Urban Cookie Collective | TOTP Rewind

TOTP 17 FEB 1994

Posted on February 7, 2023 by 80stastic

It’s the middle of February 1994 and something odd is happening. Unlike in 2023, my beloved Chelsea are still in the FA Cup. Somehow they managed to get past last season’s runners up Sheffield Wednesday after a replay in the last round and, two days after this TOTP aired, would travel to Oxford United and dump them out as well. To put this in context, this was only the third time in my living memory that they had made the Quarter Finals and I’d been supporting them since 1975. Nowadays of course they are serial finalists and winners of the cup but back in 1994, this felt like a very big deal. They would end up making it all the way to the final that season but let’s not talk about the 4-0 thrashing they were handed by Manchester United eh? I was working in the Our Price in Market Street, Manchester at the time and the Sony rep assigned to our shop was a guy called John who was also a Chelsea fan. He called in during the week and offered me the chance to go with him to the Oxford game on the Saturday but I had to work. What has all this got to do with TOTP? Nothing at all really but I like to recall what was going on in my life at the point these repeats originally aired. Right, now that’s done, let the music play…

This is the third show of Ric Blaxill’s stewardship and so far he’s only used Mark Goodier and Simon Mayo of his roster of returning Radio 1 DJs to host the show. Mayo gets the gig this week unfortunately but he gives a mercifully short intro at least before we’re into the tunes. Saint Etienne ended last week’s show and they begin this one but this time in the studio with a performance of “Pale Movie”. I said in the last post that it put me in mind of the theme tune to dubbed, black and white 60s TV series White Horses. However, on reflection it’s got the merest whiff of Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita” about it – must be the Spanish guitars. Apparently the band themselves view the track as a missed opportunity in that it could have been absolutely blinding but they didn’t get it quite right. It sounds pretty good to me though.

Mayo can’t resist going through his various gears of smugness at the end where he makes references to the staging of the performance and the usage of Lambrettas. “That’ll be the first time you’ve seen Lambrettas on Top of the Pops since…ooh…1980 and Poison Ivy” he can’t wait to tell us to show off his pop knowledge. Oh piss off Mayo!

Right, what’s this screeching nonsense?! Well, it’s Cappella, the people who bought you “U Got To Know” and “U Got 2 Let The Music” in 1993. They’ve dispensed with the use of a ‘U’ instead of ‘you’ in their choice of song title this time as they deliver “Move On Baby” though they would return to it for their next hit “U & Me”.

Reading their Wikipedia entry, they were kind of like the Eurodance Tight Fit. How so? Well, Tight Fit were a hastily put together trio of models/ singers who were assembled to be the public image of a recording of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” organised by producer Tim Friese-Greene. However, the year before a different producer called Ken Gold had made a record called “Back To The Sixties”, a medley jumping on the Starsound/Stars On 45 craze. Although it was recorded by session musicians and singers, it was promoted by a group of actor/singer types also under the name of Tight Fit for a TOTP appearance. Sound familiar?

OK but how does this relate to Cappella? Well, Cappella weren’t really a group but more a promotional name for the ideas of Hi-NRG producer Gianfranco Bortolotti. They first had a UK chart hit in 1989 with “Helyom Halib” which was fronted by model Ettore Foresti who didn’t appear on the record at all. Fast forward four years and Bortolotti was having those aforementioned ‘U’ hits but this time the public faces of the act were rapper Rodney Bishop and dancer Kelly Overett. Neither were anywhere near the recording studio at the time the tracks were laid down. Judging by the vocals that Kelly gives on this TOTP appearance, that was probably a wise choice. Anyway, it does seem like the Tight Fit strategy of promoting a single was copied by Cappella. Or was it Tight Fit who copied Boney M and Black Box who copied Tight Fit and Capella who copied Black Box? Considering that question is more likely to give me a headache than listening to “Move On Baby” if that was possible!

For all their success, Crowded House have a patchy record when it comes to hit singles. The did accrue thirteen UK Top 40 entries between 1987 and 1996 (twelve of them consecutively) which in itself is not too shabby but of those only one reached the Top 10 and of the rest only five made the Top 20. I guess they were more of an albums band. This one, “Locked Out”, was their joint second biggest hit when it peaked at No 12. The third single from their fourth album “Together Alone”, it’s a great pop song; urgent yet melodic, well crafted yet felt spontaneous.

It was also featured in a film that I’ve mentioned before (though I can’t recall why now). Reality Bites starred Ethan Hawke, Winona Ryder and Ben Stiller who also directed and whilst it wasn’t a runaway success at the time, has since become a bit of a cult classic. Its soundtrack isn’t talked about in such revered tones but it did furnish a fair few hits. Aside from “Locked Out” it also featured “Stay (I Missed You)” by Lisa Loeb (a US No 1 and UK No 6) and Big Mountain’s cover of Peter Frampton’s “Baby I Love Your Way” (UK No 2 and US No 6). Those hits are for much later in the year though.

I confidently predicted the other week that we wouldn’t be seeing Dina Carroll on the show again until 1996 when her next album came out. So what’s she doing here this week performing an album track? It was all to do with the BRITS which last week’s TOTP had bigged up with a whole section dedicated to the nominations. Dina won Best British Female but as she will have got the gong for that at the actual BRITS show, they’ve allowed Simon Mayo to present her with an award to commemorate her album “So Close” selling one million copies. To celebrate that occurrence, she’s singing “Hold On” exclusively for the show despite it never being released as a single. It’s got a bit of a Marvin Gaye vibe about it but it certainly wasn’t as strong as “Don’t Be A Stranger” for example. Was this type of performance going to be a regular thing under new producer Ric Blaxill? The ‘million seller’ slot? Surely not…?

…or definitely maybe because here’s another new section of the show that is based around songs not actually in the Top 40. To be fair to Blaxill, this slot was at least linked to the charts being billed as it was Bubbling under the 40 and highlighting a song just outside them. Was he thinking that if a single was just outside the 40, given prime exposure on TOTP it would definitely be inside it the following week anyway so why not just get it on early doors? That did rather cast him in the role of hitmaker which is maybe not the job of the show’s producer? Wasn’t TOTP always meant to reflect the tastes of the record buying public and not to be forcing songs upon it? Anyway, whatever the reasoning behind the slot, in the case of Sinéad O’Connor, the exposure it gave her song “You Made Me The Thief Of Your Heart” didn’t turn it into a hit in the UK. In fact, it never got any higher than where it was at the time of this performance – No 42. Taken from the soundtrack to the film In The Name Of The Father about the 1974 Guildford pub bombings and the four people falsely convicted of perpetrating them, it’s certainly an affecting track. I’ve never seen the film but I can imagine it fitting in well to a movie of such gravity. However, whether you’d want to listen to it over and over outside of the film I’m not sure.

Sinéad gives a typically atypical performance here. With just some spotlights, a smattering of dry ice, the word ‘forgiveness’ marker penned on her chest and a long bob wig (I’m assuming) for company, she goes from standing still defiantly to full on animated dancing via a bit of gentle swaying all in the space of three minutes. Sinéad would get herself a bona fide chart hit later in the year when “Thank You For Hearing Me” made No 13 and a gold selling parent album in “Universal Mother”.

