UK Charts: 1992-1993

1992

The year kicks off with The Prodigy going to #2 with "Everybody In The Place", nearly making itself ineligible by the initial CD single coming with five tracks, before a hasty re-release took out "Rip Up The Sound System" to drop it back to four.

The group realised that with the British public's unfortunate relationship with anything it thought was a novelty, releasing another "Charly" would kill them before they'd even got going. The "toytown techno" crazy would pass, critics would have it in for them on every future review, and record buyers would assume they were just a rave version of the Barron Knights.

"Everybody" plays it straight, a sampling of the then-current rave scene complete with synth leads, sirens, and the beats per minute edging up beyond the house and techno template toward the silly speeds they would eventually reach. (The album version boosts it even further, although that mix loses a lot of what makes the single version special to my ears).

The Prodigy were the gateway into electronic music for a whole generation of indie rock nerds. I'm telling the story out of sequence as this is them releasing two landmark albums at just the right moment - 1994's "Music For The Jilted Generation" coming as the indie rock scene eschewed its baggier dance influences in favour of strict mod copyists, and 1997's "The Fat of the Land" just in time for Britpop to collapse and leave behind a world of po-faced indie miserabilists.

By this point they had become somewhat more accessible if your starting point was rock, with tracks featuring guitar riffs and a punk-like image thanks in no small part to Keith Flint. Flint was a dancer who met Liam Howlett after the latter turned from hip-hop to rave, preferring the kinder and more loved-up scene. He requested a mix tape from the DJ, and on receiving it suggested that he, Howlett and fellow dancer Leeroy Thornhill form a group around this music. MC Maxim Reality (later just Maxim) also became part of the group after a shaky start of missing meetings and having to improvise lyrics at his first gig, while original vocalist and dancer Sharky (Sheila Burke) dropped out.

Independent label XL Recordings signed the band off the back of early demos, then in August 1991 they released "Charly" and we're just about caught up here. Except I should mention that rather than spending all the proceeds on fun and fast times, Howlett invested it into equipment to expand their sound including an extra sampler. This desire to improve and expand beyond being mere rave copyists being, of course, why they get several paragraphs here and not the obligatory handful of lines noting another crossover hit artist who'd disappear completely by 1993.

The kind of pop/house production that had underpinned a hundred SAW hits got a stamp of legitimacy on CeCe Peniston's "We Got A Love Thang" (#6 January '92), production being handled by house pioneer Steve "Silk" Hurley. Can you believe it's only five years since "Jack Your Body" went to #1 and the entire chart landscape was upset?

Perhaps it's easier to credit if you follow the journey of hard rock instead. Kiss have a #4 with "God Gave Rock And Roll To You II", a reworking of Argent's 1973 single for the soundtrack of "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey". No surprise that it sounds authentically early '70s in places, although the proggy organ and electric piano of the original are sadly absent.

Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine are back with brattish punk "Rubbish" (#14 January '92), three minutes of glorious fun and acerbic lyrics.

There's one other thing to mention in this early January countdown and it's the Sugarcubes having their one Top 40 single after a string of releases that topped out somewhere between #55-#65, aptly titled "Hit" (#17 January '92). The Icelandic band were much-loved by John Peel and popular with indie listeners, 1987's "Birthday" topping the Festive Fifty that year with shades of Cocteau Twins to it. This might be little more than a footnote were it not for the singer providing those ethereal vocals - Björk Guðmundsdóttir.

Genesis' take on "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" arrives as "I Can't Dance" (#7 January '92), a track the band weren't sure if they should release until the keyboard line was added to make it feel a little bit more Genesis-y.

C+C Music Factory's Robert Clivillés and David Cole had some chart success with remixes of Michael Jackson's "Black Or White" (#14 January '92) and "Pride (In The Name Of Love)" (#15 January '92), somewhat more sensible and serious than their party-time releases as C+C.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" loses the #1 spot to Wet Wet Wet's "Goodnight Girl" in mid-January. Blue-eyed soul had seen a small backlash toward the end of the '80s as something that was co-opting Black music and turning it into soulless yuppie dirges, and its overlap in both audience and style with sophisti-pop saw those artists who were not particularly soulful fall out of favour.

Simply Red came back by taking influences from current pop and the myriad of genres using loose James Brown style drum grooves; there are bits of "Stars" which sound almost Baggy/Madchester in places. Wet Wet Wet came back by becoming even soggier. "Goodnight Girl" is a horrible, overwrought confection of a record, vocal harmonies taken to tooth-rotting excess.

Naturally, it was #1 for four weeks. As it hit that position on 19th January, the record which would take it off the top (and remain there for a typically early '90s eight weeks) entered the Top 40 for the first time. This was "Stay", from Shakespears Sister. The two halves of the record are so different it's like looking at a pair of semi-detached houses where one neighbour has painted their side an odd colour and cultivated a selection of concerning topiary in the front garden.

Marcella Detroit takes the slow, film-soundtrack first half, while Siobhan Fahey has the heavier, lower-register second half with its guitar riffs and drums. I'm unsure quite what to make of it, and it appeared to divide critics strongly at the time too. I think this reflects something I recall from the time, though; that in the post-recession Major era we started wanting things that felt more grown-up and sophisticated.

Perhaps reflected in Kylie Minogue's "Give Me Just A Little More Time", inevitably #2 in late January. The Stock/Waterman production has a clear lineage to their earlier work on this cover of the 1970 Chairmen of the Board record, but it's that bit more laid-back with more room to breathe, and the brass-preset keyboard stabs are nowhere near as urgent as they would have been two or three years prior.

It's the kind of musical world that will readily accept Curtis Stigers and his debut "I Wonder Why" (#5 February '92), a big soft rock ballad that's trying so hard to drip with sophistication and smooth saxophone lines that I find it all rather boring.

Instead you'll find me listening to The Wonder Stuff's "Welcome To The Cheap Seats" (#8 January '92), a joyous rave-up from an EP that also features a version of "Will The Circle Be Unbroken", not the most memorable of tracks but gives me a tenuous link into mentioning the 13th Floor Elevators' "May The Circle Remain Unbroken", a musing on the same theme that closes out "Bull of the Woods" and gives a reminder as to where I'm coming from, musically speaking.

(Mainly that the two most important food groups are "tape hiss" and "fuzz")

With that as my reference point, I'm going to point at garage punk number "Love Your Money" from Daisy Chainsaw at #26. Maybe there's some conclusion you can draw from the grunge-adjacent aesthetic and touring with bands from that scene, the on-stage antics, or even mentioning that the band deliberately avoided major label imprints to end up on indie label One Little Indian.

The Pasadenas had a big seller with "I'm Doing Fine Now" (#4 February '92), an awkward middle ground between authentic soul influences and those little saccharine turns beloved of Wet Wet Wet and the softer numbers from New Kids On The Block. (By which I mean most numbers, as previously discussed at length).

Kicks Like A Mule have a #7 with "The Bouncer", spawning a million "your name's not Dan, you're not coming in" jokes off the back of this and other vocal samples patterned off the archetypal nightclub bouncer. All of which are a lot better remembered than the record they came from these days!

Entering the Top 40 the same week are the Manic Street Preachers with the hard-charging "You Love Us" (#16 February '92). The band started out in 1986 as punks playing the local Miners' Welfare Institute in Blackford, and it's been a bit of a journey from there - releasing a self-published single "Suicide Alley" in 1988, which is now worth a four-figure sum if you've got one in good condition. Three years later they'd moved away from that strongly Clash-influenced sound and were on Heavenly with "Motown Junk" (#94 February '91).

This got them press attention, and after putting out an early version of "You Love Us" through Heavenly they signed to Columbia and set to recording their major label debut, the sprawling double album "Generation Terrorists". Part of the appeal of the Manics was that they made good press; not only the statement piece of launching with what was taken to be an obvious "London Calling" tribute and claiming it would be the best (and best-selling) rock album in the world, but also their blunt critiques of any musician who made stuff they personally didn't like. This layer of punk attitude led some critics to question whether it was all an act, which came to a head in a May 1991 interview in which Richey Edwards took a razor blade and carved "4REAL" into his arm.

The hype built through 1991, with first Columbia single "Stay Beautiful" grazing the Top 40 with a single week at #40, and "Love's Sweet Exile" b/w "Repeat" going to #26 in November '91. The second version of "You Love Us" came a scant couple of weeks ahead of the release of the album, and both were strong sellers, the album reaching #13 in its own chart.

All this feels a little weird when my personal chronology is of experiencing the bulk of the Manic Street Preachers discography after Britpop, and mostly in reverse order working back from 1998's "This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours" in stages until I eventually reached "Generation Terrorists" some time around my first year in University. Much like "Nevermind", we were too young for it when it was new, then once we were old enough it took a while to gain the maturity to accept that listening to a record which had been released more than six weeks ago was actually fine if it was a good record and not, as we had previously judged, "extremely sad".

More iconic early '90s sound comes courtesy of Primal Scream's "Dixie-Narco EP", headlined by "Movin' On Up" (#11 February '92). I don't recall my peers listening to "Screamadelica" quite so much, although a few owned it and that bold primary-colour sleeve was certainly popular as a piece of imagery. A shame, as otherwise I might have discovered the 13th Floor Elevators a couple of years earlier. (A cover of "Slip Inside This House" features)

Not that record buyers in general had any such compunctions about buying old records. Prominent featuring in both "Father of the Bride" and (well, what else?) "My Girl" sent The Temptations' "My Girl" to a #2 peak well above the #43 it saw on these shores back in 1965.

Michael Jackson goes his furthest yet into the New Jack Swing sound for "Remember The Time", #3 in February. Meanwhile "don't call us shoegaze" band Ride have their biggest hit with the 8-minute "Leave Them All Behind" peaking at #9. A position below them are genre pioneers The Jesus And Mary Chain with "Reverence".

The grunge invasion continues as Pearl Jam's "Alive" goes to #16. At the slower and more thoughtful end of the movement (if still just as heavy), this contemplative nature sometimes put them at odds with their record label. Epic wanted a band who readily embraced stardom, rather than doing awkward things like refusing to make a music video because they thought it robbed the viewer of the ability to create their own images inside their head.

Buffy Sainte-Marie has a minor hit with "The Big Ones Get Away" (#39 February '92), her songwriting sounding very appropriate in the more thoughtful and deliberately conscious '90s. Also there's not much to mention for February.

Opus III's progressive house "It's A Fine Day" goes to #5, the band name a bit of a subterfuge as three members were still under contract to MCA as unsuccessful group A.S.K,, with only vocalist Kirsty Hawkshaw (not part of A.S.K.) appearing in videos at first.

Everything But The Girl are still a soft folkish guitar duo, releasing an EP of covers including a version of the Everly Brothers' "Love Is Strange". It goes to #13 for the start of March but much as I enjoy it I feel it doesn't help the case for most of February's new Top 40 entries to be a bit of a holding pattern. So let's finish the month with similarly laid-back "Weather With You", Crowded House's biggest hit (#7 March '92), and get on to the first chart countdown of March.

U2's "One" (also #7 March '92) is there, the band's slow rumination on splitting up that came from them nearly doing exactly that during recording sessions for "Achtung Baby". It was "One" that ended up keeping them together, as a simple chord progression turned into something the whole band contributed to. It was released as a charity single with proceeds going to AIDS research, and also sounds pretty good.

Eric Clapton's "Tears In Heaven" enters on its way to a #5 peak in the middle of March, and here I become an awful person once more. Because I know for a certain generation this is a haunting, beautiful song about a man coming to terms with the loss of his four year old son - Conor Clapton having fallen from a 53rd-floor apartment due to a horrifically unsafe arrangement in which a glass wall could be opened leaving an unsecured drop to the street below.

This is just the starting point in a story which gets worse with every new detail you read. Conor was conceived during an affair his father had with model Lory Del Santo while still married to Pattie Boyd. Boyd revealed at their divorce in 1989 that this was a last straw in a relationship that had been abusive, suffered heavily from the alcoholism that Clapton finally beat in 1982, and was marred by infidelity. (An earlier affair had resulted in a daughter, kept secret until 1991). I swear, every time I go near Clapton I come away feeling sullied by what I have learnt and discovered. "Tears In Heaven" isn't even something I like, coming across as maudlin in an almost manipulative way - as I say, I am an awful person because there is absolutely genuine grief here but maybe some things are best kept private and not splashed across a record that you also sell to MGM for a film soundtrack.

From there to one of the greatest ever power ballads, and certainly the only one to still have credibility at the point I was 20 years old and blasting it on the tape deck of a shit car in 2002. "November Rain" (#4 March '92). Amusingly Guns N' Roses referred to it as "the 'Layla' song" (hopefully no wife-stealing intent was involved).

I think the secret lies in taking something so dumb and cheesy, and playing it utterly straight. It's nine minutes of the kind of lowbrow semi-operatic nonsense Jim Steinman would be proud of, filtered through Elton John piano and a gigantic guitar solo Slash claimed started out as an improvisation.

The KLF take their final bow in the UK charts with "America: What Time Is Love?", playing with the "Ace of Spades" guitar riff and ending in euphoric collapse as it takes the piss out of musical "Hair" and offsets crowd noise against mock machine gun fire before coming back on the B-side with an anti-war protest. It peaked at #4 but really what we have here is the midway point of a deliberately dramatic exit from the music business.

This started in a collaboration with hardcore punks Extreme Noise Terror, originally intended to produce a whole album of rocked-up tracks in the vein of "America" called "The Black Room". At some point in this Drummond and Cauty decided that it would be more fun to commit commercial suicide, by doing something so repulsive during their performance at February's BRIT Awards that they would never be accepted into the music industry again.

As a part of this a dead sheep was purchased, but plans to do something with it on stage were ended by Extreme Noise Terror being staunch vegetarians and, well, general common sense. After toying with other gruesome ideas, the show eventually ended with Drummond using a machine gun to fire blanks over the crowd and the band's promoter telling the audience, "The KLF have left the music business". The dead sheep was dumped outside one of the afterparty venues.

