Where does one even begin?
How about this: back at the start of the “late 80s phase” of Popular I wrote about how the charts became a free-for-all between radically different visions of what pop was for: a futurist, bricolage-driven club music? A cheap production-line soundtrack for the everyday? Or a time machine for grown-ups to travel back to when music meant something? These strands in 80s pop seemed to be aimed at utterly estranged audiences, so the idea of something pulling all three together was insane. But isn’t this exactly what Jive Bunny is doing?
OK, no it isn’t. The Bunny may have become a joke to aim at anyone making mash-ups or bootlegs these days, but the coincidence of “Swing The Mood” and dance music is mostly just that. As everyone realised, the tradition the Mastermixers were working in was the Stars On 45/Hooked On Classics disco mix one: get a pile of old records and stitch them together over a beat. This could, of course, be done well or badly: the original Stars on 45 records are memorable mostly because they dropped a tortuously annoying chorus – “remember Twist and Shout!!” – over their poorly copied sources. What is true is that club culture’s leap back into the mainstream led to a rash of “megamix” hits, starting with Mirage’s “Jack Mix IV”, but 1990 was the really big year for that sort of thing, so Jive Bunny was actually ahead of the trend.
How about the idea of pop as a conveyor belt? For all that Pete Waterman distanced himself from the Bunny’s output, saying he wouldn’t be seen dead releasing this stuff, PWL had done their bit to shift expectations of pop away from glamour and wealth and towards the cheap and the cheerful. An accuser might see Jive Bunny as reaping this particular harvest. But the truth is nobody that summer saw the Bunny as pop: everybody, no matter who you talked to or who they liked, perceived the record as something entirely alien, a single only other people were buying. Sonia, Sundays and Soul II Soul fans were united in horrified awe as the rabbit clung to the top for five endless weeks.
And how about the nostalgic element? Most late 80s pop which looked backwards did so because the past was either classier or more innocent. There was bugger all classy about the Mastermixers, who went there just because it was more familiar. They had seen a gap in the market and now they danced through it. “Swing The Mood” is ultra-functional: the people who’d been teens 30 years before, when most of the source records charted, were now seeing their own children getting married, and Jive Bunny records gave DJs at those weddings something to play as a readymade oldies set, a chance for the proud parents to shine or embarrass themselves.
For a lot of other people this was culturegeddon, proof that – at a moment of accelerating creativity across British music – the charts were simply broken. The Bunny may not have been caused by any particular late 80s trend but he still pressed every possible anti-pop button in a way most novelties didn’t: cheap, lazy, tacky, recycled, nostalgic… the only relief was the knowledge that surely, surely, this was your classic one-hit wonder.
The degree of loathing Jive Bunny inspired – more so at this stage, later on a kind of weary Stockholm Syndrome set in – makes it tempting to reassess his records positively. This is unfortunately quite difficult: all you can say is that it’s no longer actively painful to hear. To the Mastermixers’ credit, they keep the old hits coming quickly and don’t linger on anything too long, and they don’t actually give Jive Bunny a voice (though I always hear the barked “C-C-CMON EVERYBODY” as being him). On this single they’re taking more technical care than they sometimes would, but even so every sample here makes you want to hear the original, where the sex and swing hasn’t been drained out. A good mix record builds new contexts – this rock’n’roll waxwork show doesn’t even try.
Actually, “Swing The Mood” does do one intriguing thing: it erases the distinction between the Glenn Miller bed of the track and the late-50s records it frames – 1941 and 1959 are both just “oldies” now, a cultural redshift taking place as the rock’n’roll era drops out of sight. The continuity between sounds isn’t one that would have made a lot of sense at the time, so in this small way maybe Jive Bunny is building context. Whether that one bit of interest is worth sitting through a cartoon rabbit ‘cutting and mixing’ “Tutti Frutti” is entirely your call.
Score: 2
[Logged in users can award their own score]
AAaaaaaaarrrrrrgghhhhhh!
not as bad as I remember, thanks to the original Glenn Miller swing – so a 2 seems about right.
the 80s had begun with the hep cats at The Face demonstrating their discerning taste by plugging Nina Simone’s ‘My Baby just cares for me’ and the Blue Note label. Throughout the decade Ace Records had built up a steady business repackaging old blues, jazz and R’n’B. This seems like the fag end of that arc.
