Fact #156401
When:
Short story:
Billy Idol ascends to the Billboard US No1 single slot with his cover of Tommy James And The Shondells' classic Mony Mony.
Full article:
Twenty years after his heyday, not one but two former Tommy James and the Shondells hits top the Billboard Top 40 Singles chart in the USA in the same month.
James had taken Ritchie Cordell’s song I Think We’re Alone Now to No4 in November 1967, and went one place higher in 1968 with Mony Mony, which he co-wrote with Cordell.
Tiffany Darwisch, who took I Think We’re Alone Now to the very top, had first sung in public aged nine, with the Country Hoedowners at a barn dance in Norwalk, California, her home town. She secured a record deal by the age of fourteen, but when producer George Tobin suggested she record I Think We’re Alone Now, she was reluctant. “I didn’t hate it, but I wasn’t crazy about it either,” she revealed later. Tobin had been working alongside Cordell in New York’s famed Brill Building back when Ritchie wrote the song, and now saw it as an ideal vehicle for his young protégé. It took a year to record and, even then, MCA Records had no plans to issue it as a single until Lou Simon of radio station KCPX in Salt Lake City pulled the track off Tiffany’s album and started to give it heavy rotation. A huge public response pushed MCA into releasing it, and a No1 hit followed on both sides of the Atlantic. Ritchie Cordell, however, was not impressed. “It was very foreign to me. It just wasn’t the same song,” he declared. Like a trooper, though, he agreed to accept the royalty cheques.
Unlike Tiffany, fashion-punk Billy Idol was well aware of the Tommy James song he covered. “Mony Mony was one of the first records I ever had sex to, with a young lady and it was great,” he revealed to Billboard writer Fred Bronson in 1988. What Idol did have in common with Tiffany (apart from a shared tendency to sing flat) was that the song took a while to record properly. The original studio version flopped, and it wasn’t until he recorded it live that it went to No1.
“I’m very flattered, frankly, “ declared Tommy James, “that artists think that the fast way to a hit record is to do one of our old songs.”
Mony Mony belongs to a select list of hit songs which appear to be about real girls but, in fact, are not. Ritchie Cordell and Tommy James were devoid of inspiration one night in New York until they looked out of the window of their apartment and saw a neon sign winking on and off across the way. The sign bore the initials of the Mutual Of New York bank - M O N Y - and a hit was born. Other hits in the same category include Roxy Music’s Virginia Plain, inspired by the writing on a cigarette packet, and Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark’s Enola Gay, taken from the name emblazoned on the side of the bomber which nuked Hiroshima.
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James had taken Ritchie Cordell’s song I Think We’re Alone Now to No4 in November 1967, and went one place higher in 1968 with Mony Mony, which he co-wrote with Cordell.
Tiffany Darwisch, who took I Think We’re Alone Now to the very top, had first sung in public aged nine, with the Country Hoedowners at a barn dance in Norwalk, California, her home town. She secured a record deal by the age of fourteen, but when producer George Tobin suggested she record I Think We’re Alone Now, she was reluctant. “I didn’t hate it, but I wasn’t crazy about it either,” she revealed later. Tobin had been working alongside Cordell in New York’s famed Brill Building back when Ritchie wrote the song, and now saw it as an ideal vehicle for his young protégé. It took a year to record and, even then, MCA Records had no plans to issue it as a single until Lou Simon of radio station KCPX in Salt Lake City pulled the track off Tiffany’s album and started to give it heavy rotation. A huge public response pushed MCA into releasing it, and a No1 hit followed on both sides of the Atlantic. Ritchie Cordell, however, was not impressed. “It was very foreign to me. It just wasn’t the same song,” he declared. Like a trooper, though, he agreed to accept the royalty cheques.
Unlike Tiffany, fashion-punk Billy Idol was well aware of the Tommy James song he covered. “Mony Mony was one of the first records I ever had sex to, with a young lady and it was great,” he revealed to Billboard writer Fred Bronson in 1988. What Idol did have in common with Tiffany (apart from a shared tendency to sing flat) was that the song took a while to record properly. The original studio version flopped, and it wasn’t until he recorded it live that it went to No1.
“I’m very flattered, frankly, “ declared Tommy James, “that artists think that the fast way to a hit record is to do one of our old songs.”
Mony Mony belongs to a select list of hit songs which appear to be about real girls but, in fact, are not. Ritchie Cordell and Tommy James were devoid of inspiration one night in New York until they looked out of the window of their apartment and saw a neon sign winking on and off across the way. The sign bore the initials of the Mutual Of New York bank - M O N Y - and a hit was born. Other hits in the same category include Roxy Music’s Virginia Plain, inspired by the writing on a cigarette packet, and Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark’s Enola Gay, taken from the name emblazoned on the side of the bomber which nuked Hiroshima.