Spice Girls

TOTP 30 AUG 1996

Posted on by 80stastic

Oh dear God! I thought we were past this point! This is a real kick in the nuts! A real ball ache! Simon Mayo is back as host for this TOTP. If you’ve taken even a mild interest in this blog previously then you’ll be aware of my complete aversion to the smug git. I have even been advised to seek medical help over my hatred of him. Given this, the idea of having to review an episode that will feature him heavily is anathema to me. So what do I do here? Just blank this episode out and stop the post right here? The completist in me won’t allow that. Review the show without making any further references to Mayo? Nah, if I’m doing this then he’s getting both barrels! Let’s do this!

The first thing to note is that in the time he’s been away from our screens, Mayo has grown his hair into what I’m guessing would have been a popular style of the time. It’s all long and slicked back – all that’s missing is an Alice band. It looks ridiculous and, if I’m honest, a bit dirty. His first ‘gag’ comes immediately when he makes some fatuous remark about the show lasting as long as a royal marriage referencing Charles and Diana who had completed their divorce proceedings two days before this TOTP aired. They were married for 15 years Mayo. Where’s the similarity with a 30 minute pop music programme? Idiot.

The first act on tonight is Shed Seven whose Rick Witter is also having a bad hair day. Quite what look he was trying to achieve I’m not sure – it’s a kind of cross between Edmund from Blackadder I and US stand up comedian Emo Philips. Anyway, Rick and his band mates were on a roll in 1996 clocking up five chart hits including their first and only Top 10 hit. In fact, I would go as far as to say the York indie rockers were never bigger than they were this year. They were good value for their success as well with those hits being some of the strongest of their career by my reckoning. “On Standby” was the fourth of those peaking at No 12 and was the last to be taken from second album “A Maximum High”. In the November, they would release “Chasing Rainbows” as the lead single from third album “Let It Ride” and yet said album would not appear for over 18 months. A similar thing happened with Paul Weller who released “Peacock Suit” as the lead single from his “Heavy Soul” album ten months before said album came out. What was all that about?

For his next lame attempt at humour, Mayo tries to compare the outfits worn by MN8 in this performance to those in children’s TV show Fireman Sam. In truth, I don’t think there’s any sort of valid comparison to be seen here. They’re more like angling waders than firemen’s overalls but Mayo couldn’t make a joke about Mortimer & Whitehouse Gone Fishing as that was over 20 years away from coming to our TV screens. As with all of his links, I always find myself asking the question “Why?”. He was there to do a fairly basic job of introducing acts on a pop music show. We weren’t tuning in to watch him. Why couldn’t he understand that. He treated these appearances as if they were an extension of his Radio 1 show which I guess people were choosing to tune into partly due to him at least. TOTP though was a completely different story.

As for MN8, they were finding out that having an enormous debut hit was one thing but following it up, well that was another different story. After “I’ve Got A Little Something For You” made No 2 in early ‘95, subsequent singles never quite measured up to that standard. Sure, they’d had a couple of further Top 10 hits but could you name them without checking? I couldn’t and I must have reviewed them in this blog. In an act of self knowledge, their latest attempt to scale the chart heights again was called “Tuff Act To Follow” (note obligatory urban spelling of the word ‘tough’) and was basically a rip off of Bobby Brown. Seriously, close your eyes and listen and it could almost be him. The single reached No 15 but it was only prolonging the inevitable. They would have one more minor hit before second album “Freaky” vanished without trace along with MN8. By the way, I’m not sure that the guy who can’t keep his shirt on under his oversized waders is quite achieving the sexy image he thinks he is.

For his next LOL moment, Mayo returns to his go to subject matter of football. Smug Simon was always been keen on flashing his ‘beautiful game’ credentials, banging on about his love for Spurs etc (well this was the time of ‘lads’ culture when following football was suddenly not only allowed but embraced). With this in mind, he gets a reference in to the recent world record transfer of Alan Shearer from Blackburn Rovers to Newcastle United for £15 million comparing it to the £52 million record deal just signed by REM with Warner. I’m not sure what his point was (if indeed he had one) by equating it to three and a half Shearers but he obviously thought he was on the money with that line. Prat.

Anyway, it’s time for another showing of the video for “E-Bow The Letter” as, after last week’s exclusive screening, it’s debuted at No 4 in the UK Top 40. That chart position was the band’s then highest ever as despite their huge international success (especially since the turn of the decade), they weren’t big on huge charting singles. Prior to this, their highest peak had been No 6 with “Shiny Happy People” in 1991, one of only four Top 10 hits up till then. Was it that once they’d crossed over into mainstream success that punters tended to buy their albums and only invested in singles when they were a brand new/lead track from a new one? Maybe. All I know for sure is that of the nine studio albums released since (and including) “Out Of Time”, seven of them went to No 1 in the UK.

Oh Mayo’s very pleased with himself for the next link as he introduces dance act De’Lacy as having split up from De’Cagney. See what he did there? De’Cagney and De’Lacey? Cagney and Lacey? Yes, Simon we all get it- it’s just that it’s not very funny. Nor topical. Cop show Cagney & Lacey stopped being made in 1988. Sure, it may have been repeated during daytime schedules around the early 90s but it wasn’t a current hit show. Would the pop kids of 1996 have even got the reference? If you’re going to persist with these pathetic lines, at least know your audience Mayo!

So who were this De’Lacy anyway? Well, they were the act that had a hit with “Hideaway” in the Autumn of ‘95. Curiously, it took them a year to release a follow up and when it came in the shape of “That Look”, it sounded like a weaker version of its predecessor (to my uncultured ears at least). Lots of beats and lots of screeching vocals is all I can hear but then it’s all about the remixes or so I’m told and “That Look” came with some from Hani and Deep Dish which was a big deal apparently. To prove the point, De’Lacy’s only other hit was a remix of “Hideaway” in 1998. Remixes, it’s all about the remixes.

Mayo is running out of material already and we’re not even halfway through the show yet. In his intro to “Undivided Love” by Louise, he goes on about the royal divorce again insinuating that Charles and Diana clearly couldn’t appreciate the concept of a love that couldn’t be divided. To back up his line, he name checks the Gallagher brothers as another couple that fall into that category. How hilarious Simon! Stand well back, my sides may split! There really was no beginning to this guy’s talents!

As for Louise, this was a fairly unremarkable piece of pop fluff that was a bit of a disappointment after the change of direction both sound and image wise instigated by previous release “Naked” especially for teenage schoolboys I would imagine. Still, I’m sure “Undivided Love” came with a fold out poster of Louise. Did they have laminators back then? Sorry, sorry, SORRY!

So Mayo has found himself some new material which was topical at the time but which makes no sense that I can ascertain. Introducing “Spinning The Wheel”, he says that it was released so early that George Michael is thinking of changing his name to George Michael Howard. After some research on the internet, I finally found the news story that Mayo was referring to. In this year, then Home Secretary Michael Howard ordered the release of two career criminals from prison with royal pardons after just ten months of their eighteen years prison sentences for heroin smuggling after they provided information leading to the seizure of firearms. So what has that got to do with George Michael? It can’t just be that there’s a ‘Michael’ in both their names can it? Does the title of the single have any relevance? “Spinning The Wheel”? Gambling? I can’t really see a connection. So what about it being released early? Well, it was the third single taken from the album “Older” which had already been available in the shops for over three months by this point. Nothing there then. It really does seem like he squeezed that line into his segue just because of the name ‘Michael’! I hate the way he then leaves his ‘joke’ lingering while he deadpans the camera before the song starts as if he’s giving the watching audience at home the chance to catch up with his amazing wit. Prick. Offering some karma here is the fact that those two career criminals were re-arrested in 2008 and subsequently convicted of having set up the weapons finds themselves to earn their early release thus proving that Michael Howard’s decision making was as flawed as Mayo’s ‘humour’. As for “Spinning The Wheel”, this is the third time it’s been on the show and I still can’t remember how it goes.

Mayo has a job to do in his next link which is to inform us that TOTP will be on at 7.25 rather than 7.00 from next week. This messing around (it had already been shifted from its traditional Thursday night slot to Friday) would contribute to the beginning of the end for the show as it lost its identity struggling to remain relevant in an ever changing musical landscape. Mayo even messes this up though instructing us to write the new start time on our fridges. Quite how do you write on a fridge Simon? Surely you meant put a post-it note on the fridge no?

Anyway, it’s time now for another one of those straight out of left field appearances next that TOTP executive producer Ric Blaxill was fond of just to shake things up a bit. After Bis before them come another band without a hit to their name at the time in Fluffy. Remember this lot? No, nor me. Hardly surprising as they featured more in the pages of the music press than the Top 40. A punk rock band from London, they were signed to Virgin and supported many big names on tour including Marilyn Manson, Foo Fighters and punk legends the Sex Pistols before releasing their only album “Black Eye” in mid September. Despite some decent reviews and a promotional campaign that included the release of an EP of songs recorded live at New York’s legendary CBGB club, it didn’t sell.

The album’s opening track was “Nothing”, performed here to promote its release as a single. A TOTP appearance didn’t help as it peaked at No 52. Why didn’t Fluffy convince the record buying public? Was it that they were not offering anything new? Was their sound too raw compared to the slicker production of Britpop? Who knows? What I do know is that the band’s bassist Bridgette Jones went on to become the inspiration for Helen Fielding’s novel and subsequent film Bridget Jones’s Diary. OK, I made that last bit up. Well, if Mayo can do his lame lines…

Mayo shows his age (he was already just a few weeks off 38 years old at this point – 38 and pretending he was still down with the kids!) by referencing former Radio 1 DJ Alan “Fluff” Freeman in his next link. Fluff? Fluffy? Get it pop pickers? Oh do piss off mate. The penultimate act before the No 1 is Jamiroquai who were about to release their third studio album “Travelling Without Moving” and it would be this collection of songs that really propelled the band (or more specifically Jay Kay) into global superstardom. The previous two albums “Emergency On Planet Earth” and “Return Of The Space Cowboy” had both sold well each shifting over a million units worldwide but the traditionally ‘difficult third album’ was nothing of the sort selling four times the amount of both its predecessors combined.

Although not strictly the lead single due to his collaboration earlier in ‘96 with M-Beat that was tacked onto the end of the album as an extra track, “Virtual Insanity” certainly felt like it. Not really a change in direction – some might say it was the same as all their other hits – but it was silky smooth and very radio friendly with an infectious groove (man!). It would become one of the band’s best known tracks debuting at No 3 backed by its memorable, award winning sleight of hand video. The album would spawn five hits in total including three Top Tenners thereby making Jamiroquai not only a successful albums artist but singles act as well. Clearly the title “Virtual Insanity” was a play on the phrase ‘virtual reality’ which must have been a thing even 28 years ago. Although it could be viewed as a slightly lazy construct, it’s still infinitely better than Peter Andre’s similar wordplay when he combined the words ‘insane’ and ‘mania’ to come up with “Insania”.*

*Apparently the word actually has its origins in Ancient Greek but I’m not about to let that get in the way of a convenient way to finish a paragraph!

Mayo is struggling now we’re deep into the show and segues into the No 1 by asking us to remember the new time for TOTP (labouring on the word ‘new’) before introducing the “Old Spice Girls”. Old Spice? Geddit? Yeah, it’s shit isn’t it? It was a sixth week of seven at the top for Spice Girls with “Wannabe” though and through the prism of its success, it’s hard to recall now that it was actually a very odd song. A mash up of sugary pop, rap, and at just 2:40 in length, was it almost a novelty record? The super smooth follow up “Say You’ll Be There” made it even more of an outlier. There’s just one more week of it to come at the top of the charts and that’s probably for the best.

