Slade

TOTP 08 NOV 1996

Posted on by 80stastic

Welcome back to TOTP Rewind where we have yet another ‘golden mic’ guest presenter hosting the show and this one was a rather unusual choice in that he was from the world of sport. Starting in March 1994, there had only been two other sporting celebrities up to this point – Chris Eubank and Ian Wright. What made this guy even more of a left field choice was that he was a jockey. Now, I don’t follow the horses so I don’t know who the current crop of jockeys are or what there personalities are like but back in the day when I was growing up, they weren’t all over the TV apart from on race days. They certainly weren’t presenting the BBC’s premier pop music show. They were jockeys not disc jockeys. However, this particular guy broke the mould somewhat. It can only be Frankie Dettori that I’m talking about and indeed it is. Now back in November 1996, the diminutive Italian wasn’t a captain on A Question Of Sport (that didn’t happen until 2002 and he hadn’t been on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here (that hadn’t been invented yet) and he hadn’t been given the This Is Your Life treatment (1998). However, what he had done and was most famous for in 1996 was to have ridden all seven winners on British Festival of Racing Day at Ascot on the 28th September. That famous image of him jumping from his horse? Yeah, that was after he’d won the seventh race. Suddenly it seemed, everybody knew the name Frankie Dettori. It wasn’t just his sporting achievements that set him apart though. He had a ‘cheeky chappie’ persona and that winning accent that endeared him to people and I’m guessing it was those traits that persuaded executive producer Ric Blaxill to give him a shot at hosting his show. I mean, can you imagine Lester Piggott for example introducing the latest chart sounds on TOTP?!

Frankie is still a name today having appeared on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here just last year. His fame touched my life in a rather shameful incident a few years back. The tale goes like this. There was an old Italian guy who lived on our street who didn’t speak much English but who was very sociable and would try and engage everyone he saw in conversation. At some point his health started to fail him and he had to have an operation which incapacitated him but he still liked to sit in his front garden so he could talk to passers by. One day, on my way back from the shop, it was my turn for a chat as he’d spotted me and beckoned me over. He started to talk to me but after some initial pleasantries I was starting to struggle to understand what he was saying. I think he was telling me about his operation but then he went off in a direction that I couldn’t fathom at all. Not wishing to appear rude, I tried to indulge his need for company by just saying the first thing that came into my head that had a vague Italian connection. I pulled out Pavarotti, the Pope, Toto Schillaci and finally my mind settled on Frankie Dettori. I know – how condescending of me. What was I thinking? At least I wasn’t shouting at him. By this point, he was as lost as I was with our conversation and so I did the only thing left to do – bid him farewell, good health and left. I never had another conversation with him and after a while he stopped sitting in his garden. Finally his house went up for sale at which point he must have passed away. I still feel bad about our interaction that day. Wherever he is now, I hope he’s having better conversations than he had with me.

So anyway, back to matters at hand and what’s the deal with the direct to camera piece at the start of the show? More specifically, why do Boyzone seem to be on it every week? This time they share the slot with…horror of horrors…Mick Hucknall! Let’s not think about that for now though as we switch to a very smartly dressed Frankie Dettori whose first job is to introduce Gina G. He manages to get a racing term into his segue immediately – is this going to set the tone for the whole show? Gina is here to perform “I Belong To You” which is at its chart peak of No 6. However, the TOTP caption says that it’s her second Top 5 hit! I mean, you couldn’t have a bigger clue than the big figure six next to her name! And it was the single’s first week in the chart – it couldn’t have possibly been higher than No 6! And while we’re at it, her last single was a No 1 record so saying it went Top 5 is underselling it rather. Honestly caption person! You had one job! In 1998, B*Witched would rearrange the words of the title of Gina’s hit and take “To You I Belong” to No 1. I don’t think you could do that with “Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit” and remain grammatically correct if indeed that song title was grammatically correct in the first place.

