Welcome to the latest installment of Random Runners-Up, where we celebrate the records that came close, but no cigar. Three records, all sitting at #2 on this date in history…
‘We’ve Gotta Get out of This Place’, by the Animals – #2 for 1 week in 1965, behind ‘Help!’
Some classic sixties R&B to start us off. This is gritty stuff, with a winding bassline, snarling guitars, and the gutteral yowl of lead singer Eric Burden telling a tale of hardship and poverty. It was written by Brill Building duo Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, intended for the Righteous Brothers. The Animals changed the lyrics slightly, to reflect their childhoods in Newcastle. Watch my daddy in bed a-dyin’, Watch his hair been turning grey… And then out of nowhere springs a very upbeat, pop-leaning chorus. It is a positive song, despite the misery of the verses. The singer will get out of this place: Believe me baby, I know it baby, You know it too…
This was the Animals’ second-biggest hit, after their 1964 chart-topper ‘The House of the Rising Sun’, and was one of seven Top 10s the band enjoyed before fracturing in 1966. ‘We’ve Gotta Get out of This Place’ was released right at the start of the Vietnam War, and became an anthem for US soldiers stationed out there in the late-sixties.
‘You Got What It Takes’, by Showaddywaddy – #2 for 1 week in 1977, behind ‘Angelo’
The seventies were a time of great musical innovation… They were also a time of Showaddywaddy. Not that I’m complaining, because I can’t resist Showaddywaddy and their rock ‘n’ roll revival schtick. They had one number one in the UK, ‘Under the Moon of Love’, but were a constant presence in the charts during the latter half of the decade. ‘You Got What it Takes’ was the third in a run of seven straight Top 10 hits, and one of the band’s four #2s.
Like their chart-topper, this was a cover of an oldie: a 1960 #7 hit by Marv Johnson. Musically it owes a great debt to Lloyd Price’s ‘Personality’, and lyrically it tells the tale of a girl who doesn’t doesn’t live in a beautiful place, doesn’t dress with the best of taste… Nature didn’t give you such a beautiful face… And yet she has what it takes. What exactly that is isn’t specified, leaving our imaginations to run riot. Johnny Kidd & The Pirates and the Dave Clark Five also had hits with this tune, which makes it all the more surprising that I had never heard it before today!
‘Macarena’, by Los Del Rio – #2 for 1 week in 1996, behind ‘Wannabe’
For some reason I had visions of ‘Macarena’ being lodged in the Top 10 for months on end, but in truth it spent just one week at number two and didn’t have a chart run out of the ordinary. I guess I thought it must have hung around like a bad smell because it was the bane of my existance for endless school discos. This, and Whigfield’s ‘Saturday Night’. Both dances looked so simple, and yet… I could never quite get them right. Any dance that involves alternating left and right, or turning, and I short-circuit.
This hit version is a remix of a 1993 original, from Los Del Rio’s 18th studio album. They were (are, in fact, as they’re still going!) a Spanish duo from the sixties, and by the time this made them UK one-hit wonders both men were almost in their sixties. And no, the Macarena is not the name of the dance, but the name of one of the men’s daughters. Britain was one of the few countries where this didn’t go to #1. In the States, it stayed on top for fourteen, presumably very long, weeks…
The UK Number Ones Blog 
Well done – WGGOOTP is an absolute belter to start off with, one of rock music’s great timeless anthems of defiance. The session band I run at the pub sometimes finish up on this one when we want to wrap it up on a real blast (and no, that’s no reflection on the pub that hosts us). It’s no wonder that many have covered this in the ensuing years. Savour this one for example, with two great feisty vocalists battling it out together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9VqHbNajoc Katrina and the Waves with Eric Burdon – We Gotta Get Out of This Place youtube.com
YGWIT is a good song too, although for my money the Dave Clark Five made by far the best job of it even if their version only just scraped the Top 30 in 1967.
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I had no idea that Burdon had duetted with Katrina and the Waves, and I enjoyed that! The Dave Clark Five version is my best of the bunch of YGWITs, and also happy to have discovered it!
Macarena was only #2 in NZ too, I assumed it was lodged at #1 for months.
I enjoy all these songs, though to varying degree. The Animals song is by far the best of the 3 #2s. Awesome song. One of their best. Fantastic vocals from Eric Burdon, though he has other better performances. The Showdaddy version of that song is decent but I prefer other versions (the DC5 version is really solid and was their last major hit in the US). As for “The Macarena”…look, I was born in ’99 and even in the 2000s they were doing the macarena at school discos. And I have younger sisters born 2-20 years after me and even they know that song. It’s endured. It’s timeless. It’s a classic. If I was alive in 1996, I don’t think I would ever want to hear that song ever again. It spend 9 weeks at No. 1 here in Australia and was the No. 1 song of the year.
I agree that the DC5 version is probably the best of the bunch. Showaddywaddy always had a sort of gloss to their songs that leaves me cold. If they could have toughened up their sound, maybe a bit more rockabilly, then they could have been a better remembered and respected band. And yes the Macarena (it has to be said with a ‘the’, even though it isnt the name of the dance, as I just discovered) is one-part nostalgia, two-parts PTSD.
The Animals’ is a classic, still has that edge-y feel to it, and one I recall from my childhood with no PTSD 🙂 Showaddywaddy was as always with their hits instantly catchy, sort of pleasantly familiar even where I didnt know previous versions (as with this one), and then they got a bit stale within 3 weeks usually, a quick peak in my personal charts and then a quick drop. Apart from the number one, I dont think any of their covers were as good as their original songs from 1974, still fond of Hey Rock n Roll – it’s Glam Rock – as their top number 2, and the Xmas hit Hey Mister Christmas is still sweet.
AS I’m much too old to have had to dance at school – we couldnt afford luxuries in our day like speakers and music and literally had ink in inkwells with blotting paper as a thing. We virtually had to walk through the snow in out shorts and do PE in our underwear after eating cardboard with jam on. “You were lucky!” etc. 🙂 So I have never done a dance routine in any public place in my entire life, and recently was still refusing to get up off my chair at a do. So I think doing the Macarena is quite sweet coming from someone that has only ever been on the outside looking in, and I applaud anyone having a go at doing it! Well done, I couldn’t!
Thing is, Macarena is not a difficult dance, and neither is Saturday Night. They’re specifically designed to be easy to do, like proto-Tik Tok routines. But there’s soemthing about going left to right that confuses me, like you’re watching yourself in the mirror. And I think I’m actually not a bad dancer, when I can freestyle and just move where the music takes me!
freestyle is the only way imho 🙂 In my case feet glued to the spot and the arms and upper body flailing. The last time I went mad dancing was a year or 2 back to Diana Ross Love Hangover, I lived every mood change, what an epic! And then the club closed down forever – Duckie at Vauxhall. I can only apologise to the regulars…..
Well at least my dancing has never been so bad it shut down a nightclub… 😉
The Showaddywaddy song immediately took me back to primary school Christmas parties and discos. Don’t think I’ve heard it since. Thanks for bringing an old fossil some nostalgia
Was there a Macarena-esque routine for it, or was it just a free-for-all?
Free for all. Dance routines to individual records seemed to fade after the 60’s (Locomotion etc) and didn’t really start to gain traction again until YMCA and Oops Upside Your Head in the late 70’s. Thankfully I was well past my clubbing days by the time Whigfield and Los Del Rio’s abominations charted
The Animals! Grit! Love it! I think their sound and Them were dirtier than the Rolling Stones back then.
I never heard of Showaddywaddy….