Worst 11 singles ever – including a Bowie hit, Black Eyed Peas and Don | Music | Entertainment
There have been plenty of atrocious singles in the charts in recent years, not least Nicki Minaj’s unlistenable 2024 single Big Foot and every excretable release from the imported virus known as Jedward. But what songs were so terrifyingly awful that the memory of them still haunts us over the decades? Gentle reader, here is my countdown of the Top of the Slops, the Top 11 worst hits of my lifetime. Please feel free to tell me which audio-atrocities I have either missed or, more likely, subconsciously blacked out.
11. Save Your Love – Renée & Renato
This cod Italian ballad was number one for four whole hellish weeks in December 1982 before Phil Collins’ cover of You Can’t Hurry Love ended the torture. Kinder critics called it ‘kitsch’, which it was, but so are singing Santa dolls and you couldn’t put up with them for a month either. In truth, the song was dreadful – three minutes and six syrupy seconds of solid cheese that stunk like a bin full of discarded Gorgonzola. Conceived and written by Johnny Edward (TV’s Metal Mickey) and his wife Sue, Save Your Love was dated even in 1982, being an over-repetitive fifties throwback that packed in melodramatic strings, shallow sentimental lyrics that had all the depth of a pound store Valentine’s Day card, and un poco of spoken dialogue towards the end.
Edward (real name John Edward Flux) had seen Roman-born Renato Pagliari on ITV talent show New Faces; Renée wasn’t Italian at all, her real name was Hilary Lester, and she didn’t even appear in the promo video – that was lip-syncing model Vivienne Marshall. The vid was filmed as a kind of a cut-price Romeo & Juliet style balcony scene with the corpulent Romeo looking like he’d eaten the entire Capulet family, plus chips and a bucket of pasta. Even his sturdy if overwrought operatic vocals couldn’t save the novelty song from critical disdain but Aston Villa fan Renato rapidly became the toast of Villa Park and the record sold a staggering 980,000 copies, more than double David Bowie’s Little Drummer Boy duet with Bing Crosby. And even Bowie hated that.
(Image: United Archives via Getty Images)
10. Orville’s Song – Keith Harris & Orville
Subtitled I Wish I Could Fly, Orville’s Song made most adults wish they could fire a hefty tranquiliser dart at the gormless green-skinned dummy duckling. Hampshire-born ventriloquist Keith Harris enjoyed a long TV career with this falsetto-voiced, nappy-wearing monstrosity, but their act reached its nadir with this whiny and excessively mawkish early eighties Top 5 hit.
Keith cranked the cringe factor up to eleven as the forlorn, baby-voiced orphaned duck dreamt of taking to the air. There is nothing to like about the song, not the high-pitched singing, or the sickly ladled-on sentimentality of the lyrics or the sub-panto spoken bridge. In fact the only good thing about their emergence as a child act for toddlers is they never managed another hit.
Harris tried of course, releasing a series of stinkers including Will You Still Love Me In The Morning? and Come To My Party, Bein’ Green. But the closest they got to the charts was their 1985 cover of White Christmas which conked out at No. 40. ‘I wish I could see what folks see in me, but I can’t,’ sang Harris. So do I, old chum, so do I. Keith died in 2015. Possibly from shame.
(Image: Evening Gazette)
9. Longhaired Lover From Liverpool – Little Jimmy Osmond
This bubblegum pop ditty from 1972 made Little Jimmy Osmond, then nine, the youngest singer ever to top the UK singles chart. Jimmy, also the youngest of the Osmonds clan, sold a million copies of this drivel, which stayed at No 1 for five weeks, keeping Bowie’s The Jean Genie off the top spot. It was a bigger success than the Osmonds’ own Crazy Horses and even out-did their 1974 chart-topper Love Me For A Reason.
Critics hated it, some even dubbing Little Jimmy phenomenon “a poisonous force”; others observing that a nine-year-old describing himself as a “long-haired lover” was in questionable taste. Cynics might add that the song was essentially type 2 diabetes in musical form – pure sugary pop, a manufactured novelty record that deliberately targeted generations of elderly grandmothers who would be won over by a bouncy, hamster-cheeked California child. Which just goes to show nothing sells better than cute.
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8. The Laughing Gnome – David Bowie
He was of course a global icon – eventually. But in 1967 Bowie resorted to this crass novelty song loaded with high-pitched Chipmunks-style vocals and groan-worthy puns like ‘gnome-man’s land’, the ‘gnome office’ and ‘The London School of Eco-Gnomics’. As annoyingly catchy as it was juvenile, the track bombed on its first release but, when Ziggy Stardust made Bowie a star for RCA in 1973, his old label Deram re-released this and it shot to No 6 in the charts, puzzling legions of his new fans. In fairness David was desperate when he wrote the song.
At the time he had released seven singles since 1964, all of them flops, and wouldn’t achieve a breakthrough hit until his tenth, Star Oddity in 1969. For this, his eighth single, Bowie and studio engineer Gus Dudgeon opted for a throwaway children’s song which he delivered as an Anthony Newley pastiche. Even David would later describe it as “cringey”, “terrible” and “a spectre of a desperate time”.
There was more embarrassment to come however. In 1990, he announced that fans could choose the setlist for his Sound Vision tour via telephone voting. The decision was ill-advised. Rock paper the NME campaigned to rig the vote, using the slogan Just Say Gnome. Thousands obliged and the voting was abandoned, although Bowie later told Melody Maker that he had considered performing it “Velvet Underground style”, which frankly would have been a vast improvement.
(Image: Redferns)