Even this was thought to be a joke at first, and Drummond suggested in an interview that the idea was more about shaking up the KLF into doing more interesting things than abandoning it. But abandon it they did, ending work on "The Black Room" and announcing on 14th May that the KLF had indeed left the music business, deleting their entire catalogue as they did so.

From 1993 to 1995 the two carried out art projects as the K Foundation, most notoriously on the 23rd August 1994 when they sailed to a remote Scottish island and burnt what they claimed to be all of the money they'd ever earnt, filming it as a documentary entitled "Watch The K Foundation Burn A Million Quid". Shown in a short tour a year after the original burning, the duo then shut down the K Foundation and vowed not to talk about it until 23 years after the anniversary of the original fire.

All of this made the KLF an object of mystique and fascination once I finally got over the idea that you picked one of guitar music or dance music and stuck with it, but also difficult to actually do anything about as that catalogue deletion meant there wasn't exactly much in the way of extensive compilation CDs on the shelves at my local record shop. And yes, this was the early 2000s by this point, so the idea of obtaining a turntable and then buying the original records second-hand was in about the same area of likelihood as driving to Mars for the weekend.

(Ah, if only... the amount of now very valuable records I could have bought cheaply back when nobody cared. Also Mars would probably have been fun, even if the weather isn't great and there's nowhere to park.)

Mr Big had pretty much faded from public consciousness by the time I was making these decisions, but at a #3 peak in March with consistently high chart positions during its 9 weeks in the top 40, "To Be With You" was a big hit.

Entering the Top 40 the same week is Nirvana's "Come As You Are" (#9 March '92). The band were unsure about releasing this due to its similarity to Killing Joke's "Eighties", but the potential for a mainstream hit won out over caution. Killing Joke were not pleased, although after speculation about whether they had or hadn't filed a lawsuit it was eventually revealed that "Eighties" had been predated by a Damned track called "Life Goes On" featuring near enough the same guitar line.

Also sharing a Top 40 debut with these two are Red Hot Chili Peppers with "Under The Bridge" (#26 March '92, although a 1994 reissue would see it reach #13). They'd seen the Top 40 already with "Taste The Pain" making #29 back in June '90, but even the RHCP lovers I met at university never played that, whereas "Under The Bridge" was near-constant.

I fear this is going to go down even less well than my admission I don't really like The Doors, but I have problems with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It's not so much the music, although I do find some of the records overlong and I'm not a fan of Anthony Kiedis' voice. Even so, I will happily state here that the musicianship is of top quality and most tracks have at least a 20 second stretch which leaves me frustrated that I can't like it as a whole because that one bit is so damn good. (For "Under The Bridge" it's the intro)

No, my problem is that for so much of a crucial stage of the development of my musical appreciation, Red Hot Chili Peppers were the preferred band of Guys Who Are Wankers At Parties. And yeah, even as someone who tries to be positive and respectful about such things most of the time... I'm sorry, it is always guys. Guys who skeeze on any female guest they perceive to be lacking in confidence, guys who spill drinks and then laugh about it rather than trying to clean up, guys who break the host's stuff and then brush it off with a "shit happens", and most of all guys who won't rest until you've put on "Under The Bridge" or "Californication" or "Scar Tissue" no matter what the musical theme of the evening and they sit there doing that obnoxious drumming on the edge of the table thing not letting anyone speak and...

So yeah, this is an association problem for me.

But it goes deeper than that. It's not just the type of person I find offensive, but that whole ethos of having this persona where you're confidently dismissive of other people's taste in music but your own choice of what constitutes Good Music is so utterly safe. Because that is what I grudgingly admit: there is almost no axis along which you can judge the Red Hot Chili Peppers as "bad" by the ways in which music is conventionally rated so. They're not mainstream or poppy enough to attract ire along those lines. There's skill in execution. There's songcraft. The only complaint most people seem to be able to find is that they have too many songs about California. Picking it as your reference point for Good Music is like having a multiplayer game of Carmageddon and choosing the massive dump truck; yes you will win, but nobody is going to have any fun.

Herein lies the Guys Who Are Wankers At Parties problem, because that's a facet of the same kind of fragile masculinity which surrounds all those things I describe. You can't attack my music taste, but I can attack yours. I can do things and everyone else must bend around me, but if I need to compromise I will pitch some kind of tantrum about how men didn't compromise back when they needed to track down deer and stab them with spears to survive. I can never show any sign of sensitivity or empathy or even just being a baseline decent human being, and it seems fundamentally impossible for me to be somewhere and not contrive some sort of situation in which we have to be playing the Red Hot Chili Peppers now, just like our atavistic deer-hunting ancestors did.

I had so many of these experiences between the ages of 19 to 31 that it now irrevocably taints the music for me, and unlike my railing against the Doors I can't even quantify it in terms of the music itself. John Frusciante, Anthony Kiedis, Flea, Chad Smith: I am sorry, I judge your music based on the actions of what is probably a tiny subset of your fans, many of whom will have grown out of it in the years since. This is my problem and I will own it, although not to the level I won't mine it for many tongue-in-cheek rants under the notional guise of entertainment.

So anyway, let's move from there to a batch of singles I'm going to be sneerily dismissive about because I can. Remember while I do this that I am a man who thinks "Shake Some Action" b/w "Teenage Confidential" is the pinnacle of recorded music.

Hammer isn't even trying with "Do Not Pass Me By" (#14 March '92), taking a minute to turn up on someone else's song, a gospel number which is much better than the rather uninspired rap verses. (The thing you'd be looking for is Douglas Miller's "Pass Me Not" from 1986)

CeCe Peniston is back again with "Finally" (again), this time going to #2 but if you've been following along it's a record you've already heard, with the same mixes being offered as alternative versions that we saw back in '91.

Oh, and Right Said Fred take "Stay" off #1 in April with "Deeply Dippy". This grates on me in a way that "I'm Too Sexy" didn't and I think it's that it's far too self-conscious about what it is. The lyrics aren't really all that silly, but they're attached to the kind of overblown showtune brass which make you think they should be.

I thought Wet Wet Wet's "More Than Love" (#19 March '92) would be an easy one to round off with a final bit of sneering mockery but actually... it's kind of alright, this one? It's got a bit of heft and swing to it, and even the inevitable vocal-harmony chorus doesn't come across all that hokey.

Down at a surprisingly low #28 with just three weeks in the Top 40 is '90s anthem "The Life Of Riley" from the Lightning Seeds. Somehow this got transplanted forward into the Britpop era, where it did admittedly feel like it belonged. Regular usage on "Match of the Day" may have helped with that feeling it was practically everywhere in the mid-'90s.

Jangling Roxette power pop effort "Church Of Your Heart" is a #21 at the end of March. More production from Steve "Silk" Hurley on pop house "Take My Advice", a #13 for Kym Sims. The Cure's "High" takes #8, all very relaxed as it does so.

The Eurythmics split without any official notice in 1990, with Annie Lennox launching her solo career with the risk-taking "Why", all very different to the upbeat pop we might have been expecting. The gamble worked, with "Why" going to #5 in April '92 and being a common thing to hear on radio for most of the decade.

Peak '90s adult contemporary comes with Vanessa Williams on "Save The Best For Last", a song written by Phil Galdston, Jon Lind and Wendy Waldman which had been offered to pretty much every star of that adult contemporary (think big, soft ballads) scene and been turned down. Williams was looking for material for her second album and realised it was one of those songs which would have to be screwed up to an unfathomable degree to not be a hit. It was exactly that, at #3 in April '92, although UK audiences may know it most well for extensive usage in Bisto commercials. Ah, romance. It's indistinguishable from gravy.

Def Leppard had been having consistent hits through the '80s, despite drummer Rick Allen losing one arm after a 1984 car accident. Starting out as one of the original New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands, here they are muddying the "grunge instantly killed glam metal" history by having a huge hit (#2 March '92) with "Let's Get Rocked", a record which is glam metal from its guitar sound to its gleefully dumb lyrics.

The Manic Street Preachers are down there at #20 with "Slash 'n' Burn", aggressive rock that rails against commercialism while referencing US Vietnam war policy.

I'm getting that sense of a bit of a holding pattern after the excitement of '91, with a brace of rave, rock, adult contemporary and the like, none of which feel new/exciting/different enough to comment on. Comic Relief's single is Mr Bean and the Smear Campaign with a surprisingly straight-faced hard rock version of "(I Want To Be) Elected" (#9 April '92), featuring Bruce Dickinson.

Mr Bean was two years into becoming a global phenomenon at this point, with the series about to launch in the US. Rowan Atkinson had created a character and premise that could not have been more perfect for export; it was not even necessary to speak English to follow along with Bean's occasional mumbled utterances as they served mostly as punctuation to a show played in the silent comedy tradition.

At this point a mere six episodes of the fifteen overall had been aired, and I find this single and its associated music video most interesting for how much Bean is out of character with long, coherent speeches and plenty of jokes aimed purely at children. Contrast with the much later appearance at the 2012 London Olympics which is a pure Bean sketch derived from the absurd solutions he comes up with for trivial, self-created problems.

Even as I start talking about things like Nirvana and the Manic Street Preachers, this shows how different a time that period was. Mr Bean was a phenomenon watched live by 18.7 million people. Can you imagine a third of the population watching the same pre-recorded television programme all at the same time now? If you ever went to any tourist attraction related to the National Grid it would have the inevitable display about what happened when all those people got up during the advert break to put the kettle on.

That popularity also damned its hopes of lasting critical appreciation because Mr Bean is, of course, now a byword for the kind of simple and straightforward humour that almost any idiot can figure out. That's the entire point of it, down to early previews of the character taking place in front of non-English speaking audiences to be sure it had universal appeal. It's Frank Spencer without the setup or the introspection, and that's why I find it relevant to a discussion about pop music. You don't end up buying a McLaren F1 off the back of taking pratfalls on screen without some level of basic craft to it.

Where does the holding pattern end? Not with Altern 8 - "Evapor 8" is a great rave track that reached #6 in April, but this is a consolidation not a revolution. L7's "Pretend We're Dead" gets to #21 off the back of the demand for grunge, with "Nevermind" producer Butch Vig at the controls. The all-female band saw themselves at the fringes of grunge and riot grrl without being full members of either, and hailed from Los Angeles rather than the Pacific Northwest, but neither distinction bothered record buyers.

Swing Out Sister have a breezy version of Barbara Acklin's "Am I The Same Girl" (#21 April '92) but I think the Dusty Springfield crate dig (#43 October '69) is superior to either. I would, really. A somewhat overblown version of "Viva Las Vegas" marks the release of a ZZ Top Greatest Hits compilation, the single going to #10 in April.

Senseless Things' "Hold It Down" (#19 April '92) is perhaps the biggest hint things might be afoot in the musical world of 1992. The Twickenham pop-punks existed on the edges of the Grebo/fraggle scene, but if there's one phrase I'd use to describe this record it's proto-Britpop. Ash and Supergrass both cited them as influences, and you can hear it clearly.

SL2 first hit the Top 40 in 1991 with "DJs Take Control" (#11 November '91), but it's "On A Ragga Tip" which is their big hit, peaking at #2 with 10 weeks in the Top 40. The reggae-inspired breaks are welcome and fresh, especially compared to the rather dull "Please Don't Go"/"Game Boy" from K.W.S. spending 5 weeks at #1 starting in early May.

Iron Maiden's rumination on the financial world of the early '90s and the scandals taking place within it, "Be Quick Or Be Dead", went to #2 immediately on entering the Top 40 in mid-April. Despite the high position it dropped back out quickly, perhaps an indication of loyal fans buying it on release more than huge overall sales.

It's also perhaps a sign of lean pickings out there in the chart world. We thought we were rid of sophisti-pop but Curiosity Killed the Cat are back, this time just as Curiosity, and "Hang On In There Baby" (#3 May '92) sounds an awful lot like something which would have been playing in an upwardly mobile household in 1987, or at least the teenager's bedroom thereof.

I think my preference would be for Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine's "The Only Living Boy In New Cross", a frenetic workout built on top of a too-fast synth bassline. It's an absolute stew of references covering everything from "Evita" to obscure goth and indie rock. A riotous gutter party of a record that made #7 in April.

Seems it's a bit of a time for heavier and more alternative music, with Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters" going to #6 in May. With shades of "The Wall"-era Pink Floyd, it's always a little hard for me to square the kind of reputation these records had in university dorms with them being relatively large hits. No such issues with The Sisters Of Mercy's "Temple Of Love (1992)" (#3 April '92) though - in my circles it was always known as the blatantly commercial cousin of the notionally more authentic and worthy 1983 original.

The Wedding Present were C86 survivors who committed the sin of signing with a major label when their independent distributor folded. In 1992 they then took it upon themselves to release 12 singles in one year, each in a limited run of 10,000 copies only in the UK. All of them cracked the Top 30, but "Come Play With Me" was the biggest hit, reaching #10. Given each sold roughly the same number of copies (sometimes extra copies pressed for international markets were pilfered to satisfy UK demand, so it's not strictly 10,000) this perhaps indicates more that not so many records were being sold in general around this time.

I've mentioned a couple of times that the big soft ballads have approached what Howard Ashman and Alan Menken were doing as part of the Disney Renaissance, and in 1992 we get the genuine article to compare. "Beauty and the Beast" will be the year's big Disney film in the UK, a Broadway-style musical presented as an animation and technical tour de force that hit US cinemas in November '91 but wouldn't see UK screens until October '92.

