Ants largely jettisoned, Adam cast around for a new angle. It was a moment in pop history when sudden changes of image and sound were respectable – even expected for some stars. Compared to today’s performers who tend to cover bandwagon-jumping with a figleaf of artistic intent, there was a refreshing honesty about this pursuit of a new look for a new season: pop and fashion were merging in a blare of colour.
Adam Ant decided on a brass section as a way to renew his impact. This was a modish choice but also a thorny one. In the early 80s horns had invaded pop to a degree rarely seen before and surely never since: they are one of the defining sounds of the era. So using them risked cliché. Initially the horn revival had been led by the likes of Dexys and the Two-Tone bands, who used their legacy in soul and ska music to add muscle and authenticity to their sound. Dexys were clearly in Adam’s mind when he put “Goody Two Shoes” together – the “pretending that you’re Al Green” line is generally interpreted as a dig at Kevin Rowland, and indeed it’s hard to work out whether the whole song is a defense of asceticism or a swipe at it.
The other wave of brass in early 80s pop had come from clubland, where harder-edged funk and latin sounds had become popular in the wake of disco. This too surfaced in the charts – Pigbag and Spandau Ballet drew on it for inspiration. So Adam needed something to differentiate himself from either scene. He found it in swing – much of the Friend Or Foe album is an invigorating and unusual mix of Burundi drumming and swing rhythms, and “Goody Two Shoes” is the most infectious example.
“Goody Two Shoes” casts Adam wholly as an entertainer – perhaps he judged that his pantomime era had driven off whichever fans had originally been attracted by his edginess and tribalism. But this repositioning came at a price. Adam himself is subdued on “Goody Two Shoes”, at least relative to those thunderous drums and jive-ready horns. His manifesto-making, previously so clear and charismatic, is confused. Worse, on this and “Friend Or Foe” itself – though they’re excellent, piledriving songs – he seems snippy and score-settling. He’s moved to songs about being Adam, from songs about how to be Adam – a crucial difference and one that surely hurt his fanbase. There were, after all, always other styles and stars to follow. But few of them had the weirdly messianic intensity and gumption of Adam in the prime of his stardom. The era of the pop ideologue and idealist was gradually slipping to its end.
Score: 7
[Logged in users can award their own score]
(The first ever Popular entry to be posted from the USA!)
I first heard this on a freebie World Cup Years compilation CD rescued from Kirsty’s dad’s Daily Mail in 1998 and was somewhat surprised that I hadn’t heard of it before (being familiar with the other Ant #1s). I thoroughly enjoyed it however! Rather exhausting to dance to, though.
“invaded pop to a degree rarely seen before” seems a slightly strange thing to say: after all swing — which you say is all over this song — is all about horns; is swing by some “jazz elephant in the room”* defn not pop? (obviously classic jazz predates the charts as actual charts, but pop doesn’t just mean “top ten”)
(i tried to find yr classic FT post on definitions of pop but didn’t know how to look it up!)
*esp. for the first popular post from new york!
this is my favourite number 1 by adam – I’m pretty sure I bought a copy. Seen in the light of subsequent events you can hear paranoia in the lyrics and the beat is manic. The horns sound shrill and compressed compared to the warmer tones of Dexys. 7 seems about right – will Adam be retiring from the top of the page soon – to be replaced by MJ perhaps?
I guess I draw a mental distinction between the big band swing era and the pop era – but even if not, the flourescence of horns in the 40s and then not much since would count as “rarely”, surely?
I can remember Adam on Swap Shop, or an equivalent, where he debuted this song and then, earnestly, asked a bunch of pre-teens what they thought of it. This seemed weird and slightly uncomfortable at the time, but makes more sense in the light of his problems.
An interesting argument, but I think Prince Charming is the first defensive Adam 45, panto or no, and it got my goat. G2S seemed much more playful. “Subtle innuendos follow… must be something inside” is a beautiful, backstage mumble of a lyric which nobody else would have dreamt of.
“Al Green…” not Spandau, or the new white boy funk acts? Kevin R later became a close pal and I’m fairly sure Adam would have spotted an ally in the rampant paranoia on Plan B/Keep It Part 2/Liars A to E.
The Teardrop Explodes’ brief moment in the sun had put brass into Pop, I’d say. Reward felt much bigger than a no.6 hit.
