10 August 1989
Next time you overhear some barstool blowhard or drunken uncle opining that the charts today are rubbish, and music was far better back in their day, well – even without entering Exhibit A for the prosecution (below) that statement is always a load of rubbish and a sure sign that the opinionator hasn’t listened to any new music in years. This is especially so if their day was late-1989. A decade of brilliant chart pop, most of it chronicled here, is about to meet an ignominious end. The more cynical instincts of Stock Aitken and Waterman had hastened its demise, and here to defile the corpse is the rabbit who put the ‘mix’ in myxomatosis.
We can refer to the retro-mash-up precedent of ‘Stars On 45’ in 1981 and put the first Jive Bunny number one—an English phenomenon that crossed the Irish Sea like Cromwell—mostly down to our old friend ‘novelty record’. Its cut-and-shut of ’40s big band and ’50s rock n’ roll doesn’t jar so much as a sound when you consider that’s how ’60s Irish showbands were effectively making a living, but that’s scant justification: Jive Bunny as the Irish showband of its generation, a Dickie Rock for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Along with showband punters from back in the day, DJs at wedding receptions and children’s parties probably bought it too, to use professionally or punitively. And we should remember the percentage of any population who are just morons.
One of these cheap and charmless Sellotape jobs at number one is bad enough. Repeat offending—and you may have forgotten there were several of these—suggests something far more sinister.
