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What’s the Maddest Big Hit Single?

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I was listening to Kings of the Wild Frontier recently. I really like Adam and the Ants, but as I was listening to it, I was thinking “You know, this is a pretty mental song to have got to number two in the charts”. Turns out I’m not alone in thinking along these lines. Here’s Alexis Petridis in the Guardian talking about the greatest ever number 2 singles:

“The single that launched Adam and the Ants v2.0 remains one of history’s flat-out weirdest bids for screamy teen stardom: the lyrics beckon new fans in – “a wild nobility, we are the family” – set to a cacophony of thunderous drums, shouting, whooping, feedback and Duane Eddy-style guitar. It is unbelievably exciting.”

It certainly is. It’s also unbelievably mental. In fact, I reckon it may be the maddest thing ever to reach the Top 5 of the charts, although I am willing to consider alternative suggestions. Over to you.

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Comments

    • I was watching some American youths react to Stand And Deliver just this week (such things come up randomly on YouTube) who watched it without the benefit of any context and it made me realise how bizarre and disparate its many elements actually are, despite the fact that when it came out, to my ears, it was such an obvious “tilt at a number one” style distillation of all he’d been doing from the charging drums to the Dandy Highwayman costume to “the devil take your stereo” awareness right through to the Da Diddley Qua Qua outro.
      I remember it being introduced as n TOTP something along the lines of “well of course it’s straight in at number one”..

        • To my mind, PC is where he goes over the top to “I’m so big I can get this to number one” status.
          SAD incorporates elements of every previous Ant hit in it’s so eagerness to please, whereas PC – big push Diana Dors video aside – makes the statement that I can put out (“You mean nick” – R**f H****s) a song with this time signature and you will buy it regardless. (It’s reminiscent of The Police, at the height of their fame, coming back with Invisible Sun as a lead single. We can do this for we are The Police..)

        • I must be weird because I thought both singles were incredibly commercial. In fact that applies to a number of songs mentioned here, this isn’t the boring US charts, it is the UK charts where pretty much anything goes.

          • I’m with Dai. I was in my early teens during the Ants’ pomp and the costumes led everyone at my school to dismiss them as a kids’ band. In retrospect I can hear the hits as classic pop, very cleverly put together, but it wouldn’t occur to me to think of them as weird.

  3. Flat Beat by Mr Oizo takes some beating. Just listen to it – that thing went to number 1.

    The record which doesn’t seem weird now because it’s (rightly) accepted as an absolute classic but which is very weird if you try to describe it to someone who’s never heard it before is Born Slippy.

    Nearly 8 minutes long, spoken word, stream of consciousness poetry over a bunch of synths and pulverising beats. Always going to be a massive hit, clearly, Peaked at 2, has a decent shout to being the song of the entire decade.

  9. I feel like Get Ur Freak On by Missy Elliott belongs on this list. It’s been so influential that it doesn’t stand out like it originally did. It stopped time when I first heard it. Nothing like anything else thus far.

  14. First song that came to mind for me is Dire Straits Private Investigations. The single edit is nearly six minutes long and it doesn’t have a chorus. Got to number two in the UK hit parade (number one in Belgium). I reckon the late 70’s and early 80’s were a bit of a weird time for the charts

  15. ‘See Emily Play’ by The Pink Floyd.

    As an aside, on the excellent ’45cat’ website they were wondering if it was the most sought after/valuable Top 10 UK hit of all time. Going rate, £100?

  16. “Ghosts” by Japan must surely be on this list, a top 5 hit during their short imperial phase…

    … and I humbly submit that both “Kiss” and “Sign O’ The Times” by Prince are objectively weird megahits if you try and listen to them with fresh ears…

  17. Following on from the recent Gary Numan thread, the great man has a couple of contenders.

    First, I give you Cars, a big hit with no chorus and no lyrics after the 1:30 mark, with most of the song still to go.

    Also, Are ‘Friends’ Electric? Hey, pop kids, here’s a No 1 about a robot prostitute!

  18. My first thoughts were Ghosts by Japan and O Superman by Laurie Anderson, both already mentioned. Another hit single I’ve always thought of as pretty bonkers is Tusk by Fleetwood Mac, with its marching band, its drum solo and its one word chorus of “Tusk!”.

  19. If we’re excluding “Happy Talk” by Captain Sensible, “Shaddap You Face” by Joe Dolce and “Being Boiled” by the Human League (clearly something going on in the early 1980s) and “French Kiss” by Lil Louis, then how about this, as the most mental hit single of all time

  20. Mouldy Old Dough – Two barrel room pianos, played in sync by a son and elderly-ish mother.

    Only You by The Flying Pickets
    Money by The Flying Lizards (no relation).

    Telephone Man by Meri Wilson

  21. Chuck Berry and My Ding-a-Ling. Yes. Chuck Berry!!!! The man who invented the rock riff, whose lyrics are poetry. Here, singing live, a children’s ditty about his penis. So much weird is going on it doesn’t bear thinking about. Number one in the UK!