The well established Breakers slot is still with us and we start with a third consecutive hit for Urban Cookie Collective. Yes, you read that right – a third consecutive hit. Remembered by many as a one hit wonder, the Cookies (as nobody ever called them) actually had five UK Top 40 hits though the final one was a a rerelease of their first. “Sail Away” was the third of those and would make No 18. It’s got a frenetic beat but none of the charm of “The Key The Secret”, as if they were trying to do their best 2 Unlimited impression.

Mayo’s at it again with his smug mode enabled going on about how there hasn’t been an act called Sasha on TOTP for decades. I presume he was referring to the French singer/songwriter Sacha Distel? Ooh Simon, you’re so knowledgeable! Nob. Anyway, this Sasha is the Welsh, multi-award winning DJ and producer. He isn’t the guy in the video who I believe is Sam Mollison. You didn’t make that clear in your intro did you Mayo? Maybe you didn’t know? He also isn’t Sash! the German DJ of “Encore Une Fois” fame. Anyway, this track “Higher Ground” made No19 and was a track from Sasha’s “The Qat Collection” which also furnished a No 32 hit called “Magic” also with Mollison on vocals though the album itself only made No 56.

Next it’s the official follow up single from Meatloaf to his gigantic, global No 1 hit “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)”. I say official as Sony rereleased “Bat Out Of Hell” in December 1993 to cash in on the renewed interest in their one time artist. However, the second song from the “Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell” album was this track- “Rock And Roll Dreams Come Through”. Yet another Jim Steinman composition, the track was actually recorded by Steinman 13 years prior for his “Bad For Good” album and was his only US chart hit in his own right.

Written about the uplifting power of rock music and its ability to see people through even the most extreme of circumstances, it’s classic Meatloaf fodder (it was originally written for him) and has the usual play on words title with the use of ‘through’ rather than ‘true’. Any song from the album chosen as the follow up to its chart busting predecessor would struggle in comparison sales wise and that was the case with “Rock And Roll Dreams Come Through” which didn’t even make the Top 10 over here. The video was as over the top as you would expect though with Meatloaf cast as some sort of vigilante fortune teller going around blowing up jukeboxes to rescue runaway teenagers including a young Angelina Jolie. Director Michael Bay would go onto direct movies including Armageddon, Pearl Harbour and Transformers so he obviously had a thing about explosions.

God Mayo really is insufferable. In his next link, he says this:

“Now there comes a point in every good Top of the Pops where your Dad in the corner goes ‘What the Hell is this?!’. Well, just tell him it’s The Wildhearts and they’re great!”.

What’s wrong with that you may ask? Well, at the time of this show, Mayo was a 35 year old father of two so I’m not really buying his ‘I’m down with the kids’ positioning of himself. As for the band he was introducing, I really can’t remember them at all despite their thirteen UK Top 40 hits and four albums they released between 1993 and 1997. So were they great as Simon Mayo told us? Well, if “Caffeine Bomb” was anything to go by, not in my book. All this glam metal stuff had been done to death before and by better bands than this. New York Dolls, Kiss with their full face make up, even Manic Street Preachers had dabbled with make up and guitars in their early days. Then there was the early 90s UK glam blues/rock movement from the likes of The Quireboys and The Dogs D’Amour…oh and guess what The Wildhearts had links to both those bands. Here’s @TOTPFacts with the details:

The Wildhearts singer/guitarist Ginger (real name David Walls) was previously in The Quireboys, while drummer Bam was (and currently once again is) a member of The Dogs D'Amour. #TOTP
— Top Of The Pops Facts (@TOTPFacts) February 3, 2023

Oh it all makes sense now. They tried to make themselves controversial with headline baiting song titles like “Greetings From Shitsville”, “Sick Of Drugs” and “Just In Lust” but it all seems a bit desperate to me. Nothing to see here. Next!

Did someone mention 2 Unlimited before? Um, yeah…it was me obviously but here they are still having hits even in 1994, three whole years after their first. “Let The Beat Control Your Body” was the ninth of fourteen in total in the UK and the fifth and final one from their “No Limits” album. To highlight how many hits they’ve had, the TOTP production team have set up a 2 Unlimited ‘art gallery’ full of gold and silver discs to enable a really weak link for Simon Mayo who obviously had a thing about other people’s disc awards following Dina Carroll’s earlier. They could have at least used the Vision On gallery music to soundtrack it:

Once the performance starts it the usual 2 Unlimited shtick with lots of pounding beats and some ropey rapping from Ray and Anita enthusiastically singing some dreadful, trite lyrics like “My beat accepts you just as you are, it drives you away just like a fast car”. Seriously, how did they get away with this for so long?!

Mariah Carey has crashed straight I at No 1 with her cover version of Harry Nilsson’s “Without You” finally bringing D:Ream’s four week reign to an end. Supposedly the release of the single was delayed by three weeks probably to align perfectly with the Valentine’s Day market but possibly so as not to clash with the death of Nilsson himself who passed away on 15th January. A respectful amount of time maybe needed to be seen to have passed or was it to see if his record company might rerelease his most famous song in the aftermath of his demise? The single’s success gave her “Music Box” album a huge sales push despite it having been out for six months by this point. I’d ordered in a load for the Our Price I was working in but we still sold out by Saturday afternoon – a rookie error. “Without You” will be No 1 for another three weeks.

The play out tune is “Rush” by Freak Power which is the second song on the show tonight after Sinéad O’Connor’s “You Made Me The Thief Of Your Heart” not to become a Top 40 hit. Freak Power were, of course, one of Norman Cook’s many musical vehicles and followed the dissolution of Beats International in his timeline. They would score a massive hit in 1995 with “Turn On, Tune In Cop Out” following its use in a Levi’s advert. I don’t remember this one at all though hardly surprising seeing as it peaked at No 62.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Saint Etienne	Pale Movie	Liked it, didn’t buy it
2	Cappella	Move On Baby	Never
3	Crowded House	Locked Out	No but I think I have it on a Best Of album
4	Dina Carroll	Hold On	I never bought her album, no
5	Sinéad O’Connor	You Made Me The Thief Of Your Heart	No
6	Urban Cookie Collective	Sail Away	Uh-uh
7	Sasha	Higher Ground	Nah
8	Meatloaf	Rock And Roll Dreams Come Through	Nope
9	The Wildhearts	Caffeine Bomb	God no!
10	2 Unlimited	Let The Beat Control Your Body	As if
11	Mariah Carey	Without You	I did not
12	Freak Power	Rush	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001hqvf/top-of-the-pops-17021994

TOTP 11 NOV 1993

Posted on November 17, 2022 by 80stastic

The 14th November 2022 saw the 70th anniversary of the UK’s official singles chart. That inaugural chart was published by the NME with the very first No 1 record being Al Martino’s “Here In My Heart”. Back in 1993 when this TOTP was broadcast, we were just three days away from the 41st birthday of the charts. Were there any celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary the year before? I can’t remember but what I do know is that as part of the 70th festivities, seven charts have been produced detailing the most streamed songs for each year of the charts’ existence. Some results were obvious – the most streamed track that was originally released in 1975 for example is “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen. Others were a little more surprising- 1990’s most streamed song is “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC. As we’re up to 1993 in these TOTP repeats, let’s check out which was the most streamed track that was released in that year…oh that’s just plain wrong! “What Is Love” by Haddaway? Ha’way and shite man! That just about sums up the terrible year that was 1993. Still, we’re nearly through it and then Britpop is just around the corner. For now though, ‘turn and face the strange’ as we navigate another thirty minutes of nostalgia…

Hang on. Captain Hollywood? I thought we were in 1993 not 1990! Didn’t this guy have a hit called “I Can’t Stand It” as the decade began?

