I’m nearly 26! Well, I’m not (I’ll be 55 next birthday) but back in 1994 I was four days from being that age. I know it’s a daft thing to say because 29 years is a long time but it feels like a lifetime ago. The memory is such a mysterious beast though. Certain things that I would have been able to reel off without hesitation at the time like the names on the staff rota I can now no longer raise from the depths of my recollection. Neither can I tell you what I did on my birthday that year. Yet, random snatches of conversation (that shouldn’t have been that memorable!) have lingered and endured. I wonder if I’ll remember all the songs from this TOTP…
N.B. The host this week is yet again the insufferable Simon Mayo who has his full weaponry of obscure and hopelessly unfunny one liners on display. I don’t propose to comment on every one as I have done previously as he doesn’t deserve the attention but be sure that they were all of his usual woeful standard.
Yep, this one’s in the old memory banks. Giving the reggae treatment to pop standards was quite the trend around this time and the latest act to jump on the bandwagon were BigMountain who scored a massive hit with their version of Peter Frampton’s “Baby I Love Your Way”. The perennial appeal of this song seems quite disproportionate to its quality to me. Not only was a live version of it a hit for Frampton himself in 1976 but it returned in 1988 as part of a medley with “Freebird” by Will To Power which went to the top of the US charts. And here it was again in 1994 only being held off the UK No 1 spot by Wet Wet Wet. Just like “Love Is All Around”, Big Mountain’s version was from a film soundtrack, RealityBites starring Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke and Ben Stiller.
I’ve talked about this film before because someone has to as it seems to be largely forgotten these days. Reflecting the angst of the Generation X demographic and channeling the grunge scene vibe (and I know that makes it sound really wanky!), it told the story of a group of friends and roommates whilst also breaking the fourth wall (sort of) with the character of TV network executive Michael (Ben Stiller). Supposedly, it now holds cult classic status but you never see it on TV or any of the streaming platforms. The soundtrack is actually pretty fab including the likes of Crowded House, Squeeze, U2, Lenny Kravitz and World Party. It was also home to another runaway hit in “Stay (I Missed You)” by the then unsigned Lisa Loeb And Nine Stories which was a US No 1 and UK No 6.
Back to “Baby I Love Your Way” though and I have to say I found the Big Mountain version a bit sickly and twee. I wasn’t the only person who wasn’t a fan of the song when it featured in another film…
TheBeautifulSouth burst onto the UK charts with a nest full of big hits after the break up of The Housemartins. Their first four singles released between June 1989 and September 1990 furnished them with chart positions that included No 1, No 2 and No 8. However, of their next seven releases, none got any higher than No 16 and three didn’t make the Top 40 at all despite all of them being quality tunes (bloody stupid British record buying public). Now I’m not suggesting that the band looked at this and thought “let’s release a cover version to arrest this trend” but that is what happened. “Everybody’s Talkin’” came to fame via the version recorded by Harry Nilsson that featured in the film MidnightCowboy and was a perfect choice to be given The Beautiful South treatment. Possessing of a delicate, fluttering melody, it was also a great showcase for the vocal talents of the recently recruited Jacqui Abbott. I think this may have been her first ever TOTP appearance which may explain her rather nervous looking demeanour.
“Everybody’s Talkin’” gave the band their biggest hit since their 1990 No 1 “A Little Time” when it peaked at No 12. A year after this they recorded another cover version, this time their take on The Mamas & The Papas hit “Dream A Little Dream” for the soundtrack of the film FrenchKiss. I’m pretty sure that it didn’t get a UK release as a single which caused record shop staff issues when trying to explain this to annoyed punters who had seen the film. The song being picked up for airplay by local radio stations didn’t help either. The band recorded a whole album of cover versions in 2004 called “Golddiggas, Headnodders and Pholk Songs” which would provide them with their final Top 40 hit in “This Will Be Our Year”. The Beautiful South split in 2007 famously citing ‘musical similarities’.
Another one that I definitely remember now which is surprising given it’s a dance tune but “Swamp Thing” by TheGrid was no ordinary dance record – this one had a banjo in it! Dave Ball (ex- Soft Cell of course) and Richard Norris weren’t exactly new to the UK Top 40 having previously visited its mid echelons with “Crystal Clear” and “Texas Cowboys” but “Swamp Thing” was by far their biggest hit reaching a nose bleed inducing No 3. Apparently, the banjo part wasn’t a sample having been played specifically by folk musician Roger Dinsdale though there were a couple of sampled spoken word bits in there. It was for all intents and purposes though, an instrumental track which maybe makes its commercial success more surprising. Maybe.
The accompanying video with the baby crawling about amongst some synthesiser instruments and equipment puts me in mind of the promo for “French Kiss” (the track by Lil’ Louis not the aforementioned film) which also featured a young child playing with some toys against a white background.
Of course, if you’re talking visual clips featuring banjos, it’s hard not to think of this…
No, don’t recall this at all but that’s hardly surprising given that “Fountain Of Youth” by Arrested Development was never released as a single. This appears to be an attempt by the TOTP producers to shoehorn an international artist onto the show just because they happen to be in the country. Simon Mayo tells us in his intro that they are his guests on his Radio 1 show the following day so why not get them on the BBC’s flagship music show while we’re at it? There was a problem though. Here’s @TOTPFacts with the story:
Arrested Development's current single "Ease My Mind" was falling from its peak of 33 to 35 in this week's singles chart, which made it ineligible to appear on #TOTP under the rules of the show at the time. It was the last of their four UK top 40 singles.
The solution was to create a space for them using the old ‘album track slot’ trick. The album in question was “Zingalamaduni” which was released the following week. However, it wasn’t a huge success, peaking at No 16 over here and massively underselling compared to their multi platinum debut “3 Years, 5 Months And 2 Days In The Life Of…”. I can’t say that “Fountain Of Youth” does much for me and who was the old fella on the raised stage at the back? Mr. Wendal perhaps? More to the point, what was he doing? Praying to the fountain of youth? Drinking an elixir from it? Or was he just watering a plant?
I said I wouldn’t spend any time commenting on Simon Mayo’s pathetic puns in his segues but his attempt to draw humour from “Shoop” by Salt ‘N’ Pepa by restyling it as adding salt and pepper to soup is truly pitiful. Anyway, this was a rerelease of a single that peaked at No 29 in 1993 but which was given another chance in the wake of the success of “Whatta Man” with En Vogue and this time it managed a high of No 13.
It’s a pretty groovy track with the ‘Shoop’ hook an instant ear worm and infinitely preferable to the only other songs I can think of with that word in the title – Cher’s version of “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” and “Exhale (Shoop Shoop)” by Whitney Houston.
Who couldn’t remember this? Is this the first time Pulp appeared on TOTP?*
*Yes, if you merge those two sentences then you almost get the title of Pulp’s first Top 40 hit and yes that was deliberate and yes, I’m a smart arse.
Of course, Jarvis and co had been around for a good 10 years by this point but “Babies” (the lead track from “The Sisters EP”) really did seem to draw a line under their early, rather gloomy work, and announce themselves as the coolest uncool anti-pop stars in the UK. Essentially a song about voyeurism that doesn’t end well for the protagonist, it wasn’t your typical pop song subject matter. And yet Pulp made it work and then some. Once the viewing public got a first glimpse of Jarvis and his idiosyncratic moves and looks to camera, his stardom was assured. His Bob Geldof / John Travolta style taunting of Wet Wet Wet only added to his appeal for many. Pulp had arrived.
In case you didn't catch it: taped instead Jarvis Cocker's jacket was a piece of paper with "I HATE WET WET WET" written on it – a phrase we'll all be screaming in another five or six weeks' time. #TOTPpic.twitter.com/xeCn6rDMf8
Well I definitely remember Pink Floyd releasing “The Division Bell” as it went to No1 in the album charts and we sold plenty of it in the Our Price shop in Manchester where I was working at the time. What I don’t recall is how it sounded as I’m pretty sure it never got played on the in store stereo (apparently record shop staff snobbiness was alive and well in 1994). Therefore, the single “Take It Back” which was taken from it is new to me. Listening to it now, I find myself asking “Is this really Pink Floyd? The Pink Floyd of “The Dark Side Of The Moon” and “The Wall” fame? because it sounds like a second rate Runrig to me.” Look, I’m no Pink Floyd devotee and I don’t own any of their albums so I may be committing heresy here but this sounds so lame. The video is awful too.
I think Mariah Carey must have been a friend of the show. How else do you explain her being on it in person so many times otherwise? “Anytime You Need a Friend” wasn’t what she said to producer Richard Blaxill when he was struggling to fill his running order but was the follow up to her recent No 1 single “Without You” and it was generally seen as a stand out track on parent album “Music Box” by critics as its gospel flavour allowed Mariah to dive deep into her record breaking vocal range. I guess it’s well produced and does a job but I’m not sure I would have remembered it without the prompt of this TOTP repeat. Mariah would see 1994 out with the release of that Christmas record which undeniably has lived longer in the memory than “Anytime You Need a Friend” and which peaked at No 8 here but was the first of her singles to miss the Top 10 in the US.
OK, so we all remember this one and some would no doubt wish that they could erase it permanently from their memories. It’s week one of fifteen at the top of the charts for Wet Wet Wet with “Love Is All Around”. My first observation of this performance would be why do they look like they’ve arrived hot foot from a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat? Oh, it’s meant to be a hippy / summer of love / flower power type thing is it? That would explain the long hair, the flowers inserted into the necks of the guitars and the bean bags I suppose? I think they may have lost people right from the start with this staging idea. Oh well. Just another 14 weeks to go. Channel your inner Jarvis Cocker people!
Oh, one last thing. There’s no play out tune this week. Not sure if this is a permanent change but it seems like a good idea given that the producers had wasted this slot on songs that didn’t even make the Top 40 played over a montage of visuals from the show that we’d all just seen.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Big Mountain
Baby I Love Your Way
Nah
2
The Beautiful South
Everybody’s Talkin’
Not the single but I have it on their Carry On Up The Charts Best Of. Don’t we all?
3
The Grid
Swamp Thing
No
4
Arrested Development
Fountain Of Youth
My wife had their first album but a second one was a purchase too far. No
5
Salt ‘N’ Pepa
Shoop
Negative
6
Pulp
The Sisters EP
No but I had seen them live the year before supporting Saint Etienne and they were by far the better band on the night
7
Pink Floyd
Take It Back
No I won’t – this was awful
8
Mariah Carey
Anytime You Need a Friend
Nope
9
Wet Wet Wet
Love Is all Around
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.
This is the eighth show since new producer Ric Blaxill took over the TOTP reins and by my reckoning the breakdown of presenter appearances after bringing back the Radio 1 DJs is as follows:
Simon Mayo – 4
Mark Goodier – 2
Bruno Brookes – 1
Robbie Williams and Mark Owen from Take That (guest presenters) – 1
What was this blatant favouritism for Simon ‘Smug’ Mayo?! I’ve stated my dislike for him many times on this blog but he seems to be even more self satisfied (if that were possible) since returning to the show after the three year hiatus imposed by the Stanley Appel era. It’s as if he’s subliminally saying to the watching TV audience “See, told you the show would suffer if I wasn’t on it”. Tonight, he’s full of football related comments during his segues (Mayo is a Spurs supporter) to show…what exactly? That he was an original ‘lad’ before ‘lad culture’ when into hyperdrive in the mid 90s? Nob.
Before the opening titles of tonight’s show we get a message to camera from Salt ‘N’ Pepa advertising their upcoming appearance later on live by satellite from New York and then we’re straight into it. Opening the show are D:Ream with “U R The Best Thing” although Mayo seems to have confused them with “Groove Is In The Heart” hitmakers Deee-Lite judging by his intro. “OK. Deee-liteful, deee-lovely… err…D: Ream” he quips in his intro. Yes, I know he hasn’t really confused the two acts and that he’s trying out what he believes to be a humorous line but it just isn’t funny. At all. Or is he yet again trying to demonstrate his huge knowledge of pop music. Ooh look at me! I know about a record that was in the charts four years ago! I say again…nob.
It is D:Ream though who surely couldn’t believe their luck given the chart run they were on. Having managed to carve out a couple of medium sized hits the previous year with this track and “Things Can Only Get Better”, they must have thought that those needed to be consolidated on with some new hit material. The usual pop career strategy wasn’t for them though as they embarked upon an even more successful commercial run using the same songs. Talk about recycling; D:Ream were pop’s great environmentalists! In their defence, this was a Perfecto remix of the original track just as “Things Can Only Get Better” was remixed for re-release and they did then put out some different tracks from their album as their next two singles. Their had been speculation that they would move onto “Unforgiven” and “Star/ I Like It” which had also been Top 30 hits in 1993. There is no defence of Peter Cunnah’s chequed suits though. This version of “U R The Best Thing” peaked at No 4.
What’s this then? A track by Soul Asylum that isn’t “Runaway Train”? Yes it is and it’s title affords Simon Mayo the opportunity to air his first side-splitting football reference of the night. “And now it’s Soul Asylum playing Eric Cantona’s favourite record “Somebody To Shove” he tells us, so obviously pleased with himself. His comment needs putting in context 29 years on to make sense of it. Cantona had been sent off twice in four days for violent conduct in the week that this TOTP aired. Ok, we get it Mayo but it’s still not a genuinely entertaining line is it?
Anyway, enough of my disdain for the host, what about the music? It seems that Soul Asylum were doing a D:Ream in that they were in a cycle of re-releasing singles one after the other. Their most well known song “Runaway Train” was originally released in June of 1993 and came to a premature halt at No 37. “Somebody To Shove” was pushed out as the follow up in the September and peaked at No 34. Then “Runaway Train” was given the green light again and this time ran as far as No 7 over the Christmas period. And finally “Somebody To Shove” was put into motion as its follow up for a second time in March 1993. I think I need some asylum for my poor brain let alone my soul. Was it all with it? Well, “Somebody To Shove” peaked two places higher on the UK charts second time around at No 32 and it’s a decent rock tune in the vein of recent chart stars Gin Blossoms but it didn’t have the cut through pull of “Runaway Train” in the same way that casual punters never went for any of Extreme’s material other than “More Than Words”. As for Eric Cantona, there was much worse to come the following year in the shoving stakes.
It’s another outing for that live by satellite performance from New York of “Dry County” by Bon Jovi next which acts as the soundtrack to the chart countdown. I haven’t got much else to say about this one having already discussed it previously so I’ll instead talk about their single previous to this one. Why? Well, it was called “I Believe” which was also the title of two different hit singles in the chart around this time by Marcella Detroit and Sounds Of Blackness. It got me thinking about how many other songs there are called “I Believe”. Well, there’s EMF’s follow up to “Unbelievable”, Tears For Fears’ fifth single from their “Songs From The Big Chair” album and the song that both Frankie Laine and the execrable Robson & Jerome took to No 1. My personal favourite though, if we ignore the brackets, is Stevie Wonder’s “I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)”. As Alan Partridge might say ‘lovely stuff’.
I’m guessing that if asked to come up with a list of boy bands from the 90s, WorldsApart wouldn’t be one of the first names on it. Take That? Obviously. Boyzone? Of course. Westlife? Indubitably. East 17? Were they a boy band? Go on then. After that you might have to delve a bit deeper to come up with names like 5ive, 911, A1 and Another Level. Then there’s the American counterparts that made huge impacts both sides of the Atlantic. New Kids On The Block, Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, even Hanson maybe? Worlds Apart though? Well if you were asking the question in the rest of Europe, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong etc then they might well be the first and immediate response. They were massive in those territories, immersing themselves in people’s consciousness to the extent that they had their own brand of orange juice and Haribo sweets in the shape of their heads! The reaction to them in the UK was lukewarm at best though. Their albums absolutely tanked over here and they only troubled the Top 40 singles chart compilers on four occasions with their best return being this No 15 hit, a cover of The Detroit Spinners’ “Could It Be I’m Falling In Love”.
Looking at them here, they have all the classic boy band ingredients:
There’s five of them
At least two of them have the 90s curtains haircut
One of them looks like John Barrowman
They’re all wearing oversized, unbuttoned shirts over T-shirts and one of them has the obligatory waistcoat on
Their doing a cover version
It’s all very predictable but also validates their boy band credentials so why weren’t they bigger over here. Perhaps we should just not worry about it and thank our lucky stars they weren’t. Where were David Grant and Jaki Graham when you needed them though?
Back with Simon Mayo and he’s in the groove now with his football-related segues. After having referenced French striker Jean-Pierre Papin in his intro to Worlds Apart – his beloved Spurs were reportedly interested in signing him from AC Milan but it never came to anything (could it be were falling in love with Jean -Pierre Papin? Geddit?) – he’s now resorted to taking the piss out of other teams. In his sights tonight were Swindon Town who were struggling at the bottom of the Premier League at the time. “OK, 9 – 10 – 12 – 12 – 10 – 9 – 7. No, not Swindon’s goal against tally, it’s the last eight chart positions for Reel 2 Real.” Right, I’ve fact-checked this statement and whilst the chart positions are correct, Simon appears to not be able to count as there the last seven chart positions not eight you arse! So far tonight we have established they Mayo is not funny, a football bully and his grasp of even the most basic of numbers is appalling. What a guy!
Anyway, about Reel2RealfeaturingMadStuntman (to quote their full artist title), that is quite the rollercoaster of a chart journey. Their single “I Like To Move It” certainly had legs. It would ultimately spend 11 weeks inside the Top 10 and 15 inside the Top 20. In total it spent 5 months on the Top 100. Given all of the above, why had TOTP ignored it until now? After all, it was one one hell of an ear worm although it wasn’t especially welcome in my auditory system. Wasn’t this just a 2 Unlimited / K7 hybrid? And why didn’t they call it “I Like To Move It (Move It)”?
Impressive as its 1994 chart life was, that was nothing to the legacy it has amassed since. It has been heavily used in the Madagascar film franchise and has also made its way into the gaming world via Singstar Dance and Fortnite. I’m pretty sure it was also the inspiration for this Top 5 hit later in the year…
Now, after a run of over nine years, we have to say goodbye to the Breakers section which was jettisoned by new producer Ric Blaxill after this show. It first appeared on TOTP in January 1985 and whilst I understand the concept behind it, the slot had become unwieldy and unworkable with often as many as five tracks crammed into a 2 minute time frame. Anyway, for what it’s worth, these were the last of them starting with TheBrandNewHeavies. Having garnered critical acclaim with their first two albums – the eponymous debut and “Heavy Rhyme Experience, Vol 1.”, the band would discover the secret to combining that with commercial popularity with the release of third album “Brother Sister”. A platinum selling, No 4 charting collection of songs, its appeal was no doubt helped by the inclusion of the band’s cover of Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight At The Oasis” which weirdly was omitted from the US version of the album. I’m getting ahead of myself though. The lead single was “DreamOnDreamer”. A radio friendly, acid jazz infused soul/pop track, it would peak at No 15 becoming their biggest hit at the time.
Here come Roxette next with the video for their single “Sleeping In My Car”. The promo is set in what seems to be an underground car park and reminds me of the video for Duran Duran’s “The Chauffeur” the final scenes of which are set in a similar location. The Duran video is filmed in black and white (as are parts of Roxette’s) and was inspired by Liliana Cavani’s erotic and disturbing cult film TheNightPorter. Whilst “The Chauffeur” is all very stylised and has high artistic pretensions, the “Sleeping In My Car” promo seems a lot less aesthetic and if it was influenced by a film, it was probably Rita, SueAndBobToo.
