What happens to pop stars when the fame slides away and, as that infamous Bros documentary put it, when the screaming stops? Well, some stay in the world of entertainment but reinvent themselves as actors or DJs. Statistically there must be some I guess who can’t handle it and slide into a world of drink and drugs. There must also be a large number who just get ‘ordinary’ jobs like the rest of us. There can’t be many though that became even more famous as a professor of particle physics and the public face of anything scientific. I talk, of course, of Professor Brian Cox who famously was also, in his youth, the keyboards player in D:Ream. And yes, D:Ream are on the show tonight. And yes, I didn’t mention Brian Cox in the last post when his band were in the Breakers section knowing I could leave that discussion for this week. Seen by many as the natural successor to the likes of David Attenborough (even though their fields aren’t remotely the same), he’s certainly more famous now for making science hip than making hit singles. I wonder if they’ll be any more pop stars on tonight’s show who became famous for something other than pop music?

So we start with Prof Cox and D:Ream who are having a mini career before they go massive next year. It’s a curious chart history. 1993 brought them four hit singles yet none got any higher than No 19. The following year, they also had four hit singles but two of them were included in those hits from 1993. This time those repeated singles went to No 1 and No 4. In total there were nine single releases from their “D:Ream On Vol 1” album but across just six tracks with “Things Can Only Get Better” being released twice (once for the Labour General Election campaign of 1997) and this song “U R The Best Thing” three times! I guess their record label must have had unshakable faith that they really were going to be big.

Cox looks unrecognisable here with a mane of long hair which he keeps swishing from side to side and a sleeveless tartan suit (God in heaven! What was he thinking?!). Mind you, wasn’t lead singer Peter Cunnah partial to a tartan suit as well? Maybe we’ll see that it a future TOTP. I used to work with someone who had a drinking mug with Brian Cox’s face on it as she was a fan. The slogan emblazoned all around the mug? Me Love Cox. When I pointed out the obvious double entendre, it had genuinely never occurred to her!

It’s that REM single next that even if you weren’t a fan of the band or even pop music in general had to admit was a pretty good song. “Everybody Hurts” had that elusive quality to be able to cut through all different strata of society and be affecting. With its themes of dealing with depression and suicidal thoughts and its melancholy sound, it was an obvious choice for it to soundtrack a 1995 awareness campaign by The Samaritans.

Fifteen years on, it was covered to raise money for victims of the Haiti earthquake. Multiple artists were involved in the project including Mariah Carey, Rod Stewart, Take That, Kylie Minogue and Westlife and, with a nice link to D:Ream, was the idea of then Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown who contacted Simon Cowell to put it together. It became the fastest selling charity record of the 21st century in Britain. Somehow I can’t imagine Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak (whichever one ends up in No 10) initiating something similar. Raising money for suffering people that don’t even live in the UK? That wouldn’t go down well with the Tory membership at all. “Ooh bit of politics!” as Ben Elton would have said back in the day.

I don’t think you could make a case that any of the members of REM eclipsed their fame as rock stars after the band dissolved but Michael Stipe has branched out into film production acting as executive producer on movies such as Being John Malkovich and Velvet Goldmine.

SWV were in the charts in 1993 with a song that wasn’t “Right Here”? Really? The Michael Jackson sampling hit is my only memory of the trio from that year but here they are with a different hit called “I’m So Into You” which would make No 17 on our charts. After En Vogue and latterly Jade, here were the Sisters With Voices as the latest US R&B import seeking to replicate their success at home across the pond.

Listening back to this track hasn’t stirred my grey cells into action – zero recall of it – but then I was distracted by their decision to turn up for the show dressed as Shaky in double denim. Quite extraordinary. One of the trio, Tamara ‘Taj’ George, became a model after the band split and then found fame as a reality TV star on Survivor in 2009.

Anyone fancy some panpipe techno? Nah, me neither but there is some on the show courtesy of Dance 2 Trance and their hit “Power Of American Natives”. In later life, the backing dancer on the right found fame as bad boy Darren Osbourne in Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks. OK, I’m made that shit up but he does look a bit like him doesn’t he?

I’ve talked long and hard before about the three ‘S’s of shite that blighted the charts in 1993 – Shabba, Shaggy and Snow. There was though another artist that I could have shoehorned in to make this unholy trio a frightful foursome of crud if I’d allowed songs instead of artists beginning with ‘s’ to be included. The song I speak of is “Sweat” or rather “Sweat (A La La La La Long)”. This heinous piece of cod reggae by Inner Circle could rot your brain when exposed to it for just a few minutes with its infuriatingly catchy drone-a-long chorus. The good people of the UK had resisted its dark arts when originally released six months earlier but a rerelease due to it being No 1 all over Europe proved overwhelming and it duly went to No 6 in our charts.

