Bands Who Have Excellent Songs On Late '70s/Early '80s European K-Tel-Style Compilations

[koganbot]

I Have Never Heard Entire Albums By These Bands Who Have Excellent Songs On Late '70s/Early '80s European K-Tel-Style Compilations

Do any of them have albums worth hearing? The world wants to know, or at least I do.

The "I" who's saying this is chuckeddy. He has a feeling some folks on poptimists might be interested in this and might have input for it too, either there or here. The thread starts with these two compilations, but there are many more lists, contributed by Xhuxk and others, and quite a few YouTube imbeds:

Double Dancing (Record 2) (K-Tel Finland 1983)

GARY LOW "I Want You"
FREEZ "Pop Goes My Love" (have only otherwise heard his/their electro-hop classic "I.O.U." before)
STYLE "Dark Eyes"
BLACK LACE "Superman" (talked dance steps, sounds like an English version of Claudio Chechetto's Italian early '80s "Gioca-Jouer," or maybe the other way around)
CAROLA HĂGGVIST "Hunger"
DAVID GRANT "Love Will Find A Way" (Linx-style early '80s Brit soul I guess?)

― xhuxk, Sunday, 11 January 2009 16:59 (2 days ago) Permalink

Disco Fever (K-Tel U.K. 1977)

BROTHERHOOD OF MAN "Angelo" (Second-tier ABBAs, right?)
MERI WILSON "Telephone Man" (top 20 hit in U.S.!)
SMOKIE "It's Your Life" (superstars in this world, I guess. Lots of hits on lots of these compilations; "Living Next Door To Alice" was their only U.S. top 40)

Comments

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, a couple people. I'm not really picking up on *why* I should avoid them, though; everything people seems to hate about them makes them sound GOOD, so obviously the point isn't coming across very well. Here's Mike T-Diva, and my reply:

>>BLACK LACE...came back to plague us in 1984 with the #2 hit "Agadoo," subsequently parodied by Spitting Image for their 1986 number one "The Chicken Song," then another top ten hit with "Do The Conga" and various lesser hits including "I Speaka Da Lingo" (clap clap), "El Vino Collapso" (clap clap) and the aforementioned "Gang Bang."<<

You know, I realize the Brits on this thread despise these guys, quite possibly deservedly. But I just want to say that all of those titles crack me up, and make me wannna check out Black Lace's oeuvre.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"Gang Bang" features in the (very excellent) British movie Rita, Sue and Bob Too -- abt prole bedhopping in bradford in the late 70s/early 80s: black lace play it in a youth club the main characters are dancing in; it has a special dance, a kind of lubriciously tatty sex-conga, which is simultaneously very creepy and very fitting (rita and sue are schoolgirls; bob is married)

the spitting image parody is much worse and much lamer

are freez the southern freeez ppl?

david grant seems well worth chasing up further, tho i don't recall what else he did

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Turns out (as somebody quickly replied on that ILM thread) that David Grant's song sounded Linx-like to me because, doh!, he was the singer of Linx. (Whose first album has been one of my r&b favorites of the past couple decades since the year it came out; not sure about anything else they did, or Grant's other solo work, though.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

linx/grant -- once upon a time i knew this but my brain is mush these days

did he become an actor? (i may have made this up entirely)

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

Nope: he became the Fame Academy chap with the annoying wife (and if you're a fan of really rotten TV - or just freelance - you might have spotted him on The Wright Stuff*).

(*For our foreign chums: morning TV show in which D-listers discuss the day's news as distilled from mid-market ultra-rightwing papers).

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

His monster hit, incidentally, was Could It Be I'm Falling In Love with Jaki Graham in 1985, which was certainly massive down here in the suburban soul heartlands.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

they also released a version of "the birdie song" about 0.00002 seconds after "the tweets" and thus didn't have a hit with it.

i have a very very strange relationship to the music of Black Lace and I'm not sure i have time right now to go into it in any depth, but it involves british holiday camps that were third rate butlinses (most with trailers rather than chalets) and being aged between 8 and 10. suffice it to say that my sister and i learnt an entirely different dance to agadoo at least three months before it charted in the UK

[ijgrieve.livejournal.com]

They weren't 'Haven' holiday camps by any chance? I went to one of those at about the same age (and probably danced to many of the same records!)

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

haven and hoseasons and other random indie ones as well, yes, never pontins though, too common.

[quick glance at DoB] dude, i was doing this when these records were HOT OFF THE PRESSES, not ten years later ;)

[ijgrieve.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I saw that you mentioned dancing to 'Agadoo' before it was a hit, making you presumably somewhere between 5 and 10 years older than me.