And now for something completely different…so different in fact that the assembled studio audience don’t really know how to react to what they are witnessing. If the artist is a little bit out there then the chances are that said artist will be Björk. Seriously, watch this performance of “Possibly Maybe” and keep your eyes on the studio audience rather than Björk (she won’t like that). They look like they are completely nonplussed by the whole affair. You can actually see some of them thinking “When are Boyzone coming on?” or “Can’t Gina G do another song?”. To be fair to them, Björk’s song isn’t a natural toe-tapper so it would have been hard to know what an appropriate reaction to it was. Most opt for swaying along a bit which I guess is as good a response as any. I’ve come round to Björk a bit over the course of these TOTP repeats but “Possibly Maybe” is setting me back a bit. It’s just noise with some lyrics that have been described as melancholy though I would call them weird and miserable. References to joining a cult, car crashes, electric shocks and sucking your tongue as an act of remembrance are not for me.

Bizarrely, they were deemed a perfect fit for inclusion on an album for Childline that had just been released. Previous efforts by pop music to raise funds for the charity had been very conventional – that cover of The Beatles’ “With A Little Help From My Friends” by Wet Wet Wet in 1988 and a duet between Sonia and Big Fun in 1990 couldn’t have been more mainstream. However, in the era of Britpop, an approach with a bit more gravitas was deemed more suitable and so artists like Ocean Colour Scene, Menswear, Cast and Pulp whose “Different Class” artwork was co-opted for the album all contributed tracks. To be fair, the running order also featured Boyzone and Lighthouse Family but they were the exception rather than the rule. Even in that company though, “Possibly Maybe” feels an odd choice. Some artists did cover versions (Menswear did “Can’t Smile Without You” and These Animal Men offered “Wichita Lineman”) whilst a U2 / REM combo tackled the former’s “One”. But “Possibly Maybe”? It’s hardly an obvious choice for a charity album. The version on the Childline compilation was a remix by LFO but that was available on one of the three official Björk CD singles that were released so it’s not as if fans would have bought the Childline album for completist reasons. I shouldn’t really be criticising someone for supporting a charity should I? It just strikes me as an odd choice but maybe Björk was trying to fit in with the Britpop vibe. “Possibly Maybe”, “Definitely Maybe”? Funnily enough, Oasis didn’t contribute a track to the album.

I couldn’t understand a word of “1st Of Tha Month” by Bone Thugs–n–Harmony because they were rapping so fast so I rewatched it with subtitles on and guess what? I still couldn’t make head nor tail of what they were banging on about. Reading between the lines though, I think they’re using a load of drug references that I wasn’t familiar with and researching the track online, its title is a reference to when welfare checks were paid (getting your giro in our country). Interesting that they called it “1st Of Tha Month” and not “1st Of Da Month”. What’s the difference? I’m not sure but, as with Gina G, I’m not convinced either is grammatically correct.

When it comes to naming 90s boy bands, I’m not convinced that 911 trips of the tongue but if you check their chart stats they’re not too shabby. After small beginnings when their first two singles peaked at No 38 and No 21, this hit – “Don’t Make Me Wait” – began a run of ten consecutive Top 10 hits. Look at these chart positions:

10 – 4 – 3 – 3 – 5 – 4 – 10 – 2 – 1 – 3

Like I said, they stand up to scrutiny. I haven’t watched that Boybands Forever series on iPlayer yet so I don’t know what sort of review (if any) they get on there. Of course, selling a load of records is no guarantee of quality and 911, in my humble opinion, were not… how can I put this?…they are more quantity than quality. Oh alright, they were pants. Rubbish. Just no good. Their two biggest hits were predictably cover versions and there just didn’t seem to be much to them – a Dec from Ant & Dec lookalike as the singer and two backing dancers who you would have sworn had a sideline in being nightclub bouncers. Apparently those two had actually worked in a club but as dancers on The Hitman And Her TV show where Take That’s Howard Donald and Jason Orange had also been dancers. The 911 lads (Spike and Jimmy) thought they fancied a bit of that pop star lark and so formed a group with Dec Lee Brennan who had nearly had a football career with Carlisle United but was rejected due to being too small (something that never seemed to be a problem to Dec). Amazingly it worked as well and they weren’t made to wait as all those hits would be along soon.

