Pras

TOTP 20 NOV 1998

Posted on by 80stastic

Those pesky BBC4 programmers have slipped an extra TOTP repeat into the schedule this week meaning I have three shows to review rather than the usual two. I think it’s to make up for the fact that they only showed one last week due to the snooker coverage and so, in order to get the 1998 shows to sync with 2025 real time, they’ve had to go with three this week. As if that wasn’t enough, this one features nine instead of the standard eight acts. I’ll never get all my Christmas shopping done at this rate!

Anyway, our host is the increasingly annoying Jamie Theakston and we start with a repeat showing of last week’s performance by the now trio of East 17/E-17 and their hit “Each Time”. With a debut chart position of No 2 and a solid second week of sales sustaining it in the Top 5, this single looked like it would foreshadow a new period of success for the group after the recent negative publicity surrounding Brian Harvey’s ‘drug interview’ and the trauma of chief songwriter Tony Mortimer’s departure. It would prove to be a false dawn though as the poor chart showing of parent album “Resurrection” indicated that there wasn’t a big appetite within their fanbase for a slimmed down version of the band with a new R&B direction and a truncated name. Subsequently, the group were dropped by their label Telstar Records in 1999. Bizarrely, the album would be released by Demon Music Group in 2013 but retitled as “Greatest” despite not actually being a collection of their biggest hits and also ignoring the fact that there were already four Best Of albums in existence by this point. Crucially though, none of those albums contained the word ‘greatest’ in their title. What a shady practice.

2025 Update: It was reported in the press this week that songwriter Tony Mortimer earns about £97,000 in royalties each year from “Stay Another Day”. What a Christmas pension pot!

What was it about the mid to late 90s and Bee Gees cover versions? Take That, Boyzone, N-Trance, Adam Garcia and 911 all had hits with their treatments of classic songs by the brothers Gibb and now here were Steps adding their name to that list with their take on “Tragedy”. As with the 911’s cover of “More Than A Woman”, this was taken from a Bee Gees tribute album but was released as a double A-side with a track called “Heartbeat” from the group’s debut album “Step One” (it would also appear as the first single on their follow up “Steptacular”). I’m sure I can’t be the only person who could genuinely claim to have never heard “Heartbeat” possibly because you couldn’t escape from “Tragedy”. This single just sold and sold and sold and then the next day it would do the same all over again. It would spend a whopping 23 weeks on the UK Top 40 and 15 consecutively inside the Top 10 including (after a wait of two months) one at No 1. It sold more than all their previous three singles put together and was surely the piece of concrete evidence that Steps were going to be around for quite some time.

So why did the nation go barmy for the Steps version of “Tragedy”? Well, it was a tightly produced and faithful-to-the-original cover of a dance classic which helped and maybe the younger elements of their fanbase didn’t even know it wasn’t a Steps original but I think what really propelled it to its commercial heights was the dance that went with it. Involving hand gestures that framed the face, shoulder twists and arm raises, it maybe wasn’t as iconic as vogueing as popularised by Madonna but it was up there. It looks pretty impressive in this performance anyway. I reckon we’ll see loads of this one in future repeats so I’ll leave it there for now.

2025 Update: Steps performed at Blackpool recently as the musical interlude for Strictly Come Dancing to promote the opening of the Steps musical.

Despite being released originally in 1989 and again in 1991, come 1998 the story of “Sit Down” by James still had another chapter to be written in the form of a remix and yet another release. The rather unimaginatively titled “Sit Down ‘98” was commissioned by the band’s label Mercury to help re-promote sales of their first “Best Of” album (which had hit the shops in the March) in the run up to Christmas. As far as I can tell though, this version never actually made it onto said Best Of nor was there a rerelease of it with the ‘98 remix added onto the track listing. It was what was known as a standalone single. Wouldn’t it have been better just to rerelease the hit version of “Sit Down” from 1991 if Mercury wanted to associate it with the Best Of album? I’m guessing that wouldn’t have been creative enough for Tim Booth though and so we got an Apollo 440 mix of the classic track which probably made sense at the time given their high profile and whilst their treatment of “Sit Down” is interesting, it does lose some of its charm in the process it seems to me. It would appear not to have stood the test of time either. Do you ever hear it played on the radio instead of the hit version? Nor did it have the desired effect of re-energising the Best Of album’s sales. As far as I can tell, it spent the whole of November and December skirting around between Nos 75 to 60 in the charts. Could you say the whole idea was ridiculous and touched by madness? Only if you’re trying to squeeze in some pathetically obvious “Sit Down” references to finish this bit off like I am.

