Roachford

TOTP 10 OCT 1997

Three days after this TOTP broadcast, Zoe Ball and Kevin Greening hosted their first Radio 1 breakfast show having replaced Mark and Lard who were shifted to an afternoon slot. On the same day, Chris Evans, who Mark and Lard replaced, started his own breakfast show on Virgin Radio. I was never quite sure why it didn’t work out for Radcliffe and Riley in that morning slot because I used to love their afternoon show which I always used to have on in the back room of the record shop I worked in if I was in there on my own. Maybe their brand of humour didn’t sit well with people on the move in a morning? That their show wasn’t pitched at the right pace? I never used to listen to Ball and Greening so I have no opinion on whether they were any better and I can’t be bothered to look up RAJAR listener figures to compare but I’m guessing that they weren’t as big a draw as Chris Evans?

Anyway, the presenter for this TOTP also had a history of replacing Mark Radcliffe but only on a temporary basis. Mark Lamarr had sat in for Radcliffe’s late night Radio 1 show as guest presenter occasionally. Ah, so maybe that’s why he was being considered as part of the TOTP host roster at this time – he had some BBC radio credentials as well as his roles as team captain on Shooting Stars and host of Never Mind The Buzzcocks. I was wondering about that in a previous post. This was the third of fourth time that he’d hosted the show and he gets this one off to a very odd start. Having done away with any theme tune, new executive producer Chris Cowey brings it back for this one show after Lamarr seemingly takes too long learning his opening intro. A reader of this blog did alert me recently that this was coming but I wasn’t prepared for the bizarre optics we actually got – Lamarr’s face on a big bank of screens checking with someone off camera what the top of the show intro is before he then gets cut off abruptly and we get the titles and the old theme tune and then straight into the opening act. It just looks odd though I’m guessing it was meant to be an attempt at humour.

Anyway, said opening act are…a bunch of 12 year olds by the look of them. Who on earth were Catch? I know I say this all the time and it’s made worse by the fact that I was working in a record shop back then but I can’t remember this lot at all. The band’s backstory is that they emerged from a previous incarnation of a group headed by singer Toby Slater called Brattish who never actually gigged nor released anything. Slater was involved in the short lived ‘Romo’ movement…hang on. The what? I have no memory of that either which apparently was based around two club nights (Club Skinny in Camden and the West End’s Arcadia). Its sound was characterised by being either art glam, Hi-NRG/Handbag House or a cross between Adam Ant, Roxy Music, Pulp and Blur depending on who you talked to. There were specific bands allied to the movement of whom I’ve never heard of any (Plastic Fantastic or DexDex Ter anyone?) but it generally seemed to be a rejection of the back-to-basics approach of Britpop. It sounds to me like it was just a re-invention of the New Romantics. According to those in the know though, Catch were more indie-pop than Romo and I guess you could describe their only UK Top 40 hit “Bingo” as that. However, it’s not your standard indie fare. It has an intriguing quality to it. The verses have a tinny sounding rhythm track that reminds me almost of something that Frank Sidebottom would have warbled along to. Slater’s vocal gives a nod to Jilted John of “Gordon is a moron” fame (aka John Shuttleworth aka Graham Fellows) before the chorus explodes into life. I can’t deny that I quite like it in a juvenile kind of way. The lyrics describe a rites-of-passage, journey of discovery by the song’s protagonist who admits he’s 17 (Slater was actually 18 at the time of this TOTP performance) and knows nothing of the world with his carnal knowledge especially weak so he goes to a red light district to…erm…enlighten himself. Slater’s youthful appearance helps to deliver the message.

“Bingo” would peak at No 23 but a follow up single just missed the Top 40. An album remained unreleased in this country and was only made available in Indonesia. In a bizarre and unwanted pop history footnote, “Bingo” was the song being played on a repeat of The Chart Show in the early hours of 31 August 1997 when the programme was interrupted by ITV to announce the death of Princess Diana. They never stood a chance did they? After splitting in 1999, Slater formed a couple more bands without commercial success and would tragically die aged just 42 in 2021.

From edgy teenagers to what many would call the definition of musical blandness. Is that discrediting of the Lighthouse Family fair? Or is it just an inevitable consequence of gaining popularity by playing a fusion of easy listening and soul music that appealed to the masses? I’m sure that back then, I would have balked at the idea of admitting even the slightest liking of them to my way cooler record shop work colleagues but was I actually at the other extreme of the spectrum holding onto a hatred of them? No, I don’t think so. I saw somebody online describe them as “offensively inoffensive” which I guess equates to someone being described as ‘nice’ (though I wouldn’t knock that description given the character of the people currently running the world).

“Raincloud” was the lead single from their second album “Postcards From Heaven” but they didn’t suffer from ‘difficult second album syndrome’ like some have in the annals of pop history (Stone Roses, ABC, The Jam) – it sailed to No 2 in the charts and went four times platinum in the UK. It seemed that there were more believers in than dissenters of their mainstream sound. Listening back to “Raincloud” though, those accusations of the band’s style lacking substance and being lightweight may not have been that wide of the mark – it’s fairly unremarkable fare. The next single was “High” which is widely regarded as their best tune (maybe). I guess we’ll be seeing that one in a BBC4 repeat soon enough. For now, I’ll leave the final word to Peep Show’s Super Hans…

The next performance is just weird. Ironically, the song being performed is completely mundane and ordinary. It’s the staging that I’m taken aback by. So, some details first. The artist is The Seahorses who are in the studio to perform their third hit single “Love Me And Leave Me”. The track was co-written by John Squire and one Liam Gallagher, a fact which Mark Lamarr has taken to run with for a cheap gag in setting up his intro as he suggests Liam’s only contribution to the song was coming up with the word “and” in its title. It’s not a very funny line and I’ve heard it done better in a self deprecating way by Andrew Ridgeley of Wham! When interviewed by Simon Bates on Radio 1 which words did he contribute to the writing of “Careless Whisper” he replied “the…and…”. Anyway, Lamarr proceeds to stroke Squire’s knee for some unfathomable reason and then hangs around on stage while the band performs for about half of the song. What was all that about? Was he channeling the spirit of that 1971 TOTP performance by the Faces when they invited John Peel on stage with them to mime playing the mandolin? If that wasn’t weird enough, why are there nearly a dozen random people dotted about the stage looking bored? Why are the band (except singer Chris Helme) all seated? Why…well, just why?

As for the song, it’s no “Love Is The Law”. In fact, it’s pretty dull which, on reflection, was a disappointing state of affairs just three singles into the band’s career. It starts off like a companion piece to John Lennon’s “God” with its lyrics about not believing in Jesus nor Jah but then just sort of drifts off into a cosmic trance with Helme singing about ‘astral bars’ and ‘heaven here on earth’. It’s all very unsatisfying which pretty much sums up The Seahorses. They would only release one more single before splitting up. John Squire would return to that writing partnership with Liam Gallagher 27 years later when they recorded an album together that would top the UK charts.

Did someone mention the Faces earlier? Yes me, obviously. Well, I’m going to mention them again because the next hit shares the same name as one of their songs (and albums). The 1997 “Ooh La La” by Coolio wasn’t anything to do with the English rockers though but rather it owed a lot to Grace Jones and her classic track “Pull Up To The Bumper” which it samples. So much of a debt did it owe to the esteemed Ms Jones that she was repaid with a writing credit on Coolio’s hit for a hit indeed it was peaking at No 14 though it would be his last in the UK. Just as well if this was an example of the direction he was going in. The lyrics to this one are just a load of sexual innuendo. “Deep in the pink”, “Stalk through the bush” and “keep it all wet all weekend” are just some of his double entendres that Viz’s Finbarr Saunders character would have found juvenile. At some points, he can’t even be bothered to disguise his filth and so we get lyrics like:

“Pull up your skirt and we can do it on the pool table…Your nipples look so tender, can I twirl ‘em in my mouth like a blender”

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Sly Dunbar / Robbie Shakespeare / Dana Manno / Artis L. Jr. Ivey
Ooh La La lyrics © Warner-tamerlane Publishing Corp., Boo Daddy Publishing, Oji Music, Chenana Music, Songs Of Polygram Int., Inc., Polygram Int. Publishing, Inc., Ixat Music, Inc.

Gulp! That last line can’t have got through the BBC censors surely? Let me watch the performance back with subtitles on…

Well, I can’t hear exactly what Coolio is rapping as it’s muffled (presumably on purpose) but the subtitles have replaced ‘nipples’ with ‘knees’ because that makes sense! I know “Pull Up To The Bumper” was also accused of having sexual innuendo hidden in its lyrics but it was surely more subtle than this twaddle?! Aside from all the nastiness, I think there’s a case for another writer credit in addition to Grace Jones as the chorus is filled with the phrase “doo-wa-diddy” as in “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” as made famous by Manfred Mann but actually written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Well, Coolio’s first album was called “It Takes A Thief”.

