The third and last of this week's top 40s with Eurovision hits atop, and before the listing starts here's a clip on the history of our sceptred isle's success from a 2008 German TV documentary:
This one comes from 18th April 1981, a chart that featured the coming force of Stars On 45 at, erm, 45, the Exploited at 63 and somewhere in the middle (48) My Mum Is One In A Million by Children Of Tansley School. Truly an eclectic age.
40 Department S - Is Vic There?
The mood is mellow? Superior careening new wave with sideways mike holding frontman Vaughan Toulouse, which is really going the long way round in search of the pun.
39 Quincy Jones - Ai No Corrida
Disco soul evergreen co-written and originally recorded by Chas Jankel during one of the periods when he took a break from being Ian Dury's sounding board/punchbag.
38 Dire Straits - Skateaway
A song about watching a girl rollerskate down the road. And that's it. Nobody said serious rock had to be about anything.
37 Echo & The Bunnymen - Crocodiles
The future Electrafixion get to the section labelled 'cool psychedelia (fast)'.
36 David Bowie - Up The Hill Backwards
That difficult moment when Bowie came out the other end of Scary Monsters and had to face up to what his 80s promised.
35 Light Of The World - I'm So Happy/Time
You'd think for all the world this was some religious thing, wouldn't you? Instead it's jazz funk plus a pretend Love Unlimited Orchestra.
34 Roxy Music - Jealous Guy
Mackay and Manzanera were still around but it's hard not to hear this vaguely opportunistic whistle solo-granted emotional sledgehammer and wonder if Bryan hadn't long decided to take it only in his image.
33 Girlschool - Hit And Run
The only top 40 appearance for the post-Leather Tuscadero female element of NWOBHM, they're said to be given their Motorhead connections, though here they appear to be channelling the Go-Gos fronted by Joan Jett.
32 Shalamar - Make That Move
Bodypopping Soul Train disco famous not for the moonwalk, because you have to keep being told Jeffrey Daniel invented that (eh, Jarvis 'I love Michael Jackson really, he invented the moonwalk so he can't be that bad' Cocker?), but for Howard Hewett being the subject of an unprovoked assault.
31 Adam & The Ants - Kings Of The Wild Frontier
A quick reissue of their flop post-reformation debut to fill a six month gap between Young Parisians and that whole highwayman thing. This way round it makes more sense, though, as once you've established Antmusic the ant people and their attendant ambitions would follow.
30 John Lennon - Watching The Wheels
Still dead - in fact, this is the song Mark Chapman was recorded singing while in custody. It didn't get higher than this either, suggesting as much as the legend lives on the record buyers sharply move away.
29 Whitesnake - Don't Break My Heart Again
Coverdale assumes the position.
28 Eddy Grant - Can't Get Enough Of You
Before his socio-political phase, and well before remixers and yoghurt corrupted that bit too.
27 Kool And The Gang - Jones Vs Jones/Summer Madness/Funky Stuff
Some dispute in the camp, we feel.
26 Barry Manilow - Bermuda Triangle
Try to see it from his angle. The Bermuda triangle is one of those legendary things that people always used to talk about as a classic old wives' tale, but we bet kids of today have never come across it. In any case the last such mythologised disappearance happened in 1963 and that was outside the zone.
25 Keith Marshall - Only Crying
Formerly of glam also-rans Hello, now attempting a Cliff Richard goes wet glam schtick.
24 Public Image Limited - Flowers Of Romance
Whether through post-Pistols residuals or a craving for really dark awkwardness PiL stuck around in chart contention for a couple of years. Flowers Of Romance is also the title of a Pistols obscurity and a 1976-77 band Sid Vicious, Keith Levene, Marco Pirroni and two of the Slits had variously been in.
23 Duran Duran - Planet Earth
No sooner had a nation gone "oh, hard Rs?" then guyliner and big frilly shirts were becoming the in thing.
22 Coast To Coast - (Do) The Hucklebuck
Novelty rockabilly revival, that's what 2012 needs. These changed their singer between recording and promotion.
21 Visage - Mind Of A Toy
Second of five charting singles, not bad for a blown up cloakroom boy. Dave Formula, also of Magazine, is on synths, which we mention because we love the glam-bluntness of that name. Dave Formula.
20 Gillan - New Orleans
19 Saxon - And The Band Played On
Much bigger than you'd thought, the whole NWOBHM thing.
18 Spandau Ballet - Musclebound
No, homoeroticism hadn't been invented yet and the Spands were too suave-manly for that anyway. Between To Cut A Long Story Short and Chant No.1 this often gets overlooked but that rhythm track just reeks of gulag.
17 Tony Capstick And The Carlton Main Frickley Colliery Band - Capstick Comes Home/The Sheffield Grinder
Surely Capstick can't have been first to take the piss out of the Hovis adverts, but he was the only one to take it - produced, incidentally, by John Leonard, now producer of Radcliffe & Maconie - to number three. Number three! Imagine if he'd released it a bit later and it'd been vying in the charts to sum up the mood of the nation with Ghost Town.
16 Toyah - Four From Toyah EP
Bluntly titled. It's the one with It's A Mystery on.
15 Bad Manners - Just A Feeling
Actually, for two of Ghost Town's summer-of-riots three weeks at number one immediately below it were Stars On 45 and Bad Manners' Can Can, so it wouldn't have been that out of place at all. This is the usual skanking'n'shouting.
14 The Nolans - Attention To Me
For some reason, as nobody's ever really demanded a Nolans reunion, the four of them have a joint autobiography out. The extracts we've found are an extraordinary hodge-podge of self-regarding carefully smoothed out aimless anecdotage. One story is based around touring South Africa in 1977 with Rolf Harris and the man Bernie calls Stu 'Stewpot' Francis - no, Bernie, that's Ed Stewart - in which the apartheid blockade is given half a sentence of consideration in passing amid descriptions of the scenery and meeting Tom Jones. Why, given most of them have had books out already, would you ever read this? Much as This Morning would give them the soft soap, we managed pretty well without them for two decades.
13 Dave Stewart With Colin Blunstone - What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted
No, the It's My Party Dave Stewart. You should have guessed from the cover material.
12 Hazel O'Connor - D-Days
Supposedly about meeting "bizarre" looking people in a nightclub. By later this same year that would be the norm.
11 Kim Wilde - Kids In America
Kim Smith takes the family stage name, gets a pout going and makes her name first time out. Much covered, never bettering the original, not even when Kim did it herself in 2006 with frankly superfluous co-vocals by Charlotte Hatherley. It's vertical stripes that make a woman look thinner, isn't it?
10 Linx - Intuition
A typically British early 80s funk band, that is to say one white bloke looking askance at the back and a lead member in glasses. In the latter case it was David Grant, later to marry a woman called Carrie without thinking through the implications.
9 The Whispers - It's A Love Thing
The wristy guitar lick type of soul crossover, the sort of thing that clearly influenced the likes of Linx and survived right until Boyz II Men beat it to death with shovels.
8 The Jacksons - Can You Feel It
And their magic dust will heal humanity the world over. God's sake, don't give Michael ideas. Ollie E. Brown, the Clem Cattini of soul, is on this.
7 Sugar Minott - Good Thing Going
Former roots selector gives in to the lovers rock dollar and ends up being covered by Sid Owen. It's alright, Sid Owen has probably forgotten he tried a solo career.
6 Graham Bonnet - Night Games
None more regional ITV news named former Rainbow member goes against the metal grain with some unsubtle grandstanding, aided by Francis Rossi, Rick Parfitt, Cozy Powell and Jon Lord in his band. If you've heard this oversung production number in the last fifteen years it's in passing on a TV advertised, phone order only drivetime rock compilation just before Survivor's Burning Heart.
5 Landscape - Einstein A-Go-Go
Electric flute attack! What a bizarre record this is, even by 1981 standards. It's the band scenes in the video after they get out of the laboratory that reveal its full oddity hand.
4 Ennio Morricone - Chi Mai (Theme From 'Life And Times Of David Lloyd George')
You'd never get a series called Life And Times Of David Lloyd George on BBC1 now, much less one starring someone like Philip Madoc, who you'll know as the U-boat captain Pike is ordered not to give his name to. This you've probably heard on an advert of some description.
3 Stevie Wonder - Lately
The first of Stevie's really big piano ballads, a path that could only lead to singing into telephones.
2 Shakin' Stevens - This Ole House
Not many of his big hits were originals, you know. This one had been around since 1954 and Americans would know the Rosemary Clooney version. As long as he had the opportunity to jump off something in the video, that's all.
1 Bucks Fizz - Making Your Mind Up
And would it have been up there, chat show anecdotage aside, without the velcro fun? It's the Eurovision winner with the fewest number of douze points ever, though that does mean everyone else voted for it somewhere for once. Second was Germany's entry, about a blind boy taunted by his young peers who becomes a popular singer-songwriter encouraging others to overcome their problems. Meanwhile Norway's entry was produced and arranged by Benny Andersson with Agnetha and Anni-Frid on backing vocals. It received nul points. They don't mention that on all those ITV documentaries. There is actually a video for Making Your Mind Up, but like that Save Your Kisses For Me clip that was on a BBC4 TOTP recently it only fitfully remembers there's supposed to be a song involved somewhere.
Showing posts with label only chart that counted. Show all posts
Showing posts with label only chart that counted. Show all posts
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Man's inhumanity to Man
Eurovision old chart number two is from 27th March 1976, and as that's the week before this run of Top Of The Pops on BBC4 started you can guess what's number one, but even so...
40 Gary Glitter - You Belong To Me
With the BBC4 run in mind, sniggering ironists please note that this was Glitter's only hit that year and it didn't get any higher than this. We, meanwhile, wonder what the story is with number 41, La Booga Rooga by Surprise Sisters. What, like on Surprise Surprise?
39 The Doors - Riders On The Storm
In fact the breakout hit thus far, Fox's Goldacre-surprising S-S-S-Single Bed, was played as a potential chart hit, their previous two singles having gone top 20 (in fact the first, Only You Can, got as high as number three, higher than this one managed, yet there being no room for your sweet head is the only Fox record anyone remembers) and didn't reach its height until mid-May. Meanwhile there seems to have been no reason at all for this to be reissued five years after original release - no tie-in best of, no film use, no rejuvenation of the band's legend, and it didn't even achieve the peak of original issue.
38 Rainbow Cottage - Seagull
What a horrible band name, redolent of no musical scene but of restored B&Bs run by retired accountants.
37 Chris White - Spanish Wine
"Not the one from the Zombies" is about the best the online sources can muster.
36 Mary Hopkin - If You Love Me
Fascinating character, Hopkin. Set for big things with Paul McCartney's backing, after Apple fell apart she withdrew from the front line of music to start a family with Tony Visconti but continued to sing backing for him - that's her on Bowie's Sound And Vision, for instance - and returned only here for a guest appearance on a Steeleye Span album and a solitary charting single, an Edith Piaf cover at that. She was in a band called Oasis, sang on the soundtrack of Blade Runner and with the Chieftans, recorded a light classical album in 1989, did the theme for a Billy Connolly series, guested with the Crocketts and "re-recorded Those Were The Days with Robin Williams rapping", and we never want to find out more about that.
35 Dana - Never Gonna Fall In Love Again
Hopkin entered the 1970 Eurovision that Dana won. Five years later Dana was named Best Female Singer In Britain by an NME for which punk well and truly hadn't happened.
34 Pluto Shervington - DAT
Would've been quite disappointing if he turned out to be from Cheshire, wouldn't it? It's a song about a Rasta who loves pork too much and may be the sort of reggae Paul Nicholas had in mind.
33 The O'Jays - I Love Music
It's actually quite difficult to write about soul in this ironic detached style, partly because 90% of the bands have the same backstory - from the eastern seaboard, had someone you've vaguely heard of writing songs for them, had three US R&B Chart hits, still touring with one original member. In this case it's Ohioans taking a turn for the disco with a Gamble and Huff song and they have two original members.
32 Emmylou Harris - Here There And Everywhere
A McCartney song - one John, Paul and George Martin all call one of their very favourite Beatles songs, in fact - given the delicacy treatment.
31 Status Quo - Rain
Twelve bar blues stomp with pouting, as per. But with Rick singing! We can never decide which of Rossi and Parfitt is the more oleaginous.
30 Hot Chocolate - Don't Stop It Now
We feel like we've been writing about Hot Chocolate for most of our lives, and the truth is there is next to nothing interesting about them when it's not one of the songs everybody knows.
29 Harold Melvin And The Bluenotes - Wake Up Everybody
Not a title you can really announce straight after playing someone else's record.
28 The Stylistics - Funky Weekend
The weekdays are just collective letdowns, really.
27 Hank Mizell - Jungle Rock
Intriguing story, Hank's - this was recorded in 1958 and only rediscovered in 1971 when it appeared on a bootleg rockabilly compilation. By that time Mizell had retired and when a label boss heard the album and decided to give it a shot he couldn't be found for weeks. The Fall covered it in the way that the Fall generally do. As we've been saying for weeks in another place, this - the costumes, the facial expressions, the set - is one of humanity's greater achievements. Fox, rabbit, camel and kangaroo in a jungle, Hank?
26 Yvonne Fair - It Should Have Been Me
Perhaps the greatest insult to a Motown African-American and Norman Whitfield protege is to have people on hen nights thinking you're Tina Turner.
25 Manuel And The Music Of The Mountains - Rodrigo's Guitar Concerto De Aranjuez
Actually Max Bygraves' bandleader Geoff Love with one of a number of easy listening cash-ins that predated the John Williams reign, and a track that in February was announced as the new number one before it was realised a computer error had taken hold and it should have been number three. You don't get that with iTunes. Though one day you will. Perhaps even now.
24 David Essex - City Lights
In which David gets the funk and makes the girls, erm, quizzical?
23 Be-Bop Deluxe - Ships In The Night
Reticent guitar hero Bill Nelson and co take a moment out of taking glam in prog directions to attempt a head-on collision between glam stomp, Eno art-rock weirdness and arena keyboard stack indulgence. That got them on pop
telly.
22 Peters And Lee - Hey Mr Music Man
A lot of artists requesting specific heys off people in those days.
21 Elton John - Pinball Wizard
He plays by sense of smell, apparently. Has Elton been in many amusement arcades? Tommy would have tried to flee the building due to the acridity.
20 Eddie Drennon And BBS Unlimited - Let's Do The Latin Hustle
Hustling, as we'll see, was very much the in thing.
19 The Drifters - Hello Happiness
It's a four-four beat, it shouldn't be that difficult to clap along to.
18 10cc - I'm Mandy Fly Me
The great subtle satirists of adult pop bid their farewell as a four-piece with a song about dreaming of getting off with an air hostess from an advert poster, Godley and Creme off after this album campaign to invent morphing. With Kevin and Lol, Art For Art's Sake. Without, Dreadlock Holiday.
17 The Four Seasons - December 1963 (Oh What A Night)
Written about the end of prohibition, allegedly, and Frankie Valli's last song with some sort of lead vocal. Given it was his name above the door that was bound to end badly.
16 M And O Band - Let's Do The Latin Hustle
Van McCoy's The Hustle had been number one the previous June, see, and everyone fancied a piece of that flute-driven library music made good. And yes, this is the same song as number 20.
15 Cliff Richard - Miss You Nights
Cliff's revival hit after a barren couple of years, from an album with the he'd-like-to-think-self-deprecating title I'm Nearly Famous. This was subsequently what nearly everything he released in the 1980s would sound like, bar Wired For Sound and I Just Don't Have The Heart.
14 The Fatback Band - (Do The) Spanish Hustle
Not the same, and not much to do with any previous hustling at all, in fact. There was a UK Hustle, by the way. With that innate sense of British timing, it came out in 1978.
13 John Miles - Music
Four people are John Miles, if his TOTP countdown picture is to be believed. Not keen on music of the present, is he/are they?
12 The Eagles - Take It To The Limit
Randy Meisner gets his way.
11 Randy Edelman - Concrete And Clay
Film and TV score composer has a dig with Unit 4+2's 1965 number one, later the single from Kevin Rowland's infamous My Beauty (an album, by the way, that got four and five stars across the board on release)
10 The Beatles - Yesterday
Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, Daffy Duck.
9 Marmalade - Falling Apart At The Seams
Having kind of kicked around pop for a decade, having a number one with a cover of Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, they split, reformed with one original member (the bassist) and had a top ten single out of nowhere that sounded like Bay City Rollers without the commitment.
8 CW McCall - Convoy
Nothing says mid-70s like a hit based on a fad rather than vice versa. CW McCall was a character that appeared in a series of bread adverts like this, where an assumed tobacco-chewing truck driver narrated his fresh bread-punctuated day. Those were written and sung by one Bill Fries, and when the opportunity for a spinoff came up he took it in a way late 80s Levis copywriters can only wonder at. And in 1978 a
film based on the flimsy premised song! Laurie Lingo And The Dipsticks' Convoy GB was a month away, and that's a whole other world of pain.
7 Gallagher And Lyle - I Wanna Stay With You
They were Scottish, they weren't golfers, they were very supper club.
6 Guys 'n' Dolls - You Don't Have To Say You Love Me
Dusty's signature hit ridden roughshod by six people in jumpsuits, two of whom became Dollar.
5 Glitter Band - People Like You People Like Me
Nothing much really changed chart-wise in two years, did it? More silver trousered wateryness.
4 Barry White - You See The Trouble With Me
Baritone disco-lite later embuggered by Black Legend.
3 Tina Charles - I Love To Love
Do you think she quite emphasises the baby dance loving enough?
2 Billy Ocean - Love Really Hurts Without You
First single straight up there for well meaning disco yearner who would after the following year go seven years without a hit before catching onto the wine bar funk wave. You don't reckon Frank Ocean's name is a reference, do you?
1 Brotherhood Of Man - Save Your Kisses For Me
As previously mentioned an entirely different line-up to that which launched the band seven years earlier, they beat Tony Christie and Frank Ifield to the UK nominacy and then essentially pissed it on the night in The Hague. Note the tremendous behind-you reaction of the females and Bill 'no, he isn't, despite what Wiki says and much as you might like to believe she is' Cotton lurking at the back. Sweden withdrew due to expense and the demonstrations of the previous year, Turkey withdrew when Greece put forward a song about the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus, and Save Your Kisses For Me won a record percentage of the possible maximum score and had the worldwide biggest sales of a winner. And despite all that, given what you know about STN, which version were we likely to post here? Also, don't some people just suit longer hair?
40 Gary Glitter - You Belong To Me
With the BBC4 run in mind, sniggering ironists please note that this was Glitter's only hit that year and it didn't get any higher than this. We, meanwhile, wonder what the story is with number 41, La Booga Rooga by Surprise Sisters. What, like on Surprise Surprise?
39 The Doors - Riders On The Storm
In fact the breakout hit thus far, Fox's Goldacre-surprising S-S-S-Single Bed, was played as a potential chart hit, their previous two singles having gone top 20 (in fact the first, Only You Can, got as high as number three, higher than this one managed, yet there being no room for your sweet head is the only Fox record anyone remembers) and didn't reach its height until mid-May. Meanwhile there seems to have been no reason at all for this to be reissued five years after original release - no tie-in best of, no film use, no rejuvenation of the band's legend, and it didn't even achieve the peak of original issue.
38 Rainbow Cottage - Seagull
What a horrible band name, redolent of no musical scene but of restored B&Bs run by retired accountants.
37 Chris White - Spanish Wine
"Not the one from the Zombies" is about the best the online sources can muster.
36 Mary Hopkin - If You Love Me
Fascinating character, Hopkin. Set for big things with Paul McCartney's backing, after Apple fell apart she withdrew from the front line of music to start a family with Tony Visconti but continued to sing backing for him - that's her on Bowie's Sound And Vision, for instance - and returned only here for a guest appearance on a Steeleye Span album and a solitary charting single, an Edith Piaf cover at that. She was in a band called Oasis, sang on the soundtrack of Blade Runner and with the Chieftans, recorded a light classical album in 1989, did the theme for a Billy Connolly series, guested with the Crocketts and "re-recorded Those Were The Days with Robin Williams rapping", and we never want to find out more about that.