The final (ever) Breaker is one of those aforementioned “I Believe” songs from Sounds Of Blackness. The track was written and produced by the legendary Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (who produced the rest of parent album “Africa To America: The Journey Of The Drum”). Apparently they were convinced to work with the 40 strong collective after taking their long time collaborator Janet Jackson to one of their shows and witnessed her enthusiastic response to them.
“I Believe” peaked at a very impressive No 17 and they followed it up with “Gloryland”, the official theme song of World Cup USA 94 which they recorded with Daryl Hall.
Time for that Salt ‘N’ Pepa live by satellite exclusive now. Simon Mayo is back with his spectacularly unfunny one liners, blathering on about Finsbury Park tube station but it doesn’t distract from the performance. It should be stated, of course, that “Whatta Man” was a collaboration with En Vogue. Up to this point, both artists had a chequered history when it came to UK hit singles. For En Vogue that meant a huge debut song in 1990 (“Hold On” – No 5) followed by three releases that all failed to chart. Then another massive song in 1992 (“My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It) – No 4) then a run of three middling hits and two chart flops before “Whatta Man”. As for Salt ‘N’ Pepa, it was a similar story with huge hits (“Push It”, “Twist And Shout”, “Let’s Talk About Sex”) punctuated by smaller ones (“Shake Your Thang”, “Shoop”, “You Showed Me”). It was probably mutually beneficial to both parties to join forces to seek out a huge record.
And whatta hit! A No 7 in the UK and No 3 in America, it sold 200,000 copies in the former and 1,000,000 in the latter. It’s not hard to hear why. The combination of En Vogue’s silky vocals with Salt ‘N’ Pepa’s sublime, chiming rhymes made for a killer track. The performance here is full of sass and swagger and a large cast but I’m not sure that En Vogue are any of them. That’s not them on vocals at the back of the set is it? So what happened next? For Salt ‘N’ Pepa, “Whatta Man” would prove to be the final time they made the UK Top 10 though they did return to the charts on four further occasions though none of those entries got any higher than No 19. En Vogue faired better. Their 1997 album “EV3” went platinum in the States and furnished them with one last huge hit in “Don’t Let Go (Love)” which went to No 5 in the UK and No 2 in the US.
The TakeThat juggernaut continues to play fast and loose with chart records. “Everything Changes” was the title track of their second album but it was also their fourth consecutive single to enter the charts at No 1 which it will do the week after next. Their first chart topper to feature Robbie Williams on lead vocals (he took on that role for the band’s cover of Barry Manilow’s “Could It Be Magic” but that peaked at No 3), it was also specifically written for him by Gary Barlow as a deliberate ploy. I have to say that I always found it quite weak and insubstantial but then again, if it had appeared on the second (much poppier) Wham! album “Make It Big”, would we have been talking about yet another George Michael classic?
The Top 10 countdown gives Simon Mayo another opportunity to showcase his amazing talent for delivering lines that only he thinks are funny. “Now the Dutch have a great tradition when it comes to the UK No 1. There’s Pussycat and “Mississippi”…and erm…well “Doop” by Doop that’s it as far as I can think…” he deadpans to camera. Once more, as well as being humourless he is factually incorrect. He’s missed out 2 Unlimited* and “No Limit” which was a UK chart topper just 12 months before! Surely he can’t have forgotten that or did he purposely omit them to try and make his ‘joke’ work? My God, I think I’d rather listen to this Charleston nonsense one more time than year any more from Mayo!
*There have been numerous Dutch DJ types post 1994 to ascend to the No 1 spot plus who could forget Vengaboys in 1999?!
The play out song is “Hi De Ho” by K7. The follow up to “Come Baby Come”, this was an example of something called the swing revival. Or was it retro swing? Or even neo-swing? Whatever its name, it was a movement that displayed a renewed interest in the swing genre of jazz. Yeah, must have passed me by as well. I mean, I remember there was a minor hit single in 1988 by the Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra that was a cover of Cab Calloway’s “Minnie The Moocher” but that surely doesn’t count as a whole movement? Yes, there was also the Doop phenomenon but did that count as swing music? A quick bit of research tells me that there was more to it than that but it mostly happened in America and was instigated by Los Angeles’ Royal Crown Revue band. These jump blues revivalists appeared in the Jim Carrey film The Mask whose soundtrack heavily featured swing music and indeed K7’s “Hi De Ho” track. The video for the song features a cameo from the aforementioned Cab Calloway himself and of course, he originally recorded “Hi De Ho Man’ upon which the K7 single is based. I’m pretty sure that I owned a copy of The Mask soundtrack (and therefore the K7 track) by default as there was a promo copy of it floating around the Our Price where I was working at the time so I took it home. Don’t think I ever played it and have no idea where it is now.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
D:Ream
U R The Best Thing
Nah
2
Soul Asylum
Somebody To Shove
No
3
Bon Jovi
Dry County
No but I had a promo copy of the album
4
Worlds Apart
Could It Be I’m Falling In Love
As if
5
Reel 2 Real featuring Mad Stuntman
I Like To Move It
Negative
6
The Brand New Heavies
Dream On Dreamer
No but I think my wife had the album
7
Roxette
Sleeping In My Car
It’s another no
8
Sounds Of Blackness
I Believe
I did not
9
Salt ‘N’ Pepa and En Vogue
Whatta Man
Liked it, didn’t buy it
10
Take That
Everything Changes
Of course not
11
Doop
Doop
Nope
12
K7
Hi De Ho
No but I had it on that promo copy of The Mask soundtrack
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.
We’re approaching Grand National weekend in 1992 and like many up and down the land, I’m on the look out for a horse to back. I’d discovered the art of having a flutter in my student days but that was betting on something I had an interest in; football. Horse racing I knew nothing about. My father in law knew about the gee gees but he didn’t go in for the Grand National as he perceived it to be a lottery and not worthy of his time so I was in my own. True, I had won £50 quid on Aldaniti back in 1981 but that was through a raffle ticket via my local non league football club and not therefore from taking money from the bookies. However, the General Election was taking place the following week and so, like many punters, I took my inspiration from that and went for a horse called Party Politics. He came in first by two and a half lengths at 14-1. I was delighted as money was fairly tight at the time so my win was timely.
If you thought that the impending Grand National might be a theme for this week’s TOTP then you’d be wrong. No mention of any nags but there were two guest presenters whose comedy characters sent up those out of touch Radio 1 DJs who should have been sent to the knackers yard years before. I can only be talking about Smashie and Nicey as played by Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield respectively. I initially thought this must be a tie in with Comic Relief but my research tells me that there was no such event in 1992 as it was a fallow year falling in the two year gap between official events. There was however a mini Comic Relief TV show on BBC1 on 17th April looking at some of the work done with the money raised the previous year and there was a Comic Relief single but more of that later.
No, as far as I can tell, Smashie and Nicey were there purely to plug the second series of Harry Enfield’s Television Programme that started on BBC2 later that evening. Were Smashie and Nicey funny? I don’t find them humorous today but I can’t recall how I felt about them back then though I much preferred Enfield’s earlier character Loadsamoney and his impoverished counterpart Buggerallmoney. Their sketches always seemed to feature them playing “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive and shouting “Let’s Rock!” and they try this schtick to introduce the opening act but it’s wide of the mark for me. Nicey says that the opening act are “quite literally, probably the Queen Mum’s favourite heavy metal band” and this royal theme peppers nearly all of their links throughout the show. Not sure why that was. Were the Royal Family especially in the news at that time or we’re they always referred to as part of Smashie and Nicey’s sketches?
Anyway, the whole thing falls flat as the opening act are LA heavy metal merchants W.A.S.P. who don’t seem a good foil for all this knockabout fun. Far too earnest about their art. I say art but their ‘music’ is quite literally, probably the worst thing I have heard since…well Def Leppard last week. Just a horrible noise. This track, “Chainsaw Charlie (Murders In The New Morgue)”, was the lead single from their album “The Crimson Idol” which the band described as a concept album. Said concept revolved around a kid called Jonathan who is rejected by his parents who are in mourning for their favourite son Michael who has been killed by a drunk driver. Jonathan goes off the rails, buys a crimson coloured guitar and becomes a rock star after being signed by a record label president called…yep, Chainsaw Charlie. Jonathan becomes a huge star but his parents still hate him so he commits suicide on stage by hanging himself using his own guitar strings. FFS! What a load of bollocks! Who was taken in by this crap?! Well, the punters that sent this single to No 17 in the UK Top 40 at a guess. Just unfathomable.
Next we have another one of those live satellite link ups, this time with Roxette in Sweden. As Smashie and Nicey launch into a decidedly unfunny preamble routine it appears that Per and Marie can’t hear the pair’s ramblings at all. Either there were some technical difficulties or maybe it wasn’t live at all and just a pre-recorded performance? They launch into this acoustic version of their latest single “Church Of Your Heart” before Smashie and Nicey have finished their intro which adds to the sense that this wasn’t live at all.
This was the fifth and final single from their “Joyride” album and it’s not much more than an inoffensive little ditty really whose title seems to be a mash up of two Culture Club singles – “Church Of The Poison Mind” and “Time (Clock Of The Heart)”. Per taking lead vocal over Marie is the only thing to stop it from hardly being there at all. He goes all Bob Dylan before the song’s coda when he brings out his harmonica which he then chucks over his shoulder when he’s finished playing it. That’s no way to treat a musical instrument! He’s the Kurt Zouma of harmonicas!
Onto that aforementioned Comic Relief single now. I have to say that I never really got the appeal of Mr. Bean. I’d loved Rowan Atkinson in all his Blackadder guises but this character? Not for me. Maybe I’m just not much of a fan of physical comedy – I’d never liked those Charlie Chaplin shows that seemed to be on every morning during the Summer holidays when I was a young kid. However, I was in the minority as the New Year’s Day episode of the Mr Bean series had attracted an audience of 28.7 million so it seemed a smart move to get the character to front the 1992 Comic Relief record. To tie in with the forthcoming General Election, the song chosen was Alice Cooper’s “Elected” though it was retitled “(I Want To Be) Elected”. Joining Atkinson on the record were Smear Campaign aka Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson and rock band Skin (then known as Taste).
I thought this was awful. Bean’s lines in it in the form of manifesto pledges were as funny as Liz Truss being the Foreign Secretary and anyway, I thought the USP of Mr Bean was that he didn’t speak. Even the army of Bean fans didn’t get on board with this and its chart placing of No 9 was one of the lowest of all the Comic Relief singles. The previous year, the odious “The Stonk” by Hale & Pace had been a No 1. Surely the obvious move for the charity would have been to ask Right Said Fred to do it. That invitation duly came 12 months later as the Freds did “Stick It Out” but by then their success was on the wane and the single peaked at No 4 (albeit five places higher than Mr Bean). By 2017, both “Stick It Out” and “(I Want To Be) Elected” ranked as only the 19th and 21st best performing Comic Relief singles respectively. The phrase missed opportunities comes to mind.
I had totally forgotten that Kym Sims had another hit other than the one she is remembered for. Just to make it easier to recall the rest of her back catalogue she made her next single “Take My Advice” sound exactly the same as “Too Blind To See It”. I mean she wasn’t the first artist to stick to a formula when it came to consolidating on initial success but mix it up a bit eh?
Unlike Kim, the TOTP producers did decide to mix it up by interspersing the rather dull video that accompanied the single with shots of Smashie and Nicey throwing some shapes back in the studio. Oh God. Guys, it’s so deeply unfunny. Who thought this was a good idea? Well, those TOTP producers I guess. Both they and Kym Sims should have taken my advice on all of these issues but they were too blind to see it.
Hang on! SoulIISoul were in the studio performing their single “Joy” literally last week! Why are they back on seven days later? Yes, they were a chart climber but it wasn’t like they were a 30 seconds cameo in the Breakers section. No, they were given a full studio slot. What happened to the rule saying the only act allowed on the show in consecutive weeks was the No 1 artist?
I have other questions. Why is Jazzie B using a conductor’s baton to lead the proceedings behind singer Richie Stephens and has he nicked Vince Clarke’s synth from Erasure’s appearance last week?
“Joy” peaked at No 4.
There’s another four Breakers this week and as is the emerging trend with this feature, we would not see 75% of them on the show again. First up is Prince&TheNewPowerGeneration with “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night”. This was the fourth single from his “Diamonds And Pearls” album and was identified by many a critic as the stand out track from it. The video shown here isn’t the one that was originally shot which didn’t feature Prince at all and only showed images of a poverty stricken African-American family. It was considered too political for MTV and so a second film was made to include footage of Prince and his band performing the song.
“Money Don’t Matter 2 Night” peaked at No 19.
Salt ‘N’ Pepa had enjoyed a pretty good 1991. Two singles that went Top 5 plus a Top 20 hit to boot and a top selling Greatest Hits album. 1992 looked to be going the same way with “Expression” released to promote a remix album called “Rapped In Remixes: The Greatest Hits”. Yet the single failed to break the Top 20 and the remix album did nothing. This was the second time the track had been in the UK Top 40 as it originally made No 40 when released as the lead single from their third album “Blacks’ Magic”.
1993 would be a better year with another Top 10 hit courtesy of their collaboration with En Vogue on “Whatta Man” and Top 20 entries “Shoop” and “None Of Your Business” all from their five times platinum in the US album “Very Necessary”. Somehow the album failed to take off in the UK struggling to a peak of No 36.
In a recent post while reviewing a TOTP that featured ThePasadenas performing “I’m Doing Fine Now“, I suggested that the end of the road for the band was coming up fast. Well surely this brief appearance for their cover of Bread’s “Make It With You” was their final destination. Taken from their covers album “Yours Sincerely” it did nowhere near the business that its predecessor did peaking at No 20.
This one passed me by at the time but listening to it now, it sounds like quite a nasty take on the original. Something very plastic sounding about it. Might be the parping brass section or the ever so 90s backing track. At least they tried to make it sound different I guess. If this is to be the last time we see The Pasadenas, I can’t say I’ll miss them.
The final Breaker sees Curtis Stigers doing a Kym Sims as he follows up his huge breakthrough hit single “I Wonder Why” with a song that sounds very, very similar. I don’t know his eponymous debut album apart from the singles so I’ve no idea if there was a better option for the follow up but I can imagine his label saying “We’re just going to play it safe Curtis man. We don’t want anything coming from out of leftfield so which song sounds the closest to your first one? Fine. “You’re All That Matters To Me” it is.”
So similar were the tracks they they nearly even replicated each other’s chart positions with “You’re All That Matters To Me” peaking just one place below its predecessor at No 6.
This week’s ‘exclusive’ performance comes from Chris De Burgh. In what universe was this man worthy of the term ‘exclusive’?! In a parallel 1992 where all dance music is banned and radio stations are only allowed to play soporific cruddy balladry?! I mean, how could the TOTP producers consider Chris De Burgh to be still relevant to the pop charts at this time?! I’m sure some negotiations took place between De Burgh’s record label A&M and the BBC over this slot which presumably was to help sell his new album “Power Of Ten” from which this track “Separate Tables” was taken because how else do you explain it?!
De Burgh’s musical reputation had never recovered since the huge turd that was “Lady In Red” in 1986. Some of his early stuff is actually OK (no it is, really) but everything since that heinous crime against music had been dreadful. This single was never going to improve his standing. If his musical reputation was in tatters, his personal reputation would take a similar nosedive a couple of years after this when the press revealed details of his affair with his family’s 19 year old nanny whilst his wife recovered from a broken neck injury. That’s real shitty behaviour right there.
The curious thing about this performance is that the staging is completely off. Where are the table props? Look at the song title guys! Instead there’s some sort of elaborate chaise longue littering the back of the stage and four Doric columns. Talk about missing an open goal!
“Separate Tables” peaked at No 30. Let’s never talk of this again. Agreed?
It’s a seventh week of eight fur Shakespear’s Sister and “Stay”. It’s probably about time that the issue of that band name was addressed. Here’s @TOTPFacts:
Shakespear’s Sister were named after the Smiths song of (nearly) the same name. The misspelling was accidental initially, but Fahey decided to keep it because, "It makes it my thing as opposed to the song by The Smiths". #TOTPhttps://t.co/rV4CxMQJfN
… That or Tennessee WIlliams's 1944 play The Glass Menagerie, in which the central character is nicknamed "Shakespeare" by his co-workers, and reference is made to his sister – a fragile loner. #TOTP
Right at the very end of the show we get a weird personal message from Cher letting us know she’ll be in next week’s TOTP. Weird it may have been but that five seconds to camera piece was more of an ‘exclusive’ than the whole of Chris De Burgh’s performance.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
W.A.S.P.
Chainsaw Charlie (Murders In The New Morgue)
A huge no
2
Roxette
Church Of Your Heart
Nah
3
Mr. Bean and Smear Campaign
(I Want To Be) Elected
Not even for charity
4
Kym Sims
Take My Advice
Nope
5
Soul II Soul
Joy
No but I snaffled a promo cassette single of it for my wife
6
Prince & The New Power Generation
Money Don’t Matter 2 Night
No
7
Salt ‘N’ Pepa
Expression
Negative
8
The Pasadenas
Make It With You
Never happening
9
Curtis Stigers
You’re All That Matters To Me
I did not
10
Chris De Burgh
Separate Tables
I’d have rather eaten my own arm
11
Shakespear’s Sister
Stay
It’s another 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.
Christmas is coming! Unlike in 2021 where the certainty of what our festive period will be like is now under threat again from the pandemic (or more accurately the government’s handling of it), 30 years ago, some of the most pressing issues we were facing included whether we had enough wrapping paper and remembering to buy a Radio Times to plan our TV watching (very important in the pre-digital age). If, like me, you were working in retail at this time, another consideration was when we could fit in any Christmas shopping of our own after facilitating everybody else’s by working behind a shop counter for hours on end. Oh, and what the Christmas No 1 would be… and please let it not be Cliff Richard again this year. Well, as it turned out, Cliff didn’t really get a look in but which records were in the charts back then? Let’s find out…
We start tonight’s TOTP with one of the year’s biggest breakout stars in Cathy Dennis who is in the studio to perform her fourth Top 40 hit of 1991 and her fifth overall. “Everybody Move” was the final single to be released from her gold selling No 3 album “Move To This” and was a return to the radio friendly dance material of her earlier hits after previous single “Too Many Walls” had seen her go down the slow ballad route.
In all honesty, “Everybody Move” should probably have remained an unreleased album track. It’s pretty lightweight stuff and certainly it doesn’t require a great leap of imagination from this to the kind of stuff that Cathy would end up writing for the likes of S Club 7 and Hear’say later in the decade. Accordingly, it only made it to No 25 in the UK Top 40.
