The success of Elvis’ reissues – a promotional gimmick which actually managed to hack the charts – made a strong case that the new pop of 2005 simply wasn’t able to capture the wider public imagination. This record makes it inarguable. The best selling single of the year – the only million-seller, a 7-week leviathan in an age of minnows – is a song which barely scraped the Top 20 in 1971, with a fictitious credit for the comedian in the video as the only link to the present day.
Nothing musical about “Is This The Way To Amarillo?” speaks of an idea whose time had come. The song reached a mid-range position on release because, for those early 70s charts, it’s a mid-range song, catchy and muscular but monotonous too. As a ’71 hit “Amarillo” sits at a midpoint between the cloying singalong of Tony Orlando and Dawn and the coming whomp of The Sweet or Slade, with some light country elements in the songwriting and a trouper’s performance from big-voiced Tony Christie.
It’s the kind of record people didn’t make any more, and that was entirely the point. Amongst its contemporaries, the beasts of an earlier age, “Amarillo” cut an ordinary figure; it wasn’t even Christie’s signature hit. Awoken from its slumber and unleashed on the low-selling, fanbase-tossed charts of 2005, it was a kaiju. Oasis and McFly might style themselves in their different ways as classicists, but nobody making contemporary records would come up with that wordless, pub-ready second chorus, let alone finish it off with that final tacky stomp. A producer like Richard X might build a knowing version of the 70s aesthetic, distorted and filtered through the decades of accumulated pop knowledge since, and fans like me would absolutely love it. But here was the real thing.
Peter Kay was an aesthetic technician just as much as Richard X, though. Early-00s comedy was very often a construct of vibes; you built a character not just around what they did or said but around the kind of things they would be into. I’ve written in previous posts about how British entertainment in the Blair years was marked by a fascination with ‘real life’, or at least the skewed, mediated version of it put forward via docudramas, reality TV and talent shows. I think the big comedy hits of the early Blair era – Phoenix Nights, The Office, The Royle Family, I’m Alan Partridge – shared some of that feeling, the metropole waking up to the existence of life in Slough or Bolton or Norwich, and commissioning shows that operated at different points on a spectrum of affection, curiosity and scorn.
Kay and his series Phoenix Nights was at the affectionate end of that scale. His comedy is in mocking, but loving conversation with an older style of cheap-and-cheerful entertainment, and the people who made and bought it. His signature routine involved his Dad on holiday, flummoxed by the exotica of garlic bread. And his breakthrough role, as Northern working men’s club entrepreneur Brian Potter in Phoenix Nights, was one of British comedy’s long line of Del Boy-style vainglorious dreamers. But while the show took the piss out of Potter’s pig-headed self-belief and the wretched acts he booked, it was more affectionate about the milieu and traditions those hopeless wannabes inhabited. Fashions come and fashions go, but family fun days and wild west nights are forever. And so are the people hoping to make a few quid off them.
Phoenix Nights brought “Amarillo” back into circulation, sung by two characters in a pivotal scene. Brian Potter would have approved of the song landing at Number 1. So would his customers. And if Peter Kay’s family holiday happened in 1971, his Dad could have heard and liked it too. Tony Christie’s song wasn’t a big hit in England, but in Germany and Belgium it was a Number 1, embraced as a rare example of English schlager. People sometimes like to say there’s no real UK equivalent of schlager, but a glance at the No.1s lists suggests that whatever you want to call it, jovial sentimentality finds a regular place in the hearts of the British public. In any case, Christie spent most of the late 70s and 80s in continental exile, at least in the career sense, releasing singles only in Germany and the Netherlands.
In 1999, though, he made a return to the UK charts, Jarvis Cocker and the All Seeing I writing “Walk Like A Panther” for him: a song that fictionalised Christie’s own situation, turning it into a scenario straight out of Phoenix Nights. The returning singer, disgusted at the low state his town and his profession have fallen into, snarling at a new breed of performers who lack respect and nous. Like many Cocker songs, “Panther” feels double-edged, proud of a threatened world of working-class entertainment while acknowledging that it was threatened: the song only works by casting Christie as a remnant, in the same way Phil Oakey in companion single “First Man In Space” is both a genuine pioneer and a castaway in the end-of-the-90s world.
But now it’s six years later, and Christie the remnant is sweeping the charts before him, with the help of Peter Kay’s bumptious charity video. It’s worth comparing the “Amarillo” video with a previous all-star video extravaganza No.1, 1997’s “Perfect Day”, as both of them feel like products distinctly of their time. “Perfect Day” was a statement of intent by a newly confident BBC coming off the back of an era when music felt central to British cultural identity (certainly in terms of column inches and export figures). Everything from the choice of song to the diversity of its singers communicates a notion of curation – the Corporation as something that selects, brings together and packages its idea of the best, creating juxtapositions that only the BBC can.
