The meanest cat from old Chicago town

Continuing my trip back through the 1977 album charts.

21/08/77 : Love For Sale - Boney M

I've never understood the appeal of Boney M - I'm sure this will be well done for that sort of thing, but I've no clue why so many people went for such Euro-cheese.  Particularly given that album cover - surely that must have scared plenty off?

I guess "Ma Baker", the opening track, is fine (if somewhat cheesy) provided you ignore that it's really all chorus which is repeated a LOT of times.  Cheese and repetition are a strong theme throughout the album - there's just enough variety between the tracks to make it bearable and the general sense of amazement at what you're being served up certainly helps as well.  Apparently "Belfast" was a single (it got to #8) and, quite frankly, I'm amazed the Good Friday Agreement was needed at all - man, people should have just listened to the lyrics and it all would have been over.  The cover of "Have You Ever Seen The Rain?" is also certainly quite something and who thought "Gloria, Can You Waddle?" was a good title for a track?  I'd say it's dated, but I'm not sure anyone has ever really done this sort of thing before or since - it's not quite terrible, but it's also very much not great (and the vocal performance is often very ropey as well).  All in all, my main takeaway is that it's just very odd - and that's before we get started on the album cover...

We're at #13 in the charts this week on their fourth week of a seven week run - this was as high as it got, so I guess it wasn't quite as popular as I remembered.  The top five this week was the Connie Francis best-of, A Star Is Born, Yes, a Johnny Mathis best-of and Fleetwood Mac and the highest new entry was Elvis Presley (#48) - he died the previous week but I think its appearance was a coincidence.

Wikipedia surprises me by telling me that, apart from "Have You Ever Seen The Rain?" (originally by John Fogerty), there are two other covers on the album.  "Love For Sale" (which is incredibly camp on the album) is obviously originally by Cole Porter from 1931 - Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga did quite a nice version in 2021.  And the other one is "Still I'm Sad" which is a Yardbirds track from 1971 - the Boney M version is a lot closer to the original than you'd expect.  There's no word on critical response but the commercial response in Europe was spectacular with it getting to #1 in Austria, Belgium, Finland, Sweden and Germany, with it shifting 500k units in the latter - they do like some odd things over there.

"Customers also listened to" Baccara (yes sir, they can boogie!), Village People, Tina Charles and Ottawan - no Euro-cheese there!  And Boney M are also Euro-cheese, but they're in a special category all by themselves and there's nothing on this album to convince me otherwise - it was certainly "interesting" but no amount of money would make me go back to it.

14/08/77 - A surprisingly successful album
28/08/77 - A fine album elevated by several super quality tracks