“Bob the Builder? Was Kylie Minogue’s ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ one of them?”
CORRECT. Kylie topped the charts with ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’, ‘Hey Baby’ by DJ Ötzi was Number 2. You beat Bob the Builder’s construction-themed reworking of Lou Bega’s ‘Mambo No. 5’ (in at Number 4) by one chart place.
“There you go! When we were making the ‘Smooth Criminal’ video, we sent it to Michael Jackson who said he loved it but he didn’t like the boy wearing the mask, probably because Michael wore the mask after botched surgeries. We were all freaking out because we didn’t want to offend him. There was a little bit of poking fun in the video, but we truly are fans. The director had to reshoot the boy dancing without the mask, but after that, Michael decided: ‘You know what? I like it better with the mask’. I couldn’t believe we were actually in correspondence with the guy!”
“We never got to meet him, but we heard that he loved our version of the song. After he died, we played a tribute show in Cardiff in 2011, and [Michael’s sister] La Toya Jackson introduced me to their mom. As she put her hand out to shake mine, I kissed it like she was the Queen or something! I didn’t know what to do!”
For a bonus half-point: how many times do you enquire if Annie is OK in the song’s lyrics?
“I would say…36?”
WRONG. 54!
“Holy shit! I thought I was maybe going over at 36! When that video was getting played, wherever I went, there was bound to be a gaggle of kids chanting ‘Annie, are you OK?’”
Have you enjoyed the numerous times ‘Smooth Criminal’ has gone viral on social media?
“We’ve had tremendous fortune to be able to ride this wave for as long as we have, when we’ve seen bigger bands fall away. ‘Smooth Criminal’ keeps coming around and we’re seeing 10-year-olds at our gigs. I’m glad we consciously geared our videos towards children back in the day and were lighthearted. In the nu-metal age when we came up, bands were trying to be cool and dark and we went the other way.”