U2

TOTP 03 DEC 1992

Posted on by 80stastic

We’ve clicked over into December 1992 here at TOTP Rewind which means that the population would officially have been starting to get into Xmas mode. Working at the Our Price store in Rochdale, my own days were getting busier and felt very long as sales got brisker. So what were some of the albums that were doing the business as Xmas loomed 30 years ago? The Top 10 albums were made up of eight Best Of / compilations from the likes of Cher, Erasure, Genesis, Gloria Estefan and Simple Minds. Only two were proper studio albums which were “Automatic For The People” by REM and “Stars” by Simply Red which was still in the Top 10 after being the best selling album of 1991! Now I’m all for a good Best Of album but 1992’s Xmas offerings did seem quite cynical on behalf of the record companies.

Whilst the record shops were getting prepared for a frenzy of activity, something else in the world of music was coming to a full stop. Cult TV programme The Hitman And Her broadcast its final show two days after this TOTP went out. It seems odd to recall now but there was a time when TV stations didn’t broadcast all night, when there weren’t any late night schedules and when if you suffered from insomnia then there were no old episodes of Come Dine With Me to keep you company during the wee small hours. So when Pete Waterman’s nightclub based show appeared in our screens in 1988, it felt truly transformative.

Filmed on a Saturday night in various clubs throughout the UK but with a definite North/Midlands bias, it would be televised in the early hours of Sunday morning. Performing hosting duties alongside Waterman and securing her cult status amongst the UK’s young male population was Michaela Strachan. Ever the businessman, Waterman ensured that the programme showcased a number of his PWL artists as well as some of the acid house tunes that he loved. The clubbers themselves were as much the stars of the show as the hosts, with many a punter, eager to get themselves on TV, happy to embarrass themselves by participating in some ‘hilarious’ games. Some of the regular dancers on the show included a pre-Take That Jason Orange and the two blokes who weren’t the singer in naff 90s boy band 911. I wonder if any of the tunes on tonight’s TOTP made the Hitman And Her playlist?

Well, possibly this one. If you’ve finally had a hit after years of trying, what’s your next move going to be? Yes, release a very similar sounding follow up of course! OK, “Step It Up” isn’t an exact replica of “Connected” – its got a faster bpm for one thing – but it didn’t fall far from the tree. Stereo MC’s were on a roll by this point. Their third album “Connected” missed the top of the charts by one place and would go on to sell 420,000 copies. “Step It Up” was their second consecutive Top 20 single after the album title track. They were the bomb (or something). This performance is surely the mental image that most people who were around at the time would conjure up when hearing the name Stereo MC’s. The main protagonist of course is the Catweazle-esque Rob Birch. With his oversize trousers and glimpse of a bare chest, he was a Frankenstein’s monster mash up of MC Hammer and Peter Andre. Then there were his moves. The knees bent, hip swivelling action that Birch brings to the party surely influenced Vic Reeves and his thigh rubbing antics on Shooting Stars. In fact, the whole thing reminds me of our Maltese puppy rolling on his back exposing his bits when being sniffed by some of the local neighbourhood dogs. Yeah, sorry about that mental image. Anyway, you have to give it to Rob; he certainly left it all out there as it were. Here’s his take on his performance courtesy of the ever excellent @TOTPFacts:

Letting it all hang out indeed. “Step It Up” peaked at No 12.

If it’s TOTP in 1992 then there must be a Michael Jackson video due and here comes the latest. “Heal The World” was Jacko’s fifth single released in the UK during the year and the sixth from his “Dangerous” album overall. I’m guessing this was always going to be the track released for the Xmas market given that it’s a huge, saccharine drenched ballad with oh so worthy lyrical subject matter. So about the song’s sound – you can’t ignore its similarity to “We Are The World” which Jackson co-wrote with Lionel Richie. I mean it’s essentially the same song. Supposedly though, it is the track that Jackson was most proud of. It even inspired him to create the Heal The World Foundation, a charity dedicated to improving conditions for children throughout the world. You can’t deny the philanthropy but it doesn’t make the song any more palatable.

I really remember the rather clunky and obvious design on the cover of the single of a plaster covering a crack across the globe which is held between the hands of a black child and a white child. It was one of those fold out sleeves that turns into a poster as I remember that were awful to refold once opened to its full extent.

Sensibly, the video for the song doesn’t include Jackson himself only children set against a backdrop of images depicting war, guns and even the Ku Klux Klan. The theme of healing is portrayed by the final scene of a candle lit vigil of children coming together as one. That restraint was not in evidence at the BRITS in 1996 when Jackson celebrated the receipt of his Artist Of A Generation award with a performance of “Earth Song” that depicted him as a Christ like figure surrounded by children. Thank God for Jarvis Cocker! In any other year, the mawkish song would surely have gone to No 1 but this was 1992 and it was up against the all conquering “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston and had to make do with the runners up spot.

Next we have another studio performance of the reactivated “Temptation (Brothers In Rhythm remix)” by Heaven 17. There’s a couple of differences between this and the previous 19th November show turn. Firstly, Carol Kenyon has a proper name check in the title graphics this time and secondly, she’s up there belting it out alongside Glenn Gregory without the two blokes on keyboards (the titular brothers presumably) for company. Still conspicuous by his absence though is Martyn Ware. Carol and Glenn don’t really need anybody else though certainly not the former who gives a masterclass in doing a live vocal performance for TV.

The original recording of “Temptation” featured a 60 piece orchestra and I’ve heard the aforementioned Ware say in an interview how mad it was back in the early 80s that they would just say to their record label that they required the services of an orchestra to play on one track and the label didn’t bat an eyelid at the cost. The 80s really were a time of excess within the record industry it seems. The Brothers In Rhythm remix of “Temptation” peaked at No 4.

The curious case of Dina Carroll next. Curious? Well, just in the respect that her success seemed to come in stages rather than via the classic overnight sensation mode. Sort of the musical equivalent of that ref who went down in stages when pushed by Paolo Di Canio back in the 90s…

Anyway, Dina had first come to national attention as the vocalist on Quartz’s dance version of Carole King’s “It’s Too Late” in 1991. Despite that flush of success, the Quartz project fizzled out and Dina disappeared from view. Behind the scenes though, a decision by her management company to launch Dina as a solo artist led to her being signed to A&M and the following year she returned to the charts with “Ain’t No Man”. “Special Lind Of Love” replicated its predecessor’s success exactly by peaking at No 16 before this single “So Close” made it a hat trick of Top 20 hits in 1992. Pretty impressive stuff which led to host Tony Dortie describing in his intro that Dina had enjoyed “an amazing year” and that she was “definitely in contention for female vocalist of the year”.

Come January 1993 her album was released and debuted at No 2 staying in the Top 20 for six months. And yet, it seemed to me that the album only really went into hyperdrive sales wise when the sixth single “Don’t Be A Stranger” was released in the October. I’ll type that again. The sixth single which was by far the biggest of the lot taken from the album when it peaked at No 3. Now surely that is curious?! We sold loads of the album in the wake of that single. Did A&M have it up their sleeves all the time, holding it back until the optimum moment? The single was different from the album version in that it was re-recorded with added orchestra strings to give it a dramatic feel. When was that decision taken? Either they got lucky or they had a long term strategy all along. Her success in 1993 led to Dina being named Best Female Artist at the BRIT awards in 1994 – again a marker that her success came in stages with her becoming award winning a whole year after Tony Dortie’s prediction.

As for “So Close” the song, it’s pleasant enough but never had the capacity to rival the sales of “Don’t Be A Stranger”. Maybe it was meant to just keep Dina‘s profile ticking over until the album was released? Surely the clamour for the album would have increased if “Don’t Be A Stranger” had been the third single anyway? Oh I don’t know. The bottom line is that it all worked out pretty well for Dina in the end unlike Paolo Di Canio who received an eleven match ban for his shove on ref Paul Alcock.

We’re back to cramming in the Breakers again this week with four of the little blighters in total. We start with one of REM’s best known songs I’m guessing which makes me wonder why these few scant seconds are all that were ever shown of it on TOTP. “Man On The Moon” was the second single to be released from the “Automatic For The People” album and is one of those songs that just works. Beautifully.

It manages to combine genuinely eccentric lyrics with ear worm producing hooks. Nominally about surrealist performance artist Andy Kaufman with references to his Elvis impersonations and work with wrestler Fred Blassie, it also seemed to be asking the listener to open their mind to multiple different realities. What if the moon landings were fake? What if Elvis wasn’t dead? Ultimately it returns to Kaufman and the conspiracy theory that he faked his own death. It’s a heady concoction. The black and white video with the image of Michael Stipe wearing a cowboy hat walking nonchalantly down a desert road before hitching a ride with a truck is in turns memorable and befittingly random. The original demo without lyrics was known by the band as “C to D slide” due to the opening which includes that shift of chords. When I attended a guitar class a few years ago, this was one of the songs we learned including that slide. It’s actually OK to play but does have some quick chord changes. By the way, I’m really not much of a guitarist. Just a chord strummer really. “Man On The Moon” peaked at No 18.