2025 Update: In an unexpected turn of events there’s another Strictly Come Dancing story – I’ve just seen “Sit Down” performed by James on the results show. It wasn’t the ‘98 remix obviously but just like in 1998, the band have a new Best Of album out to promote called “Nothing But Love: The Definitive Best Of”.

I’ve checked and this is the fifth time “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” by Aerosmith has been on the show over a period of just under three months. FIVE times in THREE months! Those two numbers are remarkable! Firstly that a hit that never got higher than No 4 could be on that many times but secondly that it was in the charts for that long! Actually, I should be more precise with that chart figure – it spent nine consecutive weeks inside the Top 10 and 18 (EIGHTEEN!) on the Top 40 in total. This week it was at No 8 but, given that this was the fourth time of seeing that satellite concert performance, were there not any other songs in the Top 40 that could have taken its place in the running order? Hang on, I’ll check…

…well, Marilyn Manson was a new entry at No 12 but maybe he was seen as not a safe enough choice. Further down the chart there are the likes of Tina Cousins, Karen Ramirez and Air but I think I would like to have seen the song at No 39 get a look in – “All I Want” by Puressence. That was never going to happen though.

2025 Update: A collaboration between Aerosmith and Yungblud topped the album charts just a week or so ago thus becoming the band’s first ever UK No 1 album some 38 years after their chart debut. Quite extraordinary.

I was right in what I said in the last post! There is someone from the Fugees on the show every week! After Wyclef Jean last time, we get Pras in this TOTP. In fact, Pras was also on with Wyclef Jean alongside Queen in that appearance seven days prior so the show really was full of Fugees around this time. “Blue Angels” is the track that Pras is promoting and although it features a sample from Frankie Valli’s “Grease”, there’s another film that is mentioned in the lyrics that caught my attention, one that I’d never heard of before but which seems to have been quite the influence on many a hip hop artist. 1984’s Beat Street was set in South Bronx with a plot surrounding the hip-hop lives of a pair of brothers and their group of friends. Now I’ve never heard of nor come across this film before but it had a cultural reach I would never have imagined. In Germany for example, which was still divided into East and West at this point, it had a particularly seismic impact. Released in the former to supposedly highlight the evils of capitalism, it instead promoted the more visual images of hip-hop and ushered in an emerging scene there. The film has been name checked in tracks by the likes of The Notorious B.I.G., Jay Electronica and AZ.

Now clearly, a white 16 year old living in Worcester in the West Midlands at the time of its release (that’ll be me) was never going to be its target audience but the fact that it bypassed me completely is surprising. I mean, I was aware of the breakdancing phenomenon at least if only via the hits of Break Machine. Did it not get UK distribution? Maybe not. Still, it’s opened my eyes a little. This blog was never meant to be educational but I seem to be learning about things I was never aware of as a by product of it.

2025 Update: In November this year, Pras was sentenced to 14 years in prison for his part in an alleged criminal conspiracy re: the illegal transfer of funds into the Barack Obama 2012 presidential campaign.

The first of three new hits now starting with Robbie Williams who made a rather cringeworthy cameo appearance during the James performance earlier trying to convince us all that he was a rock god axeman. After his first No 1 single “Millennium” earlier in the year, presumably hopes were high that he would repeat the trick with follow up “No Regrets”. However, it would debut and peak at No 4 when it was eventually released ten days after this TOTP performance. Why didn’t it go straight to the top of the charts when many press reviews had picked it out as one of the strongest tracks on parent album “I’ve Been Expecting You”? The answer possibly lies with that old issue of timing. Said album had already been out for a month by the time “No Regrets” made it into the shops so perhaps punters who might have shelled out for the single had already bought the album and didn’t feel the need to buy both? Perhaps anticipating that outcome, was that why record label Chrysalis made the single a double A-side with Robbie’s version of “Antmusic” by Adam And The Ants making up the other track? Wait, Williams did a version of “Antmusic”? I don’t recall this! I have to check this out…