This wasn’t really solo Adam, was it? I know many copies of the record have it by Adam Ant, and it was always billed as such, but my picture disc copy says it’s by Adam and the Ants, as do many early pic sleeves for the black vinyl copies, including the special poster sleeve. (check the various copies on sale at ebay)
So what was the situation – did he decide to go solo after the track was recorded, in which case it is an Ants record, or did the record company completely b*lls it up in so many places?
My own recollection is that it was the former, so this should really be the Ants’ 3rd #1, and a damn fine one it was too. The only thing wrong with it is that it kept SOft Cell’s sublime “Torch” at #2.
The other main talking point with G2S is that it was the record where Adam Ant took off his make-up!!! (This was actually quite a big deal at the time.)
Ants or no Ants, this is my favourite of the three Adam Number Ones. There’s such a joyful, invigorating silliness to it. I love the self consciously awkward way it shifts gear about two thirds of the way through and that brilliantly showbiz ending. A solid 8 from me.
This is great, but I like Kat’s description of it as exhausting. Few Popular singles seem so demanding to listen to to these ears. There really is something quite martial about those horns. Like the other classic Adam singles this sounds like a call-to-arms to me, a rallying round to the cause of nonsense and glory. I can think of few other songs on Popular that I like so much, but which would run the risk of irritating me so much.
I think of this as forming the absolute apex of Adam Ant’s career as a pop star. He’d certainly paid more attention to detail and taken complete advantage of every oportunity to build upon his name over the previous two years; the last Adam & The Ants tour (surely a licence to print money by normal pop phenomena standards) was so lavish that it hadn’t made much of a profit, and the thrilling Top of the Pops appearance for this (his first for a long while) shows him using his advantage as biggest star in the pop firmament (several stages! costume changes!). You imagine that the years of being a punk also-ran and being ripped off by Malcolm Maclaren added a sense of vengeful zeal to fuel this ambition.
You can see where the decline was coming here too, though. No Ants and chippy songs about being famous…
TOTPWatch: Just the one performance, but what a performance it was;
20 May 1982. Also in the studio that week were; Rocky Sharpe & The Replays, ABC and Patrice Rushen, plus an advance performance by Altered Images that went untransmitted. Peter Powell was the host.
Like Adam, I too don’t drink don’t smoke.
What do I do?
Very little of equivalent mystique.
As a by-product of my “black science fiction revisited” project, i’ve been thinkng a lot about attitudes to jazz in the 80s — I think Tom’s “mental distinction” is/was the default setting for 80s attitudes to pop (that in a sense it all “began” in the mid-50s, with the charts and television and rock’n’roll); but there was a militant revisionist faction which wanted to reinstate what had been the centre of pop for (at least) 20 years before this* — and certainly had presence arrangement-wise until the mid-60s (john barry’s bond theme is as much brass as it’s twangy guitar)
so for me (with a particular professional deformation: viz i was writing about and thinking about jazz and its role a lot during this era), the perception that horns were a distant blip is something i was constantly fighting against (yes seems like a blip; is actually a HYUGE mountain range all the same — at that time arguably still bigger than the rock’n’roll range we were currently in the middle of) (or perhaps approaching the end of, we didn’t know)
*benny goodman’s million-selling 78 “stomping at the savoy” (a “live” rather than a studio recording) sparked a massive teen craze for swing, but the big band sound went back to the dawn of Big Radio — both these elements (teens excited by the sounds of thmselves; radio) belong in the larger history of pop
(“stomping at the savoy” = a million-seller in 1935, while they were on tour — they started the tour relatively minor figures and ended it the biggest names in jazz, with every show a massive sell-out)
Snippy lyric about being famous matched by replacement of Ants’ multilayered rhythms by one constant, punishing drum beat. It’s a hell of a beat, but like Kat says, somewhat exhausting…
Adam had split the Antz, just after the roll-call song of “Ant Rap” was the single.
I think the last thing they did was accept an award ‘on his behalf’, even though they must have known they were out.
So, no antz (xcept Marco) on the record. Poster sleeve and Pic Disc, CBS ballsup.
I’ve always had a problem with pop stars singing songs about themselves, it’s one thing that really rubs me the wrong way about today’s pop divas like Britney, Christina etc. constantly bigging up themselves and their problems in song as if they’re 3 minute courses in self empowerment. You just wish they’d occasionally get outside the bubble of their own personality. At least this one has a sense of humour though.
