List: Greatest One-Hit Wonders

“One chance, one shot, well that’s all anyone ever got”

• Frente, “Labour of Love”

Revisiting an article I once wrote on the beauty of ephemerality, the beauty of the band that grabs you for three to five minutes, etches itself into your unconscious, and then fades away. The following is a personal list of my favourite one-hit wonders, disposable yet unforgettable.

What counts as a one-hit wonder on this list? That’s the picky part. I’ve discounted groups and performers that had successes under other names: Buffalo Springfield and Stealers Wheel may have had only one hit each but Stephen Stills and Gerry Rafferty went on to do more with their music careers. I’m also discounting performers that may have had only one major pop hit, but were really acts not trying for mainstream pop success – a measure of “influence”, if you will. So no Los Lobos, and no dance music acts who somehow found one crossover hit. And I’m iffy about British bands that only had one American hit, or vice versa. So there go Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Or Paper Lace, who covered “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” in the UK. Yeah, the criteria aren’t perfect.

1. “There She Goes” The La’s. From the La’s debut (and only) album, perhaps the most underrated album of the 1990s.
2. “Your Woman” White Town. Love filtered through static. Androgynous chorus.
3. “Earth Angel” The Penguins. Clearly one of the all-time greats.
4. “Waiting For a Star to Fall” Boy Meets Girl. Because the 80s deserve at least one song in the top 5 of any one-hit wonders list.
5. “Black Velvet” Alannah Myles. Sex and Elvis.
6. “What I Am” Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians. Not crying for Edie, since she went and married Paul Simon.
7. “Take on Me” A-Ha. Still big in Norway, though. And I can still sing along to their title song for The Living Daylights.
8. “Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand” Primitive Radio Gods.
9. “Life in A Northern Town” Dream Academy.
10. “Rescue Me” Fontella Bass. That descending intro!
11. “I Love the Nightlife” Alicia Bridges. Even studying the music played at Studio 54, the Loft, and the Paradise Garage, I can’t find any other song by her that disco DJs played.
12. “Pump Up the Volume” M/A/R/R/S. Influential in its use of sampling, infectious in its beat.
13. “Sleeping Satellite” Tasmin Archer. Was this even a hit in the US? Guru of music writing Robert Christgau liked it, if I recall correctly.
14. “Knock on Wood” Amii Stewart. The Eddie Floyd original is pretty great, loads of covers exist that I love, but this is so much part of the disco canon.
15. “Since I Don’t Have You” the Skyliners. Who’d imagine Guns and Roses would cover it?
16. “(Love Changes) Everything” Climie Fisher. It does, you know.
17. “Mouth” Merrill Bainbridge. Actually I really like her cover version of the Pet Shop Boys’ “Being Boring”.
18. “The Book of Love” The Monotones. I presume that “did you write the book of love?” line in “American Pie” is a reference to this.
19. “Tarzan Boy” Baltimora. A cheeseball of a song, but loads of fun. Who knew Jimmy McShane (the only member of Baltimora, a la John Ondrasik on the misnamed Five for Fighting) came from, of all places, Northern Ireland?
20. “Captain of Her Heart” Double. Used to play around 3am regularly at my local radio station for some reason.
21. “Love is in the Air” John Paul Young.
22. “96 Tears” ? and the Mysterians. Ah, Question Mark and the Mysterians, screwing up MP3 filenames ever since.
23. “MmmBop” Hanson. I’ve concluded, with space of 7 years to consider the question, that this is really quite a great pop song, or at least takes me back to being 18, which is more than enough.
24. “New Age Girl” Deadeye Dick. “Oh she loves me so she hates to be alone she don’t eat meat but she sure likes the bone” Yay, double entendre.
25. “In the Meantime” Spacehog. When I first wrote the list out, this was fairly new and I said, well, the band might have more hits. Shouldn’t have hedged.
26. “All For You” Sister Hazel. See comments on Spacehog. Objectively speaking this isn’t that great a song, but it was one of the big songs of my freshman fall and so I have fond memories of it. Ah, the perils of associations.
27. “I Wanna Be Rich” Calloway. “Spend my money on the lottery / my favourite number is 1-2-3”.
28. “Dirty Cash” Stevie V. “Dirty cash I want you / dirty cash I need you woah-oh”
29. “Rebirth of Slick” Digable Planets.
30. “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)” US3. Although their follow-up album Broadway and 52nd is actually quite a fine album.
31. “I Kissed a Girl” Jill Sobule.
32. “In the Summertime” Mungo Jerry.
33. Deep Blue Something, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. Apparently those in the know never say “Tiffany’s”, always “Tiffany”.
34. “Come Baby Come” K7. “Play me like Nintendo / Never ever let go”. Candy for my juvenile mind.
35. Hot Butter, “Popcorn”. Also the tune on “Digger”, one of the first computer games I ever played
36. George McCrae, “Rock Your Baby”.
37. Meryn Caddell, “The Sweater”. A big radio staple where I was, all about this girl who keeps the sweater of her high-school crushee. The “hit” aspect of this song is dubious, however. Took forever to figure out who sang the song, back in the PG (pre-Google) days.
38. Murray Head, “One Night in Bangkok”. Still banned in Thailand.
39. Deee-Lite, “Groove is in the Heart”.
40. The Capris, “There’s a Moon Out There Tonight”.
41. “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday” G.C. Cameron. G.C. Cameron’s the one-hit wonder. The song made it big again.
42. “The Promise” When in Rome.
43. The Verve Pipe, “The Freshmen”
44. King Harvest, “Dancing in the Moonlight”. I like Toploader’s cover version a lot too.
45. Michael Penn, “No Myth”. Mr Aimee Mann checking in.
46. The Heights, “How Do You Talk to an Angel?”. Show’s over, folks.