Andrew Roachford has had a lengthy and remarkable career in music – he’s been at it for nigh on 40 years, released twelve studio albums with his band, been in Mike + The Mechanics and, in 2019, was awarded an MBE for services to music. However, if success was judged purely on the number and size of his hit singles, it wouldn’t look so impressive. I make it eight Top 40 entries over a 36 year period and look at the peak positions for those eight:

4 – 25 – 22 – 21 – 36 – 38 – 20 – 34

The obvious ‘biggie’ is that first one which was “Cuddly Toy” from 1989. Do you think when an artist has one big hit early in their career that it becomes a millstone around their necks or are they just glad and proud to have had at least one? Anyway, the seventh of those hits was this one – “The Way I Feel” – which was the lead single from Roachford’s fourth studio album “Feel” and, against the odds, it would become his second biggest hit ever eight years after his first. It’s a pretty good tune but one I missed completely at the time. I’m pretty sure I saw him live at the Manchester Academy around 1994 but that was because the Sony rep who used to sell into the Our Price store I was working in put me on the guest list as we were both Chelsea fans!

As with Garbage and Skunk Anansie, Roachford is another artist whose back catalogue I should be better acquainted with. This scene from Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa shouldn’t be his only legacy…

After four years of constant hits including a No 1 no less with their last single release, bizarrely, the time of Eternal was almost at an end (not so eternal after all then). Maybe they (or their label or management) knew their sell by date was fast approaching as, in a not necessarily obvious move, instead of mining their “Before The Rain” album (which had only been out for six months) for more hits, they went straight to a Greatest Hits project. Now you’d usually expect that type of release if a group had formally announced that they were splitting up (as per Take That) not at the point of a commercial high. And yet, the Greatest Hits album was a success – No 2 in the charts, three times platinum selling, the highest selling hits package of the year and in 2013 was confirmed as the biggest selling best-of album by an all girl group in the UK.

To promote the Greatest Hits, a new song “Angel Of Mine” was released as a single. To my ears, it’s a serviceable R&B ballad but not much more and yet in America, where it was released by Monica, it went to No 1 and was the third best selling single of the year over there. Eternal’s version peaked at No 4 and would be their final Top 10 hit – of their fourteen singles released up to that point, only two had not made the Top 10. It was also the group’s last single as a trio as Kéllé Bryan left the group after being sacked by fax by Vernie and Easther Bennett’s solicitor with the sisters citing “a breakdown in professional relations”. The UK record buying public had little desire for an Eternal duo though and they would achieve just one more Top 20 single before bowing out of the music business. Numerous reunions have taken place over the years though never with all four original members. That holy grail line up for the fans was nearly green lit in 2023 but was nipped in the bud after Louise and Kéllé withdrew following the Bennett sisters apparent refusal to play LGBTQ Pride events.

I’ve said it before but I’m saying it again – I don’t/didn’t get the Backstreet Boys. I know I wasn’t their target audience (I was 29 at this point) but I just couldn’t see their appeal. Yes, they had some very slickly produced pop songs but they were just a poor man’s New Kids On The Block weren’t they? They weren’t even that good looking! “As Long As You Love Me” was a textbook example of their output. A mid-tempo ballad that was perfect for daytime radio playlists (I still hear it played on stations like Magic to this day) but oh so dull. No, not dull…cynical. A song concocted by an evil, mad pop scientist in the laboratory of dark and terrible music.

As with Mark Lamarr at the opening of the show, there’s something disconcerting about the set up of these performances with the artist having a backdrop of giant TV screens behind with their huge fizzogs plastered all over them whilst they run through the song on stage. It’s all a bit overbearing and, in the case of Eternal who had the same arrangement for their appearance immediately before the Backstreet Boys, disorientating as the order of the group on the screens wasn’t the same as where the girls were standing on stage (even though Kéllé and Vernie swapped positions halfway through).

Elton John remains at No 1 with “Candle In The Wind ‘97” / “Something About The Way You Look Tonight”. Despite it being the best selling single in UK chart history, it didn’t guarantee Elton’s next release being a huge hit. “Recover Your Soul”, taken from “The Big Picture” album would only manage a chart high of No 16 which, proportionally, must be one of the biggest drops in popularity between releases ever. Off the top of my head, I can think of the Bee Gees following up their chart topper “You Win Again” with the single “E.S.P.” which stalled at No 51 but the Elton scenario is next level I think.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Catch	Bingo	Nope
2	Lighthouse Family	Raincloud	I did not
3	The Seahorses	Love Me And Leave Me	Negative
4	Coolio	Ooh La La	Never
5	Roachford	The Way I Feel	It’s another no
6	Eternal	Angel Of Mine	Nah
7	Backstreet Boys	As Long As You Love Me	As if
8	Elton John	Candle In The Wind ‘97 / Something About The Way You Look Tonight	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/m0029vc0/top-of-the-pops-10101997?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 07 APR 1994

Posted on March 7, 2023 by 80stastic

We’re a week into April 1994 here at TOTP Rewind and the world of music is about to be rocked to its core by a tragic event. The day after this TOTP aired, the body of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain was found at his Seattle home after he had committed suicide. The coroner estimated the time of death to have been around three days earlier. He was 27 years old when he died, joining the bizarre list of musicians, artists actors and other celebrities who passed away at that age. The rock world’s ‘27 Club’ members included Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Robert Johnson and Pete de Freitas before Cobain became its latest member. Amy Winehouse would add to its number in 2011 whilst Manic Street Preacher Richey Edwards was also 27 when he disappeared in February 1995 though legal process meant that he wasn’t declared dead for another seven years. I recall the tabloid front pages carrying that image of his corpse with just his protruding legs visible which seemed very invasive even back then. I’d never been a huge Nirvana fan but this was shocking news.

As the story didn’t break until the following day, TOTP makes no mention of it which is probably just as well as I’m not sure that chirpy host Andi Peters would have provided the right tone for any reference. Peters was a regular face on our TVs at the time. He’d graduated from Children’s BBC’s The Broom Cupboard to co-presenting the corporation’s Saturday morning kids show Live & Kicking. He was a face. However Andi, in the same way that Gary Lineker knew that he had to diversify to maintain a career after kicking a football for a living had to end, saw possibilities behind the camera rather than in front of it. He went on to be TV producer for shows such as The Noise, The O–Zone and Shipwrecked. He reached the pinnacle of that part of his career in 2003 when he returned from whence he came to be executive producer of a relaunched version of TOTP (rebranded as All New Top of the Pops). Failing to build the show’s falling audience, Peters resigned his position after two years following the show being moved to BBC2. Nowadays, you can catch him on Good Morning Britain promoting the show’s latest competitions. He’s still annoying, though in his defence, he doesn’t look a day older than he does here in 1994. My mate Robin knew him when he worked at the BBC. He got Robin to moonlight on the aforementioned The Noise show where he ended up being coerced into doing the conga with the Spice Girls. No, really.

No sign of the Spice Girls on this TOTP though (they wouldn’t arrive until 1996) but there are some big names on the show and some…well…not so big ones. We start with one of the latter. Black Machine anyone? This is quite unfair of course on your blogger as I struggled to say anything about this lot the last time they were on the show which was only last week and seeing as they were the play out song then, I’m having to comment on them twice in a row! Well, I’m nothing if not a trier so here goes. “How Gee” sounds very 1990 to me. What was that song by Chad Jackson? “Hear The Drummer Get Wicked”? Yeah, it sounds like that to me. Performance wise, they’ve clearly taken inspiration from The Blues Brothers with a robust back four of Jake and Elwood lookalikes while the front two rappers bust some moves. Sticking with the movie theme, “How Gee” was featured in the 2021 movie House Of Gucci starring such stellar names as Lady Gaga, Al Pacino, Adam Driver and Jared Leto. Sadly for Black Machine, they would not become a huge name in the world of music despite, as the TOTP caption says, “How Gee” selling a million copies worldwide.

It’s the ‘Battle of the Exclusives’ on tonight’s show according to Andi Peters starting with Erasure who are back after a year away with a track called “Always” from their sixth studio album “I Say I Say I Say”. I’d always liked Andy and Vince going right back to their debut single “Who Needs Love Like That” back in 1985 which used to get played at 17 years old me’s nightclub of choice The Barn in Worcester.

