Latest Articles
Let’s Talk About Sets, Baby! The Top 10 Stages of Year Zero
The ten most spectacular stage sets of the Year Zero era ranked – where’s your favourite?
Great Bowls of Fire! A Short History of Flambeaux in Top of the Pops, part one: Flambeaux – First Blood
Ever wondered which artists have stood on the Top of the Pops stage alongside roaring, primal flame? Then read the first part of this illuminating feature…
Great Bowls of Fire! A Short History of Flambeaux in Top of the Pops, part two: Suede In Flame!
If anyone thought the arrival of Ric Blaxill’s new regime was going to signal the end of the flambeau, they were wrong…
Introduction
In 1991, the almost unthinkable happened. In an act of wanton carnage known subsequently as Year Zero, the BBC ditched everything people loved about the latest incarnation of its flagship music show Top of the Pops: the cosy studio, the avuncular Radio 1 DJ presenters, the ‘don’t even think about singing live’ policy and even Paul Hardcastle’s cool theme music, replacing them with… well, pretty much the opposite in every respect. Cavernous sets that looked permanently half-empty, fresh new faces no-one recognized, a mandate to provide live vocals even for samples and a theme tune that made Hardcastle’s The Wizard sound like Whole Lotta Love.
Though to be fair the new title sequence, filmed at Kew Steam Museum, was a slight improvement – especially if you liked Cornish cycle beam engines.
But it wasn’t until thirty years later, when BBC Four started broadcasting the Year Zero shows as part of its marathon repeat run of every surviving Top of the Pops episode (or at least the ones they could still get away with showing) that the absolutely unthinkable happened: I started writing about them. And I didn’t stop, until I’d written about all one hundred and twenty…
Dive straight in and read the reports. Or, since some of the early reports are a bit ‘work in progress’ you might wish to head for better examples, like Suede’s first show, the Top of the Pops Interplanetary Peace Summit or the late night edition that never was…
Top of the Pops: Reports from the Frontline of Year Zero 