There's not enough videos featuring non league grounds, even if we did get to see more of a Renault 5 in the car park than stands and general infrastructure.
Quite amused that the Smiths' debut was preceded by the first of many pieces of dross by Tina Turner.
Jah Womble wrote: FGTH appeared on TOTP performing Relax in January 1984 - which for the majority of people would've been their first exposure to the band/song. It promptly vaulted from 35-6 in the following week's chart, received 'that' ban and wasn't heard again on the show.
Which is when and why I stopped watching Top Of The Pops...
I am utterly appalled with myself that I never knew that Tracey Ullman's hit They Don't Know was written by Kirsty MacColl. I mean, listen to it. Of course it's a Kirsty MacColl song. It's a bloody great song, by the way.
I was intrigued by Paul McCartney's cameo in the video. I had to look it up, and apparently Ullman had a small part in Give My Regards To Broad Street which was filmed around then.
Kirsty's original version of They Don't Know was played to death on R1 during the summer of 1979 - which was pretty much the first most of us had heard of her.
However, one of those seemingly-annual strikes on TOTP prevented it from becoming the hit it should've been then.
Just watched Slade performing their 1983 Xmas singalong My Oh My: forget the Lennon-cash-ins, that song is effectively the blueprint for all Oasis post-1995 anthems. The geetar solo toward the end of the song is pure undiluted Gallagher.
(Meanwhile, the cameras catch a young girl standing dead still and staring into space during Kool & the Gang's [aptly-named] Straight Ahead. B*llockings for both floor manager and director, I suspect...)
Yes, They don't know is such a great song, isn't it? I like the video too. I think Tracey Ullman was on stiff records, hence the Kirsty Mccoll connection.
Someone mentioned that Paul McCartney appearance on this very thread a couple of months ago when we were talking about celebrity cameos on videos of this era. Since then I have found a new one. Johnny Friendly by Joboxers features a very young Frank Bruno in the video.
My first hearing of Kirsty was "There's A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis", which sounded a bit Dave Edmunds-like but in a good way. This is a nice piece on its co-writer:
Two singles later Kirsty did a Pet Sounds cover, You Still Believe In Me, but she didn't bother the Top 75 again until A New England, which was produced by her husband IIRC.
Kirsty's bigger singles tended to be covers - Ray Davies's Days being another - which was, in my opinion, a bit of a shame. Her self-penned efforts were far better IMO: the aforementioned They Don't Know, Walking Down Madison and the splendid Free World come to mind off the bat.
But her two biggest chart hits were both Fairytale of New York, of course.
Howard Jones was the Ed Sheeran of his day, except that poor Howard never got out of the B-league and was finished by Live Aid (infact he didn't make it to the Band Aid roster IIRC).
Howard was on one of those ITV competitions for faded old acts in the early 2000s, alongside Dollar, Toyah (IIRC) and various other 1980s B-listers.
Got a bit behind, so having a catch up. I've just watched a Slade performance of Merry Christmas Everybody, which is a very odd thing to sit through on a June afternoon.
The episode was shown in colour (see the closing titles), so my inference is that the tape was wiped (as were most TOTP tapes at the time) and the one used for the 1984 broadcast must have been a back-up done by a producer in black and white.
Was TOTP sold to other countries back in the day? I ask because this sounds similar to the case of some Doctor Who episodes of the Jon Pertwee era (1970-74), which were all filmed and broadcast in colour (unlike the previous two Doctors' stories) but a few of which only exist in black and white. These are where the original videotapes were wiped and the episodes concerned have been recovered from film copies made for overseas broadcasters – many of whom did not broadcast in colour at the time and hence only had b+w copies.
Matthew Wilder! While one might argue that the '80s was actually several '80s', Matthew Wilder was definitely the high water mark of one of them.
One of the peculiarities of the Yewtree hollowing out of the TOTP stockpile is that it gives the impression that Peel and the Kid presented it every week.
Radio Ga-Ga sounds marginally less awful than remembered; the sequencers are quite pleasant until it goes all Nuremburg.
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