However, by 1994 I was starting to lose sight of them. Although “Always” is classic Erasure in many ways with its usual hooks and bitter sweet vocals from Andy Bell, I don’t recall it at all despite it being another huge hit for them (it was Top 10 all around Europe and No 4 in the UK). Why would I have suddenly become disinterested in a band that had soundtracked the whole of my student days? Had I decided that they weren’t 90s enough? I’m not sure but I do know that I never really rediscovered my enthusiasm for them after this point. Looking at their discography, I couldn’t tell you what any of their subsequent singles sounded like and the only album of theirs I own post the 80s is their 2013 Christmas one called “Snow Globe” that a friend bought me for…erm…Christmas.

https://youtu.be/LWunhP_vPKk

A huge tune by a huge name incoming! I say name but I think Prince was actually, officially going by that squiggly symbol in 1994. Or was it The Artist Formerly Known As Prince? Or TAFKAP? Or just The Artist?Or even Love Symbol? Whatever it was, he was doing it to display his displeasure about the working relationship between him and his record company Warner Bros. Records. Annoyed that they wouldn’t release his new material at the speed at which he was delivering it to them, he started to appear in public with ‘slave’ written on his face (he was infamously lampooned by Blur drummer Dave Rowntree who appeared on TOTP with ‘Dave’ writ large on his cheek).

Prince felt that the poor sales of his 1992 “Love Symbol” album was down to Warners not marketing it sufficiently and so he asked to release his single “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World” on his own NPG label. In doing so, he demonstrated that there was nothing that he couldn’t do when he came up with a devilishly clever marketing campaign for the single. He essentially placed a lonely hearts ad in various magazines asking women to send in photos to his Paisley Park complex and from the fifty thousand who did, he selected seven finalists to be in the single’s video and thirty semi finalists to be on the artwork for its cover. The single was a huge global hit including No 3 in the US and No 1 over here, famously his first and only in the UK (not counting Chaka Khan and Sinéad O’Connor who took covers of his songs to the top of the charts).

I always viewed “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World” as a bit of an anomaly. Firstly, there was it being released on his own label which as I recall meant it be distributed by Pinnacle in the UK rather than Warners which was odd. Then it didn’t appear on an album until 18 months later when “The Gold Experience” finally came out. Lastly, it seemed overly commercial for a Prince song. Was he writing a big, radio friendly hit to order as Warners had asked him to or was it some kind of “F**k you” from him to them with him showing that he could do all of that but he was planning on leaving Warners and therefore this was a “Here’s what you could have had” moment? I’m tending towards the latter. The fact that a lawsuit for plagiarism was successfully brought against Prince makes me think even more that he was giving Warners the finger. The song the courts found that he stole from was by one Raynard J and was called “Takin’ Me To Paradise” and was published by Warners’ own publishing company. That Prince made his point using a song that was already part of their catalogue just adds more spite to their dispute. To be fair to Prince, I can’t hear too many similarities between the tracks.

I should have mentioned earlier that there was another artist message this week before the titles began. This time it was from Pet Shop Boys who are on the show later. This was becoming a regular feature! And then, after the Prince video, we get another one from Take That who are in Germany but are on the show later as *SPOILER ALERT* the chart toppers. It all seems a bit pointless but I guess it was producer Ric Blaxill demonstrating that TOTP was still the show that the stars wanted to be on.

A new artist now as we get a first look at Tony Di Bart. This guy was almost the classic case of a perfect One Hit Wonder. Almost. The perfect template is to come from literally out of nowhere, have a No 1 record and promptly disappear never to be heard of again. This would have been the fate of ex-bathroom salesman Tony if not for the fact that he had one other minor hit as the follow up to said No 1. Curses! The Di Bart chart topper was “The Real Thing” (that dastardly second hit was “Do It” which made No 21) and was what was presumably described at the time as a ‘dance floor filler’.

I have to admit to not getting any of this little footnote in pop history at all. I thought the record was awful – I couldn’t stand his nasal voice – and didn’t understand at all why it would be a No 1. OK, maybe it was big in the clubs but it didn’t seem to have the crossover appeal that something like Haddaway’s “What Is Love” had. Also, with the best will in the world, Tony was hardly the most charismatic performer when it came to delivering the song. I mean, whether you liked “The One And Only” or not, you could see that Chesney Hawkes was a good vehicle for it but Tony? So how did it happen? I don’t know is my honest answer. Right place, right time? We’ll be seeing Tony again so maybe I’ll become more informed as to how this all came about on repeated viewings.

As with Haddaway last week, the next act on is somebody that I associate with 1993 entirely yet here he is in 1994 still having major hits. Bitty McLean shot to fame with a Fats Domino cover in “It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes)” and I thoroughly expected him to have his 15 minutes and then disappear but he actually managed to keep himself in the charts to the tune of seven hit singles of which “Dedicated To The One I Love” was his fourth. A cover of a song made famous by The Mamas And The Papas, it gave him his third Top 10 hit. I did find all these reggae-fied cover versions of pop standards a bit tedious I have to say but then it worked wonders for his mates UB40 who had huge hits like “Red Red Wine”, “Breakfast In Bed”, “I Got You Babe” and “(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You” so why wouldn’t he have gone down the same route? Fair play to him but it just did nothing for me. Bitty would go on to work and tour with dub reggae legends Sly and Robbie and in 2017 he delivered lectures on Jamaican music production techniques to the Westphalia School of Music in Philadelphia which is consistently ranked as one of the top music programs in the US. Maybe Bitty had better reggae credentials than first met the eye.

Next to a band that were on the verge of calling it a day. Little Angels had been consistent hitmakers since the start of the 90s with nine chart entries though only one of them had managed to make it into the Top 20. They had, however, achieved a No 1 album with “Jam” in 1992. So why had they decided to break up the band just two years later? Had they fallen out with their record company Polydor? Had they fallen out with each other? I don’t have the answers but they did go out with their second biggest hit ever when “Ten Miles High” peaked at No 18. Looking at the lyrics to the song, it certainly seems like it’s a valedictory track with lines like “Ten miles high and the end is in sight” and there’s also a reference to their humble beginnings and their journey to fame with “Down by Scarborough beach to the Madison Square”. Talking of Scarborough, the TOTP captions, which disappeared halfway through on a recent show, are back with a bang but couldn’t they have found something more complimentary to say about the band other than that they were from the seaside town given that this would have been their final TOTP appearance?

Little Angels released a Best Of later in the year entitled “A Little Of The Past” and played a sold out six date tour culminating in a final gig at the Royal Albert Hall. Inevitably, they reformed in 2012 for some festival dates but have not done anything together since 2013.

It’s a second time on the show now for Roachford and “Only To Be With You” and I still can’t find a clip of either TOTP performance on YouTube. The last time they were on, the single was languishing outside the Top 40 at that unluckiest of chart positions No 41 but good fortune was on Roachford’s side as new producer Ric Blaxill gave them a prime slot anyway and the exposure propelled it up the charts. This time around they are twenty places higher at No 21 which perhaps shows that the show still had the power to make hits. Or maybe not. Despite this performance, the single went down the charts by one place the following week. It’s all very confusing.

Time for the second contender in ‘The Battle of the Exclusives’ now as Pet Shop Boys enter the ring to duke it out with Erasure. It seems somehow fitting that it’s these two artists as they always seem to go together in my mind. There’s some obvious reasons for this. Both are duos, both made synthesizer heavy pop music, both came to prominence around the same time (‘85-‘86) and both had a gay vocalist (Neil Tennant actually came out as gay in this year via an interview with Attitude magazine to the surprise of nobody). There’s one more thing though. As with Erasure, Pet Shop Boys had soundtracked my youth but by 1994 I was losing sight of them as well. Again, I’m not sure why but I didn’t seem to be interested in any of the albums they released during the rest of the decade. Maybe it was that dreadful Comic Relief song (“Absolutely Fabulous”) that finally put me off. Neil and Chris got along very well without me of course still making some fine tunes and indeed, all was not lost for me. 2002’s…ahem…”I Get Along” single was a great pop tune and just last year I finally got to see them live (the date had been postponed for two years due to the pandemic) and they were great. Back in 1994 though, I was struggling to care. This single – “Liberation” – is classic Pet Shop Boys ballad territory akin to “Being Boring” or “Jealousy” but it just seemed to pass me by.

There was a lot of fuss about the song’s video which was almost completely CGI and also had a 3D element to it which made it perfect for Cyberworld, an early 3D cinema demonstration which was shown on IMAX screens and touring roadshows throughout the UK. Given all that expense and hype, there was no way that Neil and Chris weren’t going to incorporate it into their performance here which, as Andi Peters points out, you can’t miss.

