GARETH GATES ft THE KUMARS – "Spirit In The Sky"

This technically counts as the first number 1 single I ever “bought”, but I’d been recording music channel videos on tape since 1999 and downloading mp3s since around the end of ’02, so this was really a token gesture so 14-year-old me could say I’d donated to Comic Relief. I had to get my parents to buy it for me (at the long-gone Virgin Megastore in Brent Cross) as I was far too embarrassed to be seen holding onto a Gareth Gates song. It briefly made a resurgence a few years later when I got my first iPod and needed some tracks to fill it up, but it didn’t last – 3’s about right.

The Kumars was a pretty enjoyable show, it was filmed down the road from my house in Wembley so there were various NW London jokes about the local area I appreciated. My one and only contribution to the Radio Times letters page was complimenting the series a couple years before this, which as a geeky pre-teen felt quite cool to be published.

It’s a shame this is so bad, since the song itself is great and more or less worthy of being one of a very few to top the chart in three different versions. (There’s also Unchained Melody – more Gates – and probably some other charity favourites, but not many more.)

I suppose we should be grateful that the other two weren’t Norman Greenbaum ft. Dad’s Army and Doctor and the Medics vs Last Of The Summer Wine.

It’s worth pointing out that when we next get to discuss – well, two – Comic Relief singles the dynamics had changed again. So this was one last hurrah for this kind of record for them anyhow. I remember watching The Kumars on Friday nights when I was a teenager. It was a unique take on the chat show format with a comedic angle for it’s time. That said I loved Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal in Goodness Gracious Me far more, in particular the ‘Going for an English’ sketch. We can only imagine indeed what a GGM take on ‘Spirit In The Sky’ would have sounded like. This is also, predictably, Gareth’s final meeting point with Popular. He was still the teen girl’s dream at this point, but only just.

The Katie Price debacle I mentioned on the entry for ‘Anyone of Us’ was in its full and ugly throes in the tabloids a few months after this single. This combined with much cooler contemporary poster boys coming through – Justin Timberlake, Busted, hell even Blazin’ Squad, who had a sort of Gareth lookalike in their number with Kenzie, albeit with more JD Sports garb – were rapidly making him look like yesterday’s model. Coupled with the fact he had gone for that weird mullety hairdo that suddenly became all the rage in the early-mid 00s did him no favours. He’d obviously not learned from Jason Donovan that, like his curtains, his spikes made him stand out (even if he’d nicked it off Scott Robinson from Five, I would argue).

His second album ‘Go Your Own Way’ released that September was a wildly ambitious attempt at a double album, split into two discs ‘Night’ representing his move to a more grown up, sexier sound, and ‘Day’ concentrating exclusively on the sort of material people more readily associated with him. He overestimated his audience greatly, who could probably have settled quite happily for one album mixing the two styles each. Whilst the first single, a pithy sub-George Michael cast off called ‘Sunshine’ was a top 3 hit, it was out the top 40 in very short order, and not even an obvious retread on old ground with ‘Say It Isn’t So’ (top 5 that December) could stop his sales going down the swanee. He literally descended from the top of the pile to the bottom with almost the same merciless swiftness that Hear’Say had had.

He wasn’t properly dropped from BMG – which had been merged with Sony by the time they did – until early 2006, though he did Emma Bunton’s trick of turning to his management company 19’s in-house record label for his actually quite good third album, ‘Pictures of the Other Side’, in 2007, which he worked on with Martin Terefe, better known now for his unbunnied work with KT Tunstall and James Morrison. He also retrained as a qualified speech therapist on the McGuire programme for those with a stammer like himself, showing that at least something positive came out of his success, however briefly and brightly it burned for was. For ‘Spirit In The Sky’, I shall settle on a 4. Not the best, but not the absolute worst considering which charity record we’re under two Popular years away from discussing.

#2 watch – J.Lo’s so so and somewhat unseasonal collaboration with LL Cool J, ‘All I Have’ on its first week, given it’s wintry, Christmas themed video that sat at odds with its springtime release. Mis-Teeq with the still excellent ‘Scandalous’ launching their second album ‘Eye Candy’ on its second week. Shame we don’t get to discuss it as it’s one of theirs and StarGate’s finest pre-2007 bunnied Barbadian moments. Just two more top 20 hits awaited them before they split following the collapse of their label Telstar in 2004.

There’s nothing much to dissect here really. For what it is it’s actually passable – a pop/ comedy mash up to raise money for charity that did its job and was quite reasonably disposable afterwards.

It’s worth noting that this was the first comedy Comic Relief song since Right Said Fred’s Stick It Out in 2003 and, as they were a comedy act in the first place, disregarding them takes us back to The Stonk two years before. That said Comic Relief had actually used the format for a handful of non telathon year records (Mr Bean and Smear Campaign, Pet Shop Boys’ Absolutely Fabulous).

There are two wider points of interest. One is the poster boy from a flagship ITV show fronting what is ultimately a BBC campaign. The second is the strangely prescient last line. `Is Will Young available?`

#8 – it’s true of much of Mis-Teeq’s material, but particularly that single how well it’s held up. I’m surprised for her all ubiquity on Britain’s Got Talent and other ventures that Alesha Dixon hasn’t yet been tempted back for a reunion.

There’s certainly a nostalgia for UK garage at the moment with DJ Spoony’s recent ‘Garage Classical’ album which basically took the same principle Pete Tong did with his ‘Classic House’ albums and shows by doing orchestral reimaginings of ‘Flowers’, ’21 Seconds’, ‘Movin’ Too Fast’ etc.

I was 10 and still not really into pop, but we definitely bought this – my sister liked Gareth Gates and I liked comedy songs so this was fun for the whole family. It might have been my first exposure to the idea that you could turn a real song into a comedy song by talking over it, which must have had the same Situationist appeal as MST3K and the like.

Someone (not me) just put this on over the office stereo and I will cop to “it’s who you know” raising a smile.

I was a bit baffled when they revived The Kumars about 5 years ago; it was a fun show but a prime example of something which seemed to have completely left the public consciousness the second it ended.