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Ubiquitous in the late seventies UK charts, Boney M were a manufactured band cooked up by German record producer Frank Farian. That sentence alone is enough to get many music fans reaching for a revolver, but one thing Farian was stupendously good at was taking some unlikely source material and turning it into palatable juggernaughts of songs that negated any hint of possible danger or bad taste through an overwhelming arms linked, knees up party vibe. Russian mystics ('Rasputin'),1930's American gangsters ('Ma Baker'), home-grown religious conflict ('Belfast') - Boney M were fearless in what they sang about, and even their cover versions like The Creation's 'Painter Man' and Bobby Hebb's 'Sunny' were highly unpredictable on paper but were nevertheless given a Hi-NRG, Eurodance makeover that made them sound like they were always meant to be played that way.
'Rivers Of Babylon' is a cover version too, and an unlikely a one as any. Originally recorded by The Melodians, 'Rivers Of Babylon' takes the bulk of it's lyrics from Psalm 137, detailing the suffering of the exiled Jews after Jerusalem was conquered by the Babylonians. When placed in this reggae setting, the 'Babylon' and 'Zion' references take on a more charged and respectful meaning as the ying and yang of good and evil, but as far as Boney M are concerned it's all just a good tune. In fact, with their campy image and bacofoil outfits, Farian's band would be the essence of Babylon to any Rastafari though I doubt he'd have seen the irony (or even cared if he did).
For me, 'Rivers Of Babylon' is one of the least interesting of all Boney M's singles. The tune is a strong one, but its sheer in your faceness is wearing, particularly as there's little heart or depth enough to warrant anything other than a cursory surface listen. What is (after all) serious religion is reduced to the lowest 4/4 denominator until all meaning is diluted in the Eurobeat the way English rugby fan's singing of 'Swing Low Sweet Chariot' exorcises all trace of the song's roots in slavery. There's a time and a place for both, but we perhaps shouldn't be surprised when people get pissed off with the lack of reverence being shown.
And as if to neatly illustrate what I mean, flip the disc over for the just as famous B side 'Brown Girl In The Ring' and you get another simple clapalong, only it's by far the more interesting proposition of the two simply because, being based on a Caribbean nursery rhyme, it's not meant to have any depth and Boney M can go to town on it safe in the knowledge they are not trivialising something that anyone can take offence at. And it takes a particularly humourless kind of music snobbery for it not to put a smile on your face.
Two facts to start with - John Travolta was a big star in 1978 and I was a big fan. Most people were really - with two major films cleaning up in the cinemas and his profile going supernova, Travolta and his grin exuded an air of easy cool that I could only aspire. I'll go into my love of 'Grease' in the next post but one, but suffice it to say that Saturday Night Fever was far more a piece of forbidden fruit to me than that film; Grease was racy enough, but Saturday Night Fever came with an X certificate which put it way out of my reach. Hence, all my eggs of interest marked 'Travolta' were placed firmly in the basket marked Grease; Saturday Night Fever and everything surrounding it barely caused a blip on my radar. Apart from the music, which was pretty inescapable in 1978. Inescapable enough to puzzle me anyway as to what scenes of X rated raunch and violence could be soundtracked by those squealing, pants too tight vocals; if Kate Bush's voice was a prime target for lazy mickey taking in the seventies, then the Bee Gees were the absolute bullseye.
The brothers had always sung falsetto true, but their work on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack ramped it up to a level that was borderline parody, and along with their open shirt/gold medallion look they managed to define not only what the average 'disco man' should aspire to when he scrubbed up on the weekend, but also sealed an image of themselves in aspic that came to define not only all their work that was to come, but also everything that had already been. Listen to 'New York Mining Disaster 1941' or 'Massachusetts' now and you still picture the trio singing them in their disco get up on a multicoloured dancefloor.
