World of Chig   

14.3.03

Spirit In The Sky


It’s Red Nose Day 2003 – The Big Hair Do, and time for a little bit about this year’s fund-raising single, and its illustrious and appalling predecessors. If I’ve got this right, Spirit In The Sky is the tenth single to raise money for Comic Relief, and surely one of the best too. On Sunday it will become the fifth consecutive Comic Relief #1, and the seventh in all. With Gareth Gates doing the one hit wonder that Norman Greenbaum wrote for himself, it also, quite bizarrely, becomes the second Gareth and Norman combination to score a Comic Relief number one, twelve years after (Gareth) Hale and (Norman) Pace did it.

I’ve always believed that if you’re going to do a cover version, you should either stay faithful to the original as an homage or do it in a completely different way. Either is preferable to just tinkering around the edges. Thankfully, Gareth Gates & The Kumars have gone for the former option and, a mere 43 years after the ever-so-dodgy Goodness Gracious Me #4 hit for those well-known Asians, Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren, we at last have the first Asian-sounding number one single. Let’s rephrase that though – we’ve had British Asian people at number one before, so it’s perfectly correct to say that White Town, Babylon Zoo and Cornershop were Asian number ones, but the sitars on Spirit In The Sky give it a fantastic, bright, new sound that actually sounds Eastern. And it means Gareth gets to ‘dance’ on TV shows with six lovely young women in saris. (Dancing is actually the one stagecraft that Gareth hasn’t mastered yet, but we’ll let him off on account of his voice.)

· link

Home