“Boom Boom Boom Boom, I want you in my room” Oh yes, and shyness too – that always helps. Subsequently marred by its adaptation for a never-ending ad campaign for crappy leather sofa superstore chain DFS (“Dou-b-le sa-vings!”), it still has an air of friendliness about it from which most other Eurodance of the period seemed to shy away. Like 2 Unlimited, they were Dutch unlike 2 Unlimited they did not specialise in hardcore imperiousness – although its “oh-woh-oh, wo-oh-hoh” refrain and pleasingly mangled syntax (“I wanna double boom”) ensured its instant catchiness and derive directly from venerable Hi-NRG practices (as indeed was the video – “I want you in my room” indeed), there is something attractively indie about the song’s central pledge of devotion (“Let’s spend the night together/From now until forever”). Giddily merry and gleefully semi-knowing, “Boom Boom Boom Boom” was essentially Hi-NRG for the post-2 Unlimited generation with its jolly romp of a beat and its “Barbie Girl”-derived formula of slightly pleading lead female vocal set against gruff male Vocoder responses. « S CLUB 7 – “Bring It All Back” ATB – “9PM (Til I Come)” » Comments 1 2 » All And it does its job, though the more you contemplate this feat of pop efficiency, the more it skirts the line between the childlike and the charmless. The appeal to kids is a side-effect of this more ruthless approach.
They’re trashy, trans-continental club pop, but with the sometimes wild invention of the early 90s switched for a need to keep things as simple and catchy as possible. No matter who was buying them here, the Vengaboys are firmly in the same line as 2 Unlimited, Doop or “Mr Vain”. What this Vengasmut makes me realise is that my perception of two Europops was an Anglocentric fiction. Instead it’s lap dances, topless burlesque, champagne foam spurting over bare thighs. This is bubblegum music, no doubt, but hardly a kids’ cartoon. In the video, he wears a sparkly red cowboy hat.Īh, though, the video, one look at which causes me to hastily revise any generalisation I might have had about the Vengaboys and their audience. The most enjoyable touches on the single are its purely dumbest – the chorus, of course, but also the keyboard-preset “Woo! Woo Woo!” bits in the breakdown, and the robodude who pops up to announce “Ven-ga-boys-are-back-in-town” and “Let’s-have-some-fun”.
Vengaworld, on first impression, is a world in which the Vengaboys get on the Vengabus and go party: it has a perfect cartoon simplicity that matches the cheerful inanity of “Boom Boom Boom Boom”. There has been lots of impeccably high-fashion European music, of course, but when you’re pitching Esperanto pop at a market that’s a patchwork of cultures and languages, the nuances of style are sometimes the first casualty. The two waves of Europop have something in common: neither are remotely bothered about looking cool. And for a few months in the Summer of 1999 the Vengaboys were its hottest ticket. It was a music built on gleeful gimmickry and seemed to sell mostly to the continent’s kids. The second, led by Aqua, was also designed for dancing, but as much in school discos as tourist nightspots. The first was a club music – a polyglot of house, hip-hop and rave heralded by Snap! and epitomised by 2 Unlimited and Culture Beat. The 90s in the British charts are topped and tailed by two mighty surges of Europop.
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