Top TOTP Memories Countdown

Michael Larkin of Disillusioned Lefty notes that Top of The Pops is soon to be no more. Given his tender years, he freely admits to not having watched it as a central part of the pop music experience. A child of the 80’s, I lived through it’s final few years of relevance, before it was lost to re-formatting and re-scheduling. Was I a fan? Well, that’s like asking if I was a fan of the News. Top of The Pops was almost the only place to go for pop on TV, so you just watched it as a matter of course. The decline of TOTP is part of a general change in the way in which pop is distributed and experienced these days, a change that not long ago retired Smash Hits magazine. More on this later, but first a few random childhood TOTP memories.

Seeing the KLF doing Last Train To Transcentral

Terrifying. The set was packed with people dressed in grey monkish/KKK cowls, waving huge grey flags. This semi-fascist staging combined with the apocalyptic sound of the music to render me appalled. I was convinced that they had come to destroy pop music. Only years later did I realise that this was more or less exactly their plan. By the time of Justified and Ancient (also memorably performed on TOTP), I had grown to like them, but that first appearance had rather frightened me.

A certain loss of innocence watching Holly Johnson

Too young to really have appreciated Frankie Goes To Hollywood, I was a big fan of Holly Johnson’s first few solo singles. He had a great tune called “Love Train???, which I saw him do on TOTP. Now I was aware that miming was standard procedure, but I used to think that the people doing the miming were in some way responsible for the record. (This was before the days of sample-based dance music, which rendered miming absurdly pointless). When the guitar solo of Love Train kicked in, it was mimed by a generously permed woman in copious make-up and spandex. Whereas I knew, from reading the label of the single, that the solo was played by Chris Rea. The funny thing is that had I not known who Chris Rea was (due to his own hits), I might have spent many more years thinking that Holly Johnson’s band contained a raven-haired beauty who was a dab hand at squiggly guitar solos.

Fairground Attraction, not even trying

One of the great hits of the day, “Perfect??? was a big favourite of mine. Something about Eddi Reader’s girlish voice convinced me that she must be a sunbleached Californian type. Imagine my surprise when Fairground Attraction turned out to be a scruffy, studenty bunch, so plainly delighted to be doing their No.1 hit on Top of The Pops (it still meant rather a lot back then. Bands would fly home from the states just for the show) that they didn’t even bother miming, preferring to dance about and laugh. Endearing in retrospect, though at the time I was disturbed by the lack of professionalism. It never occurred to me that they were probably drunk.

Kylie And Jason

First Charlene had escaped Neighbours for a pop career, then her on-screen love Scott (Jason Donovan) had joined her. Could it be long before the two joined up for a mega-selling duet? Of course it couldn’t, not with Pete Waterman at the helm. Released for the Christmas market, Especially For You was a sickly sweet love duet, syrupy even by the standards of the day. Nonetheless, when I watched Kylie and Jason do their winsome thing on TOTP, I was aware that I was viewing some kind of 80’s pop epiphany. Even though I loathed the song, I wouldn’t have missed the performance for the world. Kylie, as I recall wore a demure red velvet waistcoat over a white blouse and a pair of jeans, a world away from the hotpanted minx she would later become. I can’t remember much about Jason, but then who can?

Ah yes, great days. So what killed Top of The Pops? Well, as I’ve said, TOTP was like the news. It was the show you watched to find out what was in the top ten, and to discover what the people you’d been listening to on the radio actually looked like. These days, that kind of thing can be quite easily discovered without having to wait for a weekly half-hour show. As so often before, MTV are to blame. MTV Europe was launched in 1987 and became prominent, in my own life at least, around the early nineties. In response, TV stations started providing more and more pop coverage. These days pop is everywhere. A digital TV will give you more than a dozen music stations, while tabloid papers will tell you about which member of Girls Aloud showed her knickers getting out of a car last night. With such blanket pop coverage all around us (even our ringtones are part of the pop process now), who needs Top Of The Pops?
I’ll try to remember to tune into the final show on Sunday, but If I forget, I will, as Michael Larkin suggested have a wealth of YouTube clips to keep the memory alive.