Where popular music leads, others quickly follow. After Oasis came galloping into existence like the twin-headed horse of the apocalypse, labels quickly snapped up any old ham-fisted cock-sure oiks with a couple of Adidas tracksuit tops and a recently-purchased copy of The Beatles’ Blue album between them, stuck them in a studio, created a scene and flung the tepid results out for the gullible to swallow. TFI Friday was awash with one word groups grabbing hold of the Gallagher’s corduroy coat tails and seizing the opportunity before the world woke up to the fact that, beyond one and a half albums, they weren’t any good. It’s always been this way; Elvis then Cliff. The Beatles then The Hollies. Zeppelin/Sabbath/Purple. Happy Mondays/Flowered Up. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, etc, etc, etc. It still goes on today with Yard Act/Deadletter, Idles/Shame and a million others, all of whom stole something – an idea, a shouty vocal line, a guitar tone – from someone further back on the timeline and managed to find some sort of success of their own.
Baccara – Yes Sir, I Can Boogie
Yes Sir, I Can Boogie is nowadays a Tartan Army party tune, propelled into a collective Caledonian consciousness thanks to dressing room footage of the Scottish football team celebrating qualifying for the last Euros in 2020 (played in ’21, as it would turn out) by congaing their daft selves into a giddy and hysteric state as it rattled its tinny rapture through an iPhone. It’s belted out on trains, murdered in foreign fountains, sung in mass communion following Hampden wins. We’re now at the stage where the song is ubiquitous and synonymous with the Scottish football team. It wasn’t always thus.
The tune came out in 1977 when the Eurovision demographic was mad for Abba and you can hear, in its twin female vocal and string swept disco beat, that its writers took the Swedish blueprint and ran with it like a set of DIY flatpack instructions from Ikea all the way to Fuerteventura to kidnap a couple of local flamenco dancers before bundling them into the nearest recording studio, doors locked until they had a hit in the can.
That sultry, whispered and very European verse line, all hand on hip wiggle and sensuous promise of what might follow – “Mee-ster, your eyes are full of hezi-tay-zhun” – is pure Agnetha and Anni-Frid. That hi-hat, all discofied aerosol shine and four to the floor groove is George McCrae’s Rock Your Baby times ten, itself the key to the beating heart, admit Bjorn and Benny, of Abba’s mighty Dancing Queen. The chorus, when its double-tracked vocal soars out of the verse in direct proportion to the climbing string section is uplifting melancholy and deliriously magic and Abba to the max. It’s fairly easy to understand the correlation between the euphoria of a three goal victory and the song’s super soaraway chorus. That it’s also defiant in defeat is quite handy if you’re a Scottish football supporter these days.
Then there’s the breakdown where the girls ooh and coo and a clavinet line squiggles away like a mid 70s Stevie Wonder himself. And the guitar, especially at the start, which shoots wee lightning bolts of disco funk out into the ether. And a bassline that bubbles away like Bernard Edwards with a bottle of Matey in each hand. There’s a lot going on in Yes Sir..., and although in recent years it’s been kinda cool in an ironic way to like Baccara’s one big hit, I’m transported back to more innocent times whenever I hear it, when Abba, and by association Baccara, soundtracked my childhood with no pretence or embarrassment whatsoever.
Another track heavily influenced by Abba would be 1978’s Substitute by all-girl South Africans Clout.
All the ingredients are there; the understated verse with low-key vocals, the restrained hysterics that you, the listener, know are going to slide up and out into the stratosphere very shortly…
Clout – Substitute
…and there they go. From pre-chorus into chorus, backed by brilliantly produced drums and piano trills, the vocals move through the gears with overlapping Beatles harmonies – “If she doesn’t come back…if she doesn’t come BACK!” – a wee falsetto woah-woah hook between chorus lines for good measure… Substitute is pure Abba and another unashamed favourite from my past.
It was only years later that I discovered, interestingly, that Substitute was a radically-altered cover of an old Righteous Brothers ballad, written by none other than Willie Nelson. What?! Yeah! What, right? Listen here:
The Righteous Brothers sound like they’re wading through ten feet of treacle by comparison, a 45 at 33 rpm, but amongst the slo-mo despair you can hear Wille Nelson, there in spirit through the Brothers’ (but not brothers) countrified phrased twang in their arrangement. Not a patch on Clout’s full-on, late ’70s Abba approximation though. No Substitute, in fact.
Plain Or Pan 