FRAGMA – "Toca's Miracle"

Positiva Records! Those sleeves are just so strikingly gorgeous.

The hookiness of the singing about pushes this above utterly generic into good, I think. “It’s so physical what I need!”: 6/7 [6]

#1 Yes, one of the most iconic designs from my youth.

I always thought the lyric was ‘it’s MORE than physical what I need’ I.e. not just sex but love-making but works equally as an ecstasy reference.

I’m pretty sure that *is* Coco Star in the video actually, and she promoted it on quite a few TV shows at the time. Here she is being explicitly introduced at the Dance Star awards and it’s definitely the same girl.

http://youtu.be/OawFeN0Ts9s

I really like this. I find both individual parts quite dreary, but they come together surprisingly well – Fragma giving a greater sense of urgency to Coco’s mid-tempo minor hit, and she providing Toca Me with a solid hook.

Not one for the ages, but another likeable number one in a year that – for me – has many of them.

7

I remember this as a fun record at the time – too young to recognise either of the sources, and I guess no one was in a hurry to point them out. Do wish I’d known the wonderful DJ name though.

Not a patch on the eventually-released-in-incredibly-watered-down-form Found An Angel (Paul Van Dyk vs Rachel McFarlane).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5bZlM6YYsY

Used to blow the roof off the 2,000 capacity student disco Double Vision I used to play at in Liverpool in the second spring of trance (!)

Technically speaking the claim for the first ever mash-up Number One goes to Beat’s International’s Dub Be Good To Me ten years earlier although I guess it would have required the original SOS Band vocals to be laid over the top of Norman Cook’s Invasion Of The Estate Agents to properly qualify.

Anyway, the tale of the creation of Toca’s Miracle is a little murky. DJ Vimto did indeed make the original bootleg however the full commercial release was created by Toca producer Ramon Zenker himself after Positiva records called him up and said “fuck me we’ve got something massive here, but we need to take ownership of it”. He claims I Need A Miracle was so close in tempo to his own record he barely needed to change a think to make the two tracks fit together.

Oh yes, and Coco’s grumpiness may stem from the fact that singing uncredited on a Number One single never became the springboard to success she was hoping at the time. She’d been a backing singer for East 17 in the 90s before being signed to her own deal. The failure of the original issue of I Need A Miracle in 1997 had derailed her label’s plans for her and she’d been stuck spinning her wheels for two and a half years. This record was supposed to be her salvation, which is why she readily appeared in the video.

Pedants note; both the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles and the Virgin Book of Top 40 Charts give the artist credit as Fragma (Vocals by Co Co).

The video I saw at the time was the one with the indoor soccer game.

Like many dance acts at the time (include at least two soon-to-appear bunnies), Fragma managed to string out the success of this song into a short run of much-poppier hits, including a top ten album.

‘Everytime You Need Me’ (featuring a fully credited Maria Rubia) was a likeable little trance-pop ditty that got to #3 and had a surprisingly solid chart run of its own.

Their third single ‘Alive’ was a little more Europop and got to #4 – although I doubt it sold half of what ‘Everytime’ did, dropping off the charts much more rapidly.

Three hits seems to be the maximum for this kind of act. ‘Say That You’re Here’ got to #25 in December 2001 (I can’t remember it at all), and then aside from ‘Toca’s Miracle 2008’ that was about it for Fragma.

Coco never capitalised on her belated good fortune, while Maria Rubia actually did score a top 40 under her own steam with ‘Say It’ – but only just.

Re: 16. Wow, I never knew that. He’s gone slightly down in my estimation now 🙂 Although it wasn’t a unique path as Emmanuel Top (creator of Heavenly Social 303 favourite Lobotomy, amongst other tracks) was one of BBE who scored big with Seven Days And 1 Week, and Flash.

enjoyable club banger – I really enjoyed the (original) video which provided a pleasingly alternative narrative of female solidarity in contrast to the usual tropes – which unfortunately the 2008 version use instead

Coco Star has been in touch on Twitter – her handle is, excellently, @No1tocasmiracle – promising REVELATIONS. I may try and direct her to the comment box.

The first mash-up number one, and in my opinion a far better representative of the trance sound of 1999 than any of that year’s chart-toppers. And, of course, its components actually pre-dated 1999.

I actually liked “Toca Me” at the time – and being CD1 track 2 on a 1999 Dave Pearce compilation (with Alice Deejay held back until track 7!) was a pretty good vote of confidence.

I also had that compilation, and that points me to how, even though its chart run was in 2000, this song for me, even in this guise, is tied to 1999, the last unequivocally happy year of my life. Tempted to give it an 8, but can’t realistically go above a still-solid 7. Awkward bootleg or not, it’s in a different league of production quality to “Don’t Give Up.”