35 Dana - Never Gonna Fall In Love Again
Hopkin entered the 1970 Eurovision that Dana won. Five years later Dana was named Best Female Singer In Britain by an NME for which punk well and truly hadn't happened.
34 Pluto Shervington - DAT
Would've been quite disappointing if he turned out to be from Cheshire, wouldn't it? It's a song about a Rasta who loves pork too much and may be the sort of reggae Paul Nicholas had in mind.
33 The O'Jays - I Love Music
It's actually quite difficult to write about soul in this ironic detached style, partly because 90% of the bands have the same backstory - from the eastern seaboard, had someone you've vaguely heard of writing songs for them, had three US R&B Chart hits, still touring with one original member. In this case it's Ohioans taking a turn for the disco with a Gamble and Huff song and they have two original members.
32 Emmylou Harris - Here There And Everywhere
A McCartney song - one John, Paul and George Martin all call one of their very favourite Beatles songs, in fact - given the delicacy treatment.
31 Status Quo - Rain
Twelve bar blues stomp with pouting, as per. But with Rick singing! We can never decide which of Rossi and Parfitt is the more oleaginous.
30 Hot Chocolate - Don't Stop It Now
We feel like we've been writing about Hot Chocolate for most of our lives, and the truth is there is next to nothing interesting about them when it's not one of the songs everybody knows.
29 Harold Melvin And The Bluenotes - Wake Up Everybody
Not a title you can really announce straight after playing someone else's record.
28 The Stylistics - Funky Weekend
The weekdays are just collective letdowns, really.
27 Hank Mizell - Jungle Rock
Intriguing story, Hank's - this was recorded in 1958 and only rediscovered in 1971 when it appeared on a bootleg rockabilly compilation. By that time Mizell had retired and when a label boss heard the album and decided to give it a shot he couldn't be found for weeks. The Fall covered it in the way that the Fall generally do. As we've been saying for weeks in another place, this - the costumes, the facial expressions, the set - is one of humanity's greater achievements. Fox, rabbit, camel and kangaroo in a jungle, Hank?
26 Yvonne Fair - It Should Have Been Me
Perhaps the greatest insult to a Motown African-American and Norman Whitfield protege is to have people on hen nights thinking you're Tina Turner.
25 Manuel And The Music Of The Mountains - Rodrigo's Guitar Concerto De Aranjuez
Actually Max Bygraves' bandleader Geoff Love with one of a number of easy listening cash-ins that predated the John Williams reign, and a track that in February was announced as the new number one before it was realised a computer error had taken hold and it should have been number three. You don't get that with iTunes. Though one day you will. Perhaps even now.
24 David Essex - City Lights
In which David gets the funk and makes the girls, erm, quizzical?
23 Be-Bop Deluxe - Ships In The Night
Reticent guitar hero Bill Nelson and co take a moment out of taking glam in prog directions to attempt a head-on collision between glam stomp, Eno art-rock weirdness and arena keyboard stack indulgence. That got them on pop
telly.
22 Peters And Lee - Hey Mr Music Man
A lot of artists requesting specific heys off people in those days.
21 Elton John - Pinball Wizard
He plays by sense of smell, apparently. Has Elton been in many amusement arcades? Tommy would have tried to flee the building due to the acridity.
20 Eddie Drennon And BBS Unlimited - Let's Do The Latin Hustle
Hustling, as we'll see, was very much the in thing.
19 The Drifters - Hello Happiness
It's a four-four beat, it shouldn't be that difficult to clap along to.
18 10cc - I'm Mandy Fly Me
The great subtle satirists of adult pop bid their farewell as a four-piece with a song about dreaming of getting off with an air hostess from an advert poster, Godley and Creme off after this album campaign to invent morphing. With Kevin and Lol, Art For Art's Sake. Without, Dreadlock Holiday.
17 The Four Seasons - December 1963 (Oh What A Night)
Written about the end of prohibition, allegedly, and Frankie Valli's last song with some sort of lead vocal. Given it was his name above the door that was bound to end badly.
16 M And O Band - Let's Do The Latin Hustle
Van McCoy's The Hustle had been number one the previous June, see, and everyone fancied a piece of that flute-driven library music made good. And yes, this is the same song as number 20.
15 Cliff Richard - Miss You Nights
Cliff's revival hit after a barren couple of years, from an album with the he'd-like-to-think-self-deprecating title I'm Nearly Famous. This was subsequently what nearly everything he released in the 1980s would sound like, bar Wired For Sound and I Just Don't Have The Heart.
14 The Fatback Band - (Do The) Spanish Hustle
Not the same, and not much to do with any previous hustling at all, in fact. There was a UK Hustle, by the way. With that innate sense of British timing, it came out in 1978.
13 John Miles - Music
Four people are John Miles, if his TOTP countdown picture is to be believed. Not keen on music of the present, is he/are they?
12 The Eagles - Take It To The Limit
Randy Meisner gets his way.
11 Randy Edelman - Concrete And Clay
Film and TV score composer has a dig with Unit 4+2's 1965 number one, later the single from Kevin Rowland's infamous My Beauty (an album, by the way, that got four and five stars across the board on release)
10 The Beatles - Yesterday
Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, Daffy Duck.
9 Marmalade - Falling Apart At The Seams
Having kind of kicked around pop for a decade, having a number one with a cover of Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, they split, reformed with one original member (the bassist) and had a top ten single out of nowhere that sounded like Bay City Rollers without the commitment.
8 CW McCall - Convoy
Nothing says mid-70s like a hit based on a fad rather than vice versa. CW McCall was a character that appeared in a series of bread adverts like this, where an assumed tobacco-chewing truck driver narrated his fresh bread-punctuated day. Those were written and sung by one Bill Fries, and when the opportunity for a spinoff came up he took it in a way late 80s Levis copywriters can only wonder at. And in 1978 a
film based on the flimsy premised song! Laurie Lingo And The Dipsticks' Convoy GB was a month away, and that's a whole other world of pain.
7 Gallagher And Lyle - I Wanna Stay With You
They were Scottish, they weren't golfers, they were very supper club.
6 Guys 'n' Dolls - You Don't Have To Say You Love Me
Dusty's signature hit ridden roughshod by six people in jumpsuits, two of whom became Dollar.
5 Glitter Band - People Like You People Like Me
Nothing much really changed chart-wise in two years, did it? More silver trousered wateryness.
4 Barry White - You See The Trouble With Me
Baritone disco-lite later embuggered by Black Legend.
3 Tina Charles - I Love To Love
Do you think she quite emphasises the baby dance loving enough?
2 Billy Ocean - Love Really Hurts Without You
First single straight up there for well meaning disco yearner who would after the following year go seven years without a hit before catching onto the wine bar funk wave. You don't reckon Frank Ocean's name is a reference, do you?
1 Brotherhood Of Man - Save Your Kisses For Me
As previously mentioned an entirely different line-up to that which launched the band seven years earlier, they beat Tony Christie and Frank Ifield to the UK nominacy and then essentially pissed it on the night in The Hague. Note the tremendous behind-you reaction of the females and Bill 'no, he isn't, despite what Wiki says and much as you might like to believe she is' Cotton lurking at the back. Sweden withdrew due to expense and the demonstrations of the previous year, Turkey withdrew when Greece put forward a song about the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus, and Save Your Kisses For Me won a record percentage of the possible maximum score and had the worldwide biggest sales of a winner. And despite all that, given what you know about STN, which version were we likely to post here? Also, don't some people just suit longer hair?
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Quarante points
A new topical tack this week for our old top 40 exhumations, as we take three classic Eurovision winners in the week they each went to number one, starting with the biggest of all, announced on 27th April 1974:
40 Barbra Streisand - The Way We Were
Well, this song only means one thing.
Edited, says our man in the know, by Ray Stubbs. Splendidly, following it in that clip is more Mountjoyalia, all but the first few seconds of the great forgotten BBC-promoted sports song of the 1980s, Jed Ford's Boss O' The Black. Yes, TV snooker is a hell of a game alright.
39 Paper Lace - The Night Chicago Died
We'll come back to Paper Lace because we have to note that entering the top 50 at 48 is Sparks' This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us. Because it seems to have been lost we can't work out when it was that the famed first Ron Mael glowering at the kids appearance was, but it may well have been the following week for reasons we'll again come back to and because the week after that it rocketed up into the top ten.
38 Status Quo - Break The Rules
Except in the sound, obviously.
37 Ragtimers - The Sting
A cover of Scott Joplin's The Entertainer renamed after the previous year's film in which it was the main theme. We'll come back to this.
36 Queen - Seven Seas Of Rhye
Second single, first hit (it'd been number ten four weeks earlier) and all sorts of motifs that would carry many a lesser band through a career, from piano intro to May solo. Of course it's a key location in We Will Rock You.
35 The Carpenters - Jambalaya
My lord, Jambalaya?
34 Charlie Rich - The Most Beautiful Girl
Former Sun Records hack finds paydirt in country and western balladry. This had been to number two in one of country's sole representative concerted attempts at commercially breaking the UK, something that happens every few years, most recently with Leann Rimes and before her Shania Twain.
33 The Intruders - I'll Always Love My Mama
Gamble & Huff also-rans refer to their mothers as "my baby girl", disturbingly. Disco soul's own No Charge.
32 Harold Melvin And The Bluenotes - Satisfaction Guaranteed
Jumpsuited Philly soul kingpins for whom Harold Melvin was very much their Kool, ie he may have got his name above the shop front but no way was he the lead member.
31 Paper Lace - Billy Don't Be A Hero
"Opportunity Knocks was pretty much the 70s version of The X-Factor" says their Wiki. Oh, Wiki. Without a Kasabian or White Town to call their own Nottingham, despite all its venues, is somewhat lagging in the East Midlands pages of the pop gazetter - Corinne Drewery from Swing Out Sister, one of Deep Purple, one of Editors, one of the Stereo MCs, and then you're down to the very much cult concerns (Tindersticks, say). So at the top end you're left with this American Civil War death reveille that someone else actually took to number one in America.
30 The Wombles - The Wombling Song
The series started the previous year but the musical career only took off once Bernard Cribbins had dragged Mike Batt dressed as Orinoco onstage on Cilla Black's show. The series and pop career weren't thought of simultaneously, the latter was Batt's own idea, securing character rights in exchange for a flat fee for the theme. Their first album was given two stars by Rolling Stone, something to which the only reaction can be "Rolling Stone reviewed a Wombles record? Really? Why? Did they also review the Goodies and Rock Follies?"
29 MFSB - TSOP (The Sound Of Philadelphia)
TTFN!
28 Jim Stafford - Spiders And Snakes
No idea what the titular creatures have to do with the rest of the song.
27 The Rubettes - Sugar Baby Love
So what happened was This Town Ain't Big Enough... entered the top 50 and was gaining lots of interest so they were called up for TOTP, but it was only when they got there that the producer realised they were American and thus were missing Musician's Union papers. An emergency call went out to the Rubettes, for whom this was the becapped doo-wop chancers' chart debut week, and such was their impact that this climbed 25 places the following week and another one the week after that. And by that time, Sparks were at number two because of their own TOTP watercooler moment before watercoolers existed. Thems the breaks.
26 Genesis - I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)
Peter Gabriel is a very serious man, of course. Note Phil in his overalls.
25 Marvin Hamlisch - The Entertainer
Oh, that a film soundtrack could have such power today. And what sport did it come to be associated with in BBC montage form?
24 The Osmonds - I Can't Stop
Classic Sugar Sugar-style bubblegum pop slightly analogous to two years previously's Crazy Horses, largely because it was originally released in 1967.
23 David Bowie - Rock And Roll Suicide
The last song he'd ever do, he told Hammersmith Apollo. He's never apologised. And yes, you're right, that gig had been in July 1973, and apart from the money making opportunities nobody really knows why this got the very late single treatment, especially given Diamond Dogs was only six weeks away.
22 Mott The Hoople - Golden Age Of Rock And Roll
A lot of looking backwards in Mott songs, isn't there?
21 Charlie Rich - Behind Closed Doors
Engelbert's The Last Waltz with twanging, essentially.
20 Gary Glitter - Remember Me This Way
He must have recorded something that can't be reappropriated.
19 Bill Haley And His Comets - Rock Around The Clock
Somewhat left behind these days when the roots of rock'n'roll are discussed, the Jive Bunny favourite marshalled his Comets (and that is His Comets, rather than The Comets) into Blackboard Jungle seat-ripping jive frenzy. Did you know Haley re-recorded it for the opening theme of the first two series of Happy Days? Puts that Only Fools And Horses switcheroo into perspective.
18 Hot Chocolate - Emma
Errol Brown is an MBE for services to popular music. And you thought June Sarpong MBE was winging it.
17 Stevie Wonder - He's Misstra Know-It-All
Internet says this was used in a Dunlop advert, possibly the same one that also went with You're So Vain where a man gets dressed to the nines without stopping to put trousers on. This was very much the milieu of 1991-92 advertising, embarrassing sub-Milk Tray men.
16 The Three Degrees - Year Of Decision
It would have been around this time that the girl group who just forgot to stop became Prince Charles' favourites. Tis but a short hop from there to Ellie Goulding, it seems.
15 Little Jimmy Osmond - I'm Gonna Knock On Your Door
His third hit at still not eleven years old, which makes you wonder what the subtext here was supposed to be.
14 Mungo Jerry - Long Legged Woman Dressed In Black
Ray Dorset attempts to take on Thin Lizzy, ends up nearer Showaddywaddy.
13 Slade - Everyday
A plodding piano ballad. Noddy still bellows the chorus, of course. It doesn't become Dave Hill's outfit for once.
12 Bay City Rollers - Shang-A-Lang
Running with the gang, all that.
11 Peters And Lee - Don't Stay Away Too Long
Their biggest hit since Welcome Home, which surely cancels this title out.
10 Glitter Band - Angel Face
Gary Glitter, he's a bad, bad man, ruining the reputation of the Glitter Band. Loads to remark upon here beyond the insistent drumalong - they didn't record with The Leader until BEF's Music Of Quality And Distinction project, there were at one point three Glitter Bands in operation, one member received a one year suspended sentence for breaching a court order banning him from using the band's name in his own operations, two of them wrote the 2000 UK Eurovision entry and the drumming duo went on to play with Denim.
9 Wizzard - Rock And Roll Winter
Another winter rock and roll!
8 Diana Ross And Marvin Gaye - You Are Everything
The two monoliths coo an old Stylistics song at each other to not unpleasant effect. Marvin Gaye was always strong at duetting, which makes all that wanking in Belgium unpleasantness later on in his career that seems to have taken over as his populist modus operandi more galling.
7 Sunny - Doctor's Orders
"Look up Sunny in the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles and you'll find one entry for the song 'Doctor's Orders'. Which just goes to show what they know about pop music" says a 70s pop site. It's a reference book! There's no qualitative judgement involved in it! Founder Brotherhood Of Man member - they operated what we must now call a Sugababes approach - and prolific backing singer (that's supposedly her on the chorus of Joe Cocker's version of With A Little Help From My Friends) decides to be Petula Clarke in a song seemingly about having it off with the doctor against General Medical Council rules.
6 Limmie And The Family Cooking - A Walkin' Miracle
The family name being Snell rather than Cooking, a trio who perhaps brought too much of the variety angle to soul harmony.
5 The Chi-Lites - Homely Girl
Flick Colby was particularly pressed for time that week.
4 The Wombles - Remember You're A Womble
Neat link from the intro to that clip. Clem Cattini grits his teeth and sizes up the glam beat again while whoever was inside the sax-toting Orinoco works the crowd.
3 Terry Jacks - Seasons In The Sun
Actually a Jacques Brel original, though the translation takes out the very Brel-ian pisstakery and accusations of infidelity. The Beach Boys were going to cover it but abandoned their take so their producer recorded and had a hit with it instead. Covered by both Westlife and Black Box Recorder, which is something one side of that equation is probably happier about than the other.
2 Mud - The Cat Crept In
Music to do some sort of four-square Shadows-like dance step to while sporting massive sideburns and pushed up against your colleague who has Christmas baubles hanging off his earrings.
1 ABBA - Waterloo
1974, for all sorts of reasons, was a hell of a Eurovision year. Luxembourg, having won in both 1972 and 1973, pulled out of hosting again due to expense, so it was held in Brighton with a film starring the Wombles as the interval act - note John Peel Radio 1 Fun Day Out anecdote-presaging Womble driving a speedboat, albeit Tony Blackburn out of sight. Malta withdrew after choosing their competitor, ante-post favourites France pulled out after president Pompidou died in the preceding week with his funeral on the same day. Italy refused to broadcast the event due to fears Gigliola Cinquetti's song being called Si might influence the upcoming divorce referendum - they still came second. Famously, Portugal's performance was used as the cue to launch the country's Carnation Revolution military coup restoring democracy to the country. The Swiss song was performed by a female bricklayer, the Irish entrant had suffered amnesia after a recent car accident and had to write the lyrics to her song on the back of her hand, and Katie Boyle hosted for the last time with an oft told anecdote about a see-through dress that we don't quite understand. Australia's Olivia Newton-John was the UK entry, coming fourth with a song she hated. In the midst of all that Sweden and their thematically dressed composer won with the lowest outright winning percentage ever, only two of the voting sixteen countries (Sweden couldn't vote for themselves, remember), Finland and Switzerland, giving them first place. The UK gave them nothing. A proud nation reacted by staging a protest march around the Stockholm venue a year later about the cost of staging the event and the ditching of traditional Scandinavian folk in favour of capitalist pop music, the hubbub so great Sweden took 1976 off Eurovision. The winner's story you know, but this was their winning performance at the national heats, Melodifestivalen. Annifrid's excitement to be on stage at the start is only matched by how far off key she drifts about thirty seconds from the end of the clip.
40 Barbra Streisand - The Way We Were
Well, this song only means one thing.
Edited, says our man in the know, by Ray Stubbs. Splendidly, following it in that clip is more Mountjoyalia, all but the first few seconds of the great forgotten BBC-promoted sports song of the 1980s, Jed Ford's Boss O' The Black. Yes, TV snooker is a hell of a game alright.
39 Paper Lace - The Night Chicago Died
We'll come back to Paper Lace because we have to note that entering the top 50 at 48 is Sparks' This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us. Because it seems to have been lost we can't work out when it was that the famed first Ron Mael glowering at the kids appearance was, but it may well have been the following week for reasons we'll again come back to and because the week after that it rocketed up into the top ten.
38 Status Quo - Break The Rules
Except in the sound, obviously.
37 Ragtimers - The Sting
A cover of Scott Joplin's The Entertainer renamed after the previous year's film in which it was the main theme. We'll come back to this.
36 Queen - Seven Seas Of Rhye
Second single, first hit (it'd been number ten four weeks earlier) and all sorts of motifs that would carry many a lesser band through a career, from piano intro to May solo. Of course it's a key location in We Will Rock You.
35 The Carpenters - Jambalaya
My lord, Jambalaya?
34 Charlie Rich - The Most Beautiful Girl
Former Sun Records hack finds paydirt in country and western balladry. This had been to number two in one of country's sole representative concerted attempts at commercially breaking the UK, something that happens every few years, most recently with Leann Rimes and before her Shania Twain.
33 The Intruders - I'll Always Love My Mama
Gamble & Huff also-rans refer to their mothers as "my baby girl", disturbingly. Disco soul's own No Charge.
32 Harold Melvin And The Bluenotes - Satisfaction Guaranteed
Jumpsuited Philly soul kingpins for whom Harold Melvin was very much their Kool, ie he may have got his name above the shop front but no way was he the lead member.
31 Paper Lace - Billy Don't Be A Hero
"Opportunity Knocks was pretty much the 70s version of The X-Factor" says their Wiki. Oh, Wiki. Without a Kasabian or White Town to call their own Nottingham, despite all its venues, is somewhat lagging in the East Midlands pages of the pop gazetter - Corinne Drewery from Swing Out Sister, one of Deep Purple, one of Editors, one of the Stereo MCs, and then you're down to the very much cult concerns (Tindersticks, say). So at the top end you're left with this American Civil War death reveille that someone else actually took to number one in America.
