Chart entered : 5 November 1988
Chart peak : 50
Bucks Fizz are still lauded by the New Pop brigade for the records they made just after their Eurovision triumph ; there was a tribute piece by Bob Stanley in The Guardian not long ago. Actually, what they're really praising are the songwriting and production skills of Andy Hill and his wife Nicola Martin. Beyond singing, the four members of Bucks Fizz made almost no contribution to the music and have mustered one minor, TV- assisted, solo hit between them. That said, Hill and Martin couldn't get arrested in the guise of their own group, Paris, so the mannequins' promotional value shouldn't be underestimated.
Bucks Fizz were determined not to fade away after their Eurovision triumph and surfed the New Pop wave to score two more chart-toppers in the first half of 1982, both over-praised in my view but they were clearly a formidable outfit. Album sales were lukewarm though; despite containing those two number ones, "Are You Ready" couldn't advance past number 10 suggesting that their success had its limits. After "When We Were Young" dropped out of the Top 10 in summer 1983, their singles started peaking at lower positions. The wheels really started coming off at the end of 1984 when their tour bus crashed . All four members were injured but Mike Nolan nearly died from serious head injuries that still affect him today. His condition put the band out of action for six months. Just as he recovered enough to perform on their next single in May 1985, Jay Aston quit the band in acrimonious circumstances, a serious loss as she provided the band with some sexual charisma and had increasingly been used as lead vocalist on recent singles. She was replaced after X-Factor style public auditions by Shelley Preston , an attractive 21-year old who had been singing in a night club in Sri Lanka. Despite a huge publicity boost from this process , the group's first single with Shelley was one of their lowest hits to date and RCA let them go. Polydor picked them up and were rewarded with a huge hit when "New Beginning ( Mamba Seyra )" reached number 8 in the summer of 1986 but subsequent singles stalled in the forties and the ironically titled LP " Writing On The Wall" stiffed disastrously at number 89.
With "Heart of Stone" they were very much in last chance saloon. Written by Hill and his lyricist friend Pete Sinfield, it sticks with the harder-edged AOR sound they'd been trying to expand their audience with since 1983. Sinfield's lyrics use some evocative metaphors for relationship pain and Bobby Gubby 's lead vocal is on the money but the song is just too pedestrian and never soars, a point proven a couple of years later when Cher couldn't take her version much higher. The video featured the quartet mooching around Robin Gibb's mansion looking morose and half-hearted. They knew the game was up.
RCA tried to squeeze a few more sales out of them six months later by releasing a track from their third album "Hand Cut ". "You Love Love" is a dreary ballad featuring a rare lead vocal from Cheryl Baker . It achieved nothing except to spoil their 100% chart record.
Now the fun starts, Bucks Fizz having one of the more colourful post-fame stories. They had no record deal but with a famous name and a shedload of hits it was easy to fill their diaries with live dates. They toured the UK in 1989 at the end of which Shelley decided to quit. Considerably younger than the others, endlessly touring the hits ,most of which she hadn't been involved with , had little appeal for her ..She became a successful session vocalist and toured with a long list of artists including Inxs, Go West, Beverley Craven, Brian May , Luther Vandross. She's had a long term association with Belinda Carlisle and a side career as a model. She also found time to marry Spandau Ballet saxophonist Steve Norman.
The band continued as a trio and released a live album "Live at the Fairfield Hall, Croydon" commemorating their tenth anniversary tour. The following year Cheryl released a solo single "Sensuality" a lightweight Janet Jackson impersonation penned by fellow eighties refugees Paul Barry of The Questions and Steve Torch of White and Torch. Like her previous solo effort , ( a version of Amen Corner's "If Paradise Is Half As Nice in 1987 ) it didn't chart.
Its failure seems to have persuaded Cheryl, who'd had a parallel career as a TV presenter since 1985 , to knock music on the head. At the end of 1993 she gave them notice to quit.
Bobby had now taken over managing the group and he and Mike recruited two new girls ,
one of whom Heidi Manton would become the second Mrs Gubby, and soldiered on for a couple of years until an exhausted Mike quit at the end of 1995. Bobby's fateful brainwave was to invite David Van Day in to replace him. Under the deal Van Day would relinquish Dollar although he could bring his latest replacement for Teresa Bazaar , Karen Logan into the band alongside Bobby and Heidi.
It soon went wrong. Logan left and Van Day soon felt outnumbered. A BBC documentary made a few years later detailed some comical disagreements about clothing but the basic faultline appeared to be that Bobby had a stoical acceptance that the group's halcyon days were over while Van Day still longed for a return to the limelight. The final break came after a tour of the Falkland Islands which tells you how far the group had fallen. Who on earth would accept an invitation to play there ?
Van Day quit after a series of arguments on the tour. Bobby and Heidi renewed the Bucks Fizz trademark as a precautionary measure and carried on with a new singer. Then Van Day re-emerged with his own Bucks Fizz line up which featured a refreshed Mike Nolan. This thwarted Bobby's move at the Patents Office and instigated a long legal battle.
In the meantime David wrangled an appearance on The Generation Game and a record deal for releasing a nineties electronic version of "Making Your Mind Up" which failed to make the chart. They followed it up with a poorly received album of re-recorded hits and a robotic version of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up in 2000.
