ALL ABOARD!
These recent weeks in the DDP have been batshit, to say the least, and none have had bigger bite than Ozzy Osbourne. The Prince of Darkness assured immortality off fronting Black Sabbath alone, pioneering heavy metal with his macabre stylings and hard-hitters including “Paranoid”, “Black Sabbath”, and “War Pigs”. His hellraiser hijinks forced Sabbath to fire him in 1979 and landed him on the inaugural DeathList in 1987 (of which he was the last surviving individual picked). He forged through with a solo career that added “Crazy Train” and other hits to his repertoire, and The Osbournes staked him a foothold in reality TV. He ambled into old age (with help from a mutant gene) with the Keith Richards immortality sheen, but while slowed down by Parkinson’s he had entered the Drop 40 last year. He went out in a grand finale having performed his final concert weeks before his death, and has now taken over Hell from Satan.
The world just lost… another Hulkamaniac… yep, wrestling icon and racist Hulk Hogan has leg dropped dead, brother. Hogan largely modeled his braggadocious blond persona off past deadpooling troll “Superstar” Billy Graham, and he overcame the Iron Sheik’s camel clutch to run wild with the WWF Heavyweight Championship in 1984. As wrestling boomed into mainstream pop culture, Hulkamania was a phenom unto itself, with the shirt-ripping all-American ousting imposing heels and staging memorable feuds with Andre the Giant and Macho Man Randy Savage. His presence over the decades extended to everything from Rocky to cartoons and pasta restaurants to grill infomercials, and true to his American gimmick, he was also a massive fucking racist. Rumours of serious illness swirled in recent weeks, and this time he didn’t copy Superstar Billy, dying quickly rather than over a decade.
The attention whoring instead comes from radio, with shock jock James Whale. His rowdy right-wing “anything goes” format first gained prominence in the 80s and in recent years led he repeatedly proclaimed himself near the end due to a kidney cancer recurrence. The most evasive Whale this side of Moby Dick finally got harpooned on his fifth year of the Drop 40 airwaves. Another right-wing rabblerouser was Norman Tebbit, the Thatcher minister whose uncle got on his bike and looked for work and who in his later years was beloved as Sean’s cuddly uncle. Other political passings were first elected Romanian president Ion Iliescu, Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari, Nixon/Ford/Reagan/Clinton adviser David Gergen, and Indian politician V. S. Achuthanandan.
So that lipstick on your collar was the kiss of death… Connie Francis was one of the biggest pop stars of the late 50s and early 60s, first making headwinds off “Who’s Sorry Now?”. Her more energetic hits – “Lipstick On Your Collar”, “Stupid Cupid”, “Vacation” – were her best, though she also frequently mined into country pop and ballads. Beatlemania spelled the end of her chart success, and she endured numerous personal tragedies in the 70s and 80s between a rape attack, the murder of her brother by the Mafia, and a long struggle with PTSD. But she pulled through in the end and resumed performing for another quarter century. In the final months of her life, her old song “Pretty Little Baby” went viral on TikTok and gained her a Gen Z fanbase, but her chance to enjoy a resurgence was short-lived as her hip had a mind of its own.
Tom Lehrer was as kindred a spirit with our site as any, fusing his math whiz background with a love of musical theatre and dark humour into classics of satire including the brainy “The Elements” and macabre “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and “We’ll All Go Together When We Go”. He retired as a satirist in wake of feeling Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize rendered satire irrelevant, and strangely the current political climate wasn’t able to tempt him out of retirement. His atomic number made it to berkelium and he got to enjoy a glorious year-and-a-half in a post-Kissinger world. Jane Morgan and Cleo Laine both cut their teeth with traditional pop in the 50s, with Laine segueing into an acclaimed jazz career in tandem with husband Johnny Dankworth. Alan Bergman, with wife Marilyn, wrote the lyrics to “The Way We Were” and “Windmills of Your Mind”, and Dave Cousins led the Strawbs.
Jim Lovell was one of the first three astronauts to circle the Moon as part of the Apollo 8 mission, and was all set to join the elite crew of moonwalkers as the commander of Apollo 13. He had a problem, namely an oxygen tank explosion, that kiboshed any Moon landing and shifted the goal to survival. Lovell’s calm navigation of his crew safely back to Earth earned him much praise and the Tom Hanks movie treatment, and ironically made him more famous than a good few of the astronauts who did set foot on our natural satellite. Fauja Singh was one of the big deadpooling memes of recent years, gaining fame in the aughts for running marathons at record speeds (by nonagenarian standards) only to have inflated his age by a decade or two. He died at “114” in a hit-and-run, surprisingly not with drol at the wheel. Donald Rose really did make 110, and was Britain’s oldest man at the time of his death.
Two gut punches to wholly different generations of childhoods: Glen Michael presented Glen Michael’s Cartoon Cavalcade for Scottish young’uns in the 60s, and James Carter Cathcart blasted off again *ding* after voicing dozens of Pokémon characters including Team Rocket ne’er do wells James and Meowth, Ash’s rival Gary Oak, and the sagely Professor Oak. Sport deaths were baseballer Ryne Sandberg, Lisbon Lions goalkeeper John Fallon, basketball coach Frank Layden, and rugby player Ray French. Stella Rimington was former Director of MI5 and inspiration for Judi Dench’s M in the James Bond films. We also lost Brazilian singer and LGBT activist Preta Gil, documentarian George Morrison, actress and Kate Beckinsale’s mum Judy Loe, copper Ian Blair, evangelist pastor John MacArthur, and Holocaust denier sod Horst Mahler.
The Love Boat remains on top but the lack of James Whale and Ryne Sandberg reduces his lead to a slender two points…