album of the film under the pseudonym of Hi Tek 3 and Ya Kid K ‘featured’ on that as well. n some territories it was released as “Spin That Wheel (Turtles Get Real)”. The track was released as a single twice in the UK, peaking at No 69 in January 1990 but making No 15 when re-released nine months later. That do you? No? Well, Ya Kid K seemingly couldn’t get enough of those turtles so she released her own solo single called “Awesome (You Are My Hero)” from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II soundtrack in 1991. Cow and indeed abunga!

OK, so the next one is another dance track but an interesting one for all that. I already knew of the song “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega as it had been the opening track on Suzanne’s 1987 album “Solitude Standing” which my girlfriend/wife had bought. Being an a cappella song, it was quite striking on first hearing (and pretty much every one after that too). It had been released as a single but it was too out there for our tastes back in 1987 and it stalled at No 58.

The idea though that it could be converted into a dance track? Well, I for one never saw it coming. And DNA, who were they? They were a production duo from Bath who added a Soul II Soul backbeat to the original and released it as a bootleg. None of this was done with either Vega or her record label A&M ‘s approval and the former wasn’t initially keen on the idea. However, on hearing the DNA remix, artist and label decided not to sue but to get on board with the idea and give it an official release. The rest is history. Its rise to No 2 in the UK charts was still a surprise though, to me anyway. Could you actually dance to it in a club? It put me in mind more of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” more than a dance floor banger.

Seven years later, DJ and producer Armand van Helden pulled off a similar trick when he remixed American singer-songwriter and pianist Tori Amos’ “Professional Widow” track as “Professional Widow (It’s Got to Be Big)” and scored a No 1.

Oh good. Here come The Soup Dragons featuring Junior Reid with “I’m Free”. This still sounds good to me. Unfairly labelled as the polythene Primal Scream in some quarters – both bands had seemingly moved away from their jangly guitar roots to make indie-dance records come the new decade – somehow the moment for The Soup Dragons to become massive stars slipped through their grasp. Despite a marvellous follow up single in the re-issued “Mother Universe” and a critically well received Top 10 album in “Lovegod”, momentum was lost and by 1995 they had disbanded. Maybe chart success was never really the plan though. Singer Sean Dickson stated in a Smash Hits article that:

“I could bloody write a record to get in the charts tomorrow – I’m not that dumb. But it doesn’t appeal to me at all – that’s for nerds and assholes and idiots who want to ruin their lives.”

Well quite.

“I’m Free” peaked at No 5.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGpSZjfU66I

The Breakers are back! We start with Bell Biv DeVoe who were of course previously all members of “Candy Girl” hit makers New Edition. Once Bobby Brown left the band and embarked on a successful solo career, the other vocalists in the group wanted in – Ralph Tresvant will turn up in our charts again with his “Sensitivity” single soon enough whilst Johnny Gill scored big with his eponymous 1990 solo album before forming R’n’B supergroup Levert.Sweat.Gill. That left the other three guys (Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins and Ronnie DeVoe) who had pretty much always been the backing vocalists and weren’t sure what to do once New Edition splintered. Encouraged by producer Jimmy Jam, they joined forces and gained immediate success with their “Poison” single and album. The title track in particular, though only just scraping into the Top 20 over here, was huge in the US and has taken on a life of its own in the subsequent years being used extensively in film, TV and computer games soundtracks.

Unsurprisingly, it did sound very Bobby Brown to me which was like kryptonite to Superman for my pop sensibilities although I always thought that the elongated ‘poison’ hook was effective. At the song’s end, they give name checks to their ex New Editions band mates with these lyrics:

“Yo’, wassup to Ralph T and Johnny G
And I can’t forget about my boy, B. Brown
And the whole NE crew“

New Edition – the most amicable band break up ever.

Now is this the biggest ever gap between the release of a huge No 1 single and its follow up? Sinéad O’Connor‘s all conquering “Nothing Compares 2 U” was initially released on January 8th in 1990 before hitting the top of the charts in early February but its follow up, “The Emperor’s New Clothes“, wasn’t released until six months later! Why the big wait in between releases? No idea. Could it be that her record company hadn’t banked on the extraordinary success of “Nothing Compares 2 U” and the weight of expectation for more chart glory that it ushered in? Maybe they’d an original single release schedule but it was totally skewed by her rise to superstardom? Whatever the reason there certainly seemed to be some indecision before “The Emperor’s New Clothes” was plucked for single release. I don’t know parent album “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” well enough to know if this was a wise choice of track or not but it was always going to suffer in comparison to its predecessor. It’s much more “Mandinka” than “Nothing Compares 2 U” and is a pretty solid effort but it was doomed from the start to fall short commercially. It duly peaked at No 31.

As the 80s ended, Bananarama could reflect on a decade that included 18 Top 40 hits (including 10 Top Tenners) and the status of being the UK’s most successful all girl group. As the 90s dawned though, the future looked less certain than their glorious past. Their fanbase was still coming to terms with the leaving of Siobhan Fahey and her replacement by Jacquie O’Sullivan whilst original and now principal group members Keren Woodward and Sara Dallin were contemplating which direction to go in next. Their fifth studio album “Pop Life” saw them lose faith with the Stock, Aitken and Waterman formula, go back to their beginnings with producers Steve Jolley and Tony Swain before finally settling on Sara’a ex-boyfriend Youth (him again!) to produce the album.

