These posts are about the songs that just barely failed to cross the key line of chart success, entering the Billboard Top 40. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 41.

Big breaks arrive in a variety of waves. The Liverpool band the Farm had been kicking around U.K. clubs from the early nineteen-eighties, even landing an opening slot on the Housemartins’ tour in support of the 1987 album The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death. Through it all, a record contract remained elusive. Then the group made a cameo in the movie The Final Frame, about a rock star killed while performing at a benefit concert. Among the film’s cast was Suggs, the lead singer of the then-defunct British hit makers Madness. Suggs evidently took a shine to band. He helped get them signed to Sony and co-produced the resulting debut studio album, Spartacus.

“Groovy Train” was the album’s lead single, appearing several months before the full-length effort arrived in shops. At about the same time the track was issued, it also appeared right in the heart of Happy Daze (Volume One), a collection of British pop songs that “was compiled to reflect the events/music of 1990” when “Indie Guitar Pop finally left the bedroom, hooked up with some strident dance grooves and had one hell of a bender/night out!” Nested in between Inspiral Carpets and the Charlatans, “Groovy Train” unavoidably became one of the signature songs of the fast-flaring Madchester movement.

“Groovy Train” made it into the Top 10 in the U.K. and missed the U.S. Top 40 by a twirling hippie’s whisker.

Other entries in this series can be found by clicking on the “Top 40 Smash Near Misses” tag.