The band themselves had been around in various incarnations since 1968 (!) but had only grazed the UK Top 40 once in 1979 with something called “Everything Is Great”. Talk about a misnomer. They came up with a song with a much more apt name in “Bad Boys” (where bad means crap and not good as per Michael Jackson) which became a big hit when it was used as the theme song to US TV series Cops and later to soundtrack the Will Smith / Martin Lawrence Bad Boys film franchise.

It’s three Breakers this week starting with Big Country. No if we thought D:Ream were into recycling with their multiple rereleases of tracks as singles, then what do we make of the bagpipe guitar rockers? Where D:Ream simply got the in demand remix team of Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne aka Perfecto to come up with a new version of “U R The Best Thing”, Big Country did the spade work themselves and totally re-recorded a song that had already been on a previous album.

“Ships (Where Were You)” was originally a track on poorly received and underselling 1991 album “No Place Like Home” but Stuart Adamson and co weren’t happy with the piano led, string quartet enhanced version that they had laid down and so went back into the studio to add those guitars. Now sounding more like a recognisable Big Country track, it became the band’s second consecutive Top 40 hit when released as the second single from “Buffalo Skinners”, the first time they had achieved that feat since 1986.

The video is a pretty pedestrian affair with the fans looking like they’ve caught the MTV Unplugged bug with all of them sat down for the entire performance. Surely that would have worked better with the string quartet 1991 version?

Next a band at a careers crossroads. It seems strange to recall now but in 1993 Blur we’re not in a good place. The glory of their 1991 breakthrough single “There’s No Other Way” had long since dimmed to be replaced by a press backlash. The band themselves were miserable after an unhappy experience touring the US to apathetic audiences. The possibility of being dropped by record label Food was real. A decision was taken to take a new direction that channeled the spirit of English 60s bands like the Small Faces and The Kinks as a reaction to the grunge era that they’d witnessed on their American tour. The result was the album “Modern Life Is Rubbish”, a collection of songs that didn’t generate massive sales but which have retrospectively been bestowed with love and respect and a sense of importance in configuring the rise of Britpop.

“For Tomorrow” was the lead track and was written with the intention of being a hit single as it was felt by Food that the album didn’t have any. Written about Primrose Hill the top of which affords a view of the whole of central London, it peaked at No 28, the band’s third lowest charting single until 2012. However, it is a fan favourite being voted the fifth best Blur song ever in a fanbase vote.

Whilst the album underperformed commercially, it was an essential and necessary step on the way to their most celebrated album “Parklife”. Oh and Inner Circle? That’s how you write a song with a ‘La La La La’ chorus!

Now here’s an artist I never really got…at all. However, she was very much seen as the darling of the indie world around this time and her career has been littered with accolades. Her trophy cabinet (presuming she has one) houses three Rolling Stone Magazine awards, two Mercury Music Prizes – she remains the only artist to have won it twice – an NME Outstanding Contribution to Music award and an MBE for services to music. Who am I taking about? PJ Harvey of course.

Back in 1993, she’d already made a name for herself with her debut album “Dry” which had made No 11 in the charts and would end up selling 60,000 copies. It was also extremely well received in the ‘serious’ music press. Maybe that’s what put me off her. I never really felt a part of that scene. While I was coming to the conclusion that she wasn’t really for me, PJ (Polly Jean) was already onto her next album. Sophomore release “Rid Of Me” came out the week after this TOTP aired and was trailed by the single “50ft Queenie”. This sounded like a racket to me back then and the intervening thirty years have done nothing to change my mind. I wasn’t the only person who wasn’t a fan. My mate Robin who worked at the BBC had got himself into the audience for a Later…with Jools Holland when one of the guests was PJ Harvey. So unimpressed was he by what he saw that as the camera panned round the studio audience during her performance, he gave his verdict with a double middle finger gesture (or ‘the rods’ as Robin described it). I’ve looked through a number of Later…shows featuring ol’ PJ but have not been able to spot Robin’s rods. He has a particularly bad track record of being at BBC music shows. He once found himself stranded at a recording of TOTP – he’d thought that Morrissey was on but it turned out to be Kenny Thomas instead.

“50ft Queenie” peaked at No 27.

