BONEY M – "Mary's Boy Child/Oh My Lord"

Hmm, this one is so long, because it’s for playing in shops, at home during christmas opening presents, in the background.

So, could this be the first ambient number one?

Their wholly unChristmassy Roman look on that sleeve is endearing, too!

Another Christmas song where I make all kinds of allowances. I love the harmonies on the acapella intro, the vibe is lovely and it does meld well with a totally different song which sounds like a bridge that was written specially for it (I’m guessing that wasn’t a Bobby Farrell vocal, is tat right?). Overall it’s commercial tack, but it’s quality commercial tack and there’s always room for that at Christmas. But bloody hell, is it really almost six minutes long?

In my end-of-year points chart Boney M were chart champions of ’78 ahead of Travolta and Newton-John, with Darts in third.

C4 Top 100 Watch – “Mary’s Boy Child-Oh My Lord” is the tenth biggest-selling single of all time in the UK. “Rivers of Babylon” is number 5, “You’re The One That I Want” number 6 and “Summer Nights” number 21. So four of the last eight number ones are in the all-time top 25 sellers. All those people buying Grease and Boney M instead of, ooh, cleaning the streets, burying the dead etc. (Marcello, that’s a gag not a political statement, so calm down!)

With advance orders of half a million, it was a shoo-in for the 1978 Christmas number one slot; the second time this song had become the Christmas number one, and the second instance of the same song reaching number one in two different versions at two completely different times. On the evidence of this and “Rivers Of Babylon,” dispassionate observers might be led to believe that Boney M were a kind of disco Seekers; morals plus electricity. But they were always even drearier than normal when playing it straight, and it was rather offputting viewing token male member and sometime DJ Bobby Farrell (who played no part in the actual records) camping it up in a Santa Claus outfit amidst tinsel snow while solemnly miming “There is hope for all to find peace.”

There isn’t much to add except that “Mary’s Boy Child” and its unnecessary tacked-on sequel (though nowhere near as tacky as another comparable mangling in the noughties) is sung and produced in the precise manner “Rivers Of Babylon” was sung and produced – glutinous, bland, bloodless and ultimately meaningless. “They realised what they had (until the sun falls from the sky).” Their chart positions began to tail off markedly over the following year – as actual, undiluted disco really made its mark on the charts – but still the camp quotient has preserved selective amnesia on the part of their followers, such that a musical based on their catalogue, Daddy Cool, played briefly in the West End, because hey, they were a laugh when we were at school, except they weren’t, and I’m making no allowances here because this is pop music and not the sodding DHSS. But more urgent observations on camp (in) pop to follow imminently.

The ‘it’s so bad it’s good’ thing – which is actually a kind of prophylaxis against getting called on your taste – is surely about kitsch rather than camp?

The Brooklands Primary School songbook 1977/78 included; Lily The Pink, Yellow Submarine, Puff The Magic Dragon… and – more surprisingly – Maxwell’s Silver Hammer and New York Mining Disaster.

I’m dimly aware of singing Mary’s Boy Child at school at some point. I certainly remember singing Blowing in the Wind in assembly at my CofE First school, which seems quite radical in retrospect; Sloop John B at prep school; and also singing When a Child Is Born in a school concert (in which it was my role to do the spoken bit!). In all cases it was only years after that I heard the originals – probably a decade or more in the case of Boney M.

also re. experiments on offspring:
a) alec guinness last ten days etc.
b) spoiler bunny

Perhaps they sung it very quietly so the headmaster wouldn’t hear.

Dan R @ no 6: When a knight won his spurs was a staple of my primary school assemblies in the early 60s, so not a totally 1970s phenomenon then. It was written by “Jan Struther” (aka Joyce Anstruther), better-known as the author of wartime melodrama Mrs Miniver.

But yes, as a teacher I can confirm that by the late 70s even the token enthusiasm for hymn-singing in assembly had evaporated – even for those hymns that we always sang with gusto because they were damned good tunes. Swerving towards the topic, I also think that Mary’s Boy Child is a nice song to sing in the bath, or to keep me distracted while running, in the winter when the seasonal bug bites me. So I have no real axe to grind either with this or with Harry Belafonte’s 1950s version.

