The Hottest Hit On The Planet…
It’s “Get Down Tonight” by KC & The Sunshine Band!
There was an actual K.C., although, just to be confusing, his name was actually Harry.
Harry Wayne Casey.
Harry was in possession of the kind of big goofy and permanently grinning face:
Typical of your 70s teen heartthrob. Under different circumstances he could have very easily been David Cassidy or one of the Bay City Rollers.
But K.C. grew up in Miami, and so instead he began the ultimate 70s party band. As the disco wave crashed down over America, KC & The Sunshine Band were there to produce mindless party jam after mindless party jam.
KC & The Sunshine Band had been a party band even before they discovered disco.
It had just been a very different kind of party music, with different fashion accessories. Instead of bell-bottom trousers and platform shoes you had brightly colour, yet scary looking, masks. For K.C. & The Sunshine Band had originally been a junkanoo band!
If you are like me, you know next to nothing about junkanoo. So here’s UNESCO to help us understand this fascinating culture.
“Junkanoo is the national cultural festival of The Bahamas. Dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was brought to The Bahamas by enslaved Africans who used their three-day holiday to recreate festivals from home”
Elsewhere, they say:
“Junkanoo is a celebration of unity, bringing together thousands of people of all ages and backgrounds in the creation of towering, colourful costumes with cardboard and crepe paper.”
Before finishing off with:
“Junkanoo is a celebration of creativity that refines the art of making beauty out of junk.”
Don’t be confused though. That’s almost certainly not how junkanoo got its name.
Although this photo is from 1975, this is probably not K.C. & The Sunshine Band themselves– although how would you ever know? – since they had by now left their junkanoo days behind them. Given that the only other famous junkanoo band in the world is the Baha “Who Let The Dogs Out?” Men, we quite possibly dodged a bullet there.
As best as I can tell, this – “Exuma, The Obeah Man” by Exuma, the Obeah Man – is considered, by junkanoo connoisseurs – junkanoo junkies if you will – as the Number One Junkanoo Jam In The Land.
“Exuma, The Obeah Man” was released in 1970, but K.C. didn’t discover the joys of junkanoo through “Exuma, The Obeah Man.” As you may have suspected, given that junkanoo is an Afro-Caribbean tradition, and K.C. was very notably white, K.C.’s background was not one immersed in junkanoo traditions.
Instead K.C. first heard junkanoo at a wedding.
This makes sense. In addition to being the Ultimate Party Band of the 70s, K.C. & The Sunshine Band are nothing if not the ultimate disco wedding band (and they do play weddings, if you have $100,000 and a fiancé lying around) Pretty much instantly, K.C. went out and made a junkanoo record. Because the music made him happy. Because it seemed to make other people happy. K.C. would take exactly the same approach when it came to disco.
“I don’t like sad records,” he would say, “and slow records.” In his more self-absorbed moments K.C. also likes to claim that he decided to make happy records to cheer people up during America’s post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, post-Oil Crisis (wow… the early 70s really sucked!) malaise, and as an antidote to all the depressing music that was consequently all over the radio.
I believe him. Here’s a clip of K.C. producing one of his acts, Jimmy “Bo” Horne, a few years later, singing a very K.C. lyric – “LET’S DO IT!!! LET’S DANCE!!! DANCE ACROSS THE FLOOR!!!! LET’S DO IT!!!! LET’S DANCE!!! LET’S DO IT SOME MORE!!!!! – and you can see he believes in it!! Look into his eyes; he just knows that he’s struck gold!! That’s the way – a-ha a-ha – K.C. likes it -a-ha a-ha!!!
He was half-right, the song scraped the bottom of the Top 40. That’s how much – a-ha a-ha – people liked it. They liked it but not as much as K.C liked it.
But before K.C. made records, he sold them. At a record store.
And it was whilst working at the record store that K.C. learnt the most important question he would ever learn: the importance of the record buying public knowing what your record is called.
Customers would come into the store all the time, having heard a song on the radio, but having missed the DJ’s back announcement. Which meant that they had no idea what the song was called. All they could do was hum the song to K.C. – badly – and hope that he would recognize it.
This would never be a problem for K.C. & The Sunshine Band.
“Get Down Tonight” could only be called “Get Down Tonight”. Okay, sure, some people might think it was called “Do A Little Dance, Make A Little Love (Get Down Tonight)” – and given K.C.’s love of the parenthesis it’s a bit of a wonder it wasn’t – but still, it would be an extremely easy song to find at the store. K.C. had learnt his lesson well.
Meanwhile, “Shake, Shake, Shake (Shake Your Booty)” could not be called anything but “Shake, Shake, Shake (Shake Your Booty).” “That’s The Way (I Like It)” could not be mistaken for anything but “That’s The Way (I Like It).”