Whilst the reaction on Twitter to this performance focussed on Cathy’s Joker-esque outfit, I was more drawn to her dance move which comes over like a half-hearted Mick Channon windmill celebration…
Now I know I quite often draw on football references for this blog and that I’ve just done it again immediately above but quite why presenter Tony Dortie decides to do the same in his intro to the Top 10 countdown remains a mystery. “It’s day 12 on the Advent calendar, Hearts and Leeds are currently topping things in the football world but let’s see which musical crackers are doing the business in the Top 10” he trills. Hmm. For completions sake, I should note that Leeds Utd would indeed go onto win the old Division 1 league title come May the following year however the 1991–92 Scottish Premier Division season was won by Rangers, nine points ahead of Hearts. Dortie messes up the countdown straight away when he announces that Nirvana are at No 10 with “Smells Like Teen”. What happened to your ‘spirit’ Tony?! Unlike Boris Johnson, at least Tony owns his mistakes…
There’s some more curious missing word action next as we get what would probably have been described as a ‘banging’ tune’ back then called “Running Out Of Time” by Digital according to co-host Claudia Simon. That wasn’t their full name though Claudia, was it? No, that was Digital Orgasm – ooh and indeed err missus! This wasn’t anything to do with presenter error by the way as the on screen artist and title graphics confirm that Claudia hadn’t just messed up her intro. This, it would seem, was a TOTP policy decision. Presumably, the use of the word orgasm would have been seen as far too offensive pre the 9 o’clock watershed and so was dropped.
As with all of these dance tunes from this era, I have zero recall of it despite working in a record shop while it was in the charts. Listening back to it now, it sounds like it’s been concocted in a rave laboratory with the basic tune of “Insanity” by Oceanic spliced together with snippets of “Charly” by The Prodigy. Both were huge hits so I guess if that really was the formula behind “Running Out Of Time” then it was a sound one.
As for the performance, it looks as if the TOTP producers have given a bit more thought to how to portray this seemingly endless conveyor belt of dance acts. There appear to be loads more camera cuts and in quick rotation meaning we get lots of different angles of the performers which I’m guessing was meant to try and replicate a more clubby experience. There’s also some slightly different distorted visual effect for the non vocal bits – they’ve lost the Doctor Who green which never worked for me anyway. The woman doing the singing looks almost otherworldly like one of Captain Kirk’s alien love interests which kind of helps things along as well.
“Running Out Of Time” peaked at No 16.
Oh no! It’s the dreaded Cliff Richard! Oh yes though as he’s not No 1! He’s nowhere near the top of the tree actually being at No 19 and there’s only two weeks until Christmas! Talking of trees, the show’s production team have pulled out all the stops for Cliff to make the stage look like his front room at Christmas. A fully decorated tree, a mock fireplace, cards and candles – were Health and Safety informed?! – and Cliff himself in an armchair dressed in a sparkly jacket. For some reason though, they haven’t bothered with the prop of a telephone for the faux phone call part at the beginning of the record leaving Cliff to mime speaking into an imaginary one and then putting it back in its cradle. It just looks weird. I was hoping that Cliff might go full Val Doonican and sing the whole song from that armchair but he’s up on his feet in no time to look sincerely into the camera at us and do some of those wavy arm moves of his.
Does anybody really remember “We Should Be Together”? It’s surely Cliff’s forgotten Christmas single after “Mistletoe And Whine…sorry..Wine” and “Saviour’s Day”? You never hear it played on the radio come December despite some of the commercial stations like Magic having cleared all of their playlist schedules to play exclusively Christmas tunes. Somehow it did get to No 10 in the UK Top 40 though it was never a serious contender for the top spot.
We get the video for “Too Blind To See It” by Kym Sims next. It’s introduced by Claudia Simon who says Kym is “kickin’ up a flavour” (that’s probably ‘flava’ isn’t it?) whilst all the time a youth from the studio audience gurns away behind her looking remarkably like a young Mark Ronson.
It turns out that “Too Blind To See It” is a dance record that I do remember (finally)! I think it’s that shuffling back beat and the ‘no man in the world’ sample that must have lodged in my brain. It’s a pretty nifty tune I think and yet it was written and produced by my arch nemesis Steve “Silk” Hurley /aka the man who killed music with his “Jack Your Body” No 1 in 1987. Hmm. Anyway, on reflection it has a ring of “Finally” by Ce Ce Pension to it which is probably no surprise as Kym was the co-writer on her hit “Keep On Walkin'”.
Wikipedia tells me that “Too Blind To See It” was released on the East West Records label who were responsible for a string of dance hits around this time including “Peace” by Sabrina Johnston and “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)” by En Vogue. They all had that simple yet distinctive, generic East West cover as I recall or was that only used if they’d run out of the official picture sleeve? Can’t remember now.
“Too Blind To See It” was Kym’s biggest hit peaking at No 5 in the UK although she would have two further and smaller Top 40 hits by the end of 1992.
“Salt n’ Pepa are in the house and rockin’ the mic!” says Tony Dortie as we move back to the studio for their performance of “You Showed Me”. They’ve all come dressed in what looks like black latex jackets while their three dancers have dungarees in the same material making them look like a kinky version of Rod, Jane and Freddy.
The staging of the performance has a feel of West Side Story to it but the choreographer hasn’t really worked out what to do with DJ Spinderella who seems redundant when the rapping kicks in and is left to wander off with her allocated dance partner and act out an argument between them. At the song’s finale she retreats to the back of the stage, goes up the stairs erected there and assumes a rather risqué position by wrapping her legs around his crotch area. I take it back about Rod, Jane and Freddy – they’d have never got up to such vulgar antics! Or would they?…..
Meanwhile over on the other stage we find Right Said Fred about to perform their next hit single “Don’t Talk Just Kiss”. Beforewe get to the Freds though, I noticed something that I don’t believe we’ve seen before in these TOTP repeats which was the studio audience actually running across the floor to be in place for the next performance. There’s literally about a dozen people behind Tony Dortie all in a rush, vying for a view of the next pop stars on the show. I always imagined that the studio audience was shepherded around the set, the flock to the floor manager’s sheep dog. However, they all seem like they have been let off the leash to roam (or run) wherever they wish. This year zero revamp has a lot to answer for!
Anyway, I must admit that I for one thought we had heard the last of Right Said Fred when “I’m Too Sexy” finally dipped out of the Top 40 and dismissed the whole thing as a one off novelty hit. How wrong I was. “Don’t Talk Just Kiss” was not only another smash for the trio but it was (SHOCK!) a decent tune to boot! How had this happened? Well, proving that they weren’t as daft as they looked, the Fairbrass brothers (and the other one) got soul diva Jocelyn Brown in to sing on the track. Jocelyn’s vocals had already been sampled for Snap!’s 1990 No 1 hit “The Power” whilst her own 1984 hit “Somebody Else’s Guy” would form the hook for George Michael’s 1992 Top 5 hit “Too Funky”. Here though, she was actually singing on the song rather than being sampled although she didn’t actually get any credits on the record. That seems a bit weird as she’s up there front and centre on stage alongside the band for this TOTP appearance so they obviously weren’t trying to play down her contribution.
“Don’t Talk Just Kiss” would prove to be another massive hit peaking at No 3 whilst their album “Up” (released in March of the following year) would top the charts and go double platinum. Over the pond though it was a different story and the band did indeed become the one hit wonder I had thought they were destined to be. “I’m Too Sexy” had been a US No 1 but “Don’t Talk Just Kiss” stalled at No 76. Supposedly radio stations were still playing that first hit when the follow up was released and there was little interest in any Right Said Fred material that wasn’t “I’m Too Sexy”. They would have no further hits Stateside.
The camera pans around to Claudia Simon up in the gantry for the next link and she advises us of four Breakers three of which are stone cold stinkers starting with Jason Donovan and the “Joseph Megamix”. After his surprise No 1 hit earlier in the year with “Any Dream Will Do” from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, it was always on the cards that some abomination like this medley would end up being churned out to cash in. With the Christmas party season upon us, it probably seemed like a decent bet that it would be a hit but can anyone say that they’ve ever been to a party where this was put on the turntable and if so, did they not leave immediately?!
“Joseph Megamix” peaked at No 13.
Another megamix! Are you kidding me?! What’s this one then? “The Bare Necessities Megamix” by UK Mixmasters?! Sorry? What? Pardon? And crucially, why? This was a Jungle Book medley that actually only featured two songs – “I Wanna Be Like You” and the titular “Bare Necessities”. You won’t be surprised to know that this heap of shit had Simon Cowell’s fingerprints all over it as it was released on his BMG subsidiary label IQ Records. UK Mixmasters was actually some bloke called Nigel Wright who was also responsible for the equally odious act Mirage who scored some hits in the late 80s doing medleys of house records under the umbrella title of “Jack Mix”. He also did that Saturday Night Fever medley earlier in 1991. What a talented guy!
Talking of talented guys, that’s all round entertainer Gary Wilmot up there promoting this garbage. However, when the track was performed in the TOTP studio the following week, another Gary (Martin) took over the vocalist role. I had to look this guy up but apparently he went onto make his name as an acclaimed voice over actor. We won’t get to see the TOTP with Martin as it’s one of those episodes hosted by Adrian Rose who didn’t give this consent for the repeat to be aired so we’ll miss it. So….just for you… here’s that performance below you lucky people!
Finally some proper music…even if it is U2! Only kidding I liked the “Achtung Baby” era of the band and “Mysterious Ways” was the second single to be released off that album. As a follow up to their No 1 song “The Fly” it was a strong if bold choice. There’s plenty going on in “Mysterious Ways” and most of it was maybe not what we would have expected from the band at the time. This was no po-faced, earnest rock anthem like “With Or Without You” but a groovy, exuberant tune that starts as it means to go on with that wah wah peddle guitar effect from The Edge setting the tone. It sounded so much better to me than “The Fly” and should have been a bigger hit than its No 13 placing although it did make the Top 10 in America. U2 would take this path towards dance experimentation again in 1997 with the electronic influenced No 1 single “Discothèque” but for me, “Mysterious Ways” trumps it by some considerable distance.
What?! New Kids On The Block were still in our charts in December 1991? Hadn’t that particular craze blown out long before this point? Well. yes it kind of had. This single “If You Go Away” was a final hurrah of the initial phase of their career before they briefly regrouped in 1994 for a less than glorious return. They would finally return as an entity in 2008 and are still touring to this day (I think).
“If You Go Away” is a soporific ballad that you can imagine Michael Bolton having rejected as too banal. It was included as the only new track on their first Best Of album called “H.I.T.S.” that was released for the Christmas market. I was the chart cassette buyer at the Our Price store I was working at then and have to admit to a gross over estimate of demand for that album. We hardly sold any and my over optimistic ordering left us with quite a few copies to go into the New Year sale when they again failed to sell. Ah well, yuh learn.
The black and white video is meant to make us perceive them as serious artists as opposed to the unobtainable desire of teenage girls. That and the fact that they had changed their name to NKOTB was a giveaway that they were looking for a new audience. For me though, they would always be more T’KNOB than NKOTB (over ordering of their album aside).
“If You Go Away” peaked at a surprisngly high No 9 in the UK Top 40.
Oh God! I’m in “Martika’s Kitchen”! Yes, it’s time for one of the stupidest song titles of the year courtesy of…well, Martika. On reflection, is it stupid or misunderstood? I don’t think I twigged it at the time but the general consensus on the internet is that “Martika’s Kitchen” is actually filthy! How did I not pick up on this back then?! Firstly, it’s written by Prince which should have been enough evidence of its salacious nature to close the case right there and then. Exhibit B (m’lud) comes in the form of the lyrics, for example:
The table is set, the oven is hot Baby, when we get started, we won’t ever ever stop
and:
I don’t care I’ve got the chair, if you think your butt’ll fit it You turn me all the way up, I admit it
In my defence, I think the fact that Martika has chosen to wear some very non-revealing clothes in this performance maybe misled me. As for the sound of the song, at the time it seemed very pop-orientated compared to previous single “Love… Thy Will Be Done” (also written by Prince) but which didn’t seem like it could possibly have been written by the same person. However, on reflection, “Martika’s Kitchen” has some definite Prince hallmarks attached to it although parts of it also remind me of Janet Jackson’s “Nasty”.
This was the second single from her album of the same name and although it sold reasonably in the UK, like T’KNOB before it, I’m pretty sure we had plenty of copies left over for the New Year sale. Perhaps I wasn’t that great at being chart cassette buyer!
George Michael and Elton John are still No 1 with “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”. With two weeks to go, they must have been in the running for the festive chart topper but once “Bohemian Rhapsody” was re-released on the back of Freddie Mercury’s death, all bets were off. George would, of course, score a further No 1 with another cover version two years later, this time of Queen’s own “Somebody To Love” as part of the “Five Live EP” recorded at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert the year before. Elton meanwhile would return in 1992 with his “The One” album the title track of which really was a bit of a dirge.
As we’ve skipped the 19 December show, the next post will be the end of year review.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Cathy Dennis
Everybody Move
Nah
2
Digital Orgasm
Running Out Of Time
No chance
3
Cliff Richard
We Should Be Together
Never happening
4
Kym Sims
Too Blind To See It
Nope
5
Salt n’ Pepa
You Showed Me
No
6
Right Said Fred
Don’t Talk Just Kiss
Negative
7
Jason Donovan
Joseph Megamix
As if
8
UK Mixmasters
The Bare Necessities Megamix
Ditto
9
U2
Mysterious Ways
No but I bought the album
10
NKOTB
If You Go Away
I wish they would – No
11
Martika
Martika’s Kitchen
I did not
12
George Michael and Elton John
Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me
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.
What? It’s December ’91 already here at TOTP Rewind? Wasn’t the last post on the blog from mid November? Well yes but we’ve missed the final show win November due to that confusing scenario of one of the presenters not giving permission for the repeats to be aired. We skipped numerous episodes back in the 80s due to the late Mike Smith not giving permission before his death in 2014 and the issue has raised its head again in the early 90s shows. So who is it that hasn’t given his blessings for these repeats to be aired? His name is Adrian Rose or rather was Adrian Rose. He’s not dead but he goes by a different name now. Or should that be names as I’ve found him referred to on the internet as Adrian Woolfe and Adrian Rose Woolfe. It turns out that he went on to have a successful career in TV production (he was involved in bringing Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? to our screens) though that doesn’t explain his reluctance to give permission for his TOTP shows to be repeated. There’s a whole load of theories circulating on the internet about what his reasoning might be with some tweets on the subject having been deleted so I’m not about to launch into an investigation as to what happened here for fear of any litigious action. However, Adrian’s fellow presenters Tony Dortie and Mark Franklin, both of whom seem very willing to tweet along with these TOTP repeats and answer questions about them, did add to the debate on Twitter :
Put it this way name a Famous Tom Cruise Movie and a stand out scene.that gives you a answer..
I would add I personally think as well maybe some people were never shown the deserved respect that should be expected..Adrian was a pleasure to work with and a very smart lad
Hmm. If you really want to dig deeper into this issue, there’s lots more out there online not least from Tony and Mark but my take on it is that when the presenters were being supplied from the Radio 1 DJ roster then their existing contracts with the BBC covered any stints on TOTP but the presenters in the new format must have had separate and different contracts with clauses that required permission for future repeats to be shown but hey, I’m no lawyer…
Anyway, the bad news is that we will miss out on 15 TOTP shows that feature Adrian Rose between now and Sep ’92 but it’s OK as I’ve checked the running order for the shows affected and all the acts on them were crap anyway. I’m kidding! Having said that, there is an awful lot of shite we won’t be subjected to (I’m looking at you 2 Unlimited) but there are some good tunes in there as well. One of the very first casualties of the Rose pruning effect is the now iconic Nirvana performance from the 28 Nov ’91 show but I’m not going there in this post as I’ll try and round up the most notable missed performances in the review the year.
Enough though of those that we missed, how about the ones that we are getting to see all over again 30 years on? Well, after last week’s rave-tastic running order, we’re right back in amongst it again with opening act Shades Of Rhythm and their hit “Extacy”. Now as I’ve said many times before, I was no clubber or indeed raver but this looks and sounds to me like all kinds of wrong. What were they all wearing?! Have they come in their pyjamas?! Nobody could sleep in those surely?! I thought they’d topped the look off with a Santa hat (it being December and all) but on closer inspection they’re like those fur lined Russian hats with the flaps but colour coded to match the rest of the outfit with the flaps done up. If the ‘performers” on stage looked bad enough, what was going on with the backing dancers? Seriously, they look like an off his tits Andy Pandy! Please tell me people weren’t going to actual clubs dressed like that at the time. As for the track itself, it seems like a pretty unexceptional rave by numbers effort to me with the TOTP live vocal policy yet again not helping much. And that title! Surely the show’s producers must have realised what the theme here was?!
Interestingly, Shades Of Rhythm were on ZTT Records. Like many I’m sure, the acts that leap to the front of my mind when I hear that record label mentioned are Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Propaganda and Art of Noise but ZTT didn’t get stuck in the 80s as they had already had huge hits this decade with the likes of Adamski, Seal and 808 State.
“Extacy” peaked at No 16.
Before we get to the next act, just a quick note on how the charts were being handled in this period of TOTP history. Basically, they’ve f****d it! If new producer Stanley Appel was given the task by BBC bosses of coming up with the worst possible way to do a chart rundown, then he couldn’t have imagined anything better than this. For a start, there is no Top 40 countdown anymore just a Top 10. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they throw it away within the first 5 minutes of the show including revealing the No 1 record. We get to see tiny clips of the Top 10 records on screen (be they the official promo video or a TOTP appearance) but we don’t hear any of them as the new theme tune plays over the top of it. It’s insane! Appel seemed to be trying to move away from the show being based on the Top 40 singles as it had been for the whole of its existence this far by meddling with the countdown and having these new features like ‘exclusive’ performances and incorporating the album chart as well. New doesn’t always mean better and this certainly wasn’t.
Anyway, ho hum. On with the show and it’s those old reliables Andy and Vince of Erasure with their new single “Am I Right?”. These two had been TOTP staples since the mid 80s and were still a safe pair of hands into the new decade. That being said, this wasn’t one of their better tunes. The third single from their “Chorus” album, they’d gone for a slowie to follow up on the title track and “Love To Hate You” which had both had much faster bpm. Was it a definite decision at attempting to be a Christmas single? Certainly the staging of this performance would suggest so. Up there on stage with the duo are some Christmas trees, a sleigh and reindeer (of the plastic variety) and a rather forlorn looking snowman. It reminds me of the Santa’s grotto I worked in as Father Christmas in Debenhams back in 1989. I was only 21 but I filled in for the regular guys when they were having their lunch breaks. I must admit to looking at the collection of elves and penguins etc on the floor beside me and thinking to myself “where is your life heading mate?”.
Back with Erasure though and all of that paraphernalia is nothing compared to the fake snow coming down for the studio ceiling in the most unconvincing of ways. Snow has surely never been so inconsistent in its precipitation anywhere in the world as it is in this TOTP studio. I hope Andy and Vince didn’t watch the playback as they were totally undermined by this nonsense.
“Am I Right?” peaked at No 15.
Oh great, it’s Simply Red (sigh)! Hucknall and co (whoever the hell those people were) were never bigger than they were at this point. “Stars” was the title track from their fourth album and it felt like every other purchase made by a customer over Christmas ’91 in the Our Price store where I was working in Manchester was that album. We sold it over and over and over again. Then we went home, came back the next day and sold it some more. It was a monster. I guess it was the default present for all those blokes who didn’t know what to get their partner (see also, Celine Dion, Dido etc). The title track would certainly have helped sell it being a sultry, smooth as velvet pop/soul standard perfectly suited to Mick’s confident vocals. It sounded like it had been written to be played on the hour, every hour on daytime radio – indeed it probably was. Having to perform a live vocal on the show in keeping with its new policy wouldn’t have worried the Huckster at all. However, he should have been worried about the outfit that he chose for the show. He appears to have come dressed as a Wild West cowboy with his waistcoat and sheriff’s badge.