CLASSIC X100!! This is the apex of a whole glorious run of tremendous charts, so awesome it’s amazing people didn’t just run naked down the street whooping and hollering with joy sometimes. Constantly in my head here in London, esp. when I’m on the King’s Road. THREE STAGES on Top of the Pops, every one of them earned.
Sorry, but there was nothing there whatsoever for me with this one except a distinct threat to the mercury on the irritateometer. Someone above said that “Goody Two Shoes” was difficult to dance to. Ditto listening to it, I’m afraid.
Garbage.
Interesting point by the Lord at 12.
I’d add that I’d have thought the New Romantic/synthpop era was a time when the “it all began in the mid-50s in America” idea of pop was under attack if not outrightly ridiculed. Ever since Rusty Egan had spun Frank Sinatra, 30s European music, pre-rock Latin etc at the Blitz for the 1st time since the 50s there’d been a distinct scepticism in respect of guardians of the rock canon who’d largely held sway with many for the past 20 years. (When saying that of course I exclude the whole parallel stream of the soul/reggae/funk/jazz/disco scene that was content to exist unbothered by the world of rocktype electric guitars). Feeding into this new adoption of pre-rock styles was the part the New Romanticism/Pop scene that came directly from the world of the funk jazz and soul clubs as Tom quite rightly says. All these original musics were dependent to a varying degree on horns and it was therefore no surprise at all that so much pop of the 80s featured these instruments.
Surely even the most hoary old rock bore would have to admit that the pop era (as opposed to the rock era)started at least as early as the 30s with the mentioned Benny Goodman and as we go into the 40s Glen Miller and Frank Sinatra and the bobbysoxers and a case could be made for it starting even earlier with the jazz age of the 20s.
To back Tom up I remember it was widely accepted at the time that this track had a dig at Kevin Rowland with the Al Green reference.
This thing about jazz elements is interesting. I can actually think of lots of pop I love(d) as a kid featuring “sax solos” including several Madness singles but also the very different “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do), cornier overblown (npi) hits like Wax’s “Bridge To Your Heart”, the post-Spandau late 80s London likes of Blow Monkeys and Hue & Cry. Even the trumpet work on a seminal much-loved #1 we’re still a few years away from connects…and at this point why not just throw ‘Pacific State’ in there too. And Minder, and Cagney & Lacey…OK that’s enough. The influence seems immediately apparent, and brass was surely a real (and somewhat successful) 80s pop staple (have theorised before that into the 90s this was replaced by ‘wah-wah’ guitar, or a greater empthasis on funk generally) – maybe this all explains why I’ve never “feared” or particularly disliked (the more conventional side of) jazz anyway.
as I recall there were a lot of modish jazz references in The Face around this time – with an emphasis on the style more than the sound. I imagine that reflected the tastes of the editor and journalists as well as that was current at the time. There was Kid Creole referencing Cab Calloway musically and visually and I recall a lot of positive press for Wynton Marsalis in the early 80s for getting jazz ‘back on track’ after it went all skronky in the 70s.
Re 12: I don’t see horns as a “distant jazz blip”. Saxophones were pretty central to R&R; Phil Spector used horn sections on just about everything. And there’s the whole Brass Rock genre from 69/70 – Blood Sweat & Tears, Chicago, etc. – which was pretty hairy and sweaty and distinctly out of fashion by 72, leaving much of the 70s as a brass-free pop zone (exceptions being plenty of disco and Roy Wood’s pakuri-Spector).
‘Pop’ wasn’t coined as a musical term until the late 40s, and was all over the place by the mid 50s. So you can say Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller were the pop stars of their day, but so were John McCormack and Marie Lloyd. The sense of a new era was as much to do with amplification and the invention of the electric bass as the birth of R&R, both of which were pretty crucial in funk/disco/non-rock Pop to come. How about saying Rock Around The Clock was the first Modern Pop hit? And that brass dips in and out of fashion in the Modern Pop era?