The following year it was Mike's turn to fall out with Van Day and he avenged himself by withdrawing his objection to Bobby's trademark application. That didn't stop Van Day getting together a new line up as David Van Day's Bucks Fizz. so Bobby went to court for an injunction to stop him . He didn't get it and what was worse the judge commented that there wasn't "much fizz left in the name". Bobby was incandescent and you can't really blame him ; there should be something in place to hold judges to account for making unnecessary soundbite comments which cause reputational damage to others out of personal vanity.
Bobby's sister of mercy turned out to be Bazar whose willingness to return to Dollar prompted Van Day to abandon his Bucks Fizz project. That didn't help Mike who launched his own suit against Van Day for unpaid earnings. He won the case but Van Day then declared himself bankrupt and Mike had to sell his house to pay the legal costs.
In December 2004, Bobby agreed to appear with Mike, Cheryl and Shelly as "The Original Bucks Fizz " ( as opposed to the official Bucks Fizz featuring him and Heidi ) on the Here and Now tour though he couldn't make every date due to schedule clashes. Mike, Cheryl Shelly performed more shows together and appeared at Eurovision's 50th Anniversary bash.
In 2008 they were invited to take part in a makeover show on Living TV called Pop Goes The Band. When Bobby declined the invitation the producers invited Jay along , the first and only time any version of the band has featured three females. Although Shelly did the show, she wasn't happy with Jay's return and quit the group shortly after the programme was broadcast.
As mentioned above, Jay's departure in 1985 was messy. After a vitriolic war of words in the tabloid press she was sued for breach of contract, barred from launching a solo career for years and near- bankrupted. By 1990, she was receiving housing benefit. Her sister-in-law, Marcella Detroit of Shakespear's Sister, advised her to start writing songs. She re-emerged in 1993 with a single "Naked Phoenix" and a video with a metal phoenix on her chest which appeared to be pulling her boobs to the floor. It's a typically nineties piece of burbling electronica, bereft of any melodic hooks. It went nowhere and Jay couldn't find a deal to release her album "Lamb or Lizard" . The material eventually came out on a box set in 2006. She also contributed a song to Michael Winner's reviled ( as usual ) film Dirty Weekend causing a minor stir by walking out of the premiere.
Her brief comeback over, she moved back in with her parents but soon met guitarist Dave Colquhoun and. moved in with him. They formed a band called Aston and played locally. In 1999 they got married and two years later she set up The Jay Aston Theatre Arts School in Kent. In 2003 her daughter Josie was born and she also released her album "Alive and Well", the bulk of it written by her husband. I remember reading a review in Q and thinking hell this is an unexpected comeback but the only track I've heard is the crunchy Garbage -like "Rosie Banks" which featured in the film The Last Days of Edgar Harding ( which Jay had a part in ) a few years later. Two years later she was celebrated in a drag show Night Of A Thousand Jay Astons at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and in 2007 the four original members collaborated for the first time in 22 years when they appeared in the Comic Relief video that year.
The Original Buck's Fizz went on tour with Jay - in great nick for someone in their fifties I have to say - in autumn 2009 and the following year released a baffling jazz version of their 1984 hit "I Hear Talk" arranged by Cheryl's husband.
At the beginning of 2011 they received writs. In spite of his earlier collaborations and the defeat to Van Day. Bobby had decided to sue them for infringing his trademark. To an outsider all this is baffling. Bob Stanley likened them to the Beach Boys but at least in their tussles there's usually been something of significant value at stake. The brand value of the Bucks Fizz name can't be worth anything near the total of the legal costs. It looks like a textbook case of two bald men fighting over a comb.It rather put a dampener on the trio's 30th anniversary tour that year.
Anyway Bobby won this time round and the other three had to re-brand themselves OBF. They released a new single ironically entitled "This Day Is Mine" a muted synthpop number that wasn't nearly strong enough to break through. They made an album, "Fame and Fortune" available through their website that was half re-arrangements of their old hits and half new songs. There's a surprising amount of thought gone into the former, the latter are a bit of a plod but both suffer from the starkly obvious decline in the trio's vocal powers.
In 2013, for reasons best known to herself, Jay appeared on The Voice, at the same time ( or at least it was edited that way ) as Danny "Shrek" Foster from Hearsay, performing Muse's Time Is Running Out. Neither persuaded the judges to turn round.
The following year they had another re-brand choosing the snappy name "Cheryl. Mike and Jay - Formerly of Bucks Fizz" and since then they have increased their touring commitments. From recent appearances, the age gap between Jay and the others now looks cavernous. In 2015, Bobby McVay from 1983 Eurovision also-rans Sweet Dreams joined them to restore them to a quartet. The other Bobby plods along with his version.
In 2014 Jay released another solo single "True Love ", a sort of Lily Allen pastiche with a mildly amusing video. It trailed an LP "I-Spy" which was eventually released on her website last year but I haven't heard anything else from it.
Shelly went back to working with Norman in his chillout lounge act Cloudfish but that collapsed when their marriage ended in 2013. She's been licking her wounds but plans to go out on the road as a solo artist soon.
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