Top of the Dogs
25/05/89 (Simon Mayo)
Edelweiss – “Bring Me Edelweiss” (5)
The quite fabulous SOS had peaked at number 6 for Abba in 1975, but Edelweiss beat them by one place peaking at number 5.
Tone Loc – “Funky Cold Medina” (26) (video)
His biggest hit and it peaked at number 13.
Sam Brown – “Can I Get A Witness?” (21) (video)
Peaked at number 15.
Robert Palmer – “Change His Ways” (31)
Yodeling his way to number 28.
Lynne Hamilton – “On The Inside” (13)
Let out on day release to perform the theme tune from Prisoner Cell Block H, this was Lynne's only hit and it peaked at number 3.
Cappella – “Helyom Halib” (12) (video)
Went up one more place.
Donna Summer – “I Don’t Wanna Get Hurt” (19)
You can't keep her out of the studio these days! This one peaked at number 7.
Gerry Marsden, The Christians, Paul McCartney, Holly Johnson, and Stock Aitken Waterman – “Ferry Cross The Mersey” (1) (video)
Second of three weeks at number one.
WASP – “The Real Me” (27) (video/credits)
Peaked at number 23.
1st June is next.
angelo: even though am i now finding these totp re-runs of less and less interest on a personal level, i still applaud your dedication to duty in these difficult times!
ReplyDeleteSeconded - now I face the prospect of working from home for months, it is good to have TOTP repeats and Angelo's blog to help keep me sane. Stay safe and well, everyone.
DeleteJudging by the amount of people I saw out and about, most people here are treating this like a bonus holiday. Scotland will be the next Italy at this rate!
DeleteThank goodness for escapism like TOTP and this blog, I agree.
Indeed, two more shows next Friday, as we enter June 1989 with Ferry Cross The Mersey still at No.1 for the third week. "This land's the place we love, ferry cross the mersey, this land is the place we love....."
DeleteI really enjoyed watching The Story of Ready Steady Go, and the Best of Ready Steady Go on BBC4 on Friday. Very interesting how it clearly influenced TOTPs, and lots of great early clips of bands like The Beatles, The Supremes and The Beach Boys in the studio which don't exist in the TOTPs archive.
Delete@Angelo: Yes, it was really good, especially the clips (finally wrestled from Dave Clark's vice-like grip!). Bit sobering to see how old everyone was getting, though Georgie Fame is looking well.
DeleteI thought both the doc and the compilation did a great job of evoking RSG's exciting atmosphere, and we are fortunate that far more of it has survived than is the case with 60s TOTP. Hopefully BBC4 might show some surviving complete editions in time.
DeleteI really enjoyed “The Story of RSG”. Lovely to see the Rediffusion logo, Eric Burdon’s weathered better than Annie Nightingale, that director looked the spitting image of Terry Gilliam, loved The Fourmost performing while their stage was being shoved across the floor, and sad there was no Cathy MacGowan chatting for some reason – I checked to see if she was still alive on Wikipedia (she is) and I didn’t know she was married to Hywel Bennett and is the long term partner of Michael Ball!
DeleteI had no idea Cathy McGowan and Michael Ball were an item! She does seem to have kept a very low profile in more recent years, so perhaps she just doesn't want to be in the limelight anymore.
DeleteBlimey, Michael Ball is a mere 19 years younger than his partner Cathy McGowan.
DeleteJust wondering if it is Cathy McGowan in the Elton John video of Part Time Love, as the one sitting quietly near Elton's piano throughout the video while everyone else in the room is dancing:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKfIgrJwZ0Y
Yes, that is her, right enough. She seems to shun the limelight now. Wonder if she liked that Generation X song about her?
DeleteA solo Mayo does a good job overall, except when he confuses Lynne Hamilton with Lynn "Rose Garden" Anderson - perhaps that Kon Kan track was on his mind! Edelweiss get to open the show again, this time with some fake snow and pointless fake beards for our bum-slapping chums. There was something oddly disturbing about the other guy at the back slapping the backside of that life-size doll. Tone Loc is on video, with a low-key rap that does have some amusing lyrics and imagery to match, though it soon starts becoming monotonous.