*checks official.charts.com

Well, sort of. It was officially credited to Twenty 4 Seven featuring Captain Hollywood but I was right about the year – it was a No 7 in 1990. There was a follow up too called “Are You Dreaming” which went Top 20. At that point the good captain (real name Tony Dawson-Harrison) left the project to begin his own new…erm…project called…erm…Captain Hollywood Project. Their first single was “More And More” which, and this is now almost becoming as regular an admission as Rishi Sunak claiming he was unaware of the latest scandal to engulf one of his cabinet before he appointed them, I have no memory of at all. Listening to it now, it sounds f*****g dreadful! Was this really what the pop fans of 1993 wanted? The heated up leftovers of what was rejected from the recording sessions of Snap!’s “Rhythm Is A Dancer”?

The rapper is, I believe, the aforementioned Tony Dawson-Harrison who sounds like that voice over guy who does all those film trailers that begin with “In a world where…”. Apparently his voice was electronically modified to sound deeper. Why? Unless his true voice sounded like Joe Pasquale I don’t get why you would do that. I also don’t understand why all the guys on stage have a ponytail and are dressed like waiters at a high class restaurant. The whole thing is completely baffling, almost as baffling as how the record managed to get to No 23 in the charts.

As it’s nearly mid-November, the run up Christmas has started and that means, as host Mark Franklin points out, Best Of albums and plenty of ‘em. Artists peddling collections of their biggest hits around this time included Diana Ross, Wet Wet Wet, Soul II Soul, Bette Midler, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, The Christians and this guy – Bryan Adams. His “So Far So Good” album would end up as the sixth best selling of 1993 in the UK. This was quite astonishing when you consider that until the record breaking run at No 1 in 1991 by “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You”, Bry’s biggest UK hit was “Run To You” which peaked just outside the Top 10 at No 11. Look at the chart standings in this country for every track on “So Far So Good”

Title	Chart peak
Summer of ’69	42
Straight from the Heart	51
It’s Only Love	29
Can’t Stop This Thing We Started	12
Do I Have to Say the Words?	30
This Time	41
Run To You	11
Heaven	38
Cuts Like A Knife	Did not chart
(Everything I Do) I Do It for You	1
Somebody	35
Kids Wanna Rock	N/A album track
Heat Of The Night	50
Please Forgive Me	2

Maybe they were big airplay hits and that’s how people knew them? Remember those streaming charts I mentioned earlier? The most streamed song that was released in 1985 was “Summer Of 69”. Or maybe Bryan had always been more of an albums guy until his Robin Hood moment? Even his 1987 album which generated zero UK Top 40 hits went gold and made our Top 10. Perhaps it was just all about that No 1 song but surely enough people had bought the single to not need to buy a Greatest Hits album to own it? Was it the new song “Please Forgive Me” that reeled people in? I don’t know why that should’ve because it was a right dirge. Its promo video was no better – a right snoozefest showing Bryan and his merry band of musos laying down the track in the studio. Even his dog who’s there for no apparent reason looks bored. Somehow the single made it to No 2.

https://youtu.be/9EHAo6rEuas

Here’s another track specifically recorded to promote a Best Of album – it’s the aforementioned Soul II Soul with “Wish”. Who was doing the singing for Jazzie B and co by 1993? Caron Wheeler had long since departed by then. Well, my research (by which I mean Wikipedia) tells me that’s the now sadly passed away Melissa Bell on stage who was actually pregnant at the time. One of her four children (not the one from this pregnancy though) would turn out to be pretty famous herself – singer and actress Alexandra Burke who won the 2008 series of The X Factor. As well as bagging herself three No 1 singles, she was also on the charity record by The X Factor Finalists who covered Mariah Carey’s “Hero” that I mentioned the other week.

Presumably Melissa’s pregnancy explains her cover-all outfit in this performance. The feathers on it reminded me of this long forgotten BBC costume drama from 1978 featuring the Welsh Robin Hood Twm Sion Cati and his rather ludicrous outfit.

https://youtu.be/chacdwFHC9A

Five Breakers again this week starting with Paul Weller and a third single from his “Wild Wood” album. “The Weaver EP” actually featured four tracks including Weller’s cover of Neil Young’s “Ohio” but the title track was the only song actually on the album. By this point, the rejuvenation of Paul was well under way with “The Weaver” peaking at No 18 after previous singles “Wild Wood” made No 14 and “”Sunflower” No 16. More than these solid chart performances though, it seemed to me that Weller was being accepted back into the fold of artists that meant something – it wasn’t just about nostalgia for The Jam. He was suddenly relevant again.

After The Style Council disappeared up their own arse as the 80s ended, it seemed like Weller had lost his mojo completely. Without a record contract for the first time since he was 17 he took a sabbatical for the whole of 1990 before restarting his musical career with some low key live gigs playing old Jam standards as well as some new songs before dipping his toe back into recording music with the release of No 36 single “Into Tomorrow” as The Paul Weller Movement. That paved the way for his debut, eponymous solo album in 1992 which in itself was in effect a trailer for “Wild Wood”. As for the song itself, it’s not too dissimilar to “Sunflower” with its ringing guitar licks albeit that it probably has more of a groove to it whereas “Sunflower” is a bit more strident sounding. Even the videos are alike being straightforward performance run throughs in a mixture of black and white and colour film. Both are resounding and engaging tracks however.

Ah shit! It’s Bollers time! Michael Bolton that is who’s turned up with a song the title of which suggests he’s doing his best Meatloaf impression. “Said I Loved You…But I Lied” was actually written by Bollers himself alongside Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange who also co-wrote that Bryan Adams stinker that was on earlier. And guess what? This one’s terrible too! Lange seems to be the enemy of music, constructing anti-songs that go nowhere and do nothing. He has worked with some huge names like AC/DC and Britney Spears but his biggest claim to fame is producing Shania Twain (to whom he was also married) and her “Come On Over” album which is the best selling country album of all time and the best selling of the 90s but I always hated that so…ahem…that don’t impress me much. As for Michael Bolton, as usual he had an album out for Christmas called “The One Thing” from which “Said I Loved You…But I Lied” was taken. It would peak at No15 in the UK and No 6 in the US, the last time Bolton would visit the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 10.