Another huge band that we only got to see a glimpse of as a Breaker were U2. To be fair they were promoting a fifth single from “Achtung Baby”, an album that had been released almost exactly a year ago so maybe they were pushing it a bit. Did the TOTP producers think that a fifth single from a year old album wasn’t a big enough story? It hardly qualified as an ‘exclusive’. Indeed, perhaps the real reason that a fifth single was released was to complete the last piece of the jigsaw that formed a picture of the band driving a Trabant car when you put all five single covers together. A nice bit of marketing by record label Island there.

The single in question was “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” which I always quite liked. Apparently the gestation of the song had been quite laboured and the band had several failed attempts before they laid down a version they could live with. I always presumed that the song’s title was inspired by The Rolling Stones track “Wild Horses” but I haven’t seen anything online that comes anywhere near confirming that.

The singles from “Achtung Baby” achieved the following chart positions:

1 – 13 – 7 – 8 – 14

It’s not a bad haul for an album that was seen as a gamble in many ways with it being a definite shift in musical direction from where their success had led the band. It remains their second biggest selling album after “The Joshua Tree”.

Think of Xmas and then think of Cliff Richard. What song is currently running around your head? “Mistletoe And Wine”? How about “Saviour’s Day”? Bet it isn’t this one. It tends to get forgotten given the success of those aforementioned festive chart toppers and their ubiquity in Xmas playlists but Cliff didn’t just do those two Chrimbo tunes. There was “Little Town” in 1982, “We Should Be Together” nine years later and this one – “I Still Believe In You”.

This completely passed me by despite me working in a record shop at the time and despite it going Top 10. That’s probably because it had about as much staying power as wrapping paper come mid morning on Xmas day. In fact, it hardly even qualifies as a Xmas song with the only reference to Yuletide in the lyrics being one mention of Santa Claus. Just terrible. Cliff didn’t give up on the concept of making festive records though. In 1999, he scored an unexpected No 1 with “The Millennium Prayer”, in 2003 went Top 5 with “Santa’s List” and in 2006 got to No 2 with “21st Century Christmas”. There have also been numerous chart re-entries for “Mistletoe And Wine”, “Saviour’s Day” and even “I Still Believe In You” down the years when December rolls around once more.

The final Breaker comes from Rod Stewart and his cover of “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Waltzing Matilda)” by Tom Waits. We saw this the other week as an ‘exclusive’ live by satellite performance and the video here looks very similar to that as it’s just Rod wandering around an empty stage with a solitary piano player for company. I defy anybody to watch the video in full and be able to look at anything other than Rod’s beard for the whole four and a half minutes.

What on earth was this all about?! Boney M on TOTP?! In the 90s?! Well, it’s a straightforward answer. It was clearly another case of money for old rope. Record label Arista released this “Megamix” single with an eye on the Xmas party scene figuring the UK’s work force, pissed up and ready to party, wouldn’t be able to resist these 70’s tunes all over again. And so it came to pass that the single – a medley of “Rivers Of Babylon”, “Sunny” and “Daddy Cool” – returned Boney M to the UK Top 10 for the first time since 1979. I say Boney M but was this really them? Where was the guy with the mad Afro (Bobby Farrell) who used to leap about all over the place like he’d sat on an ants nest? Yes, there was a guy in the line up doing his best impression of Farrell but it’s clearly not him. In fact, there’s only the lead singer up there on stage that looks vaguely familiar. A bit of research tells me that it’s original member Liz Mitchell doing the singing but the rest of the group were just some randoms that were drafted in to promote the single. In an act of utter shamelessness / good business practice depending on your point of view, a cash-in “Greatest Hits” album was released early the following year which made the Top 20.

Apparently there were a number of different touring line ups of Boney M after the original line up was finally disbanded in 1986. I know! Boney M were still a thing in 1986?! They were not alone in this of course. There are plenty of examples of concurrent versions of groups following the disintegration of the originals. Off the top of my head there’s been The Temptations, Bucks Fizz, The Bay City Rollers and more recently UB40. All three female members of the original line up are still with us though sadly Bobby Farrell died of heart failure in 2010 while on tour with his version of Boney M. Unbelievably, he died on the same date and in the same city (St Petersburg) as Rasputin who was of course the inspiration behind one of the band’s biggest hits and whom Farrell used to dress up as when performing the song.

1992 had been a busy old time for Madonna. She starred in a well received film in A League Of Their Own and wrote a hit single for its soundtrack. She founded her own entertainment company called Maverick with production arms in records, film, music publishing, book publishing and merchandising. Not content with that, she released her controversial coffee table book Sex and her fifth studio album in “Erotica”. She was only 34 at the time and yet still had been a global superstar for nearly a decade.

“Deeper And Deeper” was the second single taken from “Erotica” and seems to have undergone some retrospective critical revisionism. It seems to me at the time that it didn’t create much of a fuss – how could it compete with Sex and the “Erotica” single for fuss to be fair? It now though seems to be recognised as one of Madonna’s better tracks. Indeed some may even say a banger. Certainly it was a return to that more mainstream dance sound on which she made her name but also embracing the house music movement. I have to say it never did that much for me though. At least the Andy Warhol inspired video with Madonna playing an Edie Sedgwick style character isn’t laced with whips and dominatrix style imagery like those for her recent singles “Erotica” and “Justify My Love” though there is some very loaded and deliberate peeling of bananas. “Deeper And Deeper” peaked at No 6.

This seems like a bit of overkill on behalf of the TOTP producers. This is the second time Simply Red have been on the show with two different tracks from a live EP recorded at a jazz festival. Really? “The Montreux EP” had four songs on it and after “Drowning In My Own Tears” was on a couple of weeks ago, this time we get “Lady Godiva’s Room”. Apparently this song had originally been released as the B-side to the band’s 1987 single “Infidelity” which kind of makes sense as it really sounds like B-side material to me. Uninspiring and a bit of a dirge, I was surprised that the EP got as high as it did (No 11). Make the most of this appearance though as we won’t be seeing Hucknall and co again for nearly three years (hurray!) when they will return with 1995’s “Life” album including No 1 single “Fairground”.

Right, strap in for a ten week run at the top of the charts for “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston. Not quite Bryan Adams but still ten weeks of having to find something to say about this song. I’m going to start off by not talking about the song but about the film it was taken from. The Bodyguard seems to get quite a bad rap from critics but I don’t mind it actually. My theory is that the negativity stems from perceptions of Kevin Costner or more specifically his lack of acting ability. OK, he’s done some turkeys like Waterworld and The Postman but he’s also been in some decent films. His run of four films in the late 80s of The Untouchables, No Way Out, Bull Durham and Field Of Dreams is impressive and then there was Dances With Wolves which won seven Oscars including Best Director for Costner. Not too shabby. I actually think he’s decent in The Bodyguard too.

Maybe a lot of the anti-Costner stuff comes from his lack of an English accent in Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves (which is ludicrous) and Madonna sticking her fingers down her throat in reaction to him describing her show as ‘neat’ in her documentary In Bed With Madonna. Seems a bit unfair.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Stereo MC’sStep It UpNo
2Michael JacksonHeal The WorldNah
3Heaven 17Temptation (Brothers In Rhythm remix)No but my wife has the Luxury Of Life album
4Dina CarrollSo Close …but no cigar. No
5REMMan On The MoonNo but I had the Automatic For The People album
6U2Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild HorsesNo but I had the Achtung Baby album
7Cliff RichardI Still Believe In You…but I don’t believe in you Cliff. No
8Rod StewartTom Traubert’s Blues (Waltzing Matilda)No but I think my wife has the Tom Waits album it’s from
9Boney MMegamixNo but one of the first albums my wife ever had was Night Flight To Venus
10MadonnaDeeper And DeeperNope
11Simply RedThe Montreux EPNever!
12Whitney Houston I Will Always Love YouI did 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/m001772z/top-of-the-pops-03121992

TOTP 18 JUN 1992

Posted on by 80stastic

We’ve missed yet another show due to the Adrian Rose issue and so find ourselves well into June of 1992 here at TOTP Rewind. The Euros international football tournament is well under way but England are already out having lost 2-1 to hosts Sweden two days before this episode aired. After the excitement of Italia ‘90, it was a huge disappointment for the nation but in truth the team had massively underperformed not having won a single game and scoring just one goal. Graham Taylor was vilified in the press especially by The Sun and their infamous ‘turnip’ campaign. I would never endorse anything in that publication but Taylor was not, by any metric, a successful appointment.

