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Meanwhile, in the UK... The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert was held on April 20th 1992 at Wembley Stadium, the profits going towards launching AIDS charity the Mercury Phoenix Trust. Selling out all 72,000 tickets in three hours, the first half featured sets from Guns N' Roses, Metallica, Extreme, Def Leppard, Bob Geldof and Spinal Tap (!) with a speech from Elizabeth Taylor, while the second featured the remaining Queen members, John Deacon for the last time, backing Elton John, George Michael, Liza Minnelli, David Bowie (who recited the Lord's Prayer apparently without warning) and Mick Ronson, Axl Rose and Slash, Roger Daltrey, Robert Plant, Annie Lennox, Seal, Paul Young, James Hetfield, Joe Elliott, Lisa Stansfield and Ian Hunter on mostly Queen songs. The performances of Somebody To Love with Michael and These Are The Days Of Our Lives with Michael and Stansfield, along with two separate George live recordings and Dear Friends from Sheer Heart Attack, were released as the Five Live EP and went to number one for three weeks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvM2Cmi-YRU In doing so it kept Monday's column subject at #2. At #3 in the first week, another lift from The Bodyguard, a Hot 100 #4 which had been Oscar nominated. Whitney wouldn't return to the UK top ten for another six years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxYw0XPEoKE
I can offer nothing to this other than Fripp on the British equivalent of The Newlywed Game (except not just for newlyweds) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64VGyoIyBgc
In the last TNOCS I talked about Suede's singles chart breakthrough with Animal Nitrate, but that period coincided with the release of the debut by the other weekly press-anointed Best New Band In Britain. Luke Haines had been in a later line-up of C86 band The Servants and when forming his own band The Auteurs, with his girlfriend on bass, school friend on drums and a cellist, took their stately jangle and added a set of influences - Kinks, Beatles, glam Bowie, Costello, Go-Betweens, urban sprawl with the promise of bohemia, unshakeable if with detectable tongue in cheek belief in his own imminent stardom - that would soon become very familar. New Wave earned critical praise across the board and lost out on the Mercury Music Prize to Suede by one vote. Haines could had he wanted it at all been the great Britpop wordsmith at a time when Blur were yesterday's news despite having just released Modern Life Is Rubbish, Pulp were a beloved small scale cult act and Oasis hadn't yet been signed. Instead his path ahead was better suggested by its closing track Idiot Brother, an attack on the A&R of the Servants' label. For further information, including deliberate ankle breaking to get out of a tour, rejecting the cream of Britpop producers (he once referred to himself as "the Britpop Albert Speer") to make a record with Steve Albini, firing a flame gun at The Verve from a hotel window, three of Metallica turning up at his house, a concept avant-funk album about the Baader-Meinhof group, being attacked on stage in Strasbourg by a dwarf, and accidentally becoming an actual pop star in his mid-thirties, his memoirs Bad Vibes: Britpop And My Part In Its Downfall is recommended. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAdn5iw_7qM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poChhIA8Cck
David Bowie's Eighties slump is well documented but the retelling of his cultural history seems to skip from documenting those artistic lows directly to Earthling and the rebirth as cool exploratory elder statesman. In doing so it writes out among other things Black Tie White Noise, his Nile Rodgers produced post-Tin Machine return to somewhere near his art-pop zeitgeist place. As uneven as it is, there was excitement about his grand "comeback" at the time and the single inspired by the 1985 suicide of half-brother Terry (also subject of The Bewlay Brothers) reached #9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPZWgCLMsW8 To retell the old, old story about how dance acts came together, Jimi Goodwin and twins Andy and Jez Williams were Hacienda regulars (albeit already schoolfriends) who were inspired to make their own music. Signed by New Order manager Rob Gretton, their synthesis of that peculiarly Mancunian dance sound with knowingly retro disco, featuring yet another Williams on vocals in the unrelated Melanie, reached #3. Sub Sub never made the top 40 again but after a string of bad luck including lost master tapes, Gretton's early death and their studio burning down, they took it as a collective sign to change direction and formed Doves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRguEi3wufQ Talking of New Order, they were a place below their friends and sort-of-colleagues at #4 in the final week of this period with the single from their last album for eight years, going on to top Billboard Dance Club and make #28 on the Hot 100. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71ZHVmSuBJM
