Before Taylor Swift took over the charts with The Life of a Showgirl, the #1 song in the land was a K-pop tune called ‘Golden’ by fictional band HUNTR/X, featured in the animated film KPop Demon Hunters.
That’s not the first time a fictional band held the top spot. In fact, it’s happened four other times. In order: The Chipmunks’ ‘The Chipmunk Song’ (1959); The Archies’ ‘Sugar Sugar’ (1969); The Partridge Family’s ‘I Think I Love You’ (1970); and The Heights’ ‘How Do You Talk to an Angel‘ (1992).
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll feature songs by fictional bands — not necessarily popular hits, but songs that made an impression as part of the films or TV shows in which they appeared.
Kicking things off is the best fictional band of them all, Spinal Tap. Director Rob Reiner and his troupe of improv geniuses did such a great job embodying the English heavy metal band that it’s tempting to think of them as the real deal.
In the imagined world, Spinal Tap’s mystical epic ‘Stonehenge’ appeared on their 1975 album The Sun Never Sweats. In the film, it is performed with deadpan sincerity before a replica of the Stonehenge monument is lowered onstage measuring 18 inches rather than 18 feet tall. There, it was “in danger of being crushed by a dwarf,” which “tended to understate the hugeness of the object.”
Hundreds of years before the dawn of history
Lived a strange race of people… the Druids
No one knows who they were or what they were doing
But their legacy remains
Hewn into the living rock… Of Stonehenge
Stonehenge! Where the demons dwell
Where the banshees live and they do live well
Stonehenge! Where a man’s a man
And the children dance to the Pipes of Pan
Hey!
Stonehenge! ‘Tis a magic place
Where the moon doth rise with a dragon’s face
Stonehenge! Where the virgins lie
And the prayers of devils fill the midnight sky
And you my love, won’t you take my hand?
We’ll go back in time to that mystic land
Where the dew drops cry and the cats meow
I will take you there, I will show you how
Oh!
And oh how they danced
The little children of Stonehenge
Beneath the haunted moon
For fear that daybreak might come too soon
And where are they now?
The little people of Stonehenge
And what would they say to us?
If we were here… tonight
This is a fun theme, though I might have gone with “Big Bottoms” from Spinal Tap.
Great idea for your blog. I look forward to reading it. Love Spinal Tap ❤️