Fancy - Greatest Hits & More (2019)

It is one of the curses of the modern era, the way a band can score one monster hit with an utterly out of character song and then spend the rest of their careers living in its shadow, unable to shake off its memory, but so unwilling to recast their own ambitions in its own image that they would rather break up the group than be condemned to churn out a string of soundalikes for the remainder of their careers. Certainly that was the predicament Fancy found themselves in, after their deeply lascivious version of the Troggs' garage hit "Wild Thing," restyled as a proto-Donna Summer festival of orgasm, became a major U.S. hit during the summer of 1974. No matter that Fancy was formed by three of Britain's most adept session musicians, nor that the band turned out two solidly excellent albums which had little more than the band's name in common with their debut single, from the moment that undulating synthesizer line kicked into gear and former Penthouse Pet Helen Court uttered her first breathy groan, Fancy's figurative goose was cooked.