Tavares – It Only Takes A Minute

A Boy Band’s Biggest Breakthrough and a Jennifer Lopez Sample Both Trace Back to Five Brothers From Rhode Island Who Sang It First

Plenty of people can sing along to “It Only Takes a Minute” without knowing they’re singing a Tavares song. For a generation of British pop fans, it’s the Take That track that launched the biggest boy band of the 1990s. For others, it’s the bassline Jennifer Lopez borrowed for a 2000s single. But before any of that, it was five Cape Verdean-American brothers from Providence, Rhode Island, who took it to No. 1 on the American soul chart in 1975 and scored the only Top 10 pop hit of their long career. The original is the one all the others are chasing.

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The song was written and produced by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter, a songwriting team with a knack for indelible hooks — they’d already given the Four Tops “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got),” and Lambert would go on, improbably, to co-write Starship’s “We Built This City” a decade later. For Tavares, they built something lean and irresistible: an instant-love lyric about falling for someone in the space of sixty seconds, wrapped in tight brotherly harmonies and a bassline that pushed the group out of straight soul balladry and onto the dance floor. Released in the summer of 1975 as the lead single from the group’s third album, In the City, it captured the exact moment soul was tipping over into disco, and Tavares rode the wave.

The numbers told the story of a breakthrough. “It Only Takes a Minute” hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Soul Singles chart in September 1975, climbed to No. 10 on the Hot 100 — the only time the brothers would crack the pop Top 10 — and spent five weeks at No. 2 on the brand-new Billboard Disco chart, the first of four entries Tavares would land there. The parent album reached No. 8 on the soul albums chart and No. 26 on the Billboard 200. For a group that had spent years on Providence street corners as Chubby and the Turnpikes before settling on their family name, it was the song that turned local heroes into national hitmakers.

The Brothers Behind the Harmony

Tavares was a true family act: brothers Antone “Chubby,” Arthur “Pooch,” Feliciano “Butch,” Perry “Tiny,” and Ralph Tavares, sons of a Cape Verdean singer and guitarist nicknamed “Flash,” raised between Providence and New Bedford and steeped in the Portuguese and Cape Verdean musical traditions their father carried across the Atlantic. The performance on this page comes from The Midnight Special, the late-night NBC concert series that was one of the few places in the 1970s to see soul and disco acts perform on national television, broadcast October 31, 1975, as the single was peaking. It catches the group at their commercial high point — five brothers in matching style, trading lines and locking into the harmonies that only siblings who’ve sung together since childhood can find.

A Song With Many Lives

Their moment got bigger before it faded. In 1976, Tavares contributed to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack — their “More Than a Woman” and the album’s inclusion of their hits put them on one of the best-selling records of all time, a 15-million-seller that earned the brothers a share of a Grammy. “It Only Takes a Minute” itself kept getting reborn: Jonathan King covered it under an alias in 1976, taking it to No. 9 in the UK, and in 1992 a young Take That chose it as the song to break them, scoring their first UK Top 10 and the launch of a career that would define British pop for decades. Jennifer Lopez sampled its bassline in 2007. By the 2020s the chorus was fueling viral video trends, finding yet another audience who had no idea how far back it went. Ralph Tavares, the eldest brother, died in December 2021, but the song the brothers cut in 1975 keeps proving its own lyric right — it really does only take a minute to fall for it.