Black Lace were a British pop group from Ossett in Yorkshire; they are noted for their deliberately light weight hits such as "The Music Man", "Agadoo" and "Superman". They also represented the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest 1979 in Jerusalem, with the song "Mary Ann", which finished seventh.
Career
The group, whose biggest hits were obtained as a duo, started out as a four-piece group; Nigel Callaghan was a member. The hit-making duo comprised Colin Routh (now using the name Colin Gibb; born 8 September 1953) and Alan Barton (born 16 September 1953; died 23 March 1995). Colin Routh had an affair with an under-age girl, got into some serious trouble and left Barton to carry on with a new side-kick, Dean Michael. [1] Amongst the songs by other artists that Black Lace recorded were The Sweet's "Wig Wam Bam", The Village People's "YMCA" and Los Del Rio's "Macarena". Some of their more original works, were "Music Man", "Mimic Man", and "Superman". "Agadoo", one of their biggest hits, is often thought to be an original, but is in fact a translated cover version of a French song, "Agadou" which was written by French songwriters after they heard a friend humming a tune he had picked up on holiday in Morocco. A few of the duo's songs (e.g. "Gang Bang" - not the song by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band) are somewhat risqué, but the overall feeling is "seaside postcard" (a la Benny Hill) rather than obscene. They appeared in the British independent film Rita, Sue and Bob Too, as themselves, performing the song as the three star characters danced to it in a nightclub. During their career, which spanned almost 30 years, they were immortalised in the spoof TV show "Spitting Image" in the mid-1980s, with "The Chicken Song" a parody of "Agadoo". They are well known for their catchy, cheerful bubblegum pop style of music, and their music is often played at children's parties. The anarchist collective Chumbawamba, after being told by Radio 1 that their single "She's Got All The Friends" was "too pop", responded by having Black Lace record their own version of the song. The "new version" sounded typical of Black Lace – much more "cheerful" and "pop-like" than the original, which was the whole idea of the joke. In 2003, Black Lace's hit "Agadoo" was named as the worst song of all time by a panel of music writers for Q Magazine. In 1995, Alan Barton died in a bus crash. Routh now uses the name Colin Gibb, and lives with his wife Susie in Tenerife. He regularly performs the "Black Lace Show" around the island.