ReplyDeleteStill on video, Sam Brown wraps her tonsils around an old Marvin Gaye song, but the end effect is more shouty than tuneful. The courtroom promo is good fun, and suggests that Sam, like her father, doesn't take herself too seriously. Robert Palmer was certainly a musical chameleon, and this must rank as one of his most eccentric singles, the yodelling merely the icing on the cake of a very odd-sounding record. While far from his best, it does kind of work, and credit to him for trying something different and belying his lounge lizard image. The studio performance is accompanied by some animations taking the mick out of the Addicted to Love video, which is a nice touch.
Jason Donovan is on hand to introduce Lynne Hamilton and the theme to Prisoner: Cell Block H, which had become something of a cult show in Britain at this point after ITV began showing it late at night. Lynne was actually a Lancashire lass, but emigrated to Oz as a teenager, and recorded this in 1979 when the show first started. It does sound like a fairly typical 70s ballad, nice enough but surely a bit underpowered for a hard-hitting prison drama? Lynne gives off a faint Stevie Nicks vibe in this performance, though her fashion sense is more conservative.
As Angelo notes, by this stage Donna Summer had gone from never appearing in the studio to becoming almost a regular. Here she is again, in a nice hat, to regale us with another SAW single. It's not quite as good as her previous hit with them, but is still a cut above their usual production line fare. Another cover to end with, as WASP turn an old Who anthem into a piece of plodding hair metal. At least the video shows more imagination than many of those produced by their peers.
"prisoner cell block h" was a staple of late-night itv scheduling in the early-to-mid 1990's, but for me it was total anethema!
Deletewhat i do remember at that time at a similar point in the evening was "the james whale radio show", which was always worth watch
Wasn't Pete Waterman all over the late night schedules at the time with The Hitman and Her?
DeleteThe Hitman and Her was only on Saturday nights into Sunday morning. Memorable for its mention on Jerry Sadowitz's comedy sketch show of the time where he thanked ITV for saving him money on porn by broadcasting it (!).
DeleteEdelweiss back in the studio - those funny Austrians! Funny peculiar, that is. It's stupid but strangely appealing, not that I want to hear it that often.
ReplyDeleteTone Loc, from an album with one of the worst titles of all time, and his growly rap was something of an irritant for a short while before he proved to be a flash in the pan. He did appear in Mario Van Peebles' western Posse, because all rappers had to have a side acting career in the 1990s. The lyrics sound incredibly right-off now, can you imagine the furore he would have created with anti-gay sentiments these days?
Sam Brown on video with Mickey Pearce (?) on interjections for a way over the top Motown non-hit. Yes, Sam, you have a very loud voice, now put it away dear. Funnily enough on tonight's BBC4 Ready Steady Go documentary Dusty Springfield was singing this too.
Robert Palmer, you wait years for a yodelling record and two come along at once. No, wait, you never wait for a yodelling record, do you? Anyway, here's a bit of fun, bordering on the wacky but Mr Palmer did have a sense of humour about himself that was not always apparent. The toons are from the video. Audience sound like they're joining in - this isn't Angels!
Then a return to mumsy balladry as Lynne Hamilton's soap theme is bought by nightbirds across the land. I used to really like the late night ITV shows, though I didn't watch all of them, and didn't watch Prisoner: Cell Block H (or Prisoner, as it was originally called, the name changed to stop viewers expecting Patrick McGoohan to show up). Late night TV is total rubbish these days in comparison.
Oh, it's Capella again, but I think we've covered this. I won't slag it off because Italy are having a terrible time right now.
Donna Summer with SAW single #2, not as good but by no means awful. Gets a bit plaintive in the run-up to the chorus, which promises something a bit catchier than what we get.
Then the Hillsborough charity single, funnily enough Gerry and the Pacemakers' You'll Never Walk Alone was chosen to be played across Europe on loads of radio stations this morning at 7:45 in a show of solidarity. And he was gasping his way through an interview on the Ready Steady Go doc tonight as well.
W.A.S.P. arseing about with a cover of lesser Who track, adding nothing but taking away quite a bit. Black and white video for this?! Were they trying to be moody?!
It was very refreshing to see Edelweiss invited back in the studio for a second performance, and a great upbeat start to the show. My favourite performer on Edelweiss was the other girl in the group playing backing lyrics and later in the song dancing with the bum-slapping men.
DeleteThe Tone Loc video clip was the middle third of the song, so it didn't actually start from the beginning, but at least we got to see that "Sheena was a man". Strange as to why TOTP didn't show the first third of the song, considering that it was the first showing of the video on TOTP.
why exactly were SAW involved in the scouser charidee single? none of them actually came from the area!
