25 January 1986
Ha ha ha – the guy dropping the ball! Then—hee hee!—the two guys running into each other! And what about—oh my sides!—the guy in the gorilla outfit!
I’m pretty sure that the above is what got the flimsy three-chord blues-rocker ‘Walk Of Life’, with its video of bloopers from baseball and American football, to number one in Ireland. God knows the thing was shown on TV enough times. It coincided neatly with Irish TV also showing weekly American football highlights and that year’s Superbowl for the first time, featuring the Chicago Bears and the one player of theirs that anyone knew: ‘the Refrigerator’. Honestly, if it wasn’t for that fortuitous tie-in to that brief and unusual bit of Irish pop-culture zeitgeist, no one would have noticed ‘Walk Of Life’ at all.
Irish Number Ones 