There was a certain time, not so very long ago, when you couldn’t walk into a house in Ireland without tripping over vast piles of James Last or Boney M records. My family home had them. Your family home had them. Homes that didn’t even have record players had them. You’d find them in fields and car-parks, just sprouting out of the ground.
Most ubiquitous of all Boney M releases was (the delightfully named) Night Flight to Venus.
One of my earliest musical memories is of falling over a coffee table while wobbling along to “Brown Girl in the Ring”. About 12 years after that I fell into a Christmas tree while “dancing” to The Pixies. Plus ça change…
It wasn’t all about pain with Boney M, however, it was also about…education. If it hadn’t been for Frank Farian and the gang it might have been many years before I learned that Grigori Rasputin was both “a cat who really was gone” and “Russia’s greatest love machine” (an insatiable, and unkillable, early-20th century disco stud). Thus, while still in short trousers, I became seduced by the impossible sexiness of all things Russian and revolutionary. It’s most likely Boney M’s fault that I find the sight of an embalmed Lenin sexually arousing.
So potent were such memories that when I stumbled across the below a couple of years ago I almost fell over a coffee table (again) with excitement (even though none were nearby).
OK, first of all, there’s that sleeve. And second of all…there’s that sleeve. It’s like Smell the Glove – only real. The reverse is less jaw-dropping, but excitingly reveals that track 3 of side 1 is “Belfast”.
Those who (like me) had experienced their first history stiffy listening to the goatish exploits of the bould Grigori might be drooling at this point. Wondering what nuggets of sex-disco wisdom are about to be laid upon us RE: The Troubles. The results are disappointingly non-lurid and blandly nonsensical.
Here was a golden chance to create something spectacularly tasteless. Something that would attach an erotic charge to their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns. Disco Semtex. Conflict porn. But they fucking blew it.
Ah well. I’ll always have sexy dead Lenin.
(by fústar)
