‘Mickey’: The 1982 song that ruined two separate summers
‘Mickey’ – not the mouse, but a chart hit so bad that, for some unknown reason, they decided to commit it to tape. Twice.
Listen, there’s enough hatred in the world nowadays that it feels a bit unethical to pile on top of something that happened decades ago, not least something as relatively harmless as a song, albeit a bad one. But then again, the dead horse is occasionally worth beating again, and so in that spirit, let’s truly put Racey and Toni Basil on blast for the crimes they committed towards musical humanity.
The treachery began in 1979 when the lesser-spotted Racey, a power pop band from Weston-super-Mare, released the song ‘Kitty’. It was a modest hit – this was an era in which they’d scored a number of top five singles, including ‘Lay Your Love On Me’ and ‘Some Girls’ – and in some ways, that was more than enough to have finished the lot.
But then Basil had to come along two years later, after the world had moved into a new decade and a new pop music persuasion to boot, and reinvent the wheel of her own. In that instance, the song was no longer called ‘Kitty’. It was rebranded to ‘Hey Mickey’, and all in a moment, a fever dream chart juggernaut had been truly unleashed.
When the singer released her debut album Word of Mouth in 1981, she clearly wanted to make a statement for herself – but doing that, primarily through reimagined covers of other people’s songs, was admittedly a fairly unconventional method. Nevertheless, Basil took ‘Hey Mickey’ by the horns and was hellbent on making it a success, so much so that it became a worldwide number one.
How was the song so terrible for the charts?
If you were wondering where you might recognise the offending tune in question, the cheerleading chant of “Oh Mickey you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind” may jog your memory. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that wasn’t part of the Racey original, but an addition when Basil got her hands on the song, which ended up shooting it to stratospheric heights.
To hand it to her, ‘Hey Mickey’ briefly claimed the top spot of the charts in both the UK and US, something that many artists would clamour for, no matter the song. But in doing so, she also single-handedly clouded every single kid’s birthday party, pop radio station, and ‘80s throwback night for the rest of time.
For that, Basil will always be in exile in the eyes of many. Hearing the song by Racey the first time around was arguably bad enough, only for it to rear its head again not two years later and take on a whole new jarring and sugary life. To be fair, though, sometimes it’s not the fault of the artist – you really have to question the state of us as a society.
Of course, ‘Hey Mickey’ is far from the only example of a pop music clanger that, with hindsight, should be burned at the gates of hell. But in realistic terms, Basil was pretty sadistic when she added a cheerleading chant into an already unbearable song, because what better way is there to worm an absolute nightmare of a track into people’s psyches forever?
