How a 70s Innuendo Hit Set the Standard for Stupid Novelty Songs

For three weeks in the early 90s, the UK Singles Chart was topped by a three and a half minute anthem about a man in a large, clumsy, pink and yellow spotted costume. Between the Battle of Britpop and that time every British person with an internet connection bought a dozen copies of an 18-year-old Rage Against The Machine song to piss off Simon Cowell in 2009, the UK has made a habit over the years of dragging the weirdest songs to the front of the public consciousness and leaving them there to fester for just a bit too long.

There was Mr Blobby. There were the Teletubbies. For some reason, we let a small blue frog with an all-too visible penis stay at number 1 for four entire weeks in 2005. Cartoon handyman Bob the Builder had the most popular song in the country twice in a single year. Sustained by one part mis-developed sense of irony and two parts awful taste, the UK charts have been a weird place for a long, long time now.

It wouldn't be unfair to blame that on The Wurzels.

The year was 1976. H from Steps had just been born, the country was going through one of the most intense heatwaves in its history and The Wurzels released "Combine Harvester (Brand New Key)" – a 'Scrumpy & Western' song that opens with definitely-probably the most rural sex metaphor in recorded history ("I drove a tractor through your haystack last night") and goes downhill fast from there. It knocked JJ Barrie's "No Charge" off the top of the charts (don't worry, no one expects you to know what it is) and stayed there for two weeks, before The Real Thing released "You to Me Are Everything" and restored something approaching normality for a while. And, in the year of our lord 2017, people are still streaming "Combine Harvester (Brand New Key)" online. So… what the hell happened there?

We spoke to long-time Wurzels accordion player Tommy Banner to try to straighten things out a bit. We all need answers: why farm machinery-centric shagging metaphors had a niche to fill, for starters, how the song came to be, why it seems to feature an attempted dog murder and all the other things people in bands absolutely love being asked about all the time.

"We took a song by Irish comedian Brendan Grace," Tommy begins, "and… well, Wurzelised it a bit. We certainly didn't start off meaning, er, 'that thing' when we first started singing 'Combine Harvester' – it was in the other version of the song first." He he goes on to say that the double entendre just stuck. "I think it's got the two meanings now. When we were filming the video – we've just played a little gig for the farmer whose land we used to film it, actually – we more or less made the set by having the farmer's workers set up a big wall of hay bales. And then our bassist just, as it says, drove through the hay in his tractor." Weyyy.

It's worth mentioning at this point that the Brendan Grace version of "Combine Harvester (Brand New Key)" was itself a take-off of "Brand New Key", a 1971 hit for folk-pop singer Melanie Safka, about a girl with roller skates trying to attract a boy. Back then, it was also considered a lowkey fucking anthem, implying what would happen when the skates came off. For her part, Melanie later said that she wrote "Brand New Key" "in about 15 minutes one night. I thought it was cute; a kind of old 1930s tune. I guess a key and a lock have always been Freudian symbols, and pretty obvious ones at that. There was no deep serious expression behind the song, but people read things into it. They made up incredible stories as to what the lyrics said and what the song meant. In some places, it was even banned from the radio."

Tommy, who celebrates his 50th year as a Wurzel this November, said that the Wurzel philosophy is similar – they picked up the shards of other songs and swept them into something new. Follow-up single "I Am a Cider Drinker" was no exception – and nor was it immune from a bit of nudge-wink innuendo, with the verse "Now dear old Mabel when she's able, we takes a stroll down Lovers Lane / And we sinks a pint o' Scrumpy, then we'll play old nature's game." The ode to apple-based pissedness made it to number 3 in the UK singles chart on release, because of course it did.

But all of this is background noise to the pivotal question this odd hit raises: why did Tommy and his Wurzel bandmates sneak in a line about … maiming a dog? The second line of the song (or third, depending on how much you count the "ooh aah ooh aah" refrain) features the song's protagonist claiming he "threw a pitchfork at your dog to keep quiet". In fairness, it's not overly grim: today Tommy says he'd never really considered the hound's fate but "knowing us, we'd probably have missed it. I'm sure it's fine".

