GOOMBAY DANCE BAND – “Seven Tears”
“Seven Tears” is a platonic ideal of rubbish European pop: if it came out today you could half believe it was some kind of plot by the UK Independence Party. In its three and a bit minutes the poor man’s Boney M hit an impressive number of touchpoints:
- elephantine oompah beat
- comical pronunciation (“if dreams were wriggles”)
- monster key change
- lyrics that make no sense
- repetition of lyrics that make no sense
- repetition of lyrics that make no sense as a spoken word bit, just to underline quite how little sense they make.
Of course all of these – maybe excepting the beat – can and have been components of excellent pop, so there’s something – perhaps the song’s simple-minded earnestness – innocently likeable about the Goombays despite their record’s manifest dreadfulness.
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Tom in FT / Popular • Pop • 1,382 views • Share/Save
I was going to wonder how this managed 3 weeks at #1 in a very competitive pop year but that sleeve has more than answered the question for me.
Well gritted there, Tom’s teeth!
This is pop-by-committee. It’s pleasant to listen to, it has a habit of wriggling inside your head. And yet, like some fundamental particle, when you try to pin it down it there’s nothing there.
There’s something profoundly sad about it. I don’t mean something paradoxical in the song itself, which is relentlessly, almost oppressively cheerful. It’s just that it seems to conjure up profoundly sad and lonely people trying desperately to have a good time. The sound of the Gingerbread social evening in the upstairs room at the pub.
#1, The singer’s fire-eating exploits on TOTP may have helped its longevity at the top.
It scores a mighty 1 from me. (Tom, are you sure you can’t introduce a ‘null point’ joker to be played no more than once by any Popular contributor – if you can, I’m playing it now)
I think this was the first number one from this period that I genuinely did not understand. Not just due to the lyrics (which you genuinely can’t understand) but I didn’t know where it came from. It was not being played on Capital Radio and I had not remembered anything but a cursory Top Of The Pops performance. I remember my sister knowingly telling me it was like Boney M, but to me Boney M was all Rah Rah RasPutin* and did not see this as a poor mans By The Rivers Of Babylon.
Seeing them perform again when they had shockingly made it to number one put in my the Ray Harryhausen Jason And The Argonauts film, and seeing that photo again brings it all back. Of course most pop songs would be improved by the addition of the band fighting skellingtons, but in this one it was both fit AND BE JUSTIFIED. And in this case I would root for the skellingtons.
Whcih would be banned from Eurovision these days in their “trying to protect Putin’s feelings” way.
Haha yes if someone can create a Stork-style icon for it. We should have a once-only Spinal Tap joker too for “going up to 11″.
#2 careful Rosie! There might well be Gingerbread staff reading this! I agree there’s something weird and sad and mildewed about it though.
everyone roots for the skellingtons pete — jason is so dull that the film ends with him jumping into the sea AND THAT’S IT THE END
There’s one other factor you omitted to mention, Tom, which isn’t hinted at on the sleeve but which I’m slightly surprised you missed, as you’re old enough to remember these things by now:
– Unexpected (and totally irrelevant to the song) display of fire-eating by member of the band on TOTP.
Ah, shoot – I knew by the time I’d written this someone would have beaten me to it!!
I remembered the fire-eating on TOTP but for some reason had associated it with the (far far superior) band Imagination!
I actually have no contemporary memory of this song AT ALL, whereas I remember Lion and the next ones well enough. The last week of Lion at #1 coincided with my 9th birthday, so it’s possible that whatever I got for my birthday was so stupendous that I just ignored pop for a few weeks.
(In fact, I think this was likely the case as it was around this time we got a ZX81.)
Tom #8 – could be because Imagination’s “Just An Illusion” was number two at the time – a track which even this discophobe quite rated. Looking further down, a reissued “Layla” was number 4.
I too found this an inexplicable number one, although not as unpalatable as some others find it – it pulled off the McCartney trick of being an instantly familiar-sounding tune, as though it had been around for aeons (probably had, since it was pretty basic). I associate the record with some happy memories, though – let me explain.