The play out track is another single that wasn’t a Top 40 hit in the UK – that’s two on the same show after Fluffy earlier. I’m no Nostradamus myself but it would seem that Ric Blaxill wasn’t that great at spotting hit potential. Apparently Big Soul were a funk-rock band from California whose single “Hippy Hippy Shake” was nothing to do with the hit that The Swinging Blue Jeans had in 1964 but it had been reasonably successful in France. In the UK however, they quickly found that one funk-rock band from California* was all we needed and promptly disappeared never to be heard of again,

*Waves at Red Hot Chili Peppers

Mayo can’t resist one last lame attempt at humour when saying that next week’s presenter Julia Carling was the only Carling recently not to be dropped – presumably something to do with Will Carling and rugby? He signs off by saying “See you soon” but guess what? We won’t be! This was the last of 56 TOTP shows that he presented! Hallelujah! The gods of pop music blogging smile on me at last! Bye bye Mayo – you won’t be missed!

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Shed SevenOn StandbyNot this one
2MN8Tuff Act To FollowNever
3REM E-Bow The LetterIt’s a no from me
4De’LacyThat LookNegative
5LouiseUndivided LoveNot even for a fold out poster
6George MichaelSpinning The WheelNope
7FluffyNothingNo – very few did
8JamiroquaiVirtual InsanityNah
9Spice GirlsWannabeI did not
10Big SoulHippy Hippy ShakeNo

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/m00241br/top-of-the-pops-30081996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 23 AUG 1996

Posted on by 80stastic

According to my 1996 diary, around this time I received a reward cheque for £50. What for? Well, back in the day, if a retail worker took a customer’s credit card out of circulation at the request of the card issuer, they would send you a cheque for that amount as a thank you. The way it would work is that the customer with the overspent card would try and buy something on it and when it was put through the PDQ machine, the display would show the message ‘contacting card issuer’ and you’d have to pick up the phone that was part of the machine and talk to the customer’s bank. They’d ask a couple of questions about the transaction and possibly ask to speak to them in person as well. The chances were that ultimately you would get asked to retain the card and cut it up in front of them before sending it back to the bank. The experience was both exciting (at the thought of the £50 reward) and unnerving (as to how the customer would react) at the same time. Mostly they would be sheepish and let you do what you had to do but not always. One in particular I remember went ballistic whilst talking to the bank shouting at the top of his voice “Don’t you know who I am?! I’m a knight of the f*****g realm!”. I don’t know what the person on the other end of the line said but it must have been withering as the customer gave me the phone back, said sorry and sloped off. Anyway, eventually the company I was working for (Our Price) changed their policy so that the reward cheques didn’t go to the individual but the shop (supposedly into a fund for a Xmas do or some such) but this reward must have predated that as it came directly to me. So, in honour of that and in view of the recent furore over concert ticket prices, I thought I’d play a game of £50 quid or gig with the artists on this episode of TOTP. Would I rather have pocketed the money or paid to see the artist live?*

*For the purposes of the game, I’m assuming gig prices from 1996 not nowadays.

We start with an easy one – there is no way on earth I would have preferred to see Ant & Dec doing their thing (whatever it was) live over 50 quid in my pocket. Did they even do proper gigs on an official tour? They might have supported Take That back in the day or maybe that was just a plot line in an episode of Derry Girls? This was their first single to be released under the moniker we all now know (i.e. their real names) as opposed to that of the fictional characters from Byker Grove PJ & Duncan. Quite why they persisted with calling themselves that long after they had ceased to appear in the show I’m not sure. It seems a like an oversight. The track itself – “Better Watch Out” – is an absolute stinker! Some cobblers about Ant (who gets to sing the verses) being beaten up by the brothers of a girl he’s trying it on with. The lyrics suggest he might be deserving of said punishment as he then pursues the girl’s sister before indicating he might set his sights on their mother. What a cad! It’s a nasty sentiment matched by a terrible song – I can imagine it being used to soundtrack some chase scene in 70s children’s show Here Come The Double Deckers!

£50 or gig? Cash every time

Ah, now this one is tricky because I have actually seen the artist live previously. Don’t take the piss! I know we’re talking about Bryan Adams here but this was years ago, years before this TOTP performance even. Back in 1987, whilst a student at Sunderland Poly, myself and a friend who was also a housemate, took ourselves off to the big smoke of Newcastle and caught Bryan live at the City Hall where he was supported by T’Pau (I mean it! Stop sniggering!). It was a top gig, it really was! He was promoting his “Into The Fire” album that had failed to shift many units in the UK but which I’d liked anyway. This was years before that Robin Hood song and his slow decline into a world of ever more dreary ballads and he rocked the joint. Fast forward nine years and guess what? He’s just released a dreary ballad! “Let’s Make A Night To Remember” was the second single from his “18 Til I Die” album and was a massive disappointment after its lead single, the fun-filled “The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You” which I had enjoyed. It’s so one paced and trudges along with Bry singing some lines that sound like he’d pinched them directly from the Ladybird Book of Hackneyed Lyrics. In short it was a duffer though somehow got him all the way to No 10 in our charts.

£50 or gig? If the gig was that one from 1987, I’d definitely go back in time to relive it. A 2024 concert? I’ll take the Benjamins thanks.

Another difficult one as I have seen Pet Shop Boys live and not that long ago; as recently as May 2022 in fact. It was a COVID delayed concert that should have taken place in 2020 and it was bloody marvellous! A date on the Dreamworld – The Greatest Hits Live tour, it did exactly what it said on the tin meaning that yes, they did play this track “Se a vida é (That’s The Way Life Is)”. The setlist.fm website tells me it was the ninth song of the night as part of a mini medley with “Single Bilingual”.

The second single released from the “Bilingual” album, it’s a joyously upbeat track which was well received by the music press and given a lot of radio support – it’s Summer release date (presumably planned to exploit its seasonal sound) certainly aided its playlist potential. The promo video being shot at a water theme park in Florida almost certainly had one eye on that Summer vibe as well though I can’t help thinking it would have been better if it was in colour and the single itself should possibly have been released earlier in the season.

Linguistically, the title isn’t quite correct. The English translation from the Portuguese of “Se a vida é” is “If life is…” and not “That’s the way life is…” which would be “A vida é assim”. Ah, you say tom-ay-to, I say tom-a-to. The single peaked at No 8 (it perhaps should have been higher) – they would never have a higher placing single throughout the 90s up until this day.

£50 or gig? I’m going gig every time on this one. It’s a sin not to.

This one’s going to be an easy decision as well. After the breakthrough of their first UK hit single earlier in 1996 with “Get Down (You’re The One For Me)”, the Backstreet Boys staked their claim as the next big teen sensation with follow up “We’ve Got It Goin’ On” which would debut at No 3. What a load of old toss this was. Recycling that horrible ‘ner ner ner na ner ner ner ner ner’ hook used previously by the likes of Montell Jordan and MN8 (and which Peter Andre would also adopt in a TOTP repeat coming very soon), this also made no sense grammatically. “We’ve got it goin’ on for years” the band sing but surely that should be “we’ve had it goin’ on for years”. Even if they’d got the grammar spot on it still wouldn’t have made sense as their first release came in 1995 so one year before this. That’s ‘year’ – singular. Maybe they were projecting into the future and meant “We’ll have it goin’ on for years” which would have been statistically accurate as, sadly, they continued to have hits for the rest of the 90s and into the new millennium. Clearly temporal clauses were not what they had going on.

This lot really were just New Kids On The Block revisited. An all male American group with five members making music for the female teenage market. They even had the same type of characters in the band. There’s the cute, young looking one, the taller, older one with facial hair, the street wise one etc etc. In the case of the last type, Backstreet Boy Brian Littrell literally looks like his NKOTB counterpart Donnie Wahlberg. He’s also responsible for some horrible wailing when he goes all Mariah Carey early on in the song where he over annunciates the word “go” as “go-ooh-aoow”. Deeply unnecessary and unpleasant. Horribly, we’ll be seeing lots more of these berks in future repeats.

£50 or gig? Show me the money!

After Bryan Adams earlier, we now have another dreary ballad although this one is also nonsensical. I criticised the lyrics to “Why?” by 3T and Michael Jackson the other week as being hopeless for lines like this:

Why does Monday come before Tuesday? Why do Summers start in June?

“Why Lyrics.” Lyrics.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 23 Oct. 2024.

A reader of the blog got in touch to point out that not only were the song words abysmal but also inaccurate as only half the planet has its summers start in June – the Southern Hemisphere has its summers start in December. Thank you to Essor for pointing that out.

Watching the video for this one (another one all in black and white just like the Pet Shop Boys earlier – it must have been a thing back then), I noticed that the guy from 3T with his rucksack has bought it back for the promo and he walks along a corridor with it dangling by his side. What was the point of this accessory? Did he gave a product placement deal with a rucksack manufacturer in place? Or was it just his trademark gimmick like Shades and his sunglasses in the film That Thing You Do! ?

£50 or gig? Despite a Michael Jackson concert being quite the event, I’d still take the cash especially if the support were 3T.

This is the third time in the show for OMC and “How Bizarre” and they’ll manage another brief appearance as the play out song before they’re done. It’s not surprising given how long the record spent on our charts (fourteen weeks on the Top 40 of which six were inside the Top 10). This week it was at its peak of No 5 but would spend a further three consecutive weeks holding at No 8.

As host Beerjte Van Beers says, OMC stood for Otara Millionaires Club however if you google OMC the top result is not the “How Bizarre” hitmakers but a fishing tackle and outdoor products manufacturer called One More Cast. They have a range called Terminal Tackle which includes such items as ‘Tweakers Touch Me Up’, ‘Revibed Blood Worm Tippers’ and ‘Vitabitz Ring Swivels Size 11’ which all sound like double entendres to my uneducated angling brain. As for seeing them live, surely it would descend into the sketch from The Big Train below:

£50 or gig? Cash please!

My interest in REM had started to wane by the mid 90s to the point that I had very little anticipation for the new single from their tenth studio album “New Adventures In Hi-Fi” called “E-Bow The Letter” (with Patti Smith no less on backing vocals). In fact, it just about passed me by but then that was possibly a lot of people’s experience as their first new song for a couple of years was not radio friendly. In fact, it was almost anti-playlist. That doesn’t make it a poor song though of course but by the band’s own admission, it wasn’t an obvious nor easy choice of lead single which their record company struggled with just as they had with “Drive” being the first track released from “Automatic For The People”. In fact, “E-Bow The Letter” actually sounds quite similar to “Drive” so there’s sonic as well as thematic similarities. On first listen, it does seem to be a bit all over the place and, whisper it, miserable. However, there’s beauty in misery and the overall effect is…well…quite affecting. The ‘E-Bow’ of the title is a device to induce sustained vibration in an electric guitar string whilst the ‘letter’ refers to a communication never sent by Stipe to his friend River Phoenix who had died of a drug overdose at the Viper Club in Los Angeles three years earlier whilst the band inside played a song called “Michael Stipe”. The track would become the band’s then highest charting single when it debuted at No 4 and its parent album would get to No 1 but a decline in sales for the band was clearly happening as the latter sold significantly less than either “Monster” or “Automatic For The People”.

£50 or gig? Now supposedly I passed up the chance to see REM live in 1988 on their tour in support of the “Green” album. What my enthralling other option was I could not tell you but I regret it, especially now the band have broken up so I’m going ‘gig’ on this one.

Next a song that was the first ever to achieve over one million airplays in America and yet it hardly ever seems to get played in this country… or so I thought until I heard it all the time on Magic Radio* recently. Donna Lewis is a classic one hit wonder – almost. A huge, enormous hit then nothing ever again. “I Love You Always Forever” would spend nine weeks (!) at No 2 in America behind Los Del Rio’s “Macarena” and go to No 5 here in the UK as part of a five week stay inside the Top 10.

*Yes, I know – Magic Radio – but in this scary world I sometimes need to hear something soothing.

