BROTHERHOOD OF MAN – "Figaro"

When pop’s weather changes, sometimes it’s the mediocre songs that tell you – left beached, suddenly seeming not just below-par but a bit ridiculous. Some records are the sound of a game being up. The hoofy hornsome jauntiness of “Figaro” wouldn’t have sounded good whenever it was released, but not so long before it would at least have fitted in better, just another bad mid-70s pop side, and why expect more? But in the context of 1978 it sounds risible in its complete paucity of ambition (those bastard horns especially). I like this a lot less than the much-despised “Angelo”: a pastiche that runs out of steam beats this horrid evocation of the holiday hustle. “Figaro” – well, “Figaro”‘s brass section – is like being woken at dawn, with a hangover, from an itchy bed by a Butlins Redcoat and made to party till your feet bleed. A single too far for the Brotherhood and their whole aesthetic.

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ALTHEA AND DONNA – "Uptown Top Ranking"

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DJ Punctum

22 July 2008 09:53

What was that about “don’t fuck with the formula”? Well, this one is uptempo – and don’t worry, readers, this is the last one of theirs we’ll have to deal with – but the six-letter Latin name as title and the running out of meagre inspiration after approximately 90 seconds make it a natural sequel to “Angelo.” On this occasion they returned to Tony Orlando and Dawn as a role model, in particular “Knock Three Times,” to tell a merry, brassy tale about a dodgy womaniser who lurks on the beach every morning (“when sun is dawning,” naturally) and who by night “plays guitar/At the disco bar” (Disco bar! In 1978!! No wonder we rushed to embrace Saturday Night Fever!!! This was the alternative!!!!). The cheery chorus rolls along like a three-wheel Boy Scout wagon – “Oh oh Fi-ga-RO! He’s got magic owoo-uh-oh!/Oh oh Fi-ga-RO! He’s a Rome-Owoo-Oh-O!” This after they’ve advised their female listeners to “Keep yourself out of reach” since “He’s out to make a killing.” So there you have it – a jolly out-of-season Club 18-30 singalong about a serial rapist. It really pleases me that we can now wash our hands of the Brotherhood of Man at this stage, as frankly their presence lowers the tone of the otherwise rather distinguished line-up of 1978 number ones; far better to look forward to the next set of British Eurovision winners, who would also rack up a trio of chart toppers, at least two of which were, and are, visionary works of art; and of course, to the next number one in this current sequence, from a group who epitomised everything the Brotherhood of Man could never have hoped to be.

Mark G

22 July 2008 10:03

If DJ P hadn’t added that chorus, I’d have been left in “I know I’ve heard this but I cannot recall it!” limbo.

This being the classic “only as good as your previous single” territory: The awfulness of the cheery chorus probably sank everything they did from here on.

And as implied, no-one really missed them.

Tom

22 July 2008 10:10

Unusually bunny-baiting comment there DJP!

Billy Smart

22 July 2008 10:12

I can’t bring myself to dislike this – though I’m sure that I’d have been at a pop-loving age in 1978 I would have. It’s the out-of-timeness that Tom suggests that make it quite evocative in a social and cultural history sort of way. It reflects people’s unthinking assumptions about what package holidays were like, Mediterranean foreigners being Lotharios, etc.

Crucially, though, it is not something that you can ever really enter into the spirit of, unlike ‘Y Viva Espagna’ (or even ‘Luton Airport’)

As with their previous chart-topper, there is a join the dots pleasure to be extracted in following along while listening to a lame song, duff rhymes, obvious melodies, etc. Looking at the vintage performance on YouTube, this sense of “Will this do?” also applies to the group’s choreography. You can’t imagine that anybody put much thought into this, let alone soul.

The brunette one looked a lot better with short hair, though.

Tom

22 July 2008 10:16

re #1: “Disco bar” strikes me as the most accurate bit of the whole song – it does actually evoke the kind of all-things-to-all-people nightspots that were, and still are in the quieter corners of the Med, generic to the European holiday resort. The Greek island we often go to on holiday has a disco bar which goes by the awesomely apt name of BAR NADIR.

Tom

22 July 2008 10:17

The guy on the left on the sleeve looks like he’s wandered in from a Hieronymous Bosch painting of Flemish peasants being tormented in hell.

lonepilgrim

22 July 2008 10:24

that this should have knocked Uptown Top Ranking off the top spot is a crime against humanity!

Waldo

22 July 2008 10:28

Fuck me!