Much was made in the lead up to the film about the ballroom scene, created using what were at the time very exciting raytracing techniques to allow the virtual camera to swoop around the ballroom, showing off the kind of reflective marble surfaces we all used to marvel at on magazine pages or, if we were very lucky, sit waiting 8 hours for the family 386 PC to render. The real show-off achievement though is the animation, Belle and the Beast moving smoothly through the scene as the perspective changes despite using a style of character design that is notoriously difficult to rotate arbitrarily and stay on-model with. It's the kind of thing Disney hadn't done since Milt Kahl used to throw in that head swaggle movement just to demonstrate that he could.

With the Renaissance films being musicals, this came with a suitably grand soundtrack moment. For the scene in the film it's sung by Angela Lansbury, but Disney thought a more pop-focused version would go down better on the end credits and as a single release. So they got Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson to record "Beauty And The Beast". Dion at the time was relatively unknown in the US, so Bryson was added to get a recognisable name on the cover.

It went to #9 in May over here, a slight oddity as few would have seen the film it came from at that point. But perhaps this is a good thing, as you would have been listening to the big romantic ballad without it reminding you that when you go into the credits of "Beauty and the Beast", you do so with the disappointment that the Prince is a far, far less attractive man than the Beast.

(A sad note here that Ashman never saw the chart success of the song he wrote or even the finished film; he died in March 1991, another victim of the AIDS pandemic)

Shakespears Sister follow-up "I Don't Care" is nowhere near as much a smash as "Stay", although #7 is still respectable and it's a fine demonstration of that more mature '90s pop sound. En Vogue's "My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It)" comes in with a riot of a bassline and goes to #4.

Ugly Kid Joe got their name from a one-off joke they made when it looked like they'd end up support for glam metal act Pretty Boy Floyd; the latter cancelled the show but the former kept the name and started recording hard rock songs with wry, satirical lyrics.

"Everything About You" went to #3 in May, helped along after its first couple of weeks on chart by the UK release of "Wayne's World" on which it features. The more deliberate soundtrack tie-in of Tia Carrere's "Ballroom Blitz" saw #26 in June.

"Wayne's World", or at least its video release in 1993, came at a particular time for my cohort. Most of us would have been between 10 and 11, a critical point in developmental psychology as this is where the desire to establish our own social identity distinct from the adults around us starts to kick in. It's this that drives us to make our own musical choices rather than merely reacting to what is played around us, but also to develop what feels like our own sense of humour.

With "Wayne's World", the attraction was that for most of us, it was the first time we'd seen (or more likely, repeated from a friend who had seen) jokes which we found hilarious but our parents just didn't get. Yes, I know the core audience and the references were all older Gen X but "schwing!", "we're not worthy", "denied!" and of course ending any sentence with a sarcastic, "...not!" - all of those infuriated parents and teachers while seeming the height of comedic sophistication to us.

That this is all affectionate parody passed us by completely. Mike Myers and Dana Carvey were poking fun at the suburban metalheads they'd grown up alongside, kids who thought they were being incredibly cool peppering every other sentence with a "...not!" but really coming across to the rest of the world as goofy, dumb nerds. However, they were doing so as insiders looking out, and rather than being mean-spirited it's largely played as a celebration of being goofy, dumb and nerdy while you still can. We certainly all looked cool repeating those catchphrases aged about 10-11... not.

Marillion celebrate ten years of existence by releasing a Greatest Hits compilation, featuring six songs from the early incarnation of the band with Fish, together with all six of the singles the band had issued with second singer Steve Hogarth. On top of this were two new recordings, including a cover of Rare Bird's early prog track "Sympathy" from 1970, which went to #17 after being released as a single.

Indie rockers Kingmaker have a #15 with "Eat Yourself Whole", although their 1992 tour is best known these days for its support acts; a little band called Radiohead who are still working on their debut album, and a little band called Suede who are just about to put a single out.

That single is "The Drowners", which goes to #49 in May. I try to avoid venturing outside the Top 40 but this one is important. The stew of '70s glam rock, Bowie's imperial period and unashamedly lo-fi production saw Suede pushed as the hot new band to watch. They'd begun in London as a collaboration between Brett Anderson and Justine Frischmann, then a couple, along with Anderson's friend Mat Osman. After placing an advert for a guitarist who could gel with their listed reference points of The Smiths, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, David Bowie and the Pet Shop Boys they ended up with Bernard Butler, a talented guitarist who'd taught himself the instrument by copying Smiths records.

They played for a while to a drum machine, but even as the charts swirled with scenes in which this was common and acceptable, decided a real drummer was needed. Ex-Smith Mike Joyce answered an early ad, but decided there was so much Smiths influence already at play his presence would do more harm than good. Simon Gilbert ended up landing in the band after hearing one of their demos.

This all hummed along until 1991, when Frischmann and Anderson broke up, then Frischmann started dating Blur's Damon Albarn. Blur at this point had got somewhat further in their career thanks to riding the Baggy bandwagon, so Frischmann spent more time with them and less with the still-unsigned Suede. Eventually Anderson got fed up and gave her the boot. With this change in the band setup Anderson and Butler started working closely together, writing songs that nobody was interested in picking up because grunge bands were the current hot thing.

In early 1992, tiny and newly-formed independent Nude Records gave Suede a two-single deal. By this point Suede being out of step with musical trends had gone from a curse to a blessing. The music press was drawing the same conclusions I did from those Spring '92 charts - those things which had sounded so hot in '90 and '91 were stagnant or fading. Suede were something new and different. Suddenly they had cover features proclaiming them "the best new band in Britain" (Melody Maker, 25 April 1992) and multiple record labels trying to court them away from Saul Gaulpern's Nude.

However, we still have several months before all of this early hype translates into them cracking the Top 40.

Shut Up And Dance take a #2 in late May with "Raving I'm Raving", a hip house reworking of "Walking In Memphis" which changed out the lyrics including a chorus of "I'm raving I'm raving". The problem here is Marc Cohn had not given them permission to change his song, and took out an injunction against it. This resolved to a compromise where the single could be released, but all proceeds had to go to charity and once the initial stock of 35,000 was exhausted it could never be pressed again, even on compilations. After just one week at #2 it dropped to #15 and then out of the charts altogether, because there were no longer any copies available to purchase.

1992 throws up yet another musical oddity with Kris Kross, the youngest hip-hop group to have a chart record, with Chris "Mac Daddy" Kelly and Chris "Daddy Mac" Smith being just 13 at the time. 18-year-old producer Jermaine Dupri, himself with a background as a teen performer, met the two at Greenbriar Mall in Atlanta. They were not rappers or even musicians of any kind, nor were they even looking to be, but Dupri liked something about their style and their response when asked about what they did do of, "we just cool".

It is a surprise given all of this that "Jump" (#2 July '92) is surprisingly credible. The hip-hop sound is authentic down to the extensive sampling of "Funky Worm" and doesn't rely on other people's hooks to hold the record together. I'm not saying this is something I'd seek out to listen to because I already have a busy itinerary of Television Personalities and The Cleaners From Venus, but it's competently executed. We've come a long way from "Ain't It 'Orrible Being In Love (When You're Eight And A Half)".

June's first Top 40 brings back the Manic Street Preachers with "Motorcycle Emptiness" entering at its #17 peak, a few of the band's earlier songs chopped together with what even the band thought might be a few too many lyrics. It works. This was the point at which the Manics realised they had something which would work, and it was one of their best-selling singles until "Everything Must Go" came along and steamrollered everything.

Entering at #30 with a peak of #16 were The Beautiful South with "Bell Bottomed Tear", disguising its rather downbeat lyrics with the kind of laid-back, soft sound that would have fit right in during the late '70s FM radio boom.

Oceanic's "Controlling Me" (#14 June '92) keeps the Euro House flag flying while George Michael goes straight in at #4 with "Too Funky". Behind the scenes, Michael was becoming fed up with what he felt was record label Sony being unwilling to promote him as a serious artist, rather than the kind of party-time poster boy of the Wham! era. He decided to sue claiming this was unreasonable restraint of trade, and... lost.

The judgment was that record labels made investments in bands like Wham! not knowing if they would be a success or not, and if every artist who achieved success decided to go off on their own then this would be impossible to sustain - Sony needed the money from Wham! and George Michael's success to subsidise all the bets they'd made on bands who hadn't made it.

This played counterpart to the earlier US precedent in which Geffen had sued Neil Young, claiming his country leanings and supposedly "commercial" rockabilly album "Everybody's Rockin'" simply weren't representative of what Neil Young fans wanted or what they had signed him for. In that case Geffen lost, the two cases effectively setting bookends. Artists could make what they want unless the contract stipulated otherwise, but record labels were free to release it without fanfare or promotion if they chose to.

Topping the charts straight on entry were Erasure with their "Abba-Esque" EP. This feels like playing with all the cheat codes on in our times, but back in 1992 both ABBA and synth-pop were entering a low period in terms of perceived naffness, so it's more like turning the difficulty up and still succeeding. Maybe some memories of 1989's "Bring Me Edelweiss" might have made "S.O.S" feel a little more current but somehow Erasure took what feels like commercial suicide and instead kicked off the gradual ABBA revival which made them the subject of sell-out jukebox musicals and virtual shows.

It denied Nick Berry's "Heartbeat" the top spot, that record peaking at #2 in June. The overly slick Buddy Holly cover has all but disappeared from streaming services in favour of karaoke versions and soundalikes, which feels odd for something that was part of the soundtrack to Sunday evening for most of the early '90s in our household.

"Heartbeat" was a mid-century nostalgia porn show, and arguably the first successful British one to follow this template. Berry's PC Nick Rowan rode around the bucolic Yorkshire countryside on his motorcycle engaging in medium-stakes policing against a backdrop of an idealised 1960s stacked with hits of the era, including the unexpectedly accurate inclusion of a couple of Engelbert Humperdinck's finest. It hit all the "simpler time" and "kinder people" notes you'd expect, although with enough grit that I recall it being fairly watchable on a Sunday evening before school. I had to wait for "Ballykissangel" to come along for the experience of having to sit still and say nothing while my parents watched a show that was, as far as I was concerned, unbroken tedium from start to finish.

I'm not quite sure why it was deemed mandatory to sit through these shows presenting various types of rural idyll, but whatever they were trying to teach me evidently didn't take since as an adult I moved to East London and cultivated an insatiable appetite for seediness.

As we reach the midway point of 1992, I find myself reflecting that while nothing earth-shattering has happened, a lot of small things have happened. Another of these is The Orb releasing the longest single ever to grace the UK charts, the 39:58 "Blue Room" (#8 June '92). This was down to an oddity in the chart rules for maxi-singles, which limited them to 25 minutes in most cases, but in 1991 had been extended to allow 40 minutes if only a single song title was present.

This sounds like someone was a prog rock fan, but the real driver was that dance singles would come with multiple remixes of an already-long lead track, pushing them well past 25 minutes in length. The Orb took their 17-minute album track and extended it up to the limit, being the best kind of correct in that "Blue Room" featured only a single song title, and was indeed under 40 minutes in total duration.

This got them a slot on Top of the Pops, which band members Alex Paterson and Kris Weston spent getting into trouble. First they openly drank brandy, then upon being told to stop, decanted it into Coke cans and continued to drink it in the time-honoured trick beloved of certain sixth form students. They challenged everyone present to a game of football, an offer taken up by Utah Saints despite stern warnings from the BBC that anyone involved would be thrown out.

It's not going to be a big surprise given such behaviour that the Orb originally started as a 1988 project between Alex Paterson and Jimmy Cauty, purveying ambient house as pioneers of the genre. Cauty was given the boot in 1990 amid disagreements over whether The Orb should release their records on KLF Communications, and Paterson's feeling that Cauty was stealing their best ideas for the KLF and not crediting his work.

Back on Top of the Pops, somehow Paterson and Weston avoided being thrown off the show and their eventual performance involved the two having a quiet play of some futuristic chess-like game along with a plush toy sheep, silently mouthing the words of any vocal samples to stay on the correct side of BBC miming requirements. Bob Geldof dismissively sneered at it as "mind-expanding", making him seem out of date and out of touch to those who understood that something was happening here and they knew what it was.

One such person was young, rebellious Robbie Williams. Oh, shit, this means I need to cover Take That. Which idiot tried suggesting that this was a year of mostly small things?

As "Blue Room" hits its #8 peak in mid June, one position above it is "It Only Takes A Minute". This was their fourth single, and up to that point they had looked like being also-rans with the best performance being a #38 for second single "Promises" in November '91, followed by "Once You've Tasted Love" failing to break the Top 40 at #47.

"It Only Takes A Minute" took a 1975 disco record from Tavares and gave it some up-to-the-minute polish. Nigel Wright did the production, and he had clearly paid attention to the way Stock Aitken Waterman would take club sounds and turn them into pop singles with the rave-influenced intro and house beat.

This is what I think made Take That. We saw bands stumble on various aspects of the boy band template through the late 1980s and this is the point where they all get assembled together into an unstoppable force. Back in 1989 in Manchester, Nigel Martin-Smith sought to create a British version of New Kids On The Block. From the auditions came a group initially called "Kick-It", built around singer-songwriter Gary Barlow along with Jason Orange, Mark Owen, Robbie Williams and Howard Donald. Williams was only 16 at the time of audition, with eldest member Donald still a mere 22.

Whatever had worked before, they took it. The vocal harmonies of Wet Wet Wet, the biro-friendly logo and brooding photography of Bros, the streetwise image of New Kids. From the music to the choreography of their stage and video appearances, every element was slick and well-planned. I hated it.

Let us talk for a moment about sibling rivalries. By the early 1990s I had gained a stepsister who was about six months older than me, and for various reasons she came to live with us in about 1994 or so. By this point I had my musical frame of reference. It was Britpop, it was the '60s and '70s bands who had inspired Britpop, and it was Queen. She had hers, and it was boy bands.

(The thought that we could have split "Now" compilations - her taking the first disc and me the second - has only just occurred to me. I guess I'm more diplomatic in my old age.)

