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

Marcus Bell and Mark Long spent several years in the U.K. new wave band the Opposition before deciding the needed to break away, determined that they had more complicated soundscapes in them. After working up a batch of new material, they thought about ways to prevent themselves from being immediately pigeonholed into a certain genre and decided setting an especially simple identity for their new group would do the trick. In an era before artists had to be wary of billing that could make them harder to find in a Google search, they called their new endeavor So.

“There aren’t too many words you can use that wouldn’t automatically suggest some type of music,” Bell told a reporter. “I don’t think the same So implies any given style or direction, and that’s very important to us, because we believe that our music should speak louder than our name.”

For most listeners, that first opportunity to gauge if the music did indeed have a bigger impact than the monosyllabic moniker was “Are You Sure?,” the lead single from So’s 1988 debut album, Horseshoe in the Glove. It’s a strong introduction, sounding like a version of Simple Minds that favored poppy punchiness over grandiosity. It garnered them some attention, too. So nabbed a spot as openers for the Australian band Icehouse when they were touring the U.S. on the strength of back-to-back Top 40 hit, and “Are You Sure?” made some headway on the U.S. charts. The single only made it so far, of course, stalling out at #41.

After a subsequent single, “Capitol Hill,” went nowhere, Bell and Long decided So wasn’t the right career path after all. The revived the Opposition, and that band went on to release several albums over the course of the next few decades. Bell died of cancer in 2014, and Long was felled by the same disease in 2022.

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