So who won ‘The Battle of the Exclusives’? Per Shop Boys edge it performance wise for me thanks to that video but Erasure got the biggest chart peak of No 4 whilst “Liberation” trailed in at No 14. However , it was the fourth of five singles taken from their “Very” album so maybe that was a factor.

The aforementioned Take That are No 1 (of course they are) with “Everything Changes”. Their fourth single to go straight in at No 1, not even Slade, The Jam, Queen nor Elvis could match that.

I said the other week that though I didn’t think much of this song, if it had been one of Wham!’s poppier moments, would we have been lauding yet another George Michael classic? I’ve worked out why I drew that comparison now; “Everything Changes” has a distinct flavour of this track from Wham!’s “Make It Big” album:

Now I find out though that this wasn’t a George Michael original after all but a cover of an Isley Brothers song! I hate it when a plan falls apart!

The play out track is yet another cover. I have to say that I have zero recall of A.M. City’s take on “Pull Up To The Bumper” by Grace Jones. The reason for that is probably because it only made No 83 in the charts and the reason for that was that it was dreadful. To say that Ric Blaxill made a big deal of predicting new entries in the Top 40 for the following week by means of a rolling script across the screen during the No 1 record, he was bloody awful at picking them for the play out music. How many duds is this now? Two? Three? Get your game together Ric!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Black Machine	How Gee	No
2	Erasure	Always	I think we’ve established that I was losing interest by this point
3	Prince	The Most Beautiful Girl In The World	I did not
4	Tony Di Bart	The Real Thing	No – I didn’t get it at all
5	Bitty McLean	Dedicated To The One I Love	Nope
6	Little Angels	Ten Miles High	Nah
7	Roachford	Only To Be With You	Negative
8	Pet Shop Boys	Liberation	See 2 above
9	Take That	Everything Changes	Never
10	A.M. City	Pull Up To The Bumper	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001jf1y/top-of-the-pops-07041994

TOTP 17 MAR 1994

Posted on February 23, 2023 by 80stastic

The era of the TOTP ‘golden mic’ is here! Well, not here as in the here and now but in March 1994 where we are up to with these BBC4 repeats and when the idea was first used. This was the brainchild of new producer Ric Blaxill to shake things up with some guest presenters from the worlds of pop and comedy (mainly) and he was certainly on the money with the first holders of the mic. Take That were the most popular band in the country and their two most popular members were Mark Owen and Robbie Williams (I’m guessing). Unfortunately, they weren’t the best at presenting (possibly due to the distraction of the attention of the young girls in the audience) but at least the change had been set in motion.

And so to the music and we start with a huge song whose legacy would far outlast its sales history. Not that it didn’t sell many copies (it did – 600,000 according to Wikipedia) nor that it didn’t achieve a high chart peak (its No 5 position easily outdid any numbers that the band had done previously) but it feels to me like it was really the start of something – we weren’t sure what it was or what it would look like but it was coming.

“Girls & Boys” by Blur surprisingly only remained on the UK Top 40 for five weeks and only two of those were in the Top 10 (hence my comment above about sales history) but that doesn’t detract from its impact. On first hearing this just sounded mental! What’s he singing about? Girls who want boys to be girls?! WTF?! It was bewildering and utterly transfixing at the same time. Then comes the realisation that this is Blur – the indie band who seemed to have struggled to find an identity for themselves after their first hit “There’s No Other Way” introduced them and their frankly silly haircuts. (apart from drummer Dave Rowntree of course) back in 1991. Sophomore album “Modern Life Is Rubbish” saw them reposition themselves as the second coming of The Kinks and The Small Faces with its theme of Englishness and stance of fighting back against the pervasiveness of American culture. It had also seen them settle into a pattern of middling sized hits – the three singles from it made Nos 28 (twice) and 26. Suddenly they were straight into the charts, week one at No 5 with this song that sounded like nothing they had done before. This was a seismic change.

Apparently inspired by the hedonistic clubbing scene in Magaluf, it was named single of the year by both Melody Maker and the NME. So what was it that the song was heralding? Britpop? I’m not sure but the impact of the song was made clear to me one morning at work when our shop cleaner who was lovely and always made me a cup of tea first thing asked me if she could buy the single on my staff discount before she finished her shift. This was totally against the rules of course but how could I refuse? Anyway, this was the first time she’d ever mentioned music to me despite the fact that she was working in a record shop every morning but something about “Girls & Boys” made her not only talk about it but want to buy it.

It was, of course, the lead track from the “Parklife” album which was released about six weeks later in late April. Many, many words have been written about that album and I’m not arrogant enough to think I have anything new and interesting to add to the collection of essays, articles and posts. However, for the record, my recollection of hearing it for the first time on the shop stereo was that it was loud. Yes, that was the extent of my critical faculties when it came to appraising Blur’s iconic masterpiece. It was loud. Sheesh!

Was this Alison Moyet’s last ever time on TOTP? I think it might have been. A twelve year run starting on 29th April 1982 with the debut appearance of Yazoo with “Only You”, through the big solo hits of the mid 80s to this last hurrah in 1994 with “Whispering Your Name”. Quite a ride.

I wrote about Alison’s struggles for artistic freedom with record company Sony in the last post. This single was a danceified version of a more acoustic take that features on her album “Essex” that Sony insisted on to make it a more commercial package. Those wrangles would lead to Alison eventually leaving Sony but it would take eight years before she was released from her contract with them. Wanting to maximise every bit of revenue out of Alison, Sony released her first Best Of album in 1995 called “Singles” which, somewhat surprisingly given that her last major chart hit prior to “Whispering Your Name” had been in 1987, went to No 1 selling 600,000 copies. Sony still weren’t finished there though. The following year they rereleased the album but with a bonus CD of live recordings taken from Alison’s last UK tour. The expanded album charted again inside the Top 20.

Freed from Sony, Moyet has gone on to record five solo albums including the critically lauded “Other” in 2017 and, to my mind (and ears), remains one of the finest singers the UK has ever produced. TOTP Rewind salutes you Alison.

https://youtu.be/owMkj-PjjAM

Despite his legendary rock status, by 1994 Bruce Springsteen had only visited the Top 10 of the UK singles charts three times and all of those entries came from his most commercial album “Born In The USA” (and one of those owed its success to being double A-sided with “Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town” if we’re being honest). Then came “Streets Of Philadelphia” which would take him all the way to No 2 becoming (and what surely will remain) his biggest ever hit here. Written specifically for the Jonathan Demme directed Philadelphia, it won an Oscar in the category of Best Original Song, four Grammys and a Golden Globe Award.

The film was one of the first mainstream Hollywood movies to address the issues of HIV/AIDS and homophobia and would earn Tom Hanks the first of two consecutive Best Actor Oscars for his role as gay corporate lawyer Andrew Beckett who believes he is fired from his firm as a result of his diagnosis with AIDS. I caught the film at the cinema at the time and found it a very affecting piece. Springsteen’s sombre song certainly added to its power. Even goofy Robbie Williams displays a moment of seriousness in his intro to the song when urging people to go and see it as they might learn something from it.

The video of Bruce walking along various Philadelphia locations is pitched just right to provide a visual montage for the song. It wasn’t, however, the first piece of music from a film that included such a visual tour of the city:

I’m on record a few times in this blog as stating that I’m not a fan of Björk mainly because of not being able to appreciate her rather unique vocals. I have to say though that revisiting her back catalogue via her TOTP appearances is starting to make me reconsider. This is the fourth single of hers that I’m quite liking. After “Venus As A Boy”, “Play Dead” and “Big Time Sensuality”, I presumed the run would come to an end with “Violently Happy” but not quite.

The fifth and final single released from her debut solo album…erm…”Debut”, whilst it isn’t the sort of thing that would ordinarily be top of my go to playlist, there’s something rather captivating about this hypnotic track. Simple but addictive House beats combine with Björk’s acquired taste delivery of lyrics that speak of a dangerous state of being when separated from an all encompassing passionate lover. It’s heady stuff. To paraphrase Howard Jones, these BBC4 repeats are challenging my preconceived ideas. “Violently Happy” peaked at No 13.

The second of three consecutive female solo artists on the show tonight as Tori Amos makes a quick return to the charts with “Pretty Good Year”. The second single from her “Under The Pink” album and the follow up to surprise No 4 hit “Cornflake Girl”, this was also a Top Tenner peaking at No 7. Tori was starting to become a big hitter in chart terms. However, nothing would ever come close to replicating those hits apart from the 1996 remix by Armand van Helden of “Professional Widow” which unfeasibly went to No 1.