30 The Wombles - The Wombling Song
The series started the previous year but the musical career only took off once Bernard Cribbins had dragged Mike Batt dressed as Orinoco onstage on Cilla Black's show. The series and pop career weren't thought of simultaneously, the latter was Batt's own idea, securing character rights in exchange for a flat fee for the theme. Their first album was given two stars by Rolling Stone, something to which the only reaction can be "Rolling Stone reviewed a Wombles record? Really? Why? Did they also review the Goodies and Rock Follies?"
29 MFSB - TSOP (The Sound Of Philadelphia)
TTFN!
28 Jim Stafford - Spiders And Snakes
No idea what the titular creatures have to do with the rest of the song.
27 The Rubettes - Sugar Baby Love
So what happened was This Town Ain't Big Enough... entered the top 50 and was gaining lots of interest so they were called up for TOTP, but it was only when they got there that the producer realised they were American and thus were missing Musician's Union papers. An emergency call went out to the Rubettes, for whom this was the becapped doo-wop chancers' chart debut week, and such was their impact that this climbed 25 places the following week and another one the week after that. And by that time, Sparks were at number two because of their own TOTP watercooler moment before watercoolers existed. Thems the breaks.
26 Genesis - I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)
Peter Gabriel is a very serious man, of course. Note Phil in his overalls.
25 Marvin Hamlisch - The Entertainer
Oh, that a film soundtrack could have such power today. And what sport did it come to be associated with in BBC montage form?
24 The Osmonds - I Can't Stop
Classic Sugar Sugar-style bubblegum pop slightly analogous to two years previously's Crazy Horses, largely because it was originally released in 1967.
23 David Bowie - Rock And Roll Suicide
The last song he'd ever do, he told Hammersmith Apollo. He's never apologised. And yes, you're right, that gig had been in July 1973, and apart from the money making opportunities nobody really knows why this got the very late single treatment, especially given Diamond Dogs was only six weeks away.
22 Mott The Hoople - Golden Age Of Rock And Roll
A lot of looking backwards in Mott songs, isn't there?
21 Charlie Rich - Behind Closed Doors
Engelbert's The Last Waltz with twanging, essentially.
20 Gary Glitter - Remember Me This Way
He must have recorded something that can't be reappropriated.
19 Bill Haley And His Comets - Rock Around The Clock
Somewhat left behind these days when the roots of rock'n'roll are discussed, the Jive Bunny favourite marshalled his Comets (and that is His Comets, rather than The Comets) into Blackboard Jungle seat-ripping jive frenzy. Did you know Haley re-recorded it for the opening theme of the first two series of Happy Days? Puts that Only Fools And Horses switcheroo into perspective.
18 Hot Chocolate - Emma
Errol Brown is an MBE for services to popular music. And you thought June Sarpong MBE was winging it.
17 Stevie Wonder - He's Misstra Know-It-All
Internet says this was used in a Dunlop advert, possibly the same one that also went with You're So Vain where a man gets dressed to the nines without stopping to put trousers on. This was very much the milieu of 1991-92 advertising, embarrassing sub-Milk Tray men.
16 The Three Degrees - Year Of Decision
It would have been around this time that the girl group who just forgot to stop became Prince Charles' favourites. Tis but a short hop from there to Ellie Goulding, it seems.
15 Little Jimmy Osmond - I'm Gonna Knock On Your Door
His third hit at still not eleven years old, which makes you wonder what the subtext here was supposed to be.
14 Mungo Jerry - Long Legged Woman Dressed In Black
Ray Dorset attempts to take on Thin Lizzy, ends up nearer Showaddywaddy.
13 Slade - Everyday
A plodding piano ballad. Noddy still bellows the chorus, of course. It doesn't become Dave Hill's outfit for once.
12 Bay City Rollers - Shang-A-Lang
Running with the gang, all that.
11 Peters And Lee - Don't Stay Away Too Long
Their biggest hit since Welcome Home, which surely cancels this title out.
10 Glitter Band - Angel Face
Gary Glitter, he's a bad, bad man, ruining the reputation of the Glitter Band. Loads to remark upon here beyond the insistent drumalong - they didn't record with The Leader until BEF's Music Of Quality And Distinction project, there were at one point three Glitter Bands in operation, one member received a one year suspended sentence for breaching a court order banning him from using the band's name in his own operations, two of them wrote the 2000 UK Eurovision entry and the drumming duo went on to play with Denim.
9 Wizzard - Rock And Roll Winter
Another winter rock and roll!
8 Diana Ross And Marvin Gaye - You Are Everything
The two monoliths coo an old Stylistics song at each other to not unpleasant effect. Marvin Gaye was always strong at duetting, which makes all that wanking in Belgium unpleasantness later on in his career that seems to have taken over as his populist modus operandi more galling.
7 Sunny - Doctor's Orders
"Look up Sunny in the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles and you'll find one entry for the song 'Doctor's Orders'. Which just goes to show what they know about pop music" says a 70s pop site. It's a reference book! There's no qualitative judgement involved in it! Founder Brotherhood Of Man member - they operated what we must now call a Sugababes approach - and prolific backing singer (that's supposedly her on the chorus of Joe Cocker's version of With A Little Help From My Friends) decides to be Petula Clarke in a song seemingly about having it off with the doctor against General Medical Council rules.
6 Limmie And The Family Cooking - A Walkin' Miracle
The family name being Snell rather than Cooking, a trio who perhaps brought too much of the variety angle to soul harmony.
5 The Chi-Lites - Homely Girl
Flick Colby was particularly pressed for time that week.
4 The Wombles - Remember You're A Womble
Neat link from the intro to that clip. Clem Cattini grits his teeth and sizes up the glam beat again while whoever was inside the sax-toting Orinoco works the crowd.
3 Terry Jacks - Seasons In The Sun
Actually a Jacques Brel original, though the translation takes out the very Brel-ian pisstakery and accusations of infidelity. The Beach Boys were going to cover it but abandoned their take so their producer recorded and had a hit with it instead. Covered by both Westlife and Black Box Recorder, which is something one side of that equation is probably happier about than the other.
2 Mud - The Cat Crept In
Music to do some sort of four-square Shadows-like dance step to while sporting massive sideburns and pushed up against your colleague who has Christmas baubles hanging off his earrings.
1 ABBA - Waterloo
1974, for all sorts of reasons, was a hell of a Eurovision year. Luxembourg, having won in both 1972 and 1973, pulled out of hosting again due to expense, so it was held in Brighton with a film starring the Wombles as the interval act - note John Peel Radio 1 Fun Day Out anecdote-presaging Womble driving a speedboat, albeit Tony Blackburn out of sight. Malta withdrew after choosing their competitor, ante-post favourites France pulled out after president Pompidou died in the preceding week with his funeral on the same day. Italy refused to broadcast the event due to fears Gigliola Cinquetti's song being called Si might influence the upcoming divorce referendum - they still came second. Famously, Portugal's performance was used as the cue to launch the country's Carnation Revolution military coup restoring democracy to the country. The Swiss song was performed by a female bricklayer, the Irish entrant had suffered amnesia after a recent car accident and had to write the lyrics to her song on the back of her hand, and Katie Boyle hosted for the last time with an oft told anecdote about a see-through dress that we don't quite understand. Australia's Olivia Newton-John was the UK entry, coming fourth with a song she hated. In the midst of all that Sweden and their thematically dressed composer won with the lowest outright winning percentage ever, only two of the voting sixteen countries (Sweden couldn't vote for themselves, remember), Finland and Switzerland, giving them first place. The UK gave them nothing. A proud nation reacted by staging a protest march around the Stockholm venue a year later about the cost of staging the event and the ditching of traditional Scandinavian folk in favour of capitalist pop music, the hubbub so great Sweden took 1976 off Eurovision. The winner's story you know, but this was their winning performance at the national heats, Melodifestivalen. Annifrid's excitement to be on stage at the start is only matched by how far off key she drifts about thirty seconds from the end of the clip.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Clearing the table
For our latest old chart, we turn to week beginning 18th May 1986 for the chart height of a song that defined a sport whose world championships start tomorrow and accidentally stumble across one of the oddest top tens of all:
40 Mantronix - Bassline
No, not like Man 2 Man Featuring Man Parrish, that was something different. A week earlier and we'd have had Samantha Fox and the Grange Hill Cast to write about; a few sales less for this and we'd be saying a big how you're doing to We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It's mighty Rules And Regulations EP. In fact, let's all listen to and watch that now.
1986, then.
39 Freddie Mercury - Time
Sounds exactly like a Queen song. So what was the point of holding it back for the solo record?
38 Miami Sound Machine - Bad Boy
It didn't become Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine until 1988, with the Machine stopped shortly afterwards despite pretty much still being her backing band. Here they're caught in another awkward transition, between Latino and synths with big keys.
37 Real Thing - Can't Get By Without You (The Second Decade Remix)
That's something they should have continued with into 1996 at least.
36 Atlantic Starr - Secret Lovers
Tinkling slow jam of the sort that gave Arista a bad name throughout the decade.
35 Nu Shooz - I Can't Wait
What a poor, poor name. Something of a sealed deal as far as jazz-funk goes, with the sort of break that one of those sampler keyboards was made for.
34 Rod Stewart - Love Touch
33 Big Country - Look Away
32 Dire Straits - Your Latest Trick
Arena rock singles that nobody really cares about triple whammy! We could get through this much quicker if it were all like this, it's the top ten where the bulk of this week's action was.
31 The Bangles - If She Knew What She Wants
As above, apart from the arena bit despite their best efforts. Hurry back, Prince/Rameses III!
30 Cashflow - Mine All Mine
Workaday funk like a Netto Cameo.
29 Force MDs - Tender Love
Is this Michael Jackson's fault?
28 Pete Wylie - Sinful
Scouse braggard and alleged inventor of word 'rockist' attempts to make all in path shudder at the forcefulness of his convictions.
27 AC/DC - Who Made Who
From the soundtrack of Maximum Overdrive, Stephen King's sole attempt at film directing. Because you kind of imagined AC/DC would record the soundtrack to a film called Maximum Overdrive directed by Stephen King sooner or later, wouldn't you?
26 Queen - A Kind Of Magic
Some of you may spot there's a small handful of records in this list that were in the chart from two months earlier we commented on not one month ago. Well, there's enough not to have to repeat too much, and we're sticking to that line. So here again is Freddie in his 1920s stage magician cloak summoning up the kind of instantly dated line-and-fill cartoons that blighted the late 80s.
25 The Cure - Boys Don't Cry
That's not really them in the video. Popular mopers preen.
24 Princess - I'll Keep On Loving You
Second and last top 20 single from royal flush completing early SAW also-ran soulstress, a template that would be refined many times over the following eight years or so.
23 ZZ Top - Rough Boy
The other video from their MTV girls and blues fantasia sequence, Eliminator (this time as a sub-Starbug space vehicle), lingering looks at legs, the lot. At least Billy, Dusty and Frank as disembodied mounted heads overshadows balladic notion.
22 Aurra - You And Me Tonight
Funk bassline blogs would go mad about today dissolves into talky overshiny soul vocals that those same bloggers just seem to have forgotten about.
21 George Michael - A Different Corner
It'd been number one three weeks before, and so the great Wham! schism was set with a song George wrote, played, produced, engineered, arranged, designed, built the studio by hand and carved the instruments from wood and plastic all by himself. The next time he did all that was for I Want Your Sex, and therein lies a world of extra-curricular issues.
20 Jaki Graham - Set Me Free
Dance diva dance diva-ises.
19 Simply Red - Holding Back The Years
An old Frantic Elevators song gets a major label budget and, at the second time of asking, sends Hucknall, still sporting hair less like that of an international jet-setter and more Alannah from the Thompson Twins, towards the sphere where he can call upon all the women and teeth he wants.
18 Marvin Gaye - I Heard It Through The Grapevine
The first big hit from a Levis advert (though it actually used a soundalike), the Nick Kamen kit off in launderette business which turned the company right around by invoking the then youth cool market of imagined 1950s Americana. Nick Kamen as James Dean. It was very late 1985 onwards, a simpler time.
17 Joyce Sims - All And All
You'd be surprised how far you can get as a disco/soul singer with the name Joyce.
16 Robert Palmer - Addicted To Love
It was supposed to be a duet with Chaka Khan, wherever her vocals would have come; Noddy Holder calls it the perfect pop song. And yet all you know about it is the strangely robot-sex video. The women were based on the look of those in Patrick Nagel paintings, apparently. And it was the first video shown on the Chart Show (and the last, come to it). STOP EJECT
15 Janet Jackson - What Have You Done For Me Lately?
Janet's first solo hit on the back of an impeccable Jam & Lewis swing production turning soul, funk and disco strands into a new thing we would all come to call R&B, here actually inventing a bass tone extensively later used on house and techno tracks.
14 Five Star - Can't Wait Another Minute
Army manoevure-precise choreography from matching tracksuited siblings. They say they're making a comeback, but they say that every two or three years. And no, that didn't happen until 1989.
13 Billy Ocean - There'll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)
SPOILER.
12 The B-52s - Rock Lobster/Planet Claire
For no apparent reason their debut album was only issued over here in '86 despite Rock Lobster being a minor hit first time around seven years earlier, and at a time the band were in seclusion after Ricky Wilson's death. For all the comedy hairpieces and Fred Schneider taking David Byrne's act and attaching it directly to the mains this is a pretty unbeatable combination of surf sci-fi absurdity. Lennon has said he was inspired to return to music by Rock Lobster, but he's credited with saying that about half the records released in 1979.
And now spot the reused bits:
11 Whitney Houston - The Greatest Love Of All
Somewhat more successful and respectful than Kevin Rowland's version. Source of "children are our future" lols.
10 Madonna - Live To Tell
The first real proof that Madge could do adult orientated, and the first real image makeover of her career as she got a Monroe hairdo and some proper clothes so you couldn't see her belly button.
9 Status Quo - Rollin' Home
Guess what it sounds like.
8 Van Halen - Why Can't This Be Love
Sammy Hagar takes over from prime irritant David Lee Roth and takes the Halen into the top ten for the second time with the sort of guitars with leopardskin straps plus arena keyboards plus shouting that Bon Jovi were on the brink of emerging to refine and ruin for us all.
7 Falco - Rock Me Amadeus
Like Chumbawamba and Little Jimmy Osmond a one hit wonder who wasn't (Vienna Calling reached number ten). There was quite the Mozart revival going on at the time, with the film Amadeus not long out of cinemas. In the version of his backstory offered by the sometime Johann Hölzel - a conservatoire-trained former bassist with both hard rock and disco bands, and not a perpetually angry faux-Welshman - though, an odd future Wolfgang kills them all in polite mid to late 18th century Austrian society as a "punker" who "had flair". For the record, the last verse translated into English reads thus: "It was around 1780 and it was in Vienna/No plastic money any more, the banks against him/From which his debts came it was common knowledge/He was a women's man, women loved his punk". Much more poetic in the bitty German, isn't it?
6 Matchroom Mob With Chas And Dave - Snooker Loopy
So this is why we're all here. At the time, it almost stood to reason - Cup final teams release records, so as snooker was now seen as the number one sport on television (this was during football's bleak years) why not pick up on that as a source of tie-in chart crossover potential? Barry Hearn ("he likes country and western, what chance has he got of recognising a good song?" - Hearn protege and prog fan Steve Davis) put in a call to near-local lads Chas & Dave and wondering if they wouldn't mind writing a song for the members of his Matchroom managerial stable, who virtually ran things at the time. Neither of them knew the game well but worked to the concept of "a song to be sung by the seven dwarfs", hence jaunty Cockney, baffling bits about suits and hairbrushes, Willie Thorne Sings!, all that. Tony Meo's line is "I always pipe me eyeballs", apparently because he always cried after a match. He sings this while sporting a broad grin.
There was a follow-up a year later. There's a reason why you never hear it.
5 Doctor And The Medics - Spirit In The Sky
Merry prankster in kabuki whiteface attempts to restart psychedelia revival through his club night, then goes the direct route about it to surprising success, albeit just for themselves. The guitarist went on to play in Badly Drawn Boy's band, the bassist co-formed acid jazzists Corduroy and the drummer is in Die Toten Hosen. There's eclecticism.
4 Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer
Don't mind saying the video, apparently MTV's most screened ever, frightened the life out of us at the time, all that turning into clay and the essential Gabriel visage being messed about with. If you've not seen Broken Pixel's tribute for Lone Wolf from last year, please do. The song? Lots of ungainly sexual metaphors, as Gabriel was pretty much solely doing at the time.
3 Level 42 - Lessons In Love
Slap bass-led jazz-funk - but popular! What a time.
2 Patti LaBelle And Michael McDonald - On My Own
Earnest AOR peddlers bellow at each other long distance over some of the flattest drum sounds ever recorded. Produced by Burt Bacharach, perhaps over a couple of sandwiches in a pre-meeting rush.
1 Spitting Image - The Chicken Song
Good god, how did this happen? Actually it's unlikely the latex lampooners (thank you, every newspaper TV column) knew themselves. Uncrowned genius of satirical pop parody Philip Pope on music and production, future smegverlords Rob Grant and Doug Naylor on deliberately nonsensical words, target "those two wet gits with the girly curly hair", only for the same people who bought the precision targeted post-holiday summer hits to go for this one too in large numbers. B-sides I've Never Met A Nice South African ("except for Breyten Breytenbach!"; somewhat overtaken by future events apartheid satire written by inventor of all comedy John Lloyd and eclectic composer Peter 'not the Field Music one' Brewis), Hello You Must Be Going and We're Scared Of Bob restored acidic comedic equilibrium, the 12" mix with random repetition and a locked groove ending added a certain something.
40 Mantronix - Bassline
No, not like Man 2 Man Featuring Man Parrish, that was something different. A week earlier and we'd have had Samantha Fox and the Grange Hill Cast to write about; a few sales less for this and we'd be saying a big how you're doing to We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It's mighty Rules And Regulations EP. In fact, let's all listen to and watch that now.
1986, then.
39 Freddie Mercury - Time
Sounds exactly like a Queen song. So what was the point of holding it back for the solo record?
38 Miami Sound Machine - Bad Boy
It didn't become Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine until 1988, with the Machine stopped shortly afterwards despite pretty much still being her backing band. Here they're caught in another awkward transition, between Latino and synths with big keys.
37 Real Thing - Can't Get By Without You (The Second Decade Remix)
That's something they should have continued with into 1996 at least.
36 Atlantic Starr - Secret Lovers
Tinkling slow jam of the sort that gave Arista a bad name throughout the decade.
35 Nu Shooz - I Can't Wait
What a poor, poor name. Something of a sealed deal as far as jazz-funk goes, with the sort of break that one of those sampler keyboards was made for.
34 Rod Stewart - Love Touch
33 Big Country - Look Away
32 Dire Straits - Your Latest Trick
Arena rock singles that nobody really cares about triple whammy! We could get through this much quicker if it were all like this, it's the top ten where the bulk of this week's action was.
31 The Bangles - If She Knew What She Wants
As above, apart from the arena bit despite their best efforts. Hurry back, Prince/Rameses III!
30 Cashflow - Mine All Mine
Workaday funk like a Netto Cameo.
29 Force MDs - Tender Love
Is this Michael Jackson's fault?
28 Pete Wylie - Sinful
Scouse braggard and alleged inventor of word 'rockist' attempts to make all in path shudder at the forcefulness of his convictions.
27 AC/DC - Who Made Who
From the soundtrack of Maximum Overdrive, Stephen King's sole attempt at film directing. Because you kind of imagined AC/DC would record the soundtrack to a film called Maximum Overdrive directed by Stephen King sooner or later, wouldn't you?
26 Queen - A Kind Of Magic
Some of you may spot there's a small handful of records in this list that were in the chart from two months earlier we commented on not one month ago. Well, there's enough not to have to repeat too much, and we're sticking to that line. So here again is Freddie in his 1920s stage magician cloak summoning up the kind of instantly dated line-and-fill cartoons that blighted the late 80s.
