Every 1's a Winner (1979)

Performer: Hot Chocolate                                     Writer: Errol Brown
Highest US Chart Position: #6                              Label: Infinity Records
Musicians: Errol Brown, Harvey Hinsley, Larry Ferguson, Patrick Olive and Tony Connor

Back when I was listening to the radio in high school I wasn’t really aware of the distinctions between U.S. and British groups. In fact, other that those artists I knew to be British already, like the former Beatles or David Bowie, I’m pretty sure I assumed every song on the radio was by an American group. And I certainly didn’t know there was any difference between the U.S. and British charts. Hot Chocolate was known to me primarily as a one-hit wonder for their terrific single, “You Sexy Thing,” back in 1975. But what I hadn’t known at the time is that they were much more popular in England and had already recorded a string of hits by 1975. One of them was actually my favorite song of 1973, “Brother Louie” by The Stories. Before the American group covered it, though, it had been a top ten song in England, and the fifth of their top forty hits in their home country before achieving even greater chart success a year later with the number three “Emma.” While that song made it to number eight in the States, it wasn’t something I remembered hearing on the radio. I can remember vividly, however, in the middle of my junior year thinking that Hot Chocolate had made a nice comeback with their newest single, “Every 1’s a Winner,” when in fact they had never left the charts in Britain, continuing to write chart hits that included the number one UK single “So You Win Again” from the same album.

The song begins with a backward strum by Harvey Hinsley on the guitar that sustains while a pulsing bass and keyboard rhythm punctuate the downbeats of every measure, an effect similar to the one Don Henley would use four years later on “Dirty Laundry.” Then comes the unmistakable sound of Hinsley’s distorted guitar playing the signature sixteenth-note lick of the song over a grinding wash of keyboards in the background. After two times around, the equally distinctive singing of the song’s composer, Errol Brown, comes in on the verse. His vocals are heavily processed giving them a distant quality that, again, was wholly unique in pop music at that time. The background on the verse is simply the steady beat of Connor’s drums with the pulsing keyboard bass of Larry Ferguson and bass fills by Patrick Olive, along with the occasional backward strum of the intro by Hinsley. Beneath the chorus that includes the title line, the band hits on the first three notes of every two-bar phrase, but in a subdued way that isn’t jarring, allowing the dance pulse to continue uninterrupted. In the second half of the chorus, horns join the three-note accent, and female background vocals enter and hold into the next of Hinsley’s intro licks. After another verse, chorus and intro, the horns assert themselves and a lengthy vamp concludes with a short solo by Hinsley punctuated by the horns. This is followed by another chorus, and more improve from Hinsley that fades out the song.

The song entered the U.S. charts in mid-November of 1978 at number seventy-five, then made an impressively gradual climb to number twenty-two by the end of the year. It entered the top twenty at the beginning of January, and by the end of the month had edged into the top ten, finally peaking at number six in early February. The B-side of the single is Harvey Hinsley’s “Power of Love,” which retains the pulsing bass line of the A-side, but softens the sound by featuring the piano work of Larry Ferguson and leaving Errol Brown’s duskier vocals unprocessed. What’s interesting about the group is that, despite having a U.K. hit in every year of the seventies--a feat only equaled by Elvis and Diana Ross--the group was not well received critically and was for the most part ignored by the music press during the decade. “Every 1’s a Winner” was pulled from the album of the same name, and also released as a 12-inch dance version, which simply extends every aspect of the original tune to make it twice as long. For me, it was simply part of the soundtrack of my junior year, and wasn’t one of the few songs I purchased as a single. Nevertheless, it is now a song that seems essential to me and an example of a major hit that, while embracing the ethos of disco in order to gain popularity and airplay, eschews the clichés that had made the genre such an anathema, even at the time.