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

The song's distinctly mediocre, but they're giving it so much welly.

Miles more entertaining than this dreary Weller number anyway.

1993 on bbc2 today (iplayer). they are getting ahead of themselves.

I was in first year of secondary school in ‘93 and as a result listened to a hell of a lot of Radio 1 while doing homework, in the absence of money to go buy music. As a result every lyric of every last song on this special is burned indelibly into my memory, even songs I haven’t heard for maybe 28 years. It may just be nostalgia but to me this special is just wall to wall classics.

By the end of the year I was buying NME / Melody Maker / Select and deep into learning guitar. I often wonder if my first year of school had been one of those ‘crap for pop’ years how different I would have ended up.

I’d met Brett Anderson a few days previous to this at their gig in Manchester and was horrified at just how short he’d cut his hair since. He looked much more casual and slightly disheveled when I saw him, I think it offended me that he’d made such an effort to smarten up. What a clot I was.

1994 tomorrow

they are really spoiling us with these.

No no, no no no no, no no no no...

I thought I'd clicked on the rolling stones thread, and was gonna say "I thought it was "Doo do Doo doo doo" "
etc

Ha ha!

xp Chartbreaker

1994 seemed to start late so the recorder cut off the end. but they were onto the Brit pop by then so i doubt i missed much

enjoyed the dawn penn section

Before tonight's TOTP revival show on BBC4, I had no memory of The Farm covering the Human League's 'Don't You Want Me' in 1992.

I now feel very nostalgic for the time when I wasn't aware of this monstrosity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmwNwXcEA30

yeah, totally unnecessary.

conversely i didn't know about bjorn again covering erasure but that worked well.

1995 tonight

I'd totally forgotten about The Farm's cover. Bjorn Again's Erasure cover better than I remember. I guess dozens of crap ABBA tribute bands have affected my memory of them, but they were actually pretty good.

xp story of 1995, followed by the biggest hits of 1995, followed by over two spirit-crushing hours of Oasis nonsense.
I was wondering if the back to back broadcast of these latest few Story Of... programmes was because BBC4 might be about to sack these TOTP re-runs. But then I remember we're on the edge of Britpop and maybe that wouldn't be such a bad idea? I was away at university by this point and didn't get to see TOTP much for a few years - anyone remember if those shows were any good?

I don't know why they'd stop showing the re-runs. Mind you, I also don't know why they didn't show the 1991 and 1992 shows until we were already halfway through the 1992 repeats and then decided to start showing the rest of the 90s ones long before those episodes were going to be shown.

91 and 92 roundups were victims of covid, i thought, editing suites and studios shut, nobody able to be talking heads (ironically as that's what everybody else had been reduced to)

i think bbc4 less likely to stop repeats given that it's been reduced to the archive channel. but yes, the Saturday evenings on bbc2 seem to be heading on bbc4 Friday evenings' ground a bit

quo vs oasis by the look this week.

bbc4 getting its own back later in the week by showing snooker...

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0086/6995/4110/products/IMG_5921_c00b0906-6a71-4cb5-ba34-8645ae5feeb5_1200x1200.jpg

Mentioned on this months Chart Music podcast. This has to be the coolest TOTP performance, I cant stop watching it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU_XhM-4S1Y

That's quite something

Only really liked Trio when they were performing live, or miming as on TOTP

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46OoOtOnEuo

I've got miles behind again, but caught up on a few episodes last night. Really like Bizarre Inc - I'm Gonna Get You, one of those tunes that you know but can't remember who it's by or what it's called. Not sure if the worst outfit ever award goes to the cossack-tetris crew or Andy Bell.

story of 1998 tonight. I'm not sure i remember the last two.

and the last weekly show was Christmas special which are never great

xp I always get the feeling that there's a deliberate intention behind Andy Bell's costume decisions, even if I don't know what it is. Gluing styrofoam Tetris blocks onto a bodysuit however is pretty bad.

