{"id":551918,"date":"2026-04-26T16:31:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T16:31:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/551918\/"},"modified":"2026-04-26T16:31:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T16:31:11","slug":"the-best-worst-number-one-of-the-1970s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/551918\/","title":{"rendered":"The best-worst number one of the 1970s"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"What<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out)<\/p>\n

Sun 26 April 2026 13:00, UK <\/p>\n

The 1970s<\/a> were, well and truly, a different time. Political correctness was an abstract concept, health and safety were nonexistent, and the music was\u2026 interesting, to say the least.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Once the 1960s had died and before glam rock and punk took over the zeitgeist<\/a>, there was an odd period of no man\u2019s land in which the music business, and seemingly society at large, just didn\u2019t know what to do with itself. It\u2019s when the true definition of one-hit wonders \u2013 as well as tracks that could never be played again today \u2013 really ran riot. <\/p>\n

One of the worst offenders that emerges from the fray is \u2018Mouldy Old Dough\u2019 by Lieutenant Pigeon, a song so belligerent that it almost warrants no explanation, besides the fact that it\u2019s pretty much impossible to find one anyway. The only lyrics to this tuneful masterpiece are \u201cMouldy old dough\u201d and \u201cDirty Old Man\u201d. <\/p>\n

But if you\u2019re looking for an explanation as to what that means, unfortunately, you\u2019re not going to get to the bottom of it. When band member Rob Woodward was asked what the significance of the words was, he simply said he didn\u2019t know. Nigel Fletcher, the singer \u2013 and I use that term loosely \u2013 just had to go along with it. <\/p>\n

If the strangeness of the track wasn\u2019t enough, Lieutenant Pigeon then decided to take things up a notch by having Woodward\u2019s mother play the piano on it. As such, when the song inexplicably went to number one, it made them the only mother and son duo to ever achieve a chart-topper. <\/p>\n

Even though that was a seismic achievement in itself, the more unbelievable thing was that \u2018Mouldy Old Dough\u2019 even got to the top of the charts in the first place. After all, when it was first released, it was a complete and utter flop. Then Belgium came along, used it in a TV programme, and the spirits were buoyed, sending it to number one<\/a> there as well as the UK and New Zealand. <\/p>\n

As it turned out, the Kiwis particularly liked a bit of jangly romps and mouldy dough, because for some unknown reason the song stayed at the top there for a whopping five weeks. There\u2019s no other way you can explain this apart from the unfit justification that it was the \u201870s \u2013 times were different, society was strained, and people were downright weird. <\/p>\n

You could say that \u2018Mouldy Old Dough\u2019 was the absolute manifestation of that, but it almost wouldn\u2019t be giving it the correct credit. The whole point was that it was music for music\u2019s sake \u2013 not exactly high class or world-beating, of course, but a real reminder that a bit of joy and silliness can go a long way in times of need. <\/p>\n

Naturally, by the time that David Bowie and the Sex Pistols came to the fore, you could breathe a sigh of relief knowing that the course of music history wasn\u2019t about to descend into utter bedlam. It was a whole new gregarious era, but you\u2019d like to think that even a tiny part of it was infused with the true bizarreness of \u2018Mouldy Old Dough\u2019.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out) Sun 26 April 2026 13:00, UK The 1970s were, well and truly, a different time.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":467328,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[42201,4622,96,128,42202,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-551918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-1970s","tag-charts","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-number-one","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/467328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}