TOTP 04 JAN 1990
YES! A brand new decade! Out with the old stuff and in with the groovy new tunes! 1990 is here at last in the world of TOTP Rewind and what fresh out of the box new acts, songs and musical directions await us? Well, it all looks very much the same as the show starts – same theme tune, same opening graphics and a very familiar presenter in Gary Davies. In an attempt to add some sparkle to the proceedings, Davies informs us that tonight’s show marks TOTP’s 26th birthday and also informs us that the show is live and that it will be “fast” and “frantic”. Ooh (Gary Davies)! The girl to Gary’s left in his intro has gone full on Lisa Stansfield in her choice of hat to top of her outfit that includes a Madonna style crucifix. All still a bit 80s sartorially then.
So who gets the honour of being the show’s first act on of the new decade? Oh, well…it’s The Quireboys. Hmm. Look, I didn’t mind their flavour of retro blues rock but maybe ‘retro’ wasn’t what was required when it came to the first act of a new decade. There was a lot of traffic on Twitter about this when BBC4 aired the repeat last week with many people comparing The Quireboys unfavourably to the opening act on the first TOTP of the 80s who were Madness apparently. The Nutty Boys were seen as much more deserving of the accolade. A bit unfair on The Quireboys maybe but I guess I can see where the Twitterati were coming from.
As for the song itself, “Hey You” would prove to be their biggest ever hit reaching No 14 paving the way for the parent album (“A Bit of What You Fancy”) to go all the way to No 2 in the charts. I didn’t buy the single but it did appear on a compilation called “Q The Album” (as in the magazine) that I purchased that had a very eclectic and not altogether coherent track listing. I think it was the first release in a long list that the publication lent its association to. To be fair most of the tracks were pretty decent but I couldn’t quite see the connection between, for example, Jesus Jones, Cowboy Junkies and erm..Elton John!
Well, say what you liked about The Quireboys but at least they had a ‘new’ tune we hadn’t seen on the show before unlike the majority of the acts on tonight with them. Yes, despite my trumpeting of a new start with a new year, a new decade and indeed a new blog, the majority of the songs on this show I have reviewed before in my old 80s blog. Bah! Here’s one of the blighters now – Madonna with “Dear Jessie”…
The fourth and final single to be released from her “Like A Prayer” album (in the UK at least – it wasn’t issued as a single in the US), it always seemed very out of synch with the rest of the album. All strings and whimsical lyrics, its nursery rhyme quality was nothing like “Express Yourself” or indeed the album title track. It would prove to be a passing affectation as her Madgesty came storming back later in the year with one of her best known and funkiest grooves ever in “Vogue”.
The animated video doesn’t help to tone down the cute-o-meter but if you do keep watching until the end and the (love) parade of characters including teddy bears, clowns and erm…roller skating bananas (WTF!) you get a glimpse of what looks very suspiciously like Gabriel the Toad from Bagpuss.
“Dear Jessie” peaked at No 5.
Another act that’s been reviewed before I think next in Silver Bullet. Adding to the never ending list of rappers with ordinary real names, comes one Richard Brown aka Silver Bullet who with his DJ (Mo) forged this rap track “20 Seconds To Comply” around the infamous Robocop sample. Supposedly their record company EMI wanted to make them into a “rap version of Bros” – the phrase ‘the mind boggles’ hardly does justice to the ludicrousness of such an idea.
I hardly remember Silver Bullet at all (always confusing them with So Solid Crew and their similarly entitled hit “21 Seconds To Go”) but online opinion suggests that they were responsible for something called ‘Britcore’ which was a faster, harder version of hip-hop and for influencing the likes of Prodigy and initiating the rise of jungle music in the 90s. Meanwhile Bros’s legacy was some distinctly average pop tunes and that documentary. Hmm.