“Only Your Love” was the lead single and despite pinching ‘woo woo’ vocals from “Sympathy For The Devil” by The Rolling Stones, didn’t really tear up the charts and after gathering some moss along the way, came to a standstill at No 27. The video featured the usual rabble of half dressed male hunks for the girls to cavort around and the whole thing looked and sounded a bit half arsed to me. Bit ironic considering that they left SAW behind because they said that the tracks they offered to them showed a complete lack of progression with accusations from the Nanas that the production trio had stagnated and were spending all their time working on tunes for Kylie and Jason Donovan.

The album fared even worse peaking at No 42 but then the group were never really an album act were they? The harsh truth is that there are more Bananarama compilation albums in existence (16) than studio albums (11). Pretty telling I think.

At the end of the promotion for the album, Jacquie O’Sullivan jumped ship and swapped a ‘Pop Life’ for a career as a yoga teacher leaving Keren and Sara to carry on as a duo.

Back in the studio we find Paula Abdul and her latest single “Knocked Out”. In a totally predictable turn of events, Paula has taken to the TOTP stage backed by four dancers dressed as boxers. I’m guessing Ms Abdul came up with the routine herself – I thought she was meant to be an award winning choreographer? The boxing theme was surely too lame and obvious though? She must have been so preoccupied by the routine though that she forgot to include any sort of tune in her single which really is nothing more than some beats to soundtrack her dance moves rather than a piece of music in its own right.

“Knocked Out” peaked at No 21.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2_xrb_vBPQ

Jakki Brambles fluffs her lines in the intro to MC Hammer‘s “U Can’t Touch This” by announcing that his album is called “Please Hammer Hurt ‘Em” when in fact it was entitled “Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em”. Come on Jakki – this is easy stuff surely? Pretty sure I would have been docked points for that answer when asked the name of MC Hammer’s album in my Our Price interview a few months on from this broadcast.

Famously sampling “Super Freak” by Rick James, unlike the aforementioned Suzanne Vega and DNA, Rick routinely turned down requests from rappers to sample his music but his lawyers authorised the “Super Freak” sample without his permission. Despite the royalties it brought in, James claimed he wouldn’t have done the deal had he been asked.

The video to “U Can’t Touch This” became the most-played of 1990 on MTV as well as winning a clutch of awards. It has been viewed 601 million times on YouTube which is mind blowing when you consider that it’s basically Hammer in some comedy oversized pants doing some cheesy dance steps. Somehow the single only made it to No 8 in the US Billboard Top 100 which seems rather implausible given its profile.

Hammer’s run of hit singles continued for a couple of years before his star started to wane. A relaunch with a harder, gangster rapper image was unsuccessful and by the late ’90s, he became a TV preacher.

A second studio performance for River City People next with their cover of “California Dreamin'”. This lot seemed such an anachronism in the charts of 1990 though not necessarily an unpleasant one. So did their hit spark a revival of The Mamas & the Papas music? It seems not. I was expecting their to have been a quickly put together, TV advertised Best Of album rushed out on the back of the River City People’s chart success but their discography doesn’t show one. There had been one in 1977 but there wasn’t another released until 1995. Do I own one? Not exactly though my wife bought the soundtrack to the film Beautiful Thing which was basically the same thing. If you’ve not seen the film, it’s worth a watch about two young lads coming to terms with their homosexuality and slowly building relationship. Kind of like an It’s A Sin for the 90s. Kind of.

“California Dreamin’ / Carry The Blame” peaked at No 13.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyd64afymW8

King Elton of John has been deposed and we have a new No 1. Unfortunately it’s “Turtle Power” by ~~Technotronic~~, ~~Hi Tek 3,~~ ~~Ya Kid K~~….Partners In Kryme. In my mind, this was only at the top of the heap for one solitary week but in actual fact it was there for four whole weeks! Oh joy!

Not wanting to miss any opportunities, the promotions team behind the phenomenon get two guys dressed in Turtle outfits to stand beside Jakki but I’m not sure starting to touch her inappropriately was in their brief. By the time we return to Jakki at the song’s end, she’s got them back under control and the whole show is rounded off with a resounding cry of ‘Cowabunga!’ although I think Jakki cocks that up too and says ‘Carrabunga!’ which sounds like some sort of bribery attempt involving Jamie Carragher.

There is still the ‘any other business moment’ of the play out video which is “LFO” by LFO. I was not frequenting any nightclubs at this time and so this passed me by completely. I do recall their ‘Frequencies” album coming out on the achingly hip Warp label about a year later as I was working in Our Price by that time and some of the dance heads at the shop got very excited about it.

“LFO” peaked at No 12.