It's never a good sign when the Christmas episode is mostly going through the year month by month showing clips of songs. It means the producers thought there weren't enough strong enough songs to fill out an entire show. Despite moving away to university in late 1992 and not ever really watching TOTP even after a housemate got a TV, I remember seeing the 1992 Christmas show at my parent's house. I didn't think much of it then either.

1998 a really awful year for pop.

I don't know what East 17 were trying to do here but they look like they're channelling Madness.

It must be love ..

The 'smoke weed twice a day' crew at university really like Duran Duran's 'Ordinary World' for some reason that I could never figure out. For me the song is an underwhelming attempt at... maturity? reflectiveness? coming to terms with their 80s past? I don't know. But I much prefer the (wild) boys when they're acting like pompous coked up yuppies worrying about their expense accounts and Learjets and Renoirs.

There must be some kind of name for this kind of landfill dance music that consists of one line of vocals repeated over and over again, but it just reminds me of being in a shit-arse Ritzy's nightclub in the early 90s.
I was so focussed on my dislike of Sting at the start of tonight's second show that I completely missed Take That standing right next to him.
I've come to the conclusion that Stereo MCs are the Muse of dance music. Once you've heard three of their songs there's really no need to hear any more, and you can watch a video of either of these bands with the sound off and still know what the song probably sounds like.

C'mon, Ordinary World has such an undeniable chorus.

Ordinary World is amazing when it has a big stadium trance backing and a singer with a pleasant voice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA39yqwnX98

Been catching up on a few of these. Pop Will Eat Itself were dreadful.

I've always been well disposed towards them for their Prodigy collab, but yes that song is terrible.

I quite liked it at the time, so it brought back some happy memories of wearing their T-Shirts. I think the remixed single version with slightly more polished singing was better - but I’m not going to dig it out just to proof myself wrong.

There must be some kind of name for this kind of landfill dance music that consists of one line of vocals repeated over and over again, but it just reminds me of being in a shit-arse Ritzy's nightclub in the early 90s.

Which song is this about. I recall their being a Snap one on which I had forgotten about and found myself quite enjoying.

Honestly I can't even remember which song it was I was referring to.

I'm still catching up via iplayer but the last episode I watched felt like a real improvement with The Beloved and M People's best song, not even that weird racist performance from Gloworm or Sting's bizarre hat could spoil it

also, "No Limits" is the first song I remember dancing to as a child in the living room, we're heading into peak nostalgia for me!

Yeah, was really good to see that Beloved song.

What was up with the Gloworm performance?

We missed this in the episode they left out:
https://t.co/Tns0kVSIvW

Favourite part of last night's two episodes - the bit where a freeze frame of Brett from the Suede video s-l-o-w-l-y cross faded into the aerial shot of Miami before the kd Lang performance.

Xpost swines!

it's becoming really obvious where the show's direction is not working. All these respectable acts like Sting, Paul McCartney, Bryan Ferry - the only bit of life from the studio audience is when "No Limits" is performed.

What was up with the Gloworm performance?

the costumes and dancing were definitely a bit culture-as-costume

the women playing with ferry looked very familiar but no credits on the single or lp for anybody female

Some real garbage this week. Didn't know and didn't need to know about this Hue & Cry remix of 'Labour Of Love'. Remember when Q magazine offered them £10 to split up?

Only one episode this week and all of it musical wallpaper (oh a song from a VW Golf ad!) until Robin S and 'Show Me Love'. Almost everything else has this 'smug gloss' over the top of it. I can't really explain it, it's like the performers are making the minimum effort while saying "look at how cool I am not caring about this". Even though this episode is from March 1993 these songs feel like they've been lazily put together to be 'summer hits'. Maybe, like punk and grunge before it, Britpop had to happen to get us away from where we'd ended up, and that the actual content of Britpop didn't matter so much as the 'getting away from somewhere' part.

Got to say if I a DJ dropped this Hue and Cry remix while I was on a good pinger I probably wouldn't leave the dancefloor.

Maybe it's just because I was 17 at the time and have rosey nostalgia for this era, but I'm now enjoying Snow - Informer.

More Covid-adled observations may follow as I continue watching the episode.