ReplyDeleteGuaranteed to make it a hit/incredibly available, presumably.
Deleteshouldn't that guy who did "three lions" have produced it? but then again it might have damaged his street cred...
DeleteIan Broudie wasn't a celebrity yet, his first hit is coming up soon, though.
DeleteWith the arrival of Capella's Helyom Halib, only a week or so after 70s music legends like Stevie Nicks, Paul McCartney, Diana Ross, Donna Summer, still coming up with new music on the 1989 shows, I wonder how these legends viewing such epileptic videos and music performances actually felt about being on the same show as them, especially Paul McCartney, as no doubt the music legends were still watching TOTP when they were still in the charts with new singles of their own?
ReplyDeleteIt sure would have sent a signal to them to retire ASAP from mainstream music, as the 1989 music scene was either led by SAW or techno house, and these two movements were hardly the company of the older music legends, with the exception of Donna Summer who joined SAW to keep her music career going. We were certainly seeing a big changing of the baton of mainstream music right here in 1989, and I doubt if the likes of Nicks, Ross and similar others would appear again on the show after their current chart singles in mid-1989.
Miss Ross did have one more big UK chart hit to come, in 1991, and it looks as if she even performed in the studio for that one.
DeleteGood Lord, it took until 1991 for her to finally appear in the studio? I remember this duet with Marvin Gaye on a 1975 TOTP show, albeit on video of course:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uhAsUtLD_Y
So it was around 20 years of having hits from around 1971 or so until a first appearance in the studio 1991. It's a pity that it took until her last final hit in 1991 to appear in the studio.
Miss Ross was on TOTP with The Supremes in the 1960s - you must have seen the famous Baby Love clip?
DeleteRIP Kenny Rogers, sad to hear of his passing today at the age of 81. His duets were second to none, and even his solo singles were just as memorable over the years.
ReplyDeleteYes, RIP Kenny, he could be pretty cheesy but there's no arguing with his talent. Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Is In is one of the great cult 1960s tracks, quite apart from his other achievements.
DeleteI was also saddened to see that menwholooklikekennyrogers.com seems to be defunct as a website! Is there nothing to rely on now?!
He picked a fine time to leave...
DeleteKenny was too cheesy for my liking apart from the hard hitting "Ruby" and "Daytime Friends", the follow-up to "Lucille" which I thought was a corker and deserved way better than number 39 over here.
DeleteKenny's finest moment as a solo singer was his sonf called 'Lady' in 1980, and as duets go, 'We Got Tonight' with Sheena Easton in 1983.
DeleteWith four hundred children and a crap in the field...
DeleteKeep calm and carry on watching TOTP. Let’s all self-isolate with Angelo! You can tell I'm stuck in as I'm three or four days earlier than usual with my comments!
ReplyDeleteSimon on good form, no doubt relieved he was the solo act in a Turnoff sandwich.
It’s those wacky Austrians again. Don’t give your partner a love bite, you at the back – she’ll fly away making a farting noise. Allegedly.
I liked Tone Loc’s rap at the time. The last verse is about him hitting it off with a woman who decides they should get married and he zooms off. Nice record deck / keytar hybrid, and surely the first time we get the penis nickname ‘weiner’ mentioned in a lyric on TOTP.
Sam Brown’s dad Joe playing judge, her backing singer mum in the jury, and I still can’t believe that no-one’s mentioned Reg Hollis from “The Bill” in the dock.
Christ, it’s cajun yodelling Wimoweh! All we needed as Frank Ifield on the show for full effect. This was silly and surprisingly enjoyable, and fair play to Robert Palmer for joining in and his plugger for getting a number 31 into the studio.
I beg your pardon, Simon? See what I did there? Lynne Hamilton with a perfectly acceptable country tune (which I enjoyed) whose gentleness belied the snarly vibe and violence depicted in the Aussie soap it advertised.
Oh dear, its “Horrible Helib” again. HH FF.
Donna Summer with insert time and looking way better than her weird mugshot, almost making SAW sound stylish. I did say almost. The tune to the chorus reminded me of “I’m Gonna Make You Mine” by Lou Christie.
We finish with We Are Sexual Perverts and by far the loudest track on the show. Thomas the Vance would have loved this. Heavy metal with brass indeed.