This is most certainly not the vibe of Kay’s video for Comic Relief, which revels in joyful, populist tackiness. A beaming Kay in a purple suit jogs toward the camera miming the song against an ever-changing green-screen background, flanked by a cast of celebrities from Coronation Street’s Ken and Deirdre to Heather Mills. Music is represented, with Shaun and Bez from the Happy Mondays and Brian May and Roger Taylor from Queen. But most of the impromptu cast are comedians, cabaret turns and kids’ entertainers: Jim Bowen, Mr Blobby, Bernie Clifton, Keith Harris and Orville. These are familiar faces, but not fashionable ones; many are presenters or comedians whose stars fell as alternative comedy rose in the 80s and 90s. Kay’s video is a sign the wheel has turned again: light entertainment is back, back, back.
In that sense “Amarillo” is pulling on the longest thread in this whole blog series – the way Britain’s light entertainment establishment, centred on the BBC, is so crucial to pop and to the charts. The infrastructure of British pop was born from it, from the old music hall venues pop stars performed in, through the Light Programme their records were played on, down to details like George Martin’s background as a Goon Show producer. For a long time it felt like ‘light ent’ was a skin UK pop had shed, transforming itself into something new and young and highly exportable. But when you take ‘what’s popular’ as your metric, you find that light entertainment is always there, tapping patiently at the window of pop. We’ve never been far away from TV hits, talent show winners, comedians, family entertainers: not many of the Amarillo line up were best known as musicians, but they’d all made records.
What we’ve seen in the 00s is the light entertainment tradition partially re-absorbing British pop music. Auteurist pop, as we’d understood it from the 60s to the 90s, was simply outgunned on a sales basis by the singles reality TV spawned, though a limited public appetite for multiple shows meant the reality-pop glut of 2001 and 2002 scaled down to an annual Winter infestation. But the reality TV shows at least pretended to be about looking for new, contemporary stars. What makes “Amarillo” extraordinary isn’t just the way it has no engagement whatsoever with current pop – most Comic Relief singles are fairly tenuous about that – but that despite this, in fact because of this, it’s easily the biggest single of the year.
The chart success of “Amarillo” feels like a broad public rejection of contemporary pop, though this probably wasn’t Peter Kay’s intent. The video, I’d say, makes that rejection part of a broader cultural mood, a backlash against the 90s conception of cool. Its parade of pre-loved old stars might have felt ironic on first encounter, but you can’t sustain irony for seven weeks. In the second week of “Amarillo” at No.1, another old BBC icon joined Jim Bowen and Keith Harris and The Two Ronnies back in the spotlight: Doctor Who was on Saturday teatimes again, with a Northern star, telling us that the kind of everyday people you see in reality shows might save the Universe if you give them the chance. It was a time of nostalgia and national treasures, and the “Amarillo” video caught the mood.
Yet some national treasures bear curses. You can see the video for “Is This The Way To Amarillo?” easily enough on YouTube, but you won’t find it as the official upload. That version is an edit, carefully removing one Sir James Winston Vincent Savile OBE KCMG, the worm at the centre of light entertainment, a man who’d embraced his national treasure status as a means to prey on hundreds of children. The tracksuited, wrinkled, cigar-chomping, chain-rattling spectre of Jimmy Savile – instantly familiar to anyone who was a late 20th century kid – is a moment to shudder at in the video, even when you know he’s coming. Kay to this day regrets putting “that shithouse” in the film, but how could he not have? Savile was in his charitable element, a predator who used charity, the BBC and the British public’s unbending belief in fun to abuse his way to the grave.
The 2012 revelations of Savile’s crimes became part of a decade-long (and continuing) era of attempted reckoning with abusive men and their ability to work within and through the structures of the media. Abuse thrives on the imbalance of power; few industries work as hard to conceal how power operates within them as the media, and so few offer such opportunities to the abuser. The fact British light entertainment prided itself on being so jovial and anodyne made the reveal of monstrous acts more shocking, but every branch of the media contained men who could match Savile’s drives, if not their stupefying scale.
I could pretend the crimes of Savile are an albatross for the song, but it would be manifestly untrue: “Amarillo” would shrug the attempt off and keep on jogging along. The “Amarillo” video has survived Savile to become a meme. In fact this happened almost at once: some BBC staffer knuckles were rapped in 2006 over something called “Is This The Way To Al-Jazeera?” and that same year Christie himself popped up again with “Is This The Way To The World Cup?”. Away from the spotlight, the video format is never far away from the thoughts of those poor souls entrusted with leaving do videos or digital Christmas cards. It’s been particularly popular with NHS workers, and Kay put together a Covid-era fundraiser featuring key workers doing the Amarillo Jog. And the jaunty record in the middle of all this is both completely insignificant next to that video and also a year-straddling hit, a song that you can connect to so much else in 2005 while realising that, in the end, it refuses to be anything other than what it is.