…Oh dear God! That’s horrible! Just awful! What was he thinking?! What was Adam Ant thinking letting him butcher it?! Anyway, back to “No Regrets” and I have to say I never really liked it that much. It didn’t have the quirky charm of “Millennium” and always struck me as a bit miserable to be honest. Maybe its source material of his time in Take That meant it was inevitably going to create a less than joyful sound given how it ended and that it was all a bit raw at the time. The overly dramatic ending when Robbie says “Guess the love we once had is officially – dead!” always seems a bit…well…overly dramatic to me, like it was trying too hard. The third single from the album released in March 1999 – “Strong” – was a much more radio friendly, pop track that maybe should have been the song to follow up “Millennium” it always seemed to me. By comparison, “No Regrets” sounded like an album track. Just my opinion of course – I could have it completely wrong but I have no regrets about sharing it.

2025 Update: And now another Yungblud story! This week the singer revealed that he had received a letter of support from Robbie Williams after admitting to mental health struggles.

Blimey! This is a bit of a thing! Madonna on TOTP in person! Seriously, this hardly ever happened. I checked the wonderful Top Of The Pops Archive website which gives a breakdown of appearances by every artist and this is as only the fourth time ever that she was in the studio over a fifteen year period (not including repeats of performances in things like year end specials or anniversary shows). How had executive producer Chris Cowey managed to pull this coup off? For the record, her previous appearances had been performing “Holiday” and “Like A Virgin” (the one with the pink wig) in 1984 and “You’ll See” in 1995 but here she was again to promote the fourth single of her “Ray Of Light” album called “The Power Of Good-Bye”. As with Robbie Williams before her, this was actually a double A-side with the other track being “Little Star”, another song from the album but I only recall “The Power Of Good-Bye” being played on the radio. It’s essentially a ballad though one that sounded nothing like a traditional slow song with acoustic guitars, strings and almost hypnotic electronic beats. This was the William Orbit effect coming into play again as it had done across the whole of the album which he co-produced and which almost redefined how a pop song could sound.

As for the performance here, Madge has sleek, shiny black hair (almost a negative of that pink wig) and a sheer black outfit but, despite the sombre appearance, you can see that, in 1998, she still retained the presence of one of the most famous people on the planet with those in the studio audience stretching out their hands just to get a touch of her as if she was a deity with life healing properties. I can’t shake the feeling that she has been totally usurped by Taylor Swift in the present day. At the end she still had the grace and humility to say thank you and touch some of those aforementioned outstretched hands. They were simpler times for us all back then.

2025 Update: Just a day ago, Madonna was pictured with her ex-husband Guy Ritchie for first time since their divorce in 2008 when they both attended the latest art show of their son Rocco in London.

After a string of medium sized hits to this point, the Stereophonics suddenly exploded with the release of “The Bartender And The Thief” which debuted at No 3. The lead single from sophomore album “Performance And Cocktails”, it’s a high-octane, relentlessly driving rock track that barely draws breath at any point but which has enough melodic hooks to make the trip totally worth it.

Written by Kelly Jones after an observation in a bar in New Zealand whilst waiting for a plane, it expresses the idea that the bartender must see multiple different characters and their changing moods as they transcend from sober to drunk during the course of their shift. Its success would help propel the album to the top of the charts and nearly two million sales in the UK. Four more hits from it would follow including two further Top 5 placings – Stereophonics were officially big news. As with their debut album “Word Gets Around”, I seem to recall playing “Performance And Cocktails” lots in the Our Price store where I was working, so much so that my wife would scratch that itch for me by buying it me for Christmas that year. The Apocalypse Now themed video for “The Bartender And The Thief” reminded me of a long night with school mates watching that film at one of their houses when I was 17. You can read that particular story here if you feel so inclined…

TOTP 12 MAY 1983

2025 Update: The band are currently on tour playing a number of Arena dates in December.

Cher is No 1 again with “Believe” for a fourth of seven weeks. This run at the top really wasn’t the norm back then. Only Run D.M.C. vs Jason Nevins and “It’s Like That” could rival it in 1998 which had six weeks at the top. At the time of this chart, “Believe” was only the fifth single in two years to have spent more than three consecutive weeks at No 1 which just goes to show the power it was wielding over the record buying public.