25 The Cure - Boys Don't Cry
That's not really them in the video. Popular mopers preen.
24 Princess - I'll Keep On Loving You
Second and last top 20 single from royal flush completing early SAW also-ran soulstress, a template that would be refined many times over the following eight years or so.
23 ZZ Top - Rough Boy
The other video from their MTV girls and blues fantasia sequence, Eliminator (this time as a sub-Starbug space vehicle), lingering looks at legs, the lot. At least Billy, Dusty and Frank as disembodied mounted heads overshadows balladic notion.
22 Aurra - You And Me Tonight
Funk bassline blogs would go mad about today dissolves into talky overshiny soul vocals that those same bloggers just seem to have forgotten about.
21 George Michael - A Different Corner
It'd been number one three weeks before, and so the great Wham! schism was set with a song George wrote, played, produced, engineered, arranged, designed, built the studio by hand and carved the instruments from wood and plastic all by himself. The next time he did all that was for I Want Your Sex, and therein lies a world of extra-curricular issues.
20 Jaki Graham - Set Me Free
Dance diva dance diva-ises.
19 Simply Red - Holding Back The Years
An old Frantic Elevators song gets a major label budget and, at the second time of asking, sends Hucknall, still sporting hair less like that of an international jet-setter and more Alannah from the Thompson Twins, towards the sphere where he can call upon all the women and teeth he wants.
18 Marvin Gaye - I Heard It Through The Grapevine
The first big hit from a Levis advert (though it actually used a soundalike), the Nick Kamen kit off in launderette business which turned the company right around by invoking the then youth cool market of imagined 1950s Americana. Nick Kamen as James Dean. It was very late 1985 onwards, a simpler time.
17 Joyce Sims - All And All
You'd be surprised how far you can get as a disco/soul singer with the name Joyce.
16 Robert Palmer - Addicted To Love
It was supposed to be a duet with Chaka Khan, wherever her vocals would have come; Noddy Holder calls it the perfect pop song. And yet all you know about it is the strangely robot-sex video. The women were based on the look of those in Patrick Nagel paintings, apparently. And it was the first video shown on the Chart Show (and the last, come to it). STOP EJECT
15 Janet Jackson - What Have You Done For Me Lately?
Janet's first solo hit on the back of an impeccable Jam & Lewis swing production turning soul, funk and disco strands into a new thing we would all come to call R&B, here actually inventing a bass tone extensively later used on house and techno tracks.
14 Five Star - Can't Wait Another Minute
Army manoevure-precise choreography from matching tracksuited siblings. They say they're making a comeback, but they say that every two or three years. And no, that didn't happen until 1989.
13 Billy Ocean - There'll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)
SPOILER.
12 The B-52s - Rock Lobster/Planet Claire
For no apparent reason their debut album was only issued over here in '86 despite Rock Lobster being a minor hit first time around seven years earlier, and at a time the band were in seclusion after Ricky Wilson's death. For all the comedy hairpieces and Fred Schneider taking David Byrne's act and attaching it directly to the mains this is a pretty unbeatable combination of surf sci-fi absurdity. Lennon has said he was inspired to return to music by Rock Lobster, but he's credited with saying that about half the records released in 1979.
And now spot the reused bits:
11 Whitney Houston - The Greatest Love Of All
Somewhat more successful and respectful than Kevin Rowland's version. Source of "children are our future" lols.
10 Madonna - Live To Tell
The first real proof that Madge could do adult orientated, and the first real image makeover of her career as she got a Monroe hairdo and some proper clothes so you couldn't see her belly button.
9 Status Quo - Rollin' Home
Guess what it sounds like.
8 Van Halen - Why Can't This Be Love
Sammy Hagar takes over from prime irritant David Lee Roth and takes the Halen into the top ten for the second time with the sort of guitars with leopardskin straps plus arena keyboards plus shouting that Bon Jovi were on the brink of emerging to refine and ruin for us all.
7 Falco - Rock Me Amadeus
Like Chumbawamba and Little Jimmy Osmond a one hit wonder who wasn't (Vienna Calling reached number ten). There was quite the Mozart revival going on at the time, with the film Amadeus not long out of cinemas. In the version of his backstory offered by the sometime Johann Hölzel - a conservatoire-trained former bassist with both hard rock and disco bands, and not a perpetually angry faux-Welshman - though, an odd future Wolfgang kills them all in polite mid to late 18th century Austrian society as a "punker" who "had flair". For the record, the last verse translated into English reads thus: "It was around 1780 and it was in Vienna/No plastic money any more, the banks against him/From which his debts came it was common knowledge/He was a women's man, women loved his punk". Much more poetic in the bitty German, isn't it?
6 Matchroom Mob With Chas And Dave - Snooker Loopy
So this is why we're all here. At the time, it almost stood to reason - Cup final teams release records, so as snooker was now seen as the number one sport on television (this was during football's bleak years) why not pick up on that as a source of tie-in chart crossover potential? Barry Hearn ("he likes country and western, what chance has he got of recognising a good song?" - Hearn protege and prog fan Steve Davis) put in a call to near-local lads Chas & Dave and wondering if they wouldn't mind writing a song for the members of his Matchroom managerial stable, who virtually ran things at the time. Neither of them knew the game well but worked to the concept of "a song to be sung by the seven dwarfs", hence jaunty Cockney, baffling bits about suits and hairbrushes, Willie Thorne Sings!, all that. Tony Meo's line is "I always pipe me eyeballs", apparently because he always cried after a match. He sings this while sporting a broad grin.
There was a follow-up a year later. There's a reason why you never hear it.
5 Doctor And The Medics - Spirit In The Sky
Merry prankster in kabuki whiteface attempts to restart psychedelia revival through his club night, then goes the direct route about it to surprising success, albeit just for themselves. The guitarist went on to play in Badly Drawn Boy's band, the bassist co-formed acid jazzists Corduroy and the drummer is in Die Toten Hosen. There's eclecticism.
4 Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer
Don't mind saying the video, apparently MTV's most screened ever, frightened the life out of us at the time, all that turning into clay and the essential Gabriel visage being messed about with. If you've not seen Broken Pixel's tribute for Lone Wolf from last year, please do. The song? Lots of ungainly sexual metaphors, as Gabriel was pretty much solely doing at the time.
3 Level 42 - Lessons In Love
Slap bass-led jazz-funk - but popular! What a time.
2 Patti LaBelle And Michael McDonald - On My Own
Earnest AOR peddlers bellow at each other long distance over some of the flattest drum sounds ever recorded. Produced by Burt Bacharach, perhaps over a couple of sandwiches in a pre-meeting rush.
1 Spitting Image - The Chicken Song
Good god, how did this happen? Actually it's unlikely the latex lampooners (thank you, every newspaper TV column) knew themselves. Uncrowned genius of satirical pop parody Philip Pope on music and production, future smegverlords Rob Grant and Doug Naylor on deliberately nonsensical words, target "those two wet gits with the girly curly hair", only for the same people who bought the precision targeted post-holiday summer hits to go for this one too in large numbers. B-sides I've Never Met A Nice South African ("except for Breyten Breytenbach!"; somewhat overtaken by future events apartheid satire written by inventor of all comedy John Lloyd and eclectic composer Peter 'not the Field Music one' Brewis), Hello You Must Be Going and We're Scared Of Bob restored acidic comedic equilibrium, the 12" mix with random repetition and a locked groove ending added a certain something.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Comedy songs
Our first old chart rundown in a while is taken from w/b 23rd March 1986, the emergence into popular culture of Comic Relief, the 2011 running of which is unfolding as we type. Yeah, we considered The Stonk just so we could point out The Mary Whitehouse Experience's out of place cameo, and we resolved to go nowhere near Love Can Build A Bridge or any of the witless recent ones, but we had to go to the primary material.
Firstly, let's skip over Made In England And Ray Dorset, Psychic TV And The Angels Of Light and, remarkably, Half Man Half Biscuit's Trumpton Riots in the 92-99 region and glance at the top 75 debut weeks of two colossi of female singing, Janet Jackson's What Have You Done For Me Lately? at 52 and of course Sinitta, now only ever the surely disappointing to Simon's choices regular X Factor mentor. So Macho was the first charting single on Cowell's Fanfare Records and in fact pretty much the only success the label ever had bar Yell!'s all too literal moment in the sun.
40 Bronski Beat - C'mon! C'mon!
The post-Somerville version with one John Foster singing. You'll know Bronski v2.0 for Hit That Perfect Beat, which is fortunate.
39 The Pogues - Poguetry In Motion EP
Very much a Dave Robinson title, that. London-Irish pathos abound on an EP featuring, none as lead track, Pogues standard Rainy Night In Soho, The Wire favourite The Body Of An American and instrumental Planxty Noel Hill, the title a reference to the nominative trad Irish musician who'd described the Pogues as a "terrible abortion".
38 Survivor - Burning Heart
Nothing says 'late night ITV advertised hard rock compilation, mail or phone order only' more.
37 Mike And The Mechanics - Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground)
MOR titans of studio sheen's debut single, actually from a film called On Dangerous Ground (Choke Canyon in the US), featuring nobody you've ever heard of and about nothing of explicable interest.
36 Paul Hardcastle - Don't Waste My Time
Fairlight soul before the post-Whitney glut, featuring vocals by Carol Kenyon off Heaven 17's Temptation. One of the three most famous things about Yorkshire, apparently.
35 Viola Wills - Dare To Dream/Both Sides Now
Oddly named disco-soul mid-ranker whose official biography claims her three singles "would land Viola in the Guiness Book of Records for the UK." Well, we're not going to dissuade her from the notion, and not just because she's dead.
34 Big Audio Dynamite - E=MC2
Nic Roeg tribute stew staring Mick Jones, winging it Don Letts and three people who went on to form Dreadzone. Have reformed, like everyone.
33 Tippa Irie - Hello Darling
Reggae tribute to Ed Stewart. Perhaps.
32 Electric Light Orchestra - Calling America
More synths! Even more synths! Well, Jeff Lynne was never someone keen on the concept of subtle minimalism, although getting rid of the actual orchestral bit - ELO were a trio at this point - surely devalues the currency.
31 Whitney Houston - How Will I Know
Second hit and the first where she really opens the pipes on those vocal chords. Very much in the Pointer Sisters idiom.
30 New Order - Shellshock
Is it sacrilege that, despite the ageing nature of some of those keyboard settings (synth trumpets!) we prefer this in New Order Go Detroit terms to all the Arthur Baker stuff?
29 Tavares - Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel
The Tavares brothers, in fact, whose nicknames - Ralph, Pooch, Chubby, Butch and Tiny - all make them sound like cartoon dogs.
28 Alexander O'Neal - If You Were Here Tonight
The sort of entry you don't need to hear to know exactly how it sounds.
27 Falco - Rock Me Amadeus
I love legitimate theatre.
26 Freddie Jackson - Rock Me Tonight (For Old Time's Sake)
See 28, but with gated snares.
25 Stevie Wonder - Overjoyed
Like an anti-McCartney, Wonder's prime age is starting to come back into its own these days when weighed against the big hit 80s schlock that affected his public standing for ages. Actually this one's quite good, largely because it turns out to have been written in the late 70s, and features ear catching "environmental percussion" - crickets, birds, water, that sort of Hexstatic-precursing thing.
24 Atlantic Starr - Secret Lovers
At least he didn't fall victim to the Linn drum soul treatment too.
23 Billy Ocean - When The Going Gets Tough (The Tough Get Going)
A future Comic Relief single itself, of course, with Adam & Joe in the video, not that they mention it much now for some reason.
22 Frank Sinatra - Theme From New York, New York
Only six years old at this point, originally written for Liza Minelli, and yet by the mid to late 90s it was already established as the only way to end a wedding reception disco. Sinatra recorded it for his concept album Trilogy: Past Present Future, one disc of standards, one of pop hits, one a freeform six track, nearly 40 minutes long experimental suite containing tracks called What Time Does The Next Miracle Leave? and World War None! This is old stager Chairman Of The Board Frank Sinatra, remember.
21 Hipsway - The Honeythief
Sole top 40 single for poor man's Blow Monkeys, what Johnny McElhone did between Altered Images and Texas. Our brother had the lyric page from Smash Hits for this sellotaped up in his bedroom.
20 Howard Jones - No One Is To Blame
Peter Powell reckoned Jones would be "one of the big new names to emerge in 1984", odd wording given he'd had two top three singles in 1983. By 1986 it was all over, this his last top 20 single.
19 Pet Shop Boys - Love Comes Quickly
Whatever can Neil mean?
18 Huey Lewis And The News - Power Of Love/Do You Believe In Love
If the former seems out of place, that's because it is - it'd reached number 10 in October 1985 but reared back up the charts and settled at 9 in March. No idea why. Video release wasn't that quick, was it?
17 Sigue Sigue Sputnik - Love Missile F1-11
"Hi-tech sex, designer violence, and the fifth generation of rock 'n' roll". Or, as everyone not Tony James called them, silly hair and sampledelic electropunk nobody needed, and now nothing is more 1986. Still, this had a vim with its Chuck Berry riffs, and the TOTP appearance with the explosions and flagrant disregard for mic technique or how wrong vocals with loads of echo come across is quite somethin. The director's trying, bless him. Whatever happened to Magenta Devine?
16 Queen - A Kind Of Magic
Look, no 'It's'. Freddie in big cloak summons backing singers in neon colours.
15 Whistle - (Nothing Serious) Just Buggin'
We know nothing else about them apart from what's on Wikipedia, which claims they were Jazzy Jazz (self-explanatory, surely?), Kool Doobie and DJ Silver Spinner. But yeah, how great in the annals of stupid early crossover rap is this? Includes one of those voice sampling keyboards. Heavily.
14 The Rolling Stones - Harlem Shuffle
Bob & Earl's original none more going to a go-go R&B groove (with opening horns sampled on Jump Around) ridden over by a coach and horses by men in pastel colours.
13 Blow Monkeys - Digging Your Scene
The quality side of 80s Brit jazz-soul - that is, 'not Matt Bianco' - Thatcher-baiting floppy quiffed emoter Dr Robert says this is about the initial spread of AIDS amid the gay clubbing community. Future Radio 1 nondescription merchant Dixie Peach on backing vocals, it says here.
12 Art Of Noise Featuring Duane Eddy - Peter Gunn
Even Paul Morley would have had trouble writing up the manifesto for this one.
11 Mr Mister - Kyrie
Now clap above your heads! Classic drivetime man-in-wide-suit-playing-keyboards-on-either-side AOR with a liturgical bent.
10 Culture Club - Move Away
Junkie George was still three months away from having eight weeks to live, but something was definitely slipping away already, this the band's last top 10 single except for a reformation semi-fluke in 1998. With that all in mind it's no wonder the big single from their new album From Luxury To Heartache (yeah, we see) was basically Fairlight-friendly anaemia.
9 Prince - Kiss
Fuck you, Jones, you've never half understood why this was so stunning at the time, and to an extent still is.
8 The Bangles - Manic Monday
Prince on writing credits here too, although in Greenwich Village summer pop mode. Rebecca Black missed out Idon'thavetorunday.
7 Jim Diamond - Hi Ho Silver
The synth horn stab favouring theme to Boon, the series that claimed Michael Elphick as a private investigator and gave Neil Morrissey a career.
6 The Real Thing - You To Me Are Everything (The Decade Remix 76/86)
You wouldn't associate it with the type of globe straddling hit that needed a tenth anniversary revival, but such is wine bar soul.
5 Sam Cooke - Wonderful World
It was on an advert.
4 Samantha Fox - Touch Me (I Want Your Body)
Easy to forget how famous Page 3 made Sam, particularly at a time when legions of glamour models appear in first name terms only on a whole shelf of weeklies and monthlies and outside that little ecosystem have no name recognition at all. Anything could have made her a chart star first time out as long as City boys on Friday nights out could dance to it and it contained lyrical allusions to sex, and that's pretty much the case. "Like a tramp in the night I was begging for you to treat my body like you wanted to"? The East End homeless must be more forward than in most places.
3 David Bowie - Absolute Beginners
The theme from a hopeless box office flop, doing so badly it brought down the company that put out Chariots Of Fire and Gandhi less than five years earlier. Well, that's what happens if you make it a Patsy Kensit star vehicle. A minor rejuvenation after a poor few years musically for Bowie, though, not to mention his getting to arse about on a big typewriter, and both Rick Wakeman and Steve Nieve on keyboards.
2 Diana Ross - Chain Reaction
Gibb provided, Steps bastardised monochrome Motown nostalgia that seemed to be around the top end of the charts forever. Phil King, bassist from Lush and at some point the Jesus & Mary Chain, is supposedly in the video. Now used to sell insurance comparison, if you can sell the concept of comparison.
1 Cliff Richard And The Young Ones - Living Doll
Pop music, let's go! Comic Relief was officially launched on Christmas Day 1985 but this was its first physical sortie, three years before the first telethon, and some argue the first sign that 'alternative comedy', as only Jim Bowen still calls it, was usurping the traditional state. Inspired by Rick's adoration of the man, of course, and Cliff's first team-up with Hank Marvin in more than a decade, though when they did it live at that year's first Comic Relief night Cliff refused permission for it to be included on the following VHS. The studio and video versions are different, which got us at the time (the "which instruments do you want us to break?" bit is fleshed out). The B-side, (All The Little Flowers Are) Happy, is quite something for the time, though Ade Edmondson in full Vyvyan flight is difficult on the unsuspecting.
Firstly, let's skip over Made In England And Ray Dorset, Psychic TV And The Angels Of Light and, remarkably, Half Man Half Biscuit's Trumpton Riots in the 92-99 region and glance at the top 75 debut weeks of two colossi of female singing, Janet Jackson's What Have You Done For Me Lately? at 52 and of course Sinitta, now only ever the surely disappointing to Simon's choices regular X Factor mentor. So Macho was the first charting single on Cowell's Fanfare Records and in fact pretty much the only success the label ever had bar Yell!'s all too literal moment in the sun.
40 Bronski Beat - C'mon! C'mon!
The post-Somerville version with one John Foster singing. You'll know Bronski v2.0 for Hit That Perfect Beat, which is fortunate.
39 The Pogues - Poguetry In Motion EP
Very much a Dave Robinson title, that. London-Irish pathos abound on an EP featuring, none as lead track, Pogues standard Rainy Night In Soho, The Wire favourite The Body Of An American and instrumental Planxty Noel Hill, the title a reference to the nominative trad Irish musician who'd described the Pogues as a "terrible abortion".
38 Survivor - Burning Heart
Nothing says 'late night ITV advertised hard rock compilation, mail or phone order only' more.
37 Mike And The Mechanics - Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground)
MOR titans of studio sheen's debut single, actually from a film called On Dangerous Ground (Choke Canyon in the US), featuring nobody you've ever heard of and about nothing of explicable interest.
36 Paul Hardcastle - Don't Waste My Time
Fairlight soul before the post-Whitney glut, featuring vocals by Carol Kenyon off Heaven 17's Temptation. One of the three most famous things about Yorkshire, apparently.
35 Viola Wills - Dare To Dream/Both Sides Now
Oddly named disco-soul mid-ranker whose official biography claims her three singles "would land Viola in the Guiness Book of Records for the UK." Well, we're not going to dissuade her from the notion, and not just because she's dead.
34 Big Audio Dynamite - E=MC2
Nic Roeg tribute stew staring Mick Jones, winging it Don Letts and three people who went on to form Dreadzone. Have reformed, like everyone.
33 Tippa Irie - Hello Darling
Reggae tribute to Ed Stewart. Perhaps.
32 Electric Light Orchestra - Calling America
More synths! Even more synths! Well, Jeff Lynne was never someone keen on the concept of subtle minimalism, although getting rid of the actual orchestral bit - ELO were a trio at this point - surely devalues the currency.
31 Whitney Houston - How Will I Know
Second hit and the first where she really opens the pipes on those vocal chords. Very much in the Pointer Sisters idiom.
30 New Order - Shellshock
Is it sacrilege that, despite the ageing nature of some of those keyboard settings (synth trumpets!) we prefer this in New Order Go Detroit terms to all the Arthur Baker stuff?
