If you don’t know who Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman are, you might recognize their alter egos: John Steed and Catherine Gale, the original swingin’ duo of The Avengers. Showing that tie-in merchandising and vertical integration were alive and well in the 60s, the powers behind the classy spy show decided its principal stars would be great on the radio as well as TV. Macnee and Blackman cut the ludicrous “Kinky Boots” on a single Saturday evening—or so the story goes. The resulting single release in 1964 managed to hit the top 5 in the UK, almost certainly riding the coattails of the ascendant Avengers platform—though there’s probably an element of unintentional humour that contributed to its success as well. 1964 was the last year Blackman was on the show, moving on to bigger and better things including a stint as Bond girl Pussy Galore. As for the Avengers, out went Cathy Gale and in came Emma Peel, leading the show to a new level of success both at home and in the States. “Kinky Boots” was quietly forgotten, a dusty relic of bad 60s marketing.

Until 1990, that is, when a BBC breakfast DJ named Simon Mayo decided the song needed a revival. During his five years hosting the Radio 1 breakfast show, Mayo made it a habit to play old pop oddities incessantly, which had the side effect of putting them on the charts—often after long absences from the spotlight. “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life,” Eric Idle’s cheerful crucifixion backing music, was reissued in September 1991—twelve years after Monty Python’s Life Of Brian came out—due to the song’s newfound popularity. Mayo featured the song on his show because he’d heard it used as a football chant. I can’t imagine what led him to revive “Kinky Boots,” but he started playing Macnee and Blackman’s ode to leather and lace in late 1990. Thus the song entered the UK charts for the second time in December 1990, almost three decades after its first stint.

Blackman did release an album of material later in the 60s, after her Pussy Galore role in Goldfinger. Macnee, however, stayed away from the recording studio. Blackman, in a 1983 interview, gives the likely reason: “Patrick said he had no sense of rhythm and couldn’t sing but we thought that was absolute nonsense until we actually got there and found it was absolutely true!”