Continuing this mini-series, here we are with part five: where we go “Ooh!”. This was an interesting one, with a bunch of what might be called novelty songs rubbing shoulders with bigger pop hits: so I went for both.

This mini-series will conclude next week with “do do do”. Thanks, as ever, to everyone that gets involved.

/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Belinda Carlisle
/Heaven Is A Place on Earth
/Heaven On Earth

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The very first word you hear on Belinda Carlisle’s breakthrough solo hit is “Ooh” (as in “Ooh baby…”), and it repeats a lot, and the skyscraping, shiny pop of the song must have been a bit of a shock to Go-Gos fans (still, over forty years on, to be the only all-female band writing their material and playing their instruments to top the US charts), even though that band had a hell of a pop-edge to their new-wave/punk sound anyway. Heaven Is A Place on Earth, though, puts it’s best foot forward from the first seconds, with that giant chorus off the bat before everything else kicks in. It’s a song of joy in being in love, and every time I hear it, it still makes me smile. Carlisle never really followed this up with any similarly big hits, mystifyingly – indeed at least one later album bombed – but she’s also been part of Go-Gos reunions as they got the critical and popular recognition (including being inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame) in more recent times.

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/Girls Aloud
/Something Kinda Ooooh
/The Sound of Girls Aloud: The Greatest Hits

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For a group that came out of “reality” show Popstars: The Rivals, Girls Aloud had remarkable longevity and an even more remarkable run of extraordinary pop hits (twenty top-ten hits, four million album sales, four million single sales…in the UK alone). Working with Xenomania, they were apparently game for basically anything their writers and producers threw at them, resulting in a wildly eclectic set of songs that played fast-and-loose with established pop convention. Something Kinda Ooooh is by no means the oddest single they released (I think it’s fair to say Biology might win that race), but lyrically it’s insane (“Something Kinda Ooooh / jumping on my tutu” for fuck’s sake) and it charges forward with the kind of energy that could light cities.

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/Goldfrapp
/Ooh La La
/Supernature

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This was one of no less than four songs suggested with the same title, and while the track by The Wiseguys was used last week, this week it’s the turn of Goldfrapp (and sadly the mighty Run The Jewels track from RTJ4 must thus miss out). Goldfrapp had already become a reasonably big thing thanks to the sultry sleaze of previous album Black Cherry, and third album Supernature took similar ideas and made them even more radio-friendly. Ooh La La is glam-meets-electro-pop – more than a bit of a nod to Marc Bolan and T-Rex, frankly – that’s all about a no-strings hook-up, and remains, to this day, an immediate dancefloor banger, alongside the equally brilliant Ride A White Horse from the same album.

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/Kajagoogoo
/Ooh To Be Ah
/White Feathers

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A first appearance for eighties synthpoppers Kajagoogoo in this series, and it’s not even Too Shy, their biggest hit by some distance. It’s actually the follow-up since, which still made the top ten, and it is perhaps the lesser song too. That said, the sneering lyrics are perhaps an inversion of the old saying “clothes maketh the man”, as the band are telling someone, or maybe their listeners, that being a dedicated follower of fashion isn’t going to transform your appeal alone, and that maybe they need to think about other aspects of themselves too.

As well, I realised when listening to this song while researching the post that I was unwittingly chanting a part of this song in my teenage years at Leeds Road (the erstwhile ground of Huddersfield Town FC): one of the best-known fan chants there is “Ooh to be a terrier” (see also)…

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/Stardust
/Music Sounds Better With You