29 Tavares - Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel
The Tavares brothers, in fact, whose nicknames - Ralph, Pooch, Chubby, Butch and Tiny - all make them sound like cartoon dogs.
28 Alexander O'Neal - If You Were Here Tonight
The sort of entry you don't need to hear to know exactly how it sounds.
27 Falco - Rock Me Amadeus
I love legitimate theatre.
26 Freddie Jackson - Rock Me Tonight (For Old Time's Sake)
See 28, but with gated snares.
25 Stevie Wonder - Overjoyed
Like an anti-McCartney, Wonder's prime age is starting to come back into its own these days when weighed against the big hit 80s schlock that affected his public standing for ages. Actually this one's quite good, largely because it turns out to have been written in the late 70s, and features ear catching "environmental percussion" - crickets, birds, water, that sort of Hexstatic-precursing thing.
24 Atlantic Starr - Secret Lovers
At least he didn't fall victim to the Linn drum soul treatment too.
23 Billy Ocean - When The Going Gets Tough (The Tough Get Going)
A future Comic Relief single itself, of course, with Adam & Joe in the video, not that they mention it much now for some reason.
22 Frank Sinatra - Theme From New York, New York
Only six years old at this point, originally written for Liza Minelli, and yet by the mid to late 90s it was already established as the only way to end a wedding reception disco. Sinatra recorded it for his concept album Trilogy: Past Present Future, one disc of standards, one of pop hits, one a freeform six track, nearly 40 minutes long experimental suite containing tracks called What Time Does The Next Miracle Leave? and World War None! This is old stager Chairman Of The Board Frank Sinatra, remember.
21 Hipsway - The Honeythief
Sole top 40 single for poor man's Blow Monkeys, what Johnny McElhone did between Altered Images and Texas. Our brother had the lyric page from Smash Hits for this sellotaped up in his bedroom.
20 Howard Jones - No One Is To Blame
Peter Powell reckoned Jones would be "one of the big new names to emerge in 1984", odd wording given he'd had two top three singles in 1983. By 1986 it was all over, this his last top 20 single.
19 Pet Shop Boys - Love Comes Quickly
Whatever can Neil mean?
18 Huey Lewis And The News - Power Of Love/Do You Believe In Love
If the former seems out of place, that's because it is - it'd reached number 10 in October 1985 but reared back up the charts and settled at 9 in March. No idea why. Video release wasn't that quick, was it?
17 Sigue Sigue Sputnik - Love Missile F1-11
"Hi-tech sex, designer violence, and the fifth generation of rock 'n' roll". Or, as everyone not Tony James called them, silly hair and sampledelic electropunk nobody needed, and now nothing is more 1986. Still, this had a vim with its Chuck Berry riffs, and the TOTP appearance with the explosions and flagrant disregard for mic technique or how wrong vocals with loads of echo come across is quite somethin. The director's trying, bless him. Whatever happened to Magenta Devine?
16 Queen - A Kind Of Magic
Look, no 'It's'. Freddie in big cloak summons backing singers in neon colours.
15 Whistle - (Nothing Serious) Just Buggin'
We know nothing else about them apart from what's on Wikipedia, which claims they were Jazzy Jazz (self-explanatory, surely?), Kool Doobie and DJ Silver Spinner. But yeah, how great in the annals of stupid early crossover rap is this? Includes one of those voice sampling keyboards. Heavily.
14 The Rolling Stones - Harlem Shuffle
Bob & Earl's original none more going to a go-go R&B groove (with opening horns sampled on Jump Around) ridden over by a coach and horses by men in pastel colours.
13 Blow Monkeys - Digging Your Scene
The quality side of 80s Brit jazz-soul - that is, 'not Matt Bianco' - Thatcher-baiting floppy quiffed emoter Dr Robert says this is about the initial spread of AIDS amid the gay clubbing community. Future Radio 1 nondescription merchant Dixie Peach on backing vocals, it says here.
12 Art Of Noise Featuring Duane Eddy - Peter Gunn
Even Paul Morley would have had trouble writing up the manifesto for this one.
11 Mr Mister - Kyrie
Now clap above your heads! Classic drivetime man-in-wide-suit-playing-keyboards-on-either-side AOR with a liturgical bent.
10 Culture Club - Move Away
Junkie George was still three months away from having eight weeks to live, but something was definitely slipping away already, this the band's last top 10 single except for a reformation semi-fluke in 1998. With that all in mind it's no wonder the big single from their new album From Luxury To Heartache (yeah, we see) was basically Fairlight-friendly anaemia.
9 Prince - Kiss
Fuck you, Jones, you've never half understood why this was so stunning at the time, and to an extent still is.
8 The Bangles - Manic Monday
Prince on writing credits here too, although in Greenwich Village summer pop mode. Rebecca Black missed out Idon'thavetorunday.
7 Jim Diamond - Hi Ho Silver
The synth horn stab favouring theme to Boon, the series that claimed Michael Elphick as a private investigator and gave Neil Morrissey a career.
6 The Real Thing - You To Me Are Everything (The Decade Remix 76/86)
You wouldn't associate it with the type of globe straddling hit that needed a tenth anniversary revival, but such is wine bar soul.
5 Sam Cooke - Wonderful World
It was on an advert.
4 Samantha Fox - Touch Me (I Want Your Body)
Easy to forget how famous Page 3 made Sam, particularly at a time when legions of glamour models appear in first name terms only on a whole shelf of weeklies and monthlies and outside that little ecosystem have no name recognition at all. Anything could have made her a chart star first time out as long as City boys on Friday nights out could dance to it and it contained lyrical allusions to sex, and that's pretty much the case. "Like a tramp in the night I was begging for you to treat my body like you wanted to"? The East End homeless must be more forward than in most places.
3 David Bowie - Absolute Beginners
The theme from a hopeless box office flop, doing so badly it brought down the company that put out Chariots Of Fire and Gandhi less than five years earlier. Well, that's what happens if you make it a Patsy Kensit star vehicle. A minor rejuvenation after a poor few years musically for Bowie, though, not to mention his getting to arse about on a big typewriter, and both Rick Wakeman and Steve Nieve on keyboards.
2 Diana Ross - Chain Reaction
Gibb provided, Steps bastardised monochrome Motown nostalgia that seemed to be around the top end of the charts forever. Phil King, bassist from Lush and at some point the Jesus & Mary Chain, is supposedly in the video. Now used to sell insurance comparison, if you can sell the concept of comparison.
1 Cliff Richard And The Young Ones - Living Doll
Pop music, let's go! Comic Relief was officially launched on Christmas Day 1985 but this was its first physical sortie, three years before the first telethon, and some argue the first sign that 'alternative comedy', as only Jim Bowen still calls it, was usurping the traditional state. Inspired by Rick's adoration of the man, of course, and Cliff's first team-up with Hank Marvin in more than a decade, though when they did it live at that year's first Comic Relief night Cliff refused permission for it to be included on the following VHS. The studio and video versions are different, which got us at the time (the "which instruments do you want us to break?" bit is fleshed out). The B-side, (All The Little Flowers Are) Happy, is quite something for the time, though Ade Edmondson in full Vyvyan flight is difficult on the unsuspecting.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Abort, retry, succeed
First old chart of a new year, and it's w/b 19th January 1997, a chart to celebrate the week at number one for one of the very greatest one hit wonders.
**SPOILER**
40 The Wedding Present - Montreal
Now that's an opening curveball. Gedge's seventeenth and penultimate (mind you, who really knows?) top 40 single, quite a good one in his slower, heartbroken, not six minutes long phase even if nobody remembers it.
39 Damage - Forever
The only thing people remember the JLS of their day except not really successful for is that one of them went out with Emma Bunton for ages, and indeed still is twelve years later.
38 Mary Kiani - 100%
There were a lot of forgettable even for its field club dance vocalists around then.
37 Spacehog - In The Meantime
Overblown Viper Room glam-many-years-too-late from expats, the guitarist of whom is the happy-shitting PA in Joaquin Phoenix vanity project I'm Still Here.
36 Virus - Moon
A week earlier and we'd have had Kenickie.
35 Warren G Featuring Adina Howard - What's Love Got To Do With It
We can't imagine the song survived kindly.
34 Jamiroquai - Cosmic Girl
This is the one where in the video he's driving all his expensive supercars around mountain roads, inventing Top Gear in the process and failing to make anyone feel more inclined towards him.
33 Arkarna - House On Fire
Prime members of the post-Prodigy heavy beats and shouting movement (see also: Lunatic Calm, Bedlam-A-Go-Go). Apparently reformed, whatever help that's going to be.
32 Mr Jack - Wiggly World
Excitable disco with giveaway acid-friendly title.
31 The Beautiful South - Don't Marry Her
The kind of daytime radio sound everyone thinks they always made, with a great big swear in the chorus. Which, obviously, was re-recorded for the daytime radio edit.
30 QFX - Freedom 2
And the problem with all this dance music is there's absolutely nothing to say about it other than accept its presence and move on.
29 Puff Johnson - Over And Over
Puff Daughter? Michael Jackson tour support essentially Toni Braxton before anyone was ready.
28 Erasure - In My Arms
Well past the peak and into "are they still together?" stage for the one time omnipresent Chart Show Indie Chart high flyers.
27 Thunder - Don't Wait Up
Hard rock travellers pay tribute to Nigel Havers.
26 Enigma - Beyond The Invisible
Like Enigma, but out of ideas.
25 MC Lyte - Cold Rock A Party
There was a time - about here, in fact - when MC Lyte was going to take on allcomers at being the biggest female pop-rap thing out there. Only problem, apart from that Missy had something up her sleeve she'd be revealing in the coming months, was she was relying on the omnipotent Combs for a leg up, and given he was also involved with Lil Kim... yeah, as far as getting on covers in the late 90s goes one of these things would not be like the other.
24 Mark Morrison - Horny
"I will always be the all-time musical great of your city. I'm the Beatles of that city." Even though it's not on the paper's site any more we've got a transcript of an interview he gave to the Leicester Mercury in 2008, and it's all gold. "I don't see a Gary Lineker soccer school in Leicester. I don't see an Engelbert Humperdinck or a Showaddywaddy singing school in Leicester." Exhibiting his full range of lyrical emotion here, this being the single before Moan & Groan. If you're keeping score, the stun gun arrest had happened by then but the lookalike doing community service wouldn't for a while yet. Releasing an album this year, it says here, though he's been saying that for years. "That's N-to-the-E-to-the-E-to-the-G-to-the-B-to-the-T-to-the-L."
23 Orbital - Satan (Live)
And so Butthole Surfers get in the top three by osmosis.
22 The Lightning Seeds - Sugar Coated Iceberg
We were going to mention that they've been ending their reunion tour sets with this, which seems odd as it's really not among their best rememebered hits, but we've just discovered their current drummer is Raife Burchell of Jetplane Landing! Admittedly he has been working a bit as a rhythm machine of a man should since JPL were last required for live performance, specifically Ed Harcourt and the Veils, but even so... the man who played on Backlash Cop is now merely keeping time on Pure for money?
21 Robert Miles Featuring Maria Nayler - One And One
The ambient piano house thing was getting a bit worn by now, even with a helium voiced singer who knew her platitudes.
20 The Prodigy - Breathe
For perhaps the only time, the Prodigy actually sound dangerous and thus worthwhile. Though of course visually everyone's trying far too hard, which was why Leeroy was always our favourite member. He didn't sing or play anything, he indulged in impressionistic lanky-man dancing that can't even have fit in at raves and he left before Baby's Got A Temper.
19 Kavana - I Can Make You Feel Good
Ten years later, the runner-up in ITV's in no way me-too search for a West End musical star, Grease Is The Word, the Sandy role in which was won by Bry/ian McFadden's sister. And they say X Factor is misleading keen plebs.
18 The Outhere Brothers - Let Me Hear You Say 'Ole 'Ole
Having got to prominence via school playground whispers of a naughty language version of Don't Stop (Wiggle Wiggle), the not actually brothers basically spent the rest of their career making what wasn't so much songs as attempts to harness chants for their own evil.
17 Whitney Houston - Step By Step
An Annie Lennox song she still gets credited for even though Whitney changed quite a bit of it, which is a neat trick if your publisher can pull it off.
16 Ginuwine - Pony
Single entrendes ahoy featuring odd bass-sort-of noise that every single journalist described as "bloke burping/farting, lol" (we didn't know what lol meant then, they wrote the long way around that) but was in fact the first mass market strike for Timbaland.
15 East 17 - Hey Child
For a band who prided themselves on their blokes down the dogs act, they couldn't half give it the full Westlife when required. Around this time it was the fate of all boy bands to put out at least one single that sounded very much like the ballad the Bee Gees never got finished.
14 Byron Stingily - Get Up (Everybody)
Actual name, that. Always chart bothering combination of second hand house beats and soulful falsetto like a post-acid Sylvester led to four-single-charter dance career.
13 Toni Braxton - Un-Break My Heart
Grandstanding r'n'b balladry from embodiment of overbreathiness always played on Radio 1 in unhelpful dance mix.
12 Nas - Street Dreams
Apart from when KRS-One reinterpreted Shaddap You Face - oh, he did - re-singing someone else's lyrics to your own rap intentions never, ever works, no matter what your reputation.
11 Spice Girls - 2 Become 1
The 1996 Christmas number one, having had its release delayed by a week so the Dunblane charity single, a not totally tactful cover of Knockin' On Heaven's Door, could have a week at number one. About condom wearing, of course, although it's since transpired it was also inspired by Geri and co-writer/producer Matt Rowe having some form of relationship, status of consummation not publicly known. She's a sly one. Well, no she isn't, no.
10 Lisa Stansfield vs Dirty Rotten Scoundrels - People Hold On (Bootleg Mixes)
Coldcut cover, except that Lisa sang on the original too, that charted higher than the original, just because.
9 En Vogue - Don't Let Go (Love)
The fourth and last time we'd see them in the top ten, also the last time they'd record as a quartet. Did we underestimate this band at the time?
8 Reef - Come Back Brighter
"Reef all now pathologically afraid of postmen". If anyone ever tries to tell you this period in music was so superior, point out that bellowed surf-anthemry was considered top ten fare.
7 Madonna - Don't Cry For Me Argentina
Perhaps the only time the phrase "she's no Julie Covington" has been used in worldwide debate.
6 Suede - Saturday Night
Narrator goes out with girl on Saturday night in Suede song and fails to get into fight, take loosely disguised drug hordes or get involved with gasoline or nowhere towns. Remarkable.
5 No Mercy - Where Do You Go
It's not even the summer dropping of guard that can explain this sort of thing being a hit. It was just the poor dance beat radio revolution of the day.
4 Backstreet Boys - Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)
Perhaps America never really got the boy band as teenage commodity. That's why all those from this period, your *NSYNCs and 98 Degreeses, essentially sound the same entirely through their career, something that Westlife proved could be taken overseas but it doesn't present them as anything but a lowest common denominator act, deciding if one strand works why not do it again all the time. This is the one where they get rain machined upon on some steps.
3 Texas - Say What You Want
The one that Chris Evans relaunched them with - he'd had Sharleen on the show the previous November as a late booking, apparently as a guest had been arrested that afternoon, she sang Tired Of Being Alone on guitar, and things swelled from there, Evans picking this up for breakfast show duty shortly afterwards. Who knew all it took was Sharleen to get a haircut and the blues guitar bits to be expunged. Looking comfortable there, Method Man.
2 Tori Amos - Professional Widow (It's Got To Be Big)
Armand's Star Trunk Funkin' Mix, lest we forget. The previous number one, though as with Primal Scream's I'm Losing More Then I'll Ever Have before her, you do wonder how they got from the original to the remix and got away with passing it off as one and the same.
1 White Town - Your Woman
Oh, just another of your big band crackly sampling socio-electro-pop nuggets with mixed message sexual leanings ("To have created such mass confusion is one the best achievements in my life") by a British Asian ex-Trotskyite Magnetic Fields fan made in his bedroom. Jyoti Mishra's was fourth debut single (>Abort, Retry, Fail?_ EP, technically) to enter at number one, after Whigfield, Babylon Zoo and Robson & Jerome. Now there's company. Although it wasn't actually his debut release at all, he'd already been going for ten years as it said in the EP sleeve notes (yeah, we've still got the CD). The press didn't know what to make of it, routinely describing him as a housebound by choice recluse. We've seen him at two of the last three Indietracks, he must have got over that. It was originally released in early autumn 1996 by a small American label, picked up and played endlessly by Mark Radcliffe on the Graveyard Shift, and we remember emailing Jyoti for distribution details. Then Mark and Lard got a breakfast deputisation stint, chose it as single of the week, Simon Mayo picked up the slack once they'd sloped back off to overnights, and Chrysalis signed him to a deal that led to a flop second single and album, and back to his own label he went. Mishra describes it now as being about "my first love affair and how I couldn’t reconcile my grand Marxist posing with real love". Wiley worked around it, briefly hyped nu-jazz annoyance Tyler James covered it, as did Cats On Fire. It remains an absolutely singular chart achievement.
**SPOILER**
40 The Wedding Present - Montreal
Now that's an opening curveball. Gedge's seventeenth and penultimate (mind you, who really knows?) top 40 single, quite a good one in his slower, heartbroken, not six minutes long phase even if nobody remembers it.
39 Damage - Forever
The only thing people remember the JLS of their day except not really successful for is that one of them went out with Emma Bunton for ages, and indeed still is twelve years later.
38 Mary Kiani - 100%
There were a lot of forgettable even for its field club dance vocalists around then.
37 Spacehog - In The Meantime
Overblown Viper Room glam-many-years-too-late from expats, the guitarist of whom is the happy-shitting PA in Joaquin Phoenix vanity project I'm Still Here.
36 Virus - Moon
A week earlier and we'd have had Kenickie.
35 Warren G Featuring Adina Howard - What's Love Got To Do With It
We can't imagine the song survived kindly.
34 Jamiroquai - Cosmic Girl
This is the one where in the video he's driving all his expensive supercars around mountain roads, inventing Top Gear in the process and failing to make anyone feel more inclined towards him.
33 Arkarna - House On Fire
Prime members of the post-Prodigy heavy beats and shouting movement (see also: Lunatic Calm, Bedlam-A-Go-Go). Apparently reformed, whatever help that's going to be.
32 Mr Jack - Wiggly World
Excitable disco with giveaway acid-friendly title.
31 The Beautiful South - Don't Marry Her
The kind of daytime radio sound everyone thinks they always made, with a great big swear in the chorus. Which, obviously, was re-recorded for the daytime radio edit.
30 QFX - Freedom 2
And the problem with all this dance music is there's absolutely nothing to say about it other than accept its presence and move on.
29 Puff Johnson - Over And Over
Puff Daughter? Michael Jackson tour support essentially Toni Braxton before anyone was ready.
28 Erasure - In My Arms
Well past the peak and into "are they still together?" stage for the one time omnipresent Chart Show Indie Chart high flyers.
27 Thunder - Don't Wait Up
Hard rock travellers pay tribute to Nigel Havers.
26 Enigma - Beyond The Invisible
Like Enigma, but out of ideas.
25 MC Lyte - Cold Rock A Party
There was a time - about here, in fact - when MC Lyte was going to take on allcomers at being the biggest female pop-rap thing out there. Only problem, apart from that Missy had something up her sleeve she'd be revealing in the coming months, was she was relying on the omnipotent Combs for a leg up, and given he was also involved with Lil Kim... yeah, as far as getting on covers in the late 90s goes one of these things would not be like the other.
24 Mark Morrison - Horny
"I will always be the all-time musical great of your city. I'm the Beatles of that city." Even though it's not on the paper's site any more we've got a transcript of an interview he gave to the Leicester Mercury in 2008, and it's all gold. "I don't see a Gary Lineker soccer school in Leicester. I don't see an Engelbert Humperdinck or a Showaddywaddy singing school in Leicester." Exhibiting his full range of lyrical emotion here, this being the single before Moan & Groan. If you're keeping score, the stun gun arrest had happened by then but the lookalike doing community service wouldn't for a while yet. Releasing an album this year, it says here, though he's been saying that for years. "That's N-to-the-E-to-the-E-to-the-G-to-the-B-to-the-T-to-the-L."
