The Greatest Novelty Songs

Product Information

The technique (which Dickie Goodman had also used on "The Flying Saucer") would inspire a number of other knockoffs, including The Nutty Squirrels and Russ Regan's one-off group Dancer, Prancer and Nervous. Fellows only played a handful of gigs as his Jilted John alter-ego: “I think we only did about six or seven… all in Manchester. As part of our celebrations for Absolute Radio’s The Best Decade, we proudly present some of the UK's greatest one-hit wonders of the 1970s!

Widely regarded as one of the finest one-hit wonders ever, ‘Spirit in the Sky’ was recently voted as among the greatest 500 songs of all time by Rolling Stone magazine. Novelty songs partially overlap with comedy songs, which are more explicitly based on humor, and with musical parody, especially when the novel gimmick is another popular song. Although I would consider "Alice's Restaurant" a novelty song, it's one that has enjoyed some ongoing success as a folk tune. Pre-fame he had played in several bands as a bassist/singer – he was born Jim Moir, and his stage-name is an amalgam of his two favourite singers, and two predecessors at the top of the charts, Vic Damone and Jim Reeves.It was subsequenty picked up by EMI and introduced by Kid Jensen on Top of the Pops as “one of the most bizarre singles of the decade”. Nope, it was The Jackson 5’s version of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus – a song that never came near making any sort of dent on the charts, but which must have made the boys (or their father! The video too is a six-minute long MJ-esque epic, in which Bart takes over a school talent show with his new dance routine (or was it all a dream…? Not a dare I would have ever taken, but it livened things up and was sometimes highlighted on the evening news. I was also aware of Squeeze and the lyrics of Chris Difford who shares a love of the minutia and detail and rhyme.

At the time this was released, the show was just halfway through its second season in the US, and was only broadcast on satellite TV in the UK (I remember it coming to terrestrial TV, on Channel 4, much later in the mid-nineties). It’s also probably one of the last, as they’ve become rarer and rarer since their heyday in the late fifties-early sixties. album version – from ‘The Simpsons Sing the Blues’ LP – so I don’t know for how long this intro did its funky thing on the single-edit. The Trashmen reached the top 5 with " Surfin' Bird", a surf rock medley of two novelty songs originally recorded by The Rivingtons. They were working class names but were guys with cool hairdos and leather jackets and the shirts with the big collars.For me, the moment that sums it all up comes towards the end of the video, when there’s footage of Blobby storming out from a helicopter and into the arms of a child, who looks like he’s seen the face of God. If I could’ve picked every Monty Python record from the 70s, and that’s a metric shit ton, I would’ve. Demento's nationally syndicated radio show gave novelty songs an outlet for much of the country; this lasted through the mid-2000s, when the show (mirroring trends in the genre) faded in popularity until its terrestrial cancellation in June 2010. He later penned follow up songs that continued the saga, but it is this first one that gained most prominence.