Next a single that I would have sworn came out at least two years later than this*. Leftfield are electronic dance duo Neil Barnes and Paul Daley who back in 1993 were about to break through into the mainstream with the release of “Open Up” which had its own secret weapon in the guest vocalist on the track, one John Lydon. Not seen in the charts for three years when PIL’s “Don’t Ask Me” made No 22 (another one of those Best Of promoting singles), Lydon’s growling vocals intertwined with some progressive house beats was an unlikely but winning combination. Anything he sings on is always installed with an instant sense of peril and brims with dread and it works a treat in this anxiety inducing track. The line ‘Burn Hollywood burn’ led to it being withdrawn from play on ITV’s The Chart Show due to an unfortunate case of timing which saw it in heavy rotation at the time of the Malibu bush fires in Los Angeles. Lydon’s own LA home was in peril at one point.

*Having checked Leftfield’s discography, I think the reason for my own case of wayward timing re: when this single was released is down to the fact that their album “Leftism” on which “Open Up” featured didn’t come out until January 1995.

Remember that awful hit “To Be With You” by a US band called Mr. Big from 1992? Well, here’s the 1993 version. Soul Asylum were the perpetrators of this year’s mournful, acoustic power ballad though they had actually been in existence for over a decade by this point. “Runaway Train” was their song and it would be the biggest hit of their career by far, going Top 5 all around Europe and in their home country of America whilst peaking at No 7 in the UK.

And then you watch the video and the song is transformed into something else altogether and your initial assessment of it is no longer valid. The decision of director Tony Kaye to use the promo as something practical rather than just aesthetic changes not just people’s perception of the song but actually changed people’s lives. Originally written by lead vocalist Dave Pirner about depression, the use of imagery in the video of children witnessing or fleeing from abuse convinced many that the song was about runaway and missing children. The disturbing scenes of domestic abuse, child prostitution and kidnapping weren’t gratuitous though as they were interspersed with stills of actual missing children with their names published alongside how long they had been missing. Pirner appears at the end of the video to advise “If you’ve seen one of these kids or are one of them, please call this number”. The children’s details were changed and tailored to whichever country the video was being shown in (i.e. UK children were featured in the video released in this country). The ultimate impact of the video which received high rotation on MTV was that twenty-six children featured in the video were found. Tragically, there were also horrific denouements to the stories of those children featured the details of which I don’t need to go into in a blog about music. Predictably, even the brief glimpse we get of the video in the Breakers has been heavily edited by the TOTP producers. As for Soul Asylum, “Runaway Train” became an albatross around the band’s neck and Pirner refused to perform it live for a while. They would have one more chart hit in 1995 with “Misery” but are still active to this day.

The final Breaker comes from The Orb and their ambient house classic “Little Fluffy Clouds”. This track seemed to have been around for ages and indeed it had having been originally released in 1990 when it was big in the clubs but not on the charts and it peaked at No 87. However, with the commercial success The Orb had received with a No 1 album in “U.F.Orb” and attendant hit singles like “Blue Room” and “Assassin”, the decision was taken to rerelease “Little Fluffy Clouds”. It proved to be the right choice as the 1993 version made it all the way to No 10.

Borrowing heavily from Ennio Morricone, and a piece by minimalist composer Steve Reich performed by Pat Metheny, its most prominent sample though was from an interview with US singer songwriter Rickie Lee Jones. Describing the sky in Arizona from her childhood, her hippy-ish tone fits perfectly with the chill-out vibes of the track. Unfortunately Rickie’s attitude to The Orb’s use of her voice on the track wasn’t so laid back. In a 2019 interview she described them as:

those fuckers
“Joy and Defiance: A Conversation with Rickie Lee Jones”. Aquarium Drunkard. 10 May 2019.

As much as I quite enjoyed “Little Fluffy Clouds” (and I did), it’s not my favourite song about the sky in Arizona. This is…

1993 was full of dance hits of all types of flavour – it felt like you couldn’t escape from them. However, if you were a dance act with a big club hit that crossed over into the mainstream charts, did that then change your identity and therefore your aspirations? If you were now a bona fide chart artist, were you then obliged to have a follow up hit and if so, was that possible? It wasn’t always. The Goodmen of “Give It Up” fame never had another hit and neither did Sub Sub after “Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use)”. Similarly, dancehall rapper Snow bagged a No 2 record in 1993 with “Informer” and then nothing ever again.

Making the case the other way though were Culture Beat who followed up on their chart topper “Mr.Vain” with two Top 5 singles in “Got To Get It” and “Anything”. And then there was this lot – Urban Cookie Collective whose “”The Key, The Secret” just missed out on being a No 1 record but, contrary to popular theory, weren’t a one hit wonder and here’s the proof. “Feels Like Heaven” may have sounded almost exactly the same as its predecessor (no really, what’s the difference?) but that didn’t stop punters buying it in enough copies to send it to No 5. They even had a further two Top 40 hits (all four came from debut album “High On A Happy Vibe”) but really, they are only remembered for “The Key, The Secret” I think it’s fair to say. To be honest, if I wanted a song called “Feels Like Heaven” I’d go for these true one hit wonders from 1984…

November and December of 1993 saw a trend for ballads that stuck around the charts for ages. There was “Hero” by Mariah Carey, “Don’t Be A Stranger” by Dina Carroll, “Please Forgive Me” by Bryan Adams, “For Whom The Bell Tolls” by The Bee Gees and this one – “Again” by Janet Jackson. The third single to be taken from her “Janet” album, it was actually written for the film Poetic Justice, Janet’s debut into the world of movies. It was the closing song in the film though it didn’t feature on the rap heavy official soundtrack. Was that a deliberate ploy on behalf of Jackson and her writers/producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to potentially build sales for her own album by ensuring fans hadn’t got access to it via the soundtrack? I’ve no idea but what I do know is that there were fourteen songs that featured in the film that didn’t appear on its soundtrack which seems like a lot.

“Again” is one of those ballads that Janet throws into the mix every so often (see also “Let’s Wait A While”, “Come Back To Me”) although it holds back on the sugary schmaltz in favour of trying to purvey a sense of real emotion. Whether Janet achieves that by appearing overcome and teary at the song’s finale is open to debate. There’s no doubting the song ebbs and flows though and Janet does a good job of the live vocals in this TOTP performance. The song clearly struck a chord with the public who bought it steadily over a prolonged period providing it with this Top 40 run:

12 – 6 – 8 – 10 – 16 – 15 – 17 – 12 – 33

Like the aforementioned “Hero” by Mariah Carey, it manages to reverse a decline in sales on two occasions to move back up the charts. Impressive stuff. Being a Jackson, Janet would release another four singles from “Janet” after “Again”, the last one coming out over 18 months after the album.

And another one! Yes, it’s another of those ballads of longevity, this time from Elton John and Kiki Dee. After the success of the “Two Rooms” tribute album of 1991, there must have been some discussion in his inner circle as to how to further plunder the Elton John brand whilst he was in between studio albums (there was a three years gap between “The One” and “Made In England”). The plan that was devised was to do a duets project resulting in an album called…erm…”Duets”. The idea was sound. Get a few of Elton’s pals round to record a mixture of standards and his own compositions and shove it out in time for the Christmas market. Bish, bash bosh!

