Spider—“New Romance (It’s A Mystery)”

Entered Top 40:  June 7, 1980
2  weeks 
Peaked at: 39

At last, we reach the group that inspired this whole Bottom Five project. Spider was an American/South African band in New York who recorded just two albums in the early ’80s and had only one Top-40 hit, below. But they got me thinking the stories of other songs and artists just creeping into hit-land might be worth telling.

Some friends and I have been reading and chatting online about Tom Breihan’s ongoing The Number Ones column on Stereogum, wherein he is reviewing every #1 song from Billboard’s Hot 100 from 1958 to the present. Eventually he reached Tina Turner’s 1984 “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” Breihan mentions in passing that the followup, “Better Be Good To Me” was a cover of a 1981 song by this band Spider. I think of Tina Turner as a unique performer even with covers, so I was surprised to hear just how much she owed to Spider’s frontwoman Amanda Blue Leigh’s original reading.

Digging further, I saw Spider also did the original version of John Waite’s “Change,” which came in between Waite’s work with The Babys and his own #1 hit, 1983’s “Missing You.” “Change” missed the Hot 100 entirely in 1982, but I remembered hearing the hell out of it as an Album Rock and MTV hit, and I liked it better than “Missing You”.

Spider’s drummer Anton Fig was getting a lot of high-profile session gigs; most notably filling in for Peter Criss on his last few KISS albums. Fig ended up as the house drummer for David Letterman’s band on both the NBC and CBS versions of Late Night. But how were these popular mid-’80s artists coming to cover old non-hits by this unknown band, anyway? Spider mostly split up songwriting duties, but keyboardist Holly Knight began collaborating with producer Mike Chapman for Spider’s second album. We’ve encountered Chapman working with Exile and The Knack, and we’ll see him again soon. Spider parted ways with Knight after two albums. They changed their name to Shanghai for a final album before splitting. Knight was briefly in another band Device, but broke out as a songwriter for big ’80s anthems: Tina Turner’s “The Best,” Animotion’s “Obsession,” Scandal’s “The Warrior,” Pat Benatar’s “Invincible” and “Love is a Battlefield” were all Holly Knight.