This is a song that I don’t remember from the time, but I spotted this online recently, decided to discover more, and once again there was a rather interesting story about how all this was promoted, but ultimately failed. The first thing to say is that the singer is called Belinda, but like so many young antipodean chart-toppers of more recent years, you can call her Queen B.
Another thing to note is that she looked rather similar to Betty Boo, one of my favourite pop stars from the early-90s, as if there could be another. This song was called “Red Top Hot Shot” (although it’s also been credited as “Red Top Hot Shot (Beep Beep Beep)”), and this was rather catchy and rocky, it definitely had an “imagine if Betty Boo was the frontwoman of Transvision Vamp” feel to it, which is good.
There was a rather big publicity push for all this, could it be possible that she was going to be the first new big pop star of the 90s? There did seem to be an “this can’t fail” air around this. Along with the video, there were also some TV appearances. These included Gilbert’s Late, a show hosted by the weird Get Fresh alien puppet thing, and she even appeared as a guest on the TV-am sofa.
There were also interviews in magazines and newspapers including NME and the Evening Standard, where the vision for success had all been set out, and she even went as far as to say “this isn’t a silly fantasy, I know I’m going to be famous”. So when “Red Top Hot Shot” was finally released in February 1990, a huge amount of people would be eager to buy this and make that happen, wouldn’t they?
Well… this only reached no. 85, which clearly wasn’t what was expected, and must’ve been very disappointing for everyone. There just wasn’t enough interest. The response to this was to, er, not release any more singles under the Queen B name at all. Not much has been heard of Belinda since, but it seems that she briefly went on to be a member of early-90s indie band Daisy Chainsaw.
ADAM'S NOSTALGIC MEMORIES 