Meanwhile, in the UK... 2 Unlimited's No Limit sticks around for the first week but two debutants at the top follow it during this period, one partially new, one entirely old. The work of Kingston-born former US Marine Corps lance corporal Orville Burrell will appear in the column down the line but from 1992 for the rest of the decade he had a kind of fits and starts international profile. Oh Carolina had been an early domestic hit, produced by Prince Buster for vocal trio the Folkes Brothers, and has been referred to as the first great ska crossover hit incorporating African-influenced chanting and percussion and for giving Rastas exposure. Shaggy's version appeared on the soundtrack to Sliver, a movie from the golden age of mainstream erotic thrillers which would provide another US and UK number one, though the movie wouldn't be released here for another six months and its success was more due to one of Britain's periodical rediscoveries of reggae, this version retooled as classic summer soaked chill and of which there will be much more to come both over the summer... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtLqmWt2h2g ...and right now, at #3 behind Oh Carolina. Shabba Ranks had already made the top 40 four times over the previous two years, including with the original release of Mr Loverman which stalled at #23 and in guesting on Scritti Politti's underwhelming version of She's A Woman. Maybe someone at the label sensed the way tides were turning as his attempt at fusing dancehall with loverboy R&B was reissued, giving us a callout catchphrase for the year and winding up to #40 on the Hot 100. Another of the earlier hits, Maxi Priest collaboration Housecall, was remixed and reached #8 three months later. This, by the way, was three months after he'd appeared on late night music show The Word and advocated crucifying homosexuals, which saw him dropped from a Bobby Brown tour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J83TLc4UrN0 Shaggy spent two weeks on top; the next four were taken up by an advertising led revival, not as common as they had been in the late 1980s but still able to conjure up the odd huge hit. The Bluebells were less cool fellow Glaswegian indie-jangle travellers to Orange Juice, Aztec Camera and Altered Images (whose Clare Grogan is in the video but not the record), reaching the top 40 three times in 1984. Their calling card was Young At Heart, written by guitarist Bobby Bluebell (Robert Hodgens) and his then-girlfriend Siobhan Fahey of Bananarama. In fact the 'nanas had the first go at it, featuring on their 1983 album Deep Sea Skiving before the Bluebells' own version reached #8 in summer 1984. Those writing credits are an interesting matter - credited to and Hodgens/Dallin/Fahey/Woodward on that album, the Bluebells version is listed as Hodgens/Fahey until 2020 when Bobby Valentino, a prolific session musician latterly playing with Mark Knopfler, successfully sued for the right to be recognised as co-author. The reissue came on the back of an advert for the Volkswagen Golf, leading to the band's temporary reformation for promotion, though they've since played the odd gig together since 2008, occasionally featuring fifth Smith Craig Gannon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7n53nIBb3g
Drummer Simon Gilbert is gay, and in fact came out to back up the Brett quote. Denim were what Lawrence from Felt did next, namely retreat into his 70s glam/glitter collection and make a record (Back In Denim, featuring two of the Glitter Band) that both bolstered and undermined the era and the whole idea of postmodern nostalgia. What got them included was that those early bands were broadly built on charity/thrift shop chic and updating two decade old genres and figures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cz7u5v7tH8
Meanwhile, in the UK... 2 Unlimited's No Limit hangs on to the number one spot. One Michael Jackson song not mentioned much these days is Give In To Me from Dangerous, his most obvious collaboration with Slash, but it reached #2 in Britain despite no US single release. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ7qXHjxj_0 I've accidentally skipped over Annie Lennox's solo career to date even though Diva produced three top ten singles in all. Following Why and Walking On Broken Glass, which reached 5 and 8 respectively, Little Bird came out on a double A side with Love Song For A Vampire from the Bram Stoker's Dracula soundtrack and reached #3, Lennox performing it at the not great 2012 Olympic closing ceremony. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjbNLVQ_Iwk Genuinely surprised just now to find Lenny Kravitz's Are You Gonna Go My Way wasn't even a single in the US - it reached #4 here - but I'm skipping him because something else is stirring with longer term British chart, and indeed popular culture, implications. Suede had been marked out for greatness as soon as the music press saw them, first written about by the NME in October 1991 (which turned out to be bad timing as it was a review of Justine Frischmann's last gig as a member) Signed three months later by Nude Records for two singles ahead of major label interest, they appeared on the cover of Melody Maker in April 1992 under the headline 'The Best New Band In Britain' and with Brett Anderson's post-Bowie/glam sexually ambiguous theatrics - he described himself as "a bisexual man who's never had a homosexual experience", which seems perfectly reasonable in our modern awareness of the sexuality scale but made him the subject of mockery for years to come especially amid none-more-hetero Britpop - and Bernard Butler's reinvention of guitar heroics there were plenty willing to back up the hype. After first single The Drowners reached #49 in May and Metal Mickey #17 in September Nude struck a distribution and financial backing deal with Sony so that they could afford to sign the band long-term and give them a degree of creative control. The third single Animal Nitrate was the big moment, hitting #7 and earning them an invitation to play at that month's Brit awards. The self-titled debut, released in March, went gold in two days and was the fastest selling debut album in Britain since Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Welcome To The Pleasure Dome in 1984. That same month Anderson appeared on the cover of the monthly magazine Select with a Union Jack added behind him and the tagline 'Yanks Go Home! Suede, St Etienne, Denim, Pulp, the Auteurs and the Battle for Britain'. It's commonly agreed now as the kickoff for what was to come. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7mEB2wnDLQ
One thing about Heaton's lyrics is they're not often straightforwardly about the thing it seems on surface level.