For posterity’s sake, I include the chart run down below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLwLB47jpFc

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Blue Pearl	Naked In The Rain	It’s a no
2	Technotronic featuring Ya Kid K	Rockin’ Over The Beat	This beat is…shit. No
3	Suzanne Vega featuring DNA	Tom’s Diner	No but my wife had the original version of the song on Suzanne’s Solitude Standing album
4	The Soup Dragons featuring Junior Reid	I’m Free	Thought I did but singles box says no. I did however by the follow up single Mother Universe
5	Bell Biv Devoe	Poison	Nope
6	Sinead O’Connor	The Emperor’s New Clothes	Nah
7	Bananarama	Only Your Love	No
8	Paula Abdul	Knocked Out	Negative
9	MC Hammer	U Can’t Touch This	And I didn’t – no
10	River City People	California Dreamin’ / Carry The Blame	Nope
11	Partners In Kryme	Turtle Power	This as a crime…against music. No
12	LFO	LFO	LF…NO

Disclaimer

OK – here’s the thing – the TOTP episodes are only available on iPlayer for a limited amount of time so the link to the programme below only works for about another month so you’ll have to work fast if you want to catch the whole show.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000rpmq/top-of-the-pops-26071990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues

TOTP 26 APR 1990

Posted on December 8, 2020 by 80stastic

Welcome to the UK in late April 1990. We’ve just had the poll tax riots, the Strangeways prison revolt and in politics, Labour now have a 23-point lead over the Conservatives in the latest MORI poll – however, it would count for little when the next General Election rolled around in 1992 with the Tories winning a reduced but overall majority. Musically, we are in the grip of dance music and in particular ‘rave’ culture with massive gatherings taking place in fields and warehouses around the country. The 80s and its pop stars seems like a long time ago with the likes of Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and Culture Club all either defunct, missing in action or struggling to remain relevant. Indeed, the day after this TOTPM aired, The Krays film opened in UK cinemas starring Spandau’s Kemp brothers as the notorious East End gangsters – being pop stars was no longer on their agenda it seemed.

So who were the pop stars of the day who had come in to replace those icons of yesteryear? Let’s find out shall we?….

…for f***’s sake! Well, the opening act tonight are not pop stars at all but Capital FM DJs blurring the divisions between presenters and performers by rebranding themselves as a bona fide chart act…it can only be Pat & Mick who are back with their rendition of “Use It Up And Wear It Out”. Look I know it was all for charity but this was just all levels of wrong. Having tormented us with “Let’s All Chant” in 1988 and “I Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet” in 1989, they didn’t see fit to leave the whole sorry debacle in the 80s but carried on into the new decade with their version of the old Odyssey hit.

I actually watched this repeat back with my wife which doesn’t usually happen and our reactions were to it were quite the contrast. I was appalled and sat there on the sofa picking massive lumps out of it while she freely admitted that she probably danced to this back in the day! While I guffawed at the atrocious dancing on display not only by Pat & Mick but also by the studio audience members, she said she thought some of the moves on display were pretty good! Whaat?! OK there are a few things to unpack here. Firstly, why were the dancers in the background TOTP audience members and not ‘proper’ dancers in the first place? Was it to create a more realistic party atmosphere? Secondly, what instructions were they given about dance moves by the producers? Just do your own thing but keep it clean? Thirdly, what was the girl on the extreme right of screen on?! Check out her mad, arm waving moves! She’s lost in a world of her own. Even Mick gives her a concerned look at one point. Oh yes, Pat & Mick themselves – why was Mick wearing a suit while Pat was sporting some sort of faux Adam Ant military jacket? Why does Pat jump when he mimes the word ‘shake’? Surely he should …erm…shake at that point? Why has Pat still got that ridiculous mullet hair into the 90s? Why….oh just…why? Why? Why ? WHY?

When I googled Pat & Mick, one of the suggested other questions that people ask was ‘What is the meaning of Pat and Mick?’ Well, I couldn’t agree more – what is the meaning of them? However, when I clicked on the link I discovered that ‘Pat & Mick’ is also Cockney rhyming slang meaning ‘sick’ or ‘out of commission due to being unwell’. Excellent! Couldn’t be more appropriate as having to watch those two berks again has made me feel proper poorly!

“Use It Up And Wear It Out” peaked at No 22 and thankfully was the last of their chart hits.

Having mentioned The Krays film above, we now find a song from another film that was out this year . “Wild Women Do” by Natalie Cole was, of course, on the soundtrack to Pretty Woman which the third highest-grossing film worldwide in 1990. This Disney re-telling of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts proved irresistible to cinema goers as did its soundtrack which went double platinum in the UK and triple platinum in the US. As well as Natalie’s track, it included the career-rejuvenating hit “King of Wishful Thinking” by Go West, the career-making single “It Must Have Been Love” by Roxette and the career-retrospective remix hit “Fame 90” by David Bowie that featured on a recent TOTP repeat.

Up against those mega-selling hits, “Wild Women Do” kind of got lost in the mix a little. Indeed, it was only a No 34 hit in the US (whilst a slightly more respectable No 16 over here). It’s actually used in the film itself in the scenes where Vivian goes window shopping in Beverly Hills….

It didn’t really register on my radar as something I should be concerned with I have to say although I did catch the film at the cinema. I recall Gere also had another film out simultaneously called Internal Affairs where he played a very different character indeed to his Pretty Woman counterpart. Worth searching out that film in my humble opinion while we’re all stuck in our houses over Xmas.

