Track Listing

1. Night Flight To Venus
2. Rasputin
3. Painter Man
4. He Was A Steppenwolf
5. King Of The Road
6. Rivers Of Babylon
7. Voodoo Night
8. Brown Girl In The Ring
9. Never Change Lovers In The Middle Of The Night
10. Heart Of Gold

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #98650 in Music
• Released on: 1994-07-09
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Import

Amazon.co.uk Review
The unearthly brainchild of uber-producer Frank Farian, Boney M may be the most kitsch group in history, but they're so much fun that Nightflight To Venus--brim-full of the gloriously absurd and the outrageously inventive--is more than just a kitchen-foil-clad period piece. Their strengths were Farian's hammering disco rhythms and neat, icy production, and, most crucially, his totally deranged imagination. Deciding to write "Rasputin" is as bizarre an act as anything perpetrated by the mad monk himself; here, it sits alongside other hits and oddities with titles as good as "Never Change Lovers In The Middle Of The Night", plus a selection of bizarrely chosen covers--"King Of The Road", a deadpan take on Neil Young's "Heart Of Gold" and "Painter Man", the ultra-hip 1960s oddity by The Creation, sped up and strapped to the most brutal 4/4 beat in disco history. --Taylor Parkes

Customer Reviews

Eurodisco fun
This varied album was released following their huge success with their biggest hit ever (Rivers of Babylon/Brown Girl in the Ring) and also contains the follow-up Rasputin, which was another chart hit and dancefloor filler. It is an album of prime Eurodisco but unfortunately the rest of the tracks do not quite live up to the promise of their other albums like Love For Sale. The title track starts with a vocoder-voice counting down to a launch into a sizzling piece of synth-pop and girlie vocals. Painter Man is a nice sing-along while King Of The Road and Heart Of Gold of passable interpretations of these classic songs. Voodoonight, Steppenwolf and Never Change Lovers are just fillers. I recommend their Greatest Hits album because it contains all their best work, including the best tracks from this album.

Super Tacky Disco Glam! Ace!
Boney M - big hair, big tunes, big fun! The funkiest band from Germany ever, the 'M' lead the way in no-nonsense daft disco. Rasputin, with its five nminute intro, is the stand-out track and the rest is too silly for words. Buy it now!

The classic album
This album was popular all over Europe and remains one of the finest disco albums ever recorded. It included four tracks that, released as singles, became huge UK hits for them - and the other tracks were also of a high quality. The title track (included here) was not released as a UK single but must surely have been considered for such a release.

The first single off the album was Rivers of Babylon, a cover of a reggae song from the sixties that was originally recorded by the Melodians. It spent five weeks at number one in the UK before beginning a slow decline. Just when it looked as if it was near to dropping out of the charts (over three months after its original release), the record was flipped and its B-side, Brown girl in the ring, was heavily promoted. The record climbed the charts again and eventually re-entered the top five. By the time the record finally dropped out of the UK chart, it had been there for forty weeks.

While the above double-sided single was still in the charts, Boney M released Rasputin, which made number two in the UK. Following a Christmas single not taken from the album, they returned to this album for one more single, Painter man, which only just made the top ten. Being released more than a year after the album from which it came, I suspect that a lot of people already had the album by then.

The other tracks include unlikely but brilliant covers of King of the road (Roger Miller) and Heart of gold (Neil Young) as well as three original songs of which my favorite is Never change lovers in the middle of the night.

The hits are, of course, available elsewhere, but this fine album is worth hearing in its entirety - if you can find it.