“Sit Down” by James

James first put out "Sit Down" on Rough Trade in 1989, and in that original form it was a sprawling thing, running about eight and a half minutes. It only got as far as 77 on the UK singles chart, but it landed at number eight in John Peel's Festive Fifty for 1989.

Then James found their moment as part of the Madchester scene, and in 1991 they came back to the song with a shorter cut and rewritten lyrics. This time it went all the way to number two in Britain, sat there for three weeks and ended up as the 20th best-selling single of the year. It's a big-hearted, arms-wide singalong, the sound of a band that had found its crowd and wanted everybody in the room.

The song has kept finding ways back. An Apollo 440 remix reached number seven in the UK in 1998. In 2013 a poll run by BBC Radio 2 and the Official Charts Company placed it fourth among the greatest songs never to top the UK chart, and the same year James played it with Peter Kay for Comic Relief. In 2017 a version of it turned up in the promo for the seventh season of Game of Thrones.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.