The session musicians (and particularly singers) on this…were destined to stay only as session performers. Let’s just say that.
And, well, what else to say?
If only the following year they had reinvented themselves, got some proper singers, laid on some sort of original tune and backing music, and made a quality pop record, the Mastermixers (with or without the long-eared rabbit-muncher) might have been regarded as fondly as Tight Fit are.
That they didn’t is surely the reason why 1990 (while broadly respectable – at least if we overlook the no 1 associated with another non-human creature) isn’t anywhere near as good a pop year as 1982 (well, that, and Chas and Dave failing to come up with an update a la “Stars Over 45”), even if 1989 is very nearly almost right up there with ’81.
Aieee! At the top of the screen – w-what’s happened to Jason??
Jase! Sweet Jesus!
Not even sure if Swing The Mood does the “cultural redshift” thing – only as much as Stars On 45 drew a straight line between Dutch session-singer disco (“remember Twist And Shout!”) and the Beatles (which it didn’t).
I saw the original Mastermix album, from where Swing The Mood sprung, in Revival Records on Berwick Street the other week. For a quid. Even I wasn’t tempted. The most grindingly awful thing about it, listening to it now, is the Elvis impersonator. Everything else is original, including a very sped-up Bill Haley towards the end. Does this make Rock Around The Clock the first recording to hit number one twice?
At the risk of other Bunny baiting, last Christmas I had what I thought was a classic pop quiz question: name all three Jive Bunny number ones. Apart from a few grudging Come On Everybodys, nobody could remember the titles of ANY of them.
OK, time for another football reminiscence…
At the end of season 1988-89, Manchester United had slumped to 11th in the First Division, their lowest placing since returning to the top flight 14 years previously. During the summer Alex Ferguson, 2½ years into his reign, spent heavily on five new players: West Ham’s Paul Ince, Middlesbrough’s Gary Pallister, Southampton’s Danny Wallace, Nottingham Forest’s Neil Webb and Norwich’s Michael Phelan (now Fergie’s representative on Match of the Day as well as the inspiration for the song “We’ve Got That Michael Phelan”, to the tune of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’”).
Despite an opening-day 4-1 win over Arsenal (better remembered for Michael Knighton’s ball-juggling) the new season looked disastrous, including a 5-1 derby defeat at Maine Road, and by Christmas United were in a relegation struggle. A famous Stretford End banner read “Ta-ra Fergie, three years of excuses and it’s still crap!”
Then a football fanzine made the connection. “Alex Ferguson buys up other clubs’ best players and turns them into a rubbish team. And there’s an act in the charts that takes the best bits of other people’s records and turns them into drivel. Ladies and gentlemen we can exclusively reveal – Alex Ferguson IS Jive Bunny!!”
Erm, yes, but there was no redemption coming in the New Year for that bloody rabbit. OK, I’ll admit there is a certain skill in DJs’ mixing of records so as to maintain the beat and choose the right record to mix into. And there are genres of music where the makers pretty much expect their records to be mixed with others, so that’s quite appropriate. But the mixing here is pretty hamfisted, there’s damn-all creativity, and the reaction of most people is likely to be that they want to hear the whole of Eddie Cochran, Glenn Miller or whoever’s record, so stop being a lazy git and play them in full rather than foisting this on us. Most people, apart from the people that bought these bloody records in droves, that is.
Loathsome.
Sheer genius there from top-of-page guy.
#5 – yeah, Monster Bobby on Twitter has pointed out that the redshifting was in place by the mid 60s in any case, and actually I think it was 80s 50s revivalism which had reconstructed a specific idea of that decade, rescuing it from “oldieness” – Jive B is reversing the process….
If Marcello can see Mother Of Mine and Death Disco as two sides of the same coin at either end of the seventies, can I draw a parallel between ’89’s Swing The Mood and ’81’s Adventures On The Wheels Of Steel? I mean they’re kind of the same thing, aren’t they?