2025 Update: Cher has denied rumours she is ready to marry her boyfriend who is 40 years younger than her ahead of her 80th birthday next year. And who is her boyfriend? The aforementioned rapper AZ. Sometimes the planets just align and the blog writes itself!

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1East 17Each TimeNegative
2StepsTragedy / HeartbeatI did not
3JamesSit Down ’98No but I had that first Best Of album
4AerosmithI Don’t Want To Miss A ThingNah
5PrasBlue AngelsNope
6Robbie WilliamsNo RegretsNo
7MadonnaThe Power Of Good-ByeNo but my wife had the album
8StereophonicsThe Bartender And The ThiefNo but I had the album
9CherBelieveAnd 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/m002nd33/top-of-the-pops-20111998

TOTP 13 NOV 1998

Posted on by 80stastic

That’s not Kate Thornton! She may have similar hair but it isn’t Kate. And it’s certainly not Jayne Middlemiss so who’s this on hosting duties for this particular TOTP? Well, it was Katy Hill (she does tell us that’s her name right at the very start of the show to be fair) and she was a Blue Peter presenter who went on to appear on kids Saturday morning show Live & Kicking. Was executive producer Chris Cowey auditioning her to become part of the roster of regular presenters? If so she can’t have passed as this was her one and only TOTP gig. Was she trying to diversify? I guess Blue Peter wasn’t known for regularly featuring pop artists. In fact, did they ever have any chart acts on? A quick search of the internet doesn’t reveal many. In terms of actual performances, we have McFly, Ed Sheeran and Olly Murs but there doesn’t appear to be many names from back in the day though I could be wrong. I wonder if any of the acts on tonight’s show could ever have been on Blue Peter?

We start with Touch And Go and their salacious hit “Would You…?”. The guy behind the record, one David Lowe produced and mixed the single in his modest recording studio on the western slopes of the Malvern Hills, not far from my hometown of Worcester. There’s another tenuous link between me and “Would You…?” though. Lowe had an ongoing association with Oval Records which was run by Charlie Gillett the British radio presenter, musicologist and writer. Lowe came up with the concept of Touch And Go in collaboration with Gillett who was always on the look out for unconventional music apparently. What’s any of this got to do with me? There is the tiniest of connections. In the mid 90s, I signed up for a further education course on 50s music. After the course had finished, all us students went for a drink and at said gathering, one of the attendees told us that he had been to school with Charlie Gillett who had been a very quiet lad who’d never spoken of his passion for music (especially rock ‘n’ roll) and so when he went onto have his illustrious career in that field, it had been a total shock to his schoolmates and peers. And that is my Touch And Go/Charlie Gillett story.

Would they have ever appeared on Blue Peter? Absolutely NOT!

When Madonna got rare permission from Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA to use a sample from “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” for her global smash “Hung Up”, it was only the third time such a request had been granted by the Swedish superstars. However, back in 1998, Madge herself was the recipient of an application to use one of her own songs in somebody else’s hit. According to Wikipedia, her agreement toallow“MaterialGirl” to be sampled for “If You Buy This Record (Your Life Will Be Better)” by The Tamperer featuring Maya was the first time she had ceded to such a petition. However, I wish she hadn’t. Whereas Madonna’s “Hung Up” was a great song making brilliant use of the ABBA source material, The Tamperer’s effort was a horrible noise with the melody from “Material Girl” just plonked incongruously into the mix of a track that had barely anything about it at all. In fact, it was so simple – it’s ‘hook’ was a stuttering cry of “f-f-f-f-f-f-fabulous” – it could have been a blueprint for all those hits by the Vengaboys. Has there ever been a more inappropriately named hit?

Would they have ever appeared on Blue Peter? Featuring the lyric “I got a party in my pants”? No chance.