Yes, quite possibly the first number number one designed for playing in the background in supermarkets and department stores. Heavens, it’s mid-August already, they’ll be starting all over again in about three weeks. In 1978 the season was mercifully a lot shorter.

Nothing much more to say about this really. It did its job and it doesn’t make me wince. Beyond that I couldn’t care less. Bring on Debbie I say!

I really don’t like this song. It’s slick, functional and not remotely interesting or engaging. I can listen to Rasputin or Sunny, but this is a step too far.

18 c – this time period (Hand Held to Videotheque) is almost exactly the period I would chose as the GREATEST IN THE HISTORY OF POP MUSIC EVER. I adored what was happening at the time, and I appreciate it even better now. There was never a time when I didn’t see this as Pop’s Golden Age, regardless of the music I was listening to (or playing).
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We have a very exciting year to come right now.

I can confirm that “When a Knight…” (oh, what a knight!) was still being sung in primary schools until the mid 80s at least. i always kind of liked it…

another early memory for me this one, singing along to MBC with my cousins into a tape recorder my grandparents had just bought…

My family possessed the Harry Belafonte version of this from 1957, the year my brother was born, and as I grew up, I fell in love with it, along with the B-side “Eden Was Just Like This”. I was thus perfectly primed for Boney M to revive MBC and correspondingly had a quota of affection for it, which I otherwise would not have had.

Unlike Harry B, Boney M segue the song into “Oh My Lord”, an offering which Doctor King would have labelled a “negro spiritual”, a term which simply would not be used today. Certainly it was nice having such an overtly Christian hymn at number one at Christmas, but again, this today would also now probably be hit on the head by the BBC and the Church of England, whose Guardianista leaders would jump up and down and insist that the record offends citizens of other faiths and one faith in particular, despite no protest at all coming from the good people these white middle class loony tunes claim that they are “protecting” against the evils of life in the very nation in which they have chosen quite freely to live.

Merry Christmas.

Oh, sorry…Happy Holidays!

Looking at the 1978 chart, there are only 2 other Christmas themed records in the Top 40; Father Abraham & The Smurfs, ‘Christmas In Smurfland’ and The Eagles, ‘Please Come Home For Christmas’

Boney M could really do no wrong. Farian found a formula and stuck to it and this definitely worked. They did look hilarious dressed as snowmen however…

What exactly was the point of Bobby Farrell in Boney-M?

“Oh My Lord was presumably a cheap trick to earn Frank Farian 50% of the writing credit.”

How cynical Wichita ! My German friend said it was well known that Farian did the voice of Bobby and probably the girls too. (what was she suggesting?). Is it really more dreary than Johnny Mathis ?

Boney M’s first single “Baby do you wanna bump” is actually superb. Sadly time has proved you often have to make dross to make it big.

P.S. Interesting to see a brief clip of the group boogying on the balcony of St Basil’s in Red Square – which has been copy/pasted into the promo video a few times over, rather in the manner of Bela Lugosi’s precious few seconds of footage in Ed Wood’s Plan Nine From Outer Space. How DID they sing the Lord’s song in a strange (and militantly secular) land?

(Looking at the way that the body movements fail to synch with the track, I suspect that it was by getting the group to sing a different song altogether. Such bold entryism! Beat that for subversion, punk rockers!)

Mathis has style, this is just by the rote sleigh-bell machine on auto and mumble through the track interminably. Mathis does the full on Jackanory with the spoken word and as a nipper I was captivated by the nativity J.Mathis style.

Looking at the wrtiting credits of Dinosaur Jr albums in a later life I often wondered what they would sound like if it was J.Mathis not J.Mascis. Until I realised they would probably sound like Johnny Mathis. Duh!

‘Johnny Mathis’ Feet’ surely, DJP?

There’s a fantastic Divine Comedy cover version of that song.

Playing Sheena Easton and Billy Joel in preference to ‘Bankrobber’ and ‘C30 C60 C90 Go!’ is not a decision that I would take, certainly. That said, Tom Browne/ George Benson/ Gap Band was an impressive run.

Next week a one hour Olympics “special” which is clearly going earlier and later than usual as it “Features hits from Johnny Ray and Gary Barlow”!