One glance at our next number one, and there’s an involuntary shiver. A comedian, a cover of a well-loved classic… It’s not that long since Hale and Pace were bothering the charts with their charidee dance-a-thon ‘The Stonk’. Is this the latest assault on the charts in the name of a ‘good cause’…?
Dizzy, by Vic Reeves & The Wonder Stuff (their 1st and only #1s)
2 weeks, from 3rd – 17th November 1991
Thankfully, no. It wasn’t for charity – more of cash-in of Vic Reeves being the hot young thing of British comedy – and, more importantly, it’s actually quite good! It’s a faithful cover of Tommy Roe’s 1969 original: slightly more frenetic, glossier in that early nineties sort of way, with a baggy Madchester beat. You can just about picture Bez shaking his maracas along to it.
Like ‘The Fly’ right before it, this feels very ‘90s’. In fact, could we claim that this is the very first Britpop #1? The Wonder Stuff were an indie band (well, technically they were ‘grebo’) who had been scoring lower-level Top 40 hits since the late 1980s, and had recently made the Top 5 for the first time. And yes, ok, Britpop isn’t officially supposed to start until Suede burst on to the scene a few months after this, but I’m claiming this as a sneak-preview of what’s to come in the middle of the decade. Plus, it’s a sixties throwback, and we know how indebted to that decade Britpop was.
Either way, it’s clear that the past two chart-toppers have been pure palate cleansers, trying to wash away the aftertaste of Bryan Adam’s ‘(Everything I Do)…’, which had been left lying out at number one so long it had started to rot. You always get the #1 that kickstarts a decade starts properly. With the sixties we had to wait until Gerry & The Pacemakers in 1963, while T Rex kicked the seventies off in style with ‘Hot Love’ in early ’71. The eighties were a more complex beast, because in some ways they started with Blondie, Gary Numan and The Boomtown Rats in 1978-9. Or, if your definition of the eighties involves more face-paint, then we had to wait until Adam & The Ants in 1981.
Still, I feel confident in proclaiming that the nineties start (around about) here. Not least because Vic Reeves would become one of the most popular television stars of the decade: ‘Shooting Stars’, ‘Big Night Out’, and ‘The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer’ were all big comedy shows: surreal, anarchic, all capturing the spirit of the time. (His partner for much of this, Bob Mortimer, features as a backing vocalist in the video to ‘Dizzy’.)
Helping this cover even further, as well as a competent indie band and a clever choice of song, is the fact that Reeves can carry a tune. Pre-fame he had played in several bands as a bassist/singer – he was born Jim Moir, and his stage-name is an amalgam of his two favourite singers, and two predecessors at the top of the charts, Vic Damone and Jim Reeves. One of the best things about this song is the fact that his northern accent – he grew up in Darlington – unashamedly shines through.
Up next, for all my talk of it officially being ‘the nineties’, is a gigantic comeback single for a megastar of the 80s. And the 70s. In fact, his very first release was at the end of the sixties…
The UK Number Ones Blog 