Which is ironic in one way, but fair enough in another; the Bee Gees in 1978 were no musical virgins. Already songwriters of note with an impressive back catalogue of hits written for themselves and other people, in turning to disco they weren't about to abandon their craft to adopt the pure dance trance of Giorgio Moroder et al. Rather, disco would come to them. In fact, it already had - they had already more than dipped their toes in the water with 'Jive Talking' in 1975, which was ahead of the game as it also appeared on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. The brace of songs they wrote following it could have been played straight in their own right, only now they were presented dressed up in the sheen of genre bells and whistles. And while that may make it all sound like a cynical cash-in, the end result managed to breathe life into a genre that was dying through it's own clichéd inertia amid a blizzard of generic recordings that sounded like the backing to some Philly soul B side run through a beat box and stretched till the elastic snapped.
'Night Fever' is a good example as any of the Bee Gees disco makeover. Sure there's the usual slick strings of disco drama, but also some timely electronic swells and throbs that punctuate the predictability with a wonderfully low key wah wah guitar chattering away in the background the whole time that keeps the groove on a slow drip like molasses from a can. And underneath beats a human heart that's simply "Prayin' for this moment to last, livin' on the music so fine" - in other words, it's 'Dancing Queen' as told from the first person instead of a bystander watching.
On that front, 'Night Fever' is a more direct and immediate song, but one that's narrower in its appeal and more difficult for non genre fans to admire. I'll be the first to admit it took an awful long time for me to overcome my initial prejudices with the whole Saturday Night Fever caboodle that had set hard as concrete since my first exposure all those years ago. And while I still don't have an awful lot of time for the film, I'm now happy enough to acknowledge a rush of hedonistic joy created by artists at the top of their game when I hear it, moreso now that the passing of time has barely taken anything away from it; 'Night Fever' sounds far less dated than the Bee Gee's last UK number one 'You Win Again' and it will retain an urgency and relevance for as long as people continue to live to cut loose at the weekend.
Ah now, I warned you a few entries ago that my life and the number ones I write about would start to fuse until it becomes hard to reconcile objectivity with pure sentiment didn't I? And so it goes here, so bear with me as I meander off piste for a bit and tell you that during the summer of '78, a mate of a mate's father converted their garage into a club house where us lads could hang out. There was an old three piece suite in there, a tiny snooker table, a record player and a few singles borrowed from his father's own collection. And an eclectic bunch they were too; that garage was where I first heard The Moontrekker's 'Night Of The Vampire', Deep Purple's 'Never Before' (amongst others), and 'Matchstick Men And Matchstalk Cats And Dogs'.
Because we didn't have that many singles, we tended to play the same ones over and over and over again. And again. And then the B sides. Which must now make me one of the few people in the world who could sing along word perfect to the song about a dead Granny's rocking chair that appeared on the flip of ''Matchstick Men'. It also means that there can't be too many people still breathing, apart from Brian and Michael, who would have heard this song as often as I have.*
So where does that leave it? Does familiarity breed contempt? Does this prolonged exposure torpedo any chance I have of being objective about the tune? Not necessarily. But for a start I'll point out that, following 'Vincent', it's the second number one of the decade about a 'misunderstood' painter, in this case L.S.Lowry. And as far as songs about painters go, it's infinitely preferable to Mclean's tune simply because it can be enjoyed in an innocent kind of way that's childlike simple and doesn't trowel on the guilt - when Lowry dies of pneumonia at the end ("The fever came and the good lord mopped his brow"), 'We' aren't accused of collusion by leaving a window open.
Brian and Michael sketch out Lowry's life in the lyrics as simply as one of the man's own paintings; there's not much meat on the bones here - Lowry paints, nobody cares, Lowry paints a bit more, people notice, Lowry dies. Fin. While I'm generous enough to infer some intent in this on the part of the writers (and, dear reader, this is me at my most charitable, albeit charity filtered through the rose tinted hue of fond remembrance of summer's past), I'm not quite so content to forgive the relentless 'eee it's grim up North' stereotype imagery and colloquialisms that pepper the song like the kids either wearing clogs or 'nowt on their feet' who are then roped into some frankly awful rhyme and forced metre. One example will do;
"Now canvas and brushes were wearing thin
When London started calling him
To come on down and wear the old flat cap"
Not only does this run as smoothly as a bent axle, I have idea what this means - try as I might, I can't find any reference to London calling in Lowry's life or what the 'flat cap' refers to. Because if it's some academic honour, then in point of fact his honorary degrees came from the Universities of Manchester, Salford and Liverpool, not London. Not that a complete understanding of lyrics is ever necessary to enjoy any particular song I agree (and as a Dylan disciple, how could I not?), but in one presented as popular biography then such shortcomings are fairly unforgivable.