So what connects 911 to legendary R&B producer Babyface? No he didn’t work with them (of course he didn’t) but he did collaborate with US pop/soul group Shalamar on this hit “This Is For The Lover In You” and which song did 911 release as their first single? Yep, “A Night To Remember” by Shalamar. They also recorded “There It Is” for their third album of cover versions. Blimey! I haven’t written so much about Shalamar in this blog for years! Not surprising really seeing as they hadn’t had a UK Top 40 hit since 1983. Suddenly though, 13 years later, they were back courtesy of Babyface and his reactivation of this track of theirs that was originally released back in 1981. I can’t say I knew it before and it obviously didn’t stick in my head the second time around as I don’t remember it at all but it did manage to reunite the three members of Shalamar (from its most famous line up). This exclusive satellite performance from Los Angeles was the first time they’d actually been in the same physical space together for over a decade (they’d recorded their backing vocals for the reworked track separately). Obviously, it wasn’t really my thing and the addition of LL Cool J on rapping duties want going to persuade me but my biggest disappointment was that we didn’t see Jeffrey Daniel perform his backslide/moonwalk steps.

In his intro to Babyface, Frankie Dettori pointed at his own fizzog and cheeky smile and he’s at it again when introducing this week’s ‘flashback‘ slot, telling us all that he was only a one year old when Slade were in the charts with “Coz I Luv You”. Yeah yeah Frankie, you were very fresh faced back in 1996 – weren’t we all? This was Slade’s first No 1 hit of six and also the first song to feature their misspelling gimmick. Their next six single releases all followed the same pattern. Am I right in thinking there was some criticism from schools in that the practice was encouraging poor spelling in children? Never mind that though – how did “Cum On Feel The Noize” get past the censors?

Like most people I’m guessing, if I think about Moby, his “Play” album comes to mind with all those singles released from it and their use in multiple films, TV shows and commercials. Or possibly his Twin Peaks inspired techno hit “Go”. I would never have come up with this awful noise called “Come On Baby” possibly because I don’t think it even made the Top 100 of the UK charts. Which raises the question, why was Moby granted a slot on the running order for this TOTP to promote it? The album it was from – “Animal Rights” – did nothing much in the charts so surely it wouldn’t have warranted being featured on the show and in any case, Boyzone occupied that slot this week. It’s billed as an ‘exclusive’ but that seems a bit over the top to describe Moby running around topless with ‘Porn Star’ daubed over his chest making a howling racket. It’s all a bit rum just like Moby’s song.

A howling racket Moby might have been but you couldn’t accuse him of being mainstream a category which the last three artists on tonight surely fall into. We start with Simply Red who had reached that point in their career where a Greatest Hits album was due and they duly delivered it in 1996, just in time for Christmas. Not cynical at all. Although the album went to No 1 and went six times platinum in the UK, for me, it slightly underperformed commercially. That statement sounds ridiculous given those numbers but if I give it the context that it was completely outsold by their studio albums “A New Flame” and “Stars” then maybe it carries a bit more weight. It was the eighth best selling album in the UK of 1996 but it was outsold by Celine Dion, Robson and Jerome and an album in “(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?” that had been released in October 1995.

Anyway, as was the trend, a new track was required to promote the album and “Angel”, a 1973 hit by Aretha Franklin, was chosen for that task. Covering Aretha might be seen as a heinous crime by some but I reckon Hucknall’s ego would have allowed him to back himself to take it on. Apparently the Fugees are uncredited contributors to his version which Hucknall acknowledges by shouting out “one time” midway through and almost chuckling to himself at his wit. He didn’t help himself sometimes did he? He must have been pleased with his treatment of “Angel” as the next Simply Red album called simply “Blue” included five cover versions. More Best Of albums followed including 2008’s “Simply Red 25: The Greatest Hits” which sold half the amount its 1996 counterpart. Maybe I did misjudge that album’s commercial performance after all.