Elton of course was not shy about recording a duet or two. A quick glance of his discography reveals collaborations with the likes of Cliff Richard, Millie Jackson, George Michael, Jennifer Rush, Aretha Franklin…However, surely the most famous and enduring of his duets was with Kiki Dee on “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”, their No 1 from 1976. So guess who was first in line to get an invite for the project and who would end up being on the lead single for the album? The song chosen for Elton and Kiki was the Cole Porter standard “True Love” from the film High Society made famous by Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly. I don’t think I knew the song back in 1993 and their version of it was never going to turn me onto it. Having played both interpretations of it this morning back to back, I definitely detected that Elton and Kiki’s take on it had pissing sleigh bells in the mix! The cynical sods! Clearly trying to stack the odds in their favour of the Christmas No 1 and indeed many bookies had it nailed on as favourite for the top spot. I kept a close eye on Elton’s face during this performance to see if I could spot any signs of smugness thinking he had the coveted crown in the bag but my powers of observation were slain by his jiggling eyebrows! WTF?! Sadly for Elton and Kiki, they underestimated the appeal of an idiot in a pink and yellow spotted costume to sell records and so never did make No 1 though they got mighty close peaking at No 2 and staying in the Top 10 for seven weeks.

https://youtu.be/KAtL06fUyCc

It’s a fourth week out of seven at the top for Meatloaf and “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)”. It’s the video again – I don’t think Meat ever made it into the TOTP studio did he? There was a satellite performance weeks back to premiere it but after that I think it was always the promo.

The lyric ‘I’d do anything for love but I won’t do that’ was first used in a Bonnie Tyler track called “Getting So Excited” from her “Faster Than The Speed Of Night” album that Jim Steinman produced. If you can manage to listen to it in the clip below (it’s utterly dreadful), stay with it until the 1.35 mark when you get the campest utterance of a line since that bloke in The Sweet on “Blockbuster”.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Captain Hollywood Project	More And More	As if
2	Bryan Adams	Please Forgive Me	No I don’t Bry
3	Soul II Soul	Wish	No
4	Paul Weller	The Weaver EP	No but I had the Wild Wood album
5	Michael Bolton	Said I Loved You…But I Lied	Never
6	Leftfield / John Lydon	Open Up	No but I had it on one of those Best Album In The World Ever compilations
7	Soul Asylum	Runaway Train	Negative
8	The Orb	Little Fluffy Clouds	I did not
9	Urban Cookie Collective	Feels Like Heaven	Nah
10	Janet Jackson	Again	Nope
11	Elton John / Kiki Dee	True Love	Definitely not
12	Meatloaf	I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001dzyp/top-of-the-pops-11111993

TOTP 05 AUG 1993

Posted on September 28, 2022 by 80stastic

I started the previous post talking about the poor state of the BBC’s musical output in 1993 and the landscape altering changes that were coming to both Radio 1 and TOTP. Well, one of them has just happened ahead of schedule. Radio 1 DJ and pretty much the embodiment of the comedy characters Smashie and Nicey Dave Lee Travis resigned on air three days after this TOTP aired. Apparently he was due to leave the station in ten weeks time anyway when his contract ran out but so irate was the ‘Hairy Cornflake’ about what was going on in the corridors of power at the station that he chose to have his own little private or rather very public moment of venting.

“…and I really want to put the record straight at this point and I thought you ought to know – changes are being made here which go against my principles and I just cannot agree with them”
“Profile: Dave Lee Travis”. Aircheck Tracker. Archived from the original on 22 October 2009. Retrieved 13 November 2008.

DLT was referring to the changes being ushered in by new controller in waiting Matthew Bannister that would lead to a massive overhaul of the station and its presenters. Simon Bates, Gary Davies, Alan Freeman, Bob Harris and Paul Gambaccini would follow him out of the door soon after. Eventually even Steve Wright whom Bannister had put on the breakfast show slot would resign* ushering in the era of the self styled saviour of Radio 1 Chris Evans. Heaven help us.

*Writing this coincidentally on the day of Steve Wright’s last ever afternoon show on Radio 2

TOTP would undergo its own major transformation a few months on from the comings and goings at Radio 1 but for the moment it was business as usual. Let’s see who was doing the rounds this week…

Well, there’s Juliet Roberts opening the show with her single “Caught In The Middle” for starters. Long before this hit, Juliet had a gig on a TV show called Rockschool. Nothing to do with Jack Black, it was a BBC programme that ran for four years and showed viewers techniques for making rock and pop music using guitar, keyboards, bass, drums etc.

I don’t remember this at all but by the comments against some of the clips on YouTube, the 80s kids loved it. It did have some pretty big names appear on the show such as Gary Moore, Vince Clarke, The Communards and Midge Ure. The presenters were pretty wooden but they were good musicians. Guitarist Deirdre Cartwright in the thumbnail below had been in a band called Painted Lady who would go on to become Girlschool. Play the opening song in the clip below. It sounds like prog-poppers It Bites who knew their way around a tune or two…

The clip below features Juliet (1:56) talking about singing styles. She also co-hosted a Channel 4 show called Solid Soul that was basically a retooling of America’s Soul Train.

All that work in front of the camera should have made her TOTP appearance here a doddle. She looks pretty confident for sure and nice to see an almost totally female backing band behind her (I think the drummer is a bloke). The 1993 trend of the tall hat started by Linda Perry of 4 Non Blondes carries on with Juliet’s choice of headgear. Top (hat) stuff.

What on earth is going on here?! Daniel O’Donnell on TOTP?! At a time when Matthew Bannister was lurking the corridors of Radio 1 on a dinosaur hunt to turn the station back to its original raison d’être of being for ‘young listeners’, what was the natural successor to Val Doonican doing on the BBC’s prime time pop music show?! Bizarre doesn’t begin to cover it. Even host Mark Franklin sounds surprised when he introduces him.

Look, I know Daniel O’Donnell has a massively loyal fan base who swear by him and he wasn’t doing any harm by giving them what they wanted to hear but in terms of the symbiosis between the BBC’s two main musical arms, it seemed like an outlier at best. To put it into context, it wouldn’t be long before Radio 1 Head of Production Trevor Dann would ban Status Quo records from being played on the station.

“Whatever Happened To Old Fashioned Love” was only O’Donnell’s fourth single release and he would only ever release eighteen in a fourteen year period fifteen of which would make the UK Top 40. Albums were a different matter altogether. Check out these numbers:

Studio albums: 38
Compilation albums: 13
Live albums: 4

Wow! That’s a lot of Daniel O’Donnell! Big props by the way to the floor managers for this show for getting the studio audience to scream at Daniel as if he was a member of Take That.

