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Actor and musician Jack Black has made UK chart history, with the shortest ever song to reach the Top 40: his novelty track Steve’s Lava Chicken is just 34 seconds long.
The spectacularly silly song reaches No 21 this week, and is taken from A Minecraft Movie, the video game spin-off film, which has earned $570m (£430m) so far at the global box office – and caused cinemas to be overrun by the game’s young and high-energy fanbase.
Black performs the song in the film as the character Steve, as he shows the other protagonists around the alternate universe, the Overworld, and hymns the virtues of chicken cooked in lava (“Crispy and juicy, now you’re havin’ a snack / Ooh, super spicy, it’s a lava attack”).
It beats the previous record-holder by two seconds. The Ladies’ Bras was an equally silly song by UK duo Jonny Trunk & Wisbey, with a chorus of “the ladies’ bras, the ladies’ bras / the ladies’ knickers and the ladies’ bras” repeated multiple times over an easy listening backing. It amused radio DJs Scott Mills and Danny Baker – the former playing it multiple times an hour on his Radio 1 show at some points – and it became a cult hit, reaching No 27 in 2007.
Steve’s Lava Chicken is Black’s highest UK chart position yet, beating both his track Pod with duo Tenacious D (No 24 in 2006) and another song from a video game-film tie-in: Peaches, his power ballad performed as nefarious pixellated reptile Bowser in 2023’s The Super Mario Bros Movie, which reached No 28.
At 95 seconds, that was another of the shortest-charting songs in chart history, behind the likes of 2007 Simpsons Movie song Spider Pig (64 seconds) and Liam Lynch’s 2002 punk hit United States of Whatever (86 seconds).
Black made a video message to mark the success of Steve’s Lava Chicken, saying: “I want to send big love to all the Minecraft fans for getting us up there – it’s insane! Love you!”
Despite being met with bafflement or outright dismay by many film critics, A Minecraft Movie has become a pop cultural sensation.
It beat The Super Mario Bros Movie in securing the highest global opening weekend for a video game spin-off (though still has a way to go beat that film’s $1.3bn (£980m) final score). By filling the film with references cherished by the game’s fans, from the figure of “chicken jockey” to a tribute to the late Minecraft personality Technoblade, it has been playing to joyous and uproarious crowds: sometimes too uproarious, with some cinemas posting warning messages about antisocial behaviour. One group of US patrons brought a live chicken to a screening – “safe to say we got kicked out” ran a caption on TikTok.
Elsewhere in this week’s pop charts, US singer and online personality Alex Warren notches up the longest stretch for a No 1 single so far in 2025: his song Ordinary scores its fifth week at the top.
Welsh rockers Those Damn Crows get their first UK No 1 album, with God Shaped Hole. It’s their fourth LP, following the No 3 success of 2023’s Inhale/Exhale. “We’ve been working so hard for so many years, this is a huge reward,” the band said in a statement. “We’re not going anywhere, man!”
Bon Iver’s fifth studio album Sable, Fable is this week’s second-highest new entry, at No 4.
