Golden Nuggets #13: Shocking Blue- Venus

Welcome back to the Golden Nuggets series, installment lucky number 13, where I take a listen to the top song on the Billboard charts from 50 years ago, and share my thoughts. This time, we'll be taking a look at the song 'Venus', by the Dutch group, Shocking Blue. If you're unfamiliar, or need to get reacquainted, you can check out the song here. Now let's dive in.

Many of us may have been first exposed to this song from the '80s cover version by the girl group Bananarama. That one has a lot more busy production, with a lot of electronic drums and synths, while the original is a lot more rock based, with even a little bit of country guitar licks thrown in there. In my research for this song, the instrumental for this was actually lifted pretty much wholesale from 'The Banjo Song' by the Big 3, featuring a pre-Mamas and Papas Cass Elliott, which was itself 'Oh! Susannah' set to new music. So, people who ever say that the Shocking Blue song is the original version is kind of right, but not entirely. This song is like rip off inception, which I had no idea about until recently. This is why I do this series; for fun little facts like this.

Another fun fact: Mariska Veres, the group's lead singer, could not speak English until later, and therefore had no idea what she was singing about. In fact, she sings 'the godness on the mountain top' instead of 'goddess' in early versions of the song because the lyricist for the song as well as the group's guitarist, Robbie van Leeuwen, wrote the lyrics down wrong. This was corrected on later issues of the single.

However, as much as there are some shady things going on involving the music of the song, I feel like the group made it their own. While parts of the vocal melody and chord changes are definitely from the Big 3 song (I'm curious to when van Leeuwen admitted to the 'inspiration', before or after someone confronted him about it), the guitar licks, Veres' vocal chops, and punchier arrangement definitelybrought the track a new fire. I'd suggest you dig up this track, the Bananarama cover, and the Big 3 song (which is for all intents and purposes a reference track with different words) a listen to make up your own mind, but for me, this song is still pretty great.

So, that's it for this installment. I actually learned a decent amount about a song I was aready pretty familiar with, which is a fun side effect from doing this series. I was originally going to compare and contrasrt this song with the Bananarama version, but this angle definitely seemed to be the road less traveled. In today's sue happy climate, I doubt that Shocking Blue would have come away clean. Next time, I'll be lookin at the track by Sly & The Family Stone, 'Thank You (Fallettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).

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