The Madonna video for “Rain” again?! This is the third time in four weeks! And it was a non-mover this week (albeit within the Top 10)! Overkill much? It would get no higher despite all this exposure. I said in a recent post that you only had to look at the fact that all five singles from the “Erotica” album made the Top 10 in the UK as evidence that she was still current, popular and relevant at this time. However, what I didn’t say was that four of them (the four consecutive releases after the title track) failed to make the Top 5, the first time that had ever happened. She wouldn’t have another No 1 record until “Frozen” five years later.

One place higher than Madonna we find Urban Cookie Collective with “The Key The Secret” and unlike her Madgesty, they are on the up. Their ride up the charts so far has been as follows:

40 – 29 – 20 – 11 – 6

They would rise to No 2 the following week where they would stay for two weeks kept off the top spot by Freddie Mercury. It would then spend the next three weeks inside the Top 10 and a further three inside the Top 40 before finally dropping out.

The other day the tweet below appeared on my timeline:

Mental note to oneself – when in office don’t randomly pipe up ‘I’ve got the secret’ when someone says, ‘I’ve got the key.’ It leads to confused looks and questions about what secret you know. Not everyone has song lyrics from 1993 still playing in their head.
— Lucy Mitchell (@LucyMitchAuth) September 27, 2022

The replies to Lucy’s tweet showed that there were loads of us with similar lines from songs that we pull out automatically given the correct prompt. Mine and my wife’s include “(Hey You) The Rock Steady Crew” by Rock Steady Crew and “Fresh” by Kool And The Gang. Within the replies to Lucy’s tweet, someone managed to get in another 1993 reference:

At a wedding once and a bridesmaid stands to do a reading entitled ‘What is Love?’ To which my husband whispers ‘baby don’t hurt me’ I don’t think our row heard any of the reading
— Bronagh (@BristowBronagh) September 28, 2022

The well worn tale of soap star to pop idol has another chapter. How many had already made that transformation by August 1993? Well, off the top of my head there’s Kylie and Jason obviously, Kylie’s sister Dannii, Craig McLachlan, Stefan Dennis (!) and that’s just from Neighbours. If we look closer to home, we find perhaps where this whole phenomenon began with another resident of the aforementioned Albert Square. Seven years prior to this, Anita Dobson took “Anyone Can Fall In Love” into the Top 5 starting a flurry of EastEnders chancing their arms as pop sensations. Nick Berry, Letitia Dean and Paul Medford, Sophie Lawrence all had hits of varying size whilst there were also some feeble failures from the likes of Tom Watt and Peter Dean. None of them though seemed to have the credibility that Michelle Gayle had.

She’d been on our screens as Hattie Tavernier for over three years by this point but left Albert Square to pursue a pop career full time. Her debut single was “Looking Up” and it was no crappy cover version designed to deliver a one-off hit. I could imagine someone like Dina Carroll, Kim Appleby or even Louise post Eternal performing it. An uplifting, catchy chorus aligned with a well placed one word sample (‘Rejoice!’), it sounded current and relevant and well…on the money for 1993. Michelle herself displays no signs of imposter syndrome in her confident TOTP turn but then this wasn’t her debut musical performance…

https://youtu.be/e1e9mDIar0I

Go to 18:25

Fresh ‘n’ Fly there wrekkin’ the mike (PSYCHE!). “Looking Up” made No 11 (not quite the Top 3 that host Mark Franklin predicted then) and its success was enough to convince Michelle and her label RCA that she should quit EastEnders to be a full time pop star. She would go on to have seven Top 40 hits (including her most well known tune “Sweetness”) and recorded two albums before leaving RCA to sign with EMI where she was the victim of an artist rostering reshuffle and never released any recordings with them. She has returned to music periodically with a second place finish in 2003’s Reborn In The USA retro music contest and even had a go at Eurovision in 2008.

They’ve dropped the number of Breakers from five to four this week (thank god!) and we start with a collaboration between two artists at either end of the alphabet. Aswad and Yazz were at school together Mark Franklin tells us and they looked each other up again to record a cover of Ace’s 1975 hit “How Long”. We’ve seen the cover version as career revitaliser strategy countless times before but both Aswad and Yazz’s fortunes certainly needed a tonic in 1993. Neither had managed a hit in three years and in the case of Yazz especiall, her career was a mess. After the huge success of “The Only Way Is Up” and the “Wanted” album at the end of the 80s, she’d record two albums for two different labels neither of which was released. “How Long” was the lead single from her third LP attempt that did see the light of day but “One On One” disappeared without trace leaving only that Ace cover to remind us of Yazz’s name. It would be her final chart hit when it peaked at No 31. Aswad though would score a Top 5 hit with “Shine” the following year. They were in the news for tragic reasons recently when founding member Drummie Zeb died aged just 62.

Next a huge dance hit from The Goodmen or is it The Good Men or is it Chocolate Puma or even Zki & Dobre? Confused? Well, these were just a few of the names that Dutch DJ and production duo René ter Horst and Gaston Steenkist went by. Not names that roll off the tongue naturally – that may explain the aliases. If their real names aren’t familiar then their tune “Give It Up” surely is to anybody frequenting the club scene around this time as it was huge. An African rhythm combined with that regimented drum sound was ubiquitous and led to it being a global hit especially in the US where it topped the dance chart. So massive was it that it crossed over into the mainstream and became a No 5 hit on the UK Top 40. Given its success, it’s rather surprising that it was never shown on TOTP again. Maybe they didn’t know what to do with it. Its impact led to it being sampled two years later by Simply Red for their No 1 hit “Fairground” but let’s not go there eh?

https://youtu.be/s3YGonwsQuI

Talking of No 1 records, here comes a future one courtesy of Culture Beat and “Mr Vain”. This lot were yet more Eurodance chart botherers and as they will be chart toppers shortly, I’ll keep my comments about them in this brief Breakers appearance…well…brief. Here’s a nice little bit of pop trivia for now though. “Mr Vain” was the first record to got o No 1 in the UK that wasn’t released on 7’’ vinyl.

Bon Jovi complete this week’s Breakers with the fourth single from their “Keep The Faith” album. Was “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” just a rewrite of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”? Bit harsh but then the band have incorporated the Stones song into their composition when performing it live so there must be some similarities structure wise. The black and white promo video features a number of scenes clearly meant as a tribute to / stolen directly from A Hard Day’s Night and also Jim Morrison’s grave in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. I went there once and there are some incredible figures from history buried within it. Chopin, Edith Piaf, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde…and yet all anybody seemed interested in was the singer of The Doors. I saw many hand made signs saying ‘This way to Jim’ and at his actual grave, someone had laid not flowers but a nicely rolled joint. It’s what he would have wanted.

“I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” peaked at No 17.

This week’s live by satellite performance is by UB40 and comes from the Garden State Arts Centre, New Jersey. It’s another pointless exercise as the only camera angle we get is of the band performing “Higher Ground” on a two level stage. Completely dull. Also completely dull was their song which was the second single from the “Promises And Lies” album.