Talking of Mick’s appearance reminds me that we had a guy working as a Christmas temp in the shop who looked a bit like him. He certainly had the long, curly ginger hair anyway. In fact, now I come to think of it, didn’t he tell us that he had roadied for Simply Red before coming to work in the store? I’m not sure he was telling the truth and anyway, he didn’t last the whole of the festive period due to an incident at our pre-Christmas do. I say ‘do’ but I think we all just went to Manto bar in Canal Street which was the newly opened super bar that was packing in them in down at the gay village at the time. I think the Hucknall lookalike got pissed and decided it would be a good idea to tell the store manager exactly what he thought of him via the medium of insults. When we tried to advise him that it wasn’t a good idea he said, “What? Just because he’s the manager? F**k him!” and proceeded with his plan. I’m pretty sure we never saw him again after that night.
“Stars” the song peaked at No 8 and was the highest charting single taken from the album.
After all that talk of presenters at the top of the post, I should say that tonight’s hosts are Mark Franklin and Elayne Smith who pops up on our screen to introduce the ‘exclusive’ section of the show. This was the second of only two appearances for Elayne who, in an interview with BBC Radio Three Counties presenter Edward Adoo back in 2018, described her TOTP experience as “daunting” and that she was “completely rubbish” on it. To be fair to Elayne, there have been far, far worse presenters of the show down the years than her.
Anyway, the exclusive on tonight’s show is a screening of the video for Guns N’ Roses versionof “Live And Let Die”. The original was of course written by Paul and Linda McCartney and recorded by Wings for the 1973 James Bond film of the same name. Now I had always believed that the Wings version had been a huge hit so was surprised to discover that it only made No 9 in the UK. It did better in the US where it stayed and No 2 for three weeks and was kept off the top spot by three different songs including “Touch Me In The Morning” by Diana Ross (more of whom later).
Routinely chosen in polls as the best Bond theme ever, it did then beg the question as to why the world needed a Guns N’ Roses version? Well, it was just a song that Slash and Axl Rose both loved apparently so they recorded it for their “Use Your Illusion” project (it was actually on “Use Your Illusion I” for all the pedants out there). Not everyone was happy about this and the song seems to spilt opinion accordingly. In short, it’s musical Brexit. Look at these couple of tweets for example:
Brilliant cover this and even better seeing Axl do it live
See? Where did I sit on the debate? I don’t mind the Guns N’ Roses version I have to say although they did seem to overdo it with the cover versions – “Use Your Illusion II” included a version of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”. Both covers would be big hits in the UK with “Live And Let Die” making it to No 5 whilst “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” peaked at No 2. As with Elayne Smith’s final TOTP appearance, the live performance promo video was the last to feature rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin before he left the band.
I did promise earlier that there’d be more Diana Ross to come and here she is with her hit “When You Tell Me That You Love Me”. Such a huge megastar is Ms Ross that she doesn’t need any backing singers or band up there on stage with her – nobody is stealing any of her limelight thank you very much – but to be fair to her, the live vocal isn’t too bad.
The sales of this single seemed surprising to me. Diana hadn’t had many big hits in the UK throughout the previous 10 years (the notable exception being “Chain Reaction” going to No 1 in 1986 obviously). It’s a huge, syrup filled power ballad which I guess went down well over the festive period when we’re all filled with love for our fellow human beings (supposedly) but even so. It would end up selling 200,000 copies in this country and *SPOILER* only missed out on the Christmas No 1 spot by a couple of hundred units.
Someone who didn’t see those sales coming was our aforementioned store manager. I distinctly recall him having a word with myself as chart cassette buyer and the CD buyer advising us not to get influenced by the success of the single into ordering loads of copies of the parent album (“The Force Behind The Power”) as in all his years of record retail, he had never seen a Diana Ross album sell well. Unfortunately, he said all of this within earshot of our colleague Andy who was a huge Diana fan and took it personally that the manager was dissing one of his idols. I think he actually said something along the lines of “ignore him, he knows nothing, go big on the album”. So who was right? Well, I think it was Andy. The album did sell well over time going platinum with sales of 300,000 in the UK despite it never getting any higher than No 9 in the charts.
Four Breakers?! Oh come on! OK, well we start with Cliff Richard (of course we do, it is nearly Christmas after all) and a little ditty called “We Should Be Together”. After bagging two of the last three festive No 1 records for himself (and he even featured on the one he didn’t as he was in Band Aid II!), Cliff naturally wasn’t not going to chance his arm again and released this…well…this! Very much his forgotten Christmas single, it peaked at No 10. Not a bad return for most artists but this was Cliff we were talking about…at Christmas! This was not a good result!
The schmaltzy video and its plot of an offshore oil worker coming home to join his family for Christmas is almost unwatchable not least for the fact that the two teddy bears that he brings as presents for his two young daughters look really crap! Very badly made. He should have gone to Build-A-Bear! Boo!
After Guns N’ Roses earlier, we now get Salt ‘N Pepa and like the former, the rap trio are also having a hit with a cover version. “You Showed Me” was written by Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds in 1964 and has been covered by loads of different artists the first of whom to have a hit with it were The Turtles in 1968 who slowed its pace right down from its original incarnation and took into the US Top 10. The hit that Salt ‘N Pepa had with it in 1991 also took it in a different direction, making it a sassy yet also smooth whilst the rapped punctuations added their customary edge. Yet another variation on the original theme came in 1996 when The Lightning Seeds released this trip-hopped, blissed out version:
It’s also been covered by Lutricia McNeal and was sampled by De La Soul (the Turtles’ recording) for their song “Transmitting Live From Mars (Interlude)” on their 1989 album “3 Feet High And Rising” for which they were sued by the LA band. I have to admit that although I do know the song, it’s probably the version by The Turtles that comes to mind rather then any of the others mentioned here. I’m not sure I even realised that the Salt ‘N Pepa take on it was the same song!
The festive period in 1991 was fast turning out to be Queen dominated. No, not her majesty and her Christmas Day speech (had the trend to not bother tuning in to that already started 30 years ago?) but the band of course. By the time this TOTP was being broadcast, Freddie Mercury had been dead for just 11 days, the announcement of his death coming 24 hours after his public statement the he had tested HIV positive and had AIDS. Although rumours surrounding his health had been rife for months, the timing of his demise was still shocking.
Queen’s “Greatest Hits II” album had been released at the end of October and suddenly it was a required purchase following Freddie’s death. I’ve never quite got why a pop star’s death inevitably leads to a rush in demand for their back catalogue. Yes, I know sometimes cynical record labels re-release material just to cash in but they do so knowing that people probably will buy it. It always seems a bit morbid. I guess it was a slightly different case with “Greatest Hits II” as it must have been scheduled for a late Autumn release for the Christmas market for some time. Or, could EMI have been hedging their bets what with all those rumours about the perilous nature of Freddie’s health doing the rounds? All I know is that we had loads of the album in stock when it was initially released and it wasn’t shifting until Freddie’s demise and then it went batshit crazy reaching No. 1 on the UK albums chart and, as of 2014, was the tenth best-selling album in the UK with 3.9 million units shifted.
In amongst all of this Queen-mania, a solo venture by their guitarist Brian May was released called “Driven By You”.
May’s only previous solo single had been “Star Fleet”, the theme tune to some long forgotten Japanese puppet sci-fi show in 1983 which I don’t remember at all (probably because it didn’t make the Top 40). I’ve just found it on YouTube and it’s horrible. “Driven By You” sounded much more like May’s day job and indeed was included on Queen’s “Greatest Hits III” album. Wasn’t it first used on a car advert though?
*checks internet*
Yes! It was used for a Ford advertising campaign! Apparently May was asked to write a song to soundtrack it and when the advert was broadcast, it was so popular it convinced Brain to re-record the song with some changed words, an expanded running time and additional verses. The result was the version that was released as a single and that would become a No 6 hit.
It would make it onto May’s solo album of the following year called “Back To The Light” which would also feature his “Too Much Love Will Kill You” follow up single that made the Top 5. However, what I recall most about the album is that it had one of the worst covers ever. Whoever thought that the image opposite would be just the thing that they wanted to promote the album….
What’s the best cover version ever? Don’t bother answering as you’ll all have a different answer depending on your musical tastes which is subjective anyway. My friend Robin used that line in defence of what I saw as an outrageous statement that he once made down the pub which was that he didn’t like any Elton John songs. None. “What?! You can’t say that!” I replied but of course he could. Talking of Elton, here’s his song “Rocket Man” back in the charts but done by Kate Bush. How so? Well, it was a track from the tribute album “Two Rooms: Celebrating The Songs Of Elton John & Bernie Taupin”. The album featured artists like Phil Collins, Sting, The Beach Boys and Hall & Oates to name but a few who all covered songs from the John / Taupin canon but it was Kate Bush with her take on her favourite Elton hit that was released as the second single from the album. She actually retitled it as “Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going To Be A Long, Long Time)” for some reason, maybe to make a distinction between her version and the original? She needn’t have bothered as nobody would ever confuse the two. Kate’s take on it added a reggae lilt and totally reworked it. Well, if you’re going to cover a song, you might as well make it your own as the hateful Louis Walsh would no doubt have said if Kate had done this on the X Factor.
The black and white promo video sees Kate in a more playful mood than perhaps we were used to though her ukulele playing looks a bit suss. Meanwhile, the scene with the concertina player with his arm around her brought back memories of her duet with Peter Gabriel on “Don’t Give Up” to mind. Kate’s version would peak at No 12. Oh, and the best cover version of all time? That would be “Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going To Be A Long, Long Time)” according to readers of The Observer newspaper who voted it as such in 2007. So that settles that then.
The KLF were a bit out of the ordinary weren’t they? That’s quite the understatement I know. Maybe I could put it in football terms. They were like a musical José Mourinho when he famously said “I’m not one of the bottle. I’m a…I think I’m a special one” and just like José, I don’t think we’d seen anything like The KLF for a very long time.
After selling more singles than any other act in 1991 so far, they decided to do a collaboration with the ‘First Lady of Country Music’ Tammy Wynette on “Justified & Ancient (Stand by The JAMs)” ! WTF?! Bizarre? Out of left field? I’m not sure there are words to describe how weird this seemed in 1991. Surely the safe thing would have been to release another dance track in the mould of their ‘Stadium House’ trilogy of hits “What Time Is Love?”, “Last Train to Trancentral” and “3 a.m. Eternal” but then The KLF could never be described as being sensible. Apparently Tammy didn’t really know what she was singing about (she’d never head of a 99 ice cream) and originally thought the lyrics were ‘justified and anxious’ but somehow it all comes together magnificently.
The single with Tammy is radically different from the album version on “The White Room” which was a much less frenetic sound and featured the vocals of Errol “Black Steel” Nicholson which caused us record shop staff some problems when disgruntled shoppers, having bought the album on the strength of the single, returned them when they discovered that “that song about ice cream vans isn’t on it”.
And so to this TOTP performance. Would this have qualified as a water cooler moment had the phrase existed in 1991? I think maybe. So obviously Tammy wasn’t actually there in the studio with Jimi Cauty and Bill Drummond but was she really doing her bits live and in sync from “somewhere in concert in Great Britain” as Mark Franklin suggests in his intro? The staging of the performance has tribal drummers and some extras dressed in towering ice cream costumes with Tammy contributing to the visuals via a bank of TV screens in the background. It was officially bonkers. My eyes though are drawn to Jimmy Cauty (I think it’s Jimmy Cauty) who’s come dressed as Jeremy Healy from Haysi Fantayzee of “John Wayne Is Big Leggy” fame.
At the end of the performance, the ice cream van that was the visual image for the promotion of the single turns up at the back of the stage in which Elayne Smith pops up to do the link into the No 1 record. She does seem to waste the moment though, not making any reference to either the van or the performance that we have all just witnessed. Cauty and Drummond had a history of using vehicles to promote their singles – remember the American police car known as the JAMsMobile aka Ford Timelord that was the central image behind their “Doctorin’ the Tardis” No 1 from 1987 under their guise of The Timelords?
“Justified & Ancient (Stand by The JAMs)” was widely talked up as a potential Christmas No 1 but the death of Freddie Mercury put paid to that although it did go to No 2 in early 1992 which was the year when The KLF retired from the music industry by basically blowing up the whole project.
Now did I say that 1991 was remembered for being a Queen Christmas earlier? I may have jumped the gun as Elton John was certainly no shrinking violet (has he ever been?) when it came to records in the charts at this festive time. After Kate Bush’s version of his “Rocket Man” song earlier we now get the man himself with another of his older songs. I have to admit I’d kind of lost track of the timeline for Elton and George Michael‘s version of “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” being a No 1 hit. In my head I thought it was a chart topper much later than this but I realise I’ve melded together this record and the “Five Live” EP which was also a No 1 but in April 1993 and featured George Michael performing, amongst other tracks, “Somebody to Love” at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert held at Wembley Stadium in April 1992. In addition, Freddie scored a posthumous solo No 1 in the August of 1993 with a remix of his ‘Living On My Own” single. There was clearly a George/Queen/Elton frenzy going on between Christmas 1991 and the Summer of 1993 – no wonder my poor memory couldn’t cope.
So why was this George / Elton live version of “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” back in the charts? After all, hadn’t we already had a cover of the song in the charts recently courtesy of Oleta Adams from the aforementioned Elton John / Bernie Taupin album? Yes, yes we had – it peaked at No 33 back in October. Well, given that Elton donated the proceeds of his single 1990 “Sacrifice” to various AIDS related charities and that his friend Freddie Mercury had just died of an AIDS related illness and that he founded the Elton John AIDS Foundation in 1992, it’s no surprise that “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” was to raise money for 10 different charities for children, AIDS and education. George, of course, was no stranger to charity having been front and centre of the Band Aid single and having performed at Live Aid where he actually sang “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me”. After his death, we learned that he had contributed loads of money incognito to many varied causes.
This live version of the song had been recorded on the final show of his Cover To Cover tour at Wembley Arena on 23 March 1991. The bit where George introduces Elton and the audience’s reaction to the surprise event is probably my favourite part. The single went straight in at No 1 (the fifth to do so in 1991 according to Mark Franklin) and would stay there for two weeks before giving way to the re-release of his old pal Freddie’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Shades Of Rhythm
Extacy
Nah
2
Erasure
Am I Right?
No but it’s probably on my Greatest Hits CD of theirs
3
Simply Red
Stars
Ooh no
4
Guns N’ Roses
Live And Let Die
See 2 above
5
Diana Ross
When You Tell Me That You Love Me
Nope
6
Cliff Richard
We Should Be Together
No we shouldn’t Cliff!
7
Salt ‘N Pepa
You Showed Me
No
8
Brian May
Driven By You
…but not bought by me
9
Kate Bush
“Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going To Be A Long, Long Time)”
Negative
10
The KLF
Justified & Ancient (Stand by The JAMs)
Thought I might have but singles box says no
11
George Michael and Elton John
Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me
It’s a no from me
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.
Over the course of nearly 5 years of writing reviews of these BBC4 TOTP repeats covering the years 1983-1991, I’ve now written 380 posts. 380! That’s a lot of words and a lot of songs to have found something to write about. Maybe 380 is my limit as I think I may have hit a wall. I feel spent, done. My creative juice is more like arse juice and the only place it’s flowing is into my pants. Talking of backsides, the very first episode of Bottom starring Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall aired on BBC2 just two days before this TOTP went out and “the only place it’s flowing is into my pants” sounds like a line Mayall’s Lord Flashheart character in Blackadder II might have said.
Also looking and sounding like he’s hit a metaphorical wall is tonight’s presenter Nicky Campbell, who, like his fellow hosts in recent weeks, is making his final appearance before he will be axed in the ‘year zero’ revamp and won’t be seen on the show again for two and a half years. They all must have known by this point and Campbell turns in a can’t-be-arsed performance that screams ‘oh what’s the point any more?’. His usual waspish remarks are missing, replaced instead by some very functional intros and segues. Let’s at least hope he doesn’t hit any bum notes before he has to shift his backside out of it. That decision to get rid of the Radio 1 DJs from the show really messed with their profiles and careers – it could have even wrecked ’em – geddit? – wrecked ’em – no? Too many bum/arse/bottom references already? You’re probably right, this blog is going right down the pan.
Last week, the show opened with a dance tune called “Such A Feeling” by Bizarre Inc. Fast forward seven days and its opened with another dance track called “Such A Good Feeling”, this time by Brothers In Rhythm. Not helping refute accusations of the charts in 1991 being a bit samey were they?
I have to admit that I’d forgotten that Brothers In Rhythm were an actual chart act in their own right as my first thought of them is as remixers/producers for other artists. They’ve worked with such stellar names as Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, New Order, Pet Shop Boys, U2, Heaven 17 and many more. The suffix (Brothers in Rhythm Remix) featured so regularly as to almost be seen as part of the track’s official song title. However, back in ’91’ they seemed to just be part of the plethora of incognito acts peddling dance floor anthems like the aforementioned Bizarre Inc, Utah Saints, Altern 8 etc. Talking of incognito, the track samples Charvoni’s 1989 single “Always There” which itself was a cover of US jazz funkers Side Effect’s 1976 original and which of course, the UK’s own acid jazzers Incognito scored a hit with earlier in the Summer of ’91. Got all that? Good.
To be fair, I might have thought this was Incognito performing “Such A Good Feeling” if I hadn’t seen the performance here which is giving me every strong Cruella de Vil vibes or perhaps even this guy opposite…
“Such A Good Feeling” peaked at No 14 and was the only hit they had under their name as a recording artist.
More evidence next of Nicky Campbell playing it straight for what he must have thought was his final TOTP appearance with a serious statement about there being a tendency for rap music to stereotype women but here were Salt ‘N Pepa to buck the trend. Maybe it was a surreptitious audition for those serious presenter roles he went on to for shows such as Central Weekend and Watchdog?
The video for “Let’s Talk About Sex” was directed by Millicent Shelton who’s next music promo was for a song called “Rump Shaker” by US hip-hop act Wreckx-n-Effect. The video was criticised for its alleged exploitation of women in bikinis and banned from MTV. That’s quite a leap from her work on a song with safe sex as one of its messages. I wonder how Salt ‘N Pepa reacted to that news? Or indeed, as Nicky Campbell correctly advises, the song’s writer Hurby Luv Bug? Didn’t he have a brother called Starski?
“Let’s Talk About Sex” peaked at No 2.
Utah Saints, U-U-U-Utah Saints now with their debut hit “What Can You Do For Me”. As with Brothers In Rhythm at the top of the show, this lot would possibly become more famous for their work remixing other artists including Blondie, The Human League, Simple Minds, James, and Annie Lennox than as chart stars themselves though they did score three consecutive Top 10 hits between ’91 and ’93. Hang on, it says here (wikipedia) that they also remixed The Osmonds? The Osmonds? I noted in a previous post that their name was nothing to do with the toothy 70s boy band who hailed from Ogden, Utah but was inspired by the Coen Brothers film Raising Arizona. However, now it seems there was a connection after all. Look:
My God! I also mentioned “Crazy Horses” the other week when talking about Julian Lennon’s “Salt-water” as other songs that had an eco-message. Weird how seemingly random things just fall into place t providing connections and continuity sometimes. And talking of continuity and connections, a nice little segue from Campbell when he says at the end of the track “Oh yes, and I’ll tell you that’s just a sample of what they can do”. See what he did there?
Prince is the next act but wait a minute….it’s with his single “Cream”. What happened to “Gett Off”?
