has anyone heard the story that doug fieger lead singer of the knack passed away after a battle with cancer .he was 57yrs old.

No more "Sharona" for him.

That's very sad, poor thing

Did he pass away? That's sad news.

Even though My Sharona didn't really grow on me as such, I do fondly remember seeing it played on Countdown dozens of times back then.

Plus I do respect the success it gave the group - it made people get up and dance and smile which isn't something to be ashamed of in the business of entertaining everyone.

RIP Doug.

That's last year.

Sometime around FEB 2010.

I thought he had already died last year and the last comment confirmed it

I thought he had already died last year as I remember someone leaving a comment about it here early last year.

SO when I saw the news yesterday I was a bit confused

was it last year he one site reported it this year

To be honest I didn't even know he'd died! Sounds shameful I know but it must have slipped under the radar for me.

In the words of the notorious gossip from Number 96, Dorrie Evans, 'why wasn't I told'??

A belated RIP to Doug anyway - My Sharona will ALWAYS live on.

Doug Fieger died of cancer on February 14 2010. He was 57 years old.

Doug Fieger died of cancer on February 14 2010. He was 57 years old.

Doug Fieger died of cancer on February 14 2010. He was 57 years old

It had been discussed on the Rage Messageboard -
http://www2b.abc.net.au/tmb/Client/Message.aspx?b=164&m=2500&ps=50&dm=1&pd=3
and Rage played My Sharona as a tribute at 8:30am Feb 20 2010.

The following is an article that appeared online:

Written to woo an underage girl, My Sharona, sung by Doug Fieger, who died this week, has been linked to everyone from George Bush to Girls Aloud. How did a disposable song with hidden swearing prove so enduring, and who was Sharona?

First come the jerky loud tom-toms, then the leaping loud bass, then the choppy and very loud guitar. My Sharona was the biggest American hit of 1979 and remains instantly recognisable.

SONG STATS
My Sharona
Written by Doug Fieger and Berton Averre
Recorded April 1979, MCA Whitney
From first album Get The Knack
UK number six (June 1979)

Lead singer Doug Fieger, then 27, had been in a series of groups and tended, he said, to write "nasty songs about girls I know". The debut single for his new band The Knack, one of these was for Sharona Alperin, a 16-year-old schoolgirl at Los Angeles's Fairfax High who was introduced to Fieger by his then-girlfriend. "She had an overpowering scent," he recalled in 1994, "and it drove me crazy."

With the age of consent being 18 in California, you might expect My Sharona to be one of those songs that hides its intentions in coded language. Not a bit of it. "Never gonna stop, give it up, such a dirty mind," goes the first verse. "I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind."

Unlikely subject matter for a number one perhaps, but in 1979 Capitol Records had decided to develop a huge band, and The Knack were launched with every trick in the music biz book: tall tales of bidding wars, record sleeves that pointedly recalled The Beatles and a producer with a impeccable track record - Mike Chapman, the man behind Suzi Quatro, The Sweet and Blondie.

Chapman recorded the song fast and cheap, with one addition to the band: Sharona herself. "I thought she looked about 14," a studio engineer told Sound On Sound magazine, recalling how Alperin joined them and how Chapman sneaked in a swear word.

Everyone present was asked to add a chanted background vocal, very low in the mix, which consisted of the "F" word followed by "-a-me".

Capitol then made the recording ubiquitous; the single, with Alperin on the sleeve, went on to sell 10 million copies and The Knack toured extensively, during which Fieger sent Alperin a ticket to join him in Hawaii. "We were together for a long time after that," he told the Sydney Sun Herald. "We lived together in Los Angeles for four-and-a-half years and I wrote a lot of songs about her."

'Knuke The Knack'

Meanwhile, the song divided opinion. Like most monster hits, its influence spread beyond the charts, with "Honk If You've Slept With Sharona" bumper stickers adorning Californian cars. LA impresario Kim Fowley attributes its party anthem status to a hostility towards disco: "The Knack made it because the heterosexual white audience found out that everyone in disco was gay."

NOTABLE VERSIONS
'Weird Al' Yankovic
'Weird Al' Yankovic (accordion)
Dead Kennedys (as My Payola)
Leningrad Cowboys (heavy metal)
Dandy Warhols (spoken word)
KT Tunstall (female duet)
The Knack (on revival show Hit Me Baby One More Time)

The music press was not kind to the band, portraying them as a marketing exercise in sanitised punk, and "Knuke The Knack" T-shirts began to appear and were briefly worn by the band before they decided the joke wasn't funny. "We were blamed for everything short of Jonestown," Fieger recalled during their 1986 reunion.

Despite the barbs, the song became a pop culture staple, endlessly parodied and reinterpreted. First up was indefatigable parodist "Weird Al" Yankovic, whose accordion-powered My Bologna was the beginning of a stream of his food-themed re-writes.

In 1987, Run-DMC based their rap single It's Tricky around the My Sharona riff; 19 years later, The Knack were reported as seeking $150,000 from Yahoo, Amazon and Apple for distributing the hip-hop track on the basis that the sample was unauthorised.