This was a very commercially successful time for UB40. As Mark Franklin says, they’d just had a No 1 single in “(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You” and the album was also a chart topper. By my reckoning, this was also the last really successful era of the band. There had been a few during their career – the heady days of their politically powerful first hits like “One In Ten”, their covers period of “Labour Of Love” and “Red Red Wine”, the chart topping collaboration with Chrissie Hynde on “I’ve Got You Babe” and then this 1993 spell. “Higher Ground” was a bit of a stinker though.

This episode of TOTP became ‘The UB40 Show’ by be end of it with Ali Campbell introducing the next act who was actually one of their mates. Bitty McLean was a tape operator at the band’s recording studio originally – the reggae Rick Astley then – before being promoted to co-producer and engineer for them. He even provided backing vocals for some of the “Promises And Lies” album. His debut single was a cover of a 1961 Fats Domino tune “It Keeps Rainin” which he retitled “It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes)” presumably much to the annoyance of the TOTP graphics team.

I hated this as it was just more evidence to me of what a terrible year for music 1993 was turning out to be. Plastic reggae with a ragga style shout out at the start of it just to jump on that bandwagon. Horrible. As always, I was in the minority and the record soared to No 2 in the charts. Bitty would have a total of seven UK Top 40 hits.

A fourth and final week at the top of the heap for Take That with “Pray”. They needn’t have worried though as it was the first of eight No 1 singles in the first part of their career. They will be back in a few weeks with “Relight My Fire” accompanied by the dreadful Lulu.

dsfghjk

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Juliet Roberts	Caught In The Middle	Nope
2	Daniel O’Donnell	Whatever Happened To Old Fashioned Love	As if
3	Madonna	Rain	No
4	Urban Cookie Collective	The Key The Secret	I did not
5	Michelle Gayle	Looking Up	Negative
6	Aswad and Yazz	How Long	Nah
7	The Goodmen	Give It Up	No thanks
8	Culture Beat	Mr Vain	Never happening
9	Bon Jovi	I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead	No but I had a promo copy of the Keep The Faith album
10	UB40	Higher Ground	I did not
11	Bitty McLean	It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes)	Just awful – no
12	Take That	Pray	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001c94b/top-of-the-pops-05081993

TOTP 22 JUL 1993

Posted on September 21, 2022 by 80stastic

Look, I know that TOTP producer Stanley Appel couldn’t possibly have known that twenty-nine years on from deciding the running orders for these shows that I would be writing a review of each one and that the more acts that he shoehorned into thirty minutes, the more words I would have to write but damn! These TOTP repeats are killing me. This edition has thirteen acts on it. Thirteen! Bastards! Right then. No time for an intro about what else was happening in the world to form a theme for the post. As Duckie said in Pretty In Pink, “Let’s plow”…

The voice and co-writer of “Unfinished Sympathy” begins the show as Shara Nelson starts “Down That Road” of being a solo artist. She looked fair set to become a huge star as well. With her fly Massive Attack credentials and being signed to Cooltempo Records (home of Carleen Anderson, Arrested Development, The Brand New Heavies and…erm…Kenny Thomas), she had credibility as well as a decent debut tune. She also had a Mercury Music Prize nominated album in “What Silence Knows” which would furnish her with four Top 40 hits. Yet somehow that huge career that seemed inevitable got away from her. Second album “Friendly Fire” performed poorly and then she rather disappeared for a bit before resurfacing to collaborate with the likes of producer and DJ Charles ‘Presence’ Webster.

“Down That Road” managed to combine some cool vibes with a crossover appeal that would see it gain plenty of daytime airplay. It was also one of those records that had a tiny but crucial instrumental hook that lodged itself in your brain – that little sax parp after Shara sings the word ‘road’ in the chorus (see also the final strum of Billy Duffy’s guitar in the riff to “She Sells Sanctuary”).

Something I wasn’t aware of though was that DJ Pete Tong obtained a restraining order against Shara in 2011 following her 12 month community order and community service sentence for harassment of Tong and his wife! Blimey! She really shouldn’t have gone down that road.

“Down That Road” peaked at No 19.

Roxette are next with their highest ever chart entry as “Almost Unreal” crashes into the Top 10 at No 7. It’s their first time back there since “Joyride” made No 4 two years previously but they shouldn’t have got carried away with themselves as it will also be their very last time there in the UK and the song itself was almost universally panned by critics. Even the band themselves didn’t like it stating in the liner notes to their 1995 Greatest Hits album “Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus!” that “if you wanted to make a parody of Roxette, it would probably sound something like this”. Erm, no. This is how a parody of Roxette sounds..

Anyway, “Almost Unreal” was from the film Super Mario Bros which I’ve never seen but I’m led to believe stank out every cinema it played in around the world. Just like Roxette not liking their song from it, the film’s star Bob Hoskins was even more scathing about the actual movie.

“The worst thing I ever did? Super Mario Brothers. It was a fuckin’ nightmare. The whole experience was a nightmare. It had a husband-and-wife team directing, whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks their own agent told them to get off the set! Fuckin’ nightmare. Fuckin’ idiots.”
Hattenstone, Simon (August 3, 2007). “The Method? Living it out? Cobblers!”. The Guardian.

The song was originally intended for the film Hocus Pocus hence the lyric “I love when you do that hocus pocus to me” but was pulled at the last minute and transferred to the Super Mario Bros project. The soundtrack featured an eclectic collection of artists from Megadeth to Charles and Eddie to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch via Us3 (more of whom later).

Host Mark Franklin gives what must be one of the most underwhelming introductions in TOTP history. “Here’s a song that’s done well gradually” he tells us. Gradually?! You couldn’t have gone with “Here’s a song that’s climbing the charts” or “Here’s a song that’s finally getting the recognition it deserves” Mark? Anyway, the record is “The Key The Secret” by Urban Cookie Collective.

Now to be fair to Franklin, the single did take a while to climb the charts and had quite the gestation period. It was released in its original format on the tiny Unheard Records label but when a remix of it sent clubbers rushing to their nearest dance floor, it was given a bigger push on Pulse 8. Even then, radio was resistant to its crossover appeal but when it finally entered the Top 40, they couldn’t cock a deaf ‘un (as my Dad might say) any longer. It would go on to rise as high as No 2 and become one of the biggest dance tunes of the decade.

The hanging gold key in the background to this performance has a nativity play scenery feel to it but then apparently the song was written about taking magic mushrooms so maybe it looked better if you were under the influence.

For my money, OMD have one of the best back catalogue’s of Top 40 hits out there. By 1993 though, I’d lost sight of them completely to the extent that this single – “Dream Of Me (Based On Love’s Theme)” passed me by completely. The second of three singles released from the patchy “Liberator” album, it was structured around the 1974 US No 1 “Love’s Theme” by Barry White’s The Love Unlimited Orchestra. I was only five when the original was a hit but didn’t Gary Davies use it to soundtrack ‘The Sloppy Bit’ of his Radio 1 show? I think he did.

Anyway, back to OMD and whilst I can appreciate the idea of what Andy McCluskey was trying to do with the track, I’m not entirely sure he pulls it off. Supposedly the single version is different from its album counterpart with the Barry White samples stripped out but I’m not sure that I can tell the difference having listened to both. Whichever version it is on TOTP, at least the slower bpm of the track has toned down McCluskey’s legendary wiggy dancing.

