Bido Lito!

From The Depths Of Disco Hell I Would Find My Path To Nirvana...

I remember being a disgruntled metal-head in a 1988 disco in Pontins-Southport, stalwart-standards like Aswad's 'Don't Turn Around' and  'The Only Way Is Up' by Yazz & The Plastic Population were filed under 'atrocious' in my cortex. Ever willing to meet in the middle I probed the DJ for 'Crash' by The Primitives...nope... "what? you like heavy metal?, I've got 'Bad Medicine?", "forget it"...what did someone say about God being a DJ?  Well, hang the fucker...not that I despised Pop Music, au contraire, I did purchase a cassette single of Paula Abdul's 'Opposites Attract' a few years later. Though one's fondness has waned over the years, at the time I considered it a riveting fusion of Pop (from Paula) and Rap (from The Wild Pair).

AAAnyway...what I do remember being particularly fond of was a number that seemed to fit seamlessly with all the other horridly clunky lego-block-beat-driven-drivel that night, however, there was something remarkably different about Bananarama's 'Venus'. Now, I'm not pretending for one cotton-pickin minute that I would have had the maturity or ability to critically deconstruct music at that oh so innocent age, but I would like to imagine that my curiosity was tickled by the exotic mysticism in the lyrics, "Goddess on the mountain top, burning like a silver flame, the summit of beauty and love, and Venus was her name". I mean, I must have had at least some semblance of reason to separate this ditty from the rest of the Stock/Aitken/Watermanesque dirge that dominated the playlist that evening. Although, in retrospect, I probably just thought it was 'catchy' and they were quite charming. When I realised it was a cover, yeah it made perfect sense even though I knew sod all about it's author Shocking Blue.

Fast-forward 5 years and I'm reading Michael Azzerad's highly-digestible Nirvana bio 'Come As You Are' and the name re-surfaces. 'Love Buzz', written by the relatively under-valued 60's Nederbeat outfit. With singer Mariska Veres's sultry allure, they provoke lazy comparisons with Jefferson Airplane though Shocking Blue drove harder ('Send Me A Postcard') and creeped the darker recesses of the voodoo underworld ('Love Buzz'). And creep they did, always under the trailblazing-rader but still managing to shift over 13 million albums. They didn't have a zeitgeistian 'White Rabbit' but they did have 'Deamon Lover', the smouldering cry for emancipation from the icy grip of a lovers possesion. Well trodden imagery, yes, but it's yet to be bettered. Always more succinctly Euro-chic than shroomy Americana, songwriter Robbie Van Leeuwen's penchant for the razor-hook means that in retrospect, they remain fresher-faced than their years might suggest...

Philip Gofton