March 1991.

Oh this made me laugh! Can I dig it? Well, I’m sitting here waiting on a delivery of gardening tools, due any minute in fact. It would therefore seem that yes, indeed, I can in fact get on with digging it.

Written by Martin Coogan (older brother of Steve, yes, the one you’re thinking of), this featured on the Mock Turtles’ 1990 album Turtle Soup.

The song was originally released as the B-side to Lay Me Down, with the title coming before the lyrics. Under pressure for a title for the B-Side, so the artwork for the single could be started, Coogan decided on Can You Dig It? (a rallying cry he recalled from the 1979 action film The Warriors that he had watched recently).

Having come up with the title, the band just had to write the song. Coogan recalls that the following evening, during a dinner party with friends, he shut himself away in the spare room and wrote the lyrics. When they signed to Siren records the song was re-recorded and released in its own right.

As a single the song proved popular, spending eleven weeks on the UK chart and peaking at number eighteen. In 2002, after being used in a Vodafone television ad campaign, the song was remixed by Fat Boy Slim and Simon Thornton and once again reached the top-twenty, this time spending three weeks on the chart and reaching number nineteen.

To this date it has been the band’s only hit single.