JIVE BUNNY AND THE MASTERMIXERS – "That's What I Like"

Lazy b’stard Bunny should be doing his bit with the paddles on that boat.

Well, for once I am early to a Popular article.

But I have nothing to add.

The cover really is extraordinarily unpleasant. My rock’n’roll loving dad was properly distressed by Jive Bunny, and particularly by a neighbour’s habit of always putting it on at parties and insisting that my dad would like it.

Number two watch: The start of three bland weeks for ‘Girl I’m Gonna Miss You’ by the retrospectively controversial Milli Vanilli. Not as good as either ‘Baby Don’t Forget My Number’ or ‘Blame It On The Rain’

They didn’t waste time, did they? The ex-miners, who may or may not have crossed picket lines during the 1984 strike and may or may not appear pseudonymously and contemptuously in David Peace’s GB84, mined their fifteen minutes with prompt gusto. “That’s What I Like” is essentially more of the same, though the John Anderson Big Band framing device on this occasion is the Hawaii Five-O theme, so I’m inclined to give the record one point, both for getting the tune into the UK charts where both the Ventures and Sammy Davis Jr had failed and also for the minor touch of inspiration in the intro as Hawaii Five-O – picking up on its twisting tempo – is underscored by Chubby Checker’s intro to “Let’s Twist Again.” Almost worthy of a prototype Avalanches demo tape.

But that’s as far as my tolerance goes, since it then sinks back into pseudo-jolly predictability; so we get both “The Twist” and “Let’s Twist Again” (and both sounding like re-recordings) plus original bones plucked from, inter alia, Chris Montez’ “Let’s Dance,” “Wipeout,” “Great Balls Of Fire,” “Good Golly Miss Molly,” “Chantilly Lace” and, with astonishing incompetence, Dion’s not remotely twisting “Runaround Sue.” But the subtext remained the same – those times were better than these, our lives were better than yours, our laughs brighter, our ages your age now, and Christ don’t we hate you for it.

Needless to say, “That’s What I Like” was the total antithesis of what I actually did like in 1989 – De La Soul restoring primary colours and playful madness to hip hop with 3 Feet High And Rising, their mirror image NWA establishing themselves as the Sham 69 of rap, the Beastie Boys arriving at the true beginning of time with Paul’s Boutique (now THIS is how you can use samples to create new art), Neneh Cherry beginning our own time with Raw Like Sushi, Inner City’s warm coolness, the Cowboy Junkies’ icy warmth, Kitchens Of Distinction revitalising old ghosts, New Order creating new ones, Kate Bush and her “ooooooooooooh yessssss,” Paul Buchanan’s life-proposing pauses on the Blue Nile’s “Let’s Go Out Tonight,” the coloured pencils of Pop Will Eat Itself (now THIS is how you can use samples to make people truly happy) and Les Negresses Vertes, Neil Young’s inhuman scream on the “guitar” of “On Broadway,” the summer spaces of the Pixies’ “La La Love You,” Aaron Neville calmly singing “A Change Is Gonna Come” as the world digitally collapses around him, Van Morrison’s “over the hill to Ardglass in the jamjar,” Jane Scarpantoni’s ‘cello as lead guitar on Bob Mould’s Workbook, “Kennedy” by the Wedding Present, the awe of AR Kane’s “i” and the Young Gods’ L’Eau Rouge (now THIS is how you can use samples to become immortal), Barry Adamson’s Moss Side Story on a watery, sunny Sunday early spring afternoon in the King’s Road, Big Audio Dynamite’s “London Bridge is falling down, but I still love this town, from the Tower to the Underground,” Freaky Trigger by Win, Spacemen 3’s whispers, Liza Minnelli and the Pet Shop Boys demolishing “Twist In My Sobriety” (they’re gonna do the Twist and it goes with a ZEE), “Fight The Power” over the opening credits of Do The Right Thing and the entire cinema audience standing up and dancing as though they’d already been liberated, Harriet Wheeler’s “England, my England,” the genius cutoff on Dinosaur Jr’s “Just Like Heaven” and have I mentioned Manchester yet? – but I suspect you’ve already guessed what I did, and still, like, and love.

9 – and not even having the narrative wit to put ‘The Twist’ *before* ‘Let’s Twist Again’!

An astonishing year, really, so much going on which I guess we’ll revel in a few entries on. Not much to note other than Chubby Checker’s original versions of The Twist and Let’s Twist Again first appeared on cd three or four years ago. Can’t imagine the Bunny having much vinyl in his hutch, so I guess these are re-recordings.