That US success led me to believe that Donna was American but she’s actually Welsh, hailing from Cardiff with the success of her hit bringing her a BRIT award nomination in 1997 for Best British Female Artist. More success seemed inevitable but her album, though selling a million copies in the US, performed averagely everywhere else including over here where it peaked at No 52. She would have one more UK chart entry (denying her that classic one hit wonder status) with follow up single “Without Love” spending a week at No 39. She did perform a duet with Richard Marx for the 20th Century Fox animated film Anastasia in 1997 that was a hit on the Adult Contemporary Billboard chart but that really was it for chart success although Donna still records to this day with her latest album having been released this year.

So what was it about “I Love You Always Forever” that struck a chord with audiences and gold for Donna? Well, it strikes me that it has a timeless quality – it could have been a hit in the 80s as easily as it was in the 90s and Donna’s girlish voice (often compared to Cyndi Lauper) suited the almost nursery rhyme chant of the chorus perfectly. Ultimately though, it was a light, joyful song that almost seemed to bring hope to a world that so often seemed dark. One reviewer described listening to it as “catharsis” and that, presumably, is why I suddenly started hearing it on Magic radio in 2024.

£50 or gig? It’s the same scenario as the OMC gig. Sorry Donna, it’s got to be the money.

It’s a fifth week at the top for the Spice Girls and “Wannabe” so it’s probably time to talk about some of the lyrics of their debut single. First off is the elephant in the room – what the hell was “zigazig ah” all about?! Well, Marie Claire magazine reckoned they had the answer in a 2023 article:

One of Wannabe’s co-writers revealed that it was inspired by a saying on set: ‘Shit and cigars.’ Apparently, the Spice Girls shared a recording studio in Shoreditch with a famous musician and decided to give said celebrity this nickname. Why? Well the anonymous co-writer told The Sun: “There was this one eighties pop dude who hated us for encroaching on what he considered ‘his turf’ which was boy bands and girl bands. This guy had this nasty habit of taking a dump in the shared khazi while smoking a cigar, so we took to referring to him as ‘Shit and Cigars’.”

By Jamie Troy-Pride, published 20 April 2023 in News


Wonder who Mr Shit and Cigars was then? Cigars conjures up images of someone whom I don’t want to reference so let’s move on to the bit in the song where the group all get a name check. Marie Claire has the inside story on that too:

‘We’ve got Em in the place’ is likely a reference to Emma/Baby Spice who, apparently, ‘likes it in your face’. Pretty self explanatory. Then ‘we got G like MC’ (Geri and Mel C) who ‘like it on an e’ – this one really caught us off guard. Who knew that we’ve been unknowingly singing that for over twenty years? ‘Easy V’ actually gets it very easy because she doesn’t come for free – ‘she’s a real lady’, so congrats Posh. And Mel B’s is steeped in mystery as we’ll just have to see what she’s all about.

By Jamie Troy-Pride, published 1 August 2023 in Features

Not sure I needed to know that but it’s too late now. A final word about the people that the girls get up on stage with them for this TOTP performance. Do you think that was planned or spontaneous? The woman on the end in the hot pants next to Mel B looked like a bit of a ‘wannabe’ to me.

£50 or gig? Say you’ll be there? Sorry but I’ll be at home counting my 50 notes.

The play out track is “You’ll Be Mine (Party Time)” by Gloria Estefan. I don’t remember this one and have very little to say about it as a consequence so I’m going to rely on a tale I’ve told before about a friend from Poly who once asked if Emilio was Gloria’s brother having conflated the name Estevez with Estefan. In my friend’s defence, Gloria’s husband is called Emilio.

£50 or gig? Miami Sound Machine or Fifty Pound PDQ Machine? I’ll take the latter thanks.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Ant & DecBetter Watch OutI did and I swerved when I saw you coming – NO!
2Bryan AdamsLet’s Make A Night To RememberNah
3Pet Shop BoysSe a vida é (That’s The Way Life Is)No but I had it on their Pop Art compilation
4Backstreet BoysWe’ve Got It Goin’ OnNever
53T / Michael JacksonWhy?As if
6OMCHow BizarreNo but my wife did
7REME-Bow The LetterNegative
8Donna LewisI Love You Always ForeverNope
9Spice GirlsWannabeI did not
10Gloria EstefanYou’ll Be Mine (Party Time)No

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0023sy0/top-of-the-pops-23081996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 16 AUG 1996

Posted on by 80stastic

After a couple of weeks of ‘golden mic’ guest presenters, we’re back with the Radio 1 DJ crowd and this week it’s the turn of Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley. As I write this, I note that tomorrow is Lamacq’s 60th birthday. Imagine that! One of the biggest names in indie music and natural successor to John Peel 60 years old! Is it such a big deal? I mean Peel was 65 when he died and still broadcasting right till the end. My own next birthday milestone will be 60 (though I have a few years to go yet) so am I supposed to just forget about music once I get to it and leave it to the youth?

Talking of which, the opening artist tonight maybe should have considered leaving it up to the kids back in 1996 when she was 50 years old if this was the best she could come up with. The 90s had been a mixed bag for Cher – two No 1 singles (albeit one was a charity record) sat alongside minor hits and complete flops. By 1996, she had resorted to releasing cover versions with three of the four singles taken from her album “It’s A Man’s World” being so. The last was “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”, the old Frankie Valli song made famous by The Walker Brothers. Now on one hand, I can just about understand the song choice here. Scott Walker had a very deep, resounding voice and Cher also has that low register tone so it does suit her vocally. On the other hand, why would you want any other version of the track than The Walker Brothers? OK you might want to investigate the Frankie Valli original if you’d never heard it but did you really need to listen to Cher have a crack at it, let alone buy her single?

Watching her performance here, there’s some technical jiggery pokery going on as Cher manages to harmonise with herself as the song reaches its climax – she even has her face inset over the top of the regular camera angle as she does so. Wouldn’t that have had to be recorded before hand? If so, does that speak of Cher being ever so slightly diva-ish about her appearance? Although her version of “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” would peak at a paltry No 26, within two years, she would have worked out what the kids (or at least the record buying public) wanted when she came up with the best selling single for 1998 in the UK with “Believe”.

Next up is “How Bizarre” by OMC. In an uncannily prescient move, Steve Lamacq foretells what the song will become known for by the TikTok generation in his intro with a stylised pronunciation of its title. Yes, a quarter of a century after it was a hit, “How Bizarre” was claimed by TikTok users as an audio meme to soundtrack all their interminably unfunny shorts on the world’s most pointless platform. I really don’t get TikTok. My teenage son shows me stuff on it and my reaction is inevitably this…

You can probably tell that I’m out of my comfort zone talking about stuff like this but then I am 56. I bet Steve Lamacq doesn’t get TikTok either. Don’t let me down Lammo!

Is the “Macarena” an audio meme? Probably. Back in 1996, it was just a dance craze and a song that you could buy. Ina shop. They were simpler times. We get the video for Los Del Rio’s hit this time which despite being basic is still memorable. It’s just ten women dancing set against a completely white background whilst the two old fellas sing into suspended old style microphones in a completely different shot but it kind of works. The promo showcases the “Macarena” dance led by choreographer and lead dancer here Mia Frye who’s also had a minor film career with small roles in movies by the likes of Luc Besson and Brian De Palma. If that video was remade today, I can’t believe all that white space in the backdrop wouldn’t be green screened with all sorts happening behind the promo’s protagonists. Like I said before, they were simpler times.

Have the music press ever turned on a band quicker than in the case of Kula Shaker? Seemingly an overnight success (they weren’t but most bands aren’t are they?), they swooped to No 1 in the charts with their debut album “K” which would go double platinum in the UK. Add to that three big hit singles in 1996 (including this one “Hey Dude”) and they were set to conquer the world with their fusion of traditional rock and Eastern mysticism. But then something happened. The tide turned. They lost the support of the music press. The reason? Well, the main cause seems to be that they were middle class white boys one of whom came from an acting family dynasty and was called Crispian! The horror! Who did they think they were with their songs informed by an idiots guide to Eastern culture?! That was wholly the reserve of The Beatles and you’re certainly not them! One of their songs was even sung wholly in Sanskrit!

However, not only did the band suffer a class backlash but they suffered from a case of inertia. 1997 saw them release just one single – a cover of Deep Purple’s “Hush”. Momentum was being lost. 1998 brought another false start – “Sound Of Drums” was the only song they released in that calendar year. The lead single from second album “Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts”, we had to wait another twelve months for the actual album to appear. By the time it did arrive in record shops, the band found themselves engulfed by another crisis as Mills had to repel accusations of Nazism following ill judged comments he’d made in Melody Maker and the NME praising the imagery of the swastika. Explaining that it had its origins in Indian culture, he accepted that he it was now irreversibly linked with Nazism and apologised for his naivety. The controversy affected the release of “Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts” with it selling only reasonably as opposed to exceptionally – six times less than its predecessor and only just scraped into the Top 10. Shaken, the band split in 1999 only to reform in 2004 since when they have released five further albums not that most people probably noticed. Like another 90s band Jesus Jones who experienced a similar trajectory, they are still active to this day with their most recent album “Natural Magick” having been released in February of this year.

As for me, I quite liked them. I had a free CD sampler of the album that the Our Price I was working in had been sent to plug in store and it sounded pretty good to me. I particularly liked the track “Start All Over”. Also, were they the instigators of the brief fascination with the letter ‘K’ a few years back. Their band name starts with a ‘K’, their debut album was called “K”, their Best Of was called “Kollected”…oh no that was Wayne Rooney wasn’t it? Well, he did call his kids Kai, Klay and Kit.

Excellent! First OMC and now OMD on the same show! How did Steve Lamacq not use this in his intro? It’s an open goal! How bizarre! Anyway, this marvellous event nearly didn’t happen as “Walking On The Milky Way” was the final UK Top 40 hit for OMD meaning this is the last time we’ll see them in these TOTP repeats. It’s a great tune to bow out with – a classic pop melody allied to an anthemic chorus. Apparently Andy McCluskey put his heart and soul into writing it only to find that Radio 1 wouldn’t playlist it due to their perception that it did not meet their target audience’s tastes and that Woolworths subsequently wouldn’t stock it. The single’s failure to get higher than No 17 would lead to McCluskey retiring the OMD name leaving him free to go and write songs for Atomic Kitten. Hmm. After a ten year hiatus, he would reunite with Paul Humphreys to reactivate OMD and they have since released a further four albums though rumour has it that they might be about to call it a day for good soon. If true, they leave behind one hell of a legacy.

It’s a third massive hit on the spin for George Michael as “Spinning The Wheel” will enter the chart and peak at No 2 when released the Monday after this TOTP aired. Sadly for George, those pesky Spice Girls would prevent him from scoring a hat trick of No 1s though after the the first two tracks taken from his third album “Older” (“Jesus To A Child” and “Fastlove”) both topped the charts. Although I could appreciate the appeal of those two singles, “Spinning The Wheel” left me rather cold. Telling the tale of a promiscuous partner at the height of AIDS, it’s seems to be neither ballad nor dance track nor pop song. I understand the CD single included some dance remixes that boosted its popularity with clubbers but the radio edit is (whisper it) a bit dull. One reviewer’s take was that the track:

“…achieves a light jazz feel (on the song) that also makes for good background music”

Gardner, Elysa (25 May 1996). “Music Reviews: “Older””. Lakeland Ledger.

I’m not sure that’s the endorsement the reviewer intended. The words ‘jazz’ and ‘background music’ would send shudders down the spine of many including myself. George would release three further singles from “Older” that would peak at either No 2 or No 3 giving the album six singles with the following chart positions:

1 – 1 – 2 – 3 – 2 – 2

Are there any other albums that can compete with those stats?

