It’s 5am on a Saturday in January 1995. My alarm goes off like it does this early every Saturday morning and I tiptoe to the living room, turn on the tv with the volume one notch above silence and take a seat on the couch for the Rage Top 50 video countdown.

The countdown starts with some familiarity: Regulate, Confide In Me, a new song by The Offspring. But nothing could prepare my nine year old eyes and ears for what they’d see and hear at number 40.

‘THIS TIME... IT’S WAR...’ booms a terrifying voice, echoing out of my television as a disembodied mouth and eyes spins its arms repeatedly towards the screen. Mechanical noises whirr out of the speakers. A beat kicks in. It’s faster than any song I’ve ever heard before.

The disembodied head keeps spinning its arms as lightning flashes in time to the furious beat. The music intensifies, building for thirty seconds before cutting out completely. It is then that I hear two words screamed for the first time in my life: ‘Here’s Johnny!’

Synths kick in as the song continues and the video progresses into the weirdest PC screensaver I’ve ever seen, a mess of colours, fire and primitive 3D effects that make Spiderbait’s early videos look like Pixar. That disembodied head is still spinning its arms.

‘Bam bam bam chi’ says a voice as a 3D image of the word ‘BAM’ bounces around the screen. ‘Gabber DJ make the bass drum go like’ says another voice, and the song goes absolutely ballistic for almost five minutes.

The song finishes. Was it even a song? It’s not even 6am yet. No amount of Celine Dion videos will help me process what I’ve just seen and heard.

The song is ‘Here’s Johnny’ by a dutch hardcore duo called Hocus Pocus. It ends up climbing the Australian charts and spends SIX WEEKS at number one. It somehow does this with no radio support.

Here’s Johnny wasn’t a number one hit anywhere else. It reached number 2 in Spain. I don’t think it charted at all in the UK or USA. For some insane reason, this bizarre song is the first and only hardcore gabber song to top the Australian charts.

Hocus Pocus are Xtro & Qbric, a duo from the Netherlands. They originally called themselves Vicous Delicious and had a hit single in Italy called Hocus Pocus (Bow Chi Bow), but due to a printing error everyone thought they were called Hocus Pocus, and the name stuck.

Hocus Pocus had no hits in Australia besides Here’s Johnny BUT the same duo had a hit in 1994 under the name Doop. Doop’s song ‘Doop’ was a number one hit in the UK for three weeks that year (it peaked at number 5 in Australia).

Neither Hocus Pocus nor Doop ever toured Australia. I have no idea if either of the members still make music today. But for a few months worth of Saturday mornings in 1995, they absolutely baffled a nine year old Australian boy, who sat confused in silence while his family slept.

Ps when I finally saw The Shining a decade later you better believe I was like ‘OHHHH THAT’S WHERE IT WAS FROM!’