“Pretty Good Year” is…well…pretty good but doesn’t have the kooky power of its predecessor although it does have a rather spooky eight bars near the end where Tori wails on about things melting and whether her baby is alright. Nothing to do with The Wizard Of Oz or the Wicked Witch of the West (“I’m melting, I’m melting!”), Tori is on record as saying that it’s about a letter she received from a fan called Greg who told her that he felt that the best parts of his life had already happened and that his future was finished despite being just 23. Tori stated that she saw that pattern repeated in young men in every country she visited. I guess learning to love yourself isn’t always easy but as George Benson once sang it “is the greatest love of all”.

After two let’s say left-field or perhaps outré or maybe even uncompromising female singer-songwriters in Björk and Tori Amos comes someone who it strikes me is currently desperately trying (too hard) to be all three of those things to remain relevant. Madonna was still one of the biggest names on the planet in 1994 but today she seems determined to provide the press with ammunition to knock her down. The whole Madame X project made for some unflattering headlines as has her appearance recently, raising concerns within her fans about hitting the cosmetic surgery a bit too hard lately. Maybe she can restore some of her former glories with her recently announced Celebration Greatest Hits tour though it’ll have to be quite a show to justify the ticket prices quoted online.

Anyway, back to 1994 and, as I said, Madonna was still a huge global superstar but she had rather upset a few people with her projects in the 90s so far. A coffee table book called Sex, an album entitled “Erotica” and a starring role in an erotic thriller called Body Of Evidence had lowered the tone rather so a rather safe ballad was released by Warner Bros. “I’ll Remember” was yet another song from a film soundtrack but Madonna, for once, was not in the movie it was from. After “Into The Groove” (Desperately Seeking Susan), “Who’s That Girl” (Who’s That Girl) and “This Used To Be My Playground” (A League Of Their Own) had all been from flicks with Madge herself in prominent roles, she was nowhere near the cast for With Honors which I’ve never seen but which sounds like a stinker from its reviews online. Its soundtrack however did sound interesting. Featuring the likes of The Cult, Lyle Lovett, Belly doing Tom Jones’ “It’s Not Unusual”, Kristin Hersh and Michael Stipe, plus a track by Seattle grunge rockers Mudhoney called “Run Shithead Run”, it might be worth seeking out. Next to that lot, Madonna sounds positively mainstream but maybe that was the intention.

“I’ll Remember” is a pleasant enough ballad being built around a choppy, synthesised keyboard part though it wasn’t a million miles away from her last single release “Rain”. The video is very similar to the promo for it as well with both featuring Madonna with black, short cropped hair in a recording studio. All seems a bit unimaginative and last minute to me. What do I know though as “I’ll Remember” was nominated for a Grammy and a Golden Globe award (she lost out to Springsteen’s “Streets Of Philadelphia” for the Grammy). The single did the business commercially as well going to No 2 in the US and No 7 over here.

New TOTP producer Ric Blaxill was tinkering with the show’s format rather than being the new broom in his early weeks. Yes, he had got rid of presenters Tony Dortie and Mark Franklin and brought back some Radio 1 DJs to replace them but other changes took their time to appear. The titles and theme tune were still the same and features like the Breakers and live by satellite performances were still there. However, all would change in time with the Breakers being first for the chop in just a couple of weeks. Another innovation was the showcasing of songs that weren’t actually in the Top 40. We’d already seen some play out songs at the end of the show not go on to be fully fledged chart hits and now here was a proper slot for a single not actually in the Top 40 at the time of the performance.

Roachford had struggled to match the success of their biggest hit, 1989’s “Cuddly Toy” in the years that followed it despite releasing some decent material. By 1994, they were onto their third studio album from which “Only To Be With You” was the lead single. The single was at No 41 at the time of this TOTP appearance but that exposure propelled it to a high of No 21 eventually as well as spending three weeks at No 22. It’s a lively, soul pop number with Andrew Roachford delivering a good vocal and parent album “Permanent Shade Of Blue” sold steadily if unremarkably off the back of it. I’m pretty sure I saw them live at The Academy in Manchester around this time but I think I only went as I got in for free thanks to the Sony rep John who used to sell into the Market Street store I was working at. He must have got me on their guest list or given me a free ticket or something.

Andrew Roachford is still making and releasing music to this day plus he was the vocalist for Mike + The Mechanics for a few years. He was awarded an MBE for services to music in 2019. By the way, I can’t find a clip of the TOTP performance so the official video will have to suffice.

Something odd is going on with the onscreen graphics in this TOTP. The show started off with each artist getting its own little description to go with its basic name and song title details. So Blur got ‘New entry in Top 5’, Alison Moyet got ‘Climber in Top 30’, Bruce Springsteen had ‘Highest New Entry Björk even received ‘Double Platinum Album Seller’! And then it pretty much stopped. Tori Amos got nothing at all (not even the basic artist/song title tile. Neither did Roachford and nor did the next act Roxette. What was all that about?! Did the graphics person get distracted and leave their desk for about 15 minutes?!

Anyway, Roxette are indeed back with a new single called “Sleeping In My Car”, the lead single from their fifth studio album “Crash! Boom! Bang!”. Although the album shifted 100,000 copies in the UK, it was nowhere near the double platinum sales of “Joyride” just three years before. That didn’t stop muggins here from completely over ordering it at the Our Price in Market Street, Manchester where I was working. Oh dear. What was I thinking?! The single did OK peaking at No 14 though all subsequent releases from it suffered from a case of diminishing returns.

“Sleeping In My Car” is orthodox Roxette although the lyrics are filthier than normal :

My heart is going boom
There’s a strange taste in my mouth
Baby babe, I’m moving real fast
So try to hold on
Try to hold on
Sleeping in my car, I will undress you
Sleeping in my car, I will caress you
Staying in the backseat of my car, making out
So come out tonight
I’ll take you for a ride
This steamy ol’ wagon
The radio is getting wild
Baby babe, we’re moving so fast
I try to hang on
Oh, I try to hang on
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Per Gessle
Sleeping in My Car lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner Chappell Music, Inc

Blimey! I haven’t heard lyrics like that about sexual shenanigans in the back of a car since Bon Jovi’s “Never Say Goodbye”:

Rememberin’ when we used to park
On Butler Street, out in the dark
Remember when we lost the keys and
You lost more than that in my backseat, baby
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Jon Bon Jovi / Richard S. Sambora
Never Say Goodbye lyrics © Bon Jovi Publishing, Polygram Int. Publishing, Inc.

Marie looks like she’s had a haircut for this performance but that isn’t what really catches my attention. No, that would be the drummer who drops a stick midway through the song and sheepishly has to go and pick it up. Crash! Boom! Bang! indeed.

“Doop” by Doop? I’d rather have “Doot- Doot” by Freur or ‘squiggle’ as they were otherwise known. Yes, 10 years before Prince tried rebranding himself as a symbol, these Welsh synth poppers beat him to it. They gave in to record company pressure for a more pronounceable name and “Doot-Doot” was their biggest hit peaking at No 59. They would morph into Underworld of “Born Slippy” fame in the 90s.

What has this got to do with Doop?! Nothing but it’s far more interesting than that awful Charleston nonsense that was still at No 1.

https://youtu.be/jSySwTpTZG8

The play out tune is “U R The Best Thing” by D:Ream. This was the follow up to the No 1 single “Things Can Only Get Better” and in a rather unlikely twist of fate, was the second time it had been the follow up release to that single. Back in January 1993, TCOGB had made No 24 on its initial issue and “U R The Best Thing” outdid it by 5 places when it followed it in the April. In fact, this 1994 release was the third time it had been out after being D:Ream’s very first single in 1992 when it peaked at No 72. It was a very confusing time!

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Blur	Girls & Boys	No but I bought Parklife (the album). Didn’t we all?
2	Alison Moyet	Whispering Your Name	Nope
3	Bruce Springsteen	Streets Of Philadelphia	No but I must have it on something
4	Björk	Violently Happy	I did not
5	Tori Amos	Pretty Good Year	No
6	Madonna	I’ll Remember	Negative
7	Roachford	Only To Be With You	It’s another no
8	Roxette	Sleeping In My Car	Nah
9	Doop	Doop	Of course not
10	D:Ream	U R The Best Thing	And no

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001j656/top-of-the-pops-17031994

TOTP 02 MAY 1991

Posted on July 27, 2021 by 80stastic

We’ve made it to May 1991 here at TOTP Rewind which can only mean two things; the culmination of the football season and the Eurovision Song Contest. Football-wise, the England team was indebted to little Dennis Wise who scored one of the most undignified, scrappy goals ever witnessed at international level with this goal vs Turkey in a European Championships qualifier the day before this TOTP aired…

As I recall, the general consensus was that it went in off his backside. Still, they all count. As for Eurovision, the 1991 contest took place in Rome on the Saturday and…well more about what happened there later.

