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

they're just trolling us now

Re-runs resume. Bizarre to see Shaky perform a Christmas song in May but we've landed in mid December 1990.

the trolling continues

Of the video for 'Freedom', George Michael said something to the effect that "people will enjoy watching it more that I'm not in it".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w8XVtETu98
from 14m25s onwards

return to form there for jive bunny.

not much mixing in that grease megamix.

Worst two show run of the year?

Yes. There have been worse individual shows but these last two are the worst back-to-back shows in a while.

I guess Christmas is often the time of the year the charts are at their most tedious, but fingers crossed January might bring something better.

there are already green shoots of recovery in the breakers section, first show was bizarre in that there were four climbers in the top 10 and they played none of them!

Christmas Day 1990 TOTP on now.

Andi Peters in 'about to hit the gym' action.

That could have been edited down to half an hour and there'd still have been filler.

I really am not sure why they didn't edit out the old Xmas number one clips.

Coming very soon then; Shoe-gazing hits!

High point was the live version of Killer, it wasn’t the worst Christmas show at all though, even if all the old clips were a bit dull - maybe in 1990 you weren’t bombarded with them quite as much as now when November 1st appears to be the start of Christmas.

Some Killer mostly filler.
Radio 1 did play Slade's Zmas joint back in the early 90s but it definitely wasn't like today's streaming dominated chart where for Nov/Dec it's seemingly every Christmas song ever recorded including at least three versions of 'Let It Snow' and Tones & I's 'Dance Monkey'.

I wasn't into the reworked Killer, it changed a lot of what was so great about it and added nothing much in the way of good new bits.

For sure, the single version is at least a 9 out of 10 for me. The vowel-y synth line wasn‘t great and ran for far too long, but taken in the context of a live perfomance I think overall this rawer take worked well with the switch-up to the syncopated rhythm added more energy at a good time and the bleepy stabs in the middle 8 were a nice variation. 7.5/10

ah, that time of the year when there's a metal #1...

(happened quite a bit - sales are generally down after Christmas but the avid metal fans would make an effort to buy there new iron maiden)

also, Grebo week. poppies vocals were terrible.

Sounded like PWEI's backing track was turned way down.

Have I missed the 'highlights of 1991' show or did they just launch into the new year without showing one?

there isn't one.

Well, this is a bummer! 😔 .@russty_russ and anyone else who is following this programme. pic.twitter.com/CcbzqZRVU1

— 80s Retro (@1980s_Retro) May 21, 2021

This is an outrage

I think it will get made eventually, just not at this present time

I'd rather they crack on with the episodes than hang around for months waiting for it to get made like they seemed to with 90.

Someone tell The Stranglers it's not the 80s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That DJH performance was an absolute shocker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Chart Show played the video for "Swallow"

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

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

And on a Saturday lunchtime too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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