"Venus" is a 1969 song by the Dutch band Shocking Blue which
the group took to number one in the U.S. and five countries
across Europe in 1970. Notably covered by girl group
Bananarama, the song returned to number one in the U.S. and
topped the charts in six other countries around the world in
1986. The composition has been featured in numerous films,
television shows and commercials, and covered dozens of times
by artists around the world.
Released in late 1969 as a single from the album
At Home, Shocking Blue's single reached number one on
the Billboard Hot 100 on February 7, 1970. RIAA certification
came on January 28, 1970 for selling over one million copies in
the U.S., garnering a gold record.
The song's lead vocals are performed by Mariska Veres. The
song's music and lyrics are written by Robbie van Leeuwen, the
band's guitarist, sitarist and background vocalist, who also
produced. Van Leeuwen used "The Banjo Song" on
Winkin', Blinkin' and Nod, a 1963 album by The Big 3
with Mama Cass Elliot on vocals, as main inspiration.
A cover of Shocking Blues' song "Love Buzz" was featured on
Nirvana's 1989 release "Bleach"
"Venus" was remixed and re-released by dance producers The
BHF (Bisiach Hornbostel Ferrucci) Team in May 1990, scoring the
group a Top 10 hit in the UK and Australia 21 years after the
release of the original. The remix featured a hip house rhythm
and samples including an instrumental version mixed by Don
Pablo's Animals. The single began with a sample from James
Brown's 1988 hit "The Payback Mix (Part One)." This release of
"Venus" peaked at #4 on the UK Singles Chart and #8 in
Australia in 1990.
"Venus" had been a part of Bananarama's repertoire for
several years before they actually recorded it. The team's
three members, Sara Dallin, Siobhan Fahey, and Keren Woodward,
had the idea of turning the song into a dance music tune, but
they met with resistance from their producers at the time,
Steve Jolley and Tony Swain. Bananarama brought the idea to the
production trio of Stock Aitken Waterman, and it became
Bananarama's first collaboration with them.
Dallin, Fahey, and Woodward had nearly completed recording
their third album, titled
True Confessions,with Jolley and Swain. Stock, Aitken
and Waterman also resisted the idea because they believed that
"Venus" would not make a good dance record. After persistence
by the women, SAW relented, and the result was a worldwide
smash. Bananarama's "Venus" went to number one in the U.S.,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Mexico, and South
Africa. It hit number two in Germany and Hong Kong and was a
top ten success in Italy, Austria, Belgium, Finland, France,
Netherlands, Sweden, Venezuela, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and
their native UK (#8 on UK Singles Chart). It also went to
number one for two weeks on the U.S. Dance chart.
The collaboration on "Venus" led Bananarama and SAW to work
together on the group's follow-up album
Wow!the following year.
A new mix of the track appeared as b-side to the 1989
limited release "Megarama '89" in Germany and France.
Bananarama has since re-recorded the track for their 2001 album
Exoticaand it was later remixed by Marc Almond, with
re-recorded vocals, and included on their 2005 album
Drama.
The music video for the song received extensive play on MTV
and video channels across the world, and presented Bananarama
in various costumes, including a she-devil, a French temptress,
a vampiress, and several Grecian goddesses. In one sequence of
the video,
The Birth of Venus,the painting by Sandro Botticelli,
was reenacted. The video marked a pivotal shift towards a more
glamorous and sexual image for the girls that contrasted with
the tomboyish style in their earlier work. Choreography by
Bruno Tonioli. Music video directed by Peter Care.
Bananarama
Additional personnel
Despite the fact that the heavily controlled Soviet mass
media totally ignored much of Western popular culture, the
Shocking Blue song quickly become a popular hit in 1970s
Russia, especially among street youth akin to Western hippie
and "hooligan" subcultures. Due to the song's simple
arrangement and danceable rhythm, "Venus" was adopted and
performed by thousands of underground amateur performers, both
those who accompanied themselves on acoustic guitar and full
contemporary bands who performed it with electric guitar at
dance parties. Thus, the English language song of a Dutch band
become a prominent phenomenon of Russian urban folklore and was
considered by many an unofficial "anthem of the
generation".
The English language in the song, however, was only very
loosely approximated, and the song was not even known by its
title, "Venus". A countless number of variants of Russian
lyrics existed for this song, but traditionally it was
performed using gibberish or scat singing phonetically inspired
by the sounds of original English lyrics which had become
hardly intelligible after being passed along via repeated
duplicate copying on cheap, low-end tape recorders. In the
Russian variant, the first line of the chorus, "She's got it",
was usually pronounced as "Shizgarah" ("Шизгáра") [
sheez-ga'-rah], and it was this word which became a
commonly adopted name of the song in the U.S.S.R., even among
those who could understand the original English text.
The Canadian teenage drama series program
Degrassi: The Next Generation,which is known for naming
each installment after an 1980s hit song, named a two-part
installment after this song.