After last week’s presenter debut for Nicky Campbell we have another one straight away as Mark Goodier makes his TOTP bow. As he’s the newbie they’ve paired him up with the very experienced but rarely seen by this point Peter Powell. Goodier is taking it all very seriously by donning a suit (he must have been stifling under those studio lights) which looks more appropriate for a wedding than presenting a pop music show.
Opening tonight are The Primitives with “Crash”. Yes it wasn’t all samples and house music in 1988 – there was still some indie music going on. Fronted by the ridiculously named Tracy Tracy, they were briefly the darlings of the indie pop world when the high-octaned speedster of a tune that was “Crash” took them from inkie music mag credibility to the Top 5. And it is a tune! After the initial jangly guitar intro, it goes full throttle and hell for leather to its conclusion.
Around this time, the band came to Sunderland Poly where I was studying to play a gig and I went along to cover it for the student newspaper. I can’t recall too much about it but I did manage to get some photos of the band in action (alongside the backs of many people’s heads in the audience). I’d managed to borrow a copy of their previous single “Thru The Flowers” from the Poly radio station to review as a build up to the gig but I don’t think I ever even played it as it was on vinyl and I didn’t have turntable at the time.
Later in the year, their nemesis Transvision Vamp would clean up in the charts with sexually confrontational lead singer Wendy James becoming the media’s favourite go to source for a controversial quote. They would also be challenged for their own position as No 1 indie pop band fronted by a woman when The Darling Buds garnered some chart success but my Darling Buds story is for a future post.
Oh Christ! It’s Morrissey! He’s become such an objectionable figure in his old age that even his die hard fans are struggling to defend his far right views. Back in 1988 though, things looked much more encouraging for Mozza. “Suedehead” was his first solo material since the split of The Smiths and it sounded pretty good to me on first hearing and I wasn’t the biggest fan of his former band by any means. It charted higher than any Smiths single ever had and the NME described it as ‘The best No. 1 ’88 never gave us’ in their review of the year.
The video sees Morrissey indulging his passion for the actor James Dean by mooching around Dean’s hometown of Fairmount, Indiana. In fact the promo is littered with homages to Dean but Morrissey recreating the image of his idol playing bongos in a field of cows is just a bit too much for me.
About three years ago, I aw Morrissey live for the first time ever and he opened the show with “Suedehead” and I suddenly realised that I had forgotten how good a song it is. Shame he’s such a twat these days.
Due to its progress up the UK Top 40, Vanessa Paradis has flown into the country to appear on TOTP in person this week. She’s got three sax players up there with her on stage two of which are playing it for laughs with their jaunty choreographed dance steps. The third one is playing it straight though and moves very little throughout. I wonder if this was how they rehearsed it or were they all meant to do the little dance and the third guy said “Nah, fuck that” at the last minute.
Paradis is now 46 but “Joe Le Taxi” is still what she is mostly remembered for in this country I would guess. I’m glad nothing I did at 14 defined me as much but then even this awful track is way cooler than the nerd I was at that age.
Four Breakers this week and we start off with that fella Rick Astley who is back with his fourth single “Together Forever”. The video is nothing special but if it looks familiar it’s because it was featured on TOTP the other week when Gary Davies visited the set to present Astley with his BPI award for ‘Best Single of the Year’. Why didn’t he get it on the night of the awards? A late running schedule meant that he was bumped so that The Who could perform on stage. There was a bit of a furore in the press in the aftermath with Rick being reported as being so upset that he was seen leaving the night in tears! He denied it of course in an interview with Smash Hits magazine.
As for the song itself, identified by Stock, Aitken and Waterman as one of the album’s strongest tracks (by which I mean infernally catchy), it was deliberately held back from being released as the follow up to “Never Gonna Give You Up” so that it could give the album an extra sales stimulus later in its shelf life when it might be flagging. Like them or loathe them, SAW knew the strengths of their own songs and “Together Forever” was duly a No 2 hit in the UK and a No 1 in the US.
This next video is epic in the true sense of the word. It cost £50,000 to make and was four and a half months in the planning of the logistics of getting fifteen people and masses of camera, sound and lighting equipment to the ancient city of Petra in the Jordanian desert. Throw in some horses, camels, Bedouins and a Jordanian air force helicopter and Bob’s your uncle. “Dominion” was the follow up single to The Sisters Of Mercy‘s last hit “This Corrosion” and was cut very much from the same cloth. Bombastic and with that huge cathedral of sound it was …well…epic and so needed an epic looking video to go with it I guess. Was all that time, effort and money that went into the video really worth it to secure a No 13 hit? I’m not so sure but I did quite like the song and this more commercial version of the band
One of my earliest musical memories is listening to my Dad’s Eddie Cochran greatest hits LP. I loved that record and still love Eddie’s music to this day. I do recall the advert that it featured in as it was the latest Levi’s one but I didn’t realise that “C’Mon Everybody” made it back into the charts on the back of it but it’s no surprise given the midas touch that any song featured in those campaigns was bestowed with around this time.
Eddie died in a car crash aged just 21 in 1960 and I feel that he doesn’t always get talked about in the same revered tones as that other great 50s star Buddy Holly who also died tragically young in a plane crash. He wasn’t just a good looking rock star, he was also an innovator in terms of musical techniques experimenting with overdubbing and multi track recording. His influence didn’t stop there though. His song “Twenty Flight Rock” was the catalyst for Paul McCartney joining John Lennon in The Quarrymen as Lennon was impressed by McCartney knowing all the words and chords. The rest as they say….
The re-release of “C’Mon Everybody” made No 14 in the charts.