Whilst we all know who Will Smith is (one of the most famous people on the planet I would surmise), how many of us are instantly familiar with the name Tatyana Ali? Well, if you’ve forgotten or never knew in the first place, she was a regular member of the cast of The Fresh Prince Of Bel–Air alongside Smith playing his young cousin Ashley Banks. After the show ended in 1996, Smith supposedly stepped up his efforts to get Ali to consider a career in music (in some of the later episodes of the show, her character had been involved in storylines that required her to sing). The culmination of Smith’s prompting was that Ali joined the roster of artists on Michael Jackson’s record label MJJ Music with an album called “Kiss The Sky” being released. The album underperformed and Ali was eventually let go from the label but it did leave us with three hit singles, the first of which was “Daydreamin’”. Peaking at a perhaps surprising high of No 6, to me, it was a decent attempt at sounding like Janet Jackson and no more. Inevitably, there would be a release that featured Will Smith which would come with the next single “Boy You Knock Me Out” which would eclipse the chart high of its predecessor by going to No 3. She returned the favour by adding vocals to a track on Smith’s “Willennium” album but would never release another album of her own, instead returning to her acting career and adding her support to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Would they have ever appeared on Blue Peter? Oh, I think so. Ali had a pretty clean living image and her song was praised for its lack of references to sex and violence.

In the course of the nearly nine years of writing this blog, I’ve witnessed many an artist just repeat the formula of their debut hit by releasing something very similar. However, Eagle-Eye Cherry took that strategy to a new level by coming up with an almost facsimile of that first success. “Falling In Love Again” sounds so similar to “Save Tonight” that I checked to see if the guitar chord structures he employed were the same in both and they damn near were. Look at this:

Save Tonight: Am – F – C – G

Falling In Love Again: Am – C – G

I’m not saying it’s not a pleasant sound but that does seem to be taking the piss rather. His sister never took such liberties with her audience I don’t think.

Would they have ever appeared on Blue Peter? Quite possibly. I think he would have met the required levels of safeness.

Like most people I’m guessing, all I knew of Faith Evans was her part in the gigantic 1997 No 1 record “I’ll Be Missing You” alongside Puff Daddy. However, there was more to her than that. She’d already had her own US platinum selling album called simply “Faith” and contributed a track to the soundtrack for Waiting To Exhale. After the death of her partner – the rapper Notorious B.I.G. – she re continued her solo career in 1998 with the album “Keep The Faith”*. The lead single from it was “Love Like This”, an out and out R&B track built around a Chic loop (weren’t they all?) that did well in all the urban charts and in the US Billboard Hot 100 but curiously failed to become a huge hit over here peaking at No 24 in our national chart. Indeed, she was bested by the improbable occurrence of another Faith in the Top 40 at the same time – Faith Hill whose “This Kiss” topped even Alanis Morissette’s “Thank U” for unlikely song words by managing to get the phrases “ centrifugal motion”, “perpetual bliss” and “pivotal moment” into its lyrics.

*The use of her name and its derivatives would be a theme Evans would keep coming back to. Subsequent album titles included “Faithfully”, “A Faithful Christmas” and “Something About Faith”.

Would they have ever appeared on Blue Peter? Married to the ultimate gangsta rapper who was murdered in a drive by shooting and an association with Puff Daddy/P Diddy/ Sean Combs and all his baggage? Never happening.

It’s the return of East 17 next or rather E-17 as the group rebranded themselves in the wake of various bust ups, negative press coverage and even a question raised about them in the House Of Commons. The fall out from Brian Harvey’s disastrous radio interview in 1997 where he endorsed the taking of the drug ecstasy claiming “it can make you a better person”, would have an everlasting effect on the group putting in motion line up changes that would become the norm in subsequent years. Harvey was initially sacked by the rest of the band but was reinstated the following year after chief songwriter Tony Mortimer himself left due to irreconcilable creative differences. The three piece vowed to carry on, bagged themselves a new record deal with Telstar and released their first new material as E-17 with the single “Each Time”. Although this entered the charts at No 2, I don’t recall hearing it at all at the time. Were they suffering an image backlash in the form of an airplay embargo? Anyway, I think I knew it was meant to be a new direction for the band with more of an emphasis on the ubiquitous R&B sound. As such, I was never that interested in actually listening to “Each Time” but now that I have, it’s not as bad as I’d feared. Quite tuneful in fact. It’s maybe a shame that this new path for the group was never given more time to play out. Sadly, that never happened as despite a No 2 position for the single, the parent album “Resurrection” never even made the Top 40 and they were left to sign off their chart career with a No 12 hit called “Betcha Can’t Wait” in 1999 and that was it. East 17 are still going (after a fashion) but with just one original member (Terry Coldwell) still in the line up. They may not be having hits anymore but they’ll always get some work at Christmas thanks to “Stay Another Day”.

