Let's Get Ready to Rhumble

Album: Pysche (1994)
Charted: 1
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Songfacts®:

  • This was one of nine top 40 hits that Anthony "Ant" McPartlin and Declan "Dec" Donnelly recorded as PJ and Duncan between 1993 and 1996. The pair took their names from the characters they portrayed in the TV program Byker Grove.
  • The song reached #9 in the UK upon its original release in 1994, the pair's highest charting single under their PJ and Duncan moniker.
  • The video was choreographed by Mark Short, who had previously worked with Tina Turner and Peter Andre.
  • In 1996 the duo reinvented themselves under their real names of Ant and Dec, scoring five more hits, the most successful being their 2002 World Cup single "We're on the Ball," which peaked at #3 on the UK singes chart.
  • By the late 1990s, Ant and Dec were receiving even greater acclaim as TV presenters on the Saturday morning programmes SMTV Live and CD:UK, before switching to such prime time shows as Pop Idol and I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!.

    On 23 March 2013 the pair performed this song as part of their show Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway. Such was the response that the track quickly climbed to the top of the official Top 40 UK iTunes chart. Ant McPartlin told BBC Radio 2's Chris Evans a couple of days after their successful performance: "[When we] recorded it, we never really thought much about it, it got to number nine. That's the one song everybody still to this day is on about, it kinda changed everything for us. I never thought we'd be performing it 19 years later on a Saturday night TV show."
  • Ant and Dec announced that any money they personally make from the song's revival would go towards the Childline charity.
  • "Let's Get Ready to Rumble" was a wrestling catchphrase, but the song's title was spelt 'rhumble' with an 'h' as a nod to the rhumba dance. The idiosyncratic misspelling of the title was due to the need to avoid infringing on the copyright of boxing and wrestling announcer Michael Buffer, who started using the catchphrase in the mid-1980s and acquired a federal trademark for it in 1992. It was feared that he would claim songwriting royalties if the correctly spelled phrase was used in this context in a pop record.
  • The song topped the UK singles chart in the week following Ant and Dec's performance on Saturday Night Takeaway, It's 7-day sales figure of 84,000 copies amounted to almost two-thirds of the 130,000 the single had sold in its entire lifetime up to its revival.
  • This was the oldest recording to top the UK charts since Tony Christie's "(Is This The Way To) Amarillo" hit #1 in 2005 after a wait of 34 years.

Comments: 1

  • Roger Cieslar from Boston, UkHi, Psyche is spelled incorrectly. It should be P-S-Y-C-H-E- not P-Y-S-C-H-E-. I know cause I got the album on CD, I remember when this song was number 1... ah, the good old days.
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