*checks chart rundown*
It’s still at No 11! He was literally on the show just three weeks ago promoting one single and now he’s already onto the next release! Prince has done a Bryan Adams!
I have to say that I much preferred “Cream” to “Gett Off ” at the time. It was funky, slinky and of course, with it being Prince, had an element of smut about it in the lyrics (‘You got the horn so why don’t you blow it’). What I hadn’t noticed until now but having read up on it, this is true – it’s an homage to “Get It On” by T-Rex. Not just the sound of it but also in the little messages he puts in the words like using the phrase ‘filthy-cute’ bringing to mind Bolan’s ‘dirty-sweet’ lyric. “Gett Off” as a song title would surely have been a better tribute to “Get It On” though although in the US it was renamed as “Bang a Gong (Get It On)”. The title he used (“Cream”) sounds like he’s channelling Grease rather than Bolan:
Greased lightnin’, go, greased lightnin’ You are supreme, the chicks’ll cream, for greased lightnin’
Three weeks after “Cream” was released, the “Diamonds And Pearls” album came out which was the first under the new moniker of Prince And The New Power Generation. Initial copies of the album came with a holographic cover which prompted a rush from fans to procure a copy as reorders came with a much more standard cover. I recall that the HMV shop across the road from the Our Price in Manchester where I was working at the time always seemed to be able to get more copies of the holographic cover than us leading to a few lost sales. Bah!
Need desperately!
Not bothered
“Cream” peaked at No 15 in the UK but was a No 1 song (Prince’s final one) in the US.
Oceanic are still riding high in the charts with “Insanity” having now made it to No 4 – the clue to their chart position is in the tops the band are wearing! Talking of which, clearly in 1991 if you were a female vocalist fronting a huge dance anthem, the thing to do when performing on TOTP was to take your top off. After Rozalla pulled off (literally) this trick the other week, Oceanic singer Jorinde Williams does the very same here to much applause from the studio audience (and presumably much internal cheering from the TOTP camera man that week). Not sure if that sort of carry on would be acceptable these days!
It’s the inescapable Bryan Adams next but it’s not that single. No, it’s the follow up “Can’t Stop That Thing We’ve Started” whose five weeks on the Top 40 would come and go while “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” was still at No 1. Quite extraordinary. Incredibly, the follow up to the follow up (a single called “There Will Never Be Another Tonight” being the third single from Adams’ “Waking Up The Neighbours” album) was released whilst EIDIDIFY was still in the charts!
As well as being a better song than its predecessor, the video for “Can’t Stop That Thing We’ve Started” was also infinitely better despite not having access to all those clips from a Hollywood blockbuster movie. I particularly liked the bucking bronco in the shape of a guitar scene. Not sure what that says about me to be honest but there you go.
“Can’t Stop That Thing We’ve Started” peaked at No 12.
Aha! Some clear evidence of thinking having gone into the running order from the TOTP producers here as we go from “Can’t Stop That Thing We’ve Started” to “Something Got Me Started” which was the new single from Simply Red who we haven’t seen on the show this decade until now. However, Hucknall and co would make up for lost time in a gigantic way with the release of their fourth album “Stars” from which “Something Got Me Started” was the lead single. As Nicky Campbell correctly pointed out, their last album “A New Flame” sold 6 million copies worldwide but “Stars” would top even that by selling NINE million copies around the world (most of which it felt like I personally sold to punters in Xmas 1991 in the Market Street, Manchester Our Price store).
Despite his undeniable global appeal, Mick Hucknall remains more divisive than Brexit when it comes to music fans opinions of him. My friend Robin hates him so much that in a game of ‘if you could change history, who would you go back and eliminate so they’d never been born?” down the pub one night, poor old Mick was second only to Hitler I think for Robin. Indeed, look at these tweets from when this BBC4 TOTP repeat aired the other week as to how he splits opinion:
I couldn’t stand “Something Got Me Started” at the time but listening now, I seem to have mellowed to it a bit (where’s that thermometer? I must have a fever!). I recall sitting in my work colleague Knoxy’s car just before the release of “Stars” waiting for him to finish his Sunday morning football match before he was driving us off to another game we were playing in for an Our Price team against a team of record company reps at Preston North End’s ground. Whilst I waited for Knoxy, I was listening to Radio 1 in the car and Hucknall was on (presumably doing the promotion rounds for the album’s release) and they were doing a phone in with him. One guy called in and said he’d just bought “Something Got Me Started” the day before. The single was going down the charts by then and the album was out the next day and I recall thinking why didn’t you just wait two days and buy the album. My next thought was ‘if you were that much of a fan to be bothered to ring in into speak to Hucknall, why hadn’t you already bought the single when it was first released?’ Simply Red fans, not up there with Numanoids, but a strange breed all the same.
Making a drama out of a pop song (to paraphrase Nicky Campbell’s intro) come Erasure with “Love To Hate You”. Vince and Andy could do no wrong at this point it seemed. The second single to be released from their forthcoming album “Chorus” that would go to No 1, this single would peak at No 4 after the title track lead single had gone to No 3. These were big numbers (well they’re not they’re small but you know what I mean) and within nine months they would have their first (and only) No 1 single with the “Abba-esque” EP.
“Love To Hate You” would display the duo’s love of another huge 70s star as it borrows heavily from Gloria Gaynor’s disco classic “I Will Survive”. The video for it also owes a debt to another artist it seems to me with a performance of the song to a captivated crowd doing overhead claps and Andy in leather trousers and a red skin tight top mirroring Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga” and Freddie Mercury (sort of).
Nine years on from this, another huge star would base a song around “I Will Survive”. Here’s Robbie Williams…
Yet another single from this era that I can’t remember – the curse of never being one of the cool kids working on the singles counter in the basement of my Our Price store strikes again. Possibly the least successful of the trinity of Stourbridge indie bands after The Wonder Stuff and Pop Will Eat Itself, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin nevertheless had a loyal fanbase and showed the power of having a major label and distribution behind them when, after failing to make the Top 40 whilst on indie label Chapter 22 Records, suddenly scored two chart hits on the bounce in 1991 after signing to Sony.
“Trust” was the second of those hits and this must have passed me by completely as I’m sure I would have remembered a video based around the set of The Banana Splits. I loved that show growing up. Basically the Monkees but with the four bands members dressed in animal character costumes and added cartoons, what was not to love? My favourite was Drooper who was the Mike Nesmith of the gang (he was my fave Monkee too) whilst my fave cartoon was probably Arabian Knights. Then of course, there was the show’s theme song “The Tra La La Song (One Banana, Two Banana)” which The Dickies took into the UK Top 10 in 1978.
Just like The Monkees, The Banana Splits also released proper records some of which were quite out there. Here’s “I’m Gonna Find A Cave” which sounds like Spencer Davis Group or The Animals to me but was actually an old 60s soul song originally recorded by Charlie Starr but which has been covered many times since.
What? The ‘Neds? Oh, well “Trust” became a No 21 hit for them but it sounds very Wedding Present to me.
Three Breakers this week starting with Bros….really? Three years after they were a teen sensation stopping traffic in London with their PAs, they could still muster a Top 40 hit? Apparently so although “Try” would be their last ever visit to our charts. The second single from their third album “Changing Faces” album, it’s actually very far removed from the likes of “When Will I Be Famous?”. There’s a definite Michael Jackson “Bad” era vibe to it with a gospel tinge thrown in for good measure. If they were going for a more mature sound and audience, then it worked. They didn’t appear on the front cover of Smash Hits once in 1991 (when even the likes of Philip Schofield managed it) and having already been dethroned in the teen hero stakes by New Kids On The Block, the deadly threat of Take That was on the move, lurking in the shadows of the lower reaches of the charts. Their day was done…until that 2018 documentary of course.
A quite horrible dance remix of a 70s classic now but instead of being by some faceless DJ hidden behind a mix desk, it’s actually by the original artists (well sort of). “Nutbush City Limits” had been a hit for Ike and Tina Turner in 1973 reaching No 4 but it was recycled as being a solo Tina Turner track for her “Simply The Best” collection as “Nutbush City Limits (The 90s Version)”. Produced by Chris “C. J.” Mackintosh and Dave Dorrell, this danced up version was horrendous, totally ruining the raw energy of the original. However, it did its job of promoting “Simply The Best” which went eight times platinum in the UK alone peaking at No 2. Mind you, this was Tina’s first official Best Of album so it was probably going to be a big seller anyway without the farce that was “Nutbush City Limits (The 90s Version)”.
Nutbush was of course Tina’s hometown in Haywood County, Tennessee. Apparently, it does not have official city limits; rather, its general boundaries are described by signs reading “Nutbush, Unincorporated” on account of it being an unincorporated rural community. “Nutbush Unincorporated” sounds stupid as a song title though with the only song that I can think of coming anywhere near to shoe-horning ‘unincorporated’ into a song lyric being the theme tune to Laverne And Shirley. Altogether now “Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!”…
From one old single prompting a Greatest Hits Collection to another. 1991 had seen REM go truly global with the success of the “Out Of Time” album, their second for Warner Bros and seventh overall. Just like any on the ball record company will always do, their previous label I.R.S. Records decided to cash in on the band’s early catalogue which they owned by re-releasing tracks under the umbrella of a collection album called unimaginatively “The Best Of R.E.M.”. The track listing included three songs from each of the band’s first five studio albums and one song from “Chronic Town”, their first EP, making a total of sixteen. One of these was “The One I Love” from fifth album “Document” which had originally been released in 1987 becoming a Top 10 hit in the US but not making the Top 40 over here. However, it was chosen to spearhead the promotional campaign for “The Best Of R.E.M.” and did a decent job when it peaked at No 16 whilst the album went gold in the UK.
A truly great track, it’s not the love song though that many might have taken it for judging by its title with it actually being about using people. I guess the giveaway is the line ‘A simple prop to occupy my time’.
It’s week 11 of 16 for Bryan Adams and “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You”. There’s a bit in the video where a clip from the film has Maid Marian screaming “Robin!!” as Mr Hood risks his life in some daring deed and every time (and I mean every time!) I have ever seen it, it always makes me think of my friend, the aforementioned Robin. More precisely it makes me think “what is she screaming over Robin for?”. Weird how your brain works sometimes.
And so it’s Nicky Campbell’s turn to bow out from presenting TOTP for at least a couple of years. He ends with a simple “I’ll see you very, very soon” and a final quip about how much closing act Julian Lennon looks like his father John when he pretends to get them mixed up (so not a fluffing of lines at all).
As for Julian, “Saltwater” is at No 29 on its way to an eventual high of No 6. Around this time, he did an instore PA at the HMV on Market St, Manchester, just up the road from where I was working at Our Price. It was to promote the single and the release of its parent album “Help Yourself”. As it coincided with my lunch hour, I decided to have a mooch up there and spy a glimpse of the son of a Beatle thinking 30 mins for an instore PA performance would leave me a good half an hour to eat my lunch. Julian turned up so late that it took up all my allotted break and I went back to work hungry. This exchange at the end of A Hard Day’s Night between Norman Rossington who payed The Beatles manager Norm and John Lennon pretty much sums up my feelings that lunch hour:
Norm: Now listen, I’ve got one thing I’m gonna say to you Lennon!
John: What’s that?
Norm: [in a Liverpudlian accent] You’re a swine
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Brothers In Rhythm
Such A Good Feeling
Nah
2
Salt ‘N Pepa
Let’s Talk About Sex
I didn’t – neither buy it nor talk about sex
3
Utah Saints
What Can You Do For Me
Liked it, didn’t buy it
4
Prince
Cream
No but I must have it on something
5
Oceanic
Insanity
See 3 above
6
Bryan Adams
Can’t Stop That Thing We’ve Started
I did not
7
Simply Red
Something Got Me Started
…but it wasn’t this song – no
8
Erasure
Love To Hate You
Not the single but I bought their 1992 Best Of with it on
9
Ned’s Atomic Dustbin
Trust
No
10
Bros
Try
Negative
11
Tina Turner
Nutbush City Limits (The 90s Version)
Hell no
12
REM
The One I Love
See 4 above
13
Bryan Adams
(Everything I Do) I Do It for You
Nope
14
Julian Lennon
Saltwater
After the instore PA farce? 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.
CORRECTION: In the post relating to the TOTP broadcast on 22 Aug 1991, I mistakenly reported that this was Bruno Brookes’ last ever appearance as a host on the show as he was removed along with all the other Radio 1 DJ presenters in the ‘year zero’ revamp. I also stated that we would see valedictory appearances by Mark Goodier, Jakki Brambles, Simon Mayo, Nicky Campbell and Gary Davies in the following weeks. Whilst it was true that the above names were replaced by a batch of new presenters from Oct 1991 onwards, it has been brought to my attention that four of those six would return to the TOTP family in 1994 as the year zero revamp was reversed. Only Gary Davies and Jakki Brambles did not reappear. Consequently, my claim about the show not being presented again by Bruno Brookes, Mark Goodier, Simon Mayo and Nicky Campbell is not true although we won’t be seeing them for over two years. Thank you to Matthew James for pointing this out.
Right, now that’s cleared up, I can say that this show was Jakki Brambles final TOTP appearance. Jakki always gave off the impression to me that she was quite disinterested in all this pop music lark and I never found her that convincing as a host. She also seemed to have an issue with the temperature in the TOTP studio with many a Winter coat being worn when surely it must have been boiling under those hot studio lights. She emigrated to the US in 1994, changed the spelling of her name to ‘Jackie’ and stayed there for eleven years as a news radio morning anchor and occasional television news anchor for the CBS network. She returned to the UK in 2005 and presented Loose Women until 2009 and owns her own digital media business called Broadstance Digital Media Production. She currently works on Greatest Hits Radio which seems to be some sort of retirement home for ex Radio 1 DJs as their roster also includes, yes you guessed it, Simon Mayo and Mark Goodier alongside other ‘star’ names as Andy Crane (has no brain) and Pat Sharp.
Right on with the show as we have 14 (FOURTEEN) songs to get through in this one. We start with Oceanic and “Insanity”. I’m pretty sure that this one would have been labelled as a ‘banger’ back then (and maybe even today). A huge anthem, it started life on a short run promo 12″ sending crowds of North-West ravers erm…insane.. whenever it was played. Inevitably, it was picked up for a wider commercial release by Dead Dead Good records and would go on to spend four months on the Top 40 and three months in the Top 10 including three weeks at No 3. Could it have made it to No 1 if that Bryan Adams song had never been released? Possibly although it would probably have got stuck at No 2 behind Right Said Fred. We’ll never know. What I do know however, is that around this time, rave music seemed to be taking over the world or at least the UK anyway. Just about anything that was a ‘dance’ track seemed to attract the ‘rave’ label. Oceanic obviously came under that umbrella but there were also Bassheads (from the same neck of the woods as it happened), K-Klass, Bizarre Inc, Altern 8 etc. Predictably, the scene became homogenised when all these club anthems started to be lumped together on compilation albums like Virgin’s “The Ultimate Rave”. Was that the point where it all started to go wrong? Look, when it comes to dance music, I freely admit that I don’t really know what I’m talking about despite having spent the majority of the 90s working in record shops.
As for Oceanic, despite two further Top 40 hits, they were never able to move on from the success of “Insanity” but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for the band. Back in 2012, in an interview with The Liverpool Echo in a piece about the reopening of a Liverpool nightclub called The State where the band were due to play a set, singer Jorinde Williams said:
“I love getting the metaphorical rave horn out now and again and singing Insanity. It still gives me shivers to see a crowd of grinning, dancing strangers singing back these words I wrote 20 years ago, and that it means something to them.”
The metaphorical rave horn?! That either sounds like something very rude or a band that did a session for John Peel in 1993.
Talking of rave, this next lot were also one of the acts that must have featured on that “The Ultimate Rave” compilation. The Prodigy were up to No 3 by this point with their Public Information Films themed hit “Charly”. Famously sampling the 1973 cut out animation warning children of the dangers of strangers, falling in the water, matches etc via the characters of a boy called Tony and his ginger cat, I notice that the spelling of the cat’s name originally was ‘Charley’ but The Prodigy dropped an ‘e’ (ahem) for the title of their single. That must have been deliberate and an in joke within the band surely?!
Sonia was still having hits into the Autumn of 1991?! That was over two years since her Stock, Aitken and Waterman produced No 1 single “You’ll Never Stop Me Loving You”! In the intervening period she’d eked out a further six hits all of which had gone Top 20. Clearly Sonia wasn’t going to give up on this pop star lark easily. “Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy” however would break that run of Top 20 singles when it peaked just outside at No 22. Our Sonia’s got a band of seven up there on stage with her to deliver the song but no amount of hired hands can distract from the notion that this seemed so incongruous with the rest of the contemporary charts acts. A rave anthem this was not! However, it was a firm favourite amongst the Northern Soul scene – no not Sonia’s version obviously but the version by The Tams which was a minor UK hit in 1970.
Looking at Sonia’s discography (not something I would have thought I would ever be doing) I can see that she still has another three Top 40 entries stretching into 1993 to get through before her well of chart hits finally ran dry. However, two of those were more cover versions and the final one was the UK’s Eurovision entry – so much for Jakki Brambles comment about ‘self-penned tunes’ on Sonia’s second album called …erm…”Sonia” that was released a month after this TOTP appearance. Jakki also refers to her as ‘a good old girl’ at the song’s end. She was 20 when this show was broadcast!
It’s the video for “Let’s Talk About Sex” by Salt ‘N Pepa next. In a Rolling Stone magazine article in 2017, Salt (Cheryl James) made the distinction that:
“The song was about talking about sex. The song was not about sex. The song was about communication and talking about a subject that nobody wants to talk about”
Pepa (Sandra Denton) added:
“It wasn’t a dirty song. It was an enlightenment song”
So powerful was the song’s message that it was re-worked in 1992 to help promote discussions about AIDS and HIV. Here’s @TOTPFacts with the details:
At the suggestion of ABC News anchor Peter Jennings (who heard his daughter listening to the song), Salt-N-Pepa later reworked "Let’s Talk About Sex" as "Let's Talk About AIDS" for 1992 ABC special Growing Up In The Age Of AIDS. Watch it here: https://t.co/fq1Qt9wbXx#TOTP
However, the song has also been used in a much more light hearted way. After Liverpool had secured their sixth European Cup when winning the Champions League in 2019, manager Jurgen Klopp was so overjoyed that he couldn’t help bursting into a rendition of it with the lyrics altered to reflect his club’s achievement. Someone then mixed it with the original track and….
In direct contrast to Sonia earlier with her seven piece backing band packing out the stage, here’s Zoë with with just a sole guitarist for company as she performs her hit “Sunshine On A Rainy Day”. Was Zoë’s style of dancing a thing back then? You know, feet rooted to the floor with the arms supplying all the movement? I guess Susanne and Joanne from The Human League made a 40 year career out of a similar thing.
As the track is coming to an end there’s a shot where you can see Jakki Brambles in place to do the next link in the gantry. What surprised me was that she isn’t even looking at the stage as Zoë is still performing. Look I know she had a job to do but it’s a good 20 seconds before the camera actually comes to her. Remember earlier when I said Jakki always seemed disinterested in the whole pop music thing…? “Good to see that one in the charts at long last” she tells us as she segues into the next act. Well, you didn’t see it Jakki, you weren’t even looking in the right direction! “Sunshine On A Rainy Day” peaked at No 4.
