The history of number ones is a history of answers to the question – “Who has the power to make hit records happen?” The labels? Radio stations? TV? The fans? Balances shift this way and that, but some constants remain, and one of them is light entertainment. British pop is a body in a long, irregular orbit around the sun of BBC Light Entertainment and its commercial imitators.A documentary series in 2006 sketched out the elements whose fusion created ‘Light Ent’ in its British form – comics, double acts, “all-round entertainers”, pop and easy listening stars, radio personalities, impressionists. To which you might later add chat show hosts, game show hosts, kids’ TV presenters, reality TV stars, YouTubers and more. It adds up to an Establishment. And like the British political and business Establishments, once you were in, it took a high level of failure – often no level was high enough – to throw you out again. In all these networks, the ability to slide easily between roles was highly prized. The befogged sensation you got watching Blankety Blank and get watching I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here – the persistent inability to work out exactly what people are famous for – is a feature of the system.
Pop’s role in this variety-industrial complex shifts around: sometimes pop music feels like a site of resistance to the complacency of light entertainment, sometimes you think the energy of the music is shifting norms and setting tones, and then sometimes pop feels utterly subsumed by the rest of it. And so you get a situation like “Mysterious Girl”, where a former pop star can have their career resurrected – briefly – by a reality TV show and see one of their old hits go to number 1 as, essentially, a flex.
Not Peter Andre’s flex, though. The revival of “Mysterious Girl” is as much down to Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles. Moyles was a radio revanchist – nostalgic for the old 70s and 80s model where the DJs, not the music, were the draw for radio listeners. The Radio 1 DJs of that not-very-bygone era were prototypical Light Entertainment figures – unhindered by taste or passion, able to slip easily into a myriad of presenting roles. Moyles’ drive, his aggressively jovial persona, seemed to me born partly of resentment that he’d missed out on those times. You can imagine him bitterly watching Enfield and Whitehouse’s Smashie and Nicey characters, angry that the giants they represented had been laid low by sneering hipsters and marketing men.
One thing those old school DJs did was bestow their patronage on records and turn them into a cause. Moyles, newly promoted to the Radio 1 Breakfast Show, saw an opportunity in Peter Andre, who’d returned to public attention with his antics on I’m A Celebrity. Andre came over well on TV – a likable dimwit with a can-do attitude towards the snake-wrangling and bug-eating tasks he was set, whose romance with fellow contestant Katie Price kept audiences gawping. He didn’t win the reality show, but he left it as a popular figure in a way he’d never truly managed during his first stardom. People were on his side.
“Mysterious Girl” was the perfect song to catch that moment, and Moyes pushed it hard. It wasn’t just Peter Andre’s signature hit, it was the one that captured the give-it-an-honest-try side which won him fans in the jungle. A jollified bit of featherweight pop-reggae, “Mysterious Girl” has that fortunate quality some bad but catchy songs do – the performance in your head is better than what actually exists. The hook of “Mysterious Girl” is strong enough that even Peter Andre’s ironically scrawny voice can’t ruin it, and besides Bubbler Ranx is there to fortify it with competence.
One precedent here is Scritti Politti’s brace of early 90s singles with Shabba Ranks and Sweetie Irie, which proved that this formula – pop reggae with one singer breathy and one singer rough – could be gorgeous. Andre isn’t as good a singer as Green Gartside (and Bubbler is no Shabba either) but there’s enough of that sweetness to make “Mysterious Girl” easier to stomach than any of Andre’s other stuff.
Its almost-goodness was something Moyles could work with, fluffing the widespread post-jungle liking for Peter into – what exactly? A comic bit that enough people would commit to for “Mysterious Girl” to land at No.1 (doing the Moyles brand no harm in the process). It’s another new wrinkle in reality TV’s influence on British pop. With Pop Idol and The Voice, the winner getting to Number 1 was the pre-scripted culmination of a story. “Mysterious Girl” is the same but improvised – a campaign to get any old hit to Number 1. In this if nothing else. Chris Moyles would prove a pioneer.
Score: 4
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I’ve always been fond of Mysterious Girl – in the way I am hits by Bitty McLean or Shinehead, say – and do wonder if its reputation would be higher (at least in terms of making it onto mainstream 90s reggae compilations, playlists etc) had it been by someone who wasn’t a straight-up teen pop star, or at least someone with the image and legacy of Andre. It’s not dissimilar to a fever dream of Michael Jackson doing lovers’ rock, with repeated (and very welcome) charismatic intrusions from Bubbler Ranx (“my heart go BOOM!”). At its best – on a sunny day – it’s a 8.