Take That were a constant presence in this world, including the merchandise: the pencils, the binders, the posters, the calendar. And of course the CDs. The upstairs of our house being hastily divided with plasterboard to create an extra bedroom, I would be happily doing Computer Things only to be interrupted by the sound of Take That being blasted through a very thin wall. Naturally, there is no parental intervention unless I respond by putting on my own music loud, at which point somehow I end up in more trouble.

Perhaps it's unfair to lay the favouritism of step-parents at the feet of Take That, but even now there's something about it which makes me react negatively. Perhaps the problem is that it is too carefully assembled and polished. All those Sunday evenings being made to watch "Heartbeat" left me wanting filth and scuzz in my music.

Back in 1988 I mentioned that Perri "Pebbles" Reid would be far more influential later on, and this is now the moment. In 1990 she was approached by a girl group put together by Atlanta producer Ian Burke and band leader Crystal Jones, at that point called 2nd Nature. Pebbles signed the group, then consisting of Jones along with Tionne Watkins and Lisa Lopes, to her new management and production company Pebbitone. She renamed the group to TLC, standing for Tionne, Lisa and Crystal.

The plan was for a confident, outgoing group following the footsteps of acts like Salt-N-Pepa. They would lean into the hip-hop end of New Jack Swing hard enough to break through that wall entirely at times, with Lopes providing raps that would have sounded at home in 1992's West Coast scene.

Antonio "L.A." Reid, then-husband of Pebbles and cofounder of LaFace records, was lined up as producer. Here things started to go askew, with Reid believing that Watkins and Lopes were girl group material, but Jones, the originator of the idea, was not. Jones said she wasn't allowed to get external advice on the band's contract, Reid later said she had never been offered a contract in the first place, and the end result was that in February 1991 the group was signed with only T and L in it.

By April, Pebbles had found a third member, Rozonda Thomas. Rather than call the group "TLR", the three were given nicknames - "T-Boz" Watkins, "Left Eye" Lopes, and (conveniently) "Chili" Thomas. By this point they were already recording backing vocals for other LaFace artists, and set to work recording their debut album, "Ooooooohhh... On the TLC Tip". I don't think that's a reference to legendary racehorse Potoooooooo as there are only seven "o"s but it does make it similarly awkward to type.

"Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg" was the debut single, released rather later in the UK than its January arrival on US shelves. It peaked at #13 in the same week The Orb sat playing future chess on your telly, kicking New Jack Swing out of its rut of overwrought production and token hip-hop nods.

More importantly, TLC were rewriting the rules of girl groups, taking the baton of feminist positivity from Salt-N-Pepa or our own Mel & Kim and running with it. Rather than a glamorous ensemble who sang lightweight songs with chaste lyrics, they dressed down in baggy clothes and talked about what they wanted - respect, independence and (safe) sex. That latter extending to a gimmick where they appeared with condoms attached to their clothes.

A posthumous hit for Roy Orbison with "I Drove All Night" (#7 July '92). It's a great record but in this company that 1987 recording date is impossible not to notice. Here, it's sharing chart space with Altern 8's "Hypnotic St-8" (#16 June '92), laden with rave leads, acid bass and the inevitable brace of samples.

Rave itself was about to implode, though. The thing the Prodigy feared would happen to them if they made another "Charly" happened to the entire scene instead. Urban Hype's "A Trip To Trumpton" hit #6 in early July. Like "Charly" it's got a solid oldskool rave hardcore backing, but here the samples from the 1960s stop motion classic feel gratuitous.

But the iconic villain of the piece here is Smart E's "Sesame's Treet". Peaking at #2, it's toytown techno taken to its most illogical conclusion. The entire track is built around the "Sesame Street" theme, and it's a wonder to me that none of my references seem to mention any protracted legal battles with Children's Television Workshop. The man behind it, Chris Howell aka Luna-C, says it made him quite a lot of money, enough to set up his own record label once the joke had run its course.

And yes, this one is a deliberate joke. Unlike many toytown techno efforts, which were viewed as outsiders ripping off rave producers in the name of a quick buck, Luna-C was known and liked in the scene, and made this with Tom Orton and Nick Arnold as a goofy bit of fun in between assembling slightly more serious tracks. It therefore took them by surprise when Kiss FM started playing it, and suddenly their distributor was asking for 200,000 copies based on pre-orders.

Both these tracks were about as healthy for rave as "Purple People Eater" had been for rock'n'roll. Any sense of countercultural cool or edge had been blown away by what was seen to be kiddie nonsense. You couldn't have a serious underground music scene making stuff that was only a few silly samples away from being bought by 12-year-olds in Woolworths.

The UK scene split two ways around this axis. One was to throw out the samples, fixate on one particular drum break, and put in hard-hitting basslines influenced by dub reggae. This spawned the nascent jungle scene, in its early days split between darkside jungle, a deliberate reaction against toytown ravers, and ragga jungle which carried more Jamaican dancehall influences and as far as toytown techno was concerned simply didn't register or care about its existence. The other approach was to accept that if you couldn't have a serious music scene you may as well have a silly one, spawning Happy Hardcore and its tribe of candy ravers.

Flying above all this is Jimmy Nail's #1 "Ain't No Doubt", a relatively forgettable contemporary R&B pop song livened up a bit by Sylvia Mason-James' trip-hop inspired vocals. I suspect much of the success is his profile from TV series "Spender", a procedural in which the policing was somewhat grittier and less medium-stakes than "Heartbeat".

Perhaps some of it is that silly season directionlessness that seems to affect these early '90s charts over the summer, or at least that's my reasoning as to why Billy Ray Cyrus' country rocker "Achy Breaky Heart" reaches #3 in August and sets off a brief line dancing craze. Film soundtrack excerpt "This Used To Be My Playground" gives Madonna her own #3 and seven weeks in the Top 40, although this is firmly in the territory of the soggy early '90s film ballad.

Nirvana's "Lithium" is a welcome respite from all this sogginess, reaching #11 at the end of July. A kid from our school once spray-painted a lyric from the song along a 20-metre stretch of raised kerb, which resulted in me being asked if I'd done it upon being discovered listening to the song those words came from. Yes, me, clearly the only person in the world to have owned a copy of "Nevermind" in the '90s.

Kris Kross follow up "Jump" with "Warm It Up", not as big a hit (#16 July '92) but avoiding the teen band tendency to follow up something listenable with mawkish, breaking-voice nonsense. Yeah, this one is surprisingly okay too.

Jimmy Nail loses his #1 spot to "Rhythm Is A Dancer" in August. Somehow, Snap! thought this was best left as an album track but reactions to it in clubs changed their minds. It stayed at #1 for six weeks and in the Top 40 for seventeen despite some exceedingly goofy lyrics.

Down at #23 is Shabba Ranks' "Mr. Loverman". This was the second version of a single originally released in 1991, and brought the Jamaican dancehall style to the charts with Shabba's spoken-word toasting and calls of "Shabba!" over a reggae beat. This dancehall toasting would become one of the signature sounds of the decade but it's a little early here; a remixed version of "Mr. Loverman" released during the reggae summer of 1993 would hit #3.

Here in 1992 the big news is the Summer Olympics, and so "Barcelona" gets another chart outing, this time hitting #2 because there's nothing like a big sporting event to get records flying off the shelves. It's not the only old record in the charts, "This Charming Man" going to #8 after being reissued to support a Smiths "Best Of" compilation.

Undercover were a group specialising in cover versions of '70s and '80s records, giving them gentle dance reworkings on album "Check Out The Groove". The first single was "Baker Street", and their most successful with a #2 in September. This kind of laid-back dance sound was evidently popular, with Janet Jackson and Luther Vandross also hitting #2 with "The Best Things In Life Are Free".

Take That's "I Found Heaven" (#15 August '92) is a record Gary Barlow cites as their worst by a large margin, and I find little to enjoy about this over-sugared Motown-lite confection. During production the band felt they were too early in their career to do anything other than take what they were given and perform it as directed (including stepping aside for someone else to do the high notes), but afterward refused to work with co-writer and co-producer Ian Levine ever again.

Lionel Richie's laid-back "My Destiny" sold gradually but consistently, with 12 weeks on the chart and its #7 peak coming late in September. Annie Lennox's "Walking On Broken Glass" (#8 August '92) is a record I seem to remember being played almost constantly on the radio. With some personal irony, as this was about the time I fell through a plate glass window on holiday and wasn't doing much walking at all, on broken glass or otherwise. Usually people don't get to say "I've still got the scars" in such a literal sense.

Another posthumous hit for Roy Orbison, this time on a 1987 duet with k.d. lang of "Crying" (#13 August '92). While I'm mentioning old records, the ABBA revival Erasure kicked off sees a reissue of "Dancing Queen" go to #16 in September. I don't know whether it's the rather thin-sounding master of "Arrival" I'm using as a source here, but after a few days of being fully immersed in 1992 it sounds almost prehistoric here. Lovely, polished and melancholic, but also very very old.

"Too Much Love Will Kill You" (#5 September '92) is a song Brian May had written back in 1988, originally intended for "The Miracle" and recorded by the full band before a decision that all songs on that album would be group compositions. He worked up a solo version for album "Back To The Light", and that's what we have here.

Dr. Alban's "It's My Life" gave him his UK chart breakthrough, and it's a big one at #2 in late September. One of the things I keep returning to while writing this project is how different things sound in the context of what else was around when they came out, and after the frenetic turn of the decade I find myself surprised by how laid-back this one sounds.

Stadium house had begun as a joke and it became more of one upon being co-opted to be the sound of a boy band. East 17's "House Of Love" enters the Top 40 at the end of August, going to #10 in September. Ah, East 17, the other scourge of teenage years in which I just wanted to listen quietly to Britpop and program computers without this emanating from the adjacent bedroom.

Manager Tom Watkins saw the early success of Take That and surmised that if these lads were to be the Beatles of their time, then they needed their counterpart Stones. A rougher, edgier act that sounded more in tune with what cooler elder siblings listened to.

Tony Mortimer, Brian Harvey, John Hendy and Terry Coldwell were the ideal candidates. As their name alluded to, they came from Walthamstow, post code E17, and if you still hadn't got the connection they named their debut album "Walthamstow" to make it clear.

This was not the East London of today with its gentrification, craft beer outlets, independent bakeries and vegan sandwich shops. Even the central London of my youth was a much grimmer place, and Walthamstow itself was a land of shuttered-up shops, derelict industrial sites and oppressive traffic passing through on its way to other places. The band reflected it with their scowls, tattoos, and photographs of the streetwear-clad boys lurking in unwelcoming alleyways or next to electrical substations. I hope they watched "Play Safe" in school.

"House of Love" didn't even feature the seemingly obligatory band photo on the front of the sleeve, instead opting for a plain design with a cartoon dog, like the proper dance records of your hypothetical cooler elder sibling. This turned out to be a relatively short-lived phase, with cover photos becoming the norm from the third single onwards (and for the US releases from the start), and the band settling into more familiar balladry and syrup for their second album "Steam", the point at which my elder stepsister got into them. Despite this they managed to maintain their "hard lad" image, and the sense that if the lads were at your school they'd have been on suspension by the end of the first term was part of the attraction.

Entering the Top 40 in the same week on their way to four weeks at #1 were The Shamen with "Ebeneezer Goode". This needs little introduction. The BBC fell foul of their usual awkward handling of oblique drug references, initially banning the single from radio playlists then having a Top of the Pops with Mr. C repeatedly calling out "E's are good". The one lyric to be changed was the closing call of "got any salmon?" (salmon and trout = snout = tobacco), rendered as "got any underlay?" Mr. C pointed out that with this line the song was clearly not about drugs; it was about rugs.

Fun as this may be I can't help feeling it's another aerial pirouette in the extended shark jump of rave-influenced music in the charts. That period from 1987-1991 felt strange to me because the charts I was familiar with didn't have anywhere near the weight and volume of serious electronic music on them. It makes sense that something happened to change that at some point, and it seems like the change is too many gimmicks and jokes.

Of course, some of that was how much reggae and dancehall swept the charts in 1993 and 1994, displacing club anthems from their usual position as sound of the summer. I'm getting a bit ahead of myself there, but you can see signs of it, such as posthumous Bob Marley remix "Iron Lion Zion" taking a #5 in September.

At #7 are the Manic Street Preachers with "Theme From M* A* S* H* (Suicide Is Painless)", their best-selling single of the early period. It was a charity double A-side, and on the flip were The Fatima Mansions with their tongue in cheek dub-influenced cover of "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You". That thing really did have a chart stranglehold in the early '90s, didn't it?

Tasmin Archer's relaxed "Sleeping Satellite" enjoys a couple of weeks at #1, before ceding the position to Boyz II Men's "End Of The Road", a slow R&B number that had entered the Top 40 back in the same week as "Ebeneezer Goode". I cannot be having with nearly six minutes of this.

Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" makes #15 in September, inspired by a school student who shot himself in front of his English class. Meanwhile Suede have another hit with a #17 for "Metal Mickey", still leaning heavily on those glam rock and early '70s Bowie influences along with a deliberate dash of early Kinks.

The Prodigy return with "Fire" / "Jericho" (#11 September '92), sampling The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown and releasing the entire thing as a "Strangely Limited Edition" with the intention of deleting it from their catalogue ahead of album "Experience", although it was later reissued with subtitle intact. For the band who had supposedly killed rave, the Prodigy got surprising mileage out of oldskool rave hardcore even after the point they had apparently killed it. Some of that is the timing of "Experience" and the singles which came from it - it was a celebration of the culture, and it wouldn't be until 1994's "Music for the Jilted Generation" that we got to hear Howlett & co.'s response to the "death" of rave and the increasing hostility of the government towards it.

That death through novelty is in full swing as Doctor Spin's "Tetris" goes to #6 in October. Doctor Spin, by the way, are Andrew Lloyd Webber and Nigel Wright. When the man who wrote "Starlight Express" is having a joke at your expense, you know the time is up. Nevertheless this idea of remixing video game music seemed to be part of a short-lived craze, with Ambassadors of Funk releasing "Supermarioland" (#8 November '92) and even Aphex Twin getting in on the act releasing several remixes of "Pac-Man" under the pseudonym Power Pill.

