10 January 1987
This was the UK Christmas number one of 1986, a few weeks late to the top of the Irish pops. I’m not sure why there was a brief Jackie Wilson revival at the turn of 1986 and 1987. ‘Reet Petite’ wasn’t in any commercial or high-profile movie, and Wilson had already died a few years beforehand, so its climb to number one seems to have been as grassroots or organic as these things can be. What’s more, ‘Reet Petite’ was followed by high chart placings for re-releases of ‘I Get The Sweetest Feeling’ and ‘(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher’. By comparison, neither Sam Cooke nor Marvin Gaye had any further posthumous hits in the immediate aftermath of their respective ad-fuelled mid-’80s number ones. Wilson had a fabulous swooning pop-soul voice—when God sings in the shower he tries to sound like Jackie Wilson—but the showy vocal gymnastics of ‘Reet Petite’ really don’t do him credit.
Maybe it was all simply down to the stop-motion clay animation video (below), which was an intrinsic part of the second coming of ‘Reet Petite’ and which plays into the slightly gimmicky feel of the song itself. (We hadn’t seen this much clay in a number one video since—spoiler alert—Lionel Richie’s ‘Hello’.) ‘I Get The Sweetest Feeling’ was retro-fitted with a similar video; perhaps ‘(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher’ was too but by then I had lost interest. Anyway, this all points to the ineluctable conclusion of ‘Reet Petite’ as novelty record.