70S and 80s: glam was doing it too, albeit in a different way
Anyway, I think the key point isn’t that the late 50s were at last old, so much as the fact that they were now fused inextricably with the mid-40s: BRUNDLEBUNNY
For a seven year old the Bunny ouevre was rather a good introduction to ‘oldie’ hits – I might have only known a few words of each chorus but at least now I recognised the names Glen Miller/Bill Haley etc as ‘dead dudes who made music once’ (whether they were dead or not – they were in black and white in the video so they might as well have been dead for all I knew/cared). Jive Bunny himself was in full technicolour but wasn’t as good as Bugs Bunny, whom I vastly preferred. Anyway, you know when people say ‘those songs are so well-known I can’t remember *not* knowing them’? For people a year or two younger than me, that’s probably because of Jive Bunny.
“A good mix record builds new contexts – this rock’n’roll waxwork show doesn’t even try.”
Is there no point in the JB hits where elements of one hit are interspersed with another (I think there may be a few examples during the segues between tracks)? This did happen in the contemporary megamixes e.g. ‘Latino Rave’ but apart from that I wouldn’t say they went far in their attempts to build new contexts either and could be regarded as equally cynical cash-ins. I would much rather listen/dance to ‘Latino Rave’ or ‘The Brits 1990’ than ‘Swing The Mood’ I guess but I’m not sure by how much. This leaves a question mark over the shelf life of the curated medley and megamix concepts. How good does it have to be to keep you interested once you’ve been introduced to and acquired the source material? ‘Pump Up The Volume’ and ‘Theme From S Express’ are a cut above mainly because they offered an original (but more importantly, good) track underneath and within the plunderphonic shenanigans. ‘Beat Dis’ and co work well by focussing more intently on what made the records (or other media) they were “honouring” so great in the first place. JB feels more just a case of “remember this? and this? and now this?” and so on. But even that isn’t quite enough to make me actively hate it.
I hadn’t realised before but when looking for a pic I see JB has been illustrated in several different styles – but all equally naff. I’d almost have preferred him to look like Hartley Hare just for the creepiness lols. The crudely animated version you see in the videos I certainly found punchable then.
Apart from that and the jarring over-used speech triggering I don’t really have a big problem with the records now in terms of concept or execution. My objection is more the scale of their overnight popularity and the idea that this was novel enough to be such a success. This is something that shouldn’t necessarily have been any more popular than Stars On 45. Still, I’ve developed casual approval of many of the songs dragged into the mix (including In The Mood) and like it or not they served as an introduction to several of them e.g. on the third hit, ‘March Of The Mods’ which I had to ask my Mum to ID during TOTP because I thought it was great (and still do tbh).
Wichita re “nobody could remember the titles of ANY of them”
Unfortunately I would’ve got this :/
So yeah, JB’s a tool but it’s mainly just the sense of redundancy about that makes me award it a WHOPPING 4 out of 10.
Had this record been billed to, say, Dave Smith and the Mastermixers would it have been as successful?
I am not even sure it would have charted.
A big part of the success here is in the coming up with a ‘cute’ little rabbit dj. It’s the Jive Bunny that sells this primarily not the records sampled therein.
Also, bit worried about Kylie up there on her own now surrounded by assorted beasts.
“Jive Bunny” produced the first (unreleased until ’92) World Of Twist single. And he STILL didn’t get a mention on Made In Sheffield. He doesn’t look quite like I thought he would. Check his logo! And how he buries Jive Bunny on his cv…
http://www.leshemstock.com/filmtv.html
Re 13: I think you’re absolutely right. Can’t remember what the original Mastermix credit was… I should have bought it for research purposes, shouldn’t I?
# 6 – Ah, contrived footy chants! For another place, I think. BUT…
In the mid eighties when Chelsea were truly shite and I believe John Neal was the manager, a section of the crowd concentrated their ordure on one particular low-grade defender, who, God only knows, tried his best but was simply a terrible player in an already bad side. It was to the chorus of a celebrated song by Eddie Floyd:
“He’s not thunder, He’s not lightening,
The way he fucks up is frightening,
You gotta drop, drop, drop, drop, drop…Darren Wood!!!”
Jive Bunny? Nothing to commend this at all.