R.E.M. followed up the already successful "Out Of Time" with the all-conquering "Automatic For The People". It came from a place of mourning that the band were entering their thirties, and the scene they'd come up through with Hüsker Dü and The Replacements no longer existed in the way it once had. That the album was melancholy, even slow, did not stop it going six times platinum in the UK. Lead single "Drive" went to #11 in October.

There was some confusion as to what Prince was going for on knowingly self-congratulatory single "My Name Is Prince" (#7 October '92). Was he playing around after listening to Public Enemy? Was he mocking himself, seeing who else got the joke, or was this intended to be taken seriously at face value? Or was it all a sly parody of the boastful raps of MC Hammer?

Bizarre Inc's diva house "I'm Gonna Get You" saw #3 in October, with singer Angie Brown rather confused as to what they were trying to do and thus surprised when she got the call that the band were due on Top of the Pops as the single climbed the charts.

The boy band wars step up as Take That come back with "A Million Love Songs", placing themselves square in the old boy band standard of balladry. Or was it still relatively new at this point? Gary Barlow had written it when he was 15, and it all seemed to go down reasonably well with a #7 peak in October in the middle of seven weeks in the Top 40.

Levi's gave us yet another '60s reissue hit with Erma Franklin's "Piece Of My Heart" (#9 October '92), all rather enjoyable. Must be a good time for it, as John Lee Hooker gets a rerecorded version of his 1962 hit "Boom Boom" to #16 that same month.

Madonna's fascination with downtempo hip-hop continues with "Erotica" (#3 October '92), although as an early Internet denizen it's hard not to hear those lyrics as "Bill Oddie".

Arrested Development's "People Everyday" is a hip-hop reworking of Sly and the Family Stone's "Everyday People" with a rather downbeat version of the message that everyone should respect each other. Despite this, it made #2 for the start of November.

A mild bit of amusement as Australian ABBA tribute/parody group Björn Again put out an EP called "Erasure-Ish" (#25 October '92), covering "A Little Respect" and "Stop" in the style of ABBA.

Somehow Euro House is still hanging in there, with Rage having a #3 with their reworking of Bryan Adams' "Run To You". It's unfortunate that a big part of this charting (it had an earlier failed release in May) was down to news articles condemning the band for using the same name as a German heavy metal group who'd been using it since 1984, and only changing it for markets where legal action might result. Oddly Suede never caught the same amount of flak for colliding with the existing US singer who had trademarked the name there, resulting in them being known as The London Suede across the Atlantic. (One music industry wag did remark, "it's a good thing they didn't come from Leatherhead")

November's next chart-topper is Charles & Eddie with "Would I Lie To You?" Despite receiving rave reviews as the perfect soul duet and selling enough copies to stay in the Top 40 for 15 weeks, it only spent a couple of weeks at #1. That was thanks to a little motion picture called "The Bodyguard" and its lead soundtrack single.

Whitney Houston's version of "I Will Always Love You" is that single, and another one of those early '90s chart-hoggers. Put it this way, it's the end of November and I already know I'm not doing the Christmas single competition this year. "I Will Always Love You" spent 10 weeks in the top spot.

Houston starred alongside Kevin Costner in the blockbuster film, agreeing to record six songs as part of the package. Looking around for "California oldies", music supervisor Maureen Crowe stopped on Linda Ronstadt's 1975 rendition of this, originally a Dolly Parton song recorded in 1973.

The surprise for me is that the version released to accompany the film is not the intended one. What you hear is an early board mix. Producer David Foster had intended to add all kinds of strings and ornamentation, but record label exec Clive Davis decided they sounded too "sweet" and released the first version as-is. I can't imagine what kind of sugar overload was being proposed, because what's there is already too much for me.

The problem I have is all those notes being held for an eternity are technically impressive, but they take what originated as a simple, plaintive country ballad and turn it into something where the technical prowess overshadows the emotion. I invite you to listen to Dolly Parton's original, including the recital verse which was restored after being excised from Ronstadt's cover, and realise what a beautiful love song this is when it's rendered simply and with imperfections.

Although Parton did say she earnt a lot of money in royalties from this, and as someone renowned for doing good with that money I guess it all works out.

November closes out with a bit of Prodigy (#5 November '92), a remix of Heaven 17's "Temptation" (#4), Genesis putting out a live version of "Invisible Touch" (#7), a Simply Red EP (#11) and Guns n' Roses having a #8 with "Yesterdays". Shabba Ranks sees more early chart success with "Slow & Sexy" going to #17.

US alternative rockers The Lemonheads had been going for about six years with little success, although early reaction to mid-1992 album "It's A Shame About Ray" had been positive. They were brought on to provide a cover of "Mrs. Robinson" for a 25th anniversary home video release of "The Graduate". Which seems a bit of an odd decision, as frontman Evan Dando hated the song, hated Paul Simon, and created this pop-punk cover that Paul Simon also hated. This last element gave Dando some cheer about the whole exercise, along with the news that Art Garfunkel quite liked what he'd done.

It was billed as a double A side with "Being Around", going to #19 and making enough of a splash that later copies of "It's A Shame About Ray" had it added to the track list.

It seems "Automatic For The People" is one of those cases where everyone bought the album, with "Man On The Moon" only seeing three weeks in the Top 40 with a peak at #18. It was originally supposed to be an instrumental, but after pressure from the rest of the band Michael Stipe wandered around with it on a Sony Walkman and came up with the tribute to Andy Kaufman.

U2's "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" (#14 November '92) was a reworking of an "Achtung Baby" album track they felt hadn't quite worked out, although as a contrarian I think I prefer the ethereal album version over the more direct and accessible Temple Bar mix.

A bit of chart success for Cliff Richard ("I Still Believe In You", #7 December '92) and Rod Stewart ("Tom Traubert's Blues (Waltzing Matilda)", #6 December '92) although both are painfully slow so I don't want to spend any more time on them than is required to note these guys were still having chart hits.

There's also a late entry for the "dance mix of video game soundtrack" genre with H.W.A. featuring Sonic The Hedgehog on "Supersonic", which seems like it can barely be bothered to acknowledge the Green Hill Zone theme exists while throwing around random sound effects like someone's trying to remember what the cheats are in the Sound Test menu. Anyway, we all know the real Sonic tribute is Janet Jackson's "Together Again". Master System players will know what I mean.

Michael Jackson had released a couple of singles from "Dangerous" that were not particularly interesting in either sound or chart position, but at the end of the year he came over all messianic and put out "Heal the World". Credit where 'tis due, he did put his own money behind the Heal the World Foundation funding programmes to reduce drug and alcohol abuse, pay for medical operations for children, and airlift supplies to war-torn Sarajevo. It went to #2. I remind you that "I Will Always Love You" exists.

December's first Top 40 countdown brings the oddity of a Freddie Mercury song I've never heard before. "In My Defence" (#8 December '92) seems somewhat difficult to find, originating from the concept album for Dave Clark's 1986 "Time" musical and not collected on any of the many Queen collections littering streaming services, even the ones that are really getting into the dregs of the solo projects. Oddly it is on "The Freddie Mercury Album", which now makes me question quite how I've never heard it. Maybe that was carefully rationed in our household and my status only afforded me "The Great Pretender" and "Barcelona". It's decent, although I can't say I feel I missed out on any life-changing experience here.

My contention that everything had a pop rap in the early 1990s is bolstered by the WWF Superstars "Slam Jam", an incongruous #4 which spent six weeks in the chart. This and its associated album "WrestleMania: The Album" was an early act of one Simon Cowell in his incarnation as an A&R man, after his 1980s attempts at running a record label failed with Cowell in near-bankruptcy. The record label begged him not to do it, fearing a joke of an album that would land them in disrepute, but he went ahead anyway and even if it was a joke, it sold well enough to put it at #10 on the albums chart.

Take That are back at the old disco hits with "Could It Be Magic", taking the Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder arrangement and stacking it with vocal harmonies. The production on these early hits doesn't half remind me of SAW's house music period, if a little less over-enamoured with the orchestra hit. It took #3 going into the New Year, and tortured me many a time back in the day.

One-hit wonders Slipstreem turn Sutherland Brothers and Rod Stewart dirge "Sailing" into "We Are Raving - The Anthem" and eventually go to #18 with it for the start of January, but there's only so much you can do with bad source material and even their use of the most famous breakbeat in all of jungle can't help this feeling like another marker in the death of rave from self-parody.

None of this seemed to stop the Shamen, who continued the run of singles from "Boss Drum" with "Phorever People" (#5 December '92). The euphoric sound belied that the band were under quite a cloud by this point. Already rocked by the death of Will Sinnott in 1991, the success of "Boss Drum" had taken them away from their underground peers. As Terence McKenna noted after doing a spoken-word collaboration with the band, having a #1 hit and appearing on Top of the Pops made them the establishment, no matter how nose-thumbing that performance might have been.

The soundtrack to "The Bodyguard" also gives us Lisa Stansfield's "Someday (I'm Coming Back)" at #10 and with "I Will Always Love You" still at #1 that's pretty much how the year ends, with a few minor hits and a lot of business as usual.

1993

1993 opens with Apache Indian's "Arranged Marriage" climbing the charts on its way to a #16. Dancehall has barely arrived and already Apache Indian (real name Steven Kapur) was blending it with the bhangra sounds of his Punjabi ancestry. Growing up in Birmingham, reggae was the music that surrounded him and drew him in, with parts of album "No Reservations" recorded authentically at Tuff Gong in Kingston, Jamaica.

I can feel that reggae summer approaching but there's still plenty of early '90s sounds still around to complement it. Sunscreem were a dance act known for performing live concerts as an actual band in a genre more commonly associated with bedroom producers hidden amidst racks of technology, or at least behind an Atari ST. "Broken English", a reworking of the Marianne Faithfull song, was their biggest hit with a #13 in January.

Little Angels had their most commercially successful period in 1993, with album "Jam" topping that chart in February and hard rock ballad "Womankind" giving them a #12 on the singles chart here in January. Indie pop from Irish band The Frank And Walters gives them their only Top 40 with a #11 for "After All".

Between this and Jesus Jones' "The Devil You Know" (#10 January '93), indie music is feeling a lot more like the mid-'90s indie I became familiar with and less like the more ramshackle, unpolished stuff of the '80s. Jesus Jones proudly proclaimed that the album from which this came had been recorded almost entirely on computer, transferred to floppy disks and assembled in the digital realm. They were ridiculed for it in the same manner as early adopters of the synthesiser, and in the same way little more than a decade later it was entirely normal for a band to announce they were working on a new project with a screenshot of a DAW. (Digital Audio Workstation, the software used to assemble and process multiple discrete tracks all the way from raw recording to final mix.)

Arrested Development represent both laid-back hip-hop with "Mr Wendal" and its more fiery political side with "Revolution", both on the same double A-side (#4 January '93). Finally, how could it be the early '90s without Snap!? "Exterminate" is up there at #2 as "I Will Always Love You" refuses to give up its top slot. I will suggest that this is sounding awfully derivative of "The Power", though.

Peter Gabriel's "Steam" (#10 February '93) was immediately seen as a "Sledgehammer" sequel, a high-concept video from the same director helping with that feeling. Gabriel himself felt this gave an inaccurate reflection of album "Us" as backward-looking. He went so far as to create a version with anything that sounded like it came from "Sledgehammer" removed, with "Quiet Steam" provided as a B-side to lead single "Digging In The Dirt" (#24 September '92) and often played before "Steam" at concerts.

Pop Will Eat Itself's "Get The Girl! Kill The Baddies!" gave them the odd distinction of being the highest-charting act to appear on Top of the Pops without having a record deal, at #9. RCA took the bizarre decision to get rid of the band not because they sold badly or were unpopular, but simply because they didn't understand them. Evidently so, as they released "Get The Girl!" after giving PWEI the boot only for it to chart quite impressively.

Faith No More saw their profile raised by a 1992 European tour with Guns N' Roses after original pick Nirvana refused to play on it. It was raised further as they started publicly joking about the ridiculous behaviour of Guns N' Roses on tour ("the whole scenario was like millions of stripper chicks just hanging out") and were sacked from it. Commodores cover "I'm Easy" double A-sided with "Be Aggressive" gave them a #3 in January.

At least if you were pining for huge hard rock ballads in the vein of "November Rain" Bon Jovi have you covered, with "Bed Of Roses" going to #13 toward the end of January.

I was not particularly kind to Lulu's output back in the 1960s, but the title track from comeback album "Independence" (#11 January '93) is a pretty solid piece of house-influenced pop. Comparisons were drawn at the time to Lisa Stansfield, and I can see it.

Speaking of comebacks, Duran Duran have a #6. After an '80s of getting increasingly weird and yelpy followed by poorly-received 1990 album "Liberty", the band had a reset with guitarist Warren Cuccurullo building a home studio to give them time to explore ideas without expensive studio fees. "Ordinary World" was the result.

East 17 give up on their arty dog covers in favour of a standard photo (at least it's in a dingy, puddle-spotted alleyway) for "Deep". This is a very unexpected record for me given I was fairly sure I had heard most of the band's output, and I'm not sure a single sheet of plasterboard would have made it that unrecognisable. We have something doing a passable impression of LL Cool J along with drums that wouldn't sound out of place on a Baggy record. Yeah, the vocal harmonies do crop up eventually and the lyrics are so ridiculous in places that even the sleeve calls out "I'll butter the toast if you lick the knife", but I will make the hazardous claim that for what it is, this is a pretty enjoyable and decent record. Buyers certainly thought so, with a #5 placing at the end of January.