This post started with a theme about the passage of time and growing old and looking at the running order for this particular TOTP, there was a definite tendency towards the more mature artist. Look at the ages of these performers at the time the show aired:

  • Cher – 50
  • Los Del Rio – 56 and 58
  • Andy McCluskey (OMD) – 37
  • George Michael – 33

Add to that list the next artist Paul Weller who was 38 when he did this performance of “Peacock Suit” in the TOTP studio. Where were all the young, hip bands? What? Kula Shaker? Ok, apart from them. I’ve already reviewed this once fairly recently when Weller was on that brief doubleheader feature that saw an artist perform two songs at the end of the show after the No 1 record. As such, I haven’t anything else to say about it so if you want to read what I wrote first time around, here’s the link:

TOTP 14 JUN 1996

After all the talk of oldies, we suddenly get two young girl groups one after the other beginning with Eternal. Three years prior, this lot must have thought they would be the UK’s next big all female act and they were…sort of. However, after ditching Louise (or vice versa depending on which version of the story you believe), they went off in a more pronounced R&B direction and the door was left open for a bunch of wannabes (ahem) to come charging through it to be the new pop darlings and subverting the boy band norm in the process.

Despite being outgunned by the Spice Girls in terms of sales and size of hits, that’s not to say Eternal didn’t continue to have success and then some. They were still a year away from their only No 1 single whilst “Someday” would peak at No 4. I’m not sure about the white, reflective jackets they’re wearing here – they’re almost giving me snow blindness. I din’t think I would have preferred the video either though. The guy who plays a jester looks like Mr Claypole from Rentaghost. Spooky!

So here they are again with a fourth week at No 1. Yes, the Spice Girls were immovable with their debut single “Wannabe”. We are all familiar with the individual nicknames given to the five members but have you ever wondered why they were called the Spice Girls at all? A quick google suggests a number of possibilities from its AI overview summary including:

  • An allusion to nursery rhymes specifically What are little girls made of? – sugar and spice and all things nice etc
  • Association with far off places – far East and India where spices originate
  • Variety is the spice of life – the Spice Girls were individuals as well as a group
  • Metaphorical reading – names suggest a fiery, uncontrolled Girl Power nature

Yeah, not sure any of that holds water with me, about as much as those individual nicknames which apparently only came about when a lazy journalist coined them as he couldn’t remember their actual names. So, in a parallel universe, they could have been Speedy Spice, Sloaney Spice, Spooky Spice, Sprog Spice and Carrot Top Spice.

The play out video is a bit out of left field for TOTP – “Ratamahatta” by Sepultura. Obviously, the “hardcore metal meisters” (© Steve Lamacq) weren’t my cup of tea at all. However, in the dark recesses of my mind there lingers a faded (and possibly totally inaccurate) memory that the Brazilian band’s fan club used to hold their annual convention in a hotel in Manchester which struck me as a bit odd. I clearly didn’t appreciate the international reach of the band but in my defence, they only ever had two UK hit singles neither getting higher than No 19. In Finland, which is home to loads of rock bands like Lordi and Hanoi Rocks, they had a No 2 hit so wouldn’t that have been a better country to host such an event?

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1CherThe Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine AnymoreAs if
2OMCHow BizarreNo but my wife did
3Los Del RioMacarenaNever
4Kula ShakerHey DudeNo but I had that album sampler
5OMDWalking On The Milky WayNo but I had it on a Best Of compilation
6George MichaelSpinning The WheelI did not
7Paul WellerPeacock SuitNope
8EternalSomedayNah
9Spice GirlsWannabeNo
10SepulturaRatamahattaOf course not

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0023sxy/top-of-the-pops-16081996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 09 AUG 1996

Posted on by 80stastic

I’m looking at the running order for this episode of TOTP from 1996 in the hope that I’ll spot a trend that will give me a foothold for a theme for this post but as usual it’s all over the place. In the latest edition of Classic Pop magazine, feature writer Ian Peel wrote:

But there’s one thing Classic Pop has never talked about or will ever talk about. And that’s ‘80s music’. Because there’s no such thing. There’s music from the 80s but it’s an era not a genre.

Anthem Publishing, 2024

Could the same not be said of the 90s? Sure, there were definite movements and trends like Britpop, Eurodance and the whole ‘Madchester’ thing just as the 80s had New Romantics, acid house music and Stock, Aitken and Waterman. However, these were transient and didn’t account for the whole of the decade’s tastes. They were a component part not the whole entity. Sometimes they would morph into something else or in the case of the dance music explosion, splinter into multiple sub genres. As for myself, I have, on occasion, been labelled as an “80s music fan” but that term is spurious – there’s plenty of music from the 80s I can’t stand and would never listen to. I like some but not all music that happened to be made in the 80s would be a more accurate description but I guess that’s a bit of a mouthful to be fair. Anyway, back to my original point which was that there are all sorts of music types represented in this show so I’ll just have to proceed with an open mind and call it as I see/hear it and see some sort of narrative emerges to glue it all together. One constant throughout the entirety of every show is, of course, the host and tonight’s is…oh god, it’s Peter Andre! He’d only been a thing for five minutes by this point – how did he get this gig so early on? Well, got it he has done let’s see how he did…

His first job is to introduce a reactivated New Edition who he claims are one of his all time favourite R&B groups before referring to them as ‘The Dream Team’. Hmm. Seems a bit over the top for a band whose best known song in this country is the bubblegum pop of “Candy Girl”. But then maybe Andre wasn’t aware of his R&B faves’ past? What was he doing in 1983 when “Candy Girl” was at No 1 in the UK.

*checks Wikipedia*

He was 10 years old and living in Australia having emigrated there with his family in 1979. Was “Candy Girl” even a hit down under?

*checks Wikipedia again*

Yes, it made No 10 in the Aussie chart so it’s certainly possible that Andre was aware of the song. In his defence, by the time he was a teenager and presumably his musical tastes more established and embedded, New Edition were recording an album with legendary R&B producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis so that may well have informed his opinion of them. Having said that, “Hit Me Off” was their first new material released since 1988 and the album before that had been a collection of doo-wop covers so that does rather undermine Andre’s claims. Why am I analysing the authenticity of Peter Andre’s music tastes? Sad as it is, I’d rather do that than write about New Edition’s 1996 comeback. “Hit Me Off”? Turn me off more like.

Another boy band next but one from our own shores. Unlike the squeaky clean New Kids On The Block who were created by ex-New Edition manager Maurice Starr to be “the white New Edition”, East 17 could never be described as beyond reproach or without vice. Whether it be interviews advocating drug use or their urban, grubby image, they were not your standard 90s boy band. It didn’t stop them selling records though, 10 million albums since their first hit back in 1992 according to Peter Andre in his intro. Is that true? 10 million?! Seems like a lot but who are we to doubt the word of a man who renewed his vows to then wife Katie Price in 2008 and ended up divorcing her 12 months later.

Anyway, “Someone To Love” was the fourteenth consecutive hit single for East 17 though by peaking at No 16, became their smallest since their second “Gold” stalled at No 28. Was the writing on the wall for the band’s future? I think it was. 1996 would turn out to be a bit of a swansong with a double platinum selling greatest hits compilation and a No 2 hit with Gabrielle. However, by 1997, first singer Brian Harvey was sacked and then songwriter Tony Mortimer left the band. There was a brief flurry of success in 1998 with Harvey reinstated and a hit single in “Each Time” but it was only delaying the inevitable. Had the band themselves realised that continued success couldn’t be taken for granted as early as 1995 and the recording of third album “Up All Night” and tried to push a new direction for themselves? “Someone To Love” is a passable gentle ballad with an acoustic guitar rhythm augmented by a sympathetic string section and Harvey’s plaintive vocals supported by some considered backing singing by his band mates. It’s actually quite a nice song and not typical of their normal output. Yes, their most famous song “Stay Another Day” was a ballad as well but that was a huge number with everything including sleigh bells thrown at it. “Someone To Love” had much more of a lilting nature. Rather sadly, in both meanings of the word, as of 2024, Terry Coldwell is the only original band member still with the group.

Next up, a song that set a new record at the time for the most plays on radio in one week. “Good Enough” by Dodgy racked up approximately 3,700 plays on national radio in seven days helping it rise to a peak of No 4 on the UK Top 40. By far the band’s biggest hit it is also, thanks to all that airplay, surely their best known as well. As far as I can tell though, it wasn’t the most played track on radio for the entire of 1996. That honour went to Mark Morrison’s “Return Of The Mack” though “Good Enough” did come in at No 8. Of those seven songs above it, only Pulp’s “Disco 2000” and “Give Me A Little More Time” by Gabrielle peaked lower in the charts than Dodgy with three of those above it being No 1 records. Not bad then for a band who had never had a Top 10 hit prior to this.

“Good Enough” wasn’t typical Dodgy fare though. An out and out pop song as opposed to an indie rock track, it felt like a deliberate attempt to write a huge hit but having read an interview with its composer Nigel Clark on its creation, it does sound like it came about organically. Messing around with an Akai S900, a very early sampler, Clark put a Lee Dorsey drumbeat on a loop and grew the track from there. Inspired by listening to Bob Marley’s “Kaya” album, he wanted it to be an upbeat track though he worried about demoing it to the rest of the band. However, their reaction was positive and after laying it down in the studio, Clark recalled thinking that “Good Enough” would last longer than Dodgy would. He was right. Thankfully though, I think their legacy is more than just that one track though – they were/are a band not a song, a fate which has befallen other artists like 4 Non Blondes who found it hard to escape the trappings of their mega hit “What’s Up?”.

The timing of its release to coincide with the Summer was perfect and surely deliberate; the single’s artwork was just a shot of a sunflower – they knew what they were doing. I think at Our Price where I was working, we had a pin badge with said sunflower on it to give away free with the single. The success of “Good Enough” would propel parent album “Free Peace Sweet” to platinum sales of 300,000 units. Pretty good going for a band derided by some as a Britpop also ran.

I’ve used the phrase “musical curiosity” or “curious musical footnote” many times whilst writing this blog – perhaps I’ve overused it but I really should have reserved it for this next hit. Anybody remember “Hanging Around” by Me Me Me? It must have passed me by despite the involvement of one of my favourite pop people ever that is Stephen Duffy. I’m not sure if his presence alongside Blur’s Alex James and Justin Welch from Elastica really qualifies as a ‘supergroup’ – probably more of a collective but it was very short lived either way. This single was their only release with the whole project only generating three tracks in total. The concept wasn’t even conceived to secure a hit single but rather as the soundtrack to a film made by artist Damien Hirst which was made for the Spellbound exhibition at the Hayward Gallery within the Southbank Centre. The film was only screened at the exhibition and once on national television at 11.50 at night.

Given that niche exposure, its peak of No 19 seems rather like a case of overachievement. Or perhaps its chart performance was down to it actually being good? Heh. Don’t be so naive I hear you shout and you’re right. When has quality been anything to do with popularity? In all fairness, there wasn’t much quality to “Hanging Around”. There wasn’t much of anything to it. A few random phrases picked because they rhymed set against a jaunty, Madness-lite tune that would have been discarded at the demo stage when it came to making the cut for a Blur album. What a waste! Stephen Duffy has a back catalogue of some incredibly affecting and crafted pop music but this…this was pure hokum. I can only assume some record label marketing and dubious ‘selling in’ practices got it into the charts at all. “Hanging around”? Nah, it was just angin’.

Although this next track topped the American charts for eight weeks, I can’t recall it being in our charts. However, most unfortunately, I do remember only too well a cover of it going to No 1 in the UK six years later. “Tha’ Crossroads” by Bone Thugs–n–Harmony was written as a tribute to a number of people close to the hip-hop group who had died recently including the rapper and their mentor Eazy-E.