Not that this is enough to bury it - 'Matchstick Men And Matchstalk Cats And Dogs' is not an awful song, but neither is it a good one. There's foundation enough there for something stronger, but Brian and Michael are far too content to rely on a catchy chorus and overt sentimentality at the expense of everything else when a little more attention to what's around it would have made all the difference. And to continue my generosity further, I'm even prepared to meet it more than half way by saying that even though the children's choir (St Winifred's no less) of 'ally ally o' on the finale may be a spoonful of sentiment too far for many, to my mind they recall the same chant that plays over the closing credits of Tony Richardson's film version of 'A Taste Of Honey', a link that at a stroke gives the song a hint of gritty 'angry young man' realism.
I'm not suggesting for one second that either Brian or Michael intended this association, (more likely they were thinking of Keith West's 1967 hit 'Excerpt From A Teenage Opera' - Lowry's death here "This tired old man with hair like snow, told northern folk its time to go" certainly recalls the demise of Grocer Jack) but sometimes a little schadenfreude can go a long way. It can with me anyway. But then maybe I'm still remembering summer's past....
* Now that I'm on a roll, fast forward two years from this and I exchange this gang hut for the local Youth Club. There was a similar three piece suite/record player set up there too, only this time it was the bigger boys who commandeered it with their own singles. On my first night as a member, there had been some kind of mix up that meant they only had two singles that were played alternately all night long. One was Peter Gabriel's 'Games Without Frontiers', the other was AC/DC's 'Touch Too Much'. It was the first time I'd heard either. The Gabriel song is still a favourite, but 'Touch Too Much' has gone down as one of my most played songs of all time - I've played it at least once a month every single year since and it will be a perennial on any 'Desert Island Discs' list I compile. See - there's no such thing as over exposure where quality's concerned.
If you want to look at this through one end of the telescope, then Kate and her creepy squeak could be dismissed as a novelty hit on par with The Wurzels. After all, both are telling a story that's inherently reliant on funny voices to get their point across. In Kate's case, it was a voice that caused no small amount of amusement in 1978. Contemporary reporting usually prefaced her name with 'helium voiced' or some suchlike to the point that most commentators seemed to think there was nothing else worthy of focussing on (The Not The Nine O'Clock News team were still taking the piss as late as 1980). Such was the interest I think it's fair to say that, had she had fallen under the wheels of a bus (or perhaps, to be more charitable, had retired) in April 1978, then like as not then that's how she would now be remembered - as a one hit wonder with a hard wired gimmick no better and no worse than Aneka and her 'Japanese Boy', a summation that would have been sealed by Kate's own wildly over the top performances of the song using a mime/dance routine that even Pan's People may have rejected as being too literal.
That's one way of looking at it all anyway, but to turn that telescope 'round the right way then 'Wuthering Heights' by itself can be seen as a stand alone single that can only be dismissed as novelty by lazy folk with their ears half cocked. And by 'stand alone', I don't mean just through its own inherent strangeness; by one definition,
'Wuthering Heights' can be regarded as the first and last recording by Kate Bush Mark 1, and 'The Man With The Child In His Eyes' being the first release proper by the Kate Bush we've all come to know. And that's because 'Wuthering Heights' barely seems sung by 'Kate Bush' at all - far from a simple third party précis of Bronte's novel, this tale is told from the viewpoint of Catherine Earnshaw's ghost, and Bush adopts this persona of 'Cathy' as completely as if she were acting as a medium for the latter's voice.
Bush doesn't normally sing in that register, in fact she rarely did again (she in re-recorded the song in 1986 for her 'The Whole Story' compilation in her more conventional range and it loses far, far more than it gains), but on 'Wuthering Heights' there's method in her madness, and that method is madness. The vocal keens and swoops throughout the song, adopting and then discarding emotions at the turn of every word conveying the idea of a woman who no longer knows what to feel - "How could you leave me? When I needed to possess you? I hated you, I loved you too".
