Say what you like about Boney M, they were an entertaining fixture in the singles chart all through the second half of the Seventies.
And most of their songs were great in a cheesy sort of way (except Rivers Of Babylon, obvs, and its equally annoying B-side, Brown Girl In The Ring).
Ok, there was also Mary’s Boy Child but nearly all Christmas singles are rubbish, so that one doesn’t count. And, dammit, Hooray! Hooray! It’s A Holi-Holiday, which was awful too.
But at least two of them were great. Notably their first hit Daddy Cool – “He’s crazy like a fool” – and also this one, Rasputin, which got to no.2 in October 1978.
Like their earlier hit, Belfast, it’s a history lesson, with added balalaikas, ‘Russian’ costumes, and Cossack dancing… by Jamaican singers and a German band. What’s not to love?
Surprisingly historically accurate, it details the story of Rasputin (“Russia’s greatest love machine”) – a self-proclaimed holy man “who could preach the bible like a preacher full of ecstasy and fire / but was also the kind of teacher women would desire.”
Most people looked at him with terror or with fear, we learn, “But to Moscow chicks he was such lovely dear.” Unfortunately those chicks included Alexandra, the wife of Tsar Nicholas II. And that was doomed to end only one way…
He clearly led a very different and, frankly, more exciting life than the monks who taught me, whose thrills were limited to molesting the young boys in their care.