This was quite an oddity. George Harrison‘s follow up to “Got My Mind Set On You” was a very retro effort, not only channeling The Beatles’ more psychedelic moments (with its inclusion of a sitar) but also making a direct (and some may say clunky) reference to their ‘Fab Four’ moniker. To be honest, I always found “When We Was Fab” a little lightweight albeit not without a modicum of charm.
The Godley and Creme directed video is quirkily curious but it does feel the need to ram the Beatles references down the viewers throats with cameos from Ringo and a left handed walrus bassist.
“When We Was Fab” peaked at No 25 on the UK Top 40. A third single released from the “Cloud Nine” album called “This Is Love” flopped at a lowly No 55 but its place as a footnote in musical history is assured by virtue of the fact that its original B-side was going to be a track called ‘Handle With Care”. Warner Records thought it was too good to be thrown a way in such a manner and kept it back. The rest as they (still) say (again)….
Two repeat studio performances are up next. The Mission were only on the other week but here they are again with “Tower Of Strength” and in the same week when former bandmates The Sisters Of Mercy are on as well. The indie gods of synchronicity clearly at work here. In 2013, lead singer Wayne Hussey described the song thus:
“It’s big. It’s pompous. It’s grandiose. It’s melodramatic.” which pretty much nails it for me (although Peter Powell prefers to call it ‘pure class’). It’s been likened to “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin but that’s probably a lazy comparison based on the fact that the track and the album were produced by Led Zep’s bassist John Paul Jones.
Did I like it? Not that much at the time but I can appreciate its epic sound more listening to it today. Apparently Gary Numan can as well as he is on record as saying he wished he’d written it because of its song structure. Myself and Numan will never come even close to being in the same ball park about anything ever again.
The second song we have seen before is Eddy Grant with “Gimme Hope Jo’Anna” – the record that saw my mate Robin accuse me of being a racist back in 1988 when I said I didn’t like it that much. Peter Powell liked it though describing it as a ‘quite wonderful track’. Even as late as 1988, Pete was still doing that weird intonation thing of his that he’d being doing the whole of the decade as he introduces it as “Gimme Hope (pause) Jo’Anna”. For the record, it didn’t go Top 3 as Powell hoped but peaked at No 7.
Although most of us could only name three Eddy Grant songs (“I Don’t Wanna Dance” and “Electric Avenue” being the other two I’m guessing), Eddy has actually recorded fifteen studio albums during his lengthy career.
Here’s the Top 10…
10. Coldcut featuring Yazz and the Plastic Population – “Doctorin’ The House”
9. Rick Astley – “Together Forever”
8. Eddy Grant – “Gimme Hope Jo’Anna”
7. Jermaine Stewart – “Say It Again”
6. Morrissey – “Suedehead”
5. Tiffany – “I Think We’re Alone Now”
4. Taylor Dayne – “Tell It To My Heart”
3. Billy Ocean- “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car”
2. Bomb The Bass – “Beat Dis”
1. Kylie Minogue – “I Should Be So Lucky”: After last week’s specially recorded video we get the official promo this time with Kylie cast as a ‘girl-next-door’ character. So quite how many different Kylies have there been? Well, I can think of the original wholesome pop puppet one here, there’s disco Kylie (“Better The Devil You Know” etc), dance Kylie (“Confide In Me”), indie Kylie (“Some Kind Of Bliss”), sex Kylie (“Spinning Around” and those hotpants etc) , country Kylie (“Golden” album”) and of course national treasure Kylie (this year’s Glastonbury legends slot).
The play out video is The Bangles with “Hazy Shade Of Winter”. It was featured on the soundtrack to the film Less Than Zero starring Andrew McCarthy who was one of cinema’s biggest young stars at this point on the back of hits like St Elmo’s Fire, Pretty In Pink and Mannequin. I’ve never seen it but it’s based on a Brett Easton Ellis book and given that the only book of his I’ve read before is American Psycho, I might tread carefully.
As for the song itself, writers Simon & Garfunkel performed it in 2003 at their Old Friends concert at Madison Square Garden and it was more in the style of The Bangles than the original I would say…
As for The Bangles, they had one more enormous hit in them which would arrive in 1989. A post for another day…
| Order of appearance | Artist | Song | Did I Buy it? |
|
1 |
The Primitives | Crash | Surely I bought this? Where’s my copy then? |
|
2 |
Morrissey | Suedehead | Liked it but didn’t get around to buying it |
|
3 |
Vanessa Paradis | Joe Le Taxi | No – far too creepy |
|
4 |
Rick Astley | Together Forever | Credibility suicide? No thanks |
|
5 |
The Sisters Of Mercy | Dominion | No – wasn’t quite goth enough |
|
6 |
Eddie Cochran | C’Mon Everybody | Not this re-issue but I now have my own copy of Dad’s best of album |
|
7 |
George Harrison | When We Was Fab | No but my housemate Roy had the album |
|
8 |
The Mission | Tower Of Strength | No but the aforementioned Robin got it on their Greatest Hits CD for a fiver in York! |
|
9 |
Eddie Grant | Gimme Hope Jo’Anna | Nope and I got some abuse for not doing so form my mate Robin |
|
10 |
Kylie Minogue | I Should Be So Lucky | Nope |
|
11 |
The Bangles | Hazy Shade Of Winter | Not the 7” but its on my Best Of CD of theirs |
Disclaimer
OK – here’s the thing – the TOTP episodes are only available on iPlayer for a limited amount of time so the link to the programme below only works for about another month so you’ll have to work fast if you want to catch the whole show as I can’t find the full programme on YouTube.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0006rh6/top-of-the-pops-25021988
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.
Some bed time reading?
http://likepunkneverhappened.blogspot.com/2018/02/february-24-march-8-1988.html
TOTP Rewind - the 80s 