At the time of the reissue I loved it and it’s never really grown off me. I knew it was old too – Now 57 alone made a charade of it being in that (genuine quote) “very exclusive band of songs to appear on the NOW albums twice” (something that’s happened more often that you might think). I had no idea it was Chris Moyles though. I watched Peter in the jungle (quite bizarre to think what shows I was allowed to watch past bedtime), but had no real idea what was going on.
(Another nice mid-1996 pairing of “pop reggae with one singer breathy and one singer rough”: Maxi Priest and Shaggy’s now-forgotten hit That Girl. A great, garish record of contrasts; just as the singing styles are opposed, so are the musical elements – a sweet Green Onions sample riding beneath wonky, snapping percussion. Somehow all the parts work together to fill the chasm.)
Mysterious Girl also did an unusual thing in Popular terms, of course. Andre was a bang to rights case of a popstar whose number ones did not include their most famous – even only famous hit. So 2004 provided a rare corrective.
The first thing that comes up when you search for this song on Spotify is a “compilation” playlist titled “Timeless Songs.”
The music video for this, reappearing on telly to accompany the song’s revival, almost certainly contributed to kid me realising I was gay. So that’s nice at least
Not a bad record, though helium kid Andre is served better by the verses than the harsh choruses. That befogged sensation was a constant for me watching the early series of “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here” as a kid – I didn’t have a clue who Joe Pasquale or Jason Donovan were – and a similar befuddlement applies to “Mysterious Girl” for me. It feels like a lot of people cannot decide how ironic their enjoyment of it is. I don’t have strong memories of its run at the top, but in its afterlife it is some half-forgotten joke, or victory, or both. That’s Chris Moyles for you, I suppose.
I was just starting to pay attention to pop music aged 11 when this hit big in summer of ’96, so I have a lot of fond memories of it from that time, even if nothing else from Andre’s initial run stuck with me (Natural and All Night All Right weren’t too bad, if I remember correctly… upon re-listening now, maybe I’m being generous).
When this returned to the top I enjoyed it well enough in an ironic way, even if I acted like I was too cool for it. Listening now, it’s good fun in that cheesy 90s way, which works for me, and it still goes down well at school-disco type nights out. 6/10
I have never watched IACGMOOH, but I was aware of it, so I assumed it just got re-released off the back of that – had no idea Moyles was so heavily involved. Wasn’t he responsible for getting a Billie Piper song back into the charts around this time?
Andre’s career resurrection lasted longer than his original run too – there was the oddly-titled Insania which made #3 after this, a ghastly rendition of A Whole New World with Katie Price and a #4 hit as recently as 2009, which I had no idea existed. Fair play to him for making the most of his second chance I guess.
@#1 – I certainly do remember That Girl from around the summer of ’96 as well. Great tune.
I almost feel Peter Andre was owed this one. During his first burst of fame, he seemed to become a figure of complete hatred and derision. I can still remember a friend of mine ranting until she was almost red in the face about how much she “despised” Andre while the rest of my friends looked slightly aghast – I mean, sure, he was a bit of a vain meatball, but hardly Colonel Gadaffi on the scale of crimes against humanity. Even on a celebrity level, there were more deserving cases to get worked up about.
Then I turned on The Girlie Show on a particularly bored Friday evening and Andre was, predictably enough, their “Wanker of the Week” and the roar of approval from the female studio audience was almost terrifying.
I didn’t like Peter Andre much at the time. His music was of no interest to me and he appeared to be excessively vain. From the little I knew of him, I couldn’t find much to like. Despite this, though, I couldn’t get worked up enough to HATE him. His work was easily avoidable, his personality not particularly loathsome, and it seemed like a lot of high octane fury about male vanity, which at the time seemed to be greeted with less hostility when it expressed itself in a feminine way (such as when Nick Rhodes got his make-up bag out) than when it amped up masculinity. Having said that, I think views on this may have changed quite significantly since.
So if he got a number one with his least rubbish song in 2004, I’m inclined to say good luck to him. It appeared to emerge at a time when public opinion had swung in completely the opposite direction and it was suddenly OK to like him, presumably because his personality had found a way of expressing itself and he revealed himself to be a nice enough sort of bloke. Maybe some of the audience also felt guilty for their original hostile responses to him and over-compensated in response.
“Mysterious Girl” is another middling pop song for me – I don’t object to it, but nor would I deliberately seek it out for any reason – but does have some significance in that it was the last record to be number one in the UK before I set off to live in Australia for awhile, which felt like a pleasant coincidence.
