Boney M: classic or dud

Here ya go, Dirty Vicar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Djil2tVDFxQ

Dancer guy: a) didn't sing on any of the records, b) with that haircut looks like Richard Ayoade.

"Dancer guy" sings live like a mad mofunkah. And owns the name of Boney M, natch.

My faves are "Ma Baker" and "Sunny". They both work very well in almost any kind of set.

dudder than dud. but i remember liking "daddy cool" when it came out. i learnt dancing in the dance school to rasputin. what a crap song. when i first heard bob marley's "no woman no cry" i thought he was covering boney m. those were the seventies in germany.

I fell for them after seeing *Touching the Void*, and hearing the mountain climber say that as he was freezing almost to death and the end appeared near he couldn't get "Brown Girl in the Ring" out of his head. That made so much sense somehow.

Whereas if it had been "Nightflight to Venus" he would have just drifted away...

Dancer guy: a) didn't sing on any of the records,

this does not matter, he very much made the band. it is noticeable that their slide into shite seems to have really commenced when he was sacked from it.

The Avalanches use "Ma Baker" to great effect on "Live at Dominoes".

The videos are great:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt77ZqE1bCA

I always liked Rasputin and the cover version they did of Painter Man.

Largely dud, but I do like their version of "Mary's Boy Child".

"Never Change Lovers In The Middle Of The Night" is a proper tune.

I'm very fond of "Night Flight to Venus". Plus lots of other stuff, so classic.

Boney M is an office party essential. However, there's many a sad story behind the productions of Frank Farian. For Boney M he had a way of sourcing songs from other, lesser known songwriters... I don't see it in the Frank Farian wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Farian), but I have an old reggae tune on a compilation which is called 'Brown Girl in My Bed' which, apart from a couple of tiny lyrical changes, is identical to the Boney M song 'Brown Girl in the Ring'. Someone once told me that the original songwriter was paid peanuts to sign the rights of the song over to Frank Farian. I can't find anything about that on the web, not with a worksafe google search anyway!

baby's gang w/ boney m "happy song" = CLASSIC.

Moley, Brown Girl In The Ring is distinctly below par Boney M. Were any of the good songs lifted from these kind of writers?

Holy shit, that "Love For Sale" cover is just BEGGING to be "Cover Connection"-ed alongside some Westbound-era Ohio Players cover.

"Moley, Brown Girl In The Ring is distinctly below par Boney M."

Wow, I couldn't disagree more! I think it's one of the greatest things they ever did. And they did a lot of great things!

and they shall never be forgotten:

I Can't Stop Watching Footage Of Turisas Doing Their Pagan Folk Metal Version Of Boney M's Rasputin!

Dirty Vicar, if you don't like Boney's version you really should hear the original. It's super sweet and quite lovely. Actually I think it's called 'Brown Girl In My Room'. I might try and dig it out. According to the wiki, most of the Boney M songs were adapted from somewhere else.

"Rasputin" always got played every year at the staff Christmas party. In Canada it's right up there with "YMCA" as a dance classic.

This group has always been completely unknown in the U.S., right? An internationally varied coalition of co-workers just gasped in horror when I said I might have heard the name before but couldn't name or recognize a song (which led to, of course, an acapella medley of their hits).

Really? They're the best selling disco band of all time!

completely unknown in the U.S., right?

Pretty much. One top 40 hit -- their cover of "Rivers of Babylon," which only reached # 30 in 1978. Three other singles hit the top 100, but none of those went higher than # 65 ("Daddy Cool," "Ma Baker," "Mary's Boy Child/Oh My Lord.") Only Billboard 200 album was the great Nightflight to Venus, a staggering #134 in 1978. So they're basically like soccer -- hugely popular all over the world except in the U.S. Weird, huh?

Begs the question - Milli Vanilli: Classic or dud?

i think there was a thread a few years ago when i posited (to xhuxk, no doubt) who the US equivalent of Boney M would be: meaning ubiquitous and stadium-huge here, yet wholly unknown in Europe. not sure if we ever figured that out.

posted Rune Lindbaek's edit of Boney M's "Silent Lover" on my blog here

http://discohorror.blogspot.com/2008/09/hearts-on-fire.html

Wow, just heard this Farian-produced Gilla Help, Help! LP from '76 (on an Asian pressing, no less). Totally like a secret and super-tawdry Boney M album I'd never even knew existed before, with over-the-top whorehouse lyrics. One song sounds like a cross between "Get Ready" and "You're No Good," plus they cover "Girl From Ipanema." Some samples:

Looks like youtube has Gilla stuff that's not on the album, too -- including an Animals cover, "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place," and a song called "Tom Cat." So maybe they had other albums, as well? Crazy:

They even do their own German language version of "Rasputin," wtf?

