Monday 15 September 2014

Ultimate KAOS 'Hoochie Booty'

Chart Peak: 17
YouTube
Haydon, Nico G, Jomo B, Jayde and Ryan are Ultimate KAOS... 'Hoochie Booty' was the 2nd Top 20 smash for the teenage Londoners following 'Some Girls' into the chart in early 1995.
I don't normally do embeds on here but I've made an exception for this great piece of archive from January 1995, back in the days when a charting single was a physical disc or cassette, Top Of The Pops was on a Thursday and computer monitors were huge pale grey things. It's an excerpt from family-friendly factual series How Do They Do That? which uses this very single as an example of how sales were collated and presented: presumably this was intended as a form of promotion by Polygram themselves, or maybe somebody just wanted to make Des Lynam say the phrase "Hoochie booty" repeatedly. Incidentally, the chart featured is the same one I referred to before with 'Protection' and 'Glory Box' next to each other. It's also 'Cotton Eye Joe's only week at the top, which is why I didn't wax too nostalgic.



It seems kind of fitting that Ultimate Kaos appear next to Bobby Brown, since they were obviously intended to be a 1990s version of New Edition. If their Wikipedia entry is to be believed, they were originally convened by Simon Cowell as early as 1989 as backing dancers for Sinitta, although this seems hard to reconcile with their young ages - that entry also says they were signed to Sony Music from 1990-6, which is clearly untrue. What we can say with certainty is that they were a young black boy band who were obviously designed to be a bit more "street" than their rivals: they toured with Take That, presumably thanks to Cowell's connections, but I suspect they'd have rather been playing to the East 17 fanbase. This is a competent enough pastiche of the style but there's something both ridiculous and faintly distasteful about hearing a group with an average age of 14 singing about going out to clubs and leering at girls. If you like it though, the whole album's on Youtube.

Also appearing on: Now 29
Available on: Ultimate Kaos

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