I have no memory at all of this next act although my wife reckons she remembers them. Unique 3 anyone? Oh hold on, did they also do that “Cantaloop” hit? No, no they didn’t – that was Us3 it seems. Unique 3 were from Bradford and, despite my lack of memory of them, are actually regarded as ground breaking in the field of UK hip-hop by those in the know (not me then obviously). Cited by the likes of The Chemical Brothers, Coldcut and Goldie, “Musical Melody” was their only Top 40 hit but hey were massive on the club scene (it says here) paving the way for the Jungle, Drum & Bass and Nu-Skool Breaks scene (I have no idea what that last one is). It sounds a bit like Dream Warriors of “Wash Your Face In My Sink” and “My Definition Of A Boombastic Jazz Style” to my uncultured ears both of which I quite liked. Maybe I’m more dope than I realised!

“Musical Melody” peaked at No 29.

Bruno followed Pat Sharp’s lead with a military style look for tonight’s show

Time for some moronic behaviour from tonight’s host Bruno Brookes next as he tries to sound hip by saying “Yo! Unique 3 y’all” whilst perfecting an impression of Napoleon Bonaparte by having one arm inserted inside his jacket. WTF?!

When he finally does get on with introducing the next act, it’s Paula Abdul with her hit “Opposites Attract”. I couldn’t really be doing with this to be honest – the song was pretty unremarkable and then there was the pratting about with that cartoon cat in the video. I can imagine a conversation in the record label boardroom going something like this:

Label exec: “Look, we need to squeeze every last drop of sales out of the album so we’re going for one final, sixth (!) single but how do we market it?”. What’s popular right now?”

Marketing guy: “How about we get Paula to sing and dance with a cartoon rabbit like in that Who Framed Roger Rabbit film?”

Label exec: “Brilliant! Except let’s make it a different animal to ensure we don’y look like we’ve completely ripped off the idea.”

Marketing guy: “How about a ….cat?”

Label exec: “That’ll do”

It all just seemed very cynical to me. Apparently Izzy Stradlin from Guns N’ Roses once wrote a song for Paula. Not sure if she ever recorded it but a video of the wholesome Ms Abdul and rock ‘n roll casualty Izzy would have certainly been worth a watch.

Some Breakers now and we start with All About Eve and “Scarlet”. I’d sort of lost track of this lot by the start of the 90s and must admit this doesn’t sound familiar. It was the third and final single to be taken from sophomore album “Scarlet And Other Stories” and although pleasant enough, doesn’t really stand out from the rest of their folk goth rock twiddlings. The band notched up nine Top 40 hits during their career but curiously, seven of them all peaked somewhere between the Nos 38 and 30. Consistent I suppose though.

Surely nobody remembers this next one – Kid Creole And The Coconuts with “The Sex of It”? What that Kid Creole? The one who had that run of Top 10 hits back in ’82 with songs like “I’m a Wonderful Thing, Baby”, “Stool Pigeon” and “Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy”? It can’t be him? In the Top 40 in 1990? It surely is – let’s be realistic, there can’t have been two acts called Kid Creole And The Coconuts – and this song was written by Prince no less. Apart from the lead vocals being contributed by the Kid himself (August Darnell), everything else recorded on the track was courtesy of Prince and his band. It sounds like it as well. Amazingly, despite their European success, Kid Creole And The Coconuts only appeared in the Billboard Hot 100 chart on one occasion when “Hey Mambo” (with Barry Manilow bizarrely) peaked at No 90.

Someone else still having unlikely hits in to the 90s was Sinitta who was enjoying her penultimate Top 40 appearance with “Hitchin’ A Ride”. Having declined to work with Stock, Aitken and Waterman any further after her 1988 hit “I Don’t Believe In Miracles”, Sinitta embarked upon a run of three consecutive chart hits that were cover versions of songs that had previously been hits in the 70s – “Hitchin’ A Ride” had been a hit for Vanity Fare in 1970 whilst the other two were “Right Back Where We Started From” (Maxine Nightingale in 1975) and “Love On A Mountain Top” (Robert Knight in 1974). Though not exactly edifying stuff (let’s be fair, they were all hideous), she undoubtedly extended her chart life well beyond her natural talents with this strategy.

“Hitchin’ A Ride” peaked at No 24.

Right, what’s Brookes babbling on about now? “Next a real band with a fabulous cult following if it makes sense” he blathers whilst introducing Jesus Jones. Make sense? Not really Bruno but then that was never your strong point was it? He finishes the segue by pronouncing the last ‘real’ of “Real Real Real” with a growl. It looks and sounds odd at best and disturbing at worst.

I’m pretty sure that this is just a reshowing of their initial TOTP appearance from the other week rather than a brand new performance. The band are still together to this day 30 years later and with the original line up which takes some doing. How many other bands have the same line up and that kind of longevity? U2? The Rolling Stones (sort of)? Erm…A-ha?