K.C. & The Sunshine Band records spent so much time building name recognition, so much time hammering the song title to death, that they were little more than radio jingles advertising their own existence.
Yet this is how K.C. & The Sunshine Band avoided One Hit Wonder status, quite an accomplishment in the field of disco, a genre that appeared to attract virtually nothing but One Hit Wonders.
K.C. & The Sunshine Band would end up having many more than One Hit. They were constantly hitting Number One. Such were the benefits of being the easiest songs to find in the record store.
“Get Down Tonight” is an 8.
Meanwhile, in Sexy Land…
It’s “You Sexy Thing”
by Hot Chocolate
At first glance, you may suspect, that if the UK had a K.C. and The Sunshine Band, it was probably Hot Chocolate:
Throwing a classic party track up the charts every year or so throughout the late 70s. “You Sexy Thing” “Every 1’s A Winner.” “Heaven Is in the Back Seat of My Cadillac.”
However, you would be wrong.
Before “You Sexy Thing”, Hot Chocolate were a very different kind of band.
Possibly mistaking themselves for Curtis Mayfield or Marvin Gaye, known around this time for this sort of thing, Hot Chocolate mostly wrote and sang about society’s woes. They wrote and sang about an interracial couple, who, upon introducing their respective partners to their respective families, found that their families would not accept them.
That was “Brother Louie”, a gut-punch of a story, but nothing compared to the story of “Emma”, although her real name is clearly Emmalene, an aspiring Hollywood actress who commits suicide when she realizes that she’ll never become a Hollywood star; a damning indictment then on celebrity culture (“Emma” is a 10.)
They had begun their careers with a particularly political song: a reggae cover of the Plastic Ono Band’s “Give Peace A Chance.” They were apparently recording reggae covers of a whole bunch of stuff in the Top 40 at the time, but all trace of any other cover appears to have disappeared.
Now you can just cover any old song without permission, that’s no problem. But it turns out that you can’t just add extra lyrics to a song without permission, and Hot Chocolate had added a whole lot of “everybody’s talking about blah blah” bits.
“Everybody talking about religious separation, racial segregation, repatriation, bringing the United Nation to Black conversation, RUBBISH!! RUBBISH!!
That sort of thing.
So John had to sign off on it… or not sign off on it, if he didn’t like it.
He liked it.
He liked it so much that he signed Hot Chocolate to Apple Records. A secretary at Apple gave them their name – The Hot Chocolate Band – for obvious reasons.
From the very beginning then, Hot Chocolate had been a political band. Or at least they tried to be.
The single before “You Sexy Thing” was “A Child’s Prayer:”
The kind of “won’t somebody think of the children” record that probably would have done better if they’d waited a bit, released it at Christmas, and made it a charity record.
Sample lyrics:
“Nobody goes to church, on Sundays anymore,
is that why the world is fighting, filled with wars?
Nobody goes to church,
or thanks the Lord for what they eat…
is that why half the world is starving, running out of necessities?”
I bet you never thought the Hot Chocolate guy was so religious, do you? Well, you really ought to have. After all, he did BELIEVE IN MIRACLES!!!!
Now, the Hot Chocolate guy did have a name, and that name was Errol Brown.
Errol Brown had been born in Jamaica, moving to the UK when he was 12, his mother working seven days a week as a shorthand typist to send Errol to private school.
“She took me out of the secondary modern stream and put me among people who wanted to be Prime Ministers, not plumbers.”
Now would probably be a good time to mention that Errol was a Tory, that he played at Conversative Party conventions during the Thatcher regime, and played at Charies and Diana’s pre-wedding reception at Buckingham Palace. He thought Diana was “tall” and “pretty.”
The other thing you need to know about Errol Brown, although I’m sure you’ve noticed it already, is that he was bald.
Bald bald.
The media made a big deal about that shiny bald head. Newspapers described him as “Rock’n’Roll’s Answer To Kojak:”
About the only other famous bald person in the world.
There was also Isaac Hayes, but Errol had been rockin’ his dome long before Isaac:
From before he was even 20, when he realized that his father had lost his hair at an early age, so why fight it?
So, yeah, Errol may have been as bald as Isaac Hayes, but in terms of socially conscious soul, Hot Chocolate weren’t Curtis Mayfield, or they sure as hell weren’t Marvin Gaye. They were Hot Chocolate. And they were born to sing “You Sexy Thing.”
In a world ruled by K.C. & The Sunshine Band, socially conscious ballad simply could not compete. But a band singing about sleeping with a sexy thing and finding it a transformative spiritual experience, just might.
A song which I like to pretend features the word “sex-tasy.”
