HOT CHOCOLATE – "So You Win Again"

Billy, I think that law isn’t at all unwritten, I’ve written about it several times and I’m not alone!

Hot Chocolate could do quite sexy angst, but while I do rather like this one that’s as far as it goes. Could – and did – do better. But there’s the charts for you.

Tom, what are you doing commenting at this hour? Should you be out painting the town red?

Best thing I like about HC is their trademark low pitched (what sounds like) tube compressed guitar lines. I absolutely loved the doom laden ‘Emma’ which should have been a number one but how many times do we regularly say that. I was/am also a fan of Argent so what should be a winning combination turns out a bit of a soggy mess. The guitar is in there but much less effective (although still the best bit) and Errol just sounds sorry for himself. Very much a fixture of the 70s charts (and a few of the 80s) but after their first few hits they started to blow hot & cold although Errol doing his little jig on TOTP was always a warming sight.

It started with a kiss was forever overwritten in my memory by Alan Partridges epic rendition.

I have regularly played Fanfare when DJing, it rules.

Billy – now that’s what you call a Guilty Pleasure! I was also quite a fan of “Fanfare” for much the same reason. The video was shot in the Montreal Olympic stadium in early 1977, hence the chill factor. I shouldn’t really have fond memories of “Fanfare”. Billy, you no doubt remember Cameron hall of residence from RHC: a few years on from this period I was in Cameron for my first year, and in the room next door tome was a total slimeball with a state-of-the-art music system. One night he played “Fanfare for the Common Man” on repeat SIXTEEN BLOODY TIMES while I bounced up and down in bed to the bass line (I was on my own, I should add) about to bounce out of bed like in that Tom and Jerry cartoon.

Now that’s off my chest…

Hot Choc. One of my earliest memories of them is seeing them on TOTP circa 1972 with my older cousin and a couple of her friends, one of whom said “I wouldn’t want to be in a group with coloured people”. I think he said “coloured”: it wasn’t the N-word and I don’t think he said “black”. Either way, at an impressionable age I still found myself thinking “well, why not?”

I think that idea was confirmed by their great run of singles in ’73-74, “Brother Louie”, “Rumours” and “Emma”. The first of these, a “well, why not?” story of an interracial relationship, was pretty bold for 1973 and was covered by a US band called Stories and taken to Number 1 in the States. The voiceover was by the massively influential bluesman Alexis Korner. “Rumours” is one that’s never mentioned in the context of political songs but there’s a definite glance over to Watergate – “there was an old man who lived in a house, a big white house… put your ear to the keyhole Charlie boy, can you hear who they’re trying to screw?”. And “Emma” as mentioned above is a death-disc classic.

Vinylscot is right in that they were the only band to have a hit every year of the 70s (and well into the 80s as well) and their best known song (though only a no.3) “You Sexy Thing” was the only record to reach the Top 10 in the 70s, the 80s and (thanks to a bunch of strippers) the 90s.

I’ve taken this long to get around to “So You Win Again” and all I can say is… it’s OK. Not one of their best. I like the misheard lyric at the start which goes “This twit made one mistake…”

‘Going Through The Motions’ is very nearly as good as ‘Mindless Boogie’, though its not difficult to see why either single failed to become a hit.

I always thought that ‘FEELINGSCALLEDLOVE’ by Pulp owed a considerable debt to ‘Put Your Love on Me’. Both songs have a slightly internal but detached quality to their arrangement, a feeling of something so unexpected having occurred that reality has become slightly askew.

I sometimes sense a slightly gloating quality in Errol Brown’s vocals, which I find unattractive but compelling – “Now you’re lying next to me – GIVIN’ IT TO MEEEE!” and throughout ‘Are You Getting Enough Happiness?’.

As with vinylscot, my attitude towards ELP-doing-Copland is irredeemably coloured by its use as the long-running theme tune to Reporting Scotland (whither Mary Marquis and Paddy Christie, if indeed they are anywhere?) though it’s nicely ironic that both ELP and Yes, bands who never released singles, should have top ten hit singles in the year of punk, which in itself is fairly punk rock.

Um, Diana Ross’ “Getting ready for love” hit in November. If it spent more than 8 weeks in the chart, it would just qualify as a hit in an otherwise hitless year for her.

Which would then mean she had hits every year of the seventies…

He’s right you know…how on earth could I forget her unforgettable 1978 #54 smash “Lovin’, Livin’, Givin'”?

MarkG,

However, Diana Ross is/was not a group!

