Here's another one of our precious one hit wonders...Los Bravos. They were formed in Madrid, Spain in 1965. Their one hit was "Black Is Black",an organ-driven mid tempo tune with some pretty nice horn parts and a very Gene Pitney-ish lead vocal by German-born Mike Kogel. It went to #2 in the U.K. and to #4 in the U.S. charts. Los Bravos consisted of Kogel, guitarist Antonio Martinez, organist Manuel Fernandez, Miguel Vinces Danus on bass and drummer Pablo Gomez.
Tragically, Miguel Fernandez commited suicide on May 20,1967 after the death of his wife Lottie Rey in an auto accident. He was 23 years old.
I remember 'Black is Black' so well. It is part of the soundtrack to my life as a kid in the 60s. Funny how one hit wonders often stick in the memory. At least they don't tarnish their own image by hanging around too long!
ReplyDeleteWell said,M.O. The thing about one-hit wonders is that there are so many of them,they make up a huge chunk of our rock experience.
ReplyDeleteI grew up with this song being played on "oldies" radio (which I was raised on, along with adult contemporary/"easy listening" radio from the '80s). This was one of my very first favorite songs, in fact. I didn't even find out until tonight about who recorded the song, though, because the oldies station was usually crap at identifying the songs they played. Anyway, after rediscovering it, I've already played it two dozen times via YouTube and have been searching for as much info on the group as I can, which has been difficult considering how many crap "lyrics" and "downloading" sites there are these days (that are probably just waiting for you to click on their links so they can stick you with a harmful virus or trojan horse). Anyway, after watching some performance footage of this band, I'm very sad that it was the organist who killed himself. He looked like he was having a grand old time playing "Black is Black" on whatever TV show they were on.
ReplyDeleteIndeed Diane, these days stations can barely be bothered to identify artists until about five songs in. One of my favorite things about the song is the horn arrangement which kind of presages the lslightly later work of bands like The Buckinghams and even later groups like Chicago. I hope you will enjoy browsing the blog and hopefully become a follower.Of course all your comments are super welcome!
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