Old TOTP (BBC4)

I can't believe how YOUNG they look. Were Depeche Mode stuck together by a record company then? It would explain how a bunch of 22 year olds could afford all those expensive synths.
 
Nope. They formed organically with the exception of Alan Wilder who was recruited from an advert when Vince Clarke left. Martin Gore and Andy Fletcher were school friends. The reason they had good gear was because Mute founder and boss Daniel Miller was an enthusiast and collector of synths and was also willing to invest in new technology such as Fairlights.
 
I do LOVE (Hey You) The Rocksteady Crew.

Nice to know where the arrival of break-dancing occurred in the context of the timeline of 1980s popular culture.
 
Howard Jones needs a smack in the fucking face. But I think as I said before, New Song would be great without the WOO WOO WOO bits.
 
Pop Goes My Love isn't all that, but as a follow up to I.O.U I would have anticipated it would have been a bigger hit, in a world where Kajagoogoo and Heaven 17 are getting bigger hits with much much worse songs.
 
The fact that Haysi Fantayzee aren't ever coming back is hard to deal with at this point.
 
HOLD ON HOLD ON HOLD ON

Janice Long just said that Margaret Trudeau was on backing vocals. As in Justin Trudeau's MOTHER?!
 
God David Grant was definitely persistent in trying to make himself the British MJ wasn't he, despite not producing one memorable tune.

These episodes are VERY repetitive at the moment, I've seen Howard Jones three times now. Is it because some are being skipped or the charts became stagnant?

I'm sure the "woo woo woo" section would have been half responsible for that song being a hit, you could hear the crowd in baited breath waiting to join in with it.
 
New Song is all about the little keyboard riff and the woos. And the little dancing man of course.

I suppose having three elements is two and a half more than some.
 
Steptacular said:
These episodes are VERY repetitive at the moment, I've seen Howard Jones three times now. Is it because some are being skipped or the charts became stagnant?
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It's skipped episodes. The "rule" was that, unless you were number one, you couldn't be on the show 2 weeks running. So every time we skip an epsiode, we can skip a hit record's "off" week.
 
Howard Jones stuck about for a whole album or two's worth of hits, IIRC.
 
He certainly had two big albums. I loved the first single from the third album, ' No One Is To Blame', and think that was only thing of his I actually bought. It underachieved and was the start of the end of him as a commercial force, though.
 
I had the first two albums, Human's Lib (he'd get hammered for that title now!) and Dream Into Action. I seem to think he issued No-One Is To Blame is about 10 different coloured sleeves or something.
 
I'm wrong - it was Things Can Only get Better that had all the different sleeves.
 
I'm not sure I ever really knew what 'Human's Lib' actually meant.
 
Ill-advised pun on "Woman's Lib". Nowadays he'd be classed as a "not all men/all lives matter" MRA before the thing even hit the shops...
 
The Smiths debut appearance was on tonight. I missed it at the time but I can see why it was such a "thing" - I didn't set eyes/ears on them until the next single. Mind you, it means I also missed Simple Minds so, y'know...
 
How many episodes have we just skipped?

And how fast did Howard Jones get rid of the dancing bloke?
 
Catching up on a few weeks of episodes. In the context of the show I didn't hate Puss n Boots by Adam Ant, which is astonishing as I always hated him.
 
I think 'Right By Your Side' was their first misstep for me.
 
Musical Youth, UB40, Culture Club, Club Tropicana, Right By Your Side, that awful Donna Summer track... Was this the original tropical era? Also, a lot of faux Motown around with the likes of Billy Joel and Marilyn.

Annie Lennox getting a few balloons in the face was amusing. I didn't realise Limahl went solo so early on. That Elton John track is bloody rubbish! I'd never heard it before.
 
To my shame, I enjoyed The Flying Pickets. It was a genuine out of nowhere hit, they were a weird looking bunch and the snowman thing was actually cute.

Mind you, the state of Slade. I think Noddy Holder was constantly drunk in '83...wait til you see 'em doing Merry Xmas Everyone around this time where he is blatantly steaming.
 
octophone said:
To my shame, I enjoyed The Flying Pickets. It was a genuine out of nowhere hit, they were a weird looking bunch and the snowman thing was actually cute.
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It really was the most unlikely hit. Obviously the original is brilliant, but as covers go it's not the worst. It's the first version of the song I knew. And yes the snowman performance must have been reasonably notable at the time.
 
I always forget that Christopher Ryan of The Young Ones and Absolutely Fabulous fame was in one of the pre-fame lineups of The Flying Pickets.

I could never really warm to the Thompson Twins. Too scraggly looking.
 
I liked Thompson Twins at the time but I wasn't as fond of this album's singles as I was of "Quick Step And Side Kick". I had a cassette of that with a load of extended mixes on the flip side. I still like "Kamikaze" and "Love On Your Side".
 
Ag said:
We really have been spoiled with some peak Eurythmics tracks.

Where is @Robbie with the missing episodes?
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Unfortunately many of the recent uploads have been deleted - the BBC seem to be taking them down as soon as they get posted these days - but here's the one from 1 December 1983 with groper DLT and Steve "love the show" Wright...



I'll see if any of the previous ones are still available to watch...
 
I need to check what the last one was that I posted before these three but I think it was before this one... DLT and Tony Blackburn, as first seen on 27 October 1983

 
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^
Just checked - the three above were all of the missing editions since I last posted a few weeks ago. The next missing edition is the one from 25 December 1983, it features Mike Smith and is the only remaining edition of 1983 that BBC4 won't be showing so fingers crossed it will be uploaded in the next week or two...
 
... and up pops the Christmas Day 1983 edition of Top Of The Pops. A little bit early since the edition that will be shown on Thursday is from 22/12/83 but just in case it gets taken down...



The edition on Friday on BBC4 is from 29/12/83 and that is the end of 1983!
 
I've been having a bit of an Alison Moyet binge on Spotify themail last couple of days, and I've been reminded of a couple of different versions of Only You she has performed over the last decade or so. She clearly seems to enjoy playing around with it. Or perhaps just gets bored having to wheel it out in the same version repeatedly.





 
I suspect Liz Kershaw isn't the kind of woman who takes kindly to being slighted.

I wasn't aware that Annie Nightingale had presented TOTP.
 
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