Having said all that, the brass on G2S surely owes more to Mariachi than it does to Benny Goodman.
agreed that adam ant doesn’t sound very like benny goodman! goodman’s hit was the catalyst for a shift in the audience for (and perspective on) swing, significantly shifting its demographic down agewise and (somewhat) up classwise — it was a campus fad as much as anything
my instinct is still to say that — whatever technological or cultural maker you’re giving this split between “modern” and “ancient” pop (including the use of the term “pop”) — there’s a rationalisation of a forgetting going on that (at this distance) i’m suspicious of: i don’t mind saying the arrival of electric bass marks a generational taste-shift, but i do mind saying electric bass caused teenagers and grown-ups to be different kinds of people… so what IS the shift? what DID happen to jazz? what was happening to rock, and was it a similar loss of nerve or loss of self-awareness or loss of what?
(i hesitate to relink again to my piece on the cutter, but it is about the same issue, albeit from a slightly different context, a rock record six months later, and tamil violin instead of jazz: what happens to the certitude of your youth culture it encounters (i) the rest of the world, and (ii) the rest of history)
Plenty of brass on the indie scene too, not just Pigbag funky stuff but the New Quiet/New Bossa lot like The Pale Fountains and Everything But The Girl. They liked a fair bit of trumpet.
I think even the NME went all London hip on the Jazz n’ Clubbing thing at this time too, I remember a few Ray Lowry cartoons taking the piss out of people in baggy Zoot suit pants.
Re 24: I’m on shaky ground here, but my understanding of where jazz had gone post-war and pre-rock was into Bop, which wasn’t Pop enough, so the majority of Swing fans lost interest. The bands got smaller, the singers went solo, and so jazz either became smooth vocal gear (Frank Sinatra), sometimes Westlife-bland (Perry Como), or too complex for Joe Public to follow.
From a purely British perspective, the noise the original Teds went for was loud, basic, percussion-heavy jazz (the Kirchin Band, Ken Mackintosh), so when R&R appeared it was what they had been waiting for – ie the same but much moreso. Plus it sounded nothing like the music their folks dug. But my knowledge of jazz is close to zero so I may be miles out!
Re 13 – “they started the tour relatively minor figures and ended it the biggest names in jazz, with every show a massive sell-out”, sounds just like Arcade Fire in 2004-5. Although not jazz of course.
Having a horn section in a song does not make that song a ” jazz” song. That’s like saying using a cow-bell makes it Swiss.
Every element of this is a joy – from the brass, whether it be jazz or mariachi, to the unrelenting though not overwhelming drums, to the witty lyric (dead right, LondonLee, it’s a world away from the latest tiresome bulletins on the life of Britney and even the way Robbie went after a while). Another one of my favourites of the year, and although the rot set in from here (“Apollo 9” had a great chorus though) it’s a cracker to remember Adam by.
Another British icon associated with this record which was on its way out… the humble “pound note, pound note”. Within a year of G2S, the pound coin was introduced, and the pound note had ceased to be issued even before Adam made his one-song appearance at Live Aid.
If I could choose one twelve-month period of my life to relive, that period would begin during G2S’ reign at the top – it would start as I put down my pen at the end of the German end-of-year exam and went off to meet my German exchange-student girlfriend for a long weekend on the Isle of Wight (Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like The Wolf” blasting from every car radio in Sandown). Later that summer I had my first summer job – working in various branches of a bookie’s in Moss Side, not exactly glamorous but still… (there was one high-roller who was Italian, sold sharp suits and was able to hop over to Madrid for the World Cup Final). And by September I was preparing for a brilliant few months to come, more on which shortly.
This was the only AA album I had in Canada . I liked the drumming in particular, reminds me also of ” I Want Candy” by Bow Wow Bow.
I saw Adam on an episode of ” Northern Exposure ” last week. Acting as a zoned out out rocker that ended up in Sicily , Alaska instead of Italy. You really can’t trust those airline check in staff , can you ?
It was kinda fun and he fit in to the bizarre premise of this very entertaining, in its day , show. Didn’t realize he was a thespian.