23 Orbital - Satan (Live)
And so Butthole Surfers get in the top three by osmosis.
22 The Lightning Seeds - Sugar Coated Iceberg
We were going to mention that they've been ending their reunion tour sets with this, which seems odd as it's really not among their best rememebered hits, but we've just discovered their current drummer is Raife Burchell of Jetplane Landing! Admittedly he has been working a bit as a rhythm machine of a man should since JPL were last required for live performance, specifically Ed Harcourt and the Veils, but even so... the man who played on Backlash Cop is now merely keeping time on Pure for money?
21 Robert Miles Featuring Maria Nayler - One And One
The ambient piano house thing was getting a bit worn by now, even with a helium voiced singer who knew her platitudes.
20 The Prodigy - Breathe
For perhaps the only time, the Prodigy actually sound dangerous and thus worthwhile. Though of course visually everyone's trying far too hard, which was why Leeroy was always our favourite member. He didn't sing or play anything, he indulged in impressionistic lanky-man dancing that can't even have fit in at raves and he left before Baby's Got A Temper.
19 Kavana - I Can Make You Feel Good
Ten years later, the runner-up in ITV's in no way me-too search for a West End musical star, Grease Is The Word, the Sandy role in which was won by Bry/ian McFadden's sister. And they say X Factor is misleading keen plebs.
18 The Outhere Brothers - Let Me Hear You Say 'Ole 'Ole
Having got to prominence via school playground whispers of a naughty language version of Don't Stop (Wiggle Wiggle), the not actually brothers basically spent the rest of their career making what wasn't so much songs as attempts to harness chants for their own evil.
17 Whitney Houston - Step By Step
An Annie Lennox song she still gets credited for even though Whitney changed quite a bit of it, which is a neat trick if your publisher can pull it off.
16 Ginuwine - Pony
Single entrendes ahoy featuring odd bass-sort-of noise that every single journalist described as "bloke burping/farting, lol" (we didn't know what lol meant then, they wrote the long way around that) but was in fact the first mass market strike for Timbaland.
15 East 17 - Hey Child
For a band who prided themselves on their blokes down the dogs act, they couldn't half give it the full Westlife when required. Around this time it was the fate of all boy bands to put out at least one single that sounded very much like the ballad the Bee Gees never got finished.
14 Byron Stingily - Get Up (Everybody)
Actual name, that. Always chart bothering combination of second hand house beats and soulful falsetto like a post-acid Sylvester led to four-single-charter dance career.
13 Toni Braxton - Un-Break My Heart
Grandstanding r'n'b balladry from embodiment of overbreathiness always played on Radio 1 in unhelpful dance mix.
12 Nas - Street Dreams
Apart from when KRS-One reinterpreted Shaddap You Face - oh, he did - re-singing someone else's lyrics to your own rap intentions never, ever works, no matter what your reputation.
11 Spice Girls - 2 Become 1
The 1996 Christmas number one, having had its release delayed by a week so the Dunblane charity single, a not totally tactful cover of Knockin' On Heaven's Door, could have a week at number one. About condom wearing, of course, although it's since transpired it was also inspired by Geri and co-writer/producer Matt Rowe having some form of relationship, status of consummation not publicly known. She's a sly one. Well, no she isn't, no.
10 Lisa Stansfield vs Dirty Rotten Scoundrels - People Hold On (Bootleg Mixes)
Coldcut cover, except that Lisa sang on the original too, that charted higher than the original, just because.
9 En Vogue - Don't Let Go (Love)
The fourth and last time we'd see them in the top ten, also the last time they'd record as a quartet. Did we underestimate this band at the time?
8 Reef - Come Back Brighter
"Reef all now pathologically afraid of postmen". If anyone ever tries to tell you this period in music was so superior, point out that bellowed surf-anthemry was considered top ten fare.
7 Madonna - Don't Cry For Me Argentina
Perhaps the only time the phrase "she's no Julie Covington" has been used in worldwide debate.
6 Suede - Saturday Night
Narrator goes out with girl on Saturday night in Suede song and fails to get into fight, take loosely disguised drug hordes or get involved with gasoline or nowhere towns. Remarkable.
5 No Mercy - Where Do You Go
It's not even the summer dropping of guard that can explain this sort of thing being a hit. It was just the poor dance beat radio revolution of the day.
4 Backstreet Boys - Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)
Perhaps America never really got the boy band as teenage commodity. That's why all those from this period, your *NSYNCs and 98 Degreeses, essentially sound the same entirely through their career, something that Westlife proved could be taken overseas but it doesn't present them as anything but a lowest common denominator act, deciding if one strand works why not do it again all the time. This is the one where they get rain machined upon on some steps.
3 Texas - Say What You Want
The one that Chris Evans relaunched them with - he'd had Sharleen on the show the previous November as a late booking, apparently as a guest had been arrested that afternoon, she sang Tired Of Being Alone on guitar, and things swelled from there, Evans picking this up for breakfast show duty shortly afterwards. Who knew all it took was Sharleen to get a haircut and the blues guitar bits to be expunged. Looking comfortable there, Method Man.
2 Tori Amos - Professional Widow (It's Got To Be Big)
Armand's Star Trunk Funkin' Mix, lest we forget. The previous number one, though as with Primal Scream's I'm Losing More Then I'll Ever Have before her, you do wonder how they got from the original to the remix and got away with passing it off as one and the same.
1 White Town - Your Woman
Oh, just another of your big band crackly sampling socio-electro-pop nuggets with mixed message sexual leanings ("To have created such mass confusion is one the best achievements in my life") by a British Asian ex-Trotskyite Magnetic Fields fan made in his bedroom. Jyoti Mishra's was fourth debut single (>Abort, Retry, Fail?_ EP, technically) to enter at number one, after Whigfield, Babylon Zoo and Robson & Jerome. Now there's company. Although it wasn't actually his debut release at all, he'd already been going for ten years as it said in the EP sleeve notes (yeah, we've still got the CD). The press didn't know what to make of it, routinely describing him as a housebound by choice recluse. We've seen him at two of the last three Indietracks, he must have got over that. It was originally released in early autumn 1996 by a small American label, picked up and played endlessly by Mark Radcliffe on the Graveyard Shift, and we remember emailing Jyoti for distribution details. Then Mark and Lard got a breakfast deputisation stint, chose it as single of the week, Simon Mayo picked up the slack once they'd sloped back off to overnights, and Chrysalis signed him to a deal that led to a flop second single and album, and back to his own label he went. Mishra describes it now as being about "my first love affair and how I couldn’t reconcile my grand Marxist posing with real love". Wiley worked around it, briefly hyped nu-jazz annoyance Tyler James covered it, as did Cats On Fire. It remains an absolutely singular chart achievement.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
The only chart that counted: 1991
40 Queen - The Show Must Go On
At the risk of ruining the suspense, we'll come back to this.
39 Kenny Thomas - Tender Love
He had a couple of successful albums but nobody seems to remember 1991's inhabitor of the British white soul boy gene. It's not the most possessing of names, in truth.
38 The Pogues Featuring Kirsty MacColl - Fairytale Of New York
As with Slade in 1981, it re-enters the top 40 every year now but between original release and download inclusion this was its only reappearance in the top 40. Every year someone mentions the Ronan Keating bowlderised cover, and every year someone makes a fuss about language.
37 Tina Turner - Way Of The World
36 Erasure - Am I Right?
35 Airhead - Counting Sheep
Those post-baggy pre-Britpop days were uncertain times for British guitar bands. On the one hand, EMF and the Primitives. On the other, the Sundays and Daisy Chainsaw. Somewhere in the middle but gently leaning towards the left, the band originally called Jefferson Airhead, with a stark inevitability, they kind of grew into a junior Wonder Stuff. Relating to previous single Funny How, their fan page claims "BBC chose it as the introductory music on their Match of the Day football programme." That must have caused a row with traditionalists.
34 Shakin' Stevens - I'll Be Home This Christmas
And home he stayed, this being his last charting single bar a one-off revival following that probably forgotten by everyone involved already Hit Me Baby One More Time.
33 James - Sound
First single from Seven, which obviously wasn't their seventh album, and one of those times when Tim Booth would just lose patience with pop and refuse to write a proper chorus when he could woo all over it instead.
32 Prince And The New Power Generation - Diamonds And Pearls
Prince, being Prince, speculates that such gifts might make the intended a "happy boy or a girl". We wonder if this might be the last any good Prince single.
31 2 Unlimited - Get Ready For This
Ray and Anita had four hit singles before No Limit, this one still being used as filler background music.
30 Simon And Garfunkel - Hazy Shade Of Winter/Silent Night
No idea why this was re-released, presuming it wasn't randomly thematic. Advert? If so, it was outdoing number 44, Home For Christmas Day by The Red Car And The Blue Car. As in the Milky Way adverts, yes, festive lyrics to a reinterpretation of the "from trucks to prickly trees" tune. That would spoil your appetite. We can but only wonder what Frank Ifield And The Backroom Boys' Yodelling Song at 56, or Mel Smith's Another Blooming Christmas at 59, entailed.
29 Cathy Dennis - Everybody Move
Still going as a writer - she co-penned Diana Vickers' Once with the almost as fluently prolific Eg White and is one of a trillion people credited on that Boy George track on Mark Ronson's album - but let's face it, you don't need to hear this to know what it would sound like.
28 U2 - Mysterious Ways
As you'd imagine there's a lot of U2 about online, but the one thing we cannot find is the advert for Achtung Baby with Burt Kwouk, or similar, and a falling Trabant. Anyone? Or did we dream all that?
27 Pet Shop Boys - Was It Worth It?
Not on Ultimate - perhaps they're embarrassed about the brusqueness of the contra-vocals in the bridge, or just that it was their first single to miss the top 20 since West End Girls, as it's about as well as Chris, with Brothers In Rhythm's production help, ever marshalled stadium-ready Ibiza house.
26 Altern 8 - Activ 8 (Come With Me)
Bassy rave kids in chemical warfare outfits and branded facemasks briefly become Future Of Everything.
25 Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit
It'd just finished a three week top ten run and the fabled unseating of Michael Jackson atop Billboard was just three weeks away. It's entirely possible there are people who think Kurt always sang like he did on TOTP.
24 New Kids On The Block - If You Go Away
Their last top 20 single, and as hardly anyone this side of the pond, and increasingly few that side, have noticed their reformation that's how it's likely to stay.
23 Lisa Stansfield - All Woman
And so a million cash-in compilations prominently featuring Eva Cassidy get their name.
22 Vic Reeves And The Wonder Stuff - Dizzy
Vic's Christmas single was actually a cover of Abide With Me produced by The Grid, which could only make 51 while this was still hanging around. It's not coming across as entirely dignified from this distance, and thus much like Vic's recent work, but a reissue of I Will Cure You is surely overdue.
21 Digital Orgasm - Running Out Of Time
Goodier must have sweated kittens when this one came up in the running order.
20 Salt-N-Pepa - You Showed Me
A cover of the Turtles song that the Lightning Seeds also had a go at. They were struggling a bit already.
19 Kate Bush - Rocket Man
A pop reggaefied - pop reggaefied! Kate Bush! - cover from an Elton'n'Bernie Taupin tribute album, the video to which features her playing ukelele, predating modern mores by nearly two decades.
18 Human Resource - The Complete Dominator
Human Resource as a band name? Only in the rave days.
17 Martika - Martika's Kitchen
Written and produced by Prince, ergo full of innuendo. Though we always liked the reaching too far double meaning reference to "the latest jams".
16 East Side Beat - Ride Like The Wind
Fear hope, all ye who read the next few. It's a Christopher Cross cover by an Italian dance outfit, a form of reversioning that blighted us all then and blights us all now.
15 Jason Donovan - The Joseph Mega-Remix
Having bled the songs from the show dry, they put them all together with a dance beat.
14 UK Mixmasters - The Bare Necessities Megamix
Why would you ever do this? And you think labels will jump on anything now.
13 Simply Red - Stars
Finally, a semblance of something. This album was omnipresent at the time, estimated to have shipped 3.4m an providing a place in the market for big grandstanding Britsoul that the Lighthouse Family would come to sully.
12 Cliff Richard - We Should Be Together
It was no Saviour's Day.
11 Michael Jackson - Black Or White
How excited everyone got when Top Of The Pops premiered the video, with the car-trashing, zip-fastening sequence left in. All official versions on YouTube cut off at the end of the morphing sequence on YouTube, but if you have ever wondered here it is. The graffiti on the windows looks just so natural.
10 Shaft - Roobarb And Custard
Before this the Magic Roundabout-using Summers Magic, after this A Trip To Trumpton, Sesame's Treet and, yes, Charly. Dance acts tried various methods of working their magic on the TOTP stage, few as unsuccessfully as this.
9 Hammer - Addams Groove
Obviously the greatest record ever made.
Well, look at it: Hammer, apparently in urgent need of pepper that can only be sated by travelling to the spooky house on the hill, gets beheaded by the world's worst CGI and ends up doing curiously Egyptian-like poses in an unconvincing graveyard. Christina Ricci makes no more comfortable a supporting dancer than she did in her pop video-from-film debut a year earlier. Buffalo '66 seems both a long, long way away and much more explicable.
8 Brian May - Driven By You
Released less than three weeks before Freddie died off the back of Ford adverts. The order went in for drivetime rock, so drivetime rock we had.
7 Kym Sims - Too Blind To See It
Used to have an old Saint & Greavsie on tape that used this as backing for a bloopers bit. Otherwise, a lesser Keep On Jumpin'.
6 Guns N' Roses - Live And Let Die
Even by the standards of non-Jamaican musicians attempting to bludgeon reggae into a rock song the bridge on this version is inexpertly done, largely because Axl just bellows it in his usual timbre regardless of the change of backing.
5 Right Said Fred - Don't Talk Just Kiss
Their second single, so still coasting on the bald muscular ticket to an extent, though for someone so out and proud Richard Fairbrass does seem to take the broad heterosexual view in their first few singles. The hirsute one, what was his story?
4 KLF Featuring Tammy Wynette - Justified And Ancient
King Boy D and Rockman Rock strike some sort of belated self-referencing paydirt, this the fourth version one way or another of the central theme, and accidentally invent Scooter in the process (Stadium Techno, song called Fuck The Millennium, "respect to the man in the ice cream van" from Weekend). Their last single too, retiring the following May, assuming you don't count K The Millennium.
3 George Michael And Elton John - Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me
There can't have been any oxygen left in the building once they'd finished.
2 Diana Ross - When You Tell Me That You Love Me
The same position Westlife would later take the song to, and when Westlife can do a straight-up cover you know you're not in PB territory.
1 Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody/These Are The Days Of Our Lives
Freddie died on 24th November, the day after comfirming long-reported rumours he had AIDS in the days when the tabloids considered it the most evil thing of all. So this got hurredly shoved out within three weeks, spent another five weeks at number one and is reputedly the third biggest selling single in Britain ever, behind Candle In The Wind '97 and Do They Know It's Christmas. These Are The Days Of Our Lives had been the single before last, the aforelisted The Show Must Go On in the middle, and is now the familiar theme to some ageing men sitting around on Sky Sports.
At the risk of ruining the suspense, we'll come back to this.
39 Kenny Thomas - Tender Love
He had a couple of successful albums but nobody seems to remember 1991's inhabitor of the British white soul boy gene. It's not the most possessing of names, in truth.
38 The Pogues Featuring Kirsty MacColl - Fairytale Of New York
As with Slade in 1981, it re-enters the top 40 every year now but between original release and download inclusion this was its only reappearance in the top 40. Every year someone mentions the Ronan Keating bowlderised cover, and every year someone makes a fuss about language.
37 Tina Turner - Way Of The World
36 Erasure - Am I Right?
35 Airhead - Counting Sheep
Those post-baggy pre-Britpop days were uncertain times for British guitar bands. On the one hand, EMF and the Primitives. On the other, the Sundays and Daisy Chainsaw. Somewhere in the middle but gently leaning towards the left, the band originally called Jefferson Airhead, with a stark inevitability, they kind of grew into a junior Wonder Stuff. Relating to previous single Funny How, their fan page claims "BBC chose it as the introductory music on their Match of the Day football programme." That must have caused a row with traditionalists.
34 Shakin' Stevens - I'll Be Home This Christmas
And home he stayed, this being his last charting single bar a one-off revival following that probably forgotten by everyone involved already Hit Me Baby One More Time.
33 James - Sound
First single from Seven, which obviously wasn't their seventh album, and one of those times when Tim Booth would just lose patience with pop and refuse to write a proper chorus when he could woo all over it instead.
32 Prince And The New Power Generation - Diamonds And Pearls
Prince, being Prince, speculates that such gifts might make the intended a "happy boy or a girl". We wonder if this might be the last any good Prince single.
31 2 Unlimited - Get Ready For This
Ray and Anita had four hit singles before No Limit, this one still being used as filler background music.
30 Simon And Garfunkel - Hazy Shade Of Winter/Silent Night
No idea why this was re-released, presuming it wasn't randomly thematic. Advert? If so, it was outdoing number 44, Home For Christmas Day by The Red Car And The Blue Car. As in the Milky Way adverts, yes, festive lyrics to a reinterpretation of the "from trucks to prickly trees" tune. That would spoil your appetite. We can but only wonder what Frank Ifield And The Backroom Boys' Yodelling Song at 56, or Mel Smith's Another Blooming Christmas at 59, entailed.
29 Cathy Dennis - Everybody Move
Still going as a writer - she co-penned Diana Vickers' Once with the almost as fluently prolific Eg White and is one of a trillion people credited on that Boy George track on Mark Ronson's album - but let's face it, you don't need to hear this to know what it would sound like.
28 U2 - Mysterious Ways
As you'd imagine there's a lot of U2 about online, but the one thing we cannot find is the advert for Achtung Baby with Burt Kwouk, or similar, and a falling Trabant. Anyone? Or did we dream all that?
27 Pet Shop Boys - Was It Worth It?
Not on Ultimate - perhaps they're embarrassed about the brusqueness of the contra-vocals in the bridge, or just that it was their first single to miss the top 20 since West End Girls, as it's about as well as Chris, with Brothers In Rhythm's production help, ever marshalled stadium-ready Ibiza house.
26 Altern 8 - Activ 8 (Come With Me)
Bassy rave kids in chemical warfare outfits and branded facemasks briefly become Future Of Everything.
25 Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit
It'd just finished a three week top ten run and the fabled unseating of Michael Jackson atop Billboard was just three weeks away. It's entirely possible there are people who think Kurt always sang like he did on TOTP.
24 New Kids On The Block - If You Go Away
Their last top 20 single, and as hardly anyone this side of the pond, and increasingly few that side, have noticed their reformation that's how it's likely to stay.
23 Lisa Stansfield - All Woman
And so a million cash-in compilations prominently featuring Eva Cassidy get their name.
22 Vic Reeves And The Wonder Stuff - Dizzy
Vic's Christmas single was actually a cover of Abide With Me produced by The Grid, which could only make 51 while this was still hanging around. It's not coming across as entirely dignified from this distance, and thus much like Vic's recent work, but a reissue of I Will Cure You is surely overdue.
21 Digital Orgasm - Running Out Of Time
Goodier must have sweated kittens when this one came up in the running order.
20 Salt-N-Pepa - You Showed Me
A cover of the Turtles song that the Lightning Seeds also had a go at. They were struggling a bit already.
19 Kate Bush - Rocket Man
A pop reggaefied - pop reggaefied! Kate Bush! - cover from an Elton'n'Bernie Taupin tribute album, the video to which features her playing ukelele, predating modern mores by nearly two decades.
18 Human Resource - The Complete Dominator
Human Resource as a band name? Only in the rave days.
17 Martika - Martika's Kitchen
Written and produced by Prince, ergo full of innuendo. Though we always liked the reaching too far double meaning reference to "the latest jams".
