Artist · chart history · #163 in alternative artist polls
Bow Wow Wow
Band London United Kingdom Active 1980–1983 English 1980s new wave band
Bow Wow Wow formed in 1980 in London, United Kingdom and was active until 1983. Bow Wow Wow has 80 chart appearances on 60 radio countdowns from 14 stations on RockLists, spanning 1981–2024. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “I Want Candy”, which appears on 53 lists with a best position of #38. The station that charted Bow Wow Wow most often is KROQ (Los Angeles, CA), with 25 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 1981.
Bow Wow Wow were Malcolm McLaren's next provocation, cooked up in London in 1980 when he recruited members of Adam and the Ants and put a 13-year-old named Annabella Lwin out front. Behind her were Matthew Ashman, Leigh Gorman and drummer Dave Barbarossa, whose rolling Burundi beat drove the whole enterprise: tom-toms tumbling like a stampede, guitars chiming and twanging over the top, and a singer half chanting, half yelping words that were cheeky, suggestive and sometimes just plain giddy.
The debut EP, Your Cassette Pet, arrived in 1980, and the full-length with the gloriously ridiculous title, See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah! City All Over, Go Ape Crazy, brought "Chihuahua" and "(I'm a) TV Savage" in 1981. "Go Wild in the Country" gave them their first UK top 10 hit in 1982, and that same year The Last of the Mohicans EP carried "I Want Candy", the one the countdowns keep coming back to.
When the Going Gets Tough the Tough Get Going followed in 1983, with "Do You Wanna Hold Me?" and "Aphrodisiac", and by the end of that year the whole brilliant, short-lived racket was over.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Bow Wow Wow on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | I Want Candy | 53 | #38 | – | – | |
| 2 | Baby Oh No | 7 | #80 | – | 1982 | |
| 3 | W.O.R.K. | 3 | #26 | – | 1981 | |
| 4 | Do You Wanna Hold Me? | 6 | #225 | – | – | |
| 5 | Chihuahua | 2 | #70 | – | 1981 | |
| 6 | Aphrodisiac | 1 | #194 | – | – | |
| 7 | C30 C60 C90 GO | 1 | #1204 | – | – | |
| 8 | Prince of Darkness | 1 | #303 | – | – | |
| 9 | Do You Want to Hold Me | 2 | #84 | – | 1983 | |
| 10 | (I'm a) TV Savage | 1 | #1844 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
Year-end chart timeline
Combined year-end countdown points per year. Taller bars mean more songs placing higher across more stations.
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