The Fizz – A Crazy Shot in the Dark

Forty-five years after they won Eurovision and had their skirts ripped off on live television, the group at the heart of Bucks Fizz is back with new music — and a brand-new lineup.

The title came from an offhand remark. Asked about marking 45 years since their Eurovision triumph, Jay Aston called the whole idea “a bit of a crazy shot in the dark” — and the phrase stuck so well it became the name of the song. Released on May 22, 2026, A Crazy Shot in the Dark is the first new music in four years from The Fizz, the group that carries the living legacy of Bucks Fizz.

Keep watching: Bucks Fizz – Making Your Mind Up · explore more →

Some history is needed to understand who is actually singing here. Bucks Fizz won the Eurovision Song Contest for the United Kingdom in 1981 with Making Your Mind Up, the performance forever remembered for its skirt-ripping dance routine, and went on to a decade of hits including The Land of Make Believe, My Camera Never Lies, and Now Those Days Are Gone. Decades of lineup disputes eventually split the name in two: one camp retained the Bucks Fizz title, while founding members Cheryl Baker and Jay Aston built a parallel group that has recorded as The Fizz since the mid-2010s. It is that group — the one with two of the four original Eurovision voices — releasing this single.

And it arrives with the lineup freshly remade. Following the 2024 departure of founding member Mike Nolan, Baker and Aston are now joined by Matthew Pateman and Nikk Mager, making The Fizz a quartet once more.

A familiar hand on the controls

For the new single the group turned to a name synonymous with British pop’s most commercially dominant era: Mike Stock, of Stock Aitken Waterman, the hit factory behind Kylie Minogue, Rick Astley, and dozens of late-1980s chart-toppers. Stock wrote and produced A Crazy Shot in the Dark, as he had the group’s recent albums, and the result is polished, upbeat, unmistakably built by someone who has engineered pop hits for forty years. Released on the group’s own MPG label, it is a celebratory record — nostalgic in spirit but pointedly about the present, about a group that has no intention of becoming a heritage act frozen in 1981.

The group has hinted that an album may follow, calling this a new chapter rather than a one-off. For an act that began life as a hastily assembled Eurovision entry and somehow turned that into a 45-year career, A Crazy Shot in the Dark is a fitting title — proof that the gamble taken in 1981 is still, improbably and happily, paying out.