  26. Taking the OP a bit too literally perhaps, but “The Return of the Los Palmas 7” from Madness was a straightforward easy-listening instrumental apart from the signature sax and Suggs saying “Waiter!”.
    If it wasn’t them, it would have been nowhere near the charts.

    • Any excuse for more Otway posting … and this one was the B-Side
      Beware of the Flowers (Cos I’m Sure They’re Gonna Get You … Yeah)

      According to a BBC Poll in 2000 it is the 7th greatest lyric of all time, ever, in the world

  29. The Goodmen – Give It Up Basically sounds like Blue Peter friendly bin-bashers “Stomp!” with some ravey whistling and shouting over it. Sampled by Simply Red on the more conventional Fairground.

    Radiohead – Paranoid Android. 6 minute + prog epic hits number 3 in 1997, not unexpectedly but still it’s not your everyday top 5 smash.

    Hot Chocolate – No Doubt About It. Pop disco hit about seeing a UFO.

  31. Not a really big hit, but a hit nonetheless.
    Was (Not Was) – Walk The Dinosaur.

    …………………………………………………………………….
    Enough of a hit to get them on TOTP. Sadly can’t find it on YouTube.
    Fairport Convention – Si Tu Dois Partir

    Bonzo Dog Band – I’m The Urban Spaceman
    Crazy World Of Arthur Brown – Fire
    Plastic Bertrand – Ca Plane Pour Moi

  34. Death Disco – PIL

    John Lydon singing/screaming about the death of his mother to the tune of Swan Lake.

    Ernie – Benny Hill

    A tale of lust, jealousy, animal cruelty and murder. A No1 smash in 1971.

    • I loved Tenpole Tudor at the time! This and Swords of a Thousand Men are terrific singles. Saw him playing live at a festival about 10 years ago and even in solo acoustic mode (I had feared the worst) he was great fun.

      • He still performs, in possibly the same stage garb as were the singles videoed in, if now threadbare and held together with patches and dragging yarns. as his guitar, a more battered acoustic than even willie Nelson’s Trigger. (Once he displays his formidable guitar style, you can see why it is so battered. ) Puts on an endearingly eccentric show.

  41. How about Rock me Amadeus by Falco? Massive hit, contains a lyric that sounds like (but isn’t) a very rude word and is entirely brilliant and completely barmy at the same time.

    Oh and Killer by Adamski popped into my head too. Perhaps not so weird when you consider rave culture at the time it came out but still, not entirely conventional.

    • I have a story about “Killer”… I was working with ZTT at the time (Seal’s record label, though at that time he was yet to release anything) and negotiations were ongoing between Adamski’s management (who were refusing point-blank to give Seal any kind of “featuring” credit), and Seal’s manager (who was insisting on equal credit.) Everyone knew ”Killer” would be a huge hit, and ZTT’s Jill Sinclair & Trevor Horn stepped in to tell Seal to just do it without credit, basically saying “no-one will remember the pasty white guy behind the keyboards, EVERYONE is going to remember the 6’6” black god at the microphone…” (and so it proved…)

  42. Collective madness. People weeping for someone they’d never met. Pre-orders in the millions worldwide. We need a song for Princess Di, lads! Bernie and Elton: “Let’s just rewrite one we’ve already done.”

    This song is the best-selling single in American chart history; it’s also the highest-selling single since charts began in the 1950s. In the UK alone, it sold 5.4 million copies and stayed at number 1 for 5 weeks. At the time, I remember witnessing someone attempting to buy 4 copies, only to be told the shop was limiting people to 3.

    Unlike Band Aid, I’m willing to bet that no one has played this or heard it on the radio since, well, 1997:

  43. Having reviewed all of the above, it’s still Flat Beat, which was an actual UK number one.

    Five and a half minutes of little more than repeated variations on the same (admittedly rad) bassline. No vocals, no chorus, no drops. It sounds like the preset on a keyboard. For five and a half minutes.

    Recorded in under two hours by an act that came from nowhere and swiftly retreated back there. Originally included as a bonus track on the album that spawned it, because it’s barely a song at all.

    Three years after release it was selected in the top 200 songs of all time by Q magazine and to this day it’s semi-regularly cited as a foundational text for Dubstep.

    None of this makes any sense. It makes Doop look like When The Music’s Over.

  46. Surely just about any so-called novelty hit would make the list (as many mentioned above would show) – so don’t forget Father Abraham & the Smurfs, Captain Beaky et al

    • Yes. I was just thinking that several of the above-mentioned are just novelty hits. In the same category as Mouldy Old Dough, I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman, Hev Yew Gotta Loight, Boy?, Hole In The Ground, Star Trekking etc. etc.

  49. This wonderful kwela track must have stood out in 1956.

    In New Zealand Tom Hark went to number one on the Lever Hit Parade.

    I heard that it’s been played to bits at sporting events.

    In 1949 Anton Karas had a mega-global hit with this tune from the Orson Welles movie.

