I wouldn’t say I was a ever a fan of “Agadoo”. But I danced to it – like “The Birdie Song” and Russ Abbot’s “Atmosphere” it was played at school discos when I was 12 or 13, to entertain the segment who were there to jump around and didn’t care about girls. I saw Black Lace as quite harmless, a thing apart from the rest of pop and not really to be judged on its terms: they were the soundtrack to marshmallow eating contests and birthday congas, nothing more. So in a way “The Chicken Song” taught me to hate them. Because “The Chicken Song” was something more: it was satire. Not only that, the B-Side was political satire.
Actually, I’m not even sure “I’ve Never Met A Nice South African” qualifies as satire – it’s just sheer nastiness and all the more effective for that. It uncovers the secret of Spitting Image – the show was all about dehumanisation: the reduction of the famous to latex tics was also a way of creating the distance needed to really lay into them. “South African” worked because it was dehumanising the dehumanisers, damning a proud and prejudiced culture as a stinking, rubber-faced joke. Unfortunately, it was only the B-Side, and the A-Side dealt far less well with a far less worthy target.
Not that I thought so at the time: I loved “The Chicken Song”. But I was wrong: it’s asking you to make a straight comparison between a record which, however dreadful, is designed to help people enjoy themselves, or a record which is designed to sneer at people enjoying themselves. Which “The Chicken Song” does, very effectively: I don’t know who sang it but his voice is a black hole of disdain. Ah, you might say, but the problem with Black Lace and their Roadshow-fodder ilk is that they were a kind of enforced fun. If you weren’t joining in you could be seen as a killjoy. And this is a good point. I would counter that if you had the good luck to be a student in the 80s or 90s the kind of tupenny-ha’penny ‘surrealism’ peddled by “The Chicken Song” was far more grindingly inescapable and orthodox than any pineapple-pushing heartiness, and makes it exhausting to hear now.
And I’d add the very obvious point that Spitting Image are destroying the charts in order to save them – all that happened was “The Chicken Song” found its way onto disco playlists and people had the same kind of inane fun they were having before, only now with added air quotes. As Nietzsche said, battle not with funsters lest ye become a funster.
Score: 2
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I hate, hate , hate this song – ‘a black hole of disdain’ succinctly sums up why
Hurray! The first number one that I absolutely ADORED at the time. I will forever associate it with being on holiday in Hayling Island, watching my dad constantly fall over while windsurfing and being incredibly annoying to my poor sister (trying to stick deckchairs up her nose etc).
Fascinating stuff, another I’d never heard before.
The double irony of a song meant to mock the charts topping the chart makes me wonder who’s playing a joke on whom. Is it Spitting Image, fooling the public into mocking themselves and laughing all the way to the bank? Is it the public, repurposing a joke at their expense and subverting it by taking it literally?
Or is it 1986, laughing at the attempts of amateur cultural analysts in 2009 to make sense of it all?
This is I think the first song I ever knew all the words to. Being in primary school at the time helped, as it was pretty much everywhere in the playground. Obviously I haven’t listened to it in at least 22 years.
OK, listening back to it for the first time since I was 4 now.
Oh dear.
Listen to the b-side it’s comedy gold!
Whilst I loved the TV show I never saw the point of this record. Black Lace never took themselves remotely seriously and in any case Agadoo was now TWO WHOLE YEARS OLD. Dire Straits or Five Star were far more deserving satirical targets in May 1986.
I don’t suppose they had the Match Of The Day theme vaguely in mind when composing this? It hadn’t occurred to me before tho so perhaps not.
Though not directly aligned with the alternative comedy movement, the Central TV puppet show Spitting Image could be said to have shamed most of it from the point of view of political polemic; yet, as with TW3 a generation previously, the programme eventually demonstrated how any protest, if sufficiently popular, can be assimilated and nullified by any Establishment. The voice characterisations for the likes of skinhead biker Norman Tebbit, besuited cold rationalist Thatcher and the ventriloquist act of Davids Owen and Steel, were provided by the youthful likes of Rory Bremner, Harry Enfield, Paul Whitehouse and Steve Coogan. The caricatures and schematas were frighteningly spot on (and continued to be such into the nineties, with John Major literally The Grey Man), and few who witnessed it are likely to forget the 1987 election special which ended with the Thatcher puppet, hissing spite and sputum at the camera below, chillingly singing “Tomorrow Belongs To Me”; it remains one of the most terrifying things I have ever seen on television, and only slightly less terrifying than the resigned horror that the majority of British people were about to want it for the third time.
