1994 - It's got nothing to do with Vorsprung durch technik you know

There were some momentous events happening around the world in 1994. Rwanda and Yugoslavia were experiencing horrendous civil wars, yet the IRA announced a cessation of hostilities and Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty. Nelson Mandela achieved the unthinkable by becoming President of South Africa but Labour’s new leader John Smith died of a heart attack, clearing the way for Tony Blair to mould the party in his image.

It wasn’t significant at the time but the first new number one of the year was D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, used three years later as the signature tune for New Labour’s successful election campaign. D:Ream are now probably better known for boasting current science broadcaster extraordinaire Professor Brian Cox on occasional keyboards. Tough on Peter Cunnah, who pretty much did everything on the recordings.

John Major’s Tory government was spouting platitudes about getting ‘Back to Basics’ and that seemed to be what was happening in the charts, too. Suede toned down their rockier sound and introduced some sweet strings on ‘The Wild Ones’, performed live here - sans orchestra - on Jools Holland’s then groundbreaking BBC2 show ‘Later with…’. I thought it simply had to soar to the top three in the footsteps of the band’s ‘Stay Together’ but it stalled at eighteen. Never mind, Brett, it was the first (and only) cassette single I ever bought.

Around the same time, Madonna’s ‘Immaculate Collection’ became the first CD album I purchased, too, so my new flat at 30 Radford Court must by then have been adorned by a new-fangled CD player. Although I was busy hiring CDs from the library for selective taping, I felt the bachelor pad deserved the foundation of a proper music collection beyond my tapes of miscellaneous tracks largely nicked off the radio over the previous decade.

Earlier in the year I had bought a cassette of Erasure’s Greatest Hits compilation. Pop! However, it had been released before ‘Always’ gave them what felt like a comeback hit. It had a fresh sound, but nevertheless unmistakeably a Bell/Clarke synthpop production. Rather too many extraneous beeps and electronic twirly bits for my liking but definitely one of their best slow numbers.

An Eighties electro classic was re-mixed in ’94 to accompany another singles compilation, this time by New Order. I don’t think I bought it until the following year, but it did allow me to become better acquainted with ‘True Faith’. For some reason it didn’t leave an imprint in 1987 but in November its rise to the top ten catapulted it into my list of all-time faves. My arms still sprout goosebumps when listening to the melody and lush production. Forget the new video: the original is peerless!

One cassette album I did buy at Christmas was Blur’s 'Parklife'. I know the date because for some reason I still have the receipt from Billericay High Street’s claustrophoblic little ‘Slipped Discs’ shop. £8.49. Sounds quite a lot these days. I should have waited twenty years and paid a fiver in HMV. The band’s ‘Girls and Boys’ and title track (featuring Phil Daniels’ delicious delivery of those witty Damon Albarn lyrics) had wormed their wily way into my head, and I splashed out. It was, and remains, a wonderful album, totally different from anything else I’d heard. They were all terribly ‘cheeky chappy’ faux Londoners, accentuated by the Walthamstow greyhound stadium images on the album cover. There was other, less knees-up, material to enjoy, too, such as ‘To the End’ and ‘This is a Low’.

The whole Britpop rivalry with Oasis had yet to be manufactured. Back then, I don’t recall being particularly impressed by the latter’s singles from Definitely Maybe. Only the Christmas song ‘Forever I’ fared particularly well, but the song I remember most distinctly was ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’. Not totally in a good way. In particular, the message of nonchalantly-dipped fags as ‘cool’ has never chimed with me. I’ve never developed a taste for booze either, but that’s by the by! In spite of my lack of vices, I couldn’t help a sneaking admiration for this dollop of grunge guitar rock, but wouldn’t become a fan for another twelve months or so.

Talking of alcohol (!), Guinness ads were beginning to take on a marketing life of their own. They tended to mine the past for musical accompaniment and the 1994 ‘Pure Genius’ commercial had the winning idea of taking a minute-long excerpt from Louis Armstrong’s gorgeous Bond song ‘We Have All the Time in the World’. The ad propelled the original to number three in December. The following year saw Perez ‘Prez’ Prado’s Orchestra do even better with ‘Guaglione’ thanks to an engagingly quirky ad.