I was still working at the Our Price store on Market Street, Manchester at this time. There was another store in Manchester at Piccadilly above which there was office space which was used by area and regional managers for admin work. I had my initial interview as a Xmas temp there. It was also used for company events where directors were invited to come and address store employees and take questions from them about company policy, initiatives etc. At one point it also housed some unsaleable stock that needed sending back to the central warehouse in Heston, Greater London and I recall spending a day up there packing up all sorts of crap albums. It was soul destroying. The person I spent the day doing this with was called Matt who went onto be a senior product manager at EMI and now runs a campaign management company for music artists. Meanwhile, I’m currently…unemployed. I seem to remember Matt was much more conscientious in his work that day boxing up loads more than I did. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Anyway, that’s enough of my personal stuff…on with the show! We start with Utah Saints and their Kate Bush sampling hit “Something Good”. Watching this back, it’s interesting to note how much the performance comes over like that of a conventional rock/pop band due to the fact that there’s some actual instruments on show. There’s the energetic bass player, someone on keyboards and the bloke with the megaphone thwacking some drums. The Kate Bush vocal is taken care of via a guy on the decks spinning a picture disc of her. As such, despite it undoubtedly being a dance anthem, the TOTP producers don’t feel the need for all that garishly coloured special effects wash to be deployed as it has been in the past for dance acts on the show. It makes for a much more enjoyable experience or maybe it’s that it just appeals to my more traditional tastes. As you know I was never a ravehead.

Tonight’s presenters are Mark Franklin and…WTF? Bob Geldof?! Why?! What was going on here?! It’s true that just a few weeks before they had Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse as Smashie and Nicey guest present but that was a tie in to promote Enfield’s comedy show that was returning to BBC2 later that evening. Was Geldof there to promote something? He released his third solo album in 1992 called “The Happy Club” but it can’t have been to do with that surely? It seems there were some other guest presenters during the ‘year zero’ era. In December, Tony Dortie was joined by Mr Blobby (I kid you not) whilst several EastEnders actors took a turn but here’s Tony Dortie to explain that connection:

So what was the deal with Sir Bob? Perhaps the more pertinent question is what the hell did he think he was doing with some of the comments he proceeds to make on the show? He comes across as a creepy, bitter, old bellend. Witness his first segue which is into one of those satellite link performances from the US this time with Sophie B Hawkins. “I don’t want to ask you any questions I just want to look at you” Geldof pervs. Eeeewww! Sophie just laughs nervously. What was he thinking?! Sadly it won’t be the last inappropriate comment he makes during the show. Here’s Tony Dortie again with his take on what went down:

There’s more…

Tony telling it how it was there. Anyway, back to the music and Sophie B Hawkins. Who was she and where had she come from? Well, she was a bit of a cultural all rounder being a singer -songwriter, musician and painter and hailed from New York City(baby!). As well as being a song title Shania Twain would pay good money for, “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” was her debut single and was a worldwide smash. This was one of those songs that’s all about the hook of the chorus with the verses actually being quite pedestrian. It works though; there’s even a false ending in there just to mix things up a bit. I don’t think that I picked up on the fact that the object of her affections in the lyrics is actually a woman and that the whole song is written from the perspective of the singer observing said woman in an abusive relationship and wanting to rescue her from it. Sophie comes across as quite the bohemian her bio suggests she was/is in this performance which does a good job of engaging the audience. As Mark Franklin says (and in a much more appropriate way than Geldof would have I’m sure), she seemed like a lot of fun. Not quite a one hit wonder (she had three more UK Top 40 hits), this is probably the one she is best remembered for though. It peaked at No 14.

Now if we thought that Utah Saints were subversive earlier when it came to being a dance act on TOTP when acting more like an archetypal rock band…well, we hadn’t seen anything yet! This ‘performance’ from The Orb must be one if the most outlandish in the show’s history. These ambient house innovators had already made a splash with their debut album “The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld” but they would become a sensation with the release of “U.F.Orb” which would go to No 1. It was previewed by the single “Blue Room” which would make history as the longest track to ever enter the UK singles chart. Clocking in at a mammoth 39 minutes, it took advantage of a change in regulations when the chart compilers allowed a maxi single to run to 40 minutes (alongside the existing 25 minute limit) as long as only one title was listed amongst the single’s tracks. It duly entered the Top 40 at No 12 before climbing to a peak of No 8.

Enough of the statistics though, let’s get to what was going down on screen. No DJs nor ponytailed fellas jigging about behind keyboards here. No, the best way to promote the track in the eyes of The Orb’s Alex Paterson and Kris Weston was to have the pair sat playing a sci-fi version of chess whilst passing a cross bearing orb between the pair of them. To pad it out a bit there’s some kaleidoscopic imagery of dolphins and some strobe lights flickering about. How to describe this performance? Avant- garde? Leftfield? Eccentric? Or maybe just plain old weird. Apparently it had a cosmic effect on Robbie Williams. Here’s @TOTPFacts:

“Blue Room” features the guitar playing of Gong and System 7 member Steve Hillage. When working at the Our Price store in Stockport in the mid 90s, Steve was the inspiration for a saying we used if someone had a mishap with a brew. If anyone spilt their drink a cry of ‘Steve Spillage!’ could be heard. Well it amused us.

Geldof is back now having a dig at Elton John whose latest video is up next. We all knew that Elton’s hair wasn’t real but to bring it up by going on about his new wig seemed unnecessary at best especially coming from a man who was criticised himself over his appearance at the time of Band Aid/Live Aid (he was too busy for a haircut if you remember). As Elton was on just the other week, I’ll return to Tony Dortie and his tweets to cover this one…err…”The One”:

Ah. You see the thing is Tony that’s not quite true. I refer you to my comments last week about my friend Robin who dismissed all of Elton’s back catalogue as unlistenable bollocks. I was wrong about him not having a favourite Lionel Richie song though. “Three Times A Lady” was his choice which is presumably three times the song that “The One” is.

Despite 1992 being awash with dance anthems, there was still space in the UK pop landscape for a boy band. Enter Take That. Actually, was the term ‘boy band’ in use back in 1992 or am I using it retrospectively? Certainly there were groups* that attracted a predominantly female teenage fan base before then. Bay City Rollers in the 70s, Duran Duran and Bros in the 80s but were they referred to as boy bands at the time? I’m not so sure. The 90s was a boy band boom time though. Off the top of my head and not counting US groups there were the big three of Take That, Boyzone and Westlife but there were also 5ive, 911, A1, Bad Boys Inc, Upside Down, East 17 and many more probably including a number in their moniker. All of these (with the exception possibly of East 17) followed a template of pretty boys singing catchy but lightweight tunes and doing some nifty dance steps while they were at it. Their catalogue of songs would almost certainly include some cover versions.

*I’m not counting The Beatles on the grounds that the connotations of what it meant to be a boy band certainly didn’t apply to them.

I guess New Kids On The Block had shown what that set up could achieve sales wise as the new decade dawned. It was probably inevitable that the UK would find its own version of them eventually. It was just that Take That got there first. Anyway, here they are in the studio again performing “It Only Takes A Minute” again and judging by the screams of the audience, they know they’re on to a good thing. Interesting to note that even at this early stage the only other band member to get a vocal line and their own personal camera close up is Robbie Williams. Hmm. “It Only Takes A Minute” peaked at No 7.

Four Breakers this week starting with U2 and “Even Better Than The Real Thing”. The fourth single from their “Achtung Baby” album of the previous year, its original version was later eclipsed by the Paul Oakenfold Perfecto dance remix both in terms of chart peak and, for many a music lover, its artistic merit. I always liked the version as it was originally intended though. It sounded angular and dynamic propelled by another great guitar riff from The Edge, the distinctive sound of which was created by a DigiTech Whammy pitch shifter pedal which created a double octave sweep (for all you tech enthusiasts out there). The video was a Godley & Creme production with the continuous rotating footage created by a 360 degree camera rig. They certainly liked to innovate those guys. Remember the face morphing “Cry” video from 1985? “Even Better Than The Real Thing” peaked at No 12 whilst the dance mixes did even better than the real thing by going to No 8.

One of my favourite albums of 1992 was “0898” by The Beautiful South which spawned four great singles yet we hadn’t seen any of them on TOTP until now. We may have missed some appearances due to the Adrian Rose scenario I guess. That situation was finally rectified when third single “Bell Bottomed Tear” made it into the Breakers. Despite it being the biggest hit of the four peaking at No 16, we would not see it again on the show. After two faster paced singles with Paul Heaton as the main vocalist, it was the turn of Dave Hemmingway to come centre stage what with it being a ballad and all which seemed to be his forte. I say ballad though it seems to be more of a lament for a one night stand that didn’t turn into a relationship.

The final single released from the album (“36D”) was the least successful missing the Top 40 completely though was possibly the most notorious. Supposedly it was a trigger for Briana Corrigan to leave the band as she objected to it reflecting negatively on glamour models when it should have been the media that gave them the platform that was criticised. There was probably more to it than that but that was the story I heard.

A first sighting now of the best selling US girl group of all time. Yes, before Destiny’s Child, SWV and the rest came TLC and they were bigger than them all with sales of 85 million copies. With four No 1 singles and a No 1 album in America alone, no wonder the group were inducted to the Black Music & Entertainment Hall Of Fame this year alongside the likes of such legendary names as Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding and Michael Jackson. It all started with debut single “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg” though I have to admit to not being particularly aware of it at the time despite it making No 13 in our Top 40. By the time the likes of “Creep”, “Waterfalls” and the “CrazySexyCool” album came around you couldn’t fail to notice them and I didn’t. Apparently the group’s them manager Pebbles (yes she of “Girlfriend” fame in the late 80s) makes an appearance at the end of the video for “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg”. Tragically Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes died in a road traffic accident in 2002.

