Freak

Old Fart!!!!!!!!

• Art of Noise "Legs" (1985)
• Think "Once You Understand" (1971)
• Yello "Oh Yeah" (1987)
• Frank Zappa "Valley Girl" (1982)
• Murray Head "One Night In Bangkok" (1985)

All of 'em GRATE! Though it's funny how most of them were in the 80s.

Lots of novelty songs that could qualify, but I assume Tom wants records that were intended as serious?

The Who at the top of their powers, 1968, and they release a song about dog racing.

Great song though.

Anything by Hurricane Smith, "Don't Let it Die" for example.

"Rock On" - David Essex

They were all magnificent.

Maybe the five I listed are not all horribly uncommercial.. but I have to put Art of Noise's "Legs" on a pedestal here. That song floored me when I was in junior high. This weird caustic, industrial number in the midst of Phil Collins, T'Pau, Scandal, Taylor Dayne, etc. just shined like the beautifully disfigured gem that it was. "Peter Gunn", "Paranoimia", "Kiss", etc. just never lived up to "Legs".

t'pau were of course terrible but they were from SHROPSHIRE! (or anyway she was)

Because of Norman's post, I listened to "Vienna" (the whole LP) before I came to work today for the first time in quite a while... I'm trying to think of the proper word to describe Midge Ure (hint: it's not complimentary).

ARhhArhArHar That'll teach you to listen to a word I say, then, won't it?

Midge Ure = not as good as John Foxx, BTW, and "Vienna" is still a v.weird hit single.

My feelings exactly.

But the weirdest song ever to chart in American top 10: that Mu Mu Land song by KLF in 1992. Relatively unknown British techno group gets faded country star Tammy Wynette to sing a pseudo-house number about the lost continent of Lemuria/Mu a few years before she dies

And it made the top 10

Vocals from another universe department:
Kate Bush - "Wuthering Heights" (although "Breathing" and "Sat In Your Lap" are perhaps weirder Top 40 songs)
The Associates - "Party Fears Two". I still wonder sometimes if this wasn't simply a joke on somebody's part.

I love Dr. C's Hurricane Smith suggestion. I just don't understand his appeal at all, that squeaky little old man voice. Who would seek out a record like that?

OK, Top 40 in the U.S.? U.K.? Germany? Australia? Mozambique? Djakarta? United Arab Emirates?

Ditto, perhaps, "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band, from IIRC 1966, though this was crucially earlier, and less warmly lavish than the HS hit. More of the trad-jazz too,

Napoleon XIV's "They're Coming to Take Me Away, HaaaaHa!" certainly is an odd piece of 45.

Johnny Wakelin: "In Zaire". Don't remember this in detail, but feel that it was a real curio from memory.

Very obvious ones: "Eloise" and "MacArthur Park". Towering constructs both.

The Peddlers: "Birth". Marcello very right to single this slow-burner of a single out in his 1969 piece. I'm very surprised indeed that anything sounding as spare and uncategorisable, genre-wise, could have made #17 in the UK chart.

This was in the chart at the same time as "Cloud Nine" by the Temptations, which surely one needs to add little on.

Rolf Harris's "Sun Arise": don't doubt it, this really is *unbelievable*-sounding for 1962 and quite a single.

OMD: "Maid of Orleans"... I remember being bewitched by hearing this on radio in the mid-90s, being utterly unsure of quite *what it was*.

Cheri's "Murphy's Law": this is outstanding and unexplainable. Quite stunningly catchy, yet irrefutably bemusing.

Another David Essex: "Streetfight" and "Rolling Stone", if they were singles, and indeed "City Lights", which I know definitely was in 1976.

Erm, J.J. Barrie's "No Charge"? I'll get me coat. ;) I can barely conceive that this was a hit in 1976... Certainly a weird sounding hit today; smug and saccharine to insane levels. One of the most appalling hit records I've ever heard actually.