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

As much as I despise the human rodent that is mick hucknall, I really love 'fairground'

It's a good song! Actually come across more decent 'Red tracks than expected over the TOTP repeats.

Next episode, Ant & Dec invent electroswing.

Enjoying the well curated TOTP2 snippets at the end

My longstanding in-joke with a friend was that jazz was a genre floundering until PJ & Duncan dropped "Krazy Katz" in the autumn of 1995, at which point sales for jazz records increased 100,000% overnight, much as sales for Western classical music did in the wake of the Toy Dolls' Orcastrated earlier in the year, and luminaries like Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and Dexter Gordon were disinterred and paraded in celebration of the new music.

I'd forgotten how many singles PJ & Duncan released. I thought it was basically 'Let's Get Ready to Rhumble' and one other, but no, they were polluting the charts like Robson & Jerome's kid brothers.

Well this Beatles song that's been cobbled together from an old demo sounds grating, I guess they won't be trying that again.

xpost yeah almost all of their hits live in the "forgotten" zone.

There was a budget "best of" in Poundland, one track was clearly too expensive to license but it had all the other 'hits' (except the football one, too new I guess)

They had three studio albums but five compilation albums. Is there any other artist or group who have had far more compilation albums than original studio albums, apart from people who have been dead for decades?

Ant & Dec are credited as songwriters or co-writers on nearly all of their original songs. Which is both simultaneously impressive for what was essentially a comedy inflected boyband, but also pretty tragic when you listen to the actual songs.

It would be impossible for something like their music career to happen nowadays. I think the nearest, in broad terms anyway, is LadBaby, but he's only released singles.

one track was clearly too expensive to license

That would be the cover of 'Stepping Stone' I'm guessing.

No. The one that everybody knows..

A&D's strong but now invisible hits career is a subject I love to bring up (and have already during the TOTP runs). The pair of them are obviously more than eager to pretend there was nothing more than LGRTR.

My fav Ant & Dec single is Shout - classic boyband maturity move that. Look forward to when we get to it.

I have that budget comp (Takeaway). The best one (if more A&D = best) was the 'essential collection' double set that came later that I definitely remember Tesco stocking. Still no We're on the Ball though.

lol Takeaway isn't even in the list of five compilation albums on Wikipedia. And it doesn't have Rhumble - https://www.discogs.com/release/7661579-Ant-Dec-AKA-PJ-Duncan-Takeaway-The-Best-Of-Ant-Dec

Yep, that's the one

Gary Barlow looks so cross all the time he's singing.

Barlow (thinks): I can't chuffing BELIEVE that I'm having to sit at THIS PIANO singing THIS RUDDY SONG *fumes*

Compare to how Mark Owen always looks like he's having a great time.

Oh here's Damon - at least the crowd here are singing along.

Weller looking a lot like mr Spock there

odd set tonight. and the way the style council were set up seemed odd too, all on top of each other.

i don't remember this episode at all

um, was i watching a previous recording rather than one from tonight? they aren't following the published schedule because of the snooker and the epg won't let me go backwards and see.

Last night the schedule was snooker from 7pm until 10pm, then an episode from 1984 followed by one from 1980.

yeah, the one i watched was this from 83 which is in the recent list on iPlayer but must've been recorded before last night (the pvr bundles things of the same name together so it got bumped to top of the new recordings list along with the new one, which turned out to be 30 mins of snooker)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08fsfy0/top-of-the-pops-31031983?seriesId=unsliced

I daresay iPlayer will be fine, but if you were wanting to see "NY at the BBC" and didn't set yr TiVo to record Christine and the Queens, then... yr out of luck.

It wouldn't be TOTP if you didn't occasionally miss it because of the snooker.

i got a 2 o'clock showing of totp 1980 and 1984 which both turned out to be david byrne at the union chapel.

iplayer will be fine, not least because these were pre-delivered - it doesn't record off air unless the programme's live. sometimes this can be missing bits if the schedule's changed but it's generally tidied up on the next working day. (unless it's the snowboarding on the red button which was royally fucked up but there were whole days cancelled and rearranged by the organisers so it's hardly surprising)

1984 had the bunnymen, Will with his teardrop vox(?) 12 string.

1980 was the cure again and bad manners again.

(my facebook history for friday was me railing against the snooker exactly two years previously, for similar reasons)

The post-Diana week must be coming up soon? Was it even on that week? Many BBC things weren't.

Normal service is resumed next Friday with two consecutive episodes from January 1996 (plus episodes from 1987 and 1976). Diana's death wasn't until August 1997. So we're quite a way off.

For some reason I like 'Slight Return' by The Bluetones despite the many small problems - lead singer looks like Ray Davies but in Phil Daniels' parka from Quadrophenia while shuffling around like Ian Brown / Liam, song title irritatingly reminds me of Hendrix's 'Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)', the rest of the band look like a generic mid '96 Britpop band, I get the sneaking suspicion they were signed because some record exec wanted a band that were a bit like Oasis but not headstrong wankers, etc., etc..

they are soooo stone roses lite

The Lighthouse Family - if you were ever on hold to Dell tech support in the late '90s then you've probably heard their entire greatest hits.

This is an absolute classic tho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5gx6dlurtI

six episodes tonight. two from the current run, two 'random' episodes and two with the featured artist, tina turner tonight.

It's hard for me to hate Ocean Colour Scene, but it's equally hard for me to like them. Alcatraz - I've said this upthread, but for my taste landfill dance is way less obnoxious than landfill indie. For the last few weeks there have been some real bangers that I've either forgotten about or don't even remember. Luniz 'I Got 5 On It' I remember from Now 60 or whatever it was. I don't remember Diana Ross completely stealing Gloria Gaynor's signature song but it boils my piss. Music may be RHCP's aeroplane, but Kiedis is a strong candidate for my idea of worst frontman ever.

Supergrass - the Slade of Britpop

In the sense that I have a lot of fun listening to their records but don't really expect deep intellectual content or insights from either band.

co-incidentally on the second of tonight's 1996 episodes, Oasis - a band that I don't expect deep intellectual content or insights from but also don't have fuin listening to the record of - cover a Slade song.

the Alcatraz track is excellent, pretty lush sounding for an almost top ten hit, not to mention rather hookless

but i've written about that before

Giv Me Luv is amazing. love the head-scrambling way in which the different rhythmic layers are brought in. there's also this call-and-response thing going on between the lead synth and the bassline, and with that handclap, it always make me think of it as some sort of wordless electronic gospel

yes i know it has actual words too, but they seem kind of by the bye to me

a couple of episodes behind but I am in awe of that East 17 single that I don't recall from the time, the lyrics and Tony's performance are ridiculous. I'm also really enjoying the performances of 3T where the singer explodes with emotion and... throws his backpack on the floor. Both when they were in the studio, and on the beach.

"The Naughty North & The Sexy South" is a banger for all ages though.

Classic hardbag. I wonder if we'll be getting it again later in the year during chart rundown (i assume not)

My intro to it was actually this erm Doctor Fox 'mix' CD, a very first-four-months-of-1996 compilation albeit with a few stranger older choices (i assume never forget is there as a memorial for take that)

https://rateyourmusic.com/release/djmix/doctor-fox/mixomatic/

Supergrass' first album is still such a blast