February opens with "I Will Always Love You" finally being dethroned from #1. You may wish for it back, as replacing it is "No Limit" from 2 Unlimited. If toytown techno had built the coffin for rave as a critically respected genre, this is the sound of the nails gleefully being smashed in one 909 kick at a time. The original UK single excises even the short raps and their token nod to the record containing anything but sugar and additives, extending the single mention of the word "techno" into a chant of "techno! techno! techno!".

(But it can't be! It's not from Detroit!)

1993 will turn out to have a thing for #1 records that are goofy, stupid, or just plain bad, and I'm feeling like we're three for three here. Yes, it is a classic piece of Eurodance, perhaps even the definitive Eurodance record. But that doesn't stop it being a hideous pastiche of rave and even, to a certain extent, the hardcore gabber scene beloved of Dutch producers of the time. Rave had lasted barely 18 months in the charts and it was dead. Even Eurodance producers would shy away from it in favour of lighter, more hi-NRG influenced sounds, with the records getting progressively goofier as the decade wore on.

One thing to mention here is that many of these singles would have been bought on CD. January 1993 was the point at which vinyl, cassette and CD roughly equalised in sales in the UK, with vinyl in long-term decline and cassette on the way back down from a short-lived boom in "cassingles" at the end of the '80s. (They would last longer in the US, not being overtaken by CD as the dominant singles format until 1997 there).

That Amstrad music centre deemed too precious for me to touch back in 1989 had become the hand-me-down with which my stepsister tormented me with Take That and East 17 by 1994. In its place came a JVC mini-system with tray-loading CD player, twin tape decks, and most importantly no turntable.

This was not an uncommon situation. Vinyl collections were sold off or banished to lofts, sheds and garages where they could warp and gather mould. (I once rescued a stack of loose singles from a summerhouse; surprisingly only a few were hopelessly warped or featured surface ecosystems even I considered too much of a biohazard). Often this was with a sigh of relief that all those questionable musical decisions of the '70s and early '80s could be cast aside never to attract the sneering judgement of teenage offspring, but did pose the question of what to do about those records you did still want to listen to.

The record industry had an obvious answer to this, which was to buy them again on CD. Early on, CD releases of back catalogue material had a reputation for being perfunctory at best, with whatever tape that happened to be to hand converted straight to digital. Some of those are now ironically prized by collectors for being the closest thing to a straight copy of a then still relatively young master tape, but CDs of old material generally had such a bad reputation that there was a persistent rumour several of them had been made with the RIAA equalisation curve used for cutting records in place. (Despite this being applied by the cutting lathe in the vinyl record process, and thus physically impossible to happen during a straight tape-to-CD transfer without someone choosing to do it deliberately.)

This changed in the early '90s with a flood of deluxe reissues containing fat booklets full of lyrics, additional details and artwork, with 1993 in particular seeing a certain sticker turning up on newly released CDs of old albums: "digitally remastered". This was not a new concept, with digital remastering being almost as old as digital mastering itself - I have a 1980s Eric Clapton hits collection on vinyl which proudly claims to be digitally remastered on the packaging of its analogue media.

However, in 1990 Atlantic Records responded to criticisms of poor-quality Led Zeppelin CD transfers with a four CD box set, also available in a condensed two CD (or triple LP) compilation called "Led Zeppelin Remasters". It sold three million copies in Europe, and then a further million on its release in the US as an expanded three-disc edition in 1992. It was obvious that there was a market for compilations and reissues targeting mainly the CD format, especially when marketed as a "deluxe" edition that would be a world away from any slapdash transfer consumers might already own or have heard.

The digital remaster boom was still a few months from taking off, but early 1993 did see a number of high-profile Greatest Hits compilations. With these would often come a reissue of an associated single. A Midge Ure and Ultravox best-of played it straight with "Vienna" (#13 January '93) although the CD did come as a gimmicky double-disc limited edition where you bought CD 1 one week, then the following week bought CD 2 which fitted into a special slot in the the first CD's case.

More common was to issue special mixes of a much-loved song from that greatest hits. The Cult's "Pure Cult" comp came along with "Sanctuary MCMXCIII" (#15 January '93), a collection of remixes of "She Sells Sanctuary" split across two CDs. A Sister Sledge best-of spawned "We Are Family (Sure Is Pure Remix)" although that only went to #30, in mid-February.

You didn't even need a Greatest Hits or even for a record to be that old. M People's "How Can I Love You More" was only two years old but the "(Sasha Qat Mix)" gave them a #10 in February. Meanwhile a little Northern Irish act called D:Ream were at the other end of that phenomenon, as their original mix of "Things Can Only Get Better" peaked at #24 in February '93. Things would, indeed, get better for them on that front.

February '93 is a bit of a weird time in the charts. Rolf Harris had a #7 with "Stairway to Heaven", a record originating in a segment from Australian talk show "The Money Or The Gun" where a celebrity would perform "Stairway" in a style of their choice, with no risk of having to abandon performance and shout "denied" upon noticing a sign. Harris chose a music-hall parody patterned after "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport".

Saint Etienne's "You're In A Bad Way" takes #12 and as a keen follower of the writings of Bob Stanley (one third of the band) it's fun trying to spot all of those influences he talks about subtly making their way through. Whitney Houston has a cover of Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman" (#4 February '93) with Cole and Clivillés of C+C Music Factory fame providing the club-tinged production.

"Are You Gonna Go My Way" gives Lenny Kravitz a #4 and nine weeks in the Top 40. It feels like it's existed for a lot longer than that, although part of that is the deliberate Hendrix influences. Also making it one of the earlier chart hits of the '90s to go really overt on those '60s influences, a trend which will have absolutely exploded by the end of the following year.

Getting into the spirit, Rod Stewart releases a cover of "Ruby Tuesday" (#11 February '93) to tie in with compilation album "Lead Vocalist", dressing up in what I hope is deliberately bad 1960s fashion for the picture sleeve and video. In my ongoing battle to try to figure out exactly what to make of Rod Stewart this is one of the good ones, coming across with a combination of orchestral pop and Bri-Nylon that is almost Suede-like in places.

R.E.M. excellence "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite" is #17 and even eventual far future #1 "Killing In The Name" finds time to put in a #25. Suede follow-up "Animal Nitrate" pushes them to the Top 10 for the first time, going in at #7 in late February. The momentum was enough that a few weeks later Select magazine featured an androgynous-looking Brett Anderson on its cover in front of a Union flag, inviting American acts to go home as we had Suede, Saint Etienne, and other bands including a little one from Sheffield no-one had heard of called Pulp.

Take That's chart battles with East 17 were later revealed to somewhat of a tongue-in-cheek exercise between bands who behind the scenes had a lot of time for each other, and at any rate at this point in 1993 both were more concerned with trying to turn their early breakthrough hits into chart success. "Why Can't I Wake Up With You" was Take That's entry, a 1992 album track jazzed up somewhat. It was mission accomplished with a #2 peak and also the first one I really can't stand, even more so than "I Found Heaven".

Are these repressed memories of trans-plasterboard terrorism colouring my opinion, or is this some perfect combination of things I dislike? I'm as mystified as anyone that my love of soul has never translated into its clear descendants in modern R&B, and having that style rendered with bland competence doesn't improve it in my ears.

I fear the decade will give me a lot of opportunities to wrestle with this, so on to one last February Top 40 entry. Back at the end of January, Virgin Records had released a cover of 1958 Jamaican record "Oh Carolina" by Orville Richard Burrell, better known as Shaggy. It climbed the charts through February and landed at #1 in March, where it stayed for two weeks.

The remix of Shabba Ranks' "Mr. Loverman" peaked at #3 that same week. The following week Snow's "Informer" hit #2, making it a 1-2-3 for dancehall records. Summer 1993 was notable for two things - being unusually cold and wet (the last year ever to not have a single day above 30°C), and despite this being the Reggae Summer.

Those early Spring chart successes let radio stations know dancehall was music people were buying and that could be put on playlists. It entered into a weird void in music; rave had imploded the previous year, the genres formed in its aftermath had yet to achieve commercial success, Britpop was still pretty much one successful band and a magazine cover, and the shelves were full of reissues and remixes of old records. I love "It Started With A Kiss" as much as anyone, probably quite a bit more, but should it really be at #31 eleven years after it was first released?

Good time then for Jamiroquai to have their breakthrough single. "Too Young To Die" hit #10 in March, the group graduating from Acid Jazz Records to major label Sony. Acid jazz had grown up in London around that city's chapter of the rare groove movement, collectors of obscure funk and soul records. At the one end it interfaced with Northern Soul (heavily underground and increasingly rarity-obsessed by this point, the Casino having closed in '81 a few years after the commercial peak and creative nadir of Wigan's Ovation) and its own "the rarer the better" mythology. At the other it touched upon hip-hop artists who loved using rare grooves as distinctive samples and breakbeats.

First from the stable to achieve chart success were the Brand New Heavies, whose "Dream Come True" went to #24 in February '92, but it was Jamiroquai who really pushed the funk side and made it clear they'd been listening to a lot of interesting '70s records. This is the music sophisti-pop wanted to be and so desperately fell short of, and the reason is obvious within one listen of "Too Young To Die"; the funk isn't some embellishment to be stick on top, it's the entire point of the exercise, the foundation on which everything else sits.

Confusingly-punctuated rockers Therapy? had their breakthrough with the "Shortsharpshock" EP (#9 March '93), containing tracks such as "Screamager". They'd been a band who'd orbited both noise rock (think Sonic Youth) and grunge scenes the previous couple of years, but for "Screamager" and most of the follow-up album "Troublegum" decided to follow the influences of Stiff Little Fingers and the Undertones.

Shaggy's #1 was taken away by a Volkswagen commercial catapulting the Bluebells' nine year old version of "Young At Heart" up to the top spot, where it sat for four weeks. It does feel slightly odd for this to be sharing countdowns with Ice Cube's "It Was A Good Day" (#27 March '93). Heavily sampling the Isley Brothers' "Footsteps In The Dark", this was the first UK Top 40 breakthrough for a hip-hop sound known as G-funk.

The big reference point was George Clinton's P-Funk collective, a heavy overlap with the rare groove people. From it G-funk took the approach that hip-hop didn't have to be an assault on the senses, it could be laid-back, soulful, and have a strong sense of groove. Short chopped-up sample collages gave way to longer sections, sometimes interpolated rather than sampled to give cleaner sound over a longer duration. You don't have to work to guess what "It Was A Good Day" samples if you already know the track - it's reproduced as-is.

One defining feature of G-funk that "It Was A Good Day" misses is a love of the Ohio Players' 1972 "Funky Worm", in particular its ARP synth lines. Dr. Dre was an early pioneer of the style, and was already using the funky worm on N.W.A's "Gangsta Gangsta" - which if you've been following along now sounds quite dated with its 808 cowbell! Dre's album "The Chronic" was the real commercial breakthrough for G-funk in '92 - "Fuck Wit Dre Day (And Everybody's Celebratin')" being a fine example from that record - but it took until early 1994 for any singles from that to reach the charts so we get another slightly out of order chronology here.

Madonna's dancey cover of "Fever" goes straight in at #6 for the end of March, a position equalled in mid-April by contemporary new entry "U Got 2 Know" from Cappella. The latter scored nine weeks in the Top 40 compared to Madonna's mere four, although I can't shake the feeling that some of this Eurodance is just early Rhythm King hip house records with a quarter the density of ideas.

It's still the style Stock and Waterman went to for WWF Superstars followup "Wrestlemania" (#14 March '93), a record so astonishingly bad I can't draw myself away from listening to it out of sheer fascination as to what awful thing will happen next. The cringeworthy rap sections sit against a backdrop which can't decide whether it wants to be a terrible pastiche of hip house or some great lost SAW single from circa 1989. The way it tries to sell "oh-oh, oh-oh, Wrestlemania" as its main lyric puts me in mind of those times the KLF played an obvious joke so straight-faced that you wondered if the real joke was that they were actually doing it straight-faced.

Reggae summer continues to build with Shinehead's adaptation of the Sting song as "Jamaican in New York" grabbing #30 at the beginning of April.

A late showing for a track with heavy Madchester influence as Sub Sub's "Ain't No Love (Ain't No Use)" hits #3 in April. The Haçienda regulars became better known after they lost their studio to a fire and decided to reform as a guitar-based indie band, Doves. Well, at least it's true to the free exchange between dance and guitar acts of the original Madchester era.

East 17 are back with "Slow It Down" (#13 April '93), a surprisingly okay track from "Walthamstow". I'm surprised by this, I was expecting to despise all of these but there has been something likeable about all of the East 17 singles I've listened to so far. Maybe my view will change later, but I think it's that compared to Take That and their centre of gravity somewhere between ultra-p0lished Motown and ultra-polished R&B, these early E17 records feel a bit more authentic.

Freddie Mercury's death had resulted in a tribute concert in April '92 with the proceeds going to launch the Mercury Phoenix Trust. It was a predictably star-studded event, but much of that faded into the background against a bring-the-house-down performance of "Somebody To Love" with George Michael taking the vocals. I recall much speculation over the decade as to whether this could become a more permanent arrangement, but Queen always demurred that while this had been enjoyable for a charity gig, they were looking for a different style of frontman.

It does feel like one of those what-if questions though, with a bundling of this with other George Michael live recordings going in straight at #1 in late April as EP "Five Live". Despite the title, track listings ranged from a two-track jukebox edition to six, typically five live recordings followed by the studio version of "Dear Friends" from Queen's "Sheer Heart Attack" album, but a couple of variants feature six live tracks. I guess "somewhere between two and six live" wouldn't have sold so well. And sell it did, with three weeks at #1.

Sonia's "Better The Devil You Know" is not a cover of the Kylie song, but the UK's Eurovision entry for 1993. Somehow the 1950s pastiche took second place on contest night, although a #15 chart peak suggests we'd lost our earlier appetite for both high-placing Eurovision songs and things which sound too much like Shakin' Stevens.

