BUCKS FIZZ – "Making Your Mind Up"

For an eight year old, this was the apex of pop craftsmanship; The hooks, the primary colour costume, the daring and memorable stage routine. We could all follow and emulate this (The verses set up a premise that is resolved in the chorus, encouraging the listener to memorise the whole thing) – and a significant proportion of us bought the single or had it bought for us (up till this and Shakey, we might have generally been aware of the number one songs, but they were actually bought by older brothers and sisters) What is more, it could be verifiably shown to be a superior pop song and performance, having won a competition to prove so.

28 years on, the greatest appeal of this fresh-faced thing is in the arrangement and instrumentation, not just the jittering sax, but the swoopy keyboard bits. There’s an odd thing that goes on in my head whenever I think about this song – it turns into a medly with ‘Here Comes The Weekend’ by Dave Edmunds.

Cheryl Baker was lovely as long as she didn’t open her gob and then we were faced with a cod Eliza Doolittle. But this one not even Higgins could save.

As for “Making your mind up”, well obviously it’s grim but the ripping of the skirts probably won the contest for them, which, I have read, did not exactly amuse the Irish hosts. Little did they know that they would make Eurovision their own annual parade a few years later. And little did we in the UK know that Bucks Fizz would not be going away any time soon.

Ah, the memories this evokes – I still recall a college magazine article about “the moment when the pretty ones in Bucks Fizz rip the skirts off the other two”. And the RHC Rugby Club version: “then you decide that the time’s arrived… for throwing your guts up”.

It was perky, fun and irresistible for a while. Cheryl Baker was making a speciality out of this sort of thing, as she’d been a member of Co-Co, who sang “The Bad Old Days” in Eurovision 1978 (IIRC – I quite possibly don’t). A distinguished career of being everyone’s favourite juvenile fantasy or big sister figure followed. Even now our local ASDA is celebrating the 20th anniversary of her opening the store.

This was part of a wave of acts who were given a lot of credit for “quality pop” – the Fizz particularly on their next number one and “Now Those Days Are Gone”, Dollar for a while, even the Nolans had a string of good ‘uns culminating in “Attention To Me”. Who would have thought that nice David Van Day would end up as one of the bitter opponents fighting the Bucks Fizz Wars years later?

Yes, the Lloyd Webber/Putin interview has set an early lead in the Most Toe-Curling TV Moment of 2009 stakes.

Number 2 Watch – Ennio Morricone’s “Chi Mai”, theme tune from the “Life and Times of David Lloyd George” TV series. An oddity but a goodie.

top 5 bucks fizz songs
1 Land of Make Believe
2 New Beginning (Mamba Seyra)
3 My Camera Never Lies
4 Making Your Mind Up
5 Now Those Days are Gone

SORRY

Light entertainment watch: Eurovision was just the start of a long and distinguished career for the Fizz in TV variety. Highlights included;

DES O’CONNOR TONIGHT: with Lenny Henry, Bucks Fizz, Will Shriner (1982)

HARTY: with Peter Cook, Lord Snowdon, Bucks Fizz (1983)

THE KEITH HARRIS SHOW: with Bucks Fizz, Jacqui Scott, Bernie Winters, Brian Conley, Jim Diamond (1985)

THE LITTLE AND LARGE SHOW: with Bucks Fizz, Lonnie Donegan (1983)

THE MAIN ATTRACTION: with Mike Reid, Charlie Daze, Roy Jay, Adrian Walsh, Gerard Kenny, Bucks Fizz, Georgie Brown, Clare Leach (1984)

THE MONTREUX GOLDEN ROSE POP FESTIVAL: with Elton John, Queen, Madness, Status Quo, The Alarm, Nino De Angelo, Bucks Fizz, Julien Clerc, Thomas Dolby, The Dolly Dots (1984)

THE MONTREUX GOLDEN ROSE POP FESTIVAL: with Elton John, Queen, Rod Stewart, Adam Ant, The Alarm, Nino De Angelo, Bananarama, Bucks Fizz, Julien Clerc, Roger Daltrey (1984)

PAUL SQUIRE, ESQ: with Bucks Fizz (1983)

SIX FIFTY FIVE SPECIAL: with Bucks Fizz (1983)

STARBURST: with Leslie Crowther, Bernie Winters, Bucks Fizz, Frank Carson, Diane Langton (1982)

STARBURST: with Bucks Fizz, Mickey Finn, Roy Chubby Brown, Sheila White (1983)

SUNDAY, SUNDAY: with Bucks Fizz, Thora Hird, Denis Quilley, Ted Rogers, Alan Titchmarsh (1984)