Levi ads had already spawned chart hits but in ’94 the jeans megabrand adopted a different approach of featuring music from new artists. As a result, Scottish grungesters Stiltskin stormed to number one with ‘Inside’, whose rocky intro formed the unexpected backing to this ad entitled ‘Creek’. The rest of the song was quite good, too!

Grunge was going especially strong at the time. Even The Cranberries, whose light, ethereal ‘Linger’ had lingered for months in the chart, ventured into the fuzzy guitar territory on the dark, brooding anti-terror anthem ‘Zombie’. However, when it came to grunge, there really was nothing to surpass Nirvana. I know many hold up Pearl Jam as kings of the genre but frankly I couldn’t name a single song of theirs. Mind you, at the start of the year, Kurt Cobain’s trio certainly wouldn’t have been my Mastermind specialist subject either but a single BBC2 broadcast was about to change all that.

In November 1993, Nirvana had followed the release of their third album In Utero with a performance on MTV’s Unplugged show. I didn’t record the date I watched it on TV here but it was probably early ’94. I recall Dad staying up to watch it with me and he also seemed to approve. Of course, his reaction may have been different had they had been fully electric and blasting out the boisterous ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. 

It wasn’t as if I knew most of the songs they played; I was familiar with only ‘Come As You Are’. However, it was heartwarming for me (and maybe John Major) to see a rock band going back to basics, and hearing something different in Cobain’s voice. From the raucous rock roar I knew from their singles, here was a cracked bluesy moan which worked really well. Not sure about his scruffy outsized jumper. My favourite track was ‘All Apologies’, the acoustic version trumping almost anything I had heard from the band.

‘Come As You Are’ features repetition of the line “I don’t have a gun”. Unfortunately, Kurt was lying. He did have a gun. And in April, having succumbed to heroin once more, he turned it on himself. I came home from work one night and Dad told me that some pop star had committed suicide. I had no hesitation in guessing the Nirvana frontman. Dad was impressed. I was just rather sad. To me, he wasn’t a rock god. I was no part of the Generation X for which he was supposed to speak so eloquently through his music. I just felt it was such a waste. The Unplugged gig was released as an album later in the year, and I bought it. I also picked up Nevermind, but I only really liked the first half. The rest sounded far too angry and discordant for me. Yes, I’d already turned into my dad!  

Or had I? After all, I don’t think Dad ever expressed any approval for dance, trance or disco. Apart from his Sixties impression of Tom Jones, I can’t even recollect seeing him actually dance. It may have been my last year in Rotaract but there were still some new anthems to get me going at village halls around the county. Identifying my three favourite dance singles of the year, by coincidence they all had ‘night; in the title. The Real Thing did well with ‘Another Night’ but surely one of the highlights was Corona’s eternally uplifting ‘Rhythm of the Night’. 

A song which divided opinion like few others was Whigfield’s ‘Saturday Night’. However irritating the song and cheesy the blonde Danish singer, it was undeniably catchy. It went straight in at number one in September and became the second biggest seller of the year. 

The song it displaced at the top had been there an interminable fifteen weeks so a change was overdue. Indeed, the song had been all around us for a few months longer. Back in May, I went to see the new hit film ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ with Elaine from Rotaract. An excellent ‘date movie’, not that anything came of it. As for the film, it became huge, made a star of Hugh Grant and made it OK to say ‘Fuck fuck fuckity-fuck’ (but not at home). It also revived the career of Wet Wet Wet, whose cover of ‘Love is All Around’ dominated the soundtrack.

After hearing it back in the Seventies on the Savile show, I’d loved the Troggs original. It was a cute, sweet love song adorned with subtle guitar and strings. Fast forward 27 years and Reg Presley’s Summer of Love composition had been transformed into a Big Ballad for the Nineties multiplex generation. It was perfect for the romcom and, once released, it topped the charts throughout the summer, shifting almost 2 million copies and eclipsing even Bryan Adams’ effort two years earlier. It was not, as Robbie Williams proclaimed in his TOTP intro, the biggest seller of all-time but had the band not insisting on deleting the single while still number one, who knows what it could have achieved? 