The curious case of Jesus Jones and their rise and fall is quite the story. Look at these chart placings and then consider what a short space of time this commercial collapse happened within:

Album	Year of release	Chart peak
Liquidiser	1989	31
Doubt	1991	1
Peverse	1993	6
Already	1997	161

What happened? Was it the rise of ‘grunge’? The advent of ‘Britpop’? Or was it just that the music press, who had hailed them as the future of rock ‘n’ roll, turned on them and the whole ‘indie dance’ movement that the band were poster boys for. Check out this quote from the NME in 1993:

“There is something fundamentally wrong with Jesus Jones: they have no sense of the ridiculous. They are loathed by every man, woman and child in Christendom, because they are a plasticine pop group who refuse to accept the fact that they are the stuff of three-minute-flavoured pop sweets. They are The Monkees who want to be Emerson, Lake And Palmer; five Mike Nesmiths.”

Ouch! And anyway, what’s wrong with The Monkees? I love The Monkees!

“Real Real Real” peaked at No 19.

After Jesus Jones have finished, Brookes advises the watching millions that the band are a “wild bunch of fellas with a really dry sense of humour”. Yeah, thanks for that Bruno. As a piece of info worthy of broadcast, it’s about as useful as one of Viz character Roger Irrelevant’s musings and he once eloped with an armchair declaring it pregnant with his children.

Right, who’s next? Well it must be Jason Donovan or New Kids On The Block or someone similar as the TOTP audience are screaming and those yelps of excitement are for…Phil Collins?! Phil f***ing Collins?! Are you kidding me?! That’s a very low bar to instigate such a reaction. “Something Happened On The Way To Heaven” was the third single from Phil’s “…But Seriously” album and was a return to that uptempo faux Motown sound that he was prone to after the heavier sound of the previous two singles “Another Day In Paradise” and ‘I Wish It Would Rain Down”. It does skip and bounce along, I’ll give it that. It’s almost “Sussudio” Part II.

Apparently it was written for inclusion on the soundtrack to the film War Of The Roses but Danny de Vito, who directed and co-starred in the movie, didn’t like it and rejected it. Some excellent taste on display there from Danny. Someone else with good taste is the dog in the video who wanders around the set as Phil and his band rehearse the song and shits on stage near a backing singer and then pisses on the leg of the bassist who looks like cross between Yoffy from Fingerbobs and Gandalf. Someone give that dog a Scooby Snack – he’s earned it!

I once got into a Twitter row with the Absolute 80s radio station about this song when I pulled them up for it actually being released in 1990 rather than the previous decade so why were they playing it. Their retort was that it came from an album recorded and released in the 80s so it was legitimate. Well, all I can say is that it’s a good job they don’t have VAR for decade radio playlists as that is a clear and obvious error!

Yet another song and act I have no recall of next. Tongue ‘N’ Cheek arose from the ashes of Total Contrast (who I also can’t remember) who had a No 17 hit in 1985 with “Takes A Little Time” (Wikipedia tells me). “Tomorrow” was their biggest UK chart record peaking at No 20. They give an energetic performance with that jumping up and down dance move but I’m afraid the song doesn’t really do anything for me.

Apparently they had another hit a year later with a cover of Patrice Rushen’s “Forget Me Nots” but surely if we’re going to reference that song when it comes to 90s chart hits, we’re talking about it being sampled in George Michael’s “Fastlove” or Will Smith’s “Men In Black”. Unfortunately for Tongue ‘N’ Cheek, I’m being absolutely serious about that comment and not…erm…tongue in cheek.

It’s a third week at the top for Madonna and “Vogue”. It turns out that all 16 Hollywood stars name-checked in the song are now sadly dead after the last person still alive, Lauren Bacall, died in 2014. Meanwhile, the video for the song has now recorded 100 million views on YouTube thereby giving Madonna the title of the first female artist in history to have four songs from four different decades reach that milestone. What were the others? Well, they were “La Isla Bonita” from the 80s, “Hung Up” from the 2000s and “Bitch I’m Madonna” from the 2010s.

You can tell I’m struggling to think of anything else to say about this one can’t you?

Hands up who wants to see what a Bruce Dickinson solo career away from Iron Maiden looked like? Right, I can see one hand …from Bruce himself…anyone else? OK, that’s a bit harsh. I hadn’t realised quite what an extensive solo career the Dickster (ooh, went a bit Boris Johnson there) has had. I just thought it was limited to the “Tattooed Millionaire” album project but no. He’s released six studio albums and ten singles as a solo artist! Who knew? Put your hand down again Bruce!

I do remember this one and for my money it was just ever so slightly more melodic than your average Iron Maiden track but as with Phil Collins previously, that’s a pretty low bar. The album includes tracks with some very Iron Maiden sounding names though like “Hell On Wheels”, “Zulu Lulu” and the obligatory Spinal Tap -esque title “Lickin’ the Gun”. It also featured a pretty straight cover of David Bowie’s “All The Young Dudes’ which was of course made famous by Mott The Hoople who had a No 3 hit with it in 1972. Bruce’s version only reached No 23 – well, no point in trying to re-invent the wheel is there?