When I think about Diana Ross in the early 90s (not that I do very often you understand) the only song that comes to mind is her No 2 hit “When You Tell Me That You Love Me”. Taken from the album “The Force Behind The Power”, it was a huge hit over Xmas of ‘91. I was therefore taken aback to learn that the album actually generated five UK Top 40 singles. “One Shining Moment” was the third of those and even made No 10. It’s a smoother sound than WYTMTYLM which always seemed just ever so slightly hysterical in its yearning but it’s also fairly unremarkable and I’m surprised it was such a big hit.

Diana (or Ms Diana Ross to use her full title) would continue to have medium sized hits in the UK throughout the decade though interestingly not in her native US – none of the singles from “Force Behind The Power” were hits there. She even had a No 1 Best Of album in this country in 1993 when “One Woman: The Ultimate Collection” was a huge seller that Xmas.

Ah shit! Geldof’s back making more asinine comments although I can’t really quibble about his target here. When Def Leppard were on the show recently with their “Let’s Get Rocked” single, I derided it as one of the dumbest songs of the decade and I was right. However, they came pretty close to topping that ‘achievement’ with its follow up “Make Love Like A Man”. I can hardly bear to hear the lyrics on this but if I have to listen to them then you can read them. Look at this horseshit:

‘Make love like a man, I’m a man that’s what I am’

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Robert John Lange / Stephen Clark / Joseph Elliott / Philip Collen
Make Love Like a Man lyrics © Out-of-pocket-prod. Ltd., Bludgeon Riffola Limited, Bmg Rights Management (uk) Ltd (primary Wave), Bludgeon Riffola Ltd

Or:

‘I’m the one (I got it) I’m Mr. Fun, (you need it) I’m Captain Cool’

Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Robert John Lange / Stephen Clark / Joseph Elliott / Philip Collen
Make Love Like a Man lyrics © Out-of-pocket-prod. Ltd., Bludgeon Riffola Limited, Bmg Rights Management (uk) Ltd (primary Wave), Bludgeon Riffola Ltd

And then there’s:

‘Don’t call me gigolo, don’t call me Casanova, just call me on the phone and baby come on over’

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Robert John Lange / Stephen Clark / Joseph Elliott / Philip Collen

Make Love Like a Man lyrics © Out-of-pocket-prod. Ltd., Bludgeon Riffola Limited, Bmg Rights Management (uk) Ltd (primary Wave), Bludgeon Riffola Ltd

What. The. Fuck?! Lead singer Joe Elliott has stated that they weren’t trying to be macho with this song but rather funny. Remind me never to invite Joe round to my house if I need cheering up with a laugh. Even Elliott seems to have seen the light though. In a 2014 interview he admitted he would rather not play this song live anymore as the lyrics are a nod too stupid. No shit. Despite all of the above, did Geldof really need to introduce it with the following words:

“Here’s their new single I’d quite like to give you one big girl otherwise known as Make Love Like A Big Girl’s Blouse”? No he didn’t. What’s that? He was trying to be funny too? Add him to the list of people never to be invited around to my gaff. “Make Love Like A Man” peaked at No 12.

Erasure are No 1 with their “ABBA-esque EP”. It’s the video this week for the “Take A Chance On Me” track with Vince and Andy dressed up as Agnetha and Anna-Frid in their 70s pomp. I wonder if they argued about who would be who? Vince looks quite convincing as Agnetha, Andy not so much as Anna-Frid. I seem to remember there being a lot of praise about how amusing the video was at the time but I’m not sure if it’s retained that humour.

Geldof and Mark Franklin are reunited for the show’s ending and we discover that unbelievably the former was there to promote his latest release – a single called “Room 19 (Sha La La La Lee)”. You’ll be glad to hear that it didn’t make the Top 100.

Order of appearance ArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Utah SaintsSomething GoodLiked it, didn’t buy it
2Sophie B. HawkinsDamn I Wish I Was Your LoverNope
3The OrbBlue RoomNot really my bag
4Elton JohnThe OneNah
5Take ThatIt Only Takes A MinuteNo
6U2Even Better Than The Real ThingNo but I had the album Achtung Baby
7The Beautiful SouthBell Bottomed TearNo but I had the album 0898
8TLCAin’t 2 Proud 2 BegNegative
9Diana RossOne Shining MomentIt’s another no
10Def LeppardMake Love Like A ManGod no!
11ErasureAbba-esque EPNo but my wife did…maybe

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/m0014rlm/top-of-the-pops-18061992

TOTP 12 MAR 1992

Posted on by 80stastic

In recent years the calling of a general election has been a relentlessly regular occurrence. Between 2015 and 2019 the country had to go through this process three times. Back in 1992, we hadn’t had one for five years but the day before this TOTP aired, sitting Prime Minister John Major announced that there would be a General Election in April.

Whilst I would no doubt have taken notice of this statement, I would have been more focussed on my imminent trip down to London. Yes, despite being permanently skint living in Manchester on a record shop worker’s wages, I had somehow managed to squirrel away enough money for a trip to the capital.

I was staying with my friend Robin and he’d got us tickets to go and see my beloved Chelsea play. See, there’s the proof above. As ever with Chelsea in those days I came away disappointed:

Those Chelsea tickets weren’t the only tickets Robin got for us that weekend. His sister is an actress and was appearing in a play that weekend so along we popped. I can’t remember exactly what it was about but my main recollection was that it was decidedly weird. When Robin reminded me of this event recently we had a strange WhatsApp conversation which went like this:

Robin: Remember seeing The Fall with Right Said Fred?

Me (incredulous): Absolutely nothing. The Fall supported by Right Said Fred?!

Robin: No we watched a play called “ The Fall”, only 8 people were in the audience and one was the ‘Freddie with porn star hair.

So there you have it. A weekend of footballing disappointment and a close encounter with a genuine pop star (sort of). Right Said Fred aren’t on this particular TOTP but are on in two week’s time. Damn the gods of synchronicity!

Suppose I’d better get in with the music then and tonight’s opening act are Gun with “Steal Your Fire”. In keeping with the major political announcement of the day before, presenter Tony Dortie keeps it topical with a reference to the contents of Norman Lamont’s briefcase. I’m guessing as Lamont was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, this would have been to do with interest rates (I’m certainly not going anywhere near that Julian Clary reference!) though I doubt at the time I was following the Exchange Rate Mechanism that closely. Now I’d quite liked this lot with their hits “Better Days” and “Shame On You”, the latter of which I’d even bought. By 1992 though, I’d completely lost track of them. I remember second album “Gallus” coming out and the cover of it but I’m not sure it was ever played in the Our Price I worked in (there wasn’t much of a rock fraternity amongst the staff) so I’m not familiar with it at all, not even this single. Having listened to it back though, it seems that Gun were, like Margaret Thatcher before them, ‘not for turning’ when it came to their musical direction. “Steal Your Fire” stuck rigidly to the formula.

The single peaked at No 24 which at that point was the band’s biggest chart hit but their peak would come in the Summer of ‘94 when they took their cover of Cameo’s “Word Up” into the Top 10.

One of the stories of the 1992 Top 40 was the blatant (and amusing) attempt by The Wedding Present to manipulate them. Yes, decades before the charts were hijacked by the X Factor and social media galvanised campaigns to artificially create hits, David Gedge and co were already at it.

Their cunning plan was to match Elvis Presley’s chart record of having twelve Top 30 hits in one calendar year, something The King had achieved in 1957. To do this, they released a limited edition single every single month in 1992. The limited stock quantities (only 10,000 were pressed for the UK and 5,000 for the rest of the world) created a frenzy amongst their fan base and crucially a brief but significant sales spike each month propelling every single into the Top 30 for one week before dropping like a stone once copies were exhausted. A genius ruse from Gedge! Meanwhile back in the record shops it was causing carnage as desperate fans tried to ensure they didn’t miss out. Even our shop which was a two trading floor city centre store would only get a handful of the singles which fans wanted to pre-order. That’s fine but woe betide the staff on release day if the system went wrong and all copies were sold before those pre-orders were picked up. Like I said, carnage.

The TOTP appearances that this practice created for the band – they were on the show four times in 1992 – only added to the chaos. Here’s Gedge himself courtesy of @TOTPFacts:

For the record, “Three” was neatly the third of these monthly single releases despite Gedge’s confusing jumper with the number four on it (oh you little scampi Dave!). They weren’t just called ‘One’ to ‘Twelve’ though. “Three” peaked at No 14.

Tony Dortie’s nicked one of my phrases! I’m sure I referred to a ‘rave conveyor belt’ in a recent post. Tony is using it in reference to the next act who are Toxic Two performing their one and only hit “Rave Generator”. Now I know I say this a lot and in my defence we are talking about tunes from 30 years ago but I genuinely did not know of the existence of this until just this moment. It seems to be a mash up of “French Kiss” by Lil Louis and “Pacific State” by 808 State.