Erithian at no 29. I actually remember the last time i ever had a pound not in my possession and if they lasted maybe a couple of years it fits in with you saying they stopped production in 1985 (Live Aid). It would have been in very early 1987 going by what I remember being on the video jukebox in this pub I used to go in and which had one of the very early (and dead easy) quiz machines in it. So easy in fact that for the first few weeks cleared it out every Saturday dinnertime. I tracked down a few more in other pubs and even started to get all these ridiculous fantasies about becoming a sort of ‘quiz machine hustler’ and giving up work and just playing these easy quiz machines for a living- well you could make £80 a session if you were lucky and it was on an estate or somewhere and no-one else who was winning had discovered – it quite a bit in 1986/87.But those who could beat the machine soon killed the golden goose and the winning period must have lasted all of 2 or 3 months…
Anyway this particular pub was an estate pub and a bit rough and I used to get a bit embarrassed after a few £10 jackpots! And like I said along with the rest after a few weeks it was no longer paying out. One of these losing weeks I getting a drink and saw an old bloke at the bar with a pound note and I said i wish I’d still got one of those and he gave it for me for a pound coin…needless to say within an hour I was skint and I’d changed my last poundnote back to a coin for a final attempt on the quiz machine!
Just about sums my life up at the time really…
I’m surprised you give this a Seven, it’s very much Adam Ant on the slide.
Interestingly, co-writer Marco Pirroni says that it is this song that keeps him in royalties cash, as it is always being used in films and TV programmes.
AndyPandy #31 – Wikipedia says the pound coin was introduced in April 1983, the pound note ceased to be issued at the end of 1984 and was withdrawn from circulation in March 1988. In summer ’83 I was back at work in the bookie’s, and the Manchester Evening News featured a letters page special every week about how awful pound coins were, which had the effect of making me warm to them – and the day a punter handed me a rancid-looking pound note with the words “That’s been in my sock all morning”… I became a total convert to the pound coin.
Yes, there was a “Give us a Break” quiz machine in a pub next to Woolwich Arsenal station that I was able to use as a cashpoint for a few months around ’88-89!
wichita@23, not sure about the 70s as a brass-free zone, not if we’re including saxaphone solos which were a tasteful-adult-rock signifier – ‘baker street’ springs to mind, but also its adoption by the more commercially-minded new wave (boomtown rats, hazel o’connor) to demonstrate their grown-up, mainstream rock/pop credentials. There’s a bunny-censored song coming up soon which comes very much out of this tradition rather than any latin/funk clubland. The themed request show ‘Get it On’ (Radio Scotland, 6-8pm, monday-thursday) reminded me of this a couple of days ago – it had ‘saxaphones’ as its theme, and featured rather too much of this tasteful nonsense for my liking.
Actually the tasteful horn solo seems a different lineage (classical–expanded-palate, rather than jazz-referencing?) to that of the brass section.
On a more personal brass-in-pop note, as a late 70s schoolboy I was briefly taught French Horn by a Mr Civil & later discovered that the French Horn solo on the Beatles ‘For no one’ was played by Alan Civil. Two french horn-playing Civils is too much of a coincidence, surely? He was about the right age as well. Possibly off topic, this.
Mr. Civil has a wiki page with photo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Civil
This is by far Adam Ant’s biggest American hit and pretty much all he’s known for over here today. What a shame. By the way we’re only one away from the #1 when I was born.
We’ll get to the next #1 one day. At a time like this we just have to be patient.
Yes, sorry about the delay in transmission. Popular will be back on a regular footing this coming weekend/next week.
Oh yes “Give Us A Break” I’m not sure I ever won many jackpots on those think it had got a bit more ‘competitive’ around where I used to play by then and I more than likely used to lose with a ball or 2 to pot – does anyone remember the name of the really easy first quiz machines (Quizmaster maybe?)that only had a relatively few questions and the only ones you ever got wrong after a bit were the ones that had the wrong answers!…eg one inaccuracy I eventually worked out was the question that insisted that New Order had a hit called ‘Mr Telephone Man’ and not New Edition when it obviously definitely WAS New Edition!
thanks brian@35, oddly his biography mentions nothing about teaching unpromising teenagers in southeast london comprehensives, but I guess like helping paul mccartney out it was a sideline
No 29 – “Another British icon associated with this record which was on its way out…”
Thought you were about to mention Caroline Munro
I enjoyed the discussion on the Lollards podcast – linked to Goody two shoes – about the impulse in pop to ‘keep it real’ by singing about oneself. Linking back to Lennon – whose version of his life in songs almost always seems to be overly dramatic and sententious made me wonder what precedents there were and whether they differed from that approach.