#13 that goes for anyone really tho e.g. “And now with her new single ‘Bad Romance’ here’s the delectable…Dave Smith?!”.
ha ha Hemstock’s ‘Jive Snakey’ logo is A+ ah wait i mean F-
For years I mistakenly thought this had all been the work of Stock & Aitken, forgetting I’d read their singles review guest spot in Smash Hits where they professed big love for Ambient House and gave 808 State’s ‘Ancodia’ (and Rob n’ Raz ft Leila K) a big thumbs up.
#17 another reason to hatorade on Chris Brown?
Re SteveM’s point abt punchable animation: yes, this totally bothered me also. Earlier in the 80s, I was a bit of an animation buff — I interviewed Chuck Jones for NME, and was generally angry about the decline from the era of Warners/MGM/Hubley et al, to rotoscoped Hanna Barbera hell (fvck scooby doo and scrappy too: I don’t even really like the Wacky Races)
In autumn 1989 the Simpsons hadn’t yet bedded in; John Kricfalusi’s gamechanging Ren & Stimpy was a couple of years away, Pixar was more than a half decade from rebooting Disney* — all there was was (the admittedly unmissable) Henry’s Cat. So the cartoon JB was some kind of ultralazy nadir: in fact at the time it annoyed me a LOT more than the music.**
*1989’s The Little Mermaid isn’t awful, but it uneasily trades on past glories and sensibility.
**Obviously now I like imitating JBunny’s one move dance TO EVERYTHING. Esp. since trying to be Beyonce at the last ever Poptimism gave me industrial-strength back ache
# 19 – Mark, I am sure that you will remember, as do I, Ollie Beak and Fred Barker, playmates of one Muriel Young? Cutting edge or what?
Haha I know who they are but they were more or less off TV by the time our family first owned one (1967). Googling reminds me that Muriel Young produced “Marc”, Marc Bolan’s TV show.
I remember my stepbrother grinning and tapping his foot to this (he was 19 at the time) whenever the video popped up on telly. I recall thinking that he was a hopeless, tasteless twat for liking JB. I now feel that I was a little hard on him. He was merely culturally ignorant. Never bought a record or attended a gig, the chap just didn’t get why Jive Bunny was so despised at the time. In a perverse way, I envied his lack of hipster credentials.
#20-21 – as well as a major contribution to children’s pop programmes, Muriel Young is also mentioned by Tony Barrow in the sleeve notes of the “Please Please Me” LP. Sukrat, Ollie Beak was a sidekick to ex-skiffle supremo Wally Whyton on very early 70s children’s TV.
Oh, and re the antiquity of “In The Mood”, don’t forget the peculiar Glenn Miller revival of the mid-70s, roughly contemporaneous with the rock’n’roll revivals – the guilty men behind Jive Bunny would probably have absorbed them at the same time.
I’m surprised no one’s popped the obvious question. Did anyone here actually buy it or at least know anyone who did ?More than 20 years on I’m still unable to frame a mental picture of the Jive Bunny fan.
Great review Tom but have you left yourself anything to say about the next two ?
#19 Oh no Wacky Races ROCKS ! Pat Pending was always my favourite perhaps because of his sportsmanship in not turning into a supersonic jet fighter every week. I’m trying to sell it to my 2-year old son via youtube but he hasn’t got it yet.
I just turned to my wife after reading this, and said: “Do you know ANYONE who actually liked Jive Bunny or bought a record of his? It’s a mystery, isn’t it?” She avoided the question for a bit, then admitted that she had. Though in her defence, she was seven years old at the time, but still one of the “other people”. And she obviously got rid of the JB catalogue, because there’s no trace of them at all around our flat.
That was the peculiar thing about Jive Bunny, I always thought – the records united people in the 50+ age bracket and small children, and as such were probably absolutely ideal wedding disco fodder for the excitable children and the nostalgia-seeking elders. Is it any coincidence that they took off during the summer, a period where most people try to hold their special days? I’ve sometimes wondered.
Ultimately though, I just can’t think of anything positive to say about this record. It genuinely is one of the most irksome singles I’ve ever heard, and it actually sounds even worse now than it did at the time, primarily because the mixing sounds so utterly unimaginative and primitive. It’s not necessarily the Mastermixers’ fault that technology has moved on, of course, but there’s every reason why M/A/R/R/S still sound relevant and “Swing The Mood” sounds like a Pritt-Stick and scissors job. I can only give this a 1. And that’s being incredibly generous.
