Music Snobs, Avoid This Quiz

Answer: Corvette

The lines in question:
'Inside and outside
Blue his house
With a blue little window and a blue Corvette
And everything is blue for him and hisself
And everybody around
Cos he ain't got nobody to listen.'

Eiffel 65 are an Italian Eurodance group consisting of Gianfranco Randone, aka Jeffrey Jey, and producers Gabry Ponte and Maurizio Lobina. 'Blue (Da-Ba-Dee)' reached Number 1 on the UK Singles Chart, and entered the Top 40 on the strength of import sales. The video, which featured some rather dodgy CGI, had the group being kidnapped by blue aliens. In the late '90s, this song would be played at Everton matches in the UK, as a reference to the team's blue kit. (The Prince comment is a reference to his song 'Little Red Corvette'.)

Answer: Jeff Beck

Jeff Beck is an English guitarist and one of three guitarist to have played with the Yardbirds, along with Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. 'Hi Ho Silver Lining' was originally written for The Attack, an English psychedelic band featuring members of The Nice, Atomic Rooster and Marmalade, with Beck's version being released a few days later in March 1967, and re-released in 1972; both times, it made the UK Top 20 Singles. Beck has since described 'Hi Ho Silver Lining' as 'feeling like having a pink toilet seat hung round your neck for the rest of your life', but that toilet seat has gone on to be walk-on music at various British sports teams; as well as Sheffield Wednesday, Aston Villa and Wolverhampton Wanderers have also adopted it, as have Sheffield Steelers, an ice hockey club.

Answer: Crayon Pop

Crayon Pop are Bo-ram 'Gummi' Baek, Min-young 'Ellin' Kim, and twins Min-jin 'Choa' Heoh and Min-sun 'Way' Heoh. (Hye-Kyeong 'Soyul' Park, the maknae - a kind of K-pop group baby - left the group due to stress in 2016, and later married a former K-pop idol; she gave birth to her first child the following year.) They are colour-coded in the video for the 2013 single 'Bar Bar Bar' (red for Choa, yellow for Soyun, orange for Way, blue for Gummi and pink for Ellin), where they wore their signature crash helmets.

The video was made on a low budget, and the song became viral due to its dance routine. Crayon Pop went on indefinite hiatus in 2017. Members of the group have since spoken out about the way they were treated by the record company, with Way claiming she was not allowed to see her father on her birthday one year, and the members being under constant threat of being kicked out, often being told to pack their bags and get ready to leave.

Answer: No Limits

'No no, no no no no, no no no no, no no, there's no limits...' Or, according to the 'Spitting Image' parody, 'No Limits'. 2 Unlimited were singer Anita Doth (née Dels), who was replaced by Kim Vergouwen in 2016, and rapper Ray Slingjaard, and Belgian producers Jean-Paul de Coster and Phil Wilde provided the music. 'No Limit' was the second single from 2 Unlimited's debut album 'No Limits' and is arguably their most famous hit, reaching Number 1 on singles charts all over Europe.

The UK version did not include Slingjaard's rap, which made it even more repetitive (frankly, I prefer the version with him on it). Manchester City fans would sing the names of Yaya and Kolo Touré to the song when the brothers both played there. Fans of the cheerleading movie 'Bring It On' might remember the Toros performing their routine to 'Get Ready for This', only to discover later that other teams were using exactly the same routine.

Answer: Victoria Newton

'U Sure Do' originally charted at 31 in the UK, but its popularity in clubs led to it charting at Number 4 on re-release in 1995. Strike were formed in London and consisted of singer Victoria Newton and producers Matt Cantor and Andy Gardener. 'U Sure Do' samples the vocal hook from Donna Allen's 'Serious' and a synth portion from Cubic 22's 'Night in Motion'. Strike also covered Paula Abdul's 'My Love is for Real' in 1996, and Newton did a solo cover of 'Martha's Harbour' by All About Eve in 1999.

The other answers are all singers with other '90s dance groups. Janice Robinson was the original frontwoman for Italy's Livin' Joy, who sang on their UK Number 1 'Dreamer', before being replaced by Tameka Starr. Brazilian Olga Maria de Souza was the singer with another Italian Eurodance group, Corona. Melanie Thornton, who died in a plane crash in Switzerland in 2001, sang with German Eurodance group La Bouche.