The members of the group were:

  • Bizzy Bone
  • Flesh-n-Bone
  • Krayzie Bone
  • Layzie Bone
  • Wish Bone

That list reminds me of a reality tv series called Tool Academy the premise of which was to take twelve unsuspecting ‘bad boyfriends’ and send them to a ‘relationship boot camp’ to teach them how to be better partners. The boyfriends were given nicknames such as ‘Massive Tool’, ‘Temper Tool’, ‘Stoner Tool’, ‘Jealous Tool’ and ‘Neander Tool’. Anyway, want to know the real names of the ‘Bones’? Here you go:

  • Bryon
  • Stanley
  • Anthony
  • Steven
  • Charles

Heh. As hip-hop tracks go, “Tha’ Crossroads” was a little unusual with an almost gospel feel to the chorus and it was all the better for that. However, the version by Blazin’ Squad in 2002 which was retitled “Crossroads”…what on earth was going on there? I’m guessing that this lot weren’t taken seriously at the time? Certainly watching them back over 20 years later they look staggeringly ludicrous. The fact that there’s so many of them for a start undermines any credibility for me and the there’s their horribly hackneyed hip-hop posturing, all that throwing their arms about and the Ali G hand gestures. Someone from their management really should have had a word with them. One of their number appeared on Celebrity Big Brother and another ended up on Love Island. Says it all really.

Suede are back in the TOTP studio after doing an exclusive performance the other week having crashed into the charts at No 3 with “Trash”. I said in a previous post that I’d caught them live in Blackburn in early 1997 so I looked that gig on the Setlist FM website and can report it was a 14 song strong set of which, rather predictably, 10 came from latest album “Coming Up” – basically the whole album. The only tracks not taken from it were “The 2 Of Us” and “The Wild Ones” from “Dog Man Star” and “So Young” and “Animal Nitrate” from their eponymous debut album. I think I might have been ever so slightly disappointed that they didn’t do “The Drowners” and “Metal Mickey” as well.

Peter Andre says of them in his intro “here’s Suede at their most Suede”. Was that meant to be a play on words? If so, it didn’t match up to my mate Robin who once wrote me a letter (remember those!) informing me he’d been to see Suede at a very early gig when the music press were going crazy for them. His three word review? “Suede. I wasn’t”.

The UK really had a weakness for Michael Jackson in the 90s. By this point in the decade he’d accumulated thirteen hit singles over here including three No 1s and two No 2s. In addition, all three albums he released topped the charts. But it wasn’t just him that was the object of the nation’s affections – anybody related to him was also on our radar. The recently passed away Tito Jackson’s offspring benefited from the UK’s devotion to all things and people Jacko to the tune of five hit singles as 3T including this one “Why?”. There was no chance of us giving this one a miss what the King of Pop himself appearing on it alongside his nephews.

I’m surprised he deigned to be officially credited on it and didn’t just give it to them free of charge as it were given what a dreary, lamentable track it is. And don’t get me started on its lyrics. It’s very first two lines are;

Why does Monday come before Tuesday? Why do Summers start in June?

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Annie Lennox
Why? lyrics © La Lennoxa Music Co. Ltd., Boobie And Dj Songs, Inc.

Give me a break! The song sticks with this theme as a few lines later we get:

Why does Wednesday come after Tuesday? Why do flowers come in May?

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Annie Lennox
Why? lyrics © La Lennoxa Music Co. Ltd., Boobie And Dj Songs, Inc.

What?! The point Jackson was trying to make in a very laboured way was ‘why do we let ourselves fall in love if that love doesn’t last?’. Not sure what that has to do with days of the week or the seasons to be honest. Look, if you want to listen to a song called “Why” then try this one:

For the third week running, we have Robbie Williams on the show with “Freedom”. Wow! TOTP was really getting behind the launch of his solo career weren’t they? Perhaps executive producer Ric Blaxill could see something the rest of us were struggling to, namely that this guy was going to have the kind of longevity that most artists can only dream of. Robbie looks a bit disheveled in this performance though, as if he’s just wandered onto the stage direct from an all night bender. Maybe he did get a couple of hours sleep judging by the ‘ski slope’ bit of hair on the back of his head that you get if you slept in an awkward position that’s a bugger to get to behave. He’ll have eight months to sort it out though as we won’t be seeing him on the show again until his next single “Old Before I Die” is released the following April.

It’s a third week at No 1 for the Spice Girls. In 2014, a study by the University of Amsterdam and Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry found that “Wannabe” was the catchiest song of all time in that it is the most easily recognisable. In an experiment of 12,000 participants who were asked if they knew songs from a random sample of 1,000 of the most popular songs since the 1940s, the quickest to be recognised was “Wannabe” in 2.29 seconds. Second was “Mambo No 5” and third was “Eye Of The Tiger”. Hmm. Well, the Survivor hit has that very distinctive guitar riff intro with the chord changes designed to match the punches in the boxing scenes from Rocky III so that’s understandable. “Wannabe” starts with Mel B’s laugh and then is straight into the “Well, I’ll tell you what I want” hook so I get that but Lou Bega? He literally just says “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mambo No 5”! Of course people were quick to identify it!

So how did Peter Andre do as host? I have to grudgingly admit he was alright actually. Nothing too embarrassing, didn’t get his six pack out and didn’t stumble over his lines. His last job is to introduce the play out video which is “Love Sensation” by 911. Of all the 90s bands, this lot were one of the most unlikely. Lead singer Lee Brennan was your typical pretty boy but the other two? They looked like nightclub bouncers. Apparently, they met as dancers on late night, cult viewing music show The Hitman And Her and decided to form a band. Weren’t Take That’s Jason Orange and Howard Donald also dancers on the show? Anyway, despite the odds, having joined forces with Brennan, they somehow managed to score 13 UK hit singles including a No 1. Many of them were cover versions of the likes of Shalamar, Dr. Hook and the Bee Gees. This No 21 hit was all their own work though but is so lightweight as to hardly exist at all.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1New EditionHit Me OffI did not
2East 17Someone To LoveNegative
3DodgyGood EnoughNo but my wife had their Free Peace Sweet album
4Me Me MeHanging AroundNo No No
5Bone Thugs-n-HarmonyTha’ CrossroadsNope
6SuedeTrashNo but I had their Coming Up album
73T / Michael JacksonWhy?What? Of course not
8Robbie WilliamsFreedomNah
9Spice GirlsWannabeNo
10911Love SensationNever

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/p00fsvcz/top-of-the-pops-09081996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 02 AUG 1996

Posted on by 80stastic

We’re still in the Summer of 1996 with these TOTP repeats and we have another guest host in the ‘golden mic’ slot. In any other year, Jas Mann of Babylon Zoo would have got nowhere near this gig but this was the year of “Spaceman” and the stardust of that No 1 hit was still just about glittering over him enough to allow this appearance. It wouldn’t last much longer.

We start though with another guy who, by my reckoning, was also still very fortunate to be appearing on the show. Why was Sean Maguire still having hits two years on from his first one?! “Don’t Pull Your Love” was his seventh of eight in total ranging in size from No 27 to No 12. How could this be true? He couldn’t give away either of his albums which both sank without trace but somehow he managed to keep churning out a string of reasonably successful singles. How? Why? Yeah, he’d been in EastEnders so he was a familiar face and he didn’t look like the back end of a bus but I would have thought he’d have one, maybe two hits at most before the novelty wore off. He was quite the anomaly.

It can’t have been that the quality of the songs he was being given were irresistible to the record buying public can it? Surely not. Listening to this one, it sounds like something The Osmonds might have recorded back in the day. It wasn’t was it?

*checks internet*

No but it was a hit in the 70s by an act called Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds who took it to No 4 in the US selling over a million copies. I knew I was in the right ballpark.

I’ve never heard of them until this moment but apparently they also had an American No 1 called “Fallin’ In Love” and get this, it was covered in 1995 by German Eurodance outfit La Bouche. Wait, I didn’t review it in this blog did I?

*checks internet again*

No, it wasn’t a hit over here so it wouldn’t have been on TOTP. However, the song was in the news again in 2009 when it was sampled by the rapper Drake for his track “Best I Ever Had” which led to a lawsuit being brought against him by Playboy Enterprises who owned the rights to “Fallin’ In Love” as Drake hadn’t sought clearance for the sample. What has any of this to do with Sean Maguire? Not much but it’s surely more interesting than his pop career no?

Rivalling Jas Mann in the famous for 15 minutes stakes were the next act OMC. Yes, the difference between being a one hit wonder and a legendary electronic band who are still going 44 years after their first hit is just one letter apparently. However, whereas the name Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark didn’t mean anything and was chosen by Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys to ensure they weren’t mistaken for a punk band, OMC was an acronym for Otara Millionaires Club and was a tongue-in-cheek reference to Otara’s status as one of the poorest suburbs in Auckland, New Zealand. Their hit was “How Bizarre” which lived up to its name by being a strange concoction of mariachi guitars, tejano trumpets, almost spoken word verses (I’m not sure it qualifies as rapping) and harmonised backing vocals.

What was also atypical about the single was the amount of time it took to become a hit and its chart positions when it finally made it. It took five weeks to break into the Top 10 (including two consecutive weeks at No 19) and then spent six weeks there four of which were at No 8. It would eventually sell 400,000 copies in the UK despite never getting higher than No 5. Not surprisingly though, it topped the charts in Australia and New Zealand. Why was it such a sleeper hit? Maybe it didn’t attract enough airplay initially but when radio finally caught on to it, they realised it was perfect for summertime playlists. My wife loved this and indeed bought the CD single which might still be knocking about somewhere. Though the idea in today’s world of searching it out to put in a CD player when you could just say “Alexa play OMC” does indeed seem bizarre.

If 1996 was Jas Mann’s season in the sun, it was an annus mirabilis for Alanis Morissette. Her “Jagged Little Pill” album was No 1 for weeks and she had three hit singles, each of which charted higher than the one before. “Head Over Feet” was the biggest of those peaking at No 7. Given that so many people were buying the album and therefore already had access to those tracks, that was quite a feat. This particular single seemed almost laid back compared to some of its predecessors like “You Oughta Know” and “Ironic” which had themes of anger and dissatisfaction. By contrast, “Head Over Feet” contained lyrics that talked about falling in love with your best friend. That didn’t mean it was lacking a punch though – it was still in the heavyweight class.

Curiously, there were two videos for the song – the ‘head’ version does what it says on the tin with a camera permanently fixed on a close up of Alanis’s face as she sings whilst the ‘feet’ promo for the European market that we see here is in black and white and has her sat around a camp fire in what looks like a building site with her band, sat cross legged, all strumming guitars. I think I prefer the ‘head’ one as its more affecting. Could it also have been the inspiration for Radiohead’s “No Surprises” which saw Thom Yorke singing under duress in a see through helmet as it filled with water?

Despite all of Alanis’s success in 1996, she would finish the year with a flop single when “All I Really Want” failed to make the Top 40. It seemed six singles from the same album was going too far even for Morissette’s growing army of fans.

Noel Gallagher once said that there was a time in Oasis’s career when everything the band released sounded like “Get It On” by T-Rex. Well, in 1996, was everything starting to sound a bit like Alanis Morissette? OK, Alisha’s Attic were hardly a carbon copy but could their hit “I Am, I Feel” be described as a poppier version of the Canadian singer? Maybe it’s just because they followed Alanis on this particular show that they somehow fused together in my head or maybe it’s to do with that aforementioned anger that is present in their lyrics? I mean, these are fairly dark:

“Like I wanna bite his head off, yeah, that’d be fun, cause I sure got an appetite“

Writer(s): Karen Poole, Michelle Poole, Terence Martin

If I’m being truthful though, Alisha’s Attic weren’t following where Alanis Morissette had walked but in the footsteps of a long line of female pop duos stretching back to the 80s with Mel & Kim and Pepsie and Shirley and on into the 90s with Shakespears Sister, Shampoo and perhaps the couple most like them Scarlet. That lineage would continue into the new millennium with t.A.t.u. and…erm…Daphne and Celeste? Or perhaps they modelled themselves after a trio. I’m thinking Wilson Phillips who consisted of Carnie and Wendy Wilson who were the daughters of The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson and Chynna Phillips who was the offspring of John and Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & The Papas. So what you may ask? Well, sisters Shelly and Karen Poole were themselves from a pop background with their Dad being Brian Poole of *Brian Poole and the Tremeloes fame.

