Picture from Pinterest (yes, it is still there)
For the last three days I have had the song 'Where's me Jumper?' in my head on a loop. Usually when you have a song stuck (I believe it was Shaun Keaveny who coined the term 'earworm'), you just get the chorus or a riff in your head but on this occasion I had everything, as soon as I got to the final Where's me jumper oh no I immediately started up with the drumming and My brother knows Karl Marx... and so on until I wanted to reach in through my ears and pull out my brain.
Don't think for a minute that I dislike the song, it is a modern classic in my opinion. It is the sort of modern classic that still somehow manages to remain a secret only known to a select group of people who remember it from Wednesday/Thursday nights when nightclubs used to let students and alternative types in. Sultans of Ping FC (now I think operating without the FC) are a band that never rose beyond cult status and are still gigging from time to time. They achieved a slight dent in the charts in 1993, not with their anthem to misplaced garments but with 'You Talk Too Much' but apart from that they have never really dipped their toes in the mainstream, unless you count 'Where's Me Jumper?' being used as the theme song to the series 'Moone Boy'. Casual Sex in the Cineplex (which contained the aforementioned chart single and the legendary lost knitwear song), their debut album, remains one of the best, most unspoiled albums of its time and deserves a place in music history.
As I said, this song has been in my head for the past three days and I couldn't get rid of it no matter how hard I tried. When someone ever mentions to me that they have a song stuck in their heads, I always sing 'Agadoo' to them as a twisted evil cure for their problem, leaving them cursed to push pineapples and shake trees for the rest of the day, but nothing would work. The problem wasn't the song itself, there are certainly worse songs I could have been lumbered with, it was the fact that for some reason I can't work out, I could not for the life of me remember the name of the band. Rather than resort to the modern day method of getting out my phone and looking it up I decided to just tough it out.
There was a moment when I almost managed to convince myself that the song was by The Toy Dolls, but I wasn't happy with my decision as they were around far earlier than that. Not that they couldn't have written it, but I knew that it was a relatively little known band whereas The Toy Dolls are possibly more so, if only due to their 1984 number four hit record 'Nellie the Elephant' (Christmas number one in the 1981 Indie charts). Even picking names out of the 1990s was no help whatsoever, I wanted to think it was Carter USM but I could tell it wasn't, it is almost as if I was trying to humour myself into giving up and ridding my head of the song. The cure came courtesy of a generic middle of the road radio station that was playing in a shop. No, of course they didn't play 'Where's me Jumper?' but what they did do was play a song by Dire Straits, 'Sultans of Swing'. All of a sudden the penny dropped as the band name Sultans of Ping entered my head and left again flushing the song out of my brain.
It doesn't end there though. I was trying to tell this story to someone and they had no idea what I was talking about as they had never heard of the song, so I tried to sing a bit of it. I had forgotten the fucking tune and had to bring it up on YouTube to play it.
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