Worst insult that’s ever been thrown in my direction: “The KLF are just Jive Bunny for people who think they’re cool, you prick”. I can’t remember how I defended myself, but I’m sure if I reproduced my response here it would be a very long comment indeed.
Erithian@23
Ollie Beak, Fred Barker, Muriel Young and Wally Whyton could be seen on Five o’Clock Club at least as early as 1965.
Ollie Beak seems to go back to 1959, and to have been on TV (with Whyton) as late as the early 80s — but I think there were BIG gaps along the way. Anyway, while I do remember watching Pinky and Perky, and Tich and Quackers, and Tinga and Tucka, and obviously Sooty and Sweep, I *don’t* really recall Ollie and Fred (or Wally) (tho I had a nice LP by him…)
Being almost 9 at the time I was presumably the prime audience for Jive Bunny. However, even at this impressionable age I couldn’t help thinking that the cartoon rabbit and his musical output was complete shit. Incredibly (and depressingly) this appears to be the first million selling single in the UK since Jennifer Rush four summers earlier. So some bugger must have bought it.
#15: Jive Bunny was classed as a Rotherham act although one of it’s offending members may have originally come from Doncaster. My home city doesn’t want anything to do with them.
I remember clearly watching Ollie and Fred (with Muriel) and it would have been when I first started school (1966) and indeed before, which ties in with what Erithian says. I also recall Tinga and Tucker (“the two little bears”) and can hear their signature tune even now!
This would be where I sit back smugly and silently, as I did through the Sonia thread, thanking my lucky stars that this never went anywhere in Australia… except the bunny was number one there, too, for three weeks in late spring. Bloody hell. Wasn’t the introduction of myxomatosis supposed to prevent that?
It’s like the musical intros round at a pub quiz, without any of the mystery. To give it 2 I should at least feel able to listen to it all the way through – so it has to be 1.
(The banner picture: it’s Donovan Darko!)
Erithian at 6 – Did you not know that this is what Jive Bunny went on to do eight years on? – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmMO8InoUFA
Cor, it goes on a bit, doesn’t it? Five minutes! I’d have a higher bunny-tolerance if it was half that length.
For all that, I don’t actively object to this… the opening “COME ON EVERYBODY! C-C-COME ON EVERYBODY!”/Glen Miller segue always makes me think that its going to be trashy fun, but then everything seems to take far too long to get to the next bit and the metronome beat starts to grate.
Number 2 Watch: 2 weeks of Kylie’s vulnerable ‘Wouldn’t Change a Thing’.
Then one week of what would have been a fantastic number one, Lil Louis’ ‘French Kiss’. Obviously, its remembered as “the orgasm record”, but the way that the tempo disconcertingly drops and changes feels just as intimate and intrusive to the listener/ dancer as the memorable vocal performance. God, that was embarrassing when that came on the radio within my parents earshot! I remember shopping at Cavern Records, Lewisham, and a middle-aged punter in front of me in the queue asking for “the number two record” in a hushed tone. Really, they should have sold that single in brown paper bags round the back of Our Price…
And then a week of Alice Cooper’s ‘Poison’. Less interesting.
I must admit, I quite thought Tom would love this when I first read about it*. Sampleadelica aimed at the dance floor? Set to a driving beat? And – the clincher – fronted by a novelty cartoon character? Of such things 9s and 10s are made.
Then, of course, I heard it and it turned out to be pump. Still, it has the decency to move quickly, even if it does so for four minutes. Three-urns.
*read about it, yes: I’m coming to most of these new
#25: I love that KLF comment!
I’ve nothing to say about this horrible record (which is new to me).
Tom’s mention of the Sundays above did send me into a reverie tho’. I don’t think I heard them until near the end of 1990. This is how the story ends came on the radio and I rejected/mocked it as strictly a Smiths imitation… and didn’t think much more about it. Some months later I saw a picture of their singer and was I confess just bowled over by Harriet Wheeler’s pixie/indie dream-girl cuteness. I checked out their album properly and suddenly their Smiths steals seemed endearing rather than off-putting/mockable. Haw haw.
