We’re still in April 1988 here at TOTP Rewind. I am in my second year as a student at Sunderland Polytechnic and living in a shared house with four other guys. In the real world outside of my student bubble, two days after this TOTP was broadcast, Liverpool would win the old First Division championship and a day later Luton would beat Arsenal in the League Cup final when that competition was still considered a big deal and not a consolation bauble for the top six clubs. I watched that game – one of the very few live games shown back then and therefore an event- in my housemate Mark’s room along with the rest of the house as he had a TV. A classic see-saw contest was decided in the last minute by a goal that was set up by, as Brian Moore described it, ‘the cultured left foot of Ashley Grimes’. Always stuck with me that for some reason. Isn’t this supposed to be a blog about 80s pop music and not football though? Indeed, but there is a nice bit of serendipity at play here. Luton’s second goal that day was scored by one Danny Wilson. You see where I’m going with this?
Tonight’s presenters are Simon Bates who turns in a performance worse than Arsenal’s Gus Caesar in that ’88 League Cup final (watch the video for that Danny Wilson goal) and Peter Powell who has done his best to upset my football themed post by turning up dressed as a cricketer. First act tonight are S’Express with “Theme From S’Express” at No 3 on its way to the No 1 spot. Faced with the usual problems of how to make a dance record with lots of samples in it look like a coherent and entertaining performance in the TOTP studio, Mark Moore and pals have gone all 70s funk with leopard print coats, massive winged collars and an impossibly tall black woman (6’2” in her heels according to Bates) with a towering afro…and it just about works.
Huge all over Europe, “Theme From S’Express” was a hit in the dance charts in the US but failed to make any meaningful headway in the Billboard Hot 100 peaking at No 91.
Still promoting his “Faith” album hard is George Michael next. “One More Try” was the fourth of six singles released from it in the UK. A biggish hit over here (No 8) it was huge in the US where it was a No 1. America couldn’t get enough of our George at this time. Four of the singles released from “Faith” went to No 1 over there and his 43 US date “Faith” tour grossed a total of $15 million with Michael performing to over 750,000 fans.
I remember quite liking this one at the time but listening to it today it does seem like quite the plodder and just ever so slightly self indulgent – it’s nearly six minutes in length! The video is all moody lighting and shadowy greyness in keeping with the song’s sombre feel but it just feels a bit laboured to me in comparison to other Michael ballads like “A Different Corner” for example.
A further two singles would be lifted from “Faith” in this country before the year was out.
Oh man! This record! This record!! This will always be with me not least because I used it as a case study for dissertation in my final year at Sunderland Polytechnic. Danny Wilson (that name again) had twice tried to seek a path into the Top 40 with “Mary’s Prayer” prior to this but both previous attempts had fallen short. Their record label Virgin must have had faith in the song though and put it out for a third time when it made it all the way to No 3. I thought this was (and remains) a great record. Just a minute…I’m going to dig out my dissertation and see what I wrote about it…
….blimey there’s loads of it! Hang on again…
…OK, well my dissertation was about the mechanics of success in the music industry and why sone songs were successful and other’s weren’t. I decided to base my case study of “Mary’s Prayer” around two lines of enquiry:
- an analysis of the musical composition of the song
- an analysis of the song’s marketing and promotion
What did I know about musical composition? Nothing at all so I was teamed up with one of the Polytechnic’s music lecturers called Brian who told me all about chord structures, added note chords, song arrangements, key changes and bridge sections. I wrote down everything Brian said and regurgitated it into my dissertation. I actually sound like I know what I’m writing about reading it back. I describe “Mary’s Prayer” as having a ‘basic ballad sound’ with ‘relatively simple chord structure of F, G, G/A and Am…which is always resolved by the calm interval of the perfect 5th.’ Ooh get me! There’s more…
‘The verses are always resolved by the C chord before a major hook is used to lead into the song’s chorus. There is always a piano guitar flourish to denote the end of the verses and start of a chorus and also a slight pause before the voice comes in’
I go on to talk about the song’s lyrics borrowing a lot from Catholic imagery and that deliberate play on the word ‘careless’ (I used to be so careless as if I couldn’t care less).
My conclusion was that this analysis did not define any rigid factors which explain the song’s success. So basically I didn’t know what I was talking about and I hadn’t proved anything. For the record, Brian thought the song was very unremarkable but what did he know.
Analysing the song and the band’s promotion I decided that it was clear that Virgin viewed Danny Wilson as a band with a career ahead of them and that their appeal was definitely in their music rather than their image. Anyone watching their TOTP performance here could have told you that though.
I concluded that I didn’t know why “Mary’s Prayer” was the band’s only success up to that point and that my dissertation had not revealed any radically significant findings. The irony of the whole thing was that a few months after I had submitted my dissertation and left Sunderland Polytechnic, the band finally did have another Top 40 hit single in “The Second Summer Of Love” which reached No 23.