*Their bass player was Len ‘Chip’ Hawkes father of Chesney.

Anyway, I quite liked Alisha’s Attic and their quirky pop tunes of which eight were Top 40 hits. None got higher than No 12 (which was actually the peak position for three of their singles) and “I Am, I Feel” itself would spend three weeks at No 15 plus two at No 18 and for all the No 1 artist’s posturing about ‘girl power’, surely was a better feminist anthem than “Wannabe”.

And talking of feminist anthems, here’s Neneh Cherry with “Woman”. I say ‘feminist anthems’ but I’m not sure that’s the correct terminology anymore. It conjures up images of Viz character Millie Tant and the world is certainly more nuanced than that. Look, just to be clear, I believe in equality of the sexes and hate all the ‘lads, lads, lads’ culture (groups of men can be such pricks) so if I misuse a phrase then please accept my apologies in advance.

Right, with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get back to Neneh Cherry. She was on The Graham Norton Show last week promoting her memoir A Thousand Threads which was published just a few days ago. It seems to be quite comprehensive and not just a retread of her discography – apparently she doesn’t get to that iconic TOTP appearance when she was seven months pregnant until three quarters of the way through the book. Sounds like an interesting read to be fair. In her interview with Graham we found out that the first record she ever bought was by Donny Osmond and that she’s now a grandmother – quite possibly the coolest grandmother ever but still a grandmother. Yeah, you feel old now don’t you. Me too.

From Neneh Cherry to the Manic Street Preachers via Bernard Butler. In the last post, I talked about how Suede recovered from the departure of their guitarist and song writer to return with their most commercial album ever. Butler, of course, is up there on stage with Neneh for this performance. And the Manics? Well, like Suede, they also lost a founding member from their line up around this time albeit in totally different circumstances with the disappearance of Richey Edwards. As with Suede, they bounced back with their biggest selling album ever in “Everything Must Go” the title track of which was released as the second single from it. I always preferred this to “A Design For Life” though I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it was that huge, orchestral swathe in the mix that they managed to produce that many in the music press compared to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. Apparently the song was written as an acknowledgment that since Edwards was no longer giving his input to the band, inevitably their identity and music had to change with the lyric “and I just hope that you can forgive us” a direct plea to the fans.

Despite the hopping around on one leg antics of James Dean Bradfield in this performance, I’m more drawn to the static drummer Sean Moore. It might be because he is stood up throughout as opposed to sat at a drum kit or it could very well be that his look here reminds me of the character of Garland Greene from 1997 film Con Air.

With this single, Eternal set a new record as the first all female group to score ten consecutive Top 20 hits in the UK. What a stinker of a song to do it with though. “Someday” was recorded for the Disney film The Hunchback Of Notre Dame though it only features as an instrumental with the full song having been discarded at the storyboarding stage. You can understand why. It’s a dreary, jaded, love-song- by-numbers snoozefest. In fact, I’d have been more entertained if Eternal had stood there on stage and spent three minutes making snoring noises. Apparently, “I Swear” hitmakers All-4-One recorded “Someday” as well and it’s their take that’s on the US version of the soundtrack. So why were Eternal asked to record it for the European soundtrack? I don’t get it. In an unusual disruption to their timeline, the group’s next single release was from their “Power Of A Woman” album but “Someday” would turn up on their 1997 studio album “Before The Rain” making a right mess of the chronology of their discography. Tsk.

The final three songs on the show have all been on before so I might whip through these at speed. We start with “Macarena” by Los Del Rio and can I get away with just signposting you to other versions of the song rather than thinking of something witty to say about it? I can? Marvellous!

OK, here’s the original 1993 version that sounds very different to the hit we all know and loathe that was The Bayside Boys remix:

Then there’s the Los Del Mar take on it which was out at the same time. Despite it being sung without any English lyrics, this lot were actually from Canada and it was their cover that was a big hit over there. That absence of English lyrics is pretty much the only difference to the Bayside Boys remix and yet amazingly, in Australia, they were both in the chart at the same time with Los Del Rio at No 1 and Los Del Mar at No 2. Just how do you explain that? Fortunately for the UK, the Los Del Mar version peaked at a lowly No 43.

There are loads of other versions including a country version by The GrooveGrass Boyz, a rap version by US rapper Tyga, an Italian version by Los Locos and even a take on it by Los Del Chipmunks (!). Finally, for those that really can’t stand the “Macarena”, there’s this…

Without wishing to discredit the aforementioned achievement of Eternal, I fear it was totally undermined, nay blown out of the water, by the chart feats of the Spice Girls. They are in the TOTP studio for the first time this week I think after two appearances from Japan and though the stage and space in which they have to work are much reduced, they give an energetic performance with Mel C even managing to get in her trademark backflip. “Wannabe” is into its second of seven weeks at No 1 and would be the second best selling single in 1996 in the UK after “Killing Me Softly” by the Fugees. That was literally just the start though. Of the eleven singles released during their career, nine would top the chart. They would sell 100 million records in total being both the best selling British act of the 90s and the best selling girl group of all time. Take that Eternal.

The play out video is “Freedom” by Robbie Williams. Now, if we’re talking chart records as we were Eternal and the Spice Girls, then we can’t ignore this man (whether you really want to or not). He has notched up seven No 1 singles and sold 77 million records worldwide. By 2008, he’d sold more albums in the UK than any other British solo artist in history. And yet somehow, it all started with this fairly straight cover of a George Michael song. Given that Robbie wouldn’t release anything else until “Old Before I Die” nine months later, I think “Freedom” could almost be a forgotten Williams single, like a false start. Indeed, it did not feature on either his 1999 compilation “The Ego Has Landed” that was initially released for the US and Australia markets nor his first official “Greatest Hits” album in 2004. However it was included on No the 2010 collection “In And Out Of Consciousness”.

Apparently, Williams was in a bad way when he filmed the video for “Freedom” struggling with an alcohol addiction and he certainly looks wild eyed in the promo – are his pupils dilated in some shots? He claims to have mimed to the original George Michael track as he hadn’t recorded his version before the video was filmed. Is that likely? Is that how it worked? Anyway, we’ll be seeing lots more of Mr Williams on TOTP in future repeats. As for Jas Mann, I’m not sure we will be seeing him again as he never presented the show after this (he was pretty shit to be fair) and he would only have one more UK hit when “The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes” made No 32. The odds on either him or Robbie becoming pop music superstars were probably evenly matched and low back then. Funny that.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Sean MaguireDon’t Pull Your LoveNever
2OMCHow BizarreNo but my wife did
3Alanis MorissetteHead Over FeetNo but I had the album
4Alisha’s AtticI Am, I FeelNope
5Neneh CherryWomanNo but my wife had the album
6Manic Street PreachersEverything Must GoSee 3 above
7EternalSomedayNegative
8Los Del RioMacarenaAs if
9Spice GirlsWannabeNo
10Robbie WilliamsFreedomNah

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/m0023k99/top-of-the-pops-02081996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 26 JUL 1996

Posted on by 80stastic

It’s the Summer of 1996 and the Olympic Games are being held in Atlanta, Georgia. For Team GB though, it was a games to forget as we endured our worst performance since 1952 with just one gold and only 15 in total. Lack of sufficient funding was identified as a major issue – cyclist Chris Boardman had to resort to practicing in his bathroom with the shower turned on in an attempt to create the humidity conditions of Atlanta for acclimatisation training. In a rare moment of celebration, the day after this TOTP aired, that single gold medal was won by rowers Matthew Pinsent and Steve Redgrave in the Men’s Coxless Pair. Meanwhile, in this week’s show, there seemed to be no shortage of cocks but sadly, like Team GB, hardly any gold standard performers. Where were Shed Seven and Gene when you needed them?*

*See what I did there? “Going For Gold”? “Olympian”? No? Oh well, it’s the taking part that’s important not winning so they say.

Bit of admin before we get going. Tonight’s host is Lisa I’Anson and we start with another to camera piece featuring the latest winner of the meet and greet competition who is in Hollywood with New Edition. The first act in the studio though is Pato Banton & The Reggae Revolution. What the guy who had a No 1 with his version of “Baby Come Back” in 1994? That guy was still having hits two years later using the same formula of reggae-fying old pop hits?! That guy?! The very same but his take on the 1967 hit “Groovin’” would be his last UK chart entry. He never got close to repeating his chart topping feat with this one peaking at No 14. He did like a collab as the kids say though – two with Sting (who seems to have a weakness for this type of artist seeing as he’s also teamed up with Shaggy), one with Ranking Roger and now this one with The Reggae Revolution. Who were they? I can’t find out much about them though I did note one of their members is called David Forskins. Stop sniggering at the back – he’s a drummer. Skins? Drum skins? Geddit? What? It was me that mentioned members? Oh, you young rascals!

Next up is Mark Morrison and for once he’s not singing “Return Of The Mack”. No, he’s finally got round to releasing a follow up single or should I say rereleasing as “Crazy” had been out before, making No 19 in 1995. Morrison doesn’t tamper with the formula much with it basically being “Return Of The Mack II”. I did notice though that the lyrics have Morrison claiming “I went to Number One (like a bomb)” presumably referring to his recent chart topper so my question is, were those the lyrics when “Crazy” was originally released before ROTM went to No 1 or did Morrison rewrite them after the event? If it’s the former, he was either very lucky or very arrogant. Either way, he then bangs on about girls “trippin’” on him since he got famous which apparently means acting crazy and is a word he seems very keen on as it was also the title of his next single. The two after that were called “Horny” and “Moan & Groan” – he was a classy fella our Mark.

He’s got a rapper in to help with the flow on this one and his name is Daddy Wattsie. When I was at polytechnic back in the 80s, I knew someone with the surname Watts who insisted on people calling him ‘Wattsie’. He was a bit of a knob and I’m not sure about Daddy Wattsie either. Had I not had the subtitles on iPlayer, I wouldn’t have had a clue what he was going on about (which is some nonsense about hip-hop ragamuffin DJs or something). Meanwhile, Morrison is singing about “doggin’” (that got past the censor) and then blatantly pinches Bobby Brown’s shtick by harping on about his prerogative. It’s all rather unpleasant and Morrison tops it off when he whips out his trademark handcuffs. Well, he had to keep up his ‘king of the cuffs’ moniker that Lisa I’Anson gave him in her intro I suppose. It’s hardly the same as being known as an Olympic champion though is it?

This next track should come with a health warning – it used to come close to giving me panic attacks. There was something about “Higher State Of Consciousness” by Josh Wink that would scratch at my nerve ends. It made me feel claustrophobic and like I just needed to escape from its sonic reach every time I heard it. Was it something to do with its frequency, its bpm, all its little bleeps, breaks and bass (to quote the title of an old dance compilation series)? Or was it that it sounded to me like a car alarm going off? Whatever it was about it that disturbed me so, what was even worse was that I foolishly let my record shop colleagues know about its effect upon me and they would mercilessly play it when I was on the shop floor.

Not content with giving me the jitters for five weeks in Autumn 1995 (the length it spent inside the Top 40), Josh Wink – a DJ, producer and remixer from Philadelphia (real name Joshua Winkelman) – decided to double down on my uneasiness by rereleasing it less than a year later under the shortened name of Wink. I mean, why? It had already been massive in the clubs of Europe and a No 8 hit in the UK on first release so why put it out again? Ah, well – it was all about the remixes wasn’t it? “Higher State Of Consciousness 96 Remixes” included a version by Dex and Jonesey (whoever they were) which deemed it worthy of another push at the charts. It succeeded as well peaking one place higher than its 1995 predecessor. Pass the paracetamol!

