Song of the Day 8/9: Carl Douglas, “Kung Fu Fighting”

The Alabama dockside brawl was more like a pro rasslin’ melee or a hockey donnybrook than a chopsocky flick, but neither the WWE nor the NHL have inspired a No. 1 hit like “Kung Fu Fighting.”

No song in history made more out of less. Jamaican singer Carl Douglas was in the studio to record a single, “I Want to Give You My Everything,” for producer Biddu Appaiah. By the time they finished their three-hour session was almost up. Appaiah asked Douglas if he had any lyrics they might use to throw together a B-side.

Douglas, as it happened, had several. Appaiah chose “Kung Fu Fighting.” He told Metro UK in a 2009 interview,

I said: ‘Quick guys, we need to record the B-side in two takes.’ Kung Fu Fighting was the B-side so I went over the top on the ‘huhs’ and the ‘hahs’ and the chopping sounds. It was a B-side: who was going to listen?

After Appaiah played the tracks for the head of Pye Records, it was no longer the B-side. I often slag record company guys for their tin ears, but it was Robin Branchflower – was there ever a name more British? – who picked the single that went No. 1 in the US and most of the rest of the world, eventually selling 11 million copies.

Biddu admitted as much. “It’s the one time I’ve listened to someone and it came off,” he said. “If I’d been all big-headed and insisted on the original song being the A-side, I would still have been flipping hamburgers.”

Branchflower can’t take all the credit. It wasn’t marketing muscle that sold the song – it bubbled into the mainstream via dance clubs, one of the first disco records to do so. It also launched Appaiah’s long career as a Euro-dance producer in Europe and India.

This was the intended A-side of the single Douglas recorded that day. “I Want to Give You My Everything” was written by Larry Weiss, best known for penning another No. 1 single, “Rhinestone Cowboy.”