I realised today that singing the first two verses of Robert Palmer's mash-up of "Good Tradition", "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" and "She Taught Me How To Yodel" takes up enough time to watch your hands these days!
ReplyDeleteWhat a weird bunch of songs in this episode. I've loved the 1989 episodes but this was lacking compared to the absolute bangers they've had in recent episodes. Agree with others - Edelweiss and Tone Loc felt verrrrry uncomfortable in a way they clearly didn't at the time. And I'd forgotten about that Robert Palmer song until now. What a strange single it was.
ReplyDeleteOkay brie here's 30/01/75 if you are out there:
ReplyDeletehttps://we.tl/t-TJn9stNa4S
Available to all of course, depending on your musical taste!
Hi, it's an mkv file which I can't open. Can you put it on mp4 by any chance?
DeleteHere's an mp4 of 30/01/75 Dory:
Deletehttps://we.tl/t-5GVAgYt0pP
Thanks, it's interesting how a wiped episode is retrieved but without the presenter in between the songs, in this case Tony Blackburn. Is there some sort of copyright issue which means that whoever found a wiped episode must remove any glimpses of the presenter?
DeleteOn a positive note, I quite liked the rare Pan's People performance of Elvis Presley's Promised Land, where this must have been one of Sue Mehenick's earliest appearance on TOTP with Pans People, before the Legs and co era a couple of years later. The song also reminds me of Meat Loaf's cover version of it in 1983 on the Midnight At The Lost & Found album.
The presenter was deliberately cut from some of the wiped shows by whoever was recording in order to try and get all or most of the music onto a 30 minute tape. There were 60 and 120 minute tapes avaliable but apparently they were unreliable and not used much. We still have presenters on some wiped shows. Jimmy Saville's links exist on 07/11/74 for example but the tape runs out as The Rubettes are singing "Juke Box Jive".
DeleteBrilliant stuff, mate! It's been worth the wait. While I'm on have you got 15/09/83, 26/01/84 and 18/07/85, all of which I've asked Anonymous for and he hasn't got?
DeleteHi Anonymous! Have you got the original archive versions of the following shows that BBC4 either cut bits from or didn't show at all, due to Mike Smith? They are 5/03/87, 2/04/87 (Both links to Smithy), 3/09/87 and 5/11/87. Cheers!
ReplyDeleteBrie no linked shows, sorry but here are two hosted ones :
Deletehttps://we.tl/t-VlIC8Wm1IN
Thanks for these, mate. Great stuff!
DeleteHere's 15/09/83, 26/01/84 & 18/07/85 brie:
Deletehttps://we.tl/t-bn64uWfjwC
https://we.tl/t-Yjq3Gf7uUt
Great stuff, mate! Thanks for these.
DeleteAnonymous, I request archive copies of 09/01/86, 10/04/86, 11/09/86, 26/02/87, and 07/05 again; I did have most of these already but were deleted in haste to save storage and didn't have them backed up. Thanks in advance.
DeleteYep, here they all are:
Deletehttps://we.tl/t-xewSmWIQ1W
Not a lot of new stuff this week...
ReplyDeleteTone Loc - An exception to my dislike of rap. Nice video as well...
Robert Palmer - started out thinking ‘what the??’, but it was quite catchy.
Lynn Hamilton - what a wimpy theme tune to a programme about Prison. As an aside, when did TV programmes stop having theme tunes? - nowadays lucky to get 15 seconds as the theme.
Donna Summer - did someone else have a hit with this, or is it just derivative of the other SAW songs? - they were definitely running out of ideas now.
WASP - the runout slot seems to be becoming the Heavy Metal slot. Ok but not memorable.
Just realised a tenuous link between two consective songs, as we get a former vocalist in Vinegar Joe (Robert Palmer) followed by the theme to a programme which had a character nicknamed "Vinegar Tits"!
ReplyDeleteThe ever dependable Boy-Mayo tonight with a line-up that doesn't inspire much confidence, however I ended up enjoying the show far more than I thought.
ReplyDeleteYodel 1 - “Bring Me Edelweiss” back again to open the show. fabulous on every level. Don't think the Director knew where to point the camera.
Tone Loc up next, plying the ladies with “Funky Cold Medina” and getting his wicked way with them (but not the men). Really not sure you'd get away with this nowadays.
Sam Brown on video. “Can I Get A Witness?” Looks like she was the witness! Catchy enough tune but very old fashioned. Clever little video as well.
