This week in 1979
1 Bright Eyes Art Garfunkel 2 Pop Musik M 3 Hooray Hooray, It’s A Holiday Boney M 4 Does Your Mother Know Abba 5 Some Girls Racey 6 Reunited Peaches and Herb 7 Banana Splits The Dickies 8 Goodnight Midnight Wings 9 Knock On Wood Amii Stewart 10 The Logical Song Supertramp Mike Batt, who famously created novelty pop act The Wombles, wrote Bright Eyes for the soundtrack of animated movie Watership Down. Batt suggested to the film’s producers that Art Garfunkel would be the ideal vocalist and, as he later recalled, ‘within a week, there he was, in my home in Surbiton, singing the song’. Bright Eyes, which has sold over 1.2 million copies, was a huge hit across Europe, particularly in the UK where it stayed on top of the charts for six weeks, becoming the biggest selling single of the year in that market. It failed to chart at all on the Billboard Hot 100 in Garfunkel’s native US, but Art Garfunkel had previously visited the US No. 1 spot on three occasions in the company of Paul Simon – in 1965 (‘The Sound Of Silence’), 1968 (‘Mrs Robinson’) and 1970 (‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’).