So that next act is Martika with the video for “Love…Thy Will Be Done”. As Jakki tells us, her latest album “Martika’s Kitchen” (terrible, terrible title) has four songs on it that were co-written with Prince including the current single which I think we were all meant to take on board as meaning that she was leaving her pop past behind and becoming a serious artist.
We also knew this because the accompanying video was shot in black and white, that classic trick to ensure that we understood what we were watching had some gravitas to it. No pop fluff this you know. When I was a student at Sunderland Poly we had to make a video short for one of the modules and my group employed the black and white tactic for ours. The point we wanted to make though was that black and white meant dull and boring before the film came alive with the introduction of colour. Out of our way Federico Fellini! Our video was entitled Wet Dream but it’s not what you might think. The black and white footage had a guy called Ian falling asleep in a particularly dull lecture before he went into a dream in colour where he is kidnapped and thrown into a swimming pool. As he awakes from his dream back in black and white he is soaking wet. Genius! We were all do pleased with ourselves! Ah, the folly of youth. I must get around to uploading it one day. “Love…Thy Will Be Done” peaked at No 9.
Meanwhile back in the studio we find some more ravers in Utah Saints with a guy up front on bass guitar looking like what I’m sure Boris Johnson (but not me) would describe as a ‘crusty’. Their performance of “What Can You Do For Me” illustrates perfectly the issues TOTP was facing with showcasing this new fangled rave music. There are no vocals apart from the short samples from Gwen Guthrie, Eurythmics and an intro from a Kiss concert. That leaves the four members of the band having to fill the time somehow. So we have the aforementioned bass player strutting about, a drummer, someone on keyboards and a DJ scratching like his life depending on it. No wonder the show’s producers decided to pad it out with some images from the promo video. To be fair, the track was good enough to not be undermined by the performance and would go up the charts the following week.
Jakki Brambles’ comment on Utah Saints? “They’re a good bunch of lads”. Hang on didn’t she say something similar about Sonia? Yes she did (“ a good old girl”). Presumably this was her default style of phrases she would go to to fill time. A bit like a Tory politician being asked a difficult question and replying “I don’t accept your characterisation of ***”.
Kylie Minogue is up next adding to the female pop star count for this show. We’ve already had Sonia, Zoë, Martika, Salt ‘N Pepa plus Oceanic fronted by Jorinde Williams and now here’s Kylie with her latest single “Word Is Out”. As Jakki says it was her fourteenth consecutive hit but it was also the first to fail to reach the Top 10. Were UK pop fans getting bored of her? No I don’t think so – it was just a shit song. Really weak. It was the lead single from her fourth and final album with Stock, Aitken and Waterman and she seemed to be a bit lost in this stage of her career. Maybe she was just finding her feet in the creative process (she shared song writing credits on six of the tracks). The album had a mixed reception both critically and commercially (it also failed to make the Top 10, her first album to do so). Very much a forgotten Kylie single (when was the last time you heard it on the radio?), its failure to rack up massive sales wasn’t due to a lack of effort on Kylie’s part as she gives the usual energetic performance here, crammed full of more dance moves than Zoë could wave her arms at. That would all be gone come her next single though which (psst… pass it on) was a big R’n’B ballad with Keith Washington. The word was out.
This is totally unfair! Just six minutes left of the show and they cram in another six songs in that time! My poor fingers! This is due to there being four Breakers this week starting with Mötley Crüe with a song called “Primal Scream”. What? I’d rather that sentence read Primal Scream with a song called “Motley Crue”.
This blog appears to have gone umlaut crazy. After the nonsense of the Marc Bölan story the other week and the appearance tonight of Zoë, we have the LA hair metallers with a single to promote their first Greatest Hits album. Hang on, what hits? They’d had just three Top 40 entries before this in the UK and none had hit higher than No 23. To be fair, they were more successful in the US where they’d had six including two Top 10s but I’m not about to let something like the truth get in the way of a petty swipe at them! According to the band’s Nikki Sixx, the song was written about Arthur Janov’s 1970 book The Primal Scream. Yeah, maybe or maybe they just stole the idea off Tears For Fears who named themselves after said book. “Primal Scream” the Mötley Crüe song kept their run of UK singles that failed to breach the Top 20 going when it peaked at No 26.
Another dance anthem now. Sabrina Johnston may only be known for this single “Peace” in this country but she’s not without musical pedigree. She toured with The Sugar Hill Gang in the 80s and was signed to Sugar Hill Records as part of West Street Mob so you know…respect and all. “Peace” was just a huge, uplifting chunk of positivity in the form of a gospel -ish dance track that was written during the Gulf War as an antidote to the feelings of dread and horror that conflict engendered. It was a tune! Peaking at No 8, it returned to the charts the following year as a double A-side with a remix of “Gypsy Woman” by Crystal Waters to promote the “Red, Hot + Dance” charity album.
Talking of whom….now I would have laid money on Crystal Waters having been a one hit wonder but no as here she is with the follow up to No 2 hit “Gypsy Woman” with a song called “Makin’ Happy”. I didn’t much care for her first hit and this one wasn’t going to do it for me either seeing as it was very much in the same mould – indeed it was described as ‘Gypsy Woman, Part II’ in some of the music press. Even in this short clip it just seemed so damn repetitive. Her discography tells me that she had nine Top 40 hits in this country. NINE?!! Don’t panic though, I don’t think we’ll be seeing her again until these TOTP repeats hit 1994 (assuming that they carry on that long).
Roxette complete the Breakers with the third single from their third studio album “Joyride” called “The Big L.” (no punctuation after the ‘L’ , no points). It’s a bit bland this one and it really reminds me of another song (who said anything else by Roxette?!) but I can’t put my finger on it. An ABBA song maybe?It wasn’t released in the US for some reason – not sure why their American record company wouldn’t have had faith in it given their last seven singles released there had peaked at:
1 – 14 – 1 – 2 – 1 – 1 – 2
Now, remember that guy who interviews Jurgen Klopp in that ‘Let’s Talk About Six’ video. Well, his name is Jan Åge Fjørtoft (the theme was umlauts Jan not…whatever they are) who is an ex-professional footballer who turned out for Swindon Town, Middlesbrough, Sheffield United and Barnsley in this country but that’s neither here nor there. Look at him again. He could be the guy in Roxette surely?
OK, what week are we onto now with Bryan Adams and “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You”? Nine? Ten? I’m struggling for any more content on this song now. What has @TOTPFacts got for me…
Sorry, I'm now considering this part of the show a tea break until the 16 weeks are over. #TOTP
Oh, great, thanks very much! Balls! Well, in a Smash Hits interview (Bryan was not only in the magazine but on the front cover -who’d have thought it?!) he was asked:
Are you mightily chuffed with the single then?
His reply was:
“You could say that”
Bryan Adams there with a magnificently downbeat show of being chuffed about something that has only been matched by David Batty when he was interviewed in Lee Chapmans’ house in Boroughbridge when Leeds Utd won the league in 1992. Asked how he felt about the achievement he replied:
“Well, it’s a bonus”.
Who’s this? Runrig? Oh yes, I remember them. Like a celtic Dire Straits weren’t they? Too glib? OK, well “The Hearthammer EP” was their first Top 40 hit despite having been around since 1973 and as I recall they were a very popular live draw. Indeed, there are almost as many live Runrig albums as studio albums. To prove the point, the video shows the band playing what seems to be a massive outdoor gig. The single was taken from an album called “The Big Wheel” which went gold in the UK. This really does sound like Dire Straits though.
And that’s it from Jakki Brambles. Her comment at the show’s end “Right, I’m off to the Darby and Joan Club” suggests maybe she knew she was for the bullet?
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Oceanic
Insanity
I didn’t
2
The Prodigy
Charly
Nope
3
Sonia
Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy
As if
4
Salt ‘n Pepa
Let’s Talk About Sex
Liked it, didn’t buy it
5
Zoë
Sunshine On A Rainy Day
See 4 above
6
Martika
Love…Thy Will Be Done
Nope
7
Utah Saints
What Can You Do For Me
See 4 above
8
Kylie Minogue
Word Is Out
Nah
9
Mötley Crüe
Primal Scream
Never happening
10
Sabrina Johnston
Peace
See 4 above
11
Crystal Waters
Makin’ Happy
Soundin’ crappy more like – no
12
Roxette
The Big L.
F******g ‘ell more like – no
13
Bryan Adams
(Everything I Do) I Do It For You
I did not
14
Runrig
The Hearthammer EP
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.
The Summer of 1991 has nearly shed its last vestiges as we look towards the Autumn. And what happens in the Autumn? Yes, a new football season begins. Despite enduring years of disappointment, I still retained some small hope that 1991/92 might be the season when my beloved Chelsea actually win something. Back in the early 90s, we were a mid table side, we could beat the best one week and lose to the worst the next. We were consistently inconsistent. On the day this TOTP was broadcast, Chelsea signed a new player to help take us to the next level. There was just one problem. It was Vinnie Jones. The renowned hard man and one time member of Wimbledon’s ‘Crazy Gang’ was signed from Sheffield United for £575,000 and his main contribution that season was to break his own record for getting booked when he was cautioned for a tackle after just 3 seconds against his former club. Oh great.
Not only did Vinnie follow Paul ‘Gazza’ Gascoigne so closely that he was infamously photographed grabbing him by the balls in 1988, he would also follow Gazza into a music career. For “Fog On The Tyne” read “Wooly Bully” which Jones recorded a version of in 1993. It failed to chart. Vinnie still thought he had a talent for singing though and in 2019 took part in The X Factor: Celebrity where he finished 6th out of 14 entries and performed covers of “I Fought The Law” and “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” by The Clash in Live Show 4 which is possibly the worst thing I have ever seen or heard…
Talking of ‘hard men’, this show starts off with someone who would make a name for himself as an actor playing some ‘tough guy’ roles along the way in flicks such as The Yards, Four Brothers and Shooter before branching out into lighter roles in Ted and Ted 2 and Instant Family. Back in 1991 though, he was more known as the brother of one of the guys in New Kids On The Block. It is of course Mark Wahlberg or as he was known in his pop career Marky Mark.
Having originally been involved in the NKOTB project but dropping out before they found fame, Wahlberg took his music career in a hip-hop direction with the creation of Marky Mark And The Funky Bunch and the decision brought immediate dividends with debut single “Good Vibrations” which was a huge global hit including being a US No 1 record. Nothing to do with the Beach Boys hit of the same name, this track instead based around “Love Sensation” by Loleatta Holloway which, of course, was famously sampled by Black Box for their mammoth No 1 “Ride On Time”. Had Wahlberg not heard that record before deciding to re-use its famous sample for his own track? He couldn’t have come up with something different? There was one difference between the records though and that was the acknowledgment of Loleatta Holloway who appears on stage here with Wahlberg. Presumably record label Interscope had taken note that Holloway had sued the heck out of Black Box for their uncredited use of her vocals and didn’t want to enter into litigation with such a formidable person.
The other thing that Wahlberg was known for back then was his pants or more precisely his Clavin Klein pants and his naked torso both on show in this performance. He would go onto star in Calvin Klein adverts the following year. Having watched them back, they really are quite repugnant.
“Good Vibrations” peaked at No 14 and was the only UK hit for Marky Mark And The Funky Bunch.
PM Dawn are next with “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss” having slotted snuggly into the No 3 spot behind Right Said Fred and Bryan Adams. I had high hopes that they would displace both on its surge to a triumphant No 1 but in the end they made no inroads on either as both stood firm against the onslaught of dreamy, Spandau Ballet infused R&B.
The video features a very brief cameo by Spandau’s Tony Hadley at its denouement. Well, his band were totally inactive at the time so why not earn some extra cash? The director of said video was a guy called Mark Pellington who sounds like he should have been playing centre midfield for Sheffield Wednesday but who actually went on to produce promos for the likes of U2, Pearl Jam, INXS, REM and Public Enemy amongst a host of others.
As for their album that host Mark Goodier plugs in his intro, “Of The Heart, Of The Soul And Of The Cross: The Utopian Experience” would go gold in the UK and platinum in the US off the back fo the success of “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss”.
Apparently, after the death of the band’s Prince Be, remaining member DJ Minutemix re-recorded all the vocals of the band’s catalogue to ensure he got more royalty money and for a while they were the versions of the duo’s output that you could hear on Spotify. Didn’t Squeeze do a similar thing to get around the issue of their record label owning the rights to their back catalogue?
Back in the studio we find EMF with their latest single “Lies”. I know they weren’t a one hit wonder as some seemed to believe and could name maybe four of their singles at a push but this one has clearly escaped my memory banks. Listening to it now, the formula was starting to wear a bit thin. This really did sound like all their other songs with the exception of “Unbelievable”. Apparently this was the track they issued as a follow up to that single in the US as they skipped the UK follow up “I Believe” thinking it wasn’t right for the US market. I’d have to day that my mind really isn’t tuned in to the finer nuances between those two songs to have made such a distinction other than “Lies” has a very slight Spaghetti Western feel to it. As for Mark Goodier’s claim the the band had sold a million albums in the US, I can’t find anything online to corroborate that but certainly they were a big deal over there with “Unbelievable” going to No 1.
As well as being commercially successful across the pond, they also attracted controversy and notoriety surrounding the track “Lies”. Initial pressings of “Schubert Dip” originally had the song beginning with 8 seconds of a sample of the voice of John Lennon’s assassin, Mark Chapman, reciting the first two lines of the lyrics to Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels”. Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, objected to its inclusion and as a result all subsequent pressings of the album have omitted the sample. Apparently pressings that include it are very rare and much sought after. Not up there with the A&M pressing of “God Save The Queen” by The Sex Pistols a mint copy of which sold for £13,000 in 2019 maybe but worth keeping an eye out for all the same.
EMF would return with their second album “Stigma” in 1992 but it seriously under performed – it was only on the charts for two weeks while its predecessor reached No. 3 and charted for 19 weeks. It would take a link up with Vic Reeves for a cover of “I’m A Believer” by The Monkees to take them into the Top 3 one last time in 1995.
Now I don’t think I would ever have described Prince as a ‘tough guy’ but he certainly didn’t flinch when it came to courting controversy. “Gett Off” was the first single to be released under the public billing of Prince And The New Power Generation and was the lead single from the “Diamonds And Pearls” album. It was also filthy. So filthy in fact that it had to undergo a drastic edit before it could be shown on TOTP. So, the first line of the chorus “Gett off, twenty three positions in a one night stand” was deleted for starters. Next, the lyric “Now move your big ass ’round this way, so I can work on that zipper, baby” hadn’t a hope of making the cut and finally the couplet “She said you told her a fantasy, that got her all wet (wet)” was included but had the word ‘wet’ drowned out by …a woman moaning?! How did that work?! In the immediately preceding lyrics, Prince used the word ‘jizz’ that also got past the BBC censor so maybe they weren’t on top of their game that week. Or maybe they just didn’t know what the word ‘jazz’ meant? I know I once worked with someone who’s never heard of it before.
As for the sound of the song, I wasn’t that impressed at the time much preferring subsequent singles off the album “Cream”, “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night” and the title track. However, listening to it in 2021, I can hear how it really was damn funky.
However, I can’t actually hear it without thinking of this sketch from The Fast Show...
Dear God no! Not Steve f*****g Wright with another of his ‘hilarious’ comedy records. FFS! There he is with the tin hat on miming with a guitar. Bellend! Of course he had previous for this sort of shit. As way back as 1982 he’d released a single called “I’m Alright” under the name Young Steve And The Afternoon Boys and follow it up a year later with “Get Some Therapy” as Steve Wright And The Sisters Of Soul. “The Gay Cavelieros” followed in 1984 (no, not at all offensive!) and finally in the 80s “I’m So Angry” by Mr Angry featuring Steve Wright. All were based around catchphrases or characters employed by Wright on Radio 1 afternoon show and they were all f*****g awful. Not content with having tortured us with this crud throughout the 80s, he decided we needed some more of his ‘humour’ in the 90s with “I’ll Be Back” by Arnee And The Terminaters. Obviously playing on the current popularity of the Terminator 2: Judgment Day film, this just stank the studio out. Not funny, no musical talent, it was idiotic and anyone who bought it must have been as well. Some f*****s did though as it went all the way to No 5. Completely and utterly inexplicable.
Simple Minds with a third single from their “Real Life” album next. This one was called “Stand By Love” and one generous soul tweeted while watching the BBC4 TOTP repeat that it was ‘The Most meaningless song ever written’. Ouch! To be fair, this was stadium rock by numbers by this point. All the ingredients for a Simple Minds song seemed to be there but it tasted as bland as the guy introducing it, Mark Goodier. Even the video is anonymous with it just being yet another in concert promo of the band.
“Stand By Love” was already at its peak of No 13.
The story of a band starting from humble indie beginnings before scoring a huge hit and bagging a major record deal is one that permeates the history of pop music. Yet for every James who switched to major Fontana from Rough Trade in the wake of “Sit Down” and set themselves up for a career of longevity and success, there is also the other side of the coin as exemplified by The Farm. Their 80s indie singles garnered them acclaim but no sales but when “Groovy Train” and “All Together Now” hit as the new decade broke, their popularity was enough to earn them a No 1 album in “Spartacus”.
Taking note of this success were Sony Records who signed the band and even gave them their own record label called End Product. With the backing of a major, what should have been a continuing tale of hits and fame turned into a footnote in the story of 90s music as the band struggled to re-establish themselves in the charts. Second album “Love See No Colour” bombed whilst the only Top 20 hit from it came from that ever desperate ploy of doing a cover version, this one being “Don’t You Want Me” by The Human League.
Before all of that though came “Mind”, the lead single from that sophomore album. It’s not that it’s a terrible record, it’s just that it’s not a very good one either. The chorus is pleasant enough but the rest of it is as sluggish as its progress up the Top 40 (where it petered out at a peak of No 31). And those shockingly awful lyrics like these:
Remember all the good times that we had Some of them happy, some of them sad
A genuine rock legend now as David Bowie is back in the TOTP studio after what seemed like forever but this time with his new(ish) band Tin Machine. This appearance was part of a big publicity push to relaunch the project with the release of their second album due out on the following Monday. They had already done Wogan in the week. For me though, once you’d got past the fact this was yer actual Bowie up there, the music just didn’t cut it. “You Belong In Rock ‘n’ Roll” was dull, dull dull. It actually belonged in the bargain bin (which is probably where it ended up). I even preferred Bowie’s much maligned late 80s output to this. Then of course there was all that nonsense with the chocolate eclair being shredded by guitarist Reeves Gaberels. What was that all about? Well, here’s @TOTPFacts with the answer:
No, you didn't imagine that: Tin Machine guitarist Reeves Gabrels DID just shred a chocolate eclair against his guitar. That's nothing: during Tin Machine's appearance on Wogan, he played it with a vibrator. https://t.co/TVb9D8WTjA#TOTP
Gabrels did actually use a vibrator – bought from a Sydney sex shop – on the record (after experimenting with an electric razor first). Top Of The Pops were having none of that, though. Hence the eclair. #TOTP
Just ridiculous. What a load of jizz! Talking of which, how overexcited must the other acts in the studio that night have been to be appearing alongside David Bowie?! Let’s remind ourselves who they were again. Well, there was EMF (could be worse) The Farm (dreary), Marky Mark & The Funky Bunch (oh deary) and Steve Wright (Dear God!). Bowie must have felt like he’d stepped into a parallel universe. I hope he thought it was all worth it.
