Stories behind your favourite 90s one-hit wonders
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Darren Hayes explains the meaning behind “chic-a-cherry cola”.
Source: News Limited
THE nineties were an awesome time.
Friends was on TV. It wasn’t politically incorrect to wear a bindi on your forehead as fashion. And the music was the best.
We sat down with the singers behind your favourite 90s pop songs and found out the stories behind their hits.
Buses and Trains — Bachelor Girl (1998)
Bachelor Girl … Tania Doko and James Roche.
Source: News Corp Australia
Tania Doko is still known as “that buses and trains girl” — but it was her bandmate, James Roche, who actually wrote the 1998 hit.
“I can’t take credit for the biggest hit we ever had,” she jokes. “I can laugh at it now.”
It’s a tune that came at the last minute. Roche wrote it just before a big EP launch where they were showcasing material at the Continental Hotel in Melbourne.
And it turns out there’s a very good reason Doko missed out on the writing credit.
“He was in the shower, so I couldn’t have been there! It just wasn’t that sort of relationship!” she says.
“I swear he did … or that’s how I justified it later. It would have been great to have been in the room when he came up with that inspired song but it’s OK because he was in the shower.”
So does she remember the first time he showed it to her?
“I remember specifically it was in his lounge room, he was on his keyboard and it was just …‘What?’” she says.
“I just thought, ‘What is this song?’ The choruses … they had something — like it or not, it had something. (You) couldn’t ignore it.”
These days, Doko lives in Stockholm — still performing and working as a songwriter for major international artists — and she still hears it on the radio there. (It was actually big in Sweden when it was released.)
And she still remembers what it was like when they struck gold with the hit.
“I was 25 when it was released — but we’d worked up all those years where my love life was quite tumultuous … I gave him very good material and he was a very good listener,” she laughs.
“In some ways I could have written it myself because I was addicted to the craziness … of chasing a dream, or chasing a risk, chasing love.
“And in a way it made the highs higher because the lows were so low — and that’s what Buses and Trains talks about — you just do it again and again and again. It’s an addiction.”
Even When I’m Sleeping — Leonardo’s Bride (1997)
Leonardo’s Bride.
Source: News Limited
Like Tania Doko from Bachelor Girl, Abby Dobson has become known for a hit that was actually written by a man in her life. In Abby’s case, it was her bandmate and boyfriend at the time Dean Manning.
“In those early days when we started Leonardo’s Bride, I had a job at a friend’s mum’s sock shop. I worked there once a week,” Dobson says.
“I was getting up to go to work in the sock shop and, the night before, Dean and I had had a big fight.
“I’d gone to bed and he’d stayed up. When I woke up in the morning to go to work, there were these notes pinned around the house — he was still asleep.
“And there was a note on the cereal packet saying, ‘I love you even when you’re eating’. And there was a note on the shower curtain saying, ‘I love you even when you’re washing’.
“And there was a note above the bed saying, ‘I love you even when I’m sleeping’. And then there was a note on the front door as I was walking out saying, ‘I love you even when you’re leaving’ — and that was actually the note that really got me the most.”
Dobson went off to work while Manning stayed home and wrote Even When I’m Sleeping. When she got home, he played it for her.
“It was a very sweet song … but it wasn’t like, ‘Oh my god, this is amazing’,” she says.
By the time they went to record the album, Manning and Dobson weren’t dating anymore — and the song almost wasn’t recorded.
“We nearly in fact didn’t record it on our album because it was just this sweet little song we didn’t know what to do with,” she says.
“And then when we were in the recording studio we gave it a little bit of a shake up and I just shifted the melody around in a few places and we recorded on this beautiful afternoon at Megaphon Studios in Sydney and we immediately went, ‘Oh my god, that was beautiful’.
“We recorded it pretty much in one go. And we knew it was beautiful but … I remember that night I was seeing a guy in Chippendale and I took a DeskTape of the song and said, ‘Check this out! Look what we made today!’ Almost like, ‘Look what I found’.
“But none of us ever thought it would be a single or that anyone would like it.”
I Want You — Savage Garden (1996)
Savage Garden … Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones.
Source: Supplied
When Darren Hayes wrote the lyrics to Savage Garden’s debut single, he had just returned from a trip to America. And he had no idea that a line about soft drink would make the band internationally famous.
“The first time I ever went to America I was obsessed and I tried Dr Pepper,” he says.
“I mistakenly thought the flavour was cherry — and it isn’t.
“I went home to Brisbane and I wrote the lyrics, I wrote: ‘Sweet like a cherry cola’.
“I can’t remember why I decided to stutter the word cherry. It’s a love-hate song, we were a love-hate band and it’s a love-hate lyric.”
Fast, wordy and with slick production, Hayes says it came simply.
“It’s essentially a wet dream. The lyrics to the song are about having a dream about someone you fall in love with. It’s always very surreal. Thank god for ‘chic-a-cherry cola’ — it was one of the lyrics that’s stuck in your head.”
Even though the song eventually made them internationally famous, it sat around collecting dust before it was released in 1996.
“A lot of people don’t know we recorded the album and then it sat on a shelf unsigned for 12 months,” he says.
“Then I went back to preschool teaching and working in a video store at night. And I heard it on B105. They had a ‘hit or s**t list’. A customer walked in (to the video store) and I heard it playing.”
Unofficially known as the “chic-a-cherry cola” song, it made it’s way across to the US where it became a favourite of a famous talk show host.
“Rosie O’Donnell heard the song and would just play it on her show for six or seven days and she was saying, ‘Who are these guys?’ We weren’t even signed over there yet,” Hayes says.
Mouth — Merril Bainbridge (1994)
Merril Bainbridge.
Source: News Limited
When Mouth first came out, a lot of people mistook the song for being about something quite sexual. But that’s not what Bainbridge meant.
“Of course there was this sexuality to it because it’s that kind of … in your 20s you’re really experimenting with yourself and your identity in a relationship and who you are and who you want to be,” she says.
“And I really just couldn’t stand all the stereotypes especially for women around that time. I wanted to challenge that a little bit.
“I didn’t set out for it to be that way … it just happened to be part of it. It was a little piece of the song but it wasn’t the whole song.”
As well as dealing with the struggles in a relationship, Bainbridge says it is mainly about “just being open, about being OK with being a mess and trying to work it out.”
She was in her 20s when she wrote the song in the early 90s in a little studio in Carlton, Melbourne.
“I started working in a really creative environment with a whole lot of people that were in the same boast as me — musicians, writers, programmers — and we’d just come in, we kind of lived at the studio, we hung around there, we worked on each others stuff and that’s kind of how Mouth got put down,” she says.
“So I had the ideas and then I started recording. I just had this rhythm section and I was working with my husband, Owen, who was my friend at the time, and we put it down and that was it.
“I couldn’t get a better vocal than that. We ended up keeping that vocal.”