Among those that didn’t make the cut:

• Bruce Channel, “Hey! Baby”
• The Proclaimers, “(I’m Gonna Be) 500 Miles”
• Vickie Sue Robinson, “Turn the Beat Around”
• RuPaul, “Supermodel”
• Sir Mix-a-Lot, “Baby Got Back”
• Gary Glitter, “Rock and Roll Part Two”
• EMF, “Unbelieveable”
• The Turbans, “When You Dance”
• Four Non-Blondes, “What’s Up”
• Green Jelly, “Three Little Pigs”
• Nena, “99 Luftballoons”
• Kajagoogoo, “Too Shy”.

Thoughts: I’m glad the saccharine-laden “You Light Up My Life” was Debbie Boone’s only hit. Same for Terry Jacks and “Seasons in the Sun”. And I wonder if a more singles-oriented market like Britain’s produces more one-hit wonders.

After conjuring up that list, I checked out VH1’s list, from the “100 Greatest One Hit Wonders” show. Unfairly stacked in favour of the 80s and 90s. Of course, it’s hard to do a show about older songs that don’t have music videos, so I don’t blame them. Got some good ones that I missed:

• Blind Melon “No Rain”
• Men Without Hats “The Safety Dance”
• Biz Markie “Just a Friend”
• Edwyn Collins “Girl Like You”
• Andrea True Connection, “More, More, More”
• The Divinyls, “I Touch Myself”
• Van McCoy, “The Hustle”. Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.
• Billy Paul, “Me and Mrs Jones”. Ooh, I kick myself for not remembering this song.
• Charlene, “I’ve Never Been to Me”. A supercamp classic.

Also discovered One Hit Wonder Central, from which I learnt that Janis Joplin only had one top 40 song in the US (“Me and Bobby McGee”, obviously). Would hardly think of her as a one-hit wonder though. Finally, the best movie about one-hit wonders: Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do. Not necessarily truly great, but sweet and hey - what other movie could you name? One great song: sometimes that’s all you have in you, and that’s all anyone asks for.