Third time on the show for Right Said Fred and “I’m Too Sexy” but first time for their promo video. Had they been in the studio alongside Bowie*, Richard Fairbrass could have had a reunion with him as he worked with David as a session bassist in the mid 80s and appeared in the videos for “Blue Jean” and “Loving The Alien” alongside him.
As for the video for “I’m Too Sexy”, well, it’s all very knockabout fun made on a cheap budget by the looks with the scenes within it a direct correlation to the lyrics. There’s catwalks, shirts being pulled off, cars, images of Milan, New York and Japan, and of course a hat. According to IMDB database that bit where Fred Fairbrass pulls off his brother Richard’s hat as the three Freds walk down the street was improvised and Richard’s reaction of surprise is genuine. Oh come on! There’s a string attached to the back of the hat which Fred used to yank it off. Was Richard really not aware of that and not in on the joke?
“I’m Too Sexy” stayed at No 2 for six consecutive weeks.
*Late update:
According to Fred Fairbrass, David Bowie came up to them during the recording of a #TOTP and said "What the hell are you two doing here?". This was the only show I could find with both of them on. But it was a Right Said Fred video, not a performance… Odd.
There’s only time for two Breakers this week but they were both memorable for different reasons. “Let’s Talk About Sex” by Salt ‘N’ Pepa would be another of those records that peaked at No 2 behind Bryan Adams and would surely have been a No 1 if the UK record buying public weren’t behaving so bizarrely as to keep the same record at the top of the charts for 16 weeks.
With AIDS very much acting as its backdrop, this was basically an upfront discussion about the dangers of unprotected sex in the form of a pop/rap song. The track was originally released on the trio’s “Blacks’ Magic” album but in the UK, it is more well known as being on their “Greatest Hits” album that seemed to appear very rapidly in October, possibly rush released to cash in on the single’s success?
The lyrics included some memorable lines none more so than the three way conversation in the middle 8:
Yo, Pep, I don’t think they’re gonna play this on the radio And why not? Everybody have sex I mean, everybody should be makin’ love Come on, how many guys you know make love?
The brilliance of the track was the dichotomy at the heart of it. Whilst the subject matter was decidedly heavy, it was addressed in such a playful manner and backed up with an insanely catchy sound. A very clever rerecord all round. A huge hit globally (though not especially in there native US), it went to No 1 in eight countries including Germany where it was the first original song by an American hip-hop act to achieve that feat.
The second Breaker was significant mainly because of who it was by. Dire Straits had not released an album since the all conquering “Brothers In Arms” in 1985, an album so massive that it is the eighth-best-selling album in UK chart history. More than its commercial feats though, it was its cultural influence that made its legend. It was the first album to be recorded entirely digitally which perfectly lent itself to CD and would promote sales of that format within the rock/pop genre like never before. Despite being around since 1982, CDs had mainly sold within classical music markets but “Brothers In Arms” changed everything and became the first album to sell a million copies in that format. It became the default demonstration disc used by shops to persuade customers to turn to CD players. So huge was its perceived connection to the CD technology that it almost became a well worn joke.
Up against that legacy, anything the band released next was on a hiding to nothing. “On Every Street” was the album they came up with and despite going to No 1 and achieving double platinum sales in the UK, it was still dwarfed by “Brothers In Arms” which had gone 14 times platinum in this country.
“Calling Elvis” was the lead single and I have to say I found it a particularly drab affair. The Gerry Anderson themed video is fun though and reminds me of the Team America: World Police film from the makers of South Park. Very bad taste but very funny as well. “Calling Elvis” the song on the other hand was just very bad. If I wanted a song about Elvis Presley then there are loads of other songs that are more worthy of attention. How about “Blue Moon Revisited (A Song For Elvis) by Cowboy Junkies or “Tupelo” by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds. Hell, I’d take “Walking In Memphis” by Marc Cohn over “Calling Elvis”! Mark Knopfler seemed very preoccupied by Elvis as he would write a song called “Back To Tupelo” as a solo artist.
Anyway, the single that announced the return of Dire Straits wasn’t a big hit peaking at No 21 but then I guess they weren’t really a singles band and the record company would have been more concerned about sales of the album. I was slightly more tolerant of the follow up single “Heavy Fuel” which was a very obvious but desperate attempt to rewrite “Money For Nothing” but that missed the Top 40 altogether. I did say they weren’t really a singles band.
We’ve reached the halfway point of its reign at the top as “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” by Bryan Adams racks up its 8th week at No 1. It’s hard to recall what the reaction of the press and media to this astonishing chart story that was unfolding was. I suppose by week 8 there must have been talk of and reference to Frankie Goes To Hollywood and “Two Tribes” which was No 1 for 9 consecutive weeks in the Summer of 1984. Once that milestone was passed, I’m guessing all bets were off.
Looking at the songs that have been No 1 for the longest (discounting anything this century like Drake and Ed Sheeran) then once Adams got into double digits then he really was out on his own. Queen had been No 1 for 9 weeks with “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 1975 and indeed spent another 5 weeks atop the UK charts on its re-release in 1991 after Freddie Mercury’s death but that was obviously not a consecutive run. Apart from that, Slim Whitman spent 11 weeks at No 1 with “Rose Marie” in 1955 but that was so long ago that any reference to it felt like talking about another universe. By the time Adams’ run was into the teens it felt like nothing would ever dislodge it.
Of course, rather than being a once in a lifetime event, the phenomenon of “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” started a mini trend. The following year, Whitney Houston took “I Will Always Love You” to the top for 10 weeks with yet another song from the soundtrack to a Kevin Costner film in The Bodyguard and two years after that Wet Wet Wet were No 1 for 16 weeks with “Love Is All Around” from Four Weddings And A Funeral. I believe they would have even eclipsed Bryan Adams had the band not asked for the single to be deleted so sick of it themselves were they. None of them though could match the feats of “I Believe” by Frankie Laine which spent 18 weeks at No 1. Initially at the top for nine weeks, after a week at No 2, he went back up to spend a further 6 at the top. He was then toppled by Mantovani before Frankie struck back by regaining the top spot for a further 3 weeks. Quite remarkable.
The play out video is the re-released “20th Century Boy” by Marc Bolan & T.Rex. My favourite story about Marc is that he chose the surname Bolan (he was originally born Mark Feld) because he liked the name of a young actor that he was flat sharing with in Landale Road in Barnes – a certain James Bolam of The Likely Lads fame. Apparently James wasn’t too keen on the idea.
Marc had been going by the name of Toby Tyler before this which would have been great alteration for his act had he stuck with it (Toby Tyler & T.Rex). Mark became Marc after a trip to Paris and at one point he adopted an absurd affectation of adding an umlaut to the ‘o’ of his new surname making it Bölan. Thankfully it dropped off somewhere in the mists of time.
“20th Century Boy” (the 1991 version) peaked at No 13.
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Marky Mark And The Funky Bunch
Good Vibrations
Nope
2
PM Dawn
Set Adrift On Memory Bliss
Yes on cassette single! No idea where it is now mind
3
EMF
Lies
I didn’t and that’s the truth
4
Prince And The New Power Generation
Gett Off
Negative
5
Arnee And The Terminaters
I’ll Be Back
Get to f**k!
6
Simple Minds
Stand By Love
Nah
7
The Farm
Mind
Thanks but no thanks
8
Tin Machine
You Belong In Rock ‘n’ Roll
Definitely not
9
Right Said Fred
I’m Too Sexy
No
10
Salt ‘N Pepa
Let’s Talk About Sex
Don’t think I did
11
Dire Straits
Calling Elvis
100% no
12
Bryan Adams
(Everything I Do) I Do It For You
It’s a no
13
Marc Bolan & T.Rex
20th Century Boy
Not the re-release but I have it on a Best Of CD
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.
This is my fifth year of reviewing these BBC4 TOTP repeats. I started with the shows from 1983 and we are now up to 1991. This is my 367th post over two blogs. Thats over 825,000 words. I’m tired. I’m stuck in the house due to testing positive for COVID and I’m staring at a blank document awaiting inspiration to strike. I’m not helped by the fact that the TOTP production team were determined back then to cram in as many acts as possible into 30 minutes of screen time. This week there are 14 acts! 14! I’m not sure I can do it anymore. Look, I’ll try OK, just for you…
…OK, first song of the night and not only do I not remember it at all but it’s already giving me a headache. The cause of my distress is “Tribal Base” by Rebel MC / Tenor Fly / Barrington Levy. What that Rebel MC who did “Street Tuff” because this sounds nothing like that. Wikipedia informs me that this was from his second album which was in a ‘breakbeat hardcore’ style with some ‘reggae fusion’ thrown into the mix. I have absolutely no idea what any of those words mean. Apparently it was a precursor to the ‘jungle’ sound which then begat drum’n’bass both of which I do remember because you couldn’t escape them in the mid 90s (‘jungle ist massive’ and all that).
As for Tenor Fly, he was a leading light of the rave movement whilst Barrington Levy is a reggae and dancehall legend whose back catalogue stretches back to 1979. Now of course, it’s possible that there are some reggae fusion fans out there reading this (there might be!) that are now shouting at their devices incredulous at my lack of knowledge in this field but I can only tell it how it was and is via my own memories and knowledge. I have very little else to say about this one other than I didn’t expect to see a double neck guitar on stage for a track like this. I thought they were the preserve of prog rock.
Presenter Nicky Campbell makes a really lame quip about the Rebel MC never stopping and being a ‘rebel without a pause’ (groan!) and then follows it up by saying that“Salt ‘n’ Pepa would have been here tonight but Salt is currently having a baby which is kicking it almost as hard as she is here…”. Surely the pun there was about pushing it Nicky as in “Push It”, one of their most well known hits? Their actual current single is “Do You Want Me” which is promotes the idea of men respecting women and not pressurising them until they are ready to have sex….or as @TOTPFacts put it:
No shagging with Salt 'N' Pepa until the third date. #TOTP
Yes, well…anyway. Salt ‘n’ Pepa would continue this conversation in their next single “Let’s Talk About Sex” which including these classic lyrics:
Yo, Pep, I don’t think they’re gonna play this on the radio And why not? Everybody havin’ sex I mean, everybody should be makin’ love Come on, how many guys you know make love?
“Do You Want Me” peaked at No 5.
Talking of having sex (as just about every song in the charts seemed to be at this time), here is LaTour with “People Are Still Having Sex”. Campbell bravely takes on the single’s title by trying to intellectualise the subject going on about a “chilling assessment of contemporary attitudes towards an activity fraught with danger” before saying it’s great to dance to. Was it really though? Even the backing dancer up there on stage for this studio performance doesn’t seem to know what moves to do. Oh yes, that backing dancer who’s mouthing “hello lover”? General consensus on Twitter was that she was one of the Bombalurina women last seen cavorting with Timmy Mallett. She got all the good gigs didn’t she?
A stage performance of this track doesn’t really work does it? The tempo of it doesn’t really naturally make for a visually engaging spectacle whilst the main guy (Mr LaTour?) comes across as really creepy. Just nasty.
Campbell works very hard in his next link to make sure he gets the title of the song right, overly articulating the world ‘funk’ when introducing “Get The Funk Out” by Extreme. It’s the promo video but surely this performance would surely have been better suited to the TOTP studio than LaTour’s? It’s full of energy with lead singer Gary Cherone looking almost demonic with some of the weird shapes he pulls his body into.
When I first heard this, I thought Cherone was singing ‘No Robbie Nevil’s going to spoil my fun’ as in the “C’est La Vie” hit maker from the 80s as opposed to what he actually sings which is “No rotten apple gonna spoil my fun” which makes much more sense. Quite why Robbie Nevil would have been seen as a party pooper by a bunch of funk metal heads I have no idea.
“Get The Funk Out” peaked at No 19.
Meanwhile back in the studio we find Kenny Thomas having an enormous hit (I said hit!) with “Thinking About Your Love”.Kenny was one of the biggest breakout stars of 1991 with four Top 40 hits and a Top 3 album. Eventually the hits dried up and by the middle of the decade Kenny had disappeared from view altogether. However, he re-entered the public consciousness after appearing in ITV’s Hit Me Baby One More Time in 2005 although he was beaten to a place in the grand final by one of the weakest and weediest pop bands of the 90s in 911 – the shame!
Nowadays, he’s the lead singer of Living In A Box who shared the same record label in Chrysalis Records back in the day which is how they originally met. On the band’s official website, in answer to the question ‘Are you going to be singing some of your own songs at the Living In A Box shows?’, Kenny replied:
Yes, definitely! Fans coming to see The Box will hear their hits and people who want to hear some of mine will get the chance to hear those too. I think the fans will hear six Top 10 records in our set, which is quite something.
Well it would be Kenny if that were true but although ‘The Box’ (nobody calls them that surely?!) did have three Top 10 hits, you only had the one in “Thinking About Your Love” which makes a grand total of four not six.
A load of Breakers now starting with something for which the official description is, I believe, ‘techno bollocks’. Cubic 22 were a Belgian (not Italian for once) dance project whose only UK Top 40 hit was “Night In Motion”. They comprised Peter Ramson and Danny Van Wauwe the latter of whom sounds like he should be a Man Utd midfielder who was bought for a lot of money but who can’t make the team. Apparently we’ll get to see them in the studio next week. Oh joy. Cue another visually bizarre performance just like LaTour.
If the track sounds vaguely familiar, here’s @TOTPFacts with the reason why:
The piano riff from "Night In Motion" was later pinched by British dance outfit Strike for "U Sure Do", which reached 31 in 1994 and 4 in 1995: https://t.co/b639Sfosyr Borremans and Van Wauwe didn't get any money out of it. #TOTP
This is more like it!Despite having been formed in 1987, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine had never achieved any mainstream success until now. Quite why was 1991 the turning point in their career? Well, it could have been that their brand of sample heavy, indie dance pop that they had been making was finally receiving national recognition with bands like EMF, Jesus Jones and Pop Will Eat Itself all having chart hits around this time. Or maybe it was just that their band name really fitted in with the sex obsessed Top 40 at this time!
“Sheriff Fatman” (possibly their most well known song though certainly not their biggest hit) was a re-release of an early single that had failed to chart though it had been a big indie hit. Like the band themselves, their timeline is a bit chaotic but as far as I can tell, it was re-released when the duo signed with Chrysalis Records (them again!) after the collapse of Rough Trade – a bit like when “Sit Down” was re-released after James has moved from Rough Trade to Fontana. Also like “Sit Down” was the fact that “Sheriff Fatman” had been on that influential ‘Madchester’ themed “Happy Daze” compilation album which I think must have been when I first heard the track.
Highlighting the dodgy practices of slum landlords via the use of some inspired wordplay in their lyrics, “Sheriff Fatman” was an absolute stomper and a mosh pit favourite for fans when played live. Indeed, those lyrics, once heard were impossible to forget.
Moving up on second base Behind Nicholas Van Wotsisface At six foot six and a hundred tons The undisputed king of the slums With more aliases than Klaus Barbie The master butcher of Leigh-on-Sea
Those lines of course had their basis in reality. Nicholas Van Wotsisface was a reference to British businessman and convicted criminal involved in property Nicholas van Hoogstraten whilst Klaus Barbie was the German Nazi known as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’ for having personally tortured prisoners of the Gestapo. This wasn’t your average pop song – even Nicky Campbell acknowledges that in his introduction to Jim Bob and Fruitbat as “something very intriguing now…”.
All of this and I haven’t even got onto my CUSM claim to fame yet. I’ll leave that for the next post when they are on the show properly though.
“Sheriff Fatman” peaked at No 23.
Next a young man who was being talked up as the next big thing in British soul…or was it acid jazz?. Time has decreed that it was a sub genre called ‘neo soul’ actually. His name was Omar and his song was “There’s Nothing Like This”. In fact, his full name was Omar Lye-Fook (which sounds like a lyric from Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves Of London”) and he was a hugely talented musician who could play multi instruments and had a smooth, velvety voice to go with that.
Like many singles in 1991 it seems, “There’s Nothing Like This” was another re-release having originally been issued in 1990 on Kongo Records. It was re-released by the hugely influential acid jazz label Talkin’ Loud when Omar signed with them in 1991 becoming his biggest ever hit when it peaked at No 14. The bass riff gave it an instant hook that made it stand out and he looked set for superstardom. And then…nothing. There was no follow up single until the following year and that was actually the lead single from his new album. By that point, momentum appeared to have been lost. Omar didn’t have another Top 40 hit until 1997.
In my mind, I have an image of Simon Mayo saying “That was Omar and “There’s Nothing Like This”….except the rest of the album”. Maybe I made it up but it sounds like the sort of snide thing Mayo might have said.
The final Breaker sees the return of Paula Abdul with the lead single from her second album “Spellbound”. Unlike all her other hits up to this point, “Rush Rush” was a ballad and a big one at that. No uptempo dance number here. It was all very accomplished and polished and all those other words ending in ‘-ished’ but it was ever so slow and just a tad dull I thought.
In the US, it would supply Paul with her fifth consecutive No 1 single and indeed stayed top of the charts or five whole weeks. Over here, it got to No 6 which was just about the same pattern of difference between the UK and America for all her releases. And yes, clearly that’s Keanu Reeves in the video which was a play on the James Dean film Rebel Without A Cause – oh, is that what put the idea in Nicky Campbell’s ahead for his awful ‘rebel without a pause’ pun?
Talking of awful puns, here’s Driza Bone with “Real Love”. The people behind Driza Bone were producers and remixers Vincent Garcia and Billy April but it turns out they didn’t come up with the name themselves though. Here’s @TOTPFacts with the rest of the story:
Driza Bone were named after an Australian brand of oilskin raincoat. Billy April: "[Vincent Garcia] saw that name on a trip to Australia in 1990 and liked it. When we couldn’t come up with anything better we used it." #TOTP
As well as being an act in their own right (they employed a revolving conveyor belt of vocalists – this one was Sophie Jones), they also used their name for the remixing arm of their set up and worked with artists like Lisa Stansfield, Jody Watley, Mary J. Blige, Shanice and Duran Duran.
Sadly for Drizabone, I remembered their dreadful name more than their song which peaked at No 16.
Just when we thought that the Jason Donovan phenomenon was all over, he comes back with a massively successful hit! I have to admit I didn’t see this coming at all. I thought he was spent, done – ‘you’ve had your season in the sun now f**k off mate’ type of thing. Yet his decision to agree to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s offer to play the lead role in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (apparently he mulled it over for a whole three weeks) proved to be completely correct as his version of “Any Dream Will Do” scored him a huge No 1 single.
I’d forgotten that to went straight in at No 2 – not something that happened every week in 1991 – so the buzz around the release must have been big. It would spend two weeks at No 1 whilst the cast album of this production was also No 1 for two weeks. Donovan’s success in the role and the way it reignited his career was a beacon for others to follow in his wake with the likes of Phillip Schofield, Donny Osmond and Boyzone’s Stephen Gately all playing Joseph over the next few years. In 2007, the song gave its name to a second Lloyd Webber talent show-themed TV series as he searched for a new star to play the role in a revival of the show. The winner was Lee Mead who took a version of the song to No 2 in the charts. It was clearly one of those songs that people just couldn’t get enough of.
As for Jason, “Any Dream Will Do” would prove to be a false dawn. There would be just one further Top 10 single (a cover of The Turtles’ “Happy Together”) and an album in 1993 that his new label Polydor Records had so little faith in that they licensed several of his old hits and included them on the album much to his annoyance. It didn’t work and the album stiffed at No 27. It would be the last Jason Donovan album of the 90s.