For posterity’s sake, I include the chart run down below:

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Pat & Mick	Use It Up And Wear It Up	What do you think?
2	Natalie Cole	Wild Women Do	Nah
3	Unique 3	Musical Melody	Not for me
4	Paula Abdul	Opposites Attract	I was repelled by this though – no
5	All About Eve	Scarlet	No
6	Kid Creole And The Coconuts	The Sex Of It	Nope
7	Sinitta	Hitchin’ A Ride	Shittin’ a turd more like – no
8	Jesus Jones	Real Real Real	Don’t think I did actually
9	Phil Collins	Something Happened On The Way To Heaven	It’s another no
10	Tongue ‘N’ Cheek	Tomorrow	Negative
11	Madonna	Vogue	Not the single but it’s on my Immaculate Collection CD
12	Bruce Dickinson	Tattooed Millionaire	And no

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000pz16/top-of-the-pops-26041990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues

TOTP 12 APR 1990

Posted on December 1, 2020 by 80stastic

It’s nearly Easter already in 1990 where TOTP Rewind currently resides – the day after this TOTP was broadcast was the Good Friday – but the 21 year old me doesn’t have chocolate eggs or bunnies on my mind. No, I’m more concerned with finding a job as I am in my fourth month of unemployment. What’s more, this very day (12th April) is my girlfriend (now wife)’s birthday so I would have needed to get her a present. I seem to recall that I decided for some reason that a brass ornament of a vintage style camera (one of those ones where the photographer ducked underneath a black cloth covering to take the picture) would be just the sort of thing she would like. I saw it in a shop that specialised in that sort of knick-knacker but in truth, she would rather have had my original idea which was a VHS tape of The Beatles Help! film. She really wasn’t taken by the brass camera and I’d even haggled about the price with the shop owner to get it for her! Oh well, let’s see what tunes that the charts had to offer that week – there’d better be some good stuff in stock!

Not a bad start at all! In my head, Jesus Jones didn’t appear on the charts until much later in the year but I’m clearly getting my facts skewed as here they are in mid April with “Real Real Real” which was their first Top 40 hit peaking at No 19. Very much seen as being part of that indie /dance crossover movement, they were one of the first (alongside Happy Mondays simultaneously) to make the big commercial breakthrough and opened a gate to chartdom that acts such as EMF, The Shamen and Pop Will Eat Itself would also stride through.

I think I may have heard of Jesus Jones previous to this via their nearly hit “Info Freako” from the year before but I didn’t know much about them. By the start of 1991 however, they would be genuine chart stars and the future of rock ‘n’ roll according to some. When I did my first Xmas working at Our Price in 1990 there were two albums that we were asked for all the time that hadn’t even been released yet. One was The Farm’s “Spartacus” and the other was “Doubt” by Jesus Jones. I think they were delayed possibly to heighten the clamour for them to fever pitch and when they were finally released within a month of each other in 1991, they both reached no 1 in the album chart.

I always get a bit confused about Jesus Jones’s timeline in terms of their hits, possibly because they racked up a few in quick succession over the course of a year or so. After “Real Real Real”, they scored another four Top 40 hits including “Right Here, Right Now” being released twice and peaking at No 31 on both occasions. I hadn’t realised until now that the band had also briefly been a very big deal in the US with “Real Real Real” going to No 4 over there whilst “Right Here, Right Now” peaked at No 2. I had always assumed they were a peculiarly British phenomenon.

The band are still together having gigged throughout the years when they were being referred to as residing in the “Where are They Now” files. Indeed, I recall them receiving some very derogatory press about resorting to playing corporate gigs as the entertainment for big conglomerate firm events although I’m guessing such gigs probably pay pretty well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhUT8IAz0_U

Like Gloria Estefan, Janet Jackson has always seemed to me to be capable of only two types of song. The big, lush soul ballad like “Let’s Wait A While” and “Come Back To Me” and the uptempo R’n’B dance tune like “What Have You Done for Me Lately” and “Miss You Much”. Completely unfair I’m sure but it’s my blog and that’s my opinion when I think of her (see what I did there? No? Oh forget it!).

“Escapade” was very much in the latter category and was one of seven (!) singles taken from her “Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814” album. As with all the other videos for her uptempo songs, it’s all about the choreographed dance routines. Whilst undoubtedly impressive as a spectacle, it always seems to me as if the tracks are written with a routine in mind rather than for any musical reasons. Yet again, this was a Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis production and they came up with the name “Escapade” as it was one of many potential song title ideas that they kept in a little notebook which sounds overly cynical and not very organic at all to me. Aside from Jam and Lewis, the track also features ‘finger snaps’ contributed by former New Edition member Johnny Gill. Finger snaps?! If you’re going to get an official credit for that, I should maybe have bigged up my triangle playing in my Junior school concert back in the day!

“Escapade” peaked at No 17 in the UK but was a No 1 song in the US.

“It’s hot in here” informs this week’s host Mark Goodier referring to the temperature in the studio – so why are you wearing a jacket, shirt and tie then Mark? I’m sure you’ve done enough shows by this point to be able to make informed wardrobe decisions surely?!

OK, the next act is Technotronic. When I was putting this post together, my wife (she of the unwanted birthday present!) remarked, “God, you haven’t got to review this have you?” referring to “This Beat Is Technotronic”. Yes, I’m afraid so. This was the third single from their “Pump Up the Jam: The Album” erm…album and saw someone called MC Eric take the mike while previously used vocalist Ya Kid K took a rest. It still sounded the same as all the rest to me though apart from perhaps even more annoying and repetitive if that were possible.

