19 October 1989
When Chubby Checker followed up ‘The Twist’ with ‘Let’s Twist Again’, he at least had the decency to make them two different songs. No such qualms for our Watership Downer friend Jive Bunny, whose follow-up to hit single ‘Swing The Mood’ also starts with the exact same Chubby Checker sample. I bet even Stock, Aitken and Waterman, heretofore the high kings of ’80s pop cynicism, stood and applauded that baller move.
Why would anyone have wanted a second Jive Bunny record? It’s not as if the cartoon rabbit had any tie-in TV show or even a personality; it was just an expedient for getting the record credited as an act rather than ‘various artists’. The first one sounded cheap, and no progress had been made in the meantime. The standard of mixing is on a par with what I was doing in 1989 by pressing ‘play’ and ‘record’ to tape songs off the radio, allegedly. Formulaic? Well, duh!
A third one of these things would go to the top of the UK charts in December and get perilously close to taking the 1989 UK Christmas number one. We were no better; Jive Bunny will burrow up the Irish charts again in 1990. In fact, ‘That’s What I Like’ was near the top of most European charts on 9 November 1989, the night the Berlin Wall came down. Next time you see footage of crowds crossing the newly-opened Checkpoint Charlie that night, see if you can count how many were actually going from West to East to flee the crumbling, retrograde tyranny of Jive Bunny.