Sure, the lyric sheet claims that it’s “it’s ecstasy!!” but I know what my ears want to hear – might be a cert.
It’s quite incredible really that they hadn’t released a cheese-ball classic before. After all, following their short association with Apple Records – which folded at the same time as The Beatles did – they had fallen in with Mickie Most, Britain’s premier producer of cheese-ball pop.
It was Mickie Most who had produced Herman’s Hermits “I’m Into Something Good.”
It was Mickie who was responsible for turning Donovan from a Dylan-wannabe to some sort of hippie guru:
(“Mellow Yellow”, “Hurdy Gurdy Man”)
Mind you, Mickie also produced The Animals, including “The House Of The Rising Sun.” The man had layers.
You might expect that a man like Mickie Most would hear a song like “You Sexy Thing” and see dollar signs. You’d think that the guy who made a whole lot of money with Herman’s Hermits, and would, in a few short years, make a whole lot more money with “Some Girls” by Racey, would instantly recognise that he could make a whole lot of money from a song like “You Sexy Thing.”
But no.
Maybe it was because Hot Chocolate’s reputation as a socially conscious band was too strong. They couldn’t conceive that people would think of Hot Chocolate as “that ‘You Sexy Thing’ band.” Whatever the reason, they put “You Sexy Thing” on the B-side. The B-side to this: “Blue Night”, a nice enough song that doesn’t sound like a hit and indeed wasn’t one.
Mickie Most may have had a reputation for picking hits, but it was failing him in 1975. At roughly the same time as “You Sexy Thing” was being buried, he also decided that “I Love Rock’n’Roll” sounded like a B-side for the group Arrows.
Ultimately the mistake was caught, it was rectified, it was re-recorded – to be fair the original version was only about half as good – and it became the hit it was always destined to be. A hymn, celebrating the transformative nature of sexiness. A revelation so great that all you can do is gape in awe and ponder: where you from? You sexy thing, you.
“You Sexy Thing” is an 8.
Meanwhile, in Glam Rock Land…
It’s “Love Is The Drug”
by Roxy Music
Roxy Music were famous for a lot of things; one of which was the way that Bryan Ferry dressed.
I want to mention that straight up, because there is one aspect of that video that needs to be clarified: Bryan Ferry was not actually going for a pirate look with that eye patch. Of course not. If he were, then why would he otherwise be dressed as a boy scout?
Given Bryan’s history regarding that sort of thing, and given that this was the glam rock era when everybody seemed to be into that sort of thing.
David Bowie in particular being famous for his own eye-patch phase.
You might be forgiven for thinking that it was some sort of fashion statement. But no, Bryan had bumped into a doorknob and had to go to hospital. Bryan Ferry may be the only person in the world to not only get away with going on Top Of The Pops with cotton sticking out of his eye but actually look cooler doing so.
And when I say Roxy Music was famous for the way Bryan Ferry dressed:
I mean lounging about in suits and tuxedoes and generally looking as though he were a member of the jet set.
Such was his image that the NME dubbed him ‘Byron Ferrari.’
Also, ‘The Prince Of Sleaze.’
But Bryan wasn’t quite the urbane gent he put himself across as. Decades later, he’d claim that he “identif(ied) with Gatsby.” An interview with Record Mirror opens with a scene in which Bryan is asked to choose a bottle of wine – something the journalist assumes would be well within Bryan’s area of expertise – and he can only cluelessly ask “red or white?” Not what they expected from a guy who lived in a tuxedo.
Later in the article, the BBC shows up to film Bryan getting into a Limousine: that’s what people expected from Bryan Ferry!
The reason Bryan Ferry didn’t know a whole lot about wine – and the reason he felt a Gatsby affinity – was that he grew up in an extremely working-class environment. His father worked on a farm.
But such was the British education system at the time, that virtually everybody seemed to go to arts school, regardless of background. Those were the days!
Bryan was particularly lucky, since he studied under Richard Hamilton, Britain’s most famous pop-artist:
Most famous for the collage “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?”
This experience would have a lasting impact on young Bryan.
He’d spend much of his career approaching pop culture as though he were collecting source material for a collage.
He’d record covers albums, describing them as though they were one of Duchamp’s Readymades.
A lot of British rockstars in the 60s and 70s went to art school. Quite possibly most of them. Quite possibly no other took such detailed notes on art theory, and so painstakingly attempted to put them into practice.
For it was while Bryan was at art school that he formed Roxy Music and found himself having to deal with another Bryan/Brian:
Brian Eno, a tech-wiz who looked like a literal wizard from certain angles, and like an alien lizard-person from others.
Brian (Eno) was responsible for the sound-effect and synthesizer side of things.
He didn’t know how to play instruments well, but he certainly knew how to twiddle knobs.