Apparently the two dancers up there on stage with him are his old school mates called Gary and julian who he plucked from being on the dole in Cardiff to come and be in Technotronic with him. If any of my old school pals are reading this, fancy joining me for another go at perfecting the triangle?

“This Beat Is Technotronic” peaked at No 14.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoNtholiovs

“It’s the way they move that makes you want to groove” remarks Goodier at the end of Technotronic’s turn in one of the cringiest segue ways ever which leads us into “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You” by Heart. Again. Really? I think this is the third time this has been on the show in recent weeks. Look, I’ve talked about the ridiculous lyrics, I’ve commented on the nasty video…what else is there left for me to say about it?

Well, it was taken from an album called “Brigade” that managed to rise all the way to No 3 in our charts but the band would only achieve chart action one more time in this country when their 1993 single “Will You Be There (In the Morning)” made No 19 from the album “Desire Walks On’ which was also their last long player to make any impression on the Top 40. There. Now please go away.

The Breakers are back after being missing in action for the last two shows and we start with David Bowie and “Fame 90”. So why was a 15 year old Bowie track being released again? It was all part of the promotion for his “Changesbowie” retrospective album that was released in March of this year which included all his biggest hits from 1969’s “Space Oddity” to 1984’s “Blue Jean”. I remember the album being a staple of the ‘Core Stock’ / ‘Best Seller’ section when I first worked for Our Price which were titles that you should never sell out of (although I’m sure we did of course).

Bowie was also embarking on a career spanning greatest hits world tour called the Sound+Vision Tour in support of the album. In what was seen at the time as quite ground breaking, fans were asked to vote for which songs should be included in the set list by phoning a number to log their votes with proceeds from the calls going to charity. In a world where telephone voting for everything from The Eurovision Song Contest to Strictly COme Dancing is second nature to us all today, this seemed like a revolutionary idea back in 1990. I’m sure there was some sort of counter campaign to rig the vote by encouraging people to vote for “The Laughing Gnome” thereby forcing Bowie to have to perform it live but I think he twigged what was going on before committing to the idea.

The video for “Fame 90” featured clips of previous Bowie promos alongside the man himself throwing some shapes with a blonde female dancer which supports the idea of the Changesbowie retrospective but seems a little short of inspiration to me.

“Fame 90” peaked at No 28, 11 places lower than its original 1975 release.

The scouse Kylie next as Sonia is back with “Counting Every Minute”. This was the fourth of five tracks released as singles from her debut album “Everybody Knows” with each one making the Top 20, a feat that made Sonia the first ever British solo female artist to achieve this. Quite how she managed to do this remains a mystery though. “Counting Every Minute” in particular is especially weak. I’ve had dumps with more substance to them.

The video is as half-hearted as the song. Just Sonia and some backing dancers going through the motions in front of a clock face back drop. How long did the video director take to come up with that concept?! You can almost hear him saying “Right then Sonia. Just smile and do that rolling shoulders move you do and we’ll fill in the rest afterwards in post production. No, don’t worry – it’ll look great. Promise. ACTION!”

Right, so quite why was “Everybody Needs Somebody To Love’ by The Blues Brothers in the charts? It seems to be because the film of the same name was re-released on VHS for its 10th anniversary by MCA/Universal Home Video. The movie has garnered cult status over the years – the movie poster was a mainstay of student room walls when I was one of at Sunderland Poly back in the 80s. However, I was surprised to discover that it was also a sizeable commercial success. It was the 10th biggest film in the US in the year of its cinema release (1980) and is the ninth-highest-grossing musical of all time.

Where The Monkees had gone before and The Commitments would follow, the film spawned a real life band who toured in support of the movie. Its celluloid stars John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd retained their roles as front men / brothers Jake and Elwood with a supporting band of established musicians from the likes of Blood, Sweat & Tears and Booker T and the M. G.’s. The whole thing had started out as a sketch on legendary US TV entertainment show Saturday Night Live and spiralled once a film based on the characters was proposed. Here’s a 1978 clip from SNL showcasing the Blues Brothers:

Despite its legendary status and the stars it made of Belusihi and Ackroyd (thanks in part to those amazing dance steps of theirs), The Blues Brothers isn’t what I will forever associate the latter with – in fact I don’t think I’ve even seem the film from start to finish. No, I will always think of my time at Sunderland Poly where I spent three years being called Dan due to my resemblance to Ackroyd at the time.

Some more bpm nonsense now as we see Bizz Nizz and their hit “Don’t Miss The Party Line”. The phrase ‘party line’ is not associated with some crappy dance tune for many people who grew up in Hull in the 70s and 80s (of whom my wife was one). No, it referred to the type of telephone service you had and in the case of a ‘party line’, it was a local telephone loop circuit that was shared by more than one subscriber. Yes kids, this meant that there was no privacy on a party line! If you were chatting with a friend, anyone on your party line could pick up their telephone and listen in! Unbelievable! Think you’ve go a problem because you want to upgrade your phone and you’re still under contract for your existing phone? Try dealing with someone listening in while you’re exchanging tales of drunken exploits with your bestie! Or, heaven forbid, on a booty call!

What? The Bizz Nizz record? Oh, that was shit as well.