16 East Side Beat - Ride Like The Wind
Fear hope, all ye who read the next few. It's a Christopher Cross cover by an Italian dance outfit, a form of reversioning that blighted us all then and blights us all now.
15 Jason Donovan - The Joseph Mega-Remix
Having bled the songs from the show dry, they put them all together with a dance beat.
14 UK Mixmasters - The Bare Necessities Megamix
Why would you ever do this? And you think labels will jump on anything now.
13 Simply Red - Stars
Finally, a semblance of something. This album was omnipresent at the time, estimated to have shipped 3.4m an providing a place in the market for big grandstanding Britsoul that the Lighthouse Family would come to sully.
12 Cliff Richard - We Should Be Together
It was no Saviour's Day.
11 Michael Jackson - Black Or White
How excited everyone got when Top Of The Pops premiered the video, with the car-trashing, zip-fastening sequence left in. All official versions on YouTube cut off at the end of the morphing sequence on YouTube, but if you have ever wondered here it is. The graffiti on the windows looks just so natural.
10 Shaft - Roobarb And Custard
Before this the Magic Roundabout-using Summers Magic, after this A Trip To Trumpton, Sesame's Treet and, yes, Charly. Dance acts tried various methods of working their magic on the TOTP stage, few as unsuccessfully as this.
9 Hammer - Addams Groove
Obviously the greatest record ever made.
Well, look at it: Hammer, apparently in urgent need of pepper that can only be sated by travelling to the spooky house on the hill, gets beheaded by the world's worst CGI and ends up doing curiously Egyptian-like poses in an unconvincing graveyard. Christina Ricci makes no more comfortable a supporting dancer than she did in her pop video-from-film debut a year earlier. Buffalo '66 seems both a long, long way away and much more explicable.
8 Brian May - Driven By You
Released less than three weeks before Freddie died off the back of Ford adverts. The order went in for drivetime rock, so drivetime rock we had.
7 Kym Sims - Too Blind To See It
Used to have an old Saint & Greavsie on tape that used this as backing for a bloopers bit. Otherwise, a lesser Keep On Jumpin'.
6 Guns N' Roses - Live And Let Die
Even by the standards of non-Jamaican musicians attempting to bludgeon reggae into a rock song the bridge on this version is inexpertly done, largely because Axl just bellows it in his usual timbre regardless of the change of backing.
5 Right Said Fred - Don't Talk Just Kiss
Their second single, so still coasting on the bald muscular ticket to an extent, though for someone so out and proud Richard Fairbrass does seem to take the broad heterosexual view in their first few singles. The hirsute one, what was his story?
4 KLF Featuring Tammy Wynette - Justified And Ancient
King Boy D and Rockman Rock strike some sort of belated self-referencing paydirt, this the fourth version one way or another of the central theme, and accidentally invent Scooter in the process (Stadium Techno, song called Fuck The Millennium, "respect to the man in the ice cream van" from Weekend). Their last single too, retiring the following May, assuming you don't count K The Millennium.
3 George Michael And Elton John - Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me
There can't have been any oxygen left in the building once they'd finished.
2 Diana Ross - When You Tell Me That You Love Me
The same position Westlife would later take the song to, and when Westlife can do a straight-up cover you know you're not in PB territory.
1 Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody/These Are The Days Of Our Lives
Freddie died on 24th November, the day after comfirming long-reported rumours he had AIDS in the days when the tabloids considered it the most evil thing of all. So this got hurredly shoved out within three weeks, spent another five weeks at number one and is reputedly the third biggest selling single in Britain ever, behind Candle In The Wind '97 and Do They Know It's Christmas. These Are The Days Of Our Lives had been the single before last, the aforelisted The Show Must Go On in the middle, and is now the familiar theme to some ageing men sitting around on Sky Sports.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
The only chart that counted: 1988
40 Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra - Minnie The Moocher
Because that's just what you'd buy for Christmas, a light drum machine-backed reggae version of a Cab Calloway song. By the way a hardy perennial of festive radio classics, Chris Rea's Driving Home For Christmas, is at 53, which was as high as it got until cracking the 40 for the first time in the great download surge of 2007.
39 Boy Meets Girl - Waiting For A Star To Fall
The reverberations from the rival dance-cheese versions - one sampled, one re-recorded vocals - are still being felt.
38 Humanoid - Stakker Humanoid
They called it acieeed, we gather. Future Future Sound of London members break out the 303.
37 The Beach Boys - Kokomo
Right then. Written by Mike 'not war' Love, John 'Papa' Phillips, Scott 'Flowers In Your Hair' MacKenzie and Terry 'it's unlikely you would've, but he produced the Byrds, introduced Brian to Van Dyke Parks and was reputedly the Manson family's actual target when they killed Sharon Tate - oh, and he was Doris Day's son' Melcher. It was their first Billboard number one in 22 years, and Carl Wilson, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston are on it, but now we're well past the critical evaluation you tend not to see it mentioned much. For, oh, some reason.
36 Hithouse - Jack To The Sound Of The Underground
Music to make lightly satirical, studenty early 90s comedy to. That show, there, contains a sketch about Mark Gardener.
35 Alexander O'Neal - Christmas Song/Thank You For A Good Year
Don't mention it.
34 Natalie Cole - I Live For Your Love
33 Pet Shop Boys - Left To My Own Devices
Big heroic The Big Country-style orchestra, especially on the MGM ending, does battle with Lowe on Europop setting and Tennant on the joys of being alone. Probably an allegory.
32 Gloria Estefan And Miami Sound Machine - Rhythm Is Gonna Get You
The song that started the 1989 Brit Awards ceremony. And yes, it's all still there.
31 Traveling Wilburys - Handle With Care
Harrison, Dylan, Orbison, Petty and Jeff Lynne get a title from a box in Bob's garage and decide the results are too good to fester on George's B-side. The box set (of two albums) reached number one as recently as three years ago. And they say it's predictable in the modern charts.
30 Chris De Burgh - Missing You
Is Bill Bailey still writing jokes about him?
29 Bon Jovi - Born To Be My Baby
28 Annie Lennox And Al Green - Put A Little Love In Your Heart
Apart from it being Green's first secular release for a decade, it's a blast of the 80s practice of getting whichever adult contemporary solo star had time spare in their release schedule to duet with a soul legend in the hope of contracting something.
27 Tiffany - Radio Romance
From an album with the odd for its type title Hold An Old Friend's Hand, the last track of which is an acoustic guitar instrumental. No, not of Tiffany's playing, and as she wasn't a songwriter it has nothing to do with her at all.
26 Bomb The Bass Featuring Maureen - Say A Little Prayer
Maureen! The glamour of it all. She sings Aretha mostly over just a breakbeat, and acid jazz as one pokes its head up.
25 INXS - Need You Tonight
The best guitar riff Prince never played sullied forever by Professor Green, we fear.
24 Bananarama - Nathan Jones
Lauded at the time as the first video to include vogueing, more than a year before Madonna caught on. But as this was SAW Bananarama doing a little known Supremes song, nobody cared.
23 Shakin' Stevens - True Love
"The others said he was old enough to shake himself"
22 Robin Beck - First Time
Holidays are coming.
21 A Tribe Of Toffs - John Kettley (Is A Weatherman)
And so is Michael Fish. Sunderland's big contribution to pop pre-Kenickie, assuming you don't count Dave Stewart as he hightailed it in his teens. They got their deal by sending a tape to Andy Crane - who, you'll recall, has no brain. He seems to have taken it well. One of them was later in a band with Matt 'Aqualung' Hales. Mark Morano? Borano? What?
20 Enya - Evening Falls
19 Londonbeat - 9AM (The Comfort Zone)
*pause* No, no, that was the London Boys. Londonbeat were a poor man's Pasadenas. How come, by the way, nobody's recently attempted to give a priority launch to a modern day Temptations?
18 A-ha - You Are The One
Don't recall this one. Seems to have a passing resemblance to Boys Of Summer.
17 New Order - Fine Time
Their Balearic phase kicks off with something that in comparison to most Ibiza house seems all over the place. Much like Barney was on TOTP, in fact.
16 Rick Astley - Take Me To Your Heart
Still supporting Peter Kay, although his material must seem fresher.
15 Freiheit - Keeping The Dream Alive
Münchener Freiheit to everyone but the UK. A Christmas song, in that it appears on festive compilations, that isn't related to Christmas in any way, shape or form, not even musically - French horn yes, bells no.
14 Kim Wilde - Four Letter Word
Kim's last visit to the top ten, and probably coincidentally her last single written by dad and brother. Apparently now a creator of American anthems, says X Factor.
13 Michael Jackson - Smooth Criminal
Single number seven of eight from Bad - what did Just Good Friends and Speed Demon do so wrong? - became one of the most iconic due to The Hat and The Lean. Who'd like to see the technology patent behind The Lean?
12 U2 - Angel Of Harlem
They really did think they were a blues-soul band.
11 Petula Clark - Downtown '88
Back in his Broom Cupboard days Philip Schofield ran a feature entitled Downtown, where Pet's hit would be played under photos of viewers and their friends around 'town'. Schofield lobbied for a re-release which was unsuccessful sales-wise, but a year or two later a Dutch DJ put a beat under it and here we were.
10 Phil Collins - Two Hearts
From Great Train Robbery-as-comedy (only not about the glamorous one from the gang) film Buster. "It opened the radio station BBC Hereford and Worcester, appropriate in that the station was based in two different places." Lateral, BBC, lateral.
9 The Four Tops - Loco In Acapulco
This following Kokomo - this really wasn't a good time, so posterity says, for veteran heroes. This was also from Buster, and a Collins co-write. Never forget his late 80s malignancy.
8 Bros - Cat Among The Pigeons/Silent Night
Matt's just done his Rat Pack-inspired show at the Royal Albert Hall after a residency at Caesar's Palace, a show that apparently includes the first of these. Those sort of facts do kind of leave you bereft of ironic notion about 80s nostalgia, except to think that yes of course a member of Bros wanting to be taken seriously, something that wasn't in short supply at the time - look, they're covering Silent Night! - would do a swing set with reworkings of his old songs.
7 Neneh Cherry - Buffalo Stance
Actually quite aged in pretty much every way - the colours in the video, Neneh's dollar sign pendant, that not even Kate Nash took time out to go "what is 'e like?" Still, all sorts of groundbreaking at the time and still the high water mark, both commercially and intrinsically, for all urbanite British females.
6 Inner City - Good Life
"It is often remembered for being played at dance clubs and on the radio" says its Wiki entry. Helpful.
5 Status Quo - Burning Bridges (On And Off And On Again)
The song they rewrote for Come On You Reds six years later, bringing in a new era of football song where we were shown it couldn't just be game squads bellowing together.
4 Angry Anderson - Suddenly
Wedding Theme From Neighbours, of course, Scott and Charlene soundtracked by a stocky formerly rock bald man. Not to be confused with Dame Edna Everage's Theme From Neighbours, which was at 98. Whose idea was that?
3 Erasure - Crackers International EP
Stop! the lead track for the perennial Chart Show indie chart invaders.
2 Kylie And Jason - Especially For You
Them again. Minogue and Donovan always denied being in a relationship at the time, and would do for years afterwards, then some time in the late 90s it suddenly became an accepted fact all along.
1 Cliff Richard - Mistletoe And Wine
And so the Cliffmas industry really kicked in. After his aforementioned Little Town near miss Please Don't Fall In Love went top ten in 1983, but from here on in until 2007 there'd be an end of year release more often than not. Originally written as an ironic counterpoint in a musical version of The Little Matchgirl, Cliff had it rewritten as more religiously inclined and brought in kiddy choirs akimbo to help strike gold and get backing singers on TOTP into jumpers. Everybody!
NEXT WEEK: Scooter are accidentally invented, megamixes become the new rock'n'roll and Christina Ricci discovers the dark side of her profession.
Because that's just what you'd buy for Christmas, a light drum machine-backed reggae version of a Cab Calloway song. By the way a hardy perennial of festive radio classics, Chris Rea's Driving Home For Christmas, is at 53, which was as high as it got until cracking the 40 for the first time in the great download surge of 2007.
39 Boy Meets Girl - Waiting For A Star To Fall
The reverberations from the rival dance-cheese versions - one sampled, one re-recorded vocals - are still being felt.
38 Humanoid - Stakker Humanoid
They called it acieeed, we gather. Future Future Sound of London members break out the 303.
37 The Beach Boys - Kokomo
Right then. Written by Mike 'not war' Love, John 'Papa' Phillips, Scott 'Flowers In Your Hair' MacKenzie and Terry 'it's unlikely you would've, but he produced the Byrds, introduced Brian to Van Dyke Parks and was reputedly the Manson family's actual target when they killed Sharon Tate - oh, and he was Doris Day's son' Melcher. It was their first Billboard number one in 22 years, and Carl Wilson, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston are on it, but now we're well past the critical evaluation you tend not to see it mentioned much. For, oh, some reason.
36 Hithouse - Jack To The Sound Of The Underground
Music to make lightly satirical, studenty early 90s comedy to. That show, there, contains a sketch about Mark Gardener.
35 Alexander O'Neal - Christmas Song/Thank You For A Good Year
Don't mention it.
34 Natalie Cole - I Live For Your Love
33 Pet Shop Boys - Left To My Own Devices
Big heroic The Big Country-style orchestra, especially on the MGM ending, does battle with Lowe on Europop setting and Tennant on the joys of being alone. Probably an allegory.
32 Gloria Estefan And Miami Sound Machine - Rhythm Is Gonna Get You
The song that started the 1989 Brit Awards ceremony. And yes, it's all still there.
31 Traveling Wilburys - Handle With Care
Harrison, Dylan, Orbison, Petty and Jeff Lynne get a title from a box in Bob's garage and decide the results are too good to fester on George's B-side. The box set (of two albums) reached number one as recently as three years ago. And they say it's predictable in the modern charts.
30 Chris De Burgh - Missing You
Is Bill Bailey still writing jokes about him?
29 Bon Jovi - Born To Be My Baby
28 Annie Lennox And Al Green - Put A Little Love In Your Heart
Apart from it being Green's first secular release for a decade, it's a blast of the 80s practice of getting whichever adult contemporary solo star had time spare in their release schedule to duet with a soul legend in the hope of contracting something.
27 Tiffany - Radio Romance
From an album with the odd for its type title Hold An Old Friend's Hand, the last track of which is an acoustic guitar instrumental. No, not of Tiffany's playing, and as she wasn't a songwriter it has nothing to do with her at all.
26 Bomb The Bass Featuring Maureen - Say A Little Prayer
Maureen! The glamour of it all. She sings Aretha mostly over just a breakbeat, and acid jazz as one pokes its head up.
25 INXS - Need You Tonight
The best guitar riff Prince never played sullied forever by Professor Green, we fear.
24 Bananarama - Nathan Jones
Lauded at the time as the first video to include vogueing, more than a year before Madonna caught on. But as this was SAW Bananarama doing a little known Supremes song, nobody cared.
23 Shakin' Stevens - True Love
"The others said he was old enough to shake himself"
22 Robin Beck - First Time
Holidays are coming.
21 A Tribe Of Toffs - John Kettley (Is A Weatherman)
And so is Michael Fish. Sunderland's big contribution to pop pre-Kenickie, assuming you don't count Dave Stewart as he hightailed it in his teens. They got their deal by sending a tape to Andy Crane - who, you'll recall, has no brain. He seems to have taken it well. One of them was later in a band with Matt 'Aqualung' Hales. Mark Morano? Borano? What?
20 Enya - Evening Falls
19 Londonbeat - 9AM (The Comfort Zone)
*pause* No, no, that was the London Boys. Londonbeat were a poor man's Pasadenas. How come, by the way, nobody's recently attempted to give a priority launch to a modern day Temptations?
18 A-ha - You Are The One
Don't recall this one. Seems to have a passing resemblance to Boys Of Summer.
17 New Order - Fine Time
Their Balearic phase kicks off with something that in comparison to most Ibiza house seems all over the place. Much like Barney was on TOTP, in fact.
16 Rick Astley - Take Me To Your Heart
Still supporting Peter Kay, although his material must seem fresher.
15 Freiheit - Keeping The Dream Alive
Münchener Freiheit to everyone but the UK. A Christmas song, in that it appears on festive compilations, that isn't related to Christmas in any way, shape or form, not even musically - French horn yes, bells no.
14 Kim Wilde - Four Letter Word
Kim's last visit to the top ten, and probably coincidentally her last single written by dad and brother. Apparently now a creator of American anthems, says X Factor.
13 Michael Jackson - Smooth Criminal
Single number seven of eight from Bad - what did Just Good Friends and Speed Demon do so wrong? - became one of the most iconic due to The Hat and The Lean. Who'd like to see the technology patent behind The Lean?
12 U2 - Angel Of Harlem
They really did think they were a blues-soul band.
11 Petula Clark - Downtown '88
Back in his Broom Cupboard days Philip Schofield ran a feature entitled Downtown, where Pet's hit would be played under photos of viewers and their friends around 'town'. Schofield lobbied for a re-release which was unsuccessful sales-wise, but a year or two later a Dutch DJ put a beat under it and here we were.
10 Phil Collins - Two Hearts
From Great Train Robbery-as-comedy (only not about the glamorous one from the gang) film Buster. "It opened the radio station BBC Hereford and Worcester, appropriate in that the station was based in two different places." Lateral, BBC, lateral.
9 The Four Tops - Loco In Acapulco
This following Kokomo - this really wasn't a good time, so posterity says, for veteran heroes. This was also from Buster, and a Collins co-write. Never forget his late 80s malignancy.
8 Bros - Cat Among The Pigeons/Silent Night
Matt's just done his Rat Pack-inspired show at the Royal Albert Hall after a residency at Caesar's Palace, a show that apparently includes the first of these. Those sort of facts do kind of leave you bereft of ironic notion about 80s nostalgia, except to think that yes of course a member of Bros wanting to be taken seriously, something that wasn't in short supply at the time - look, they're covering Silent Night! - would do a swing set with reworkings of his old songs.
7 Neneh Cherry - Buffalo Stance
Actually quite aged in pretty much every way - the colours in the video, Neneh's dollar sign pendant, that not even Kate Nash took time out to go "what is 'e like?" Still, all sorts of groundbreaking at the time and still the high water mark, both commercially and intrinsically, for all urbanite British females.
6 Inner City - Good Life
"It is often remembered for being played at dance clubs and on the radio" says its Wiki entry. Helpful.
5 Status Quo - Burning Bridges (On And Off And On Again)
The song they rewrote for Come On You Reds six years later, bringing in a new era of football song where we were shown it couldn't just be game squads bellowing together.
4 Angry Anderson - Suddenly
Wedding Theme From Neighbours, of course, Scott and Charlene soundtracked by a stocky formerly rock bald man. Not to be confused with Dame Edna Everage's Theme From Neighbours, which was at 98. Whose idea was that?
3 Erasure - Crackers International EP
Stop! the lead track for the perennial Chart Show indie chart invaders.
2 Kylie And Jason - Especially For You
Them again. Minogue and Donovan always denied being in a relationship at the time, and would do for years afterwards, then some time in the late 90s it suddenly became an accepted fact all along.
1 Cliff Richard - Mistletoe And Wine
And so the Cliffmas industry really kicked in. After his aforementioned Little Town near miss Please Don't Fall In Love went top ten in 1983, but from here on in until 2007 there'd be an end of year release more often than not. Originally written as an ironic counterpoint in a musical version of The Little Matchgirl, Cliff had it rewritten as more religiously inclined and brought in kiddy choirs akimbo to help strike gold and get backing singers on TOTP into jumpers. Everybody!
NEXT WEEK: Scooter are accidentally invented, megamixes become the new rock'n'roll and Christina Ricci discovers the dark side of her profession.
Sunday, December 05, 2010
The only chart that counted: 1981
Returning for three Sundays up to the big weekend with our obsession with Christmas top forties of yore. Now, what haven't we covered? In this case, an entirely ordinary number one in the greater scheme of Yule things...
