Old Favourites Coming Back

It is always nice to get answers when you pose a question. Here's how things panned out this week. McFly taking 'Baby's Coming Back' to the top of the charts for a typically brief run gave me an opportunity to wax lyrical about the originators of the song - Jellyfish - and how good it was to see the work of an underappreciated band finally getting some modern day recognition.

I have to confess to a small edit however. The original version of the text contained the following line:

" In spite of this they never really caught on commercially. They had two Top 20 hits in the states and just one Top 40 single on these shores ('The King Is Half Undressed' creeping to Number 39 in January 1991). Their first album didn't even chart here and after one more long player release in 1993 the group dissolved, destined it seemed to remain a fleeting memory for those of us who were aware of them at the time."

The piece had barely been online an hour before I received an email from one reader pointing out that Jellyfish had never breached the US charts, at least not the main Hot 100 chart that everyone takes as a reference. I checked my all too often neglected copy of "Billboard Top 40 Hits" and discovered he was right, their entry was missing. Hence the swift rewrite of that paragraph and a caustic reference to the original source that mislead me slightly:

"They had just one Top 40 single on these shores ('The King Is Half Undressed' creeping to Number 39 in January 1991) and never officially made the US Top 40 (although Wikipedia is claiming two Top 20 hits on some unnamed chart)."

The other day the answer came forth, flatteringly from the source itself:

Hello James,

I read your column this week mentioning Jellyfish and
how the act had some
chart hits in the U.S., but Wikipedia didn't say on
which chart.

The act had three hits on Billboard's Modern Rock
chart:

The King Is Half Undressed - No. 19
That Is Why - No.
11
The Ghost At Number One - No. 9

The Modern Rock chart is a
radio airplay chart, not a sales/airplay
combination chart like The Billboard
Hot 100.

Thanks for the always-interesting column each
week!

Keith Caulfield
Charts Manager/Analyst
Billboard
Magazine

I thought that was very nice of him frankly, not only for solving the mystery but also for giving me the ego boost to know that at least one of the people responsible for publishing the insanely complex American chart system reads my words with rather more care than I often do. I felt the same frisson of pride that I did back in 1996 when Sir Tim Rice dropped me a polite email to inform me I'd failed to acknowledge properly his contributions to Andrew Lloyd-Webbers hit-writing career.

Back to Jellyfish though, and despite the fact that the McFly rendition will predictably bomb out of the Top 10 this week, it is a joy that many of my old university colleagues have shared with each other, seeing the rise once again of one of the songs that helped define the musical appreciation of our hedonistic days. Shockingly I don't actually own a copy of their famous "Bellybutton" album. A quick check of the database reveals that I've got "The King Is Half Undressed" (the one track I actually didn't rate) on my vinyl copy of "Q - The Album" from 1991 and three copies of "Now She Knows She's Wrong" via CDs of "Alternative 90s", "Q - Take It Easy" and Track 13 on self compiled minidisc MISC08 which I suspect predates obtaining the CDs. Yes you are right, I don't own a copy of the original version of "Baby's Coming Back". How very wrong.

Everyone at some point in their life has to go through the stage of expanding their horizons beyond the mainstream and encountering an act through a means other than the Top 40. You listen to their work with glee and howl with frustration when they don't receive the respect you feel they so very much deserve.

Either that or you fall victim to the thing that forever nixes any notion you had of becoming an A&R man - losing your ability to spot a hit. As a teenager I would latch on to "bubbling under" tracks which had received brief airplay and would spend the next few weeks scanning the lower reaches of the chart hoping they would rise to stardom. When it happened it was a moment to cherish. Watching "Eternal Flame" top the charts, a full three and a half months after you first heard it on the radio, seeing Aztec Camera land a Top 3 hit with "Somewhere In My Heart" just a few months after the failure of "Deep And Wide And Tall". Or what about the way "Mary's Prayer" by Danny Wilson made up for failing in the summer of 87 by becoming a smash in the spring of 88. Sometimes you had to wait a while but it was still worth it. The cloth eared 14 year old who wondered in December 1987 why Michael Stipe was singing about "a simple bra to occupy my time" was able to become the newly a-levelled up 18 year old in September 1991 who watched "The One I Love" finally become a Top 10 hit. Of course there were still failures, and my singles collection brims with flops such as "Electric Blue" from Icehouse, "Just To Get By" from Babakoto and virtually everything ever recorded by Perfect Day.

Nope, the early 90s were the time when I developed tastes beyond the mainstream although I remained as always very much a pop kid. No death metal or industrial ambience for me. Even as an early 90s student I remained indifferent to the charms of Eskimos and Egypt despite attempts by friends to persuade me otherwise. Furthermore it is only 15 years later that I can listen to the Carter USM back catalogue and appreciate its finer points after rejecting them as tossers due to their being hero worshipped at the time by people whose opinions I didn't particularly respect. Now the wheel has turned and it is good to know that a longstanding appreciation of Jellyfish has finally been rewarded, even if it is with the sight of a pop band performing a here today gone tomorrow version in an attempt to prop up their poor album sales.

There are still many more joys locked in the vaults of my early 90s tastes. I will therefore raise a glass and live in hope that one day the songbooks of Material Issue, Fat And Frantic, The Doves, The Senators and OK if you must, The Army Of Lovers will bear fruit and come to be appreciated by a generation with better taste than their forefathers.