As there are hardly any lyrics in it (there’s a sample of someone saying ‘How do you feel now?’) the show has the perennial problem of how to stage the performance of it. They’ve gone for some zoom in zoom out camera trickery, some overlaid special effects and a panoramic view of the studio audience to try and create the impression that we are witnessing a rave in full flow. Oh and those dancers in leotards who look like they’re doing a yoga class on speed. Were people really dancing like that in clubs around this time?

There’s a noise in “Rave Generator” that reminds me of the blast sound from a Blake’s 7 ray gun. Maybe it was the same sound. After all, the aforementioned 808 State used sound library clips. Here’s @TOTPFacts again:

“Rave Generator” peaked at No 13.

The grunge bandwagon rolls in with Nirvana’s follow up to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. Now it’s never occurred to me before and so I must have missed this story at the time but there was some controversy around “Come As You Are” and it wasn’t to do with Kurt Cobain’s lyrics about guns. No, it was to do with the fact that the song bore very strong similarities to the track “Eighties” by Killing Joke. And it does. Now I’ve made the connection I can’t unhear it. Apparently Killing Joke considered legal action against Nirvana but sacked it off as a bad idea after Cobain’s suicide in 1994. Or maybe it was because there’s a case to be made that Killing Joke weren’t innocent of plagiarism themselves and that they based their song on a Damned track called “Life Goes On”. Maybe they didn’t want to draw too much attention to that with a high profile law suit.

At the time though, if I’d have been asked about similarities between “Come As You Are” and another song I’d have replied ‘Yes, it sounds like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” only less frenetic’.

Cobain’s hometown was a place called Aberdeen, Washington but the story I draw your attention to isn’t that there’s somewhere with the same name as Scotland’s Granite City in America but that the sign welcoming you to Aberdeen includes the line ‘Come As You Are’.

“Come As You Are” peaked at No 9.

Who’s next? Clivilles & Cole? Who were they then? Well, they were the guys behind C+C Music Factory of course ( C+C geddit?) but for some reason they felt the need to release this single – “A Deeper Love” – under their own names. I’m not sure what the criteria was for that decision. Was it because “A Deeper Love” was a change in musical direction and therefore wouldn’t have sat comfortably under the C+C Music Factory name? My dance head credentials are really good enough to make that assessment. Sure, I can tell that “Things That Make you Go Hmmm…” was of a much more popper flavour than “A Deeper Love” but was it really that different from “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)”? I’m sure someone out there could tell me ‘Of course it is and here’s why…’. Anyway Clivilles & Cole it was (although co-host Claudia Simon confusingly refers to them as just C+C) and singer Deborah Cooper was chosen to front it. The only other track that Clivilles & Cole released under their own names was this cover of U2’s “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” who was the flipside to “A Deeper Love”.

The performance here includes the return of the bubble machine that we saw when Manic Street Preachers were on the show the other week. There you have it then. In the world of TOTP 1992, there was seemingly little difference between house anthems and alternative rock.

“A Deeper Love” peaked at No 15.

It’s the video for Eric Clapton‘s “Tears In Heaven” next. I went into the back story of this one in the last post so I don’t propose to go through it all again now not least because it’s already well known to most people.

However, what I didn’t say was that the track was co-written with one Will Jennings who also wrote “Up Where We Belong” for the soundtrack to An Officer And A Gentleman which was sung by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes. Joe of course was in the Breakers section last week alongside Clapton. Yeah, this little bit of pop trivia really should have gone in last week’s post shouldn’t it. Once again I curse the gods of synchronicity! Jennings also wrote “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic which gave Celine Dion a huge No 1 hit. Maybe any more references to Will Jennings are best left alone then.

“Tears In Heaven” peaked at No 5 in the Uk and No 2 in the US.

The Exclusive performance this week comes from Annie Lennox who is embarking on a solo career after her and Dave Stewart decided to put Eurythmics on an indefinite hiatus. Striking out on her own would prove to be a very successful decision for Annie with debut album “Diva” going four times platinum in the UK. In hindsight it seems ridiculous to imagine anything other than further success for Lennox but I can’t recall whether that was the general perception at the time. Surely Annie herself must have experienced some self doubt given that she had spent the last 15 years working with Dave Stewart? If she did have any nerves about being on stage alone, Annie certainly conquers them in this performance. The closing “You don’t know how I feel” line is delivered with real conviction.

If she did then the chart performance of debut single “Why” must have settled her nerves. A soulful ballad with a hint of gospel with existential dilemma lyrics, it was a hit all around Europe including the UK where it peaked at No 5. Some critics described it as her attempt to write her own version of “My Way”. I’m not sure about that though the first person lyrics give it a very personal touch.

Annie would score a total of eight hit singles throughout the 90s including four Top Tenners.

The Breakers are a bit weird this week. There’s only two of them and they’ve both already been on the show as performances via satellite. U2 were on the 27 Feb show that we missed due to the Adrian Rose issue whilst Mr. Big were only on last week. Were they not actually in the Top 40 when we saw those satellite performances and therefore they’ve been allocated as Breakers because now they are? Seems a bit rum to me.

Anyway, it’s Mr. Big up first with their drippy ballad “To Be With You”. This is the official promo video as opposed to that satellite performance and it’s as dreary as the song. It’s just the band sat around in a railroad car performing the track. Halfway through it changes from black and white to colour. That’s it. Now when I was a student at Poly, we had to make a video as part of one of the course’s modules and one of the visual effects that we used was switching from black and white to colour. It may have even been my idea. However, we were just a bunch of clueless 18 year olds messing about not a professional video director. Surely whoever was for this promo could have come up with something better than this? Very poor.

And so to the twice aforementioned U2. Now there seems to be three different videos for “One”. TOTP shows the version directed by Mark Pellington which has a buffalo running in a field (an image that would be reused for the cover of their second greatest hits album “Best Of 1990 – 2000”). A second video directed by the band’s long time official photographer Anton Corbijn depicted the band in drag and featured Bono’s father Robert Hewson. The video was pulled after the band announced that royalties from the single would go to AIDS charities and they were worried that the drag theme might link AIDS to the gay community in a negative way. Finally a third video was shot by Rattle And Hum director Phil Joanou which was basically Bono sat at a table in a club smoking and drinking interspersed with footage of the gang performing the song.

I have to say that “One” is up there as one of my favourite U2 songs and is certainly my fave from the “Achtung Baby” album. I even performed my own version of it at my guitar class many years ago. Thankfully I don’t think any recordings of it exist. The lyrics resonate with the line ‘We’re one but we’re not the same’ pithily conveying the notion that humanity has to get along for the world to survive. It should surely have been a bigger hit than its No 7 chart peak. Its legacy though has outlasted that commercial peak and it regularly features in various ‘the greatest song of all time’ polls.

Shakespear’s Sister remain at No 1 with “Stay” and this week we get to see its famous video. Inspired by the 50s American independent sci fi film Cat-Women Of The Moon, it depicts Marcella Detroit at the bedside of her comatose lover willing him to regain consciousness before Siobahn Fahey appears as some sort of grim reaper/ angel of death figure come to take him to the after life. A physical fight between Detroit and Fahey ensues (a metaphor for the man’s struggle between life and death presumably) in which the former wins out and her lover awakes. I think it’s the demonic look on Fahey’s face that makes the video so memorable.

As with the video for “November Rain” by Gun N’ Roses last week, this promo was also lampooned by French and Saunders, just as Baddiel and Newman had done.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1GunSteal Your FireNah
2The Wedding PresentThreeEven working in a record shop couldn’t secure me a copy
3Toxic TwoRave GeneratorHell no!
4NirvanaCome As You AreNo
5Clivilles & ColeA Deeper LoveNot for me thanks
6Eric ClaptonTears In HeavenNope
7Annie LennoxWhyNo but my wife had the album
8Mr. BigTo Be With YouNegative
9U2OneNo but I had the album
10Shakespear’s SisterStayI didn’t

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/m0013vgd/top-of-the-pops-12031992

TOTP 12 DEC 1991

Posted on by 80stastic

Christmas is coming! Unlike in 2021 where the certainty of what our festive period will be like is now under threat again from the pandemic (or more accurately the government’s handling of it), 30 years ago, some of the most pressing issues we were facing included whether we had enough wrapping paper and remembering to buy a Radio Times to plan our TV watching (very important in the pre-digital age). If, like me, you were working in retail at this time, another consideration was when we could fit in any Christmas shopping of our own after facilitating everybody else’s by working behind a shop counter for hours on end. Oh, and what the Christmas No 1 would be… and please let it not be Cliff Richard again this year. Well, as it turned out, Cliff didn’t really get a look in but which records were in the charts back then? Let’s find out…

We start tonight’s TOTP with one of the year’s biggest breakout stars in Cathy Dennis who is in the studio to perform her fourth Top 40 hit of 1991 and her fifth overall. “Everybody Move” was the final single to be released from her gold selling No 3 album “Move To This” and was a return to the radio friendly dance material of her earlier hits after previous single “Too Many Walls” had seen her go down the slow ballad route.

In all honesty, “Everybody Move” should probably have remained an unreleased album track. It’s pretty lightweight stuff and certainly it doesn’t require a great leap of imagination from this to the kind of stuff that Cathy would end up writing for the likes of S Club 7 and Hear’say later in the decade. Accordingly, it only made it to No 25 in the UK Top 40.

