Our next number one follows nicely on from the first chart-topper of the year, Wet Wet Wet’s ‘Goodnight Girl’. At least at first…

Stay, by Shakespears Sister (their 1^st and only #1)

8 weeks, from 16^th February – 12^th April 1992

The opening two minutes are paired-back, moody, and again almost a cappella. If this world is wearing thin, And you’re thinking of escape… The voice is memorably kooky, a slightly higher-pitched Cyndi Lauper, to my ears. It lulls you, draws you in, takes you a moment to realise that the lyrics are pretty dark: When your pride is on the floor, I’ll make you beg for more…

It’s not ‘Stay’ as in ‘please stay, baby’. It’s ‘Stay’ as in ‘stay… or else!’ So, darker than first anticipated. And then things get very dark indeed, when one-third of Bananarama comes crashing through the doors, and the song flips to grungy, industrial rock. You better hope and pray, That you make it safe back to your own world…she crows, relishing her pantomime villain role.

The two contrasts – the soft, gospel opening half against the heavy final two minutes – are complemented by the two very different voices. What could have been a nice but fairly run-of-the-mill ballad (like, say, ‘Goodnight Girl’) becomes something else altogether. Towards the end the first voice takes over again, much more frantic now, begging their lover to stay.

‘Stay’ really has to be listened to in conjunction with its bizarre, award-winning video. One Shakespears Sister – Marcella Detroit, very pale and panda-eyed – sits by a dying man’s bedside while the other, Siobhan Fahey, barges into their hospital room looking like a slimmed-down Ursula from ‘The Little Mermaid’. The two women wrestle over the man, before he finally comes back to life in Detroit’s arms, and Fahey shuffles off with a roll of the eyes. It’s every bit as melodramatic as the song, and very camp.

By the end, this has turned into one of the stranger chart-toppers of recent years. It’s very hard to pin down, and whoever described it as ‘a weird sci-fi ballad of gothic-gospel electronica’ for PopMatters is pretty spot on. It was written by both women (managing to chart higher than Bananarama ever did), alongside Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, who was then Fahey’s husband.

Shakespears Sister was Fahey’s post-Bananarama solo project, with Detroit joining a bit later. (This was one of the only songs on which Detroit sang lead, and its success apparently annoyed Fahey.) The duo’s name was a misspelling that stuck, inspired by the Smith’s song of the same name, which had in turn been inspired by Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’, which eventually leads us all the way back to William himself. A fittingly literary heritage for a song that packs an epic story into less than four minutes. They’d had one Top 10 hit before this, and would have one more after, but it is for ‘Stay’ that they are to this day best remembered.