There were other huge love songs, but most just sounded over-bombastic crap to sell cinema tickets and soundtrack albums. Bon Jovi’s ‘Always’ is a case in point. All-4-One’s R’n’B dirge ‘I Swear’ was pinned at number two for a record-breaking seven weeks by Marti Pellow and the boys, but a true legend went all the way in April.  

Amidst his infamous falling–out with Sony, Prince was no longer Prince. He wasn’t even officially ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Prince’. No, he had reduced his brand to a ‘symbol’ which defied pronunciation. No matter. He still took his falsetto-laden ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’ to the zenith. I couldn’t understand why. I daresay he wooed and bedded countless beauties with it but, unlike most of his stuff, it just sounded mind-numbingly boring. Another example of me missing the point, as it proved to be Prince’s only number one single in the UK. Well, not Prince exactly, but – er – the Artist/Symbol. Whatever. 

Mariah Carey never needed to resort to falsetto. Her destruction of ‘Without You’ also went all the way in February. Singer of the original, Harry Nilsson, had died only a month earlier, so he must have been spinning in the proverbial at what Mariah’s excesses were doing to his 1972 classic. 

Marcella Detroit’s soprano was similarly in the canine auditory scale but she seemed to know when to rein it in. Having been booted out of Shakespear’s Sister, she wrote and sang ‘I Believe’. Had it been used for ‘Four Weddings…’ instead of ‘Love is All Around’, I reckon it could have been almost as popular. However, it wasn’t, and it reached only eleven here. One of the better ‘big ballads’, in my book.

If anything I preferred Lisa Loeb’s ‘Stay’. No superfluous trills and runs, no grandiose production, no self-indulgent promo, just a simple romantic message, beautifully delivered. Apparently it was featured in a film but for me it was the young American’s own performance in the video that won me over. Sadly, Loeb became another ‘Outstanding Newcomer’ Brit winner who barely troubled the chart thereafter. 

Bruce Springsteen also showed his sensitive side in his ‘Streets of Philadelphia’. Appropriately sombre in mood, the song accompanied the groundbreaking AIDS movie Philadelphia. Tom Hanks won the Best Actor Oscar but Bruce cleaned up in the Academy Awards, Grammys and everywhere else with this elegiac track, one of my Springsteen favourites.

Anther artist to re-appear in the top three was Kylie Minogue. ‘Confide in Me’ shared a basic trip-hop beat with Bruce’s hit but the rest was a smorgasbord of dance and Eastern rhythms. Her S/A/W days were long behind her, but somehow, like Madonna, she seemed to hook up with the right people at the right time, record the right song and be re-born. 

It was a good year for solo female singers. Gone were the days when the Brits nominee lists consistently consisted of Madonna, Kate Bush and Annie Lennox, plus a few extras plucked from the inside pages of the music press. I enjoyed hearing Tori Amos performing ‘Cornflake Girl’ and at the end of the year, Sheryl Crow brought an agreeable brand of Country to the charts in the form of ‘All I Wanna Do’. She sang of a Los Angeles world I didn’t know, nor particularly wanted to know, but did so in such a way that even the Santa Monica Boulevard sounded exotic. And then there was Dawn Penn. Amongst another crop of reggae hits, her re-working of an old song ‘You Don’t Love Me (No, No No)’ stood out. The nine-beat tattoo intro suggested something more lively but it morphed into a summer slice of rock-steady, perfect for the June-July heatwave.

There was still space in the charts and my heart for the more offbeat. The Beautiful South had for several years been prize purveyors of light-hearted yet perceptive pop. Ready for the Christmas market, they released their first compilation album Carry On Up the Charts. In barely a month it became the second biggest seller of the year, and went on to be five-times platinum. The band was commonly described as everyone’s second favourites, and I succumbed to temptation the following year. 

Located further along the oddball scale were The Crash Test Dummies. My diary notes that I didn’t like their number two hit ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’ at first but it certainly grew on me. The strange baritone voice of Brad Roberts may well have grated with many, but it has a unique aura about it, an archetypal slow-burner. Strangely it wasn’t hugely popular in their native Canada, but trust the Aussies to celebrate the bizarre! 

Well, I’ve got this far into 1994 without mentioning Take That. Not that they weren’t successful. Far from it. They toured extensively, garnered more hits and, had ‘Love Ain’t Here Anymore’ not faltered at three, would have delivered an impressive sequence of eleven consecutive number ones. Their success was inevitably spawning competitors in the new ‘boy band’ market. 