And so to that album chart feature. In his intro, Frankie Dettori announces “It wasn’t much of a race in the album chart. These guys even beat The Beatles. No photograph. Boyzone!”. Frankie wasn’t wrong either. Boyzone had indeed gone straight in at No 1 with sophomore album “A Different Beat” whilst the much anticipated third volume of The Beatles Anthology project debuted at No 4. To celebrate, they are back on TOTP with a track from said album in the form of “Isn’t It A Wonder”. This syrupy ballad would eventually become the third single released from “A Different Beat” after “Words” and the title track both went to No 1. It just failed to make it a hat trick of chart toppers when it peaked at No 2. Watching this performance, I’m struck by how young they all look. Shane Lynch especially looks extremely fresh faced without all those horrible tattoos that were yet to be inked onto his neck. I’ve never understood that fashion but there are so many examples of it in the world of celebrity from Lynch to David Beckham to current Strictly contestant Pete Wicks. It just makes them look like they need a good wash to me.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Well not me personally you understand – I never bought any Robson & Jerome records but plenty of people did not once but twice. After the nation lost its collective head in 1995 over the two actors from the TV drama Soldier Soldier and delivered Robson Green and Jerome Flynn the best selling single of the year in the UK in the form of their cover of “Unchained Melody” and a six times platinum album, those not under the duo’s spell must have hoped it was a short lived aberration that we could all agree to never talk of again. RCA and Simon Cowell had other ideas and the two actors were back just in time for Christmas (and I thought Simply Red were cynical) with a new single and album, the latter, rather aptly, called “Take Two”. The song chosen for the lead single was Jimmy Ruffin’s excellent “What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted” which I think I would have been made aware of initially by the cover by Dave Stewart and Colin Blunstone. That version was all about synths and 80s production which brought a different angle to the original soul classic. What I didn’t need was a sub par facsimile of it delivered by two actors thanks but that’s what we all got. In fact, what we actually got was a a triple threat of “What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted” alongside “Saturday Night At The Movies” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” with all three tracks receiving equal billing – in effect a triple A-side. Apparently this was the first time this had ever happened. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me three times, shame on both of us.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Gina GI Belong To YouNo you didn’t
2BjörkPossibly MaybeI did not
3Bone Thugs-n-Harmony1st Of Tha MonthNegative
4911Don’t Make Me WaitNope
5BabyfaceThis Is For The Lover In YouNah
6SladeCos I Luv YouI was only three at the time so no
7MobyCome On BabyHell no!
8Simply RedAngelNo
9BoyzoneIsn’t It A WonderNot really no
10Robson & JeromeWhat Becomes Of The BrokenheartedAs if

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00fsvdz/top-of-the-pops-08111996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 17 OCT 1991

Posted on by 80stastic

It’s mid October 1991 and therefore week three of the new TOTP format – had we all got used to it yet? I recall some of these performances so I must have carried on watching it whether I liked the show’s new style or not (pretty sure it was the latter). I would have been 23 by this point – was that too old to have been watching TOTP? In my defence, I was working in a record shop (Our Price) for a living so I could make a case that it was work related. Looking back, I didn’t feel too old to still be a TOTP viewer but as I say, I was working in a mainstream, chart led record shop so it kind of felt the obvious thing to do.

Now if I was too old to be watching the show, tonight’s opening act were surely too old to have been performing on it?! Presenter Tony Dortie correctly advises us that even back in 1991, it was 20 years since Slade had scored their first No 1 single (“Coz I Luv You”) and in 1991 the youngest member of the band was Jim Lea at a sprightly 42 while the rest of the band were all 45. That makes them 8 year younger than I am now and I would like to think I’m not an old man yet but mid 40s for being on a pop music show that had recently gone through a revamp to show it was still ‘hip for the kids’? Clearly new producer Stanley Appel hadn’t learned his lesson from two weeks ago when one of the bands booked for the first show under his tutelage were Status Quo!