Score: 4
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Now this is interesting, because I could swear blind that “Amarillo” started to do the rounds again slightly before Phoenix Nights got its mitts on it. I’m deeply struggling to remember the full story – but as with many things in this era, I suspect clubs in Hoxton/ Shoreditch had something to do with it. If not them, it may have been a cabaret night a friend of mine ran (he was slightly irritated when Kay used it, so it possibly was just him).
I just know that when I saw the relevant episode in question, my first thought wasn’t “What’s that song?” but “Oh, they’ve used that! I’ve been trying to track down a copy of that for ages!” Finding one was surprisingly tricky if you were searching second hand record stores in those days. It wasn’t exactly a collector’s item, but it also wasn’t highly likely to be sat in Music and Video Exchange just waiting to be scooped up. Like most mid-placed chart hits, it would only emerge when it felt like it.
Why did I like it? I’d suggest it was because I was quite a keen drinker and socialiser in those days, and the song was just about obscure enough to sound fresh. It hadn’t received a hammering on daytime radio within my living memory, and I was by then old enough not to be too snooty about its contents. I think we all need our party pops, whether they’re old fashioned, unapologetic stomping schlager anthems like this one or “Saturday Night” by Whigfield. We need our little bursts of bonhomie before we take the night bus or night train home, and once we get to a certain age, we don’t like being asked to apologise for them.
Of course, I bought the CD single in the end, helping this to get to number one. I handled its success as badly as I handle blanket coverage of most big hits, and got sick of it relatively quickly. It’s no “Tainted Love” or “Come On Eileen” in monster hit terms – it starts as it means to continue and if you try to look for hidden depths to the lyrics or subtle elements in the arrangement you missed on the first, second or third listens, you’re going to get frustrated. Despite this, even now when I hear this one (which isn’t at all often, it really seems to have slipped off oldies playlists) I remember friends who have moved on to other towns, cities or even countries, promising to stay in touch but never doing so. I can remember the crappy London pubs friends of mine used to hire for events with their rough, mouldy old carpets, some of those places now converted into flats or demolished. I didn’t know it at the time, but it marked a bit of a full stop in my life in many ways, the end of the party before I met my wife and all my friends met their respective husbands, wives or partners. For those reasons alone, I can’t possibly hear this as a disposable record, but then nor can I mark it as highly as a true classic. A 7 then.
An excellent piece Tom. I do really enjoy “Amarillo”. Right age, perhaps? Very few, if any, songs quite dominated the playground, school discos, birthday parties and so on quite like this one did. Being as trebly as it is certainly helps. But I can’t fault it even now. It just mainlines straight to my musical pleasure centres, leaving any rationality behind.
Like Tom Jones (if you consider projects Reload and The Voice to be one thing, and the acclaimed albums he’s made with Ethan Jones another), Christie pulled off having two revivals – one of broad popular appeal (the sort of territory that makes one a ‘national treasure’), and another of critical and artistic respect. “Walk Like a Panther ’99” was a natural hit but it belongs to the latter camp. He was establishing himself as part of Sheffield’s ripe musical culture of the preceding 30 years, and appearing on an album alongside Jarvis, Phil Oakey and err the bloke out of Babybird was perhaps as much an artistic repositioning and repurposing as Tom on Reload. The album, Pickled Eggs and Sherbet, set the thematic (if not musical) template for Christie’s own Made in Sheffield a decade later, made with the crucial involvement of Richard Hawley, Alex Turner and Jarvis again. This was followed by Now’s the Time!, an impressive northern soul-inspired album with, again, collaborators who continued to ease Christie into an album-oriented, and not embarrassing, late career. The sort of albums that Mojo 4/5s seem made of.
And then in between there was “Amarillo”. And for a while yet he served up several other novelties to diminishing returns. Firstly, he made way for a chart-topping greatest hits – with an underperforming reissue of “Avenues and Alleyways” to stand alongside it – but then there was the tacky swing cover of “Merry Xmas Everybody” with leather-booted Santa girls and then, one of the most baffling hits of its age, “(Is This the Way to) the World Cup?” Baffling not because of its existence – it existing might just be the most inevitable thing in the world – but because it makes no attempt to follow the melodic cadence of the original “Amarillo”. Its chorus? “England… Win the world cup!” I can think of few other hits that signpost their ‘Will this do?’ attitude to blatantly. And yet, in a market swamped with the Stan Boardman’s “World Cup Song” and “Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Jurgen Klinsmann?”, things were much worse elsewhere. The post-“Amarillo” well ran dry after this, and it’s just as well he was able to sashay over to the Made in Sheffield project without a dent in his armour.
