THE VENGABOYS – "We're Going To Ibiza!"

Isn’t their pronounciation closer to “Eivissa”anyway?

We’re going to eat pizza.

Well, that’s how I heard it. Actually, there are some neat ideas buried in the vid; the electrified Stonehenge, and the Capitol Hill knocking shop. I’m of the generation that still cringes at the thought of Typically Tropical, so this smoothing out and and retrofitting of “Barbados” for the party crowd is, to paraphrase Marcello, like kissing Marmite covered lips.

Trouble is, the execution is still cheap & cheerful, and there’s nothing here to suggest I might want to fly Venga Airways to the White Isle, any more than I’d want to get on board a minibus with The Dooleys to Rhyl. (2)

Another Vengaboys record; but this one is markedly less charming. Although Captain Tobias has changed name and gender to “Captain Kim” and, mercifully, Coconut Airways to Venga Airways – it doesn’t quite scan but anything would count as an improvement – “We’re Going To Ibiza!” is essentially a rewritten cover of “Barbados” by Typically Tropical with all of its “whoa!”s intact, even if one can’t quite picture Our Kim as a frustrated bus driver, and thanks to her idiosyncratic pronunciation the chorus sounds much more like “Whoa! We’re going to eat pizza!” Perhaps this underlines 1999 as another 1975; certainly for number ones (despite the thirty-five different singles which topped the chart this year) it has proved a year of comparable listlessness and inertia. The record brings new meaning to the adjectives “torpid” and “turgid,” even if the inane Vengagrins would be sufficient foundation for a delta, let alone the perhaps unfortunate malapropism of having a party “in the Mediterranean Sea.” That doesn’t quite scan, either.

There a couple of Venga Records I’m prepared to stick up for. The first has already been discussed here, the other (which does make Caribbean references) won’t be. (And doesn’t deserve to be). No, actually, scrap that, “Boom x4″” is the only one whose cheesiness really can be wallowed in even a little.

This, though,l is irritatingly catchy, but is otherwise difficult to defend. (I also just thought to google “Coconut Airways” – blimey. I kind of reckon it unlikely there will be a flight training school in Ibiza (however mispronounced) named “Venga Airways” in 30 years hence, or the song thought with such fondness, or even remembered there, after such a duration of time.)

Very much sub-2 Unlimited pap, if not without a certain entertainment value. But still (3)

whatever (limited) appeal this record has for me is down to the catchiness of the original melody – this sounds like the demo tune from a cheap synthesiser – one of the worse records I’ve had to listen to as part of Popular (2)

a cheap holiday in other people’s ecstasy

Excellent line. A more cynical visitor might suspect you designed the rest of the review to build up to it.

Re:14 That is indeed the correct Castilian pronunciation. Although, as Mark G points out, it’s Eivissa in Catalan, but neither is anywhere near the Venga version.

There’s a very different history to Ibiza and Cancun – Ibiza was a midcentury boho then hippy hangout that eventually helped give birth to the rave movement. Young Brits do love it, but lots of people also go there for 40th birthdays etc – it’s a ‘one last large one’ place.
Cancun is a very successful example of something free-market purists insist never happens – a government-masterminded scheme to bring in foreign currency that actually works, in this case by creating – from scratch – an international resort. (There were – again – hippies hanging out just along the coast).

@14, @15 FWIW, I think Latin Americans pronounce ‘z’ like the English ‘s’, and to their ears the Castilian lisp sounds a bit stuck-up and affected.

Not that that is particularly relevant in the Balaeric Islands, or to the Vengaboys…

More detail than most people will probably want on Spanish “coronal fricatives” here. None of it offering ‘tz’ as an acceptable rendering of ‘z’, it seems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanish_coronal_fricatives#Castilian_.27lisp.27

@13 Seconded!

“Rainbows down the drain” would be a fantastic lyric in another song. The front-ending of the better ideas just highlights how meagre the rest of the song is.

Like a turn-of-the-century Boney M, the Vengaboys made a limited musical spectrum go a very long way, even by the standards of pre-fab Europop. It feels like they were supposed to put a face to a couple of essentially faceless dance hits, then accidentally became a proper pop group.

Ibiza is the fourth of seven top ten singles, all of which are cheap, cheerful and sound more or less the same. I always found the way they ended their chart career quite bemusing though. First they broke their run of top tens with the utterly bizarre ‘Cheekah-Bow-Bow (That Computer Song)’ which appeared to be a less-than-subtle song about the dangers of STD’s ‘sung’ by a heavily vocodered CGI frog. I have to quote the whole lyric because it really is a very strange song.

“I saw you at the disco
Last night in San Francisco
The way you used your joystick
It really made my mouse click
Come sit upon my Laptop
And do a little hiphop
Let’s go into a chat room
And do a little boom boom

I saw you at the disco
Last week in San Francisco
The way you used your joystick
Has really made me feel sick
The doctor checked my hard-drive
A virus in my archive
My disc was not protected
And now I am infected”

Chilling.

After that flopped they wisely decided to call it quits, ending their career with an entirely uncharacteristic ballad ‘Forever As One’. I don’t know if there was an intention to position Kim as the sort of Diana Ross of the group or something (she’s even shot in front of a full Orchestra in a very Ross-esque sparkling ensemble), but the poor girl really wasn’t up to it vocally and it wasn’t a very good song anyway – although there’s something quite endearing about how heartfelt it is compared to their previous efforts.

