0: I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper

All journeys have to start somewhere.

This journey is starting with I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trouper by Sarah Brightman & Hot Gossip. Or, in Spotify style, by Sarah Brightman, Hot Gossip. If you use the ampersand it won't understand what you mean. Anyway, it's a respectable enough song, although it's only on Spotify on those compilations they have with horrid cheap-looking covers, where the design focus is on how clear it is at thumbnail size. The way Ribbit Hole works means that it's the track's appearance on a specific one which is the fulcrum of the of the jump, even though the same recording appears in identical form on other ones. In this case, it's this one - 70s 100 Hits (2010, Sony Music Entertainment):

Lovely, eh?

It does have 100 tracks. I was not motivated to check whether they were all hits or all from the 70s. The track also appears on the following:

• Disco 100 (2009, Sony Music Entertainment)
• Disco - 100 Hit's - Dance floor fillers from the 70s and 80s inc. The Jacksons, Boney M & Earth Wind & Fire (2013, Sony Music Entertainment, possibly identical to the previous one but I only checked tracks 1-4, 43 and 97. The apostrophe in 'Hit's' is not mine.)
• The Best Year Of My Life: 1978 (2011, Sony Music Entertainment UK Limited)
• Pure... 70's Dance Party (2011, Sony Music Entertainment 

Spotify also offers us some pointless cheapo cover versions. It does this for anything popular, that and the compilations are two of the things that gave me the idea for Ribbit Hole. I can only think that the point of them is to make a little money from people playing them by mistake. There are versions by The Movie Band, "Dianne Spall, Latin System", Trap Stars, The Starlite Singers, The Royal Movie Band, Single Sessions, Gary Brown, and The Hit Co. which might not all be the same but I was unable to pay enough attention to tell them apart. 

one of the albums containing the Dianne Spall, Latin System version. I think I checked every cover I could use for this bit to find you the worst. Copyright 2010 Alhambra/Marathon, in case they come up again some day.

The Starlite Singers and The Hit Co. also have instrumental versions, as do The Hit Crew, and Mona Carita has a Finnish version. As well as being in Finnish it was much more obviously a different recording to all the ones I couldn't tell apart instrumentally. But she seems to be a proper pre-Spotify artist, with pre-Spotify albums, so she's not really the same thing.

see?

There are also various karaoke versions on Spotify, but I'm not going to go into them. I'd rather talk about the original. It's a decent record! Don't hold The Phantom Of The Opera against it, this is before she even met Lloyd Cole.

 a decent record, yesterday

It was produced by Steve Rowland. Steve produced Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky Mick & Tich (who Spotify manage not to call "Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, Tich") and he was the singer in The Family Dogg. But that doesn't explain where he got his disco chops from. In 1977, the year before Starship Trooper, he produced and co-wrote Shake, Sheik, Shake (The Arab Hustle) by Sally and The Sultans. "OMG, he was behind that famous record that everyone knows" I heard you cry, and yes, yes he was. Incredibly, it's not on Spotify. Not even a cover version by The Starlite Singers. Not even a karaoke version. We will have to go off-piste.

 I think my very favourite thing about Shake, Sheik, Shake (The Arab Hustle) is that it's nothing like The Hustle.

Everyone respects and admires Sally and The Sultans for going out at the top, one perfect single and then nothing. They were like Manic Street Preachers only for real.

The song (I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper, not Shake, Sheik, Shake (The Arab Hustle)) was written by Geraint Hughes (aka Max West) and Jeffrey Calvert, both out of Typically Tropical, and the same writing team that wrote their smash Barbados. Can we say Hit Machine? Yes, I think we can. For one thing, because Barbados was on a German compilation called Hit Machine on the Arcade label. 

WHERE JUMP NOW?

Criteria may vary with the winds, the tides, and the wrinkle angle of an ickle puppy's nose, but today it's the most horrible cover of Jump 0 which means our next jump must be to Enola Gay.