In the olden days of the early 2000s, when you still had to drive to the other end of Durban to get to the airport, and Gateway didn’t exist, just about the only thing that a young chap with a budding rock music curiosity could listen to was East Coast Radio.

I’d be lying if I said I remembered all the DJs from those days. There was the astonishingly rowdy breakfast show with their awful phone competitions. Then there was the boring 09h00 to 12h00 presenters who spoke softly, like they were actually in every KwaZulu Natal office. Except for Damon and Mags. They were fun to listen to, but played far too much Nickelback and Westlife for anyone’s good. I remember Jane Linley-Thomas very well because of that crazy laugh of hers.

Even if a lot of the DJs were forgettable, they all had one thing in common: eighties music.

They all played eighties music.

I could never understand it. Why did Durban love music from two decades ago that much?

There is no way that you can listen to that much eighties music and not like some of it. That’s my excuse when people ask me why I like that one song by Kajagoogoo, and Tears for Fears.

Which brings me nicely to one-hit wonders. The point of such songs is that you nostalgically play them once every six months to remind yourself of a more innocent time. Being very young, my generation’s one-hit wonder songs are probably Temptation by Brandon October, Popular by Darren Hayes of Savage Garden (ironic, right?) and the unspeakably bad This is the World We Live In by Alcazar.

These one-hit wonders pale into insignificance next to the spectacular failures of the 1970s and 1980s. These bands, a mere humorous footnote in the annals of popular music, were kept alive by East Coast Radio for much longer than they honestly deserve.

This column is really a tribute to Durban’s Number One. Thanks to those DJs and their music selection committee, I got the joke when Jay-Z and Mr. Hudson sang Forever Young. I was belting out the tunes like all the white 30-somethings when the Wedding DJs played at Oppikoppi this year.

I threw out the question of the greatest one-hit wonders of all time on Twitter yesterday afternoon, and the responses were varied and colourful. This is not a compilation of the five most chosen songs. This is not a democracy. This is my list.

But if you grew up on East Coast Radio, I’ll happily entertain discussion on the list in the comments.

In no particular order:

Honourable Mention: Forever Young by Alphaville

No, sorry. No. Alphaville doesn’t count as a genuine one-hit wonder. The entire album is a collection of one-hit wonders. Songs like Big in Japan, Sounds like a Melody and Summer in Berlin all had their place in the sun.

I’m afraid the rules are clear: for a song to be a one-hit wonder, it must be the only one in a band’s entire repertoire to gain traction in the popular arena. One song. Not an entire album.

The One and Only by Chesney Hawke

There was nothing wrong, per se with this guy’s effort. It was bad, in that acceptable eighties way. He was a good looking bloke. In another age, he would have been in Westlife. He had a crop of lush, feminine hair.

What Chesney Hawke did very wrong was to try and pull the 1980s into the next decade. Bad idea. The nineties were for the darker affections of Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine and Skunk Anansie.

Had he recorded and released his song ten years earlier, we could very well be thinking of Chesney Hawke in the way we think of Bryan Adams today.

Macarena by Los del Rio

What can I say about this that you don’t already know?

It was a mistake. A terrible, terrible mistake.

99 Luftballons by Nena

Click here to view the video.

Remember 99 Red Balloons by the ska-punk band Goldfinger? The song was borrowed from Nena, a 1980s German New Wave artist.

Twenty-eight after it was first released; I still think that this was a really good song.

What makes it doubly cool is that it was a protest song against a divided Berlin.

In the Summertime by Mungo Jerry

Shout-out from the 1970s!

In the decade of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and The Doors, we had this.

Interesting side-note: Mungo Jerry went through 21 band members.

This one was a particular favourite of East Coast Radio’s weekend evening DJs. A plague on their houses.

A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum

There is absolutely no reason why Procol Harum should be on this list. But here they are. One of the fathers of progressive rock and what we’d later come to call “art rock”.

Their only song that really caught the public imagination is A Whiter Shade of Pale, the famous tale of booze-sodden tale of seduction and lust. It has been featured in countless films and hummed by many millions of drivers on the highways of planet earth.

There are over 1 000 known cover versions of the song.

And yet Procol Harum never became as famous as, say, Genesis.

It is a crime against music.