Whilst the reaction on Twitter to this performance focussed on Cathy’s Joker-esque outfit, I was more drawn to her dance move which comes over like a half-hearted Mick Channon windmill celebration…

Now I know I quite often draw on football references for this blog and that I’ve just done it again immediately above but quite why presenter Tony Dortie decides to do the same in his intro to the Top 10 countdown remains a mystery. “It’s day 12 on the Advent calendar, Hearts and Leeds are currently topping things in the football world but let’s see which musical crackers are doing the business in the Top 10” he trills. Hmm. For completions sake, I should note that Leeds Utd would indeed go onto win the old Division 1 league title come May the following year however the 1991–92 Scottish Premier Division season was won by Rangers, nine points ahead of Hearts. Dortie messes up the countdown straight away when he announces that Nirvana are at No 10 with “Smells Like Teen”. What happened to your ‘spirit’ Tony?! Unlike Boris Johnson, at least Tony owns his mistakes…

There’s some more curious missing word action next as we get what would probably have been described as a ‘banging’ tune’ back then called “Running Out Of Time” by Digital according to co-host Claudia Simon. That wasn’t their full name though Claudia, was it? No, that was Digital Orgasm – ooh and indeed err missus! This wasn’t anything to do with presenter error by the way as the on screen artist and title graphics confirm that Claudia hadn’t just messed up her intro. This, it would seem, was a TOTP policy decision. Presumably, the use of the word orgasm would have been seen as far too offensive pre the 9 o’clock watershed and so was dropped.

As with all of these dance tunes from this era, I have zero recall of it despite working in a record shop while it was in the charts. Listening back to it now, it sounds like it’s been concocted in a rave laboratory with the basic tune of “Insanity” by Oceanic spliced together with snippets of “Charly” by The Prodigy. Both were huge hits so I guess if that really was the formula behind “Running Out Of Time” then it was a sound one.

As for the performance, it looks as if the TOTP producers have given a bit more thought to how to portray this seemingly endless conveyor belt of dance acts. There appear to be loads more camera cuts and in quick rotation meaning we get lots of different angles of the performers which I’m guessing was meant to try and replicate a more clubby experience. There’s also some slightly different distorted visual effect for the non vocal bits – they’ve lost the Doctor Who green which never worked for me anyway. The woman doing the singing looks almost otherworldly like one of Captain Kirk’s alien love interests which kind of helps things along as well.

“Running Out Of Time” peaked at No 16.

Oh no! It’s the dreaded Cliff Richard! Oh yes though as he’s not No 1! He’s nowhere near the top of the tree actually being at No 19 and there’s only two weeks until Christmas! Talking of trees, the show’s production team have pulled out all the stops for Cliff to make the stage look like his front room at Christmas. A fully decorated tree, a mock fireplace, cards and candles – were Health and Safety informed?! – and Cliff himself in an armchair dressed in a sparkly jacket. For some reason though, they haven’t bothered with the prop of a telephone for the faux phone call part at the beginning of the record leaving Cliff to mime speaking into an imaginary one and then putting it back in its cradle. It just looks weird. I was hoping that Cliff might go full Val Doonican and sing the whole song from that armchair but he’s up on his feet in no time to look sincerely into the camera at us and do some of those wavy arm moves of his.

Does anybody really remember “We Should Be Together”? It’s surely Cliff’s forgotten Christmas single after “Mistletoe And Whine…sorry..Wine” and “Saviour’s Day”? You never hear it played on the radio come December despite some of the commercial stations like Magic having cleared all of their playlist schedules to play exclusively Christmas tunes. Somehow it did get to No 10 in the UK Top 40 though it was never a serious contender for the top spot.

We get the video for “Too Blind To See It” by Kym Sims next. It’s introduced by Claudia Simon who says Kym is “kickin’ up a flavour” (that’s probably ‘flava’ isn’t it?) whilst all the time a youth from the studio audience gurns away behind her looking remarkably like a young Mark Ronson.

It turns out that “Too Blind To See It” is a dance record that I do remember (finally)! I think it’s that shuffling back beat and the ‘no man in the world’ sample that must have lodged in my brain. It’s a pretty nifty tune I think and yet it was written and produced by my arch nemesis Steve “Silk” Hurley /aka the man who killed music with his “Jack Your Body” No 1 in 1987. Hmm. Anyway, on reflection it has a ring of “Finally” by Ce Ce Pension to it which is probably no surprise as Kym was the co-writer on her hit “Keep On Walkin'”.

Wikipedia tells me that “Too Blind To See It” was released on the East West Records label who were responsible for a string of dance hits around this time including “Peace” by Sabrina Johnston and “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)” by En Vogue. They all had that simple yet distinctive, generic East West cover as I recall or was that only used if they’d run out of the official picture sleeve? Can’t remember now.

“Too Blind To See It” was Kym’s biggest hit peaking at No 5 in the UK although she would have two further and smaller Top 40 hits by the end of 1992.

“Salt n’ Pepa are in the house and rockin’ the mic!” says Tony Dortie as we move back to the studio for their performance of “You Showed Me”. They’ve all come dressed in what looks like black latex jackets while their three dancers have dungarees in the same material making them look like a kinky version of Rod, Jane and Freddy.

The staging of the performance has a feel of West Side Story to it but the choreographer hasn’t really worked out what to do with DJ Spinderella who seems redundant when the rapping kicks in and is left to wander off with her allocated dance partner and act out an argument between them. At the song’s finale she retreats to the back of the stage, goes up the stairs erected there and assumes a rather risqué position by wrapping her legs around his crotch area. I take it back about Rod, Jane and Freddy – they’d have never got up to such vulgar antics! Or would they?…..

Meanwhile over on the other stage we find Right Said Fred about to perform their next hit single “Don’t Talk Just Kiss”. Before we get to the Freds though, I noticed something that I don’t believe we’ve seen before in these TOTP repeats which was the studio audience actually running across the floor to be in place for the next performance. There’s literally about a dozen people behind Tony Dortie all in a rush, vying for a view of the next pop stars on the show. I always imagined that the studio audience was shepherded around the set, the flock to the floor manager’s sheep dog. However, they all seem like they have been let off the leash to roam (or run) wherever they wish. This year zero revamp has a lot to answer for!

Anyway, I must admit that I for one thought we had heard the last of Right Said Fred when “I’m Too Sexy” finally dipped out of the Top 40 and dismissed the whole thing as a one off novelty hit. How wrong I was. “Don’t Talk Just Kiss” was not only another smash for the trio but it was (SHOCK!) a decent tune to boot! How had this happened? Well, proving that they weren’t as daft as they looked, the Fairbrass brothers (and the other one) got soul diva Jocelyn Brown in to sing on the track. Jocelyn’s vocals had already been sampled for Snap!’s 1990 No 1 hit “The Power” whilst her own 1984 hit “Somebody Else’s Guy” would form the hook for George Michael’s 1992 Top 5 hit “Too Funky”. Here though, she was actually singing on the song rather than being sampled although she didn’t actually get any credits on the record. That seems a bit weird as she’s up there front and centre on stage alongside the band for this TOTP appearance so they obviously weren’t trying to play down her contribution.

“Don’t Talk Just Kiss” would prove to be another massive hit peaking at No 3 whilst their album “Up” (released in March of the following year) would top the charts and go double platinum. Over the pond though it was a different story and the band did indeed become the one hit wonder I had thought they were destined to be. “I’m Too Sexy” had been a US No 1 but “Don’t Talk Just Kiss” stalled at No 76. Supposedly radio stations were still playing that first hit when the follow up was released and there was little interest in any Right Said Fred material that wasn’t “I’m Too Sexy”. They would have no further hits Stateside.

The camera pans around to Claudia Simon up in the gantry for the next link and she advises us of four Breakers three of which are stone cold stinkers starting with Jason Donovan and the “Joseph Megamix”. After his surprise No 1 hit earlier in the year with “Any Dream Will Do” from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, it was always on the cards that some abomination like this medley would end up being churned out to cash in. With the Christmas party season upon us, it probably seemed like a decent bet that it would be a hit but can anyone say that they’ve ever been to a party where this was put on the turntable and if so, did they not leave immediately?!

“Joseph Megamix” peaked at No 13.

Another megamix! Are you kidding me?! What’s this one then? “The Bare Necessities Megamix” by UK Mixmasters?! Sorry? What? Pardon? And crucially, why? This was a Jungle Book medley that actually only featured two songs – “I Wanna Be Like You” and the titular “Bare Necessities”. You won’t be surprised to know that this heap of shit had Simon Cowell’s fingerprints all over it as it was released on his BMG subsidiary label IQ Records. UK Mixmasters was actually some bloke called Nigel Wright who was also responsible for the equally odious act Mirage who scored some hits in the late 80s doing medleys of house records under the umbrella title of “Jack Mix”. He also did that Saturday Night Fever medley earlier in 1991. What a talented guy!