It's not quite the in-depth, complete answer I was hoping for – but maybe that's not a surprise from a man who's pushing 80 and just got back from playing three gigs over a weekend. Listening to the song though, I go back again and again to fixate on this one line. It's easy to miss, because The Wurzels sing their songs in a version of English that nobody outside of The Wurzels is allowed to know, but this is ostensibly a song about a farmy man trying to convince a woman to marry him. Unlike a seemingly nonsensical chart hit like Crazy Frog's "Axel F" – actual lyric: "A ram da am da am da am da weeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" – this one at least had a message.

Fine, yes, a lot of it stems from the protagonist wanting to farm on the woman's land (not a euphemism this time), but there is some real warmth in there, like when he insists "you know I'll love you darlin'", or when he talks about how this mysterious lady smelled nice at the last "wurzel dance". So much of what makes songs like this resonate with British audiences is their combination of giving in to silly humour coupled with lashings of salacious innuendo. As just about anyone who visits this fair island will know, few things make whole groups of full-grown adults snigger more than clever wordplay or pointing and laughing at people's bits, usually after a limb-loosening drink or two. Mix the two together, and you've got the prime conditions for something like "Combine Harvester" – both knowing in its dumb humour and weirdly loving – to take off.

It's hard to overstate what a cultural phenomenon "Combine Harvester" still is to this day – it's more unusual, even 40 years on, to find somebody over the age of 20 who grew up in the UK who's never heard of it than it is to find a person who'll groan and hold their head in their hands after hearing a few bars of the chorus. For some context, at time of writing, there have been 926,432 plays of this song on Spotify. By the standards of some artists, that's not much but this is The Wurzels. With all the love and respect due to the British institution they absolutely are, the fact remains that they mostly do farmers' versions of vaguely popular songs.

How's it happened? There can only be a handful of explanations. 1) There are a few thousand siblings playing pranks by sneaking into each others' rooms and playing the song on repeat to fuck up their brother or sister's Discover Weekly playlist algorithms. 2) A worldwide glitch. 3) Loads of people born between the 1940s and 1960s have lost their physical copies of the original "Combine Harvester" single, and have had no choice but to ask their children or nieces and nephews to set up Spotify accounts for them so they can relive the good times. 4) One person's sat listening to the same song for over two years without a pause, and nobody else actually remembers that the song exists. 5) This is what Young People like now? 6) Me. It's all me. It's literally all me, going back over and over again coming up with dozens of headcanons about what happened to that damn dog.

If you include remixes, people have listened to "Combine Harvester (Brand New Key)" by The Wurzels – a song that clambered to number 1 in the UK charts and hung on there for two whole weeks and has been played on radio shows and at weddings for the last 40 years – more than a million times on Spotify. "Even now," Tommy says, "we're amazed at the success. We certainly never expected it to hit the charts."

The chart success was the least of the impact, though. After "Combine Harvester" came out in 1976, Britain went head over heels for novelty songs; combining the joint British obsessions of terrible things and not-quite-ironically loving those terrible things. The 80s took that baton from The Wurzels and ran with it, from Worzel Gummidge to Harry Enfield's "Loadsamoney (Doin' Up the House)" via Morris Minor & The Majors' "Stutter Rap" (swear down, none of those are made up), before the Teletubbies, Crazy Frog et al brought us into a whole new millennium of horribleness. In Britain we're willing to commit to a gag in a way that propels the absurd from a quiet chuckle shared between friends to a ripple that can spread across the country – see that whole Boaty McBoatface thing from last year for a prime example.

The Wurzels basically took that rush you'd get from taking the piss in class and pushing a joke that *little* bit further, and set it to song. And they ended up performing the running joke on Top of the Pops, looking as jolly as you'd imagine. Not too bad for a band most famous for not being able to directly sing about farmyard shagging.

You can find Chris on Twitter.

The Wurzels are on tour and at festivals all summer, and released their new single "Old Rosie" at the end of June.