A genuine rock god next. Robert Plant needs no introduction from me mainly because I’m not qualified as I never really got the boat to Led Zeppelin island but just to give this some factual context, this was Robert’s third solo Top 40 single over a ten year period. His first had come in 1983 with the paean to toilet humour “Big Log” whilst his second was 1988’s “Heaven Knows” which I don’t remember at all. “29 Palms” though I do recall as the album it was taken from – “Fate Of Nations” – we had a CD promo copy of at the Our Price store where I was working at the time. I wouldn’t normally have been interested in a Robert Plant album but I took this one as me and my wife had just purchased our very first stereo that had a CD drive! Yes, just a mere eight years (!) after Dire Straits’ “Brothers In Arms” was single-handedly driving the adoption of the CD as the format of choice for music buyers, we finally joined the digital recording revolution. The problem was we didn’t have any actual CDs to play on our newly acquired stereo. All our music was either on vinyl and then latterly cassette. Given this, I figured I’d claim the Plant promo CD to test out the CD player. To be fair, I don’t think anybody else I worked with was likely to want it.

And so it came to pass that one of the first CDs I ever had was a Robert Plant solo album. I had it for years and maybe played one track on it once (the single obviously) and in the end I gave it away to a friend who liked, yep, that one song. So about “29 Palms” – did I like it? I wouldn’t have changed station if it came on the radio but I certainly wouldn’t have bought it either (remember, the CD I had was a free promo – no monetary transaction was necessary). I think I preferred “Big Log” though from my school days. There’s a bit in it that’s been bugging me because it reminded me of another song but I couldn’t place it but I’ve got it now – it’s “Heaven” by Bryan Adams. That’s probably heresy to Led Zep fans but that’s what I’m hearing. It’s rumoured to be about Canadian singer Alannah Myles of “Black Velvet” fame whom Plant toured with. Alternatively, it’s about the town of Twentynine Palms in the Mojave desert or more specifically its radio station. Either way, at least Robert ensured there was no room for any “Big Log” style faeces innuendo with this one…unless you can think of any.

“29 Palms” peaked at No 21.

The 1993 Eurovision Song Contest is only two weeks away so it’s about time we got another glimpse of our entry for this year who is of course Sonia. The UK was in a run of runner up finishes with three of the previous five contests seeing us finish in second place. Sonia would make it four out of six with “Better The Devil You Know” but we would come nowhere near winning again until 1997 when Katrina And The Waves brought the crown back to the UK despite Katrina herself being American.

Back in 1993 though, Sonia found herself unlucky enough to be competing in an era where the contest was dominated by Ireland who were in the middle of a trio of wins between 1992 and 1994. A bit like Andy Murray playing elite tennis when Nadal and Federer were in their pomp. Well, sort of if you can get on board with the idea of music being competitive. Then again, what was the Top 40 singles chart if not a competition?

Not only did Sonia miss out on Eurovision glory but “Better The Devil You Know” was also her final ever Top 40 hit. She had eleven in all but I’m betting most of us would struggle if she was the ‘Three In Ten’ artist on Ken Bruce’s Popmaster. After the hits stopped, Sonia starred as Sandy in the West End revival of Grease and also as Lily Savage’s wayward daughter Bunty in The Lily Savage Show. I don’t think any of those projects outdid her fame as Sonia the pop star though. Certainly appearing in Channel 5’s Celebrity 5 Go Caravanning was unlikely to be people’s abiding memory of her.

P.S. Did Sonia and SWV plan their Shaky style outfits beforehand?

There’s a new No 1 as The Bluebells are no more and are replaced by George Michael and Queen with the “Five Live” EP. A charity record in support of The Mercury Phoenix Trust that fights HIV/AIDS around the world, the five tracks were:

1. “Somebody To Love” – George Michael and Queen
2. “Killer” – George Michael
3. “These Are The Days Of Our Lives” – Queen, George Michael and Lisa Stansfield
4. “Calling You” – George Michael
5. “Dear Friends” – Queen

Tracks 1 and 3 were recordings of the live performances from the 1992 Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert with the first being the one that received all the airplay. The EP went straight in at No 1 making it the eighth charity record to do so at the time since Band Aid in 1984. It was also George Michael’s third No 1 single as a duet after “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)” with Aretha Franklin in 1987 and “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” with Elton John in 1991. It would become the 11th best selling single of 1993. It also was top of the charts for three weeks so I’ll leave it there for now. Oh, one more thing. We’re all agreed that George’s fame post Wham! outstripped his pre Wham! fame yeah?

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/m0019tp0/top-of-the-pops-29041993