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A truly amazing one hit wonder, this French supergroup were formed by Daft Punk member Thomas Bangalter, DJ Alan Braxe, and vocalist Benjamin Diamond to perform at what turned out to be just two shows, and reputedly turned down a multi-million dollar offer to record an album (!), leaving their legacy as this one extraordinary song. Borrowing a riff from a mostly obscure Chaka Khan song, it is looped into a sleek, modern disco song with rich, powerful vocals (all the more remarkable when you learn that Benjamin Diamond was previously a punk vocalist, and kicked out of the band after they learned he was working with a member of Daft Punk!) and hooks that could probably be picked up by Voyager 1, out beyond the solar system. There’s not much to it otherwise – “Ooh baby, I feel right, the music sounds better with you” is one of the few lyrics kept from the original ideas – but then, it didn’t really need to be. It’s absolutely staggering to think that this was never followed up, although Bangalter and his bandmate Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo would return with Daft Punk’s monumental Discovery just a couple of years later…

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/Salt-N-Pepa
/Push It
/Hot, Cool and Vicious

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Another group made up of women that helped to shatter barriers. At least in part thanks to the massive hit Push It, this album was the first by a female rap act to pass Gold and then Platinum status in the US, but also thanks to their sex-positive and safe-sex agenda on later songs, their songs remain enduring hip-hop classics. That said, it almost didn’t happen – remarkably this was a B-side, and after radio-play made this the vastly more popular track, it was shoehorned into the album and things took off quickly. It remarkably references The Kinks, among other songs, and one of the many hooks is “Ooh baby baby” as Salt, Pepa and DJ Spinderella smash it out of the park.

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/Hall & Oates
/Maneater
/H2O

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There was perhaps never a better proponent of blue-eyed soul in the late seventies and early eighties than Hall & Oates, who had a string of fantastic, memorable singles in that era that remain much-loved classics. This song – one of their five US number one hits – is a sleek, dark song that is dominated by Daryl Hall’s plaintive, powerful vocals warning someone that the woman they are chasing will chew them up and spit them out. The video sees the duo, and their band, in shadowy corners of a building where a Cougar is also prowling (as if the subtext wasn’t obvious enough), and while it might be closer to “Oh” than “Ooh”, there was no way this song wasn’t being featured. Sadly the duo no longer work together, mired in a legal battle after over fifty years as a duo.

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/The Smashing Pumpkins
/Disarm
/Siamese Dream

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The fuzzy, guitar-led power of Siamese Dream is perhaps what’s best remembered – in retrospect, there’s nods to shoegaze in the walls of guitars and overdubs and it is far, far more than grunge, that’s for sure – but there were moments where Billy Corgan dialled everything back and made some gorgeous ballads. One of those was the orchestral drama of Disarm, where Corgan examines his difficult relationship with his parents and the general feeling is that pretty much everyone involved doesn’t come out well, and the plaintive howls that are the “Oohs” here are of generational pain.

Fun fact: a song from Siamese Dream is my only entry on The Chain – entry #6793, where I suggested the much noisier Rocket.

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/The Goodies
/The Funky Gibbon

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I make no apologies for including The Goodies with their 1975 novelty hit. Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor all became much-loved TV and Radio personalities subsequent to their work together, and remarkably they had a number of chart hits too. The Funky Gibbon is probably the best-remembered, as they tell a tale of going to the zoo and seeing said Gibbon doing a dance (“Ooh ooh ooh ooh“) and so decide to teach everyone else it. The music behind them is seventies funk, and fifty years on from the original release, it remains a naggingly catchy song…

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/Louis Prima & Phil Harris
/I Wanna Be Like You
/The Jungle Book

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The legendary New Orleans trumpeter and band leader is probably best-known to many as the voice of the loopy Orangutan King Louie in The Jungle Book – a film that played fast-and-loose with Rudyard Kipling’s book, instead turning it into a joyous, music-led story that leaps from one marvellous set-piece to another, every single one of them embedded in the brains of anyone who knows the slightest thing about it.

King Louie kidnaps Mowgli, as he wants the secret of fire to become more like the humans he sees, and from what we see of his kingdom, it’s a chaotic place barely held together by the King, not lease thanks to their propensity to switch their attention to playing the coolest, swinging jazz you could imagine – with Phil Harris as the loveable bear Baloo gatecrashing the party late on to rescue Mowgli from the madness.

One more time: “Oh, oobee doo / I wanna be like you…”