Cliff Richard’s 1976 single Satan Girl has quietly change into one of many stranger music tales of the autumn after Rockstar Video games used it within the first prolonged have a look at Grand Theft Auto 6. Streams of the track jumped sharply within the days after the trailer went dwell, introducing a observe that turns fifty this 12 months to an viewers that had principally by no means heard of its singer.
For readers outdoors the UK, Richard is the closest factor British pop has to an establishment. Nicknamed the Peter Pan of Pop, he has had UK hits in virtually each decade because the late Nineteen Fifties, a profession that started earlier than most of GTA 6’s present gamers’ dad and mom had been born.
The clip in query is Grand Theft Auto VI: An Prolonged Look, a 26 minute showcase made with Rockstar and Netflix. Netflix says it pulled in 31.1 million views in its first 4 days and reached No. 1 in 87 of the 93 nations it tracks, with greater than 20 million additional views on Rockstar’s YouTube channel. Grand Theft Auto 6 itself is due on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Sequence consoles on 19 November. Take-Two’s chief government, Strauss Zelnick, has described pre-order demand as “unprecedented and astonishing.”
The size of these numbers suggests Grand Theft Auto 6 has outgrown the video games pages and change into a mainstream leisure occasion. Netflix did properly out of the partnership too: its six-hour world unique put the platform on the centre of the largest sport reveal in years, and makes a powerful case for its wider push into video games.
Reddit and different fan communities have been particularly taken with the choice to indicate uncooked, uncut PlayStation 5 gameplay that includes protagonists Jason and Lucia as a substitute of an ordinary CGI trailer, and followers have been choosing the 26 minute clip aside body by body ever since. That stage of scrutiny, set in opposition to Zelnick’s discuss of pre-orders, is why a lot of the leisure business is watching 19 November.
Satan Girl arrives about 17 minutes in, scoring a montage after Jason and Lucia’s getaway with Raul Bautista. It was one among a number of older songs used as mood-setting needle drops, alongside Captain and Tennille’s However I Suppose It’s A Dream, Prefab Sprout’s Vehicles and Ladies and the Bellamy Brothers’ Let Your Love Circulate. All of them obtained a streaming bump as soon as the trailer aired, although not an equal one. MusicRadar reported Spotify performs of Satan Girl up by 325 per cent, in opposition to 530 per cent for Vehicles and Ladies, however it doesn’t title the supply of these numbers, so they’re value treating as estimates, not official counts.
Richard, 86, didn’t instantly clock what had occurred. Informed in regards to the second by his family earlier than he noticed it himself, he recalled to The Instances: “My nephew, who has two boys, mentioned they got here screaming to him, ‘Dad, it’s Uncle Cliff!’ They didn’t realise I may sing like that.” Requested in regards to the sport itself in the identical interview, his first guess was that it have to be a TV sport present.
The response items that adopted sat someplace between delighted and baffled. MusicRadar’s personal headline requested, bluntly, “Is Cliff Richard cool now?” It’s a honest query for an artist discovering relevance with an viewers three or 4 generations youthful than his authentic one, via a sport he nonetheless has not tried.
Satan Girl itself has at all times carried a streak of the uncanny that fits against the law sport higher than most Nineteen Seventies pop ever may. Written by Terry Britten and Christine Authors and launched in 1976 on the album I’m Practically Well-known, the track is normally instructed because the story of a person cursed after a wierd encounter with a stray cat, who pays a fortune teller to elevate the curse solely to find she is the one who put it there within the first place. What precisely the curse entails is rarely spelled out, then or now, which can be why it nonetheless works as a thriller fifty years on.
On the time, it gave Richard his greatest American hit, reaching quantity 6 on the Billboard Scorching 100 and changing into his first US high 20 single. Within the UK it peaked decrease, at quantity 9, however it went on to promote greater than 2 million copies worldwide and stays, by most counts, the third finest promoting single of his profession.
Rockstar has not confirmed Satan Girl for any of GTA 6’s in-game radio stations, the lineup of stations hosted by actual musicians akin to Unhealthy Bunny, Lana Del Rey and Burna Boy that Rockstar revealed earlier in October, and the total radio soundtrack continues to be to come back. For now it’s a trailer needle drop, the form of soundtrack cameo constructed to set a tone, and that’s most likely why it took Richard’s personal bemusement to show it right into a information story.
It suits a sample value watching all 12 months, the place a track’s second life on-line not often has a lot to do with its first one. The TikTok customers who turned one lady’s seek for 365 buttons into January’s greatest meme weren’t serious about the unique clip’s which means any greater than GTA 6 gamers are serious about Nineteen Seventies psychic curses. The sound simply arrived on the proper second, the identical hole in logic that runs via a whole lot of the slang Gen Alpha has pulled out of gaming and music over the previous 12 months, the place half the enchantment is that no person concerned can absolutely clarify why it caught on.
Richard is leaning into the second anyway. His subsequent album, Solely Quantity Ones, due on 27 November, gathers covers of songs that reached number one within the UK, together with a model of Harry Types’ 2017 hit Signal of the Instances. He says the thought was his personal, and that he steered it to Warner Music himself.
He nonetheless has not performed GTA 6, and by his personal account didn’t know what it was till his household defined it to him. Someplace in Vice Metropolis proper now, a cursed man continues to be driving round to a track its personal singer didn’t see coming.
