In the summer of ‘99, legendary BBC music show Top of the Pops relocated to Edinburgh for one night only.
Dozens of fortunate music fans descended on the city’s Revolution nightclub in Lothian Road on August 25 that year where they were treated to a smorgasbord of late ‘90s musical talent presented by Edinburgh's very own Gail Porter.
It was a break from the norm for the legendary televised chart show, which had barely left London for more than 30 years.
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The show, which was the only Scottish date of Top of the Pops’s eight-week UK roadshow to celebrate the Millennium, included a mixture of live studio performances and pre-recorded footage from popular acts of the era, such as Travis, Texas, Supergrass, Apollo 440, Binary Finary, TLC and former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell.
Binary Finary’s suitably-titled 1999 and fellow trance anthem Better Off Alone by DJ Jurgen feat. Alice Deejay was particularly well-received by the Revolution masses, as were the performances by homegrown acts Travis and Texas, who debuted Why Does It Always Rain On Me? and Summer Son respectively.
Top of the charts in the week leading up to the Edinburgh show was Geri Halliwell with Mi Chico Latino. The singer, formerly known as Ginger Spice, had launched her solo career a few months earlier.
Halliwell's song would spend one week at number one before being dethroned by Mambo No5 by Lou Bega.
Many of the performances from the Edinburgh show are available to watch online on YouTube and via the BBC Archive social media accounts.
Edinburgh was the first leg of the Top of the Pops mini tour, with Britain’s longest-running TV music show, which was normally filmed at London’s Elstree Studios, hosted in Brighton, Nottingham, Sheffield, Newcastle, Swansea, Liverpool and Birmingham before the end of the Millennium.
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Launched in 1964 at Manchester’s Dickensian Road Studios, Top of the Pops spent decades as the UK’s number one most popular TV music show, attracting a peak audience in the 1970s of more than 14 million viewers.
Despite a brief revival in viewing figures during the Britpop era of the 1990s, the show had hit a downward spiral by the early 2000s, with the number of people tuning in each week dropping to just 3 million.
A decision was made to axe the show in 2004, with the final episode of the record-breaking programme coming on July 30, 2006.
Top of the Pops 2 (TOTP2), which screened archive footage from the main show from down the years, continues to air. However, while repeats of TOTP2 are still shown on the BBC, no new shows have been produced since 2017.
Revolution nightclub in Edinburgh later became music venue HMV Picturehouse, but has since been converted into a Wetherspoon gastropub.
Top of the Pops full line-up for Edinburgh on August 25, 1999:
Apollo 440 - Stop The Rock (Music Event Performance)
Texas - Summer Son (Music Event Performance)
Supergrass - Moving (Music Event Performance)
Binary Finary - 1999 (Music Event Performance)
Hepburn - Bugs (Music Event Performance)
TLC - Pretty (Satellite link up)
Texas - Tell Me The Answer (Music Event Performance)
Better Off Alone - DJ Jurgen feat. Alice Deejay (Music Event Performance)
Supergrass - Mary (Music Event Performance)
Bran Van 3000 - Drinking in L.A. (Studio Performance)
Geri Halliwell - Mi Chico Latino (Music Event Performance)
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