Are those guys fer real?  Frontman looks like a gay vampire. [shock]

What are you talking about? That song was the shiznit back around 85/86.
Never saw the video.

Ditto.

[img]http://www.geocities.com/regitorico/taco_a8.jpg[/img]

...looks like !?

Thanks for putting that song in my head, ya Jerk! [torch]

[img]http://www.gocontinental.com/photos2/taco1a.jpg[/img]
TACO Puttin' On The Ritz


If you're blue and you don't know where to go to
why don't you go where fashion sits,
Puttin' on the ritz.

Different types who wear a day coat,
pants with stripes
and cutaway coat, perfect fits,
Puttin' on the ritz.

Dressed up like a million dollar trouper
Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper (super duper)

Come let's mix where Rockefellers walk with sticks
or "umberellas" in their mitts,
Puttin' on the ritz.

Have you seen the well-to-do up and down Park Avenue
On that famous thoroughfare with their noses in the air
High hats and Arrow collars white spats and lots of dollars
Spending every dime for a wonderful time

If you're blue and you don't know where to go to
why don't you go where fashion sits,
Puttin' on the ritz.
Puttin' on the ritz.
Puttin' on the ritz.

The horror, the horror...

Taco's fifteen minutes were up long before many on this board were even alive.

Taco is/was a Dutch guy whose family was originally from the old Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia. I remember reading this in the German music paper Musik Express back in 1983 or so (when his song was popular) that he was half-Dutch, half-Indonesian.

Even stranger is the Bob Hope TV special he was on around that time, along withthe Village People (!!!) and Bonnie Tyler (It's a Heartache) that was presented on a US Navy carrier!![puke]! Anybody remember that one? Talk about about bad taste- the Village People and Taco as recruiting tools (heh heh- he said "tool") for the Navy?..... somebody in the USN recruiting dept. must have been transferred to swabbing decks at a seagull-poop-infested weather station up near the Arctic Circle for that one....

Oh the humanity! [shock]

Did I just step into a time warp? I forgot about that song 15 years ago!

Amen, brother....

You have NO IDEA how many times people at my first civilian job would hum "In The Navy" when I walked into a room....

It was the threat of physical violence and the inability to have their remains found that finally brought a stop to it....

Scritti Politti: Perfect Way.

How about German Peter Schilling's song Major Tom?  This was when I started listen to pop music, when I was in 4th-6th grade.  All this 80's crap on the radio.

My favorite band from the 80's, The Pixies, I never heard until 1997.  They never played them on the radio.  They were ahead of their time, they belonged to the 1990's, you could hear their influence on bands like Nirvana very clearly.
[img]http://users.adelphia.net/~bsturk/pics/music/pixies.jpg[/img]

Well, I'll go you one better.  Their lyrics were influenced by the writings of Nietzsche and Immanuel Kant, and their melodic/harmonic fabric is suggestive of the more complex canvases of Schonberg and Berg. I give you Katrina and the Waves. [:D]

[img]www.dimensional.com/~mwluse/kw.jpg[/img]

Is he dead from HIV yet?

I remember that Taco song...

...unfortunately.

DrMark

BTW, Taco did not write that song.  It's an Irving Berlin tune from the 30's.  It was first popularized by Fred Astaire, but Taco had a better run with it... unfortunately.

Of all people to sing this song, Clark Gable did in some movie where he's up on stage with a bunch of Ziegfeld Follies-type dancers- it was pretty bizarre- can't think of the name of it, though....

BTW Gable was quite the macho sex symbol in his day- because of some movie he was in, where he took off his shirt and didn't have an undershirt on underneath, undershirt sales in the US plummeted. But he wasn't perfect either, and had a hard time living up to his image sometimes. His glamorous wife, actress Carole Lombard, was once asked by reporters how Clark was in the sack.

"Gable's no Gable", she answered.... [:D]

Never heard of them.  What songs would you recommend?

Of course the definitive version of "Puttin' On the Ritz" is the classic Peter Boyle and Gene Wilder send-up in "Young Frankenstein."
[img]http://www.filmwise.com/invisibles/invisible_060/image_07a.jpg[/img]

I don't know if he (Green Gartside is his real name) had any hits here, but in Germany, his big hit was "The Sweetest Girl", which Madness later covered as well.

[

Katrina and the Waves wouldn't know what a chromatic scale is if it came up and bit them in their collective asses.

Groan...

hey coulda been worse- if you lived in Germany in the '80s, you couldn't get away from:


[size=6]NENA![/size=6]

whose big hit was "99 Luftballons" (or 99 Red Balloons).

[img]www.nena.de/nena/hp_g/d_pics/lp09.jpg[/img]

She and her group were ominipresent- on TV, radio, always on tour, talk shows, game shows (!), kids' shows. You couldn't turn on the TV/radio or look at a newspaper or magazine without her puss staring you in the face...and it went on for years.....

[img]http://www.nena.de/nena/hp_g/d_pics/lp04.jpg[/img]

[img]http://www.nena.de/nena/hp_g/d_pics/si02.jpg[/img]

[img]http://www.nena.de/nena/hp_g/d_pics/si03.jpg[/img]

After the worldwide, VERY unexpected success of 99 Luftballons, they pretty much gave up trying to replicate that success in the non-German-speaking world, (couldn't write good Englsh lyrics, heavy accent when singing in English), so the made sure they kept the German-speaking world under their thumb, so to speak....

The band broke up eventually, but she, Nena, originally Nena Kerner, a former goldsmith's apprentice (!), BTW, still kept at it, with the same name, but as a solo act.

She's still at it, twenty years on, and still, somehow, omnipresent- I give her credit for that- where are most artists from the 80's today? She makes children's records, acts in movies, does voice-overs for cartoon films, does duets with Kim Wilde, has her own TV shows (at least a while back), writes books, newspaper columns... love her or hate her (I kinda did both, 20 years ago), she's still around, and making a good living at it. And she's got four kids!

[img]http://www.nena.de/nena/hp_g/d_pics/si69.jpg[/img]

[img]http://www.nena.de/nena/hp_g/pics/nena_bio.jpg[/img]

Unkraut vergeht nicht!

All perspective I guess.

Back in the 80s I was in a club and hooked up with one of the more seriously hot chicks I ever scored and Taco was playing.

I kinda like that song. [:D]

Only one I know of is "Walking on Sunshine."

TACO IS NEWS????

Christ, you have to get out of the cave more often!

They have this new phenom you should check out, called "Hip Hop".

I think it has to do with rabbits.

Ah, the silly 80's.

And that's the only one worth recommending by them....one great tune, and then- pffft- they were gone, never to replicate that success ever again.

K & the Ws had their 5 seconds of fame 20 yrs ago or so...