Anyway, all of the above is why this particular single will forever be a part of me which I hope I have demonstrated on this post in a way that I never could prove my point in my dissertation.
This week’s Breakers...
Oh man! This record! This record!! This record…was soooooo bad…and yet its hard to give it the slagging that it so obviously deserves as it was for charity. Even so – it really was the bottom of the shit barrel. Pat & Mick were Capital FM DJs Pat Sharp and Mick Brown but let’s be honest, nobody remembers Mick Brown because he didn’t have Pat Sharp’s ludicrous hair. To be fair, Pat was already known to TOTP audiences as he had appeared as a presenter on the show earlier in the decade but now he was back as a bona fide Top 40 act and God help us all! Now apparently “Let’s All Chant” was originally recorded by the Michael Zager Band and was critically well received on its release in 1978 and was regarded as a classic of the disco era. I wasn’t aware of the original version at the time of Pat & Mick’s abomination and duly dismissed it as absolute crud (and I was right to do so). I just couldn’t stand the ‘Ooh-ah, Ooh-ah’ refrain that ran throughout it and will always associate it with the hordes that assembled down at Lexington Avenue nightclub in Hull which I must have attended back in the day as my wife is from Hull.
I think I obliterated from my memory that Pat & Mick released an annual disco cover version for six years in the name of charity including the likes of “I Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet” and “Use It Up and Wear It Out” – charity singles, as ever, have a lot to answer for.
I could never get along with this single but my housemate Roy loved it. Will Downing was (and still is) an American R&B singer who is, according to his website, known as ‘The Prince of Sophisticated Soul’ although reading that today was the first time I’ve ever heard him referred to as that. “A Love Supreme” was his take on the celebrated John Coltrane piece but it left me cold. Maybe it was the jazz back story to the song that was the cause as I’m left similarly nonplussed by jazz in all its myriad forms. Most of it is just musical wanking to me.
Not quite but not far off a one hit wonder, “A Love Supreme” was by far Will’s biggest hit here reaching No 14. It was from his self titled debut album and in the intervening thirty years since it was released he has recorded a further twenty albums! That’s an awful lot of wanking.
From the ‘The Prince of Sophisticated Soul’ to the ‘Godfather Of Soul” in one move. I’ve said it before in this blog and I’ll say it again – I just don’t get James Brown. Yes I know – musical heresy and all that! I can’t be doing with all that “take it to the bridge” and ‘you know like a sex machine” stuff and don’t get me started on all the stage theatrics! Oh do fuck off!
He was back in our charts in this year with “The Payback Mix 1988” which jumped on the samples bandwagon that every other song released at this time seemed to be doing. As well as a mash up of a load of his own songs, the track also sampled the likes of Otis Redding and Kurtis Blow. However, the only part that I liked was the intro. Isn’t that sound the same as the one used with the logo for Gerry Anderson’s Century 21’s production company that made all those great puppet series like Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet? You know, this one…
Right,now listen to the intro on “The Payback Mix 1988″…
See? I’m sure someone could tell me the exact source for the James Brown sample but I’m really not interested as I really can’t stand James Brown.
For the love of God Bates! Don’t you ever get anything right It’s “She’s Like the Wind” not “She Likes The Wind”! Just unforgivable incompetence. Anyway, this is of course from the soundtrack to one of the biggest films of the decade Dirty Dancing and as well as singing on it, the film’s male lead Patrick Swayze also co-wrote it. It’s actually credited to ‘Patrick Swayze & Wendy Fraser’ with Fraser being his co-writer Stacy Widelitz’s then girlfriend.
I always found it to be a fairly unremarkable soft rock ballad but it was a huge No 3 hit in the US and a reasonable sized No 17 over here. I also have an issue with the fact that, like its fellow soundtrack hit “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life”, it’s totally out of synch with the rest of the early 60s songs featured in the film. If I was making a film about the 80s, I wouldn’t have some, I dunno, 90s Britpop tracks in it!
“She’s Like The Wind” wasn’t Patrick’s only foray into songwrtiting. His Wikipedia entry lists another song that he wrote called “Sweet June Farts”! Years later and before his untimely death in 2009, I saw Swayze in a production of Guys and Dolls in London’s West End. He got a tremendous reaction from the audience as he came on stage (including some screams) and he was great in it to be fair.
Jermaine Stewart? Again?! Blimey, his record pluggers were doing him proud. For a very ordinary dance pop record in my humble opinion, “Get Lucky” was getting some decent exposure. Specialist re-issue label Cherry Red Records retrospectively increased the song’s life when it released a deluxe edition of parent album “Say It Again” recently which included the original 12 tracks and twenty additional tracks including four different versions of “Get Lucky”. I’m sorry, I know its a posthumous release so I should show some respect but really, does anybody need that in their lives?
