Artist: Doctor and the MedicsTitle: Spirit In The Sky
Year: 1986
Chart peak: 1
You can't say that one hit wonders aren't a mixed bunch. At one end of the scale, you have the Serious Artists who try doggedly for years to break through, and are disppointed when it only happens once. And then at the other, you have those acts are only in it for laugh anyway, whose success takes even them completely by surprise and who don't really care if they never have another hit - acts like Doctor and the Medics, in fact. Truly, they are the anti-Eric Carmen.
The Medics were initially formed in London (supposedly to win a £5 bet) by psychedelic club promoter and DJ Clive Jackson (vocals), Steve McGuire (guitar) and Gareth Thomas (bass) and released their debut single, "The Druids Are Here", in 1982. A clue to their not-entirely-serious outlook can be found in the title of the B side, "The Goats Are Trying To Kill Me". At the same time, Jackson was running a club called Alice In Wonderland, playing psychedelic rock.
Having failed to be assassinated by the caprine mafia, the band re-emerged in 1985, with Richard Searle replacing original bassist Thomas, issuing a brace of well-received indie singles, "Happy But Twisted" and "Miracle Of The Age". Taking their cue from glam rock and psychedelia, the group had a distinctive visual style (helped not only by a lorry-load of make-up but also by Jackson's towering 6'5" frame) and a manic air which in 1986 came together with the perfect song to propel them into the wider public consciousness.
That song was "Spirit In The Sky", a bonkers pseudo-Christian number originally written by maverick Jewish songsmith Norman Greenbaum, and a number one hit for him back in 1970. The idea for the Medics' cover came to Clive Jackson in a dream - John Lennon took him to see Marc Bolan playing in a pub, and what should the late T-Rex frontman be playing but... you've guessed it. Thus, The Medics' version gave the song a T-Rex-like arrangement with Tony Visconti-style strings. The result: "Spirit In The Sky" became the first song to be a number one hit for two different one hit wonders.
The group issued two albums in the 1980s, 1986's "Laughing At The Pieces", which included the hit, and 1988's "I Keep Thinking It's Tuesday". Their 70s retro trip extended to covering Abba's "Waterloo" as a single, recorded with glam rock legend Roy Wood.
For a bunch of psychedelia fanatics, Doctor and the Medics remained remarkably well-grounded. To their credit, the group never took success too seriously, just enjoying fame while it lasted. They went their separate ways in 1989 - Jackson to a snail farm in the Brecon Beacons (which went out of business when all the snails caught the gastropod equivalent of influenza and died!), McGuire became a dance music producer and latterly started a company hiring out vehicles to bands needing tour buses and lorries to carry all their gear around in, while Searle formed the no-hit-wonder band Corduroy.
A new version of the group (with only Jackson remaining from the original line-up) emerged in 1996, releasing an album called "Instant Heaven" on their own Madman Records label, and soon afterwards Doctor and the Medics became a touring band again. Recent years have seen them pop up on various retro TV programmes, even competing in the musical reality show "Hit Me Baby One More Time".
