The Rolling "Top of the Pops" BBC4 Revival thread.

story of '84 on over the weekend and what i think was Mike Reid trying to rewrite history when talking about Relax. he said he was doing a chart rundown show and they were overrunning so he was looking for something to cut...

best of the tube on London Live covering a lot of the same ground recently - siouxsie, frankie, lauper, madonna...

This follow up single from Vanilla Ice is so dire that I'd completely forgotten about it "your body's getting hot yo, so I can smell it"

When I was at sixth form college I had a Saturday job in FADS ('the paint and paper people'). At the start of 1991 the manager decided to jazz things up a bit and replaced the nondescript muzak with something that he thought would get the customers rolling in: more muzak, but this time reinterpretations of current hits. So there's a lot of songs here that are sending shivers down my spine as I recall hour after boring hour of peeling old price tags off of tins of paint / selling rolls of wallpaper to the soundtrack of naff cover versions by cheap session musicians played on an endless loop week after week. I know the Queen song, the Robert Palmer song, the Seal song, the Candi Staton song inside out...but only in their reimagined form. They even had Do the fucking Bart Man on the tape. Devotion by Nomad is actually pretty good, but not when the rap is delivered by what sounded like a very bored Dale Winton.

FADS, like DER, Rumbelows, Do It All and Timothy Whites - all long-gone fixtures of the late 80s/early 90s high street.

Because I am old, I tend to think of FADS as a new thing, as that’s what Ellison’s in Liscard became - where my older brother was sacked from his Saturday job for refusing to unload the van in torrential rain. It’s one thing to turn up at Eric’s covered in paint, but looking like a drowned rat wasn’t on.

This run of TotPs still uniformly bad - constantly dreadful choices from the chart, the odd gem.

mbv in chart rundown during first show, but i'm guessing they went out in time for the second show.

instead we have people like steffi who looks like she could do with a good meal.

To Here Knows When on Top of the Pops would have been incredible

I missed the chart rundown on the radio, apparently that was something...

Yeah, I definitely remember hearing it on the radio on the Sunday evening. It didn't exactly fit in with the rest of the charts.

That DJH performance was an absolute shocker.

MBV on the R1 chart rundown was Tommy Vance. “Incredible atmosphere on that record” he said. I took my AM/FM Walkman with me to David Collett Hall just to hear it (koogs will know that place).

I'm surprised that the isn't anything eps didn't at least scrape the charts.

railway children and Julian cope deserve a mention. the Xpansions not so much.

(never got any nearer to david collett than the library, despite being in elvyn richards for 3 years - every place i had reason to go to was in the other direction)

(I had a poke around campus on Google the other day - much of it has changed, and some of it (which must have been there in the early '90s) didn't seem familiar. Students Union doesn't look how I remember it at all).

Get out of town Xpansions is a banger, Railways Children so boring.

The Chart Show played the video for "Swallow"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSR0-X6nwpA

it's odd when you think how there were only four TV channels and a very limited amount of music programmes at this point, that this got the playout over something more conventional

And on a Saturday lunchtime too.

Living Colour - what happened to them? I only remember this one song
N-Joi - woo!
Neds Atomic Dustbin - they look bad and it's a totally forgettable song. I saw them about a month after this in Kilburn (because my best friend was a big fan of them), but they never really did it for me (though I will confess to buying Kill Your Television)

NAD always one of those bands where the name was far more memorable than the music.

'The One And Only' written by Nik Kershaw apparently as 'one of those songs he had to get out of his system'.

Why did they miss number 11 out of the chart run down? Some kind of Gulf War censorship (like 'Massive' instead of 'Massive Attack')? Anyone know what it was?

Anyway, Ride and the Happy Mondays. I'm keeping this one.

It's 'All Right Now' by Free.
https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/singles-chart/19910310/7501/

That's weird. They'd played it in three previous weeks and then decided to pretend it didn't exist.

if it’s the week where Ride’s “Unfamiliar” was at 14 and Happy Mondays’ “Loose Fit” at 25, it was the remix of The Free’s “All Right Now” at 11.

ha

I really could have happily lived the rest of my life without being reminded of Hale & Pace doing the Stonk.

they were only listing the new entries and climbers in the charts for some reason

28/03/1991 - With Dannii Minogue, James and Chesney Hawkes.

04/04/1991 - With Inspiral Carpets, N-Joi and Chesney Hawkes.

I'd forgotten how Chesney Hawkes was fucking everywhere for a few months in 1991.

[insert obvious joke]

number one for 5 weeks, wasn't it?

In late 1991 I was reading a review in a computer magazine of a particular high end laptop. The reviewer was really enthusiastic and said that if they had the money they'd buy one straight away. However they then talked themselves out of it because 'in six months it'll be just another Chesney Hawkes amoung computers'.

It would be the one and only?

Rolling Stones doing a strong entry in the "vague protest songs that are about nothing really" subgenre I discussed above.

The Wonderstuff's 'Size Of A Cow' - guaranteed to cause chaos on the dancefloor of the twice weekly student night in your nearest town's 'free entry with student ID all drinks 50p all night' toilet club.

I’d totally forgotten Lana Pillay was on this Gary Clail track! A small highlight.

cheesy wotsit

two more very skippable shows. but the charts are strangely full of things they still play - losing my religion, sit down (never liked this), whole of the moon...

hate the holes in the chart rundown though

Why holes?

they are only reading out the new entries and climbers

Oh right, ta

Nicky Campbell just read out ZZ Top which was a non mover this particular week.

still not doing fallers though

You forget Blur were new on when Delasoul were up to “Ring ring ring” and the KLF were on the Train to Trancentral etc

Oh Propaganda are on!

(Sky arts)

Hah, just caught “Duel”… Claudia Brucken seemed a bit nervous and unsure, but still a delight to stumble across.

whilst also single handedly destroying the ozone layer

(lol 80s hair)

psycho candy era Mary chain too, from the tube. nice matt black guitar Jim has, unplayed.

some talk from Ian Mac, and now the cocteaus...

is that one of fuzzbox playing with klf? and Harold from the Halifax?

That's Cressdia who was married to Jimmy Cauty at the time.

Haha, wow, that Frances Nero song - I was totally convinced it was a cover of Sister Sledge Thinking of You to begin with. A bigger rip-off you could not find.

gosh yes! it's that song with 90s naffcore production and a load of 60s motown elements (strings, horns, backing vox). i do vaguely like it, but it is kind of awful. don't thing i've ever seen a bargain bin without a copy?