So why exactly were these gods of glam rock in the charts and on TOTP in 1991? Well, after their resurrection in the mid 80s due to hits like “My Oh My” and “Run Runaway”, the band’s chart fortunes had once again been on the slide and they’d descended into a world of greatest hits packages for the Xmas market and endless re-releases of that festive single (8 separate occasions in the 80s). However, 1991 racked up a quartet of a century of the band’s existence (in one form or another) and the Slade fan club-organised a 25th anniversary party to celebrate. Wanting to cash in on the renewed interest in the band, their record label Polydor floated the idea of yet another Greatest Hits compilation album but backed with a TV advertising campaign and two new singles to add interest for the fanbase. “Radio Wall of Sound“was the first of those two singles and it’s a right old stomper and no mistake but why is bassist Jim Lea doing most of the singing and not Noddy Holder? Well, it was written by Lea for a solo project and when the band came to record it, they found that it was not in Noddy’s key and so Lea did most of the vocals with the Nodster just joining in on the chorus. Around this time, Noddy had come into the Our Price where I was working and I ended up serving him. I can’t recall what he bought but I was delighted to note that his credit card was emblazoned with the legend N Holder on it. However, my joy was cut short when I realised that his real name is Neville and so the ‘N’ of course referred to that and not ‘Noddy’.

Back to “Radio Wall of Sound” though and despite it definitely sounding like a Slade record, for me it also displayed another influence. The radio DJ voice-over bits were undeniably channelling Starship’s “We Built This City”. Apparently, the DJ in question is Mike Read who had presumably taken time off from writing the theme tune for BBC horse racing drama Trainer and had also had to miss a UKIP fund raiser dinner party to record his lines.

To be fair to Stanley Appel and his production team, they’ve gone in hard straight away to create a buzz with some pyrotechnic explosions behind the band before they even start singing. Happily, they haven’t reverted to that practice during their mid 80s revival of handing out nasty, cheap looking and probably highly flammable Slade scarves to the studio audience to wave around.

“Radio Wall of Sound” achieved a decent chart high of No 21 but was undone by, according to Noddy Holder, a lack of TV slots to promote it. Apparently they’d tried to do Wogan but couldn’t get on the show. I checked the listings for the week that this TOTP was broadcast and the two musical guests on Wogan were Alison Moyet and Texas both of who performed their latest singles – Alison’s track “This House” peaked at No 40 and The Texas single “In My Heart” stalled at No 74. Neither were pulling in huge hits in the early 90s so it seems odd that a space couldn’t be found for Slade (especially Texas who at this point had only scored one hit single in 1989 and were six years away from their commercial peak of the “White On Blonde” album). The second of those new Slade singles was called “Universe” and was released as the follow up to “Radio Wall of Sound” in the December but got lost in the Xmas market and failed to chart. As such, Polydor went cold on the idea of the band recording any new material and they broke up in 1992 with Lea and Holder leaving whilst Dave Hill and Don Powell carried on under the banner of Slade II.

As Tony Dortie walks up the gantry steps at the end of the song to do the link into the Top 10 countdown, you can hear what I assume can only be Noddy Holder making some guttural noises that sound like an alarm going off. Maybe he was making it up to the studio audience for his lack of vocal participation on “Radio Wall of Sound”?

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

Oh crikey, Enya‘s back! Yes, she of the No 1 song “Orinoco Flow” that everyone went overboard about back in 1988 for being so dreamlike and haunting and blissful and all those other epithets that the press and media bestowed up on her. The single propelled her to international stardom and the album it was taken from (‘Watermark”) sold 11 million copies worldwide. Well, it took her three years to record the follow up which was an album called “Shepherd Moons” of which “Caribbean Blue” was the lead single. I remember that the album was expected to shift a huge number of units over Xmas in the Our Price store I was working in and therefore a huge amount of units were ordered in. It didn’t disappoint going to No 1 with 13 million copies purchased world-wide. All this sales were achieved without the massive promotional pull of a No1 single that its predecessor “Watermark” had benefitted from. “Caribbean Blue” went to No 13 in the UK but was not a huge hit globally only making the Top 10 in her native Ireland.