Tonight’s show is hosted by the interminably smug Simon Mayo and he promises us “The most incredible opening to TOTP ever, ever seen, I mean it…”. Wow! That’s some promise! Who could he have been referring to? Well, if it’s 1991 then it could only be The KLF and indeed it is as they had crashed into the charts at No 3 with their latest single “Last Train To Trancentral”. So, did the performance live up to Mayo’s hype? Not for me sadly. Yes, there was a crowd of people up there on stage so it had more numbers than most acts and yes they were wearing white robes with Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond also sporting a bull horn protruding from their hoods which was presumably all meant to signify something ‘other’ and ‘cultish’. Maybe a better word would be ‘unpalatable’ as the imagery reminds me of The Klu Klux Klan and some sort of satanic ritual. They don’t do much though do they apart from jog around in a circle at the end and shout ‘Woo Woo!’ or is it ‘Mu Mu!’? Apparently the lady in the Native American headdress is Cressida Cauty (Jimmy’s then wife) who now goes by the name of Cressida Bowyer and is currently at the University of Brighton’s School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences where she been doing ground-breaking research into liver cancer. Seems a hell of a lot more productive than playing silly buggers and shouting “Woo Woo!’ on TV to me.

Mayo was wrong about another thing as well. His confident proclamation that “Last Train To Trancentral” would be a No 1 proved to be false as it stalled at No 2. Ha! Take that dullard!

Whilst 1991 was undoubtedly the year of The KLF, it was also an annus mirabilis for Cathy Dennis. We’d last seen Cathy back in 1989 when she was the featured vocalist on D-Mob’s “C’mon And Get My Love” single but here she was, striding out on her own with “Touch Me (All Night Long)“. Now I had no idea until now that this wasn’t a Cathy Dennis original (which was a surprise given her career as a prolific songwriter post being a pop star) but was in fact by somebody called Fonda Rae who had a minor hit with it it 1984 (it also had a Slade style spelling as it was entitled “Tuch Me (All Night Long)”). Wanna hear it? Ok then…

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

I say it’s not a Cathy Dennis original but she did rewrite the verses retaining just the chorus hook. The track proved to be a winner both with pop fans and dance heads as it went to No 5 in the UK Top 40 and No 1 in the US dance chart. Is that what Mayo meant when he did another of his predictions as he says in his introduction that “Touch Me (All Night Long)” was about to be No 1 in the US? If he meant the Billboard Hot 100 chart then he was wrong again as it peaked at No 2.

Anyway, back to Cathy and the single lit the touch paper for her career as she racked up a further three Top 40 hits this calendar year, all coming from her debut solo album “Move To This” which itself was a UK No 3, gold seller. For a while she looked like she had everything – the songs, the appeal, the looks and the moves. She certainly looked a better bet for longevity than some of her peers like Dannii Minogue. Unfortunately the two years between this and her next album saw grunge happen and she lost a lot of ground and her place in the scheme of things from which she never really recovered. Her final album as a recording artist, 1997’s “Am I The Kinda Girl?”, rode the Britpop zeitgeist and was critically well received but floundered commercially peaking at No 78.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbs1nxEKTuQ

OMD are next or that should really be OMD Pt II as this is the version of the band without founding member Paul Humphreys. I like the fact that remaining original Andy McCluskey didn’t see any need to change his renowned and wonderfully awful dancing style despite the band’s new era. He explained the back story of his dancing in an interview in The Scotsman, saying that it stemmed “from the perception that we were making boring robotic intellectual music that you couldn’t dance to. I was trying to say, ‘No, no, you can dance to it, look, I’m dancing to it…”. Hmm. It was famously dubbed the ‘Trainee Teacher Dance’ by DJ, presenter and writer Stuart Maconie. At least Andy went for a leather jacket look and not a comfy cardigan with patches on the elbows.

“Sailing On The Seven Seas” peaked at No 3 whilst parent album “Sugar Tax” went platinum. Fast forward 30 years and that quip by Mayo that the album’s title was “as good a name for a tax as any” looks pretty silly doesn’t it given that just last week we heard of government plans to raise a sugar and salt tax to help to break Britain’s addiction to junk food.

OK, we arrive at the Eurovision part of the show. The UK entry for 1991 was Samantha Janus with a little ditty called “A Message To Your Heart”. The contest took place in Rome on 4th May and by this point in our history, the UK had only finished outside of the Top 10 once since 1978. Indeed, we’d finished 2nd twice on the spin at the end of the 80s and had been a respectable 6th the previous year. Twelve months on and our competing song was once again written by Paul Curtis who had penned the previous year’s entry, “Give A Little Love Back To The World” by Emma. Whereas that song had an environmental theme, “A Message To Your Heart” was all about those in the world suffering from poverty and starvation with the lyrics offering up a contrast of the have and have nots with lines referring to those who “are hungry just from being born” and those of whom “their only hunger being greed”. That was all very laudable but the sound of the song was completely at odds with its lyrics in that it was defiantly up tempo. In this TOTP performance, Janus ploughs on through it like a soft rock anthem with plenty of air grabs, fist clenches and tossing of her hair. She also does a lot of grinning, smiling and there’s that little prayer hand gesture which reminds me of Aneka of “Japanese Boy” fame. It’s not really her fault I guess – it just doesn’t make any sense in the context of the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FxO3WAbn4w

Come the day of the contest itself, Janus was given the 20th singing slot out of 22 performers. I’m not sure that helped her and neither did her pink mini-dress outfit when singing about poverty and starvation…that and her dreadful out of tune singing obviously. Samantha finished 10th overall which was seen as quite the disaster back then but which would be seen as a right result these days. Janus was devastated though and thought it would spell the end of her. Fortunately for her, she recovered and went onto have a very successful acting career both on stage and on TV with her most memorable role being that of Ronnie Mitchell in Eastenders I would imagine though my personal favourite of her shows was Game On.

As for the UK ‘s relationship with Eurovision, we recovered some ground during the rest of the 90s with three 2nd place finishes building to our last win with Katrina and the Waves in 1997. Since the turn of the century though, it’s all pretty much turned to shit.

“A Message To Your Heart” peaked at No 30 in the UK charts.

I never knew Nomad had a second hit! Well, if I did I’d forgotten all about it but here is the follow up to “(I Wanna Give You) Devotion” called “Just A Groove”. Right, let’s have a listen to it then…

…my God that was awful! There’s no tune in there at all. It’s just a backing track with some bullshit lyrics about Nomad having the music. Vocalist Sharon D. Clarke went on to have a Laurence Olivier Award winning acting career and has appeared in many West End productions and also had a wide TV career appearing in shows such as Soldier Soldier, Eastenders and most recently in the eleventh series of Doctor Who. Now I don’t know if it’s that bit of info which is causing me to hear this but it when she’s singing ‘Nomad’s got the groove’ it sounds a bit like ‘Nomad’s Dr Who’.

If that wasn’t weird enough, check this lot of trivia out. Having already discussed in length the 1991 Eurovision Song Contest earlier in the blog, it turns out that, in 2000, Sharon took part in the Eurovision qualifier A Song for Europe as part of Six Chix who came second to Nikki French. Now if you know your 90s chart history, that name will ring a bell as Nikki scored a No 5 hit in 1995 with a dance version of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. However, 9 years prior to that in 1986, she recored a song called “Dirty Den” released under the name Whiskey and Sofa. Dirty Den? Eastenders? The soap that Sharon appeared in? Weird no? Oh suit yourselves!

Meanwhile band member Steve McCutcheon, known professionally as Steve Mac, would go on to a hugely successful record producer and songwriter career having had a hand in 30 No 1 singles in the UK chart including four for Irish boyband Westlife. However, he was still clearly honing his skill backing 1991 as “Just a Groove” peaked at a lowly No 16 and was Nomad’s last ever UK chart hit.

Simon Mayo’s smugness gets an outing again next as he informs us all that “Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” by Paul Young and Zucchero was an old Record of the Week on his Radio 1 Breakfast Show and that it is now shooting up the charts. Yeah, whatever Simon. Presumably this wasn’t anything to do with your own musical choice but was the result of a deal brokered between the record company and the Radio 1 playlist team made up of producers, music editors etc.