While I'm at it, what the heck, pretty sure this is Farian's biggest hit post-Boney and pre-Vanilli, namely Far Corporation's 1985 cover of "Stairway to Heaven," which went to #89 on the U.S. pop chart:

Actually, correction, the Gilla LP says 1978 on the record label and 1979 on the outer sleeve, not 1976. I'm horrible with Asian-language alphabets, but my undeducated guess is that the pressing I got is from Thailand (where both Boney M and whorehouses are extremely popular, I'm told, though I've never been there.

that "Love For Sale" cover is just BEGGING to be "Cover Connection"-ed alongside some Westbound-era Ohio Players cover

Did something real similar to this in my second back, but connected it with the bechained back cover of Isaac Hayes's Joy instead.

Brown Girl In The Ring is distinctly below par Boney M.

Utter horseshit.

i see two cool gilla cd comps on ebay, but they are too pricey for me. i'll look for cheaper copies. maybe amazon. all the vinyl on ebay is from turkey and portugal and italy. all singles though, no albums.

I got mine for free! In a big box that came in the mail from the singer of the Angry Samoans!

my second back

second BOOK, obv

yer a lucky duck.

"Rivers Of Babylon," banned on the West Bank

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100722/ap_en_ot/ml_palestinians_boney_m

RIP Bobby Farrell

rip

Teena Marie and Bobby Farrell, just a few days apart -- What a shitty way to end the year.

he was a steppenwolf

God hates poptimists this week. RIP.

Fitting he died in Russia, though, no?

And the day after Rasputin.

woah

Another disco singer leaves us too soon. Boney M never got their due. When can I get them on mp3.

RIP

Did he actually sing on those Boney M records, or was he just Frank Farian's mime?

Me on on Nightflight To Venus.

just one "on."

You're so so wrong about Never Change Your Lovers In The Middle Of The Night - one of the funkiest mid-tempo disco tracks ever. Love the slap bass breakdown.

I find it very hard to believe that the singers don't understand the words to the songs, looking at the various session singer involved in Boney M:

Liz Mitchell, Marcia Barrett, Reggie Tsiboe, Frank Farian, Madeline Davis, Cathy Bartney, Patricia Schockley, Elaine Goff, Amy Goff.

In view of the continued use of the word "wrong" when applied to somebody else's personal opinion, I have applied to have the word in this context routinely replaced with the word "beetroot."

In that case, you're dead beetroot about Never Change Lovers. Come on, that piano breakdown in the middle 8th is reason enough to <3 Boney M unconditionally.

As with a lot of their other records, Boney M would be good if it wasn't for Boney M.

Then Play Long update gets to their 20-track TV-advertised best of: http://nobilliards.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/boney-m-magic-of-boney-m-20-golden-hits.html

Comfortingly WTF as a semi-camp Eurodisco act, less convincing when they tried to be Bahama Abba.

togther with abba the dudest band on the planet. those two are responsible for the worst music of the 1970s. additionally their music was playing everywhere at the time, you couldn't escape this rubbish. i learnt to dance to rasputin, no wonder that my dancing faculties never ever evolved...

They did a Christmas album that I play every year and I like it quite a bit. So, classic.

You're still wrong about Never Change Lovers in the Middle of the Night, Marcello.

Alex IM is wrong about everything ITT.

DL, it's time for the most important work you'll ever do in your life. Find out about yourself. Get to know yourself. Enjoy life.

plus, jitterbug

However, for Bowie/Official Charts Company and other reasons, we're winding up TPL: http://nobilliards.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/we-cant-go-on-like-this.html

I haven't been following the Bowie hype - why does it break the rules?

The reason is that part of the single sales are tied in with promotion of his new album, i.e. buy the single now and get the album when it comes out. Even if these sales could be separated from actual "single sales" I don't see how (a) OCC can't separate them with the technology available to them and (b) they merit separation in the first place. Hype has been an occupational hazard in the singles chart throughout its entire existence, but I think this is a classic example of an old organisation unable to come to terms with new means of selling music, and if they're going to purposely leave out the nation's most popular song then why should their chart be taken remotely seriously?

I haven't paid attention to the singles chart in well over a decade now, so I can't really answer that one. So do people who buy the single get the album free?

No, people who buy the album get the single now, the rest of the album later. Or you can just buy the single on its own.

I agree with much of what you say about the OCC Marcello (and disagree with you on "Scream and Shout" but let's leave that). But it seems obvious that the singles chart, which started life as a promotional tool, is increasingly unnecessary and irrelevant as a promotional tool. Popular music has outgrown the Top of the Pops mentality, for better or worse. Where the form of "the chart" remains it's only as a nakedly dishonest structure for music TV or radio stations to mould playlists around. the dishonesty itself tho was probably always there.