OMD would only return to the UK Top 40 one more time in 1996 with the rather lovely “Walking On The Milky Way”.

The Breakers are the reason that there’s thirteen songs on tonight’s show as there’s five of them! The first three are all dance tunes starting with “Take A Free Fall” by Dance 2 Trance.

This was the follow up to “Power Of American Natives” but I couldn’t really care less about that. What’s intriguing me about this track is the guy in the video zooming about on some sort of flying Minecraft piece. The look of it reminded me of something and I finally remembered what it was…

Go to 2:33

It’s all about the record labels tonight. After name checking Cooltempo earlier here comes an act that you can’t talk about without mentioning the legendary record label that they were on. Us3 were all about Blue Note Records the American jazz label which released recordings by everybody from Miles Davis to Art Blakey to Horace Silver (and yes I only know those names from the jazz section of every Our Price store I ever worked in). Not only were they signed to the label but their debut album “Hand On The Torch” only featured samples from tracks that were released by Blue Note. Even their name came from an album produced by Alfred Lion, the founder of Blue Note Records. They were totally committed.

“Tukka Yoot’s Riddim” was the jazz-rappers’ first chart hit when it peaked at No 34 (btw another song that Mark Franklin described using the word ‘gradually’ – “this song’s getting there gradually” he says) but I reckon most people know them for their hit “Cantaloop” which was their biggest chart placing when it was rereleased after this single and made No 23. I must admit to sometimse confusing them with the similarly named Oui 3 who were their chart peers.

And another dance tune! This one is from techno ravers N–Joi and their “The Drumstruck EP”. This was their belated follow up to “Live In Manchester EP” that was a No 12 hit in February of 1992. It all sounds like a load of bleeps to me. Much more interesting is that one of the guys in N-Joi was called Mark Franklin! How did TOTP host Mark Franklin not comment on this in his intro?!

“The Drumstruck EP” peaked at No 33.

Around 1992/93 was the time in REM’s career when they did the whole Michael Jackson thing. I don’t mean they bought a chimpanzee and called it Bubbles though. No. They were releasing loads of tracks from their latest album as singles. “Nightswimming” was the fifth of six singles to come off the “Automatic For The People” album and like its immediate predecessor “Everybody Hurts”, it was quite the melancholic number. Based around Mike Mills’s memorable piano melody and not much else, it remains a beautiful piece of music. It was recorded at the same studio where Derek And The Dominos laid down “Layla” with Mills playing the same piano that was used in its famous coda.

In my head, this was only released as a limited edition 10” but I can’t find anything to substantiate that online and in any case, that would have severely limited its chart potential so maybe I just imagined it.

“Nightswimming” peaked at No 27.

Just what we all needed. A retread of a Grease song by an ex-Neighbours soap star. We’d been in similar territory just two years before when Jason Donovan took “Any Dream Will Do” to No 1 when the single was released to promote the soundtrack to the West End version of Joseph And The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat he was starring in. In 1993, it was the turn of Jason’s Neighbours pal Craig McLachlan to advertise the West End show he was in which was Grease via the track “You’re The One That I Want” with 80s popster Debbie Gibson.

Look, one of my abiding childhood memories is that of the Summer of 1978 when the film version of Grease was everywhere and you couldn’t escape from John Travolta and Olivia Newton John so I have a great affection for the songs from it but if you were going to buy any of its music then surely you’d go for the film soundtrack and not the 1993 London Cast Recording album? From Craig and Debbie’s perspectives, it was probably a good career move as both of their time as a pop star was coming to an end and I’m sure they were great in the show but this all seemed a tad unnecessary.

After that little Grease interlude, we’re back onto the dance music as Utah Saints graduate from being a Breaker last week to appearing in the studio this with “I Want You”.

I’d liked their other singles up to this point but this one was rather lost on me possibly because it didn’t employ a vocal sample like its predecessors with the band’s Jez Willis provided the vocals instead. I can think of at least two other songs called “I Want You” I’d rather listen to. Firstly there’s the Inspiral Carpets / Mark E Smith collaboration from 1994:

Then there this wonderfully atmospheric track from Elvis Costello’s 1986 album called “Blood And Chocolate”…

OK, so this show has been dominated by dance singles of various hues but I do think that Stanley Appel’s stewardship of TOTP did try and reflect other musical genres. The other week they had The Levellers on and now here’s another band who would have been considered outside of the mainstream. So much so that this was the band’s first (and I’m guessing last) ever appearance in the TOTP studio. The Waterboys though were on a roll (for them) with a second consecutive Top 40 hit in “Glastonbury Song”.

The follow up to “The Return Of Pan”, it was the second single from their “Dream Harder” album which was seen as possessing a much harder rock sound than previously heard form them but it came at a cost causing those old musical differences to splinter the existing line up. Mike Scott was left as the only true member of the band and the album was completed with session musicians. The next logical step was for Scott to go full solo and he did do with the next two releases put out under his own name.

He certainly looks like a solo act in this performance as everything centres around him and his floppy, red hat. In fact, the headgear, the long hair and being sat permanently at his keyboards, he reminds me a bit of Gilbert O’Sullivan in his 70s heyday. The song’s not bad actually and possibly the most radio friendly since “The Whole Of The Moon”. Oh and apparently, The Waterboys have had more members than the aforementioned Mark E. Smith’s The Fall. No really.

Talking of ‘aforementioned’ people, here’s Jason Donovan. I know, I can’t believe he had another TOTP appearance in him but this really was the last knockings of his pop career. In fact, this must be his final time on the show. How do I know? Because this single “All Around The World” didn’t even make the Top 40 and he didn’t release another single until 2007 and the show finished in 2006. The song really is a stinker, just awful. Talk about going out on a low. Jason has found gainful employment though and is now fronting an advertising campaign for the People’s Postcode Lottery.

Take That still hold the No 1 spot with “Pray”. We get the video this week and it’s basically just the lads getting their pecs out with chests being bared roughly every five seconds. It was pure titillation for their army of teenage girl fans. At least they didn’t get the jelly out like they did for their very first single “Do What U Like”. Small mercies and all that.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Shara Nelson	Down That Road	No but my wife had the album
2	Roxette	Almost Unreal	No
3	Urban Cookie Collective	The Key The Secret	Nope
4	OMD	Dream Of Me (Based On Love’s Theme)	Not but I have its on a Greatest Hits album I think
5	Dance 2 Trance	Take A Free Fall	Negative
6	Us3	Tukka Yoot’s Riddim	Nah
7	N-Joi	The Drumstuck EP	Never happening
8	REM	Nightswimming	No but I had their album
9	Craig McLachlan and Debbie Gibson	You’re The One That I Want	As if
10	Utah Saints	I Want You	But I didn’t want you
11	The Waterboys	Glastonbury Song	I did not
12	Jason Donovan	All Around The World	Ha! Of course not
13	Take That	Pray	And no

Disclaimer

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

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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001c1qs/top-of-the-pops-22071993