WOGAN: with Richard Branson, Bucks Fizz, Jessye Norman, Daniel J. Travanti, Andy Williams (1985)

this is the sound of Butlin’s redcoats for me – a bit too chirpy and cheesy in large doses but rooted in a widely shared culture. Nowadays that culture has been atomised in the UK – I’m trying to imagine what would be the sound of CentreParcs? Maybe the latest Goldfrapp album?
Subsequent British entries that I can recall largely continue to follow a model based on 50s/60s US pop filtered through UK Stage School routines with a few contemporary production touches thrown in.
What I’ve noticed about other recent European entries is that many of them appear to draw on influences from their ‘folk’ music (as did ABBA) in a way that the UK acts don’t – unless you consider ‘UK Variety’ to be our ‘folk’ music. For that reason I don’t think a RnB type singer (of whatever colour) is ever going to win it.

re #16: that 9th April TOTP sounds a cracker! that PiL performance must have been Flowers of Romance which I remember watching and which is available on youtube

re #8 were you at Maidstone Lee? I knew someone from my Foundation Course who went there in 1979 – to do Fine Art or Graphics

This is truly horrible..Try playing it around in your head for a while and see how irritated its cheap n nasty cheesiness makes you feel…This style of utterly artless manufactured pop would reach its nadir with S.A.W in the late 80s when peoples expectations had been driven to an all time low by ever bigger beats and ever weaker and more numbingly predictable tunes n chord changes..

Makin Your Mind Up has a quality of FORCED joy to me(i.e not joyful at all)..The kinda vibe in this song was exploited to the max by S.A.W -and really,really bad pop ever since..
Altho there was obviously bad pop in the 60s/70s i don’t think you could get away with quite such a forced n manufactured mood and have such a massive hit..
The feeling of joy expressed in songs like Brown Eyed Girl or I Can Hear Music is a totally different,life affirming timeless feel to me to the mood in this song..There’s such an ocean of difference you can feel and thats why i love the SPIRIT in pop.

#20 The last several years I’ve had several conversations – at work generally – in which people have been really quite vociferous about what a fiddle Eurovision is now, how we never win it, etc. I should point out that I’ve never started these conversations: they are thrust upon me as the person in the office who is “into pop”. My officemates I would say are fairly typical middle-class Brits – no perjorative intended!: a mix of Mail, Times, Guardian, Metro readers.

So while I think it’s fair to say the meme was started by chattering classes looking to fill their paper, it’s found “legs” – something about it chimes with people’s genuine concerns, there’s a little bit of real anger mixed in with the amused outrage. I suspect that these concerns started at around the time “Polish plumbers” et al. became national stereotypes.

I don’t think Britain remotely cared about Eurovision BEFORE 1963! Certainly from the mid-80s and through much of the 90s it was held in contempt by much of the GBP, it then turned into a kind of St Patrick’s Day equivalent where Brits (from students up) could discover their Inner Gay, and in the last 3-4 years this role has been combined with anxieties about Europeans and our national rubbishness.

#21 I agree that MYMU has an element of forced joy (what I’d call its tactical side), but whether or not Brown Eyed Girl had that at the moment of recording, its supporters (and karaoke interpreters) have definitely enforced its joy ever since: it’s one of the songs I find really intolerable! (Though not as bad as Moondance!)

My brother and I were big fans of Buck Fizz at the time, if I recall… at the time of this record we would have been 6 and 4. I don’t think I had any conception of there being a difference between them and ABBA. There was a harrowing day though when my brother used his favourite record as a frisbee and it shattered into many pieces (roll on mp3’s, eh); to this very day I remembered this as having been a Bucks Fizz record, but now that I reflect, it may have been “Seven Tears” by the Goombay Dance Band. All pop blurs into one song in the ideal world of our childhoods.

To AndyPandy : There have been many superb entries in eurovision over the years, but sadly the winners were often the most simple, catchy and banal tunes

2 examples below :

Check this shortfolk ditty from 1966

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNdUpLjxrig

and this fabulous bit of progressive pop for Yugoslavia in 1974

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFmVCSJ_1JA

Tom..Agreed about Brown Eyed Girl..But many ‘karaoke classics’ have suffered the same fate due to endless drunken wedding party abuse-‘specially the utterly sublime Dancing Queen (REAL joy!)…..The ‘tactical’ side you mention (the cynical mood-manufacturing of the writing), is akin to the clodhopping ‘hoof the ball forward’ of some 4th division duffer,compared (say) with the magical World Cup Brazil ’70 skill of Holland-Dozier-Holland..

