Crash Test Dummies, ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’: The monster behind most novelty songs

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Highest UK Top 40 position:
#2 on April 24, 1994

1. Once there was this kid who

Canadian band Crash Test Dummies were unlikely candidates for international stardom.

In 1991, they managed some modest success in Canada with their debut album, The Ghosts That Haunt Me. Their first single, ‘Superman’s Song’, even managed to cross the border and make a modest dent in the Billboard Hot 100.

But their second album wasn’t so successful. In October 1993, they released ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’, which peaked at Number 14 in Canada and wasn’t even released overseas. Crash Test Dummies seemed to be finished, one of those vaguely remembered acts that only existed because of Canada’s strange CanCon policy.

But the music industry is an unpredictable beast.

In early 1994, a British music impresario was visiting America. He heard the Crash Test Dummies song, and was instantly grabbed by catchy hook and surreal, slightly disturbing lyrics. He knew that this song could succeed in the UK.

This impresario was head of a venture called The Tip Sheet, an exclusive newsletter that went out to 3,000 music industry bigwigs, including label bosses and radio DJs. The Tip Sheet was a paper-only affair, but in 1994 it got an upgrade: a free CD containing the week’s hottest tracks, so the bigwigs could hear these songs for themselves.

The very first Tip Sheet CD contained a number of acts that hadn’t yet cracked the UK Top 40 (R Kelly, Pulp, Echobelly, and Tool), plus a few that never would (D-Force, Young Black Teenagers). But the most prominent track was ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’, which went on to become one of the biggest singles of 1994.

(The free CD also included ‘It’s Good News Week’ by Hedgehoppers Anonymous, an obscure one-hit-wonder from 1965. Why? We’ll come back to that.)

Who was this impressario behind The Tip Sheet? One of the most influential—and notorious—figures in the British music industry. A man who has been a singer, songwriter, producer, record promoter, self-promoter, TV presenter, trend-spotter, influencer, and author, but who is now mostly remembered as a convicted sex offender: Jonathan King.

2. His hair had turned from black into bright white

Jonathan King is a pivotal figure in British pop culture, but telling the Jonathan King is a daunting task. A lot of it sounds quite unbelievable—and the man himself comes across as an unreliable narrator.

Everything he says sounds like the words of a delusional narcissist. After he was jailed for sex offences in 2001, he wrote to the journalist Lynn Barber, saying:

“Friends say I’m ‘putting a brave face on it’—bollocks—this is far and away the most stimulating, fascinating thing that’s happened to me.”

People like King are very good at creating urban myths about themselves, so we have to tread carefully. That said, some of the objective facts about his career make some wild reading.

When King was 21 and still a Cambridge undergraduate, he wrote and recorded his first solo record, ‘Everyone’s Gone To The Moon’. King lacked a pop star’s charisma and his vocals could be charitably described as “functional”. But King did have a remarkable knack for schmoozing and self-promition, getting himself on radio and then Top Of The Pops.

‘Everyone’s Gone To The Moon’ was a runaway success, reaching Number 4 in the UK and Number 17 in the US. More impressively, it became something of a standard, with covers by everyone from Nina Simone to Marlene Dietrich to Bobby Womack.

Had Britain discovered a new songwriting talent? No, absolutely not. King’s next few singles flopped, before he inexplicably returned to the charts with a torturous version of ‘Just Like A Woman‘. He also found chart success as a writer/producer, masterminding a hit single called ‘It’s Good News Week’ for Hedgehoppers Anonymous.

(See? I said we’d come back to it.)

King discovered his ideal niche: cover versions (he recorded Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Je T’aime’, although thankfully this seems to be lost media), novelty songs (something called ‘The Night I Chased the Women With an Eel’, and novelty covers (he is the person who added the “oooga chakas” to ‘Hooked On A Feeling’.

But, credit where it’s due, he did have some positive impact. King launched a record label, UK Records, to which he signed 10CC and The Rocky Horror Show cast before they got famous (although the rest of the UK Records roster leaned more towards acts like Terry Dactyl and the Dinosaurs.) When some boys from his old boarding school formed a band, he took them under his wing, even suggesting their new name: Genesis.

Years later, Peter Gabriel said:

Our mentor was Jonathan King, who liked my voice. He was our route to making records, so we were trying to create music that would appeal to him.

However, King did spend a lot of the 70s pumping out some of the worst records known to man, sometimes releasing up to ten singles per year. He was so prodigious that he started releasing records under pseudonyms. In the early 70s alone, he recorded as The Crew (a cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Cecelia’), The Weathermen (covering ‘It’s The Same Old Song’ by The Four Tops), Sakkarin (doing ‘Sugar, Sugar’), Shag (covering the German pop song ‘Loop Di Love’), 53rd and 3rd featuring the Sound of Shag (covering ‘Why Can’t We Be Friends’), Bubblerock (doing ‘Satisfaction’), and Count Giovanni Di Regina (singing ‘Just One Cornetto’ from the old ice-cream ads).