The Bunny himself pulls off the almost impossible act, for a cartoon rabbit, of not looking cute or cuddly, but looking like a paedophile.

Oh. Beaten to it. (#17)

For all that this is less objectionable than “Swing The Mood” (and the quality of the remakes used in the medley is less egregious than there, too), I am really bloody angry that this post has put this “song” in my head. Grrrr. Run, rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run…

Re 2: sometimes I think there isn’t a single second wave r’n’r singer who DIDN’T cut a lost psychedelic classic, but even so, LP, I think Chubby Checker will win your heart and mind with this staggeringly nutso recording, cut in 1971 and released as the b-side of the awful Reggae My Way in ’75.

I didn’t know but Hawaii Five-0 was recently re-imagined! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Five-0

“Critics received an early copy of the pilot with a synthesizer and guitar-based version of the original theme. After negative reaction to the reworked song spread quickly online, Kurtzman said he and others realized that changing the music that much was a mistake, and arranged for studio musicians,[9] including three who had worked on the original from 1968,[10] to rerecord the theme “exactly as it was”

Bl00dy rockists. Actually, I take that back, given my dislike of the modern Doctor Who theme.

#21 – Chubby Checker’s early seventies album “Chequered/ New Revelation” features such absurdities as “Stoned in the Bathroom”, “No Need To Get So Heavy” and “My Mind Comes From A Higher Place”. Sadly, it’s not as good as many collectors would have you believe.

Erm… I don’t have anything else to say about Jive Bunny at the moment, to be honest. I exhausted my energy on the previous JB entry.

Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers currently have two entries in the Populist bottom 10 – will they be the first band to get three? Come on, everybody!

(formerly known as just ‘Billy’, I’ve registered with my surname to avoid confusion with Mr Smart)

Well…just as my favourite part of ‘Swing The Mood’ was the sampled ‘Way-woah-way-woah-way-wake up little Susie”, the best moment of this is simply the entire ‘Runaround Sue’ section, simply because I adore the original.

I have this on the compilation album ‘Monster Hits’, which unbelievably I found in a CD shop in Battersea last year, for one pound, and the shrinkwrap still attached after twenty years. From that album, the songs I copied to my iPod were these criminally underrated classics:

Starlight’s ‘Numero Uno’
Donna Summer’s ‘Love’s About To Change My Heart’
London Boys ‘My Love’
Liza Minelli’s ‘Losing My Mind’

…and this.

Monster Hits (which is really ‘The Hits Album 11’) is absolutely jam-packed with top tunes, also including Ride On Time, 808 State’s ‘Pacific State’, Alyson Williams’ ‘I Need Your Lovin”, ‘The Sun Rising’ by The Beloved, and ‘Head On’ by The Jesus & Mary Chain’ – and is a prize exhibit in any case that you might make for the all-round pop excitingness of 1989.

Funnily enough, I was pleased to discover a copy of 1990’s ‘Monster Hits 2 – Snap It Up!’ in Caversham Help The Aged for 99p last month. The ugly sleeve depicts a cartoon dinosaur in baseball cap, shades and beach shorts snapping his claw-fingers. Its thin stuff in comparison with Monster Hits 1, the nadir perhaps being the dubious inclusion of number 46 smash ‘Celebrate’ by An Emotional Fish (“A big future is predicted for this Irish band!”)

@wichita. Holy crap! that’s Janet Leigh in that thar monster movie. A bit of a drop-off for her from the glory days of Psycho, Touch of Evil, et al..

Never make the same mistake twice.
Hhmm so much for that.

Nope, sorry, still loathsome.

You’re right! I forgot Everyhit’s strange date mechanism so was counting 3 weeks from the 21st.

@40. Good point. Perhaps I may be forgiven in the light of the fact that the dread amphibian did the full Jive Bunny in NZ in 2005: 3 #1s. Scarred I am.

@42, Jimmy. Thanks for that reference. I’ll be sure to track that ep. down. I’ve heard that Leigh was great on an ep. of Columbo in the ’70s too.

#9, punctum, a cascade of joy. Thank you.

Maybe you were confusing Chubby Checker with Roy Chubby Brown, the arguably Manning-Lite stand-up, altho I don’t remember Brown being quite as visible as Manning somehow still was even then (and tbh tho I know RCB is known for sexist humour I don’t know the extent of any racism in his material – presumably it was on the Jim Davidson level?).

Can’t CONfirm. Tut.