46 YEARS OF YES SIR I CAN BOOGIE BY BACCARA: AN APPRECIATION

There’s a chapter in Will Hodgkinson’s book In Perfect Harmony which touches upon the Euro element in the rise of the cheery chart-topper. How a song like Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep went through variations around Europe before Middle Of The Road — who were a bit like a Scottish hotel cabaret act, who’d have liked to have been a bit heavier but had a nous for melodies and turning their hand to the hits of the day to entertain dining punters, and which lead to a rum series of events where they had a disastrous tour of Argentina and ended up in Rome being the backing band for a Sophia Loren single.

Anyway, a typical ‘returning home as things looked like they weren’t happening and then some bloke from RCA heard it in Rome and long-story-short it was a huge hit across the continent before eventually made number one in the UK and everyone thinking they were an Italian band’, Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep become one of the biggest-selling international hits of all time. There’s also a nice bit about how much in common James Last had with Kraftwerk (about building a new German cultural identity, effectively, as the recent history wasn’t, well, worth celebrating *mouths ‘Hitler etc’*) and how the rise of the package holiday influenced pop.

ANYWAY, this got me thinking about Baccara, as 46 years ago this week Yes Sir I Can Boogie entered the UK chart. Sadly the snobbery towards such magic means that the original, actual release date is lost to time, as Yes Sir entered at number 50. Of the Top 50. So could’ve feasibly been knocking around a few weeks before taking off thanks to custodians of the airwaves. In fact, Radio Luxembourg had been ALL OVER IT for months by this point. I got it as one of the singles I would receive each birthday, so in 1977 I’d have been eight.

1977, as I’ve mentioned before, had various other revolutions available, but I had been definitively turned on by the strange and important sound of the synthesizer with the likes of I Feel Love and Magic Fly, which I will now attempt to claim that Yes Sir belongs in the venn crossover of both: I Feel Love with its forward-facing, world-altering futurism being part of the onset of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s ‘music to bum to’ with erotic moaning and the impression that Donna might have had a couple of fingers up her during recording. Magic Fly: Equally futuristic but French — exotic, strange and somewhat optimistic about space travel in the way that Telstar had been 15 years before — a utopian fantasy in under four minutes. Okay, so the venn isn’t VAST, but Yes Sir combines the sauciness of I Feel Love and the allure of the foreign that Magic Fly had. Disco is, obviously, fucking amazing, but disco in a foreign language is possibly even better.

Also, what did I make of Baccara when I was eight? They seemed like nice ladies with a breathy vocal — like a pair of nice gap-year au pairs. They had the sort of vocal equivalent of Pete Paphides’ notion of kind faced pop stars who’d you trust to babysit you, or take on parental duties if anything should happen to your mum and dad. Baccara were in fact a pair of dancers (Mayte Matee and Maria Mendilo), who were dancing flamenco and singing traditional songs for tourists on the island of Fuerteventura and were spotted by a record company bod who signed them to RCA.

What’s more staggering is that Baccara flew to Germany to record two songs — Yes Sir was literally written the day before they arrived — and hoofed back to Spain to record a TV show almost immediately afterwards. Why that seems staggering is that Yes Sir does not sound like a song that was knocked up fairly sharpish. Oh, and btw, you know who else who went to Germany in 1977 and altered music? That’s right, Mr Piss-in-fridge himself David Bowie. And THAT is why Yes Sir I Can Boogie is basically on a par with Heroes, or at least Be My Wife. Deal with it.

For the glazed-over, slightly xenophobic comedy foreigner-ness about ‘some sexy senoritas and their boogie number’, it’s actually quite a complex and yet multiplex record. The string arrangement is very ‘easy listening goes disco’ but to focus on it in isolation and develop the motifs, it’s not some ersatz photocopy. It’s basically Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra or Chic before Chic got going, and you have to remember that the Germany hit machines were at their best essaying the sounds from across the globe, as Frank Farian was proving around this time with Boney M. Classical musicians would make easy money playing sessions on pop records, and so producers and studios basically had top quality orchestras to hand.

The effect of strings on a disco record adds a certain glamour and sophistication — a sheer glide of elegance and fantasy lifting the listener staring at his Dansette into some adult, magical world of chiffon and tulle and mirrorballs and excitingly-lit areas for dancing. You imagined the artist may have gone dancing after having a light world-class meal at an acclaimed restaurant before heading to the hot nightspot to dance off their Osso Buco and perhaps enjoy some fine wine. Where discos looked like magical spaces — actual boogie wonderlands — rather than the Studio 54 model of doing gak off a naked gay horse (which also sounds incredible but for different, more adult, reasons).