Talking of talented guys, that’s all round entertainer Gary Wilmot up there promoting this garbage. However, when the track was performed in the TOTP studio the following week, another Gary (Martin) took over the vocalist role. I had to look this guy up but apparently he went onto make his name as an acclaimed voice over actor. We won’t get to see the TOTP with Martin as it’s one of those episodes hosted by Adrian Rose who didn’t give this consent for the repeat to be aired so we’ll miss it. So….just for you… here’s that performance below you lucky people!

Finally some proper music…even if it is U2! Only kidding I liked the “Achtung Baby” era of the band and “Mysterious Ways” was the second single to be released off that album. As a follow up to their No 1 song “The Fly” it was a strong if bold choice. There’s plenty going on in “Mysterious Ways” and most of it was maybe not what we would have expected from the band at the time. This was no po-faced, earnest rock anthem like “With Or Without You” but a groovy, exuberant tune that starts as it means to go on with that wah wah peddle guitar effect from The Edge setting the tone. It sounded so much better to me than “The Fly” and should have been a bigger hit than its No 13 placing although it did make the Top 10 in America. U2 would take this path towards dance experimentation again in 1997 with the electronic influenced No 1 single “Discothèque” but for me, “Mysterious Ways” trumps it by some considerable distance.

What?! New Kids On The Block were still in our charts in December 1991? Hadn’t that particular craze blown out long before this point? Well. yes it kind of had. This single “If You Go Away” was a final hurrah of the initial phase of their career before they briefly regrouped in 1994 for a less than glorious return. They would finally return as an entity in 2008 and are still touring to this day (I think).

“If You Go Away” is a soporific ballad that you can imagine Michael Bolton having rejected as too banal. It was included as the only new track on their first Best Of album called “H.I.T.S.” that was released for the Christmas market. I was the chart cassette buyer at the Our Price store I was working at then and have to admit to a gross over estimate of demand for that album. We hardly sold any and my over optimistic ordering left us with quite a few copies to go into the New Year sale when they again failed to sell. Ah well, yuh learn.

The black and white video is meant to make us perceive them as serious artists as opposed to the unobtainable desire of teenage girls. That and the fact that they had changed their name to NKOTB was a giveaway that they were looking for a new audience. For me though, they would always be more T’KNOB than NKOTB (over ordering of their album aside).

“If You Go Away” peaked at a surprisngly high No 9 in the UK Top 40.

Oh God! I’m in “Martika’s Kitchen”! Yes, it’s time for one of the stupidest song titles of the year courtesy of…well, Martika. On reflection, is it stupid or misunderstood? I don’t think I twigged it at the time but the general consensus on the internet is that “Martika’s Kitchen” is actually filthy! How did I not pick up on this back then?! Firstly, it’s written by Prince which should have been enough evidence of its salacious nature to close the case right there and then. Exhibit B (m’lud) comes in the form of the lyrics, for example:

The table is set, the oven is hot
Baby, when we get started, we won’t ever ever stop

and:

I don’t care I’ve got the chair, if you think your butt’ll fit it
You turn me all the way up, I admit it

In my defence, I think the fact that Martika has chosen to wear some very non-revealing clothes in this performance maybe misled me. As for the sound of the song, at the time it seemed very pop-orientated compared to previous single “Love… Thy Will Be Done” (also written by Prince) but which didn’t seem like it could possibly have been written by the same person. However, on reflection, “Martika’s Kitchen” has some definite Prince hallmarks attached to it although parts of it also remind me of Janet Jackson’s “Nasty”.

This was the second single from her album of the same name and although it sold reasonably in the UK, like T’KNOB before it, I’m pretty sure we had plenty of copies left over for the New Year sale. Perhaps I wasn’t that great at being chart cassette buyer!

George Michael and Elton John are still No 1 with “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”. With two weeks to go, they must have been in the running for the festive chart topper but once “Bohemian Rhapsody” was re-released on the back of Freddie Mercury’s death, all bets were off. George would, of course, score a further No 1 with another cover version two years later, this time of Queen’s own “Somebody To Love” as part of the “Five Live EP” recorded at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert the year before. Elton meanwhile would return in 1992 with his “The One” album the title track of which really was a bit of a dirge.

As we’ve skipped the 19 December show, the next post will be the end of year review.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1Cathy DennisEverybody MoveNah
2Digital OrgasmRunning Out Of TimeNo chance
3Cliff RichardWe Should Be TogetherNever happening
4Kym SimsToo Blind To See ItNope
5Salt n’ PepaYou Showed MeNo
6Right Said FredDon’t Talk Just KissNegative
7Jason DonovanJoseph MegamixAs if
8UK MixmastersThe Bare Necessities MegamixDitto
9U2Mysterious WaysNo but I bought the album
10NKOTBIf You Go AwayI wish they would – No
11MartikaMartika’s KitchenI did not
12George Michael and Elton JohnDon’t Let the Sun Go Down on MeAnd 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/m0011myd/top-of-the-pops-12121991

TOTP 31 OCT 1991

Posted on by 80stastic

When did Halloween become such a big event in the UK? My take on it would be that this is a fairly recent change within say the last 5-10 years when it has overtaken Bonfire night in the cultural calendar. Certainly when I was a kid, there was no suggestion that we would be dressing up and going around the local streets expecting residents to be handing out sweets willy nilly. We might have done a spot of apple bobbing on occasion but that was it. Bonfire night was always the much bigger deal. Back in 1991, I was 23 and living in Manchester and we certainly didn’t have any trick or treating going on in the street where we lived. Fireworks being lobbed at you as you went about your business by the local youth possibly (you had to keep your wits about you at all times) but no kids dressed up as ghouls or werewolves etc although…we did once see a man down our street who from a distance looked like Freddie Kruger doing something suspicious with a rake – never did get the bottom of what that was all about. Anyway, the TOTP producers have decided that since they have a show falling exactly on the witching date of 31st October that they were going to play up to Halloween theme. To that end, we have a carved pumpkin graphic following the titles sequence and presenter Mark Franklin describes this edition of the show as being ‘spooky’!

I don’t know about spooky but the opening act is certainly shocking. Shockingly bad that is. SL2 were, as Mark Franklin advises, DJs Slipmatt and Lime (the S and L of SL2) while the rapper is Jason ‘Jay-J’ James (see what the did there?!) and “DJs Take Control” was the first of four hits for them. I don ‘t remember this at all though. What was the big one that they had?

*checks wikipedia*

“On A Ragga Tip”! That was it. No 2 in 1992 apparently. That one sounded a bit like The Prodigy and I could just about stomach it. “DJs Take Control” is just garbage though. I mean, I’ve never been a massive dance head but there’s literally nothing to it. The rapping is so pedestrian and repetitive whilst the track itself is just some basic breakbeats and shuffled drum machine patterns slung together. The energetic windmilling actions of the two dancers up front seem to be a bit at odds with the track to me. It’s just …I don’t get it (then or now).

As an act to open the show it seems an odd choice as well. I guess the producers were still courting the rave market that they didn’t seem to really understand and which the format of the show (despite its revamp) couldn’t really accommodate. It just looks …well…jarring. Not going too well this new era of the show so far is it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpzQ7vhno3A

Oh this is just ridiculous now. From hardcore rave to…Don McLean?! How? Why? The juxtaposition is made even more striking by the fact that, like SL2, Don is actually in the TOTP studio! He’s literally on the other stage next to SL2 patiently awaiting his cue to begin. Said cue comes from presenter Tony Dortie moving through the assembled audience who look like they’re just realising that they’ve come to the shittest rave ever and literally have no idea who this old duffer on the other stage is. Even when Dortie introduces him, I bet they’re none the wiser. I’m not criticising them rather pointing out the utter absurdity of the show’s run-in order. It’s barking mad! If this had been the 70s, it would have been like the Sex Pistols segueing to Val Doonican or Des O’Connor.

Obviously, McLean is here to sing “American Pie” to promote his Greatest Hits album but even more obviously it’s a truncated version clocking in at just 3 minutes in length (the original album version is 8 and half minutes long!). Don himself seems in a hurry to sing it as if there was a TOTP producer stood in the wings pointing to a big stopwatch. Sartorially, he looks like a Tory MP in his casual gear for a Sunday stroll. It’s just all too much to take in. Interestingly, on the subject of song timings, another act later in the show are given far more screen time to perform a full length version of their latest hit which actually cuts down the amount of acts on tonight’s show to just 10. More of that later but I wonder what Don thought about that?