“Amarillo” had other follow-ups too from parties other than Christie, of course. Again, diminishing returns, though Popular will reach two of them. One thing which I think struck me even at the time somewhat, before I really knew who most of the figures were in the video (though my parents eagerly pointed them out), was how the whole thing seemed to be an extension of Peter’s brand. Several people crop up who, I’d later learn, were bit part characters in either Phoenix Nights or – Kay’s real success at that moment in time – Max & Paddy’s Road to Nowhere. Both this and, to a lesser extent, Kay’s next number one really made me feel like I had a grasp on Kay’s “world”. And that this world was similar to my dad’s – he was big into Kay, and much of the comedy and light ent callbacks felt made squarely for him and others like him to acknowledge. Me owning the CD single (even though I already had Now 60) (there’s a strange revival of 1920s laughing records on the B-side, btw) made me feel, however untruly, like I owned an entrance to my parents’ world myself, in a way not really comparable to owning 80s compilations and suchlike. Something about ‘old TV’ felt less approachable and understandable than ‘old music’.
Except, that blatantly wasn’t true when shortly afterwards I spent a Sunday afternoon enjoying this strange old thing on the telly, only for my mum to walk in and say something to the effect of ‘oh this is an old Doctor Who [it was Dr. Who and the Daleks, in fact], are you excited for Saturday?’. My dad had hyped the new Who up to the heavens and my wee life was about to change completely.
At the time, and as daft as it seems, the real water cooler moment in the “Amarillo” video was Ronnie Corbett taking a tumble. Funny to the grownups because it’s Corbett losing his balance. Funny to the kids because anyone falling over is funny.
2005 up to this point hasn’t been great as heritage acts –minus Ciara and McFly– and established artists have all reigned supreme. Proving low sales really did mean fan assisted chart toppers over (subjectively speaking) better songs.
I suppose the success of this particular one depends on the joke: is it funny?
For myself the answer was no. I can understand the music video being light entertainment, but was the joke supposed to be the song also? The fact it is a little naff?
In the same way Chris Moyles used his profile and position to get Mysterious Girl to #1 the previous year; it seems Peter Kay is doing the same here.
I agree with the comment about Elvis previously in the year and this release also felt like a statement was being made against contemporary music of the time, and who could control it. A forgotten hit amongst a strong musical landscape dominating in another time. Almost a public shaming.
2005 in Britain was the year of new Indie (UK) and Emo (US) bands. However, these genres would hit the top spot later on this year and next with their most prominent groups.
Amarillo made its innocuous first appearance in the charts towards the end of 1971. In context Slade were halfway through their run at number one with Coz I Luv You before giving way to Benny Hill. Kicking it’s heels behind both records was Jeepster by T Rex. Note this case of a novelty record outscoring one of the biggest rock acts of the moment – it’s about to happen in 2005.
I’m not sure how the listener of 1971 would have contextualised Amarillo as the mid table hit it was then or indeed who the demographic buying it might have been. Certainly no 18 was no disgrace; many far better and more important records have charted far lower. And many songs have made a modest initial chart run before gaining new legs on a re-issue.
At the same time Amarillo was no lost classic and it didn’t deserve to go supernova the way it did in 2005 (but how many of the UK’s really big sellers can claim that either). The fact is that what happened, just happened, and why is ultimately a mystery. It’s probably worth noting that Amarillo has cemented something of a reputation in the twenty years since – it hasn’t vanished back in the world of budget compilations.
Amarillo at least spared us no less than three further Elvis chart toppers to add his already excessive re-issue tally (Devil In Disguise, Crying In The Chapel and Way Down all got stuck behind it). If there is a great chart topper lost in those seven weeks it may be Someone Else by Razorlight – the one great song by an otherwise irritating band.
I never got that view – Somewhere Else is mid and one of the worst tracks on the versions of the album that have it tacked on to them.
Somewhere Else is pretty solid, but I think Golden Touch from 2004 was their peak. Of course we’ll have a chance to discuss them in more depth in due course.
I’m not sure if there’s anything else upcoming that has a better hook to attach this to, but one of Doct Who show-runner Russel T Davies’s features is that he’s very comfortable with light entertainment and culture in general – sometime it leads to Anne Droid hosting the fatal Weakest Link (which I love in a very 2000AD way), sometimes it’s slightly hackneyed jokes about the Jukebox iPod, but also it’s realising that the way to sell that the ghosts inhabiting the world had become a feature that people accepted as Just Another Thing is that they’d been written into Eastenders.
I have to be careful what I say about Tony Christie here because, as someone else has already noted, the success of the rekindled “Amarillo” led to a number one best-of album, hence I’m going to be talking about him – and the mid-noughties British cultural world which surrounded, but did not engulf, him – more fully on Then Play Long. These are therefore just a few remarks.