Almost halfway through my student days, I was finding that hitch-hiking had rather more pros than cons, and it was becoming a hobby as much as a useful means of getting around. For the RHC Rag Week that year I hit upon the idea of hitching from Land’s End to John O’Groats, since I’d noticed there was a record for this kind of trip in the Guinness Book of Records – it stood at a fraction under 24 hours. When I tried it, it took me some 46 hours, stymied by a driver who dropped me off at Taunton Deane on the M5 just as I realised the northbound services were closed. Then there was the three-hour wait at Sandbach in the middle of the night when I hallucinated that the trucker giving me the thumbs-down was Hitler. But I met some really good people, including a chap who put me up in his guesthouse on the A9 for free – and vividly remember listening to the chart rundown, with the Goombays at the top of it, while waiting for a lift to Glasgow at an exposed roundabout outside Ayr.
The other main thing I remember the trip for – and many of us will identify it with this particular Number 1 – was the invasion of a little-known group of islands in the South Atlantic the day before I set off. As I travelled down to Plymouth there was a military vehicle every hundred yards on the M5 on its way to join the task force.
Tom @ 5: I have nothing against Gingerbread the organisation, in fact I thoroughly admire it.
And now Gingerbread has merged with the more campaigning focused One Parent Families it really is a robust organisation campaigning for lone parent rights, fit for the challenges of the 21st Century.
(I’m not the one who works for them by the way.)
Actually Rosie, this would have been the period that my uncle would have been active on the Gingerbread scene, where he met his second wife, and gained three more children to add to his three girls. Unfortunately the new three were mixed genders, and the phrase Brady never mentioned. I shall ask him if he has any memories of an upstairs room of a pub and the Goombay Dance Band.
Hearing this now, you would assume it to be an October-hit, that summer’s Euro-holiday floor-filler belatedly hitting the charts after everyone’s come home and forgotten how bad it actually was. But this was March; how can it be?
(They did have a summer Euro floor-filler in 79 or 80 with the slightly superior “Sun of Jamaica” which was duly resurrected as the follow up to this)
It was even a year or two too late to cash in on Boney M; you would think. Truly Terrible
If this kept “Just an Illusion” off the top, I hate it even more than I have heretofore (great word, that!)
As Erithian says, I cannot understand how this was a best seller. It sounds like a comedy record to me, as Tom seems to suggest. Since I have no inclination to do the simple research myself, can someone tell me if this was a Europe-wide hit or was it just us who embraced this lunacy?
Wikipedia seems to suggest that the Goombays were massive in Germany EXCEPT for this song.
I have little or no memory of this beyond a vague impression of something in a lets-link-hands Kumbayah stylee.
I can barely summon the energy to suffer it on Youtube (if it hasn’t been affected by their ban).The picture sleeve does not bode well.
European pop – it’s like another country
My only previous exposure to Goombay Dance Band is “Sun of Jamaica”, which I “inherited” from a friend who apparently had hazy teenage memories of listening to it when drinking with his girlfriend. Don’t ask.
Anyway, they are frighteningly similar. If I had heard this played on the radio, I could well have thought it to be “Sun of Jamaica” (which apparently didn’t chart in the UK). I don’t think they had that much success here in Sweden either, we have our own native “dansband” scene which is probably immune to foreign influences – it’s an extremely weird musical subculture made up primarily of middle aged people. Something to investigate if you’re interested in odd Scandinavian exoticism. My friend had some strange German friends in his home town, that must be where he got it from.
welcome jungman (I so want to say ‘I was once in your shoes’ that I have resorted to this self conscious patenthesis) – perhaps you can shed some light on any swedish musical influences in abba that we brits assume are uniquely abbaesque
What the bloody hell is a Goombay Dance Band anyway? Is Goombay a place? I really don’t want to look it up, just the thought of this record is making me lose brain cells.
