Shocking Blue – Venus

The Netherlands stopped “Venus” at No.3. America sent it to No.1, borrowed melody, misspelled first line and all.

In the Netherlands, “Venus” stopped at No.3. Shocking Blue’s single entered the Dutch Top 40 in July 1969 and climbed no higher, a solid summer hit for a band from The Hague and little more. Seven months later, Billboard ranked the same record No.1 on the Hot 100 for the week ending February 7, 1970, the first time a song by a Dutch band had reached the top of the American chart. Between those two numbers sits a record built almost entirely from borrowed parts, sung by a woman who was not yet fluent in English, from a lyric sheet with a spelling mistake in its first line.

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Robbie van Leeuwen, the band’s guitarist and songwriter, did not start from a blank page. His tune came from “The Banjo Song,” a 1963 single by the American folk trio the Big 3, whose members were Tim Rose, Jim Hendricks and a singer soon to be famous as Mama Cass Elliot of the Mamas & the Papas. Rose had written it as a fresh setting for the words of Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna.” Van Leeuwen kept the melody and wrote new words about a goddess. Even the guitar figure that opens the record has a family resemblance, to The Who’s “Pinball Wizard.”

The voice was a late addition. Shocking Blue formed in The Hague in 1967 around van Leeuwen, formerly of the Motions, with Klaasje van der Wal on bass, Cor van der Beek on drums and Fred de Wilde singing. When de Wilde was called into the Dutch army in 1968, van Leeuwen went looking for a replacement and found Mariska Veres singing with a club band. She had been working Dutch stages since 1963, in groups with names like Les Mystères and the Motowns. She brought what the band had lacked: kohl-rimmed eyes, a curtain of jet-black hair that was actually a wig, and a flat, unbothered delivery that made every line sound like an order.

A misspelled goddess at No.1

The band cut “Venus” on a two-track machine at Soundpush Studio in Blaricum, with van Leeuwen producing. Veres was not yet fluent in English, and the lyric sheet she worked from had misspelled “goddess” in the opening line. She sang the word as written, on the record and later on television, and the mistake stayed in the grooves while cover versions quietly corrected it. Pink Elephant, a label Dureco set up for the band, released the single in the Netherlands on July 14, 1969, with “Hot Sand” on the B-side. Belgium and France sent it to No.1 that year while it stalled at home.

America came through a talent scout. Producer Jerry Ross was in Europe that fall hunting for records to release in the States, heard “Venus,” and signed Shocking Blue to his new Colossus label, which put the single out in October 1969. The RIAA certified it gold for a million sales on January 28, 1970, and ten days later it topped the Hot 100. Canada, Australia, Italy, Spain and Switzerland followed it to No.1, and Britain took it to No.8. The American success sent Dutch buyers back for a second look, and the single returned to the Dutch Top 3 in 1970. Worldwide sales eventually passed five million.

Shocking Blue never had another American hit. “Mighty Joe” and “Never Marry a Railroad Man” each sold over a million copies abroad, and the band kept charting across Europe, Latin America and Asia into 1973, but neither came close in the United States. Van Leeuwen quit in 1974, Veres followed later that year, and the band was finished. Reunions came in 1979, 1980 and 1984, and from 1993 until her death Veres fronted another version of the group. The catalog kept finding new ears: Nirvana chose a Shocking Blue song, “Love Buzz,” for its debut single in 1988.

Bananarama took “Venus” back to No.1 in America in 1986, sixteen years after the original, and in 2020 The Queen’s Gambit put Shocking Blue’s version in front of a new generation. Veres recorded the song three more times over the years, the last a lounge version with pianist Dolf de Vries, released in 2007, months after her death. Cor van der Beek died on April 2, 1998, Veres on December 2, 2006, and Klaasje van der Wal on February 12, 2018. Van Leeuwen withdrew from the music business, moved to Luxembourg and has rarely given interviews since. Almost nothing on the record began with Shocking Blue: a borrowed folk tune, a riff with a famous cousin, a misspelled word. The one original element was the singer who delivered all of it as if it could not have been any other way, and that turned out to be enough.