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This infectious & saucy ragga house anthem stormed out of the clubs to give the Positiva label its first UK Top 10 hit in February 1994... The Mad Stuntman is a Trinidadian toaster who now lives in Brooklyn, NYC
As far as I know that is true about this being the first Top 10 on Positiva, but it hardly seems the sort of fact that most buyers would have been interested in. It's probably more notable that this was a very successful single with a long chart run by the standards of the time, probably because it was largely ignored by commercial radio stations (the Network Chart, which at the time combined the sales Top 10 with an airplay/sales combination for positions 11-40, made this very obvious). It was apparently the biggest-selling single not to make the Top 3 in the first half of the decade, although it has since been eclipsed.
It's not that surprising because with my previously-noted distance from pop in early 1994, this is about the only dance record I can clearly remember hearing at the time. It got played quite a bit at school, I can tell you that. And with all due respect to Erick Morillo's production, it's the Mad Stuntman who gets the credit for making it memorable. He seems to have bucketloads of personality and enthusiasm and he splashes them all over the record, with exactly the right level of sauciness. It's a formula with enough mileage for them to score several more hits in a similar vein, though this is really the only one that posterity concerns itself with. Blame my age if you like, but this kind of joy is all the more attractive to me now and when I bought the CD this was one of the first to go onto my MP3 player. All together now, "big ship on the ocean like the big Titanic..."
Also appearing on: Now 28, 29, 34
Available on: 101 Running Songs
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