Blur's popularity had been hit hard by the backlash against bandwagon-jumpers piling into the Baggy scene, with Food Records deciding the best thing was to pack them off to tour the US in Spring 1992. They arrived to find a country in thrall to grunge, and with little interest in a British scene that was already waning on its home shores.

As the band disintegrated into drunken fighting, Damon Albarn started listening to The Kinks, particularly their late '60s material. Coming back to the UK, he found that the local music press were now lionising Suede as the future of British music. A sense of competition with a band who'd once been far behind Blur in their career, a new-found contempt for the US and a love of "Waterloo Sunset" came together into a single plan: Blur would prove themselves by making an album of timeless British pop.

Food were not keen, seeing this as Blur deserting all hope of commercial success. Nevertheless, they gave a reluctant go-ahead for the band to record with Andy Partridge of XTC and, perhaps more importantly for an album intended to evoke the sounds of 1960s pop, the Dukes of Stratosphear. The problem was it sounded too much like XTC. The tracks were shelved, until the band started working again with Stephen Street, producer for "There's No Other Way".

They thought they finally had their album, but Food told them to record more potential singles. American label SBK opined the whole thing was unsaleable and needed to be re-recorded for the US market (Nirvana producer Butch Vig was suggested), although they were eventually appeased with the Stateside-oriented "Chemical World" (#28 July '93 on these shores)

This meant "Modern Life Is Rubbish" was another one of those '90s albums with a big runtime. Somehow Food squeezed all 58 minutes on to an LP, although those grooves must be so narrow it's a wonder you can hear it above the surface noise. Growing up in this CD era, it took me a long time to get used to older albums being only 30-40 minutes long. You weren't getting as much for your money!

Food's demand for a proper single gave us "For Tomorrow", peaking at #28 on entry in late April '93. The Kinks influences are obvious, even if you ignore it coming from an album whose title and artwork are straight-up borrowing of themes from "The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society".

If you start drawing out a map of the nascent Britpop scene, you now have Suede at one corner with their love of glam rock and 1960s orchestral pop. (The latter not so evident in their initial run of singles, but take a listen to all six glorious minutes of album track "Breakdown"). At the other, you have Blur stewing up Kinks, Small Faces and even a little tilt at psychedelic-era Stones (I swear "Oily Water" owes somewhat of a debt to "Dandelion"). One might wonder if there's any other huge 1960s influences a band might choose to draw from. This space intentionally left blank.

Much as I'd like to spend more time in the development of Britpop, 1993 has a reggae summer to be getting on with. Inner Circle's "Sweat (A La La La La Long)" hits #3 in May and spends 13 weeks in the Top 40, which gives a clue how absolutely everywhere this thing was in 1993. It's consistently dumb throughout, but then at no point has it pretended to be anything else. You knew what you were getting into.

May's first Top 40 countdown is a busy one when it comes to new entries. Going straight in at its peak of #16 is Rage Against The Machine's "Bullet In The Head". These days earlier single "Killing In The Name" (#25 February '93) is the more well-known and got more radio airplay, including BBC Radio 1 not realising it would need to be censored the first time it hit the Top 40, but "Bullet" was the one people bought back in 1993.

Kingmaker have a decent #15 with "Ten Years Asleep" but it would be their last record in the Top 20. The problems started with record label interference, followed by a laborious approach to deciding on the best tracks to make up an album that saw them completely miss out on the explosion of early Britpop. By the time they were ready, the world of guitar-based pop had moved on.

Shabba Ranks with Maxi Priest take a #8 with "Housecall", dancehall/R&B fusion. It took that position from Utah Saints' "Believe In Me", the boys off doing their own thing as if the house boom of the late '80s had continued as-is until devouring all other forms of music. Sadly it had not, as 2 Unlimited's "Tribal Dance" (#4 May '93) is ready to demonstrate with its stadium-baiting co-opting of hip house.

It didn't take long for the reggae summer to spread beyond pure reggae and dancehall into fusion, or for it to spread beyond Jamaican artists (or at least those trying to be as authentic as possible). Swedish quartet Ace of Base enter the Top 40 at the start of May with "All That She Wants" and two weeks later they were at #1.

The obvious suggestions of "reggae as if performed by ABBA" were made in reviews of the time, but I can't say they're entirely uncalled for. The lyrics have that same read-between-the-lines quality of sadness to them, and there's the occasional melancholic note to the sound.

Not to be confused with Doctor Spin, American rockers Spin Doctors reach #3 in June with "Two Princes", one of those huge hits that the band never quite managed to equal, although they did get a few other records in the Top 40. I do wonder whether an aggressive re-recording of "Modern Life Is Rubbish" aimed at the US market might have ended up sounding quite a bit like this in places.

House of Pain's "Jump Around" has received a fair amount of modern attention from people wondering exactly where that saxophone screech sample came from, with people going to the level of detailed waveform analysis to try to pinpoint whether it was Prince's "Gett Off" or 1965 Junior Walker number "Shoot Your Shot" that provided the sound. Most sources reckon the latter, although it's far easier to spot the intro lifted near verbatim from Bob & Earl's "Harlem Shuffle". This was the record's second crack at the charts, a #32 back in 1992 followed by a #8 here.

If we're going to have a reggae summer, why not invite some older acts along to be a part of it? UB40 by this point had settled into their ever so slightly Casiotone interpretation of reggae fusion, covering Elvis Presley's "(I Can't Help) Falling In Love With You" in the style and spending two weeks at #1 over June.

Jamiroquai's "Blow Your Mind" enters at its peak of #12 at the end of May, appealingly squelchy and a little reminiscent of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" in places. I never appreciated them much back in the day, but I'm now thinking there's yet another band whose work I need to add to the listening backlog.

Green Jelly's comedy hard rock record "Three Little Pigs" goes to #5 that same week and hangs around in the Top 40 for seven weeks. If the notion of comedy hard rock sounds somewhat wearing then yes, it is.

Getting back to those records that seemed to be absolutely everywhere for most of the decade, Haddaway's "What Is Love" peaked at #2 late in June. The singer was from Trinidad but both the song and production came from Germany, explaining the slick Eurodance result.

It was kept from the top spot by Gabrielle's "Dreams" (#1 June '93). It reminds me a lot of "Fast Car", so it's no great surprise to find that the original version circulated to clubs included a sample of that record, although it couldn't be cleared for the public release. Quite a position for a song originally written in response to the singer being told she'd never go further than performing Luther Vandross covers in a small club.

After the sprawling "Generation Terrorists", the Manic Street Preachers recorded the comparatively svelte "Gold Against The Soul" with its 43-minute runtime spread across just ten tracks. The less abrasive and somewhat less single-minded nature of the album saw it written off as a bit rubbish compared to its predecessor and successor, although it has seen somewhat of a rehabilitation in recent years. Lead single "From Despair To Where" reached #25. Ever a lover of the underdog, I spent a lot of time listening to it in my university years.

Few names are more evocative of the Reggae Summer than those of Chaka Demus & Pliers, often in a somewhat mocking sense. "Tease Me" is their first UK hit, peaking at #3 in early July. I'm thinking it's a little unfair writing them off as a one-reference joke, since beneath the the surface is the kind of studied authenticity you'd expect from two guys who've worked with a Who's Who of Jamaican reggae production. Sure, they had a sense of fun about it but then what do you think the Pioneers were doing using a record to bemoan losing all their money down at Caymanas Park... again?

There's a background layer of soft rock with Sting's "Fields of Gold" at #16 and Rod Stewart's "Have I Told You Lately" going to #5. There's also a moment of me wondering whether I have any memory at all of my teenage years because "West End Girls" (#11 June '93) is yet another early East 17 track I find myself quite liking. Yes, they're working with good source material, but the treatment carries enough similarities to "Deep" that I fear it's actually Brian Harvey and the boys I'm enjoying listening to here.

Back on to safer ground as 4 Non Blondes hit #2 in mid-July with "What's Up?", the song which noticeably does not feature the phrase "what's up" anywhere in its lyrics. It was considered that a more accurate title might invite confusion with Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On". A #53 for October's "Spaceman" saves them from being one-hit wonders in the technical sense but... yeah. People couldn't seem to work out whether this was great or terrible. I always quite liked it, which is probably not a favourable data point.

Madonna's "Rain" goes straight in at its peak of #7. It's brooding and not shy of throwing in a few minor chords, and if you think that sounds like the recipe for some solid gothic music then Rosetta Stone certainly agreed with their version from 2000. You may be able to guess from this aside which one I'm more familiar with.

Back in 1993 it's a summer of big hits dominating the charts, and the first of these to reach the Top 40 is Urban Cookie Collective's "The Key The Secret", although it took until August for it to hit its #2 peak. The home-grown Eurodance number was a big club hit, and even a discovery that the main hook repeated that of Glam's "House Party" was resolved amicably.

Meanwhile, Take That's "Pray" went to #1 in mid-July, giving them their first chart-topper. At least I still dislike this one just as much as I remember doing all those years ago. Forcing myself all the way through it makes my teeth itch, not least because there's nothing I can say is objectively bad. I'm not sure I can even say it's bland, certainly not in the way that the Rollers or Showaddywaddy so aggressively aimed for the middle of the road. I might be forced to do the impossible for a Man On The Internet and accept that there's nothing wrong with it, it's just not aimed at me.

More aimed at me is the No More Brothers' remix of "Living On My Own", referencing bits of "Radio Ga-Ga" as it it turns Freddie Mercury's tilt at Italo disco into house. It went to #1 in August and stayed there for two weeks, losing the position to Culture Beat's "Mr Vain", another one of those slick Eurodance numbers.

If the dance output of German producers sounds far from the notion of a reggae summer, note Bitty McLean's cover of "It Keeps Rainin' (Tears From My Eyes)" reaching #2 at the end of August. Please do, as it's rather enjoyable, including a little dub section two thirds of the way through.

Billy Joel is one position below with "The River of Dreams". There's the usual smattering of Janet Jackson and Whitney Houston. Down at #21 are Cypress Hill with "Insane In The Brain", a diss track which took a lot of production influence from "Jump Around", including another controversial pitched-up screech. The popular belief is that it's a sample of a horse from Mel and Tim's "Good Guys Only Win In The Movies", but DJ Muggs himself denies this. There is however some conjecture that this denial itself is covering for an uncleared sample, or that Muggs used it and forgot where it came from after smoking a lot of the thing Cypress Hill were quite famous for smoking.

UB40's "Higher Ground" took #8 in mid-August, with Mariah Carey's "Dreamlover" reaching #9 at the end of the month. Further down the chart are the Pogues with "Tuesday Morning" at #18. Shane MacGowan had been dropped by the band in 1991 for drug and alcohol related problems, resulting in a band that was somewhat less raucous and ramshackle in nature. Apache Indian's "Nuff Vibes" EP goes to #5 and gives us "Boom Shack-A-Lak" as its first track.

I've said that I prefer the plaintive original of "I Will Always Love You" over the gigantic #1 version, but Sarah Washington makes an intriguing case for taking it in the other direction with a version on top of a house backbeat. It made #12 in mid-August.

SWV reached #3 in September with their debut single, "Right Here". The initials standing for Sisters With Voices, Cheryl "Coko" Gamble, Tamara "Taj" George, and Leanne "Lelee" Lyons had started out as a gospel group before transitioning to R&B.

Oddly for a Tina Turner household, I don't think I recall ever hearing her version of "Disco Inferno" (#12 August '93). Perhaps including a house remix from the Beatmasters on copies of the 12" and CD variants was considered sacrilegious enough to skip the track. Or maybe we never had that album. Or perhaps my memory is just that bad, after all I'm still wrestling with how much of early East 17 is kinda OK, really.

"Ace of Spades" has one of its many spells in the Top 40, going to #23 helped along by a new CCN remix sticking a kickdrum under it. Moby hits #21 with "Move", a track mashing up Italo house piano with an ambient techno background.

James are at #18 with "Sometimes", and comparing it to this year's efforts from Blur and Suede you can see how much it's less a case of them becoming a Britpop band than Britpop happening to land where they already were.

While SBK had been pushing for Blur to record with Butch Vig, Nirvana had decided that "Nevermind" had been a bit too radio-friendly and for their next album they wanted to record something more abrasive. They wanted Steve Albini to produce, citing his work on the Pixie's "Surfer Rosa" and the Breeders' "Pod". Albini was not a fan, but saw the band as being in the same kind of jam with record company demands as the smaller acts he worked with, and agreed to produce third album "In Utero".

Not that the lack of radio-friendliness did them any harm. "Heart Shaped Box" went to #5 in September, and the album was a staple of student CD collections even in the early 2000s.

Another such staple was Radiohead's "OK Computer", an album so ubiquitous that I know someone whose collection at the time totalled two CDs and half of them were "OK Computer". He has no memory of buying it. It's possible this is our generation's version of "War Of The Worlds" and the album was simply snuck into student dorms whenever anyone was careless enough to leave their door open and unattended.

(A lesson learnt quickly; even if you didn't get your laptop and credit card nicked by a local ne'er-do-well or gain an unexpected copy of "OK Computer", pranks were rife. We once removed every item of furniture from a hallmate's room, stashing it in storage cupboards and the shared bathroom, then made a line of all his shoes across the bare carpet. He had about eight pairs. Who brings that many shoes to university?)

"OK Computer" is somewhat in the future from this discussion, but first album "Pablo Honey" and its lead single "Creep" are not. It went to #7 in September and spent eight weeks in the Top 40. The band became utterly fed up with it and audiences demanding they play a song they felt didn't represent their musical direction and was sophomoric in its lyrics.

Not that it stopped any of us from still enjoying it. I recall one evening where a student band protested about being excluded from a union line-up by setting up their instruments outside the doors and serenading the queue by repeatedly playing "Creep". Evidently they were less fed up with playing it over and over than York, Greenwood et. al. were.