Amusing that such a prime example of “British schlager” should have been written by two Americans – is this the only UK number one single to involve Neil Sedaka? In addition, the wordless second chorus was a happy semi-accident; when Sedaka first played the song to Christie, he (or Howard Greenfield) hadn’t quite finished the lyric yet, so he apologetically sang “Sha-la-la, la-la, la-la, la” etc. while explaining that a full lyric would be forthcoming. But Christie liked what he heard and urged Sedaka just to keep the “la-la”s in – it was the song’s “hook.” So the tra-la-la days weren’t quite over for Neil.
So why did something which only did middling business over ’71-2 make such a belated impact in 2005? One of the clues would be in my own mother’s response to seeing the song performed in the studio in that year’s Christmas Top Of The Pops. She knew full well who Tony Christie was – indeed was a big fan of his in the early seventies, and even went to see him perform in a big club in Cambuslang (!) in October 1984 – and while I don’t think she had a clear memory of this song, she immediately declared it her new favourite song. Why? “Because it’s so happy!” – and there wasn’t an awful lot of happiness being spread around in late 2005.
Equally, as a seven-going-on-eight year old, I would have registered “Amarillo” as one of those busy bits of fluffy easy listening business you’d hear Terry Wogan or Jimmy Young playing on daytime Radio 2. As already noted, it was not Christie’s “signature song” – that at the time would have been “I Did What I Did For Maria,” an artfully-updated slice of gunslinging melodrama which could have come from Frankie Laine twenty years earlier, which jostled for the paranoid number two slot with R Dean Taylor’s “Indiana Wants Me” – and in the context of its era’s charts, it certainly looked out of place next to Slade, Bolan, Isaac Hayes and John Kongos, but was perhaps more congruent with the parallel “records your parents bought” strand of Cilla Black, the New Seekers, Val Doonican (though “Morning” is a VERY strange song) and the Congregation (John Barry’s Persuaders theme comes somewhere in between the two)…
…and of course Benny Hill, absent from the charts since the rise of the Beatles but back on top for Christmas thanks to the silent majority of British people who DIDN’T NORMALLY BUY RECORDS EXCEPT ONCE A YEAR, and who’d seen a funny sketch on the telly and wanted the song that went with it (and again, the scenario of “Ernie” is basically an affectionate send-up of the aforementioned Frankie Laine gunslinging melodrama template – it was like ROCK HAD NEVER HAPPENED).*
*also the main reason why “Jeepster” never went top, apart from “Ernie” being way ahead of it in sales, was that Bolan had just changed record labels, was severely miffed that his old label had rushed out an unauthorised single, and therefore declined to promote it…
And yet and yet and yet…when it came to 2005, I found myself unable to stop playing “Amarillo” and I think it’s fair to suggest that this is a record which made more sense in 2005 than in 1971. Why with me? Did it remind me of a time in my life when everything was done for me, I felt safe and didn’t have to fret about being an adult? Or did it simply sound so lively and giving when set against the slightly cynical robojobs surrounding it in 2005’s charts? Was the record offering something 2005 itself couldn’t, or wouldn’t?
Of course there was plenty of fabulous and inventive new music in 2005. If you paid any attention to The Church Of Me at the time you’d have read me rhapsodising about it. But NOBODY ELSE KNEW ABOUT IT, THERE WAS NO WAY OF LETTING PEOPLE KNOW – not even with TOTP still desperately clinging onto its life raft.
Did the Guilty Pleasures boom have something to do with “Amarillo”’s resurrection? Not very likely, I’d wager – that manufactured craze was already two years past its peak. And its most unexpected yet welcome consequence is that it got Tony Christie “mattering” again, and in the company of Richard Hawley (All Seeing I-adjacent) and others he would go on to record his finest work, almost entirely unheard by the million-plus who were attracted to this particular manifestation of “forgotten seventies.” Sometimes, though, old pop records can spring back into reuse just when they might be needed.
Finally, I note the date when the record got to number one. Twenty-four days later. Christ, did we f*cking need reassurance. When one of the worst things ever to happen in the world happens, you’re a liar if you claim not to have required some kind of reassurance.
Just to note – the song got to #1 in March 2005, not sure if anything momentous happened earlier that month?
The 31 July above is the date Tom posted the article in 2024.
Or am I missing something?
Quite correct and if Tom wants to delete that last paragraph of mine then fair play. However, I think the overall feeling still stands. 7/7 was horrible and we lost someone we knew because of it. And people needed cheering up and reassuring. “Amarillo” was still in the air we were trying to breathe. When I wrote the above words Mr Gut took precedence over Mr Facts and I’m not sure that isn’t often the best way to approach things (although obviously not in sociopolitical contexts, where such prioritising is frequently fatal).
sorry, what happened 24 days earlier?
The London Underground bombings. Some people on this board were there, let’s just say ..