Also, in August/Sept 1989 I was listening a lot to Nine Inch Nails’ Down In It. It was on a college radio promotional sampler that was on my local dive bar’s jukebox. It had this big, gut-shaking sub-sonic bass drum effect that was new to me.
Looking back, the things that cause some music to catch fire for me (to jump out from the pack and overcome initial skepticism) have often been as specific as a cute haircut or a bass drum effect. Not that Jive Bunny has anything to offer in that dept! I gather there are more #1’s to come from this direction. Blimey.
I’ve got a confession to make – I actually owned the Jive Bunny album. Well, it’s probably still in a drawer in my mum’s house so I probably can’t use the past tense there. Sorry, I was 9 or 10 at the time, but that’s really no excuse. Just put it down to never having heard most of the tracks they were sampling maybe. I remember my grandad did NOT LIKE the way they cut up Glen Miller into the mix (there was also an orchestral hip-hop version of Minnie The Moocher in the charts around then, if I remember correctly).
This gets a 2, because their other singles are worse.
This record – along with Jive bunny’s other hits – is why I stated earlier that 1989 was the true nadir of the history of number ones in the singles charts.
Surely even bad years like 1967 are eclipsed by this.
#36 It was the Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra – I had to look it up! Only got to Number 35, so well remembered there. Somewhat irksome IIRC.
#37 Some of the immovable multi-week #1s of the early 90s were worse to actually endure but yes, this was a grim time.
@37 This, along with the dud half of SAW’s output (and I’m only moderately okay with the better half), means you’ll get no argument from me. It’ll be fun to do the post-mortem in a few weeks.
Straight into the bottom 10 of the readers’ poll, by the way, though it’s still only the 5th worst #1 of the 80s on that count. (which seems fair, I’d rather listen to this than “Grandma” any day).
Re: #11, I’m in the same boat really – I thought this was great at the time (though I didn’t buy it) and I can see how a series of catchy, popular choruses cobbled together would appeal to my eight-year-old self. I also remember my Dad liking it too – even though he was born in the ’50s, rock ‘n’ roll was his music as a teenager and I’m sure he owned ’70s reissues of (or Greatest Hits collections featuring) most of the songs sampled here. I’d have to re-listen to it before giving a grade… As a medley, it sounded seamless to me back then, yet I’ve a feeling that wouldn’t be the case today.
The most charitable thing I can find to say about “Swing The Mood” is that if the requisite technology had been available at the time, this would have been the 1958 equivalent of the maximalist remix of “Pump Up The Volume”; snatches of fashionable tunes of the period strung together. However, the depressing success of Jive Bunny can safely be categorised as the revenge of Stars On 45, except here, at least in part, sections from the original records are (ab)used. Whereas the likes of MARRS, the KLF, S’Express and Coldcut tried to arrange and orchestrate their elements into entertaining and danceable nonsense, and/or to make serious points about art and life, the two Rotherham ex-miners who (together with one of their fathers, who acted as manager) were behind Jive Bunny seem to have had nothing else in mind than to put together a simplistic and clumsy bastardisation of hitherto great music. With an irritating cartoon rabbit added.
And so, as the new silver dreams of the nineties approached, the British public opted to turn their backs and go back, back, as far back as they could possibly tolerate. Though most of the songs sampled or copied on “Swing The Mood” are fifties rock ‘n’ roll standards, the record itself is framed by the strains of the John Anderson Big Band performing “In The Mood” and the video inevitably played the tune against footage of jubilant crowds on VE Day – yes, the war, The Bloody War, the war that started 50 years ago in 1989, the war whose 50th anniversary was commemorated by the BBC in a series of nightly mock-news bulletins, The War that this country cannot bring itself to forget – before launching into elements of, among others, “Rock Around The Clock,” “Tutti Frutti,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” “C’mon Everybody” and some Elvis tunes which seem, no doubt for copyright reasons, to be performed by an impersonator. The sampler-directed mix is inept in an offensively sloppy rather than endearingly amateur way; tempos, keys and even simple bpm elisions are muddled and discontinuous.
