![]() ![]() ![]() Maybe if I had written it I might have felt differently…. Interestingly, the same week “Hooked on a Feeling” topped the charts, ABBA won the Eurovision song contest with “Waterloo.” They would go on to become the face of ’70s Swedish rock music, and Blue Swede, after two albums half-filled with covers of recent hits, would sink without a trace.Īnd how do the artists who came before Blue Swede feel about that band’s scooping up all the attention in 1974 and today? “It didn’t bother me,” B.J. At any rate, an arrangement can’t be copywritten, so King wasn’t going to see any money anyway.īlue Swede amped up the obnoxiousness of the “oogah chuckas” – inspired, in part, by the Beach Boys’ “Do You Like Worms?” – and cut out any drug references, changing “I’ll just stay addicted and hope I can endure” to “I’ll just stay a victim if I can for sure.” Apparently, that was what it took to spell out the difference between a top-five hit and a number one hit. Bjorn fronted a Swedish pop/rock band named Blue Swede, and he wanted to know if it would be okay to cover King’s arrangement of “Hooked on a Feeling.” King gave his blessing, thinking little of what money he might get out of it – “A smash in Sweden wouldn’t have put enough petrol in the Rolls to get there,” he later said. The bass player at the session, the legendary Herbie Flowers (Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” Harry Nilsson’s “Jump Into the Fire”) called the arrangement “the most brilliant thing I’ve ever heard.” It did fairly well too, selling over a million copies worldwide, though it didn’t get a whiff of success in America.Ī few years later, King got a call from one Bjorn Skifs. He also arranged for the instruments not to come in until after the first “I.I…I’m (thud thud)” part, for maximum impact. When he listened back to the demo, he thought the “Ooga chucka oogah oogah” part he’d sung was so compelling that it was worth keeping as sung, rather than played. He sang the individual parts into a tape recorder as a demo for his arranger not knowing how to start the song, he just sang the reggae rhythm, planning to assign instruments to play it later. “I wanted to turn it into a pop/reggae track since country was less appreciated in Britain,” he said in his autobiography 70 FFFY. In 1971, he decided to give “Hooked on a Feeling” the reworking treatment. Under various pseudonyms, he would cover various songs that somehow missed the UK charts, doing them in a wholly different style to some success – for an example, check out “It’s the Same Old Song,” done as the Weathermen, with a violin/drum break that’s crying to be sampled. Jonathan King was a Brit who had made a name for himself in England – or, to be more accurate, several names. ![]()
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