Boyzone debuted with a limp version of the Osmonds’ ‘Love me For a Reason’ but Let Loose re-released the far superior ‘Crazy For You’. I had designs on Lois, the PA to the head of department at work. We had a few sort-of dates in London but we weren’t really suited. However, I do remember that she quite liked Let Loose (as well as Jimi Hendrix) but I didn’t need her to tell me that ‘Crazy For You’ was a cracking single. 

East 17 were a different beast. They were the Stones to Take That’s Beatles, the boys your parents wouldn’t really want you to consort with, unlike nice wholesome Gary, Mark et al. They weren’t dancers and to my untrained eye, they just looked ridiculous in back-to-front baseball caps. I know they cultivated a mean, moody image but I’d bet they were about as hard as jelly!  Their career hit a highpoint at Christmas when ‘Stay Another Day’ topped the chart. It wasn’t even a Christmas song but add a few bells and dress up the drongos at the back in white furry snow suits et voila! I was no fan but had to concede that Tony Mortimer could write some decent stuff.

Could the boy band era last, would synths take over the world or, just possibly, could guitars make a prolonged comeback? I may have reached my mid-thirties but there was still new music to entertain a dinosaur like me.

1991 – All bound for Mu-Mu land

Strife was still bubbling around the world in 1991. The break-up of Communist Eastern Europe hadn’t settled revolutionary fervour. In June, Slovenia and Croatia broke away from Yugoslavia, laying the foundations for the appalling war there in the following few years. President Gorbachev survived a coup in the Soviet Union but, understandably fearing for his life and opting for a quieter (and more lucrative) retirement, finally jacked it in at Christmas. But the worst violence was the preserve of a UK-US alliance.

Operation Desert Storm began on 16^th January, heralding six weeks of carnage as our forces blitzed Iraq to rubble in retaliation for the invasion of Kuwait. Talking of slaughter, Iron Maiden made the cunning and cheeky calculated move of releasing ‘Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter’ at the perfect time to displace holier-than-thou Cliff Richard from the number one spot in the New Year. While they didn’t stay at the top for the Iraq War, the hostilities were instead accompanied by the rise of Enigma’s contrasting ‘Sadness Part 1’!

Metal tracks rarely registered with me, but several monsters did register in the upper echelons of the chart. In January, Queen channelled their inner Led Zep in their six-minute single ‘Innuendo’, crashing straight in at number one. At the time, I described it as “such a slovenly mish-mash of HM posturing, flamenco guitar (!) and sub-Bohemian Rhapsody effects”. In many ways my contemporaneous opinion still holds water, but I might now replace the word ‘slovenly’ with ‘oddly appealing’! 

It certainly wasn’t the best year for the band, but then Freddie Mercury’s health, like their music, was in rapid decline. I was shocked to see Freddie’s skeletal appearance in the video for the awful ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’, and so the news of his death in November from “an AIDS-related illness” came as no surprise. Neither did the consequent surge to the Christmas number one slot of a re-released ‘Bo-Rhap’, twinned with the new and grossly inferior ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives’. When the following Easter, Mercury’s life and music were celebrated in a Wembley fundraising mega-concert, it was only fitting that ‘Innuendo’ was sung by Led Zep’s Robert Plant.

Metallica also featured heavily in that show but at the time their brand of chugging guitar rock in hits like ‘Enter Sandman’ wasn’t to my taste. The same went for Nirvana, whose sensational ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ assaulted the top ten in November. It was another year or two before I came to appreciate Kurt Cobain et al and buy not one, but two Nirvana albums – and then he went and shot himself…. I like to think the two events are unconnected.

U2 went ‘Rock’ in the autumn, too. Releasing ‘The Fly’, they announced it would be available for three weeks only. Would it have topped the chart otherwise? Maybe, but it ranks as one of my favourite U2 tracks of all time, from one of my favourite albums by any artist, Achtung Baby. This also kicked off the band’s predilection for extravagantly-staged multimedia event shows, beginning with the ZooTV tour in 1992-93. I just wish I’d grabbed the opportunity to see it for myself instead of just on video. 

