1972: Rod Stewart, in his yellow trousers, overlarge neckerchief and fin haircut, is doing something odd at the start. Who among us believes he really needs that piece of paper?
1978: Electromagnetic interference seems to elbow in on The Stranglers. Maybe it's from this remarkable Legs & Co routine to Cerrone, which starts with the girls as comedy scientists then, with a certain sense of inevitability, ends up with everyone in bras and pants, albeit here styled as cavegirls. Then, fruit appears. Then, fake fruit.
1989: Martika, with her doily sleeves and all sorts of allurring looks, poses in front of the famed grand dry ice waterfalls of Elstree. Some classic arm waving going on halfway through, unreplicated by those in the centre.
Fuzzbox's Vix was kind of a dry run at Wendy James, with the always on show midriff and the trying just that little too hard to please. Here she ends up on all fours crawling along the lip of the stage to absolute crowd disinterest.
1995: Who remembers Wendy Lloyd? No, just generally. The faintly willowy DJ was on Radio 1 for about a year and ended up doing two Pops, of which this was the second, before disappearing off to Talk Radio and then LBC. Here she is introducing post-grunge one hit wonders Moist. That Bjork performance promised in the intro was quite something to throw at a prime-time audience. Does that sound like any accordion you've heard? Deuce, a kind of accidentally released prototype of Steps, believe a gospel choir and wedding dresses instantly convey classiness. If the girls are in wedding dresses, though, why are the boys in bad suits and what appear to Hawaiian shirts? Eventually Oasis appear and a passing friend takes over. As I say, Wendy Lloyd's last show. For some unaccountable reason Bonehead and Guigsy find the guitar solo hilarious and there's fewer close-ups of it than you might imagine. And yeah, they lost that chart battle, but we'll come back to that.
2001: With the show already on the way down Radiohead and Bjork seem absolutely alien to the atmosphere already. The director chooses the latter to debut the ceiling mounted camera, for some reason.
1 comment:
I thought Wendy Lloyd was quite good - understated, not in your face. Trouble with her on the radio, though, was that she was obsessed with films, which don't interest me.
Martika was in TV Centre in 1989. Good performance, I reckon. The move to Elstree was over 2 years away, although Martika's final Pops performance was in Elstree.
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