‘Twas the week before Christmas, and all the potential Xmas number ones were lining up for a shot at the crown…
JCB Song, by Nizlopi (their 1st and only #1)
1 week, from 18th – 25th December 2005
2005’s left-field, indie contender for festive top spot – following in the grand footsteps of Housemartins, the Flying Pickets, Gary Jules and co. – was from folk duo Nizlopi, with their song about a bullied kid skipping school to drive with his dad in his big yellow digger. It’s a gentle acoustic tune, nostalgic in tone, written from the POV of a five-year-old. I can see why it was a big Christmas hit.
Shame, then, that I’m now going to rip it to shreds. I hated this song at the time, and two decades haven’t improved matters. To my ears, what some people might argue as being ‘sweet’ comes across as cloying, twee, simpering… insert your synonym of choice. Sample lyrics: The engine rattles my bum like berserk… and My dad’s probably had a bloody hard day… It’s cynical heartstring pulling, is what it is. Holding up the bypass, Me and my dad havin’ a top laugh… the refrain goes. And of course loads of people will gobble up this sort of thing at Christmas like it was leftover turkey. (Though it wasn’t written with the holidays in mind. It had first charted at #160 in June, before growing in renown via the internet.)
I misremembered the ‘JCB Song’ as being for charity, which might have explained its lyrics and its success. Back in 2005, charity wristbands were all the rage. The white ‘Make Poverty History’, yellow ‘Livestrong’ (ummm…), and the blue ‘Beat Bullying’ are the ones I remember. It was how we virtue signalled before social media. So I’d always assumed that this – a song about a bullied child – was raising money to ‘beat the bullies’. But no. We can’t even give it a pass on those grounds.
For the coda, it transforms from gentle folksy ballad into a rousing rapped, hoe-down finale: I’m Luke, I’m five and my dad’s Bruce Lee… This bit sounds familiar. It makes me do a double take. It dawns on me why ‘JCB Song’ is so bad. A quick bit of research puts two and two together… When Nizlopi were starting out, their guitar technician was a certain Edward Christopher Sheeran.
Oh Nizlopi, what did you do? I could just about forgive this twee slop – it is Christmas after all – and appreciate the fact that you are all but one hit wonders (follow-up ‘Girls’ made #91). But to know that Ed Sheeran was sitting backstage at your gigs, taking notes, making his plan for world domination. That’s unforgivable.
Unlike the previous indie hits I listed in the intro, both Nizlopi and the ‘JCB Song’ seem to have been pretty much forgotten. And though they didn’t hold on to make Christmas #1, they did take one sizeable scalp when they consigned the twin powers of Westlife and Diana Ross, and their rejig of ‘When You Tell Me That You Love Me’, to the runners-up spot. This may be the only instance in recorded history when I would have preferred Westlife at #1…