It was another good year for the rock ballad. Guns ‘n’ Roses seemed more appropriate interpreters of ‘Live and Let Die’ than Paul McCartney ever did, while Extreme temporarily went acoustic for the memorable romantic number two song ‘More Than Words’.  1991 also saw German behemoth band The Scorpions go global with the stirring power ballad ‘Wind of Change’.

Of course, I had never heard of them, but this record was to become one of the world’s biggest-selling singles in history, not just in Germany. Forever associated with the country’s reunification – and a million times better than David Hasselhoff’s crass, but for some reason hugely popular ‘Freedom’ – it was actually written about the fragile political situation in the Soviet Union. Yet the precise political inspiration behind the song is unimportant; it just works wonders as a glorious emotional ode to the human spirit.

However, where sales are concerned, it paled into insignificance compared with the UK’s biggest seller of 1991. Following the previous year’s Ghost supremacy, it was the turn of Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves to attract hordes into cinemas and enjoy Kevin Costner and his Merrie Men fight in the forest and ultimately kill Alan Rickman’s gloriously over-the-top Sheriff. From the film came Bryan Adams’ even more all-conquering track ‘Everything I Do I Do It For You’. It was number one for an unbelievable sixteen weeks, spanning July to October. For all its irritating longevity, it remains one of the all-time best movie love songs, perfectly structured with its piano intro, climactic crescendo then final breakdown. I wasn’t aware at the time, but the incessantly-broadcast Julien Temple video was mostly filmed not in glamorous California but in little ol’ West Somerset. Take a bow, Kilve beach.

In the days before she sold her songs to some of the biggest stars on the planet, Norwich’s Cathy Dennis enjoyed a modest solo career of her own. Her dance tunes were instantly forgettable but I have fond memories of the less successful ballad ‘Too Many Walls’. Terry Wogan seemed impressed, too! 

I’ve never liked Spandau Ballet’s over-rated ‘True’, but I have to admit the simple guitar motif sounds much better on PM Dawn’s ‘Set Adrift on Memory Bliss’. Another American hip-hop single which effortlessly evokes the emotions of West Coast sultry dog days was ‘Summertime’ by Jazzie Jeff and the Fresh Prince. I never watched the latter’s Bel Air sitcom but Will Smith was a rapper I could listen to. Occasionally. 

From hip-hop to trip-hop. I suppose it got its name from mixing hip-hop and Acid House beats and 1991 gave us one of the best examples in the form of Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy’. With its sumptuous strings, minor synth chords, Shara Nelson’s soulful vocals and the ‘heyyy hey-hey heyyy’s, together with the groundbreaking single-shot video in non-descript LA, it all felt so American; yet it was a very British, ney Bristolian, production. Seal was another domestic star with a transatlantic sound. His biggest hit ‘Crazy’ went silver early in the year, making him more than just ‘that bloke with the facial scars who sings on Adamski’s ‘Killer’’. Like ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, it possesses a smooth, chilled, almost ambient style. Not quite a ballad, not quite pure dance, not quite a political statement, it nonetheless successfully fused elements of all three, and it was one of my favourites of ’91. 

Trip-hop was also to the fore in the work of the most successful, possibly the weirdest and definitely the most controversial singles artists of the year. The KLF wasn’t the first project created by thirty-somethings Jimmy Cauty and A&R man Bill Drummond. They had already topped the chart as The Timelords but in 1991 they blew us away with something very different.

The coming together of hip-hop, trance, soul and a punkish attitude was altogether too much for me at the time. When ‘3am Eternal’ went to number one in February, I described it as “awful claptrap”. Kind of Snap! meets The Prodigy meets The Clash. What was all this nonsense about The Justified Ancients? MuMu Land? I never understood it then and I still don’t. ‘Last Train to Trancentral’ was more of the same but, when they flew to number two in December, I began to appreciate their music a bit more. ‘Justified and Ancient’ must go down as one of the most bizarre collaborations in pop history, marrying Drummond’s offbeat take on music with the country legend Tammy Wynette!  How did that happen? Well, according to the lyric: 

“They called me up in Tennessee
They said "Tammy, stand by The Jams"
But if you don't like what they're going to do,
You better not stop them 'cause they're coming through” 

Apparently Drummond was a Country fan. Whatever. It was a chart-topper in eighteen countries and refreshed the career of Wynette, introducing her to a whole new generation of listeners and rave-goers for whom breakbeats and wacky lyrics (“They’re justified and they’re ancient And they drive an ice cream van”. I mean, really?!). And that proved to be their final single. Their outlandish thrash metal performance of ‘3am Eternal’, climaxing with Drummond firing a machine gun at the incredulous audience of suited and booted record industry execs at the 1992 Brit Award ceremony, proved to be a dramatic suicide note for the duo’s musical life.  