36D is the reason Brianna Corrigan, who'd been co-vocalist to date, quit the band, feeling co-writers Paul Heaton and Dave Hemingway were blaming the models for normalising misogyny rather than the sexist media industry, both since pleading mea culpa on it.
Three more? Just while we're here. It still gets me that Rod Stewart had actual hits with Tom Waits covers, first Downtown Train peaking at #10 at the end of 1990, then around Christmas 1992 Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen) from Small Change lost its parentheses and reached #6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oSKWL7Ymbk The Beloved, like the Shamen, were a relatively successful mystically inclined jangly guitar band who saw the rave light, changed their membership and had actual crossover success for years to come. The ambient house of The Sun Rising only peaked at #26 at the end of 1989 but became an indelible great. By 1993, down to founder Jon Marsh and his wife Helena, another downtempo synthpop spiritual excursion reached the top ten (#8) for their first and only time, with the aid of a, er, memorable video. The one closest to the camera on the right in the group shots now co-hosts our (original) version of Dancing With The Stars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP9Z5Pc8cRM She was also in a couple of Duran Duran videos around the same time. By the end of 1992 they'd refreshed and were back having big hits, the first single from The Wedding Album reaching #6 and Hot 100 #3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqIACCH20JU
Christmas chart week #4 was an early Simon Cowell A&R-ed get rich quick scheme written and co-produced by Stock and Waterman. WrestleMania: The Album reached #10 here while failing to break the Billboard top 200. Davey Boy Smith was released before the single was. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB3rKiCApvw The Shamen's imperial phase came to an end during this period, which is what happens when the fifth and last single from an album, Re:Evolution, is primarily spoken by mystic and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna. Before then Phorever People reached #5 and topped the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart. They would only reach the top 20 once more, released their last album in 1998 and splintered into DJing and little noticed production projects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAq3iyDnCQI We haven't touched on East 17 yet, proud products of East London built around songwriter Tony Mortimer with three dancers, one of whom, Brian Harvey, took over equal vocal duties. Explicitly more adult, grittier and rap aligned than Take That and their fellow boy bands of the era - debut album Walthamstow would be Mercury nominated - their third single Deep took them into the top five for the first time, sounding like I Need Love with the filters removed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLqVm4i4IsI
So. Fourteen weeks. Great. Wonderful. Just as with the #1s, three singles reached #2 in these weeks. One was Michael Jackson's Heal The World, of which there is nothing more than can be said. The second was more brand-established Eurodance, the last of Snap!'s four top five singles introducing their new singer Niki Haris, a former and future Madonna backing vocalist and occasional choreographer - she's in Truth Or Dare and the Vogue and Music videos - though there's not that much of her in the actual mix. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyFF56tBrWc The other was Take That getting closer to their target - a cover of Barry Manilow's Could It Be Magic? had reached #3 and just five weeks later they fell just short of immediately toppling 2 Unlimited with Gary Barlow's first diversion into a very white version of new jack swing. I'm pretty sure this isn't the original video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBos6OCmZEU Less expectedly, Faith No More reached #3 towards the end of this period with a live favourite cover, their second top ten single after Midlife Crisis crept up to #10 six months earlier. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPzDTfIb0DU
Meanwhile, in the UK... This is easier than you might have anticipated, as after Charles & Eddie's Would I Lie To You? spent one last week at number one we had I Will Always Love You at the top for ten weeks ourselves, including over Christmas. It was unseated from w/e 13th February by a record starting its own five week run, the ultimate triumph of Eurodance at its bounciest and hookiest, especially when all but one word of Ray Slijngaard's rap was excised from the UK release. "There's no lyrics!" went old cultural men shaking fists at clouds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exLG0XWM_Dg
Discogs lists a UK release but it didn't reach the top 100, and it looks like Sky One showed it in fall 1992 but it can't have caught an audience.