After Angelo, bleeding Figaro. Right, good. So why break a winning formula? Why didn’t they follow this up with Romeo, Mario, Indio, Stefano, Julio, Leonardo, Francisco, Claudio, Alfredo, Ronaldo, Marcello and fucking Waldo?

I have a better suggestion. Why didn’t The Brotherhood of Man just piss off?!

Leave the brunette….Mind you, on the basis of that photy, maybe not!

DJ Punctum

22 July 2008 10:36

I would have sued if they’d gone that far.

rosie

22 July 2008 10:42

But it’s magnificent! How can one not feel a shiver of delight on hearing non so più? Can anybody not feel that the world is a wonderful place when they hear that stupendous finale to Act II?

Oh, I see…

I’ve never been on a package holiday, and with any luck I never shall, so I don’t know for sure what one is like, but I’d imagine that this sums up the kind of enforced through-gritted-teeth jollity that these things involve. (Actually, although I haven’t been on one, I’ve seen returnees passing through Bristol airport armed with cheap sombreros, stuffed donkeys and cheap guitars, and this seems to confirm my prejudices.)

Now I think about it, what this does remind me of is the days in the infancy of Radio 1 of the “Radio 1 Club”, often broadcast live from the Top Rank Suite (see previous entry) in Watford or somewhere equally gruesome. Radio 1 had been created with part of its aim being that of giving gainful employment to hack members of the Musicians Union, so these events featured cover versions of popular melodies performed by a BBC house band with a BBC hack singer. The effect was pretty much like Figaro and it was anachronistic even then. By 1978 it’s looking like an abandoned and derelict candy-floss stand on a windblown shingle beach.

DJ Punctum

22 July 2008 10:45

Second “Figaro”-namechecking number one, of course, after “Bo Rhap”…and there’s a third to come which, although it does not specifically namecheck Figaro, is said to owe more than something to the opera itself, but SB twitches ominously…

Waldo

22 July 2008 10:52

Rosie – Not only Mozart but Rossini as well, of course…

“You wanna sommathing for the weekend, Senor Waldo?”

rosie

22 July 2008 11:09

Waldo @ 12:

Naturally! Figaro’s here, Figaro’s there, Figaro’s up, Figaro’s down!

Un verissimo barbiere di qualità!

DJ Punctum

22 July 2008 11:24

I’m more of a Sweeney Todd type…

Dan R

22 July 2008 12:00

I hadn’t listened to this for (probably) 30 years until five minutes ago. I suppose I’d always had it in the back of my mind as pleasingly jaunty. It now seems rather despicable. It’s actually quite hard to fathom isn’t it? If Figaro is such a threat to women, why do they seem so cheery about it? And in what sense has Figaro got magic (oh woah)? And if he’s out to make a killind and a score, what is this ‘more’ that he’s going to ask for? Money?

Their performance on the YouTube clip I saw made them look like two married couples on the Generation game trying to mimic the Floaters’ dance routine.

Mind you, if I’m being honest, at the time, aged nine, I don’t think I saw any fundamental difference between this and God Save the Queen. I think until a certain age, music is all blooming buzzing confusion until you begin to separate foreground and background, light and shade, self and other, pick out the features of other minds and hear that under the category of music there are ontologically quite distinct things being gathered together. As the eighties dawned there was a bizarrely juxtaposed pair of number ones, both of which I liked equally, aged 11. But that’s not for here.

Waldo

22 July 2008 12:19

#13 + # 14 – Big difference being that whilst you get simply a drop of bay rum from Figgers, Toddy takes the “apres ski” a touch too far.

Bloody good cut, though!!!!

DJ Punctum

22 July 2008 12:28

Our local barber was Mad Mick. He’d make every boy who came in look like Sid Vicious and halfway through your haircut he’d go out and take a walk in the rain for no good reason. My dad was having none of it so I had to go to Glasgow for a proper haircut.

rosie

22 July 2008 12:38

16: The meat pies are pretty good though. I wonder what rock pundit tastes like?

LondonLee

22 July 2008 12:52

Christ, talk about pearls before swine.

To be honest I can’t even remember how this goes and can’t bring myself to look it up on YouTube for a refresher. Not after I did that with “Angelo” and spent the rest of the day with the damn thing in my head.

While I’m long past being the type who quotes Monty Python sketches it did remind me of this:

Tourist: Yes I quite agree I mean what’s the point of being treated like sheep. What’s the pointof going abroad if you’re just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea – “Oh they don’t make it properly here, do they, not like at home” – and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney’s Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White’s suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh ‘cos they “overdid it on the first day.”