The second FT Pop Music Focus Group has vanished from the archives, I think, but if memory serves Thong Song won it. (It was then we noticed a potential glitch in the hard science methodology of the focus groups, namely that spending an afternoon drinking and marking pop songs out of 10 works firmly to the advantage of any played later on.)

Something technical about the track that I think I’m the only one in the universe to hear.

The standard radio edit – and I’ve checked both the CD single and Now 45’s version and they’re identical – has some sort of mastering error, which can particularly be heard at the start and Coco’s opening few ‘Hey yeah-eh’s. There’s some very slight dropouts in the backing track and generally it sounds like an mp3 that’s been encoded incorrectly, despite coming from a proper CD.

Listen, however, to the version on Fragma’s album ‘Toca’ and it sounds perfect, although it’s several seconds longer as they’ve added more of a buildup. It makes me wonder if the original was done in a bit of a hurry, hence the slight audio errors, and the version on Toca – released in January 2001 – is properly mastered.

I’d give you a youtube comparison, but irritatingly the majority of the high quality versions are of the (terrible) 2008 remix. But load up Spotify and find one of the 3:24 radio edits and you’ll hear the dropouts clearly at around 15 seconds in when Coco’s vocals start, and then compare it to this HQ rip of the album version at 0:29 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjvEBwe8Q0I .

It’s something that’s bothered me ever since buying the CD single, and when I bought Now 45 I was surprised to hear it there too – is it just me? I suppose if I wanted the perfect version I could just take the album track and edit it so it matches the radio edit…

Coco Star turned up at my sister-in-law’s 30th birthday party about a decade ago. They don’t know each other, so none of us is quite sure how or why this happened. Anyway, there was a karaoke machine and – yes – she put on Toca’s Miracle and performed it to the stunned audience of a ropey Rochdale pub who had hitherto been enjoying beige Billy Joel covers.

She was great. Captivating, even. But I did wonder if she just spent her Saturday nights wandering around looking for karaoke nights to hijack.

Looong time reader, first time commenter here. This was definitely a clichéd “Sound if the summer” for me and seemed a continuation of the chilled-out feelgood vibe of Pure Shores. Despite it’s murky beginnings I can’t help but adore it today as much as I did a decade and a half ago, definitely a high 8 or 9

Re 33: Hemel is real enough. It used to have a great record shop in the old town (I found the first Bill Fay album there for £15 – happy days). Also has a ‘magic roundabout’ where I always think I’m going to crash. Fewer pop stars than Welwyn though, which is, of course, also home to S*M*A*S*H.

Alesha Dixon, who we sadly won’t meet on Popular (short of a future no.1) is from Welwyn

If Hemel Hemstead were not a place, it would really shorten the car journey to my in-laws, so that would be nice

Consider Yourself .. Welwyn.

Stevenage is no Basildon, when it comes to hellish concrete London overspill new towns, in terms of musical legacy. (obvs, Essex > Herts in any many of other ways, too, but)

I really hope that means you are supporting the town where I live, 41, what with our legacy of Depeche Mode and associated acts, Kunt and the Gang and, oooh, loads others.

@40 one of my pet peeves is the use of the words ‘cheeky’ for no apparent reason. ‘Ooh you like a cheeky whiskey before you go to bed’ ‘Let’s have a dirty McDonalds’ et al. My old boss did it a lot, and he was a semi-literate anti-semitic bullying fucktard.

#43, yes, strongly. Yes, DM, yes, Kunt (though I can’t look at the “market square” in the same light since one of his videos depicted it as being full of people chanting one of his more direct and less ambiguous lyrics while undertaking dance moves of a similarly direct and unambiguous nature…), and YES: ALISON MOYET, too. And even, really, 50% of Erasure, the Assembly, etc, etc. Bas is verging on being second only to Sheffield for brilliant electronic pop music in the UK, really.

(Am from down the road ie the A13, and also lived, the other way down the road ie the A13 for a few years, too – both towns mentioned in the Billy Bragg song. Have relatives in both Bas and Steve, I find both places vaguely menacing, but am intrigued as to why Basildon has produced such a wealth of brilliant music, whereas Stevenage, as far as I know, despite having very similar origins and demographics – nowt)

The quality of pie and mash is also far higher in Bas than in Stevo, with the place by Pitsea station being particularity noteworthy. (maybe the overall greater strength of influences from London contributes to an explanation of sorts)

Re46: So for some twisted reason I couldn’t resist knowing more on this – and found an academic paper from Chile suggesting that the average lifespan of a tractor is 22 years, which certainly suggests the economics of the business aren’t that promising. But I suspect in large-scale agribusiness they get through tractors faster than that…
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