...and even that replacement video has been removed since I wrote this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC1yQRz-hA0
So how do you follow a huge hit that gets away with as much as Ebeneezer Goode did? The Shamen actually had that single deleted after four weeks at number one (and it was out of the top 75 five weeks after leaving the top spot) as they wanted to get on with their lives, by which they meant Boss Drum, which peaked at #4 three weeks after that hit had been deposed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GM81gHq0_s By 1992 Vanessa Paradis was well known worldwide for her appearance in a Chanel commercial but still most famous in Britain for her fluke #3 hit Joe Le Taxi as a fifteen year old in 1988. By this time she was dating Lenny Kravitz and making her first English language recordings with him, leading to her one and only return to the charts making #6. You've heard far worse Motown pastiches and there's no Kravitz soloing on it. Shame the video appears to be blocked in the US (as far as I can see) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl_Vce0M118 There's going to be a ridiculous backlog to cover in the next column so just to sneak in here that another superior Prodigy single, sampling a Kool Keith line from an Ultramagnetic MCs track (something Liam Howlett would come back to with more infamy) and Max Romeo's Lee 'Scratch' Perry-produced reggae classic Chase The Devil, entered at #14 in this second week and would climb to #5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4eav7dFvc8
Meanwhile, in the UK... End Of The Road completed a more manageable three weeks at number one in this first week, followed by the ascendancy of a Hot 100 #13 one hit wonder by Charles Pettigrew and Eddie Chacon, who according to the latter met due to one of them holding a copy of Marvin Gaye's Trouble Man, a kind of neo-soul version of the Jagger/Richards origin story. Pettigrew died of cancer in 2001; Chacon released a new album, Pleasure, Joy and Happiness, in 2020, produced by John Carroll Kirby who co-produced tracks on A Seat At The Table. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_UXvcr22rM
It's A Fine Day was a stealth cover of a surprising UK indie chart hit from 1983, written by eccentric poet Edward Barton and sung acapella by his girlfriend Jane Lancaster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vgcYBwyw28
BONUS ETC BEATS: Ever wanted to hear Jarvis Cocker sing End Of The Road? 9:37 on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfniB3PllHE People covering End Of The Road at the very unrelated to this song End Of The Road Festival doesn't happen as often as you'd hope/fear, but Jens Lekman gave it a go too, and he'd found out how it goes in advance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1hio7evPww
Another example of the power of advertising reached #6 in mid-October. In fairness Simple Minds were still charting regularly and had been in the top ten a year earlier but it felt like their commercial potential was slowing down. Regardless, when the Premier League started that August the FA and Sky Sports' advertising campaign used their arena sized 1985 #7 (Hot 100 #3) Alive And Kicking, a consequent reissue sending it one place higher. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljIQo1OHkTI Take That had been heavily pushed to dancefloor divas and children's television shows alike for a year with little to show for it, but they had the secret weapon of Gary Barlow, who had been picked up by manager and band assembler Nigel Martin-Smith on the basis of his credentials as an aspirant sensitive singer-songwriter. After his previous songs had gone the dancefloor route to little effect he got the chance to stretch his AOR legs on their sixth single, which he wrote when he was 15, and although it stalled at #7 its sales outstripped its position and it's become a talent show finals favourite. There was no looking back from here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-98w8bO6PXo And very much finally... back in 1990 Andrew Lloyd-Webber teamed with his regular producer Nigel Wright and children's TV irritant Timmy Mallett, covered Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini and had a summer number one. Two years later Lloyd-Webber and Wright had an even wilder idea for a novelty hit, a Eurodance arrangement of Korobeiniki, the 19th century Russian folk song that became the theme for Tetris, and in a lightly disguised new form made #6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoeG72AFUk8
I'm sure you'd understand that with so many weeks to pass through I'm going to skip some songs everyone knows (Achy Breaky Heart #3, People Everyday #2, This Charming Man becoming the Smiths' biggest hit on a hits album endorsing re-release at #8) or just can't bring myself to write about (dance covers of Baker Street and Run To You) Three singles reached #2 in August and September. The Freddie Mercury memorial was still fertile ground as his 1987 #8 with Montserrat Caballé, recorded for a collaborative album, came back out after being used on TV coverage of that summer's Olympics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1fiOJDXA-E Luther Vandross and Janet Jackson's Hot 100 #10 duet for the soundtrack of Mo' Money would chart twice, making #7 in remix form in 1995. This time around it was Janet's first UK top ten since Let's Wait Awhile in 1987. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79SNvZi3ltE And lastly, a dentist. Alban Nwapa, born in Nigeria, settled in Sweden, moved into DJing to fund his dentistry studies and became known for singing over the records. Denniz PoP, the man who would later set up Cheiron studios and hire Max Martin to pop-changing effect, discovered Nwapa at the start of the decade and he renamed himself Dr Alban, partly to nod to his by now opened dental practice. It's My Life, a PoP-produced single that drilled itself into the cortex of everyone who endlessly heard it on the radio, also made Dance Club Play #9 and slightly later featured in a much repeated Tampax advert. He only had one more top 20 UK single but was making the Swedish charts as recently as 2003. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zHm_6AQ7CY
Meanwhile, in the UK... OK... Four number ones during this endless period, though the first is Snap!'s Rhythm Is A Dancer completing six weeks on top and the last is End Of The Road itself, its first two of a far more manageable three weeks. The Shamen, having made complete their transfer from psych-indie also-rans to rabble rousing rap-rave collective, went all out in as uninhibited a way as they could. Main musical member and writer Colin Angus was inspired to write about some low-lifes he'd come across at clubs and put them into one vaguely Dickensian chancer central character, intended as both cautionary tale and hero, aided by Mr C's Mockney rapping. And then with mass cheek they called him Ebeneezer Goode, which abbreviates conveniently. The tabloids and some of the dance press were up in arms, some TV shows (but not Top Of The Pops) banned it, so it spent four weeks at number one before the band themselves had it deleted so they could release a follow-up on time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b2T8K2D-ps The single that bisected them and Boyz II Men for two weeks (Hot 100 #32) didn't come from the underground at all but still landed from out of somewhere leftfield. Yorkshire's Tasmin Archer had no real backstory other than kicking around locally before being scouted and signed by EMI partly for a song drawing existential connections to the space race against reality that found a midpoint between heartfelt/earnest acoustic singer-songwriter and modish, lightly baggy beats. Come to think of it, there's a line you could draw between this and Torn at the other end of the decade, though that didn't have a Hammond organ solo. Archer reached the top twenty once more but was dropped after her second album flopped and although she continued recording hasn't released anything since 2006. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOqVQPq8zm8
Clearly it was impossible for anyone to know in September that Covid would still exist in 2022.
Meanwhile, in the UK... The start of a six week run at number one, following two weeks at number two, for the German by way of assorted USAF bases Eurodance kings and queen Snap!. Their second number one out of two, also reaching #5 on the Hot 100, is of course most famous for the "I'm as serious as cancer when I say rhythm is a dancer" line, though it's not a million miles away from previous rap uses ("I got a question as serious as cancer, who can keep the average dancer..." - Eric B & Rakim, I Ain't No Joke) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYIaWeVL1JM Was (Not Was) had made the top ten before, Walk The Dinosaur number 10 towards the end of 1987, but their biggest UK hit reaching #4 didn't appear in any Billboard chart. Shake Your Head, featuring Ozzy Osbourne, had originally appeared on their 1983 album Born To Laugh At Tornadoes. Remixed by Steve 'Silk' Hurley for a compilation, the plan was to restore an unused vocal Madonna had recorded first time around but she refused permission. So obviously Was and Was turned to Kim Basinger, although the Madonna mix is out there having accidentally appeared on a various artists compilation. The actual video is blocked in the US as far as I can see but if anyone can find it... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TCy9icPURg
Another son of Tyneside was approaching the top of the chart in the first week, but you'd be hard pressed to hear the Geordie accent in Neil Tennant's singing voice. Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner bringing Tennant on board Electronic had worked on their debut single Getting Away With It and proved a wise move again on their fourth, reaching #6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUTJCIPsWwE Toytown techno, remixing children's themes for rave use, was a much maligned but cheap, immediate and profitable sub-division. The Prodigy had been seen as the thin end of the wedge sampling a PSA for their first hit Charly but several followed in that path even when it became clear Liam and co weren't. Hence, #2 hit Sesame's Treet by Smart E's, later a breakbeat hardcore lifer under several pseudonyms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7uVVImPhdY Also raising ire and eyebrows, in a very different way, the Hot 100 #66 that here got to #4, probably because of its title and refrain rather than US outlets being put off by it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfHsF6FKgb4
Meanwhile, in the UK... Erasure's Abba-Esque EP spent the first two weeks completing a five week run at number one before such glamorous, gloriously synthetic versions of pure pop classics were replaced by the polar opposite. Proud Geordie and former labourer Jimmy Nail had fallen into acting and landed a role in hugely successful bricklayers abroad comedy-drama Auf Weidersehen Pet (also starring Tim Healy, father of The 1975's Matty) Off the back of that he'd employed his gruff workmanlike soul growl on a cover of Love Don't Live Here Anymore that reached #3 in 1985. Seven years later, during the success of his own detective series vehicle Spender, he was cajoled into returning to the studio by Guy Pratt, session bassist to the stars (Michael Jackson on the new HIStory tracks, Madonna's Like A Prayer, Pink Floyd as a semi-permanent later member, Roxy Music, Tom Jones, Debbie Harry, the list goes on for some time) The pair and others co-wrote what can only be described as straight-talking pub swingbeat, which spent three weeks at the top. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iF47M3YDlg
Sorry, going to have to get this out of my head now before it takes over the rest od the day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEmay4xIKBc
Meanwhile, in the UK... Erasure's Abba-Esque EP continues at number one. Buddy Holly's 1958 single Heartbeat reached #30 here and #82 on the Hot 100, but it had been rediscovered by Showaddywaddy (if you missed that period, think a less interesting Sha Na Na) and reached #7 in 1975. In 1992 it lent its name to a period police drama series for boomers that proved spectacularly successful, the theme to which was sung by lead actor Nick Berry, who as a star of BBC soap EastEnders had reached #1 in 1986. Sure enough, the theme's single release reached #2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJy5xFenpVQ On a wildly different note, the advance of the Manic Street Preachers was gaining steam so they brought out their grand statement, inspired by the book Rumble Fish and an attack on the consumerist lifestyle, surprising people by dialling down the punk elements that had been affixed to them and going full modernist classic rock, reaching #17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gavcjNniIvk In the second week Richard Marx's murder mystery, an Australian #1 and Hot 100 #9, reached #3, one place above the U-U-U-Utah Saints, utilising a sample from Kate Bush's Cloudbusting. Next single Believe In Me would also reach the top ten but things went patchy after that and they disappeared into remixing for years at a time - their 1999 album Two contains Metallica, REM and Public Enemy samples and Chrissie Hynde and Edwin Starr new vocals - before a remix of this by Australian electropot outfit Van She made #8 in 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixMWhpg0iXU
Lightning Seeds reached the Hot 100? Actually The Life Of Riley was picked up shortly afterwards as background music for Premier League TV coverage, which inspired someone at the English Football Association to approach Ian Broudie about writing the official national team song for the 1996 European Championships, and the results have been heard at every major tournament since then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NlGAVdkqKA
Quickly glossing over a few more big hits from these weeks - Curiosity Killed The Cat, now just Curiosity after a member left, covered Johnny Bristol's Hang On In There Baby with Simon Cowell's support, reached #3 but killed their further career prospects. Guns'n'Roses' version of Knockin' On Heavens Door got as far as #2 in w/e 23rd, the same week En Vogue's glorious My Lovin' got to #4. Marc Cohn's heartland growler Walking In Memphis - US #13, UK #22 - was pretty much as far separate as could be from west London breakbeat hardcore. That is unless you were the acclaimed duo Shut Up And Dance, who chanced it thoroughly with Raving I'm Raving, which sampled much of the original music and lyrics with the purpose of taking them down their own wormhole. Clearance hadn't been sought and Cohn obtained an injunction to prevent further manufacture and distribution as soon as it went on sale. When word got out it became a cause celebre, entering at #2 but falling out of the top 100 after two weeks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZnanvrPj2I The Cure's #6 single in the first week of June isn't their highest charting but it's their best selling single and comfortably their most famous, also #18 on the Hot 100. Robert Smith, like McCartney with Yesterday, held onto it for some time as he was convinced he'd stolen the melody from somewhere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkfvZ8ixiHc And in the final week George Michael returned at #4 with his final single before the Sony contractual tangle, found on the AIDS fundraising compilation Red Hot + Dance, sampling Jocelyn Brown's Somebody Else's Guy with a video envisaged as the next step from the Freedom '90 clip based around Thierry Mugler designs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ2DVwSVIIo
Week ending 2nd May saw peaks at 2, 3 and 4 of very different types. So, in order... SL2 was one of several identities for Matt 'Slipmatt' Nelson and John 'Lime' Fernandez, children of the rave scene who became torchbearers for breakbeat hardcore, their reworking of Jah Screechy's 1984 UK dancehall hit Walk And Skank proving their calling card as they didn't last out the following year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXCN1DhHTZA Andrew Eldritch had been at a bind. The first version of the Sisters Of Mercy had split acrimoniously, the next two albums had been recorded in straitened circumstances and a troubled US tour involving members leaving and cities banning shows with Public Enemy co-headlining had left them without an American record deal. As a stop-gap a compilation of early recordings, Some Girls Wander By Mistake, was arrived at and to promote it the label suggested a re-recording of 1983 single Temple Of Love with Ofra Haza on backing vocals. To everyone's surprise it reached number 3. A year later there would be a greatest hits album, one more top 20 single (Under The Gun, with Berlin's Terri Nunn) and the start of a protracted feud with their label EastWest. Even after being granted freedom and occasionally touring new recordings have been conspicuous by their absence, despite Eldritch telling an interviewer in 2016 "if Donald Trump actually does become President, that will be reason enough for me to release another album. I don't think I could keep quiet if that happened." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMETa77dUrg Even though it only crawled into the top 40 Marc Almond's seventh solo album was his most successful in singles chart terms, having already spawned top 20 single Jacky, and now he reached #4 with The Days Of Pearly Spencer, a cover of a 1967 single by Irish baroque pop singer-songwriter David McWilliams that was a hit across Europe but not in Britain as the BBC refused to play it due to his manager's business involvement in pirate radio station Radio Caroline. https://www.youube.com/watch?v=4NlGAVdkqKA
Meanwhile, in the UK... You can tell it's not a vintage people for British pop when this period's number ones are covered by a band who had four top five singles' third biggest selling single (Right Said Fred's Deeply Dipply, completing three weeks at the top) and two cover versions involving putting dance beats behind 1970s hits, albeit in very different ways and with differing underlying reasons. Nottingham based KWS, an acronym for the singer and two producers, are about as generic as it gets, aimed squarely at the weekend provincial town partygoers rather than ravers. Even their version of KC and the Sunshine Band's Please Don't Go (US #1, UK #3) was a cover, copying a version by Italian Eurodance outfit Double You that had been a big hit across Europe but stalled at #41 on import here because it had failed to be licenced for distribution. After three years of legal activity the label who brought KWS on board paid compensation to Double You's producer, who had had this version withdrawn from sale in Germany. Six weeks at number one and #6 on the Hot 100... these really were poor times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glWQc8tgYQA It wasn't the done thing to like ABBA in early 1993. Shared memory had relegated them to "naff", "decade that taste forgot" fashion disasters, a type of kitsch that "we" didn't need any more, at best "so bad it's good"/"guilty pleasure" provincial disco music for white-stilettoed Essex girls. Erasure, who have always undermined notions of cool, had been covering ABBA songs live for years and put four of them - Lay All Your Love On Me, SOS, Take A Chance On Me and Voulez-Vous - together on the Abba-Esque EP. As such one of our most consistent chart acts, ten top five singles between 1986 and 2005(! - admittedly that was eleven years after the previous one), landed their only number one and stayed there for five weeks. That September ABBA Gold was released (Dancing Queen reached #16 on promotional reissue) and, maybe coupled with a newfound appreciation of camp that somehow prefigured both gay acceptance and ultra-hetero laddism, the rest is history - the upshot of course being that you don't hear these covers a lot nowadays because if anything they seem more dated than the originals. Meanwhile the ABBA tribute band Bjorn Again recorded and reached #25 with the Erasure-ish EP, covering Stop! and A Little Respect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-d4J3YUQmU The problem with a format like this having to cover seven weeks at once is there's almost too much to write about, even if you discount Jump reaching #2 in KWS' final week. So... first week, another marshalling of the Iron Maiden fanbase troops and Be Quick Or Be Dead, their response to recent scandals including financial money laundering and Robert Maxwell emptying his companies' pension funds, enters at number two. Despite the overall drop in singles sales however they won't make the top five again until 2005. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTt1vk9nM9c
I have no idea if India has any history of commentator impersonation based satire but the nearest thing the other key market of cricket came through Rory Bremner marking a disastrous series against the West Indies in 1985 with a 19 rewrite that Paul Hardcastle actually produced under a pseudonym. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3bl4xaFZMM But actually the best song about a moment in Australian cricket was by two Irishmen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAOhryZNcfo
Five weeks to cover, though for two of those the highest peaking singles were To Be With You and Save The Best For Last (both #3) so that's that job saved. Another is that in the first week the only top five peak is Eric Clapton's Tears In Heaven, at #5, and let's not bring ourselves down with that. At #7 in that week is the Finn brothers' commercial pinnacle (though Tim had left mid-tour four months earlier), catching the wave if anything from a Q magazine-pushed resurgence in melodic rock for adults. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag8XcMG1EX4 In contrast to Mr Big, Def Leppard were one of our own not just taking a turn for the glam metal but having their biggest chart hit with it, reaching #2 in the first week of April (Hot 100 #15) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO1Nae_EBvQ A week later came another example of shifting tastes, as although they'd reach the top twenty twice more the Soul II Soul imperial phase was at its end. Soul II Soul's Volume III Just Right, with a whole new set of vocalists, reached #3 in the album charts but you'd be hard pressed to hear anyone talk about it now despite its lead single reaching #4. The collective disbanded after two more albums but have periodically reformed as a nostalgia act since 2007. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2NkE0biUfE
Meanwhile, in the UK... Stay by Shakespear's Sister completes its eight week run at number one, followed in this final week by... you know how we recently discussed the way Color Me Badd's two Hot 100 #1s aren't their famous song? In Britain, much like everywhere else, Right Said Fred are remembered as one hit wonders for I'm Too Sexy nowadays, but while it was their best seller that actually wasn't their sole number one song. However, instead of being the pinnacle this feels like the end, their only top ten single from here on being a charity record. People talk about this 1991-93 stretch as being terrible for British pop music, with everything from boy bands to guitar crossover being at a low ebb, and it's not hard to imagine that this was the one time you could make a career this huge out of being jobbing musos and likeable people (although, boy, has Richard Fairbrass undermined that in the last few years) making happy-go-lucky pop, because a little goodwill goes a long way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to0l73sMhew
