Hot Chocolate - BBC Sessions (1970-1976)

Here's an album of the British R&B band Hot Chocolate performing for the BBC. Everything here is unreleased, and I believe the vast majority of it hasn't been publicly available until now. Once again, I'm getting some great "Top of the Pops" radio show material from an anonymous helper.

In my opinion, Hot Chocolate are very underrated. Today, they're mostly known for a few songs, especially "You Sexy Thing" and "Every 1's a Winner." But they had many other good hits, for a surprisingly long time. In fact, they had at least one hit a year in Britain every year between 1970 and 1984!

Unfortunately, what they did for the BBC is frustratingly incomplete. The vast majority of the songs here are from the Top of the Pops BBC radio show. As I've mentioned in previous posts, live performances just for that show generally died out around 1972 or 1973, although there were some exceptions. That's the case here. Tracks 1 through 12 are all from that show. But after that, the show just played the record versions. This is one exception though, track 14 ("A Child's Prayer"), which was done live on Top of the Pops in 1975, even after that show had started merely playing their records. (In cases like this, I compared the BBC versions with the record versions to see if they were different.)

So that's the bad news. The good news is, at least this gives us a great look at the band's early years. Hot Chocolate was very unusual in that they started having hits in 1970, yet they didn't release a studio album until 1974. Even BBC DJ Brian Matthew, while introducing one of the 1972 songs here, commented how strange it was the band hadn't released an album yet. I'm guessing this is because the band was produced at the time by Mickie Most. Most had an extremely impressive track record of getting bands to have hit songs in the 1960s and 70s, but he was almost exclusively focused on hits. (In fact, I might later post an "album that should exist" of a studio album this band should have released around 1972 or 1973.)

Most of the songs here are versions of the A- and B-sides of singles at the time. But there are exceptions. "Money Don't Make a Man," "Orphan Boy," and "Dance to the Music" were never released by the band in any form. The first two probably are originals that would have been on an early studio album if they'd been allowed to release one. "Dance to the Music" is a cover of the famous hit by Sly and the Family Stone.

I tried to augment this album with some later TV performances, but I was mostly frustrated. It turns out that the vast majority of TV performances were lip-synced. I even found a short concert done for TV in East Germany in 1978, and the entire thing was lip-synced. But I did find two songs that were done for TV shows in 1974 and 1976 respectively and were actually live: "Cheri Babe" and "You Sexy Thing." Those show the band was more than capable of playing these songs very well for TV shows. It's a shame that so many shows at the time favored lip-syncing.

This album is 47 minutes long.

01 Love Is Life [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
02 Money Don't Make a Man [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
03 You Could've Been a Lady (Hot Chocolate)
04 Everybody's Laughing [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
05 Orphan Boy [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
06 I Believe [In Love] [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
07 Caveman Billy [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
08 Dance to the Music (Hot Chocolate)
09 Give Them a Hand (Hot Chocolate)
10 Mary Anne [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
11 You'll Always Be a Friend [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
12 Go-Go Girl [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
13 Cheri Babe (Hot Chocolate)
14 A Child's Prayer [Edit] (Hot Chocolate)
15 You Sexy Thing (Hot Chocolate)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/1hGSGtXw

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/RP68nfJDtnfgb8h/file

The cover photo shows the band in 1972.