    He became a global superstar! Wiki tells the story rather well…

    Karas disliked the glamour, and his soundtrack proved to be an enduring one-hit wonder. He later stated, “I never was a star, and never felt like one. It is because of that film that I was pushed from one place to the other … My only desire was to be back home again.”[citation needed] He toured again in 1951, travelling to Montreal and Las Vegas, followed by other tours, including Japan in 1962, 1969 and 1972, where he performed for Emperor Hirohito.

    In 1953 Karas opened a heuriger or wine bar in Vienna he named Zum Dritten Mann.[7] It became fashionable among cinema celebrities including Orson Welles, Gina Lollobrigida, Curd Jürgens, Hans Moser, Paul Hörbiger, Marika Rökk and Johannes Heesters, thereby becoming a tourist attraction. He was not satisfied, as he preferred to perform for locals who would understand him, his language and music.

  50. This quirky gem from Dillinger topped the charts in the Netherlands.

    @LOCUST will know this Swedish floorfiller….

    There’s an an elusive, mysterious quality about this song by IT’S IMMATERIAL which always hits the spot for me.

    • That is a wistful, beautiful number, one of my very favourites, and not ‘mad’ in any way, though their only hit reaching no 18. Became an unlikely Ibiza smash in the early years.

    • But I doubt that In kommer Gösta was high in any chart, ever. The album won a Swedish Grammy (“Grammis”) for “Best production by a group”, but did it actually sell well? I can’t find any evidence of that. It was cult, it was an in-joke in certain progg crowds, but surely didn’t take up any space at Svensktoppen…?

      I like it, but I prefer Henning i sin presenning by them:

      (It’s like Punk didn’t need to happen…)

        • @Kaisfatdad, this is quite a can of worms, because there are so many lists to consider, and the least important one (culturally) is actually the official sales statistics chart that is the so called Sverigetopplistan (previous names Topplistan/Hitlistan).

          The ones people mean when they talk about charts are the different radio list programs over the year, with Svensktoppen being a constant that is still going. This has nothing to do with sales (though, naturally, to a degree this will overlap with sales of course), it’s always been voted on by the public, or rather a selected and rotating jury. By postcard, by phone, by forms sent to randomly selected people – the ways of voting has changed during the years, as have the rules about how Swedish the music had to be.
          A lot of dansband and schlager and visor and rather bland and conservative during especially the earlier versions of it, when the rules were stacked against pop music.
          But you also had the radio show Kvällstoppen(for a while), which was based on the official sales.

          The other big voted list radio show, which I remember fondly from my childhood, was Tio i Topp. Again, voting by the public through postcards and jury groups, but this one was open for all nationalities, not just Swedish music and artists.

          It ran from 1961 to 1974, when it was taken off the air after protests from the very political progg movement, declaring it too commercial.
          But the shut-down was an empty gesture, as they quickly started two new shows to replace it.

          Poporama was the list show, still votes on postcards from the listeners, new contenders every week trying to get on the list, the usual stuff. It ran from 1974 to 1984 (and I was a faithful listener, my finger hovering over the Rec button on my little cassette radio to make another mix tape).
          The second show, Discorama, didn’t have a list, it just played new music that weren’t quite as hit friendly as the ones on Poporama, but not in any way obscure.

          In 1984 they were cancelled for a new show called Tracks, which ran until 2010 (but I had bailed many years earlier). Trackslistan was again voted for by postcard, later phone, later still the internet. As teenagers in the 80s, this show was the one thing we connected over. There were other music shows that catered to less commercial stuff and different genres, but whatever kind of music you preferred on the side, Tracks was the one thing we all listened to. Poporama, Discorama and Tracks were all made by the legendary Kaj Kindvall, whose voice every Gen Z kid will recognize instantly.

          All of these lists, official or randomly selected, had weird stuff in them occasionally, but usually not at the top of the list.
          The strangest thing is probably the fact that in the official sales chart Frank Zappa’s Bobby Brown stayed at the top spot for 6 weeks in 1979…
          I don’t particularly like that one, so I’ll post a Swedish novelty hit from 1981 instead (6 weeks in the sales charts as well, and 10 weeks on Svensktoppen) called “Köppöbävisan” AKA “Fån’t ja en körv…” with the annoying dialectal chorus of “If I don’t get a hot dog I’m jumping into the river”:

          Written by a local school teacher and sung with kids from his class, it became a surprise hit nationwide…unfortunately.
          Give me Philemon Arthur and The Dung any day!

          • Thanks for that explanation @Locust. It certainly was complicated.

            There are probably books to be found that tell of the competition between the different charts in different countries. And then of course there is the USA which has different charts for different musical genres

            Your comment about people having their personal favourite music shows and what a statement that made who you were was so true in the UK too.

          • Thanks for that explanation @Locust. It certainly was complicated.

            There are probably books to be found that tell of the competition between the different charts in different countries. And then of course there is the USA which has different charts for different musical genres

            Your comment about people having their personal favourite music shows and what a statement that made who you were was so true in the UK too.

  52. Going back to the ‘maddest’ can we have a moment for Zig and Zag, childrens cult puppet heroes, doing 90s raggamuffin – or ‘zagamuffin’ Genuinely mad.

    Can I say also this video is wrong in many ways and has G=== Gl====r introducing the band.

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