Oh man! It’s another song I’ve already reviewed and another dance tune to boot! Latino Rave weren’t even a proper act at all but just a promo tool to flog the newly conceived “Deep Heat” dance compilation album issued by Telstar that would flood the market in the late 80s and early 90s. The clue was in the single’s title “Deep Heat ’89” just to make it absolutely clear what was going on here. Mixing together recent dance hits from the likes of Technotronic, Starlight and A Guy Called Gerald, it did what it was supposed to do I guess by climbing all the way to No 12 in the charts and establishing the “Deep Heat” brand in the process. All very cynical and manipulative in my book but then I wasn’t a clubhead so maybe I wasn’t the target audience.
Another song we’ve seen before and that was reviewed in my 80s blog now courtesy of Sonia who implores us to “Listen To Your Heart”. The Scouse Kylie has been shorn of her usual back up dancers for this performance and is up there selling the song all on her own – bless. It’s OK though as she’s beefed up her look by clearly having a look in Ms Minogue’s wardrobe and has half inched one of her trademark hats. She should have just asked that Lisa Stansfield wannabe lass from the top of the show if she could have borrowed hers.
Later in the year, an entirely different song but with exactly the same title would become a No 6 hit via Swedish soft rock peddlers Roxette thereby eclipsing Sonia’s effort by a whole four chart places. Arr ay!
And another! Yes, we’ve seen / heard this tune on the show before as well! This version of “The Magic Number” by De La Soul doesn’t seem to be the radio edit though – not entirely sure why TOTP chose to go with this remix.
I’ve always been very partial to this version though….
This was the last single to be released from the seminal album “3 Feet High And Rising” and would be the last we would see of the trio for over a year before they would return with the rather unwieldly entitled single “A Roller Skating Jam Named Saturdays”.
A new song! Hallelujah! It is yet another Italian house tune though…49ers were co called, according to Gary Davies, because vocalist Dawn Mitchell (didn’t she used to be in Eastenders?) was the 49th vocalist to audition for them. Really? Surely the band’s name must have had something to do with American football team the San Francisco 49ers?! Surely?! Even if we believe Davies’s story, that must mean that there were 48 singers worse than Dawn Mitchell?! I’m not even sure she was the singer on the track as the original vocalist was someone called Ann-Marie Smith but Dawn Mitchell was brought in to ‘front the band’. Ah that old chestnut! Like the woman who fronted Black Box then. Talking of whom, “Touch Me” very much has the feel of “Ride On Time” to me with its statutory component parts of pounding beats and uplifting piano. No wonder it made No 3 in the charts.
49ers followed this up with a single called “Don’t You Love Me” which I don’t recall at all while DJ and producer Gianfranco Bortolotti would go onto have multiple hits with house act Capella in the mid 90s.
Yay! Another ‘new’ song! Oh, it’s by New Kids On The Block though. Yes, the NKOTB (or T’KNOB as I like to call them) phenomenon was just getting into full flow by this point. To follow up their No 1 success with “You Got It (The Right Stuff)”, they re-released “Hangin’ Tough” which had flopped outside the Top 40 in September of ’89 but which would become their second consecutive No 1 single in the UK this time around whilst also being the first ‘new’ No 1 of 1990.
After the American sports connection of previous act 49ers, we now get another one immediately as “Hangin’ Tough” was written to be a sports anthem, specifically a theme tune for basketball team Boston Celtics. Oh right – hangin’ as in hanging on the basketball hoop after a slam dunk? Is that what they meant all along? Anyway, it was meant to be their version of “We Will Rock You” by Queen but isn’t “We Are The Champions” Queen’s sports anthem? Whatever, as well as possibly their most well known song for its dumb ass “oh oh oh oh oh” chant- a- long refrain, “Hangin’ Tough” also sucked big time (seeing as we seem to have dived head first into American culture). Just awful.
OK, back to the previously seen hits and it’s yet another dance track, this time by Rob ‘n’ Raz featuring Leila K with “Got To Get”. Leila was a bit like a Swedish Betty Boo it strikes me watching this back – “Got To Get” isn’t a million miles away from the likes of “Doin’ The Do” is it?