Bush's gothic treatment is soaked through with a helpless tragedy of a woman who can't find peace even in death*, a lost soul still pining for a happy ending that can't possibly come; "Too long I roam in the night. I'm coming back to his side to put it right". Throughout the song, her delivery is pitched at such a self absorbed and unhinged level that the "Oh it gets dark, it gets lonely, on the other side from you" suggests even all the other ghosts are too sacred to talk to the mad woman with the Heatcliffe obsession and leave her well alone.
The brittle persona of Cathy is further carried over into the music with the dominant high key piano runs sparkling like shards of broken glass, giving the song it's own 'Twilight Zone' aura and so it's a shame (to me at least) when a conventional rock guitar solo on the outro brings the whole thing crashing back to reality. But no matter - 'Wuthering Heights' is a startlingly evocative debut, a song as rich and deep as the novel it's based on. Off the wall yes, but there's a lot more to it than simply surface kookiness and in an arena somewhere in my imagination Kate herself is forever doomed to slug it out with Donna Summer as part of a tag team against 'Dancing Queen' for the title of 'Best Number One Of The Seventies'.
* As an aside, this reminds me of Bob Dylan's 'Death Is Not The End'
"When you're sad and when you're lonely
And you haven't got a friend
Just remember that death is not the end"
Dylan presents it as a song of hope, a message that no matter how shit things are here on earth, it's not the be all and end all and that there's better to come. The song was covered by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds on their 'Murder Ballads' album where Cave and his merry men skewed Dylan's meaning 180 degrees until he's telling you that no matter how shit things are here on earth, there's an eternity of it to come after you're dead. Perhaps the most chilling example of this kind of reasoning comes in Tom Waits' 'Poor Edward', an allegedly true story of Victorian era Edward Mordrake, a man born with a second, female face on the back of his head. According to the story, the extra face could neither eat nor speak, but it could laugh and cry, but in Waits' telling "at night she spoke to him of things heard only in hell". With operating not an option, Edward sought peace through suicide, only to find that the face followed him to hell:
"Some still believe he was freed from her:
But I knew her too well
I say she drove him to suicide
And took Poor Edward to Hell"
Makes you realise that Cathy got off lightly!
After the middle aged angst of 'The Name Of The Game', Abba perform an effortless volte face back to the disco with their most direct single in ages. 'Take A Chance On Me' is one of the most danceable tunes in the Abba catalogue, perhaps moreso than the high class drive and shimmy of 'Dancing Queen' or the follow up to this 'Summer Night City'; no need for any fancy footwork with this one, it's a tune tailor made for even the most awkward and uncoordinated down at the tackiest club in the land to jig along to.
Once again, love is on the agenda, but there's no hint of the uncertainty of recent past; the girls know what they want and they know where to get it. And if it means being second best ("If you're all alone when the pretty birds have flown. Honey I'm still free") then they ain't fussy. Which doesn't mean that they are going to be anyone's doormat - the confidence of "You don't wanna hurt me, baby don't worry, I ain't gonna let you" is quite startling following the reluctant suitors of 'The Name Of The Game'.
The 'go out and get 'em' lyrics are complimented by the music which, though it jumps around excitedly never loses that the danceable thread. Whenever the centre threatens not to hold, it reverts back to the homebase of that wonderfully spongy keyboard riff that rings out as the aural equivalent of a bright yellow smiley face. I wouldn't place 'Take A Chance On Me' in the premier league of Abba songs, but it's a tune to be cherished nonetheless if only for the act that Abba sound as if they're truly enjoying themselves, a commodity that would be in short supply from here on in.
From one three syllable name ending in 'O' to another, the Brotherhood were on a roll though Figaro is a less involved affair than 'Angelo'; the titular character is no longer a doomed Mexican shepherd boy but some Club 18-30 rep-cum-lothario forever on the pull:
"Every morning when sun is dawning
You'll see him down on the beach.
Look out girl better beware
Better take good care, keep yourself out of reach."