From this point on, though, my awareness of the UK charts (even the number ones) starts to get very fuzzy. Missy Higgins and Spiderbait really weren’t megastars in the UK but had huge number one hits in Aus in 2004 (“Scar” is a lovely single, actually, a shame we’ll have no reason to cover it here).
Great write up from Tom. Not too much to add from me here, but I would be a bit more on the generous side and go with a 6/10.
This was a truly historic single the first time around, marking the very end of the wild and glorious 90s pop-reggae boom. By the time it got to number 1 another mini-boom (Sean Paul, Kevin Lyttle, Wayne Wonder) had come and gone – they seem to be cyclical, but for me at least 93-97 was the big one.
Anyway for much more about Mysterious Girl please do see the definitive 90s reggae blog – this is the very last chance I’ll have to plug it on here.
https://neggae.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/peter-andre-mysterious-girl/
Fun fact. Mysterious Girl was co-written (as were most Peter Andre tracks from his imperial phase) by former 80s soulman Glen Goldsmith. Girl, am I dreaming?
I was blissfully unaware of Moyles’ hand in this at the time, but the influence of another largely tedious but intermittently amusing British phenomenon of the time was apparent to me, one that will rear its head in a number of bunnies over the next couple of years; liking stuff “ironically”, either pretending to like something you think is “a bit crap” because it’s funny, or pretending something you like is “a bit crap” because it isn’t cool. Maybe time has been a great equalizer for Mysterious Girl and it’s seen as no better or worse than a lot of similar 90s pop hits that you’re perfectly happy to hear in a pub or supermarket, but in 2004 it was still in that “nothing as unfashionable as the recent past” zone, and in my experience few were willing to admit any genuine appreciation for it without being half apologetic.
I only saw bits and pieces of that series (and any series for that matter) of I’m a Celebrity, but I picked up quite a lot of its highlights through cultural osmosis and it seemed to be something of a peak for that series in terms of public awareness (I could well be wrong). As far as I could tell Andre was generally considered a bit ridiculous in the series, and getting this to No.1 was a form of mockery by the public; affectionate mockery, but mockery none the less. The lines were blurred further by Insania, kind of like the 00s equivalent of a Viral hit (at 00s pace perhaps taking a little too long to reap the full benefit) a professionally produced version of the “silly little tune” he infamously composed via hum in the jungle that got all the way to No.3.
Andre seemed to be in on the joke and was keen to be a good sport; in the following year’s naff-even-by-Comic-Relief-standards big skit Spider-Plant-Man (cripes) he was willing to appear next to a spoof newspaper caption that suggested a successful rescue operation for the tapes of his new songs would be a national disaster. I always got the sense that he was playing the long game, that he was happy to be a figure of fun because it was better than continuing to wallow in obscurity, and one day the public would embrace him as a great performer and songwriter. If my feeling was right, it sort of worked; not immediately (perhaps telling his comeback album peaked a good 40 places lower than this re-release or Insania), and perhaps not fully (I don’t know if there are many people who would call him “a great songwriter), but come the next decade he started to find an audience who appreciated him as a light entertainment hunk and a nice guy rather than just a joke. And fair enough, really, that’s probably fairer than the excess opprobrium he got on his first go round.
I had just turned 7 in the summer of 1996 when “Mysterious Girl” came out the first time round. I do remember my sister who was in Year 6 at the time and several of her friends being a bit obsessed with him (though she staunchly denies it now) and this song being a constant soundtrack that summer in between repeat plays of “Wannabe” and/or “Macarena”. It was just the point I’d started listening to the charts on Sundays and watching Top of the Pops every week, so for better or worse, it’s a record that makes me think of 1996 instantly.
It was somewhat telling that this song was better remembered than either of his two actual chart toppers from that year, or indeed any of his singles thereafter. I do also remember that late 2003, literally a few months before Peter turned up in the jungle on I’m A Celebrity, that one of my other sisters (both of us were by now in secondary school, her about to leave Year 11, and myself in Year 9) told us that one of her friends had told her he’d died after his pecs imploded from steroid overuse(!)
Cut to February 2004 and he was suddenly back on telly in the jungle, and very much not dead from a tragic overuse of steroids. As I recall however, the re-release of “Mysterious Girl” (and indeed, him singing the chorus of the non-bunnied follow up to this re-release, “Insania” whilst in the jungle) were long planned before it became the first bandwagon to which Chris Moyles (who in a roundabout turn of events, was in last year’s I’m A Celebrity) hitched himself after taking over host of the Radio 1 Breakfast Show, a fact that Popbitch pointed out as this was on the cusp of hitting number one. But my God were we not allowed to forget it when it did make number one when Chris kept going on about it all the time like it was a badge of honour. The worst was on Top of the Pops and it was just teeth gnashingly irritating. It was very annoying and a good example of the “ironic” chart topper which we encounter a few examples of before we reach this current decade. I loathe it when music is approached in that manner.