40 Holly And The Ivys - Christmas On 45
Yeah, the whole disco medley thing was still big. Assorted rumours online that laughing boy David Gilmour played on it, and that future Dream Academy principal and Gilmour's mate Nick Laird-Clowes was involved. And to think this held off all sorts of stuff just outside the top 40, not least our old friends the Barron Knights at 61 and at 68 the damn near incomprehensible here in nearly 2011 One Nine For Santa by Fogwell Flax And Ankle Biters From Freehold Junior School.
39 Bad Manners - Buona Sera (Don't Be Angry)
A surprisingly low charting single, and after that it was pretty much it chart-wise for the full-figured, heavily tongued, still doing well for ticket sales in decent sized venues Buster and colleagues.
38 Modern Romance - Ay Ay Ay Ay Moosey
Nobody salsa! Still touring with a different singer, Geoff Deane having gone off to write Birds Of A Feather and later the film Kinky Boots.
37 The Four Tops - Don't Walk Away
Still with their classic lineup they signed for a big comeback to Casablanca, famous for its elastic attitude to legal stimulants, chemically and sexually, in partying and signing incentives. By 1983 the label had gone under but they did their job with the Tops for a while with two top 20 singles in 1981. Their only subsequent shot at the UK radar was Loco In Acapulco, and we'd all rather that hadn't happened.
36 Olivia Newton-John - Physical
Substantially controversial video at the time, not in the modern sense as Neutron-Bomb remains fully clothed but in the muscle men/gay subtext becoming gay text element. Plus, comedy fat blokes with full overhang.
35 Queen And David Bowie - Under Pressure
As beautifully rendered at Latitude by Ben Miller and David Cross.
34 The Pretenders - I Go To Sleep
A Ray Davies song, in common with about 70% of early Pretenders material.
33 Brown Sauce - I Wanna Be A Winner
The Multi-Coloured Swap Shop spin-off single! Edmonds co-wrote it with STN cult hero and Swap Shop theme writer BA Robertson, but they got session musicians in behind Cheggers and Philbin cocking a snook at the concept of 'Reagan' and 'Keegan' not actually rhyming. Apparently it achieved some success in Germany. We'd love to know how that was plugged.
32 Slade - Merry Xmas Everybody
Its only top 40 re-entry before the advent of downloads. They gave it a good go, though, missing out only two years between 1980 and 1990. "Does your granny always tell you that the old songs are the best?" sounds more ironic as the years pass.
31 Showaddywaddy - Footsteps
Doo-wop bass men are a commodity that need reviving if the boy band is to have any lasting future in pop.
30 Meat Loaf - Dead Ringer For Love
We used to think Cher's presence as co-singer was a secret for years, but now we see she's in the video, and it wasn't while her career was in the doldrums, at least not in America. That said, she can't have done a lot of overblown highway rock before.
29 Toyah - Four More From Toyah
We'll say this for her, she had a pragmatic attitude to titling EPs.
28 John And Yoko And The Plastic Ono Band - Happy Christmas (War Is Over)
Making a slight return after an obvious reissue resurgence the previous year, but this was as far as it got. Unswerved in impact despite the Shirehorses' live-only reappropriation Happy Xmas (Fighting's Brilliant).
27 The Fun Boy Three - The Lunatics (Have Taken Over The Asylum)
Reportedly written and recorded before the Specials putsch, as can probably be told by the lack of much conventional instrumentation on a song by three singers, one of whom played rhythm guitar.
26 Kool And The Gang - Get Down On It
Music to sell affordable couches to.
25 Earth, Wind And Fire - Let's Groove
Unbeatable electro-funk with falsetto bits and video full of the sort of effects that seemed revolutionary in 1981 and can now probably be done on a laptop given ten minutes' practice.
24 David Bowie - Wild Is The Wind
A cover of Nina Simone's cover of Johnny Mathis, released to promote a compilation five years after making up space on Station To Station.
23 Imagination - Flashback
Whatever year we do on these there always seems to be something by Imagination turn up, and they definitely weren't that successful for a long period. There's only so many references to headbands and extraneous second vowels that can be made.
22 Tweets - The Birdie Song (Birdie Dance)
Actually a Swiss accordion tune originally known as the Chicken Dance. And at 55, Let's All Sing Like The Birdies Sing. Well, the follow-up is always difficult to get right.
21 Chas And Dave - Stars Over 45
Jaap Eggermont can't have ever imagined his moment of inspiration would one day lead to a medley of Cockney pub interpretations of When I'm Cleaning Windows, Any Old Iron, Run Rabbit Run, The Laughing Policeman and What A Rotten Song, whoever's otherwise heard of that. And, you know, they wiped nearly all video footage of Troughton-era Doctor Who, Z-Cars, Apollo 11 coverage and Not Only But Also, but...
20 Altered Images - I Could Be Happy
The awkward period between post-punk gone awkward pop and adopting the glossy 80s sound, where Clare Grogan was on every adolescent wall and Gregory's Girl had happened. Somewhere Haircut 100 were taking notes.
19 Foreigner - Waiting For A Girl Like You
18 The Snowmen - Hokey Cokey
Oh, all the crackers this year - Jingle Bells (Laughing All The Way) by Hysterics was at 44, and somehow we don't need to hear it. This? A Stiff Records fallacy fronted by a curiously gravelly voice for something constructed of frozen rain and stones. Rumoured to be Ian Dury and the Blockheads in character, though Will Birch's so-called 'Definitive Biography' never so much as touches on it - it's 29 years after the fact, someone should own up. Also they seem to be moving with a suppleness Dury's polio would have prevented.
17 Kim Wilde - Cambodia
"He was Thailand based, she was an air force wife" as opening lyrics aren't exactly subtle scene setting. This is about when Kim realised people found her sexy and acted accordingly.
16 Soft Cell - Bedsitter
Marc and Dave's second top five single, straight after Tainted Love, as good a tale of post-club life ennui as you'll find and one of the few times Almond's limited pipes - a man who recorded endless tributes to Scott Walker later on, somehow - found their niche.
15 Duran Duran - My Own Way
They didn't get to go anywhere in the video, that's how you remember it.
14 Julio Iglesias - Begin The Beguine
Somewhere between Pope John Paul II and Gordon Ramsey in the list of famous ex-goalkeepers, this Cole Porter song was on a rapid route down from number one. Anyone remember the attempt to launch Julio Jr at the same time as Enrique?
13 Diana Ross - Why Do Fools Fall In Love?
A former You've Been Framed montage favourite.
12 The Police - Spirits In The Material World
Ska doesn't sound like that, Sting! Additional material: Should you be able to bear it, and indeed Sumner's chest flauntage, some prime Kenny Everett.
11 Rod Stewart - Young Turks
It's easy to believe there's an audience for all those Great American Songbooks if the alternative is his digging the synths out again.
10 Jon And Vangelis - I'll Find My Way Home
Jon Anderson of Yes, for the uninitiated, and lots of tinkly keyboards that don't seem to be in the same time signature.
9 Dollar - Mirror Mirror (Mon Amour)
With David Van Day's reputation since and their place as a poor retrospective's Bucks Fizz assured, it's easy to forget how oddly produced a lot of their early work was. This one's just steely synth tinkles and Therese's flyweight vocals.
8 Status Quo - Rock 'N' Roll
Actually a ballad. How unpredictable.
7 Godley And Creme - Wedding Bells
Wry 1970s hitmakers had a brief return around this time. Entering at 47, Phil Lynott was telling us, in perhaps greater detail then required, that we are now living in a situation where that self same situation depends on the Yellow Pearl. It would reach number 14 in January. helped by its recent unveiling as the Top Of The Pops Theme, and there's a clip no longer on YouTube in which Jimmy Saville commends the new music before very briefly introducing its maker by only referring to him as "Mr Thin Lizzy". Meanwhile Kevin and Lol, shortly before discovering the brave new frontiers of music video, were producing the sort of cynical under a Motown vocal arrangement song that must have adorned every wedding reception for the next half-decade.
6 Madness - It Must Be Love
At least the mobile DJ would be safe with this one, Labi Siffre's song given a video in which Chris Foreman plays a guitar in a swimming pool, leading to the necessity of recording a special intro where it was advised kids don't follow his lead. As it were.
5 Bucks Fizz - The Land Of Make Believe
Written by Pete Sinfield of King Crimson, who claimed it was his anti-Thatcher song. Jay Aston promptly went on to support Thatcher in 1983.
4 Adam & The Ants - Ant Rap
"Basically I was making a point of saying 'Well, it's not about the music anymore.' I made a wonderful video, the Ant Rap video is the best fucking video I've ever made; jumping out of turrets and shit, but I was just trying to kill myself. And it was an attempt to do a record that had no fucking music on it, and take the piss. And I'd heard about this rap thing and I did it and I paid the price. It was the end of Adam and the Ants. It was basically my grand finale saying 'There's nothing here anymore, you're not listening. You're still buying the cunt, but it's shit.' Well it's not shit, it was a beautifully-made record, and bold in that respect, but looking at it now, asking me thirty years later when I've had time to think, I shouldn't have done it, I should have had a break." (Adam Ant, talking to Simon Price for The Quietus)
3 ABBA - One Of Us
Imagine this breakup raking being the first single from their new (and last, it would transpire) album. After all, Super Trouper had been a year earlier. As we're now duty bound to say, they didn't put this in Mamma Mia!
2 Cliff Richard - Daddy's Home
Saccharine even by Cliff standards. He'd had singles out just before Christmas in between but this was his first top ten Christmas chart hit since 1967. You may be aware it wasn't his last.
1 The Human League - Don't You Want Me
And so, almost without trying, the 'sort of Yorkshire ABBA' - thank you, Mr Morley - found their third of five weeks at number one was also the Christmas chart topper, and with the fourth single from Dare! at that. Film-within-a-film video, spectacularly flat vowel sounds and suspicion that embittered love story might have a trifle to do with the Heaven 17 split all present. The two The Ascent Of The Human League strips from Smash Hits in 1985 are worth your while.
NEXT WEEK: two legends in their fields disgrace themselves, Tim Burgess and Mark Gardener have a kickabout and Debbie Thrower does something about her overgrown garden.
Previous years covered: 1975, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2002
40 Holly And The Ivys - Christmas On 45
Yeah, the whole disco medley thing was still big. Assorted rumours online that laughing boy David Gilmour played on it, and that future Dream Academy principal and Gilmour's mate Nick Laird-Clowes was involved. And to think this held off all sorts of stuff just outside the top 40, not least our old friends the Barron Knights at 61 and at 68 the damn near incomprehensible here in nearly 2011 One Nine For Santa by Fogwell Flax And Ankle Biters From Freehold Junior School.
39 Bad Manners - Buona Sera (Don't Be Angry)
A surprisingly low charting single, and after that it was pretty much it chart-wise for the full-figured, heavily tongued, still doing well for ticket sales in decent sized venues Buster and colleagues.
38 Modern Romance - Ay Ay Ay Ay Moosey
Nobody salsa! Still touring with a different singer, Geoff Deane having gone off to write Birds Of A Feather and later the film Kinky Boots.
37 The Four Tops - Don't Walk Away
Still with their classic lineup they signed for a big comeback to Casablanca, famous for its elastic attitude to legal stimulants, chemically and sexually, in partying and signing incentives. By 1983 the label had gone under but they did their job with the Tops for a while with two top 20 singles in 1981. Their only subsequent shot at the UK radar was Loco In Acapulco, and we'd all rather that hadn't happened.
36 Olivia Newton-John - Physical
Substantially controversial video at the time, not in the modern sense as Neutron-Bomb remains fully clothed but in the muscle men/gay subtext becoming gay text element. Plus, comedy fat blokes with full overhang.
35 Queen And David Bowie - Under Pressure
As beautifully rendered at Latitude by Ben Miller and David Cross.
34 The Pretenders - I Go To Sleep
A Ray Davies song, in common with about 70% of early Pretenders material.
33 Brown Sauce - I Wanna Be A Winner
The Multi-Coloured Swap Shop spin-off single! Edmonds co-wrote it with STN cult hero and Swap Shop theme writer BA Robertson, but they got session musicians in behind Cheggers and Philbin cocking a snook at the concept of 'Reagan' and 'Keegan' not actually rhyming. Apparently it achieved some success in Germany. We'd love to know how that was plugged.
32 Slade - Merry Xmas Everybody
Its only top 40 re-entry before the advent of downloads. They gave it a good go, though, missing out only two years between 1980 and 1990. "Does your granny always tell you that the old songs are the best?" sounds more ironic as the years pass.
31 Showaddywaddy - Footsteps
Doo-wop bass men are a commodity that need reviving if the boy band is to have any lasting future in pop.
30 Meat Loaf - Dead Ringer For Love
We used to think Cher's presence as co-singer was a secret for years, but now we see she's in the video, and it wasn't while her career was in the doldrums, at least not in America. That said, she can't have done a lot of overblown highway rock before.
29 Toyah - Four More From Toyah
We'll say this for her, she had a pragmatic attitude to titling EPs.
28 John And Yoko And The Plastic Ono Band - Happy Christmas (War Is Over)
Making a slight return after an obvious reissue resurgence the previous year, but this was as far as it got. Unswerved in impact despite the Shirehorses' live-only reappropriation Happy Xmas (Fighting's Brilliant).
27 The Fun Boy Three - The Lunatics (Have Taken Over The Asylum)
Reportedly written and recorded before the Specials putsch, as can probably be told by the lack of much conventional instrumentation on a song by three singers, one of whom played rhythm guitar.
26 Kool And The Gang - Get Down On It
Music to sell affordable couches to.
25 Earth, Wind And Fire - Let's Groove
Unbeatable electro-funk with falsetto bits and video full of the sort of effects that seemed revolutionary in 1981 and can now probably be done on a laptop given ten minutes' practice.
24 David Bowie - Wild Is The Wind
A cover of Nina Simone's cover of Johnny Mathis, released to promote a compilation five years after making up space on Station To Station.
23 Imagination - Flashback
Whatever year we do on these there always seems to be something by Imagination turn up, and they definitely weren't that successful for a long period. There's only so many references to headbands and extraneous second vowels that can be made.
22 Tweets - The Birdie Song (Birdie Dance)
Actually a Swiss accordion tune originally known as the Chicken Dance. And at 55, Let's All Sing Like The Birdies Sing. Well, the follow-up is always difficult to get right.
21 Chas And Dave - Stars Over 45
Jaap Eggermont can't have ever imagined his moment of inspiration would one day lead to a medley of Cockney pub interpretations of When I'm Cleaning Windows, Any Old Iron, Run Rabbit Run, The Laughing Policeman and What A Rotten Song, whoever's otherwise heard of that. And, you know, they wiped nearly all video footage of Troughton-era Doctor Who, Z-Cars, Apollo 11 coverage and Not Only But Also, but...
20 Altered Images - I Could Be Happy
The awkward period between post-punk gone awkward pop and adopting the glossy 80s sound, where Clare Grogan was on every adolescent wall and Gregory's Girl had happened. Somewhere Haircut 100 were taking notes.
19 Foreigner - Waiting For A Girl Like You
18 The Snowmen - Hokey Cokey
Oh, all the crackers this year - Jingle Bells (Laughing All The Way) by Hysterics was at 44, and somehow we don't need to hear it. This? A Stiff Records fallacy fronted by a curiously gravelly voice for something constructed of frozen rain and stones. Rumoured to be Ian Dury and the Blockheads in character, though Will Birch's so-called 'Definitive Biography' never so much as touches on it - it's 29 years after the fact, someone should own up. Also they seem to be moving with a suppleness Dury's polio would have prevented.
17 Kim Wilde - Cambodia
"He was Thailand based, she was an air force wife" as opening lyrics aren't exactly subtle scene setting. This is about when Kim realised people found her sexy and acted accordingly.
16 Soft Cell - Bedsitter
Marc and Dave's second top five single, straight after Tainted Love, as good a tale of post-club life ennui as you'll find and one of the few times Almond's limited pipes - a man who recorded endless tributes to Scott Walker later on, somehow - found their niche.
15 Duran Duran - My Own Way
They didn't get to go anywhere in the video, that's how you remember it.
14 Julio Iglesias - Begin The Beguine
Somewhere between Pope John Paul II and Gordon Ramsey in the list of famous ex-goalkeepers, this Cole Porter song was on a rapid route down from number one. Anyone remember the attempt to launch Julio Jr at the same time as Enrique?
13 Diana Ross - Why Do Fools Fall In Love?
A former You've Been Framed montage favourite.
12 The Police - Spirits In The Material World
Ska doesn't sound like that, Sting! Additional material: Should you be able to bear it, and indeed Sumner's chest flauntage, some prime Kenny Everett.
11 Rod Stewart - Young Turks
It's easy to believe there's an audience for all those Great American Songbooks if the alternative is his digging the synths out again.
10 Jon And Vangelis - I'll Find My Way Home
Jon Anderson of Yes, for the uninitiated, and lots of tinkly keyboards that don't seem to be in the same time signature.
9 Dollar - Mirror Mirror (Mon Amour)
With David Van Day's reputation since and their place as a poor retrospective's Bucks Fizz assured, it's easy to forget how oddly produced a lot of their early work was. This one's just steely synth tinkles and Therese's flyweight vocals.
8 Status Quo - Rock 'N' Roll
Actually a ballad. How unpredictable.
7 Godley And Creme - Wedding Bells
Wry 1970s hitmakers had a brief return around this time. Entering at 47, Phil Lynott was telling us, in perhaps greater detail then required, that we are now living in a situation where that self same situation depends on the Yellow Pearl. It would reach number 14 in January. helped by its recent unveiling as the Top Of The Pops Theme, and there's a clip no longer on YouTube in which Jimmy Saville commends the new music before very briefly introducing its maker by only referring to him as "Mr Thin Lizzy". Meanwhile Kevin and Lol, shortly before discovering the brave new frontiers of music video, were producing the sort of cynical under a Motown vocal arrangement song that must have adorned every wedding reception for the next half-decade.
6 Madness - It Must Be Love
At least the mobile DJ would be safe with this one, Labi Siffre's song given a video in which Chris Foreman plays a guitar in a swimming pool, leading to the necessity of recording a special intro where it was advised kids don't follow his lead. As it were.
5 Bucks Fizz - The Land Of Make Believe
Written by Pete Sinfield of King Crimson, who claimed it was his anti-Thatcher song. Jay Aston promptly went on to support Thatcher in 1983.
4 Adam & The Ants - Ant Rap
"Basically I was making a point of saying 'Well, it's not about the music anymore.' I made a wonderful video, the Ant Rap video is the best fucking video I've ever made; jumping out of turrets and shit, but I was just trying to kill myself. And it was an attempt to do a record that had no fucking music on it, and take the piss. And I'd heard about this rap thing and I did it and I paid the price. It was the end of Adam and the Ants. It was basically my grand finale saying 'There's nothing here anymore, you're not listening. You're still buying the cunt, but it's shit.' Well it's not shit, it was a beautifully-made record, and bold in that respect, but looking at it now, asking me thirty years later when I've had time to think, I shouldn't have done it, I should have had a break." (Adam Ant, talking to Simon Price for The Quietus)
3 ABBA - One Of Us
Imagine this breakup raking being the first single from their new (and last, it would transpire) album. After all, Super Trouper had been a year earlier. As we're now duty bound to say, they didn't put this in Mamma Mia!
2 Cliff Richard - Daddy's Home
Saccharine even by Cliff standards. He'd had singles out just before Christmas in between but this was his first top ten Christmas chart hit since 1967. You may be aware it wasn't his last.
1 The Human League - Don't You Want Me
And so, almost without trying, the 'sort of Yorkshire ABBA' - thank you, Mr Morley - found their third of five weeks at number one was also the Christmas chart topper, and with the fourth single from Dare! at that. Film-within-a-film video, spectacularly flat vowel sounds and suspicion that embittered love story might have a trifle to do with the Heaven 17 split all present. The two The Ascent Of The Human League strips from Smash Hits in 1985 are worth your while.
NEXT WEEK: two legends in their fields disgrace themselves, Tim Burgess and Mark Gardener have a kickabout and Debbie Thrower does something about her overgrown garden.
Previous years covered: 1975, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2002
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