And Finally Artist News

George Ezra puts success down to burping

By | Published on Wednesday 5 December 2018

George Ezra

Although many proclaim to know, there’s still no real indicator of what is going to make a song successful before it happens. Some will tell you that it’s toiling over your craft, others that it’s merely sticking to tried and tested formulas. In the case of his number one hit ‘Shotgun’, George Ezra reckons it was a burp. And not even a real burp.

About a minute into the song, Ezra makes a noise, which sounds like a burp. He insists it’s not, but lots of people noticed and decided it was.

He tells the Daily Star: “I got this email saying: ‘Look there’s this meme going around saying that you burped’. But it’s just me saying the word ‘well’. Within about a week [the track] got back to number one as everyone was checking out to see if I burp”.

The fake burp was so successful that it got the song to number one for two whole weeks at the end of August, after five weeks stalled at number two, following its initial two week run at the top in July.

‘Shotgun’ fell off the top of the singles chart first time around during a collective delusion, everyone in the country decided that England were going to win the World Cup. In celebration of this looming triumph, a campaign was launched to get Frank Skinner and David Baddiel’s ‘Three Lions’ into the top spot – a successful campaign, which Ezra backed.

Of course, England promptly crashed out of the World Cup, leading to a record breaking chart fall for ‘Three Lions’ the following week. Perhaps if all the England players had pretended to burp they would have done a bit better.



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