Anyway it limped in at #28 and that was the end of the Vengaboys – at least in terms of the UK charts. There have been the inevitable reformations, university tours and a collaboration with Perez Hilton a couple of years ago entitled ‘Rocket to Uranus’ which was unspeakably crass even by their standards. Bizarrely, the video used to get heavy rotation at my local gym.

#21 – as this is indeed their last appearance here, it’s worth pointing out that they rereleased one of their first singles to cash in on the Brazilian World cup this year – now with (NSFW) video. Notable mostly for those who only know a particular air in the context of a particular film, who may find the experience a little disorienting.

Until tonight I had no idea this was a cover – I must have missed the Typically Tropical discussion back when it happened – so only ever heard this as a Vengaboys original. Knowing its origins now makes sense of a couple of lyrical oddities (going “home” to the island; not wanting to be a bus-driver), but those didn’t stand out before because they could be read in other ways (Ibiza as the singer’s spiritual home; the bus in question being the Vengabus, parked in the long-term car-park at Venga International Airport while the driver takes a well-earned Venga break).

Although the “eat pizza” reading was amusing (and common in Oz at the time too), I always figured it was the Dutch pronunciation of the name, and liked that: it underlined something it felt worthwhile to recognise, that no Mediterranean holiday destination is the exclusive playground of the British – that in any of these places you’d encounter Germans, Dutch, Swedes, and of course the people who actually live there. Eye-beeza is Ibeeza is Ibeetha is Elvissa is Ibitser.

I’ve already written at length about why this frivolous but fun band meant a lot to me, and won’t repeat myself here, other than to note that I like this song, too, for the same reasons. Thinking of this all along as a Venga original, I never rated it as highly as some of the other tracks on The Party Album!, but for singalongs in proxy Vengabuses in exotic locations this was hard to beat. Logic might dictate a 5, a 4, maybe even less, but logic has nothing to do with it: hearing this takes me back to islands where the sky is blue and the beach is waiting, and that’s good enough for me. 7.

I wouldn’t say “Cheekah Bow Bow” is a masterpiece, but with that vocoder effect on the vocals its cheesy lyrics are hardly its most prominent feature… apart from that, it’s just second-rate Vengaboys. As are most of the songs on their disappointing second album. The only ones that really do it for me are “48 Hours” and “Opus 3 in D#”, the two with flashes of the dancefloor brilliance of the album tracks from The Party Album!

(I must have been pretty tired last night to read “Eivissa” as “Elvissa”. You are always on my mind…)

Rory – the “fucking hell” was more for the video than the music, though the music plays its part.

I wouldn’t agree that the island’s role as spiritual home of club music was ‘fading’ by this point, Tom. On the contrary, summer ’99 was its very peak. Virtually every other TV-advertised dance comp had the prefix ‘Ibiza’. Radio One seemed to spend all summer there. By September I was heartily sick of all things Ibiza and I hadn’t ventured further south than Cornwall (for the eclipse, of course)

Vengaboys on Rikki Lake around this time, Rikki lines up a bunch of ‘Vengaboys’ biggest fans’, “What do you think of the Vengaboys?” she asks a chubby, balding bloke, “oh, wow, they’re just awesome” he says with the enthusiasm of a man who’s just been told he’s got to unblock a backed-up toilet.

I’ve always had a weird soft-spot for the blank delivery of the ‘Woah’ in the chorus. Especially followed by the pizza/Ibiza pronunciation. And the demo-setting synths. Real-time reactions: Christ, that’s some cheap production, not to mention the video. I’m guessing this was rushed out to capitalise on BBBB’s success since it makes even BBBB sound like Bohemian Rhapsody. I’m generally positive on VengaBoys’ Poundland fun, maybe because there was so much dreary, mopey music around this time in both pop and indie. Still, no more than a 5 absolute max.

#31
I had the impression the Ibiza peak in 1999 was very much tied with trance music at that point. As such, though the Vengaboys namecheck the island, ATB was (easily) the better representative of Ibiza ’99 on Popular.

Germany and neighbouring countries might have been an even bigger source of Balearic tourists than the UK – and most of the trance DJs/producers/remixers came from mainland northern Europe. (ATB was German, other big names like Ferry Corsten and Armin van Buuren were Dutch – Paul Oakenfold is the only big-name Brit in the scene I can think of.)

In retrospect, the #1 that best represents late-90s trance is not “9pm,” as I thought, but one of next year’s bunnies…

#34
I was in Weymouth for the eclipse. Cloud cover was erratic, a fairly standard British summer’s day in many ways, and my overwhelming memory was that it felt like a day/night cycle sped up to practically movie-timelapse levels. Which was rather enjoyable in its own right.

Dismal. No fun at all. New Seekers positivity meets Jackson 5 computer generated dance moves.2

I’m trying to think of a more unlikely political protest song and I really can’t.

3 is pretty fair here. I did enjoy B,B,B,B!! but this one is just half-arsed and irritating. And yes, like many others have commented, I remember the “we’re going to eat pizza” jokes of the time.

I thought they’d had more number 1s than this but apparently not – I had a quick skim of their discography and realised I’d forgotten the track Uncle John From Jamaica (a #6 hit) which was a little better than their other later singles. They are still touring and (like many of the acts of this era) can be found at various 90s nostalgia festivals. Fair play to them I guess.

Other chart highlights: Sixpence None The Richer followed up their classic Kiss Me with a cover of There She Goes which made #14 this week. Not quite as good as the La’s original but still rather lovely and a rare example of a proper two-hit wonder.