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How was this not a huge hit?

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Just saw this terrific little song on a rerun of a Kenny Everett Video Show that first went out on 05/03 exactly 44 years ago

Any other candidates for long forgotten can’t miss hits that barely scraped the charts at best?

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Comments

  1. Being a Mod Revival band at the end of 1983 with a minor indie label may have hampered radio play and Top Of The Pops appearances. This one deserved a wider audience.
    The Gents – Revenge

  2. Re : “How was this not a huge hit?” – my guess is that it didn’t sell enough copies to put it on par with the other tunes that were on sale during the same period.

  5. Well, I don’t care much for any of those, but how was THIS never a hit? No 152 with a bullet back in 2000, for a breezy strum somewhere between the Lightning Seeds and the Electric Soft Parade.

    • Steve Wright played this to death trying to get it into the charts. Didn’t make it.

      It owes a lot to I Will Survive musically. I think it was his only serious stab at the UK charts though I believe he has written hits in Japan.

    • An artist that I have never really explored – the only track I know is “The Guitar Lesson”, which is brilliant, yet disturbing (and I admit that I only know that due to the Steven Wilson cover version)….

      • It certainly is a grim track however good a song it is @chrisf I’d recommend the Tender Pervert album as peak Momus. The first two more acoustic albums Circus Maximus and the Poison Boyfriend also feature some of his better songs. For me, he tailed off quite a bit after the fourth album Don’t Stop the Night but I’m sure his subsequent work has its fans. He’s a fascinating artist, very talented, smart and funny but I can’t help thinking that he sabotaged his potential broader appeal with his wilfully challenging work. His Brel interpretations Nicky and Don’t Leave are brilliant. I wish he’d done more.

    • I like Perfect Day and So Long, both hits here in Australia, but anything from else from the catalogue I’ve tried has been awful. For some reason I always thought they were German, and I could confidently detect a Germanic accent in the singing. My Wikipedia research has informed me that a) they are/he is English, b) the band’s name is pronounced Fischer Zed and c) it was a homophonic pun on ‘fish’s (h)ead’.

  11. The post begs the question – what makes a record a ‘hit’..? My first thought was that it is very different today, but I’m not so sure.

    Obviously it needs to get heard, and that used to mean getting it played on the radio or the TV. So many records were released and were never heard, and that happens to this day. Many will be works of genius, but we will probably never get to judge.

    The pirates were so influential in the 60s as everyone listened to them, and Ready Steady Go! was a huge, in modern parlance, ‘influencer’. Then I guess Radio 1 was hugely important and TOTP, but it had to be a hit already to get on there, although it undoubtedly pushed records up the charts. I’m sure radio still plays its part, but these days I assume it is social media driven as to whether you hear it.

    Distribution used to be a problem for some labels too. You had to go and buy the thing, and that depending on supply and stocks, not to mention having to buy them from a chart shop to make any difference…and we all know how that could be influenced. If it was out of stock, then you would likely buy something else that Saturday. Nowadays all you have to do is supply a link, so I assume demand will never outstrip supply, so it is even more important to get it heard/seen. This must give a huge advantage to established artists who have a following.

    • What defines a “hit”? I know some people used to say if it reaches the top 75 – but that seemed a bit broad to me.

      I’d say top 30 – based on good ol’ TOTP purism from the 70s because I think a Number 40 song isn’t a hit single, but a Number 30 song is. Top 10 counts as a smash hit.

      • When I was a nipper it was just the top 20, as brought to us by NME and Fluff on Pick of the Pops. Southend, where I was brought up, was a hotbed of showmen of one sort or another, and when I had a paper round I delivered several copies of their comic, The World’s Fair, which along with reviews of jukeboxes and one-arm bandits had a Top 100. This was probably juke box plays rather than sales, but it was a revelation nonetheless. All kinds of fascinating waxings were lurking in the lower reaches of that list, and I quickly learned that anything on the Stateside, Sue or London American labels among others was likely to be of interest. I would make a note of anything that sounded good and then go off and listen to it in Gilberts Record Shop. I hardly ever bought anything, but its was a good eduction in stuff you never heard on the radio.

        • The Indie charts in the NME used to be a good source of up ‘n’ coming acts because most of the time a successful indie act would move to a major label and be plastered all over Smash Hits and the like. Based on the permanent presence of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead!” by Bauhaus – I was certain they’d be ginormous. I was wrong.

          By the time we got to the mid-80s Stock Aitken Waterman”s PWL label began to dominate, so then we had Kylie, Jason, “Big Fun” and Sonia rubbing shoulders with Anal C*nt and Crass.

      • A good point. I always think of a hit as being something that becomes really popular and can even be independent of the charts. The Monkees Theme was never a hit single, and neither was Queen’s We Will Rock You, but I’m most of would think of them as ‘hits’.

        Even how the charts are compile has varied, and I think is different now in the world of streaming anyway. The US used to count radio plays as well (somehow!?), whereas here it was always just sales back in the day.

        • Paul McCartney said that he ended up not worrying too much about chart positions – he knew a record was a hit if he heard it being played from shops and cars as he walked down the street. Which is a very Macca-type thing to say.

          • Similarly, when I was having an CD* mastered in a studio, I knew end result was going to be good when the mastering engineer (on loan from Abbey Road) started to whistle the chorus of one of the songs while he went for a slash. I was in the kitchen next door, making us both a cuppa, at the time.

            (*) don’t worry, I didn’t play any instruments on it.

  12. My wife was into a virtually unknown indie rock band called The Championship in the 2000’s. They’re from Milwaukee. This song is from ‘Dance Casador’. Was never released as a single but the first time I heard it I instantly thought ‘this is a hit record’. I still do. I believe the singer was still a teenager when this was written/recorded.

  13. A quick search reveals a mention of this very video at the Hoffman forums, where the poster reveals the following:

    Backing Singers (left to right):
    1-2. Nina Carter (the future Mrs Rick Wakeman) and Jilly Johnson (the two performed/recorded as Blonde on Blonde).
    3. I think this may be the actor Clarke Peters (he also sang the deep backing vocals for Joan Armatrading’s ‘Love and Affection’ and Heatwave’s ‘Boogie Nights’, and appeared notably in TV’s The Professionals).
    4. Jill Sinclair (John’s sister and late Mrs Trevor Horn).
    5. Don’t recognise the girl on the right, any ideas?

    The mad conductor is the brilliant Richard O’Brien of the Rocky Horror Show.

  14. “Heroes”, one of arguably the three most iconic David Bowie singles, reached the lofty heights of 24 with a bullet in the UK chart.

    I won’t post the video…you probably know the song.

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