I have to agree with those who’ve said they’d rather see It Started With A Kiss, which is a bit odd as I’ve always assumed it was just me who held it in such high regard.

And Billy Smart, you’re 100% right about Fanfare sounding vast. Although I’m sure the video must have something to do with it, there’s definitely an inherently “stadium” quality to the record even without those visuals.

Mm, those warren-like concrete corridors, that humid laundrette, collecting letters in the reception pigeon holes, the glare of daylight through the Athlone dining hall…

Most resonant Athlone/pop memory. Sitting in the chaotic room of (in terms of intensity of experience, anyway) the great unrequited love of my life and her girlfriend at about half past eleven, a weekday evening circa November 1994. Mark Radcliffe is on Radio 1 and plays ‘If You Could Love Me’ by Edwyn Collins. Rarely has a song seemed so precisely atuned to my feelings at that specific point in time, and all three of us realise this in unspoken embarrassment.

The building may be gone, but the memory remains!

Anyway, returning to the subject of Hot Chocolate…

Light Entertainment watch: A surprisinly poor showing for such seasoned entertainers;

EDANDZED! EDANDZED!: with Ed Stewart, Hot Chocolate (1970)

THE KENNY EVERETT VIDEO CASSETTE: with Kenny Everett, Michael Aspel, Terry Wogan, Hot Chocolate, Hot Gossip (1981)

THE ROD AND EMU SHOW: with Grace Kennedy, Hot Chocolate, Louise Tucker, Christopher Booker (1984)

SUMMERTIME SPECIAL: with Tom O’Connor, Chuy Fu Dey, Hot Chocolate, Jade, The Nolans, Adrian Walsh (1982)

SUNDAY, SUNDAY: with Hot Chocolate, Katie Boyle, Stubby Kaye, Eric Sykes (1984)

1978’s hit is only a rerelease of ‘Don’t Be Cruel’, though (Yes, I know that it was only ever a B-side originally), which is technically acceptable, I suppose.

Does the transition between verse and chorus in this song remind anyone else of Dancing Queen? Whenever I hear “you’d be leaving any day” I always imagine it launching straight into the violin riff and “you are the dancing queen…”

This song is wonderful by the way. It’s the only Hot Chocolate song I know though.

Personally, I’ve never forgiven Errol Brown for singing at a Conservative rally during the ’87 general election campaign.

Good singles band though.

My father worked at the Department of Employment in the 1980s and – I think – worked with one of the Pacemakers.

As with Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, I recall Radio 1 dj’s talking this one up as a number 1 before it got there. Surely not, I thought, not if Emma and Brother Louie couldn’t do it. What do I know? Certainly SYWA is one of their less powerful songs.

Have they been ill-served by cd? I don’t recall seeing anything beyond Best OF and Best Of The Rest Of (or somesuch). There are some great tracks on the Cicero Park album – the stark-as-hell Could’ve Been Born In The Ghetto also fits into the ‘could’ve been Berlin Bowie’ category.

The BBC’s Soul Britannia managed to ignore them completely, I know they’re not a soul group in the purist sense, but if you’re gonna go searching for BRITISH SOUL then Hot Chocolate are it, taking hints of Philly orch-soul and New Orleans swampiness and fusing it with gothic British melancholy: Emma sounds almost Dickensian to me, with the tortured shriek of “Emmaline!” just as effective as Levi Stubbs’ paranoid cry at the end of Bernadette.

I’m not at home just now so can’t check with the books, but when Diana Ross was suggested I checked several others, and I think Cliffbert missed out in 1978 as well, although I don’t know offhand what he released that year (can check later)

Hot Chocolate are still the only group to have done it (on the singles chart every year of the ’70s)

No hit action at all for Cliff in 1978.

Consulting ‘Chart Stats’ however I do learn for the first time that he released a duet with Janet Jackson, ‘Two To The Power’, a #83 smash in September 1984!

Hot Chocolate pressed many of my positive buttons. A UK answer to the superb Sly and the Family Stone, if in a far more superficial way. “Brother Louie”, for example (as Erithian has remarked), which like “Billy…Hero” had been unceremoniously pinched by a nothing Yank outfit, this time The Stories, who promptly scored a US number one with it, was so much less dynamic than Sly’s “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Honky”; and nothing Errol Brown ever produced came anywhere near “Family Affair” or “Everyday People”, both class pieces (and also both Us number ones), the latter lending the English language the phrase “different strokes for different folks”. That said, Brown nevertheless is a not insignificant figure in British pop culture and by 1977 Hot Chocolate had remained number one-less for far too long. I can remember this point being made on a kiddies’ tv show just before the group performed (actually mimed to) their new single. The presenter (I think it was DLT) said something like: “Well, Errol, I’ve heard this new record already and I think your wait is definitely over”. I initially scoffed at this blatant sycophancy but within two minutes into SYWA I felt that Travis was on the money. We were both right. Excellent single, and I’m curiously surprised that many of you do not agree.