Many artists have proclaimed they are the people to revolutionise the music business, overthrow the status quo and go out on a high. The KLF are the only ones who succeeded, if only for one year. They proceeded to delete their entire back catalogue and move into arthouse territory, culminating in the public burning of a million pounds. Did they make a statement? Oh yes. That Drummond and Cauty were a couple of obnoxious mad numpties with more money than sense.  Mind you, I believe their subversive anarchistic attitude hasn’t extended to a boycott of Spotify, and 2017 saw them dip a toe back into the public eye..

Speaking as I was of The Clash, the veteran punk rockers finally hit the top with Mick Jones’ ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’, thanks to Levi’s latest TV ad campaign. Not, in my view, their finest musical moment. I much preferred the rawer Strummer sound of ‘Rock the Casbah’, the re-release of which peaked at a mere fifteen. Not quite ‘London Calling’, but in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, it had an apt contemporary political comment to make. 

The Sixties were re-born in the guise of Cher’s monotonous ‘Shoop Shoop Song’ (aka ‘It’s In His Kiss’), a massive hit from the ‘Mermaids’ soundtrack. The comedian Vic Reeves later teamed up with the ubiquitous folk/alt rock outfit The Wonder Stuff to update Tommy Roe’s ‘Dizzy’ while The Doors’ brooding ‘Light My Fire’ blazed into the charts on the coat-tails of Oliver Stone’s biopic of the original stoner band. I have never understood why this had failed to light up the UK charts back in ’67 but for all the media obsession with recreational drugs, the sound didn’t quite chime with the early Nineties scene. Good, though! 

I couldn’t say the same about other songs prominent that year. I really detested Crystal Waters’ ‘Gypsy Woman’, Kiri Te Kanawa’s ‘World in Union’ (part of ITV’s commercial blitz surrounding the Rugby World Cup) and The Simpsons’ ‘Do the Bartman’. Back then, Sky TV was in its infancy, with an audience still largely comprised of white van men’s families keen to adorn their terraced homes and flats with the latest hideous satellite dishes. Was I just being a snob? Most definitely. I therefore tarred the unfamiliar cartoon comedy with the same contemptuous brush. Consequently, any associated single never stood a chance with me. After The Simpsons appeared on BBC2, bringing it within my reach, I realised that instead of being brash American trash it was in fact rather brilliant, probably the funniest sitcom I’ve ever seen.

Strangely enough, it later transpired that Bart’s anthem was written by superfan Michael Jackson! He had kept it quiet so as not to interfere with the promotion of his new album Dangerous. I didn’t particularly like his number one single ‘Black or White’. I considered it ironic given that Wacko Jacko had by this time become more white than black. 

Jackson could no longer guarantee outselling everyone else; not in the UK anyway. His latest effort was easily eclipsed by an act I found it hard to like.  Simply Red’s fourth album Stars was released in September and took a grip on the album chart for well over a year, eventually selling well over 3 million copies. I wasn’t one of the buyers. Mick Hucknall may have boasted ginger hair and left-leaning politics but his brand of pop/soul wasn’t my thing at all. For me, Stars was the ultimate dinner party record. Too slow to dance to, too boring to listen to, it was fit only to play in the background while you ate and nattered, twinkling gently and inoffensively overhead while more interesting things were happening on the ground. ‘Something Got Me Started’ did at least have a bit of drive to it but the title track epitomised everything that was wrong – yet also right – about Simply Red. It was inescapable throughout December. Searching desperately for positives, I must admit it was preferable to ‘Fairground’, the group’s only number one from 1996. I hated that one! Maybe it was because I wasn’t really a dinner party person either.