Back to Zucchero and Paul though and last week, the hashtag Keith Lemon was trending on account of the Italian singer’s resemblance to Leigh Francis’ comedy character. However, somebody this week posited the theory that he looked more like Coronation Street‘s Jim MacDonald. Let’s have look then…

Nah, definitely Keith Lemon for me.

“Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” was taken from Paul’s very first Best Of collection called “From Time To Time – The Singles Collection” which was a huge seller in the UK. Since then, his record label Columbia have released a further eleven Paul Young Best Ofs under various different titles. That’s more than double the amount of studio albums he recorded for them! Talk about getting the most out of your money!

“Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)” peaked at No 4.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEJ9W2Rdmpw

After being a Breaker last week, Frances Nero has leapt up the charts nine places which warrants a studio performance of “Footsteps Following Me”. The title of the song sounds pretty sinister when you think about it. Having examined the lyrics, it seems to be about the need for trust between lovers with phrases like ‘I am allergic to jealousy’ and ‘love without freedom will die’. There’s also a line which is utterly banal and lazy and that line is ‘free as a bird high in the sky’. Oh come on! Primary school kids could write better than that!

“Footsteps Following Me” peaked at No 17 whilst Frances Nero sadly passed away in 2014.

Chesney is gone – toppled by the might of Cher and an old 60s song that was included on the soundtrack to her latest film Mermaids. It’s not quite how I imagined him going out really. Surely someone more ‘happening’ (as the TOTP hosts were likely to say) in 1991 like The KLF or Seal would have been expected to dethrone *Chezza? Cher though? I for one didn’t see it coming.

Within a few short weeks of “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” being at No 1, Cher released an album called “Love Hurts”. Nothing very exceptional about this of course but there are couple of little anecdotes about the album’s release that I recall. Firstly, “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” wasn’t on it. Except that it was. What am I banging on about? Well, it wasn’t included on the US release of the album as the single had not been anywhere near as popular over there where it peaked at No 33. Across Europe however, it was huge and was a No 1 in Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Norway and the UK of course. Consequently, the European version of the album did include it as a bonus track. Presumably that decision helped to send the album to No 1 in the UK where it was a three times platinum seller.

Secondly, there was the issue of its cover. When it was originally released it had some weird mirror reflection artwork going on with a banner across it proclaiming the album’s title. This was the version released in North America and also the initial worldwide copies. Once we started re-ordering it at the Our Price I worked in, the albums that arrived had an entirely different image of a red haired (and very air brushed) Cher against a plain white background. What was that all about?

*Does the nickname Chezza work for both Chesney and Cher? Just wondering.

The play out video is “Get Ready!” by Roachford. Despite having released a dozen or so albums and more than 30 singles over the course of his career, Andrew Roachford says that somebody mentions his biggest hit “Cuddly Toy” to him at least once every day which reminded me of this…

“Get Ready!” peaked at No 22.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-ffbfKN-tg

Order of Appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	The KLF	Last Train To Trancentral	No
2	Cathy Dennis	Touch Me (All Night Long)	Negative
3	OMD	Sailing On The Seven Seas	Not the single but I’m sure it’s on a Best Of CD of their that I have
4	Samantha Janus	A Message To Your Heart	Of course not
5	Nomad	Just A Groove	Nah
6	Paul Young / Zucchero	Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman)	No but I bought that Best Of album with it on
7	Frances Nero	Footsteps Following Me	Nope
8	Cher	The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)	Yes but it was all a big mistake honest!
9	Roachford	Get Ready!	Yes albeit from the Bargain Bin

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/m000xw3v/top-of-the-pops-02051991

TOTP 25 APR 1991

Posted on July 25, 2021 by 80stastic

The record company release schedules were very busy back in April 1991 as there are 10 songs new to the charts on this particular TOTP. Also having a busy old time of it was one David Icke who had resigned from the Green Party and then held a press conference to announce to the world that he was a son of the Godhead and that the world was going to end in 1997 after a period of tidal waves and earthquakes. Four days after this TOTP aired, he appeared on Wogan and gave an interview that was catastrophic to his career and credibility.

The following month, a crowd of youths gathered outside Icke’s home and went all Life Of Brian by chanting “We want the Messiah” and “Give us a sign, David”. Oh dear.

He resurfaced when the pandemic struck suggesting that there was a link between the COVID-19 and 5G mobile phone networks. To think he just used to be that fresh faced sports presenter on Grandstand when I was a kid. I remember the media storm surrounding Icke at this time and in particular the reptilian conspiracy theory he promoted that shapeshifting lizard like aliens control Earth by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate human societies. Didn’t he even say that the Queen was a reptile? Fast forward 30 years and we are overrun by conspiracy theories including QAnon and the anti vaccination protesters in London this weekend. Icke and his son were at the latter by the way. Have we / Icke learned nothing?

Hopefully there will be no trace of a conspiracy theory or any playing of records backwards to reveal satanic messages in any of tonight’s acts…

…we start with EMF and their latest single “Children”. The third track to be taken from their “Schubert Dip” album, it was very much still in the same vein as previous hits “Unbelievable” and ‘I Believe” and maybe that was the problem. They were starting to sound a bit samey. Certainly there was a downturn in commercial fortunes with this one as it failed to make the Top 10 as its predecessors had and indeed only just scraped into the Top 20 at No 19. I mean, there was nothing wrong with it per se but watching the performance back, was there a tiny bit of melancholy in lead singer James Atkin’s eyes indicating that maybe this pop star lark wasn’t all it was cracked up to be?

A second album “Stigma” was released in 1992 but did little to reverse their decline in popularity and indeed was only in the charts for two weeks (its predecessor had charted for 19 weeks). By the time of 1995’s third album “Cha Cha Cha”, they had resorted to teaming up with another of tonight’s acts Vic Reeves for a version of The Monkees “I’m A Believer” which although a big hit (No3), failed to revive their career. Follow up single “Afro King” (which was actually fantastic) missed the charts and they disappeared before resurfacing in the new millennium for a series of reunions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVR_3TMq1hI

Just when I thought we’d got away without any conspiracy theory stuff, host Nicky Campbell (who seems to be on one tonight) hooks us back in with the old ‘what does EMF stand for?’ conundrum. Many a theory had been posited about this including ‘Epsom Mad Funkers’ but it was generally believed to be ‘Ecstasy Mother F*****s’. In any case it certainly wasn’t ‘Exciting New Music’ as Campbell jokes. Just lame. To be fair to Campbell, he did tweet this when the repeat was shown on BBC4 thereby demonstrating a bit of self knowledge at least:

Daughter turned it on. Torture. Watching is like the most painful therapy session ever. #totp pic.twitter.com/jVNlUmZmR6
— Nicky Campbell (@NickyAACampbell) July 16, 2021

I don’t remember this one at all …except I do. What am I talking about? Well, the track is “Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)” by De La Soul which I have no recall of but the chorus is nicked from “Name And Number” by Curiosity Killed The Cat which is still in my memory banks (some might say unfortunately). This was the lead single from their second studio album “De La Soul Is Dead” but the only single I remember from that was the next one called “A Roller Skating Jam Named “Saturdays”” and its ‘Saturday, it’s a Saturday’ chorus.

Wasn’t there some fuss about the album’s title and also its cover with its fallen over, broken flower pot and strewn flowers image? Did some critics read into it that it meant that the trio were splitting up? In actual fact, it was meant to refer to a change in musical direction and the dead imagery referred to the death (or at least a deliberate distancing from) the “D.A.I.S.Y.” (Da Inner Sound, Y’all) scene. Although the album sold pretty well (it went Top 10 in the UK), it seems to me that it is nowhere near as revered as their iconic debut “3 Feet High And Rising”.

“Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)” peaked at No 10.

This is the single I was meant to buy for my wife the other week but somehow I bought her home “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” instead! How could I get Vic Reeves and Cher mixed up?!

Me not buying my wife Vic Reeves single in 1991

For two years we had all been enamoured with Vic Reeves Big Night Out on Channel 4 (at least myself and my wife had been) and I think I’m right in saying that the second and final series had just aired the week before this single came out. That single was a cover of “Born Free”, the title song from the 1966 film of the same name sung by Matt Monro (hence Nicky Campbell’s name check at the end of the performance). However, it wasn’t that track that my wife wanted but the B side which was “Oh! Mr Songwriter” with which Vic always closed each episode of Big Night Out.

Coming off the back of the success of the TV series, the single was a huge success peaking at No 6 and was followed by an album called “I Will Cure You” later in the year which would make the Top 20 and include an actual No 1 record in Vic’s collaboration with The Wonder Stuff on a cover of Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy”.

