Robbed hit of the week 4/20/20 - Bush's "Machinehead"...

"Machinehead" - Bush
from the album Sixteen Stone (1994)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #43

This week's "robbed hit" comes from the British rock band Bush, who were in a ways the UK answer to the Seattle "grunge rock" movement of the early to mid 1990s. Led by Gavin Rossdale, their debut album Sixteen Stone had already spun off four big rock radio hits, with "Everything Zen" reaching the airplay top-40, "Little Things" just missing that mark, and "Comedown" and "Glycerine" actually making the top-40 on the Hot 100 as they were released as singles. A fifth track was also released commercially on this momentum. "Machinehead", written by Rossdale, who produced it with Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, was a driving, uptempo exercise in cold comparisons to industry in our lives in contrast to the human side, which comes through in the bridges. The song also got exposure from being used for the soundtrack of the Mark Wahlberg/Reese Witherspoon movie Fear...

While "Machinehead" did the best out of the five Sixteen Stone songs on pop radio, reaching #24, because the single simply didn't sell because everyone already had the album, the track just missed the top-40 by a couple notches in May of 1996. But the song made the top-five on both the Mainstream (#4) and Alternative (#4) Rock radio charts in Billboard magazine. Internationally, the single snuck into the Canadian top-40 at #40, while missing the mark in their native UK at #48.

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Here's the band doing a live TV shoot in 1996...

and again that same year at the MTV Video Music Awards, where they lost Best Video from a film to Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise"...

Next up is the band in concert in 1999 at Woodstock...

Finally, live in Mexico City in 2019...