Discovering that the ‘original’ was a big hit in Germany helps to clear up one mystery for me, at least. The first time I knowingly encountered the song was at the climax of the 1998 German Eurovision preselection (where else?). Schlager revivalist Guildo Horn stormed to victory as expected, prompting his “fan block” in the audience to sing:
Sha la la la la la la la / Sha la la la la la la la / Sha la la la la la la la / Guildo fährt nach Birmingham!
I didn’t recognise the melody, though like anything football chant-adjacent, I assumed it must be based on an existing song. Years later I heard the charity reissue and realised that this, of all things, was the tune they’d been using. It all makes (a little) more sense now…
Great piece, Tom!
RE:the song being popular in Europe,I’m Irish and my parents were familiar with the song, but then I discover that it was actually a far bigger hit in Ireland in 1971, than in the UK. Maybe because Christie’s the kind of showband-adjacent fare (Brendan Bowyer used to cover Amarillo, for example) that did well, especially when covered in the dance halls and ballrooms of rural Ireland.
A good fun video for a worthy cause and a perky song to boot. It certainly cheered me up anyway! I’ll opt for a 7/10 here.
Just adding, that the All-Seeing I/JarvisC had written two songs for TC based on titles he’d already done: “Walk like a Panther” was an LP track, “Drive Safely Darling” a very low charting A-side. He refused the latter, had to be persuaded by his agent to do the former after hearing the backing track in isolation. Oh, and “Happy Birthday Nicola” which was a little ‘too close to home’ for comfort but too good to turn down.
I had thought that about Sedaka-Greenfield too, D.J. Punctum, but then I remembered that they had crossed paths with Connie Francis – in the Fifties! – talk about old soldiers! I can only say that his legacy on the list could have been much worse than Amarillo. I agree with the rest – this was and is a high-quality song, phenomenon, and video concept, even if we’d rather remove one or two details of the execution, and in this case I think the sociology can take a back seat, some songs just need a second chance. That it persisted into the early 2020s bolsters the idea that it was more resilient than other mega-sellers like Candle in the Wind.
Oh yes, “Stupid Cupid” – thanks; I suspected there had to be another one!
I have to go to bat for this song. I’m a longtime Falkirk fan (hometown team) and in about 1998 or 1999 we, for some reason, started playing Is This The Way To Amarillo as our entrance and goal celebration music. Thus it was a little surreal when the song blew up nationally a few years later – it felt like being a hipster fan of an underground band that suddenly goes mainstream.
That aside, I always liked the song and it’s great that it got such a big moment. To this day we still play this at Falkirk and that’s what I’ll always associate this song with, not Peter Kay.
Sha-la-la la la-la-la-la… FALKIRK!
7/10
I’m glad it’s not just me who remembers this picking up appreciation in random places way before “Phoenix Nights”! It’s possible the All Singing I single caused a few deep dives into Christie’s back catalogue with inevitable results.
Time has a habit of squeezing gaps, something I think this blog has observed more than once before. I was thinking about this earlier, listening to a relatively timestamped mid-2010s bunny and wondering about what makes songs feel timestamped or indeed otherwise.
When a song is 34 years old, as “Amarillo” was then, it’s going to get chalked down simply as “oldie” – even ignoring how it feels older still in a way, with the 60s crooner singing it and the big band-like arrangement. Perhaps in 1971 it felt like an awkwardly not-quite-current record and that’s why it wasn’t big – but that’s the exact sort of gap time squeezes. “Goodnight Girl” is almost as old now as “Amarillo” was then, and was also arguably a few years out of time at that point and had a monster hook to power it; perhaps that this was enough to get it to multi-week bunnydom in 1992 when “Amarillo” didn’t even go top ten in 1971 shows that the latter was a Better Era for Music, as the boomers for whom it was their youth would surely collectively argue?
And effectively did in making this the biggest hit of 2005, a fractured pop year in an increasingly fractured Britain, number 1 during an election campaign where the Tories fought a Lyndon Crosby-led dog-whistle culture war (“are you thinking what we’re thinking?”) and actually won more votes than Labour in England; they didn’t convert that into even 200 seats, and they’d only take power at the next election by at least pretending to move on from this kind of approach, but the boomer nostalgia for the England of their childhood was now ascending to becoming perhaps the defining political force of the next decade. I know that was then, but it could be again…
This song shouldn’t get looked at through this lens really – it’s really just another from the circa-1970 wave of bubblegum hits that had killer hooks at least and indeed at most*, and like most of those I’d give it 5 and consider 6. But “British boomer nostalgia machine goes brrr and takes over a staple of British culture” hits different in 2024, weighing down a song that couldn’t carry that weight and was never remotely meant to.
