BOMBALURINA – "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini"

A “Smile. You might even like it” sticker made into a record.

I believe that the 11-year old me was on holiday with my family at Butlins in Minehead when this was #1. This was played everywhere there at the time, a truly appropriate and horrific soundtrack.

I was nine too, and I remember really, really, hating this. Timmy Mallet, like Bodger and Badger, only made sense to me later in life: “oh right – he was for the thick kids!”

I think this might have been a crucial moment in the development of my critical faculties, because I don’t remember hating a song like this before. However, I do remember being about the same age and thinking to myself “I don’t really understand what people mean when they say they didn’t enjoy a film – going to the pictures is great”. I know that I enjoyed going to see The Bodyguard two years later, so cinematically I was more of a slow learner.

I was in Year 3 when this came out, and I loved it at the time, as I did the bizarre accompanying album of 50s novelty songs given a hi-NRG makeover by Andrew Lloyd Webber (and I believe the same studio team who pumped up the Donovan-era cast recording of Joseph?). My Mallett fandom reached a peak when he opened the Tunbridge Wells Pantiles and ‘malletted’ me, but didn’t last long afterwards, and my ownership cassette of this very soon became an embarrassment.

Some years later, while DJing a college disco, I attempted to test the limits of ironic student appropriation of nostalgic tat by playing this, and cleared the dancefloor, perhaps reasonably.

Interesting to see Tom bring up the samples, it’s jam full of them – and because I came to this first rather than some of the ‘cooler’ tunes that made use of it, many of my later explorations of early dance music threw up unwanted recollection of Mallett and his kin. Has anyone bothered to list what all the sample are and where they’re from? (Probably not.)

And wasn’t there a rumour a few years back that Mallett doesn’t sing on this?…

[I rated this a 2, the extra point purely being for the nostalgia, however unwelcome.]

This is my least favourite and most hated number one of all time, much much worse than the Jive Bunny trio, and more than any bunnyable others to come.

In part it’s because I genuinely hate this record, although there are others that fit the biull. But mainly it’s because its stint at number one coincided with the year of the biggest chart music obsession of my life, and so there was no avoiding it. It genuinely upset my teenage tastes that anyone could even dream of buying this, I couldn’t think of a single redeeming feature – it even had the effect of making me flinch when I heard those overused dance samples in records that I’d previously liked, so it didn’t just ruin the charts for me it ruined other records. The memory of this is making me shudder at the memory, and unlike other awful records that we’ve seen here before, I’m not even mildly tempted to click on the video link to hear it again.

Was Mallett responsible for “sheet, pillow, dooooovet” on Wacaday? Was he also responsible for introducing Michaela Strachan to the public? In both cases, that means I’ll let him off the fact he was clearly in his mid thirties with the haircut of someone a third of his age and looked like he would be NO FUN AT ALL if you had the temerity to ask for his autograph.

I’m not letting Brian Hyland* off so easily. At least Timmy didn’t follow this up with Four Little Heels (The Clickety Clack Song) and Lopsided Overloaded And It Wiggled When We Rode It.

Shoreditch/Dalston types remind me of junior Mallet funsters.

*unsurprisingly made cataclysmically great records once his teen pin up days were over – Rainy April Morning, You, You’d Better Stop, all moody loner orchestrated pop.

And you would have thought that Timmy Mallet’s pop career would have had ‘One hit wonder’ written all over it, but – Oh no – there he was back in time for Christmas with No. 18 follow-up ‘Seven Little Girls Sitting In The Back Seat’.

There was even an album, ‘Huggin’ & A Kissin’. Do you suppose that anyone got that, the Gazza & Friends album and the second Jive Bunny LP that Christmas?

TOTPWatch: Bombalurina thrice preformed ‘Itsy Bitsy’ on Top Of The Pops. More about the Christmas show anon;

9 August 1990. Also in the studio that week were; Craig McLachan & Check 1-2 and The Hothouse Flowers. Gary Davies was the host. What an awful week.

23 August 1990. Also in the studio that week were; The Human League and Lindy Layton & Janet Kay. Nicky Campbell was the host.

They’d stopped bothering with imperial by the time I got to school EXCEPT when it came to weighing/measuring yourself, presumably because “X foot Y” is easier to remember than “Hundred and something centimetres” (same with stones vs kg). All the metric kids in the maths textbooks sounded like giants.

#18 beware of confusing Wacaday with Wideawake, the latter of which was Michaela S’s main outlet and had lots of different dudes presenting. Wacaday was on during the holidays, not just Saturday mornings, and was pretty much All Mallett All The Time.

Re 31: Two rather better singles. A week of New Kids On The Block’s best moment ‘Tonight’ and then a week of a 24 carat 1990 classic, Betty Boo’s ‘Where Are You Baby?’ – that’s the genuine sound of fun!

Was Timmy Mallett the original inspiration for Wayne’s World? Famous, or infamous, in 1990 as a children’s morning TV host, with his vomited-upon multicoloured short-sleeved shirts, his “comedy” spectacles and his general air of pointless franticity, he employed the young Mike Myers as sidekick in his Wide Awake Club of the early-mid eighties; but whereas Wayne’s World exhibits an inane but essentially benign air of enthusiastic idiocy, Mallett, with his pink, squidgy “Mallett’s Mallet,” was apt to bear the air of someone who should have been kept at least a thousand miles away from any children. As a DJ at Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio he mentored the young Chris Evans. Several circles could be completed, or broken, with that particular triangle.

