What was the first song about drugs to hit number one in the charts?
There’s nothing like the hysteria around drugs to twist prurient knickers during pop’s golden age of censorship.
It all seems so innocent now, but it wasn’t until fairly recently that sex, drugs, and blasphemy still landed many an artist in hot water. While now top-down attacks are ever more politically motivated, from Bob Vylan’s media hounding to the monstering of the underground drill movement, the slightest whiff of chemical hedonism was enough for the BBC to enter panic stations when playing such irresponsible corrupters of youth on their radio playlists or Top of the Pops appearances.
Naturally, acid house and the mainstream didn’t get along. While professing to never touch drink or drugs, D-Mob was nonetheless scolded with a BBC ban for 1988’s ‘We Call It Acieed’, not helped by Steve Wright introducing the Top of the Pops performance sporting a baggy smiley face t-shirt popular with the day’s ravers.
Further tabloid heads exploded four years later when Scotland’s The Shamen dropped the naughty ‘Ebeneezer Goode’ during the peaks of the UK’s indie-dance crossover, Mr C chanting “Eezer Goode, Eezer Goode” in his thick east London accent, sounding much like the E’s forming dance culture’s steady diet, and still scoring a UK number one.
Since the 1960s counterculture, Auntie Beeb and the broader establishment almost had to give up sifting through the era’s rock and pop to ward off references to marijuana and LSD. Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, Small Faces, Procol Harum, and Jimi Hendrix would all boast numbers celebrating their drug of choice, and The Beatles would raise eyebrows with ‘A Day in the Life’s “I’d love to turn you on”, rightly interpreted as a lyrical nod to the hippy culture’s trippy lingo.
Later on, smack would course through the veins of The Stranglers’ baroque-waltz ‘Golden Brown’, an opiate rush of elegance that masks its ode to heroin behind a beguiling pop number touching an impressive UK number two, a trick pulled again eight years later for The La’s’ ‘There She Goes’ re-release. After The Shamen, the most notable UK big hitters to discuss drugs in any capacity were The Verve’s stirring ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ in 1997, and Ed Sheeran’s soft-folk ballad about a homeless woman’s addiction to crack cocaine in 2011.
So, what was the first number one song about drugs?
In August 1982, the entirely charming kid-reggae stylings of Musical Youth dropped their major-label debut single from The Youth of Today, ‘Pass the Dutchie’. A seemingly infectious, summer riddim, scrutiny of its titular lyrical refrain caused a minor panic as to the song’s suspected praise of the rolled-up joint.
There’s a blim of truth to the breezy slice of reggae pop’s subversive potential. ‘Pass the Dutchie’ was in fact a mash-up of U Brown’s ‘Gimme the Music’ and the Mighty Diamonds’ ‘Pass the Kouchie’, the latter an explicit appraisal for the ganja pipe. When reworking the lyrics for the Musical Youth rework, ‘kouchie’ was swapped for ‘dutchie’, the patois lingo for a Dutch oven and supposedly innocently about merely wanting a snack.
It didn’t matter, however. From then on, ‘dutchie’ was forever embedded in the weed lexicon after Musical Youth reached the top of the UK charts, a number impossible to extricate from the thick cannabis smog of the cheerful cut’s former reggae roots.