The downside of this type of satire, as always, lay in the easier targets the show found to pillory, particuarly in the light entertainment arena. “The Chicken Song” was written as a parody of the group Black Lace, erstwhile underperforming Eurovision entrants (“Mary-Ann”, 1979), who subsequently specialised in cheesy snare-the-tourists-at-the-airport Eurotack dance routine knees-ups, the most successful of which were “Superman (Gioca Jouer)” (#9, 1983) and the dreaded “Agadoo,” which stopped just short of becoming 1984’s eighth million-selling single and was kept off number one only by “Careless Whisper.”
However, Black Lace were perhaps too easy a target for a series which had set its main targets so high, and as with the continued jibes at punk rock in David Nobbs’ Perrin novels – but didn’t the writer realise that Reggie Perrin WAS punk? – there is a slight air of condescension in “The Chicken Song,” which adopts the standard Black Lace template and then becomes the Club 18-30 equivalent of “Imagine” in its dance instructions; starting off with “Hold a chicken in the air/Stick a deckchair up your nose,” it then progresses through ever unlikelier steps (“Form a string quartet,” “Learn to speak Arapahoe”) before culminating in the bloodied cheer of “Casserole your gran/Disembowel yourself with spears,” all delivered as a jaunty singalong. But its irony, almost inevitably, worked against it; despite its inbuilt warning of “Though you hate this song/You’ll be humming it for weeks,” that is exactly what its public did, sending it speedily to number one and clapping along to it on the dancefloor in complete ignorance of what the song was saying.
The other half of the “double B-side,” namely “(I’ve Never Met A) Nice South African” – and both were listed on the charts at the time – unsurprisingly received little airplay; another list song in the Lance Percival topical calypso/”I’ve Been Everywhere” mode (with more than a touch of Squeeze’s “Cool For Cats”) which again deliberately lurches toward the absurd (“I had lunch with Rowan Atkinson when he paid and wasn’t late,” “I’ve danced with ten-foot pygmies in a Montezuma ball”) until it gets to its payoff chorus of “But I’ve never met a nice South African…/’Cos we’re a bunch of arrogant bastards/Who hate black people.” It is unknown how many, if any, of the 800,000 people who bought the single gave this half any serious thought, or even listened to it; but bonus points to lyricist John Lloyd and colleagues for at least attempting a Trojan horse, and indeed making this the only chart-topping song to namecheck Breyten Breytenbach.
Tom – I think Phil Pope is the lead vocalist on this. I remember the South African song was actually broadcast on the show much earlier (autumn 84 IIRC). The common room audience was laughing along with it until the third chorus where an exception is made for white dissident Breyten Breytenbach of whom only 0.0000001% (being generous) had heard and the joke was killed stone dead.
#3 Birdseed yes you can tie yourselves in knots pondering the multiple ironies of releasing this as a single. I don’t recall it being a charity single so the moral value of satirising a process you’re taking part in is dubious.
I didn’t mind it without finding it remotely funny and wished it had hung on given the horror that came next.
the lyrics were by the creators of Red Dwarf
Can I get in and be the first to say it’s written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, later best known as the creators of “Red Dwarf”?
In the words of Unlucky Alf: “Booger!”
I had instinctively resisted Black Lace’s “Agadoo”. Not because I was a miserable git at parties (I WAS a miserable git at parties btw), but I felt that it’s chivvying “this is FUN! You should be JOINING IN!” message was anathaema to me. This reeked of the kind of Butlins/Pontins “organised” jolly-up, that I never ever felt comfortable with. Maybe it was a half-hearted attempt to “act cool” or perhaps more likely it was fear of assimilation. An attempt to resist, like Picard against The Borg and their imperative to homogenise the universe into cyber-zombies. Without our uniqueness, our individuality, who are we? It’s the same reason I resist Line Dancing, simply because it’s a calculated form of control, a rigid, structured exercise in dancehall totalitarianism…but more on that at a much later occasion.
The Spitting Image parody did nothing more than make me shudder in bleak recognition of a joyless experience where everyone else was “having fun” except me.
re14 Picard and the Enterprise are the forces of blandness – viva la borg!
#10 It certainly sounds like it could be Philip Pope – much respect for this guy and his best works so a shame to realise that this is also on his CV!
if the borg did line-dancing it would be AWESOME
direct oughties descendant = that peter kaye cross-dressing x-parody christmas song
noughties?
Maybe I should have used The Amnion in Stephen Donaldson’s Gap series as a comparative, rather than The Borg.
I have to say, though: as a Swede, the nonsensical humour appeals to me a great deal. Come on, “Behead an Eskimo”, that’s funny. Ha ha. Isn’t it?
The singer sounds like one of Crass, who usually picked more deserving targets at least. Middle class whey-faced types pointing and sniggering at poor people on package holidays. They went on to write a sci-fi series? Coo, what a shock! Stones and glass houses aside, this is truly nasty nerdwork.
Those well known satirists The Shadows released a double B-side of The Dreams I Dream/Scotch On The Socks in 1966 (quite beautiful – red B’s on a white label, just like the regular Columbia A-label demos, for those into less spiteful nerdwork).