Oh, and one final thing, what were all those Pet Shop Boys references that Nicky Campbell made in his intro about?
Some sadness attached to this next performance from Bette Midler as the artist who originally recorded “From ADistance”, Nanci Griffith, passed away literally days ago aged just 68. RIP Nanci.
Getting Bette Midler into the TOTP studio in person must have been quite the coup for the BBC and she’s come dressed as if she’s auditioning for the part of Peter Pan in that year’s Xmas pantomime at the Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury. She even adopts a Peter Pan stance when starting the song with one hand at her waist while leaning back as if surveying Neverland. All that was missing was a slap of her thigh. Come the key change at the song’s finale, she attempts a few jumps as if expecting to be lifted high into the rafters by some invisible wires but sadly for her, she can’t get off the ground. Where’s Tinker Bell with her pixie dust when you need her?
Joshing aside, I have to admire ‘The Divine Miss M’ for her very overt social media stance against the horrific presidency of Donald Trump. Good on you Bette.
Those jokers Color Me Badd are still at No 1 with “I Wanna Sex You Up”. In a Smash Hits interview, the band announced that “I Wanna Sex You Up is just a modern way of saying ‘I want to romance you'”. OK, so firstly, nobody’s opening line is ‘I want to romance you’ is it?! Secondly, the phrase ‘I Wanna Sex You Up’ definitely does not say ‘I want to romance you’ anyway!
The play out video is “The Motown Song” by Rod Stewart. In keeping with the sexually charged feel of the show, Nicky Campbell can’t resist one final risqué comment when he introduces the track thus:
You can hear the charts on Sunday 4.30 on Radio 1 FM, see them again next week on TOTP presented by Radio 1’s very own blonde bombshell Simon Mayo. We leave you tonight with a man who’s partial to a blonde bombshell…or three…it’s Rod Stewart and The Motown Song…”
So there you have it – a show featuring songs called “People Are Still Having Sex” and “I Wanna Sex You Up”, a band whose name included the word ‘sex’, a conversation about shagging with Salt ‘n’ Pepa and then we round it all off with an innuendo about threesomes (or was that a foursome?!). And we didn’t even have the song on about female masturbation!
I’ve made it through! Fourteen acts and their tracks all viewed and reviewed! Maybe I have more resolve than I gave myself credit for!
Order of appearance
Artist
Title
Did I buy it?
1
Rebel MC / Tenor Fly / Barrington Levy
Tribal Base
Nah
2
Salt ‘n’ Pepa
Do You Want Me
Nope
3
LaTour
People Are Still Having Sex
Definitely not
4
Extreme
Get The Funk Out
Not in the singles box but I think I might have it on something
5
Kenny Thomas
Thinking About Your Love
Negative
6
Cubic 22
Night In Motion
Not my bag at all
7
Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine
Sheriff Fatman
See 4 above
8
Omar
There’s Nothing Like This
No
9
Paula Abdul
Rush Rush
I was in no rush to buy this
10
Driza Bone
Real Love
Another no
11
Jason Donovan
Any Dream Will Do
Ooh no!
12
Bette Midler
From A Distance
…is where I would like to be when this song is on
13
Color Me Badd
I Wanna Sex You Up
Vile – no
14
Rod Stewart
The Motown Song
One final no
Disclaimer
I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).
All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.
When I started out reviewing all these TOTP shows beginning with the 1983 repeats, quite often a show would not be re-broadcast due to the consequences of Operation Yewtree. As the old brigade of presenters began to be weeded out, the unacceptable elements we’re also part of the cull and so the shows that were omitted from the BBC4 schedules began to get less and less. As we pushed on into the 90s, every single TOTP was shown again….until now. Yes, we are missing out the 30 May 1991 edition but it’s nothing to do with any forces of darkness. This is the first episode not to be repeated since 23 June 1988 and the reason is…well, it could be a couple of things. Firstly, the quality of the existing video isn’t up to broadcast standards or secondly, and this is the theory that Twitter seems to suggest was the true reason, oh I’ll let @TOTPFacts fill you in:
This will be due to ongoing licensing issues re: using The Doors' catalogue on TV. (The video for "Light My Fire" plays over the end credits, making it hard to edit out) #TOTP
The Doors?! You might well wonder why they were on a TOTP in 1991 and it was nothing to do with an advert this time. No, it was all to do with the Oliver Stone Doors biopic that was released that year starring Val Kilmer. As part of the film’s promotion, a soundtrack album was released (featuring the original versions of the songs and not Kilmer’s vocals which were used in the actual film) and “Light My Fire” was re-released as a single to publicise it. OK, so that explains why Jim and co were back in the charts in 1991 but why can’t the BBC broadcast a show that includes their music 30 year later? It’s because The Doors and their estate have withdrawn from the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS), no longer wishing to accept the society’s licensing agreements. This means that the BBC would have to negotiate a deal directly with the artist to play their music and as the corporation is sticking with its policy of single blanket collective licensing, that rules out The Doors from any BBC playlists. The Doors aren’t the only artists to have left the MCPS – Neil Young, Bonnie Raitt and Journey have also done so. I’ll leave you to make up your own minds as to whether this is a good or bad thing.
So are we finished with the whole Doors thing now? Not quite. In orders to maximise the revived interest in the band’s music, their record company Warners withdrew all their back catalogue from sale, presumably to force punters to buy the soundtrack album. Then, when the fuss surrounding the film had died down, they made them available again. Great for Warners, not so good for those of us working in record shops trying to explain tis marketing strategy to customers. Off the back of this comes one of my claims to fame. I indeed did have to explain this to none other than the Rochdale Cowboy himself Mike Harding. Yes, the singer, songwriter and comedian who seemed to be on the TV all the time when I was growing up came in to buy some Doors albums but was dismayed by our poor stockholding. Luckily for Mike, we still had a one copy left of the 1985 Doors Best Of (the double CD with the iconic ‘Lizard King’ photo of Jim on the front cover) so I sold him that instead of the soundtrack album as it was more comprehensive (as I recall the latter didn’t have “Hello, I Love You” on it).
As for the film itself, I wasn’t sure about it when iI first saw it at the cinema. It was 2 hours and 21 mins long for a start (which was very long for a film back then). They even had an intermission in the screening I was at cutting the film into two parts. I watched it again a couple of years ago and found it more likeable.
Anyway, the upshot of all this is a non repeated TOTP. Fortunately, the whole show is on YouTube if you really need to see it but I am already behind in may reviews so I’ll be given that one a miss. For the record, these are the artists that were featured:
Technotronic
MC Hammer
Pop Will Eat Itself
Sonia
Kraftwerk
Siouxie and the Banshees
Amy Grant
Kylie Minogue
Cher
The Doors
If you’re annoyed about missing out on seeing any of the names listed above, take solace in the fact that you have also missed out on having to endure Anthea Turner presenting and get this….it was her last ever TOTP appearance! Hurray!
The decision to axe Anthea would be the tip of the iceberg in terms of changes to the show in 1991. The ‘year zero’ revamp was coming but before then even, some changes were afoot. We’ve already had the truncated chart rundown which doesn’t include records going down, the compressed Breakers section with up to five acts concertinaed into under a minute and a half and now another change that would have been heresy back in the programme’s 80s heyday. A record that isn’t even in the Top 40 opening the show! Apparently this was a regular practice in the 70s but since 1980 the criteria for appearing on the show had been inflexible one of which was your record had to be in the Top 40. Suddenly though, in June 1991, that didn’t matter as here were Northside with a very clear graphic announcing that their single “Take 5” was at No 41 in the charts. None of this made any sense. Even host Mark Goodier doesn’t seem to have got the policy change memo as he says in his intro…
“Good evening and welcome to TOTP featuring the world’s most exciting chart – the BBC UK Top 40”
…and then he introduces an act whose single is outside of that ‘most exciting chart’. Just weird. Who knows what negotiations and deals went down behind closed doors to make this happen but it didn’t really do Northside much good as the single would only rise one place in next week’s chart before falling away completely. At least they could say it was a bona fide Top 40 hit I guess. Of course, the band already one of these to their name as “My Rising Star” had made it all the way to the giddy heights of No 32 the previous year.
The band were part of the Factory Records roster of artists and did indeed hail from Manchester (Moston to be precise) and I remember there being some fuss about them when their only album “Chicken Rhythms” was released later in June. It did quite well as I recall (Wikipedia tells me it got to No 19 in the album chart) whilst “Take 5” was a pretty funky tune to be fair. I like that, despite the privilege of being on TOTP without a Top 40 hit, the band had a dress down Thursday approach to being on TOTP in their choice of outfits. On the other end of the spectrum and also on this show were Marillion and that led to this little Twitter spat when the repeat went out on BBC4:
Always the professionals you know…and who are Northside?😄#totp#marillion
Oh, by the way, before we get any further, this TOTP was originally broadcast on my 23rd birthday so Happy Birthday to me! I am now 53. This can’t be right surely? Something else which wasn’t right was the fact that rather than doing all his links in and amongst the studio audience, for some of them (those for promo videos and not studio performances) Mark Goodier seems to have been green screened! In this intro to “Jealousy” by Pet Shop Boys he does it against a backdrop of Neil and Chris before being zapped off screen Star Trek like. Not another new innovation?
This was the fourth and final single to be released from the duo’s album “Behaviour” and for me was the best at the time (I may have been swayed by “Being Boring” in later life though). A huge, sweeping, epic ballad with an orchestral outro which was perfectly at odds with Tennant’s dead pan vocals, it should have been a much bigger hit than its No 12 peak. Maybe if it hadn’t been the last track to be released as a single? Apparently it was the first proper song that Neil and Chris wrote together but they waited for years before recording it for an album as they wanted Ennio Morricone to score the orchestral part but they had to settle for Harold “Axel F” Faltermeyer in the end.
I seem to recall there was a guy working at our shop around this time who was going through some relationship problems with his boyfriend and who would play this track a lot on the store stereo. I’m not sure that helped to be honest.
The aforementioned Marillion next though it was a Fish-less version of the band by now. “Cover My Eyes (Pain and Heaven)” was the lead single from their sixth studio album “Holidays In Eden” and guess what? It wasn’t in the Top 40 at the time either! Yes, like Northside earlier, the TOTP producers gave the band a slot anyway. What was going on?! Makes their snarky tweet about who were Northside seem a bit lacking in credibility seeing as they were benefitting from an unusual TOTP appearance just like them. And they were even further down the charts at No 42 that week. In fairness, it did make it all the way to No 34 in the end but even so.
So who was it that took over from Fish? Well it was Steve Hogarth of course though I had to do a double take to make sure that wasn’t cockney comedian Micky Flannagan up there at first. As for the song, I don’t remember it at all but that’s hardly surprising as it meanders along going nowhere for its entire length.
Goodier is back with his Star Trek transported trick again next as he introduces Salt ‘N’ Pepa with “Do You WantMe”. His intro is not quite factually correct though:
“Do you remember the 1988 hit “Push It” by Salt ‘N’ Pepa. Well in fact they haven’t really been in the charts for about three years now they’re back though…”
Well actually Mark, since “Push It” they’d had three Top 40 hits the last of which was “Expression” in April 1990 so not really three years then. OK, “Expression” only just sneaked in at No 40 but as we have seen tonight, you could get on TOTP with less of a hit in 1991.
“Do You Want Me” would go all the way to No 5 but I have to say I don’t really remember it. If I think about Salt ‘N’ Pepa and 1991, the only single that comes to mind is “Let’s Talk About Sex” which was a No 2 hit later in the year. Both tracks were from their “Blacks’ Magic” album which despite the success of its singles was largely ignored in the UK. That was largely due to the fact that their record label released a Greatest Hits album in October which was a healthy seller peaking at No 6.
Another Madonna re-release next as, off the back of her whopper of a seller Best Of album “The Immaculate Collection”, “Holiday” was back in the charts. Unbelievably, this was the third time the song had been a hit in the UK! Originally it made No 6 in 1984, then No 2 when re-released in 1985 (kept off the top by her own “Into The Groove” single) and finally in 1991 when it peaked at No 5. So, at the risk of sounding like Craig David, does that make the 1991 entry a re-re-release?
Look, I’ll have covered this song twice before in my 80s blog (https://80spop.wordpress.com) so I don’t propose to spend too long on this one but I have to say I don’t really understand why record buyers would have forked out for this one for a third time especially as so many people had already bough the “The Immaculate Collection” album with it on over Xmas. Was it a rare mix of it? Or were there loads of Madonna completists out there? Or could it have been for this reason courtesy of @TOTPFacts:
This third issue of "Holiday" was released to tie-in with compilation "The Immaculate Collection". As well as the 7" you could also buy CD EP "The Holiday Collection", which included 3 Madonna hits left off the LP: "True Blue". "Who's That Girl" and "Causing A Commotion". #TOTP
You’d have to be a real obsessive super fan to buy it just for that though surely?
It’s that nice Kenny Thomas now with his second and biggest ever hit “Thinking About Your Love”. I’ve said in previous posts that back in 1991, I really had a problem with Kenny and it seems irrational to me now. Yes, I thought this music was a bit on the bland side but there have been loads of artists down the years that have fallen on deaf ears with me and I didn’t despise them nearly as much as I did Kenny. From what I can make out he seems a thoroughly decent chap as well but boy did he get up my nose back then. Let me watch this performance again and see if it triggers some of those feelings of loathing…
…nope. Nothing there to cause such an extreme reaction in me. His backing vocalist looks a bit like TV presenter June Sarpong. Can’t be can it?
“Thinking About Your Love” peaked at No 4.
Some Breakers now starting with the first of two bands on tonight with the US spelling of the word ‘colour’ in their name. “Solace Of You” by Living Color is another one I don’t recall but listening to it now, it has a world music feel to it and a different sound altogether to hear previous hit “Love Rears Its Ugly Head”. Sort of like Paul Simon meets Eagle-Eye Cherry? Maybe not. Presumably they had to make do with a Breakers slot on the show rather than a studio performance despite being 1 and 2 places higher in the charts than Northside and Marillion respectively due to their touring commitments that Mark Goodier outlines. They had the last laugh though as “Solace Of You” was a bigger hit than either “Take 5” or “Cover My Eyes (Pain and Heaven)” when it peaked at No 33.
Another Gloria Estefan single! Wasn’t she just on the other week with a song called “Seal Our Fate”? Well, she’s back again with another track from her “Into The Light” album called “Remember Me With Love”. I really couldn’t tell you how this one went and even after watching it on this TOTP I can’t as the clip cuts off before she’s even got to the chorus! This compressed Breakers section really was pointless, talking of which this single would surely be a jackpot winning answer on Pointless if the subject was Gloria Estefan Singles.
While Michael Bublé was learning to shave, Harry Connick Jr was the guy being talked of as the natural successor to Frank Sinatra in the crooning stakes. He came to global recognition back in 1990 when his album “We Are In Love” tore down the traditional musical genre walls and became a mainstream hit despite essentially being a jazz album. My wife was quite taken with him at the time and had that album. Around the same time he had recorded the music for the Billy Crystal /Meg Ryan film When Harry Met Sally from which this single “It Had To Be You” was taken. The soundtrack album was a also a massive success and earned Connick a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Male Vocal Performance.
There was such a rush of material from Harry at this time that it all got a bit confusing. In September of 1991 he released “Blue Light, Red Light” which was a big band album and was also a sizeable success whilst he also contributed a song to the soundtrack of The Godfather Part III. The albums kept on coming with one released every year throughout the 90s pretty much although that initial buzz about him was never really recovered. Effortlessly cool, Connick Jr ran a career in acting parallel to his music making appearing in more than 20 films but I think I liked him best as tail gunner Clay in Memphis Belle. Eat your heart out Bublé.
Innuendo songs – it’s a niche genre but it does exist. I’m thinking “Love Resurrection”. by Alison Moyet and of course “Turning Japanese” by The Vapours but perhaps the biggest of them all was “I Touch Myself” by Divinyls (as with Eurythmics, there was no ‘The’). Largely unknown outside of their native Australia (where they were a much bigger deal), their only song to make any inroads anywhere else in the world was their homage to masturbation. It was written by Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg who had form when it came to provocative pop songs – they also wrote “Like A Virgin” for Madonna.
I thought this was a great pop song. Immediately catchy but also having an angle with a great vocal delivery from Christina Amphlett. One of the best one hit wonders of the decade. Sadly Christina died in 2013 of breast cancer but her legacy lived on with the founding of the I Touch Myself Project which was created in her honour with a mission to create educational forums to remind women to check their breasts regularly.
“I Touch Myself” peaked at No 10 in the UK and No 4 in the US.
Ah, the very wonderful Kirsty MacColl is back in the charts. Last seen exactly two years prior to this with her version of “Days” by The Kinks, this would turn out to be her last ever Top 40 hit if you discount all of the re-releases of “Fairytale of New York”. Her lack of chart success remains a mystery and travesty. “Walking Down Madison” was the lead single from her “Electric Landlady” album (see what she did there?) and was seen as a change in direction for Kirsty with its hip/hop feel and extensive use of rapping in it. The guitar part in it reminds me of Happy Mondays and that influence would make sense as Kirsty supplied backing vocals for their hit “Hallelujah”. However, it was actually written by Johnny Marr and was one of the first songs that he wrote after the break up of The Smiths. Despite the multitude on stage here with Kirsty, I don’t think Johnny was one of them but is that Roland Rivron on bongos?
When Kirsty died in 2001, I was on a Xmas night out from work and recall seeing her face on the news on a TV screen in an electrical shop window as I walked past. I remember thinking why is Kirsty MacColl on the news? It was tragic news.
Oh and by the way TOTP graphics team, you spell her surname MacColl not McColl. Show some respect.
A brand new No 1! Cher has finally gone after what seems like ages (mind you if we thought her time at the top was a long one, watch out for Bryan Adams in a few weeks time!). The ‘Badd’ news is that it’s been replaced by that horrible “I Wanna Sex You Up” song by Color Me Badd.
The other week I commented on the fact that two of the guys in the band looked like George Michael and Kenny G. I wasn’t the only one. Here’s Beavis and Butthead making the same connection (maybe I was just regurgitating their take on it subliminally) and they’ve added another name too…
The play out video is “Shiny Happy People” by REM again. I think it’s the third time it’s been on the show and it’s that level of overkill that quickly turned a lot of people off it. I was one of them. Parent album “Out Of Time” was played to death in the Our Price I worked in and “Shiny Happy People” was never off the radio. It became one of those songs that you couldn’t listen to any more after having already reached saturation point. Other songs that triggered me like this would be “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen and “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell (which was also back in the charts in 1991!). Even the band themselves tired of it quickly and avoided playing it live whilst it was not included in the track listing for their 2003 Warner Brothers greatest hits “In Time: The Best Of REM”.
It’s not that REM were always suffering for their art with sombre, melancholic songs though. “Stand” from 1989’s “Green” album is a great pop tune full of hooks whilst 1986’s “Fall On Me” has a wonderful pop structure and melody. And yet somehow, for many of us, “Shiny Happy People” seemed to cross a line. Maybe it’s due a bit of a revisit.
For posterity’s sake, I include the chart run down below:
This one is on the singles box though I think my wife bought it
12
Color Me Badd
I Wanna Sex You Up
Away with you!
13
REM
Shiny Happy People
Nah
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.
TOTP Rewind - the 90s 