One candidate, Jimmy Rogers: “The singing Brakeman” – a ‘pop star’ from an earlier generation – also sings about his life but does so in an unnervingly chirpy way – singing about the TB that would eventually kill him. This may reflect the fatalism that IIRC Greil Marcus identified as a defining characteristic of Country music (contrasted with a more optimistic impulse in rock).
Reading the lyrics to GTS (for the first time) I see a kind of knowing bravado that put me in mind of the pre-fight taunts of boxers like Ali. It’s a lot more endearing than Lennon’s self pity. If they were aimed at Kevin Rowland it would have great for him to have come back with an answer record.
>>If they were aimed at Kevin Rowland it would have great for him to have come back with an answer record.
Captain Sensible pretty much did it for him.
I’ve never really taken to ‘Goody Two Shoes’, I think it’s the way the song sounds like it’s racing itself to get to the end (and hurrying you along with it) – I have to say though that I’d never given the use of brass much thought. Several posters have already referred to the use of the sax solo in pop and I’ve often wondered when its use as a sort of signifier of soulful sophistication really fell out of fashion. It seems a very ’80s touch although I can think of at least one future Popular entry from the early ’90s with one – have they disappeared from the charts completely, and if so, when? One for later maybe.
AndyPandy@39; yes it was the QuizMaster, Blockbusters, and (later) The Fruit Machine type of quiz machines, manufactured by the now-defunct Coinmaster, that had a very low number of stock questions and glaring errors such as New Order doing Mr. Telephone Man. I once took £73 from a single one of those in Carmarthen in about 20 minutes…
Those babies kept me living high on the hog through 1986 and 1987 before giving way to the Give Us A Break machines, one edition of which cost me a tenner on the final question thanks to Charlie Nicholas signing for Arsenal and thus being a wrong answer (the correct one being Aberdeen).
I used to be the only person who knew that there was a hole in the bottom of the drinks machine in the green room of the Drama Department, Royal Holloway College, through which every old-style heavy 50 pence piece would fall to the floor. Whenever I was alone in that room, I’d fish a few pounds out from under it.
It was a sad day when they replaced that machine.
I realise I am coming to this conversation a little late (having only just discovered this site on the back of the “Come On Eileen” discussion …oops!) but I feel the need to respond to the comments about the “pretending that you’re Al Green” line being a “dig” at Kevin Rowland. Quite the opposite, Adam Ant had declared himself a fan (he named Dexys as the Best Group of 1981 in that year’s Smash Hits Reader’s Poll!). It is clear to me that the reference in “Goody Two Shoes” is a homage rather than a dig. Adam Ant had been in the audience during Dexys’ live shows at The Old Vic in late ’81 during which Rowland used to incorporate a monologue into their cover of “Respect” about feeling like “pretending I’m Al Green when he sings “So Tired of Being Alone”…” It seems obvious that Adam found this inspiring – as he had also apparently found their use of brass.
What has never been established (as far as I’ve seen) is quite how MUCH of the lyrical content was inspired by Rowland and Dexys. The sale of alcohol was banned at those Old Vic shows (causing quite a stir amongst journalists at the time!) and Rowland had a famously puritanical stance towards drugs at that point, so the “don’t drink, don’t smoke” element to the song may also stem from Adam’s experiences of seeing Dexys in ’81?!
P.S. Has any other artist been both the subject of a Number One single AND the provider of a Number One single in the same year?!?
I want “Goody Two Shoes” to be an answer record to (what? Searching for the YSR?) more than I have wanted anything in pop since Ut failed to become the new Mountain…
If you are looking for “Goody Two Shoes” to be an answer record to anything in particular, I’d try Dexys’ 1981 single “Liars A To E” which contained such lyrics as “Bad habits – you should sleep alone” and “You don’t look like me, never think like me, try smoking your own and don’t follow ME” AND “here comes his soul, get your pen and note-books ready” …which match up pretty well with Adam Ant’s lyrics like “No ones gonna tell me, Whats wrong or whats right, Or tell me who to eat with, sleep with” …and “We dont follow fashion, That would be a joke, You know were going to set them, set them, So everyone can take note, take note.”
@47: In a real sense (Ballad Of John And Yoko, Get Back) and in a tangential sense (Jealous Guy / Imagine) John Lennon has been both provider and subject of number ones in two separate years!