For this studio performance, the stage has a back drop that seems to be some sort of lost temple in an overgrown jungle but which fortunately still has functioning dry ice machines. Enya herself sits statically at the piano but unlike with Julian Lennon’s keyboard performance the other week, new TOTP producer Stanley Appel resisted the urge to beef up the performance with clips of the official promo video (even though it featured future Eastenders star Martine McCutcheon).

The intro to the song by presenter Mark Franklin is a bit sycophantic…

“She’s live in the studio tonight playing the unique sound of Enya…”

What sound did you expect her to play Mark? She is Enya after all so she was hardly likely to come out and do a tribute to Liberace was she?!

Moving on and it’s another studio performance by another returning female solo star in Lisa Stansfield. Like Enya before her, Lisa had also scored a massive No 1 back in the late 80s with “All Around the World” but hadn’t been seen in the charts for a good 18 months by this point. “Change” was the lead single from her second solo album called “Real Love” and that album would help to establish Lisa as one of the UK’s most prominent soul singers by going double platinum over here and reaching No 3 in the charts. It housed four UK Top 40 singles including one of her most well known songs in “All Woman” though the track I would have liked to have seen released was “Soul Deep” that remained an album track.

Lisa’s grown her hair a bit since the days of “All Around the World” and that short cut and kiss curl look. She still looks fabulous. I worked in Our Price Rochdale (Lisa’s hometown) for a whole year between ’92 and ’93 and the only time she came into the shop, I was on my day off. Damn it!

Luckier than me was presenter Mark Franklin who gets to interview Lisa at the end of her performance for one of those embarrassing interviews in which he asks Lisa about her forthcoming tour and we find out that she is going on tour (surprise surprise), that it begins in February and is going pretty much everywhere on the planet. Quality in depth interviewing there. He reminds me of Lady One Question from early noughties Channel 4 comedy gambling game show Banzai…

So after Stevie Wonder and Queen in weeks one and two of the show’s new format, week three brings us another big hitter in the ‘video exclusive’ section as we get U2‘s latest promo for their new single “The Fly”. Their first release of the 90s, this was the lead single from their multi-platinum “Achtung Baby” album. Very much seen as a change of style at the time with its multi layered guitars and distorted effects on Bono’s vocal, it was certainly no “With Or Without You”. Indeed, Bono is on record as describing the song as “The sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree”. For me though it sounded like U2 doing their best INXS impression but that wasn’t a bad thing in my book although I was surprised to find a copy of the 7″ in my singles box as I don’t recall buying it. I would also end up buying the album on which there are much better tracks than “The Fly” for me.

The song would also announce Bono’s ‘The Fly’ character which was meant to send up the stereotype of an egomaniacal rock star. Sadly for Bono, I’m not sure everyone got the joke and his wearing of large wrap-around sunglasses backfired on him in many ways. Attending press conferences in ‘The Fly’ persona was probably not the best idea Bono ever had either and didn’t help his cause.

Whatever any of us thought about the song, it created itself a space in chart history as the single that eventually toppled Bryan Adams’ 16 week run at the top of the charts. Ironically, although it went straight in at No 1, “The Fly” was only made available for three weeks before the band’s record label Island deleted it so that they could clear the release schedules for further singles to be pulled from the album. How many music fans wished that Bryan’s record label A&M had done a similar thing with “(Everything I Do) I Did It For You”?