Answer: Scatting

Scatting, or scat singing, is a vocal improvisation technique often used by jazz singers - Ella Fitzgerald being a notable example - which substitutes nonsense syllables for words. Paul Berliner believed that it was the result of instrumental soloists such as trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who did a fair bit of scatting himself, trying to vocalise their riffs. Rarely do you hear it on the pop charts, but Scatman John's 'Scatman' was an exception. 'Scatman' John Larkin had a severe stutter and used scat singing, inspired by the likes of Armstrong and Fitzgerald, as a way to help him manage it; as the lyrics say, 'Everybody stutters one way or the other, so check out my message to you/As a matter of fact, I'm letting nothing hold you back/If the Scatman can do it, so can you.' While in Germany, working as a jazz musician, his record company gave him the idea of combing scatting with dance music, and 'Scatman' was born.

The song was a hit all over Europe, reaching Number 1 in several countries. Sadly, Larkin died of cancer in 1999.

Answer: Step to Me

'Step to Me' was written and produced by Eliot Kennedy during the 'Spice' sessions, but unfortunately did not make the final cut, although it was included on the Japanese version of the group's second album 'Spiceworld'. Pepsi were one of the many companies advertised by the Spice Girls; 'Move Over', which would later end up on 'Spiceworld', was used in the 'Generation Next' ad campaign and 'Step to Me' could be obtained by sending in twenty pink ring pulls from cans of Pepsi. Fans who sent off for it also had their names entered into a draw for the Spice Girls' first live gig in Istanbul in October 1997.

When the Spice Girls played Istanbul, it was on the setlist, and they also performed it on 'TFI Friday' in 1998, a few weeks before Geri left. (The other answers are solo singles by individual Spice Girls from the late '90s: 'Bag It Up' is by Geri, 'What Took You So Long?' is by Emma Bunton, and 'Northern Star' is by Melanie C'.)

Answer: N-Tyce

Like Eternal before them, N-Tyce were three-quarters black and one-quarter white, but their music was more upbeat; Ario Obubore, Donna Stubbs and Michelle Robinson were the Brits, while heiress Chantal Kerzner was the token South African. 'We Come to Party' was released in 1997 and was the group's highest charting single on the UK Singles Chart at Number 12, and was their first US single. N-Tyce released only one album, 'All Day Every Day' in 1998, which only reached Number 44 on the UK Albums Chart; Telstar, their record company, subsequently dropped them and later went into administration.

(All the other groups were English-based but had an international member; Girl Thing had Anika Bostelaar from the Netherlands, Solid HarmoniE had Elisa Cariera from the USA, and Honeyz had Naima Belkhaiti from France. Incidentally, one of Solid HarmoniE's members, Mariama Goodman, would later replace Heavenli Abdi in Honeyz.)

Answer: Monkeys

'The Bad Touch' was released in 1999 and was the lead single from the Bloodhound Gang's third album 'Hooray for Boobies'. Because Funtrivia is a family site, I'm not going to go into too much detail where the lyrics are concerned, except the song's chorus: 'You and me, baby, we ain't nothing but mammals/So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.' Fittingly, the single cover features a couple of zebras mating.

The video featured the band in monkey suits with big ears, rampaging around Paris and attacking a pair of gay stereotypical Frenchmen with baguettes (this scene was cut after GLAAD complained to MTV that it was homophobic), catching some chefs with a croissant and running over a mime artist.

Answer: Rabbit

Chas 'n' Dave's 1980 single 'Rabbit' has nothing to do with bunnies; 'rabbiting' is British slang for 'talking'. It comes from the Cockney rhyming slang 'rabbit and pork', or 'talk'. Dave Peacock originally wrote the song about a 'jaw-me-dead', a person who never shut up, but the late Chas Hodges came up with the idea of 'rabbiting'.

The line 'you've got more rabbit than Sainsbury's (a British supermarket chain)' was his idea. A shorter version of the song was used in an advert for Courage Bitter. Tori Amos is a fan of Chas 'n' Dave and has covered a couple of their songs, 'London Girls' and 'That's What I Like Mick (The Sandwich Song)', and it's quite surreal hearing her singing about Spurs and Glenn Hoddle scoring a goal (Chas 'n' Dave being Tottenham Hotspur fans) in her American accent.