IT may be an incredibly annoying song but forget about that for a moment: in the battle royal to keep Cliff Richard and his execrable Lord's Song off the number one spot next week, pop pickers everywhere are being advised to go out and buy, buy, buy the Dancing Hamsters Song, seeing as it's one of the few records out there which is capable of knocking Cliff off his self-righteous pedestal.
Officially the Dancing Hamster Song is known as Cognoscenti vs Intelligentsia and is by a band called The Cuban Boys, but most everyone associates it with the World Wide Web page which has become something of an Internet phenomenon.
Just over a year ago, Deirdre LaCarte from British Columbia, Canada, made her own web page that was a tribute to her real life pet hamster called Hampton The Hampster (the misspelling is deliberate). It was just another banal homepage to be avoided on the Net - featuring as it did 392 animated hamsters dancing in a repetitive fashion to a speeded-up sample from an old Roger Miller song called Whistle Stop.
In the first eight months of the page's existence, it attracted just 800 visits and seemed destined for the recycle bin. But sometime earlier this year, by web word of mouth, the page, inexplicably, became a cult hit and in the past few months over 17 million people have visited the dancing hamsters at either www.hampsterdance.com or www.hamsterdance.com.
There is simply no reason for the page's success. It doesn't feature any state-of-the-art graphics or sound, just a bunch of dancing animated hamsters. However, word of its existence and cult status soon spread like a virtual forest fire with people being tipped off by email or hyper-linked to the page by other sites.
Enter The Cuban Boys, from Eastbourne in England. Visiting the hamster page one day, they decided to sample the hamster dance music and release it as a record.
"We're really amazed by all the attention," says Skreen from the band, "but it isn't a one-off Christmas song. Originally we hadn't even planned to release it for Christmas - we've recorded other tracks which are less of a novelty". Certainly hope so.
Credible DJ John Peel gave the song his authoritative stamp of approval and, in the past week alone, the bookies have brought it in from 100/1 to 10/1 to become number one next week - Cliff remains at 13/8.
NOT everyone, though, is succumbing to the dubious charms of the dancing hamsters. You'll be glad to know that anti-Hampster web sites have now been set up to counter the mystifying craze. If you go to www.newgrounds.com/assassin/hamster, you can take a pretend machine gun and blast the hamsters away in glorious techni-colour. Sure made my day.
Meanwhile, the woman behind it all now finds herself answering 1,000 emails a day from demented people. She's also enforced her copyright on the "concept" after some very naughty people started linking her page to pornographic sites. Ha ha ha.
Imitation sites have now sprung up everywhere on the Web - there are at least 500 including dancing cows, fish, amoebas, genetically modified hamsters and Dan Quales.
The song itself, for what it's worth, is a dreadful bit of electro pop/pap which features hamsters singing alongside spoken word comments. But that's not important: Cliff must be stopped - at any cost.
Cognoscenti vs Intelligentsia by The Cuban Boys is on the EMI label.