Dannii Minogue‘s annus mirabilis continues a pace with her fourth hit single of 1991 “Baby Love”. Not a cover of the Diana Ross & The Supremes number but a cover version all the same as this track was originally recorded by one hit wonder Regina and was a US No 10 hit in 1986. Dannii would have been better off going for the Motown track in my opinion as the Regina song doesn’t seem to have much going for it to my ears. Interesting to note that now the acts have to sing live on the show, Dannii’s dance moves are considerably curtailed – in fact she hardly moves at all leaving all the “nifty dance moves” (as promised by Tony Dortie in his intro) to her trio of backing dancers. To be fair to her, you couldn’t have expected anything but an out of breath vocal if she’d also attempted all the dancing we saw for her performance of previous hit “Jump To The Beat”.

The film that she is starring in that will be released the following year that Tony Dortie references, I hadn’t realised I’d seen until I researched it for this post. Success (also known as One Crazy Night) tells the story of four Beatles obsessed fans (plus an Elvis fan who can’t stand them) who find themselves locked in the basement of the hotel that the moptops are staying in whilst in Australia during their touring years period. While waiting to be rescued, they start to share their deepest secrets with each other. Often compared (unfavourably) to The Breakfast Club, it attracted criticism for the use of Beatles songs that didn’t belong in the time period the film was set. The plot takes place in 1964 but some of the songs used are from much later albums like “Abbey Road” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” which does seem unforgivable. However, the fact that I even remembered the film at all suggests it must have done something right to stay in my memory banks although I’d certainly forgotten that Dannii Minogue was in it.

“Baby Love” peaked at No 14.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uqo01s83XU

The video for “Wind Of Change” by Scorpions is next. As Tony Dortie says, it was giving Bryan Adams a run for his money by occupying the No 2 spot in the charts this week although I have no idea how many copies it was actually selling and whether it was indeed anywhere near to knocking the Canadian off his throne.

The song was the subject of an eight part podcast in 2020 which raised the possibility that the song was written by or connected to the CIA. What?! The premise goes that the CIA may have wanted to engender anti Soviet Union sentiment by utilising pop culture and the result was the writing of this people unifying, Cold War busting anthem. I haven’t heard the podcast but it’s an interesting theory and all. However, I get the impression it involves lots of internet rabbit holes and reminds me of all those conspiracy theorists out there who believe that Paul McCartney was killed in a car crash in 1966 and replaced with a lookalike as the Beatles obsessed nation couldn’t have handled the truth. I’m not buying either story.

This week the album chart feature is fulfilled by Paul Young whose Best Of collection “From Time to Time – The Singles Collection” is at No 5 this week. I’m guessing that neither Paul nor his record label Columbia could have foreseen the album going straight in at No 1 and being certified triple platinum but that’s exactly what happened. To be fair to Paul, it was a quality package filled with substantial hits from 1983 to the present (i.e. 1991) plus four newly recorded tracks one of which was this cover of Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over“. I’d bought the original back in 1987 and although Paul’s version is inferior, he does a decent job of it all the same.

The performance here is interesting with Paul sat down for the duration and strumming a guitar! Don’t think I’d ever seen him do that before or indeed knew he could play. And isn’t that Paul Carrack on keyboards once of Ace, Squeeze and Mike + The Mechanics? It is you know. Bizarrely, Carrack had shared lead vocal duties with another Paul Young whilst in Mike Rutherford’s Genesis offshoot project but this one was the ex lead singer of Sad Café who passed away in 2000 rather than the singer of such hits as “Love of the Common People”, “Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home)” and “Everytime You Go Away”.

Paul’s version of “Don’t Dream It’s Over” peaked at No 20.

Mark Franklin goes in for another interview about tour dates when he grills Paul Young about his forthcoming Xmas tour and then we’re into the Breakers starting with Ce Ce Peniston and “Finally”. Hang on – I thought this was in the charts much later than this and after she’d had already had a hit with a track called “We Got a Love Thang”

*checks officialcharts.com*

Yes I was right…and wrong. It was a much bigger hit (No 2) when re-released in March of ’92 after “We Got A Love Thang” had been a Top 10 hit at the start of the year. I had completely forgotten that “Finally” was also a No 26 hit in ’91. The track has routinely featured in various publications and music stations polls usually called something like The Biggest 90’s Dance Anthems of All Time etc and was also a huge smash in the US where it peaked at No 5. There was also a parent album called “Finally” which also performed well in the UK peaking at No 10.

