"Coconut" is Dannii's most tragifabulous pop moment. According to Dannii, she was inspired to cover the song while waiting in a doctor's surgery after being bitten by an insect. Apart from the refrain of "Doctor!", I don't really see the connection between the song and Dannii's terrifying medical emergency, but that's beside the point. Dannii was moved to record "Coconut" and it ended up as the hidden track on Dannii's criminally underappreciated third album, "Girl". I find the very concept of hidden tracks baffling, but releasing the hidden track as a single is simply bizarre.
In fact, just about everything about "Coconut" is crazy. The song was released as the fourth single from "Girl" in Australia well after the album was dead and buried, without a video and with even less promotion than usual. There is a video clip that plays on high rotation in Sydney gay bars but that is a fanmade montage of old material. It's not that unusual to release an underpromoted single but the quality of the the song's tracklisting is. "Coconut" contains the brilliant "Everybody Changes Under Water", "Someone New" - the mammoth 9 minute plus Japanese bonus track, as well as several rare mixes of "Heaven Can Wait". The excellent "Someone New" would have to be one of Dannii's most stunning B-sides. Its omission from the album is an utter disgrace. While "Heaven Can Wait" is one of the many fabulous tracks Dannii recorded with Xenomania before they went shit and starting working with Whores Aloud and unloaded the stinking "Giving You Up" on poor Kylie.
On its release, "Coconut" limped to #62 on the Singles Chart but became an instant gay classic. I still hear the song almost every time I go to a club. There is even a popular drug taking game, which takes the lyric "put the line in the coconut" quite literally. Not that I have any knowledge of that kind of outrageous behaviour. In any case, "Coconut" is still being played and enjoyed almost a decade later - no small feat for a song that failed to make the top 50.
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