I think there is a lot of the Police in the backing in I’ve Never Met A Nice South African, which I think a lot of people listened to a bit more than the a-side because, well the a-side grates quite quickly.
I prefer “Checkout the Chicken” by Grandmaster Chicken and the DJ Duck for silly uses of chickens in songs.
There’s a deconstruction of South African here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A3700234
I had never even heard of “Agadoo” until now, and the same goes for “The Chicken Song”. Hence no unpleasant memories of being tormented by a song that (wittingly or unwittingly) became the very thing it set out to mock.
And while I’d say it isn’t very nice to sneer at people for their taste in musical entertainment, I’m also not saintly enough to be above a good sneer every now and then.
So – slightly funny the first and maybe the second time I heard it, but definitely not enjoyable as an actual song, only as cheap shot comedy.
SwedenWatch: No trace of it. To the best of my knowledge, Spitting Image never aired here – whether it was thought to be “too British”, too rude, or if it’s simply coincidence, I don’t know. Not the Nine O’Clock News was, for instance, shown on national TV and that seems British enough – so it’s anyone’s guess.
With all the cheap novelties and irritants that filled up the top of the ’86 charts, the George Michael track sounds like Schubert by comparison.
“Spitting Image” had a mild vogue in the US around this time. I think there were a couple of made-for-America specials, unless I’m remembering wrongly (one had Reagan and Stallone heavily featured, and one amusing bit about Roger Moore praising Leonard Nimoy’s acting versatility). The “jump the shark” moment for SI came when they did Genesis’ “Land of Confusion” video, at least for my sullen teenage friends..
Seeing this title coming up, I’d assumed that someone had got to #1 with, say, a dance/silly costumes video to the old Chicken Dance polka (which often shows up in sloppy drunk settings in the US, and which did get some Pabst-swilling, hipster attention in the ’90s). Alas not. Next.
This is the third and final disc on Popular that my father ever bought – after Jailhouse Rock and Two Little Boys!
I must say that in the context of being performed by puppets of Douglas Hurd and Archbishop Runcie, and then within the context of a half-hour Sunday night show, I did find this – and do now – funny. Divorced from the visuals though, this did become a bit tiresome. And listening to it again now, overwhelmingly sour.
Yes, there were a couple of US specials, which suffered from being extended and carrying a plot, instead of quickfire sketches and songs. My feeling about Spitting Image as a show is that it stopped being funny once Ian Hislop and Nick Newman stopped writing the bulk of it in 1989.
Agadoo I like though! Something to do with the tinkling structure of it that seems to turn in on itself.
Number 2 watch: Three weeks of Patti LaBelle and Michael MacDonald’s ‘On My Own’. Certainly not to the taste of my 13 year-old self.
Happy to say that here in the U.S. we passed on this one.
For some reason I have a 45 of Black Lace’s “I Speaka Da Lingo” which I assume I must have bought in a fit of studenty ironic japery. I think it made me laugh more than this did though, and I loved the TV show.
So who actually sung this song then? Some people above are saying Philip Pope, but all the information I can find has him as composer / producer rather than singer. The only actual claim I can find on the internet is this – http://www.inthenews.co.uk/comment/entertainment/tv/interview-remembering-spitting-image-$1338336.htm – in which the singer is named as one Kate Robbins. But it really doesn’t sound like a woman to me. Anyone have any better evidence?
…or was it Michael Fenton Stevens? – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Fenton_Stevens
I cannot believe that the voice of kindly Mr Beakman from Third And Bird was responsible for this horror
Spitting Image was always very ropey as I recall – I’d feel I’d seen a good episode if it had two good gags. More likely it would have an excellent opening skit followed by an entire show of filler.
I speak as a (pre) teenager though – I suspect the show pitched itself differently at different audiences and that others will have got more out of it. Even so, as a kid I felt caught between two versions of what it imagined its audience to be, so that the wordy stuff was usually too obvious and the puerile stuff just plain not funny. I was always happiest to note some minor gag going on off-centre, which at least speaks of attention to detail. Probably I was just oblivious to much of it – it seems like the kind of show that’d lend itself to the kind of public-school-type humour for which I would be no ready audience.
I’m amazed it aired at all outside the UK, to be honest. I’ve seen a French version of the idea and had not one clue what was going on, who the characters were, or even which bits were the jokes (and my French is pretty good, it’s a cultural reference problem). Even the British characters didn’t necessarily translate, at least to me – although, like the single, the show did accord a sort of cachet to those it sought to lampoon. I still would have little idea who John Selwyn Gummer was, for example, had I not frequently passed his house in Queen Anne’s Gate to see his puppet on display in his front window. At least I think that’s his house – it’s a bit try-hard, whoever it is.
