1985: The trend of opening the year with a new artist continued with Strawberry Switchblade, who had their dresses especially layered for the occasion. Jill seems to be enjoying herself, which is more than the week's other female duo Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson can summon up. Dickson looks like a Janet Brown version of herself. Meanwhile Bronski Beat's Jimmy Somerville is busy leaning into the ground level camera.
1991: Dual coloured trousers and raggedly tied back long hair is very much Midlands 1991, as Pop Will Eat Itself gladly demonstrate.
1997: Hope you like Blur's new direction, Britpop kids. Actually, they did - check the screaming when Damon pauses - but that's besides the point and they were the same people really, as you'll see by Graham ear-flicking Dave in the intro. Lauren Laverne never hosted TOTP, doing a few months' service on CD:UK until it was ditched, but her Kenickie opened the show's 1997 account. For a band who proudly flaunted cool-trashy fashion, Marie du Santiago does seem to be sporting a golfing jumper.
2003: I've included this, Avril Lavigne's Sk8er Boi, not so much for the performance - yeah, she actually does do the devil horns thing, doesn't she - but for the intro sighting of
2 comments:
Sorry to christen this excellent blog's comments with a correction, but the Star Bar wasn't a Peters innovation and in fact the best thing about his reign was that he got rid of it, it was invented by Chris Cowey. It's a terrible idea, though, as you say it's an actual working bar so you can't hear anything, and what we gain from seeing anonymous hangers on quaffing booze on our licence fee, I don't know.
The interesting thing about that Sweet clip is of course the one and only appearance of Johnnie Walker as Pops host, seemingly at the last minute as he wasn't billed in the Radio Times.
Yeah, Steve is absolutely right about the Star Bar - Andi Peters didn't take over TOTP until September 2003, so Chris Cowey was still in charge at this stage. The Star Bar was introduced when the Pops returned to BBC TV Centre in 2001, although a similar backsatge area in Elstree had been used for similar effect through most of Cowey's earlier tenure of the show.
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