More Simon Bates drivel next. What the fuck is he babbling on about in his introduction here?! “There’s a lady who always has a Summer hit…third time lucky it’s Spring into Summer..at No 6 Hazell Dean in Top Of The Pops with “Who’s Leaving Who”. What?! OK – let’s break this down:
- Hazell Dean didn’t always have a Summer Hit. She had one four years previous to this. She had not had a hit record since then.
- Third time lucky? What’s third time lucky? If he’s meaning that she’s finally had a hit after two flops then that is untrue. She released six singles between her last hit “Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go)” and “Who’s Leaving Who” none of which made the Top 40.
- Spring into Summer? OK April would certainly count as Spring but Summer was way off so why even mention Summer in the first place?
The unfathomable bollocks that Bates spoke on this programme! If that were not enough we then had to endure Peter Powell getting in on the act at the song’s end. ‘It’s a bright, young, fresh hit single…’ he blathers. With the upmost respect to Hazell Dean, I don’t think anyone would have described her or her sound as bright, young and fresh. She was 35 at the time which, admittedly is 16 years younger than I am now, but was probably the older end of the scale for pop stars in an era when the likes of Tiffany, Debbie Gibson and Bros were all teenagers having huge success.
Hazell didn’t seem put off by any of this tripe though and puts in a solid, committed performance as she always did. She was a bit like the James Milner of 80s pop stars in many ways but better looking and not boring. Hmm…not sure that analogy actually works.
Top 10:
10. Michael Jackson and Jackson 5 – “I Want You Back ’88 Remix
9. Bros – “Drop The Boy”
8. Pebbles – “Girlfriend”
7. Bananarama – “I Want You Back”
6. Hazell Dean -“Who’s Leaving Who”
5. Natalie Cole – “Pink Cadillac”
4. Fleetwood Mac – “Everywhere”
3. S’Express – “Theme From S’Express”
2. Climie Fisher – “Love Changes Everything”
1. Pet Shop Boys – “Heart”: I think this is the first time we’ve seen the Nosferatu themed video for this one. Fine actor though he is, I’m not sure the scenes with Sir Ian McKellen as a vampire figure actually add anything to the visual depiction of the song. It’s possible it looked more affecting back then – maybe our expectations of film and TV have grown so exponentially due to technology ‘s advancements that anything from the past looks – well… a bit shit by comparison I suppose.
Two songs in the Top 10 with the same title! Not the same song though obviously. Whilst Bananarama were peddling their latest Stock, Aitken and Waterman ditty “I Want You Back”, The Jackson 5 or Michael Jackson with The Jackson 5 as it was packaged were tearing it up with “I Want You Back ’88 Remix”. The original 1969 US No 1 is considered one of the most sampled songs in all of hip-hop history having been used over 60 times by the likes of Jay-Z and The Notorious B.I.G. Indeed in 1988, it had featured heavily in Eric B and Rakim’s “I Know You Got Soul” single. Given the renewed interest in the track, I guess it was no surprise that Motown decided to re-release it with a fashionable remix which incorporates their other copycat hit “ABC”. It was also a tie-in with the 30th anniversary of Motown being founded. As with everything in this year though, there was a SAW connection as the remix was produced by the PWL studio’s Phil Harding who coincidentally did some of the remixes for that Jermaine Stewart album re-issue. This blog isn’t just thrown together you know.
The video features the The Jackson 5ive cartoon which ran from 1971-72 and which I can just about remember from my very early childhood days (along with the The Osmonds cartoon).
You cannot deny the irrepressible joy that bursts from this song so I won’t try to. A deservedly recognised classic.
| Order of appearance | Artist | Song | Did I Buy it? |
|
1 |
S’Express | Theme From S’Express | No but my wife had their album ‘Original Soundtrack’ |
|
2 |
George Michael | One More Try | No but my sister had the Faith album |
|
3 |
Danny Wilson | Mary’s Prayer | Yes! Yes! Yes! |
|
4 |
Pat & Mick | Let’s All Chant | No! No! No! |
|
5 |
Will Downing | A Love Supreme | No but my housemate Roy had the album I think |
|
6 |
James Brown | The Payback Mix 1988 | I took it to the bridge and chucked it over the side – No! |
|
7 |
Patrick Swayze | She’s Like The Wind | No but I think my wife had the Dirty Dancing soundtrack |
|
8 |
Jermaine Stewart | Get Lucky | Not my bag at all |
|
9 |
Hazell Dean | Who’s Leaving Who | No |
|
10 |
Pet Shop Boys | Heart | No but I have it on their “Pop Art” collection CD |
|
11 |
Michael Jackson with The Jackson 5 | I want You Back ’88 Remix | Don’t think so |
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/m0007778/top-of-the-pops-21041988
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/2018/04/april-20-may-3-1988.html
TOTP Rewind - the 80s 