So then Peter comes out of the jungle. And what happens over the next few years just put him in another league of fame and ubiquity – albeit strictly of the tabloid variety – that was so far beyond anything to do with music or indeed what he achieved of his own accord in the 90s. Getting married to Katie Price meant that endless ITV2 documentaries – “Katie and Peter: The Next Chapter”, “Katie and Peter: The Wedding Story”, “Katie and Peter: What Happened After The Wedding Story” etc – plus constant appearances in OK and Heat magazine essentially became their playing ground and meal ticket (probably hers more so than his) for the next five or so years that followed. (And also that terrible duets album which we don’t talk about)
And then they broke up, and suddenly it was the same spiel – endless documentaries and more average music, including an out of nowhere top 5 in August 2009 with “Behind Closed Doors” – but just with him on his own. And it was a bit like watching Alan Partridge but instead reimagined as a semi successful late 90s popstar. Yet somehow he maintained a constant media presence throughout. Why the Gods smiled upon him is a bit of a mystery still.
It could be argued that others did what he did before him either on the show or similar ones like it – Mark Owen was on the second Celebrity Big Brother for instance and won, and had a brief reflowering of his solo career before the Take Bunny reunion happened. And others also attempted to use the jungle as a springbroad to reactivating music careers after chowing down on witchetty grubs or having bugs poured on them for a fortnight (a big old dusty tumbleweed in the direction of Blue’s Antony Costa, All Saints’ Natalie Appleton and Busted’s Matt Willis, who all appeared on the series after Peter did).
I think the reason we now get to discuss “Mysterious Girl” again after all this time is mainly a bit of luck given what he got up to in the jungle, but also being in the right place and the right time. And sometimes that can’t be argued with. With all those factors combined, I land on a 5 for this.
#2 watch – and I’m gutted we don’t get to discuss this instead because I genuinely loved her, was Jamelia with “Thank You”, the follow up to her career rejuvenating “Superstar” from the previous year, a moving and engaging song she wrote about her former relationship where she was subjected to domestic abuse. She then followed it up in the summer with the brilliant “See It In A Boy’s Eyes” which Chris Martin from Coldplay co-wrote for her.
Everything I know about I’m a celebrity etc etc is both a member of Busted and one of Mcfly ended up winning it — and I find it much more interesting than this song or this Andre character.
Yikes, this has been a mediocre crop of songs, hasn’t it?
A 5 is all I can muster for this song. Maybe if Peter didn’t have…that voice, I’d reconsider. It just doesn’t stand out too well.,
Somehow I’m a Celebrity didn’t do much business in the US. I only remember one season. The only tabloid-y stuff to come out of it was the “bad behavior” antics of two reality show siblings that’s not even worth summarizing!
Re 11: It’s such a shame we don’t get to talk about Jamelia here – her run of hits in the early ’00s outshines pretty much all UK competition, R&B or otherwise. I had no idea Chris Martin co-wrote See It In A Boy’s Eyes (which I purchased on a 7″ picture disc in Leyburn, Yorks, around 10 yrs ago).
See It in a Boy’s Eyes would be a dead cert for my favourite songs of the 00s list.
Seconded, See It in a Boy’s Eyes is really fantastic!
Thrilled to have rediscovered Jamelia thanks to these comments – Thank You, Superstar and See It In A Boy’s Eyes had all been hidden away in my subconscious somewhere for the past two decades. Seriously great stuff.
I normally run a mile from ‘sensitive’ indie covers of pop hits but this, by in/out Fat White Family man Saul Adamcheski is a pearl: https://youtu.be/199jefKUY0g
I didn’t think I knew Thank You but had a listen to it and it does ring a bell. It’s better than I expected in fairness; actually pretty decent.
I do remember Superstar well; I’m not normally into R&B but that song is great.
Banner year for Chris Martin even with no Coldplay releases – he also wrote Gravity which resurrected Embrace’s career later in 2004. Wonderful track, that.
Passing note: this was the song performed by Welsh brothers Ant and Seb in possibly the funniest X Factor audition in the history of the programme.
One very small piece of justice that Moyles did deliver; Peter Andre’s best song was now a number one.
How much this is damning with faint praise or not is a question that I can’t blame this comment section for not being sure about. It certainly checks the earworm box, and all in all it deserves a better performer than Andre. (And, thanks to the guest spot, has one. Was Bubbler Ranx credited the first time? I’m sure I vaguely remember he was. In any case, he doesn’t show up with a performer credit on Tidal – indeed his only credited performer appearance there that I can see is one 2017 album! – but does show up with a writer credit.)
While we’re discussing Moyles, I recall the “Soundtracking 9/11” article, which had an excellent insight into his presenting and what it meant for Radio 1’s music department. (The author of that article included.) The article was remembered again when it showed up in the Guardian’s famous Operation London Bridge longread, so it’s quite interesting to return to it now that Operation London Bridge has actually been activated. (Apparently quite a few people ended up suddenly playing In The Nursery’s Sabres of Paradise cover that day, based on last.fm data. For the curious, the song Radio 1 ultimately went with for the gap between the announcement being tweeted and the all-stations Radio 4 simulcast was Arlo Parks’ “Eugene,” a song about as old then as ITN’s “Haunted Dancehall” was when it featured in the Radio 1 Diana obit rotation almost exactly a quarter-century earlier. After the all-stations simulcast ended, Radio 1 went back to their presumably-planned transitional phase of subdued regular programming, but it wasn’t exactly like that for Philip the previous spring; Radio 1 broke out of the simulcast somewhat early, and played instrumental versions of mostly-subdued pop for a few hours before lyrics returned. It was a surreal experience, and honestly my favourite broadcasting moment from either obit period.)
#6 Spiderbait are known to me – but exclusively for their “Black Betty” cover showing up on the soundtrack to Need For Speed Underground 2, a high water mark in the street racing video game subgenre. It’s a mostly inferior cover but amped up enough to work in the context I met it in. The soundtrack in general was quite fun, a mixture of hard rock, rap, and dance (I forget if they were put into separate sub-soundtracks, but they definitely weren’t radio stations in the GTA mould). This was the era where EA started really pushing soundtracks as standout features of their game – usually featuring Rise Against, who seemed to put their songs in every one of these as a latter-day Hue and Cry-esque piece of entryism. (Another of their racing games in this era – the ultra-arcadey, crash-driven Burnout 3: Takedown – featured Franz Ferdinand’s “This Fire.” Which they also licensed out for a Green Party PPB at almost the exact same time.)
#19 I was in on that second wave of Embrace! It had its moments, “Gravity” one of them, but they definitely should not have been one of my most-played artists through my university years like they were, especially as those entirely postdated “World At Your Feet.” Still, we’re very unlucky not to meet them in that wave on Popular, one song from it was denied bunnydom only by early teething troubles with iTunes data if memory serves. I’m sure that’ll be bought up on #2 watch when we get there!
I think Spiderbait’s Black Betty cover would be at least passingly familiar to anyone who regularly attended the cinema or at least was watching a lot of US films at the time, particularly if you were in your teens; it turned up in either the trailer, in actual scenes or in both for an awful lot of films aimed at the PG-13/12a demographic in that era. Without a Paddle and the Dukes of Hazzard remake are two that immediately spring to mind. I actually did buy the CD single around 2005 in a mostly second hand record shop that had some overstock of new items. I don’t know if I liked it so much as had a pavlovian response upon after having heard it in so many films.
Mysterious Girl had of course been a massive hit less than eight years previously, the ninth biggest seller of 1996 and only denied the top by an even bigger hit. And here it is finally reaching the top as a souvenir single for a reality TV show.
Interestingly it might be seen as representing a period of cultural transition both times. In 1996 Mysterious Girl broke big at a point where many pop fans were still adapting to the demise of Take That and nobody had yet heard of the Spice Girls (Boyzone had also briefly gone quiet while they recorded their second album).
In 2004 reality TV is the biggest way to guarantee a surefire hit; provided you had the right product (Pop Idol/ Fame Academy etc was easy enough but nobody wanted to hear Big Brother contestants sing). At the same time we were still a couple of years away from downloading which meant a physical product was needed. Mark Owen was the previous example of a pop star who revived his career on the back of a reality TV show but as his solo work was little remembered he had to go away and record a new album. By contrast Peter Andre had a nostalgia record that could easily be re-issued to strike while the iron was hot.
Finally I remember reading at the time that when Mysterious Girl became a hit again Bubbler Ranx had faded into such obscurity nobody knew his whereabouts.
#24 – if my memory recalls, I think they did track him down after a campaign by (who else?) Chris Moyles so he could appear on Top of the Pops with Peter the week it went to number one. He disappeared quietly back to Wolverhampton thereafter I think.
Not much to say about this very average mid-90s pop reggae hit, and Peter seems like a nice guy, but the idea of Moyles getting it to number one as (as far as I can tell) a completely unfunny joke just sums up why I’m happy I spent most of the 2000s out of the UK.