Speaking of Swedish dance bands
Oh dear, first I have to admit loving The Lion Sleeps Tonight, and now this one too. Obviously 7 year old me had particularly rubbish taste. My main memory of this song is that it was the cause of the first serious argument I remember having with my sister, as I insisted my parents copied this off the radio onto tape, and in the process wiping over her favourite song. Anyway, that aside, I loved this at the time, and looking back on it, I think the fire eater played a big part.
Listening to this for the first time ever: it’s like someone thought Auld Lang Syne wasn’t quite linking-arms enough and required some dribbling vicar vocals over the top. I can see why Cliff thought he might be able to have a better shot at it a few decades later (sorry SB).
As a child I couldn’t get a handle on this song – What’s the narrative point? How is it supposed to make me feel?
I wasn’t yet familiar with the concept of hackwork.
My memories of a stint working for Gingerbread are, oddly, heavy rotation for Spandau Ballet’s Only When You Leave. Which is worse, and sadder in its own way I’d venture, than Seven Tears.
Definite campfire quality to this. Again, Terry Wogan played this ever such a lot – that and the fire eating were enough to elevate it above Imagination. Wot a shame.
I’m afraid that today in the Gingerbread offices we have nothing as exciting as Seven Tears or even Spandau Ballet to listen to, but I can confirm that one of my colleagues has just said the word ‘Splott’ to whoever he is on the phone to.
Also, thanks Pete!
#21: “I understand”…..
This song was sufficient a hit in Australia to the point that I can hum the tune to the first two lines, but that’s it.
Snif @ 26: Come now, it’s such a musical cliché that, given the first two lines, you can hum the rest without thinking.
Detested it then, as now. But I haven’t been able to shake the bugger out of head for the last two days.
TOTPWatch: The Goombay Dance Band peformed ‘Seven Tears’ on Top of the Pops on no less than five occasions;
4th March 1982. Also in the studio that week were; Toni Basil, Gary Numan, Imagination, The Jets, ABC and Tight Fit, plus Zoo’s interpretation of ‘Deutscher Girls’. David Jensen was the host.
18 March 1982. Also in the studio that week were; Classix Nouveaux, Leo Sayer, Japan, Gary Numan and Tight Fit, plus Zoo’s interpretation of ‘Layla’. Steve Wright and Richard Skinner were the hosts.
25 March 1982. Also in the studio that week were; Altered Images, Bucks Fizz, Foster & Allen, The Boomtown Rats and Killing Joke (!). Peter Powell and Garth Crooks were the hosts.
1 April 1982. Also in the studio that week were; Motorhead, Roxy Music, Dollar, Bardo and Status Quo. Yay! – John Peel was the host.
8 April 1982. Also in the studio that week were; Haircut 100 and Chas & Dave, plus Zoo’s interpreatation of ‘I Can Make You Feel Good’. Simon Bates was the host.
Light Entertainment Watch: The Goombay Dance Band were a familiar sight on British TV screens in 1982;
STARBURST: with Bob Monkhouse, Alvin Stardust, Druids, Goombay Dance Band (1982)
SUMMERTIME SPECIAL: with Little And Large, Chas & Dave, Gigi Garner, Goombay Dance Band, The Grumbleweeds, Rudi Schweitzer (1982)
When I was small and this was a hit, I assumed that the lyrics had some kind of deep meaning that I would understand when I was big.
Brian Jacks got fed up of winning “Superstars” and decided instead to sing and eat fire. The brilliantly named “Oliver Bendt” had a solo career and beat Peter Kay to this one
http://i12.ebayimg.com/05/i/001/3a/3d/ed48_1.JPG
K-Tel watch: Oliver Bendt and friends closed out side one of Turbo Trax, following Bad Manners’ Got No Brains and Matchbox’s One More Saturday Night.
Hated it then…. hate it now. Go away, Goombays, please make them go away, somebody!!
in what sense have they not in fact gone way?
I swear that sleeve is getting brighter.
“You called Tash to Narnia. Tash is come. What have you now to say to hm?”