Would they have ever appeared on Blue Peter? What with all those negative drug taking headlines and their ‘bad boy’ image, it was surely never on the cards unless it was to light a candle on the Christmas Advent Crown whilst singing that song. They’d have probably set fire to it anyway. Oh no, that was John Noakes wasn’t it?

Is it me or did there seem to be someone from the Fugees on the show or in the charts every week at this point? In October we had Lauryn Hill with “Doo Wop (That Thing)” riding high inside The Top 5 and just seven days prior to this, Pras dropped in to the TOTP studio to perform “Blue Angels”. This week it was the turn of Wyclef Jean but he wasn’t on his own. No, he’s got the aforementioned Pras with him alongside someone called Free Marie who is a rapper and nothing to do with the 70s rock band who had hits with “Alright Now”, “Wishing Well” and “My Brother Jake”. There was, however, a different rock band involved in Wyclef’s hit which, once you know its title is “Another One Bites The Dust”, means that you instantly know who I’m talking about. Apparently the Queen fanbase were none too pleased about this classic track by their favourite band being hijacked by Wyclef for inclusion on the soundtrack of the film Small Soldiers and I can sort of understand why. He basically took the original track and just (c)rapped all over it. Not especially creative nor indeed respectful. Also not respectful was Wyclef Jean’s video message which introduces the video we see here when he says “ C’mon Freddie Mercury, where you at?”, a line he also repeats in the actual track. Well Wyclef mate, he’d been dead for seven years so I’m not sure why you were expecting to see him! This whole project just felt all wrong from initial conception to its bad execution but it didn’t stop the sometime Fugee from doing loads more subsequent collaborations with the likes of Bono, Tom Jones, Mary J. Blige, Missy Elliott and even The Rock.

Would they have ever appeared on Blue Peter? No, I don’t think he would have been a natural fit.

Cher reigns supreme at the top of the charts with “Believe” for a third straight week of seven. This really was a transformative hit not only for Cher for whom it marked a massive uptick in her commercial fortunes after the disappointment of her last album “It’s A Man’s World” but also for the wider music world. The fact that Cher was 52 years old at the time meant that middle aged female artists suddenly had licence to show that this wasn’t a one-off and would follow in her footsteps with the likes of Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Donna Summer, Madonna and Cyndi Lauper all releasing albums that were of a dance music flavour.

Would they have ever appeared on Blue Peter? I think Blue Peter might not have been a big enough show for Cher. A bit beneath her. Still, she may have won a Grammy for Best Dance Recording with “Believe” but she hasn’t got a Blue Peter badge I’ll wager.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Touch And GoWould You…?No, I wouldn’t and indeed didn’t
2The Tamperer featuring MayaIf You Buy This Record (Your Life Will Be Better)Hell no
3Tatyana AliDaydreamin’No thanks
4Eagle-Eye CherryFalling In Love AgainNope
5Faith EvansLove Like ThisNah
6East 17 or (E-17 if you prefer)Each TimeNo
7Wyclef Jean / Pras / Free Marie / QueenAnother One Bites The DustNever
8Cher BelieveI did not

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/m002n30j/top-of-the-pops-13111998

TOTP 06 NOV 1998

Posted on by 80stastic

We’ve got through the October TOTP repeats and the end of the year is finally appearing upon the horizon and not a moment too soon – 1998 has been a real slog. Our host is Kate Thornton who seems to have styled her hair on Billie’s barnet but more of her later. We start though with Alanis Morissette whose video for her hit “Thank U” we saw on the previous show. There was no way the BBC would have let her recreate her look from that promo what with her being naked and all so she’s gone for pigtails and…well…clothes for this appearance. I have to say that her song’s lyrics includes some of the most eloquent words ever to appear in a hit record. Look at these:

  • Disillusionment
  • Frailty
  • Consequence
  • Masochistic
  • Divinity
  • Unabashedly

However, my favourite lyric is “transparent dangling carrots” which could also be a description of those pigtails of hers. However, she then spoils it all by wailing the following in the outro…

Yeah, yeah
Oh, oh, oh
Yeah, oh, oh
Yeah, oh, oh, whoa
Yeah, no, oh, oh

No, oh, oh, oh
No, oh, no, oh
No, oh, no, no
No, oh
No, oh, oh
Oh, oh, oh
Ooh

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Glen Ballard / Alanis Nadine Morissette

Thank U lyrics © Universal Music Corp., 1974 Music, Arlovol Music

Oh. And indeed no. Or yeah.

Ah, it’s the aforementioned Billie and she does indeed have hair that looks like Kate Thornton’s or is it the other way around? Billie is here to perform her former No 1 single “Girlfriend” and when I say former I mean literally about a month ago. So why is she back on the show now that she’s at No 10 in the charts? I can only assume it’s because her single has remained at No 10 for two consecutive weeks. “Do you have a minute?” Billie sings. No, not really. Not after all this time. I can’t give you one minute more. Sorry. Next!

If I thought Billie was in overkill territory, how do I describe the decision to feature “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” by Aerosmith again?! Excessive? Or just plain ridiculous? By my reckoning, this was its ninth week on the chart and it had just dropped from No 7 to No 8 having been as high as No 4 a month before. In terms of its appearances on TOTP, this was its fourth of five meaning yes, executive producer Chris Cowey wasn’t done with the song yet. Once more it’s that satellite performance that is shown presumably because of all the TOTP branding that can be seen all over the stage – Cowey was trying to sell the show into other territories around this time. As for our theme of female hairstyles, has any male rock star’s locks looked more like a woman’s than Steven Tyler?

What on earth is going on here?! Kate Thornton has just propositioned a young woman to go to bed with her! WTF?! Well, yes, precisely. It’s all to do with the next hit song in the show which is “Would You…?” by Touch And Go. The story behind this one is that Touch And Go were a jazz pop ensemble led by one David Lowe who would go on to forge a career composing music for television, radio and commercials including the theme tune to the BBC News and has worked on such shows as The One Show, Panorama, Cash In The Attic and Grand Designs. In 1998 though, he was behind this almost novelty single which took a Herb Alpert trumpet solo and added the flat toned voice of a woman speaking the lines “I’ve noticed you around / I find you very attractive / Would you go to bed with me?”, hence the intro from Kate Thornton. It’s all rather bizarre but the sort of strange curio that could often flummox the UK record buying public into shelling out its hard earned cash to purchase it. And buy it they did, 200,000 copies worth to send it to No 3. Designed to be the ultimate icebreaker for supposedly reserved and tongue-twisted types in nightclubs (surely not!), its lyrics were inspired by a 1978 psychological study. If that’s piqued your interest, then here’s @TOTPFacts with the story behind the statement:

Those results remind me of an interview with Paddy McGuinness who said of the game show Take Me Out which he presented that they had to have women picking a man as if it had been the other way round, all the men would have just kept their lights on permanently.

It might have escaped your attention with everything else going on in the world (it did mine) but just last month one Prakazrel Samuel Michel was sentenced to 14 years in prison. Well, put like that it might not ring any bells but what if I said Pras of hip hop group the Fugees was sent down on criminal conspiracy charges for alleged illegal donations to President Barack Obama 2012 presidential re-election campaign? Yep, that’s the attention grabbing headline. Back in 1998 though, Pras was onto his second solo hit after the hugely successful “Ghetto Superstar” (That Is What You Are)”. After interpolating “Islands In The Stream” for that track, he once again used some very familiar source material as the basis for “Blue Angels” by sampling “Grease” by Frankie Valli. For me, this didn’t work nearly as well as its predecessor. It just didn’t have that immediate hook that pulled in pop and rap fans alike. There’s some very verbose rapping going in which somehow manages to reference the Bosley character from the Charlie’s Angels TV series which must be a first. However, by the end, as so often happens with these rap performances on the show, it descends into the artist shouting “wave your hands in the air like you just don’t care”. I bet Pras dreams of being so carefree in his current situation.