Bounder: (agreeing patiently) Yes absolutely, yes I quite agree…

Tourist: And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentales with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they’re acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you’re not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners.

Bounder: (beggining to get fed up) Yes, yes now……

Tourist: And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there’s an excursion to the local Roman Remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding Watney’s Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local colour and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing “Torremolinos, torremolinos” and complaining about the food – “It’s so greasy isn’t it?” – and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday’s Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Pow ell can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres.

Waldo

22 July 2008 13:08

# 18 – As a hearty trencherman myself (indeed a pieboy), I am similarly curious, although one suspects we are also in the realm of “Titus Andronicus” now.

My barber in Landor Road, SW9, was called Andy the Greek. Yeah, I know, it sounds like a “Fools and Hoses” character but he’s for real. The shop was just like Desmond’s, with Waldo adding an indigenous ingredient to some lively characters of essentially Caribbean and Mediterranean backgrounds who used to just lounge around selecting their bets for the day. Andy himself, though, hardly uttered a word.

Erithian

22 July 2008 13:12

Lee, you do a pretty good impression of the type who quotes Python sketches! But wasn’t this the one where the bloke pronounced some of his C’s as B’s, co it was Boventry and Bontinentales? What a silly bunt.

As for the song, I think we exhausted BoM abuse with the last one. And I managed to erase all but the chorus of this from my memory years ago. Next!

DJ Punctum

22 July 2008 13:50

Thing is, Eric Idle probably agrees with all of that!

Mark G

22 July 2008 14:09

Jasper Carrott’s ‘tribute’ to Eric Idle would fit here too.

Lena

22 July 2008 15:17

Search: The Smash Hits interview with Thatcher where she calls Brotherhood of Man ‘professionals’

Destroy: “Figaro”

Mark G

22 July 2008 15:26

Well, I’m sure they didn’t work for free, as Grandmaster Flash once said.

jeff w

22 July 2008 17:07

I can’t recall this one at all, even with MC’s lyric quotes upthread. I do have a gut antipathy to follow-ups to big hits that too blatantly repeat the formula, though, so maybe I dismissed it at the time and promptly forgot all about it. From the looks of this thread, I did the right thing.

mike

23 July 2008 11:51

Fascinating Figaro Fact: this was voted as the best single of 1978 by the viewers of Magpie (ITV’s version of Blue Peter).

I do quite like the rising and falling bass vamp which lurks within the chorus. So that earns it One Point.

DJ Punctum

23 July 2008 11:52

I hope Tommy Boyd had a right go at them.

LondonLee

23 July 2008 12:49

I’m shocked that Magpie viewers would make such a choice, I always thought of that show as the vaguely hipper cousin to Blue Peter. The first time I ever saw XTC was on Magpie, they did ‘Science Friction’ – can’t imagine them sharing a studio with John Noakes can you?

mike

23 July 2008 12:53

Tsk, kids those days eh? And my generation has the temerity to complain about bassline house at the back of the bus…

I also saw XTC doing “Science Friction” on Magpie! “Damned attractive!” quipped one of the male presenters after it had finished…

DJ Punctum

23 July 2008 13:39

Sounds like the Boydmeister, all right…

Waldo

23 July 2008 15:41

Ah, “Magpie”!

Theme tune sung by Spencer Davis Group and Susan Stranks followed by Jenny Hanley. Hotpants! Woo-Hoo! A little bit more trouser movement for the young fastly-developing Waldo than was to be had from watching Auntie Val stroking Jason, who I always thought was dead.

And then one day, he was.

Mark G

23 July 2008 15:55

Jenny Hanley used to work behind the bar at Playhatch, which is not a kids TV show but a village outside Henley and not far from us here. I think it’s her folks’ pub.

Anyroad, we went, and I had to stop a friend of mine going up and asking her if she was her off Magpie. dense get!

LondonLee

23 July 2008 18:04

Mick Robertson from Magpie came to our school once to film a bit about our Swing Orchestra (Glenn Miller type thing, they made an album!) and I was in a crush of kids around him trying to get his autograph but by the time I got to him the bell had gone for the next lesson and he told me I had to go to class so no autograph. The bastard.

mike

23 July 2008 18:09

Mick Robertson was, I think, the first male Magpie presenter since the show’s inception whom I didn’t fancy. I blame the curly perm.

Waldo

23 July 2008 20:25

I can recall Mick Robertson singing a song called “The Tango’s Over” and going nowhere in a hurry with it. As Mike says, the barnet was to blame.

