- SCRITTI POLITTI featuring ROGER Boom! There She Was (Virgin)
- Week Ending 12th November 1988
- 2 Weeks At #1
Ah! Mr Gartside – delighted to see you again. Would you like your usual place? Table #1. No need to wait Sir, you can enter right away…
Yes, with absolute (oops) inevitability, the third single of the year from Scritti Politti duly went straight in at the top of my personal chart. Provision really was the sound of my 1988.
This time around, Green was assisted by Roger Troutman, the frontman (the everything-man, basically) of Zapp. His trademark vocodered interjections are central to Boom! There She Was, the track which kicked off the Provision album in a seriously funky (if perhaps melodically limited) fashion. Given I’d already played the album at least 968 times since its release in June, you might have wondered if I’d become just a little over-familiar with this track by the time it appeared as a single on the very last day in October.
No chance.
Unfortunately, as with the previous 45, First Boy In This Town, actual UK chart success was harder to come by. Boom! did peak a little higher (#55) but didn’t last as long on the Top 100 (just 3 weeks). We weren’t to know it, but there would be a wait of over 10 years before the next Scritti album came along.
I doubt my 1988 self would have coped too well if he’d been told!
Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes 
The perennially underrated album/single… The video is funny/rubbish though, have you seen? I think Green was quoted somewhere as saying that he went straight from the shoot to a hospital bed, suffering from exhaustion… It was all getting too much for him by then.
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Hi Matt – no, I’ve not seen the video (or any from the Provision era, in fact). Sometimes I think it’s been an advantage for me, not seeing most of the videos between late 1987 and the mid-1990s. I also didn’t read the booklets in that time, so for years I misheard the chorus of this track as “Zippy Boom Love”!
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Ha, yes, Green’s lyrics are perfect for the occasional mishearing… I’m still frequently surprised when I read what he’s actually singing compared to what I think he’s singing. The video is a horrid big-budget stage performance affair with a (dancing) Green fronting a massive band and loads of dancers etc., it’s like something from a Pepsi video…
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