Robert Palmer turning into Billy Joel with his very cringy yodelling on “Change His Ways”. Another old fashioned tune but I quite enjoyed it.
Lynne Hamilton with a seventies throwback “On The Inside”. Wasn't looking forward to this but it made a nice change of pace, the sort of thing we saw a lot of back in the day.
Prisoner of course updated for the 21st Century as Wentworth Prison. Less hammy acting and wooden walls and more murder, rape, brutality involved this time around.
More of Cappella this week. “Helyom Halib” obviously on the playlist to keep the Radio 1 audience happy. Terrible video.
Donna Summer back again. I was dismissive of the other tracks from this album earlier in the year but having heard “I Don’t Wanna Get Hurt” again it really is rather good. SAW could turn out a decent tune or two.
"Gerry Cross The Mersey” still at the top.
Play out with WASP and even this wasn't too bad. Normally can't stand this type of thing.
A much better show than expected.
I was watching the MTV 80s channel this afternoon, and they played the Edelweiss video in a show called "The Best 1985 Party Ever". Since when was this a 1985 hit? It makes me think that the people who put these shows together on the music video channels were not born prior to the 80s in order to remember the 80s music!
DeleteAmazingly Dory there are people out there who care less about 80s music and pop charts than us! How do they go about their days 😀😀😀😀😀😀😀
ReplyDeleteSeriously does wind me up though. Absolute 80s Radio used to annoy me when they slipped in the odd 79 and 90 record. I always tweeted them to let them know but they never replied!
Yes indeed, I've been mainly watching the superb new Now 70s channel on Sky 373 since it launched three months ago, and I noticed that they slipped in Funkytown by Lipps Inc which was a hit in the summer of 1980, and also the rare video for Cuba by The Gibson Bothers which charted in March 1980:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZKOjuh-cTs
I means Good Lord, there was already a Now 80s channel well before the 70s one was launched recently, so you'd think they would get these two songs placed in the right channels! There's probably some others which I have overlooked; but for us TOTP regulars, it's not good at all!
Cuba was actually released originally in 1979.
DeleteFunkytown was released in a single in 1980 in the UK, but was taken from an album released in 1979, so I don't think there is any issue with these appearing on Now 70s :)
even if the above were actually recorded in 1980 rather than 1979 (i remember "cuba" originally as only a minor hit before being re-issued in the wake of a more successful gibsons track), then i still consider 1980 to be sonically far more 70's than 80's with disco still going strong at that point. whereas it tailed-off quite sharply almost overnight the following year, mainly thanks to the rapid development of musical technology that started replacing actual musicians
DeleteIndeed, when 1980 introduced the synthesiser craze from Britain with the likes of OMD towards the end of that year, it seemed to sweep away the transatlantic disco scene in one swoop. Earlier in 1980 we still had The Gibson Brothers, Odyssey, Crown Heights Affair and of course Ottawan, but that was pretty much all.
Delete"cuba" was in fact originally released in 1978, as i thought was the case as i remember being really into while i was still at school that year!
DeleteIncredible how it only charted as late as March 1980 in the British charts, but nevertheless, probably one of the greatest and underrated disco tunes of all time.
DeleteJust realised that this month is the 40th anniversary of the UK chart entry of Cuba by The Gibson Brothers. Wonder what they are doing now, 40 years on?....
DeleteIf you wanted to be really pedantic, of course, you could argue that the 80s decade didn't actually begin until 1981 anyway, just as the 21st century didn't properly start until 1 January 2001...
ReplyDeleteI guess that would seem to explain why the Now 70s video channel could get away with dropping in some 1980 singles into the 70s
DeleteTone Loc - I remember this going down very well amongst my fellow 6th Formers, and though I still like it, you can definitely file it under 'wouldn't be allowed these days'.
ReplyDeleteSam Brown - One of those so-called 'classic' tunes that I've never had much time for, regardless of who's singing it.
Robert Palmer - An unusual song, but I really enjoy it now even if I didn't much at the time. He's got that 'I still can't believe the record company put this out as a single' look on him though.
Lynne Hamilton - It was Central TV that first made Prisoner Cell Block H a cult hit, I remember watching it at University. The theme is OK if an unlikely hit.
Donna Summer - Another good SAW hit, albeit not as perfect as the previous one.
WASP - Utterly wretched.