Vic can’t resist subverting the norms of a TOTP performance here by having his backing singers indulge in a plate of sandwiches half way though whilst he shows the audience a flip chart of birds. Here’s Vic on that performance via @TOTPFacts:

Vic Reeves on his first #TOTP appearance: "I sang the song and they dropped a load of tinfoil down. They didn't tell me about it, and I swallowed half of it and started gagging halfway through the song."
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 16, 2021

By the way, I did ultimately correct my error and buy the Vic Reeves single for my wife so no conspiracy there.

One of the best singles of the whole decade next? Possibly. “Get The Message” by Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner super group Electronic appeared some 18 months after their first single “Getting Away With It”. The intervening length of time and the fact that “Getting Away With It” was so dominated by the distinctive vocals of Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant made it feel like this single was almost by a new artist altogether. And what a song it was! It just sits together effortlessly, an almost perfect combination of Marr’s musicality, Sumner’s low register singing and Primal Scream vocalist Denise Johnson’s wonderful vocal talents at the song’s coda. Plus there was that incessantly catchy, swirling ‘wah-wa-wa wah’ sound effect at the end of the second chorus.

An eponymous album followed in May and I remember there being some disappointment amongst punters that the track listing didn’t include “Getting Away With It”. I think there was an import version of it that did include that track if you were prepared to pay around £18 for the CD though I’m not sure we sold many of those in the Our Price I was working in. Subsequent releases have rectified that omission. The album was a big success peaking at No 2 and selling over a million copies worldwide. “Get The Message” itself peaked at No 8.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyW6AGB_P3I

Some Breakers and the TOTP producers are sticking with the pile ’em high strategy of the previous week as they cram 4 songs into 1 minute and 30 seconds. We start with Roachford whom we haven’t seen for nigh on two years. “Get Ready!” was the new single and also the title of their second album. I had a bit of a soft spot for Roachford – “Cuddly Toy” had been a floor filler at the Sunderland nightclub of my choice when I had been a student up in the North East – and though this track wasn’t anywhere near as immediate as their biggest ever hit, it was a bit of a grower I thought. It grew on me so much that I bought it in the end although it was from the bargain bin of our Summer sale later in the year. The album sold steadily though it was hampered by a lack of any further hit singles from it

I once saw Roachford live – it must have been about 1994 – as I got on the guest list for their gig via the Sony rep who came to our store. They were pretty good I have to say. Andrew Roachford would later join Mike + The Mechanics as their some time vocalist and also released an album as recently as 2020 called “Twice In a Lifetime” which charted at No 31 on the UK album chart – the first Roachford album to make the Top 40 for 23 years.

“Get Ready!” the single peaked at No 22.

Yet another AC/DC single! There have been a plague of them since I’ve been writing my 80s and 90s TOTP blogs. “Are You Ready” is their ninth Top 40 hit in the period I have covered and guess what? It sounds the same as all the other ones! No I don’t care, it does! Plus, the video is exactly the same as well – the band live in concert with Angus Young in his schoolboy uniform and Brian Johnson in his flat cap. Give it a rest! “Are You Ready” peaked at No 34 and was from the band’s gold selling album “The Razors Edge”.

I think I remember this next one or am I thinking of a different record altogether? Frances Nero had recorded for Motown in the 60s but her only UK Top 40 hit was “Footsteps Following Me”. Apparently it was written by Ian Levine, the man behind the UK Hi-NRG scene and who worked with a load of artists in the 80s including Pet Shop Boys, Bucks Fizz, Erasure, Kim Wilde, Bronski Beat and Bananarama. “Footsteps Following Me” peaked at No 17 and was dubbed by British DJs as ‘the soul anthem of the nineties’ (it says on Wikipedia).

What is that other tune that “Footsteps Following Me” reminds me of? Oh yeah, it’s this…

Did someone mention Bananarama earlier? Here they are doing The Doobie Brothers. I really don’t remember this but the internet tells me that their version of “Long Train Running” was the third single to be released from their “Pop Life” album and was basically only recorded to fill up the album track listing. The TOTP graphics team were at it again with this one calling it “Long Train Coming” which is probably another record altogether!

The 1973 original wasn’t a hit in the UK at the time but it was remixed in 1993 and became a Top 10 smash whilst this rather weedy sounding version by the Nanas peaked at No 30.

A bit of pop history now as the get our first national view of Blur. Hands up those watching this performance who thought this lot would become a giant figure bestriding the UK musical landscape for years to come? Yeah, me neither. I quite liked “There’s No Other Way” though I have to say. Somehow though, at the time, I didn’t feel the need to explore their debut album “Leisure” which was released a few months later. Had I done so and developed a loyalty to Blur three years before Oasis appeared, I may have been on their side in the war versus the Manc lads of 1995.

This performance though did little to convince me that they weren’t just another of those floppy fringed, indie bands like Ride but put into drug induced overdrive. Drug induced? Looks at the state fo Damon Albarn’s wide eyed stare and Alex James’s clueless leaping about. Both clearly under the influence. Don’t take my word for it though. Here’s Damon himself courtesy of @TOTPFacts:

Before playing "There's No Other Way" at the Reading Festival in 1999, Damon Albarn recounted Blur's #TOTP debut, saying "[Alex and me] both took an E before we went on stage. Before us, Vic Reeves was signing that 'Born Free' song… and he had all this glitter…"
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 16, 2021

"… And it was really nice, probably the best time I ever had at Top Of The Pops. And our record company gave us those drugs! Isn't that fucked up?" #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) July 16, 2021

The single peaked at No 8 whilst the album also went Top 10. Even so, their elevation into the national consciousness was still a good few years off. There’s no other way of seeing it though, “There’s No Other Way” was a statement of intent.

I said the other week that I didn’t remember “Seal Our Fate” by Gloria Estefan when it was included in the Breakers section. I clearly can’t have caught this episode of the show either as who could forget Gloria performing the single in that PVC dress?! Blimey! She has a whole parade of people up there on stage backing her (The Miami Sound Machine?) but nobody is looking at them. Erm…anyway…unusually the single was a bigger hit in the UK than it was in the US peaking at No 24 over here but only No 53 across the pond.

It was used in a Pepsi advert also featuring Gloria herself which I also don’t remember but here it is:

He’s still there for a fifth week at the top and as Nicky Campbell advises us, nobody had achieved such a run at No 1 since Paul Hardcastle with “19” in 1985. Was there some sort of music industry conspiracy happening to keep Chesney Hawkes in pole position for all this time? How could such a dastardly deed be done and to what end? Had anybody thought to ask David Icke about “The One And Only”?

Despite that plea from Jakki Brambles last week, Chezza doesn’t seems have had his locks shorn at all. To be fair, his brother on the drums has an even worse haircut. Are all those shrieks from the TOTP audience genuine or were they result of the floor staff whipping them up into a false frenzy? If Chesney-mania was a thing, it was very short-lived. Just one Top 30 single was to follow and that was that. Only Sajid Javid’s time as Health Secretary before he caught COVID himself was shorter. Chesney seems at one with himself and his time as a pop star though. He now lives in Los Angeles with his American wife Kristina and their three children and occasionally performs on the nostalgia circuit.

The play out video is “Quadrophonia” by Quadrophonia and guess what? I have zero recall of this one. This seems to be happening a lot lately. Back in the 80s I seemed to know every song that made the Top 40 (and a fair few that didn’t) but the 90s is proving a horse of a different colour altogether. Maybe I was out having a life as opposed to spending all my hours sat in a room listening to Radio 1.

Apparently this lot were a Dutch/Belgian electronic music collective – like we didn’t have enough of them clogging up the charts back then – who thought it would be a clever trick to make a play on words of the title of The Who’s 1973 album and the 1979 film it inspired. The sound that they came up with was a horrible noise. The end. Cue someone riding a Vespa over a cliff top at Beachy Head.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_K4yn4IIRI

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	EMF	Children	No but I bought that Afro King single the extra tracks on which were basically a mini greatest hits including Children
2	De La Soul	“Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)”	Nope
3	Vic Reeves	Born Free	Yes for my wife (eventually!)
4	Electronic	Get The Message	Not the single but I must have it on something surely?
5	Roachford	Get Ready!	Yes (albeit it from the bargain bin)
6	AC/DC	Are You Ready?	Not for this garbage no
7	Frances Nero	Footsteps Following Me	Nah
8	Bananarama	Long Train Running	No
9	Blur	There’s No Other Way	See Electronic above
10	Gloria Estefan	Seal Our Fate	Negative
11	Chesney Hawkes	The One And Only	I did not
12	Quadrophonia	Quadrophonia	Not likely

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/m000xw3q/top-of-the-pops-25041991

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