What is most striking about the entirely uncalled for revival of Brian Hyland’s jolly thirty-year-old allegorical account of loss of virginity (“So in the water she wanted to stay”) is the complete lack of personality Mallett displays throughout the record as a “singer”; he finds it difficult enough to keep in tune or time with himself on resolutely clumsy double-tracking, never mind with the song. With its ghastily grinning effusion of Jive Bunny, Tight Fit and Black Lace and abrupt, money-run-out-in-the-machine ending, listening to “Itsy Bitsy” is a painful experience, as though presented with an out-of-date karaoke machine programmed to please and doing everything but. It was the summer smash of 1990 that “Kinky Afro” or Bocca Juniors’ “Raise” or Flowered Up’s “It’s On” should have been.

But what makes the record, literally, less than nothing is its options. The TS Eliot reference in the Bombularina name provides a clue, and perhaps the terrible sub-House assemblage of the most cliched samples one could hope to find in 1990 (most prominently, Michael Jackson’s “Go on girl!”) might betray another, but the record was conceived and produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Worse, Mallett himself has for the best part of thirty years been an independent Chaucerian scholar, his father was one of my former English Literature tutors, and as a resident of Cookham and accomplished artist, with entries in the Tate Britain catalogue, he has also become practically Cookham’s Official Recorder, his local subjects including John Spencer, Stanley’s grandson. In other words, while the likes of Jive Bunny were get-rich-quick pyramid schemes of pop, Bombalurina is the product of people who know infinitely better – and for that reason, even more than for its wilful dragging back of pop into 1989, “Itsy Bitsy” disgusts me more than any number one reviewed to date.

Tom at #16: obviously you can’t tell us yet, but I’m now racking my brains wondering what your least favourite #1 might be, given that it isn’t ‘…Grandma’ ‘Lady in Red’ ‘Every Loser Wins’ or anything by Jive Bunny.

I can’t actually remember this particular one, but am I alone in taking a perverse enjoyment in seeing truly terrible records get a deserved critical kicking on FT?

‘Horribly British professional funsters’: nicely put! Numerous representatives of the genre were still ruling the roost at Radio 1 at this time, and probably contributed to the success of this record.

Tommy Boyd can’t stand Mallett by all accounts.

It’s interesting to note that a lot of responses to this one are school-based. It wouldn’t have been too long after this that a girl in my class actually appeared on WACaday and emerged triumphant in Mallets Mallet. Don’t remember anyone being that impressed. Same goes for the track. Even at that formative stage I think a lot of us knew this strange man in the specs was a troublemaker.

When people these days glance at the charts and despair of modern music, they should look back to 89-90 and compare the crap at Number One to the stuff that actually got remembered.

I’m not an indie snob or a rock snob – I love a good pure-pop song, but this is awful. Jive Bunny is awful. Most of SAWpop is awful (apart from “What Do I Have To Do?”, which is mysteriously far better than it ought to be).

Ah yeah.

If 1990 was going to have a novelty summer holiday hit, why couldn’t it have been Digital Underground’s Humpty Dance?

Tricky Disco also used the “yeah! WHOO!” sample this summer, but filtered it to sound as it was coming out of the mouth of a baby Cadbury’s Smash Martian.

Other alternative no.1 summer smashes of 1990:

Ragga Twins – Hooligan ’69
The KLF – What Time Is Love
Moodswings – Spiritual High
My Bloody Valentine – Soon (original or Andrew Weatherall mix)
Tribe Called Quest – Bonita Applebum
Meat Beat Manifesto – Radio Babylon
Primal Scream – Higher Than The Sun
1 World – Down On Love
History feat. Q Tee – Afrika
Sheer Taft – Cascades
Young MC – I Come Off (Southern Comfort mix)
The Grid – Flotation

A glorious summer… and, oh yes, not forgetting one single which was sorta kinda robbed, but Tom’ll get there soon enough.

@44, @45 yes yes yes

add

Everything – Kicking Back with Taxman

En Vogue – Lies (surprisingly big on the pirate stations in east london at the time)

loads of stuff on WARP and Shut Up and Dance (as well as the Ragga Twins already mentioned, Waking Up by Nicolette, I’m Not In Love/Fuck The Legal Stations by Rum and Black warrant a mention I think). And whatever the name of the record label that Jesus Loves You and the E-Zee Possee was on too.

and – above all

The Grid – Floatation (which I am alarmed to learn from Spotify was evidently remixed and rereleased last year). “A Beat Called Love” was fun too, but not quite in the same league.

I’m almost inclined to look back at that summer as the peak of the 12″ single – this was still a time when major labels were chancing their arm. Plus they hadn’t swallowed up and sucked the life out of every indie label – many were still going strong (on an entirely different note I think that the best singles/EP act of the year were Ride – 3 cracking 4-track EPs, and the 1st one of 91 even better. Then it all went wrong). Every high street, almost, still had a record store, and a lot of interesting stuff was out there for the taking.

It really does find new depths, doesn’t it? It makes me introspective, and I find two things. Firstly, I would prefer people felt I had no love for music and no sense of humour than anyone might feel that I felt this was either enjoyable musically or funny. Secondly, I dislike myself for my snootiness, but at the age of 41 I have only just come to terms with what no.10 implies about the target audience. What was previously mystifying has been replaced by something less palatable; no. 10 has shown me the truth and I do not like it (though I am grateful for being shown). Maybe I was just kidding myself all along. In denial.

No.34. In addition, ALW put this out on the Carpet label. Because his Ltd company is called Really Useful Group or RUG. Carpet, Rug. See.

A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

What was I laughing at again?

I’m not at all comfortable with the idea that Mallett could be Cookham’s 2nd most famous artist after Stanley Spencer. I’d be happy if Rolf Harris was a Cookham resident, I have a lot of time for him, but I think Rolf lives a bit further down-river. Rolf, if by any chance, you might be lurking here, please sell up and move to Cookham!