Falling short behind the Spice Girls in Christmas-week, but thrusting to number one for the new year… A funky ode to some sweet, yet salty, confectionary.
Chocolate Salty Balls (P.S. I Love You), by Chef (his 1st and only #1)
1 week, from 27th December 1998 – 3rd January 1999
Part-recipe, part funk-soul masterpiece… Could we argue that ‘Chocolate Salty Balls’ is the first and perhaps only true funk song to make number one in the UK? Naturally everyone came for the innuendo, but they stayed for the fact this is actually a great song, with a nasty funk riff. Plus, the voice is Isaac Hayes – soul, funk, Stax Records legend – becoming one of the oldest chart-topping artists, aged fifty-five.
In all honesty, these balls do be sounding delicious. Cinnamon, butter, brandy, vanilla, and chocolate (though, interestingly, no salt)… Grease up the cooking sheet, (Cause I hate when my balls stick)… Then pre-heat the oven to 350, And give that spoon a lick…! It all leads to a frenzied ending, in which Chef’s balls start to burn, and a piano takes a pounding like nothing we’ve heard since Jerry Lee Lewis was at number one.
If you’re going to do a novelty song – if you really must – then use records like this as your ‘How To’. Ridiculous innuendo, a genuinely good tune, and a proper singer that doesn’t mind taking the mickey out of themselves. Some might blanche at a soul legend like Hayes only making number one by growling Now suck on my balls! I am not one of those people. And it’s not like he’d come especially close in the previous three decades: a #10 in 1975 with ‘Disco Connection’, after a #4 in 1971 with the iconic ‘Theme from ‘Shaft’’.
Chef was of course a character in 1998’s breakout cartoon, ‘South Park’. I was slap-bang in the middle of the show’s target demographic, and the playground that year had been full of kids shouting ‘Oh my god, you killed Kenny!’ (though I wasn’t allowed to watch the show myself). ‘Chocolate Salty Balls’ had featured in an episode a few months earlier, and proved memorable enough to be released as a single, pushing the actual Spice Girls all the way in the race for Christmas number one, and finishing only eight thousand copies behind them. (In doing so it recorded the highest weekly sale for a #2 since 1984.)
‘Chocolate Salty Balls’ isn’t the only chart hit to come from South Park. The following year ‘Mr. Hankey The Christmas Poo’ made the festive charts, peaking at #4. A funny postscript to this record, though, is the fact that Isaac Hayes had joined the Church of Scientology in the 1990s, and left South Park in 2005 after an episode satirising said Church. He also presumably disowned his sole British chart-topper. Hayes died in 2008, following a stroke.
The UK Number Ones Blog 
Oh, God! LMAO!
“HELLO THERE CHILDREN!!!”
I don’t really watch South Park anymore (sometimes I’ll catch a stray episode), but there was a period where it was my obsession. One of the smartest and cleverest yet crudest and vulgar shows on television. This song slaps. We get a 70s-sounding soul/funk song atop the charts in 1998. Awesome. I had heard it before but I had no idea it had gone to #1 in the UK (I guess that ensures the UK wins over the US when it comes to #1s, especially in the 90s).
Anyway, in honour of Isaac Hayes, here’s some more quotes from Chef (RIP, his final episode where they just reuse all his old dialogue is so funny yet kinda depressing too)
“I’m gonna make love. To your. Butthole. Children.”
“Sometimes you kill your teacher, and they find your semen in her stomach and- wait, what the WHAT??!”
“Alright, everybody get in a line so I can whip all y’all asses”
“I’m very proud of you, children. Let’s all go home and find a nice white woman to make love to.”
“This is all I’m going to say about drugs: Stay away from them! There’s a time and a place for everything and it’s called college.”
“Well I’ll be sodomized on Christmas!”
I have seen many an episode of South Park, without ever really getting into it fully. But I remember the almost instant popularity and controversy in the late 90s. I remember one of my friends on stage as Cartman, singing in the school talent show… Presumably before the school really knew what South Park was, because I’m sure he’d have been banned from doing so a year or two later!
Never liked South Park much – Family Guy, American Dad and classic Simpsons, or Futurama for me. I am a fan of Isaac though, and Shaft should have been a huge number one, what an innovative track that was when it came out and Richard Roundtree was hot as Shaft in the movies. Sadly I missed seeing Isaac, I’d been to see a total train-wreck of a comeback concert for Sly & The Family Stone, so they were handing out free tickets to forthcoming Isaac’s show to the long line of people demanding money back way past midnight. I couldnt be bothered to wait, so didnt get one – it was late enough already! Neither act got that UK chart-topper they deserved, so I suppose at least one funk chart-topper is better than none. Not a fan of this one though!
I’ll take this one over the last 4 any day! I forgot about this!