![]() Taking a 1920s big-band sample and looping the word 'doop' (which as far as I know, doesn't actually have any meaning whatsoever). Their debut song was really nothing more than a bit of sampling and a huge slice of luck. Their only other Top 40 single was 1996's 'Happy Birthday' it's surely one of the greatest crimes in modern music how their later single 'Banana Na Na (Dumb Bi Bumb)' never got higher than No 64.oh wait - no it's not - it's because it was a massive lump of twat that nobody cared about.ĭoop were made up of Ferry Ridderhof and Peter Garnefski - two music producers from Holland. Weirdly though, he found 'Ebeneezer Goode' by The Shaman to be completely acceptable.Īfter raping the charts and impressionable kids' minds senseless with 'I Wanna Be A Hippy', things went a bit tits-up in Technohead's world. He did the same thing with 'Living Next Door to Alice' by Smokie featuring Roy 'Chubby' Brown, the utter bastard. Unfortunately, the youth centre manager got wind of the song and banned us from playing it (probably on the grounds that it immediately sent children off to score some choice weed and get blasted out of their tiny gourds). It was a massive hit at our youth club discos at school, where I sometimes helped my friend Ken with the DJing. ![]() I have the dubious honour of having this released in the same week as my birthday in 1995, but I assure you that, while I did actually buy this CD single, and still have it somewhere - I do not play it any more. It had an element of happy-hardcore about it, and that parent baiting chorus of "I want to be a hippy and I want to get stoned on mara-marajuana!". Unbelievably, this shit reached No 1 in twelve - bloody TWELVE - countries including Germany, Holland, Belgium and Switzerland. ![]() 'I Wanna Be a Hippy', arguably the group's biggest hit under any name, reached No 6 in the UK, and featured a video where some skinheads chase a hippy around a park with some blow-up hammers. Lee Newman died in August 1995 from cancer, and since then, Wells has continued to record and release music, adding the solo aliases The Man and S.O.L.O to the list of names (as if there weren't enough already). Apart from Technohead, they have recorded under the aliases Greater Than One, Tricky Disco, GTO, John + Julie, Church of Extacy, Signs of Chaos, T.D.5, Salami Brothers, Killout Squad and L.E.D. They're actually English, and the group was started by a husband and wife duo named Michael Wells and Lee Newman right the way back in 1985. Technohead are a bit of a funny one, and perhaps a controversial entry in a list of shit Europop songs. The sole consolation is that, as you will see, the perpetrators of these musical hate crimes are now probably scraping a living together as they, in the words of the mighty Manic Street Preachers, look through ‘newspaper cuttings from their glory days.”ġ0. In recognition of this most guilty of pleasures, here is a run-down of the top ten offenders, those who used the genre most shamelessly in terms of grabbing a quick chart hit. Except being a teen in the 90s meant that, in addition to the dangers of puberty, came the horrors of having to live through the hey-day of the genre known as Europop. Being a guy of a certain age, I spent all of my teenage years in the 1990s.
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