I always quite liked it and much preferred it to “We Got a Love Thang”. It was kept off the top spot in ’92 by another long running No 1 song – Shakespears Sister’s “Stay”.

The second Breaker comes from Moby with “Go”. As with Ce Ce Peniston, I get a little confused over the chart history of this one. Various sources say that it was either released in March ’91 or July of that year – either way, it took a long time then for it to get into the Top 40. Maybe it was a sleeper hit, big in the clubs but not being played on mainstream radio?

The track was originally the B-side to Moby’s debut single from the previous year “Mobility” but was remixed with added samples from the obligatory Jocelyn Brown (the ‘yeah’ bit) and David Lynch’s mystery-horror TV series Twin Peaks and it would eventually (ahem) go Top 10. It wasn’t really my cup of tea although I would end up working with someone at Our Price who adored Moby well before his record-busting “Play” album of 1999 (which I did succumb to buying).

The clip that we see on TOTP of the kaleidoscopic video for the track was pretty standard dance tune fare and gave no idea to the identity of Moby who would turn out to be a little bald headed American bloke (although he does feature if you watch the whole promo).

Oh, it’s one of those TOTP performances that get talked up as memorable but was it actually any good? I refer to Monty Python and “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life”. I say Monty Python but it’s really just Eric Idle surrounded by what seemed to be a cast of thousands but was in fact a few blokes in Python-esque housewife fancy dress and a fake band. I guess it’s quite well choreographed with various explosions, instruments being broken and parts of the set falling down (hopefully the Health & Safety risk assessment was rigorous) and Idle does a good job of leading us all through it (and the studio audience through the set) but was it that funny?! That walk through the studio reminded me of similar performances by Adam Ant for “Goody Two Shoes” and that time Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes To Hollywood took a stroll to relieve the boredom of miming to “Two Tribes” on the show for the ninth (?) time. In all honesty, I preferred Adam and Holly’s excursions. The taxi at the end to whisk Idle away brought to mind Blur in that milk float at the start of the TOTP in the week of the legendary Blur v Oasis chart battle.

“Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” went all the way to No 3 whilst the re-release of the “Monty Python Sings” album off the back of it peaked at No 62.

And it’s STILL there at No 1 – Bryan Adams records a 15th consecutive week at the top of the charts with “(Everything I Do ) I Do It For You”. Bryan must have got a taste for doing songs for film soundtracks as he would record three more before the decade was out – “All for Love” (with Rod Stewart and Sting) reached No 2 in the UK charts in 1994 from the film The Three Musketeers whilst “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?” a year later from Don Juan DeMarco peaked at No 4. A final soundtrack song was recorded with Barbara Streisand in 1996 called “I Finally Found Someone” from her The Mirror Has Two Faces movie. Into the new millennium, he recorded “Here I Am” for the DreamWorks animation film Spirit: Stallion Of The Cimarron. I don’t think I liked any of them.

Just before the closing credits, Eric Idle returns to pie presenters Mark Franklin and Tony Dortie in the face. A watching nation cheered him on.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1SladeRadio Wall Of SoundNope
2EnyaCaribbean BlueNo
3Lisa StansfieldChangeYes! Well, it’s in my singles box but I think my wife bought it actually.
4U2The FlyYes! Two on the trot! When was the last time that happened?
5Dannii MinogueBaby LoveThis was never going to complete a hat-trick of purchases – no
6ScorpionsWind Of ChangeNah
7Paul YoungDon’t Dream It’s OverNo but I bought his Best Of album with it on
8Ce Ce PensitonFinallyI did not
9Moby GoGo? No.
10Monty PythonAlways Look On The Bright Side Of LifeNever happening
11Bryan Adams (Everything I Do ) I Do It For You”Negative

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0010rl4/top-of-the-pops-17101991