Despite all the fuss over Paula Abdul in the US (four No 1 singles and a No 1 album). reaction to her in the UK had been more muted. Yes, “Straight Up” had been a Top 3 single for her over here but that was 12 months back and her only chart entry since then had been the No 24 hit “Forever Your Girl”. What was needed was a gimmick to reinstate our attention – how about her duetting with an animated cat? Purrfect! (sorry). “Opposites Attract” would become her biggest ever UK hit charging all the way to No 2 and is probably her best known song.

So this cat business? What the f**k was that all about?! Well, there had been a big reaction to the Who Framed Roger Rabbit film at the end of the 80s with its live action / animation mash up so maybe that was an influence. The cartoon cat in question was MC Skat Cat who was voiced by a duo called The Wild Pair who get the official credit on the record as the collaborators. The guy who wrote the song, Oliver Leiber (son of legendary songwriter Jerry Leiber), came up with the title after browsing a second-hand bookstore after his car broke down and he had four hours to kill. He wrote down titles of a number of pulp fiction novels like A Bloody Moon or Midnight Mistress but the one he plumped for was Opposites Attract. Hang on, didn’t we see this method of songwriting earlier with Janet Jackson’s “Escapade”? Is that all it took to come up with a song title? What have i got on my book shelves I could use to inspire me as a song writer? Hmm. Chelsea: 100 Memorable Matches is probably a little niche in all honesty.

Back to Paula though and the song is basically a play on the Gershwin tune “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” made popular by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It all seemed very calculated and lacking in any authenticity to me and I couldn’t really be doing with it at all.

Ah, good to see that The Cure were still ploughing their own particular furrow into the new decade. “Pictures Of You” wasn’t a new song as such though as it was the fourth single to be released from their “Disintegration” album and was very much immediately recognisable as a Cure song. Doomy? Sure. Dark? Yep. Quality tune? Undoubtedly. I’ve always admired the way Robert Smith has never given a shit about following trends or chasing the zeitgeist, an attitude perfectly summed up by this clip of him at the ceremony where the band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019…

“Pictures of You” peaked at No 24 and was voted No 278 on Rolling Stone magazine’s “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list in 2011.

So it took just two weeks for Madonna to hit the top spot once again with “Vogue”. I saw some online opinion criticising the lyrics of the song last week, specifically the name call section in the song’s bridge where Madonna references sixteen Hollywood stars from the 1920s to the 1950s. It seemed to be all about the ‘Harlow Jean’ line in that her name was reversed to shoe horn it into the lyrics to make a rhyming space for the following line ‘picture of a beauty queen’. I’m not sure that I agree with the negative opinions to be honest. After all, there is a precedent for this type of wordsmithery. Here’s the opening lines of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”:

“It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday
The regular crowd shuffles in
There’s an old man sitting next to me
Makin’ love to his tonic and gin”

His tonic and gin?! Have you ever gone into a bar and asked for a tonic and gin as opposed to a gin and tonic? Well, if it’s good enough for Billy…Madonna could have avoided all of this if she used Norma Jeane as in Marilyn Monroe instead of Harlow Jean but she’d already used Monroe in a previous line to rhyme with DiMaggio. Oh I give up!

After two fast hits in “Seven o’Clock” and “Hey You” came the inevitable ballad from The Quireboys in “I Don’t Love You Anymore”. I’m not sure that I remember this one. Let me have a listen…

Hmm. Pretty nondescript stuff really. Reminds me a bit of “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” by Poison. I can imagine it got lighters waving in the audience when they performed it live but it’s got as much longevity as lighter fuel.

For posterity’s sake, I include the chart run down below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwDogcM_d7s

Order of appearance	Artist	Song	Did I Buy it?
1	Jesus Jones	Real Real Real	Don’t think I did actually
2	Janet Jackson	Escapade	Nah
3	Technotronic	This Beat Is Technotronic	No, this beat is metronomic and dull
4	Heart	All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You	It’s a no from me
5	David Bowie	Fame 90	Not the 90 remix single but I’m sure my wife must have the original somewhere
6	Sonia	Counting Every Minute	Huge no
7	The Blues Brothers	Everbody Needs Somebody To Love	Nope
8	Bizz Nizz	Don’t Miss The Party Line	Miss it? I gave it a massive wide berth!
9	Paula Abdul	Opposites Attract	I was repelled by this though – no
10	The Cure	Pictures Of You	No
11	Madonna	Vogue	Not the single but it’s on my Immaculate Collection CD
12	The Quireboys	I Don’t Love You Anymore	…don’t think I ever did

Disclaimer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000pr1x/top-of-the-pops-12041990

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.

Some bedtime reading?

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is imgres-2-3.jpg

https://michaelmouse1967.wixsite.com/smashhits-remembered/1990-issues

TOTP Rewind – the 90s

My memories of 90s chart music

TOTP 15 JUN 1995

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TOTP 11 JUL 1991

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TOTP 27 JUN 1991

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TOTP 20 JUN 1991

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TOTP 26 JUL 1990

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Some bedtime reading?

TOTP 26 APR 1990

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Some bedtime reading?

TOTP 12 APR 1990

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Some bedtime reading?