The UK number one single from 1975 that didn’t even deserve to chart
The 1980s get a bad rap as the supposed decade of musical awfulness and fashion disaster, but it’s easy to forget what trove of horror the preceding 1970s actually was.
Punk happened for a reason. Aside from all the social ennui and cultural stagnation that lit punk’s insurrectionary fire, the charts had curdled into a barren popscape of unremitting dross, from dodgy disco, saccharine MOR, yacht rock snooze, or the bafflingly bad pap fodder scoring Pan’s People’s antiquated jive during the naff end of Top of the Pops’ Thursday night takeover.
Rock had lost its way, too. While glam had offered the kids a much-needed sugar rush escapism, by 1975, the supposed heroes of the counterculture had curdled to the arena strutting self-parody lapsed into by The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, and the psychedelic frontiers once so evocatively radical had cheesed into Yes’ wizard twattery and the hopelessly boring classical-prog self-indulgences conjured by Emerson-Lake & Palmer.
Even glam’s glitter had grown stale. Former greats Roxy Music and David Bowie had long scarpered to other music realms, Slade and T Rex were running out of serious steam, and the likes of Mud or The Sweet now defined glam’s heyday as the platformed heel and sequin jacketed scene wandered into dead ends of kitschy irrelevance.
In that pivotal musical year where something had to change, one number managed to top 1975’s UK charts that truly marked how dreadful much of the pop landscape was as the decade went through its musical motions five years in.
So, what’s the number one that didn’t deserve 1975’s charts?
They certainly came from a respectable pedigree. Audio engineers for the famed Trojan Records ska and rocksteady label, and lending their studio expertise to records from Jimmy Cliff and Desmond Dekker, Jeff Calvert and Geraint Hughes decided to try their hand at their own original song. Adopting the joint moniker Typically Tropical, and inspired by a recent Caribbean cruise tour, the seeds of their only charting hit were sown.
Dropped in May and leading their sole LP Barbados Sky, Typically Tropical unleashed to the UK pop scene a gratingly irksome slice of cod reggae slap and agonisingly mayonnaise conga trite that presages all the nightmares of a Butlins dancefloor. Amid ‘Barbados’ wet synths and mawkish strings, somehow one can feel the terror of future ‘Agadoo’ sadists Black Lace gestating horribly amid Typically Tropical’s plastic sunshine grim like some Hawaiian-shirted, Cronenbergian body horror.
It’s bloody awful, but the duo’s patois-affected cruise tune still sailed to the top of the charts, holding number one for a week in the summer of 1975, as well as enjoying a healthy chart presence in Ireland, South Africa and Australia.
The cruellest part of Typical Tropical’s sick joke? It wasn’t even the last time we’d hear ‘Barbados’ toothless jaunt, Dutch Eurotrash quartet Vengaboys scoring a UK number one with ‘We’re Going to Ibiza’ in 1999, reworking Typical Tropical one hit wonder with added dollops of migraine-inducing club bounce and heightened, plastic cringe.