The first of two songs on this show that I will always associate with each other. Not for any musical reasons but purely because they formed an end panel display in the Our Price store where I was working at the time. In fairness, they were also both comeback singles of a sort. The first one is from Suede who released their first new material for nearly two years with “Trash” , the lead single from their third studio album “Coming Up”. It was also the first new material written without Bernard Butler who had left the band after the “Dog Man Star” album so there was a lot riding on this song. Would the absence of Butler prove to be insurmountable for the band? Or would his replacement Richard Oakes prove to be a just as gifted songwriter? History shows us that it was the latter scenario that played out. “Coming Up” would become Suede’s biggest selling album going platinum in the process. It generated five Top 10 singles with “Trash” itself the biggest of those and Suede’s joint highest charting hit ever when it peaked at No 3. You could hear why. It was a great tune displaying a much bigger pop sensibility than anything on “Dog Man Star”. Apparently, it was a deliberate choice by Brett Anderson to go down that route after the downturn in sales experienced by their 1994 album. Although, defiantly more ebullient, “Trash” also retained the band’s edge. This was angular pop with Brett singing about being “litter on the breeze”. It worked and it worked well.

Obviously the band toured the album and I caught them in Blackburn with my mate Steve in February of 1997. They were supported by Mansun who would release their excellent debut album “Attack Of The Grey Lantern” two days later but that’s all for a future post. For now, Suede were back and how. They’d survived the fallout from Bernard Butler’s departure and added to their ranks in the aforementioned Richard Oakes and keyboard player Neil Codling (who Lisa I’Anson rather fawned over in her intro). Britpop may have seemed to have washed them away but they had surfaced from the depths and were riding their own wave and not the zeitgeist.

Although mostly overshadowed by her 60s career and subsequent rise from the ashes in the 80s, Tina Turner was remarkably consistent in the 90s. I’m not talking gold medal standard here (most of it wouldn’t even make the medal podium) but she was certainly a qualifier for the final. She achieved 18 Top 40 hits in the UK during the decade albeit that most of them were distinctly medium sized with only four making the Top 10. The fifteenth of those hits was her cover of the soft rock classic “Missing You”. The third single to be lifted from her “Wildest Dreams” album, this was a stinker from start to finish. The 1984 John Waite original had always been a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine but Tina’s rendition is simply the worst. It just doesn’t suit her growly vocal and overblown delivery. Whoever made the decision for Tina to record should have been disqualified. I was surprised to learn that Trevor Horn produced it because the backing sounds all tinny and hollow. There’s even a sound in there that is reminiscent of that ‘boing’ effect you get from a mouth harp. Just horrible. Let’s move on quickly…

I’m still not convinced by this meet and greet competition. I mean, the locations are great – so far we’ve had the likes of Madrid and now Hollywood – but the pop stars involved don’t strike me as stellar. After Shampoo the other week, this time we’ve got New Edition. That’s New Edition of “Candy Girl” fame from 1983. That’s 1983! Since then, despite continued success in the US, they’d scored just one more hit single in the UK with “Mr. Telephone Man” from 1985. Sure, after the group split in 1988, all the members went on to solo success (or trio success in the case of Bell Biv DeVoe) especially Bobby Brown but when they reformed in 1996, would they have been seen as a huge name? I guess what I’m saying is would the competition winner have been blown away by meeting them? I’m not so sure. Had TOTP been an American TV show, maybe the chance to hangout with New Edition would have been a huge deal – after all the 1996 version of the group scored a huge hit in comeback album “Home Again” which sold two million copies in the US and went to No 1. It wasn’t the same level of success over here though. The album stalled at No 22 whilst it’s lead single “Hit Me Off” peaked at No 20 (it was an R&B chart topper and No 3 hit on the Billboard chart over the pond). I suppose we just weren’t as invested in the group here – we didn’t have that level of connection with them.

Anyway, the performance here is from the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios, Hollywood which explains why there is a huge crash of water behind them every now and again as the log flume ride splashes down. By the way, if you’re thinking that there seem to be more members of New Edition than you remember, don’t worry. You’re not losing it. There were five in the original line up but there are six here as both Bobby Brown and the guy who replaced him – Johnny Gill – are both featured. As for their song, it sounds like every other R&B song from this era with them singing about spending “an hour in the shower when it’s nice and wet”. If only they had misjudged the staging of this performance even slightly then maybe that log flume ride would have made their desire to be soaking come true.

Who remembers Joyrider? Not me for one. As Lisa I’Anson tells us in her intro, they were from Portadown, Northern Ireland and this was their big moment. One solitary week in the UK Top 40 and a TOTP appearance. They can’t gave thought this would be it for them surely but it pretty much was. Their single fell out of the charts despite this exposure and the follow up peaked at No 54. They did release an album but initial pressings didn’t include their only hit – a rock cover of Jane Wiedlin’s “Rush Hour” – which seems like a massive oversight though I believe it was reissued with it as included at a later date.

Listening back to this frenetic, high speed run through of one of the finest pop records of the 80s, the first question that comes to mind is ‘Why?’. Maybe their label desperately needed them to have a hit and we all know which position to assume in that scenario and, after all, such a tactic had worked for Gun a couple of years earlier when they gave Cameo’s “Word Up” the rock guitar treatment. Then there’s California rockers Redd Kross who did a brilliant job on “Yesterday Once More” for a Carpenters tribute album offering more proof that songs from one music genre could work in that of another given the right choice and treatments but something about Joyrider’s example of this just didn’t click for me. I think it’s that the pop brilliance of the original just can’t be beaten so any attempt at doing something different with it was doomed to failure if indeed you can call a No 22 peaking single a failure. What I can say with some certainty is that we won’t be seeing Joyrider on TOTP ever again.

And so to that other single that was on the end panel in Our Price alongside Suede that week. Just as Gary Barlow was toppled by the Spice Girls, here came another chart adversary but this one was much closer to home and with a much deadlier rivalry. Since leaving Take That in 1995, – labelling Barlow a “clueless wanker” as his parting shot across the bows as he went – the only time we’d seen anything of Robbie Williams was in the tabloids being out of it on another bender. His much hinted at solo career seemed to be taking an age to appear*

*I assume there were some record company legalities to be sorted before he could officially extricate himself from Take That’s label RCA and therefore release anything? His choice of song to cover for his debut single certainly suggested so and indeed, he signed to Chrysalis Records ultimately.

Finally, there was something with his name on it that you could buy in the shops when “Freedom” came out. His version of George Michael’s “Freedom 90” though seemed fairly redundant to me. It was a pure copy of the original with only Robbie’s trademark gurning vocals any sort of differential. What I found really revealing though was that the extra tracks on the CD singles were just remixes of “Freedom” and an interview with Williams in two parts. I recall saying to an Our Price colleague how pathetic this seemed and asking where his songs were. I was convinced at this point that he was doomed to fail as a solo artist. Within a year, Williams would meet Guy Chambers (ex of the wonderful Lemon Trees) who would answer my question about where his songs were and after a couple of false starts, Robbie would become a superstar. I watched a documentary about him on Netflix recently and although I had anticipated it portraying him as all self indulgent and woe is me, he was actually brutally honest about what a f**k up he was/is. In July ‘96 though, I for one thought I had him all figured out and had proclaimed sentence on him. I was wrong. Very wrong.

The Spice Girls have gone to No 1 with “Wannabe” and in so doing, become the first all female group to top the UK charts since The Bangles in 1989 with “Eternal Flame”. Perhaps more significantly, they were the first UK all female group to do so ever. This really did feel like a changing of the guard moment with the deposed former No 1 artist having been a member of the recently defunct biggest boy band in the UK. The Spice Girls were here to wash all them and all the pretty boys that followed in their wake away – it was time for ‘girl power’.

Like last week, the group are still in Japan but this time we get to see them at night in an oriental garden. Interestingly, they subvert the usual model of performance by running across bridges whilst miming before eventually lining up together to knock out some loosely choreographed dance moves. Obviously, we also get Sporty Spice doing her back flips. In another life she was surely an Olympic gymnast*.

*She has completed the London Triathlon twice.

The play out video is “Mysterious Girl” by Peter Andre which is still in and around the top end of the charts. Thankfully we only get a few seconds of the repugnant Andre and his cartoonish six pack. Apparently, his 16 years old son Junior wants to follow in his Dad’s footsteps and become a pop star – he is already signed to Columbia Records. As if there aren’t enough problems in the world along comes a dynasty of Andres making music. There really should be a law against it.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Pato Banton & The Reggae RevolutionGroovin’Nah
2Mark MorrisonCrazyNo
3WinkHigher State Of Consciousness 96 RemixesHell no!
4SuedeTrashNo but I had their Coming Up album
5Tina TurnerMissing YouNever
6New EditionHit Me OffNope
7JoyriderRush HourI did not
8Robbie WilliamsFreedomNegative
9Spice GirlsWannabeNot likely
10Peter AndreMysterious GirlAre you crazy?!

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/p00fsvcm/top-of-the-pops-26071996?seriesId=unsliced

TOTP 19 JUL 1996

Posted on by 80stastic

We’ve jumped from the end of June straight into the middle of July ‘96 with these BBC4 repeats having missed two whole shows in the process. Why? Well, general consensus amongst the TOTP community seems to be that there were some issues with the meet and greet competition winners in terms of criminal proceedings being brought against them in later life. Yet another depressing indictment of our society.

With that sombre start to the post, I’m looking for some positive energy now so who’s hosting this week? Well, he’s certainly bringing the energy but whether I’ll have a positive reaction to him is in doubt for our host tonight is Keith Allen or more specifically his alter ego ‘Keithski’. I find Allen the person quite intriguing and his autobiography was a good read but ‘Keithski’ was a bellend. Totally unfunny and intensely annoying. Before we even get to him though, we have the direct to camera message at the top of the show and this one is a little piece of pop music history. Was this our first glimpse of the Spice Girls on our TVs? Probably not as they must have been doing the media rounds to promote “Wanabe” to have got it to debut at No 3 in the charts but it must be their first TOTP appearance and given the show would have been the most obvious choice for pop fans to get their weekly fix of chart music then it might well have been a first for many viewing at home.

Anyway, they’ll be along in due course but we start with …who? Umboza? Yes, Umboza. Surely you remember their first, Lionel Richie sampling hit “Cry India”? Erm, no I don’t actually and I must have reviewed it for this blog. The only thing I recall writing is that their name reminded me of the tropical fruit drink Um Bongo which had that memorable ad campaign featuring the jingle “Um Bongo Um Bongo they drink it in the Congo”. However it seemed that one hit wasn’t enough for these fame guzzlers and so they were back with “Sunshine” using the same formula as before but with a different sample. Instead of “All Night Long (All Night)” we had “Bamboléo” by the Gipsy Kings – it seemed that Lionel Richie wasn’t the one they were looking for this time (I’ll get me coat later). Given the ubiquity of that song (it always seems to soundtrack any piece of film that has a Latin theme to it), I was amazed to discover that it’s never been a hit in the UK in its own right. In fact, the Gipsy Kings have never had a single make the Top 40 which makes you wonder how they became so popular over here. Was it something to do with the late 80s lambada craze?

As for Umboza, this sounded to me like music for bozos. Were committed clubbers seriously out dancing to this on a weekend? Maybe it was popular at some of the more cheesy nightclub establishments? Certainly the guy fronting this nonsense has gone down the cheddar route with his Saturday Night Fever suit and wide winged collars. The whole thing seems very unnecessary on reflection and should be consigned to the pop music waste bin of bad ideas.