Hot Chocolate have been consistently good and sometimes extremely good. SYWA certainly raised the bar IMHO, as subsequently did “No Doubt About It” and “Put You Together Again”, the melody of which is just lovely and could quite easily have come from the pen of one of the light classical composers.

As DJP observes, “No Doubt About It” was, Brown claimed, based on a real life incident when he (Errol) had an encounter with what he perceived to be an alien space craft: “It wasn’t an illusion…Oh no…No doubt about it!…” There were, sadly, plenty of sceptics who did indeed doubt it, disgracefully suggesting either Mr Brown was telling blatant meltons in order to sell the record or had been munching on too much of the cake which had been left out in the rain by that old rogue Richard Harris. Who knows?

Re 38: Stone me. I can’t trust my fast-fading memory – I would’ve laid good money on Please Remember Me charting low in ’78. So, ’75 and ’78, Cliffy’s only blank years til 2000. Sorry about that.

B-side of Two To The Power, sung by Janet alone, is called Rock ‘N Roll. I’m quite intrigued. Anyone got it?

Back to the Choc’s 3-week stint at the top: other 45s inside the Top 40 but not even making the Top 20 included Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams, Brothers Johnson’s Strawberry Letter 23, and Andy Gibb’s I Just Wanna Be Your Everything. All number ones in a better world, and two of them were in the US.

..

Re. Errol at the Tory conference – the way I remember it, most of the Shock Horror was reserved for Errol’s choice of song.

“Imagine no possessions, it’s easy if you try…”

Was that supposed to be an Awful Warning about what would happen if Labour got in?

In answer to 45 – Aha, if you ask me questions like that, you run the risk of getting a memoir of Proustian density and recall! Let’s see if I can confine my reply to one incident that also has a slight pop framing pop context.

December the 1st, 1994. There is an International AIDS Day disco at the Union, clearly the big social event of the week where everyone will be in attendance. I am filled with an uncharacteristic sense of carpe diem. (Also its not as if she doesn’t know anyway – a few weeks ago I had slipped a letter into the pocket of her bottle green velvet jacket while we were drinking in Holloways).

The day is probably best remembered in pop terms for being the one on which ‘The Beatles at the BBC’ was released, and I’d bought it in Woolworths in Egham. ‘Angel, full of gaiety’ had also been shopping that day, having been up to London with her girlfriend, and returned with a ‘New Wave Of New Wave’ style pair of tartan zipped jeans, which she wears to the union, much to my delight and admiration.

So as the night progresses, I get progressively drunker, and move between the dancefloor trying to cheer myself to ‘Movin’ On Up’ by M People and ‘The Rhythm of the Night’ by Corona, and my room listening to excitingly rough and unfamiliar versions of the likes of ‘I Want To Be Your Man’ and ‘I Feel Fine’. (A once in a lifetime advantage of living on campus is that you can simultaneously have a night out and a night in)

Three pints and many songs past midnight, she is sitting around a table with her pals, a group whom I join. I make my declaration to her, attempting to adopt a vocabulary and attitude of humility and sincerity suitable to my feelings. ‘Angel, full of gaiety’ replies, speaking directly into my ear in that nightclub way.

Her reply is completely inaudible.

I appologise, explain that I couldn’t hear what she said and ask her to say it again. She does so.

I still can’t make out what she’s saying.

I don’t really feel like repeating this pattern again and again into the night – with any sense of affection and significance continuing to recede as conversation becomes more and more impractical – so I strike what I hope is a suitably measured and reasonable expression, touch her shoulder and bid the party goodnight. And then probably listen to some more Beatles in my room.

And that was the only time that we directly discussed my feelings towards her!

I, too, sympathise with you. A very similar thing happened to me in 1988, whe the object of my (long-term) affection said something into my ear in a crowded bar. Although it sounded quite encouraging, I couldn’t be sure enough of what she had said, so I did nothing; the moment passed, and of course nothing ever happened.

How many times have I gone back over that moment… curse my ever-present all-consuming fear of rejection!!!