* Yes, I’m fully aware that I’m referencing another BBC comedy sketch here. So that’s the culture! Watch it, watch it it’s gonna MOVE!
well, more people were buying singles in Jan ’72 than Jan ’92; also “Goodnight Girl” benefited from “nothing else out this time of the year” syndrome (see also “Everybody In The Place”).
Can I just say that I freakin’ love “Goodnight Girl”!!!
The first Number One single in the download era of the UK chart when that era launched on 17 April 2005. Let that sink in, folks.
The song’s a bit much for me, I think. I’m reminded of the analogy Tom used in the “See My Baby Jive” review…too many sweets packed into too small a jar.
And yes, “find Jimmy Savile in this historic video/picture” is a depressingly easy game to play. He’s like Nonce Forrest Gump.
Amarillo was three waves cresting at once.
You had Peter Kay’s rising star after That Peter Kay Things, Phoenix Nights, Max & Paddy, and the Blackpool & Bolton shows. You also had a long-building wave of the previous 25 years seeing Amarillo become a karaoke/setlist staple in British labour clubs just like the Phoenix – by the early 2000s it was something people were already affectionate for, hence its appearance alongside the Minder theme in that Phoenix Nights scene (imagine if they’d re-released that instead). But thirdly, and most importantly for Amarillo’s 7-week run at number one, was the decision in April 2005 to allow mp3 download to be classed as full sale in the Official Top 40. Suddenly, three weeks into its run at the top, Amarillo got another boost and it stayed at the top for the longest run since Cher’s Believe. The first 12 number one singles in 2005 were all one-week chart toppers. Then you get Amarillo for 7 weeks, Crazy Frog for 4 weeks, You’re Beautiful for 5 weeks, etc.
Something shifted for a bit when downloads were classed as legal tender in the Official Charts. Sales for number one singles went up almost overnight and then those songs stuck around in the charts for much longer (sometimes taking weeks to get to number one again, a huge deviation from the early 2000s norm). Amarillo was very much in the right place at the right time and those boosted download sales probably kept it at the top ahead of acts like Razorlight, Snoop Dogg, and Ciara.
How I feel about Amarillo is exactly how I feel about deck chairs. Bear with me. They’ve always been there and I sort of have happy memories associated with them, and I can’t really imagine my life without them existing. I can definitely see why they’re popular. But if they vanished off the face of the Earth tomorrow, I wouldn’t feel as though my life was missing anything. I’m not keen on deck chairs or hammocks or anything like that. They just don’t do it for me.
This is nice, simple. Easy listening. Admittedly, I really think that post-chorus is wonderful. The “sha la la” section. Thump thump. It seals the song’s future in football stadiums, pubs, labour clubs, family parties, discos. Forever. But the big appeal, it seemed to me, was that the whole thing seemed geared towards the age 30 to 60 white English demographic. It hearkens back to an era of light entertainment that had been long gone (as you say Tom, extinguished by alternative comedy), and the song itself hearkens back to images of the Old West and the American South.
But there’s also a tinge of WWII-era big band in here. And a little bit of Motown soul. And there’s the family-friendly side which makes this perfect for bingo halls too. It pitches itself, in this 2005 context, alongside acts like Daniel O’Donnell, Cliff Richard, Val Doonican, Barry Mannilow. Simultaneously at home in football stadiums and living rooms everywhere. I was only 10-year-old when this hit number one, but I’d known the song for years because it was alongside Daniel, Cliff, Val, and Barry in my grandma’s CD and tape collection.
We used to go round to my gran’s every Saturday. We used to teach my little cousin, who was four or five years old, easy-listening songs. Yellow Submarine, Shang-a-Lang, Living Next Door to Alice, Knock Three Times. Anything that gave my cousin an excuse to bang on the dinner table. Thump thump. And Amarillo was perfect for him. By the time the Comic Relief skit came around I knew all the words despite being born 23 years after the original had barely crept inside the top 20.
But more than anything, it’s the video that sent this over the top. Seven weeks. Jesus. The video, more than anything, evokes this idea of British tradition. It’s an era I have no memory of or affection for, but it was so keenly felt by my parents’ generation, and my mum’s side of the family, that it was impossible to ignore really. I’m convinced Peter Kay is one of our great pop culture connoisseurs thanks to the way he curates and cultivates – his recollection and affection for pop and TV is unlike anyone else in his position in the mainstream. He’d still get 39 on PopMaster, no question.
He’d know which song reached what peak on the charts, every lyric to every number one of the 80s, and I reckon he’d know how many singles an artist had and the order they were released in. Think about the role pop music plays in literally all of his comedy, from the wedding disco skit at Bolton Albert Halls, to the Phoenix Nights bus driving scene with Amarillo and I Could Be So Good For You, right the way through to Hear’Say’s appearance on Now 48 accompanying a massive character beat in Car Share.
