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House and Techno on Top of the Pops

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We’re up to 1988 on the TOTP re-runs. As ever you’re reminded that the biggest music of the era wasn’t Rave, Indie or Hip Hop it was Bros, T’Pau, and dreadful songs from Coke Adverts. However, we are starting to get underground club dance records getting into the charts, made in back bedrooms and designed for hardcore Rave action suddenly becoming freak novelty hits. Of course, TOTP wants to dutifully represent the music that’s in the Hit Parade, and the producers of dance records can’t resist the chance to tell their Mums they’re on TOTP so they’ve got to try and translate sequenced music into a TOTP performance. Most of these are pretty toe-curlingly awful, KLF and The Orb excluded. Here’s a very early Orbital, before they’d hit upon the light-up glasses and nailed a way to perform live basically showing off their synths and occasionally turning a knob – with a pal throwing some shapes in a futuristic jacket…

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  1. Here’s Stakker (one half of Future Sound of London) – the fact that hardcore Acid Techno charted and is on TOTP is still mind blowing -he’s brought some decent dancers at least – not sure about the guitarist though.

    • Yeah, Mark Moore was on the documentary about 88 TOTP and said he wanted to present them as an imaginary band and go for a Family Stone/Soul Train thing with the look (which would have been v novel at the time). It still looks a bit Pony miming to samples though. I wonder what the Musicans Union reps that plagued TOTP for years prior to this thought of all this?

  10. This thread has caused me to revise my music retention policy.

    I now have almost three feet of shelf space available for new music, for the first time since 1993. The Black Box discs have been kept, for nostalgic reasons, but as for the rest, good God what were we taking at the time?

  12. Here’s where things go really badly wrong for Dance producers when TOTP decides it wants to be more “authentic” and have everyone do Karaoke style performances with badly mixed live vocals over backing tracks. Vocalist here does her best trying to replicate a sampled vocal but it’s a mess and doesn’t do this classic tune any justice.

    • I can still remember hearing Pacific State for the first time, in the kitchen of my student digs, on the “woo” Gary Davies show. A real stop-what-you’re-doing moment.

  15. It’s weird , looking at this stuff, that I’m reminded of stuff that Jean Michel Jarre has said repeatedly in the past about performing electronica/dance music.

    Electronic music is a European art form, unlike Rock n Roll, which is by its nature is more tactile and kinetic. All the guitar,s and drums,see. Part of the appeal is the more, for want of a better phrase, visceral, elements of the performance. It’s meant to be seen…live.

    But the synthesiser isn’t like that. He was asked why he put on the big shows, and he said that there were two parts to his thinking: the first was connected to the above – that a person twiddling some knobs wasn’t, of itself, an visually stimulating experience, and so something needed to be added, however good the thing sounded. The second was that he wanted to recreate the feeling of the circus or fair that he had as a child – that the thing you’d see was unique, one-off, and would be a moment you wouldn’t have again: a sense of occasion.

    These clips kind of illustrate point 1 perfectly – you need the visuals. Really, you do.

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