Marti Pellow, of all people, wondered aloud at the time (on Radio 1’s Round Table) how such a terrible record could have been fashioned from the components of some of the greatest records ever made, but the response is straightforward; here is history and memory reduced to blips, “good bits,” erstwhile rebel music reheated and reshaped as TV dinners for those too busy “living” to appreciate actual music. I am fully aware of the distinguished history of the Mastermix private pressings of 12-inch mixes which preceded Jive Bunny, and perhaps this shabby series of hits should have remained as such. But there was no “perhaps” in terms of the British public, who eagerly lapped up “Swing The Mood” and sent it to number one for five weeks – not quite 1989’s biggest-selling single (that honour goes to the next Popular entry) but near enough to prevent alleviation of the unutterable depression which accompanied its “triumph” from my perspective. Gil Scott-Heron’s words once again became sorely relevant: “They want nostalgia, they want to go as far back as they can, even if it’s only as far as last week – not to face now, or tomorrow, but to face backwards.” And there was a huge now and a sparkling tomorrow to anticipate in 1989 – so why retreat into the past? Why even ask such obvious rhetorical questions? And very, very sadly, this wasn’t the end of the phenomenon…wake up little Suzie and, indeed, weep.
The odd thing about Jive Bunny was the way it stood apart from everything else, being part of no discernable commercial trend, without imitators (unlike the Stars on 45/Starsound/Tight Fit/Starturn on 45 Pints/even Hooked on Classics situation in 1981).
(I would argue that the whole trend of the megamix of recent hits, which was at its peak about this time is something different, as is the rather differnet reappropriation of the past carried out by a subsequent, and rather better number one and, which we will discuss then, which certainly was representative of a wider trend)
It was, in essence, the music of the provincial wedding reception that somehow had cleverly snuck up to the top of the charts. Maybe Fairground Attraction had cleverly nodded in that direction in the previous year, but this was the real thing..
I don’t hate the record, or the (first) follow-up, anyway, but certainly felt by the end of the year that the appeal had run thin, and that it became apparent that the third and fourth singles (and any after that, even the recollection of which has been totally erased from my mind) were of markedly lower quality as medleys than the first two, being cabbage-chomping cash ins.
punctum – the war nostaligia aspect is spot-on. This is Max Bygraves Singalongawaryears reimagined for the grandparents of the acid house generation.
#42 I didn’t actually go back and watch the video, but yes absolutely – I now remember there’s a sequence in it where fighter planes are launching from an aircraft carrier and the Bunny comes on and gives a thumbs up or waggles his cartoon arse and it made me angrier than anything in pop for AGES.
I think it’s weirder than that Tom – a plane leaves the aircraft carrier, crashes straight into the sea, and JB does a “sad face”, throws the pilot a rubber ring and does a thumbs up. One of the videos had something that looked a lot like the space shuttle blowing up. Sex and death were the Bunny’s new gods.
Swing the Mood spent 5 weeks at #1 in NZ too. Figures, we Kiwis sent Stars on 45 to #1 for a gruesome *7* weeks in 1981. The #1 before Stars on 45? Joy Division’s Love will tear us Apart. The #1 after? Joy Division’s Atmosphere. Talk about a schizophrenic country…
Yes, awful awful awful. And if anything their next two Number Ones were even worse.
By the way, I was at a small-ish club night in Bristol last year that was playing an odd mixture of disco and world music. About halfway through the night the DJ put on Swing The Mood, as a joke (I think). Naturally, I walked off the dancefloor and looking around you could see the faces of anyone who was over 35 grimace in painful recognition. Curiously though, all the 20 somethings who were there carried on dancing as if nothing had happened. Clearly they hadn’t been traumatised by Jive Bunny’s omnipresence during 1989/90.
re the war footage, just be glad Swing The Mood didn’t come out a year later in the wake of the World Cup.
I’d like to know where pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør stands on Bananaman, altho it only ran until ’86, whereas Dangemouse somehow carried on until ’92, a year before Henry’s Cat’s own demise.
#48 careful Will, mention of their next two Number Ones will bring Jive Bunny into contact with Spoiler Bunny, thus causing a rift in the space-time continuum…
Billy #31 – are you telling me that these people did a record with United? Ye gods. As MUFC collaborators go, Jive Bunny <<< Tony “Save Your Kisses For Me” Hiller <<< the people we’ll be discussing in 1994.