Which just about sums it up quite nicely, only leaving me to say that 'Figaro' is a bland, British, bakelite Butlins chug of forced gaiety that's powered by the theme tune from a C grade sit-com as played on the horn from Noddy's car. It's quite the most jaunty song about a serial sexual predator that you are ever likely to come across, but is that by itself any cause for celebration? (Does that question need an answer? I think not. On both counts).
And from one song that confused me no end as a boy to another, albeit for different reasons. But before any of that, some history will be useful; 'Uptown Top Ranking' borrows its backing track hook and line from Marcia Aitken's 'I'm Still In Love With You', which was itself a re-recording of Anton Ellis' 'I'm Still In Love' from 1967. To add another layer to the cake, Aitken's tune was then 'liberated' by toaster Trinity on 'Three Piece Suit' for him to brag over about how sharp he looked in his new whistle.
Anything the men can boast about the girls can boast about better and 'Uptown Top Ranking' is a recorded response to Trinity where Althea and Donna themselves brag about how good THEY look as they strut around turning male heads ("See me 'pon the road I hear you call out to me") in their "alter back'" and "heels and ting". Such a patchwork of mix and match influences could have easily resulted in a curates egg of a song, but the fact is they don't. And the fact they don't is mainly down to simple youthful exuberance.
Not that you need to know any of the above to enjoy the song, but I think the history is important because not that many listeners in 1978 would have known what was going on here. I know I didn't - the patois slang was a code as foreign to me as Esperanto and I had no more idea what they were on about than I understood the popularity of 'Mull Of Kintyre'. But while the scales have fallen from McCartney's ditty, my gender, race and age mean that 'Uptown Top Ranking' remains a closed book to a certain extent. And that's fine, because my ignorance has not dented my enjoyment of the song one iota.
And enjoyment is very much the key word, it's why 'Uptown Top Ranking' works so well. Youthful exuberance see? On one hand you can take the girls as a novelty act peddling another Jamaican one hit wonder a la Millie that manages to crossover to people who don't normally listen to reggae. And on that level it's harmless enough. But flip the coin and it's an uplifting celebration of black youth mixed with an awareness of feminine sexuality and the power it holds - subjects that perhaps weren't that high on most people's agendas in dour late seventies Britain. Certainly not topics most would have appreciated being shoved in their faces on prime time television.
But there's no danger here, nothing malicious or manipulative about the song. Althea (17) and Donna (18) had the street smarts, but they were more inclined to slay you with a sharp put down ("Nah pop no style") instead of pulling a knife. At heart here are two young girls enjoying their youth, not looking for trouble - after all, "Love is all I bring inna me khaki suit and ting". Neither is there any of the gender confrontation of, for example, their contemporaries The Slits, four girls of similar age and musical persuasion who scared the life out of me when I saw them perform on video footage.
Watching this duo on Top Of The Pops clips, they come across as gawky, giggling schoolgirls and not militant Black Panthers sowing seeds of unrest or the hard nosed super confidence of latter day rap stars - 'Uptown Top Ranking' is as much the authentic sound of the streets as anything (to pick a usual suspect at random) Lil Kim et al rapped about, but it comes wrapped up in sunshine rather than bitches, bling and beefs. Another time and another place maybe, but there's a joyous innocence about the whole that's infectious, and it's this infection that makes this such a sheer delight.
Ubiquitous in the late seventies UK charts, Boney M were a manufactured band cooked up by German record producer Frank Farian. That sentence alone is enough to get many music fans reaching for a revolver, but one thing Farian was stupendously good at was taking some unlikely source material and turning it into palatable juggernaughts of songs that negated any hint of possible danger or bad taste through an overwhelming arms linked, knees up party vibe. Russian mystics ('Rasputin'),1930's American gangsters ('Ma Baker'), home-grown religious conflict ('Belfast') - Boney M were fearless in what they sang about, and even their cover versions like The Creation's 'Painter Man' and Bobby Hebb's 'Sunny' were highly unpredictable on paper but were nevertheless given a Hi-NRG, Eurodance makeover that made them sound like they were always meant to be played that way.