Also, the non-stringed elements of Yes Sir are top sessioning — this is disco as done by experts. People who could actually READ music. There are layers here that lift the song far and above the sort of lowest common denominator ignorance that squares said disco was. Like an ecstatic prog you could actually enjoy.

Then there’s the lyric. That first verse ‘Mister. Your eyes are full of hesitation. Sure makes me wonder if you know what you’re looking for’ makes it sound like Baccara are possibly escorts or even prostitutes. Or that even they’re mid- encounter with a man who can talk it but not walk it. It’s as though this hapless and horny gent has bitten off more than he can chew with the ladies of Baccara. Perhaps they’re being kind and saying ‘look mate, this isn’t happening — do you want a dance instead? I’m good at dancing’. There’s a melancholic tinge there if you look at it from the perspective of Baccara; having seen it all and done it all, they know how to handle these hook-ups and want to do the best for their, um, customer by offering them a dance.

Or, you know, if you think I’m going too deep here, ‘boogie’ could just be a euphemism for fucking. That also works.

However, the line ‘But I need a certain song’ — does that mean it literally is a particular song that moves the ladies of Baccara? That they’ll supply the most ecstatic boogie you could ever witness but only for the 3–8 minutes of the average floorfiller?

Or, again, is the ‘certain song’ a penis? Or some sort of fetish that the ladies of Baccara must involve in this time together otherwise the moment of pleasure with the gentleman is a no-go?

And what level of absolute GENIUS is the second verse? ‘No, sir. I don’t feel very much like talking. No, neither walking — You wanna know if I can dance. Yes, sir, I already told you in the first verse. And in the chorus. But I will give you one more chance’. That’s actual poetry. That level of self-referencing the context of the moment during the moment is the sort of thing songwriters can take years to achieve. Who were the songwriters of Yes Sir? Frank Dostal, who was in the German group The Rattles which some far-outers will know as the The Witch hitmakers. Obviously The Rattles’ long-term plan didn’t pan out long-term, and so he became a songwriter for hire penning numbers for Goombay Dance Band and Father Abraham (yes, the German version of The Smurf Song) as well as Baccara’s other hits. Oh, and Judith Angela’s Super Cool Disco Queen. Dostal married the bassist from a Liverpudlian band called The Liverbirds (and I just can’t even with that fact.)

The music composer was Rolf Soja, whose previous scene was working arranging with light ent-ers Nana Mouskouri and Claude Francois, as well as no end of schlager types. Once Baccara came along, he focused pretty much on them — reuniting with them much later — with a side order of making Classic Rock type albums under the name Orchester Rolf Soja that performed the hits of Elvis Presley among others. No offence to Rolf — well he died in 2018 anyway, so he can’t see this — but he sounds like the least disco person ever.

It is, then, the duality of those worlds that you see why two of the most popular covers of Yes Sir I Can Boogie have been so successful. There’s been Goldfrapp’s version, recorded during their fruity ‘foxes with their cocks-out’ pervery era of Black Cherry, and a more lightweight, purer confection by Dame Sophie Ellis Bextor. In fact if Alison Goldfrapp and Sophie Ellis Bextor combined together, they’d basically be a nu-Baccara. But then there’s already been New Baccara and so it would all just get confusing.

(I’m sorry, someone’s shouting ‘But The Fratellis had a hit with it too’ but that’s not the answer I have on my card.)

Oh and I once played it three times on repeat walking home drunk after a works do. I haven’t played it ‘out’ DJing, but seeing as I’ve reclaimed D.I.S.C.O. at three separate social engagements this summer, I’d advise you to lock down your aerial and keep ’em peeled.

*scans further notes, throws away the ‘it’s been adopted by a football team’ and remembers summary*

OH YEAH and it was literally only like five years ago that I learned that Baccara were Spanish and not in fact French. And it’s when you listen to it with this new information that you can tell with the delivery. The Spanish-ness stumbling over English words instead of the fluidity and nonchalance of a French vocal, where it would be more chanson-y and ‘Look pal, I can boogie or not. Not bothered. I’m having a fag, yeah?’* (*roughly ‘Regarde mon pote, je peux boogie ou pas. Pas dérangé. J’ai une clope, ouais?’)

WELL DONE YES SIR I CAN BOOGIE AND IN ESSENCE, A BELATED 46TH HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU