The Strangeloves' I Want Candy, from 1965, is one of those impossibly cool 60s garage/beat singles, all tribal drumming, surf guitars and dumb lyrics. It was covered famously by Malcolm McLaren's jailbait pop band Bow Wow Wow (I posted Kevin Shields' remix of it when McLaren died earlier this year). The truth behind the original single is a little stranger.
The Strangeloves were the creation of a New York songwriting/production team- Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein and Richard Gotthehrer (who went on to produce Blondie and Richard Hell, and started up Sire records with Seymour Stein) . They concocted the story that The Strangeloves were actually from Australia, three brothers who had grown up on a sheepfarm, made themselves rich by crossbreeding a new type of sheep (the long haired Gotthehrer) and this money made it possible for them to form a band. When I Want Candy became a hit Feldman, Goldstein and Gotthehrer found themselves not wanting to perform on stage so they put together a group of session musicians to perform the song live, eventually finding Rick Zehringer while on the road and taking him back to New York to record Hang On Sloopy as The McCoys. It's Bill Drummond-esque isn't it?
I_want_candy (3).mp3
The Strangeloves were the creation of a New York songwriting/production team- Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein and Richard Gotthehrer (who went on to produce Blondie and Richard Hell, and started up Sire records with Seymour Stein) . They concocted the story that The Strangeloves were actually from Australia, three brothers who had grown up on a sheepfarm, made themselves rich by crossbreeding a new type of sheep (the long haired Gotthehrer) and this money made it possible for them to form a band. When I Want Candy became a hit Feldman, Goldstein and Gotthehrer found themselves not wanting to perform on stage so they put together a group of session musicians to perform the song live, eventually finding Rick Zehringer while on the road and taking him back to New York to record Hang On Sloopy as The McCoys. It's Bill Drummond-esque isn't it?
I_want_candy (3).mp3