Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Taco

Very few biographical details exist anywhere about Taco Ockerse, so we'll cut to the chase fairly quickly: born in Indonesia (yet of Dutch descent) and raised in Germany, Ockerse studied theater and dance before making a name for himself around Hamburg as the frontman of the band Taco's Bizz.

Apparently, Taco Bizz's nightly setlist of re-imagined swing/crooner-era oldies performed in the swankest nightclubs in the city began to attract some record company attention, and Ockerse soon found himself recording a radically modern-ized solo cover of the Irving Berlin standard "Puttin' On The Ritz" (last made popular by Fred Astaire in 1946) for a single release at the end of 1981.

Astutely realizing the commercial potential in Ockerse's neo-retro schtick, RCA Records green-lighted an album to be created around "Puttin' On The Ritz," serving up a mixed bag of similarly-retooled Depression-era pop tunes from the Taco's Bizz repertiore alongside a few original songs. With Ockerse now simply billed as Taco, After Eight was released in Germany at the end of 1982.

About seven months later, the unexpected happened as "Puttin' On The Ritz" improbably managed to cross the ocean and became one of the biggest surprise hits of 1983 in the United States. While a nod for this breakout success is certainly due to rotation on then synth-crazed MTV, "Puttin' On The Ritz" was also a bona-fide radio and retail hit, reaching #4 for two weeks on the Hot 100 that September. A crisply recorded, vocoder-sprinkled work of charming robo-pop cheese (with a tap-dancing break midway through in an apparent nod to Astaire), "Puttin' On The Ritz" managed to sounded utterly unique on the radio despite the plethora of foreign synthwave acts swarming over American airwaves at the time.

In true "one-hit wonder" fashion, Taco seemed to vanish just as quickly as he had appeared. Despite After Eight climbing up to #23 on Billboard's album chart and ultimately selling half-a-million copies, Taco became persona non grata at Top 40 radio from the instant "Puttin' On The Ritz" slipped off of the hit parade. Another cover tune, "Cheek To Cheek" (which probably sounded too much like "Puttin' On The Ritz" for its own good) was worked by RCA as a follow-up single, but there was no interest whatsoever from the public and the song failed to list on any chart stateside. Ouch.

In a futile effort to reverse Taco's immediate decline of popularity in the U.S., a second album, Let's Face The Music, appeared in the summer of 1984. While the new album sported a noticeably slicker, funkier, and even more-polished sound (if that can be imagined) than After Eight, RCA quickly found that getting anyone to so much as look at a copy of Let's Face The Music was about as easy as trying to sell Christmas trees in April. Hell, the only way I knew there even was a second Taco album at the time was by catching the video for the slinky title cut on an episode of HBO's half-assed time-filler show Video Jukebox one afternoon that fall. Needless to say, I never saw it again.

So, what killed Taco's career so completely after one single that he never charted another record in the U.S. again? You might as well ask what kills the momentum of any one-hit wonder: the reasons are legion. In this case, however, I'll venture a couple of guesses ...

1) If you listened to the "Cheek To Cheek" mp3, you probably thought to yourself "hmmm, maybe this was a cute idea taken one song too far." Now imagine a whole album of that same idea. In the case of After Eight, at least 500,000 people picked up a copy (a pretty good haul for a full-length album by a flash-in-the-pan artist), and hardly any of them came back for seconds.

2) Pardon the pun, but the sheer novelty of "Puttin' On The Ritz" might have sated the public's appetite for Taco right then and there. I can vouch for this reason personally, as listening to "Puttin' On The Ritz" once in a blue moon during a radio station's "All Eighties Weekend" is goofy fun, but actually sitting down and listening to an entire Best Of Taco collection -- yes, these things actually exist -- can be a rather ... emasculating experience (and this is coming from someone who likes a lot of totally fey bands from the same time period, mind you). Without a doubt, this is some of the fruitiest electropop in the history of the medium.

Abandoning the U.S. market, Taco concentrated on the German market from that point forward, starting with 1985's Swing Classics In The Mood Of Glen Miller, and, it is said, recording the soundtrack to a movie called Whiz Kid. Incidentally, one of these albums sports a truly dreadful disco rendition of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" that is so awful I just had to share the pain ...

See, this is why the internet exists, friends: so you can learn absolutely useless trivia while listening to records no one ever wanted to hear twenty years ago, let alone now.

From sketchy information, it appears that there may have even been another album or so from Taco as the 80s wore to a close, as his Best-Of collection also features a disturbingly Stock-Aitken-Waterman-scented hunk of Limberger called "Got To Be Your Lover," which dates from 1988. There are also accounts of Ockerse dropping the robopop and trying out a more R&B-leaning style of music, but information on these latter albums is nonexistent (or written solely in German).

As far as what Ockerse is up to these days, all I have been able to glean from a scouring of the web (including the one and only website dedicated to his life and work) is that he still lives in Germany and is prone to performing music on the odd occasion ... but your guess is a good as mine as to whether "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" is still in the setlist.