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

After the latest egregious Top 10 rundown complete with a witch’s hat graphic at the end (Halloween and all that), we go straight into…well…what fresh hell is this?! It seems to be a woman with a giant treble clef on her head singing very, very badly. This is in fact Congress featuring Lucinda Sieger (Mrs Treble Clef herself) with “40 Miles”. As with SL2 at the top of the show, these were basically two nerdy DJ types (both called Danny coincidentally) plus vocalist -used in the loosest definition of the word- Lucinda. Right, the immediate problem here (apart from the ludicrous treble clef adornment) is that Lucinda was not a very good singer. In fact, her live vocal (as per TOTP ‘year zero’ policy) is diabolically bad. There’s just no getting around that and her performance certainly provoked the ire of many a viewer on Twitter. I think my favourite was courtesy of this gentleman…

Apparently the track uses a fair few samples taken from songs which I don’t know so I’m going straight onto the business of that treble clef. Just….why?!! To distract us from her terrible singing is the only thing I can think of. A dead cat on the table in musical form (literally) if you will. If she was a politician, Lucinda would surely be Boris Johnson. Oh hang on, my research tells me that Lucinda is a former Alternative Miss World runner-up. The Alternative Miss World? I didn’t know there was such a thing. Come to that, is the regular Miss World still a thing even? Anyway, apparently Alternative Miss World has been going (irregularly) since 1972 and was last held in 2018. According to the official website, it was established by the artist Andrew Logan and anyone can enter and everyone is judged on the same criteria as the dogs at Crufts: poise, personality and originality. Past guests, hosts and competitors including everyone from Derek Jarman, David Hockney and Zandra Rhodes to Grayson Perry, Divine, Leigh Bowery and the stars of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Now I can’t find conformation of when Lucinda took part or an image of what she wore but just google Alternative Miss World, click on images and you’ll see that actually, Lucinda (like Don McLean earlier) had dressed quite casually by comparison for her TOTP appearance.

From one horrifically bad vocal performance to…well…another. Sorry Zoë but there are definitely some bum notes in your performance of “Lightning”. To be honest, this is the third (of four) songs that I don’t remember from this show already (and I was working in a record shop for a living at the time!). In my defence, “Lightning” isn’t that memorable. Very much in the same vein as “Sunshine On A Rainy Day” but without the same hooky chorus, it didn’t get anywhere near the same success as its predecessor whose No 4 chart high was 33 paces higher than that which “Lightning” achieved. Wikipedia’s description of it as ‘another moderately popular song’ seems very generous. As for her album “Scarlet Red And Blue” that Tony Dortie bigs up here, well that only got as high as No 67 in the charts. Has a pop star ever projected their future in a song quite as clearly as Zoë does here?

“Lightning never strikes twice, maybe take some advice…”

A couple of Breakers next starting with yet another dance act that I don’t recall at all in Control with “Dance With Me (I’m Your Ecstasy)”. It’s hardly surprising as so forgettable was the whole shebang that there is very little trace of Control and their hit on the internet. I did find something on puredjs.com the said that this track (and I quote) “had the whole world buzzing”. Really?! It didn’t even make the Top 10 in the UK (peaking at No 17). Maybe it was a club thing – I wouldn’t have known as I was skint at the time and certainly had no extra cash for cutting any rug at Manchester’s hottest nightspots. Apparently it was remixed and re-released in 2006 and Control are still a going concern and appear at (again I’m quoting) “festivals, clubs, raves, parties, etc…”. And that’s your lot. God, I hope they’re not on any future TOTP repeats – I’ve nothing else to say about this at all.

*checks BBC4 TOTP repeat schedule*

Oh great, they’re on the next show. Marvellous.

One of those Pointless songs next. Not that there wasn’t any point to it you understand, just that it would possibly score you zero points if you were ever a contestant on that game show starring Richard Osman and Alexander Armstrong. “Shining Star” by INXS anyone? We’d all be forgiven for forgetting this one. A stand alone single to promote their concert album “Live Baby Live” despite the fact that it was a studio recording and not a live cut. Never quite got my head around that concept.

The track itself is very much INXS by numbers and derivative of a lot of their other material from around this period. Accordingly, it only made it to No 27 in the UK charts. The band would return the following year with possibly my favourite album of theirs, “Welcome To Wherever You Are”. For now though, they very much seemed to be treading water,

Meanwhile back in the studio, it’s that funny little bald American bloke Moby whom most of us had never actually seen before…except, he wasn’t actually bald back then and instead has what passes for (almost) a full head of hair. Yes, hard as it is to imagine, there was a time when Moby wasn’t just a cranium. Like most of us probably, the mental image that come to my mind when I think of him is of that “Play” era Moby with him shaven headed on the album’s front cover jumping about with his hairy (oh the cruel irony) chest exposed through his oversized white shirt. Maybe the emergence of comedian Harry Hill has conflated (to quote the word being used by just about every Tory MP in defence of Owen Paterson at the moment) the two. Here he is though with his first ever chart hit “Go” not looking follicly challenged.

None of this hirsute business is helping the TOTP production team manage to showcase a dance act any more effectively than they were ever able to though. For Moby, they’ve dispensed with any backing dancers and instead are reliant on the man himself just jumping around on his keyboard and shouting …erm…’Go!’ to meet the new live vocal criteria. There’s the usual deployment of the Dr Who ‘Green Death’ story visual effect as well of course (well it is a dance track) and not much else apart from the ‘Yeaaaah’ vocal sample which is courtesy of the ubiquitous Jocelyn Brown. Studio performances of dance tracks on TOTP in 1991 are still not working for me.

“Go” peaked at No 10.

As we have a humongously long song coming up soon, the schedule will only allow for about 90 seconds of the next video which is Kylie Minogue and Keith Washington with “If You Were With Me Now”. This was a curious thing, a song written by Mike Stock and Pete Waterman for their PWL label that sounded like a genuine soul standard. Not only that, it was a duet but this was no “Especially For You” (Keith could actually sing unlike Jason for one thing). I should add that Kylie herself gets a writing credit on this as well – it was her first hit single to feature her as a co-writer.

The single would reach a very respectable high of No 4 (much higher than I remembered) despite being from her “Let’s Get To It” album which is surely one of her least memorable and underperformed commercially. Apparently the vocals were recorded separately (see also Michael McDonald and Patti LaBelle’s “On My Own”) and although they were on the set together for the recording of the video, you wouldn’t actually know it as the director chose to not include any scenes of them together. It must have been an artistic licence thing. Or an oversight maybe.

Finally we arrive at this week’s ‘Exclusive’ performance and it’s that song that is massive… in length rather than stature though. Genesis are back everyone!

*everyone groans*

Phil and co hadn’t realised an album since 1986’s “Invisible Touch” before they returned in 1991 with the “We Can’t Dance” LP. That’s not to say we’d all been given five years off from Mr Collins who had been torturing ‘entertaining’ us in the meantime with his mahoosively successful 1989 album “…But Seriously”.

“No Son Of Mine” was the lead single from “We Can’t Dance” and it weighs in at length of 6:41 on the album version. For some reason, presumably to big it up as an exclusive, the TOTP producers allowed them just about all of that time for this performance. Was it worth it? Well, it was for the band with both the single and the album selling exceptionally well, with the former going Top 10 (No 6) – the first Genesis single to do so in the UK since 1983’s “Mama” – and the latter going to No 1 and achieving platinum sales five times over. For the credibility of TOTP though, was this really what the rave crazy kids wanted? Unbelievably Phil Collins was only 40 here (13 years younger than I am now) but he looks ancient. As for Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks…they always looked middle aged didn’t they?

Performance wise, it seems odd to have a drummer up there who isn’t Collins but apparently that’s what crowds will see when they see Genesis play live on their current tour – Phil is doing the vocals sat down out front as he is no longer able to play the drums due to nerve problems for which he underwent an operation on his spine in 2016.

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

Some awful intro work finally from hosts Dortie and Franklin as they segue into the No 1 song. U2 have finally brought the 16 weeks reign of Bryan Adams to an end with “The Fly” but they get introduced as ‘The posse from Dublin’ and ‘The U2 boys‘. Dearie me. Given the enormous chart feat that they executed by toppling the groover from Vancouver, the reaction on Twitter to this significant moment was quite surprising with many a viewer tweeting their displeasure at Bono and co including some who wanted to see Adams back! Surely that was tongue in cheek? As well as knocking Adams off his perch, “The Fly” also prevented Right Said Fred getting to No 1 in Australia with “I’m Too Sexy” so double bubble and all that.

Whilst not their best tune by a long way in my book, it was a statement I guess of their intent coming into the new decade. They weren’t going to be churning out “The Joshua Tree” parts II, III and IV into the 90s – they were leaving U2 of the 80s firmly in their past.

U2 would only last for one week at the top as the single was deleted after three weeks to ensure the schedules weren’t clogged up Adams style thereby hindering the release of subsequent singles from the album “Achtung Baby”. Quite the different approach from their label Island as opposed to Adams’s label A&M despite them both being part of the same parent company Universal Music.

Order of appearanceArtistTitleDid I buy it?
1SL2DJs Take ControlNo chance
2Don McLeanAmerican PieNope
3Congress featuring Lucinda Sieger40 Miles40 piles of shite more like
4ZoëLightningNah
5ControlDance With Me (I’m Your Ecstasy)Negative
6INXSShining StarNot the single but I have it on their Definitive INXS Best Of CD
7Moby GoNo
8Kylie Minogue and Keith Washington If You Were With Me NowBut I wasn’t – no
9Genesis No Son Of MineNo purchase of mine either
10U2 The FlySingles box says yes though I don’t remember doing so

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/m00116fl/top-of-the-pops-31101991

TOTP 17 OCT 1991

Posted on by 80stastic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Baby Love” peaked at No 14.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*checks officialcharts.com*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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