MANHATTAN TRANSFER – "Chanson D'Amour"

As with Leo Sayer re “Moonlighting”, “One Man Band” and lots of others, so with this – there are several MT songs I’d rather have seen at number one. This is passable enough, a nice smooth-sounding novelty, but what about the lively “Operator”, the sassy “Don’t Let Go”, the jazzy “On A Little Street in Singapore” or the downright sexy “Walk in Love”? Still, a very welcome presence on the chart for a good few years.

Manhattan Transfer are a band that always seemed to be on The Two Ronnies when I was growing up. If it wasn’t them, it would be Barbara Dixon, and you’d have to sit glumly until the dreadful experience was over. The hook is the ‘rat-ta-ta-ta-ta’ and it says something that it is the most enjoyable thing about this single.

It’s hard to hear in this anything of their supposed origins in gay clubs, nor indeed their reputed early passion for jazz. The aura of cocktail-lounge swing-lite makes them the sort of band who, in the disaster movies of the decade, would be playing on a cruise ship before its capsized, standing for prelapserian ordinariness and sumptuous expense. I somehow connect it with Rupert Holmes’s ‘Pina Colada Song’ in the way they both summon up a very particular mid-70s vision of romance and richness and luxury – white tie and tails, champagne in those wide flat glasses, saxophone, the Dunes on the Cape – that only thirty years later seems irretrievably from Another Age. For me, this summons up the frustrating puzzle of childhood, growing up in a world made by a previous generation who feel no need to explain their choices to you. I’d be interested to know why and how this became number 1. I may be tin-eared but I don’t see what the attraction could possibly have been. It didn’t have stars singing it, like ‘Whispering Grass’, or open-hearted good humour like ‘Combine Harvester’, any sense of drama like ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’, or rich enjoyable vocals like ‘When a Child is Born’, just to mention some recent similarly one-off singles.

While I’m not a lyric person, it’s striking that it’s only their being partly in French that disguises the astonishing banality of these lyrics. It’s the effort of middle-brow style to so little end that gives it a soiling feeling of deep stupidity that I can’t find charming or novel. The vulgar whining saxophone that sprawls all over this kills it off utterly.

That all said, the muppets did a delightful version of this, making much of the ra-ta-ta-ta-ta.

I rather liked the concept of ManTran at this time, in much the same way as I actually enjoyed much of Bette Midler’s pre-filmstar musical work. It was an obvious pastiche, but an affectionate pastiche, as they appeared to enjoy what they did, and they never veered very far from it.

I’m very much with Erithian on this one, however, I much preferred their version of “Operator” to this; it actually had some artistic merit to it. “Don’t Let Go”, the follow-up to Chanson was also a better song, written by Jesse Stone (a.k.a. Chuck Calhoun), and later covered by Jeff Lynne among others.

This song (Chanson) was just awful, and the ubiquitous hook didn’t help.

Elsewhere in the chart, while this was number one, Elvis entered the top 10 with “Moody Blue”, his last top ten hit before his death, and there were several songs on the chart far more deserving of being #1, even Ray Stevens and his chicken version of “In The Mood”!

The very concept of this had a dish au gratin baked right onto it. An American group specialising in revival songs from way back when and this time going all French on us, complete with accordion and “ra da da da das” Francais. Big risk. Manhatten Transfer had previously scored to a far less spectacular degree with “Tuxedo Junction”, a Gershwin style swing number, which despite being about a club in Alabama, is served up with pastrami on rye – a Manhattan sandwich, no less. That, I liked.

“Chanson d’Armour” should have sunk like a lead balloon but by cracky it didn’t. And it didn’t because quite frankly it was extremely good. It was bound to appeal to the oldies (my impossible Edwardian father loved it), children took to it, if only for the “ra da da da das” and teenagers appreciated the novelty. A very clever and, above all, happy little piece, this, and I could never criticise it, especially as Manhattan Transfer were clearly enjoying themselves immensely, which they had every right to do with their perfectly commendable “Song of Love”.

This is the vinyl embodiment of late ’70s Radio 2 – an impossibly glam world I didn’t understand at five years old. The song’s ritzy, sickly, glittering sound is the essence of parties my parents and their friends would dash off to, leaving us with the babysitter and a waft of perfume.

For me, it’s too unreal to like or dislike.

i interviewed man tran for the wire! i don’t recall a single thing they said but it wz the most fancy restaurant ever, in high street ken i think

I love Manny Tranny and I’d give this more than 4. Seven, perhaps even eight. This said, now that I know the MT canon much than I did in early ’77 (hanging around Mum’s house in Reading that Easter), I agree that this isn’t the best of many possibilities for a number one – but how many acts can we say that of?

At the time I distinctly remember thinking, what the fuck. It was quite unlike anything else that had hit the charts in my memory. It would, perhaps, have seemed retro even at family Sunday dinners in the early sixties with Two Way Family Favourites on the radio. But it haunted that Easter, and eventually became something I looked forward to hearing.

I first got really hooked on Manny Tranny when I was introduced to their wacky vocal rendering of Joe Zawinul’s Birdland. Their Pastiche album is one of my enduring favourites, including a couple of other hits (On a Little Street in Singapore and Walk In Love) and opens with a similar rendering of Woody Herman’s Four Brothers.

I don’t think any of the punk advocates could seriously maintain a charge of taking themselves too seriously. One thing always comes through when you hear them, that this is singing for the sheer joy of singing rather than for commercial gain (though no doubt there was plenty of that). Janis Siegel in particular has always had a separate career as a top-notch jazz singer, with a voice as rich and zappy as a well-made zabaglione, but the group still stay together.