For me, one of the more surprising success stories of 1998 was Another Level. Yes, you could argue that although we’d had loads of boy bands in the UK during the 90s, we hadn’t had many with an R’n’B slant so maybe there was a gap in the market? On the other hand, there had been many a US R’n’B boy band in our charts and, indeed, we had one British example of the genre in Damage so was there room for another one? There proved to be at least another level needed on the UK R’n’B boy band car park and it was taken by…erm…those Another Level boys. Having already had two big hits this year (including the No 1 “Freak Me” no less), a third was always on the cards and so, just in time for the Christmas market, a ballad was released. Cynical? Maybe. Guaranteed sales? Certainly. Having said that, “Guess I Was A Fool” only spent four weeks on the Top 40 and just one inside the Top 10. Maybe that was because we’d seen the likes of this track all before done much better by groups like Boyz II Men whom Another Level seemed to be doing their best impression of here. A handful of hits would follow in 1999 for the AL boys but the game was up by the new millennium as they failed to progress to the next level (I’ll stop now).

The era of M People is nearly through but unlike the near title of that book by Edgar Rice Burroughs and subsequent 1977 film, I don’t think it has been a case of ‘The M People That Time Forgot’ (ahem). Nineteen charting singles in seven years plus three Top 3 albums is a pretty decent legacy to leave behind. Sure, not every one of those nineteen hits was a top drawer banger (anyone for their cover of “Itchycoo Park”? Thought not) but some of them were the most memorable hits of the whole decade. I’m thinking “One Night In Heaven”, “Moving On Up”, “Search For The Hero” etc but by the end of their run, some of the hits didn’t quite match up to their predecessors. Take “Testify” for example. Released as a new track to promote their first Best Of album, it’s not terrible but it’s not terrific either. My sixteen year old son would describe it as “meh” or “mid” I’m sure. I’m not sure that the title being a legal term and all is particularly suitable for a ballad or maybe it is. After all, a couple getting married to prove their love to each other also creates a legal contract in law between them. Maybe I’m just remembering it being used by Smash Hits magazine to describe the likes of Billy Idol pulling a fist clench move in concert and describing it as “testifying on stage”. “Testify” was the 18th of those 19 hits peaking at No 12 meaning that there might just be one final appearance for the group to come.

P. S. Whilst we’re talking about women’s hairstyles (as we were), mention must go to Heather Small and her various (mostly towering) looks that she has spotted down the years. Quite remarkable.

Cher is No 1 for a second week of seven with “Believe”. So, I guess we should address the issue of her vocals. Much was made in the press at the time that it was due to a vocoder which was a reasonable claim given its previous usage in music production. As far back as 1969, Sly and the Family Stone used it on a song on the album “Strand!” before electronic pioneers Kraftwerk took up the mantle alongside experimental jazz fusionist Herbie Hancock. Come the 90s, French electronic music duo Daft Punk consistently used the vocoder in their work so it didn’t seem too much of a stretch that it could feature on a global smash albeit from an unlikely source in Cher. However, that wasn’t actually true. The vocal effect had been achieved using the extreme settings of Antares Autotune, pitch correction software designed to correct sharp or flat notes in vocal performances. Keen to keep their technological discovery to themselves, the produces made the vocoder claim. However, the manual for subsequent releases of the software refer to that use of it as ‘The Cher Effect’.

After last weeks host Jamie Theakston referred to Cher as being no spring chicken but remaining a game old bird (or something like that), Kate Thornton doubles down on the ageist remarks by pointing out that the singer (no stranger to a variety of hairstyles herself down the years) was still two years older than her Mum. Was there meant to be a compliment in there Kate? If so, I’m not sure that there was.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Alanis Morissette Thank UNo
2BillieGirlfriendIt’s a no
3AerosmithI Don’t Want To Miss A ThingI did not
4Touch And GoWould You…?”No thanks
5PrasBlue AngelsNope
6Another LevelGuess I Was A FoolNever
7M PeopleTestifyNah
8CherBelieveAnd 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/m002ms9d/top-of-the-pops-06111998