In the 70’s I liked all of the usual music that guys were into — The Who, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, ELO, the Eagles, etc. Later, I went through a major Punk/New Wave phase. But there was a part of me that absolutely loved ABBA. Heavily imprinted upon my musical memory they are.
http://youtu.be/QfRaBsDhNaI
http://youtu.be/2AEYRgdgU04
For myself, it was a small step to go from ABBA to K3, despite the trio’s lack of English.
http://youtu.be/xcVA4XUdHzo
Karen Damen is my favorite member of K3, and I assure you that my preference has nothing to do with her resemblance to Frida in ABBA!
One more time trying to put my appreciation of K3 into perspective. I once posted the Rubettes’ song “Sugar Baby Love,” but it was lost eighteen months ago when a bug-ridden WordPress plug-in allowed my database to be destroyed, forcing me to restore from a backup. Here again is “Sugar Baby Love.”
http://youtu.be/3X7PvU6qYEA
No, I never cared in the least for The Bay City Rollers, but this I love. If I were going to write and produce a pop tune, you can bet it would sound like “Sugar Baby Love.” Next, ABBA ranks right up there with the best of the 70’s sicky-sweet stuff.
Listen to the 15+ seconds that start at :45 into the song. That’s it! For me that’s the song. Perfection! The same bit is repeated at 1:45. (The song is over a little after 2:30, but they drag it out.) If you think my liking ABBA means I would be inclined to see “Mama Mia!” then you don’t get it. It’s the song itself. How it’s put together, and how it sounds, that I appreciate. Something that’s “based upon it” is of no interest to me at all. In the case of ABBA, the “how it sounds” aspect depended completely upon the girls, Anni-Frid and Agnetha.
And now K3, in a piece I can’t praise enough. “Hart Verloren” pushes all sorts of buttons in so many ways, even with the terrible quality of this video. And I’m speaking as a confirmed disco hater from the 70’s who favored The Ramones, Elvis Costello and The Clash.
http://youtu.be/sEackIhp-O4
The people who create this stuff really know what they’re doing. But the thing that I didn’t get when I first encountered K3, but I certainly do now, is that K3 is successful not because of the formula, but because of Karen, Kristel and Kathleen. Accept no substitutes, of which there are now two sets.
Finally, another reason why I push K3 so much is the fact they’re happening NOW. I caught them before they stopped having hits, broke up, or went into semi-retirement. Not everything I write should be about the pop culture I loved when I was 10-15 years old. There’s also the fact I can’t compete with the big sites that talk about the Beatles, Marvel Comics, etc., and here in America I have K3 practically all to myself as a topic.
For the few of you who are staying with me as I lead up to my post about Petula Clark on Paul O’Grady’s BBC TV show — because that really is what I’m doing, I promise — here’s more about K3 from Belgium.
As I once heard Elvis Costello describe his enjoyment and appreciation of ABBA, I think the best K3 songs are “sprinkled with magic pixie dust.” Studio 100 exported K3’s sound to Germany, with a group called Wir 3 — different women in place of Karen, Kathleen, and Kristel, but everything else looking and sounding the same as K3. Click here for some background.
The song they’re talking about is “Heyah Mama,” which dates back to when K3 was targeting an adult audience of on-the-make 20-something women. Indeed, their first video is downright risqué. By the time of the Wir 3 spin off, K3 had made the switch to catering to kids, so Wir 3 is comparably clean. The embedded YouTube videos on that Belgovision link above are broken, but I’ll fix that here. Note: The first video, with K3, isn’t for kids!
This answers my question about exporting the group and casting different women. Wir 3 just doesn’t click like K3 does. It doesn’t take long when first watching K3 for Karen Damen to stand out, and I don’t see anybody comparable to her, nor Kathleen or Kristel, for that matter, in Wir 3. So the formula doesn’t work the same elsewhere, and I guess it’s unlikely they’ll be transplanted to America; which is just as well, because we wouldn’t want to see the three K’s without their magic pixie dust. 😉
