The Intro

The first ever number 1 by a female duo, Yes Sir, I Can Boogie is also one of the best-selling songs of all time.

Before

Spanish duo Baccara had only formed the year previous. Mayte Mateos (born 7 February 1951 in Logroño) graduated as a teacher at the Royal Spanish Academy for Arts, Drama and Dance. She started at a television ballet company, where she met fellow performer María Mendiola (born 4 April 1952 in Madrid). They bonded and formed variety show singing and dancing duo Venus and left the company.

Venus garnered a few TV and nightclub appearances but they decided to relocate to the Canary Islands. In Fuertaventura, they were performing flamenco dance and Spanish songs for mostly German tourists at the Tres Islas Hotel. Among the guests was Leon Deane, manager of the German subsidiary of RCA Records. He invited them to Hamburg to meet producer and composer Rolf Soja.

Soja remodelled Venus, developing their stage act, recruiting backing musicians and renaming them Baccara. This was a reference to the black rose, which Soja compared the duo to due to their dark Spanish looks. He took their flamenco stylings and updated them for the disco era, which was growing ever more popular. By suggesting Mateos, who would normally sing lead, in black and Mendiola in white, he created a striking image. Together with their sexy groans, Baccara fitted in nicely with the era in which Donna Summer had released the filthy epic Love to Love You Baby.

Soja co-wrote their debut single Yes Sir, I Can Boogie with Frank Dostal. In the 60s, Dostal had been singer with German rock group The Rattles.

Review

I was very surprised to see this single ranked so highly among the bestselling of all time. In my mind, Yes Sir, I Can Boogie was a minor entry in the canon of 70s disco hits, but it was very popular around Europe, reaching the top of the charts in Ireland, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.

It’s not the most inspiring of tracks. The steamy moans at the start bring to mind Summer’s classic and the music is almost a complete lift of Don’t Leave Me This Way by Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes. Baccara’s number 1 is a low rent combination of the two.

The lyrics, written only the night before the duo recorded, are rather seedy and desperate, depending on how you read them. Is this some kind of dirty game, with the ‘Sir’ in question in charge, and ‘boogie woogie’ meaning something rather less innocent? Incidentally, I hate the words ‘boogie woogie’, which doesn’t help my enjoyment. Unless we are meant to take them on face value and Baccara really are just exclaiming about how great they are in the disco. The way Baccara sing this in a broken English makes it both grubby and rather comical at the same time.

Having said that, there are a couple of lines which are genius: ‘Yes sir, already told you in the first verse and in the chorus/But I will give you one more chance…’. The chorus, particularly the string stabs, are pretty memorable. But for me there are plenty of other better disco tracks out there.

After

Baccara’s eponymous debut LP followed and next single Sorry, I’m a Lady (great title) was another hit, reaching number 1 in many European countries and peaking at eight in the UK. Third single Darling did OK in Europe but the hits then dried up. Their second album Light My Fire was released in 1978 and one single, Parlez-vous Francais? was selected to be Luxembourg’s entry in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest, where it placed seventh. Baccara appeared weekly on French singing star Sacha Distel’s TV series in the UK. Third album Colours failed to chart anywhere in 1979.

Such was Baccara’s fall from grace that their final album Bad Boys didn’t even get released here in 1981. Disco was dying and tensions were high after a disagreement between Mateos and Mendiola over the vocal mix of the single Sleepy-Time-Toy the previous year. As a result of the fall-out neither Soja or Dostal were involved in Baccara’s last album. They decided to go their separate ways.

Following the split Mateos began working with Soja on solo material. She reformed Baccara in 1983 with Marisa Pérez. This pairing was short-lived and Mateos went through umpteen partners across Europe’s light entertainment circuit. In 1999 Mateos and Cristina Sevilla released a reworked version of Yes Sir, I Can Boogie and recorded an album, Baccara 2000. This version attempted to enter Eurovision in 2004 but didn’t get selected. In 2008 Mateos recorded another Baccara album with Paloma Blanco (?) Satin …in Black & White was produced by Soja and Dostal and featured yet more reworked back catalogue material.

In 1985 Mendiola teamed up with vocalist Marisa Pérez and they became New Baccara. Two years later they had a Spanish top five hit with Call Me Up and their Hi-NRG songs went down well in European clubs. Towards the end of the 90s they confusingly dropped the ‘New’ from their name. In 2004 they appeared on UK reality show Hit Me Baby One More Time. To make matters even more confusing, Pérez left in 2008 and was replaced by Sevilla from Mateos’s Baccara. In 2016 they released yet another version of their UK number 1, with the band Plugin.

The Outro

Yes Sir, I Can Boogie was reworked and improved on by Goldfrapp in 2003. Yes Sir turned up the sleaze and dropped any mention of ‘boogie’. In November 2020 the original made the top 60 again after members of the Scotland football team posted online videos of them dancing to it. Sounds bloody awful.

Mendiola’s death was announced on 12 September 2021. She was 69.

The Info

Written by

Rolf Soja & Frank Dostal

Producer

Rolf Soja

Weeks at number 1

1 (29 October-4 November)

Trivia

Births

1 November: Singer-songwriter Alistair Griffin
4 November: Singer Kavana