Lee – We didn’t have a bell sounding to denote lesson changes at my school. We had four pips/bleeps. The final “hometime” bleeps were then followed by the plumby tones of our librarian, Miss Barclay, announcing which kids, who were not already in custody, were warned for court the next day.

LondonLee

24 July 2008 00:41

We beeps too over the school tannoy, it was just easier to say “bell”

Billy Smart

24 July 2008 08:16

The thought’s just struck me – isn’t the chorus ripped off ‘Una Paloma Blanca’?

DJ Punctum

24 July 2008 08:42

No doubt influenced by it, but I don’t think it’s a direct steal.

Mark G

24 July 2008 10:23

I remember Mick Robertson’s follow-up single “and then I change hands” being better.

It was about dancing the tango again, and not the old Boy Scouts joke.

DJ Punctum

24 July 2008 10:28

“Then I Changed Hands,” a former Fab 208 Powerplay.

I saw his album (also called Then I Changed Hands) on tape in a charity shop recently but alas the tape was too mangled to justify purchase.

wwolfe

24 July 2008 14:18

It’s very strange to see Brotherhood of Man as a recurring chart topper here: they were a definitive one hit wonder in America, with “United We Stand.” I’d always thought they were a made-up band, a la Edison Lighthouse, but here I find them a veritable Pop Steamroller. (Well, not really, but still.)

Re: The Survey:

1. When were you born? 1959
2. What was the year you were first regularly interested in what was at #1? 1971. (I listened to casey Kaem’s “American Top 40” every Sunday morning, even going so far as to keep track of how much each song had risen or fallen from the prior week.)
3. Do you still listen to music in the Top 40 on a regular basis (and if the answer’s “no”, when did you stop)? Yes, I do. The main difference from when I began in 1971 to now is the segregation by genre that exists now across the American commercial radio dial. Which is why I’m about to subscribe to satellite radio, where you can pick channels that mix everything together. Much more interesting and fun.

Mark G

24 July 2008 14:24

I’d always assumed the “Brotherhood of Man” to be a dormant bandname that was reactivated for the Eurovision song comp.

But one read of Wiki has a consistent release schedule through the Deram singles all the way up through Pye and onto “kisses 4 me”…

mike

25 July 2008 14:24

And on the Cattini-watch front, it’s time to bid Our Clem farewell for the best part of five years, as his impressive 15-year run of placing at least Number One in the charts each year draws to a close…

DJ Punctum

25 July 2008 14:31

The constant (xpost) was Tony Hiller, who owned the Brotherhood of Man “brand name.”

wichita lineman

25 July 2008 19:51

It took them six whole months to come up with this ‘sequel’. Wild.

A pub conversation the other night was on whether a whole compilation could be made up of Abba-alikes from the late seventies. Angelo and Figaro obviously stake their lowly claims, then there’s the much better Wanted by The Dooleys (who, like BOM, switched from male lead to twin female lead with suspiciously ‘professional’ timing). I have a recollection of Dutch group Luv sneaking into this bag. Must be a bunch more acts across Europe doing something similar?

wichita lineman

26 July 2008 21:40

“I’m rather hoping now that when we get to 1978, we don’t have all this over again, along with ludicrous accusations of “racism” being levelled at people who are merely expressing an opinion with which others disagree” said Waldo in the Typically Tropical thread.

Was he referring to this grotesque Latin lothario? I’d like to think so. What next, stereotyping the Italians as overly defensive killjoys with all the entertainment value of Jack Charlton’s Middlesbrough?

Billy Smart

26 July 2008 21:43

Re: 46 the 2M 2F pop group appears to be a model that comes and disappears for a few years. The most glaring example of this phenomena occurring out of time that I remember was Deuce (“On The Loose!’), much heralded by Smash Hits in the spring of 1995. The kids weren’t convinced.

DJ Punctum

27 July 2008 13:17

#47: no, Waldo had another one in mind which we’ve yet to reach (and which similarly lowers the tone IMO but we’ll deal with that when we get there).

Re. Italians: my office please, 9 am tomorrow sharp.

Tom

27 July 2008 13:40

Typographers’ favourites Luv’ were definitely ABBA soundalikes though I don’t know if they followed the 2M2F formula. They cleaned up in some areas of the continent, acting kind of as the Coldplay to ABBA’s Radiohead, i.e. “they’ve gone all experimental so someone has to step in and play the early funny stuff”.

They were pretty good though – I may just do an MP3 post on them this afternoon.

wpDiscuz

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BROTHERHOOD OF MAN – "Figaro"

ALTHEA AND DONNA – "Uptown Top Ranking"

Popular Demographic Survey

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