* ( Matchroom Mob with .... )
Chart entered : 3 May 1986
Chart peak : 6
After seven years it was time to bid farewell to the singing cockneys ( except see below ).
Chas and Dave peaked in 1982 when their ballad "Ain't No Pleasing You" reached number 2 but leaner times followed very quickly and this was their first hit in three years. It's perhaps a measure of their diminished status that they accepted second billing on this single despite doing the lion's share of the work on it.
So who on earth were the Matchroom Mob ? They were the professional snooker players who had signed up to the management of megalomaniac sports promoter Barry Hearn. Hearn had been manager of Steve " Interesting" Davis since 1976 and, along with second division player Tony Meo , they had set up Matchroom as a management company in the early eighties. Since then three more top pros had signed up, Dennis Taylor, Terry Griffiths and Willie Thorne and it's that quintet that performs on this , a self-promoting marketing device masquerading as a novelty single to coincide with the 1986 World Championship when the game , commercially at least, was at its zenith.
Mike Gardner in Record Mirror nailed this in a review so good it's worth repeating in full :
The professional Cockneys take on Steve "Interesting" Davis and his chums. This is a mildly amusing seaside postcard ditty but where's Tony Knowles, Alex "Hurricane" Higgins and Kirk Stevens ? Obviously having a lot more more fun with various combinations of the seven deadly sins.
For those who weren't around at the time the sins in questions were, sex , booze and cocaine respectively.
Besides reminding us of a faraway time when snooker players were top tabloid fodder, Mike also identifies another problem with the record. The "Matchroom Mob" were good at their sport but not its most charismatic stars and Chas and Dave are hard put to find anything funny about them. So Meo is over-emotional when he wins ( which wasn't often ) , Taylor wears silly glasses, Thorne is bald and Griffiths had a new haircut - hilarious. As for the terminally boring Davis, he gets a boastful line about Hearn sewing up the field which thankfully was immediately exploded when rank outsider Joe Johnson beat Davis in that year's Final. All five of them appear to be tone-deaf - Meo's line is particularly painful.
"Snooker Loopy" is hauntingly awful; once heard it can never be entirely erased from the memory bank. If any song deserved to end a chart career it's this one. They quickly followed it up with another topical song "Halley's Comet ", which I haven't heard, but just as the celestial object failed to appear to the naked eye so the single failed to materialise in the charts. They did get a hit album at the end of the year when "Christmas Carol Album" reached number 37
In March 1987 they got back together with the 'Mob ( now expanded to include Jimmy White and the less than stellar Neal Foulds ) to record a follow up single "The Romford Rap". I couldn't actually say it's worse than "Snooker Loopy " but the public didn't bite twice and it disappeared without trace. The lads were quickly back in action to write another FA Cup single for Spurs ,"Hot Shot Tottenham" which reached number 18. Although their involvement was no less than on the earlier collaborations, "Ossie's Dream" and "Tottenham Totttenham" they were not credited as artists on the single.Perhaps they had a premonition that Coventry City were going to beat the lads from White Hart Lane.
At the end of the year they released the single "Flying" a sentimental piano ballad ( re-worked from a 1982 instrumental track ) trailing an album of the same name. Both flopped. Subsequent singles from the album "The Diddlum Song" a characteristically silly novelty song and the woozy country ballad "I Can Get Along Without You " failed to turn things around.
Once we got into the nineties, new material from the duo became very sporadic although they remained a popular live act. In 1991 they confused everyone by recording two FA Cup Final songs on different labels, both equally awful , "When The Year Ends In 1" and "The Victory Song". The former got to number 44 and at least some copies credited the duo but the record books don't. Perhaps they were excised for recording the alternative song ?
Later that year they released their last single for a decade with the nostalgic "When Days Were Long " which utilises lots of strings and an Abba-like piano melody. In 1995 they reached number 3 in the album charts with a rock and roll medley album "Street Party", their last LP for 18 years.
At the turn of the millennium they appeared to be completely washed up - God knows who wanted a remix of "Snooker Loopy" in 2001 - but in recent years they've enjoyed something of a re-appraisal. In 2003 and 2004 they were invited to be the support act to The Libertines at a couple of gigs in London. Following on from that they appeared at Glastonbury in 2005. Chas Hodges published his autobiography in 2008. The following year Dave Peacock announced his intention to retire following the death of his wife but he later changed his mind. Original drummer Mick Burt did retire in 2011 ( he died in 2014 ) and was replaced by Chas's son Nick.
In 2013 , following a successful tour and BBC Four documentary they made a new album "That's What Happens" on Warner Brothers which highlights their musicianship on a set of blues covers and re-workings with the superfluous assistance of Jools Holland and Hugh Laurie. The single "When Two Worlds Collide" sounds like a re-write of "Ain't No Pleasing You" ( itself present as an acoustic re-working ). Chas's voice is showing signs of age but on this sort of material it doesn't really matter. The album made number 25 in the charts. The duo are still active so there might be more to come.
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