The press took one look at this freaky looking lizard person and decided that he must be the one in charge… naturally Bryan (Ferry) wasn’t going to let that stand. After all, Bryan started the band, and wrote all the songs.
Particularly since Brian (Eno)’s synthesizer seemed to be gradually encroaching onto Bryan (Ferry)’s side of the stage…
In the beginning, Brian (Eno) hadn’t even been allowed on the stage. He and his contraptions were set up in the wings.
By the time Roxy had made their first record – the space-age “Virginia Plain”, a song named after one of Bryan (Ferry)’s paintings, of a cigarette packet – and appeared on Top Of The Pops, Brian (Eno) was finally allowed on stage. But he looked so much like a vampiric vulture, that all the BBC would show of him was his sparkly gloves.
This apparently got Brian (Eno) a little annoyed, and he decided to be less easily ignored.
Since this was the 70s, this meant dressing-up like an alien.
Or: just generally more glamourously than Bryan (Ferry)
Even worse, from Bryan (Ferry)’s point of view, Brian (Eno) was doing all the talking – theorizing mostly, with great dollops of philosophising – in all the interviews. Brian (Eno) found himself with his own cult who would go to shows and boo at Bryan (Ferry). “ENO!” they’d shout, all throughout the set. People called them “The Eno! Shouters”
But Bryan (Ferry) had his own cult followers as well.
Well-dressed dandies, who would copy everything he wore.
If Bryan (Ferry) showed up at a concert with his tie tucked into his shirt – which he did – they would show up at the next concert dressed exactly the same.
The fans were divided against each other. The band was divided against each other. Before too long – two albums to be precise – Brian (Eno) left, going off on an epic adventure through increasingly ambient soundscapes, talking in the press about how he wanted to create music that was meant to be ignored.
Brian (Eno) and Bryan (Ferry) clearly had different ideas about how to do things; Bryan’s big idea being to record a series of covers albums, confounding people by singing serious songs as though they were a joke.
Some have suggested that the way Bryan sings Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” makes it sound as though he’s singing about a hard-on. It certainly doesn’t sound as though he’s singing about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bryan always insisted that he was singing them with 100% sincerity, which only makes it funnier
It’s always tricky to tell whether Bryan is being serious, since it’s always tricky to tell exactly what, what with his myriad of mannerisms, he is aiming for.
On “Virginia Plain”, for example, it sounds as though he’s trying to channel Nico, or some other Warholesque Eurotrash superstar.
And on “Love Is The Drug”?
It is known that the “taint no big thing” line was inspired by a Trinidadian roadie, and certainly there are moments on “Love Is The Drug” where it’s not impossible that Bryan is trying to sing in patois. But only in moments.
Other times he’s being a crooner. Yet others, a soul singer. And yet others, he just cocks his eyebrow: “you can guess the rest.”
So, Brian (Eno) had left, and Roxy Music became less obviously weird. But one thing never changed; they continued to use glamorous models on their album covers, and in various states of undress.
So much so that what few copies of Country Life found themselves in Mid-West record stores had to be sold in a bag.
In the case of their 1975 album “Siren”, that glamorous model was Jerry Hall. That photo shoot both kickstarted Jerry’s modelling career,
And, since she and Bryan soon started dating, Jerry Hall -apparently being the drug for Bryan – her career as a serial celebrity-girlfriend/wife.
Soon they’d be off to Los Angeles together, to live in Bel Air.
Together they were one of the best dressed couples on the planet.
So that’s how Bryan and Jerry met. On an album cover photo shoot, on the rocks of Anglesea.
And not – you may be disappointed to learn – as a result of Bryan parking his car and staking his place at the singles bar.
“Love Is The Drug” sees Bryan Ferry playing the role of a sex addict, out on the prowl. It’s Bryan as a professional pick-up artist. Bryan’s pick-up line: “Go.” When you are Bryan Ferry, you don’t need to say anything more.
But just because sex addiction sounds as though it would be the most fun of all addictions, this doesn’t mean that it’s not a serious problem and that we ought not take it seriously: Bryan suddenly leaps into some soulful swoons, crying out in real (fake) need: “WOOAAH O-OH OH LOVE IS THE DRUG!!!”.
“Love Is The Drug” is a 9.
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& Presenting The Official It’s The Hits Of October-ish 1975 Spotify Playlist!
From Earth, Wind & Fire, to Hot Chocolate, to the Brothers Johnson, to the Ohio Players, to Kool & The Gang… to K.C. & The Sunshine Band of course… it’s a 70s Disco Party from “Get Down Tonight” to “Get Down On It”!
(although technically “Get Down On It” is 1981)
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/36tnYWsYpUKjrMXvnZMnNd?si=6b3b2f93fec64036