Jonathan King was to Top Of The Pops what The Master was to Doctor Who, a master of disguise who showed up when you least expected it. Whenever a mysterious novelty appeared in the charts, there was a strong chance it was Jonathan King. Here’s a slightly dispirited Noel Edmonds revealing the true identity of One Ton And A Feather, a band who were surging up the charts with a cover of ‘It Only Takes A Minute’:

The song that killed his career was one that he released under his own name. In 1975, he reached Number 5 with a cheesy version of ‘Una Paloma Blanca’, a song that already had whiffed of manchego before King got his hands on yet. It’s regularly voted the worst song of all time.

[Now, I’d normally drop a clip of ‘Una Paloma Blanca’ here but—no kidding—almost every Jonathan King clip on YouTube is introduced by Jimmy Savile. Nobody needs that jumpscare, so instead please enjoy this fabulous Spanish version by Georgie Dann.]

The 80s saw King transition into a media personality role. He became a familiar face on the TV show Entertainment USA, wrote an entertainment column in The Sun that could make or break careers, and was heavily involved in the Brit Awards. Behind the scenes, he was still plugging records and making deals, using his connections to influence the charts.

In 1993, he started a new business that capitalised on his ability to spot a future hit. And so, The Tip Sheet was born.

3. They’d always just been there

The Tip Sheet was a simple proposition: for a fee, you’d get a weekly newsletter with a list of interesting new releases, some were by established acts, others were unsigned.

(Also, you would occasionally be reminded of Jonathan King’s past successes, such as Hedgehoppers Anonymous)

An online archive of Tip Sheet don’t exist, so it’s hard to tell how King promoted these songs. The one piece of text I can find is on Jim Steinman’s site, where he has preserved a Tip Sheet piece about Bat Out Of Hell II.

However, The Tip Sheet CD tracklistings are avilable online, so at least we can see which acts he supported. In the first half of 1994, some of the then-unknown featured artists included:

• Counting Crows (with ‘Mr. Jones’)
• Cracker (‘Low’)
• Stiltskin (‘Inside’, although this was after the Levi’s ad)
• Sheryl Crow (‘Run Baby Run’)
• Youssou N’Dour (‘7 Seconds’)
• Shampoo (‘Trouble’)
• Coolio (‘Fantastic Voyage’)
• Warren G & Nate Dogg (‘Regulate’)

And yes, he also supported Crash Test Dummies. After ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’ found international success, Vox magazine ran a feature on the band which included this passage:

Brad [Roberts, Crash Test Dummies’ lead singer] had met Jonathan King — the man partly responsible for their UK success. King first heard ‘Mmm’ in America in January, then played it to a convention of radio bigwigs in London. The Dummies’ UK record company, “being very bright and on the ball”, pressed 200 copies of the song and distributed them to the delegates. Hardly surprisingly, the single soon exploded on radio in the UK. King’s guide-to-form industry weekly, The Tip Sheet, had also feted ‘Mmm’ and put it on the front cover, fit acknowledgement of his efforts, RCA asked King to present the band with a gold disc at a reception at the Canadian embassy in London.

King, who likes the Dummies’ skew-whiff lyrics for the same reason that he likes They Might Be Giants and Carter USM, spoke to Brad at great length and found him “fascinated”: by the embassy, by London, by the UK music scene, by his band’s emerging success here, by the fact that King had his own idiosyncratic musical past

“Idiosyncratic musical past” is putting it mildly. If Crash Test Dummies had existed in the 70s, you could be sure that King would have released his own cheesy-listening cover of ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’, a song which isn’t a million miles away from ‘Everyone’s Gone To The Moon’.

In fact, there were probably a few old-timers who briefly wondered if Crash Test Dummies was Jonathan King. He does show up in unexpected places…

4. He couldn’t quite explain it

The Tip Sheet kept running throughout the 90s, giving a boost to hundreds of artists. The Wikipedia site claims that they helped get record deals for bands like The Darkness and The Corrs, while driving hits like ‘Tubthumping’ and ‘Who Let The Dogs Out’ into the charts, although there’s no source to corroborate that.

But it does seem to have been legitimately influential. Here’s an old Hot Press feature about Irish band The Revs:

Meanwhile, The Rev’s cross-channel stock continues to rise with their last 45, ‘Wired To The Moon’, making it on to Jonathan King’s influential Tip Sheet.

“We’re track number two on their current promo CD, which is fantastic,” enthuses Treasure Island head honcho Robert Stephenson. “The amount of interest it’s generated – on both sides of the Atlantic – is incredible.”

That article was published on October 7th, 2001. Six weeks later, King was sentenced to seven years for abusing young boys.

King’s crimes were part of a larger pattern of systemic abuse in the British music industry involving industry figures like Larry Parnes, Tam Payton, Joe Meek, and Jimmy Savile. I don’t want to get into details because it’s quite grim, and some might find it triggering, but if you do want to know more, check out Jon Ronson’s Guardian feature on King and other predators.

But even if King’s worst crime had only been ‘Una Paloma Blanca’, he’s still a baffling figure in pop culture. A charmless oddball who could barely sing and was widely disliked, with a reputation for tacky opportunism. Despite this, he worked himself into a position of substantial influence.

Weirdest of all, his influence might have been strongest when his profile was lowest. In the mid-90s, he was a dwindling presence on radio and TV screens, but he was still pulling strings, making deals, and helping turn oddities like ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’ into major commercial hits.

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