11 September 1977 was the last day I was six years old. I have no idea what I got for my 7th birthday. It was a Sunday, so it would have been the day the week’s new singles chart was announced. I can’t tell you if I paid any attention to that broadcast; I would have been birthday-excited, but school was the next day, so no doubt I had an early night. I imagine that, by this point in my life, I was starting to be interested in music. However, the following year I was still searching for children’s records, or specifically the theme song from The Famous Five television show, and getting my mum to use her shorthand skills to transcribe the lyrics to Brain and Michael’s Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs. So, who knows what I thought about music? I guess musical taste evolves; maybe it never stops.
But back to the singles. At chart position 34, and about to spend its very last week on the chart until some remix appeared for a couple of weeks in the late 90s, was a single that I often cite as my favourite record: Boney M’s Ma Baker.
I don’t think it’s really possible to pick a favourite record; it’s so much a matter of mood and moment. But Ma Baker has stuck with me since I first heard it, and it’s the song I’ll probably tell people is the best when they ask, maybe because it’s been in my memory longer than any other song.
In many ways, I should really be calling it the world’s most preposterous song, and it was, at least until the Vengabus came along. The opening “freeze I’m ma baker”, the FBI’s most wanted woman, the whole call-and-response format, the news bulletin: there’s a lot of novelty production going on there. The German Europop disco beat might have been fashionable, but the sound was more studio than stadium rock. Still, it resonated with enough people to reach number two.
Boney M had already had top-five hits with Daddy Cool and Sunny, and had established themselves across Europe as purveyors of disco hits. But by September 1977, Ma Baker was their biggest hit to date. Sure, a few months later they’d top the charts with Rivers of Babylon, and by the end of 1978, Mary’s Boy Child. But in September 1977, this was considered one of the best in the country.
Yet Ma Baker is highly questionable. It’s apparently based on the real Kate ‘Ma’ Barker, whose sons were associated with a Depression-era American criminal gang. But the song takes liberties with the story. These days we know many of the faces who appeared as ‘Boney M’ on television and in magazines were, shall we say, adjacent to the singing (and even the speaking) that you hear from the speakers. No one has credibility when citing this as a favourite song, because no reputable musician or critic can find redeeming features. Even the tune is derived from something else, the traditional Tunisian song “Sidi Mansour”.
I often wonder if that little spoken section, “here is a special bulletin…” was the real start of my love affair with radio. And if the whole gangster tale was the start of my preference for songs that tell a real story as opposed to singing about umbrellas. But, I’m not searching for credibility. Ma Baker is my favourite song. Probably.