Pet Shop Boys did for "Go West" (#2 September '93) what they had done for "Always On My Mind". It started out with a performance they gave for an AIDS charity event at the Haçienda, although Neil Tennant didn't remember the lyrics until they decided to cut it as a single. You can't really go more kitchen sink than the Village People went originally, so instead the Boys strip the song all the way back to its Pachelbel's Canon underpinnings.

Chaka Demus and Pliers keep that rainy summer going on "She Don't Let Nobody" (#4 September '93). "Moving On Up" gives M People a #2 toward the end of the month.

Lording it over all of these are DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince with two weeks at #1 for "Boom! Shake The Room". Yeah, utterly everywhere at the time. The jokey lyrics and general PG-rating nature belie that this is a lot closer to serious hip-hop than anything else to have made the pop crossover. Compare Cypress Hill's "When The Shit Goes Down" (#19 September '93), rather more laid-back and rather less child-friendly of lyric, but there's less distance between these two than there is between them and, say, "U Can't Touch This".

Of the early '90s R&B girl groups, none seemed to achieve quite so much mindshare as Eternal. They were put together by manager Oliver Smallman, patterned after the success of En Vogue. Sisters Easther and Vernie Bennett were found in a nightclub, they then found Louise Nurding, who brought in her friend Kéllé Bryan. "Stay" (#4 October '93) is their first out of the gate. You can hear some of the same approach, including the halting and partially a cappella introduction but the production is a bit warmer and softer. It's not that far off the Motown-influenced sound of early Take That, so it's no surprise Eternal also ended up on my list of things that were heard from the other side of the plasterboard.

Speaking of which, Take That become the latest band to record with a '60s icon, bringing Lulu on board for a cover of disco classic "Relight My Fire". It is too much for the foundations, and not in the good Elvis way with that farty trumpet off in the corner. Disco had a tendency toward over-ornamentation, the '90s boy band sound also has a similar tendency toward over-ornamentation, and when they're both applied to the same record the result is the attic floor collapses and you find yourself drowning in baubles. The joists just aren't designed for that kind of load. Not that anyone else seemed to care. It was another #1 for the band.

It enters the Top 40 the same week as the song which deposes it from that throne and then stays there for seven weeks. Meat Loaf's "I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)". You know you're into something a bit ridiculous when even the most common single edit is 7:48.

We've not heard from Meat Loaf in a while. Following his bust-up with Jim Steinman and disappointing sales for "Midnight At The Lost and Found", the singer went bankrupt in 1983. The following year he moved to the UK, recording here and there, but spending most of his time touring.

At the end of the decade he buried the hatchet with Steinman and the two started working on a project they'd first worked on in 1978, a sequel to "Bat Out Of Hell". By the time recording started in 1991, the project was seen as a bad joke. Take a washed-up musician and attempt to revive his career with an album of the kind of bombastic mini-operas at radio-unfriendly lengths that had last sold in the late 1970s.

What this perhaps missed is the changes that had taken place between 1978 and 1993. Steinman's songs were perfectly suited to the by now quite mature medium of music video, and Michael Bay provided a suitably dramatic one featuring a police chase, an abandoned castle and references to "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Phantom of the Opera". Also motorcycle stunts and a pretty lady.

The other was the people who'd originally bought "Bat Out Of Hell" back in late 1977, now middle-aged and left behind by nearly everything that had happened in pop music since 1986. Where even your favourite songs were getting house mixes, here was an album of old-fashioned bombastic rock that sounded fantastic on your new CD player, with not a 909 kick in sight. "Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell" sold like crazy, along with its singles. We even had the VHS tape collecting the videos for its three singles.

Further down the charts things remain settled. The Lemonheads have a #14 with "Into Your Arms", an enjoyable bit of power pop. Iron Maiden see #9 with a live version of 1982's "Hallowed Be Thy Name", along with three other live tracks on the CD single. (The 7" is in red vinyl and comes with a poster, but all you get is the title track and the live version of "Wrathchild" on the flip)

The Prodigy are working on a new album, and they trail it with "One Love" (#8 October '93). Somehow they get away with ignoring the commercial death of rave by sheer force of will, although the group were already starting to process their reactions to both the commercialisation of the genre and the increasingly strong police response to raves.

Cappella's "U Got 2 Let The Music" hits #2 at the end of October, kept off the top by Meat Loaf despite reaching the top in several countries across Europe. Reviews from the time suggest a certain sense of weariness with this sort of Eurodance thing, describing it mostly in technical terms and a tired acknowledgement that it was likely to land somewhere high up the charts.

Björk's "Play Dead" with David Arnold was a breakthrough at #12 after a #36 for "Human Behaviour" and a #29 for "Venus As A Boy" earlier in the year. From the soundtrack of "The Young Americans", those strings are instantly recognisable.

October 1993 also saw the broadcast of Red Dwarf VI. This was the one where the comedy sci-fi series crossed over into mainstream appeal, with "Gunmen of the Apocalypse" winning an Emmy. Also the one that all but the most contrary of fans reckon as "the last good one", although it can be in somewhat grudging tones if, like me, you're one of the people who think the show was at its best in the stark, melancholy days of "Waiting for Godot in space" before the third series retool.

The BBC realised that Red Dwarf was worth exploiting and started putting out the previous series on VHS, concluded in late 1994 by a collection of out-takes from series 4-6, "Smeg Ups". With all this interest in the show, Danny John-Jules re-recorded "Tongue Tied" in character as The Cat, although it wasn't an official BBC production. The song was originally from Grant and Naylor's radio series "Son of Cliché" that had included the "Dave Hollins: Space Cadet" sketch which inspired Red Dwarf, and had made it to TV in 1988's Red Dwarf II episode "Parallel Universe". As a physical single you could buy, it made it to #17.

Bryan Adams gets to experience what it's like to miss out on #1 thanks to one of those long-lived chart-toppers with "Please Forgive Me" at #2 in late October. It's a little bit "more of the same" as a big romantic ballad with soft/loud dynamics.

Phil Collins' plea to hear "Both Sides of the Story" in situations of conflict sees him at #7. Further down the chart, the Levellers' "This Garden" (#12 October '93) is a bit of a stew of ideas that never quite fit together successfully. Then at #17 in early November are Aerosmith with "Cryin'". Album "Get A Grip" was their commercial peak, and one I spent a lot of time listening to. Apparently "Cryin'" was their attempt to take the basic ingredients of a country record and make it their own. I can see it.

Leftfield team up with John Lydon for "Open Up" (#13 November '93). The progressive house group provide a backdrop for Lydon to sing about disillusionment with Hollywood. If you prefer things a little more ambient, the Orb's reissue of 1990's "Little Fluffy Clouds" is at #10.

James' "Laid" makes only #25 and three weeks in the Top 40, odd for how well-known it is now. The band originally considered it a throwaway, which may explain lyrics that some critics have considered rather graceless. The line "she only comes when she's on top" had to be adjusted for more sensitive audiences when it was released in the US.

No such concerns for Guns 'n' Roses with their version of the Dead Boys "Ain't It Fun" (#9 November '93) from covers album "The Spaghetti Incident?", preserving the line "Ain't it fun when you tell her she's just a cunt" in the third verse. The band was increasingly unstable by this point, the album title itself coming from a moment in the court case brought by original drummer Steven Adler after being fired.

Janet Jackson tried the big piano ballad with "Again" (#6 November '93), a record in search of a Disney film. It was used on Jackson's own "Poetic Justice", but that is neither animated nor features any cute animal sidekicks. Also it was Columbia/Sony.

Pub quiz time as we name one of the other Elton John and Kiki Dee duets to chart in the Top 40, "True Love" at #2. (The other other one is "Bite Your Lip" b/w "Chicago", #28 in June 1977). From a 1993 album of duets, it's nowhere near as fun as the version of "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" (#7 February '94) with RuPaul featured on the same album.

Another Ben Liebrand remix saw the Doobie Brothers' 1973 song "Long Train Runnin'" at #7, while the Bee Gees hit #4 in mid-December with "For Whom The Bell Tolls". It sounds decently current, although I say so in terms of the guitar-based bands. We're not getting breakbeats under it or anything.

December is a busy month in the charts. We get a few older records taking solid positions; the Village People's "YMCA" at #12 leading into the month, Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "The Power Of Love" at #10, and even "Bat Out Of Hell" taking #8 in the wake of all the people buying the sequel. Prince's 1981 "Controversy" takes #5 off the back of a new Greatest Hits compilation.

Even Frank Sinatra has a hit, although it's on the double A-side of U2's "Stay (Faraway So Close)", as "I've Got You Under My Skin" (#4 December '93), taken from Sinatra's 1993 "Duets" album. Evidently releasing such a thing was the spirit of the age. Some ire was drawn for none of these being actual duets in the traditional sense; Sinatra performed his vocal lines alone and then the end result was assembled digitally.

Aladdin is the big Disney film for 1993, and it's no surprise Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle take #12 with the film's big love number "A Whole New World". Compare with that Janet Jackson record to see my point there. Or Dina Carroll's "The Perfect Year" (#5 January '94), covering much the same musical themes.

Hip-hop puts up a decent chart showing. Dre produces on Snoop Doggy Dogg's "Who Am I (What's My Name)" (#20 November '93), revelling in the same Funkadelic sample as "Fuck Wit' Dre Day". Cypress Hill hit #15 with "I Ain't Goin' Out Like That". At least this time the sampled screech is clearly a saxophone and we don't need to bring in the horse detectives. Ice-T's brooding "That's How I'm Livin'" goes to #19 in the middle of December.

Pet Shop Boys have Beatmasters produce a remix of Lightning Seeds-esque "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind Of Thing" (#13 December '93) for its single release. It's a lot of fun. Björk's "Big Time Sensuality" is similarly fun, going to #17 at the start of the month.

I can only ignore December's Christmas #1 battle for so long, though. East 17's entry is "It's Alright", released as four different mixes of the same song. A little of the boy band glitter is starting to show through but it's still satisfyingly punchy. This is the first one I remember hearing at the time and very much not liking, which is mostly that shouty variant of the chorus. It made it to #3, although that took until January.

Unfortunately, this is the point at which I run out of other records. Taking #1 from Meat Loaf at the start of December is Mr Blobby, with "Mr Blobby". I'm not going to link to it, out of basic decency. You know how to find it if you need to.

How could a loving god allow such things to happen?

It goes something like this. Noel Edmonds started out as a newsreader on Radio Luxembourg in 1968, before moving to BBC Radio 1 the following year and gradually working his way to the prestigious Breakfast Show. This got him appearances on Top of the Pops, which expanded into a run on the original Top Gear and 1970s Saturday morning staple Multi-Coloured Swap Shop.

This was followed by a Saturday evening light entertainment show, The Late Late Breakfast Show. This ended on ignominious terms in 1986, when lax attitudes to safety from the BBC (a problem that would repeatedly dog Top Gear in later years) caused the death of a volunteer. Edmonds resigned immediately from the show, although continued to present quiz show Telly Addicts - a staple of our weekday evening viewing.

In 1988 he returned to Saturday evening variety with the Saturday Roadshow. This was a moderate success, giving Edmonds the opportunity to pitch a format he thought would be more than just a moderate success. This was Noel's House Party. It would take some of the more popular elements of Saturday Roadshow such as the gunge tank and parent-child quiz "Wait 'til I Get You Home", and surround them with the conceit this was all taking place in Noel's massive house in the village of Crinkley Bottom.

The retool did exactly what Edmonds had hoped. It was near-universal viewing in its peak years, sitting there as a family wondering if it would be your house to feature the hidden cameras as part of the show's "NTV" segment, in which the show would switch to a live broadcast from the "lucky" family and ask them to give some kind of performance.

One of the features carried forward from Saturday Roadshow was the "Gotcha Oscars", renamed to simply "Gotcha" once the Academy of said awards noticed the name. This involved playing a practical joke on a celebrity, filming it, then inviting them on the show to cringe at their reactions and receive a completely-unrelated-to-the-Academy-awards tchotchke.

For the second series in 1992, someone realised that given how often children's television went wrong live on air (cf. Blue Peter and its many misadventures over the years with urinating elephants, escaping kangaroos and border collie-on-robot fights) it would make an excellent cover story for extended pranks. Even better, the prevalence of puppets and costumed characters on such shows would give an ideal opportunity for Edmonds to hide inside such a costume for the reveal that this was all a joke.

Thus into the scene strode the latex golem himself. Mr Blobby was seven feet tall, pink with yellow spots, and designed with one purpose: be the single most unprofessional entity in (fictional) children's television presenting. The rubber titan would careen around sets knocking things over, utter only the nonsensical "blobby blobby blobby!" by way of communication, and devour the souls of the innocent.

He was an instant hit. Our national love of things which are endearingly terrible simply wasn't ready for such a powerful foam antagonist. Blobby remains to this day one of those odd national shibboleths, as British as putting on the tea or arguing about how "scone" is pronounced. (The correct answer is, of course, "aaargh the pink terror has been released, he stalks the night, please save us")

It was perhaps inevitable that in a time of novelty pop raps he would be given his own record. There is indeed a short pop rap section, although the bulk of it is lightweight Eurodance with an emphasis on the lightweight. Jeremy Clarkson drove him on in a (predictably) pink car for the video, giving a bemused look to camera as the chaos elemental blunders away to cause... well, chaos.

Blobby was at #1 for a week before Take That knocked him off with "Babe", giving them a record for three consecutive singles going straight in at #1. It's a bit of a soporific effort, and so a week later Blobby returned to claim what he viewed as rightfully his. Possibly. We've lived with the terror for several decades by this point, it's difficult to ascertain exactly what his motives are.

Still, this left what is often popularly described as the worst record ever made as Christmas #1, which is a little harsh as it's not even the worst UK Christmas #1. Perhaps the lesson here is that if you create a single as a joke and aim it lowbrow enough that even young children find it funny, in an era where young children can go to Woolworths and buy it with their pocket money, you're never going to do that badly out of it.