Hang on, Swedish you say? Yes, all three of them hailed from Sweden which presumably is the prompt for Gary Davies to advise us to “Watch out for some good music coming out of Sweden this year” at the song’s end. Who could he have meant? Swedish music acts? Well obviously there’s Abba but he can’t have meant them. Who else? Ace Of Base wouldn’t appear for another three years and in any case , nobody would have described them as good surely? Far too early in the decade for The Cardigans. Hmm…Army Of Lovers of “Crucified” fame? Maybe. Oh, I’ve got it. The aforementioned Roxette – it must be them. Hardly a Swedish invasion was it? To be fair to Davies, as the decade progressed, the Swedes did make an impression on the UK charts with the likes of The Wannadies, Whale and erm…Rednex all having hits on our shores whilst The Hives continued that run into the new millennium. Maybe Gary was on to something after all.
“Got To Get” peaked at No 8.
So to the No 1 which, as it’s only a week or so since Xmas, is still the festive chart topper which in 1989 was Band Aid II with “Do They Know It’s Christmas”. I’ve said everything I want to say about this in my 80s blog but serendipitously there is a timely tie in as one of the guest vocalist on the track was of course Sir Cliff Richard and it just so happens that as I write this post, I note that today (14th October) is his 80th birthday. I’ll type that again… His. 80th. Birthday! Unbelievable. So he was how old when he did Band Aid then?
* performs some basic mental arithmetic*
My God he was 49! That’s younger than I am now. I am as old as f**k!
The play out track is yet another dance track in “Going Back To My Roots” by F.P.I. Project feat. Sharon Dee Clarke. This was of course an Italian house version of the Odyssey 1981 hit and as with De La Soul earlier, this appears to not be the radio edit as it is an instrumental version. Just weird. Why bother having the act perform in the studio if it’s basically just two dancers up front going through some very perfunctory dance moves. Where was vocalist Sharon Dee Clarke? As result all we get basically 1 minute and 40 seconds of the TOTP studio audience constantly labouring through the ‘Woo! Yeah!’ chant that was de rigueur for any commercial house tune at this time. Ever wonder where that all originated from? Here’s @TOTPFacts with the answer…
I’m assuming that the three waist coated geezers in the background trying to gee up the crowd are Marco Fratty, Corrado Presti, and Roberto Intrallazz, whose surname initials spell out the act’s name (F.P.I. Project- geddit?). Yes, Gary Davies that’s F.P.I. Project and not “Rich In Paradise” which was the name of one of the songs that are sampled in the track, specifically by Honesty 69. I take it all back. Davies wasn’t onto something – he didn’t have a clue what he was on about.
For posterity’s sake, I include the chart rundown:
| Order of appearance | Artist | Song | Did I Buy it? |
| 1 | The Quireboys | Hey You | No but as I say, it was on that Q Album compilation that I bought |
| 2 | Madonna | Dear Jessie | No but my wife had the album |
| 3 | Silver Bullet | 20 Seconds To Comply | No |
| 4 | Latino Rave | Deep Heat ‘89 | I’d have rather covered my genitals in Deep Heat muscle rub than bought this |
| 5 | Sonia | Listen To Your Heart | As if |
| 6 | De La Soul | The Magic Number | No but my wife had their album |
| 7 | 49ers | Touch Me | Nah |
| 8 | New Kids On The Block | Hangin’ Tough | No but I think my younger sister may have been into them and bough it |
| 9 | Ron ‘n’ Raz featuring Leila K | Got To Get | I really didn’t feel the need to get this at all |
| 10 | Band Aid II | Do They Know It’s Christmas | I bought the ’84 version but not even charity could make me part with my cash for this one |
| 11 | The FPI Project | Going Back To My Roots | Nope |
Disclaimer
OK – here’s the thing – the TOTP episodes are only available on iPlayer for a limited amount of time so the link to the programme below only works for about another month so you’ll have to work fast if you want to catch the whole show.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000n7g4/top-of-the-pops-04011990
I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).
All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.
Some bedtime reading?
http://likepunkneverhappened.blogspot.com/2019/12/december-27-1989-january-9-1990.html
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 