The idea was revived with a fanfare about two years ago, with computer animation rather than puppets – which did seem to be missing the point rather. I presume that version sank without trace.
Absolutely loved it at the time. I remember Smash Hits doing an illustrated lyric page with which I did an evening’s work of memorising the chorus for later bellowing in the playground. We’d do Snooker Loopy as a encore. I have no desire to hear either now.
TOTPWatch. Spitting Image performed The Chicken Song on the Top Of The Pops of May 22 1986. I remember that as being a cumbersome appearance, featuring Ronald Reagan on drums.
Also in the studio that week were; Jaki Graham, Billy Ocean and Simply Red. Peter Powell was the host.
Rory McGrath singing?
Just sounds like him…
re37 that sounds like one of the dullest TOTP line-ups ever – with PP the tasteless icing on the cake.
That reminds me that for some reason he was championing an up and coming b(l)and (possibly called Rouen – but I may be wrong) and appeared at a gig they did at the University of London Institute of Education Student Union some time in 1986 – which in turn triggers memories of seeing Sonic Youth being photographed for the NME just outside the building on another day.
Re 35: I remember the French version being little more than a non-satirical, gentle jog around the French political scene with only the puppets as a common link. Don’t recall Le Pen at all.
I always watched SI (wonder if that was intentional?) but often felt it was too Steve Bell-ish in its heaviness of touch. D Steele as a pocket-size figure – great! Douglas Hurd’s 99 flake hair – great! But not at all consistent. Having said THAT I don’t think for a minute that if it was a brand new idea anyone would broadcast it in 2009.
There was talk of the show returning to ITV a few years ago (strangely around the same time of satirical animation sketch show 2DTV) but this seems to have come to nothing. If it had I wonder how many of the original puppets could’ve been re-used.
It’s weird to think that it was actually still going right up until the arrival of Tony Blair (initially they portrayed him as a hyperactive schoolboy but only after he became the new Labour leader did they add the super wide smile iirc). Perhaps he was the one of the last puppets to have been made.
Ah it was all PJ & Duncan’s fault: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/news/a39486/ant-and-dec-stunt-ends-spitting-image-return.html
SI didn’t always hit their targets dead on, but as it became more news-driven and writers had to script on the hoof, it had a freshness of feel for a while at least.
Thatcher’s voice was by Steve Nallon (as was Major’s) and I think it’s that vocal caricature that endures in my mind more so than Janet Brown’s which was, at the time heralded as the definitive Thatcher Impersonation.
Nallon could absolutely turn soft tones (used particularly effectively when Thatcher was being patronising) into a harsh guttral roar (used when bollocking her cabinet) at the drop of a hat. Skinhead Tebbit in his biker jacket stroking a cosh was pretty much bang on as well.
Lord, imagine the “fun” they could have had with George W. Bush.
#36 – Snooker Loopy, much more memorable than this one. the Edinburgh-Dundee train stops at Cupar, (and then) Leuchars before crossing the Tay. A friend can never hear the station announcement at edinburgh waverley without mentally triggering chas & dave
#45: quite magnificent!
Funnily enough, I always think of Chas & Dave’s ‘Margate’ whenever I pass through Moorgate.
the rather unpleasant and unfortunately not uncommon sound of middle class often Oxbridge educated members of the alternative comedy “establishment” taking the piss out of the working class rather ironic when I should imagine most of them liked to identify with the left.
this was the second single i bought (i never much got the single-buying habit though and i’m pretty sure the next 7″ i bought after this was pavement’s “trigger cut”) and we all thought it was hilarious at the time. in retrospect it is unpleasantly sneery (the involvement of the loathsome r mcgrath would make absolute sense) but i’m pretty sure that nearly everyone buying it did get the joke, and unlike, say, frank zappa’s “satires” it does at least have the grace to be as good at the thing it is sneering at*.
i think the b side lasted a bit longer in our affections and i remember trying but failing to cause an outrage by playing it in the ‘bring in a song’ bit of a school music lesson. actually, we all had to note down and give a score to whatever was played each lesson in our music books – i’d love to see this now as a bit of cultural history. the other record i remember taking in was queen’s ‘stone cold crazy’. this received much awestruck praise for how fast freddie was singing iirc.
*(my views on zappa consist entirely of what i remember myself to have thought one night fifteen years ago when a z-loving mate played me some of his stuff, and so i admit they may be open to a degree of challenge)
I reached a similar view on Zappa after equally brief exposure to him: a version of ‘Stairway To Heaven’ where a horn section plays the guitar solo note-for-note; and John Lennon doing ‘Well’ with the Mothers of Invention, where beforehand Zappa tells the crowd to ‘cool it you guys’ and they do. I would normally admire those kinds of confidence, but (as you say) there’s something that goes beyond into sneery territory – on the latter clip he comes across less leader-of-the-gang, and more like a humourless Fonzie.