Venus (Shocking Blue song)

Infobox Single
Name = Venus


Artist = The Shocking Blue
from Album = At Home
B-side = "Hot Sand"
Released = 1969
Format = 7" vinyl
Recorded = 1969
Genre = Pop/Rock
Length = 3:07
Label = Pink Elephant, Metronome, Colossus, Poplandia, Joker, Yugoton
Writer = Robbie van Leeuwen
Producer = Robbie van Leeuwen
Certification = Gold (RIAA)
Chart position =
* #1 (U.S., France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain)
* #2 (Japan)

* #3 (Netherlands)

* #8 (United Kingdom)
Last single = "Lucy Brown Is Back In Town"
(1968)
This single = "Venus"
(1969)
Next single = "Mighty Joe"
(1969)"Venus" is a 1969 number-one song by the Dutch band The Shocking Blue, which again reached number one in 1986 in a cover version by Bananarama. The composition has been featured in films and television shows and commercials and covered dozens of times by artists around the world.

Shocking Blue

Released in late 1969 as a single from the album "At Home", The Shocking Blue's single reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on February 7, 1970. RIAA certification came on January 28, 1970 for selling over one million copies in the USA, garnering a Gold Record award.

The song's music and lyrics are written by Robbie van Leeuwen, the band's guitarist, sitarist and background vocalist, who also produced. Van Leeuwen used "The Banjo Song" on the "Winkin', Blinkin' and Nod", a 1963 album by The Big 3 with Mama Cass Elliot on vocals as main inspiration.

Shocking Blue version in popular culture

* Included in the film "The Brady Bunch Movie"
* Included in the film "Grumpier Old Men"
* Included in the film "Zonder Zelda"
* Included in the film "Remember The Titans"
* Parodied by the Muppets for a television public service announcement about the V-chip and TV ratings.
* Sharon Watts (played by Letitia Dean) sang "Venus" in an episode of "EastEnders" shortly after its release.
*D.J. Tanner (Candace Cameron) and her best friend Kimmy Gibbler (Andrea Barber) sang "Venus" with Jesse Katsopolis (John Stamos) in a season one episode of Full House when he was teaching them how to succeed in a band.
* A "Spanish" version was played on the "Prison Break" episode "Good Fences".
* The popular Canadian teen drama series program "," which is known for naming each installment after an 80s hit song, named a two-part installment after this song.
*The song is used in the opening sequence of the 2008 film "Otis"

Shocking Blue version on the charts

Other cover versions

On July 18, 1981, Dutch act Stars on 45 reached number one with a medley which included the opening guitar riff from "Venus", which itself had been borrowed—stolen, Pete Townshend alleged—from The Who's "Pinball Wizard." Five years later, British girl group Bananarama covered the song and likewise scored a number one on the Billboard Hot 100. This arguably made it the only song in the history of the Billboard charts to hit number one by three different artists, even though the Stars on 45 song medley only included a portion of it.

In 1990, Italian dance group Don Pablo's Animals scored a UK number-three hit with an instrumental cover version of the song that featured a sample of the original version, and also a sample of James Brown's voice at the beginning, saying, "We're gonna do a song that you've never heard before", lifted from Brown's 1988 hit "The Payback Mix (Part One)."

When auditioning for the Spice Girls in the early '90s, Victoria Beckham recorded a version of the song for a demo tape, never actually intending it to be released. However, the original recording has since leaked onto the Internet.

Stefanie Sun (Simplified Chinese: 孙燕姿; Traditional Chinese: 孫燕姿), a Singaporean singer-songwriter, made an album "(Start自選集)" containing several cover versions, including "Venus", "Hey Jude", and "Silent All These Years" in 2002.

The winner of the Eurovision Song Contest 2004, Ruslana, has recorded this song. Norwegian act Erlend Øye also recorded part of the song in a medley on his album that was part of the "DJ-Kicks" series.

Japanese singer Hitomi featured a cover of the song as the B-side to her "Japanese Girl" single in 2005. This version was used as the theme song in commercials for the Gillette Venus razor in 2006. Those commercials featured Hitomi herself on a rock of a lagoon in Hawaii. (A different version was also included in North American ads by the same company.) Koda Kumi recorded the same song for Japanese Gillette commercials the following year. There was also a cover released by then J-pop idol singer Yoko Nagayama in 1986, which became her first big hit.

The Russian children's band, Street Magic (Volshebniki Dvora) (Волшебники Двора), released a cover version of the song in 2005 on their album "Hit Parade" (Хит-парад). Its lead vocals were performed by band member Denis Uzkov (Денис Усков).

"Shizgarah", or Venus in Russian urban folklore

In spite of total ignoring by the soviet mass-media, the Shocking Blue song quickly become a number one hit in 1970's Russia, especially among street youth close to hippies and hippie-like "hooligans" subcultures. Due to simple arrangement and attractive dance rhythm, "Venus" was adopted and performed by thousands of amateur singers, accompanied themselves with acoustic guitars as well as by electric bands which performed it on dancing parties. Thus, the song of a Dutch band become a prominent phenomena of Russian urban folklore and as was admitted by many people, an unofficial "anthem of the generation".

A countless number of variants of Russian lyrics existed for this song, but traditionally it was performed using gibberish or scat singing phonetically inspired by the sounds of original English lyrics (hardly intelligible after numerous copying on low-end class tape-recorders). In this variant, the first line of the chorus ("She's got it") usually pronounced as "Shizgarah" ("Шизгáра") ["sheez-ga'-rah"] that became a commonly adopted name of this song in Russia (including even those who could understand the original text). The original song name, "Venus", was unusual.

Legacy

The popular Canadian teen drama series program "," which is known for naming each installment after an 80s hit song, named a two-part installment after this song.