The Stadium House trilogy was done. The big statement/calling card with Tammy Wynette, achieved. Now all that was left for the KLF to do was implode. First came America: What Time Is Love?, a reworking of a track that had already been reworked multiple times across Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty's career together, adding borrowed riffs, big orchestral swells, a male voice choir chanting "America!" to the tune of Aquarius from Hair, ex-Deep Purple singer Glenn Hughes on vocals that blew out the studio mikes (he later said receiving the opportunity helped him kick a longstanding crack habit) and a £500,000 video involving a custom-built Viking longship and flooding the James Bond stage at Pinewood Studios. It reached #4... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_253-HURY8 ...and meanwhile the pair were recording The Black Room, a thrash metal experiment with grindcore band Extreme Noise Terror. When the Brit Awards, who were to award them Best Band, asked for a live performance it was an ENT-backed desecration of What Time Is Love? that they got, ending with Drummond firing blanks from a machine gun over the audience. It could have been worse - Drummond had in preparation bought a dead sheep from an abattoir but the band talked him out of his plan to throw its blood and entrails over the throng (and his plan B, cutting off his own hand instead) Instead he dumped the carcass outside the hotel where the official dinner was taking place, covered with a banner reading 'I died for you – bon appetit'. The awards show performance ended with their publicist and occasional portentous narrator on record Scott Piering announcing "ladies and gentlemen, the KLF have left the music industry". (Their award was picked up by a motorbike courier.) In May they deleted their entire back catalogue. In 1994 Drummond and Cauty realised they had seven figures in royalties awaiting them so withdrew a million of it, nailed it to a frame as part of an exhibition, then had it framed in an art gallery with an unsuccessful reserve price of half a million pounds, and finally on 23rd August 1994 (23 reappears a lot in KLF mythos, one more thing borrowed from the Illuminatus! Trilogy) took it to a disused boathouse on the Isle Of Jura - where they had held a ritualistic celebration of the 1991 summer solstice, depicted in short film The Rites of Mu - and burnt it, making sure to have the act videotaped so they could tour with it a year later under the title Watch The K Foundation Burn A Million Quid. With that, both disappeared into other projects, eventually coming back together 23 (hey!) years later to the day to launch an experimental novel, 2023: A Trilogy, a three day event on the street of Liverpool, Welcome To The Dark Ages, and The People's Pyramid, a plan to house volunteers' ashes in a large pyramid sculpture in the city. From 1st January 2021 compilations of their work and re-mixed albums started appearing on streaming platforms. I'd go into detail about what Bill and Jimmy have done otherwise during that time but my head is spinning already. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGNz0IW8vQw
Meanwhile, in the UK... Shakespear's Sister will by the last week of this run be halfway through its eight weeks at number one. For the first two of these weeks number two will be the Temptations' My Girl, which Tom covered back in another life (July 2018) and was reissued off the back of the Macaulay Culkin/Anna Chlumsky/Some Bees movie. It's A Fine Day was written by eccentric Mancunian poet Edward Barton and recorded as an acapella by his friend Jane Lancaster in 1983, becoming a cult hit on Cherry Red. Nine years later Opus III, comprising three producers and singer Kirsty Hawkshaw - whose father Alan was a production music composer who became one of the most sampled library musicians ever - covered it, reaching #5 and the top of the the Hot Dance Club Play chart. Elements of the instant house classic have been sampled by Kylie Minogue and Orbital; Opus III never made the top 50 again, Hawkshaw now an in demand dance music sessioneer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjIPzyVlK60 The second week saw November Rain at #4, but you already know about that. Madness had been six years gone when Virgin chanced a greatest hits album, Divine Madness. Released in January, it spent three weeks at number one and wouldn't leave the top 50 until October, aided by a reissue of their 1981 #4 Labi Siffre cover (Hot 100 #33) that reached #6. The attention led to them taking over Finsbury Park in London over an August weekend for Madstock, fabled for a) Morrissey's support slot where he draped himself in a Union Jack during The National Front Disco and was nearly bottled off, and b) 33,000 dancing fans causing a tremor that registered 4.2 on the Richter scale. Madness pretty much decided not to split up again after that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmezIIrFQmY In the chart w/e 14th two modern standards, U2's One (#7) and Nirvana's Come As You Are (#9), were outcharted by a start that didn't go far and an ending that led somewhere spectacular. Shanice Wilson had been on Star Search, Kids Incorporated and a KFC commercial with Ella Fitzgerald before being signed by A&M. Still only seventeen, I Love Your Smile went top ten in 22 countries and #2 on both the Hot 100 and UK chart. Featuring production from Narada Michael Walden, session sax from Branford Marsalis and session laughter by Janet Jackson, she didn't trouble our top 40 again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9GSMei0NAw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obMRztklqU
Popular from the same album even more so as it's about the Tom Ewing column that inspired our Tom, and by extension the community of people that gather to discuss and glorify number one singles. (And it needs adding as backup that Bob Stanley is a regular TNOs reader. Hi, Bob!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AMCyEZRpYk