Even as a kid, I remember thinking this novelty single was inauthentic. Inauthentic but catchy enough to top the charts.
Even though I had never met a single Jamaican by my mid-teens, I knew that two white men in holiday shirts singing a cod-reggae song about a Caribbean island was a bit… dubious.

But not dubious enough to stop it selling almost a million in the summer of 1975. So who were they?

Typically Tropical grew from a half-cocked, half-baked scheme to compose a reggae song by Jeff Calvert and Geraint Hughes, a pair of recording engineers for a London recording studio. And yes, you guessed, they had just come back from a Caribbean cruise (with Jeff’s dad), their heads filled with calypso and reggae.

The pair penned Barbados in just two hours on a rainy afternoon in Ealing, imagining a Brixton bus driver dreaming of going home to see his girlfriend on the fictitious Coconut Airways. Why so long, do I hear you ask?

The very same night they sneaked past the caretaker into Morgan Studios in Willesden, where Jeff’s dad was one of the directors, and recorded a demo with whatever instruments had been left in the studio. Six months later Gull Records gave them a three-single deal and £1,500 to record their songs properly.

The studio musicians are Chris Spedding on lead guitar, Vic Flick, who played the famous guitar lick on the James Bond theme, on rhythm guitar, Blue Mink’s Herbie Flowers and Roger Coulam on bass and piano respectively, The Tornadoes’ drummer Clem Cattini, and percussionist Frank Ricotti adding the “tropical” flavour with his marimba.

It was all done in a day, with the backing tracks in the morning, the violins and overdubs in the afternoon (including chirping cicadas from a sound effects tape) and the duo’s vocals in the evening – Hughes taking the role of the airline captain ‘Tobias Wilcock.’

They only chose the band name afterwards and then sat back and watched their first ever song climb to the top of the charts. It would be their only hit but Calvert and Hughes (writing under the pseudonym Max West) went on to write the 1978 disco hit I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper by Sarah Brightman – and, far more implausibly, to produce Judas Priest’s album Sad Wings Of Destiny.

This song had a second life when it reappeared as The Vengaboys’ equally awful 1999 hit We’re Going To Ibiza, which entered the charts at no.1 a quarter of a century after the original topped the charts.