I – and Waldo – are out on a limb here again but I still say, wonderful stuff.

We’ve already discussed the old school revivalism which hit the charts throughout ’76-7, and I note that Manhattan Transfer had their first UK hit a year earlier with their cover of Glenn Miller’s “Tuxedo Junction.” They came out of a wave of early ’70s camp postmodernist nostalgics which also encompassed Bette Midler and her Harlettes, and the first edition of the Pointer Sisters. Their repertoire was deliberately schizophrenic; wartime ditties like “On A Little Street In Singapore” mixed with straightforward AoR (the quite superb “Walk In Love”), disco (“Twilight Zone”) and even Todd Rundgren (their rather magnificent reading of “It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference”). But “Chanson D’Amour” was their biggest British hit, and provides yet more reasoning for the existence of World Music; it sounds like an ancient Charles Trenet smoocher but in fact is a rather cynical pseudo-Continental simulacrum in the mould of “That’s Amore”; the song was written by the decidedly un-French sounding Wayne Shanklin. The lyric is minimal (“Play encore,” “Je t’adore,” and lots of the central hook “Ra-da-da, da-daa!”) and proves the song to be further fodder for Abigail party non-goers; a pretence of sophistication, but sophisticated only when heard in the next room. And the record is camp only in the sense of: is my life long enough to be told that it’s all just a joke?

something Edith out of ‘Allo ‘Allo might sing to scare off Germans.

Funnily enough, my chief association with this track is of the cast of Hi De Hi repeatedly singing this, possibly at the end of an episode in a small railway station, with much laughter at all the “rat a ta ra ta”s. Resurrection Watch!

The whole cabaret/christopher isherwood angle. On one extend, Manhatten Transfer. On the other, Velvet Underground.

Now that’s a covers album that I would want to hear: Liza Minelli sings The Velvet Underground (arranged like ‘Chanson D’Amour’)

Where did Walk In Love (a straight-down-the-middle 10 in my book) get to in the charts? I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if it actually sold more copies altogether than Chanson d’Amour.

But heavens, everything Manny Tranny ever did oozes camp. It is, it’s true, the far opposite end of the gay spectrum from the hot, dark, sweaty dives playing supercharged dance music (I use the phrase in its most general sense) as the aural equivalent of amyl nitrite. In another life I used to patronise a bar in the Fulham Road that was all louche Manhattan piano bar, smooth and silky, the sort of place where Manny Tranny would fit perfectly. And then one night it was all change – nobody was coming in not clad in leather and nails, and the noise emanating from within mitigated the disappointment.

#26:

“Walk In Love” reached a respectable #12.

#22:

I fear that such an undertaking would now have been superseded by the Mike Flowers Pops’ excellent “Velvet Underground Medley.”

#21 the ‘are you being served’ episode is my main memory of the song too. following a complex (though perhaps less than seinfeldian) chain of events mrs slocum et al ended up miming to a recording of this that got faster and faster as the song progressed. the rat-ta-ta-ta-ta’s resulted in particular hilarity.

Arguably, of course, Manny Tranny took on rock, or at least Miles Davis-ish jazz with a foot in the rock camp, when they took on Joe Zawinul. It’s worth tracking down their version of Birdland if you haven’t heard it – it may not be Rock’n’Roll but it’s great fun and supremely well-executed.

Of course, it’s natural for a group of people who get their kicks from creating complex harmonies together to steer clear of a musical genre which eschewed that sort of thing in favour of raw simplicity.

Quite, since in 1977 Miles was having problems moving anything, poor old soul…

Now, as for Weather Report’s “Birdland” versus 1977’s Actual Most Important/Influential/Punkish Album, viz. Dancing In Your Head…

Never mind all this nonesense, peeps. I’ve just read some uber-exciting news. Popular icon and eternal sex goddess, Anita “Just Loving You” Harris (mother of Wee Willie) is appearing currently at the Grand Theatre in Blackpool in Wodehouse’s “Carry On, Jeeves” along with Victor “Most People Think I’m Dead” Spineti and Derren “It’s Your Funeral” Nesbitt. During the performance, Anita dances a “show-stopping pearls-swinging Charleston”, much to the gratification of the audience populated heavily by block-booked rows of Waldoesque tragicoes, each donning Harry Palmer-style bins and decked out in buff-coloured mackintoshes with extra deep pockets. It would seem unlikely that any of these “admirers” will be admitted to the cast party afterwards, celebrating La Harris’ 66th birthday.

What an entertainer! What a diva! WHAT A GAL!!!!

Not with that ruddy great chain of office hanging round his gregory!!

ManTran was always my “guilty pleasure”. Friends were puzzled, I’d have to go through the whole “good taste/the right influences/doo wop/be bop” thing. I must admit I preferred when they hung with Jon Hendricks to this type of thing, but still in all, they were always under-valued. They just need another “Vocalese” to be back on top of their game.

But this one, well, I get it, but it was still kinda Mom’s music to me.

Yes, welcome to the asylum, Laurel! I had a funny turn when I saw you there but it’s great to see you here and hear what you have to say,

Oy, my parents were quite the Manhattan Transfer fans, so I had to hear some of their output growing up. Had no idea they had a hit outside America, let alone a #1. Best they could get here was #7 with a cover of Boy From New York City.