Kay’s 31 at this stage but he’s such an old soul. The success of something like Amarillo proves that. All of his cultural references should be from someone 10 years his senior. I don’t know if it’s because of the characters he plays but for as long as I’ve been aware of Kay it’s like he’s permanently been 40. That’s why he can connect with people much older than him. His comedy seems perfect for people 20 years older than him. His biggest fans are mostly 50 or older, even at this peak stage.
And Amarillo is just another one of Peter Kay’s sketches. Another “Do you remember?” fond look at the past. Another “Who remembers Amarillo?” Another look at the way the world used to be.
Which brings me to the video.
As they say, the past is a foreign country. I feel that no more keenly than during something like Amarillo. The video alone adds so much weight to my belief that the pop culture of the first half of the 2000s has more in common with the 1980s than it does the late 2000s (and early 2010s). 2008 and 2009 are another world. This feels like a line in the sand. A last hurrah for the 20th century before mp3 downloads come in and gradually usher adult contemporary and easy-listening almost entirely out of the charts for good.
Ronnie Corbett. Mr Blobby. Ken and Diedre. Rod Hull and Emu. Bez. A host of others. And, of course, Sir Jinglenonce OBE. As of 2024, there are more sex offenders than black people in the Amarillo video, and there are more fictional puppets than brown or black faces. And the only non-white face we see is a Gandhi impersonator. This isn’t to cast judgement on Peter Kay, or anyone involved, but a lot of his comedy comes from a time when the make-up of British TV was very different. And it hits in that moment how far away we NOW are from 2005.
This has more in common with 1987 than it does with 2009, let alone 2014 or 2015. The world undergoes a change thanks to people pointing these things out. There’s no chance this would have been OK’d even five or ten years after its release. It’s not an accurate representation of how the UK was in 2005, it’s barely an accurate representation of what the UK was like in the 1980s. It only reflects the TV of the time. It’s a picture of the UK as it is no longer going to be. Kay has 500 Miles after this, of course, but that was less funny and less of a big deal, and relied on more star power on the CD cover to drive it.
Amarillo is the baby boomer generation’s last big gasp on the pop chats just as new technology (mp3 downloads) ushers in a new era of music listeners and music buyers.
“The video alone adds so much weight to my belief that the pop culture of the first half of the 2000s has more in common with the 1980s than it does the late 2000s (and early 2010s)”
This is very true. It was around 2009/10 – when the use of Autotune became omnipresent and it started to become very difficult to buy actual physical singles -that I date my falling out of love with contemporary pop from.
I’ve no real opinions on the song – I was out of the UK for the first six months of 2005 so I kind of missed it. But wouldn’t it have been difficult for Rod Hull (though not Emu) to have appeared in the video, having died in 1999?
Sorry, yes! For some reason my mind’s eye merged Orville and Oswald together and I imagined a darker long-necked bird over Peter Kay’s right shoulder.
Walk Like A Panther is a gem of a tune so glad we could touch upon it here. I’ve not much to add but the vibe of it certainly appeals to my slightly smug indie/good credentials it feels like a song unlike any other. Maybe Shock Headed Peter’s “I, Bloodbrother Be” kind of comes close.
It’s odd. I love Ernie The Fastest Milkman In The West, but I despise this track and always have done. Kay turning it into a piece of Timmy Mallett-type ‘lolzany’ didn’t help. 4 isway too generous, frankly I’d give Mr Blobby an honestly higher score than this. But the blame isn’t so much on Christie as to the irksome Mr Kay.
I’m pretty ticked off about that feature credit. If Kay was credited at all, it ought to be “Peter Kay presents Tony Christie”. Incidentally I have heard ugly rumours about Kay asking co-writers to sign away credit (no idea if true, could just be some bitter ex-collaborators) so possibly this spotlight-grabbing is him all over. Or maybe he’s just lending his name as a way to get more money for the charity. Either way, he doesn’t feature – the credit is just wrong!
There’s a rumour he offered Dave Spiky £200 for his share of the Phoenix Nights IP and Spiky told him to jog on. Tbh there’s lots of stories about Peter Kay being an arse. No idea whether any of them are true. Loads of comics resent him because he’s a) very successful and b) openly contemptuous of anything you could reasonably call alternative comedy (one of the stories has a heckler shouting “what the fuck what he on about?” after Noel Fielding’s set at a charity gig, Kay saying “no idea, mate” and Fielding having to be physically restrained from running back on stage and belting him)
I don’t think I realised Kay wasn’t on the track. If I’d given it any thought I assumed he was buried in the mix on the chorus somewhere.
Possibly dumb question: is this even a re-recording or just a remaster of Tony Christie’s 1971 original recording.
I hate the wacky ‘lets all have a knees up!’ side of Peter Kay. Much prefer his stuff with a dash of pathos which he does very well, such as Phoenix Nights, Car Share etc.