MoR was beginning to grow, while Dance was starting to take itself less seriously, and not in a good way. However, there were some enjoyable tracks around. Candi Staton’s ‘You Got the Love’ was given a toe-tapping trancey update by British DJ/producer The Source. Florence and the Machine’s more recent high octane version is perhaps better known over here, and there have been other dance remixes but I still love The Source’s bubbly synths.

K-Klass went to number three with ‘Rhythm is a Mystery’, probably forgotten by everyone except me. I shamefully recall having it as an answer in a Rotaract pop quiz at the time, with only one team knowing it. I still wake up in a cold sweat remembering what a ridiculously difficult quiz I devised. Lessons were learnt, of course. They never let me fly solo writing all the questions again, and rightly so.

Now for the sillier songs. Oceanic’s ‘Insanity’ sold surprisingly well, its House piano bed and catchy chorus making it a popular party anthem before the term was ever used. It also helped to have your act name beginning with the number two. 2 in a Room’s ‘Wiggle It’ and 2 Unlimited’s ‘Get Ready For This’ were great for Rotaract discos – and were indeed played at quite a few! - but not much else.

I tend to think of Erasure as an Eighties band, but they probably enjoyed more success in the Nineties than they did in the previous ten years. In ’91, ‘Chorus’ was the biggest hit but the more memorable one was ‘Love to Hate You’. Not so keen on the echoes of ‘I Will Survive’ but otherwise definitely one for dancing to. REM first appeared on my radar, too. Not their utterly brilliant ‘Losing My Religion’, but the top-tenner ‘Shiny Happy People’. Back then, Michael Stipe could actually pass for being of a sunny disposition!

Later I would ponder on the likelihood of the song being about something far more miserable and depressing. Yet the lyrics are simply full of ‘happy’s. Lots of them. Speaking of misery, Morrissey’s fave Manchester band (apparently) and one-time ‘baggies’, James, took ‘Sit Down' to number two, with a gloriously upbeat rhythm and vocal. Yet its theme was supposedly that of mental illness. In the words of Kurt Cobain: oh, well, whatever, never mind! It became a song we could enjoy at discos while, well, sitting down. Also Tim Booth was to become one of my favourite singers.

Some front men and women have truly amazing voices. I’m thinking Freddie Mercury, Karen Carpenter, Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison. Others are memorable for being uniquely bizarre: I give you Kate Bush, Noddy Holder, Rod Stewart. However, Booth comes into the category of just sounding wonderful for no apparent reason whatsoever. James didn’t quite repeat the success of ‘Sit Down’ but the follow-ups and his occasional appearances on 'Later… with Jools Holland' cemented Tim Booth’s as one of my all-time top voices.

There was plenty of sex in the charts and on TOTP. Color Me Badd wanted to sex me up while Salt n’ Pepa insisted: ‘Let’s Talk about Sex’. No, let’s not! However, one of the most entertaining three minutes of music came courtesy of a camp couple of Putney gym club owners with little hair but a twinkle in the eye. Richard Fairbrass had you from the unaccompanied baritone monotone opening lines:-

“I'm too sexy for my love
Too sexy for my love
Love's going to leave me”

And just kept going! Even the band’s name, Right Said Fred, possessed just the right sense of fun and comedic nostalgia, while ‘I’m Too Sexy’ was one of the rare tracks you could jig along to with a stupid grin on your face. Bryan Adams kept it at number two for a record-equalling six weeks but it outsold all but three singles in the UK and even scooped an Ivor Novello songwriting award. I suspect that was merited by one of the finest finales of any song ever. It simply ends with:

“I’m too sexy for this song”.

That’s all, folks! It had ‘one-hit wonder’ stamped all over it and yet for all its novelty value, ‘I’m Too Sexy’ was not the beginning and end of RSF’s musical career. I actually preferred the Christmas follow-up, ‘Don’t Talk, Let’s Kiss’ while the following Spring, ‘Deeply Dippy’ presented them with a number one success, and a second Ivor Novello. But it was the first single which remains unforgettable. Let’s face it, we’ve all strutted around the living room singing “I’m too sexy for my shirt, so sexy it hurts”, haven’t we. Haven’t we? Oh, maybe it’s just me then, but I don’t care.