^

So, this was similar to 'inserting a voucher into the sleeve of the 45" of old?

It's funny, rules change and then they change back..

One time, it was expressly forbidden to get your fan base to buy your single in specific shops to guarantee a high chart entry, then one day John Otway decided to do exactly that with a view to staying within the rules, and got a lot of help and advice from the chart compilers to do exactly that. I guess they liked him..

I can only remember two instances of voucher, one involved the Art of Noise and a press-out voucher on the sleeve of "Close to the Edit" (allowed), and the 12" of "Sheenah is a punk rocker" where you could send it off for a Ramones t-shirt. (for a price I think)

I 'lost faith' when 'Crazy' Gnarls Barkley got 'excluded' by the record company from the chart for no other reason than they 'said so' but continued to sell the single anyway and it had 'phantom' top 10 placings for a long time.

Still, the current method of selling things that the company does not have to 'manufacture' is something the industry has been pining for for decades...

i'm surprised there's no method of determining which copies were given away as freebies and which copies were expressly bought, but if there's not, then it seems pretty reasonable to exclude it from the chart imo

The OCC are saying that they can't distinguish album pre-order sales from single track sales, as the info isn't provided to them by the retailers - but if the retailers did provide the info, they would count the single sales towards the chart.

You'd have thought the record company would have looked into the workability of this whole thing in advance. Bit of a cock-up imo.

Would the individual singles sales be significant enough to make a decent entry in the chart anyway? January record sales are notoriously slow anyway. And didn't Bowie or someone in his organisation think of this? Is the same thing happening in the US, incidentally or are their charts based on airplay as well as sales? Sorry, a lot of questions there.

"The OCC are saying that they can't distinguish album pre-order sales from single track sales, as the info isn't provided to them by the retailers"

i don't think that's right. it's that if you pre-order the album on iTunes you get the single free. and those freebie numbers are being added to the column for actual sales of the single, and can't be disambiguated (supposedly). like i said, it seems like a reasonable decision to exclude the song if the figures are that polluted.

can't they just subtract the number of albums pre-sold? are they a bit thick or something?

I just think they need to consider compiling these charts on the basis of "songs" rather than "singles" as such. Maybe that gets us back to the pre-1952 days of sheet music sales but I'm not totally optimistic that streaming charts will remedy the situation.

In any case, it was the straw that broke this particular camel's back - there are, as I said, a number of other factors contributing to TPL's demise, not least my stroke a year ago but also the generally low number of hits the blog's been getting, the failure of the BiA book, etc. Time maybe to be doing something else with my life.

Well well well...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/jan/10/david-bowie-single-eligible-charts?CMP=twt_fd

hray!

Put this on Twitter, but I'm thinking of what else to do with TPL; I think it would work as a book, like David Thomson's Have You Seen...? but with albums; one 500-word entry per page (different from but related to the blog) and No Received Opinions. Who would publish it, or would it be e-book/Kindle time?

i wd've thought eBooks might be the way to go in terms of stress vs accessibility?

Woebot's just published an eBook of his blog writings:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Big-Book-Woe-ebook/dp/B00AY0D4GI/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&qid=1357828940

I also saw that today. Have a lot of respect for young Matt Woebot; unlike me, he gets off his backside and gets things done. I should follow his example.

I wouldn't now publish CoM as a book because on the rare occasions I look at it now I just put my head in my hands and sigh: "Did I REALLY think that ten years ago?" But I'm sure TPL, given the right sort of push, would.

Speaking purely from a reader's POV, I'd prefer a physical copy, because a TPL book would have future value as a reference work. I imagine it would feel trickier to dip back into an e-book.

had a dream where boney m's "el lute" segued into leonard cohen singing "take this waltz" and it was just perfect

lol

https://scontent-lht6-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/19224896_1534004596673119_486616542806894906_n.jpg?oh=94405d3770789c47475b1a5b232c9c34&oe=59D3ED3B

http://www.superdeluxeedition.com/news/boney-m-complete-9lp-vinyl-box/

boney m are good but vinyl is bad

Nightflight To Venus is a front to back flawless album and this is a hill I'm ready to die on

maybe you can draw strength from the fact that you won’t be dying alone up there

I shazammed something a few days ago that I thought might be some sort of clever disco throwback song but it turned out to be "Children of Paradise" by Boney M. I'd never heard that.

An updated (but still credited) version of "Rasputin" is currently #21 in the UK singles charts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZwYpAh3bXQ

(Oh, and Bimini Bon-Boulash from UK Drag Race S2 is in the video)

I hear this version of Rasputin in the wild every time I leave my house now (not that often but still)