Bucks biz:

The follow-up single (often the true litmus test for Eurowinners) was a strange thing:

“I know it may sound funny but I don’t want to be in love, just want a piece of the action. And no amount of money could ever be too much for a piece of the action”

Shades of early Elvis Costello?

I actually told the man himself my thoughts. “That’s very strange” he said.

The two girls I was in the Meryfield upper playground Bucks Fizz with were Clare and Allison. Clare was Cheryl and Allison was Jade, though between myself and Steven, we never designated the male parts. School cardigans belted loosely with the arms made a perfect substitute for the “over-skirt” for the songs gimmick, though we would often race to that part.

Yeah, I felt like the song was originally called “You’re making it mine”

That’s because it was Bucks Fizz, Dick!

Tom #23 – I hear what you say about Polish plumbers et al (I spotted a Sun cartoon once depicting a globe with three signs stuck in it – at the top “North Pole”; at the bottom “South Pole” and in GB “All The Other Poles” – seriously nasty). But I think the grumbles about Eurovision basically stem from the change in the voting system a few years ago from juries (which could maintain some semblance of impartiality, Cyprus/Greece excepted!) to phone voting (where demographics take over and, for instance, the Turkish-descent community in Germany will always give the Turkish entry a heavy vote). The extension of that is of course the inevitable voting for fellow former-Soviet or former-Yugoslavia nations (wartime hostilities taken into account).

Plus of course, as several people have pointed out, the fact that last year’s Russian entry was a bona fide star already very popular throughout eastern Europe. If we’re not winning it because we don’t take it seriously enough (Daz Sampson and Scooch made Jemini look like Coldplay) then replacing Wogan with Graham Norton is a right old step forward.

Intriguing thoughts about the “tactical side” of songwriting and SAW from Tom and Steve. SAW were pretty upfront about it – use an instrumental version of the chorus as the intro to establish an earworm, and that sort of thing – and 00s reality-show songs are just as shameless. Westlife, Will Young and successive X Factor winners’ songs deploy the “obligatory key change” all the time and it rarely fails. But then what’s the dividing line between cynical mood-manufacturing and writing effective pop hooks? Even the Beatles used to talk in terms of “let’s write ourselves a swimming pool”…

#40, you are number forty …

sorry, make that five of the last eight.

here’s last year’s discussion of eurovision btw

haha also the rightful heir to all that is popular having his say in 2007

Tom at 23 – (notwithstanding The Allisons and a British entrant from circa the late 1950s about a “little birdie” which my dad said had been well known when it was played on Radio 2 once)I’d agree that much like the England football team and the early World Cups Britain was probably a bit sniffy about Eurovision before 1963. Probably for similar reasons too ie “we invented it so are obviously best at it (in the case of football)/we’re obviously the best at it so why should we compete against Johnny Foreigner?” (in music after British pop had conquered the world)etc

But what I was trying to say was that the from the advent of the Beatles/Stones etc and pop as we know it today, and the start of a significant body of opinion starting to take it seriously most of those people (who gradually became ‘serious rock’ opinion)would have looked on Eurovision as showbiz and not worth bothering themselves with. For example from day one of their careers the idea of the Beatles, Stones competing in Eurovision would always have obviously been ridiculous.

Wichita at 46: I couldn’t agree more about Gigliola the ’64 winner when she was only 17 is extremely classy, imaginative and well constructed and her ‘Dio Come Ti Amo’
is one of my favourite tracks of all time. And her vocal range is really something to behold.

And yes especially with the relatively ‘state of the 80’s art’ production of ‘My Camera Never Lies’ Bucks Fizz were positioning themselves squarely in the region of the New Pop World already staked out by Dollar.

Finally I was looking at one of the old Abba threads where it was debated when Abba became “acceptable” to “serious musical” thinking and some said it was as late as the early 90s. I’d say that was way way too late and that was the era of them as camp icons and mainstream press reassessment and completely distinct from serious music opinion.

What I remember as a fan of synthpop/new pop in 81-83 is people like Phil Oakey amongst others often praising them in interviews, the 12inch only import of “Lay All Your Love On Me” featuring in James Hamilton’s column and his ‘serious’ club charts and Blancmange even releasing their own hit version of “The Day Before You Came” in (I think)1983.And by then I don’t remember that being looked on as a particularly surprising move.

#30 and #32 – the Cassetteboy version of ‘Day Trip to Bangor’ is really rather marvellous (though to appreciate it fully you probably have to be at a Bangface night).

I like this song! I also like Cheryl Baker, first known to me as host of Saturday morning kids cookery programme Eggs’N’Baker (which featured Blur’s first tv appearance IIRC). I knew she was in a pop group though – they appeared on the programme every so often, between recipes.