As an antidote to the crap that opened the show, here’s some rock music from Terrorvision who were on to their third hit of the year with “Bad Actress”. I say antidote but it was more like a placebo (no, not the band!) as I feel like this particular song gave off the sense that it was better than it actually was. Oh sure, compared to Umboza, it was the best song ever recorded but, in reality, it wasn’t even Terrorvision’s best song. After some great earlier hits like “Oblivion” and “Perseverance”, “Bad Actress” was quite pedestrian or at least was jogging along rather than running at full pelt. Tony Wright has to annunciate the word ‘actress’ as ‘act-tress’ rather than ‘actriss’ so as to enable some rhyming lyrics and the whole thing feels forced as if the band was told to hold up in the studio and not come out until they’d written and recorded a single from scratch. Terrorvision would finish the year with a fourth and final Top 20 hit before disappearing for two years and then returning with the “Shaving Peaches” album and that No 2 hit single.

Oh not this again. Why was the “Theme From Mission Impossible” by Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jnr going back up the charts? Well, it’s an easy and obvious answer – the film had been released in the UK and was doing big business. This caused the ripple effect of blowing out the burning fuse about to detonate the chart life of its iconic theme tune and sending it from a low of No 27 to a second peak of No 16 before finally leaving the Top 40 by stealth four weeks later. I don’t know what else to say about this one other than “What’s done is done when I say it’s done”* and my review of this hit is done.

*It’s a line of dialogue from the film if that doesn’t mean anything to you

Here’s another song that’s been similarly knocking around the charts for a few weeks. By my reckoning, this was the sixth week on the chart for “Don’t Stop Movin’” by Livin’ Joy with all of them spent inside the Top 10. It was a most orderly descent of the chart with one place dropped per week from its debut at No 5 for the first five weeks until a rise of one place back up to No 8 afforded this further TOTP appearance. In total, it would spend three months in the Top 40 and nearly re-entered it in November when it missed achieving that feat by just one place. There was one last week at No 62 before it ignored the instruction of its title and did, indeed, finally stop moving…sorry…movin’.

Next, a charity record for a very worthy cause – The Nordoff -Robbins Music Therapy Centre – whose aim is to help children with psychological, physical or developmental disabilities using the tool of music. Back in 1996, the Rock Therapy project was set up to raise funds for the charity via the release of the single “Reaching Out”. Sadly for the charity, and in a cruelly ironic twist, the song failed to raise much money when it peaked at No 126. Yes, No 126. Not a great example of the power of music and its ability to help change lives. This lowly chart peak was despite the presence of such huge names as Queen’s Brian May, ex-Free singer Paul Rodgers, “Stop” hitmaker Sam Brown, the “Wide Eyed And Legless” Andy Fairweather Low and…erm…the drummer from Wet Wet Wet. The sad truth was though that “Reaching Out” was a stinker of a record. Words can’t quite express how awful it was but I’ll try. How about lumbering, insipid, lifeless, soulless or passionless? No? A sleeping pill in the form of a song? Not quite there? Musical melatonin? Yes, that’s the one. Nailed it which incidentally is what should have happened to “Reaching Out” – a nail put through every copy.

And so it begins. The time of the Spice Girls is here. Sporty! Scary! Ginger! Baby! Posh! Girl Power! An undeniable global phenomenon and it started with debut single “Wannabe” and what a curious thing it was. Musically all over the place but with enough cohesion and charisma to make it a worldwide chart topper. Look, I can’t recount the whole Spice Girls story in one post and I’m guessing you wouldn’t want nor need me to but just a few words about their origins seeing as we’re starting at the beginning. Recruited Monkees style by Bob and Chris Herbert of Heart Management via an advert in the trade paper The Stage, their intention was to create a girl group to rival the boy bands that were dominating the charts of the early 90s. After whittling down 400 hopefuls to just five – Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Victoria Adams, Geri Halliwell and, with their very own Pete Best figure, one Michelle Stephenson. The group were originally titled Touch of which Stephenson was seen initially as an important ingredient (she’d received the highest scores at the first audition). However, she was removed from the project by Heart Management amid accusations of laziness and lack of commitment. Stephenson naturally refuted such claims stating that she left of her own accord to care for her mother who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Victoria Adams (later Beckham) wrote in her autobiography that Stephenson “just couldn’t be arsed” to work as hard as the rest of the group. Whatever the truth, she was ultimately replaced by Emma Bunton and the rest is history. Michelle Stephenson would forge herself a career as a television presenter for a while whilst also finding work as a backing singer for the likes of Ricky Martin and Julio Iglesias.

As for this satellite performance from Japan, it’s notable that Posh Spice is the only person in the group not to have any solo lines in the song. Stephenson has her own story behind that as well claiming “Wannabe” was originally written with Stephenson in mind and that after she left, Adams refused to take on her parts. Other accounts suggest that it was due to Adams experiencing scheduling conflicts during the writing of the track (which happened after Stephenson’s departure). Yeah, right. Just one more thing, wasn’t Ginger Spice meant to be called Sexy Spice originally? Stephenson has her own take on that as well claiming she was going to be given that nickname. Ginger does make a lot more sense if we’re talking spices but then I’ve also never seen any spices called Sporty, Scary, Baby and Posh on the racks of my local supermarket either.

As with the Spice Girls, there’s a lot to unpack about the story behind the next song and given the song in question, I’m not sure I can be bothered to go through it all. Damn the completist in me! Right, let’s go through this quicker than a Cole Palmer hat trick. Two Andalusian Spanish blokes who’d had a Latin lounge act called Los Del Rio since 1962 went to a private party whilst touring Venezuela thirty years later and witnessed a dance by a local flamenco teacher. One of the fellas is inspired to write some lyrics in tribute to the dancer’s moves and calls it “Macarena” after his daughter. Initially released in 1993 to mediocre success, the track turned into a true worldwide sensation three years later thanks to a remix by The Bayside Boys who added a dance beat and English language lyrics. Its popularity in nightclubs led to a dance being associated with the song which would become a global craze. Fourteen weeks at the top of the US Billboard Hot 100 followed making it the best selling single of 1996 in America. With Europe falling in line with the track’s dance moves, it clocked up No 1s all over the continent. Dear old Blighty initially resisted the charms of these two codgers and their insanely infectious hit when it spent two weeks at Nos 64 and 77 in June but come July, it leapt straight in at No 11 making it one of the then biggest leaps up the chart in history. It would go on to sell eleven million copies worldwide and is a staple of party playlists to this day. I myself have witnessed teachers and children alike performing its moves at end of year discos when my son was in primary school. And that’s all I’m saying (for now) about “Macarena”. Ay!

Neneh Cherry burst onto the music scene in the late 80s with the box fresh, street wise sound of “Buffalo Stance” and her debut, platinum selling album “Raw Like Sushi”. She was one of the big stories of 1989 though she’d actually been around the industry for years before that performing in the likes of The Slits and post-punk outfit Rip Rig + Panic. Indeed, her stepfather was the American jazz musician Don Cherry. That first blast of success though proved hard to sustain with 1992’s sophomore album “Homebrew” a significant commercial downturn. In the intervening four years though, Cherry had actually come up with two of her biggest hits albeit that neither was completely under her own steam. “7 Seconds” with Senegalese artist Youssou N’Dour was a perhaps unexpectedly huge hit almost everywhere whilst her appearance alongside Cher, Christie Hynde and Eric Clapton on 1995 Comic Relief single “Love Can Build A Bridge” would provide her only career No 1 record.

In 1996 though, she would come up with a last commercial hurrah as a purely solo artist with the album “Man” and hit single “Woman”. Written as a response to James Brown’s 1966 hit “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World”, it talked of the hardships faced by women in life and very much espoused and sought to empower the female voice. Culturally, in the same week that the Spice Girls were making their debut on the show, the difference in style between “Woman” and ‘Girl Power’ was marked. Still, two techniques to amplify your point however dissimilar they were from each other is surely better than one. Matching its themes was the sound of “Woman” – brooding yet soulful, did it have a hint of Portishead about it? The single would give Neneh one last Top 10 hit whilst the album would achieve silver status for sales of 60,000 copies. She is still releasing music to this day with her last album, 2022’s “Versions” being reworking of songs from her back catalogue. Her two daughters Tyson and Mabel are both singers, with the latter having had both her albums go Top 3.

P.S. Nice to see Bernard Butler up there on stage with Neneh, He has a credit on the song for a ‘Special Guitar Section’ plus a shout out from Keithski.

Ah yes, Keithski. How to evaluate Allen’s alter ego in this TOTP? Irritating? Vexatious? Infuriating? Probably all of the above. He seemed determined to get one over the TOTP producers by slipping in some innuendo into his segues but some of it was so cryptic (“Banging out the round ones”, “Check the pellets in my pistol”, “Bump and grind to the garden tribe”) he just sounded like he was talking crap at high speed. Allen finally drops the act to announce the winner of the latest meet and greet competition before fake yawning as he introduces this week’s new No 1…

Hard as it is to remember, there was a time before the reemergence of Robbie Williams when all signs pointed to another ex-member of Take That being the one with the stellar solo career. Everybody expected Gary Barlow as the chief songwriter of the group to be the one to carry on seamlessly with chart hit after chart hit and sure enough, here he was first out of the traps with his debut solo single “Forever Love” straight in at No 1. The natural order of things was happening just as expected. To nobody’s surprise, his first post Take That hit was a big, slushy ballad with the piano to the forefront demonstrating our Gary’s musicianship as he sought to do a George Michael and transcend from boy band star to mature recording artist. It would sell over 100,000 copies in its first week of release before eventually going gold. There’s a bit in this performance when the screaming audience are at their loudest where Barlow almost smirks to himself. Maybe it was from embarrassment or maybe it was his inner voice saying “You’ve cracked it Gary lad. This solo star stuff is a piece of piss. All your dreams are coming true”. And it looked like they were. Uptempo follow up single “Love Won’t Wait” also topped the chart whilst his debut solo album “Open Road” did the same achieving platinum status sales. Meanwhile, as we shall see in next week’s show, Robbie decided to launch himself with a copycat, pointless version of George Michael’s “Freedom”. Nah, Gary was clearly the true talent. Fast forward two years and the roles were well and truly reversed. Barlow couldn’t buy a hit whilst Williams was unavoidably everywhere, racking up the hits as fast as Keithski could speak. Pop had raised see its fickle finger once more…

After a weak pun from Keithski where he refers to Gary Barlow as Ken Barlow, we’re into the play out song which is “Krupa” by Apollo Four Forty. As you might have guessed, I didn’t take much notice of this electronic dance group from Liverpool who’d made their name as remixers initially before raiding the charts in their own right. After three small Top 40 hits, “Krupa” became their biggest ever (at the time) when it peaked at No 23. Essentially an instrumental track, it was inspired by the jazz drummer Gene Krupa. So here’s the question that needs answering – did I know who Gene Krupa was back then? You know, I think I did. I have a vague recollection of having watched a documentary about the most influential drummers in music history and Krupa was featured. I could be bullshitting myself of course as we all know that the memory shifts and re-edits things to make false recollections but I’m sticking by my stick man story. Apollo Four Forty would go onto rack up a further six UK Top 40 hits including their biggest “Lost In Space” from the soundtrack to the 1998 film of the same name which was a remake of the 60s TV series.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1UmbozaSunshineAs if
2TerrorvisonBad ActressNo
3Theme From Mission Impossible Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen JnrNope
4Don’t Stop Movin’ Livin’ JoyNah
5Rock TherapyReaching OutNever
6Spice GirlsWannabeI did not
7Los Del RioMacarenaOf course not
8Neneh CherryWomanNo but my wife and the album
9Gary BarlowForever LoveNegative
10Apollo Four FortyKrupaNot my bag

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/m00239nb/top-of-the-pops-19071996?seriesId=unsliced