Hot Chocolate brought a powerful message of racial unity to the charts when they broke into the top ten with Brother Louie.

“She was black as the night / Louie was whiter than white / Danger danger when you taste brown sugar / Louie fell in love at first sight.”

Brother Louie sets up its interracial romance narrative in the very first lines, though I can honestly say its subject matter never once occurred to me at the time it was hit, back in 1973.

Which is weird when you listen to the lyrics. Especially the conclusive couplet: “Ain’t no difference ‘tween black and white / Brothers you know what I mean.”
What’s more, when you remember this was the era of racist TV comedies like Love Thy Neighbour and Mind Your Language, you can see – and hear – how controversial it must have been at the time.

So it’s encouraging to find that it went into the top ten and made a star of Errol Brown, one of the most charismatic front men of the era and – and, with Ray Dorset of Mungo Jerry and Madeline Bell of Blue Mink, one of only a small handful of black British pop stars outside the world of soul and reggae.

Hot Chocolate had at least one hit single for fifteen years straight, from 1970-84, which is an incredible achievement. This was the first one I heard, though they formed five years before this before finding success under the guidance of pop svengali Mickie Most.

Always one to get the most out of his artists (many of his early efforts featured Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones as session men), he recruited two other musicians on his roster to play on the single – drummer Cozy Powell and Alexis Korner, who provides the spoken-word bit as the father who says he “Don’t want no spook” in his family (the other dad “Don’t want no honky” in his).

Formed in 1968, Hot Chocolate’s first single was a reggae version of Give Peace A Chance, which found approval with John Lennon and led to a contract with Apple Records, but their hits came after they signed up to Most’s Rak Records, before jumping on to the disco bandwagon when it arrived, finally hitting the top of the charts with their 16th hit, So You Win Again, in 1977.

A small, entirely imaginary, prize if anyone can name the other two acts along with Hot Chocolate who had a UK hit in every single year of the 1970s.