With Adam back in action and pretty much playing wayward gigs for anyone who'll have him it's high time his big production number for his big solo hit was revisited. So first there's some girls inventing vogueing in yellow taffeta - Zoo? It's not clear - the presence of a small harp suggesting some sort of angels motif. Then it's full-on regency bawdiness, and then he previews future single Puss 'N Boots with the aid of big hats. And in the end, collective prancing in the round. It's the Citizen Kane of sub-Hot Gossip arm-swinging man and girls in variety dancing girl costumes, and it explains why accidental BBC bringer-down Georgina Baillie is in Ant's band these days.
The only other TOTP performance we can recall using more than one stage is Mick Jagger's spectacular studio-traversing solo spot for Let's Work, but the only instance of it we can find has been muted. Anyone?
3 comments:
Several points of interest here -
1) "Write it on a pound note"...sob sob, I miss those old crinklies. Certainly makes the song severely dated, just like "1999" by Prince or "She's So Modern" by the Boomtown Rats ('She's so 20th Century / she's so 1970's').
2) Love the way our Stu's miming for all he's worth, but you can hear him audibly slapping that pillar.
3) Slightly less than subtle edit at 2:14!
Earlier in 1982, Fun Boy Three and Bananarama used two stages, linked by a catwalk performing "It Ain't What You Do" - with each trio facing each other then coming together at the end.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doHQjoQmr1E
Mick Jagger muted? lol... whoever did that was doing us a favour - that song stank as did all his solo stuff of that time.
You can't really see it behind the TotP2 captions, but as I remember my Mum pointing out at the time, one of the maids in the Regency section actually drops a shoe while they're running around and has to try and pick it up later, which is why she's not quite with the other two when Adam runs to the next set. It's more visible in this copy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WQSlLnXwZs
I presume if it'd been a deliberate play on the song title they'd have made a bigger deal of it.
See also this odd performance from some other show where he seems to be tied to a plank in a room full of shaving foam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27Tj-Xo_eqI
Incidentally, there's a brief use of a second stage on Eric Idle's performance of 'Always Look on The Bright Side Of Life' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY0jeTTfSns
Brilliantly, my word verification is "podiums".
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